Guilds and Beacons

Devlog
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Alright so i was just now pointed towards this topic which i hadn’t really looked into before. But reading over it i got to the same conclusion as the others. This would be a horrible and abusive system. luckily you were convinced of that [quote=“olliepurkiss, post:38, topic:4340”]
we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not 100% sure what to do, but given the feedback, the answer is not what we originally proposed.
[/quote]

Awesome. Now let me make a rant on the topic where i will pull from previous experience and other games. its not going to be very neat but it should hopefully be worth reading. (Specifically hope that @olliepurkiss @james or @ben have time to read it)

Okay so guilds summed up. you can have a main guild with various branches and you can be in multiple guilds at once. great idea. Not leaving the guild? not so much. so the problem (as already discussed) is the fact that you give away a permanent limited resource (AKA Beacon). The problem wouldnt even be the price it would be the fact that you would never get it back again (with the proposed system). So lets scrap that and look for other ways.

One of the bigger problems is the fact that guilds can be used for so many things and that you can be in multiple guilds at once. So if we talk guild beacons as in getting a bigger guildhall you would not need as many constantly as if you talk a guild city where players live. (So i assume many people would like one beacon per player).

Right so lets start off with the one mentioned. Allow size to be compared to the amount of members. Now as mentioned above there are many problems with this since you can be in many guilds at once and people could just hire none active guild members to stay in the guild without ACTUALLY being part of the guild. Doesn’t seem like that should be the point of the system. This system is Members = Space

The second obvious one would be gold, materials, Oort shards. whatever. some sort of currency or resource to expand the guild. The problem with this is quite simply the fact that the rich guilds would be able to dominate massive amounts of space. Maybe even more than an active guild with more members. The question with this would be does spending MORE on space not entitle you to MORE space? This system is Money = Space

Third system are two in one and more along the lines of WoW and GW2 where when the guild can do activities, events, achievements together which will pool into a sort of “level” or “Guild currency” which could be used on guild beacons or upgrades to the guild (personally i was always fund of the idea of a level guild). This means that that it is not the richest nor the biggest guild which will get the most space (though they could help a bit) but instead the most dedicated guilds. This system is Dedication = Space

Fourth potential system would be a mix of members and money. I recently started playing WoW again after some time. And in the WoD expansion they have certain “currency” you can craft to buy recipes for things you want to make with a 24 hour cooldown. This sets a natural limit to how quickly you can progress. even if you play 24 hours a day you CAN’T achieve all recipes faster than a set limit. Now if you imagine something along the lines of that in B< for beacons. So some of the problems mentioned before, No downside to having a ton of members, Money could buy you the most space. Lets say that the average person is in 5 guilds which means he supports 5 guilds progress at once. Now imagine if there was a system where you could buy the guild a beacon for X currency. BUT there are some rules. 1) You have to have been in a guild for a week. 2) You can only give out 1 beacon every week across all of your guilds (would have to be account wide cooldown to avoid abuse). That way even if a player was fed the materials it would still be a big choice which guild to give the beacon too BUT not a permanent choice. Just a choice with a cooldown. This would mean that a guild could gain more space either by having alot of members who doesnt care for their beacon. Or have less members that are dedicated to the guild and decides to put their beacon there. And that it wasn’t just something that could be bought easily (though dont get me wrong, they could still be bought simply because people would use beacons only to sell them). This idea is alot more complicated and the downside about this idea is the fact that it might make it quite a bit harder to grow your beacons quickly which would mean that there might be times where a new guild member can’t instantly get a beacon. The good part about this would be that it would encourage both guilds and people to consider how they want to spend their beacons a lot more. This system is Dedication + Members + Money = Space

Now those were some various suggestions which could be considered all with upsides and downsides. Now i will try to explain a bit what i see as one of the bigger problems which is in general the attitude towards guilds and how much space they take up. For example. Does having X members make you ENTITLED to X amount of space? Does having only Y members mean that you shouldn’t be allowed to get more space? Would it be wrong/fair for guilds who invest a lot of money into the guild to have more space? would it be wrong/fair for people who invest a lot of time into a guild to have more space? Those are some pretty basic questions but i know that the answer will differ greatly from person to person. And i don’t think there is a universal correct answer. A guild with a lot of money is not necessarily better than a guild with less money. A guild with a lot of members is not necessarily better than a guild with few members. A guild with a few active members is not necessarily better than a big guild with less active members and so on.

