Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsOfficers' Quarters: In defense of guild talents
by Scott Andrews 
Jun 21st 2010 at 2:00PM
About a week ago, Blizzard revealed all the latest updates concerning their gameplan for Cataclysm. Among them were a host of changes to the new guild systems and UI overhaul that were originally announced at BlizzCon 2009. Today I'd like to focus on the removal of guild talents. In future columns, I'll address other changes.
Guild talents get the axe
Two of the biggest announcements from last week were not new features but the cancellation of previously announced features: Path of the Titans and guild talents. I've heard a lot of complaints from people about removing the Path, which is to be expected -- it was considered a key feature of the expansion and a long-awaited means to customize your character beyond talents after glyphs, in the words of Ghostcrawler, "didn't live up to what they could have been." It's a shame they couldn't make the Path work, but I'm hopeful that the revised glyph system will compensate for its loss.
On the other hand, I'm not hearing nearly as many complaints about the removal of guild talents. Again, perhaps, this is to be expected. After all, Blizzard's plan is to replace them with unlocked perks that you receive automatically as your guild levels up. In other words, every guild will get every talent. Awesome, right? For guild members, yes. For officers, not as much.
I'm sure many people will disagree with me on this point. Ghostcrawler had this to say:
Ghostcrawler -- Guild TalentsGuilds are, for the most part, groups of friends. We don't want features to drive wedges between them. We don't want you to guild hop looking for the talents that suit you best; we want you to play (or in many cases keep playing) with your friends. With a talent tree, guilds would naturally have different talent trees, which creates a reason to bail or guild hop that doesn't exist today. If you didn't like the direction the guild was taking (for example, you were a PvP guy with a GM focused on raid-progression) you might feel like you should leave. That can happen today of course, but you can also stay in a PvE guild just because you like the members even if you don't participate in the same content because you're not losing out on inherent guild benefits.
I agree with him in theory. There is a risk (as well as a benefit) inherent to making your guild different from others, and it's not impossible to imagine that spec'ing your guild a certain way could have caused this scenario. In practice, though, I wonder if such a thing would really happen.
I mean, what sorts of talents was Blizzard planning such that choosing one over another could actually drive people out of your guild? During BlizzCon, they listed examples such as increased gold drops, removal of reagents for raid-wide buffs, mass summon, mass resurrection, and reduced repair bills. If someone gquits over whether they get more gold per kill instead of foregoing reagents, I'm pretty sure there are additional factors at play.
Yes, if there were talents that gave you 10% more damage and healing in battlegrounds but not in raids, then I could see people moving to another guild if they wanted that extra 10% to apply to their raiding instead. I strongly doubt Blizzard would have implemented such game-breaking talents though.
I wish Ghostcrawler had provided a few examples of talents that might have had a negative impact on your guild, because I just don't see how a realistic "perk" talent choice could make such a big difference that people would actually gquit.
Why do I care?
As I explain in Chapter 1 of The Guild Leader's Handbook, it's important to define your guild, to give your guild an identity that sets your organization apart from others on the server. Doing so provides a number of benefits, not the least of which is more effective, targeted recruiting. Of course, there will always be guilds who want to be all things to all people, but it's vastly easier to run a guild with a focused purpose and a strong idea of the types of players who would want to join.
To date, all such differentiators have been external, by which I mean they are chosen by the officers but they have no actual representation in the game itself. You need to speak to guild members or read the guild's policies on its website in order to understand what the guild is all about.
With talents, Blizzard had a means for allowing officers to differentiate their guilds using the game's own interface. For that reason, talents could have been a huge win for officers, but now it looks like we won't get this functionality in WoW. (I should mention that the new recruiting feature in the UI may allow you to choose from one of several labels that describe your guild, which is a small step in the right direction.)
