Official Feedback Thread: Stronghold Economy Changes

rgutscheradev · February 2016

Greetings Guild Members!

This preview build has some changes to the Stronghold progression, with the goal of making it easier to increase your guild level. We’ve looked at particular sticking points and tried to remove them. Some of this is lowered costs, some of it is new ways to pay, and there’s also just a bit of extra Guild Mark earn. The hope is that raising your guild's level will be less frustrating than it was before.

Access

You’ll need to be in a (Preview Shard) guild to fully test these features. As always, while any guild member can look at building costs, only the more senior members will have the permissions to actually start a building upgrade or begin construction of a new building. Some of the new features involve profession tasks, in which case you’ll need to have sufficient rank in the relevant professions.

Features

Astral Diamond Stronghold costs reduced by very large amounts, typically 50% to 90% (lower level guilds will see the biggest discounts)
Treasures of Tyranny and Fey Trinket costs reduced by significant amounts, typically 20% to 40%
Doubled guild mark earn for Glory and for Astral Diamonds
30 new Professions tasks that make “crates” of various kinds:
- Two each for Alchemy (Gems and Gold), Jewelcrafting (both Gems), and Leadership (Labor and Astral Diamond Chests)
- Four each for Artificing, Leatherworking, Mailsmithing, Platesmithing, Tailoring, and Weaponsmithing (these all give Surplus Equipment)

Known Issues

Some icons for the profession tasks may still be placeholder

Feedback Desired

If any prices don’t fall within the above guidelines (something didn’t change, or did change but shouldn’t have, or changed in the wrong direction), definitely let us know that. If a profession task fails, or you can’t use the resulting crate to feed your guild coffers, or anything else goes wrong, let us know that as well. General feedback about how much you think this will help guilds, and where any remaining “pain points” might be for guild advancement, is also most welcome!

Respond to this forum post.
Type: Bug or Feedback (Please only choose one)
Format: Please use boldface text for the Type, and then type your feedback in the body of your post. If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, and if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use BLUE.
Concise feedback is best
Screenshots are much appreciated

Examples

Bug: Siege Workshop Cost Went Up
The Fey Trinket cost to upgrade the Siege Workshop from level 2 to level 3 actually went up (from 105,000 to 800,000) instead of going down as expected. Was it meant to be 80,000?

Bug: Quest: Cannot Donate Crate of Steel Spears
I successfully created a “Crate of Steel Spears” at my Weaponsmith, but then I was unable to donate it to my guild coffer. The Crate never appeared on the dropdown of donate options.

Feedback: Dungeoneer Shard Costs Too High
The biggest problem for our Guild in live is Dungeoneer’s Shards of Power. The costs for those just seem too high compared to the rate we can acquire them.

Thanks for the help! See you in your (hopefully new & improved) Stronghold!

beckylunatic · February 2016

Already pleased with proposed changes just from reading this post. I see you guys have put our suggestions to make professions more useful to Strongholds into development, which is nice.

Feedback: Major stumbling blocks for the small guild
Influence and Dungeoneer Shards can both be tough requirements to meet. Many small guilds rely on members' alts to obtain more resources per person than would otherwise be possible, but the amount of Influence earned per character per day is painfully small compared to the amounts required to accomplish anything, and earning Influence means you are effectively doing nothing else useful for yourself or your guild. I know it's meant to be a progress gate, but the daily caps are brutal and requirements are high. Dungeoneer Shards are kind of the same problem; small guilds tend to hit player burnout long before they can actually meet these requirements. Running multiple alts for resources takes a long time. Dungeoneer Shard shortfalls can be alleviated by buying around the problem, but that should feel like an option rather than a requirement, even in a small guild.

