Influence and small guilds

mynaam

With the new mod right around the corner that will decimate small guilds it would be wise for the powers that be to rethink their cap on influence. I would recommend a simple alternative.

1. Remove cap on influence farming
   
2. Add cap on daily guild wide donation to coffer
   

This will give smaller guilds the opportunity to fairly farm for the influence and prevent larger guilds to get all required influence in 1 day(probably the reason it was created in the first place). Since there is no limit on guildhall level for Sword and gauntlet levels all the big guilds are ganging together(not blaming the big/medium guilds).

As things stand now small guilds will have to compete against alliances and have no hope to PVP at all(another massive PVP hit). Please consider doing at least this.

mynaam

magenubbie said:

Small guilds don't have PvP buildings. And the few that do have no hope as it stands. Alliances or not, a bit more influence won't cure that.

I know what you're trying to do, but it's time we stop fixing the symptoms and fix the real issue, which is the abysmal matchmaking options. PvP should be fun for everyone.

You need influence for boon structures and guild hall so PVP is not the gist of my sugestion.

As for what I am trying to do is obvious I am trying to help out smaller guilds as we(Neverwinter) have had a massive exodus of players since the glory days(right after the IWD launch). We can't afford the player base bleed to continue.

This game also like all games needs players that do not play everyday. Small guilds allow these players an opportunity to belong to a guild and thus return to the game at their leisure big guilds kick( They need more active members) them if they are say ... offline for more than a month. These casual players also spend real money since they want what others have and don't want to invest the time. This helps all players ,even big guilds . So what I am trying to do is help this game get better and not trip over itself because, it seems, only one type of gamers opinion makes it to the end developers. I have decent high end characters and will fit in most big guild, but I(and my fellow guildies) try our best to help developing players to get what they want from the game. We have members that mostly play during school holidays, or traveling businessmen that can only play when at home. There has to be room for this type of player.

I do however agree with you that the current PVP system is designed to prevent Small guilds and Solo players from competing in PVP. This might be the reason that PVP is dying in this game. Again acting as a deterrent for new players to join that are looking for a PVP element

vjarl

I belong to one of those small guilds and I agree that something is needed for the influence bottleneck. Whether you follow the OP or something else.

My guild is very small, only 5 or 6 really active players. We are working on Guild Hall Rank 6 and pretty much have maxed out all the contributions except Influence. Because we can farm everything else. If the idea is to reward people for playing the game, then let's do that with influence as well. Allow players to have other avenues for gaining influence. Right now we can only get 420 Influence per character per day. That means in a month we only get 60K or so Influence. Some folks will say to recruit more people and that is an option and we have recruited many, but often the lure of larger guilds end up taking them from us. Other folks will say to buy the Influence via the Zen Market. In our case, we don't have a huge amount of disposable income, so that is not so much an option for us. We do buy some from time to time, but it gets pretty expensive the higher you go.

The ability to get vouchers through the Siege of Neverwinter event was AWESOME! Other avenues, would be vouchers through Professions (say Leadership which only has 2 recipes where as all others have 4, except Alchemy). Drop Influence from the weekly quests in each of the campaign areas. Put it in the final chest, have the quest giver include it as a reward. Remove the cap for each individual, as OP suggested. I am not even sure you should have a daily limit per guild as I would like to see how things will shake out with alliances and such.

kvet

Influence is something of a bottleneck, but once you get higher in levels - gems and surplus gear becomes a much larger issue. Heroic Shards of Power also become problematic since there's very very limited ways to earn them. Conq shards are even more difficult to come by (but I know this isn't about PvP). My point is that, yes, Influence is a bottleneck but it is NOT the most significant problem.

Overall - if I had to boil it down... I'd have to go with: Cryptic developers are currency crazy. There's TOO MUCH STUFF... For SH - boil it down. Gear? ok.. but make it stuff, not just gear. Treasures, kits, pots, gear, alters - everything. All the random junk we pick up and have no real use for other selling for gold, which we generally have no use for. I mean, I have nearly 13K gold in my bank with absolutely nothing useful to spend it on...

Gold, Glory, AD, Gems... fine as is. Gems can be a trick to fill sometimes, but it's manageable.

Resource building stuff (food, wood, etc). Fine as is.

Campaign trinkets - just group them all together into one. I understand you want to promote people doing all the areas - but don't force it. If people aren't running IWD anymore, maybe you need to address the root cause there rather than force people to go to a zone they're not fond of. Group them in the coffer and combine the costs into a single cost. So, if you need 10K fey and 10K dark.. now you need 20K Campaign items. No cost reduction, just combination and the opening of options.

