Hi, I'm the leader of a fairly busy guild on The Red Eclipse. We reach the member limit of 1000 every week or so which means regular guild cleaning down to the 14 day mark. A lot of my guild members have characters on other servers including back on our original (ToFN) so these are all going to be merged together. Several people, myself included, asked you during the stream if you would increase the guild character limit above 1000 and your reply was:

Not right now, no increase in Guild membership. That could change. But, I'm not inclined to make those changes until after everyone is moved

Please reconsider and include a guild cap increase at the same time as the merge. Personally I would say to remove the cap entirely. It serves no real point. If a guild is going to be busy then it will be busy. Let us decide for ourselves when to halt guild invites. We have many people that actively play a lot of their alts. Even Keith said he was playing alts in the double digits. Think of it this way, just 50 players with 20 characters each is 1000 slots (the current limit). My guild has over 450 active accounts. If each player has just 3 characters then we would need 1350 slots. If each had 20 characters then that would be 9000 slots! This is not a case of "just stop recruiting" since we don't actively recruit in fleet chat, people find out about us and ask to join.

 

Alt Guilds

I know a lot of people will start screaming "make alt guilds" but we've done that in the past and I have no interest in doing so again. All alt guilds do for active guilds is increase our workload as we have to moderate/admin two or more guilds. Guild administration is already difficult and frustrating with the current slew of guild panel bugs. Having multiple alt guilds multiplies the amount of time we have to spend screaming at the problems

 

Communications

Multiple guilds also hurt in terms of community and communication. People online in the alt guild will miss out on the conversations and groups being formed in the main guild's chat and vica versa. Sure we could try and force everybody to use a custom chat channel but most people's natural instinct will be to write in normal /g and past experience has shown that custom chat channels are not a satisfactory solution due to how broken they are. The problem is primarily down to the permissions system. If I create a custom chat channel then I am the admin/owner and I can moderate the channel, promote people, kick people etc. When I go offline then the next person to login to the channel becomes the new admin/owner and I lose my permissions. Sure I can join the channel again but I won't have my admin/owner permissions unless I happen to be the first person to login after the new owner logs off. Even then several commands do not work, /list for example.

 

Conquest

I guess some people will argue this will hurt smaller guilds in terms of conquest but it won't make a difference to how things stand now. If small guilds currently have problems competing for the #1 spot against large guilds then what difference does it make if the character limit is raised/removed? Besides, if large guilds all start putting each of their alt guilds into conquest then it means less spots in the top 10 for smaller guilds unless they push even harder. We've all seen how smaller guilds can surprise large guilds with heroic farms, final boss farms and mega crafters but do you really want to do that every week just to get into the top 10? Sure even if the 1000 cap is removed some guilds may still try to invade with multiple guilds but I think most will choose to focus on just one, mine included. Maybe the 2018 conquest overhaul will remedy these problems, there is no way to tell without more details

 

Please Help Your Guilds!

Please increase (10k+) or remove the 1000 character limit. All we want to do is play with our friends in our own guild.

Signed.

 

And please fix the buggy guild window soon. It's a constant source of annoyance for everyone in a guild a it makes the (unpaid!) work of guild administrators a living nightmare.

 

Thanks.

Signed as well!

 

Let us play all together and enjoy the game without constant adding/removing characters all the time!

Signed.

Signed.

 

For me there is nothing worse than the endless /w for guild invites while i am trying to do something, this would more than half the number of /w i get for guild invites.So please please please just remove the cap altogether.

/Signed

 

Nothing is more disjointed than multiple guilds trying to operate with a guild channel. People who quit never quit out of the channel. The people who are not in the original guild always feel less important in the alt guild. Having to manage the alt guilds is pure tedium as people constantly want to be moved back and forth.

 

Up the limit to 5000

When I played Guild Wars 1, which I played for a long time, there was the possibility to create alliances. An alliance could take up to 10 guilds.

In the guild panel you'd have your own guild roster and you had a tab for the alliance where you could select their guild and visit their guild hall. Additionally there was an alliance chat channel.

 

One thing I found is that people do tend to like to have their own identity but also want a bigger group of players to work together with. I find this idea of alliances a more interesting idea because simply put, a lot of people do not like to be swallowed up in a huge guild, but they would want to work more closely with befriended or like-minded guilds.

