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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria 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 5 of 6)
Eisengel Jun 21st 2010 9:09PM
False equivalence is when you equate two processes or items that are disjoint. It's essentially an overloaded metaphor where you not only say two different things are similar, but that two different things are the same.
'An item's value is inversely proportional to the number of players that have it'
This is not necessarily true. If some item is a best-in-slot item for me, I don't care if every other player in WoW has it, I don't, and it is still the best-in-slot item for me. Other people having it does not affect how valuable it is for me, I still want it since it is best that I can have. If everyone else has the best items, does that mean they will be less capable in my hands? In fact, if everyone has it, personally I would want it more since I would be underpowered until I got it. By that same token, if a piece of fantastic BoP plate gear drops in a 10-man raid, but you have no plate wearers, is it still great? It will still get sharded. An item's value isn't necessarily decided by how many others have it especially when you are dealing with virtual and constructed realities.
Blizz's vision on WoW is changing as it continues. Pursuant to this, they want a guild to be a group of players you WANT to play with, rather than a group of players you HAVE to play with. If there was one guild on the server that had the best PvP talents then everyone who wanted to PvP would have to either join them, or form their own guild and pick the exact same talent path in order to be competitive. People already in the PvP guild that had been interested in PvE would be at a disadvantage if they stayed. Reverse PvP and PvE and you get the opposite effect. The talent trees would essentially characterize a guild as 'only PvP' or 'only PvE' and any players that were not 100% on one or the other would get marginalized, and even if they formed their own guild and bought up some mix of the talents they would not be competitive with other guilds who were 100% on one or the other. It would split the game into three sections: 100% PvPers, 100% PvEers, and everyone else who liked some of both that are now left out in the cold. They would either have to bite the bullet and give up either PvE or PvP or just stop playing. I don't think Blizz liked those options. I certainly don't.
In essence they turned talents into perks to incentivize players to contribute to and enjoy their guild no matter what their focus was, rather than polarize players into either being benefited or disenfranchised by their guild's talents; possibly pushing them to leave friends to find a new guild in order to be competitive in their chosen area of interest in the game. There's no reason why I can't have a 5s team that we play after raids in the same guild. My guild's talent selection shouldn't make one activity (be it arena or raiding) better/easier than the other - especially when a single character can have both a PvE and a PvP talent tree.
Daedhir Jun 21st 2010 4:19PM
Cataca, that's actually a horrible analogy.
It's not that 1 person gets to go into the ice cream shop and get all of the flavors.
It's 20 people standing outside, sending one person in to get the ice cream, and that person makes the choice. The leader brings the ice cream out of the store. 5 people are really happy about the choice, 10 people are okay with it even though they would have made a different choice, and 5 people just get up and walk away because of how stupid they think the choice is.
And that's not a great situation.
Hih Jun 21st 2010 4:24PM
This is why we can't have nice things.
This is why Blizzard doesn't like to unveil new features early. Because then people bitch and moan when they decide to make cuts.
If people would stop bitching and moaning whenever Blizzard tries to tell us about this cool idea for the game they have, *they might actually do it more often. *
But no. We can't have nice things. Thanks jackass.
Koffee Jun 21st 2010 4:34PM
GC and crew have decided that making GMs and Officers choose whether to take mass ressurection or mass summon as a guild talent would cause too much guild drama and potentially break up groups of friends and cause people to gquit.
Now if you'll excuse him, GC is late for a meeting to decide how many rare dagger fragments a single person will have to farm before they stick them up inside Deathwing's nasal passage on Heroic mode with no healers in order to create the caster legendary item.
Cataca Jun 21st 2010 4:34PM
@Daedhir
You do have a better analogy for why it's good they got removed.
But it does not show why the author would be insulted.
Sciarc Jun 21st 2010 4:40PM
For guild talents to have any real meaning or usefulness, they have
to provide a way to differentiate guilds of the same playstyle type
from one another - for example, a 25-man raiding guild from another
25-man raiding guild, or one pvp guild from another pvp guild. Not a
pvp guild from a 25-man raiding guild - that's easily done already.
My guess, without actually knowing what any of the talents were like,
is that Blizzard couldn't find a way to meaningfully do such a thing.
