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Guild Strongholds have serious disadvantages.


nerdofprey

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When details of the Galactic Strongholds expansion started to emerge, my small guild got very excited. Not about the flagships, not the conquest, not even player housing. We wanted a guild stronghold. That was all we really cared about. This option would give us an opportunity to create something together that would show our spirit to the rest of the community.

 

We knew the cost would be many times more than a personal one, and we were fine with it. For the past week we have been gathering up millions of credits and collecting hundreds of decorations, all to put in the guild bank. Our free Sky Palaces were nothing more than a testing ground for what would be our masterpiece: A magnificent guild stronghold on Tatooine.

 

Then, finally, amid much rejoicing, we unlocked that stronghold.

 

It was kind of a letdown!

 

Guild strongholds have exactly one advantage: More than one person can place decorations. That's cool, but that is IT. That's EVERYTHING you get for the enormous cost, and for the serious disadvantages of a guild stronghold.

 

What disadvantages?

 

#1 - The name of it is not customizable AT ALL.

In several of the developers' live streams, explaining the features of strongholds, it was very explicitly stated that guild strongholds, like flagships, could be named. Very explicitly stated, multiple times. As it turns out, not only is that completely untrue, but guild strongholds don't even benefit from the "label" mechanic of personal ones. You can't choose an "owner" or set it up as a "Temple of Darkness" or any of that cool stuff. You get "Headquarters: (guild name)" and that is IT. Huge, huge disappointment.

 

#2 - You can not give keys of any level to non guild members.

Is this a bug? Some mechanic we haven't figured out? I don't know... but this appears to be the case. Forget about giving your friends in other guilds access to the place. With your personal one, anybody on your faction can be given a key. You can pick and choose exactly who has what level of access, with no guild restrictions. With your permission, a friend in another guild can go to your place and invite their friends, even if you're not online. One personal stronghold could thus become a 24/7 hotspot for your entire server! Did your whole guild go to sleep? No problem! Somebody else can keep it running. With a guild stronghold, people outside your guild have to take their chances with the public listings and hope one of you is online. Oh, except...

 

#3 - By default, your publicly-listed guild stronghold does not show up in public listings.

Maybe I'm stupid, but it took me a couple days to figure out how to find the guild strongholds on there. You have to use a hidden drop-down menu at the top of the screen and filter your search by either personal or guild. By default it shows only the personal ones. There's no "both" option. Most people who are just casually clicking around looking for places to visit probably won't think to change their settings to track you down. You probably won't get a lot of visitors!

 

#4 - You don't get your decorations.

By now most people have figured out that unlocking decorations for yourself doesn't let your guild use them. It's a little frustrating, but if you pay attention you know what's up with that, and you know how to donate stuff to your guild. Guess what you can't ever donate, though? Companions! With a personal stronghold, you can hop around on all your alts, on both factions, and place their companions in any combination. Sure, they turn into holograms when you switch characters, and are occasionally naked, but at least they're there. Your guild stronghold gets none of them, ever. Not even a lousy naked hologram.

 

(edit: this part wasn't right!)

 

You also lose the fluidity that you have with your personal decorations, being able to move them from one planet to another according to your whims, and the security that those items will be with you even if your guild situation should change. You have a lot of options with your personal decorations that you never will when you donate it to your guild.

 

It's clear after messing around with these systems for a week that guild strongholds were an afterthought, and that their mechanics are unfinished at best. After paying out the wazoo for the mega-expensive version of the exact same freaking building, you actually LOSE significant features.

 

Before you buy, it's a good idea to weigh all of this against the awesome power of more than one person placing decorations.

 

The Tatooine stronghold is great, and we're kinda stuck with the place now that we spent all the credits in the universe on it. I really hope that some of these things will be addressed, and soon, so that it does not become a great regret in our lives.

Edited by nerdofprey
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If we could name it, and if people who opened up the public listing screen could - by default - see that name among the listings, that would go a long way toward justifying the cost.

 

The cost of a guild stronghold is absolutely absurd, too. The cost of fully unlocking a personal stronghold on Tatooine with every expansion is less than half of the initial unlock cost, with no expansions, of the guild version. And for that we lose features.