PERSONALLY i would prefer for B< to favor dedication over money and members. If i were to make the choice i would pick option 3 but have an upgrade menu making people take choices with their “currency”. For example if you just want a big guild city then you can spend the currency on buying more beacon plots. But there might be other dedicated guilds who could use the bonus on something else. Forexample hunting guilds buying bonuses to hunting. Or a crafters guild who can increase chance of rare items or maybe an “architect” guild who values freedom more than space might want to unlock special looking blocks and props they could use for their builds. Allow people to tailor their rewards to their own personal needs. This should come with a 24 hour period for bonuses to kick in when you “represent” the guild so you can’t start gaining rep instantly nor get the bonuses instantly. Again this is not the perfect suggestion but rather a personal preference. After all the guild system is huge with various sub-guilds so i think it would be a shame for it to just be “join a guild so you can build more stuff together”

Hope this atleast sparks some thoughts or highlights some of the upsides/downsides to various potential systems

-Zouls

3 Likes
43

I <3 Integrated TLDR

+1

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money = space
I like this model pretty much, more then a member based one! Because it has a lot of advantages without disadvantages.
1) Well balancable model - Money is a ressource that will be created by each player (I assume). The the amount of money running around a server could be estimatable. Which leads to the conclusion: deciding and balancing, how much money per guild leads to how many beacons is quite “easy”.
2.) easy guild administration - It’s easy for the leadership to decide when to spend invest into beacons (in this case they need to decide how much money they want to store). There is no factor, that gets the amount of beacons out of control (like the fluctuation of members in member based system). That means: whatever you built and protect by beacons will always stay protected. You can even save the system agains “money stealing” if leadership has to store money permanently to achieve further beacons.
3.) flexibility - The money (as a from the community generated ressource) can be used either spent for beacons or the leaders decide to invest it to buy ressources on the market, i.e. for a big project.
4.) support for economical competition of guilds - Since devs aim for a mmo model in which guilds rival with each other on economical ways, that would be a great opportunity to support it.
5.) A ressource people also spend permanently in other games - Players have a ressource they can deal with like in any other game. Noone would mind to spend his money and won’t get it back. And he can decide where to invest his money. He can join the guild he wants and decide how much “effort” (time spent to earn the money) he wants to present to a guild / project.
6) public projects last "forever "- public projects covered in beacons, could stay forever without the need of members (except one). So after you finished such a project, you can feel free to leave the guild (that was supposed for building a public bridge). As long as the money that you need for the amount of beacons stays, the project will be secured.

This model should definetly be NOT A LINEAR SYSTEM, because else guild could easily abuse this system once they are very rich. Make it EXPONENTIAL: means even if they are able by their lot members or a good economical strategy to achieve a lot of money, it’s getting harder and harder to recieve more beacons

Like this it’s easier for newcomer guilds to catch up and compete as well as it’s harder for long time guilds to strengthen their advance. Yes it’s right that beacons just start at a certain amount of money. I did this, because of the thought: noone should be able to create beacons without money. Also the amount of money should be so high, that noone easily can “buy extra beacons” for himself. Maybe it would be wise to also implement a member amount barrier. Like without more then 5 members, you cannot “buy” beacons. Else single persons could abuse with lots of coins.

The system also is “effort” based (what I personally very like - nothing should be awarded more then effort and cleverness). Players have to “work for” money, means spending time on gathering it.

Just an idea woud be: implement a protocoll that record the percentual amount of money each player invest (either by tax or donation). Also give the opportunity to delete a guild. Why these two points?
Imagine the game starts. about 20 players find together and want to build a city (City A). The city is on a river. on the other side of the river a second city develops by another guild (City B). Someone decides to create a guild for a public project. they want to build a bridge to the other side of the river to be able to easily cross the river and support the economy between both cities. in the next 3 month, “in a closer distance” a third city rises (city c). City C developes faster then A and B. Members of city A are patriotic and stay, but members of city B leave and abandon their city. The connection bridge now gets pretty useless and contains a lot of player effort. If the guild who created it now has the possibility to delete, people (dependend from the percentage they invested) could get the invested money partwise back. Why partwise? Money spent by leadership for ressources on the market should not be part of it, because it would create more money then player generated by deleting the guild. Just the money on the guild account + Money invested on beacons should return.

The only challenge that I see, is finding the balance of Beacons for money. But this is practicable.

Do you see disadvantages to the model? (that don’t appear in other guild models)

Here the question is: what does “better” mean? Do you see kind of ranking in different disciplines? I currently just see the competition on economical way, what in my supported model (money = space) is connected with “influence” (in this case controlled space and economical strength). I also don’t see the necessarity of more comparisms.

