Moo Tang Clan: guild math?

Thursday, May 28, 2009

guild math?

The math behind mechanics can be interesting.

Imagine if you could invite anyone into a guild, and the larger the guild the bigger a bonus to the power of the members. A mage in a smallish guild for example might do 1% more damage, while a mage in a larger guild might do 3% more damage.

A simple bit of math. Net result would be a game which encourages larger guilds, even your basic zerg guilds.

Add a twist - make the mage bonus be dependent on the number of mages in the guild. Now it's likely that there would be some tendency towards specialist guilds, but not that much. Consider: a guild with just 20 mages would have the same bonus as a guild with 20 mages and 20 priests, while the latter would have priests on hand to help out with healing.

One more twist then - divide the bonus by the total number of guild members, mage or not. Now, a guild of just 20 mages might have a 2% bonus, while a guild with 20 mages and 1 priest would get a 1.9% bonus, and a guild with 20 mages and 20 priests would only get a 1% bonus.

With this arrangement there is an active discincentive to forming zerg guilds, and active incentive to forming specialist guilds.

The same math might be available on other factors too - perhaps a guild of mixed classes might instead specialise in one particular form of crafting, and another guild specialises along racial lines.

So .. what ramifications does this have on the game world, what are the subtle ways this might change the way the game is played?

3 comments:

Melf_Himself said...

I think that guilds in MMO's are more designed to be an extended friends list rather than a 'guild' in the traditional RPG sense.

I would, however, like to see more of the 'ye olde' style guilds, e.g. the Mage's guild, the Thieve's guild, etc. I think those sorts of guild, though, should probably be ultimately run by NPC's (to stop people from being excluded/have to apply on forums just to get access to the quests of the 'Mage Guild', etc).

Garumoo said...

Aye, the term "guilds" in MMOs bear as much accuracy as the term "quests". A closer term might be "Company" from the early 19th century, although today the term is too muddied and not much better.

I'd love to see more "ye olde" specialist guilds, especially if there could be multiple of the same type (eg. Orgrimmar Thieves Guild vs East Silvermoon Rogues Company).

Having quests available only if you're a member of the relevant guild .. an interesting idea! It could work with player run guilds based on size of the guild and accomplishments of the guild. Not much different effectively than how some raiding guilds can get into EoE and some cannot depending on attunement keys etc.

Verilazic said...

That's a really interesting thought. If you did something like that, you'd probably need to make some other devices available just for the social aspects that guilds currently fulfill. And imo, that'd be better than simply making it possible to be in more than one guild at a time. Keep it to just one guild; that'll make the decision important.