Official Feedback Thread: Guild Alliances

darthbbq

@blindfury11
You are correct there is not really an incentive for the Sword or Gauntlet to give their resources to the Helm.

If there was an additional bonus to donating to alliance member coffers, it would make much more sense. i.e. If I donated my daily 400 Influence into your guild's mimic, my mimic would also get 400 plus an additional percentage of influence and guild marks. Like a credit card cash back reward system...

This would encourage all the tiers to use their resources on their alliance members.

@micky1p00
In your example, are you saying that if I am in Gauntlet guild and donate 1000 influence to the Helm coffer, my Gauntlet guild would only get 20 Influence or 1020 influence?

micky1p00

darthbbq said:

@blindfury11
You are correct there is not really an incentive for the Sword or Gauntlet to give their resources to the Helm.

If there was an additional bonus to donating to alliance member coffers, it would make much more sense. i.e. If I donated my daily 400 Influence into your guild's mimic, my mimic would also get 400 plus an additional percentage of influence and guild marks. Like a credit card cash back reward system...

This would encourage all the tiers to use their resources on their alliance members.

@micky1p00
In your example, are you saying that if I am in Gauntlet guild and donate 1000 influence to the Helm coffer, my Gauntlet guild would only get 20 Influence or 1020 influence?

20.
If you propose 1020, you just multiplied the donations by 5. There is no reason for a gauntlet to donate to the helm. The helm gets automatic discount from the gauntlets. It's not reasonable to ask lower ranked guild to donate to higher - unless using straw guilds.

Also following the original concept, the helm is the highest ranked guild with the highest donation rate, giving them percentage based discount (and basing of their percentage the drill down) makes the most sense, their 6%-2% of their donation worth more than lower ranked guilds percentage based discount.
Hence the lower ranked guilds get less percentage of a discount, but in absolute numbers get more flowing from the top. Ofc this is based on the original concept with high ranked guild on the top and lower down the chain and they split and reform with the sword becoming helm when the middle / bottom get high enough to get higher discount for themselves.

ironzerg79

What about just making one of the active boons "Alliance Boon" slot. Everyone in the Alliance can pick one of their 3 boon spots to be a choice of the highest level of a boon that one of the Alliances has obtain. Then you have some boon sharing in the Alliance, but it's only 1 out of 3. There's still incentive to improve your other boon buildings.

It also gives people potential incentive to split out other niche boon buildings within the alliance, as they could rely on each other to have all the boon buildings covered across all the guilds.

micky1p00

ironzerg79 said:

What about just making one of the active boons "Alliance Boon" slot. Everyone in the Alliance can pick one of their 3 boon spots to be a choice of the highest level of a boon that one of the Alliances has obtain. Then you have some boon sharing in the Alliance, but it's only 1 out of 3. There's still incentive to improve your other boon buildings.

It also gives people potential incentive to split out other niche boon buildings within the alliance, as they could rely on each other to have all the boon buildings covered across all the guilds.

This is can also encourage diversity in boon structure. Something in this direction sounds reasonable.

asterotg

First of all, imo the alliance boons should be the same for all ranks, so ppl dont have to 'fight' for a specific rank.

Concerning the shared SH boons, I like the idea, but with some changes. All allies can use the boons of the other guilds should have some minimizing factors.

The level of the boon available to all allies should be limited by

a) their own SH lvl (a lvl 1 guild cant use any boons and higher ranked guild limited to the boon level available to themself, if they would have the boon structure)

b) the max rank of the boons structure in the alliance achieved.

Otherwise a SH 20 guild could put some alts in a new or inactive guild (I could 'donate our 'abandoned' lvl 8 guild) build the missing boon plots and be done. Same goes for smaller guilds. They would get all the boons they wish for without the work, but be totally depending on the big ones without an incentive to rank up on their own.

This limitations would force all guilds to level up and be an incentive for maxed guilds, to max allied guilds, so they can use the boons they did not chose at max level.

johnieohm

ok I have played for a while now. and all of a sudden I am unable to accept items from the in game emails. before this I had put items up for auction and now I can't get my payment so I would rather hope that an admin looks into why this is happening

johnieohm

i was being dumb i am sorry

zhodia

Today I went to preview shard to update our remaining stronghold buildings to rank 10 and to my surprise I wasn't able to interact with any building. It was saying I am visiting the ally stronghold and can't interact with their structures.
I think this bug has been introduced with the recent update that happened between yesterday and today.
Here is the screenshot.

kvet

(Just to clarify - Zho was in her guild's SH instance, not in an ally's instance. I haven't been able to get anyone to help with actually forming an alliance with us on Preview yet, so Greycloaks are not even IN an alliance there)

micky1p00

An QoL request: Can we have a field in guild settings named "Tag" or something, so it will be some sort of a short version of the guild name set by us.
For example for my guild "Imaginary Friends" we will set it as "IF" and it will be shown before the char name in alliance chat. Or we will have the option to enable it in chat channels.

ghoulz66

Very mixed feelings about sharandar. Isn't EE and Underdark enough for 60-69 players?

