In 3.4, a pet rescue can be active across an entire guild for 1 hour. Is there anything being added to the game to prevent someone from completing their pet rescue, finding a new guild, doing their rescue, and rotating this around 10+ guilds per hour?
The max amount of pets that would normally be available is 1 rescue event every 60-90 minutes. If guild switching works for pets, this will be increased to around 6-12 pets per hour.
To a similar degree, what is the devs’ stance on playing in a guild for a few hours, switching to a guild primarily in a more favorable time zone with people actually playing, and doing this constantly throughout the day always attempting to go to the most optimal time zoned guild for the current time? This would take a lot of coordination, but would nearly double the rate of obtaining pets.
The current pet obtaining system from how Salty described it on stream has a lot of exploits to it assuming the pet gnome things are as rare or rarer than treasure gnomes.
Not sure what current measures are being added in 3.4 to combat this, but one of the easiest fixes I can think of is prevent a person from participating in pet events unless they have been in the guild for at least 24 hours. This would fix both guild hopping and time zone hopping.
The time zone one likely wouldn’t be too big a deal, but if guild hopping to a guild with a pet active lets you do the pet than that will be extremely exploitable.
Late game players could just go around offering to donate 250k+ gold to any guild that has a pet active, go to the guild to claim the pet, then keep repeating this to any guild with a pet that will take their offer. Smaller and mid sized guilds that have a pet active would likely not hesitate to get 250k donated for letting someone into their guild for 5-8 minutes. Many late game players have millions in spare gold that they could use for this purpose. A guild could profit millions of gold per hour from just selling their pet event to others.
I don’t see this as a real concern. But I suppose if 7 guilds are in alliance. Players could rotate depending on who has a pet event going on.
Hopefully, the pet rescue only works for people in the guild when it starts. Anyone who joins during a rescue won’t be able to partake.
The interaction you describe is exactly how it works in another free to play game I know that uses a similar system, to the benefit of said system. Said game uses a cap on the number of entrants, but a much more malleable friends list to determine who has access to any given event, so it is encouraged to add people for that express purpose. If this is really a concern, do what they do and cap each event at a certain number of entries (in the case of GoW, 30).
If pet events are so rare that at any point people feel they need to do this for this system, we have another problem entirely. Same with the whole “being able to refresh explores by initiating a server contact” that was sometimes used, primarily when hunting down a specific troop type versus “putting up single troop suicide defenses” as a method of manipulating matchmaking that gives everyone else a flood of single troop suicide battles. Sometimes you need to patch the “exploit”, but it is generally better that you address the reason behind why people might feel the need to exploit in the first place.
30 cap would have no effect. This would just make it so only casual guilds could sell them. There are plenty of guilds with 20/30 members that still play enough to obtain the event then sell a pet to 10 people in an hour at 100,000 gold each.
My fix still stands at a 24 hour delay of being in the guild before any pets can be obtained from the guild.
Why do you assume the slots would have to be “sold” instead of given freely for smaller guilds? And why is this inherently a bad thing, though? What you describe as “abuse” in this system is the only thing that makes it bearable for casual players in the other game I mentioned that uses similar one-hour timer triggered events. The thing about performing it here is that you would need to drop/join guilds instead of a friends list, making it much more logistically difficult (not to mention an abhorrent thought to many people right out of the gate, as this wipes all your guild records).
What I’m hearing here is “I want to maintain my advantage as a leader of a high ranked guild, but I don’t want to have to do this to do it”. And that is perfectly fine. You shouldn’t have to do this to do it. Doing this shouldn’t be dominant strategy. Given the logistics involved, I highly doubt it will be, and if it is, it would only give someone at most a few days headstart before the people at the top get all the base pets and stop caring. On the other hand, if the average player feels it is necessary to do this, the system has bigger problems, and thats the thing they need to address.
tl;dr: This would only be a problem because of the way the system is implemented with guild and the 1 hour timers in the first place. We don’t need a “solution” that just tacks more unpleasant design on top of something that is already problematic.
