I would like to mention an idea maybe about increasing the amount of seals per player. At the moment a guild with 30 players can reach 40,000 seals. But a new guild has no hope of reaching that unless they have plenty of players. I was in a top 50 guild for a long time and i had some family members that wanted to start playing so i decided to leave a good guild and start my own guild to get them involved in the game. For ages i have been trying to get players to join but it seems unless your a high ranked guild nobody wants to join which makes it near impossible to reach 40,000 seals. I would like to suggest maybe increasing the seals per player for example 1 player 40,000 seals, 2 players 20,000 3 players 16,5000 4 players 10,000 and so on till a guild gets 30 players and the max seals per player is back down to 1500 per player. Then guilds that dont have 20 to 30 players have a fighting chance of reaching 40,000 seals. Just doesnt seem to be any incentive to start a guild of your own at the moment. But i do love this game.
I would like to hear anybodys thoughts.
I think you have the wrong idea. The current system encourages people to organize themselves in groups of 30. I don’t think devs want really small guilds to be viable. There are already too many guilds in the game, and I don’t understand why people want to be Guild Leaders, it is mostly a hassle. I would never even try to create my own guild because for that reason alone.
That being said, there are all kinds of guilds out there, I’m sure there’s plenty for every kinds of player and playstyle.
It would be ridiculously broken to a person to earn that many seals to spend. You’d have people forming 1 person guilds, rack up 40k seals for a couple emweeks then join another guild and spend them all.
However, it might be feasible to allow players to earn more seals past their 1.5k toward the guild total but not their personal total. That would be awesome for casual guilds to have a better chance of hitting 40k. That extra amount shouldn’t be very high, say an extra 500 per player to help make up for other member shortfalls.
So for instance, each player can earn up to 2k seals for the guild but they can only take home 1500 of them to spend on chests.
Of note as well if anyone didn’t realize this, the daily GW reward seals can actually be earned above & beyond your 1500. So if you save your GW rewards until after you max out your personal 1500 and then redeem them, the 50 extra seals count beyond your 1500 max both personally and for the guild. So a 30 person guild can earn an additional 1500 seals for the guild off of 1 GW reward if everyone redeems them after maxing out. That’s a whole extra person worth of seals toward the 40k.
So in theory winning 6 GW days raises the max each player can earn to 1800 seals/week.
That’s a mistake, tbh, because more than likely your family members will eventually quit the game too, leaving you to hang dry ><
Come join us in DrudsHaven? 
Then you will have all the Seals.
NowayJoe2Go
One thing I’ve for which advocated in the past is more system-managed guilds.
I know on some level that might seem repellent, but I think it could accommodate everybody if it was designed to be optional, and still allow the really competitive folks to self-organize into more dedicated crews.
I may be dumb but I don’t understand what you mean by that.
This is probably the best decision that could be made if the devs were to budge on this topic. As @vanyel already mentioned, having 1 player capable of getting 40k seals in a week (it’s a lot of playing) is a bad tactic. If that person has all their guild guardians to mythic and 4 copies, then they will be getting 2000 free gem chests a week. Even if they don’t have the guardians mythiced, it would only take just over a week to get them (perfect average is ~2328).
I’d like an extra 500 seals, it would be an help and some extra resources both, that will be helpful after recent nerfing resources.
For the record I’m not advocating that players should be able to earn another 500 seals for themselves (though 2k seals would be nice). Just that players can earn the additional 500 seals toward the guild’s total seals to get to 40k. More motivated guild members can then help offset those not able to do their 1500.
As the system is right now, 1 person does no seals or your guild is missing 1 member, nearly everyone else has to hit 1500 to get to 40k. That’s not going to happen in a casual guild so they’ll never attain 40k. With the extra 500 toward guild totals, 3 motivated members can make up for that person.
I can see myself playing either side.
The thing is, I agree with the side that thinks there’s far too many guilds with only a handful of active players. That’s part of why climbing to any particular rank is a slog: you have to claw your way past hundreds of guilds that are abandoned, or only have 3 members, etc. There are a lot of other mechanics that might assist with that, but I don’t want to get bogged down in a lot of them. They’re all “good ideas” and at least some of them should be implemented.
So if fewer people “left a good active guild to start their own” without 20 people following, it wouldn’t be so hard to climb the brackets, and it’d be easier for smaller new guilds to pull in high-performing new members. But look at it this way: the top 100 guilds represent 3,000 players. Those slots are perpetually full: everyone wants to be in the top one. What about 101-1000? That’s got room for 29,970 players if they’re all 30-member guilds, or 999 players if everyone forms a 1-member guild.
The more 30-member guilds exist, the more rewards are distributed to players.
To me the most sensible way to satisfy your request is to encourage “guild death”. There’s probably a huge ghetto of inactive guilds at the bottom that just need to be deleted. The most elegant way to do that without hurting feelings is to do this at “rollover” every week:
For each guild:
For each player, sorted by rank:
If this player is the leader and inactive > 30 days:
Mark the player "inactive" and pass leadership to the next-ranked player.
If no "active" players remain:
Mark this guild "inactive" by:
* Removing it from Guild Wars brackets.
