Dev Blog: Guild Quest Rework
Guild Quest Rework Dev Blog
Dear Settlers,
A Dev Blog provides a glimpse behind the curtain. It's written by our Gamedesign team and not translated to avoid information loss or unintentionally changed facts. This time, BB_BobMoriarty provides background information and explains certain development decisions about the new Guild Quest system.
Guild Quest Rework - information & details
The Guild Quest feature received a complete rework and we received a lot of questions and comments from the community about the new system. This post is intended to sort out any doubts players may have, and explain the feature in detail so everyone understands the way it works completely.
Pleased to meet you, Settlers! My name is BB_BobMoriarty, and I'm the designer in charge of the Guild Quest rework; and I've been following the development and feedback provided very closely on the feedback threads. I thought that this would be a good moment to address you directly to resolve and explain a few of the questions that have arisen over this period.
First of all, why was a rework of the Guild Quest system necessary?
With the old guild system, there were numerous concerns about guilds that were blocked because of inactive players, and inactive leaders who were not able to cancel the quests in case it was impossible to the guild to complete them. Generally, in these cases, guilds would earn very few guild coins, making the guild market close to irrelevant to them. With this rework, even if the leader is inactive, the intention is for any guild regardless of size and activity to be able to get a steady inflow of guild coins by completing Guild Quests on a daily basis. Additionally, by discarding the member tiers to get Guild Quests, all of the possible Guild Quests will be playable by everyone, giving a lot more variety to the feature.
How does the rework actually work?
Every day at midnight (GMT time) ** the guild will receive a task that has to be completed over the following 24 hours. If a guild member completes his task, he will receive the final reward via in-game mail when the time runs out at midnight (GMT time) of the following day. This final reward is conditioned by how many players complete their own tasks, compared to the amount of members the guild has. The bigger the participation, the bigger the reward. Since larger guilds will have the greater challenge; to coordinate all of their members in order to receive greater rewards. On a best-case-scenario, a 100-member guild with full participation can obtain up to 264 guild coins per member daily. That's more than double the reward offered in the previous iteration of the Guild Quests!
But my guild is very small. Would this mean that I'm being punished for not having a lot of members?
Not at all. We have reworked the balancing of the Guild Quest rewards so even smaller guilds will have their rewards boosted compared to the previous iteration. Even if your guild does not have many members, or completes quests with fewer participants, the amount of guild coins that you would obtain weekly will be higher than you would have obtained previously over the course of a week.
How are the Guild Quest rewards calculated?
We initially thought about including a linear reward progression based on members and percentage of completion, but we soon found that this would be way too unfair to smaller guilds, and way too generous to big guilds. It was clear that we had to find a middle ground so as many players as possible could participate and enjoy having a fair reward on the Guild Quest rework. To do this, we have opted opted for a different type of system that will give a decent reward to the smaller guilds that progresses to the full reward. This reward is then big enough to be attractive to be an incentive to make a guild grow, but not to be seen as a punishment for guilds who simply just want to play at their own pace.
Do these changes mean that kicking inactive players is encouraged?
Absolutely not. Under our perspective, playing in a guild is about having a good time with friends and people, and cooperate towards a common goal. These changes to the Guild Quest system should not affect the way you interact or play with your guild mates.
Has anything changed on the already existing quests?
In terms of quest requirements and individual rewards, no. They stay just the same as they have always been. However, the gem price to finish quests has been increased to reflect the potential reward obtained in the main quest, and to standardize the price for all of the quests. The new prices are explained as follows:
Hang on, the gem prices go up, but the individual rewards don't? That's very unfair!
The reason individual rewards have not gone up and have been standardized is to reflect the difficulty of the task given. Since the tasks have not changed at all, neither have the rewards. The reason why the gem price was raised was because they were initially calculated on the previous main Guild Quest rewards that were offered, and were balanced with the old values. In some cases, with the new balancing values some tasks would require about 8 gems to be completed in order to obtain a reward that would surpass on average the 100 guild coin mark. This would quickly devalue the market value of the Guild Coins, and would lead the players to not even bother completing the quest, but paying gems instead. We wanted to keep the game exciting for everyone, and reaffirm the market value of the Guild Coins. Therefore, the rise in price was necessary in this case.
Having a 24-hour limitation really puts a lot of pressure in our guild...
Guild Quests were never intended as a "main mechanic" and are only one part of the huge amount of content available in the game, so pace yourself as you normally would. Nevertheless, we are taking your feedback into consideration, to allow players to adapt their play style better to the new mechanics. We will keep a close eye on the feedback that you, the players, leave in the forums so please keep it coming!
Some quests are just unbeatable in 24 hours!
We are aware that this could be the case. We are thoroughly collecting data to further improve this feature and re-balance the quests at a future date to make sure that they can be finished in time and everyone can enjoy this feature.
What are the plans for "the infamous quests that nobody wants to do"?
As previously stated, we will observe and evaluate thoroughly. With all the data we gather, we will determine which quests are not attractive enough to our players and worthy of their valuable time, and will be reworked in the future.
Why don't you do guild-wide cooperation quests, or something like that?
We also thought about this approach, but we found that if we were to make these kind of quests, there would be a chance that one or two very advanced players may be able to complete the quest on their own for the whole guild, which pretty much defeats the purpose of collaborating as a guild to achieve the biggest reward. The system would be easily exploitable, and we fear that this may impact the feature. We are firm believers in teamwork and reward the dedication and joint effort of the guilds, so this is the system that we came up with instead.
Additionally, guild-wide quests would put a big strain on our servers technically, as we would have to handle much bigger amounts of data, impacting the game's performance. Since bringing a quality experience is one of our top priorities, we decided that doing that was too much of a risk.
Lastly, I would like to close this letter by stating how important your feedback it is to us. We like to browse the forums to see how you, the players, react to our features and our game. The good feedback, the bad feedback, everything helps! So I would like to personally send and a big THANK YOU to all of our players who keep believing in us.
Strength in numbers, settlers!
BB_BobMoriarty
**:
The first version of the Guild Quest rework does not reset at midnight GMT in all instances.
We will fix that with one of the next game versions.