Feedback: Crafting Influence
We recognize that the daily Influence caps were designed to be one of the inhibitors for Stronghold progression, to prevent going "too fast". Still, with the amount small guilds have now been left in the dust, and with large guilds also slamming into the Influence wall when they're all set with everything else for their next upgrade(s), it may be worth considering making Influence craftable in Leadership as well. It's a thematic fit - doing charitable work enhances the good will of the people. Leadership is still fairly self-limiting with 3x task caps, glacial levelling progression, and presumably having to make choices between tasks to benefit the Stronghold or yourself (refinement). It has the potential to ease this grind immensely, for guilds of any size.

Feedback: Shard Exchange
One proposal players have made a few times is to exchange one type of shard of power for another, at a 2:1 ratio to make it better to run all types of content, but still possible to progress from converting your surplus shards to make up your deficient ones. I have accumulated literally thousands of Heroic and Adventurer Shards totalled across multiple characters that I can't deposit until we empty the coffers, and I keep accumulating them from running content for other needed resources. Can't build a warehouse until we progress much further. I know we're meant to progress the SH by running content, but it's currently possible to run content endlessly and still seemingly get nowhere because you get too much of one thing and not enough of another. I'd also add that trading Shards for Influence could be enormously helpful too. It wouldn't discourage us from playing the game, because all the resources still have to come from playing something, and would be most efficiently earned from their "native" source. But it would make us feel better about everything we do being useful and less locked into particular activities at particular stages regardless of what we actually feel like doing.

Thank you so much for looking at these issues. Means a lot.

mrshabok · February 2016

I'm loving the changes you guys are making. Really glad that you are taking a hard look at everything!

warpet · February 2016

influence costs needs big reduction as much as I can see there aren't any changes there

whyrat · February 2016

Why do the costs not scale to guild size? Small guilds mainly hav a problem because they're paying the same amounts as very large guilds. The burden difference between a 25 person guild and a 100 person guild is 4x as much. Why is it so expensive to advance stronghold if you want to be in a smaller guild?

Unless there is some underlying reason why you want guilds to be near max player cap; scale the rewards slightly. a 1:1 scale doesn't make sense, as it should be easier for bigger guilds to get things done (after all, they have more people / resources so they should expect faster progress). Why not set a baseline cost, then increase it by X% for every guild member over Y? E.G. X = 1%, Y = 50. This would allow guilds up to 50 to have the same (lower) costs, and as guilds get get larger the costs grow, but not by more than baseline (base amount / 50 = 2% per character, so any additional character lowers the average contribution amount required per character).

This prevents small groups from having enough of an advantage to game the system (the optimal guild size should not be 1). But allows smaller guilds of ~25 players to have an easier go at things. And it still preserves the (relative) advantage of being in a large well-organized guild.

reds351 · February 2016

whyrat said:
Why do the costs not scale to guild size? Small guilds mainly hav a problem because they're paying the same amounts as very large guilds. The burden difference between a 25 person guild and a 100 person guild is 4x as much. Why is it so expensive to advance stronghold if you want to be in a smaller guild?

Unless there is some underlying reason why you want guilds to be near max player cap; scale the rewards slightly. a 1:1 scale doesn't make sense, as it should be easier for bigger guilds to get things done (after all, they have more people / resources so they should expect faster progress). Why not set a baseline cost, then increase it by X% for every guild member over Y? E.G. X = 1%, Y = 50. This would allow guilds up to 50 to have the same (lower) costs, and as guilds get get larger the costs grow, but not by more than baseline (base amount / 50 = 2% per character, so any additional character lowers the average contribution amount required per character).

This prevents small groups from having enough of an advantage to game the system (the optimal guild size should not be 1). But allows smaller guilds of ~25 players to have an easier go at things. And it still preserves the (relative) advantage of being in a large well-organized guild.

Large guilds will abuse the system by booting players upgrading then re-inviting everyone

Or why we cant have nice things

lwedar · February 2016

awesome changes. Did i miss the note about reducing influence? Because that is the number one pain point..

beckylunatic · February 2016

whyrat said:
Why do the costs not scale to guild size?