 

So I don't have a problem with higher guild caps but I think allowing guilds to become part of an alliance with helpful tools to make grouping easy and an alliance chat channel would offer more than simply making guilds bigger. In any case, I'm pretty much for everything that gives guilds more tools.

Signed.

 

More than 80% of the invite requests I get are reinvites...

I'd love to see it bumped. It seems we are consistently having to trim the guild these days as we hit the cap over and over.

 

Now that we have some returning players who moved servers and plan to come back to the east coast we are once again trimming the guild.

 

Would love to see at least another 1000 added if not more.

The code is already written, hopefully this request was also in the server merge thread.

What I would really like to see would be the ability to invite characters to a Guild without them having to be online at the time. If you are in a relatively dead Guild, it can be hard (or impossible) to find someone to invite your alts.

Very valid points made by OP. I agree 100%. Edited October 20, 2017 by Drunken_Ewok

Totally agree on it

 

/ Signed

 

And as someone told and i agree even on that even fix the guild panel once for all would be good

Edited October 20, 2017 by MasterWontolla

Double signed.

 

Just remove the cap altogether. As Ula said, there's no point in it and I won't make a change for smaller guilds, because if they're not hitting even half of the current cap, they're sure as hell are not gonna get more players just because there's no more cap.

Signed

Very good idea

Would be great to see this.

I concur.

Disagree. Mega-guilds are bad for the game.

 

*** I do think that the member cap should be based on account, so guilds are capped with 1000 player accounts, not number of characters. If I have 20 toons in one guild, why should that be detrimental to the guild?

Edited October 20, 2017 by Rion_Starkiller

triple sign!!

- Way to many unguilded alts that feel very lonely

- If we are already having trouble on not keeping guild full server merges will turn that into Mission Impossible 6

- My low lvl alts will have no xp bonus, and I dont have the gal to ask an officer to ginv an alt lvl 1-10 while guild is at 980+ members

 

#increaseguildscaporremoveitalltogether

Edited October 21, 2017 by louisreis

Signed.

 

Personally I hate the guild admin side with kicking to free up space and then getting whispers mid-raid for re-invites, or telling new people who want to join that they can only bring their main in, or that they will have to wait a few minutes while we find some semi-inactive characters to kick. Increasing/removing the cap would make GM/officers' lives much easier. As people have said, this is only going to get worse with servers merges when everyone's toons will all end up in one place.

 

Yes you can argue it might lead to a few mega-guilds and that might be detrimental to smaller guilds for conquest, but you are already looking at changes to conquest that you say will make it fairer for all guilds. Rion's idea of capping the *account* numbers is a good one if you still want to keep guild numbers in check - so Mark with his three alts is happy and Bob with his 52 alts can have them all in one place and be happy.

 

 

Oh, and please, please fix the damn guild panel!

Disagree. Mega-guilds are bad for the game.

 

*** I do think that the member cap should be based on account, so guilds are capped with 1000 player accounts, not number of characters. If I have 20 toons in one guild, why should that be detrimental to the guild?

 

Given the number of alts that many people have hitting a limit of 1,000 doesn't require a large number of accounts. So over 1,000 isn't a mega-guild in a true sense. It simply allows the very large number of people who have 52 alts to place them all in a single guild.

 

I have no desire to place my characters in three or four guilds in order to have all of them guilded. I see no benefit to anyone in doing so.

 

That cap is what created the multi-guilds with a single name(varied every so slightly in each iteration of the guild) who dominate conquest on .. certain servers. I think 'that' is far worse for the game that allowing the count to recognize accounts as 1 rather than characters.

 

<Oops think I quoted the wrong one, was answering the fellow you quoted. ;p>

Edited October 20, 2017 by Kyrra_T

Ugh! The guild panel! I am the one who does all our guild notes, both imp and pub side for our guilds. Every time someone speaks, logs in, logs off...just fix it, please!

 

I really like the idea of the account counting as one instead of each character counting. That is how the sub bonus works, so why not members as well?

Signed.

With servers merging and players probably having so many alts, I can see the need for this.

However personally while this is important it should wait until after the merge. More things added to the merge will probably mean more downtime, more errors, just more things that can go wrong. Guilds probably should be next on the list. just remember that all such things mean time for BW to do, which takes away time from development in all other areas.

signed