Outlaw secondary guilds.

[frosty dome]

This whole I have one guild named exactly the same with one lower case letter, or a number afterwards is a clear affront to the guild cap that is already in the game. The guild cap requires resources to extend. Outlaw the secondary guilds entierly. The game has become ZvZ instead of 20v20 or 15v15 to maintain ports. It's bad mechanics with people defending ports all day instead of being in the open ocean seeing what the game has to offer.

[ionic hill]

Make it so dupe Guilds can’t participate in things!
-20% lower penalty!!
Making a report system that once reported enough it can be DEEMED as a duplicate!

[frosty dome]

-90% penalty

[quasi folio]

Problem is
Sister guilds are kinda left alone since YEARS

Changing the rules now would seems weird

I'm pretty sure this will be not implemented and even if it is, people will figure ways around it

[rain rune]

Also what is the difference between sister guilds and friends/allies

[fallow scaffold]

you see when you max out the slots in your guild at 70, and you still have more people who want to join and play, you make a second guild. it eats up a trusted guild slot too

[crimson burrow]

THİS. I was going to write the exact same thing, word for word. The guild I'm a member of captured a port the other day, and then after the shield wore off, one of those sister guilds with the same name tag (with the uppercase thing) attacked us. We didn't stand a chance. 70 vs 140 is just unfair for single guilds like us. This whole sister guild BS needs to be taken care of.

[ionic hill]

Thank you that what I’m saying, it’s killing smaller guilds and new players to encourage them to join lower ranked guilds and just join the top best one and start the sister guild
Thing…
It’s lower any chance to even own a port for a week for guilds as big as 70..that’s what’s killing this game unless you like be a subject to someone else’s agenda..
I said it once and I’ll say it again but the double guilds is what killing the ambition of new players to explore and learn what the game has to offer.

[smoky quarry]

My only point against this argument is this would essentially just ban the use of using similar/duplicate guild names. If you have two guilds named XyZ/XYZ you just change one to XXP,green tag them and call them an alliance member. This is not a new concept to MMOs and it’s not really something you can enforce without going on a crusade and killing the community in my opinion

Big groups=more players = lots of money for dev man. Essentially outlawing large groups of players isn’t exactly a money maker

I personally think they should make port battles guild vs guild regardless of what faction you are in. The guild’s that rely on another guild(s) to do their port battles would be against this and I understand that but in my opinion if your guild cant field the numbers to defend their port you shouldn’t have it anyways. Use your alliances to fight in tension phase but the battle should be up to the guild that holds the port. This pushes newer players and guilds to actually grow and learn PB mechanics and not just make friends with people that can do it for them.

[ionic hill]

No offense but new player sail to Fiji and to the starting water and call it a day while watching everyone else Zerg and no life the game 🙂 I agree these idea Mike but then again if you fix Guild system it allows for less greed that happing…

It isn’t about out lawing them out of the game it’s about balancing them out to evenly to other guilds without punishing players to hard (but greed kills devs and community).

Second rate ships are faster than Fourth Rate ships.
Example:Neptuno with one upgrade can go as fast as Red Arrow forcing you to use upgrades with no strategy just Meta builds or pay to win or slave to win methods. You times that simply by two your screwed that’s not okay..they’re doing it at levels above 70 which is far ugly.
There’s no reason we should have a fight for 12 mins with friends and 30 other people fight ya less than 2 mins and get pinched by other guilds including Trading guilds lol.
It’s just so unfair and terrible I went from being able to run black flag to being bullied into peace like other players making the experience overall not fun.
And a PVE game not giving black flag players who aren’t just being A hole Pirates.

double up guilds is like double up upgrades you shouldn’t be able to upgrade like Triple reload speed with perm seal/reload upgrade/ the cannons/ special crew. It’s OP and there’s no skill involved just knowledge.

[quasi folio]

Problem is, even you outlaw sister guild, they could operate with different name with same leadership

Let say one guild called XXX and another called YYY
XXX and YYY founder are friend
They can gang you like sister guild do, without actually having same name. So the sister guilds can just masquerade as new guild but in reality its the same circles.

These kind of things exists and happen. The only way to mitigate it is to balance things out, but how can you balance open world gankings? How would the game prevent a 70 v 140? Now that's the question you want to ask the developers. Banning sister guilds with same name will just make ppl do sister guilds in disguise. It wont work

[stray saffron]

I’m anti sister guild but I don’t know how you effectively moderate the practice in a way that doesn’t have a collateral damage ratio that is palatable.