They are separately looking at what they can borrow from the Armada system from STO's Fleets as a way for large and small guilds to set up mutually beneficial relationships to address some other imbalances and concerns, but in the meantime, broad economic adjustments are very welcome.

freshour · February 2016

Yup, influence is the number one complaint and I don't think they hit on that one. So keep it up guys and make sure we let them know that INFLUENCE is the hard part. You can gut out a lot of this via pve/he's/dragons/shpvp... but influence... 40 per day and needing hundreds of thousands of it is the gigantic problem with SH advancement. I did 5 HE's on 12 characters for quite a while and I never will ever.... ever.... EVER do another heroic encounter again. I hope others didn't get to the level of burnout that I did.

These changes are amazing! But if the entire idea is to reach out to smaller guilds, influence should be the #1 priority as that takes the most amount of people to do.

beckylunatic · February 2016

freshour said:
I did 5 HE's on 12 characters for quite a while and I never will ever.... ever.... EVER do another heroic encounter again. I hope others didn't get to the level of burnout that I did.

I didn't run myself to that level of exhaustion, or ask it of anybody else, but it has meant that progressing our guild is very much on the "hah, yeah, whenever it happens... like in a couple of months or whatever" track of development.

My sympathies.

weaver936 · February 2016

Is this something we can get BEFORE Mod 9? lol. Like tomorrow. I LOVE that professions will help us with SH.. especially since I have already been leveling mine on 15 toons lol. Good news.

obsiddia · February 2016

DCed:
[color=red]Constant disconnects today, at least in PE. You knew that, but just as a reminder.[/color]

Yeah, I give up on the coding this place uses for color.

beckylunatic · February 2016

Feedback: Profession tasks

Leadership - Leadership has never had a tiered reward structure before, and lacks assets to support it. If these assets are not planned to be added, obtaining a rank 3 result isn't actually possible. I obviously don't know if this will be covered with updated profession packs. If so, then there's no issue. Even without the tiered rewards, these tasks are decent. The AD one is very welcome. I still think adding an Influence task would be a good idea.

Alchemy - While turning common materials into gold fits well with traditional alchemy lore, this is a task only someone with a very poor understanding of the relative value of the materials involved would ever do. I could sell the vitriols and regia used to make 1 gold for about 2800AD. I could buy 3 platinum chalices for about 150AD and sell them to a merchant, obtaining a bit more than 1 gold. Nobody who has the remotest understanding of Neverwinter's economy needs help with gold once they're established. I never deposit gold into my SH coffer because I know somebody else will fill it in short order, because all of us have more of it than we can conceivably use. It's a bad task, period. The one for gems isn't much better, mostly because there's still a universal shortage of emerald vitriol from the year or so that it wasn't in any loot tables. I didn't analyze it thoroughly because I thought the jewelcrafting tasks would be better.

Jewelcrafting - It would make more logical sense to use the 4-task structure from the weapon and armor professions for jewelcrafting, with tasks at 4, 10, 17, and 23 instead of only at 4 and 23 the way it is now. Level-capped players have surpluses of tier 3 crafting materials because this is what drops in the places they go. Both tier 1 and tier 4 materials are too valuable to use for this little return, due to relative scarcity compared to continual need for them in producing crafted items people will actually buy. It makes way more sense to use actual enchants than to waste resources on the available tasks.

Armor and weapon crafting - Surplus equipment tasks are fine. Players can actually choose which resources to use up, which means the possibility of converting useless resources into something useful, which is what we really hoped for in the first place. Huzzah.

mynaam · February 2016

reds351 said:

whyrat said:
Why do the costs not scale to guild size? Small guilds mainly hav a problem because they're paying the same amounts as very large guilds. The burden difference between a 25 person guild and a 100 person guild is 4x as much. Why is it so expensive to advance stronghold if you want to be in a smaller guild?

