I will start by saying I did not find this discussed or answered in my browsing. If it has my apologies.
TLDR: The question is, can a Super hang out with more then one group?
So looking around I found The Titan Legacy [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/building-first-super-powered-family]over there[/url]. I of course planned to be in Phoenix Rising [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/phoenix-rising-initiative-redirect]over yonder[/url]. This led me to but all like, but I wanna join BOTH!.
Then I got to thinking about how my husband and I traditionally play MMOs. We have our own guild/sg/ect just the two of us. So naturally that doesn't allow me to join other SGs if I want to play with him (which I very much do).
Before you say make an Alt I want to halt you there. I tend to only play 1 character. I have all the slots on WoW on a server loaded. All my achievements raiding and questing are on 1. The others do crafting. On DDO, I have 13 level 4 or 7 toons holding junk and 1 completionist going epic completionist soon. I played a mage exclusively on EverQuest till Beastlords came out and got all the toys we mages begged for. Shelved the mage forever and went Beastlord.
So now to the meat of it. How does a Non Alting player or from a world view. How does an extremely active super be allied or in multiple groups? Will it be possible? The obvious answer is no, but lets assume for a moment the answer can be yes.
Second Life had groups and group permissions. It affected land entry rezing items in world and taking items out of worlds. I know Batman has his own layer he shares with Robin. Yet Batman also hung out at the Watch Tower too. Even villains were allowed to fight for the good of the world in the Watch Tower.
So the question is, can a Super hang out with more then one group? Can it be possible to limit Access to certain areas/items based on number of groups your part of? Example, in the Layer of the Cuddle Bunny he will grant full Access to every member no matter how their alliances may fall. Yet in the smoldering layer of the ever rising phoenix they might not let you into the vault if your loyalties lay anywhere else.
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
Hello Cute Kitsune, there are a couple of ways we can broach this subject. One way is game-world affiliations we call the reputation and faction system. While internally we haven't finalized exactly how far a players reputation with a faction can go, one of the highest level possibilities is to gain sufficient rep as to be awarded status or membership with a faction. This of course may not occur, if not, there might be a honorary membership that can be gained with a faction. Now there may be factions where this isn't possible either. It is something we will be discussing.
Another way we can approach this is through what Cityof...called Coalitions. A coalition consists of 2 or more Super Groups that have agreed to work together in some capacity. The most basic of these functions is a linked chat for the coalition. Each Super Group within the Coalition can also give permission to other member of the coalition to enter their base.
A third possibility may exist in a Super Group permission setting to allow "guests" to enter the super group base. Guests could be limited to an active player currently teamed with a super group member or it may be expanded to offering guest privileges to specific character names. This may be something we use as a basic way to invite players into a personal base or housing.
One other request that has been made is to allow for super group bases to have a common area, one that is open to anyone in the public. There are certain factors associated with this one that I'm not certain to the feasibility of this request, but it has been noted.
I hope this helps.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
That is a great question! Thanks for bringing it up.. I too an a single character player. I look forward to being able to build a wide and varied base of PLAYERS that I enjoy playing with but it is extremely likely that my SuperGroup is a smaller, more elite group. Just because my SG is small and compact doesn't mean we don't want the chance to connect with the player base at large.
I really hope the game keeps track of MANY of our inter-connectedness as players. Friends (people we team with often), People we enjoy fighting (enemies and enemy factions we've PvP'd)..
Crowd Control Enthusiast
It does in deed help. If you are able to implement this well it also opens up the possibility or a personal lair too.
One idea I have is this.
Each Account can have 1 Base.
Each Account is the sole owner of that base and true control can never be lost.
Each Account can be in up to 5 Super Groups.
The player may "Deactivate" certain SGs for characters and appear offline to that SG and be treated as not in the SG mechanically. This promotes RPing or taking a quiet evening to yourself. Activating or Deactivating a SG has a 5 minute cool down.