And when will IWD become relevant again? Corrupted and Purified BI gear/weapons need to be brought back to their former glory. We have all these set bonuses now so there's no excuse to leave em as useless memory trinkets.

melindaoz

kvet said:

(Just to clarify - Zho was in her guild's SH instance, not in an ally's instance. I haven't been able to get anyone to help with actually forming an alliance with us on Preview yet, so Greycloaks are not even IN an alliance there)

Fair Dinkum has a level 10 Stronghold on Preview. If I can work out which one of my many Preview alts is IN that guild and we are awake at the same time, I'd be happy to help with that.

valwryn

zhodia said:

Today I went to preview shard to update our remaining stronghold buildings to rank 10 and to my surprise I wasn't able to interact with any building. It was saying I am visiting the ally stronghold and can't interact with their structures.
I think this bug has been introduced with the recent update that happened between yesterday and today.

I was able to upgrade a couple buildings on my SH but was not able to change the SET Target For Contribution for any building on the list.

Can ya lower the Alliance Marker about a half inch, the names override with your own Guild. Ya know all those Peasants on LIVE server will keep clicking the wrong marker.

valwryn

As ya can see from the Previous Guild bonuses pics.....upgrading to Rank 11 has increased the bonuses for everyone. Swap the numbers for the Helm Guild and the Sword numbers are in between. It's hard for me to tell what the discounts look like since I didn't compare from b4 joining the Alliance.

scathias

micky1p00 said:

An QoL request: Can we have a field in guild settings named "Tag" or something, so it will be some sort of a short version of the guild name set by us.
For example for my guild "Imaginary Friends" we will set it as "IF" and it will be shown before the char name in alliance chat. Or we will have the option to enable it in chat channels.

I want to second this request. The alliances chat is going to be very large and have a lot of new accounts (and multiple characters per account). having a short identifying guild tag on chat messages within the Alliance chat would be wonderful. This can be should be an option to have disabled of course, but a guild tag would be awesome

arcticblitz

Lots of great stuff in here, just wanted to make a suggestion not overly thought out so feel free to pick holes in it.

Goal is to get large guilds to help donate to small guilds in order to help small guilds to level up right.

To me it seems to structuring the rewards aspect will be key. I think 2 tiers is all that is required Just make it an AD reward in which the Alpha guild receives a AD into a pool for every donation made to a Beta guilds coffer, the pool is then distributed to all members of the Alpha guild once it reaches a certain level or when a distribute funds button is pushed.

so i see it impacting like this :
- Alpha guild wants to help as many beta guilds as possible to generate AD,
- Beta guilds want to level as fast as possible to become alpha guilds and generate income, leave coffers open
- Alpha boons can be shared because they are receiving income from donations

regenerde

So, Alpha guild dumps unwanted resources into Beta guilds and gets rewarded with AD.
When the Alpha guild can't donate anymore into that Beta guild, they just kick the Beta guild out, and then invite a fresh one.
Rinse and repeat for an unlimited supply of AD.

I'm curious, where is that helping any small guild?

Anyway, i'm still waiting for something, that will actually help small guilds to get a basic stronghold together... but looks like alliances will not offer anything in that department.

It rather looks like everyone here is more concerned about how they can get even more out of alliances for their own big guilds.

arcticblitz

regenerde said:

So, Alpha guild dumps unwanted resources into Beta guilds and gets rewarded with AD.
When the Alpha guild can't donate anymore into that Beta guild, they just kick the Beta guild out, and then invite a fresh one.
Rinse and repeat for an unlimited supply of AD.

I'm curious, where is that helping any small guild?

Fair point, I'm sure a safe guard could be put in place something like a minimum time in alliance before kicking or some such and scalable reward on roadblock items.

regenerde

arcticblitz said:

regenerde said:

So, Alpha guild dumps unwanted resources into Beta guilds and gets rewarded with AD.
When the Alpha guild can't donate anymore into that Beta guild, they just kick the Beta guild out, and then invite a fresh one.
Rinse and repeat for an unlimited supply of AD.

I'm curious, where is that helping any small guild?

Fair point, I'm sure a safe guard could be put in place something like a minimum time in alliance before kicking or some such and scalable reward on roadblock items.