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I think the rename option should exist for all strongholds, but it should AT LEAST exist for guild strongholds IMO. I also think having the ability to invite others outside of your guild (especially if you are recruiting) and having it listed in some primary way instead of buried in a menu are also required changes IMO.
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Trophies can be purchased for the guild. Three of my members have done so. They range in price depending on the items. A guild member even purchased the statue on the collections edition for the guild.

 

I was wrong about that part. Must have been looking at the wrong part of the interface last time I tried it. I corrected the post. I'd love to be proven wrong about all the rest!

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In several of the developers' live streams, explaining the features of strongholds, it was very explicitly stated that guild strongholds, like flagships, could be named. Very explicitly stated, multiple times.

 

I agree that Guild Strongholds were pretty poorly implemented. They should have been identical in cost of personal strongholds given that their layout and functionality is essentially identical. However, I don't recall ever hearing BioWare state during one of the Stronghold streams that Guild Strongholds would have customizable names, only Flagships.

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Valid points, except this:

You also lose the fluidity that you have with your personal decorations, being able to move them from one planet to another according to your whims, and the security that those items will be with you even if your guild situation should change. You have a lot of options with your personal decorations that you never will when you donate it to your guild.

You can move decorations between the guild's stronghold(s) and flagship just fine. Or maybe you personally can't if your guildmaster hasn't granted you a gold key. But since it's a guild stronghold, you can't really expect it to be decorated according to your whims alone, now can you? And wouldn't it be a bit unfair if half of the decorations were removed just because the biggest contributor decides to leave the guild? If you donate money to a charity, do you expect to get it back if you decide to switch to a different charity?

 

While a collaborative stronghold where everyone is responsible for his or her own items might be an interesting experiment, I think the current model is ultimately better for creating an attractive guild stronghold. If you want a personal stronghold, you should create a personal stronghold.

Edited by DataBeaver
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I don't recall ever hearing BioWare state during one of the Stronghold streams that Guild Strongholds would have customizable names, only Flagships.

 

To be fair, I don't think that was officially "announced" as a feature. It was actually kind of maddening how little official information about guild strongholds was available before launch. For that reason, I paid really close attention to every word out of their mouths when those videos came out, and made careful note of any tidbits related to guild strongholds. When people asked if strongholds could be named, they said: guild strongholds and flagships, not personal ones. The question came up a few times and that answer was consistent. Maybe the people saying it were mistaken, or maybe it was planned but scrapped before launch. Maybe I missed the time where they said "we changed our minds about that." In any case, my guild expected naming and didn't get it, and it was a huge disappointment. It's one of the features we assumed would justify the cost.

 

Valid points, except this:

 

You can move decorations between the guild's stronghold(s) and flagship just fine. Or maybe you personally can't if your guildmaster hasn't granted you a gold key. But since it's a guild stronghold, you can't really expect it to be decorated according to your whims alone, now can you? And wouldn't it be a bit unfair if half of the decorations were removed just because the biggest contributor decides to leave the guild? If you donate money to a charity, do you expect to get it back if you decide to switch to a different charity?

 

While a collaborative stronghold where everyone is responsible for his or her own items might be an interesting experiment, I think the current model is ultimately better for creating an attractive guild stronghold. If you want a personal stronghold, you should create a personal stronghold.

 

I'm not talking about some kind of missing or broken feature in that case. I'm getting into the philosophy of it. I understand why they did it, and I don't really disagree. I'm talking about the things you sacrifice by choosing a guild stronghold over a personal one - justifiably or not - and that's one of them. It's a major one. It would indeed be unfair for somebody to leave a guild and take guild decorations with them... but what if you're the one who contributed half the decorations, and you leave the guild? You would lose all of it.

 

I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm just saying it's kind of a big consideration. If you get a decoration that's worth millions, where do you put it? Share it for today, or keep it forever? In a very real sense, this system pits you against your own guild in the competition for resources and rewards.

 

Stuff that you can actually pay to donate from your own collection is great, because you get it AND the guild gets it, without having to buy two - which could cost a fortune. Unfortunately this does not apply to most big-ticket decorations.

