Officers' Quarters: The guild achievement controversy
by Scott Andrews 
Dec 13th 2010 at 2:00PM
Less than 24 hours after Cataclysm went live, Blizzard announced a major change to the way guilds would level up in the brand-new system: Guild achievements no longer provide experience. The change came as a shock to many players. Typically, major shifts in design philosophy such as this occur during beta or even earlier. However, as Nethaera explained, the beta did not provide an accurate picture of guild experience from achievements because most characters were templates without their own achievement history.
It seems shortsighted that Blizzard did not anticipate a rush on guild achievements, particularly in the early days of the guild leveling system when there are so many juicy perks to unlock. Not to mention, achievements were the only way to get around the daily experience cap and powerlevel your guild. If anyone should know the lengths that players will go to in order to reap rewards, you'd think it would be Blizzard.
As it turns out, the game's developers somehow did not see this coming and, unfortunately, the timing of the announcement could not have been worse.
The announced change went into effect after many guilds had already gone on achievement sprees, some earning multiple guild levels and their associated perks. Earning these achievements was not often trivial -- a lot of planning and farming went into earning them. Last Friday's Around Azeroth was a great example. Blizzard then had to retroactively de-level those guilds and remove their perks. From a players' perspective, the only thing worse than being forced to wait for a reward is to earn that reward and then have it unceremoniously stripped away.
The right decision?
I think we can all agree that Blizzard could have handled this situation better. However, the more important question is this: Did the developers make the right decision?
The change effectively removes any chance of accelerating your guild's level. Most guilds will be able to hit the daily experience cap without much hassle. Very small guilds may not always make it. In a nutshell, that means most guilds will all level at the exact same pace. Any advantage that larger guilds might have been able to claim through sheer numbers has been erased.
Is that best for the health of the game? In one sense, you could say that it is. Clearly, larger guilds would have been able to earn certain achievements, such as most of the crafting achievements, far more quickly than smaller organizations. Guild size should be a matter of personal preference, not a throttle for rewards.
On the other hand, let's look at the long-term scenario. At some point and around the same time, every active guild that existed when Cataclysm launched will be max level. Those guilds will have a significant advantage when they go to recruit players over guilds that formed more recently. With achievement experience intact, those new guilds had a chance to catch up faster. Now, they will be have to be patient and live with the disadvantage, because leveling speed is more or less out of their hands.
Discouraging players from forming new guilds may cut down on drama to some degree. It's possible that fewer guilds will split or reform to become more exclusive. At the same time, though, this change may also discourage people from creating new guilds from scratch for the right reasons: because they want to try their hand at leadership, for example, or because they have a vision for a specific type of community.
Right now, I'd say it's too early to tell exactly what impact this change will have. Certainly there are both upsides as well as drawbacks. Much depends on how willing players are to join guilds that have not yet unlocked all the most desirable perks.
What it means
The meaning of guild achievements has changed in a significant way. Prior to this announcement, earning guild achievements was a way for your guild to work together toward a common goal that would benefit everyone in the guild community. Best of all, anyone could contribute. Going after achievements wasn't just an excellent team-building and morale-boosting exercise -- doing so allowed everyone in a guild, regardless of whether they were able to raid or PvP on a competitive level with the other members, to feel like a vital part of the organization. By gathering a handful of herbs or stomping on a gnome who wandered into Hillsbrad, you were making a difference.
Those aspects, by and large, have been lost. Now it feels like your guild will level with or without your contributions, because someone at some point during any given day will cap out the experience. Also, much of the sense of purpose to these achievements is gone. Be prepared for members to opt out of helping with specific achievements. Much like the player-based achievements with no actual rewards, some people just won't care.
Surely there has to be a compromise somewhere in this achievement system between teamwork being rewarded too well and teamwork barely being rewarded at all. We as officers know very well that players respond to goals, but goals are hard to push for when we're achieving them purely for their own sake, with no direct benefit to anyone. Since the goal of leveling faster has been taken away, I would like to see more tangible rewards, such as the Broiled Dragon Feast recipe and the Armadillo Pup, tied to specific achievements.
