Is it time for daily guild XP limits to be removed?
by Anne Stickney 
Mar 16th 2012 at 8:00PM
Is your guild level 25? Surprise, most guilds are -- or at least most guilds that have been up and running since the first days of Cataclysm are. The higher-end guilds or guilds with plenty of members pushed the leveling cap every week and managed to hit level 25 in a fairly short amount of time. Others with plenty of members followed soon after. In fact, as long as your guildmates were running dungeons on a daily basis and maybe indulging in some PvP or raiding, it was pretty easy to hit that daily cap.
However, there are plenty of guilds out there that were established later in the expansion, guilds with fewer members. And those members may be awfully tired of running the same heroics over and over by this point. At the beginning of the expansion, running those instances was all well and good -- they were new, interesting, and perhaps most importantly, they contained gear upgrades for just about anyone. However, we're at the end of the expansion. Most people have seen the heroics far too many times to count, not everyone is raiding, and there's a lot less activity from players in general. It's typical for that end-of-expansion lull to occur.
But when you're trying to get a guild to level 25, it's awfully hard to do when there's a daily XP limit in place. Is it perhaps time to remove the daily cap and let guilds level as they will?
However, there are plenty of guilds out there that were established later in the expansion, guilds with fewer members. And those members may be awfully tired of running the same heroics over and over by this point. At the beginning of the expansion, running those instances was all well and good -- they were new, interesting, and perhaps most importantly, they contained gear upgrades for just about anyone. However, we're at the end of the expansion. Most people have seen the heroics far too many times to count, not everyone is raiding, and there's a lot less activity from players in general. It's typical for that end-of-expansion lull to occur.
But when you're trying to get a guild to level 25, it's awfully hard to do when there's a daily XP limit in place. Is it perhaps time to remove the daily cap and let guilds level as they will?
The value of a level 25 build today
What exactly does level 25 mean this late in the expansion? It means you've got a ton of perks to offer to new recruits, fun items to play around with, and useful tools like Mass Resurrection to help mop up wipes during raiding or even instance runs. It's no longer the status symbol that it was at the beginning of the expansion. In fact, if your guild isn't level 25 by now, it can almost be viewed as a detriment, which is incredibly discouraging to those wanting to create a new guild.
In the face of a new expansion, where we will presumably receive the opportunity to get some more guild levels and hopefully a handful of new guild perks along with it, starting out at anything less than level 25 is essentially holding a guild back from progression instead of encouraging it. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had a chance to start from the same footing? Because right now, the guild leveling experience is becoming more of a limitation than a bonus -- if you don't have it, you're going nowhere.
Honestly, at this point, it seems silly that those XP limits are in place. We're at the end of the expansion, nobody's really apt to complain about a temporary removal of the daily guild XP cap, and that cap can easily be put back into place at the start of Mists. We've already seen something like this with the changes made to heroics. You can now complete seven heroics all in one day or spread out over as many or as few days as you like until you hit the cap. This worked out great for players who didn't want to feel obligated to log in every single day. Why not do the same for guilds?
Feel free to share your thoughts on the topic on the forum thread -- it's a subject that maybe Blizzard should be looking at in the end days of Cataclysm.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Guilds
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Noyou Mar 16th 2012 8:11PM
I would have no problem if they made it a guild perk actually. My theory on how guild perks should be in Mists is that you can move them around in each tier of 5. So 1-5 you can order them any way you like, 6-10, 11-15, 20-25. It would be cool for the groups who are not 25 yet if they could take the guild XP cap off to catch up. As a GM of a lvl 25 guild, I would have no problem with this.
shatnerstorm2 Mar 16th 2012 8:21PM
The daily experience limit doesn't matter much when you can't even hit it to begin with. I still don't see why they don't give us a scaling experience system. Is it really the end of the world if guilds of a few family and friends can reach level 25 without needing two or three expansions to do it? Cause for my friends' guild, that's what it looks like it's going to be.
I really hope Blizzard throws us small guilds a bone in MoP.
LynMars Mar 16th 2012 9:09PM
Yeah, my guild's existed since May of 2005. We've got 30ish accounts, and a bit less than 50 characters--but not all of our players are active, for various reasons. We're small and mostly RP, but some of us do raid (with a sister guild) and run heroics, together when possible.
