Originally Posted by
Cinco
Thank you for putting so much effort into this request. The Mega-Guilds of Dark Legends are a very special and powerful phenomenon!
As you know, we designed our Guild system to provide access to all members even if they are offline and even if they have not logged in for centuries. This means that we must load all relevant player data so that Guild functions can be applied to any member. For mega-Guilds this necessity adds significant loading time... and while there are probably a few optimizations that we could apply, there is really no way to avoid it.
With this in mind, I would encourage the leaders of large Guilds to spend the time to selectively and compassionately remove inactive members. If we were to create an automated system for this we would need to create simple criteria (such as hasn't logged in for X days, etc.) that could possibly cause many more problems than it solves. Alternatively, a system that was complex enough to intelligently cull membership based on custom criteria would take a very long time to develop - to such an extent as to make it technically infeasible.
I do like the idea of creating a Guild advancement and awarding increased membership limits as they level-up. There are some big hurdles for this. First, we would need to retroactively apply the membership limits to existing Guilds. This could be extremely disruptive (even moreso than the simplistic culling example I mentioned above). For things to be truly fair all Guilds would need to start at Level 1 which would mean the lowest membership cap - so EOE15, DP, DX all become 30 members, disbanding somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 members.
Guild Events in the past have shed some light on how players will react when there are prizes at stake. I believe that these behaviors should be factored in to any design for Guild Advancement. Primarily, the players' ability to instantly switch from Guild A to Guild B without penalty introduces some very challenging obstacles. Guild A may be 1,000 Vampires strong but Guild B is one guy willing to paying millions in gold to mercenary / temporary members. So he poaches members from Guild A 'til Guild B reaches Level 20... then they can go back to Guild A. Unless we have some sort of a 'loyalty period' wherein members are unable to leave their Guild, we will have mercenary memberships and a potential social crisis on our hands.
It goes the other way too, in my above example if Guild B promises payment and poaches a bunch of dudes - then they reach the objective, Guild B master collects the rewards and kicks all of the mercenaries... we have another problem. We would need an intelligent system that prevents officers from kicking players in certain situations - and that could be prohibitively complex.
Obviously, questions of how the Guild Advancement interfaces with leaders who go inactive, quit or get banned also rise - but these are less important in light of the general problems created by the 'ad hoc joining' system we have right now.
I would be very interested to know your thoughts on how we might secure Guild membership to prevent the kind of "professional Guild booster" or the "robber baron Guild master" stuff I'm talking about. Or if maybe you think that I'm off-base and that previous Guild Events are not a good basis for my opinion :-)
Bookmarks