[limpid ridge]

If guilds are within the same faction, how do you want to force them to have diferent allies/enemies?

(If you're pirate)

They also can form an alliance, if you're yolo you wont win.

[atomic elm]

just rise the cap, no more sister guild. Oo

Game is already zerg vs zerg, sister guilds have no factor over it

[crimson burrow]

The solution is simple: just remove the whole “trusted guild” mechanic. I understand it kind of damages the point for guilds that are in the same faction, but otherwise it’s just unfair.

Change it so that the port battles are 70 vs 70, exclusively between the attackers who want the port and the defenders who want to keep it. Make it so that only the attacking guild can raise the tension. During the port battle, no one else besides the attackers and defenders should be able to enter the general area of the port where the battle takes place. Any additional support tips the scale and makes it unfair.

This way, the side with more skill wins instead of the annoying “more ships = win” mechanic.

[stray saffron]

😵‍💫 NOPE! Keep it the way it is now thanks!

[eternal jetty]

how exactly do you enforce this lol

mechanically, in-game, what is the difference between an allied guild and a "secondary" guild?

[eternal jetty]

this.

There's effectively zero difference between "sister guilds" and allied guilds within the same faction when it comes to the game. Allied guilds cooperate in all the same ways as sister guilds. Trade port tension/battle assistance, shared PVP and PVE squadrons with communication via faction discords, etc.

[eternal jetty]

If you limit it to solely the attacking/defending guilds in a 70 v 70 wherein nobody else is able to enter the area to help with tension or join the port battle, you are going to kill the game. Small guilds will be unable to gain experience in fights, particularly port battles. They'll be unable to take or hold ports, making it harder to recruit new players. This will not remove "more ships = win" in any way. Even the most active guilds almost never have all 70 players online, so all you'd be doing is making fights smaller and preventing smaller guilds from participating in the game in a meaningful way.

[outer parrot]

Just make the map bigger, you would spread out the guilds, keep the growing player base on the move with the map expansion, if you take more ports now your going to have to have more to hold and more to lose. The map size the way it is, is pretty small when you have 1200-1500 players online.

[eternal jetty]

I think the cap is good because it limits the effectiveness of allied guild support (including "sister guilds").

If a guild wants to take a port in a 20v20, they need to have 10 of their own people in the fight in order to have 10 players from Allied guilds. If that's a sister guild or another allied guild, it makes no difference. You still need 10 from the main attacking guild.

Let's say guild [ABC] has only 8 people online. Their subsidiary, [abc], has another 8 online. [ABC] already built tension, but they can't bring in a full 20 to the port battle because they don't have enough of their own players on and they can't move players from the [abc] guild in time. Even if other allied guilds are around, [ABC] only having 8 players limits their team size to 16.

If the member cap is removed, then this scenario doesn't happen. All of [abc]'s members are moved to the main guild, which now has a massive number of players and would have 16 players online, enough to get the last 4 from allied guilds. Removing the member cap worsens the numbers balance when it comes to sister/allied guilds supporting each other

[eternal jetty]

I don't see how this solves anything. Fast travels exist and the scaling difficulty of defending multiple ports simultaneously already exists.

This is the same reason why I oppose the idea of capping the number of ports a single guild can capture. The more they take, the harder they are to defend. It adds an element of risk vs. reward

[outer parrot]

You would increase the amount of ports, therefore increasing distance and giving smaller guilds more room to hold their own ports even as sister guilds, you would increase the amount of ports one guild can take which in turn increases the risk for them to try and hold said ports, we are saying the exact same thing…?

[limpid ridge]

If you don't cap the ports a guild can control, then you should add a mechanic so only the guild who owns can defend.

[eternal jetty]

Again, this makes it so that smaller guilds trying to build up and recruit get the worst of it. They won’t be able to partake in a major part of the game in a meaningful way.

[eternal jetty]

So not just increasing the map in size, but adding more ports as well? Sure, I could see that helping.

[outer parrot]

Smaller ports, we can’t get rid of sister guilds we might as well make more smaller ports and a few larger ones, people are limited on fast travel, maybe working on that too, making certain ports that are key competitive ports to take, a further distance that requires fast traveling nearby and sailing to, that could slow down the assistance in a port battle.

All just ideas though.

