There was some more discussion today in-game about how frustrating the guild member cap is, and I went ahead and made a post in their suggestions thread about guilds expressing my opinions. Basically, I told them that whatever they want guilds to be is clearly different from what players want them to be, and they're losing players (and revenue) by not changing them. I think it might be helpful if anyone who agrees would come back me up:
There's been some more discussion of this in-game today and I'd like to add my opinions and ideas.
As others have said, the devs are seeing guilds as tools for technological advancement which they don't want too many people to have access to because it would make the game too easy, while the players see them in a totally different way.
1. The game is not too easy. It is so complex and detailed that when a new player joins, it is often so overwhelming that they simply give up and quit. That's a loss of a customer, and a loss of revenue for the developers. I have invited three specific friends to play the game who, when they got on, said it was too confusing. Their first question? CAN I BE IN A GUILD WITH YOU so that we can work together and I won't feel so lost? The answer was no, we can only work together by sending each other items through the mail, so they quit, just like that.
2. Guilds are not just about resources and machines. I get that you are trying to be different from other games, but there NEEDS to be a way for new players to feel like they have a home, a community of their own to be a part of. An easy way to chat, a place to share things more easily than going back and forth between their home and the post office. Without that, most players just aren't going to stick around. It isn't a question of wanting access to better machines. It's a question of playing with your friends.
I'm from the Bay12 community, which the devs know has really increased the size of the playerbase. However, when Bay12 first joins a game, the first thing they do is obtain whatever resources they need to make a guild, which everyone then joins and plays in together. The fact that this isn't possible in this game has already caused nearly HALF of our players to quit. Bye-bye, players, bye-bye game revenue.
This game is not something you can sit and play for hours on end. You click "do this" and then wait for a few hours until it's done. Without a guild to at least share this experience with, what you have is essentially a single-player game that you can only play for a few minutes a day, and a messy chat system and item exchange system that takes a lot of extra effort to use (walking to a post office in between jobs). If you pitched that as a single-player game, no one would buy it, but without guilds for beginners, that's exactly how it feels.
3. The current system isn't even working the way the devs want. The idea is to keep the advanced resources in the guilds limited to only a few players, so that the game isn't too easy. So what people are doing is having 5 of their group form a guild, and keeping the rest together on an external chat or forum, and everyone in the group shares resources. Those without access to the machines send in the raw resources, those with access use them and pass the result back. So everyone in the group is STILL getting the benefit of those machines, except they have to use a frustrating work-around that costs them time and makes the game less fun for them. Why not just let them all join the guild and save them the frustration?
If you're really so worried about locking out access to some of the advantages of a guild and keeping it for only a few players, then how about a guild level system? Level 1 members have access only to chat. Level 2 members have access to shared storage. Level 3 members have access to machines. There could be a "dues" function to act as a gold sink - players who pay enough dues have a chance to advance to the next level. No cap on membership - as many members as they want. But only the ones who have invested enough dues will have access to the top levels, so only advanced players with money to spare would make it that far. And the actual creation of the guild doesn't need to be so expensive.
This way, everyone can play together who wants to. New players will have a home and feel more secure in the complicated and often confusing game. The devs get their way in that some of the biggest advantages of guilds will only be available to more advanced players.
The way it stands now, it feels like this:
Devs: We want guilds in our game to be X.
Players: Well, we want guilds to be Y.
Devs: Well, you need to get used to it being X. We're willing to make some changes, but it's never going to be Y.
Players: Bye then! Good luck with your game!
I don't think that's what the devs want. You want players, you want us to have fun, and of course you want us to spend money on the game. I personally have decided to wait on spending money on this game until I see whether it will be something I can properly enjoy for a long time. So far, I'm still not totally convinced. Changing the guild system to make it something that everyone can enjoy would definitely be enough to convince me, and I promise right now that I will spend money on blue crowns to unlock more options, if you make it so that I can play with all my friends in a single guild. Maybe others will back me up on this and show you that the majority of players really do want guilds to be changed.
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Topic: Therian Saga [Sandbox Browser MMO] (Read 181460 times)