Running a guild involves a lot of cat herding. It’s easier said than done to get players to do exactly what you want. One of the places I see this hit hard is guild donations. Every week, no matter whether the guild uses guild chat or Discord or anything else, there’s some joker who sleepily rushes to donate without checking. (I find I’m better at following orders when drunk than sleepy!)
There is a UI to set a priority for tasks, but I can’t figure out how to see it anywhere but the guild admin screen. Either way, we established above players aren’t super good at checking and following orders.
So I propose a Guild Tax. There are two parts.
I hope the “tax” part is obvious. The GM can set a %, and that % of all gold earned in combat by guild members will be automatically donated to a task. The tax can perhaps be a rank permission, so guilds have a way to classify players that have a gold goal like leveling kingdoms considered more important than donating to tasks.
The second part is where the complexity lies, it concerns where the money goes. I have a lot of ideas, some or all of these make sense:
The money could be donated in the priority order specified in guild admin.
The guild could indicate “we don’t want to spend on this task” by setting it to priority 0.
If the guild reaches all task goals, the tax could stop being collected.
Or, it could go into a pool that is auto-applied to next week’s taxes.
I think this would make donation more or less an automatic affair for players. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The donations page is a UI loop that represents a chore, is out of the way from gameplay, and allows players to make bad choices. The tax, on the other hand, is transparent, frictionless, and places blame for bad decisions on the guild leadership. Casual guilds can choose to have no tax to avoid making it seem stressful. Guilds can have “Tax-Free Weekends” and other events if their players want to hoard gold.
I think this would take a little bit of stress out of managing a guild.
Make a guild gold pool instead.
X% of all gold earned by all members ingame goes to a guild pool (except gold bought with gems, for fairness sake).
Then the admin/gm decides how to gold is spent. The admin can add gold from the pool to tasks, or the admin can send gold from the pool to individual members (maybe with a set limit per week, like max 1 million gold per week to guild members).
That would bring order in the guild task jungle, as the admin solely decides which tasks is filled, or if any tasks are filled at all (at times might be more effective to hoard the guild pool for like 1-2 weeks, then go all in with it).
And it will allow guild actively help their less developed members, by sending them gold to finish kingdoms/etc.
That would even allow guilds to run ingame contests, like the most active in that week’s event/lb/whatever gets a prize in gold from the guild pool.
Thus more interaction and feedback.
The interface would be easy, just add sliders to all tasks, from 0 to full completion, and sliders to all guid members, from 0 to 1 milion.
Guid tax would ofc be adjustable, let’s say between 0% and 50%.
I thought about a pool and it’s a double-edged feature. I think it’s helpful for big guilds with trustworthy GMs. I think it will also lead to this kind of post:
I don’t know, maybe pool should be an option if it exists at all. My goal was to reduce the dimensions of complexity for the GM, the pool adds a new task to their list.
Either way I root for the core idea, there’s a lot of other sub-features it could have and still be useful!
Especially with the advent of epic tasks, some improvements to guild management tools need to happen.
First I suspect the devs don’t want to enable the transfer of currencies between users. Not only would it mess with their economy, but it will instantly be an avenue of abuse. IMO it is best avoided.
I think the better way to approach the cat herding problem is to simply be able to lock down tasks.
That being said, I think that a tax mode is z horrible idea. Yeah if a member is not contributing to their ability, you at least get something out of them. However members that go above and beyond still have your hands in their pocket even after substantially exceeding their commitment to the guild. That’s going to breed animosity amongst guild members unless everyone plays similarly.
Putting my mind to it, just make the task priority screen be numeric with up and down adjustments 0-12. Then just make task contributions like legendary tasks. The guild management picks task and priorities and the guild just contributes. They get completed in the order of priority. Priority has to be unique if not zero. Zero priority means it never gets done. If any are left at zero you will never reach LTs.
Sorry but I think this is a bad idea.
This is a game and should be fun for all the participants. I know the GM can set a priority for the tasks and some members don’t care for that, so what? Maybe they are in need of the rewards that task gives.
If we gonna start treating this GAME as a job or real life I quit immediately as a GM.
Again … this is a GAME let us keep it like that.
Also there might be players spending a huge amount this week and less next week because they want to upgrade a Kingdom or Faction.
So just forget that bad idea and try to appeal to the common sense of our guildies.
That’s why “no tax” should be an option and the default. That way it doesn’t hurt people who see the very presence of guild tasks as a job and apparently are good at not scrutinizing the rest of this game.
The problem is solved much easier. The admin sets the priority of each statue and until it / they is completely filled, the remaining statues are inactive. The priority of each statue can be changed in the process by opening or closing certain statues.