In my opinion, it is possible to provide talented differentiators that don't necessarily drive away players who aren't part of a guild's major activities. For example, in a progression-oriented raiding guild, you might choose a talent that provides 5% increased reputation gains for PvE factions (i.e., Sons of Hodir) over one that provides the same gains for PvP factions (let's assume Cataclysm has PvP factions that actually matter). While it's true that a player in your guild who PvPs rather than raids may not benefit as much, she still does benefit. It's hard to imagine that the cumulative difference of talent choices would affect her game experience to the point that she would leave a guild she was happy with and players she liked for the sake of minor convenience. Perhaps I'm giving too little credit to a player's desire to min/max her time, but I just don't buy it.
The risk of drama
Ghostcrawler's other reason for removing guild talents is this:
Ghostcrawler -- Guild TalentsFurthermore, we felt like the decision-making, for many guilds, would be up to a relatively few people, possibly as few as the guild master. Talent trees work for classes because the decision is up to you. We didn't want to create the risk of drama over choosing those talents or even not being consulted in choosing them.
GC, I take umbrage with you here. Call me sensitive, but this statement is an insult to your game's officers. You're pretty much saying, "We don't trust you to make decisions that won't cause problems."
Officers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Sometimes it's better to talk to your players and achieve a consensus. Sometimes it's better to act alone for the benefit of the guild as a whole. Good officers know when to move forward with either method. By taking this power out of our hands, Ghostcrawler is telling us that we don't know how to do our jobs.
Beyond that, I was honestly shocked by this statement. Never before has Blizzard so much as batted an eye at whether their game design would "create the risk of drama." Where was this concern when they decided to create a 5 > 10 > 25 progression path in Burning Crusade? Where was this concern when they were implementing the Immortal achievement? Or restricting Algalon access to individual players rather than the guild as a whole? Or creating four separate lockouts for Trial of the Crusader? Or designing the Tribute to Immortality achievement? Or making cool and purely aesthetic rewards such as the Amani War Bear, Mimiron's Head, and Invincible -- rewards, by the way, that take the dedication and hard work of everyone involved for months at a time in order to earn -- drop one. at. a. time?
C'mon, GC. Some days I feel like you guys do nothing but sit around your office inventing new ways to "create the risk of drama." Seriously, that is not card you get to play at this point. Don't get me wrong: I love that it's finally occurring to you and I hope that this represents a shift in thinking. However, I'll believe you actually care about that when I see it over the course of an entire expansion.
Ghostcrawler also goes on to say that it's easier for Blizzard to make adjustments and add more perks over time without worrying about a talent tree, and that is completely understandable. At this point, anything they can do to get Cataclysm into our eager hands faster is a good thing. Even so, I also feel like the dumping of guild talents is a missed opportunity for officers, and I don't think Blizzard's reasons for this decision, beyond the basic logistics of it, are particularly strong.
What do you think?
/salute
Send Scott your guild-related questions, conundrums, ideas, and suggestions at scott@wow.com. You may find your question the subject of next week's Officers' Quarters!Filed under: Officers' Quarters (Guild Leadership)
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 6)
Evi Jun 21st 2010 2:54PM
Now this would be a good system to take the place of the talent tree. I like the idea of unlocking the bonuses. But there should also be levels of bonuses based on the longevity of the guild. Like getting 5% extra gold drop if your guild has been around for more than a year or if you have remained in the guild for a year. Something to reward guilds that stand the test of time and guildies that don't gquit over the smallest issues. This would also discourage guild hopping. =)
Zorbak Jun 21st 2010 2:46PM
You should never ever be able to Min/Max your guild. Ever.
I don't want to be in a PvE guild and feel myself at a disadvantage in some form of PvP, because of the guild I'm in.
Wow Jun 21st 2010 2:45PM
After reading this I realized my job sucks, I want to be paid to QQ.
Are you actually saying that because Blizzard has made some bad decisions in the past that cause drama, they shouldn't be avoiding those kind of decisions now? Because it seriously sounds like you are arguing against learning from ones mistakes, which may make you unique among everyone on the planet.
As far as I am concerned the change to guild talents has fixed some pretty obvious flaws in the original design.
Koleckai Jun 21st 2010 2:49PM
Removing guild talents while having guild bonuses tied directly to leveling and guild achievements was the right choice on the part of Blizzard. It simplifies the system without removing the perks, abilities, items and mounts from the game. You can still provide direction to your guild based on the achievements that you will work towards and the bonuses those provide. I see this as the best system without introducing unnecessary politics and drama into the guild system. There is enough politics and drama in guilds already.