We're level 16, and that's an accomplishment. We're still working on several "easy" achievements larger guilds can get with less trouble, too.
We can't hit the daily cap most days, and we're looking at going into MoP at less than lvl 25 and seeing several new levels added on top of our already hard-to-climb mountain. It's frustrating when our sister guild hit 25 in a couple months no problem (they aren't too much larger, but have more active members with a ton of alts); it's not a problem for big guilds, especially guilds who aren't choosy about the kinds of people they recruit (and it's led to new forms of drama and jerkishness there as well).
Small guilds, niche/concept guilds, and new guilds are at a severe disadvantage, not just at the start of an expansion, but especially later when people expect a level 25 guild with a bunch of perks and goodies to help them and their alts level. But not all of the guilds that are struggling to level are new, either. Small, friend and family, or concept guilds like mine are not having an easy time either.
K.B. Mar 16th 2012 9:20PM
I agree, my guild with my friends is only level 9. It's almost like a punishment to have a small guild. I'm not sure why they felt it was a positive thing to promote large impersonal guilds.
daenacat Mar 17th 2012 4:17AM
Yes, yes, yes! For small guilds, the XP for each guild level seems insurmountable. My guild is small -- a friends and family guild. Even with doing all we can to level the guild, we don't hit the XP cap every week. Even if we wanted to recruit more players, the fact that we're not a level 25 guild would put us at a distinct disadvantage.
Killik Mar 17th 2012 8:09AM
But then, if you scale the XP levels according to how many members are in the guild, you'll actively discouraging small guilds from recruiting more casual players. "Sorry, Mom, you only play once a fortnight - you're holding us back from guild progression."
mvietzen1 Mar 17th 2012 11:57AM
I can't believe an article is written without any thought as to the basis of the article.
If guilds could hit the limit then they would be 25 already. That is entirely the point.
Removing the limit does NOTHING to help non level 25 guilds it just allows the big guilds to level faster and make the abyss between even larger.
SamLowry Mar 17th 2012 3:17PM
Killik, most small guilds aren't interested in recruiting. Friends-n-family guilds are, by their nature, rather limited in how many members they will have.
If anything, the amount of xp awarded for completing guild challenges should be scaled based on how many active accounts are dedicated to the guild--large amounts for small guilds, small amounts for large guilds.
My friends-n-family guild has been around since Vanilla, and we just hit level 12.
Fawatam Mar 17th 2012 4:58PM
A large part of the problem is in how guild experience is gained. Most experience is given for raiding and completing guild rated battlegrounds. While XP from dungeons is fine, howeve experience gained from questing is pretty ridiculous. It's scaled to level, (and scaled too low) and with guilds that focus primarily on the leveling experience, it's near impossible to level a guild. For social and leveling guilds that don't have the opportunity to raid and field competitive battleground teams, how are we supposed to level our guild? I understand you don't want people to start a lot of low level characters to game the system, but can't we bump up the level just a bit?
Pyromelter Mar 16th 2012 8:22PM
"Is it time for daily guild XP limits to be removed?"
Yes, with the caveat that they can code it such that guilds at level 25 continue to have the limit, so that in Mists the mega-large guilds don't get an unfair advantage over the smaller ones.
Martin Mar 16th 2012 9:53PM
It's either all on, or all off. The "little guy" should get no advantage over anyone else. An unfortunate byproduct of being little is that you have fewer members to contribute to your guild experience. You either live with it, or get more members to get those perks.
Pyromelter Mar 16th 2012 11:02PM
Okay, so turn it off now, then turn it back on a week or two before Mists drops (one less thing to worry about on the launch date).
The point is you don't want it off when the mists launch date comes, because you'll have some of the mega guilds hitting level 30 in a matter of hours, which will force hardcore uber guilds to recruit temporary members to boost their guild leveling rate, and just the thought of that makes my head spin, kind of a mess.