If the guild is "inactive":
It loses one bracket of GW standing.
We could bicker about the various balances but I think that’s the most fair. If a guild leader quits, the guild eventually passes to the next-highest ranked member, if some last survivor wants to keep the guild they have to wait at most 30 days. Guilds consisting solely of inactive players stop hurting other peoples’ GW rank, but if their members suddenly come back they can start competing again. But if they stay inactive for a long time, they’ll fall. (I added that part because I predict shenanigans among highly competitive guilds abusing alt/sister guilds. I don’t understand how it would work, but I think going “inactive” should COST something to a guild.)
Anyway. You need 27 members if you want the 40k guild chest. That’s a thing you should think about if you want to leave an active guild to start your own. It’s sacrifice. You need 26 people to follow you. It’s harder than you think, and if it were easy, I think it’d be more “optimal” for guilds to organize around smaller groups. Think “abusing sister guilds to protect your main guild’s place in the rankings”.
How about you can only keep 1500 seals per week but you can make more that would count towards the guilds chest amount of 40k.
I think that’s exactly what I suggested above…
And I agree with slypenslyde, there really should be some mechanic to eliminate truly dead guilds. I know it sounds like a great accomplishment when a new guild gains 600 ranks in a week, but when only 1 of them actually has anyone in it doing anything it doesn’t seem so awesome. And those new guilds shouldn’t have to start at rank 10,000 or whatever ridiculous number is at the bottom. AND new players shouldn’t have to bounce through 20 inactive random guilds to find 1 that actually has any activity.
That’s really the same thing as “allow individual players to obtain more seals”.
The problem I’m highlighting isn’t “people can open too many guild chests”, the problem is “mostly-empty-guilds are a major problem”. If we let players “count” 2k seals towards the chest each week, a guild only needs 20 players to reach 40k. Let’s walk through what competitive guilds might do in that world and how it might trickle down to not-competitive guilds.
What I worry is if competitive guilds get in a scenario where they only need 20 players to hit 40k, they will organize around teams of 22-23 to maintain some “margin of error”. That will technically push a lot of guilds out of top 100/1000 as everyone reorganizes around that.
Part of me wants to say “that seems stupid, even if seals are “wasted” all 30 people in the guild get the chests.” The other part of me wants to say, “Sometimes competitive people are stupid, and don’t like the concept of anything being “wasted” at all.” I’m not sure which way they’d go.
The key thing is deciding if we think, “I started a new guild and it’s hard to attract 27 people” is something that shouldn’t be true. I think that’s a hard sell, and I don’t think attracting 20 people is much easier than 27. I suspect if we could purge dead guilds, it wouldn’t take a small but competitive guild to hit top 5000 and start courting more people.
I don’t think that’ll be an issue due to GW. You can’t get into or stay in bracket 1 without 30 active GW participants. And there are very few top 50 guilds who don’t care about GW.
Otherwise I agree whole-heartedly. Dead guilds need a mechanic to be purged.
I think that you’re wrong, especially because you said that you decided to leave the iron-daddy.to guild, sounds not pretty good!
Aha, I figured there was a hole in my nightmare.
Still, some kind of “dead guild purge” seems like it would alleviate a lot of issues.
If the guild is inactive, it won’t be registering for guild wars in the first place, so won’t even show up in the GW rankings.
I like your first step, but I think the next two steps should be:
2. as soon as a GL is inactive for 30 days (or even less) to prevent the guild from showing up in the in-game guild-finder (so no new players will stumble into a dead guild), and
3. to disband the guild if no active players remain (taking them out of the overall guild ranking table).
That’s true. I wasn’t sure if a guild drops to the bottom if this happens or not, so I wanted to define something.
I like your (2), but I feel like (3) is a bad idea. Over in the thread about holding guilds hostage, you can see people get real attached to the guild name and their statue progress. If someone who put a lot into the game goes on hiatus, I think the game should give them a warm welcome when they come back. If they show up a year later and the first thing they see is their guild has been erased, they might not stick around. I think the devs would rather them think, “I’m gonna make my guild a powerhouse again!”.
It’s kind of like how in Animal Crossing I missed a week or so due to a funeral. I just didn’t feel like playing while I was going through everything. When I came back, my player’s hair was messed up. He had roaches in his house. My favorite townsperson had moved away. A new person had moved in on top of one of my flower beds. And every person I spoke to made fun of me for not having played. I never played that Animal Crossing again.
Fair enough, and I take your point. There would be no harm in allowing the guild to continue to exist as long as it isn’t contributing to the problem (which would be solved if players couldn’t join guilds with inactive leaders).
At the same time, for every player that takes a lengthy hiatus, leaving an inactive guild and returning to resuscitate it sometime later, there are probably many more that either never return or care so little about their guild that they wouldn’t mind starting over, joining a new one, or whatever. All of those guilds continue to clutter up the ecosystem with no benefit to anyone.
The guild system needs a major overhaul to help newer players from falling into the many traps that the existing system leaves in their path. It’s hard to imagine a worse possible system than one with an existing forest of inactive guilds, extremely low barriers to entry, poor explanation/documentation, poor communication options, no way to filter available guilds to find a good match, etc.