The Leader of the Super Group may pick any Account to be the "Home" of the group. If it is someone other then the Group Leader that person must be online and accept it. They can revoke permission at any time. They must be in the SG to allow it to be that SG's home. They may be home to only 1 SG at a time.
If not otherwise set the original SG leader's base is the home as long as they are still a member even if inactive. The Current guild leader has the same control over the SG Home as the person who owns the Base.
Accounts invest in Base improvements. They then can chose which of the 1-6 bases those funds are in. Once spent they are lock in unless that Account leaves that group. Any put into personal Base is forever locked.
If the Account leaves a group. Any investments will fade over 14 days at a steady pace and the SG will get a notification if this causes them to be over spent. The Account will be able to reallocate these investments as they become available over the next 14 days.
If that Account is kicked out the guild immediately loses all investments from that Account. The Account gets those investments back to reallocate over 14 days as if they had left.
Let me know what you think. I am mixing mechanics from a few programs and even a little from some linux permissions. Adding in a touch of how I would do it.
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
There's been much conversation about base features..
I specifically maintain the position that Guild purchases belong to the Guild. I dislike blurring the line of what belongs to a guild and what belongs to a player. If the guild wants a base the guild should use guild funds to buy/finance a base.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
I find it's worth mentioning that Guild Wars 2 has a system like this, the only difference being that it has no cooldown, and that when you're not repping a guild (or Standing Down, as their system calls it), you're still visible as being online in the guild roster, but there's a little strike through your online indicator, denoting the fact that you're not repping the guild at the moment.
It's a good system, and it makes a lot of people happy (especially those that have trouble concentrating on more than one or two characters), but the main complaint that a lot of people had (guild leaders and hardcore content runners in particular) was that it promotes a lack of commitment to any one guild, especially once you had joined more than three or so (I think the cap is either five or six). The various guilds that people had on their rosters were locked in a tug-of-war of sorts for the attention of their players, often leading to "comatose" guilds; they weren't truly dead, because their members were online, but only a mere handful of players repped them at any one time, usually not even enough to form a five-man content party.
One way to fix this could be to have custom channels that people can use in lieu of their guild chats, or make all guild chats visible at all times, in order to keep supergroup members in the loop, even if they're not repping at the time. The player can then decide how they want their chats displayed on their own.
(Please keep in mind that I'm writing my own personal ideas here! I'm just a comp-guy, I know nothin'!)
[color=#ff0000]Composition Team[/color]
I was thinking of how GW2 handles multiple guilds as well. Of course we would probably want to have the multiple SGs be based on a per character basis instead of by account. Plenty of players belonged to multiple SGs and we don't want to limit them to just 5 or so in total.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
A limit on number of SGs might make some sense on a per-server basis, but CoT is going the single super-server route.
Be Well!
Fireheart
D-Pad brings up most all of my fears. Player behavior and building is, for me, a commitment to creating a consistent social gaming. I suspect that the guild resource sharing would require much more scrutiny. I put 90% of my personal resources into the guild banking. I don't expect everyone to play like we do, but it does make telling people "no" a bit harder.
Also I really love guild unlocks (like those in Wildstar) that are based on your guild participation.. carrying dead (inactive) weight factors into that. I don't want to create competition between guilds for players in that way. Much less do I want players compelled to be over taxed unless they sign up for it.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
If something like this were used, I would hope it doesn't limit players who want to put different alts in more than five groups to do so, since I see no reason the game would disallow for that playstyle possibility.
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
Yikes. The L-word. I don't see why limits are necessary here.
I think an account-wide base is a very attractive idea, but I don't think that it should prevent an alt from establishing his/her own base for RP or whatever purposes (...not to say that was implied up-thread).
I also like the aforementioned idea of "guild-rep" on/off...muuuuuuuch better than "prestige on/off".
As you phase into mission, among a few other things that pop-up on your screen is "You are representing the Kick-@ss supergroup."
Type in your bind or shortcut to change that status and you get the pop-up, "You are no longer representing the Kick-@ss supergroup."
You'd get the same or similar notice when you log on.