Shards -- group them together. Dungeons, Adventure, Heroics, PvP - just combine them and let us get shards whichever way is funnest for us. PvP stuff is STILL gated because of the Glory requirement as well - but this allows for the Barracks to not be gated behind a very heavy PvP requirement.

Influence - provide additional ways to earn influence other than HEs and the stables task. Influence, by nature, should be acquired by deeds. But apparently defeating Demogorgon or Orcus doesn't sway anyone to your favor.... that should change. We should be able to earn influence (up to the existing 400 per day, no change to the cap) though instance content. Make it small (5?) for normal DDs, 10 for skirms, 25 for the basic Epics, 50 or even 100 for CN, etc. Also, 50 per win in PvP - 100 or even 200 for a Siege win (as if anyone does Siege anyway - OMG what a massive waste of time and resources that was, whoever was in charge of that fiasco should embarrassed... but that's a whole other thread)


Anyway, on the original idea to remove individual caps and add contribution caps instead -- I don't think so... That wouldn't promote the notion of doing it frequently. Instead, a person could farm HEs a few hours and basically fill the guilds entire daily allotment on their own. For a very small or inactive guild, I can see the allure, but for most other guilds - you end up with the a problem where people will have all this influence, but can't contribute it. Sure, Alliances might help that a little... but not really - that's just 13 coffers that will have their daily influence filled instantly by a handful of members that have saved up stacks and stacks of influence....

The real cure to fixing the problem of smaller guilds not being able to farm influence well enough is..... recruit more people to your guild that will help build the stronghold with you. That is to say - stop worrying about being small and make yourself larger. It takes time and commitment, but it's not impossible. The Greycloaks started with 5 people after all. Don't worry about being competitive, just worry about building your guild up with solid people - there's lots out there. Rather than ask Cryptic to further nerf the game, make your own luck and concentrate on improving your guild, not resource-wise, but people-wise - the resources will come if you build up a larger contributor base, simple as that.

zibadawa

vjarl said:

Other folks will say to buy the Influence via the Zen Market.

With the ZAX decimated, that's not really an option anymore unless you were already willing to be a wallet warrior.

kvet

Shards can be acquired with Zen - Influence is purely in-game. I think this for the best.

sigillmacfinn

An exchange programme would also work - i.e 1x Dungeoneer's Shard for 1 x Conqueror's Shard or 1 x Influence etc - tradeable within the Stronghold at a Market trader or something - that way if a currency is maxxed there will be no need to hoard 999 + 429 of 1 type of Shard until the next upgrade but it could be converted to something that was needed at that point in time, or players that prefer 1 type of content to another can then convert their reward into 1 that is more useful.

But I do agree with the OP - Influence cap needs to be raised - maybe only to 500 or 600 but it needs to be raised - yes recruiting is an option to increase those donating but 400 is very low for such a "must have" resource at every step of the way. IMO

mynaam

One thing I forgot to mention the traveling merchant that comes during certain events really help with acquiring influence.

Yes I see your point Kvet it will be a problem in bigger guilds to have a guild wide donation. They can however supply an option (similar to the option to donate to other guilds in alliance) where the guild leader can choose a guild wide donation or current donation. This option can have a cool down period of say 30 days to prevent abuse

hustin1

magenubbie said:

Small guilds don't have PvP buildings. And the few that do have no hope as it stands. Alliances or not, a bit more influence won't cure that.

I know what you're trying to do, but it's time we stop fixing the symptoms and fix the real issue, which is the abysmal matchmaking options. PvP should be fun for everyone.

PvP has nothing to do with it. Ours is a small PvE guild, and the amount of Influence we need to get our guild hall to 7 is staggering. A fair way to handle it would be to have the server maintain a one-month rolling average of the average number of active players on each day and use that to determine an appropriate Influence cap per player.

putzboy78

The core issue was/is the same. The stronghold system should have been designed to account for multiple sized guilds. Let's say you reach GH6 and have a population of 25 people and you want to expand your guild population to 50 people. You should be able to "pay" for a guild size increase via coffer donations. Then going forward the cost to upgrade to GH9 is higher for a guild with a population cap of 50 than 25. It should have scaled and allowed for at least 3 guild sizes so that smaller guilds can remain competitive.

