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Stronghold looks great, with a suggestion to help smaller guilds
darwinsradio
Member Posts: 61 Arc User
I like the concept behind strongholds and I think it has a lot of potential to be great fun, but...
My guild is very small it is made of a group of friends that have played together on various games back to the original Neverwinter Nights on the Australian Mystara Server.
With only 3 or 4 guild members on at any given time that eliminates the 15+ Heroic Encounters, we have managed fine with the 10+ one if we get the full time for them.
Resources, well unfortunately at our current rate of gathering it should take us just under 4 months to get the mill built. So that unfortunately relegates the content to time sink with little chance of ever getting to the pay off.
Im really bummed by this as It is a great concept, and since we will probably not invite in a crowd of random players to our guild it will likely end up abandoned.
I would suggest to the developers that perhaps the resources needed to build should be in proportion to the size of the guild so smaller guilds can take part.
Make resource gathering proportionate to the size of the guild so if you have 200 members you need 20,000 of a thing but if you only have 5 you need 2,000 (Im dyslexic and bad at math so don't expect my example to be perfect).
Just a suggestion
My guild is very small it is made of a group of friends that have played together on various games back to the original Neverwinter Nights on the Australian Mystara Server.
With only 3 or 4 guild members on at any given time that eliminates the 15+ Heroic Encounters, we have managed fine with the 10+ one if we get the full time for them.
Resources, well unfortunately at our current rate of gathering it should take us just under 4 months to get the mill built. So that unfortunately relegates the content to time sink with little chance of ever getting to the pay off.
Im really bummed by this as It is a great concept, and since we will probably not invite in a crowd of random players to our guild it will likely end up abandoned.
I would suggest to the developers that perhaps the resources needed to build should be in proportion to the size of the guild so smaller guilds can take part.
Make resource gathering proportionate to the size of the guild so if you have 200 members you need 20,000 of a thing but if you only have 5 you need 2,000 (Im dyslexic and bad at math so don't expect my example to be perfect).
Just a suggestion
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At that point, it would be prudent for them to unbind shards of power (and possibly even some other resources), so that the large guilds-which no longer need such things-can sell those shards to the smaller guilds, giving those smaller guilds time to catch up.
That would be the smart thing to do. But I suppose if they just made them sellable on the AH now, then the large guilds-which also have more AD-would just have even MORE of an advantage.
This would be good for smaller guilds. A scaling method will keep the smaller guilds competitive.
It would make sense logically, why does one stronghold for 50 members have to be as large or consume as many resources as a stronghold for 150 members?
Instead of it scaling per person, however, perhaps there could be categories of guild sizes (I'm pretty certain this has been suggested before). There could be a small guild (no more than 50 players), medium (100 players) and larger guild (150 players, which is the current cap). This will still encourage smaller guilds to recruit members up to their guild size limit, but not make it so that individual people can have their own stronghold, which would defeat the purpose of the expansion.
Each tier of guild size would have different resource requirements. I'm not necessarily advocating for a reduction in difficulty of mobs, however, as if a small guild is active enough, then it could field enough players to defeat a number of dragons in the Dragonflight Heroics.
Fielding different sized guilds could also fill in gaps in the MOBA like matchmaking, where it would sometimes require smaller groups of people to fill in the 20vs20 player quota.
Our few longtime members are starting to feel intense pressure to "carry the load" so to speak, even over my objections ("just enjoy playing the game!"). Nevertheless, players are beginning to be faced with a choice: stay in a SH that progresses at a snail's pace, or leave and get their boons?
As a side note, on the topic of guild meetings: now that we have a logical location for meetings, it would be super-duper-helpful if the game mechanics supported a periodic meeting. For example, for one hour per week, maybe some picnic tables could spawn, with a vendor, and maybe a pinata once every 10 minutes. And maybe the meeting could show up on the minimap event list? For tiny guilds like mine, we need all the help we can get.
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
Scale would be great.
But agree that after a while, big guilds start to float away with nothing to do, then maybe smallers can build due to ability for bigs to sell shards or something.
Although I know you can buy them for zen. Altough that would get expensive very fast. That might be the point.
After all, you were eventually able to buy 100% completion with zen for module zones.
Instead of scaling resource requirements to build the stronghold, here's an alternative idea.
