We need Guild Co-Op features

  • CoffeeLight5545
    Legend
    Insider

    Guilds are a great social concept but as things stand now, Guilds divide the player base.

    Guilds are a group venture however only the Guild owners can never be removed from the Guilds. I started my own guild solely so I wouldn’t loose out on any progress. Unfortunately I’m the only person progressing my guild. I’m in an another guild that I’m not a part of and only the guild owner of that guild is progressing his guild. At this rate, our respective guilds will never see LV 100.

    I have a solution, a co-op feature where 2 or more guilds form a joint venture. With the joint venture, guild progression could be earned for both guilds. We can even add guild challenges! Rare can give us a set of challenges that the two guilds can complete against each other to complete. These challenges could be anything from fishing to faction battles wins. Challenge related progress would be separate but the reputation would be shared between the 2 guilds. With my idea, we would be progressing multiple guilds in a single session.

    Since we can have a maximum of 3 guilds I suggest that 3 guilds can co-up and join forces. I fear the guild system is no different than captaincy. Everyone wants to progress their own guild first which is dividing the player base

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  • Hurtwillcam10
    Ship Mate
    Insider

    no guilds feals like it is ment to be a grind

  • CoffeeLight5545
    Legend
    Insider

    @hurtwillcam10

    Guilds was meant to be a social hub where players can come together. I honestly feel like it’s having the opposite effect

  • Hurtwillcam10
    Ship Mate
    Insider

    @coffeelight5545
    yes but in a guild with 10 or so mates, it is very easy to lv up (we play Hourglass) having guilds as a grind I feel brings me and my mates closer as we just want 1000 guilds and play more to get there. but if you and your friends cant compensate on whos guild to grind it's not the game that is the problem

  • Hurtwillcam10
    Ship Mate
    Insider

    @hurtwillcam10 and sorry after rereading my comment i took it as a tad offensive that wasn't my intent

  • CoffeeLight5545
    Legend
    Insider

    @hurtwillcam10

    I have a thick skin. You didn’t offend me.

    Unfortunately, not everyone is good at hourglass. As things are now, all PvE activities are severely under tuned. The only reliable way to level up the guild is to have a pure hourglass faction. Yes Rare needs to rebalance how reputation is given. Until then, I feel like people will simply do their own thing.

    I’m happy to hear that your guild is bringing you together.

  • Foambreaker
    Sailor

    @hurtwillcam10 said in We need Guild Co-Op features:

    no guilds feals like it is ment to be a grind

    Yup, they totally messed it up, rather than be a social structure that brings people together they created a grind whose obvious purpose is to keep players logging in so their numbers look good to the Masters in Seattle. Grinding for someone else's guild when you can be removed and lose the benefits is just dumb.

  • WolfManbush
    Champion

    @foambreaker said in We need Guild Co-Op features:

    @hurtwillcam10 said in We need Guild Co-Op features:

    no guilds feals like it is ment to be a grind

    Yup, they totally messed it up, rather than be a social structure that brings people together they created a grind whose obvious purpose is to keep players logging in so their numbers look good to the Masters in Seattle. Grinding for someone else's guild when you can be removed and lose the benefits is just dumb.

    I think they just try to create long lasting content and it's tough in an environment that has some struggling while the most vocally critical cheese pretty much everything asap.

    Personally I think they care about their content beyond just their obligations it's just tough in the space and with how different the player base is.

    Do I think guilds will end up all that they can be as far as a wide reaching social resource goes? probably not, but I think they will try to implement some of the feedback.

    There is a lot I disagreed with them about Captaincy and I love Captaincy and am glad it's around even through the stuff that bugged/bugs me.

    Hopefully that is the same with people that enjoy guilds as Rare considers their feedback.

    I still have hope for the content and experience.

  • BurnBacon
    Vanguard
    Insider

    Nah, just make guild Rep like every other faction Rep.

    No matter what you do, nothing is better or worse. You gain Rep equal to the work you do.

  • Foambreaker
    Sailor

    @wolfmanbush But all games have the small minority of players that consume content meant to take days in a matter of hours.

    You can't design around them, otherwise you put the game out of reach for the vast majority of players.

    I was hugely looking forward to guilds. You know what I am doing? Playing Elder Scrolls Online. I just don't have time for that kind of grind, so S10 is a bust for me so far.

  • WolfManbush
    Champion

    @foambreaker said in We need Guild Co-Op features:

    @wolfmanbush But all games have the small minority of players that consume content meant to take days in a matter of hours.

    You can't design around them, otherwise you put the game out of reach for the vast majority of players.

    I was hugely looking forward to guilds. You know what I am doing? Playing Elder Scrolls Online. I just don't have time for that kind of grind, so S10 is a bust for me so far.