 

And yes, you can move stuff between guild strongholds / flagships, but my point is that you can't look at something in your own house and say "that would look better in the guild's base" and move it there. Well, not with most things. Ultimately, if you're a guild leader and you buy a guild stronghold, you won't have nearly the flexibility with decorations that you would by simply passing out keys for a personal stronghold to your friends.

 

For an example, my guild has a secondary "guild base" that's just one guy's house for which we all got a key. If we want to "donate" stuff to that stronghold, we mail it to him. If we want it placed in a certain way, we suggest that to him. It's really amazing how flawlessly this system is working, and it became clear pretty quickly that we could have done the exact same thing on Tatooine. We would have saved tens of millions of credits and actually gained some extra functionality. There's almost no disadvantage to doing it that way.

 

Consider this: If you have a cross-faction guild setup (as we do) it's easy for the owner of a personal stronghold to log on with a cross-faction alt and hand out keys to your whole guild on the other side, too, and then your alts from both factions have 24-hour access. There's no way to do that with a guild stronghold.

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OK, some repeated testing has revealed some amazing guild stronghold facts:

 

You definitely can not give a key to anyone outside the guild, regardless of faction. This restriction doesn't apply to personal ones.

 

You can't "invite" anybody of the opposite faction.

 

Your guild stronghold does not show up in the opposite faction's public listings regardless of your settings. We even tried setting our republic-side guild stronghold to empire-only, and imperial players still couldn't see it.

 

This means the faction setting on a guild stronghold literally does nothing!

 

There is no game mechanic to allow the other faction to visit your guild stronghold at all. This restriction doesn't apply to personal ones.

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OK, some repeated testing has revealed some amazing guild stronghold facts:

 

You definitely can not give a key to anyone outside the guild, regardless of faction. This restriction doesn't apply to personal ones.

 

You can't "invite" anybody of the opposite faction.

 

Your guild stronghold does not show up in the opposite faction's public listings regardless of your settings. We even tried setting our republic-side guild stronghold to empire-only, and imperial players still couldn't see it.

 

This means the faction setting on a guild stronghold literally does nothing!

 

There is no game mechanic to allow the other faction to visit your guild stronghold at all. This restriction doesn't apply to personal ones.

 

These were the deal breakers for me. I love the guild ship because its our space stronghold! But man........ the planet strongholds... well you already listed it all out very well. Very, very, very stupid.

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After this latest round of discoveries my guild is officially trying to figure out how to salvage this terrible mess we're in.

 

What we really want is a refund of all the credits AND decorations that we sank into this useless, functionally inferior version of a stronghold. We wasted so much time and so many rare crafting materials, and we did NOT get what we paid for at all.

 

At this point I'm willing to conclude that guild strongholds should not even be a thing! Simply letting us give out gold keys for the personal ones would wipe out the only advantage that they have. In fact, that would make the entire game so much better that it's ridiculous.

 

I feel so cheated.

 

And it's not just that we got horribly ripped off, it's that this entire game mechanic is a horrible ripoff and we happened to notice. What do we do with that? It's a hell of a "customer complaint." I mean, this goes all the way to the top!

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The inability of giving guild stronghold keys to non-members is definitely a disappointment. All of my characters are in a social guild with a small group of friends, but there's this other guild I run ops with. I'd have liked a key to their stronghold as well (and they'd have liked to give me one), but in the current system it's not possible.

 

I thought of possible lore implications of allowing cross-faction invites to guild strongholds, but I guess they're not that much worse than for personal strongholds. The existence of the faction dropdown in the stronghold directory suggests that they intended to make public guild strongholds available to both factions, so why not allow targeted invites or even keys as well.

 

As for the donation issue, the situation may seem dire now that the expansion has barely been out a week. I bet in half a year everyone will be overflowing with decorations and donations are made without a second thought.

 

Nevertheless, I can see two possible solutions for the problem, dubious as its existence may be. Neither is entirely without problems of its own though. The first one is to simply allow the purchase of any decoration for the guild with credits. The prices would have to be high enough to keep the drops somewhat desirable as well, probably in the hundreds of thousands of credits for ops decorations. Still, people seem to be much more willing to spend generic effort to gain credits and then use those to buy what they want than to spend specific effort to get a particular item.

