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.
- Remove cap on influence farming
- 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.
Comments
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
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
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.
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.
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
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
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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
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
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.
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
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.
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!
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
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.
I think it's time to say "you win" and join a big guild.
we are close to pushing the button on ten just 90K influence to go and we are pretty small.
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.
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.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
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.
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.
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
@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.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79
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.
The Holy Crusaders guild leader ♚ Mod 10 PVE Destroyer GWF guide ♚ Founding member of the Relentless Alliance
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
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