4 Likes
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“Do you see disadvantages to the model? (that don’t appear in other guild models)” As I mentioned. One of the problems is the attitude towards it. Each player gets x amount of personal beacons and when talking guilds people often talk about dedicated guild cities too. Using a pure currency based system would mean that money is always pure power. Forexample there has been some worry. About guilds taking too much space they don’t deserve. Money means that a rich 3 man guild could acquire more beacons than a 100 man guild. There will always be people at the top with the most money.

In point form
-allow for the top richest people to gain the majority of land
-an exponential money based system wouldn’t control this since they Could just make new guilds to keep it low
-even if you said they wouldn’t, there will most likely be people who make personal guilds JUST to gain more space. Doesn’t matter what you set the price as. Rich people can afford up it
-would punish guilds which doesnt focus entirely on money

And I’m sure people could mention even more. There are a ton of disadvantages. But that is how it is with every system.

For the “better” part. It’s quite simply to show that there is no completely correct answer. There is no type of guild that directly “deserves” more space. It’s all about figuring out what the devs wants to value the most.

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For me there is no worry, yes. Because the 3 people spent a lot of time and effort to gather the money and the beacons (for the guild!) are their success.
I don’t think there will be a problem with too much occupated space by them, because: the amount of money a guild needs to occupy space should be high enough so that individuals cannot abuse. Also the Exponential system will stop too much occupation. That goes for every guild.
But as I said, I think it is right if 3 people who spend together 3000 hours of play time to a guild (1000h per person) have same amount of space like a guild with 300 members and 3000 hours of spent time (10h each person). (I equalize time = effort = money = amount beacons here).

For me, that is neither unfair nor abusive.

You talk about dedication, what for me is synonym for effort. So more money - more dedicated time.

And you still need to keep in mind for individual needs people still have their own beacons (in my current imaginative model).

Okay to me, because they were either clever and had a good trading strategy or spent a loooot of time. Both can be rewarded.

true, then there should maybe a limitation to the amount of guilds, i.e. 5 (then you can stay in your main guild and run 4 projects). I’m anyway not a fan of entereing many several “guilds”. I would join a project of course, if it is just for a certain matter. And after finishing this, I would leave again. My money stays for the project - that’s okay because I decided it for myself that way.

With a limitation everyone has to decide himself what to spend his time for. I don’t think that I run in any lack for myself with my simply “progress” beacons. If some people want to build big, space consuming. let them do, but since you set a limitation of member amount from when you even get beacons… you need at least 5 or something. That’s quite a barrier to break through. And with just five guilds a person can maximum enter, a person who wants to do so will also not easily find other just for “joining” him to get his plots.

Even then… if they don’t focus on money (example raid guild), what would they need all the space for? Decoration? No worthy argument for me for the raid guild. On the other hand you can solve this, if raiding also gives you a lot of money. Because here also it is time consuming.

I can see your critics, but for me everything is solvable in a just way.

And you have the above mentioned benefits on the other hand.

And you are right too… pro and cons are everywhere. But here you have some strong pros. Especially that this system rewards effort (time) you spend playing.

1 Like
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I’m sorry but your diagram really bothers me A LOT so I fixed it for you to fit your actual explanation(perhaps you could double check them in future to get them right):

Now to add an other option how guilds and beacons could work(inspired by @Zouls “rant”).

To start with, as we know the beacons could be sold between players, so perhaps this system could be taken a bit further here by making it possibly to mark beacon to be buyable by the guild or/and the guild could mark a spot they need plot in and players could then sell the guild one on there.

As for how it would be determined how many plots the guild could have is based on guild level which can be increased with a combination of members and money. A guild would have to reach member threshold for every level before it could be upgraded by paying, level by level, increasing sum of money. This would allow for theoretically unlimited guild growth.

This is quite raw idea yet, as I haven’t thought for any penalties for leaving/kicking, as it’s right now people could just upgrade a guild and make a huge beacon and then leave it and the guild(except for the leader) behind with no purpose.

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That’s really embarrassing. Thatnks for correcting, of course it is what I mean… I will fix it.

So now, comments:

  • selling/buying beacons makes this system complex. Also here it is easier by good trading skills to get beacons cheap. So the danger, rich people get more beacons is higher and for no appropriate effort.

that’s the thing why i just wanted the member barrier on the lowest stage. As a problem just for creating a guild and to stop people from creating individual ones.

2 Likes
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Money is not the same as dedication in the way I mentioned. I’m talking dedication to the guild. Not the game. When you talk to the game you make space the sum of the money the people in the guild has. Putting a lot of focus on the individual. AKA guild beacons are nothing more than an extension of personal beacons. Which comes with its own problems. It’s the system of the ones mentioned which is THE MOST selfish or the one which is the easiest to abuse as personal beacons. Also you used the argument “raiding guilds won’t need the space” which is true but not quite. It’s a system where you say to people “if you want more space then you have to focus on making money rather than do stuff together”.