Sciarc Jun 21st 2010 2:51PM
I am skeptical that guild talents could have really done much to differentiate similarly-focused guilds (PvE raiding, PvP, leveling, social) from one another anyway, especially with regards to recruiting. Just like with class talents, there likely would very little variation in PvE guild talent specs, or PvP guild talent specs. So if I was shopping for a 10-man raiding guild, they'd all most likely have the same or very similar talents anyway. Thus my decision would come down to raid times, guild culture, loot system, and so on. Just like it does today. I can't see how guild talent specs would really change anything.
Fierna Jun 21st 2010 2:52PM
While I think I am happier with it being a leveling feature rather than a talent tree, I can see where he is coming from. Most guilds feel pretty much the same these days, everyone is a casual raiding guild (which speaks to the success of the raiding changes I would say). \
Talents could have been a way to do things differently but in the end wouldn't nearly all groups have chosen the same talents because someone on elitist jerks posted that if you don't pick the "right" selection?
Rendarkin Jun 21st 2010 3:00PM
No, that's exactly the point. If certain guild talents are most appropriate for certain types of play, then you could actually have some quantifiable differences in guilds; that's Scott's point. It's very likely that there would be certain optimal specs, but there might be a best PVE spec, a best PVP spec, a best rep grinding/achievement hunting spec, a best economics-based spec, and so on.
So, no, all guilds wouldn't devolve into a single build. Instead of all guilds having the exact same mechanics in the game, you might end up with 5 or 6 optimized builds, for example.
Mr. Crow Jun 21st 2010 2:54PM
I agree with the removal of guild talents, but let me approach it from a game design perspective.
The core mechanic of a talent tree is that you are presented with a set of choices that would give you different bonuses, along with a limited or gated number of points you can spend within that set. Spending points in the first tier allows you to spend in the second tier, and so on. However, as you get deeper down in the tree, the choices become more meaningful, meaning that the point placement becomes increasingly more important to maximize their usefulness. If you just dump 51 points in the top tiers of any class talent tree in the game, you miss out on the abilities at the bottom of the tree that can be spec-defining.
This is fine design for classes, because it creates diversity and choice about what's optimal for whatever the spec is supposed to do. There's also a great deal more freedom in terms of being able to respec if the choices don't work. There's also Dual-Spec to be able to switch your expenditure completely at no cost.
If you duplicate that with guild talents, you have to do a lot of things. You have to define what would benefit players, but you have to make them choices that are going to provide quality-of-life upgrades, not straight-up damage buffs.
From the start, guild talents were not meant to augment throughput because that would lead to everyone going for the damage buffs and ignoring all of the other possible perks.
This means you have to come up with meaningful choices that benefit players in different layers of PVE and PVP -- but then you have to ask about guilds that are hardcore in those areas, or have large memberships that diversify and do both. How do you come up with a design that's going to be beneficial to a potentially large set of people? If you want to prevent guild drama and guild breakups, the choices can't be TOO important -- and if the choices aren't too important, why even have the choice?
I can see the thought process that went into this decision, and while I agree (somewhat) with your assertion that a guild should define itself clearly and that guild talents were a way to work gameplay into that, I can see another side of it. If Blizzard can tell that most people join guilds as a social construct and NOT because they want to focus on PVP or PVE, then making a system that would compel ALL guilds to choose between those is going to cause problems, which might drive away those players, and is thus poor design.
Ultimately, I think it's a matter of a) the designers choosing to cater to the more social population of the game, b) flat out not having enough ideas for talents to fill the trees with meaningful choices, and c) Blizzard deciding that throughput increases are an okay bonus to give guilds, but not at the expense of other fun options, especially given the design intent of class trees giving more options for fun utility talents over straight DPS increases.
With regards to how to differentiate the guild? That is probably something that Blizzard prefers to leave as a social decision, not a gameplay-motivated one. Time will tell, I suppose.