Unless there is some underlying reason why you want guilds to be near max player cap; scale the rewards slightly. a 1:1 scale doesn't make sense, as it should be easier for bigger guilds to get things done (after all, they have more people / resources so they should expect faster progress). Why not set a baseline cost, then increase it by X% for every guild member over Y? E.G. X = 1%, Y = 50. This would allow guilds up to 50 to have the same (lower) costs, and as guilds get get larger the costs grow, but not by more than baseline (base amount / 50 = 2% per character, so any additional character lowers the average contribution amount required per character).

This prevents small groups from having enough of an advantage to game the system (the optimal guild size should not be 1). But allows smaller guilds of ~25 players to have an easier go at things. And it still preserves the (relative) advantage of being in a large well-organized guild.
Large guilds will abuse the system by booting players upgrading then re-inviting everyone

Or why we cant have nice things

That is easy to solve by adding a 3 month cooldown for rejoining a guild you left previously

mmm1001 · February 2016

Since you are making new way to get labor, maybe you should remove/fix the labor exploit

mmm1001 · February 2016

What will happen with guild that finish all structures to lvl 20?
After that, there won't be a way to get guildmarks, unless they demolish/rebuild some building.
So my suggestion is to find alternative way to spend guild resources and get guildmarks for them.

Suggestion 2: Make guild resources/vouchers/campaign currencies tradable (wither player to player tradable or guild to guild tradable). This will benefit both smaller and larger guilds, as it will present alternative way to avoid bottlenecks. It will allow more advanced guilds to benefit from their efforts.

Suggestion 3: Replace/add one of VIP dungeon daily keys with key for Strongbox of the Dragonfight.

whitestarua · February 2016

This is absurd! Really. My guild atm has 19lvl. When Cryptic will launch M9 -> we will have 20GH. And what? Millions of AD, Treasures of Tyranny etc...
And after that any noob\casual player\small or weak guild can get the same but so much easier. Where is justice?

mirlegris · February 2016

Reducing diamonds/fey/tyrrany costs don't change anything for you. Even with this reductions and news sources of ressources, 90% of the guilds will not reach the Hall20 before mod 10. On part because players will quit the game, and on part because the globals ressources needed after Hall 12 still enormous for a majority of guilds.

urabask · February 2016

whitestarua said:

This is absurd! Really. My guild atm has 19lvl. When Cryptic will launch M9 -> we will have 20GH. And what? Millions of AD, Treasures of Tyranny etc...
And after that any noob\casual player\small or weak guild can get the same but so much easier. Where is justice?

Who cares? My guild is 14 and in the middle of the 15 upgrade. If your guild is big enough to get that far then the costs really aren't that big a deal. We've already made AD donations for everything through GH 17 and it was only 405k per player. The grind for campaign currency is more annoying even.

whitestarua · February 2016

urabask said:

whitestarua said:

This is absurd! Really. My guild atm has 19lvl. When Cryptic will launch M9 -> we will have 20GH. And what? Millions of AD, Treasures of Tyranny etc...
And after that any noob\casual player\small or weak guild can get the same but so much easier. Where is justice?

Who cares? My guild is 14 and in the middle of the 15 upgrade. If your guild is big enough to get that far then the costs really aren't that big a deal. We've already made AD donations for everything through GH 17 and it was only 405k per player. The grind for campaign currency is more annoying even.

sometimes is hard to build Guild, but is cool.
This building requires good teamplay, strong guild members, strong organization etc...
Its very intresting to do. Challenge to all players.

minotaur2857 · February 2016

mynaam said:

reds351 said:

whyrat said:
Why do the costs not scale to guild size? Small guilds mainly hav a problem because they're paying the same amounts as very large guilds. The burden difference between a 25 person guild and a 100 person guild is 4x as much. Why is it so expensive to advance stronghold if you want to be in a smaller guild?