Gwen Mar 17th 2012 4:14PM
Don't they remove the cap after level 20?
razion Mar 16th 2012 8:46PM
Imagine nowadays if you were deciding to level a character to 85 before Mists is released. However, imagine there's a throttle of experience you can get in a day or week. This imaginary throttle was put in place so people didn't, say, stomp through the zones to get geared quickly and start raiding immediately at the start of the expansion, so that people would have time to enjoy the new quests and zones and dungeons as intended at a regular pace. The situation is comparable to what guilds are going through now. The purpose of guild level throttling makes sense at the start of the expansion, but doesn't make sense when that initial rush is over. It impedes those who are then trying to catch up during current content and those who are trying to get ready for the next batch of content.
I would agree--daily/weekly guild experience limits need to be done away with. At least in their current form.
It would make much more sense if you wanted to throttle something and make it accessible later in an expansion to make it an *overall cap* that goes up weekly. This way, the cap rises weekly, but anyone during any given week can get up to that same cap and point, and can then advance like everyone else.
The reason weekly and daily caps don't tend to work is because those who are ahead of the herd can *stay* ahead, provided they keep capping during every week. There isn't a way for people to catch up. In order to give people a way to catch up but still provide a throttle, you have to provide the throttle as a maximum, instead of an incremental.
We this sort of system *somewhat* implemented already with PvP weapons--there's a season total of conquest calculated before you can get your weapon. If such a total calculation was applied to, say, things like conquest and valor as well as guild experience, we would see a lot of positive influence in the game. PvP particularly (and PvE to an extent) would be more balanced because everyone could get closer to the same gear level without all these huge gear gap disparities across new or returning players who didn't start at the beginning of an expansion or who decided to roll an alt or have to manage many characters but don't have time for all of them. Being able to cap a character to the top whenever you want to would open up a lot of freedom. You can take a week off the game without stress because you can just do double in the following week and catch up.
An overall cap to replace daily/weekly caps seem like an ideal solution. That's what I think, anyway. Maybe there would be repercussions for such a system, but at this point I really can't see any, but I'd love to hear from the rest of you.
Helston Mar 17th 2012 5:08AM
Razion, you are a genius.
Shrikesnest Mar 17th 2012 6:26PM
It sounds like a great idea to me. Maybe make it so that you could expand your cap to, at most, four weeks' worth of work at once, to avoid certain ludicrous edge cases. But in general, I'm in favor of anything that makes the treadmill less brutal for people who like to play the game in manageable chunks and put their other concerns first.
indeo2010 Mar 16th 2012 9:05PM
Just from personal exp. I think the cap should be modified, like some commenters suggested, or done away with, I have a couple alts on alliance side is what you would call friendly alt guilds, and as of today, the highest level is 19, fyi this guild has been around since wrath.
indeo2010 Mar 16th 2012 9:09PM
oh and just to add, the main reason they are still this low is because people hit 85 and want all the perks, so these guilds also become a revolving door, its kinda like spinning your wheels in the snow u move an inch but mostly get bogged down.
MysticalOS Mar 16th 2012 9:31PM
My issue has always been the cap being daily. It should have been a weekly cap, period. Daily cap is a biased system to people who actually active 7 days a week. My guild for exaple, capped 3 days a week, we raid 3 days a week. We'd hit daily cap, then piss away THOUSANDS of experience in all the extra bosses we downed, then on off nights barely even get 50% of cap. We didn't do any less work then someone who say took 5 days a week to kill same amount of raid bosses, but yet they got more experience for it.
This has gotten further worse with things like heroics being weekly now. Heroics used to be daily, which divided fine in daily exp caps when queuing as guildies. But now when people pound out a bunch in a single day, again it's same problem as raiding, experience gets pissed away while other days suffer, all do to a silly cap system. If ANY cap is used, it should be weekly, just like every other cap in game pretty much is, VP, JP, CP, HP, guild rep. Why not guild experience?
Noyou Mar 16th 2012 9:50PM
In Blizzards defense- there are 2 reasons I see why to have a daily cap: 1. So you don stay logged on for 24 hours and neglect yourself (I realize people probably do this anyways) 2. People would whine about players who played 24-36 hours straight being some unfair advantage. There should be a point, maybe to help guilds catch up, to remove both caps until the guild hits level 20/25.