This topic has come up a few times before with various suggestions on how to deal with actual and perceived guild hopping.
The problem is that the structure of guild families makes any sort of loyalty reward system unfair to players in a network of guilds that work together as a large unit.
When I was the guild leader of a hardcore, top 10 guild, burn out was common. So, it required regular recruiting. We had a great core group of members. However, there will always be a percentage of players in a hardcore guild that will either burn out from the intense amount of play time, competition stress and/or general game evolution.
At that time, it was the early days of sister guilds. Since we didnât have one, we lost some good players to retirement guilds, or they just quit the game entirely.
Now, Iâm the 2IC of a top 100 endgamer guild that has a casual sister guild. Both guilds benefit greatly from this partnership. Players from the more competitive guild can easily go to our sister guild when they need a break, get a long term sickness, take an extended vacation or just decide to focus on other games for awhile. They can do all this without worrying about letting the competitive guild down.
On the flip side, the casual guild can take in and train new players while also having space for endgamers that need a slower pace for whatever reason. Of course, some of those new players move to the competitive guild when they are ready.
Long story short, this guild family system is stable and beneficial for all players in it. We rarely have to recruit outside the family. The guild family system naturally fosters loyalty without any need for outside payoffs.
MY guild is a good destination arguably one of the very best, depending on your definition, but that aside there are other great guilds which suffer this issue
Well people are going to come and go based on their real life stuff. No amount of bribery will get them to stay. If you are trying to get a guild hopper to stay my first question would be why.
Well Iâm in the top guild on Xbox and we were not always top guild and most of the other top guilds were not always top guilds. They had to put in some work. There are only 2 guilds on Xbox that have never competed in B2 guild wars and Iâm in one of them. Maybe that also helps retain good people. Having discord also helps.
Your feelings are not invalid. I think a good guild system that encourages devotion to friends and friendship could be built. But as long as there is a competitive mode that offers more rewards for being in a competitive guild than staying put, that will be the player tendency. You canât really offer enough rewards to make up for the leaderboard rewards without dramatically altering the economy.
Further, if you put a game designer lens on guilds, it seems clear that guilds are meant to be competitive teams, not social constructs, so trying to bolt on team building exercises sort of goes against the design. The only point where guilds get âmore social than competitiveâ is at the top, since those people are either âclearly trying to get furtherâ or âhappy with where weâve landedâ. The only way for you and your friends to get there is to disband and join some other guild.
Thatâs the way itâs made, and some periodic rewards wonât change it.
Force a player to stay in a guild that they donât like?? What if that person has perfectly legitimate reasons for not liking the guild environment or the guild leader? If the person isnât a guild hopper, this will be a huge turnoff to staying in the game. Iâve never played a game with guilds that literally forced a player to stay in a guild. If I ever came across such a game, I would never play it on principle.
Besides that, it wouldnât help the guild thatâs holding the player hostage anyway. All they would have to do is not play or contribute at all for the time they are forced to stay.
I did mention, chronic guild hoppers.
Some are so bad i could actually name a couple from pc / mobile.
If they stay without contributing then the GM can force remove them but clocking this up, eventually they may not able to join another guild.
This could force them to contribute at the least than just leech.
Your suggestion unfortunately isnât going to get you the results you want. As others have suggested, tiny rewards arenât going to stop anyone from leaving unless the rewards are set to economy-breaking levels, which the devs wonât do.
There will always be those who donât have the decency to inform their guild of their departure, not leave in the middle of GW, not guildhop after theyâve taken advantage of their guild or any of a hundred other annoying & demoralizing habits.
My own experience has shown these few things (among others) have built a loyal & faithful group, maybe you can employ them to your benefit as well in some way:
guild family/alliance - having multiple guilds that work together is awesome for guild loyalty, especially if each guild has varying reqs & appeal to varying playstyles. Being able to move players up & down among the guilds as their playstyle changes is great for building loyalty, especially if all the guilds share a common discord or similar platform to communicate. This way people can move to a guild that suits them better but still communicate with friends they made in their previous guild.
recruiting - VERY important. Be as open as possible about everything when recruiting. Ask recruits about their playstyle, what kind of guild theyâre coming from, what they want in a guild, what your guild offers, what their goals are, what your expectations are, etc. Donât just take the 1st person who applies. If your req is 500k gold & someone says they can only do 400k, donât force a square peg into a round hole. Itâs not going to work out well for the player or your guild. Make sure they are the closest fit you can get.
use honor as an incentive - honor has some not insignificant benefits at high levels and most people want to complete it. My guild council & myself save honor each week to reward preset gold donations & event participation goals. So for instance top 5 event participants + everyone over a certain threshold (youâd have to test this out for your guild) and top x gold donors + everyone over a certain min amount get awarded honor.
Just thoughts, take them for what theyâre worth to you if anything.
Thanks but trying to get away from the notion of players abandoning and working together terribly idealistic of me but Iâm looking for the game to move forward rather than going the route of âIf you canât beat them, join themâ which is why Iâve proposed an idea to move away from that mentality
I suggested making the rewards Significant therefore a player would leave and try and build up loyalty then by finding a guild suitable to their individual input.
Im not suggesting accepting any account the guilds who have this issue do look to recruit the type of players recommended, unfortunately players tend not to divulge that they are only there to exploit a guild or to move to one to the top 2 guilds. Thank you for taking the time to give some thoughtful input
I like the thought but my post/idea is not to limit players movement as I appreciate there are genuine reasons to for leaving guilds , just canât accept crappy ones where players tell you they want to play less then join a higher requirement guild. Have seen this happen to a number of guilds
As someone posted itâs not in the interest of the most dominant guilds for other players to be rewarded for trying to help improve their existing guild, jumping up sticks and not trying to work cooperatively is far more rewarding to them.
I donât think itâs that black and white. Most of those top guilds are also in bracket 1 Guild Wars. Having a chronic guild hopper bounce during the middle of GW can be the difference between getting 1500 gems and 300. For some, it could cost them their position in the bracket all together. So, I donât see guild hopping as some grand benefit for top guilds.
[Granted, this situation wonât be so dire once the devs switch to 27/30 GW scoring.]