What does that mean exactly WRT privileges, places you can/cannot enter, communication channels, status, etc? That can be in a separate layer or window or page of the U/I. Generally, I would anticipate a much more effective help system in CoT as compared to CoX anyhow, so a lot could be detailed there.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/26pBVBG.png[/img]
([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
TLDR: I'm Jaded and learned to distrust, this effects the way I play. Have ideas though.
I have been playing MMOs far to long to agree with this. In DDO due to a glitch during 1 update my Guild deleted it's self. Because the day it happened the I guild leader wasn't VIP the GM said the guild is lost they only restore those to VIPs. This happened weeks after I had dropped $100 on the game. In WoW I was part of a large guild of more then 60 active people at once and I was the main druid tank for them. The guild leader and his wife transfered servers stealing the guild's entire everything with them without warning. The guild reformed and arguably improved but still.
I personally am far more willing to invest resources into a guild if I know I can trust that the Guild Leader can't keep it for themselves. This has lead to the issue that started my thread. My husband and I keep everything hoarded to ourselves neither borrowing nor giving out to others. Not because we are selfish, but because we've been burned more then once. I believe strongly in Supporting the Guild. I do not believe in tempting the Guild's Leader into betrayal. I am trusting that a base won't just go poof with no system in place to "prove" what I invested. I would wager may people have been kicked from a guild the poured heart and soul into just to lose it all, it's common in MMOS.
My proposal is as such.
Currency in such that it is invested into Super Groups is linked to the Account (as explained in above Post)
Resources (Salvage) Placed into Super Group containers follow normal permissions and are considered Super Group property such as it is handled.
With this someone can chose to be generous and trusting. (Shut up and take my Salvage!) Supportive but cautious. (I think I'll place my investments here) Or just me "That Guy" (I'm so poor I have to spell it POR cause I couldn't afford to O's, please PLMEKTHXAFKBBQ). The reality being most will be somewhere in the mix.
In LARP the term used is "Sanctity of Merits". The idea being that you could lose you home/base/lair and all the stuff in it through roleplay. However you can always get a new one of the same value with a little time. This stems from the fact you have placed a certain amount of effort into the game and invested in your home over yourself. You can not control what happens IC or OOC to the other players you share a home with or if the ST's next plot puts a bomb in your kitchen.
I have not played Guild Wars 2, I did play 1 for awhile. I liked the Account based Guild system. Honestly I can not comment on how it works or doesn't. Can you give a list of Pros and Cons?
Your starting to get to the point where I think ones attention will drift to far causing what D-Pad was concerned about. My rational for 5+You is based on the following logic.
Myself because I'm evil and need some time to plot alone. (rubs tails together menacingly)
One for Family (Dynamic Duo)
One for casual play. (Want to run X it's 5am the server is dead? Sure!)
One for Hard Core Raiding (Raid nights 2nd Friday each week at 2700hrs no excuses!)
One for Crafting. (I'm a member of the S.S.M.A.W. [Super Science Meets Arcane Wooge])
One just because I can be, should be, love the name, got begged to (The just cause SG)
This is based on years of playing MMO's and the activities a Singlist, Deticatist, Focuseder, ... a um ... Someone who only plays 1 character really. This is my normal list of people I wish I could do things with. I don't know how the world looks from the eyes of an Altaholic.
A valid point I had thought about over lunch. (I started this posting am 9am) I think there should be 5 limit on Account SGs. Then a Limit of 5 Personal SGs (character personal) With a Total of 5 SGs per character. It sounds odd at first. The idea being that You can deactivate Account SG slots for a per character slot or the other way around. This would allow for flexibility while still limiting it to 5 per character. So someone like me would have 5 Account SGs but someone who alted a lot might have 1 Account one and each char would have 4 personal with or without overlap.
This lead me to thinking of guild roster display. Instead of saying "online" "offline" and "not repping". Make it simple. Active or Inactive.
Active = Online Repping for this SG at this time.
