This is incorrect. I still donate 60k weekly and have 6 kingdoms I am slowly leveling. That’s a pretty broad brush you used.
You are donating 60k but if you focused on putting 60k into your kingdoms instead of the guild then you would max your kingdoms faster. Then in the long run have the ability to donate more sooner. I will admit it was pretty broad of me though to think that focusing on kingdoms was more important than focusing on the guild.
Hmm. What I thought when I first saw the thread title was that this was a “membership fee.” I see that is actually more of a guild tax.
I think I like a membership fee better. You would have to pay x amount per month (or week, but I like monthly better) to stay in the guild. Or to receive full benefits. And such fee would not be overly large–10,000 or so. If you do not pay the membership fee, you are automatically dropped (perhaps you get one grace month to catch up.) Alternatively, if you don’t pay your membership fee, you get a reduced payoff (say only half of the offered currency.) The half you forfeit could be split among the other players.
The thing I don’t like about the Guild Tax is that if you are a player who is trying like mad to build your kingdoms, or your troops, or anything else you might want money for (is there anything else?) you end up paying more than the player sitting back and collecting gems until he/she can buy celestial armor.
Well, if there is a guild tithe, EVERYONE benefits greatly.
The major players in this game gave the huge amount if resources and things available to the BECAUSE of guild donations.
You want to make the most of this game? Get I a guild who actively contributed and has requirements for contributing. You will earn such high rewards from it that the only way to compare would be to spend large amounts of money.
Not necessarily. The power of a guild comes from the willingness of the members to work to develop it. If you have a bunch of lame-Os in the guild, no amount of taxing or any other tweaking will force them to produce. And it also does not prevent members from coasting (i.e. doing nothing.) My guild master is one of those. I don’t know what the heck he does. He apparently set up this guild but hasn’t reached lvl 50 yet (we have 20,000 or so trophies, so have been around) and is in the bottom third (of 30) for contributions. Is that okay? I myself like the idea of “Okay, you have your guild and you’re safe, but if you do nothing, you will only get 50 souls instead of 100 or 5 gems instead of 10 or whatever.”
On this point I agree wholeheartedly. A good guild kicks soccer balls. But that does not mean we should force a set tax on every member. As with any worthwhile club, it makes sense that you should have to pay for benefits. But I want to be able to pay my dues and be cool for a while.
As I think on this, I ask myself, “What is the purpose of this guild tax?”
Obviously if all guilds were filled with members who contributed to tasks consistently, this thread would not exist. So the purpose as I see it is to address the problem of non-contributing (or under-contributing, whatever we determine that to be) members.
Continuing on: what is the problem with under-contributing members?
The ones who do contribute feel they are doing all the work and not receiving equitable benefits because they are completing tasks for the rest of the guild but nobody else is completing tasks for them.
Example: the 10 gem task costs like 36,000 gold. That is 1200 gold per member. That is some CHEAP GEMS when everybody does their part. But you get 10 members who do nothing, and the cost increases to 1800 gold. Drop to only 10 hardcores and they are putting out 3600 gold each for those 10 gems. It gets to a point where it seems almost not worth it.
The problem I see with the guild tax is that—as proposed in this thread—it does NOTHING towards ensuring that deadbeats are not deadbeats. It just means that those 10 hardcores now HAVE to contribute. The deadbeats can still sit back and absorb the benefits from the oligarchy.
My thoughts on a membership fee: pay it or receive reduced bennies. The withheld bennies (or a percentage) are doled out to members who are paid up. If the guild has 30 members, a completed gem task pays out 300 gems in total at 10 per member. If 10 members are not paid up, those 10 will only receive 5 gems each, leaving 50 gems in the ether-void. Those 50 could be doled out to the 20 paid-up members (rounded down) giving them 12 gems each. If there were only 5 paid-up members in a 30-man guild, they would receive 35 gems for completing a gem task! I don’t think anyone would argue they were being unfairly used if that were the case.
But the entire discussion is almost moot, as no tweak—neither the guild task nor the membership fee—does anything towards replacing a strong guild with active leadership, reasonable requirements and contributing members.
The idea I think behind a tithe feature is to help players in the high contributing guilds have less work involved. It would also be helpful for every guild that has active members.
Really the key is the whole having “active” members. Many of us in the higher end of gold earners would love a tithing feature.
Also: you should get in a better guild.
The issue with a model such as suggested by IronyMan, is it is likely to result in many small exclusive guilds of 1 to 5 persons.