Chmmr Jun 21st 2010 2:54PM
Scott, you are QQ'ing about one set of unknowns in favor of a different set of unknowns, mostly because of how you *feel* about what Blizzard is allegedly "telling you".
It sounds like you just want more control over others, and, apparently game design should revolve around you in that controlling position.
Say your idea of guild differentiation was to choose, ++PvP Tools and ++Economic Benefits. If Blizzard then designs the guild levels to include BOTH of those things, AND the factors you would have ignored, say ++Raid Tools and ++Alt Benefits ... there's really no basis for your complaint. It all lies in your personal feelings about control here. Really poor article.
Xxvaceltic Jun 21st 2010 3:00PM
There seems to be a misinterpretation of his point here. The problem lies not with the talents themselves and the perks that we will or will not get, but in the lack of differentiation between guilds. Guild talents are, just as talent specs for characters are, a way of defining your guild. They are a way to categorize your guild as a guild for raiders, a guild for PvPers, a guild for casuals, a guild for levelers, etc. While this may not seem to be a huge deal, having a guild identity is crucial to the long term health and success of a guild. These talents are a way of further defining your guild to outsiders and guildies alike.
Sciarc Jun 21st 2010 3:40PM
Those identities are already defined by guilds without the use of talents. Guilds already define themselves as raiding guilds because their members focus on raiding, or PvP guilds because the members focus on PVP. I fail to see how guild talents add any further definition than is already possible.
Brien Jun 21st 2010 3:04PM
I think the author is whitewashing the hell out of a lot of past data that indicates that Blizzard is completely right as to what is going to result from guild talent selections which are exclusive of other available guild talent selection.
The reality is that there is no way to make meaningful guild talents to take that are not going to end up creating divisions between players, play styles, classes and guild goals. For instance, I can't really see a lot of rogues or warriors caring terribly much about talents that reduce the reagents required to cast spells. Why would they?
Proceeding with a talent-based system for guilds, which is predicated on the idea that you can't select all of the talents, is simply going to give rise to more conflict and to exclude more people from participating in the guild they want. It will reduce the number of possible guild accommodations available to players.
The entire point of expanding guild systems is to expand possibilities, not limit them. The only option to avoid this is to either end up creating a system of guild talents where you get everything (which is what they're doing, essentially) or to make the choices insipid, giving rise to either irrelevance in choice or cookie-cutter choices which offer little to no flexibility.
Glyff Jun 21st 2010 3:04PM
It's like Sports Radio (or any talk radio program), people complain just to complain and introduce conflict. /yawns and goes to read something productive.
ObiChad Jun 21st 2010 3:08PM
I think the basic design decision came down to this. They believe the ability to only choose certain talents would break up guilds of friends (possible combination of different play styles - alt, pvp, pve). As you mentioned, for more hardcore purpose driven guilds, it could have been a way to differentiate the guild. It seems that to them, the risk of breaking up guilds is more important than the reward of differentiated guilds.
Personally I agree with the decision, but then, I'm in a guild of friends with different play styles.
(cutaia) Jun 21st 2010 3:09PM
I think somewhere in the middle would have been cool.
Obviously, there are guilds out there that do more than one thing in the game, so forcing them to choose between a PvE and PvP benefit or something would have been fairly problematic.
But think about when a character levels. They get both talent points AND sometimes just new trainable skills. Why not do the same thing with the guild leveling? Have the controversial benefits be skills that are gained merely by leveling, while keeping a talent tree that's just full of cosmetic or fun changes? (e.g. Maybe one of the optional talents could be larger logos on your guild tabards and overcloaks or something, or the ability to track guildies on your minimap).
That would seemingly stop the talents from being drama-causers, while still giving officers another piece to the guild management meta-game and allowing guilds to differentiate themselves from other guilds just a little bit...
(I could even see just leaving all the talents in tree form, but giving enough talent points to fill up the tree completely. That way if you don't like what they choose, you can just help them level so that you can get the one you want next time...)