That does not fix your problem with inactive players. It's a F2P MMO, if you have inactive players or players that only play on weekends a little credit card redemption would be required to keep pace with a guild of active players. You play or you pay if you want to keep up. Unfortunately the existing system doesn't work because the costs are far to high for credit card redemption.

zibadawa

putzboy78 said:

The core issue was/is the same. The stronghold system should have been designed to account for multiple sized guilds. Let's say you reach GH6 and have a population of 25 people and you want to expand your guild population to 50 people. You should be able to "pay" for a guild size increase via coffer donations. Then going forward the cost to upgrade to GH9 is higher for a guild with a population cap of 50 than 25. It should have scaled and allowed for at least 3 guild sizes so that smaller guilds can remain competitive.

That does not fix your problem with inactive players. It's a F2P MMO, if you have inactive players or players that only play on weekends a little credit card redemption would be required to keep pace with a guild of active players. You play or you pay if you want to keep up. Unfortunately the existing system doesn't work because the costs are far to high for credit card redemption.

You'd have to do a lot of work to not make that give heavy incentives for every guild to be minimum size until every structure is maxed.

mynaam

zibadawa said:

putzboy78 said:

The core issue was/is the same. The stronghold system should have been designed to account for multiple sized guilds. Let's say you reach GH6 and have a population of 25 people and you want to expand your guild population to 50 people. You should be able to "pay" for a guild size increase via coffer donations. Then going forward the cost to upgrade to GH9 is higher for a guild with a population cap of 50 than 25. It should have scaled and allowed for at least 3 guild sizes so that smaller guilds can remain competitive.

That does not fix your problem with inactive players. It's a F2P MMO, if you have inactive players or players that only play on weekends a little credit card redemption would be required to keep pace with a guild of active players. You play or you pay if you want to keep up. Unfortunately the existing system doesn't work because the costs are far to high for credit card redemption.

You'd have to do a lot of work to not make that give heavy incentives for every guild to be minimum size until every structure is maxed.

Medium to big guild are currently reaching the upgrades at maximum speed anyways it would not be of any use to have a minimum size guild for them. They will still max their SH at the same speed, maybe even slower since there will be less people to help with dungeon runs.

lantern22

us small guilds are like the rebel alliance, you big guilds are the evil empire ;p

bigredbrent

I have always thought that they should remove the cap on influence and have the larger heroic encounters give more influence than the smaller ones.

There is already a build time cap to prevent guilds from building too quickly. I don't understand why influence is capped this way, unless it is to try to gouge those who try to buy this extremely over priced currency.

instynctive

Does anyone else remember how much Influence we were capped at before they increased it? 200, I think? It wasn't a lot.

Even after they increased the cap, and we, the players, were urging the devs to further increase the cap and to allow characters to get more Influence a day, their response was akin to "we need to be able to predict the amount of Influence per day that a guild can gather." While yes, that makes sense, but there are too many variables in place for them to be able to predict such a thing.

But, as in the example of upgrading the GH from L8 to L10, it takes 536k Influence. That's 1,340 character days. It would take one character over 4 years to finish that. You can otherwise math to calculate your own guild.

There does need to be more ways to gain Influence... perhaps as a reward (minimally 100 Influence) for each of the "Support" quests from the Master of Coin. There should also be a way to "convert" the unused "Caer Konig Reputation" after a character has finished in IWD. My oldest characters probably have thousands of those sitting in a trash can somewhere. Again, minimally,
100 Influence per.

We built the Wizards Workshop for the HP and healing potion boons... and while yes, the Wizard gives out quests that are worth 35 influence, at the moment, it takes a lot longer to do his quest than it takes to do any of the HEs. At the very least, those rewards should *start* at 100 Influence, and nearly double for each additional Workshop level/quest.

Other currencies can be "made" with professions.. I haven't found any profession tasks that make Influence, but I admit I may have overlooked something. Seems that "Escorting a Wizard's Seneschal" or "Guarding the Clerics of Ilmater" or "Protecting Magical Goods Market" should net some Influence.


While I'm not trying to finish the SH overnight (3 years was my estimation), the problem with the continuous grind for currencies, especially Influence, is that it's taking away my guild member's play time. There is a dedicated group of guildies who have done nothing but grind influence for the past two or three weeks. That's horseshit, to be honest. I finally told some of them that they can run influence on one character per day and that's it. Of course, they defy that "order", but I sleep at bight a little better.


Anyway.. hai!

loboguild

As much as I think the system stinks for small guilds, I don't see how you can effectively scale it without risking it to be exploited in some ways.

I like @putzboy78 's input the most. Maybe you should have gone with a system that unlocks additional account slots for a guild and the costs are balanced around the total number of slots. It shouldn't be hard. They obviously have used an average guild size to calculate the SH costs, so you can easily transfer it to a "per player" cost and multiply it. This probably means guilds at 100+ accounts might even have to pay more, but guilds with five accounts a lot less.