Imagine if you set-up an invite only guild for one person (you), then completed the 10 - 20 PvP battles to generate the 36,000, then complete the task to get a return of 300 gems! If this was available, almost everyone would start their own guild. Heck, even if it was 150 gems it would be worth going out alone.
Yes, you’d have to alternate with the other tasks…but 3,000 souls, or 36 maps or 360 glory keys are all great rewards for 30 - 40k gold.
Namour: I’m not sure you understand my counter-proposal.
For ease of discussion, let’s continue with the gems task. A guild with only 5 people does not have 300 gems to play with. They have only 50 gems to play with. In order to earn those extra gems, a player would have to figure out how to fill their guild with deadbeat players.
If a guild has 22 members out of a possible 30, then a completed gem task currently pays out a total of 220 gems (10 each to 22 players.) Under the membership dues model, if 7 of those members are deadbeats and have not paid their monthly (or whatever) membership, then those 7 would receive only 5 gems each. The 15 members in good standing would still receive their expected 10 gems. That leaves 35 gems from the expected payout of 220 not accounted for. My idea is that those 35 be distributed among the players that are in good standing, giving them 2 bonus gems each. The rounding down leaves 5 gems unaccounted for (total payout being (12 x 15) + (7 x 5) = 115. It would be fairly easy to keep those 5 “on the books” to be included in the calculation of the next gem task completion, or simply have them disappear as a “bonus tax.”
Agreed. If that were possible, everybody would be doing it (I know I would.) As I envision this, however, the only way I can see that it could be exploited is if an individual got on a bunch of other computers (say at the public library), created dummy accounts, and then joined his own guild with no intent to ever develop the characters. I can think of several ways to counteract that.
I guess the easiest would be to require some sort of level progression in order to be in a guild. If you aren’t moving ahead, you don’t lose your character, you just don’t have the right to join a guild. (Actually, that might almost be a solution to the whole issue we are discussing! Hmmm…)
The problem is that if the guild has active members, they don’t need the tax. And if they don’t have active members, the tax won’t help get them.
My counterproposal at least provides some benefit from having a couple deadbeat members, and also some deterrent to becoming a deadbeat member, without greatly penalizing either side. You can still be a deadbeat and collect 5 gems or 6 keys at a crack doing nothing, and if you are the altruistic Rank 2 buddy-knight, you can at least get a little bonus for your largesse.
Probably.
It’s not necessarily true that having a guild with active members means you don’t want a tithe feature. Most of the people in support are people in guild with active players.
Active guilds don’t become active by themselves, this usually requires a hard working guild leader, constantly watching activity and contributions, warning and kicking inactive members and so on. This has become quite a troublesome task, and the tax would help reduce at least some of the load guild leaders currently have.
There are some other ways it could help:
- When you look at your hard earned cash, and have to decide if it goes to leveling another kingdom or to the guild, that’s not always easy. But if a percentage of all earning goes to the guild automatically, then you never got the gold in the first place, and you don’t feel it as much.
- Currently most guilds require same amount of gold from all players. That is somewhat unfair, because lower levels have a harder time getting gold even if they do the same amount of PVP. Also, not everyone has the same amount of free time. With the tax, you can be sure that each player’s contribution is relative to how hard it is for them to get it.
- And of course, there’s the fact you don’t have to remember and watch your contributions, they just happen automatically. That’s less work for everyone.
Basically, the benefit was never meant to be “getting more contributions”, it was just a way for current contributions to happen in a more convenient way.
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I’d only be ok with that kind of feature if it could be set to zero. I’m currently the only active contributor of my guild, and I told the two others to just stop giving while they’re leveling up their kingdoms, even though they do pitch in occasionally. I would not want a feature that forces them to give anything.
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If that is a response to my post (I assume it was) I never said that. What I said is if the players are active, they don’t NEED a tithe feature. It’s obvious active players want the tithe. They are p.o.ed about all the deadbeats and want to make sure those folks can’t continue to coast on their efforts.
Oh yeah. Federal withholding. Boy, we love that idea, don’t we? Wouldn’t we be happier if we could just pay the government x dollars every year and know that everything else was ours to do as we wished? Apparently, that second idea is not as universal as I thought it might be.
This is a pretty blanket statement that is not very accurate. True this reason exists, but it is not universally THE reason for the desire for tithing as your language seems to say. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, I apologize if so.
Speaking for myself as NOT a guild leader, but a member of an active guild that rarely has problems with donating members, I personally want a tithing feature to make my life easier. I also believe that the guilds as a whole would benefit from this feature, with more players getting more rewards.