Wilk Jun 21st 2010 4:45PM
I'm confused. You dismiss the idea of a guild member leaving because of guild talent choices, but you then bring up the concept of new guild members joining because of guild talent choices? I would have thought that if you accept the possibility of one of those, you'd have to accept the possibility of the other.
muffin_of_chaos Jun 21st 2010 5:32PM
Scott is wrong. This sort of drama would be way over the top compared to anything that's come before.
Attempting to make the guild itself, rather than the players, important is just a downright terrible idea.
Hollow Leviathan Jun 21st 2010 5:50PM
The GM still gets to decide which talents to get FIRST, or which to buy at all, since they cost cashmoney now.
There isn't no decisionmaking now, it's just not exclusionary decisions. Getting every single talent is not going to be trivial, I'm sure. Unless you've been in a guild for years, you're very probably still gonna have decisions to make.
Wuvlycuddles Jun 21st 2010 6:04PM
Really your whole arguement hinges on how many talents vs how many points to spend. From what GC said i can only assume they were planning waaay more talents than you can possibly hope to get with the handful of points your guild would be able to pick up.
I always figured it'd be a simple choice, like speccing a Holy Paladin, you put the bulk of you talent points in the Holy tree (guild talents useful to all guilds) and then you have the choice of sticking whats left into Protection (for pvp guilds) or Retribution (for pve guilds).
Bort Jun 21st 2010 6:49PM
They have never explicitly said every talent that we had planned is now going to be a perk. They simply said we haven't removed any content - you might take those to mean the same thing but we have zero assurance it is true.
That being said, there is no indication of what kind of effort is going to be required to level up a guild to completion. Im sure there are tens of thousands of guilds with decent active player's without 5 guild tabs. Not all guilds in this game are end content raiders or top PVP guilds - in fact far less are not then are.
Players already have reasons to leave and belong to guilds based on what they can and choose to do. Why does making them better at the things the guild prefers to do regularly mean those players are less likely to stick around. How many guilds lose their best players to more competitive guilds or give the best loot to their best players to further their guild agenda at the cost of equality.
Guild leaders already choose every day who gets to raid tonight, or how we determine loot, or what classes/specs we will accept into our guild, or when we move to new content. Players guild with people they align them selves with idyllically and when those ideals change or turn out to be different they move on.
I would prefer to chose the order of abilities my guild achieves rather then have them chosen for me. There is no reason a guild talent system could not eventually allow you to have every talent. It simply says the more casual players have to work their way through talents they have no use for in order to get to the ones they care about.
If at any point leveling the guild is easy that the above is moot - its simply one more thing to be farmed and sold - and that IMO - is even worse.
Bort Jun 21st 2010 6:51PM
Why do you assume that a system could not exist where by you get to both choose the order of talents/perks you want as you level up and potentially gain all of them over time.
The view is the following.
We used to have something like this: A or B or C
You are assuming we are getting something like this: A then B then C
I think what Scott essentially is asking for is the ability to say I would like to make C a priority.
That could be accomplished by a system like:
A then B then C or
A then C then B or
B then A then C or
B then C then A or
C then A then B or
C then B then A
Eventually all paths lead to the same homogenization they are offering now - if/when you can obtain it. Eventually you all get all the perks you want and it can even require the SAME amount of effort.
Taking away the option to prioritize your guilds abilities in one aspect of the game is, I believe, an insult to guild masters and officers the game around. Unless they are adding in crazy over powered talents, there are far more sinister things a guild master can do to destroy his guild and drive out members then this.
jonahb Jun 21st 2010 7:18PM
" I want that talent tree daddy!" says the 9 year old wow player 50 years from now
" sorry son that is the package you have to pay 90 extra dollers a month or 10 Yuan*" Says the father who has to already pay 1 organ a month to let his son play wow
Father goes back to his home office and after closeing the door shouts "DAM YOU BLIZZARD, DAM YOU ALL TO HELL!!!"
* Chinese Currency
Just my private little joke
Paradoxx Jun 21st 2010 7:40PM
If you're in a "raiding guild" and you actually need a mass-summons ability, you need to be looking for a new guild
Eisengel Jun 21st 2010 8:33PM
I think he didn't get the implied philosophy in what GC was saying. That they want guilds to be groups that you WANT play with, rather than a group you HAVE to play with. Most of this expansion has been typified by ease of use and increased accessibility. Scott rails against Blizz for not being able to play the 'worried about discomfort to players' card, but guess what, they have a new Lead Systems Developer. I'm going to guess they have a slightly different momentum.