 

The second solution is to allow moving unlocked decorations between the guild and its members. The decision to move decorations away from the guild should be limited to gold key holders or possibly even the guildmaster, so it may not help if you're leaving on bad terms. This will also allow moving them between players, which may or may not be desirable. Given that most decorations are already tradeable, it probably isn't too big of an issue. If both of these solutions are applied to the same decorations, it allows creating infinite copies of them, which is definitely undesirable.

 

I have to wonder though... Given that this and similar issues has been brought up in several threads, how exactly do people see guilds? Are they just groups of people to chat and run ops with, to be abandoned at a whim? It's like wanting to have frequent sex, but balking at the idea of having to support a possibly resulting child. I'm extremely loyal towards my guilds, but perhaps I'm in the minority here.

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I love my guild. We're all very close. In theory I'm totally fine with the guild owning all the decorations and me having nothing. My personal spaces are a really low priority to me compared to the shared spaces we've been trying to set up.

 

Now that it turns out the guild stronghold doesn't support the features we wanted most, I look at the hundreds of decorations I earned / bought / crafted and dumped in our bank, and I'm feeling pretty regretful. The guild stronghold doesn't do the things we bought it to do, and now there's no way to get those items back.

 

If all decorations were set up to be used by the individual and then shared with the guild for a fee, like pets or speeders, that part wouldn't even be a problem. I might be out some money from the donations, but I could set up a personal stronghold with all the same stuff.

 

 

Edit: If anyone doubted me about Bioware telling us we could name guild strongholds, he's one example from Dulfy's livestream notes: "You cannot name your strongholds, but you can change the owner of the stronghold to one of your characters in your legacy. The exception is Guild Strongholds which you can name it as whatever you want."

 

Feel free to actually watch the Dromund Kaas Livestream if you don't want to take mine or Dulfy's word for it. This wasn't the only time they said it, just the first one I could turn up with a quick search.

 

I know their off-the-cuff Q&A sessions in the videos probably aren't legally binding or anything, but we were definitely misled.

Edited by nerdofprey
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Man, I'm really sorry to hear about that! Have you filed a complaint? Knowing Bioware, you probably won't get anything back, though :/

 

I'm loyal to my guild. I've gotten invites to a couple other guilds, but always declined. This was before I even became a guild officer lol. My guild just has our flagship, but I love it. I don't have the time, credits, or inclination to decorate my personal strongholds the way I would like, so I just use the flagship. So many guildies have donated awesome decorations that would cost me an arm and a leg to get for myself. And all our guildies use flagship over fleet now; we've got GTN, cargo hold, guild bank, legacy storage, mod station, appearance changer, mailboxes, the works.

 

So for me and my guild, the flagship has worked quite well.

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Now that it turns out the guild stronghold doesn't support the features we wanted most, I look at the hundreds of decorations I earned / bought / crafted and dumped in our bank, and I'm feeling pretty regretful. The guild stronghold doesn't do the things we bought it to do, and now there's no way to get those items back.

This early into the expansion's lifecycle I'd still be hopeful that the missing features can be added. Perhaps Bioware just didn't anticipate their importance.

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Another point (and I apologize if this was already said and I missed it)

 

If your small guild manages to get all 35,000 Conquest points, you ONLY get the reward if you place in the top 10 on the leaderboard. (just confirmed by experience)

 

I'm sorry, but there is no feasible competition whatsoever if #10 has over 2 million points this week so far! A guild putting in that many points is not doing it for the piddly (to them) rewards --- whereas to a smaller guild, those rewards are not so trifling.

 

It would be nice if a guild received the reward, period, if they managed the task.

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After reading several of your posts / replies, I am surprised you feel " taken " by Bioware. It seems your Guild and yourself put a lot of emphasis on the Guild Stronghold, ie; reading upcoming notes, PR releases, grinding materials for future crafting, farming credits for the cost of the stronghold, etc.

 

Did you not learn about what you can and can not do on the PTR ?

 

Or was the one thing you did not do?