Here is another point, they can't remove rAD rewards from nearly anything with "bots & AD sellers" as reason, and then turn around and add pure AD as reward to an easy to abuse/exploit alliances system like this.

rgutscheradev

Hello everyone!

Thanks for all the feedback. Sorry to take so long to respond -- I've been busy working on the *next* (!!) module. But I managed to catch up (kinda sorta) and thought now would be a good time to post here.

The math of the guild boons -- lots of good comments here, with scathias having one of the more detailed posts. Scathias, you're basically right in terms of the incentives being limited, and players mostly wanting to donate to their own guilds. There are a few things to keep in mind, though:
* One is that there are different resources, and big guilds might have extra of something (eg gems or surplus labor, maybe even something like Icewind Dale currency) that small guilds are not maxed out on. The players in the big guilds still want guild marks, though, so they will donate to the small guilds in that case. Obviously that only applies in some cases -- it's unlikely any guild is going to be donating influence to a smaller guild (unless they are truly capped out).
* The big thing, though, is that the bonuses are a pretty tiny part of the overall system. The biggest benefit to small guilds is the ability to use the big guild's stores (I'm in a small guild myself, and the chance to get some Dragonflight or Lionsmane gear is what I'm looking forward to most). The biggest benefit to big guilds is probably making it easier to spend capped currencies (and thus gain guild marks).

This leads into another question -- why is the system so hierarchical? That was how the system came to us from Star Trek, and I resisted it at first. But on further thought, I decided it was actually a good thing. That's because the worst outcome (in my mind) would be if the alliance system encouraged all the big guilds to group together and just left all the small guilds further behind. That's a risk (it mostly hasn't happened on Star Trek, though), but there are some important things that push against it:
* psychologically, the hierarchical flavor makes a big guild not want to be "on the bottom" of the pyramid
* the benefits of the bonuses are small (if they were super-good, then the big guilds *would* all want to group up)
* the best benefit for small guilds (store purchasing) works best if they are allied with a big guild; the best benefit for big guilds (a place to spend excess resources) works best if they are allied with small guilds
* the Helm guild bonus is better than the Gauntlet bonus, so a big guild has a reason to leave Gauntlet position in a giant alliance and become the Helm guild in a new alliance (or to start its own alliance to begin with, rather than join an all-big-guild alliance)

This last point is a mixed blessing -- in my ideal world there would be an awesome bonus that a small guild wanted and a big guild didn't. I haven't been able to come up with one that is simple, clean, and doable in the time we have. There have been some intriguing proposals people have made, but none that fits all those criteria *and* isn't just good for the big guild too. However, although I agree the XP bonus is pretty meh, keep in mind the real small guild benefit -- shopping in a big guild store -- is really, really good. As in, "best alliance benefit in the whole system" good. So to make sure big guilds have some benefit, I think it makes sense that they have the better bonus.

Limiting visitors: a couple of people mentioned this. This should be implemented -- guild leader only. Has anyone tried it? Does it work? If not, please say right away! (There might just barely be time to fix it, depending on what exactly is wrong.) I'm hoping it's all OK and just the people mentioning it didn't realize it was guild leader only.

Shared boons: yes, it was just an example, not an actual feature. It was a feature I really wanted, but it got cut because of time If enough people agitate (politely please!) maybe I can convince people we should do it. If we did it, I'd like to do something like Ironzerg79's suggestion (where you only get 1 or 2 shared boons, so that you still care about your own boon buildings). However, keep it mind it would be a new feature, so it's not something we could do for the upcoming launch of alliances -- it would have to be done later.

Lastly, although it's not part of guild alliances per se -- I hear what everyone is saying about Influence. I have been wanting to get those costs down, but I haven't managed to convince people (it's the key limiting factor in guild advancement, the only one with a real time gate on it, so people are nervous about lowering it). I will keep pushing for it!

scathias

@rgutscheradev, thank you for your feedback.
Your points about trying to force large and small guilds apart make some sense, however there are already alliances forming that ask for lv 16+ as a sword guild, and lv 11+ as a gauntlet (nothing against these people, but they are there). The smallest guilds are still getting cut out of powerful alliances because they do not provide enough levels for them to be worth taking. You bring up the idea that as guilds grow stronger it is possibly they will want to leave to form their own alliance as a helm guild so that they can get a better bonus. This is quite correct that as enough time passes there will be guilds that wish to do this, but that is the key issue here. Time. Most gauntlet guilds are 6-12 months or more away from being able to consider such a thing. So that is 12 more months of many smaller guilds being left out. sure they can band themselves together, but a group of lv 4 guilds still doesn't have that player base to get much done resource wise (look at beckylunatic's feedback on a very small guild's experiences). Another possible thing preventing guilds from leaving to create new alliances is the aspect of community. If you have a group of guilds who have meshed well together why would you want to leave? Rotation within an alliance is a very real option. any maxed level 20 guild is not going to care about being helm (unless they are really stuck on that psychological mountain you mentioned