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Yeah this is precisely the same problem money based system holds. It’s a bummer to try and work around

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True but i recommended then to higher the enefit for raiding.

I have a problem with understanding your interpretation of guild dedication. Give me some examples in which the “inividuals” within the guild don’t use their ingame time to reach goals.
Or what else you mean with it.

Bah, we are again in an endless discussion cycle of 2 -3 people… noone will read that all xD

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Gladly. Ever played wow? In that game you can do “guild runs” of dungeons by being 4 from the guild in the dungeon together. Same with raids. There are also guild achievements that they can work together to achieve. Other games has other ways of getting that GC (guild currency) gw2 for example has boss hunts and challenges/ puzzles. Black Desert has timed challenges which can be started (e.g collect x wood in a certain amount of time) the common points are

  1. it’s not something you can do BEFORE you get into a guild
  2. they focus on doing stuff together

Now with gold. A guy can have made stupid amounts of gold. Then join a guild and then donate it instantly unlocking several beacons. That has nothing to do with how much he focused on helping the guild but rather just him using some of the gold he won’t need.

Hope this clarifies why I find them different.

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I referred here to my own idea, as I wrote it after my idea, you probably read too much into it as I think your saying I’d be referring to yours. I only wrote the post as reply to your post for the diagram part.

I don’t know about complexity, unless you’d be referring to your idea here.

Otherwise if referring to my idea, it could be just that the guild representatives could mark spots that need to be beaconed and then set(unless the pricing couldn’t be controlled by players) price which would be paid for the player who places the beacon/plot. This would work same way as mentioned here how it works between players, so the guild would have limited amount of free plots(which can be raised by the before mentioned way in my first post) to use, but the players should “donate” them as in the guild cannot craft plot placer to use the guild plots, but they must be bought from players, while not taking away from the players own plot limit(I don’t know if that makes sense but I hope it does :sweat_smile:).

Obviously if the pricing is decided by players griefing is possibility, as in ripping off noobs, which I wouldn’t consider a clever/smart way to make riches(only a person who perceive him/her self more intelligent than they are in reality would). But as I finished the idea, it’s still very raw and requires work and more thought to be put in to make it something that could work in the best possible way.

Also since I haven’t heard that how guilds will work in certainty when we reach 1.0, I think the guild leveling could be beneficial in other ways as well as increasing the allowed plots for the guild, not to mention these could be tied to the player count to make it more appealing for people to stick with guilds rather than guild jumping, but I guess that could make it’s own topic.

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I believe it’s 3, not 4. Just need a majority.

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For me personally, I really do like the way that beacons are mostly planned at the moment.

Beacon allowances will currently be tied to player progression, which will prevent people from building too big, too quickly. Thinking longer term, I believe we will need this progression to keep the game interesting and goal driven (as opposed to just being money driven). I also think a money based beacon system (or even a resource based one) will just open the game up to people coin/link farming and selling it in the real world, for guilds to then get a leg up.

I honestly like the fact that we need to contribute player beacons to the guild to make it bigger and greater, other than just throwing money (or additional resources) at it. For me it shows that players contributing in such a way are dedicated to that guild. It makes players think about their choices.

The only thing I didn’t like about the proposed beacon system, was for you not to be able to leave a guild of your own volition and get your contributed beacons back. I don’t think that warrants the need for a complete rewrite from the ground up of the whole system. I still think that combining options 2 and 3, so that both guilds and players can decide when a player is to leave a guild, is the best route. I also still think that a cool down of up to 7 days for a guild to return any owed beacons to a player (otherwise they get randomly taken from the placed ones) will work as well.

4 Likes
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Okay, I got it.

But then tell us too, what kind of group tasks you see and how you would connect in with recieving plots as rewards? Your tasks don’t fit that much to Boundless I guess / and do you think they are worth to achieve beacons?

Tasks I would imagine would be i.e.:

  • PVE - slay a titan together
  • Economy goal - construct a working supply chain with different specialist abilities (like special ores a miner can just gather, that can be just refined by high level manufacturer and finalized to a finished item be a specialist crafter)

That are nice teamtasks, but worth beacons? and how often do you want to repeat this for further beacon achievements?