As a non Guild leader in a high guild that does not necessarily require contributions (cheers!) and with all my kingdoms currently at six, I’d love to have a small tithe (ie 2 or 5%) so that whatever I contribute (automatically) is in relation to what I’m earning.
Ofcourse if I’d want to contribute more, there’s still the manual option.
I do feel kind of ashamed at this point since I benefit a lot from what others are contributing, but I am unsure where to strike the balance between levelling my kingdoms and contributing to the guild.
As a guild leader myself, I would like to implement a system alike as the propposed here. Setting a % on guild members profit for each battle would be nice because it would make it more fair; everyone contributing acording to their activity. Players with full leveled kingdoms would be avalible to hoard there leftovers in order to progress on new kingdoms, and players who are still struggling to level those up could use the leftovers to progress them while still keeping their responsabilities with the guild. Of course each guild can set their own weekly requirements as it is right now. A couple of key points for me on the system are:
a) Completing a task trought the profited amounts from guild members battles would give the same rewards to everyone.
b) Guild leaders retain the right to remove players who even with the tax system, can’t keep up with min contribution requirements.
c) Chance to arbitrary mark and unmark players to stay “safe” from the tax system while recieving the same rewards. This could have a limited times to be changed with a monthly reset.
d) Guild Members in or out of the tax system can still manually contribute to guild task.
e) To avoid exploits from guild leaders, all the changes to the system inside the guild enviroment (Mark, unmark and setting the profit % to the guild members battles) Would have to be approved by atleast half of their members.
I think is good to remind that right now guilds have the right to accept and remove players, which lead to the most Important point, everyone on the guild should have the same rights and rewards because everyone is part of it, and this ones should not be releted to the amount of contribution. I believe I said this before here but, again, setting different amounts of rewards for members of the same guild is a nono for me, I believe on everyone progressing together.
Soz for Englando,
Cheers, Serale from MM.
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You’re right. I wrote that before leaving for work and was in a bit of a hurry. Perhaps not p.o.ed, but there is certainly disgruntlement. There is a general feeling that some guild members are not pulling their weight. And that will always be the case. In any game, there are the hardcores who live, die, and bleed all things related to it, and then there are the moms and dads who like to do something other than watch television to wind down after they put the kids to bed (and all degrees in between.) You are never going to get the same input from mom and dad that you get from Joe College whose primary purpose for a 50 minute class is to give his tribute a chance to recharge. Should we just make mom and dad join the Moms and Dads guild so the hardcores can get that last kingdom maxed out before the next update?
I know nobody wants that. What it sounds like is that people just want some way to ensure that every guild member does SOMEthing.
But making people do something is never the best way.
If you make someone do something they don’t want to do, it just makes them mad. It is far better to make it beneficial for a person to do what you would like them to do. You can tell them, “Fine, you don’t have to pay. But then you will not be a full-fledged member.” Non-payers would still get some great benefits. They can collect a lot of resources just sitting there and doing nothing. But they will collect more resources if they keep the membership current.
I don’t actually have a strong dog in the fight. My personal opinion is that I do not want to see any change at all. But if we do see a change, I do NOT want to see a guild tax (euphemistically termed a “tithe” in this thread, but basically an income tax.) And it absolutely astounds me that there appears to be so much general support for this tax when it will do absolutely nothing to achieve its targeted intent (i.e. ameliorate the disparity between the contributions of casual and hardcore players.)
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Then join a guild that does not require a tax.
You speak as if there’s no such thing as a guild tax currently, and this thread suggest to make one. But reality is, many guilds already have a tax, and if you don’t pay you get kicked out. The suggestion in this thread is just a feature that will make the tax process more automatic and more fair, and is aimed at guilds that already have a tax and want it. Nobody’s going to force a guild to have a tax if they don’t want to.
This thread does suggest a tax. What thread were you referring to?
No they don’t. They can’t levy a tax. That is what is being proposed here. Some guilds attempt to enforce a contribution requirement, and then it is up to the Guild God and the Rank 2 and 3 bean-counters to make sure everyone is anteing up. But it is still voluntary.
I don’t see how forcing people to do something makes it more fair. That is what I am arguing against.
No guilds already have a tax. That is what is being proposed.
“Tax” and “contribution requirement” are not synonymous. You keep saying tax when you mean the other. A tax, as proposed (alright, they call it a tithe to not make it sound so bad) is a certain percentage of the gold you win being automatically turned over to the guild. You never see it. It is like FICA or federal withholding on your paycheck.
A contribution requirement is good-faith based and completely optional. If, however, the requirement is not met (by whatever method the guild uses to measure it) you can be kicked out, but are not kicked out automatically. The Guild God has to do that.