Welcome to the first posting in what will hopefully be a semi-regular series of musings by yours truly, Orlock Bloodthorne co-founder of Warhammer Geek.
I have recently been involved in a lengthy discussion with the great community over at Warhammer Conflict revolving around guild size, and I would like to go into detail about a specific element within that conversation.
That element being about whether or not alts should be allowed in the guild or alternatively excluded. Now the obvious answer for most guilds (the casual, family and middle of the road ones) would be yes, there is no issue with alt's in guilds.
The issue arise when it comes to the hardcore guilds, those that live on efficiency and want to make their mark on the world by being the strongest, fastest, smartest and overall the first to achieve various goals. Now parts of this means having their guild advance at as fast a pace as possible.
The stated intent of the developers is they want people to have pride in their guilds and that people will have their alts in the guild. So the question becomes for the hardcore, will Alts have a negative impact on advancing your guild?
It has been explained that in order to level the playing field between the small 20 member guilds and the uber zerg fest 500 man guilds there will be some formula put in place to even out the rate of xp characters can generate for the guild. As such the more characters in the guild the less XP each can realistically produce in a given time period.
For the purposes of the hardcore they will want to have the highest possible output of guild xp from its members. And if as stated Alt characters will factor into the numbers where gaining guild xp is concerned, this will result in the hardcore guilds restricting alts from the guild, which deviates from the stated intent of the development team.
So how can this be fixed? Well first off the thought comes to mind of simply making it so alts don't count to guild member size in terms of the formula. At first glance this may seem like a reasonable approach, but again there comes an issue with the hardcore guilds, efficiency would say that well why do we want characters in the guild which do not contribute to the advancement of the guild. This in an efficiency drive arena makes fair sense. So simply removing alts from the formula isn’t the answer.
So we need another alternative, one which allows for alts to not create a negative influence on the guilds advancement rate but allows them to be a positive one.
The first suggestion here from people was to have it so you could flag people as alt's in the guild management tools and said alts are not counted when dividing the earn rate but can still earn xp. Now this would actually be the "perfect" solution for those that only care about generating guild xp. However this would be due to the abuse that could be put into play, what would stop certain guild leaders from just marking as many characters in their guild as possible as alts creating 500 man guilds which according to the books only has one main character, leaving all those people generating maximum xp.
So from a fairness point of view that's another system blown out the water. Ok now we move on to what I myself believe the answer to the problem is to take unique accounts into the equation. This way alt's could be taken out of the mix for the purposes of the formula which reduces members guild xp production, yet allows for them to gain points themselves and doesn’t open itself to abuse as it is a server side calculation.
The reason why I find this the fairest method is that any single account can only have one of the characters on it logged into the game at any one time, so each account can only have one potentially earning character active at any one time. Surely this is the key number in determining how to level the playing field, the amount of potentially active members that can be out there raising their guilds level. It has the benefit of not having any drawbacks which would in itself cause guild leaders to deny people having alts in their guild, it has the bonuses of allowing people to play any of their characters in the guild and still be helping the guild, and above all wouldn’t adjust the rate at which the guild advances in an unfair manner.
If you would like to discuss the specifics of this topic please do so in our forum.
I will leave you now with a random quote, which I happen to find helps inspire me in all my endeavours...
"Some people see things that are and ask, Why?
Other people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?"
Orlock Bloodthorne
- Co-Founder of Warhammer Geek.
Author