[crimson burrow]

idk why you keep saying this. but the effect would be the exact opposite solo guilds would have more room to breathe not every guild is keen to work with multiple guilds/dont have enough members to create a sister guild solo guilds dealing with 2/3 guilds at once is just unfair veteran guild members can help out gain both in game xp and pvp experience to new guild members idk why you keep saying tihs would effect new players experience

[eternal jetty]

Which part are you referring to, specifically?

Preventing "trusted guilds" from assisting in port battles?

[limpid ridge]

Or at least making you cannot change trusted guilds in more than a week, so certain guilds CANNOT be on every battle by changing it

[eternal jetty]

Let me try to clarify this, assuming it's what you're referring to @crimson burrow . The reason this harms smaller guilds is because, thanks to the "trusted guilds" system, a smaller guild can receive help from more-established allies to take and hold a port. If you have started a new guild and have only 5 active players with the ships and experience necessary for a port battle, you can ask your faction allies to help by shielding you while you raise tension on the port, then help in the port battle itself by filling out the rest of the team in a 10v10.

This assistance from established groups often makes the difference in getting newer guilds their first ports. Having a port of their own lets them build up resource+gold income, grants their players a centralized base to operate out of (facilitating collaboration and trade between guildmates), and- critically- earns the smaller guild some points on the season.

Those influence points not only help the guild directly through gold rewards, but help them appeal to more players looking to join a guild. New players are far more likely to join a military/pirate guild if that guild holds a port and is doing well in the rankings.

If you prevent these smaller guilds from getting assistance from faction allies, they won't be able to compete for port battles. They won't be able to win a 10v10 with only 5 players and, since they can't get the port, will have a harder time recruiting new people for all the reasons I just gave. Removing the "trusted guild" mechanic only makes it harder for smaller guilds to compete and grow.

[eternal jetty]

If someone is in a "solo" guild unwilling to work with their faction allies, I'm not sure how they plan to take a port in the first place, let alone defend it. Teamwork between guilds of the same faction is a major feature around which the game was designed. I'd wager this was done specifically to facilitate mobility within the factions, with newer guilds able to build up strength quickly by working effectively with more-established allies.

I agree that there is often an imbalance in the number of active players between opposing factions, but preventing allies from working together does the exact opposite of helping the smaller guilds within a given faction.

[limpid ridge]

Maybe if you only have 5 players to take a port, you shouldnt be able to take a port.

Better make it that a solo guild who fights all PB can control all the ports and end this faster

[eternal jetty]

End what?

[limpid ridge]

For those of us who report problems with the PB system, we only have to follow the battle logs to see the same names fighting in all the port battles.

The trusted guilds system is like a ‘help me, daddy’ system in which veteran players (from the server that has been active for several years, unlike EU1) assist, tank and direct the entire battle, leaving the guild that owns the city simply hidden nominally until they win the game.

Is it really a faction supported by several guilds? Or is it really just one, abusing the mechanics to maintain the faction's hegemony for itself?

Perhaps changing the ‘trusted guilds’ system so that you cannot change it in a week, and ‘one guild’ is not ‘trusted by everyone’ in all battles, but rather we can see a variety of clans helping and defending each other, changes the situation.

If your clan cannot hold the port on its own, perhaps it does not deserve it and maybe an enemy is much better prepared to control it.

If you always have to rely on THE SAME clan to defend all ports, simply remove the mechanic that a clan can only hold 3 ports and let the entire map belong to it.

[eternal jetty]

Maybe I’ve missed a patch or something but on NA1 as of the end of season 2 guilds could hold as many ports as they wanted- certainly more than three

I think the difference is that even if one guild is calling the shots to get a smaller allied guild the port, that is a boost to the small guild in the way of experience, influence, etc. The same still holds true when it’s the big guild taking the port with the help of the little guild.

The alternative is that people who aren’t in the big competitive guilds simply don’t get to participate in one of the main mechanics of the game because it’ll only ever be the large, established guilds in the port battles. There’d be no room for the smaller ones to grow, let alone overtake

[limpid ridge]

Isn't ‘losing’ one of the best ways to learn how to fight?

Mentoring is certainly a good way to accelerate your learning exponentially, but...

When do you draw the line between ‘mentoring novices in battle’ and ‘fighting for your figureheads"?

[torn pebble]

It depends how hard you lose or win. If you lose too quickly or too hard, you probably won't learn much. Actually close matches are where you can learn a lot.
The Issue with NA1, there is little to no competition for Port Battle against Kai faction.