Divide heroic encounter rewards depending on how many players are involved.
Zerging HE's would give reduced rewards (per person) compared to soloing HE's.
Of course, this tends to encourage soloing/duoing.
However, it should not encourage guild kicking.
Soloing/duoing an epic HE is a lot of work, and it seems somewhat fair to scale rewards based on number of players.
Or are the rewards already scaled?
1) Make a guild with 5 players:
2) All 5 players spend all the resources they have
3) Switch the 5 first players to another 5
4) Repeat
That's how you break this system easily.
We all came back after a long break for EE (Pally class brought me back), working our way through all the campaigns, etc, I have been happy with where I am, and how fast I have been moving forward. I now feel trapped, I either abandon my friends, and join another guild so I dont fall behind the curve due to not being able to get gear or boons, or stay and know I will never again be able to do top level content, as any tuning for future dungeons etc will have to account for SH boons, which I wont have, meaning my Tank will be stuffed. If they are not tuned with those boons in mind than those that have them will cake walk things while the rest of us struggle, again leaving us behind the curve, as GS and Guild Rank will become the required things to do Dungeons.
I already struggle to get in a party as I dont have ubber gear yet, that seems to be need to the dungeons, that give you the same uber gear need to the dungeon.
We have not even got our farm up, as we will struggle to make the resource requirements, as all of us are still progressing throughy the campaigns, for those boons, so do I spen resources on SH or my boons from campaigns.
The future looks bleak, I really want to play, and play the next mod, as my big attraction to this is from the PnP game. I am seriously considering is this worth the effort?
In most ways I love the game, enjoy the combat mechanics they feel great and are fun, enjoy most of the quest zones, and am looking forward to the changes for 60-70, so that does not seem such a grind and I might level a couple of my other toons. I feel like I am being pushed out of the game by unachievable goals.
I dont usually QQ about things, but something has to change.
(We are all currently looking at other games to see if we can find one where we can all have fun even the more casual players..)
A few of us also have other disabilities in real life, that make it a challenge to group up with people we don't know, so seeking out a Guild that might be casualy and frienly enough with out people putting preasure on you to perform at a certain commitment level must login daily, must log in every fortnight or such make it hard. I for one sometimes require Hospital, where I can be for anytime from a couple of weeks, to a few months, often with out any real notice, so these guilds may not be as tollerant.
I know I will never be BiS player, but I am trying to get as close as I can, which now seems impossible.
It is also nearly impossible for a guild with a limited number of players online at any given time to fight the dragons. I would like a scaling on that. have the dragons' hp and damage scale to the amount of online players(from guild) at any given time. This will not help exploiters or larger guilds but would be very helpfull to guilds that normally have 10 or less players online.
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)
Mate, 4 months for the mill isn't a good thing. Its hardly freeing an entire country by making the lv1 buildings. 4 months is a bit to long considering my guild (4 persons) is currently trying to get the 2nd building which with the current rate should come in 1 month or so. Regardless if its 1 or 4 months this is still a bad thing.
You can ofc say that we should just join a larger guild but thats beside the point. I don't expect nor do I whish small guilds to godmode their way through strongholds. It however needs to be smoother. It doesn't make sense to have to grind so much for lv1 buildings.
Scaling might not work that much because of exploiting it but a reduction in costs could be a thing. Mainly the surplus equipment is hard to get with only 20 points per blue identified item.
Some ideas:
- reduce the costst of the lower tiers
- make surplus equipment take in un identified items or increase coffer gain of blues and greens
- Increase droprate tokens
- Increase purple companion items
As a side note, I heard rumors that the test shard had 10x lower costs? Or was that only so guilds could more easely test it in shorter span of time?
One person above said it - people will stay at the lowest number to get the easiest time to level. Thats just one way I could see them abuse it.
You can either scale it to larger guilds and have smaller guilds suffer, or you can scale it to smaller guilds and have larger guilds (who, lets be honest, are the people paying them the most money and involve more people), just breeze through content in a week.
I disagree with the way they went about the boons and gear...those should not be attached to guild content really or at least an alternative in a non-guild scenario that allows people to access it.
Anyways, scaling won't happen unless they decide to allow large guilds to basically blow through the content.