Sangrael Jun 21st 2010 7:47PM
Wow, there's a lot of officer/GM hatred out there. I agree with the OP completely, I thought most of the same things when I read the first report about them removing the talents. I liked the idea of having more variety amongst guilds, and something to truly differentiate between casual/leveling/pvp/etc guilds. All types of guilds serve their purpose, and refining them further wouldn't have led to any more /gquits than the current model.
I've also always enjoyed reading negative comments from people regarding GMs and officers. The guild system is very much a free market. If you don't like your current officer structure, you'll leave. A guild has to provide you with services you want to keep your loyalty. I can recall putting up with a lot more in a server first progression oriented guild than I ever would in a casual raiding guild. Frequently the people bad mouthing their prior guilds officers were new members resentful of the perks established raiders did. It typically fails to register in their conciousness that the guild wouldn't exist witout the hard work that the original members put in. Guilds start off small, and they require considerable effort and time to get off the ground, especially if you're trying to be competitive in the raiding scene. You have to offer something other guilds don't or you'll just end up as a revolving door, like so many leveling/casual raiding guilds become. Those guilds have their place, but their officers also understand that's the end result.
TL;DR - If you're unhappy with a guild's officer structure and philosophy, leave. And next time do a bit more homework before you choose a guild if its going to matter to you in the long term.
Cataca Jun 21st 2010 3:16PM
His point is that you can no longer use your guild spec to make your guild interesting and unique for players. Also, that you can not use it to bring in new recruits that join specifically because you have a desirable guild spec for their play style.
It's not necessarily making officers jobs harder than they are now, but in the eye of the author, it is harder with the current incarnation of guild perks than it would have been with guild talents.
Chairman Kaga Jun 21st 2010 3:17PM
This article fails. It reads more like a cheap shot at Ghostcrawler than any sort of cogent argument. So the author here would rather choose half the talents instead of just getting them all over time? That is just idiotic thinking. The only reason you wouldn't like this change is if you wanted to power trip and dangle the choices over your guildmates' heads like some piece of jerky to a dog. And that seems to be exactly the type of drama that they want to avoid.
Besides that, guild talents were just a flat-out stupid design and not at all aligned with the direction the game is taking, which is "Hardcores get everything, casuals get everything more slowly". I'm not sure why GC feels the need to come up with reasons to kibosh the feature beyond that.
Dave Jun 21st 2010 3:18PM
You guys all really think this? The guy who likes the write-up is downranked?
I for one was looking forward to the fact that guild talents would allow guilds to further define themselves, to give themselves a separate edge or competitive advantage in their chosen area.
Giving all the benefits with no choice isn't some great advantage. What's happening now is that there is an inherent advantage to being in a guild...any guild.
Unguilded people(there are some good ones out there), are left out in the cold, as they will not have access to these talents.
I am not and have not been a (serious) guild leader, and no one is saying they are better than anyone, but someone like Scott IS more important than the rest of us clowns. Without someone to:
1) Put up with our shit
2) Log on every day(even when you don't want too)
3) Remember who got what loot
4) Remember who likes what spec
5) Remembering who just changed specs to roll on new gear(avoid that drama!)
6) Taking care of inventory issues
7) Guild gold management(and making)
8) Deciding where rare/legendary/sought after drops go to
9) Planning raids
10) Herding 9/24 clowns with differing priorities through an event that takes precision
11) Reading up on strats ahead of time
12) Teaching the strats to players who DIDN'T read up ahead of time
13) Knowing every class in the game
14) Be more than 10 minutes early to the raid
15) Has to stay more than 10 minutes after the raid
16) Recruiting
17) Successfully pugging in players when the tank has finals
That's off the top of my head, and I haven't logged on in weeks.
(18) Dealing with players who don't log in for weeks)
Rubitard Jun 21st 2010 3:19PM
I cannot believe this is still an issue. There is zero real downside here. None. Blizzard has gone from a "Guilds will be able to choose from either the chicken or the fish" model to a "Guilds will get both chicken and fish" model. If the bone of contention here is that an officer doesn't get to pick the fish or chicken for his guild mates, then it sounds like Blizzard is doing the right thing.