    Even though I've posted my criticisms about the guild design I still look at it like this,

    I don't wanna play the game without Captaincy. I want my Captained ship, I want to work on my milestones, I like story telling through my activity, I like my logbook. Even with the parts I don't like agree with I really wouldn't enjoy the gameplay without it. That's how I know that I enjoy it more than I don't

    I see guilds that way for people, set aside the grind part and it's still a new way for people to approach their sessions. There is some room for people to create solo type of guilds and more family/friend type of guilds that don't take the grind seriously and just want to feel more together in the experience.

    It'll take doing what I did with Captaincy and personalizing it for a rewarding experience that tells a story. I still think people can do something similar with guilds if they really want to, even in the current design.

  • Hurtwillcam10
    Ship Mate
    Insider

    @foambreaker I see what you mean so wouldn't similar to Hourglass be better to have distinction 1 be almost the last of the rewards, and make it quite easy eg 10-15 hours of normaly play would get there but after distinction 1 it a lot harder

  • CGallerine
    Commander
    Insider

    "Dividing the playerbase" is something we're only going to have to accept going forwards. It comes in sections and parts (xbox/crossplay servers, safer seas/high seas, and now guilds) but eventually we have to admit it's just a thing that has happened, I wouldn't worry about it too much honestly.

    Of course, everyone might want to own their own guild but sometimes you just gotta be realistic about it. Warframe tackled the problem too by making the grind extremely difficult for solo groups, so people look for already advanced clan. However, this isn't as bad as it might sound, because how low the maximum player count is on SoT guilds, there is no shortage of player overflow, so those overflow players will join smaller guilds and progress them, and the cycle continues

    I'd be open to having a clan/guild alliance feature similar to Warframe, so 2 clans/guilds can be "related" to each other, but I'm not a fan of the idea of progressing both at the same time. It makes it too easy, and this game always releases something ever so slightly difficult or long-term and then changes it so it's easy as and then everyone just maxes it out fast.

  • Ghutar
    Legend
    Insider
    Founder

    I think that cardinal sin is tying cosmetic sets to being in guild, high possibilty to loose it even if you contribute towards it push folks to make they own guilds.

    Ship role sets shuold be tided to guild thamed comendations and stick to playet forever.

    Another problem is pushing eny inguild communication out of SoT, there is lack pf eny social aspects in something that should be social thing.

  • Magus104
    Captain
    Insider
    Founder

    @coffeelight5545 Kind of did the same. Small guild of friends & family. Unlikely to get 100 but the fact that you can't even do achievements or most unlocks since those are locked behind 100s of levels of progression. Even as a full guild would have to all be super active to achieve anything and at a very slow pace. The design is so flawed with a small player limit people are obviously going to want to trim the fat so to speak for the sake of min maxing progression. I find it extremely odd with open crew being a thing and captaincy now yet we never got a vote kick or "walk the plank" option to kick a bad actor off our ship, especially once we became captains giving a false sense of ownership to our vessel. Yet they added a guild feature where you can contribute 99% of the guilds progression and just be kicked on a whim. Guilds originally had me excited but now overall they aren't great. They have solved 1 glaring issue I have had since the introduction of captaincy, losing captain status when I get DC'd or leave. They could have just patched it so a captaincy ship always stayed captaincy and it would have had the same effect. Guilds allows me to jump around ships within the guild... However very buggy sometimes have to set sail solo to clear myself off the guild ships as the UI wont let me join since it sometimes sees a clone of me.

    Leveling is problematic as well. Better to level solo than play together. They keep adding things that are supposed to be social but are forcing me into even more anti social mindset than I am already in by default. Before captaincy I played with other people outside family. Now it's me solo most the time.

  • b4njAx
    Seafarer

    Honestly we really should only have the ability to be in or create one single guild so you have to do the one that matters more to you. I fear that the freedom we're given when it comes to guilds leads to people spreading themselves thin which exacerbates the slow guild rep progression.

    So until Rare can give us a better solution, I recommend making use of guild recruitment: https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/category/137/guild-recruitment

    Like for now, I made my own guild with certain ambitions in mind but my recruitment post didn't seem to appeal to anyone so I'm probably gonna disband and focus on the guild I joined via that recruitment section and try get to know the people I could be sailing with.

    Although I will say that I feel like I'm the minority for not caring about the grind and that's probably the main reasoning for why I feel this way about it.

