I can cetainly see how this happened: beta artifically skewed the rates at which guilds leveled by letting toons level faster (so they could test more content) and by relying heavily on premades without representative amounts of rep etc. So the balance between guild rep being earned from leveling and achievements was weighted toward leveling. Might someone have caught it if they were really crunching numbers on just guild leveling? Maybe. But without a control group (ie, previous history of guild leveling via some other system), it would be easy to miss amid the flood of other data being examined.

So okay, I can understand. However, the solution smacks of knee-jerk "Oh s__t!" reactionism rather than a well thought out recalibration. Surely there were options beyond just yank it out. Perhaps a separate daily or weekly gains cap on just achievement XP. Or a fixed number of achievements allowed to be registered per week. Or a significant reduction in the amount of XP granted per achievement. That's three just off the top of my head.

Allowing guild achievemens to contribute to the overall progression of the guild was a great way to promote a sense of teamwork and guild cohesion. Now that the guild achievements are purely fluff (entertaining, possibly addictive fluff to be sure, but still fluff) there's still little incentive for guilds to really pull together and achieve group goals. Hopefully, the guild achievements can be reconsidered now that the immediate crisis. After all, it's not like Blizz has never changed their minds before... :)

Reply