Retours officiels sur The Maze Engine : Guild Alliance

rgutscheradev (Développeur) a écrit:

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!