Feedback: Guild Quest Rework

IT'S NOT WORKING. Timer only allows 16 hours for the quest.
Quests are too difficult and NOT doable in this time frame, 2 examples:
Produce a codex and donate coins. It 7 days to make 10 manuscripts to make 2 tomes to make 1 codex.
Donate 50 cannons and produce 100 wheels. Really? I'm going to donate 10,000 coins worth of cannons for a few guild coins?

Also the lack of guild coins available compared to the prices of items in guild market is
driving up the price of guild coins and reducing the ability to buy anything in guild market.

Make the guild quests easier, and lower the guild market prices.

I like the underlying reason for changing how the guild quest system works. The problem is the burden of some of the quests. No one wants to be the guildie who lets the others down by stiffing the quest, and yet we do have real lives (gasp! how'd *that* happen?), connectivity issues, and resource challenges.

So here's a suggestion: have a choice of 2 guild quests. One is the regular, random level of challenge one which rewards a number of individual coins (like the quests we now get). The other one is a "quickie" like selling a basic resource, or making 2500 fish/meat deposit or other PH resource, and this quest either has no coin reward or only a small one (no more than 1-5 coins depending on resource/time requirement). This way, if we don't have the resources or the time to hang around to make big items (tomes, carriages, etc), or don't have the time or troops to do an adv (or can't find an affordable ls), we can still do a quest that doesn't reward the individual much but will count for the guild participation %.

Why is everyone over 51 getting the same quest?

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Originally Posted by KingBys

Why is everyone over 51 getting the same quest?

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the dev diary has something about that, they released one today

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SweaterPuppies

To sound completely bitter... when does anything change between day one on test and when it hits live? Test seems to be more of this is what is coming like it or not rather than a place to test and offer feedback.

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^ This

Most of the assumptions on the guild rework blog are false. Developers have no clue and do not understand.

"Do these changes mean that kicking inactive players is encouraged?
Absolutely not."

FALSE. You do want to kick inactive to make room for actives. To quote from their final parting words:
"Strength in numbers, settlers!"

Since inactive players do not move the quest reward bars. Your numbers are lowered. Dead weights.

Previously the guild quest was based on numbers in guild and inactive players actually helped. Now it is not the case.


"Hang on, the gem prices go up, but the individual rewards don't? That's very unfair!
The reason individual rewards have not gone up and have been standardized is to reflect the difficulty of the task given. Since the tasks have not changed at all, neither have the rewards."

FALSE. again.

The tasks actually have changed, I noticed. AND the rewards are worst. Not better. The rewards are worst.


"But my guild is very small. Would this mean that I'm being punished for not having a lot of members?
Not at all. We have reworked the balancing of the Guild Quest rewards so even smaller guilds will have their rewards boosted compared to the previous iteration. Even if your guild does not have many members, or completes quests with fewer participants, the amount of guild coins that you would obtain weekly will be higher than you would have obtained previously over the course of a week."

FALSE again.

The amount earned on a week to week basis and daily actually is LESS than it was before.
I already posted examples of how this is the case, in a previous feedback thread elsewhere. Smaller guilds actually hurt the most.


Overall conclusion: This heavily favors large active guilds.

Guild with Inactives or casual players, and Small guilds are at a huge disadvantage.

Couple of thoughts about the guild quest changes.

Overall, I think it's a step in a good direction.

While part of me cries when the 24 hour window sometimes passes without being able to complete the quest, I'm learning to just let go and move on. It's a big change from trying to muster enough people to get the GQ done.

It needs refinement.

I think that many players feel like test subjects. There are a lot of things that need to be tested more thoroughly before going live. This, despite my own positive view of the change, is clearly one of those things that needed more testing.

Individual quests that require more than 12 hours of action should absolutely not be included in a guild quest that is going to end in 24 hours, period. I've actually gotten lucky and had books under construction that happened to finish in the right time frame to finish otherwise impossible guild quests since the change but it's pure luck, especially given that we can no longer see what's coming next.