Inactive = All other times, offline, not repping, /afk /dnd
**(I also feel active hours this week/month/year statistics and contribution should be listed but that is a WHOLE different topic)** So back on topic.
5 SG Limit will be up in the air but there comes a point you need to place a limit. You cry Yikes L-Word. I say to you, Typical limit is 1 per character or account. I'm asking for 5. I'm trying to help remove limits. I am actually asking for what your wanting. Still limits are needed. Limit of 1 was too restricting but there are performance issues if 1 person was in 50 actively chatting SGs. Lets assume 50 messages over 60 seconds in each group. Now 2.5k messages is a noticeable load on a peak time. Lets assume your in an active club zone during a major party event. 400 people getting just as many messages along with all the flashing lights and powers going off. 1 million messages over 60 seconds with a limit of 50. Drop it down to 5 SGs and it becomes only 100k. Obviously these are just rough numbers but I've been in same very chatty guilds/sgs. I think of these kind of issues when I put forth advice. I've written proto-types for programs and am marred to a programmer.
Going out of state 9 days will read all and reply when back. Might have to consolidate my ideas into their own thread and evolve it. Talk to you all later.
The line between knowing and understanding is often blurred.
Cute Kitsune the Anti Villain of Phoenix Rising.
I have more fervor then empathy, I still like you.~Me to a friend
It applies here too, I'm passionate not hostile.
I can see a system where you can have *account* based SG groups and also *character* based groups. Not sure on the numbers, but that is something that can be worked out later on.
Hell, you could have it so that any limits are increased with a store purchase. So instead of it being just 5 account SG memberships (that you can flick between) and an optional 3 (again flick between representing when you want) "per character" SG memberships; you could increase that up to 10 Account, 5 Character SG memberships with a purchase.
Limits are useful though, because it gives you a starting point. And then you can try to work out additionals. Hell, it could be good to be able to upgrade a Character based SG to an "account" SG membership if you want to burn a permanent "Character" SG slot (so you could go to 6 account, 2 Character based for example).
Of course, this all depends if there are any limitations with SG memberships concerning alignments or not.
While we're discussing this, what about the other angle? Should there be any limit to the number of members that any SG can have?
I'd like to see it unlimited.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Technically, there may be good reasons to limiting them. A systems designer, I am not. Data management is often an SOB though, so maybe a challenge lives there?
Functionally, I don't know what's ultimately in-store for SGs, so no clue there either. CoX may or may have had good reasons on both sides, I really can't remember reading anything definitive.
As a sub and prospective SG leader, I'd be just fine imposing whatever cap I desired.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/26pBVBG.png[/img]
([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
CoH originally kept supergroups limited to 75 members. That cap was eventually raised to 150.
I strongly suspect the main reason for the relatively small numbers had to do with how PvP base raiding was supposed to work. Remember the original idea was that you'd theoretically have an entire supergroup to go head-to-head with another group in one of their respective bases. By keeping the group cap at 75 this would limit the total number of people in one instance to 150 max. Of course as we all know the entire base raid concept never really worked and once the Devs effectively gave up even trying to fix it they allowed the cap to double. By that time it didn't really matter - they probably could have let the cap slide up to 1000+ and it wouldn't have adversely affected anything.
So now we have CoT to consider. It's unclear if supergroup size will once again have to be dependent on any plans to have PvP base raiding or not. But for the sake of argument let's say that it won't and that the CoT Devs will be free to let supergroups be any size possible. Should they be "unlimited" as Fireheart suggests? There really isn't any technical reason why you couldn't hypothetically have every single character of CoT be in the same "supergroup".
But when the "rubber meets the road" as they say there probably ought to be an arbitrary upper limit just for the sake of sanity and/or reasonableness. Once you allow a guild/supergroup to get much past say 500 members it really becomes a matter of tedious organization and whether you even "know" that many people. I have recent experience with ESO's 500 member guilds and even the most active ones usually only have say 200-300 online with a couple of hundred in various states of "churn" at any given time. I'd say if you potentially allowed thousands of members it'd become almost the silly extreme I mentioned earlier of having virtually every character in the game also be a member of the same supergroup.
