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If items from major raids bound to the guild of the leader of the raid it would solve a lot of problems.
First items would continue to be tradable within the guild so that when you get a better item someone else in the guild can use your item.
Second if someone were to quit the guild they would not be able to steal guild items from the guild -- they would go back to the guild vault if someone left the guild or was kicked out of the guild.
Third it would allow the flexibility to move items around to whoever needed specific items.
Fourth it would allow people from outside the guild to participate in a guild raid without worrying they would run off with key items.
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In essence it would make drops from progression raids and major raids etc the property of the guild who ran the raid as opposed to the property of any individual person.
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Optionally you could set a raid to pick-up as opposed to being run by any specific guild in which case all such items that dropped would default to the old method of bop.
Comments
not a bad idea. how about just giving everyone a piece of loot? just take rolls out of the equation all together. everyone would have contributed.
I've got the straight edge.
One problem I see with the system: it gives insanely amount of power to the guild leadership. They can make significant threats towards their members if those members do not do like the leadership wants. The members would not only lose their guild membership but also a lot of strong items.
Edit: I would prefer if players kept their items even if they leave guild, but new members are unable to get equips from raids which happened prior to them joining.
well how many pieces of gear can your character equip? and why does it have to be a long process? if you can equip 15 or so pieces of gear that's 15 drops. assuming they aren't all the same piece.
I've got the straight edge.
Well the problem here is that whenever you make people too reliant on guilds to progress; guilds (leadership) themselves become asshats.
Give people a little power and they become drunk with it.
Developers don't want players to blow too quickly through content. That's why developers have certain timesinks in MMO, such as Leveling, and raid lockouts. Even if those time sinks are stupid or useless. It's there to control the pace that players progress.
Raid lockouts are part of certain MMO, so that guilds can "power progress", as I put it, through the endgame content.
Explained by example:
Let's say the guild has 100 people. But only 20 of them are into the hardcore endgame content. Rest of them are casual etc...
Now with raid locks, that "specific" players would need to wait a week to reset the raid in order to run it again for more rewards. As they gear up, week by week, they get stronger, and can overcome the content at hand.
In order to fit in the rest of those 80 members into the raid, they would need to split up the main group to lead the other players through the content, week at a time.
Now without the raid locks
Those 20players once geared up, can simply reset the raid at any point, is slide in a few of those other members into the raid, and power gear them up in a matter of days, compared to the weeks it would have taken with raid locking. These players would push through the content, and rewards, than get bored once they complete everything, as they wait for more developer content.
Same thing here with gear sharing. It's the same concept as the no raid locks. The 20 players get the advanced gear, and pass it down to those other members so that they can just power progress through the content, which will lead to them doing everything in a shorter time than developers planned, leading players to becoming bored, and quiting.
Hope I explained it well enough.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Lets look at a person changing guilds:
Guild X is looking for clerics and they put together a set of appropriate armor aside and begin advertising for a cleric.
Person who is not all that happy in guild Y decides they want to change to guild X.
When said person quits guild Y, the equipment earned in guild Y stays in guild Y -- so they have items for whoever they get as a replacement cleric.
The person gets the set of items that guild X put together -- and starts raiding as a part of guild X.
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The point here is that the GUILD is advancing not so much the individual players.
Good players can move from guild to guild and the progress stays in the guild they came from. They become a part of whatever guild they go to.
Yes this means as guilds grow they can set aside gear to pass to recruits -- who if they dont work out, they do not get to keep.
As for guild leaders ending up too powerful -- if everyone leaves they simply end up having a vault of items and no players... Players will have little trouble joining a new guild as there is no loss to a guild for accepting a new player -- you just put them in whatever spare equipment you have and let them play. If they work out they work out -- if they dont they dont. Their participation furthers the guild.
The only problem you could have is if no guild wants you at all -- and if your reputation is that bad there is a reason for it.
Apparently you're looking to take a horrible game mechanic and find creative ways to make it even worse.
"First items would continue to be tradable within the guild so that when you get a better item someone else in the guild can use your item."
"Third it would allow the flexibility to move items around to whoever needed specific items."
That defeats the entire purpose of having gear bound to you in the first place: once it's no longer of use to you, it's effectively taken out of the system. If you want to argue that gear should never become bound to you, that's fine, but good luck doing that without also making a case that it shouldn't be bound to the guild, either.
Indeed, it's far more important that raid epics become bound to a particular player than lower level stuff. If there is a lot more good low level gear floating around, it's no big deal. But the entire point of the endgame is to take a long time, so that you have to keep subscribing for a lot longer to get through it. If you gear up too fast, then that defeats the entire point of the endgame.
"Second if someone were to quit the guild they would not be able to steal guild items from the guild -- they would go back to the guild vault if someone left the guild or was kicked out of the guild."
Others have touched on this, but that would be so rife with abuse that I'm shocked that you'd even propose it in the first place. You want to let raid leaders unilaterally steal epics that members earned months ago, with no recourse whatsoever for the guild members? You want to give guild leaders the ability to make members they dislike start over entirely on endgame raiding on a whim? Really? Why not just give guild leaders a list of member account logins and passwords while you're at it; that would be less abuseable than what you propose.