What's saddest of all to me is that leveling your guild is now a soloable grind. It takes more than one person to level efficiently, but it requires no teamwork whatsoever to accomplish. That was true prior to this change, but the fact that teamwork could level the guild faster was a fun and exciting concept to many officers and players. For that reason, the new system just feels wrong to me. What's your take on it?
/salute
Learn how to survive the leveling process, deal with guild perk freeloaders, and discuss the guild talent controversy or the guild reputation system. Send Scott your guild-related questions 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 4 of 7)
szilagyi Dec 13th 2010 2:50PM
That's the real power of the new guild system. Blizz could trivially tie any number of in-game achievements into guild-facing bundles with prizes to encourage team play. Our guild is decidedly not PVP friendly, a handful of us aside, and we're already gung ho--widely--for some of the PVP achievements.
Imagine if Blizzard tied an achievement that says "50 Guild members get Classic/Outland/Northrend/Cataclysm Dungeonmaster and Heroic versions" for a new mount for all members? Make it a combo land/flyer like the Horseman's reins, and it would be ultra-popular. Make it 75 guild members with a 110/310 version, and people would be falling over themselves to dungeon up, even with alts. Do the same thing with any number of other packages, and the sky is the limit.
szilagyi Dec 13th 2010 2:43PM
I'm rather OK with this. Wowpedia has estimates of 137~ days to level 25:
http://www.wowpedia.org/Guild_advancement#Guild_perks
Personally, I wish that levels 11-20 took twice as long as 2-10, and then double again for 21-25, to give more meaning to it--say, a minimum of 365 days from inception of the system/as a guild to present maximum level. Assuming the trend of 2.0 to 2.5 years (ballpark) for an expansion's lifespan, that would give the big dog guilds a year of fun at the top for recruiting and other purposes, and then open 26-30 with an estimated +365 days (73 days per level) to achieve those levels with the next expansion. That should be the benchmark each time. Assuming we go to level 100 before WoW 2.0, that gives us guild levels tied to max character levels of 85:25, 90:30, 95:35, and 100:40.
You would know that with a huge group exactly what your timetable will look like, and you'd be able to plan for it, and even to do things like merge guilds (smaller ones) if you want to achieve a common goal. The market--the players--will sort itself out. Just tie the max level's fastest possible attainment for a group of say a typical "big" guild of up to 20-30 active players on nightly at one calendar year and things will be fine.
jesusfreak216 Dec 13th 2010 2:44PM
just make the experience a fraction of what it was! dammit blizz use your frakkin heads!
Chalcedony Dec 13th 2010 2:46PM
My guild is rather small (15 warm bodies with 2-3 chars each), but I gotta say the guild achievement and leveling features were THE feature I was most excited about in Cataclysm. We have 2 hardcore achievement hunters, some achievement enthusiasts, and some people who never open the achievements tab. I do em for fun, but not everyone feels that way. The incentive to do achievements for guild XP was so fun for the short time we had it. Now? I doubt I'll ever get a Black Temple guild run organized.
Wild Colors Dec 13th 2010 2:56PM
This is pretty much the same position I'm in, and I agree entirely.
loop_not_defined Dec 13th 2010 5:55PM
So basically, you were hoping to bribe your fellow guildmates into doing stuff *you* want to do? Not sure why you feel you deserve sympathy.
Bumblebee Dec 13th 2010 2:48PM
You know, there's no real reason they couldn't decide to up the Guild's level cap during an expansion. They don't necessarily have to wait for a new one to come out to do a move like that. Now, if they were to do something like that, they could either make new ranks for existing perks, or come up with new ones altogether.
Another way of earning perks would be to tie them with Guild Achievements, as is already done with some. So, to combine these to things: Get new perks by GA's, then upgrade them via leveling up.
It could work, and it would bring back the idea of having to work together for stuff. Long as the perks don't become game makers or breakers I don't really see this as a big problem for the majority of players.