You are correct that shopping in a big guild store is an incredible bonus, and that is going to significantly impact the cost of masterwork resources when alliances hits, but dragonflight gear is something a lv 8 guild can get. lv 12 is where masterwork charts become available which is really nice, but as i said the prices are going to drop making these less attractive for guilds who don't have rich players since getting masterworks leveled is still going to be an huge huge undertaking. r2 overloads is best with lv 16 guilds (drains, which are terrible and I'll be mentioning this more later on) but those are applicable only to pvp since for the most part the monster slaying overloads are too specific to be worth switching out for every dungeon to might do, and to be honest, they are not that needed for pve. The pvp wards/marks are huge for those that participate, but only because the drain overloads are stupid, horrible items that should never have been introduced to the game...wider access for stam/ap wards will be somewhat helpful here as well, but completely offset since the drains are in greater use as well. And since many of those lv 16 guilds are not making their own alliances as a helm guild that leaves a huge portion of small guilds who might have pvp inclined members to suffer at the hands of even more drain users.

on a different note, could you comment on the possibility of adding guild tags to people participating in alliance chat as mentioned by micky1p00 here? it would be an awesome QoL feature

scathias

Also, it is not entirely the high cost of influence that is the problem, (though high costs are part of the problem). The biggest issue as i see it is that there is currently only 1 way to earn influence reliably right now, and that is by grinding HEs on as many alts as you can do. This sucks.
Getting the strongbox of influence from dragonflight is a wonderful experience (though slightly less so by having to spend 18k for a strongbox key to open it so as to get the most benefit from it), these boxes drop from Stronghold siege as well, but siege is so screwed up right now that it doesn't pop, and when it does it is a laggy mess filled with drains, and pets (like the owlbear cub) that are so overpowered in pvp they can kill you in seconds.
There was mention in the patch notes when the Influence strongbox was introduced that they had a possibility of dropping from HEs but I run a lot of those (minor ones) and i have never seen one drop, and never heard of one dropping from any of the major or epic HEs either.

Many people have suggested that influence be able to gained by running normal content, like dungeons and pvp and raids and dragonflight. perhaps make it a reduced rate (50 per run) so that doing HEs is still the fastest way to reach your cap, but this would be an amazing QoL improvement that could be made while still having a 400 influence cap per character

valwryn

The Guild Information page is all screwidity up!!!





My EVIL Bunny Guild along with 2 others entered into the Alliance at level 20. The SS2 and the Polish Guild entered at level 1 and since upgraded. These latter guilds display their proper levels on the Alliance page while us 20's show ZERO.

rgutscheradev said:

Hello everyone!

Limiting visitors: a couple of people mentioned this. This should be implemented -- guild leader only. Has anyone tried it? Does it work? If not, please say right away! (There might just barely be time to fix it, depending on what exactly is wrong.) I'm hoping it's all OK and just the people mentioning it didn't realize it was guild leader only.

I can't find anywhere in the guild settings that can limit visitors.

unitedweevil679

"Lastly, although it's not part of guild alliances per se -- I hear what everyone is saying about Influence. I have been wanting to get those costs down, but I haven't managed to convince people (it's the key limiting factor in guild advancement, the only one with a real time gate on it, so people are nervous about lowering it). I will keep pushing for it!"

I can copy paste the text from the link in if you wish, sir dev, but here is a post containing ideas specific to influence modifications. Speed wise some are just a comment away from implementation, others would require copy pasting existing code with minimal changes (location, creatures summoned), still others would involve a complete overhaul and are unlikely to be done in time.

Hope it's to your liking.

http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/comment/12830216

josiahiyon

@kvet I can invite your guild to the alliance we have on the ptr if you are still without an alliance. It's the absolute alliance that several have already posted pictures of in this thread.

kvet

josiahiyon said:

@kvet I can invite your guild to the alliance we have on the ptr if you are still without an alliance. It's the absolute alliance that several have already posted pictures of in this thread.

Thanks - for whatever reason Greycloaks seems to be broken. I invite you to try - just invite Greycloaks and see if you get an error. 4 other guilds have tried and gotten an error, maybe you'll get lucky? I created two test guilds and was able to make and alliance with those two new guilds and test guild from Team Fencebane, but... Greycloaks seems to be broken for some reason. We thought it might be because it was maxed out... but clearly that's not it.

@rgutscheradev @strumslinger