[limpid ridge]

Wich is the reason in your server case?

[torn pebble]

Hard to say, the reason is probably multifactorial. Too many players/veterans in Kai faction ? No leadership in other faction ?

[grim topaz]

i think the NA1 server will die soon because of the WO, WO2, DVS, DV$ guild fron kai, they are insanely toxic constantly in general chat, and they have way more numbers than the other factions so nobody can fight them and stop them from harassing and dominating the whole server, what the hell are the devs doing? they should monitor behavior like this and do something about it, not just let it happen, it is going to kill the game eventually

[limpid ridge]

Well, you can change to EU1, and obbey their same label in espaniol, or try to fight as pirates or antilla (kai its non-existent here), but the problem keeps being the same

[grim topaz]

EU1 is even worse, and im guessing the RU server is even worse than EU so no thank you, also the reason you're replying this way, let me guess you're a part of either WO or DVS

[quasi folio]

btw i would say what you said is true
thankfully im a pve player 😄

[grim topaz]

well it's because it is true, people from those guilds are trying to shut down anyone who speaks against them

[smoky quarry]

I’m sorry but most of these issues come from stubbornness. This discussion happens in every game ever created that can have “large” guilds or groups.

I don’t think the players who band together because they enjoy having large fights should be punished because the stubborn 6 man Guild is upset they can’t compete against a guild of 25+. Every small group has to ability to join another small/medium group and become a bigger group. How do you think large groups are formed?

Some also seem to forget or just don’t realize that “gaming community’s” are a common thing these days. I know players on EU1 and NA that are falling under the “big guild” category and they are groups that have been established in other games for years and their player base jumps game to game. You are not going to break these groups up. I recognize 4-5 groups in this game as established groups Iv seen in a handful of other games over the years.

[eternal jetty]

You’re missing my point. The issue isn’t that the small guilds will lose PBs, it’s that they won’t get the PBs in the first place because only the big guilds will have the numbers for them

[eternal jetty]

The “unfightabla Kai Zerg” lost oneg a few days before the season ended. They lost nisogora a few days before that. Even more recently, they were unable to tension Bord Radel for multiple attempts in a row because they didn’t have the numbers to beat the Antilla fleet. The server is healthier than it’s been in months.

[grim topaz]

sounds like you're part of the big zerg of either WO or DVS since you're litterly defending them, because it doesn't affect you at all from the sound of it, and who cares if they lost towns at the end of a season, during the end they don't really matter as much as early season to mid, the fact that they have 2 main guilds and 2 sister guilds makes them by far the strongest guilds on the server, i don't even think the Crosswords pirates are as big

[eternal jetty]

Nice ad hominem. I’m going to ignore it

Would you like to address the actual points I’ve made up to this point or would you like to continue ignoring them?

“Banning secondary/sister guilds” is unenforceable and meaningless because they function the same way as any other allied guild.

“Removing trusted guild functionality” would make it more difficult, not less, for small guilds to fight back against the larger/more powerful ones.

[grim topaz]

i never mentioned anything of banning or remove a guild function that i know of, they just need to split them up and balance out the factions, because right now it's not very balanced at all

[eternal jetty]

There is no functional difference between two "sister guilds" and two allied guilds with cooperative leadership.

Nearly all of the proposed solutions in this thread would worsen the problem.

1. "Dissolve the sister guilds" (OP's suggestion). There's no way to enforce this since players can just start a new guild with a different tag, move to another allied guild, etc.

2. "Increase the cap so that sister guilds aren't needed" (Alasson's suggestion). The issue with this is that, with allied guilds, you still need to have enough people online in one guild to raise tension and get half the slots in a port battle before you can bring in trusted allies. If the cap is raised above 70, it's going to worsen the current imbalance astronomically because these large groups will reliably be able to pull together enough players to raise tension and take all the slots in a PB.

Let's say guild ABC wants to take a port. They've got 15 online of their 70 total. Their sister guild, abc, has another 15 online. Instead of having 30 players to tension the port, only one of the two guild is going to be tension-flagged, and it will take twice as long.

If they want to take a 40v40 port, they won't be able to do it because having only 15 ABC members online means they can only bring another 15 allies into the port battle for a total of 30.

If you raise the member cap, allowing ABC and abc to merge to form a 140 player guild, these managerial difficulties disappear and thus big guilds will become impossible to dislodge.