With all that I'd suggest a upper limit of 500 for CoT supergroups regardless of any other considerations. That would allow groups to have a huge number of active members/alts without becoming so large as to be semi-pointless.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I know from my time on the CoH Live Journal community it was quite common to put together a SG for a single team worth of players built around a theme. I even built one myself towards the end of CoH. All you had to do to make an SG was get someone to level ten, which could be done in an hour without power gaming. Not all these SGs had fully functional basses, but that is a different issue.
It was very possible to have 50 different characters in a dozen different super groups across multiple servers. I know that must seem odd from your point of view, but players like that were far more common in CoH than single alters. That's not a criticism, by the way. If you are happy just playing one character, it's none of my business.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
I had at least one character in the Legion of Catgirls on every single server. Some were neither cat nor girl, but the Legion didn't discriminate, as long as you could uphold the oath.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I wasn't a "heavy alter", but I would only have one or two characters on the go at any one point in time. There were times when I do wish that the cap for the character limit for an SG was higher (or that it was account based) so that I wouldn't have to kick a semi regular player over a "newbie" just because we hit the player limit for characters. Especially where a game for so long was "alt heavy" as a form of endgame it did boggle my mind.
Then again, the global chat channels did help combat this (to a greater/lesser degree) and keep people in contact with each other.
So to a fashion, that is all guilds/SG's are really... a place for people to gather and communicate with each other. There could well be *ingame* benefits of it, but nothing that really couldn't be dealth with via personal housing/neighbouring system and a global chat channel system (either per character/per account membership).
This is the thing as well that would be interesting... if the zone "splits" into instances how would that deal with larger SG's whose memberships are higher than the zone cap? How could it cope with all of those in one place? What would the difference be between that and a *global chat* meetup in game?
Would there be any difference there infact?
Its strange really, because in Wildstar, I can represent as my guild... and I can actually represent as one of the Circles (private chat channel) instead (this replace the guild name tag, although they don't have an icon to show).
So when you see someone as "Gangrel, The Elders" or "Gangrel, The Miners", you wouldn't necessarily know if I was showing as the guild or as the circle; although in this case, it might be a bit easier.
One thing you could do, and this is just an idea, is to have the game itself charge SGs a monthly fee (in Inf, or whatever we're calling it) for their base rent, like CoX did, via some NPC or another (e.g. the mayor, a City Hall rep, etc), then each SG tithes its members some amount of Inf to cover those costs. In that system, being in multiple SGs will take a toll on a given toon. You could also make the overall cost to the SG be a thing that gets more expensive as the membership of the SG increases in size. That way, SGs are encouraged to be smallish, and individual toons are encouraged to be members of a small number of SGs. Anyone who doesn't have the Inf when the rent get's paid goes into Inf debt, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
What purpose would be served by setting such limitations on SGs and SG members? Prestige was earned outside of the character's Inf-generation cycle. And what about the SG member that has to take a break from the game, like, if they are Deployed. Should they continue to be taxed while inactive?
I worry that taxing SG members for membership will not lead to small SGs, but NO SGs.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I never liked the fact that SG rent in CoX was paid using a separate currency in the first place, and I heard a lot of people echo the same sentiment at the time. Also the SG base salvage and components being their own separate system was clunky. I think people would have preferred just paying Inf for base rent in CoX, assuming it was a reasonable rate.
As for how to handle the inactive members, you could instigate a mechanic whereby your toon goes officially inactive if they haven't logged in for over two weeks (for example), thus they don't get counted towards the SGs membership size for rent calculation purposes nor does that individual get tithed.