Unless there is some underlying reason why you want guilds to be near max player cap; scale the rewards slightly. a 1:1 scale doesn't make sense, as it should be easier for bigger guilds to get things done (after all, they have more people / resources so they should expect faster progress). Why not set a baseline cost, then increase it by X% for every guild member over Y? E.G. X = 1%, Y = 50. This would allow guilds up to 50 to have the same (lower) costs, and as guilds get get larger the costs grow, but not by more than baseline (base amount / 50 = 2% per character, so any additional character lowers the average contribution amount required per character).

This prevents small groups from having enough of an advantage to game the system (the optimal guild size should not be 1). But allows smaller guilds of ~25 players to have an easier go at things. And it still preserves the (relative) advantage of being in a large well-organized guild.
Large guilds will abuse the system by booting players upgrading then re-inviting everyone

Or why we cant have nice things
That is easy to solve by adding a 3 month cooldown for rejoining a guild you left previously

This would hurt my guild. We have a reserve guild for lowbies, and we're trying to level it up by people in the main guild donating surplus stuff. If you can't switch to the other guild, donate and switch back, the second guild is dead in the water.

beckylunatic · February 2016

minotaur2857 said:

mynaam said:

reds351 said:

whyrat said:
Why do the costs not scale to guild size? Small guilds mainly hav a problem because they're paying the same amounts as very large guilds. The burden difference between a 25 person guild and a 100 person guild is 4x as much. Why is it so expensive to advance stronghold if you want to be in a smaller guild?

Unless there is some underlying reason why you want guilds to be near max player cap; scale the rewards slightly. a 1:1 scale doesn't make sense, as it should be easier for bigger guilds to get things done (after all, they have more people / resources so they should expect faster progress). Why not set a baseline cost, then increase it by X% for every guild member over Y? E.G. X = 1%, Y = 50. This would allow guilds up to 50 to have the same (lower) costs, and as guilds get get larger the costs grow, but not by more than baseline (base amount / 50 = 2% per character, so any additional character lowers the average contribution amount required per character).

This prevents small groups from having enough of an advantage to game the system (the optimal guild size should not be 1). But allows smaller guilds of ~25 players to have an easier go at things. And it still preserves the (relative) advantage of being in a large well-organized guild.
Large guilds will abuse the system by booting players upgrading then re-inviting everyone

Or why we cant have nice things
That is easy to solve by adding a 3 month cooldown for rejoining a guild you left previously
This would hurt my guild. We have a reserve guild for lowbies, and we're trying to level it up by people in the main guild donating surplus stuff. If you can't switch to the other guild, donate and switch back, the second guild is dead in the water.

Also, "promote" and "kick" commands are side by side, and sometimes guild officers have fat fingers....

darkstarcrash · February 2016

beckylunatic said:
Feedback: Profession tasks

Leadership - Leadership has never had a tiered reward structure before, and lacks assets to support it. If these assets are not planned to be added, obtaining a rank 3 result isn't actually possible. I obviously don't know if this will be covered with updated profession packs. If so, then there's no issue. Even without the tiered rewards, these tasks are decent. The AD one is very welcome. I still think adding an Influence task would be a good idea.

Alchemy - While turning common materials into gold fits well with traditional alchemy lore, this is a task only someone with a very poor understanding of the relative value of the materials involved would ever do. I could sell the vitriols and regia used to make 1 gold for about 2800AD. I could buy 3 platinum chalices for about 150AD and sell them to a merchant, obtaining a bit more than 1 gold. Nobody who has the remotest understanding of Neverwinter's economy needs help with gold once they're established. I never deposit gold into my SH coffer because I know somebody else will fill it in short order, because all of us have more of it than we can conceivably use. It's a bad task, period. The one for gems isn't much better, mostly because there's still a universal shortage of emerald vitriol from the year or so that it wasn't in any loot tables. I didn't analyze it thoroughly because I thought the jewelcrafting tasks would be better.