I like the idea. In general most of the fundamental changes to raiding/instances I've liked. Blizz originally planned for WoW to live about 1 to 2 years (from the interview with the Content Director). They're now dealing with the reality that this one-shot title has taken off fantastically and has a momentum and user base that they've never anticipated - so they have to retool the game to move from what they expected to what the reality is. The biggest change is the shift in philosophy from a widely stratified player base with uber epic raiders on the top and newbs on the bottom to a single, massive pool of players leveling to max level, then raiding and leveling 2 or 3 alts. A lot of the wrinkles that divided players are being smoothed out so that WoW, in general, is more accessible and appealing to the majority of players.
Hierarchical guild talent trees are very much a Vanilla-type idea, where a single player can dictate what the focus of the entire guild is. At the time, that was reasonable. That isn't Blizz's vision for the way they have seen or want guilds to operate; everyone being able to gain all the perks and do whatever they are interested in within a single guild is now the intended design.
noobdeluxe Jun 21st 2010 9:14PM
/2 WTS guild with tabard - bank tabs - fully leveled
Gorgondor Jun 21st 2010 9:26PM
Okay, just want to start off saying I don't necessarily agree with the author here, I understand the concerns, but i think ultimately, the decision to remove this choice was a good thing.
You want to be able to create a different guild compared to others so that it adds a different choice for people when they're looking for a guild. Yet you say if someone leaves the guild for higher gold drops instead of having reagent requirements removed, then there's probably something else going on there. I agree, there probably is something else going on there, but I feel any system that that effect ones decision to join a guild, can effect ones decision to leave a guild.
In my opinion, the main decisive factors in changing guilds, should be 1. Social Environment, and 2. Which Part of the game you play (PvE, PvP, Solo).
In respect to number 2. What part of the game you play is also tied into number 1. how you socialize with others in the game, if you introduce other factors such as guild talents, which would separate guilds from one another, creates a more of a min/maxing decision.
Fact is, we don't know what all the perks are going to be, so we can't really judge how much effect it would have, and now that they have removed it, i think the can add more perks that have greater effects such as more damage/healing done in BG's or something like that.
When it come to officers of a guild making the decisions, it's hard enough to make other decisions without adding in this extra burden, there would undoubtedly be disagreements/arguments regarding this, there already is when it comes to strategies and such on boss fights.
I hear where you're coming from, but I think you're giving the community a little more credit than it deserves, I'm sure there are people out there that agree with you, and want more customization for their guild, but I just don't see how it can really benefit guilds out there.
One last thing, LoL at all the people who didn't get your post at all, it's not about obtaining the talents/perks at all, the argument here is for more customization.
icepyro Jun 21st 2010 10:19PM
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. [...] Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
That is all.
squidpuppet Jun 21st 2010 11:29PM
Actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but one talent mentioned in the article does seem to be intended for a certain type of player.
If I am not mistaken, getting killed in PvP doesn't damage your gear.
So let's say you're a PvPer in a guild that, before Cataclysm was mixed. The Guild leader is a raider, maybe even a plate-wearing raider.
He takes the talent to reduce repair bills, you, taking your arena team as seriously as he takes his raids complain that that talent does nothing for you or the other PvPers in your guild.
You might even be tempted to go over to a PvP specced guild that has put those same talent points into something more worthwhile for you.
Drama.
I imagine that eventually more talents capable of causing this type of divide would have surfaced. How many did we know about? 5? It's hardly logical to say that based on that sampling we know exactly how the guild talent tree was going to shape up.
Cure4Living Jun 22nd 2010 1:18AM
I agree they should have given people better examples of these guild talents, because from my perspective I have no idea if it really would have been dramatising.
Although the logic of removing it because it might drive a wedge is odd? Guild already have specializations, rarely do you have a guild were the pvp and pve components are equally balances, I'm in a casual raiding guild, sure we get together every now and then for some pve but as a whole we're a raiding guild.
Is the fear that if you give guild talents to a guild and 'define' the guild that people will realize that: "oh wait I'm in a raiding guild, mmm sure we run ICC like 7 days a week but I never though we were a *gasp* raiding guild..."
Sure it probably would cause problems for small casual/social guilds (although how much content to they actually have access too? And how would guild talents then affect this limited access?) but all the big guild are already specialized to a pretty big extend.