As to the question of "Why bother? If it costs Inf people will simply avoid it." that assumes there will be no tangible benefit to being in a SG in the first place, which I hope there will be. I used to use my SG base to TP around town in CoX all the time, and to craft IOs, and to store my salvage and other stuff, etc. If being in an SG equates to MORE storage space for you the toon, EASIER crafting, more efficient travel options, etc, then I think people will want that. For example, you could have a single teleporter or other such device in your bat-cave, but the SG base has like ALL of them, so the individual base gets you SOME convenience, but the SG gives you WAY more. You might have a bat-computer in your personal lair that can give you say three radio-type missions per day, whereas the SG base has one that can give three more, for a total of six repeatable missions per day if you're in a SG. In your SG base you might have a personal locker that you can use to store more stuff than you can carry or put in your personal lair, so that's a benefit. Stuff like that.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Actually, I really [i]really[/i] hope CoT uses a separate system like prestige for SG bases. Although I am the first to admit that as implemented the prestige system had problems (restricting the earning of inf while in SG mode and a laughable conversion rate from inf to prestige most notably), but the real beauty of it was it allowed everyone to contribute to the SG independent of their level. If the basses had just ran on Inf, there is little low level characters could contribute to funds.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
I think that a combination of both Inf and Prestige could work. But Prestige would have less importance in "buying stuff" for the base than it had in City of Heroes.
The Prestige would be earnt in the same way, and it would be a method of *unlocking* features. So if you have 200K Prestige, you could unlock X/Y/Z items, if you have 400K Prestige, you could unlock more of them. This would not prevent Prestige from being used (spent) though for "special" base purchases, something that would affect the whole SG, even when they were outside of SG base.
To be honest, even if the bases ran on "prestige", there was little that low level players could contribute to the bases anyway. The conversion ration from Inf to Prestige was too high for a lowbie to contribute. And as Prestige scaled with Influence earning even if the
If anything, this would be the ideal time to get changes into the system. Before they go live.
How about we allow each hero to be part of one supergroup or villains have their villain teams.
That is where their affiliation, reputation and base perks come from.
On top of that a hero can for a limited time period be 'on loan' to another supergroup because they are doing a mission or taskforce with them (and being part of the same communication structure is useful). Being on loan does not entitle you to base resources, but it does grant access to the base perks for the duration (so you can't access the storage vaults of the other supergroup, and you may or may not use their crafting equipment, but if the other group has a game wide buff then while on loan your hero will share in that buff as well.
Then there is a larger number of superteams that each hero can be part of. This is a mini supergroup without the base and other amenities, but with the ease of teaming up and communication perks of a supergroup. Each superteam would be a group of players you regularly team up with and that you can check if they are online, and quickly meet up with if you decide to team up. Such teams can earn their own perks like the aforementioned group teleport anchor.
Personally I believe the game should support a guild as much as possible while imposing as little as possible. For "Guild bases" I would rather say screw it and make it based on personal housing, and whomever owns the house can "host" for the guild, like the bat-friends hanging around the cave, or X-men going to school in Xavier's mansion. Don't trust some random stranger who invites you to their SG during the tutorial? Easy, don't join, they won't steal your stuff. The most important thing a "guild" needs is organization tools. For the most part, that's a custom chat channel and a roster UI. This is a superhero game, there should not be so much "loot" that there needs to be a guild bank, or even if there is, it should not be so valuable that it is worth "stealing" or so difficult to replace that it matters if someone stole it. A character should be able to affiliate with as many or as few "supergroups" as they desire, or will have them.
One thing I would think would be cool is if when you gain or lose faction with NPC groups, half that amount is also granted to your supergroup(s) members, split evenly among them. What you do has a bearing on those who you associate with, and what they do has a bearing on you. Guilt by association an all.
On an opt-in basis.
Would be pretty cool for an SG of like-minded alts such as the mighty TCCAT.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/26pBVBG.png[/img]
([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
The most interesting thing to me about starting with an idea like this- and we've seen it coming up a lot in threads - is the idea of starting here with the launch and maybe in the future, considering if you could expand it to have half of the bonus go to one SG and half to another, if that option becomes widely requested.
Or to take the basic idea and expand it in later big content updates. Which for now I am referring to as "Titanic updates."
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
Titanic updates. I like that. When Titans update, even the Gods must patch...