Feedback talk:User/Tennessee Ernie Ford/Recognize existing guild structures

Scott Hawkes agrees

Good suggestion as well as one with actual precedent. Scott Hawkes at Gamebreaker.TV has been quite vocal on this issue in at least two of the Guildcasts in which he's participated. His criticism being he had to create three separate guilds to allow enough room for all of the Gamebreaker.TV guild members to join during the BWEs.

He spoke of the difficulties inherant in coordinating efforts, deciding who would be placed in which guild, fielding requests from players who want to be in the same guild as their friend(s), and placating players who were upset that so-and-so got placed in such-and-such guild but they didn't (accused of playing favorites). It got to the point where he refused to make any guilds for BWE #3 just so he could play the game; so much of his time in the previous BWEs had been spent just putting out fires in the three guilds he created. It got so bad that - to have any chance to play the game to give an informed review - he had to log-in anonymously to avoid the barrage of chat messages asking to resolve one guild membership mini-crisis after another. This was when the guild cap was at 100; it sounds from your feedback suggestion that the cap has now been increased to 500. Even so, there are some guilds which could exceed even that number.

Personally, it won't effect me as my current guild has 12 people; the same 12 people who've been together since 2005's Prophecies. We like it that way and prefer a smaller, closer-knit group. However, I could see this being a real issue for the much larger guilds. It isn't clear to me what informed ArenaNet's decision to place such a small cap on guild size to begin with. Obviously, there had to have been discussions in their offices which led to this decision. I'm just curious to know the background. Were they worried monster guilds would dominate in WvWvW, eliminating any chance of smaller guilds having an impact in that arena? That would certainly be an issue for smaller guilds such as mine. I can't imagine there's any technical issues involved as 1,000 players is still 1,000 players; whether they're all in a single guild or spread out among ten guilds shouldn't make a difference. Guild Wars 3 perhaps 04:49, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, the cap has been increased to 500, but it requires about 4 gold before you can grow the guild to that size. I'm guessing that quite a lot of guilds will end up at 200+ members within three hours (when coin is scarce), but will have no trouble getting the cash to expand from that size to 500 before they need to (that will be more likely to take a day or more).

I'm sympathetic with ANet wanting to cap (too much influence generation gives too much advantage too quickly, probably) and I agree that 1 month in, it should be harder to form a guild of quantity over quality. But that doesn't apply to the first hours of gameplay: tons of guilds think they are ready for GW2 (and probably half of them are correct). I don't really understand why ANet hasn't already taken that into account.

Thanks, as always, for your comments. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 15:53, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Transition

Guild names should be reserved in the same way character names will be. A lot of people had asked me if I would continue my guild in GW2. I initialy said yes, but now I will reserve myself around 3 months as I personally believe the sequel will fail as bad as Diablo III. This means for my particular guild, nobody will be able to continue my clan. Officers asked me what's going to be then? I told them that any of the current ones can take the lead and wait for me if I ever get to buy GW2. So, replying to your feedback. ANet could ask present time Guild Leaders by GW1 guild roster to pick-up a successor to build up the same guild but in GW2. For many cases, guild names might mean nothing. But Faction Farming guilds had always worked hard their identity, which in practical terms can determine acceptance or rejection from other guilds/alliances. It would be very outrageous is an unknown player steals an entire guild's reputation...And it would be horrible to see that happening...but then again we are talking about ANet...and the reason why I will be withholding to purchase GW2 sparks again.

Regular members should also have the chance to instantly join the same guild from GW1 to GW2 by a roster option. This can easy the re-grouping need. Yoshida Keiji talk 17:09, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I would prefer ANet to offer a method of reserving guild names. As you say, some guilds have worked hard to develop their reputation and there's nothing they can do to prevent someone from appropriating the name. In some cases, I wouldn't call it stealing, since sometimes original members disagree about who holds the "rights" to the name and there are other legitimate reasons for wanting to use a certain name (e.g. Guild:Rage Against The Machine M C V uses the name of a rock band, so I'm not sure that the guild can claim "ownership" of the idea).

Still, existing GLs should have some recourse available to them, but ... I'm not sure those reservations deserve more of a grace period than the character names get (those expire at the end of launch day).

Finally, while I agree that anyone deliberately choosing to build off another person's (or group of persons') reputation is morally repugnant, I'm not sure that ANet has any moral obligation to prevent it from happening. I agree that they should (as a part of good customer service), but it would be fairly expensive (it requires creating new mechanics in both GW1 and GW2), so I don't hold it against ANet that they would choose to avoid the headache at this late date. The overall game for the vast majority of players is unaffected by guild name reservations, but there are lots of other game elements that would interfere with everyone's enjoyment if not optimized for headstart/launch. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 17:49, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I would imagine reserving GW1 guild names might not be too difficult. Players are currently given the option to reserve their GW1 character names for GW2. The same database which stores the character names very likely has a column which identifies which of those names is also a guild leader and the name of their guild (or, at the very least, can be merged with the database which does track the names of guild leaders and their guild names).

When a player creates a GW2 account which uses a reserved character name from GW1, their GW1 guild name will be reserved and made available to them on launch, as well. This would apply even if the character who will be the guild leader has a different name than the reserved GW1 name. The only stipulation is the player has to create a character in GW2 with the GW1 name. They could then create a new character with a different name who will then become the guild leader. The reserved name character could then be deleted if the player no longer wishes to use it. Guild Wars 3 perhaps 19:29, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Small side note: If player names will only be reserved for the launch day. Somebody else may try to personalize me, as player, as Guild Leader, as GW wiki contributor. Yoshida Keiji talk 14:16, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

The point is that ANet hasn't yet built the mechanism for reserving guild names, that means it's a big deal for them to introduce the feature with less than a month left before release. At this moment, any new mechanism is costly, even if it's easy for a dev to build it: it has to be tested, regression tested, support has to be trained to deal with the potential issues/resolution, and ANet has to figure out how to communicate the details. All of that distracts from flawlessly implementing the game as currently designed. Do we really want ANet to risk an imbalance of skills or traits in order to reserve guild names?

And yes, the fact that ANet is only reserving player names for a day means that people can appropriate someone else's name. But:

• If the player really cares about the name, they can pre-purchase and get four days to reserve it (it takes less than five minutes to create 2-3 toons in GW2).
• In RL, anyone can take any name they like (with only the barest of restrictions, e.g. you cannot avoid legal issues or IOUs). Why should in-game names be better protected?
• The in-game names don't belong to anyone really. Why should the player who first chose "Anya Stark" in GW1 get special treatment to lock that name against the 10,000 other people who wanted to use it?

Still, I wouldn't mind if ANet added to the gem store the possibility to increase the reservation duration or add a few names to the list. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 18:54, 4 August 2012 (UTC)