Jewelcrafting - It would make more logical sense to use the 4-task structure from the weapon and armor professions for jewelcrafting, with tasks at 4, 10, 17, and 23 instead of only at 4 and 23 the way it is now. Level-capped players have surpluses of tier 3 crafting materials because this is what drops in the places they go. Both tier 1 and tier 4 materials are too valuable to use for this little return, due to relative scarcity compared to continual need for them in producing crafted items people will actually buy. It makes way more sense to use actual enchants than to waste resources on the available tasks.

Armor and weapon crafting - Surplus equipment tasks are fine. Players can actually choose which resources to use up, which means the possibility of converting useless resources into something useful, which is what we really hoped for in the first place. Huzzah.

I pretty much agree with everything @beckylunatic wrote.
No one will ever do the Alchemy gold task -- although for roleplay purposes it's still good to have the task, I think. And I agree that Emerald Vitriol is sorely lacking, due to the loot table bug.

BUG: Alchemy tasks have the labels for the crates switched, so that the task "Crates of Gems" states the result is a crate of gold (although the description for the result is indeed gold).

FEEDBACK: Weaponsmithing tasks required 20 each of blades and hafts, while all other armor and weaponcrafting tasks require a total of 30 items.
Mass crafting in Weaponsmithing creates 8 blades and 4 hafts, while Artificing creates 4 each of Ornamental metal and Carved wood, and the armorsmithing tasks create 8 cloth/plate/etc. So either change Weaponsmithing to 15 each blades and hafts like Artificing, or require 20 blades and 15 hafts to reflect the uneven numbers crafted.

urabask · February 2016

whitestarua said:

urabask said:

whitestarua said:

This is absurd! Really. My guild atm has 19lvl. When Cryptic will launch M9 -> we will have 20GH. And what? Millions of AD, Treasures of Tyranny etc...
And after that any noob\casual player\small or weak guild can get the same but so much easier. Where is justice?

Who cares? My guild is 14 and in the middle of the 15 upgrade. If your guild is big enough to get that far then the costs really aren't that big a deal. We've already made AD donations for everything through GH 17 and it was only 405k per player. The grind for campaign currency is more annoying even.
sometimes is hard to build Guild, but is cool.
This building requires good teamplay, strong guild members, strong organization etc...
Its very intresting to do. Challenge to all players.

And for the vast majority of players even with these changes it will remain challenging. Large guilds are outliers that Cryptic doesn't need to cater to especially if they're got special cupcake syndrome causing them to cry over other people getting nice things.

beckylunatic said:
Feedback: Profession tasks

Leadership - Leadership has never had a tiered reward structure before, and lacks assets to support it. If these assets are not planned to be added, obtaining a rank 3 result isn't actually possible. I obviously don't know if this will be covered with updated profession packs. If so, then there's no issue. Even without the tiered rewards, these tasks are decent. The AD one is very welcome. I still think adding an Influence task would be a good idea.

Alchemy - While turning common materials into gold fits well with traditional alchemy lore, this is a task only someone with a very poor understanding of the relative value of the materials involved would ever do. I could sell the vitriols and regia used to make 1 gold for about 2800AD. I could buy 3 platinum chalices for about 150AD and sell them to a merchant, obtaining a bit more than 1 gold. Nobody who has the remotest understanding of Neverwinter's economy needs help with gold once they're established. I never deposit gold into my SH coffer because I know somebody else will fill it in short order, because all of us have more of it than we can conceivably use. It's a bad task, period. The one for gems isn't much better, mostly because there's still a universal shortage of emerald vitriol from the year or so that it wasn't in any loot tables. I didn't analyze it thoroughly because I thought the jewelcrafting tasks would be better.