... will follow up with #3 in a new message due to character limit

3. "remove the trusted guild mechanic" (Hunkster's suggestion). Preventing guilds from being aided by their allies in port battles, as I've already gone over, just makes it harder for guild with fewer active players to compete against "the zerg." This one's fairly straightforward. If one guild has 30 active players and another has only 20, then the smaller guild is going to lose every port batle because they can't call upon their other small allies to fight the "zerg" of the more active guilds.

4. This hasn't really been mentioned here, but I've seen it proposed elsewhere. "Limit the number of ports a guild can take." The tradeoff of taking more ports is that, since a guild can only have one battle time setting, it makes those ports much harder to defend. That's how WO. ended up losing multiple ports at the end of the season; multiple ports came under attack from multiple factions and they didn't have enough players online to get full rosters into all of those port battles. Taking more than a couple of ports is a big risk.

If the goal is to make it so that the big alliances are less dominant, all of these suggestions do the exact opposite.

The only suggestion I've seen on here that I believe would actually help is adding more ports (with or without an increase in overall map size). With a larger map, the difficulties a large group has in holding more ports means that it will become exponentially more difficult for a single guild to control large percentages of the map. Holding 4 ports is quite demanding, so if there are more ports to go around, holding 4 will have less of a negative impact. However, the concern here is balancing it so that holding ports is still meaningful. There are already several ports in the game that, at least on NA1, are largely ignored by the stronger guilds because these ports don't have much economic flow or are annoying to defend due to their PB layout. To an extent, though, this is a good thing because it means the smaller, growing guilds can fight over these ports without worrying so much about a massive fleet of experienced players showing up to spoil the party.

imo the real issue, and I think the OP was talking about this, is that a single port being available for attack means that the entire faction shows up, which obviously favors whichever faction has the most active players regardless of what guilds they are in. Early in season 2 on NA1, ZRO didn't even have a full roster- only about 12-15 players total- yet they were able to build tension on Masadora because they had the support of the rest of the pirate guilds. This gave them sufficient screening to raise tension before Antillan guilds with more players could do so.

(Though it's worth noting that a contributing factor in that case is that pirates, unlike other factions, can raise tension on a port by destroying merchant ships, but that's a different discussion for another thread)

[grim topaz]

ok these are some good points, but could they possibly to do stop this from happening then? but i think a bigger map would help a lot, i know they are going to develop the endless season in the 3rd quarter but i don't feel like it's going to be a massive expansion of the map with more ports etc but we'll see...

and yes as you mentioned i have seen the suggestion of limiting the amount of ports a guild can take but i don't think that one will work
i still think they need to somehow enforce the numbers of each factions, or add like faction specific buffs or something to make it more appealing to join idk, i never liked in mmo's where people just stack into one single faction

I've also mentioned it before about the amount of toxicity in general and the impersonation of other players also fuels the fire with all the uneccessary bs in general chat

they could maybe add like a small buff for factions lacking manpower to encourage people to split up into all factions and not just stack into one

[eternal jetty]

As to how to mitigate the issue of faction-wide zergs, I'm not sure what the best solution would be. I hate to comment here without offering my own take on how to mitigate the issue, but I decided to throw my hat in the ring because I believe the suggestions given so far would have the unintended effect of intensifying the faction zerg rather than lessening it.

Perhaps the pending flag rework will have some influence on the port tensioning/battle mechanics. We'll have to wait and see on that. Perhaps adding more ports on the map will mitigate the problem.

I do think it's worth pointing out that, to an extent, these dominant phases come and go naturally. When one faction is dominant, it leads others to band together in temporary alliances to even out the numbers. On the NA1 server, we saw this in season 1 when Antilla and Kai worked together to even out the odds against the massive numbers of Pirates. We saw this in season 2 with Antilla and Spain working together to even the odds against Kai, so on and so forth. Controlling a large portion of the map means a guild's players have to be extremely active to defend all those ports. This causes more of their players to get burnt out with the game. I think the game will continue to have some degree of self-policing over time.

As for toxicity, as a general rule I try to avoid it when it pops up. I've certainly seen players (of all factions, frankly), get nasty with each other since season 1 and it's unfortunate. Improvements to the profanity filter and especially moderation should help in this regard but that's been pretty well agreed upon by the bulk of the playerbase for a while, as far as I can tell.