Hello warriors!
A huge update has just been applied – we’ve expanded the guilds system and added Alliances! Also, now you can set permissions for control over the structures in your guild castles and invite offline players to the guilds.
Read below for details and see you in battle!
Introduction:
While working on improving the player level retention, we’ve started gathering and analyzing a lot of data relating its’ relation to being a part of a guild, the guilds’ size and activity of their members. We’ve come to several conclusions:
– Players tend to stay in the game for longer if they join a guild early;
– Player activity lowers as the guild’s size increases, leading to lowering the player level retention among the such guild’s members – players tend to drop the game faster than in the mid-size guilds;
– Big guilds recruit much more new players than the mid-sized or small guilds, which seems to be an obvious statement as the guilds numbers haven’t ever been limited;
– As a result to the former point: smaller guilds have no room to grow up and in edge cases are being forced to merge, or end up pushed out of the nation/server; it can lead to stagnation, dominant behaviors and potential community collapse if such a guild would disband in future
For those and other reasons, we’ve introduced the Alliance system, along with the guild members limit and Quality of Life improvements: offline notifications and permissions settings. We believe that most of the biggest guilds will turn into alliances, and smaller guilds will be able to form alliances with other smaller guilds, in effect being attractive enough for the new players.
As you can assume, the toughest part for us was setting the guild members limit. We’ve been discussing it for a long time and checked the data researches regarding the guilds size which provides the best retention rates of players and, luckily, it exactly covers our data.
We found out that the actual activity rate (we checked players who have logged in within last 30 and 90 days) fits pretty well for almost all guilds – and tends to decrease drastically as the guild size grows over the assumed limit.
Alliances:
– Up to 3 guilds in an Alliance - they can be created and managed in the Guild window;
– The State of War time is common for all GCs controlled by an Alliance, set by the Alliance leader. This change was made in order to prevent a potential nation-wide Alliance from controlling almost all GCs on a server and to give smaller guilds a chance to fight over them;
– A guild can’t compete over a province controlled by a guild belonging to the same alliance.
Guild members limit:
The guild members limit depends on the current guild’s level:
– Level 1 – 80 members
– Level 2 – 90 members
– Level 3 – 100 members
– Level 4 – 110 members
– Level 5 – 120 members
– Level 6 – 130 members
– Level 7 – 150 members
In the end, the top guilds can still maintain huge numbers by forming an alliance of 3 level 7 guilds, which will allow them having 450 members in total. At the same time, the starting member limit doesn’t punish the low-level guilds willing to engage in the server’s’ politics.
Offline notifications:
From now on, a guild with more than a maximum number of members won't be able to add more members until it has an empty slot. We know that some of the larger guilds will want to re-arrange into an Alliance of sub-guilds, so for that reason, we’ve added the offline notifications system. It allows you invite the players to a newly formed sub-guild whether they are logged in or not, and these players will be able to join it immediately at the moment when they will log in – as long as the guild isn’t full, of course. The system will be expanded in future, accordingly to the current needs. Also, we’re going to implement the in-game recruitment board soon, which will help the guilds recruit new players, and new players will be able to join a guild easier.
Objects control permissions:
From now on, guilds can set individual permission for interaction with objects inside a guild location: opening doors, moving through the doors (the ones which already offer such functionality: inner doors in the gatehouses and doors of the stone main building) and using the defensive devices. Permissions are being set separately per each layer of fortifications in order to give you more freedom in managing your property, under the following categories:
1. Guild controlling the province
– Officer
– Member
2. Guilds belonging to the Alliance
– No one
– Leader
– Officer
– Member
3. Nation players
– No one
– Ally player with the required minimum reputation
– Every ally player
Guilds soft lock:
The changes described above are a significant expansion of the guilds system and have increased the complexity of the guilds’ database structure. In order to be able to maintain it, we had to limit the occurrence of potential unpredictable edge case issues by introducing the guilds’ soft lock. Also, the soft lock is another step taken in order to promote playing on the native server and to prevent interrupting the other servers’ population and politics, so the native communities will able to stand the fight and grow.
From now on, a guild can:
1. Control the GCs only on the main server – changing the main server will cause losing all GCs controlled by a guild on the former main server. Every guild’s main server has been set to the main server of its’ leader unless it would lead to losing the currently controlled GCs – in such a case, the main server is set to the server on which a guild currently controls a province.
2. Create or join an Alliance only on the main server – changing the main server will cause leaving the Alliance. Also, Alliance can’t be created by inviting a guild which has set a different main server.
State of War at Skergard:
From now on, the rules of the Skergard’s State of War does no longer differ to other guild provinces, since maintaining 2 different core rulesets for such a complex system could cause potential unpredictable edge case issues.
Other changes:
– Enabled attacking and looting traitors in the capital cities’ safe zones
– Further improvements of the animations mixes – footwork with longswords and after stopping
– Fixed the pink objects appearing in the swamp area
– Fixed an issue allowing to attack party members in the arena
– Fixed an issue allowing to attack players in the arena’s safe zone