Massively goes to WAR: Everything you need to know about guilds pt. 3
Is there a formal in-game mechanic for alliances?
Christian: There certainly is. We do allow formal alliances in the game, you can form an alliance with up to ten guilds, and you can assign officers within that alliance structure, though that is very limited. We actually have a roster for the alliances, you form it just from this window, and then it populates with your alliance roster. Note that every member from your alliance is not displayed in this roster, only your guild, the alliance leaders and the officers, because that would be - if you had ten guilds in your alliance, that would be a lot of people.
Is there a cap for the number of people that can be in a guild?
Christian: There is not, actually, at the moment.
Josh: We're looking at tuning that probably when we get to the guild beta. We want to make sure that there isn't a way to game in the system, making sure that randomly bringing in a thousand people isn't somehow efficient because there are diminishing returns for how much guild experience and individual player can contribute, based off of the actual size of the guild. We want to make sure there's not this kind of disparate variance, where a six or ten person tiny guild never gets above guild rank 5, so that the diminishing returns there were obviously never in habits of somebody that's not offering anything to the guild progression.
We want to make sure that there isn't a way that you can go "Well, I've added a million people to my guild, and now we just generate, each of us offer one point of experience a week - but we generate a million experience a week!" So, there is no cap currently but that's something that the system allows us to cap if, we will make that decision once we've got guilds there.
Do calendars work across guilds in an alliance?
Christian: That's under discussion. It's definitely one of those "We'd love to do this..."
Josh: It makes sense, when you think about it - because otherwise what you wind up with is each guild leader having to independently schedule an alliance battle, and it makes more sense for an alliance leader to be able to schedule an alliance event.
Just make sure we're clear ... A six-person guild is obviously not going to gain experience as fast as a hundred-person guild. At the same time, there's no cap per se on how high they could get? So if those six people are really dedicated players, they could easily level up to and beyond the hundred-person guild ...
Josh: Absolutely! You're going to have people that join on day one that basically play in a committed sense with the same 10-15 people for years, that are going to slow and steady win the race, vs. a brand new guild that comes on, two or three years down the line, and says "Hey, let's form up with 100 people, and run through the guild's leveling system". You're going to be able to advance past where that guild is, just based off of time. The idea again is to try and avoid the sense that you're punishing people for not being in a huge guild. We're trying to again get away from the idea that enormous super-guilds are the dominant force in the world.
They will be a force, a really strictly regimented, extremely talented group of players is always going to be somewhat more efficient and effective than a comparable group of people that are maybe a little more casual. So we have no problem with saying there's going to be a difference between the speed of leveling across the board for casual players and hardcore players. The idea is not to build in abusive systems that disproportionately reward hardcore play. So you give them a tiny bonus, congratulations, your 40 hours a week dedication to the game has given you this additional sort of experience, but it's not exponentially greater.
Broadly, how fast do you expect guilds to be leveling up?
I was saying that what you actually have are multiple sort of experience pools for you. So the easiest way to think about it is almost visually - you'll have your 40 levels as a player, and we actually want you to get through that relatively quickly. Even for casual player it's not going to take them years, it's going to take them months, to get from 1 to 40. Hardcore gamers will do it much more quickly than that. The idea is that the game really sort of kicks into high gear at that 40th tier. Between the 35-40 territory is really where you're finally in the thick of it. You go back and forth between capital cities, you're fighting for territory, you're in the NFL Championship, back and forth and back and forth.
That progression actually in no way represents the lifespan of the game or the experience for an individual player. Your renowned ranks, which as you saw earlier, start with you at level 1, and from the moment that you start fighting RvR, extend well beyond in terms of the amount of time and effort that it's going to take, well beyond the actual experience level cap for your player. So that extends well out beyond level 40. And then guild advancement is another one of those examples of something that extends well beyond the character leveling progression. So a group of people who start at level 1, form a guild, and then level through the entire game to 40, when they all get to 40, their guild is not going to be topped out. There's a substantial amount of additional material available for them, additional advancements and leveling and so forth.
There isn't a hard cap in terms of what we're thinking of, the time sink hours played sort of thing - and we can obviously add to it at any time, so the idea will be that there will always be something new and interesting that's available to you guys to work towards. You're eventually going to move to the point (again, to return to the Civilization example), where you're going to move from "Hey, we're building an infantry unit" to at the far end "We're building the Colossus of Rhodes". And so it's going to eventually be this epic undertaking, but guilds that accomplish really super-high end stuff will be very high-status, high-prestige, significant entities in the world.
Christian: So - we were talking about standards a little bit, and how they're used in RvR, but one of the very strategic points of standards too, is that your guild actually takes that standard out into RvR and claims keeps with it. So I go in, I defeat the Keep Lord, I go up and I plant my standard at the top of the Keep, and therefore that is my guild's keep.
And then the guild's heraldry perpetuates out to the keep guardian NPCs, correct?
Christian: Yes! And also there can be additional bonuses that can be applied to the guild just by claiming that keep. And also, that banner will radiate out bonuses that actually affect not just my guild and my group, but also any friendlies within the area around that keep.
Josh: When we were refactoring the RvR experience, initially we just started with the open world system, where it was just sort of control points in the world, and you tag 'em when you're done. We actually think that that's a decent mechanic for early experiences. We want it to feel like that area is always in flux, that there's always a back and forth fight there, that there's something going on that it's easy to understand what you're doing. What we didn't want to do was go "All right! Level 5 player, you've worked your way through the first zone, now lay siege to a castle!" - because the the difficulty curve there would be too extreme. So we actually, like everything else, we trickle it to you in increasingly complicated and difficult experience as the game progresses.
By the time you're actually in the areas where you're engaging in sieges and so forth, you understand your character, you understand their weaknesses, you understand the RvR experience, you understand the back and forth of zone control, your guild's role, you've had time to join a guild, and on and on and on. So that by the time you actually are defending those structures, it makes sense in the game. Early on, what you'll see there are like lower-level fortifications. Fences and blockades and so forth that are put up to funnel enemy players as they're fighting their way through a zone.
Is there any way for a guild to lose levels?
Christian: If a guild does experience some sort of upheaval, where it's a very large guild, lots of progression, and it's relatively high level within the guild system, and then it sort of fades away, trickles down and suddenly there's only a very small number of people left, we don't take away any of the benefits they've earned. They keep all of that. It's what they've earned as a guild!
Josh: Which, in its own way, is actually a mechanism that simplifies rebuilding the guild, because if you were a once-great guild that has all of this stuff, you have the opportunity to go to new people that are brought into the game through whatever means, and say "Look, would you like to be part of something that has a significant history, that we've already done a lot of this work for you, wouldn't you like to join our guild now?" So I don't think we're actually going to see - except in very specific cases where people really want to contract the size of the guild and keep it small, I don't think you're going to see a lot of guilds that level way up and then lose all their population, because the incentive to join that guild is simply going to be too high to make it not attractive.
You mentioned recruiting drives ... is there anything ingame that supports that?
Josh: There isn't like a recruiting system of any sort. But obviously, there are going to be things like being able to point people to your guild page on the Herald, and say "If you want to know what we're all about, check us out! We have a keep, this is our standard, this is our heraldry, you can see how many people are in the guild, you see where we rank, you'll understand who we are, and so on and so forth" and that's what that's all about. But no, there isn't like a recruitment system.
Many thanks to both of you for your time.
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