Additional character slots should become more expensive based on the Guild Hall level and already existing slots. You should also be able to delete slots in case your guild suddenly shrinks by a lot.

This additionally would completely make an account cap unnecessary. Guilds can have 500 account, but they have to pay a lot more than a guild with 50 characters. I think it might be necessary to add a certain slot amount to the requirements for specific Guild Hall levels.​​

taitinhakkaaja

Being in small guild (gh 6) for me it's constant battle to motivate myself to continue to do sh dailies for our guild. After doing some calculations it would take a decade to get our guild to level 20 and during that time i should farm guild stuff with multiple characters
I think it's time to say "you win" and join a big guild.

mahburg

If alliances work as intended it should get easier as you will be able to hook up with others, it appears there are target discounts available if I read it correctly, notwithstanding my disturbing experience on sunday it might help all of us out a lot (or not of course)

we are close to pushing the button on ten just 90K influence to go and we are pretty small.

mahburg

Sorry should have mentioned I am on Xbox so we watch this thread with great interest forgot I was on this tab

taitinhakkaaja

Mainly it's now how many players there are in guild, it's about how motivated they are to build sh. We have almost 100 accounts, but building sh is in few players motivation.
Things were very different when i was in the unholy crusaders (i quit playing for a while and left that guild), TUC was and probably is full of motivated people, and building sh was fun and fast.

qexotic

The biggest problem is that Strongholds need to be built, or should I say 'refined', at all. Prior to their introduction, guilds were communities/groups of people who played together and got a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction from doing so. They did not need to build or improve identical in-game structures for that to be the case. While it was a good idea to give guilds somewhere they could meet up that their guild could call their own, it was completely and utterly wrong for them to be presented with what could in effect become places of work within a game people play for fun and entertainment....quite often as a way to escape from the day to day demands of their place of work in real life.

instynctive

taitinhakkaaja said:

Mainly it's now how many players there are in guild, it's about how motivated they are to build sh. We have almost 100 accounts, but building sh is in few players motivation.
Things were very different when i was in the unholy crusaders (i quit playing for a while and left that guild), TUC was and probably is full of motivated people, and building sh was fun and fast.

This.

Right now, we're at about 40% participation in the latest Influence grind... of that 40%, maybe half of them have pretty much dropped everything and are only running HE trains.

Hence the "Influence contest". Bribery is not beneath me... and while we don't have the extra $120 to spend, we're putting up some kick-HAMSTER prizes. Sadly, even that hasn't motivated the other 60%.

While the devs *did* look at guild numbers, etc., before upping the cap to 400 per character per day, I really think they need to look further into it... If Guild A has 100 members, with only 40% contributing, they are being out-paced by Guild B with 50 members and 90% contributing.

plasticbat

As a "workaround" of the cap before Cryptic decides to do something about it is: run multiple toon per player for influence. Even the weak toon can contribute and finish fast regardless the size of the HE when he/she is running with a group of guildie. I personally run 3 toons per day. They can solo. More if there is a guild run. When influence is the only bottleneck, we usually can solve that fast. Our leaders do a good job to motivate us. Putting MOTD in chat to let us know what is more urgent to contribute. No, I don't know how many of us (in terms of percentage) does that regularly. I do know many do.

taitinhakkaaja

That's what i'm forced to do also. There were days when i grinded sh he's with 6 characters daily. But influence is just a one of many things needed to upgrade sh.
Campaign currency etc. are VERY hard to get. It's like maybe influence is the least of the problems with inactive guilds in the long run.

mynaam

plasticbat said:

As a "workaround" of the cap before Cryptic decides to do something about it is: run multiple toon per player for influence. Even the weak toon can contribute and finish fast regardless the size of the HE when he/she is running with a group of guildie. I personally run 3 toons per day. They can solo. More if there is a guild run. When influence is the only bottleneck, we usually can solve that fast. Our leaders do a good job to motivate us. Putting MOTD in chat to let us know what is more urgent to contribute. No, I don't know how many of us (in terms of percentage) does that regularly. I do know many do.

That is Good advice. Many do this, but it ends up more like a work than a game and therein lies the problem. I currently run 9 toons daily to farm influence and are leveling 2 more for the sole purpose of acquiring Influence.

So basically I get 3600 Influence per day and that is not nearly enough. Most of my guildies try, but killing spiders are really boring if you are not yet strong enough to take on the bigger HE's. So a Few of our better geared member take guildies on HE runs where we hunt for the beholders, Giants,.... and other major HE's. The problem is we have to do AD farming/dungeons ..... and can't always be there to assist.