It isn’t that the default rate is too low; the exploitable rate is just too high. It would be mandatory to guild hop as it is upwards of 10x quicker than not guild hopping. Pets will always have value as you need to obtain 31 of each pet with over 36 pets initially being released, plus extras beyond 31 of each pet feeds other pets of the same color.
I don’t see how a 24 hour delay for pets when guild hopping is “unpleasant design”. Guild Wars has the same thing, except it is a 6+ day delay, and that has been working fine with minimal issues.
My current guild management involves players jumping between guilds weekly. So for 24 hours they’d be penalized for moving? No thank you.
I already stated the solution…
Members who join after a pet rescue has started… Won’t be able to partake in the current pet rescue.
If there is concern… It should towards the pet events that last 24 hours. Since people could jump guilds all day to get different pets or the same pet multiple times. I offer the same solution as above… Those who join the guild after the event… Can’t participate in the event.
Only in a very specific set of circumstances, and only uncapped, and only an “issue” if this gives some kind of clear advantage in the competitive meta as a whole. Guild Wars is designed to be a competition, pets are designed to be something you can collect. The lockout is not meant to establish their pedigree in your guild to determine their “worth” to fight, but rather to prevent people from swapping for extra attacks and a competitive advantage. Guilds don’t need arbitrary time lockout features for things like donating seals, donating gold, getting guild skill bonuses, accessing seals chests, or getting any credit for any tasks completed after they joined they haven’t completed that week - it would be silly if they did.
The 24 hour limit prevents any kind of guild hopping or collaborative effort on a casual level for everyone to obtain them as collectibles long term. You are saying, vehemently, that guild hopping for pets shouldn’t be a thing. I’m saying, it maybe shouldn’t allow it for this theoretical 10x upper limit, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t allow others that don’t conform to the specific play pattern this attempts to promote to be able to have more than a fringe interaction with a system that wants you to have eyes on the game pretty much 24/7.
Another way to prevent guild hopping entirely would be to have the event associated with each player instead of the guild - it is triggered for everybody in the guild when it is triggered, but if they leave the guild, they still have that same event and can’t trigger another one. For all we know, it might already work this way. We also have no knowledge of what happens to the event when you finish it if this happens to be the case.
For the record, I don’t intend to guild hop for this. I just don’t think that a stand needs to be taken that it is an issue to such a degree that we cut off arbitrary (not competitive) guild features for any length of time due to the precedent it sets. And I think concern with regard to “time zone hopping” is a bit overboard as well - the system, the way it is outlined, encourages this, which, again, is a flaw with how it is designed in the first place if the intent is to have guilds be tight knit collectives.
That would likely work best, but sounds a lot harder to code. Hopefully they do have something of that like implemented. Won’t really know until we get some kind of reply from the devs on all of this.
I don’t think the issue is going to be as big as your concern is. Idk if people still can… But people used to jump between guilds just to get 100 seals from each one. To me… It was never worth the effort. I see this pet thing being similar… Cause if a guild does accept random joins. They probably don’t have people playing 24/7.
My two biggest concerns with it, most of which could and possibly already do have some kind of fix to prevent them, are the following:
1: People selling the best pests for gold donations. Things like Lucky, Mimic, Moon are all resource gaining pets that increase resources accumulated from battles. All of these pets will be some of the most desired pets to obtain. If it was by some chance possible to have the pet from hopping, things like “Selling Mimic, 100k Gold” and other similar messages would be spammed in global chat 1 and taken up by 10s-100s of players.
2: While likely uncommon, really organized networks of guilds could create pet farming guilds for different time zones. These guilds would have a guild name like “10 AM - 2 PM EST” indicating that this time is when the entire guild farms for pets. Several of these would be made by the organized guild covering every possible time frame throughout 24 hours. These time zone hop guilds would have the quickest rate of pet gains being able to reach a pretty consistent 1 event per hour at any time of the day.
Challenge accepted. Lol
We have members in 6-7 different countries. Spanning from California (heading east) all the way to New Zealand. If the Pet Gnomes drop as often as the normal gnomes. Then I for see 12-18 pet rescues a day for us.
On a positive note… It…will give the top guilds incentive to do PvP rather than just farm the arena all day/night.