"Fourth it would allow people from outside the guild to participate in a guild raid without worrying they would run off with key items."
Sure, you can come raiding with us. But game mechanics make it impossible for you to get any of the loot that is the only reason why you'd ever consider coming raiding. Yeah, that will be popular.
Once it is earned by the guild it stays in the guild and can not be traded outside of the guild. This still keeps completely obsoleted items out of the economy it just allows more flexibility inside the guild making item balancing easier. It also makes it far easier to deal with new members and leaving members. It does not defeat the purpose of binding.
As for "person X earned that epic" um -- the guild earned that epic. So long as the person stays in the guild they have access to it. If they leave the guild they lose access to it.
Good players have nothing to fear at all from "abusive raid leaders." Those guilds would find themselves without players. And if you do end up outside a guild, you can join a different one. Since items stay in guilds and do not follow players -- they would be able to very easily gear you up to a little below the average of the guild.
It is just a different paradigm. The items are the property of the guild not the players. Items would roughly go obsolete about the same speed you just wouldnt be throwing away as many items such as when no illusionists were present on that raid or the one who actually needed item X wasnt on that specific raid.
Plus if half the guild decides to quit the items stay in the guild so it is easier to replace the players. It makes guilds a lot more stable.
I like the idea of heirlooms that I heard from LotRO.
I never played LotRO, but the way it was explained to me: heirlooms are account bound, meaning you can equip your lowbie characters with them, but you cannot give them to other players.
About "guild bound items" - you gotta be friggin kidding me. If I spend my time with raiding, I want a result. Not something that gets removed from me if I leave the guild.
Geezus H. Christ---this idea is like a wet dream for all the wannabe little dictators out there. Oh I can definately see every asshole guild leader being in favor of this because it would give them the power to let out their true asshole nature without any consequences.
Sure, let's put all the progrogression guild members make in the hands of guild leaders to do with as they please. Nothing belongs to the individual players it all belongs to the guild (which means in reality it belongs to the guild leader). Nope, nothing wrong with that idea at all.
My God, Stalin would be so proud of the guy who thought this up.
Just give everyone a piece of the loot, in the form of ingredients.
Then lol about as your game gets called a little innovative for having a crafting focus.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
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There's something very, very important that you're forgetting here. It's awkward to have to spell it out for you, as it's going way back to first principles, but here goes:
Guilds don't matter for their own sake. A guild is just a bunch of bits of data on some hard drive somewhere. It's players that matter. Every player in the game is a real human being sitting at a computer somewhere. A real person with real hopes and ambitions, joys and frustrations. And people matter, just because they're people.
Guilds exist for the benefit of their members, and not the other way around. The only good reason for a guild to exist at all is for the benefit of its members. It must always be the players that make the guild, and not the other way around. A guild that makes its members worse off as a result of being in the guild ought to cease to exist.
And sometimes the best course of action is for a guild to shut down. Maybe people just don't get along very well. Maybe too many players have quit the game and no one wants to recruit. Maybe it is beneficial to merge with some other guild to make a larger guild. Maybe the leaders have disappeared and moving everyone to a new guild with new leaders is the way to keep the guild intact. Your proposal would trap players in their existing guild, and say that they can't carry out any beneficial guild actions without having to start over on raiding.
Any statement of the form "the guild did X" is complete nonsense unless it means "the players in the guild did X". It wasn't a guild hall and a bunch of laundry that cleared a raid. It was players that cleared the raid. It wasn't an abstract guild that earned raid loot. It was players that earned it.
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But you haven't merely lost sight of everything that matters. You're also wrong on the merits.
You say that guild leaders can't be abusive or they'll lose members. But what if they don't care? What if a guild leader gets hacked? Do you really want to say, "I spent six months raiding but then lost everything because someone else had his password stolen"? What if a guild leader decides to quit the game and sell his account? Having dozens of redistributable raid epics on there would surely make it very valuable.
And even that is ignoring the human tendency to squabble with each other. Have you really never seen people fight over who should get which loot?
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And you're still missing the point of binding items to particular players. Yes, it makes it harder for guilds to gear up. That's the entire point. Endgames are supposed to take a long time to get through. They're supposed to throw all sorts of stupid barriers in your way. That's the entire point of an endgame. If it were quick to play through everything, then it wouldn't make you take months of extra subscription fees, and it wouldn't be an endgame.
You may be implicitly arguing without realizing it that raiding shouldn't be part of the endgame. But that's a different discussion for another time.
What I see happening, is a lazy guy A makes Guild 1, recruits a bunch of people, goes raiding, several sets of armor are accumulated by the guild and everyone is happy.
Guy A has a disagreement and to punish the guild, he kicks everyone out.
Now, Guy A has tons of loot, all at his disposal, and everyone who ever contributed to it no longer has any access to it. I see so many people abusing a system governed by players. Players want control, but players can't handle control.
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Thanks for the clarification. In this case, your idea is even worse than originally posted. I doubt I would play a game with such a system in place. As someone else said, people with a little power turn into a$$hats.
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Who or what is the guild? The guild is all its members and the things they have achieved together. The system you propose would not give power to the guild, it would take it away and give guild's leadership power over the guild.