GhostWhoWalks Dec 13th 2010 2:50PM
I was...disappointed by this removal. Leading up to the release of Cataclysm, my guildies were putting groups together for banging out achievement runs; in particular, we were going to chain-run the Lich King heroics and then work our way down the list, getting the guild-run achievements for every pre-Cata dungeon in the game. People were excited and really liked the idea of taking a dungeon tour while earning some sweet rewards for our guild at the same time.
Now the removal of exp earned from achievements and the cap on guild exp/rep you could earn has kind of killed much of that excitement. Sure, people are still enjoying what Cataclysm has to offer, but they're back to doing their own thing rather than organizing group activities. At the very least, the caps are surprisingly low and really need to be extended.
zoom Dec 13th 2010 3:00PM
I disagree with some of the author's and posters' comments. I run a small guild with a max of 11 people on at any one time. As we were leveling last week, we were easily hitting the daily guild exp cap. But as more of our members have dinged 85, it's become increasingly more difficult to reach the cap. Last night we didn't reach it till after midnight. As soon as this week, large guilds will start outpacing small guilds in the leveling process, which I'm fine with. But also granting exp for achievements would have significantly accelerated that outpacing. The Blizzard fix was the right move.
And the argument that guild members won't work together now is just plain silly. Have you seen the guild achievement perks? They're awesome and guild members will still be motivated to work together to obtain them.
Jeremy Dec 13th 2010 4:10PM
The thing is, all but two of the achievements that give perks don't really involve guild members working together. All the crafting achieves people will be doing individually; the pvp achieves can be easily soloed (I had gotten almost all the Horde Slayer achievements before a second 85 in my guild even stepped into a BG); getting each class up to 85 obviously takes a lot of people, but you can easily (and probably will) level mostly by yourself. The only things that requires guild members actively working together as a group are the guild heroic dungeon and raid achievements since you have to go as a guild group. There's not much now to motivate guilds to go back and do guild runs of dungeons and raids from previous expansions and such.
matt Dec 13th 2010 2:51PM
Matt Low posted something on his blog a few weeks ago about the possibility of meta guilds forming in order to facilitate faster leveling. I mused in the comments of that post that Blizz would be unlikely to let the concept of guilds as groups with common purpose to devolve into giant cartels. I assumed that they removed the G-achievement -> G-XP link due to unusual guild merging activity.
After reading this article, though I have to wonder why this feature made it to live. It changes recruiting to a new guild from very hard to completely impossible. The rewards are distributed with uniformity to all guilds so the perks end up just being penalties for new guilds rather than benefits given to great guilds. I think its time to take the whole guild leveling/rep/achievement/perks business out behind the barn. Bury it next to path of the titans and dance studios.
szilagyi Dec 13th 2010 3:12PM
Or simply tie all of the guild advancement past what we have on levels 1-25 into achievements. Have 5 of your guild members complete every dungeon from 1-85 on both Heroic & regular (i.e. all the Dungeonmaster ones), you get perk x. Have 15 do it, perk y. Have 30 do it, perk z. Little guys get stuff, big guys get stuff.
Wild Colors Dec 13th 2010 2:54PM
The guild achievements were the closest thing available to the guild quest concept that would really bring guild together to do interesting things, including taking a break from current tiers of raiding.
Making them give no reward whatsoever eliminates this entirely. I'd suggest something more along the lines of "up to 50% of each level can come from guild achievement xp." I understand that they shouldn't be able to be used for really rapid guild power leveling, but if they still provided some benefit then they'd give guilds some new goals to organize around. Especially the smaller guilds which haven't, for example, seen all of the old content.
Blizzard is still working out the model. They just reduced standard guild xp gain by 75%; maybe that's the first step in reintroducing guild achievements.
arrowrest Dec 13th 2010 3:02PM
Despite Blizzard's obvious and justified concern about the pace at which large guilds will advance, large guilds will still reach level caps merely through the strength of their numbers.
