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Re: Guild Rewards - Guildfavors
Disclaimer: This is in no way a fully developed idea, and I fully expect that if it ever gets implemented, it won't be completely as written. Constructive criticism is welcome, but preferably in a way that refines the idea rather than just totally trashing it.
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THE BASIS
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Some people have been talking about guild incentives/rewards/etc outside of plain rp/progression (I can think of at least one report this season that touches on this subject, and there's been at least one discussion on the official Discord about it). I was thinking of a minor way to tell the guild that someone has done a lot of stuff for the guild without having to commune/cityfavor or recommend them to the guild leader or promote them. Maybe they've done a lot of themed designs, or helped a newbie, or wrote a book, and you want to make them feel good about their progress. Alternatively, it could involve a whole new system of progression in a guild.
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GUILDFAVORS AND GUILD TIERS
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My suggestion is the guildfavor, which could be implemented one of two ways. The first is that there is no mechanical tracking of guildfavors, letting the guild manually track how many favors a guild member has received, set its own number of tiers, and manually set rewards; however, this would be entirely manual, and could be tricky compared to my other proposed option.
The second option has a set of guild tiers (either public or private, but always trackable by the guild leader, and possibly a new priv to view them), which would be mechanically entirely separate from and have no bearing on guild rank (I imagine an individual guild could set up different rewards for promotion for achieving different tiers, however). I would suggest a maximum of 7 tiers, and a minimum of 3, on average 5. I imagine to move up a tier, you require a certain number of guildfavors on top of any you've already earned, like city/communefavors. For example, it could be 3 favors to move from tier 1 to tier 2, and then 5 to move from tier 2 to tier 3, etc.
Each tier could have different benefits for each guild. Each guild could theoretically have unique titles for each tier, as the same with ranks. An example with 5 tiers is below under the spoilers; this is hardly an exhaustive list, and I imagine many people would have different ideas of where things should be, or things I personally haven't even thought up.
Guild Tier 1: little to no change, as everyone starts on tier 1.
Guild Tier 2: having access to a hidden guild emote.
Guild Tier 3: having access to a hidden room in the guildhall, and/or demigod flavors.
Guild Tier 4: having access to an otherwise hidden shop bin in a guild shopkeep's wares that could sell a few rare items specific to the guild, such as signets (guild stoles).
Guild Tier 5: being able to access a locked guildhall quest to receive a guild honor.
Guild Tier 2: having access to a hidden guild emote.
Guild Tier 3: having access to a hidden room in the guildhall, and/or demigod flavors.
Guild Tier 4: having access to an otherwise hidden shop bin in a guild shopkeep's wares that could sell a few rare items specific to the guild, such as signets (guild stoles).
Guild Tier 5: being able to access a locked guildhall quest to receive a guild honor.
Having the guild tiers would result in a highly customizable reward system for each guild, and in a way that makes it formal and fairly easy to track. I expect limitations similar to commune/cityfavors would be implemented (such as only being able to give 1 guildfavor per weave), and guilds would likely make their own guidelines for how guildfavors may be earned.
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Again, this is a fairly rough/beginning of an idea, and I do not expect it to be implemented. If anyone has suggestions or ideas, feel free to put them down below.
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(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
Rank locked rooms/etc are possible and there's the report noted for demichoices/etc which would address that side if it goes through. But the issue with them is that they can be quite fluffy as far as rewards go.
- Emotes are nice and probably the most likely to be used but they also don't really do anything you couldn't just custom emote or emoverride.
- Demichoices and signets are extra options in the pool so they're great if they hit something that suits your character but if not they're kinda irrelevant.
- While for locked guild hall additions they can be really awesome but they can also come with the question of whether anyone is going to actually go there which comes up even with guild halls general.
So bringing back the old guilds rank system as a second progression I think wouldn't necessarily help things because the issue seems more in the choice of rewards? Also, if we had ranks and tiers, we'd need to decide what you get for ranking, then what for tiers, and potentially things for doing both. You could easily end up with something like 10 demichoice packs from the combination of variables. You probably want the secret shrine to be accessed by rank progression but do you then also create a second lounge room for tier progression, and maybe some other special place for when you've got both. All of which are PRs that require admin time to create.I think it's a good idea to look at orders and report 312 for this sort of discussion because realistically orders are basically just a better version of guilds.
It seems everything a guild can an order can too outside an elected leader on the org council and paths(?). But structure wise orders also get the circles as well as more freedom with stoles compared to a single signet and the ability to have beasts.
Then they also have the direct oversight of the admin creating more opportunity to have tailored rp scenes with a god. Pysynne, I think, basically had his own cutscene where he stole the eye from Nocht as part of Maylea's order and I remember Elostian letting one of his order members science to create a flower of living crystal.
