Is it time for daily guild XP limits to be removed?
Is your guild level 25? Surprise, most guilds are -- or at least most guilds that have been up and running since the first days of Cataclysm are. The higher-end guilds or guilds with plenty of members pushed the leveling cap every week and managed to hit level 25 in a fairly short amount of time. Others with plenty of members followed soon after. In fact, as long as your guildmates were running dungeons on a daily basis and maybe indulging in some PvP or raiding, it was pretty easy to hit that daily cap.
However, there are plenty of guilds out there that were established later in the expansion, guilds with fewer members. And those members may be awfully tired of running the same heroics over and over by this point. At the beginning of the expansion, running those instances was all well and good -- they were new, interesting, and perhaps most importantly, they contained gear upgrades for just about anyone. However, we're at the end of the expansion. Most people have seen the heroics far too many times to count, not everyone is raiding, and there's a lot less activity from players in general. It's typical for that end-of-expansion lull to occur.
But when you're trying to get a guild to level 25, it's awfully hard to do when there's a daily XP limit in place. Is it perhaps time to remove the daily cap and let guilds level as they will?
A player named Myths brought up this question on the offical Raid and Guild Leadership forums, and it's honestly a really good question, and some really good points are made. In my guild right now, the most activity we see is when there are a lot of members online for raiding -- and we only raid three nights a week. If a guild only raids two or three nights a week and most everyone is absent doing other things on those other nights, they aren't going to hit that daily XP cap. And that means they aren't going to hit their weekly XP cap, either.
The value of a level 25 build today
What exactly does level 25 mean this late in the expansion? It means you've got a ton of perks to offer to new recruits, fun items to play around with, and useful tools like Mass Resurrection to help mop up wipes during raiding or even instance runs. It's no longer the status symbol that it was at the beginning of the expansion. In fact, if your guild isn't level 25 by now, it can almost be viewed as a detriment, which is incredibly discouraging to those wanting to create a new guild.
In the face of a new expansion, where we will presumably receive the opportunity to get some more guild levels and hopefully a handful of new guild perks along with it, starting out at anything less than level 25 is essentially holding a guild back from progression instead of encouraging it. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had a chance to start from the same footing? Because right now, the guild leveling experience is becoming more of a limitation than a bonus -- if you don't have it, you're going nowhere.
Honestly, at this point, it seems silly that those XP limits are in place. We're at the end of the expansion, nobody's really apt to complain about a temporary removal of the daily guild XP cap, and that cap can easily be put back into place at the start of Mists. We've already seen something like this with the changes made to heroics. You can now complete seven heroics all in one day or spread out over as many or as few days as you like until you hit the cap. This worked out great for players who didn't want to feel obligated to log in every single day. Why not do the same for guilds?
Feel free to share your thoughts on the topic on the forum thread -- it's a subject that maybe Blizzard should be looking at in the end days of Cataclysm.