Small guilds try to invite more players , but the first question that is asked is what level are you. The second one is what boons do you have. 1 or 2 boons are not good enough. So in order to invite we have to level. The problem is we can't level without inviting. That is why I think there is a serious problem with getting Influence and something has to be done. Cryptic, to their credit has made it easier to gain some items. Like AD I currently are well on my way to 200 vouchers from professions, the problem is I can't donate since everything is maxed except Influence.

Hopefully we will see a return of the Jubilee trader during the Protector's jubilee. That should help us get the required Influence in a few Days.

beckylunatic

instynctive said:

While the devs *did* look at guild numbers, etc., before upping the cap to 400 per character per day....

They didn't, actually. The starter cap of 400ish was designed in from the ground floor, but originally assumed that each character would also be running one or maybe even two boon structure quests in addition to HEs to reach said cap. User acceptance testing (aka. launch) indicated this was untenable, but shifting the bulk of the daily Inf to HEs so that it was available to guilds of any rank came with a very hard nerf to what you get from the structure quests (before most of us got a look at the original rewards).

@rgutscheradev Since you have been trying to make the case for us that Inf needs to be looked at, you get to read this thread too.

instynctive

beckylunatic said:

They didn't, actually. The starter cap of 400ish was designed in from the ground floor, but originally assumed that each character would also be running one or maybe even two boon structure quests in addition to HEs to reach said cap.

Yup.. that's right.. however, how many guilds had boon structures back in August? lol

rinat114

taitinhakkaaja said:

Mainly it's now how many players there are in guild, it's about how motivated they are to build sh. We have almost 100 accounts, but building sh is in few players motivation.
Things were very different when i was in the unholy crusaders (i quit playing for a while and left that guild), TUC was and probably is full of motivated people, and building sh was fun and fast.

I was wondering what happened to you, good to see you're playing again Contact us in-game if you wish to come back at some point.

As for the subject - coming from a leader of two giant guilds, influence is still a pain in the HAMSTER, even for us. We did contests, gave away stuff, do influence runs daily, but a guild can never fulfil its full potential in that regard. I think small guilds should get a discount on Influence or something to make it bareable, but still tad more difficult to make the work worthwhile and the prize (the GH and the boons) worthy.

Perhaps account brackets? 3X% if less than 50 accounts, 2X% if less than 80 accounts, etc.

putzboy78

It's all typical F2P MMO wizardy. Start it out very restrictive. Let the "elite" guilds work their HAMSTER off to build ($). Then over time relax the rules to make sure other people stay motivated.

I do think the non-scaling really hurt the model because the incentive to break out the credit card for the "big fish in a small pond" was limited. The costs to pay to upgrade the GH is to massive to make an individual feel like its worth it.

However, if guilds scaled then a person could be motivated upgrade. Also there would be more guilds in the game. Building resources would be smoothed across 2x-3x as many guild.

Don't loose hope though, even on influence. Its an MMO, a marathon not a race. They will have event like siege and jubilee to help gather resources that big guilds paid for earlier on. In the long run the development goal is not to leave people behind, its just to ensure that those willing to pay for early access get a chance to. It doesn't mean you give up, just means you keep your guild competitive and ready to strike as soon as new opportunities arise.

Also I'm quit confident that Cryptic will introduce new buildings, some even may require tearing down old buildings (including boons structures) to stay BIS. Smaller guilds will not get hit with that rebuild cost and therefore save in the long run. Large guilds will get hit with the cost but will be in the best position to work on the new BIS because of having the guild hall complete and the players motivated to stay on top. Medium guilds get hit the hardest because they will have dedicated resources to a now obsolete project and the time to rebuild is long. They've already done this with the pvp structures.

So for those smaller guilds, don't loose hope. You are not as far behind as things may appear on the surface

lantern22

Our guild has around 3-5 active players each with 2 main toons, most of the regular players left after Mod 6. We are slowly approaching GH Rank 3 Probably doesn't help that we are all from different timezones

Influence is a very long and slow grind, the other bits and pieces we had sorted months ago.

Would be nice if the influence cap was reconsidered, say:

Weekly Char cap instead of daily
Account or even guild based,

That way the really small micro guilds like ours, where players have time constraints, could grind out some influence when they have time. At the moment we have to choose between grinding influence or getting some RAD so we can upgrade toons.

Having said all of that, I'm not sure it would be fair to make it too easy on small guilds like ours, given that the other larger guilds have done all the work and had to do it the hard way