And then on top of that they also have the shrine, avatar, and cult mechanisms plus wherever you want to put god favours.
To me some of the comments give the feeling that there's a belief that the mechanical rewards are why players are engaging with orders and if you could get them in another way then players would stop engaging with orders. For me this really reinforces the need for real mechanical guild benefits because how are guilds meant to thrive without them if orders of all things couldn't. Can drop in some ideas to that end but that might be off this particular topic.
I removed the secretary position. It seemed silly to me that a GR3 has more power than someone ranked GR10. And then I redistributed the powers (promote, award points etc) to the higher ranks - if you reach that rank, then you absolutely should be able to rest novices on tasks, and you should be able to write to the news or the logs or what have you. Also by this point the Society has a good number of highly ranked people so we weren't left short.
The guild hall has quite a few secrets, that are unlocked based on guild rank - so more incentive to want to rank up too because you get something out of it.
I think you can make use of guild points to reward someone without creating a new system, or even a tangible reward such as guild credits. The Society matches 1 credit for everything you'd earn a city favour or credit for, as reward and recognition of working to empower Magnagora. Even little amounts could work as a head pat for doing good - you have been doing great things for the guild, and here's 5 credits in recognition of that.
tl;dr I think you can achieve your goals within the system with some creative thinking, without needing to add new tiers/levels/system.
An introduction stage for gr1 and 2 where you do tasks to make sure you're in the right place by going through some guild lore and setting up some basic grounding.
The second part is migrating towards a large list of thematic things you can do with capstones as you rank up, for example, at one point you'll have to earn the Brave Herald guild honour to go higher. So the tiers suggested would separate things we currently have integrated into the one system really.
Arguably having an option for an "outer circle" for guilds would be helpful but only really as far as moving the intro part down so the main progression could be 1-10.
As far as permissions rewards go, it sounds like the sort of thing that could work with sufficient population yeah. But that seems similar to how larger guilds have an easier time with retention because they have the bigger community to help with that? It wouldn't really work in the Listeners, for example, where if someone shows enough interest/willingness then positions help give them early access to privs they'd get later and we kinda need as many people with privs as we can get.
I also don't think it's just about creative thinking. The Listeners have had a few brainstorming sessions over the past year and the ideas that players have come up with are generally all pretty neat. But at this point the venn diagram of things that players were interested in that would have the incentive impact and things that aren't allowed is a circle.
We've had demichoices and Ginger added which are great but they also don't incentivise anything because they're both available to everyone. We could limit Ginger but we'd want at least part of her stock available to everyone which means everyone having access to all of it.
The list is ongoing, some stuff got scratched because if one thing wasn't possible another idea wouldn't be either or stuff that's probably far too big. (There's some scaling issues when your spirits are a potentially infinite number of ancestors)
But, having an actual mechanical system that helps with the incentivisation would be a massive boon to complement every guild trying to build out something through PRs.
The only reason I'm going to join a guild in the future is for existing emotes, domoth blessings or to get a council position in any org of my choosing on one other person's vote. /hj
More accessibility to emotes, stoles and demistuff would be good! Like orders, it just feels like the best guilds are filled with legacy content and people new to the system are locked out, like avatars of gods that have been dormant for 3+ years. Most of the good stuff in guilds I've seen is carried in from the old class based organisations.
Guild leaders can't even offer the classflexing thing anymore which used to be a thing when my first character got purged.
And yeah jokes, but Domoth blessings are kinda interesting to consider as it seems like they incentivise consolidating your orgs population into one guild because then you can just target that guild and hit the majority of your org for the blessing.
You also missed "getting" to maintain a research project for your org, potentially without support, that doesn't actually provide any specific benefit to your guild other than arguably you could threaten to drop it and be hated by everyone. Leading to potentially being removed from your org and never being trusted in a position with that priv.
It doesn't seem to have been mentioned but you can also do something like this by delineating between point value tasks and required tasks.
Basically, it's just a simple rule in the Listeners... If a task is required for progression it is worth 0 points and conversely if it has a point value then it isn't required.
By doing so you can create a bucket of tasks that people can create to earn enough points to advance, but at the same time you can ensure they complete any required progression basically working two separate concepts into the same system.
Our intro has some required tasks with, basically, electives. But once that's done the points tasks are a bucket of excuses to give people points with some required tasks to mark progression.
You can tune the balance as you like, maybe one guild gives out a bunch of points and has few required tasks. Another might be similar but has a required task each level. Or a bunch of required tasks with point values not mattering as much for progression but being more bragging rights.