  • Magus104
    Captain
    Insider
    Founder

    @ghutar Yea and we can't even earn the commendations until you get hundreds of guild rep levels and then you can grind the commendations and you need to grind all of them to unlock the achievements. As someone who has been trying to 100% the game they keep adding speed bumps and road blocks. There were some I held off on. IE merchant voyage completion? Well they are working on a new merchant voyage so I will wait till they add those... Then they added cargo runs which don't give voyage complete. So in that case I realized voyage failed for merchants due to running out of time counted as voyage complete. So I would always put down merchant voyages when doing forts and stuff so eventually I would get voyage complete progression passively over time. Had slowly been working on gold hoarder and legend of the veil voyages for milestones and ledger progressions so waiting on seasonal resets for that. But then I knew guilds were coming. Why waste time playing now and not progressing my guild just to make my guild grind even longer?

    The arena achievements and commendations were the first time they really added stuff as part of the grind that was outside of the normal scope of gameplay. Sad part is most of those commendations and achievements could have been done in adventure but then there would be no reason to play arena so weapon kill commendations only progressed in arena yet canons fired, shovel digs etc worked in adventure. Then they axed arena giving me incomplete achievements which thankfully only show on this site not on steam. Then they added hourglass commendations which for a non pvper are going to be impossible to complete. The achievements were rough but I managed to get through the grind for that at least. As daunting as the hourglass seemed guilds seem worse. Hopefully there will be achievement guilds letting people rotate in and out to complete the commendations instead of leveling their own guild.

    Just seems like from a completion perspective they are trying to make the game so overwhelming to 100% that people will stop playing with the mindset of 100%ing the game. In the very least I would appreciate them ending new achievements. We have stacked completionist systems let us be able to at least complete 1. Commendations are a lot more grindy than most of the achievements so constantly adding more of those... Fine. The commendations at least offer cosmetic rewards a lot of the time. Achievements don't give you anything other than profile status. I still enjoy the game but a lot of the recent stuff has been pushing me away or turning me even more casual than I already was. I had 1 big regret from quitting the game when seasons dropped. I never got the season2 hull and the season3 figure head. Now I have obtained both since they thankfully re-added them. Though I had cached in all my doubloons when they made it obvious they would never be adding new doubloon items so that was a bit of a grind to recover what I foolishly threw away. I'm tempted to follow the same approach I did with World of Warcraft. I quit around March 2022 with the plan of returning November 2022 to cash in all my gold for bnet balance (account credit) since conversion values get your more money for your gold around an expansion release. Then I bought a token for 1 month of time to redeem later. The intent was come back for 1 month for the valentines event to try and farm that mount. I had 2 mounts I still wanted to collect that I had been farming for literally years. Once I obtained those I would call my WoW journey complete. Thanks to hot fixes and the developers finally taking mercy on the players I managed to actually get both one after like 18000 weekly kills the other after maybe 1000 daily kills. I would go back to wow on the free weekends to see if the new expansion had fixed any major problems I had with the game but they haven't been address so yea haven't give the game much thought since Feb and it feels amazing to be free. So I have obtained the 2 cosmetics I missed in a failed attempt to quit SoT. My mindset when seasons came out "If I miss this FOMO then I have no reason to ever come back" but I needed something to fill the WoW void and I do genuinely enjoy the game, Though I often feel the developers are actively working to push people like me away with a lot of their choices. Just trying to keep in mind they are doing what they think is best for the game. The updates sometimes seem like an attempt on a very personal level to force me out but it has nothing to do with me... That was a lot of rambling that I imagine most people don't read my walls of text anyway. I often delete them without posting but then it's like ok I wasted all that time typing. Found myself silencing myself a lot lately under the "If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all" but imagine what SoT would be today if we never spoke out. A lot of the game as it is today is because of our feedback. Just because 99% of it is ignored, moreso now than year1 where we seemed to have a much larger impact on the game. I do miss little things, IE moving the bell on the mast for the crows nest used to be on the side, the ammo box which used to be directly under the weapon locker, the shelf on the sloop, the addition of skeleton ships etc etc

  • Ghutar
    Legend
    Insider
    Founder

    @magus104 I got another way round, never was and never be complitionis and I worked only for cosmetic that I liked. That brought a lot of peace for me.

    Up from day one I was bouncing in and off when I get bored. Never was more pve or pvp but Season8 give me way to make some fast action when I feel I need some naval action emotnions.

    I like most changes made to game as it allows me to make some fast seasions and I have still plenty things to do.

    So guilds dont ruff my feathers yet its sadly to see potenical wasted.

    Yet I creve for some new voyages, new loot or little rewamps of existing places.

  • OtherFanboy
    Legend
    Insider
    Founder

    @coffeelight5545 guilds need something right now the best thing about guilds is my crew and I can start an Captained ship that's anyone us own with out us being on outside that it a slow grind faction with some new cosmetics we need more things to do with guilds maybe raids or a guild war where guilds pick one of three sides Athena's, Reapers, or Neutral(fight for them selfs)

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