The system with money could be by the way also worked out in another way.
When people earn money, while being in a guild, they can decide if the money goes to their own account or to the guilds account. Like this people could not simply invest big savings, they had to sell tons of goods. And probably selling tons of goods are easier in diverse locations with many players, then for a few single players. of course the quality of goods are still a weight, but it makes it also more difficult for small groups.

Maybe it would be also possible to create high win rates with guild internal supply chains based on skills of many diverse profession specialists. That’s on the one hand a nice group task and on the other hand again easier with many players then with less.

But tell me your proposals.

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I see @Zouls point that rich people shouldn’t necessarily be able to contribute large amounts of money to a guild if they didn’t do anything for the guild. Perhaps there could be a toggle option, so you can either mine by yourself and kill creatures, etc. this would give you experience and resources for yourself. Or you can gather resources and creatures for your guild, then you would earn experience and money just for your guild. This would prevent new guilds from becoming powerful right away, as new players couldn’t just donate a ton of resources.
Perhaps guild owners could submit orders that needed to be filled (such as x number of a certain block) and players could mark it as “active.”
This could be abused by some owners who want to rapidly increase their guilds power. They might send out a request for 500 blocks of dirt that they don’t plan to use just so the guild receives experience. I’m not exactly sure how to prevent this yet, but I know there is a way.

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I like the idea of having money tied to beacons, and have the amount of money needed increase for each beacon.

This might be a bit weird if people can join multiple guilds, but honestly I don’t like the idea of being in multiple guilds at all. It complicates stuff without adding any gameplay benefits.

Yes there will be some people who have someone else set up a guild for them and they pay money, but I don’t see this as too much of an issue. Maybe have an upkeep/tax cost for guilds so a guild doesn’t claim more territory than it can upkeep. I think having an upkeep for a guild is completely fine, as it is incredibly unlikely for every single person in a guild to have several month long IRL issues at the same time. This would both make a natural amount of territory a guild can control for the amount of people&effort involved, and make it so guilds that are either inactive or poorly funded would slowly decay.

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Let me start off by saying i do not believe EVEN THE SLIGHTEST that it is possible to have a “player to player” interaction without it being abused to all hell. So i will leave out anything that is called Trading between players or selling from plinths.

To start with examples of the community ideas

  1. Titans
  2. Temples (we know they are coming)
  3. Timed Challenges (Collect x RAW wood/stone/materials they haven’t been picked up before)
  4. Achievements which could cover a massive amount of things (Above mentioned, Have one of each guild member with maxed skill, Have x guildmembers die within 5 sec of eachothe, kill x of a creature, kille one of each creature.)

I was also considering this the other day, except for the whole voluntary part. We were told already that they plan for many different things to give money and some of the money goes to The guild (like the lore one) I see no reason for there not to be a possiblity of adding taxes from the guild you represent too. If anybody is familiar with Albion online you would know they have such a system. the guild leader can set x% of what people earn as taxes to go directly into the guild. The guild i was in ran 20% tax and then at saturdays they ran 50% and guildruns to collect gold. This would also be a possibility. Whether they make a guild currency that is unique or they just collect gold. the system would be nearly identical. This would mean that it isn’t just the people who sit high and mighty on a pile of gold which can determine everything but the people who are actively playing the game.

But you are right in the fact that it gets alot harder to plan for guild activities in the game since we still havent heard a lot about the RPG elements yet. Only briefly

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Why would you want to prevent this in first place?
Guilds are not what we are used to from other games and will probably be focused on very specific tasks (hence the ability to join several guilds).
Slowing down the expansion of a guild would effectively kill the intended use of guilds.

Example scenario:
The guilds A & B have cities that often trade with each other but an obstacle (mountain, river, whatever) slows the trading down.
They decide to build a bridge, tunnel, whatever to boost their economy and in order to be able to help each other while building they found a 3rd guild “C” which all member of guild A & B join.

If player are able to simply donate beacons to the guild they can immediately start to build the bridge, tunnel, whatever but if they have to somehow “progress” their guild they´d have to do specific guild activities together.
The members of guild C are no friends they don´t want to raid titans together, they only want to build a bridge, yet they would be forced into some tedious guild activities.

Besides of that:
Why would it be that important/ bad if a guild would acquire a lot of beacon space very quickly?
The “value” of a guild will probably be determined by its economic power not the space it occupies.
So a new guild would have a “get going” phase by natural limitations like:

  • Markets and workshops need time to be built and set up
  • It will take some time until your location becomes popular & well known within the world/community
  • You have to compete with already established trading hubs
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With the exception of any that are trying to get the top spot on their world and competing for the bragging rights/potential rewards that may come with that spot.

But yeah, I agree that time doesn’t seem to be a necessary boundary.

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