Removing the ability to advance through certain achievements and the huge unannounced nerf this weekend (75% reduction it appears) to guild xp obtained through questing only handicaps the medium and small-sized guilds. Previous to these changes, the smaller guilds could still advance at a reasonable, albeit much slower rate than the larger guilds but these two changes combined really impact their ability to advance. It would have been better to leave xp gained at the previous rate and lowered the daily and weekly caps instead.
In addition, attracting or retaining quality players will be more difficult for smaller guilds as some players might see these perks as an incentive to find the largest guild they can. Building a new guild was always difficult but this system has the potential to make it even harder.
Collected Dec 13th 2010 3:06PM
"... do smaller guilds really deserve the same gifts that a guild that has worked together potentially for years can receive?"
I know why you said what you said, but I think your assumption that all small guilds are new guilds is wrong. Small guilds can be around for years too. Just because a guild has lots of members doesn't make prove it's been around a long time either.
Some small guilds may be small family/friend based guilds who feel no need to go out and recruit strangers into their ranks. They may be happy with their small guild of real life friends and are now met with a punishing blow to their hopes of fully enjoying the guild perks system.
What makes a guild of 50 people more worthy than a guild of 5 people? And consider that the 50 member guild may have been 5 people one day, 50 the next. All of a sudden this guild, and it's members, have access to lots more potential perks than a 5 member guild that has been together for several years.
It's clear to me that small guilds are hindered by this system, which is a shame because Blizzard spent a lot of time telling us they wouldn't be. I think Blizzard had a chance to be really really smart with this system and scale XP based on some very clever equations that scaled XP earned towards the guild based on how many people are earning XP for the guild during the given week and scale it so a guild of 5 people can earn the same XP as a guild of 50 people if they're giving a similar level of effort towards the goals available.
That way your small guild gets the same feeling of satisfaction and achievement that your 50 member guild gets. I disagree strongly that a large guild is somehow more worthy than a small one. It isn't. It's purely a reward for number of members, nothing more. And that is tragic when there are guilds out there, small ones, who care very deeply about the guild experience and are now looking at spending the next 1.5 years wishing they were enjoying the same perks as someone who joined 'Big Guild Inc' with 500 members and couldn't care less about their guild.
Evi Dec 13th 2010 3:18PM
We had a guild event scheduled to get some achievements accomplished but it really took the excitement and enthusiasm out of it to not be able to level our guild completing these. There are some achievements that will still unlock certain perks and we will be focusing on these.
My major concern is the personal guild experience cap. I hit friendly with the guild in the first few hours of leveling and on my alt I am almost half way to friendly by just logging in everyday and doing my cooking and fishing daily. I think it should take much more than logging in to do a daily all the time or leveling for a few hours to max my cap for the week. BUT on the other hand I don't think that anyone should get through the personal guild rep levels quickly. That would take away the incentive to stay committed to a guild. I think the best way for Blizz to correct this is to lower the amount of guild rep a person earns for each thing they do but keep the cap where it is. This way the more active people will stay ahead of those less active in the guild and give them something to work towards past the first 3 hours after the reset.
I also must add that it feels very, very wrong to only be friendly with the guild I have been leading for 3 years. ;)
wdm+hall Dec 13th 2010 3:20PM
There are deeper implications here. Guild members are all working towards something that the Guild Master alone owns. What happens when Guild maxes everything out and Guild Master sells the guild for heaps of gold or perhaps even a real money transaction?
erin Dec 13th 2010 5:00PM
If that's actually a concern for you -- that you can't trust your guild leadership to not be such a phenomenal and across-the-board dick to the people who trusted them to lead -- then maybe you're in the wrong guild.
wdm+hall Dec 13th 2010 7:15PM
I don't have this problem since I am the GM, just speculating what could happen with other guilds since, last I checked baddies do play WoW too.
Toucan Dec 13th 2010 3:21PM
Bring the player, not the class...
New guilds will always form, and the need to redo levels will be no disincentive, any more than joining a guild with no bank tabs to start is no disincentive to starting a new group.
People will skill to lead others to endgame will be able to attract others to join them.
WOW's strengths have always been about community, not the fake digital shinies you can earn.