I've also had quests end with 4 hours showing on the timer while I was almost done producing the materials. C'mon, WTF. This is a couple of timers not synced - middle school level programming mistake. More testing needed.

Bring back the upcoming quest viewability - it will help some of the quests be more palatable.

Many people felt that there would be a greater window of discussion before this change was implemented, along with the concept of getting event rewards for GQ during events. I feel that many will warm to the latter but I've heard grumbles. It reeks of force feeding.

The use of a 24 hour timer itself is debatable. Since it's system run, this means that if the quest requirements are time consuming and a person is not regularly available to access the game early in the quest timer, their chances of participation in this game feature are greatly diminished simply because of time of day and scheduling. While I do like the concept of a system run timer, perhaps this should be a 36 hour timer. This would both ease some of the time crunch for quests to be completed AND provide a more equitable distribution of time access for players around the world.

Which brings me to quest rewards. They do seem to be low. The TO market reflects this as the price of guild coins continues to escalate. If some action were taken to lengthen the time window the rewards would need adjustment simply due to a decreased frequency of availability but even without such a change I believe that the rewards are around 20-30% too low at the moment.

These are my thoughts I've had so far from the change and a couple of cups of coffee.

A friary in the guild market is 7425 guild coins. I have a guild of 18 people, half of whom are inactive and the other half are casual. I am averaging 3-4 people a day completing GQ, and getting around 30-35 gc a day, so basically 2/3 of a year to earn enough gc for a friary. Under the old system we completed roughly 3 gq's week and were earning roughly 300 gc a week. The new system forces me to make a choice, cut some friends who do show up on occasion, or take a cut in gc earned. So yes, it does force guilds into the decision to trim in-actives. I know half the community thanks that is great, but I have people in the guild that I started playing with 3 years ago who do show up a couple of times a week. Meh, just an old man rambling, BB is going to do what they want regardless. If you insist on these changes then at least reduce the cost of the items in the guild market.

Is it possible for the quest stating to produce X amount of an item..for example brew, start when the guild quest is dropped if a player is active rather than when the individual logs in. The guild quest are starting during the night for many members, thereby shortening the time they have to complete the quest before a new one starts. These individuals are already producing the item, but those productions are not counting towards the guild quest requirement.

There are some positives and negatives to the new guild quest system. There were a few specific goals that were intended, like removing the link to the guild leader and preventing guild quests from being hung up by a few people, and these are hard to argue as a negative. There are some mechanics issues, like the timing for the 24 hours, but I am not sure what time would be fair to everyone who is playing. For guilds who did complete the GQ on a daily basis, the timing should not have a significant impact, and the change from number complete to timed allows everyone who wishes to complete the GQ the ability to do so. Under the previous system, people were shut out from completing the quest if they were not in the first 80% to complete it. However, there are other changes that are debatable, and really a matter of balance.

There was an inherent discrepancy regarding the total guild size and active players. In the past, the guild reward was set by the total size and the completion requirement was set by the number of active players. This mean that as long as the difficulty of the quests were not an issue, guild received higher rewards for increasing the guild size with inactive players. In order to fix this discrepancy, there are two things that could have happened - either the reward is reduced to the active member count or the completion rate is increased to total guild size. Either solution would lower the payout for guilds that maintain inactive players to increase the guild quest payout, but either should be considered more fair. My initial preference was to have decreased payout to the active member roster, as it would simply make the inactive players inconsequential either way. However, this would tend to penalize players who do not play every day and would continue to have same problem of the delay in being labelled inactive. So, using the total number seems to be the better option. However, either way guild do not benefit from inactives.

Another issue is the difficulty for quests for players over level 50. Before the expansion upgrade, players have been sitting at level 50 for up to several years. With the islands continuing to grow through population expansion and improvement of buildings, the vast majority of the upper level quest have still been fairly easy for these players. Having quests that are of an appropriate level of difficulty should be have been expected with the expansion, but were obviously delayed for the guild rework; so many have continued to advance without the quest getting more difficult. However, many of the quests are outside what can be expected for an average player to be able to reasonably complete, and will need to be tweaked. This is also true of some of the lower level quests as well.