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They also said repeatedly during these streams that they were "actively working on this as we speak" and that things were not all set in stone.

 

You have to judge a finished product on a finished product. Not on what it was going to be in development.

 

Also, yes.. you folks should have poked into PTS and tested out what was going to be the final product. We had at least 2 weeks to tool around with that stuff. Plenty of time to copy rich characters over, form a guild, buy a SH and see what you could and could not do.

 

Plenty of products in the past have been touted to have "such and such" a feature, only to have it not be there at launch for whatever reasons.

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I for one, find Guild Strongholds -great-! There's nothing like crafting something beautiful with several people, BUT: I'm in a big agreement with the OP here. Guild Strongholds have some restrictions that I don't see a purpose in applying. I'm not sure if it's been mentioned in this topic before, but the fact that Guilds cannot have more than one stronghold surprised me! You can have a ground HQ + a flagship. If you're a role player like me (oh god, not one of those!) - and in a role playing guild, you tend to have more than one story going. For one, we strongly separate force-users from blaster classes because of the inherent difficulties in their interaction (it's a preference thing!) - and right now we're only able to accommodate our blaster classes with our beautiful HQ, leaving our Sith to mock around on Korriban (wait, isn't that what they do all day?).

 

So my top four Guild Strongholds "would like to see changed" sorted on personal preference priority:

  1. Multiple Guild HQ's
  2. Give Keys to non-Guildies
  3. Invite or give keys to members of the other faction!
  4. The ability to name HQ's (not a high prio for me).

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  • 2 weeks later...
OK, some repeated testing has revealed some amazing guild stronghold facts:

You can't "invite" anybody of the opposite faction.

 

You can't invite anybody of the opposite faction to a personal stronghold either. You can switch to an opposite faction character in your legacy and invite them then, but you can never invite cross faction any more than you can email or whisper cross faction either.

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I agree that Guild Strongholds were pretty poorly implemented...

 

Exactly. They have no function except as a meeting place for guilds that have no flagship. They do not even give a bonus for the conquest as private Strongholds.

Even for small guilds it is better prepare a private Stronghold for the guild and distribute keys. This gives at least a bonus.

Edited by Magira
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It is really a shame. Makes our guild wish we just used a cheaper, personal stronghold instead. All the issues the original poster raised are valid and need to be addressed. There are certainly possible solutions for all of them. Bioware needs to make guild strongholds way more attractive to justify their comparatively exorbitant prices and limitations.

 

It may also be worth adding that a guild stronghold still has the same max decoration and concurrent players limit as a personal one, even though it costs substantially more. Guilds with more than 50 active people can't even be in there all at once to roleplay or conduct meetings!

 

Plus you can't invite characters from the opposing faction to the stronghold to roleplay "invasions" and such, which you can do with personal strongholds when you log in an Imperial character on your account.

 

You also can't purchase and unlock guild strongholds and it's rooms with Cartel coins (really makes little to no sense, since you still need to decorate the original copy of cartel market decorations to the strongholds as well instead of being able to donate a copy like with achievements, etc.).

 

The only advantage guild strongholds have over personal ones is that more than one account can decorate them (and they really should allow players to give gold keys out for personal strongholds so they can allow their friends to decorate them and give people that would like to roleplay decorators/interior architects a job) as well as that you don't have to manually assign a key to every guild member and it doesn't count against their key limit of four (which is way too low, too!). Compared to the huge disadvantages it brings, it really makes Guild Strongholds a bad investment compared to using a personal stronghold for the guild.

Edited by Glzmo
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  • 1 month later...
You can't invite anybody of the opposite faction to a personal stronghold either. You can switch to an opposite faction character in your legacy and invite them then, but you can never invite cross faction any more than you can email or whisper cross faction either.

 

You're taking that bit out of context. My larger point is that it's impossible for cross-faction players to ever visit a guild stronghold under any circumstances. That's just one of the mechanics that makes it so. Like you said, personal ones don't have that limitation. You only have to switch characters, send an invite (or key), and switch back.

 

My guild has slowly been rebuilding our base in personal stronghold form, and we've had plenty of cross-faction alts coming and going. I figured it's not a bad time to bump this old thread.

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