The Cancer of Guild Guards:

[Emdash]

A short essay by Emdash!

I have already spoken about how I believe resource generation that does not involve player work is bad for the game, but guild guards are further down the line, right before walls.

Watch this video, if you want. Approaching Jungle Camp, decided to shoot someone...

Now, if guards simply suppressed all pvp, it would still be kind of wack to have free placement guards in THE WILDERNESS, but it would be kind of fair. The fact that they will not attack allies and will attack war targets is like having turret support dmg in most spots, and it is completely ridiculous. It would make more sense to put elite guards in jungle camp, at least then it would be 'fair.'

Yeah, it costs money to have guards, but I felt this same way in the North when Overt had spammed many of them, except this is in the lawless zone.

Why should there be NPC mercs? They cost. They are not super strong, but it's still a bad mechanic.

Would love to hear a rebuttal.

 

[Beatel]

The largest problem with areas like this, especially this village in particular, is the incentive for the other large groups to destroy these buildings.
(Edit: I was also reminded how performance does not help the siege situation. Large fights just destroy the server performance)

My own in game political views aside, many guilds do not like Tribe and their allies, yet they do not knock all these structures down. There has been a problem with the gameplay balance of territory control and sieges for a long time, a point many have complained about for years. Some improvements have come, but the incentive to spend 10's of thousands of gold in order to clear any of this out is not there.

Some ideas I've heard proposed by the larger guilds and bounty hunters (who are usually solo):
1) Allow destroyed structures to be instantly lootable
2) Allow us the ability to break open doors from the inside and outside. Currently, the effort to open a door is still tied to a massive cost.

This needs to be balanced with small guilds and solo's in mind, as too much incentive would lead to large guilds gambling a siege on poor solo Bob's house, hoping he has valuable things squirreled away inside.

Another part of this problem is the upkeep on non-subbed accounts, creating an abundance of housing and TC on the map. This has been acknowledged by the staff, and it sounds like they might be reverting this finally; no confirmation of time-frame on that.

Guild guards serve their purpose, but they are also fairly easy to kill if you have a few people and take a decent amount of time to rewpawn. Removing guild guards won't solve the problems I've talked about that lead to these frustrations in the first place.

 

[Jackdstripper]

The largest problem with areas like this, especially this village in particular, is the incentive for the other large groups to destroy these buildings.
(Edit: I was also reminded how performance does not help the siege situation. Large fights just destroy the server performance)

My own in game political views aside, many guilds do not like Tribe and their allies, yet they do not knock all these structures down. There has been a problem with the gameplay balance of territory control and sieges for a long time, a point many have complained about for years. Some improvements have come, but the incentive to spend 10's of thousands of gold in order to clear any of this out is not there.

Some ideas I've heard proposed by the larger guilds and bounty hunters (who are usually solo):
1) Allow destroyed structures to be instantly lootable
2) Allow us the ability to break open doors from the inside and outside. Currently, the effort to open a door is still tied to a massive cost.

This needs to be balanced with small guilds and solo's in mind, as too much incentive would lead to large guilds gambling a siege on poor solo Bob's house, hoping he has valuable things squirreled away inside.

Another part of this problem is the upkeep on non-subbed accounts, creating an abundance of housing and TC on the map. This has been acknowledged by the staff, and it sounds like they might be reverting this finally; no confirmation of time-frame on that.

Guild guards serve their purpose, but they are also fairly easy to kill if you have a few people and take a decent amount of time to rewpawn. Removing guild guards won't solve the problems I've talked about that lead to these frustrations in the first place.

Agree with all of this. These are all bad design decisions by SV that have needed fixing for years now, but continuously get overlooked. Its like they purposely make shitty designs and rules and then are stubborn as hell about not changing, until they lose half the population and then they capitulate.
This has always been Henriks achilles heel. Bad decisions, and unwillingness to change that which nobody likes. Then he loses half the players, and all of a sudden things get changed. Always too little too late.

 

[Emdash]

Guild guards serve their purpose, but they are also fairly easy to kill if you have a few people and take a decent amount of time to rewpawn. Removing guild guards won't solve the problems I've talked about that lead to these frustrations in the first place.

I don't think they do serve a purpose, tbh. It takes like 5 min to respawn? If there are guild guards in multiple spots, they will be there, as I said, applying supplementary damage whenever you are doing something that is against the guild / alliance who controls. Sure, in a vacuum, they also help untagged blues v untagged greys, but the fact that they are loyal to alliances means that large amounts of players can be immune to them.

Those guards are shooting arrows haha. I think with TC. you should have to protect your own shit, just like you should have to gather your own shit. What influences your success is being able to work with people who will protect your shit or gather stuff for you. If you can just hold an outpost, get mats, and place a bunch of guard towers, you can go without interacting with anyone outside of your alliance, as JA does.

I am not mad at Tribe because they stay there and do work there. I am gonna fight Tribe, sure, but they live in that area and take it very seriously. That is sandbox gameplay. But having guild guards that you will have to kill every time (which also makes you susceptible to being attacked, as I assume they get some notice?) is not really fair.

I don't even think that guild scouts are really fair, tbh, but at least they aren't applying damage. They hit harder than outlaws, and while that isn't a bunch of dmg, it is enough to force you to consider it unless you are in good armor, and again, that defeats the purpose of trolling shitter zerglings if you are gonna feed them 100g of mats every time they finally kill you.

 

[Beatel]

I don't think they do serve a purpose, tbh.

The concept of building your own small village or outpost, by yourself or with a couple friends, is not a simple effort.

For example, if I wanted to setup a small fishing outpost with some vendors, stables, and a bank, I would also like to have a barracks and guards to support this small outpost. It is not cheap to build these structures, and the upkeep cost is quite a chore unless you're dedicated (or in a much larger group). This enables me to at least have some support to keep the area a bit more "grief" free from the smaller or naked attempts of chaos. If this didn't exist at all, those types would just camp these small player outposts endlessly.

If a small player outpost is farming "safe" it should be up to the players to say "I don't like this, let's stop it".

I do agree the balance of it all feels off once the scale of player groups goes up, but again I'd rather be motivated to help other groups just siege these problem areas, but as it stands that part of the game has many issues.

I can only imagine how many strongholds and houses currently belong to players who will actually never return to the game, inflating the amount of TC structures on the map. If large guilds want walls of houses and towers surrounding their villages it shouldn't be enabled by unsubscribed accounts, alts or otherwise.