Jewelcrafting - It would make more logical sense to use the 4-task structure from the weapon and armor professions for jewelcrafting, with tasks at 4, 10, 17, and 23 instead of only at 4 and 23 the way it is now. Level-capped players have surpluses of tier 3 crafting materials because this is what drops in the places they go. Both tier 1 and tier 4 materials are too valuable to use for this little return, due to relative scarcity compared to continual need for them in producing crafted items people will actually buy. It makes way more sense to use actual enchants than to waste resources on the available tasks.

Armor and weapon crafting - Surplus equipment tasks are fine. Players can actually choose which resources to use up, which means the possibility of converting useless resources into something useful, which is what we really hoped for in the first place. Huzzah.

All the numbers for anything aside from AD are way too low considering what you can get on the AH to donate to your coffer. Also pretty dumb that they're bind on pickup; they should be BtA.

Just for reference I can get a stack of r4 enchants for 980 AD on the AH. It's worth 495 points in the coffer. Why should I waste professions slots on my characters making something that's worth at best 140?

darkstarcrash · February 2016

Take gems for example: the rank 23 Jewelcrafting task will result in up to 200 points for Gems, and can be repeated ~5 times with an epic jewelcrafter (6 hour task --> 4 hours). So that's 1000 points, equivalent to 2 stacks of rank 4 gems, per day. (Note you can only run each task in one slot per character).

Of course, that's with mithral tools -- if you only use base tools you will get 500 points of Gems a day.

The real point is most professions have become less and less useful: JC is outdated with new Underdark rings, armorsmithing shirts and pants have tremendous pricing pressure from Drowcraft underwear, and Artificing and Weaponsmithing have been useless since Mod 6. This gives a reason to use a profession slot for something besides Leadership refinement tasks.

Personally, I will run the tasks when I have the mats lying around to do so -- I certainly have piles of adamantine scales and such. Does it makes sense to buy or mass-craft the raw materials to run the SH tasks? Probably not.

mattachine · February 2016

beckylunatic said:
Already pleased with proposed changes just from reading this post. I see you guys have put our suggestions to make professions more useful to Strongholds into development, which is nice.

Feedback: Major stumbling blocks for the small guild
Influence and Dungeoneer Shards can both be tough requirements to meet. Many small guilds rely on members' alts to obtain more resources per person than would otherwise be possible, but the amount of Influence earned per character per day is painfully small compared to the amounts required to accomplish anything, and earning Influence means you are effectively doing nothing else useful for yourself or your guild. I know it's meant to be a progress gate, but the daily caps are brutal and requirements are high. Dungeoneer Shards are kind of the same problem; small guilds tend to hit player burnout long before they can actually meet these requirements. Running multiple alts for resources takes a long time. Dungeoneer Shard shortfalls can be alleviated by buying around the problem, but that should feel like an option rather than a requirement, even in a small guild.

Feedback: Crafting Influence
We recognize that the daily Influence caps were designed to be one of the inhibitors for Stronghold progression, to prevent going "too fast". Still, with the amount small guilds have now been left in the dust, and with large guilds also slamming into the Influence wall when they're all set with everything else for their next upgrade(s), it may be worth considering making Influence craftable in Leadership as well. It's a thematic fit - doing charitable work enhances the good will of the people. Leadership is still fairly self-limiting with 3x task caps, glacial levelling progression, and presumably having to make choices between tasks to benefit the Stronghold or yourself (refinement). It has the potential to ease this grind immensely, for guilds of any size.

Feedback: Shard Exchange
One proposal players have made a few times is to exchange one type of shard of power for another, at a 2:1 ratio to make it better to run all types of content, but still possible to progress from converting your surplus shards to make up your deficient ones. I have accumulated literally thousands of Heroic and Adventurer Shards totalled across multiple characters that I can't deposit until we empty the coffers, and I keep accumulating them from running content for other needed resources. Can't build a warehouse until we progress much further. I know we're meant to progress the SH by running content, but it's currently possible to run content endlessly and still seemingly get nowhere because you get too much of one thing and not enough of another. I'd also add that trading Shards for Influence could be enormously helpful too. It wouldn't discourage us from playing the game, because all the resources still have to come from playing something, and would be most efficiently earned from their "native" source. But it would make us feel better about everything we do being useful and less locked into particular activities at particular stages regardless of what we actually feel like doing.