Sadly, I agree with the possible abuse. The obvious possible abuse: keep the number of guild member low, cycle in and out "members". Everybody join back when the stronghold is fully built.
Sure, there are ways to prevent the abuses but somebody needs to fully think about that and spend time to implement them. Otherwise, this can make it worse instead of better.
As for the aforementioned abuse I think I may have an idea for that. Rather than scaling the requirements based on guild size, what if they instead only lowered the requirements for building the first few ranks of structures while keeping the building requirements for the upper ranks high. Sure, larger guilds will blow through the first handful of ranks on their structures much easier but to a large guild those lower ranks are going to be small sauce rewards and they'll be gunning for the higher tier stuff so all their time, effort, and resources can be spent on those. As a small guild leader if all my guild managed to make after several months was a T2 market and a few ranks of a boon structure (or two) I would be completely satisfied. Unfortunately, as it currently stands, it's going to take several months just to make the first farm.
That's just my opinion and maybe other small guilds wouldn't agree, but I'm just throwing the idea out there.
To set it in perspective. The farm is costing 27.000 surplus equipment. Over the last few days we were able to deposit around 120 points per person per day. With 4 people it will take us 56 days in order to reach the target for a lv1 farm.
EDIT: Indeed rex, thats what I meant
I also don't expect to be able to get a maxed out Stronghold with only 3 active and 2 partially active guild members. I would like some progress to at least be possible before the rest of my guild decides that the stronghold isn't worth the time put into it.
It is most likely it does not worth the time to put into it for a tiny/inactive guild.
Anyways. Good for you that you're having fun. We have fun too with it. The only non fun part is where you need to take months and months before you can unlock the basics of the basics. There you definetly shouldn't need a huge army for.
Regarding your ... 'meh shut and merge already' there is a reason why there are smaller guilds. Let it be either family or close friends. Like explained above we only ask for the bare basics. There is no reason why a group of 2-7 people shouldn't be able to get the basics within a decent timeframe.
+ the basic structures, with small benefits for every small guild, reachable within a few days
+ reasonable upgraded structures, with medium benefits for medium guilds, reachable within a few weeks
+ extremly upgraded structures, with big benefits for big guilds, reachable within a few months
problem solved.
My guild(max 10 online any given moment) is working nicely and we should be at a state where we will be able to upgrade to level 2 castle very soon. The problem is that some of the guilds might loose their members to bigger guilds if they don't get that essential buildings up fast, like the market.
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)
Reasonable donation rate per person in a casual guild:
100 Inf (I'm rounding: 105 influence for 3 HEs, if you are lucky enough to get it)
20 adventurer's shards
10 heroic shards
100 surplus equipment (that's 20 greens, and greens are the only equipment that drops while questing)
50 gems (10 rank 3 or 4s: non-BiS players need the gems for their artifacts and enchantments, so you're asking them to sacrifice personal development for the guild)
Farm costs 27k surplus equipment, 18k gems, 1500 adventurer's shards.
Assuming 10 players in the guild, all contributing above amounts daily:
7.5 days for shards
27 days for surplus equipment
36 days for gems
So about a month before small guilds can build the second structure in the Stronghold.
Getting to rank 2 Marketplace is much, much worse.
Small Strongholds for small guilds, with small benefits.
Medium Strongholds for medium guilds, with medium benefits.
Big Strongholds for big guilds, with big benefits.
No point in sizing down a guild.
But everyone would at least get some benefits (and of course equipment) out of Strongholds.
A "MMORPG" with less dungeons to play through.
A "MMORPG" with a lot of boring and repetitive grind in it.
A "MMORPG" that is kicking solo and casual players out of the door.
A "MMORPG" with huge login and game crashing issues since Strongholds.
My guild has officially given up on Strongholds. For a small guild its simply absorbing too many assetsneeded to feed gems and Artifact equipment.
"For Sale, crappy pile of stones with lumber mill nearby. Slight orc infestation, but plenty of deer to eat. Pleasant staff with the exception of a rather shifty ranger."
You mean 100 000 right ? lol
Recently STO has implemented something called Armadas, which many of you smaller guilds may very well be interested in. You might want to check it out over here and here.
I imagine if something like this is implemented, it will be a little while before we see it in game, but my point is... there is still hope for smaller guilds.