Stronghold Addition Suggestion

dayhjawk

So I have been thinking lately on how the devs could add something to strongholds that would give an incentive for players to see out guilds and to give a reason for guild members to actually want to invest into their guild.

So my suggestion is to add a new spot on the map that will allow you to build a AD (Astral Diamond) Mine or Refinery (something along these lines). It's a one time build and it's the only thing that can be built there, so it won't conflict with the current system. Once built, it would allow members of your guild to refine an additional 1,000 AD per Guild Rank. So if your guild is rank 20, you can get an additional 20k AD a day. The catch is, you have to go the npc at the location and ask him to do it for you. This gives a good reason for players to seek out, specially new players, and join a guild. It also gives an additional incentive for guild members to work towards helping out and improving the guild.

Now, I have spoken to a lot of people about this ideal and the general thought is that 1k-20k a day isn't enough, but I understand that if this amount is too high then the devs aren't going to do it. Maybe the devs can figure out a balance, but I think 1k-20k extra a day is a step in the right direction.

kiraskytower

Star Trek Online has a similar feature to this - once your Fleet's Dilithium mine gets to a certain point you can go (once a day) to an NPC there to refine an additional amount of Dilithium (their equivalent of AD) over and above the cap.

Maybe as part of the promised future stronghold expansion something like this could be added ...

mordekai

How does giving people in the highest level guilds an extra 20'000 Astral Diamonds a day for doing nothing other than popping in to the Guild House help anyone apart from the players themselves?

Small guilds will lose even more players as the lure of 20K AD on TOP of the maxed out Guild Boons for literally doing nothing more than turning up and saying "Hello" becomes even more enticing.

The big guilds will fill up with wasters who don't do anything other than turn up and say "Hello"

IF, after a couple of months of turning up to claim their free AD, the Guild Leaders notice and say "That guy's milking us..." and kick them... there are enough Gh20 asking for nothing more than an IL and occasional attendance as a requirement for them to keep hopping from one to the other for the forseeable future.

Guilds need incentives to participate, not just "Sign up, do naff all and grab the goodies!"

Make the Boons reliant on continued participation... make them earned through contributions, so you don't drop all of them at max level the second you join...
If you want a magic AD Fountain for players, (and can persuade Cryptic that 20K extra AD won't upset the economy that they are trying to tighten...) make them have to earn it. Not just turn up.

Turning up to ask an NPC for free Astral Diamonds isn't a "Catch" it's basically advocating for the easiest, most rewarding repeatable quest in the game's history.

If they are going to make Guilds work again, so that new players have anything like the same opportunity old players had to start, and build, a Guild they need to look at bold new ideas, not just "Add more cool stuff that benefits big guilds the most."

First, they need to address ways for the really big Guilds to have some sort of over-spill for resources. For those who've capped out all their buildings and filled their coffers and need to spam vendors to give players a shot at earning some GMs.

Maybe trade with guilds outside the immediate alliance?

(This is off the top of my head so hasn't been challenged for exploits...)
Send them some of your resources in exchange for gold or other resources in return... BUT!!! Tie that in to a Marauders event where the players are defending ACTUAL resources or gold... Have the players who participate earn a "stack" of something like "Guild Deeds" or something... Those stacks determine a bonus to GM for donated resources and a discount on GM purchases, (Nothing big, to damage the Guild event discounts/bonuses, but just enough to help...).

Outside of that I think the game finally needs to exploit a resource it has had for years but never really taken advantage of.
Factions.
Kind of like Icewind Dale, but done properly...

Lords Alliance
Harpers
Purple Dragon thingies...
Zhentarim
etc...

Link Guilds or Alliances to factions for added depth. Factions need resources Guild can use its own stockpile to donate to Faction. Factions fill like Tiamat Treasure hoard and guilds earn rewards if targets are met and get to take part in Faction quests to secure transit, protect the merchandise en route, and even break into other Factions warehouses and steal theirs...

"Factions" has much more potential than that...
At the macro level, Guilds that do a lot for the faction get extra/better visiting merchants and probably all sorts of other bonuses, and at the micro level, the player can become a member and do solo quest lines to improve their standing in the Faction.

Guilds NEED some work... offering lazy members 20K AD per day to stick their head round the door and say hello does nothing more than tell a Guild Leader, "Oh, he's still alive then..." it needs to be bigger and more inventive than more free stuff for people who didn't earn it.

ETA: and, OF COURSE, they need to have "Donating resources from more recent campaign!!!" at the top of the "What should Guilds look like" list.

fyrstigor

The incentive to join a guild is already plenty. Boons, and strong boons that isnt scaled. This along would be enough reason to join a guild for anyone.

Ur also forgetting that being in a guild is the player making a choice that they wanna be more social. In some guilds u dont have to talk, u dont have to join anything, so the only thing different from guild or not guild would be guild boons. But the joining something makes some players feel they are part of something, and they dont like that idea, so they solo. Even though the boons are strong, u can do easily without them. So making more incentive to join guilds means the ones who wanna be solo is getting HAMSTER.

What they should do instead is making more incentives to play with ur guild.

Many guilds and alliances are full of some materials like dungeon shards, surplus equipment, profession stuff. Instead a way should be done to combat this so u can again earn guildmarks from everything. This could be done in many different ways.

Leaders could empty x% of type from coffer.
Once a category is full, u can keep donating to it but only get x% of original GM gain.
Build special vendor that lasts x hours and then u can donate to him, could be a special vendor for each category or each type.
Make the marauders event an event where u protect the strongholds outgoing caravans from bandits. So after each 5 waves u can empty the coffer of selected type with x% or flat numbers. This would make a guild having to work for clearing space in the overflow types.

It would also be nice to see them change up the rewards from guild events. Dragonflight used to be fun and easy. The rewards where never good, but it was ok cause u could kill them pretty easy. BiS players could solo 1 dragon. But now u need to gather alot more players or u need several strong players to be able to kill dragons in the 10 min timer. And the rewards are still bad.

If its gonna be this hard, could the rewards be better ? Instead of random vouchers, give us vouchers to a voucher vendor. And make the vouchers upgrade in quality depending on how many dragons is killed. So if u kill all 4 u get better quality than if u kill 3, 2 or 1. Right now u get 1 more vouchers for each dragon killed, but the quality is still just as bad, and its random. With the voucher vendor a guild could run the DF get vouchers and then turn them into the type of stuff they need. This would give a much better incentive to run DF.

And i also think the timer should be changed. This free summoned we get every 2 hours, can for some guilds be hard to make fit in the prime time of when u have most online and u would be able to do it. And the bells are just not worth the price in zen with the HAMSTER rewards. Make the DFs free to summon at any time. But put a timer on the wizard after, so u can only do that every 4h. This would give us less overall DFs, but we can time them for when we are able to do them. And with bells u would be able to summon 1 right away. I dont see anyone using bells anyway with that change because of the rewards, so the change in timer wouldnt be anything that would hurt the zenstore.