Thank you so much for looking at these issues. Means a lot.

Our guild agrees with the above feedback.

weaver936 · February 2016

mmm1001 said:

What will happen with guild that finish all structures to lvl 20?
After that, there won't be a way to get guildmarks, unless they demolish/rebuild some building.
So my suggestion is to find alternative way to spend guild resources and get guildmarks for them.

Suggestion 2: Make guild resources/vouchers/campaign currencies tradable (wither player to player tradable or guild to guild tradable). This will benefit both smaller and larger guilds, as it will present alternative way to avoid bottlenecks. It will allow more advanced guilds to benefit from their efforts.

Suggestion 3: Replace/add one of VIP dungeon daily keys with key for Strongbox of the Dragonfight.

In STO people would join smaller guild to donate then go back to their guild.. This is a nice way that smaller guilds could get some of the stuff they need for building their SH's... win/win for everyone.

weaver936 · February 2016

doublea2015 said:
lol I know folks who have blown about 100mill AD or more on their stronghold already, so imagine how those folks feel

1. The rewards given in these profession tasks are not even close to being worth doing.. with maybe a couple exceptions..
2. Those guilds that spent all that money on being first or whatever... they got ACTUAL USE for a longer period of time when what you got from leveling your SH mattered... unlike now (Mod 8) and more so in Mod 9... the complaint should be more that SH's are pointless... except for the Boons you get.

weaver936 · February 2016

This will only be used by people who don't know enough (or care enough) about the game to use their professions efficiently. The costs (in time and AD) that are associated with each of the tasks given are not worth the rewards from them. It takes less (by other means) to get Coffer points for each of the ones offered in the professions task than it does to make them in Professions. The ONLY way this will help guilds level their SH more than hurt them is if they have a butt load of alts they don't do anything with and don't have the time to use the cheaper (smarter) ways to get their Coffer points.

It's really sad that the Devs continue to give us things take them (I assume) huge amounts of their time and barely (if at all) meets the needs or interests of the NW Community. I'm beginning to believe that the only people that enjoy this game anymore are the people new to it. A lot of the rest of us are here out of habit.... emotionally and financially invested in an abusive and manipulative Gamer/Game Company relationship.

I'm not over stating the point. If any of the Devs (or Strum) would like to understand how I come to this conclusion.. I can explain in detail.

andrew33 · February 2016

The discounts are awesome. Thank you!
I guess the AD task in leadership can be performed only once at the same time!

Btw I think Influence isn't a big problem if you have at least 20-30 ppl online daily.
AD, Conqueror's shard and campaign currencies is much more of a problem for a non/barely pvp guild.

Lowly geared ppl afraid of pvp like animals from fire! And its hard to convience them to do dailies again when they have already finished it!

fernuu · February 2016

Feedback: Why do you punish players that did most effort to push their Guild Hall
I am really looking forward to SH economy changes. This will make whole PvE and PvP looking better. But what you are missing is that we (2-3 guilds) did really put effort in upgrading our Stronghold (my guild is already upgrading GH to 20). We're looking forward in this changes but as you can imagine - you really messed up (and that's a nice word) our supplies - including AD. If you could find any solution in some "extra prize" (like extra boon spot) we're gladly looking forward to it. This is totally unfair that you made as spent like billions of AD, keep us farming like hell and now you don't even want to talk about it. We worked for our SH boon till Module 6 started, we put a much of our time, effort, resources to keep our Guild Hall at best.
Again - I (and my guild) are really appreciating the work that Devs are doing - but we also value ourselfs - and I'm damn right looking into your response into that.

Cheers and regards,
Fernu Stormborn@fernuu form Gutbusters Brigade.