/5char

I personally think that Guild Alliances would help out the small/medium guilds if they were implemented. Made a post about it in the suggestions section - http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=761490

Check out my suggestion for alliances a couple of posts down - I was thinking of guilds like yours when I made it.

Currently, many folks in smaller guilds feel "shut out" of Conquests. IMO, telling them to leave their guild and join a larger one is not the answer....guild merges/absorbs can get messy and can be kind of a huge hassle. (Besides, there is nothing wrong with actually being fond of the guild you're currently in, even if it's not huge.) My solution would be to introduce Guild Alliances. Sorry for using a WildStar reference here, but the quickest thing to compare them to (for me) would be circles in that game. They do NOT have the same functionality as guilds (no bank, etc...) so guilds in that game very much still serve a large purpose. Max member size would be no larger than max guild size, to prevent mega guilds from forming alliances and destroying everyone else. This could also have a potential positive side effect on, well, how people actually treat each other in game. Seems to me you might think twice before you trash talk another person or guild if you might need to ally with them later! Essentially, everything for alliances would be copied from guild functionality, minus maybe one or two QOL features like banks. The social panel would need to be reworked slightly to allow a tab for guilds and another for alliances; and a drop down allowing a player to "represent" either their guild or alliance would also need to be added. Whichever "tag" you're wearing...that's where the conquest points would go.

It would be one thing if the "new" people actually wanted to be there, but it seems that a lot of them don't. Faster queue pops just for the sake of faster queue pops = not what people were after.

What would people think of something like this as a reward? Effects that you could add to your gear - similar to dyes. Reusable, but character bound. Stuff like..lightning, fire, etc. It would take care of the concerns about reskins - because you'd be applying it to the gear you already like.

https://i.imgflip.com/aw6mj.jpg Lol.

Unfortunately, this would be exploited to h%%l and back. :/

They could set the limit of the alliances to the max guild member size. Or even if they didn't, it could make for some interesting server "politics." People might actually start caring more about how they treated people in other guilds.

I think a lot of the fussing over the price of the ships could have been avoided if there was some sort of "guild alliance" option built into this system (ships and conquests.) That way, people who are legitimately attached to their smaller guilds (maybe it is a bunch of real life friends) - could hook up with other similar guilds and work together to do this stuff. The prices, etc, would stay the same. Maybe eventually they would want to merge with the guilds in the alliance - but they wouldn't be forced to.

They mentioned it in one of the blogs, and said it was coming sometime after 2.4, but Musco said in one of the streams recently that it is NOT happening. The logic given was that too few people were hitting the weekly cap for it to be worth it.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=656371

I actually think looking at it that way is somewhat of a mistake, and a little shortsighted, for the following reason; I kind of view a games playerbase/community as an ecosystem. Each different playstyle/part of this ecosystem has its place, and if you lose something in that ecosystem (your hardcores in this case,) it has ripple effects. I just don't think it's quite that simple.

One thing I didn't see mentioned here is the possible use of battle rez. It's really tricky to pull off if you're not in voice with the person you're trying to rez...but if you can pull one off, especially on the voidstar bridges - you can buy yourself a bunch of extra time, depending on who you rez.

I think you're right that it surprised them, but in all honesty, it really shouldn't have, because I personally don't do GSF, but even I remember a lot of these same issues being brought up before it was even released, and nothing was changed. It's not ALWAYS a good idea to change things based on the reaction from your playerbase, but it seems to me that in this case, the feedback you guys gave them was completely on target.

The sad thing is, if you read waaaay back in their posts, solo queuers and groups of less than eight were supposed to be able to queue for team ranked with their "flexible" matchmaking system. IIRC, it was supposed to even pull people in from the regular queue if it absolutely had to, to make a match happen. But trying to put together a queue system that complex (well, for BW, anyway,) well...part of me wonders if that isn't why they were late putting it out in the first place. (Which of course caused its own pvper exodus, as many of us remember.) I mean, look at what happened when they tried to 16 man PvE group finder. Anyway. It still boggles my mind that they think that PvP guilds (those that still exist) not having any structured PvP content available for groups larger than 4 is ok. If PvE guilds were to suddenly find out that all they could do = flashpoints, it would destroy the PvE community the same way it destroyed ours.

This was one of my favorites...ever have one of those Civil Wars where you are just slightly outmatched enough for the whole thing to be an uphill battle? You *almost* kill the defenders fast enough to cap but can't quite pull it off? I was on my mid level slinger...we were just about to hit "need a three cap" territory, just a few ticks away. It was cap another node or lose time. I had just died and was respawning, and noticed their team was, for whatever reason, fighting off the node towards *their* spawn (not ours.) So did one of my teammates who had respawned slightly before me and ran straight to mid and started capping. But wait! One of their defenders actually noticed and comes running back to the node. Got a couple of feet away from it, too - just in time for me to get there and FLASH BANG TO THE FACE. If I'd been a couple of seconds later they'd have stopped the cap and it would have been a loss. We managed to hold both for the rest of the match and turned what should have been a loss against a slightly better team into a win.

Which, ironically, often keeps the threads of the very complainers they are complaining about...on the front page. And then we get complaining about too many complaint threads. Sometimes, the prudent thing to do is to let go of the idea of always needing to prove oneself right/someone else wrong.

I would, but that would be too technically challenging. I'll put it on my Wall of Crazy, though!

I'm expecting a lot of posts just like this one over the next week or so, sadly...

Yeah, I know. I didn't mean to imply you were trying to make him feel bad. But, as you found out, people can get defensive when they're questioned like that.

Lol, you laugh, but I've actually used similar logic for folks coming back in champion and battlemaster gear. Instead of OMG THE OLD GEAR IS CRAP GET IT OFF YOU RIGHT NOW YOU'RE HURTING THE TEAM... I think I started with "oh hey, wow, full Battlemaster, eh? You must have PvPed a LOT in the old days. Welcome back! Oh, and hey, they've made a bunch of changes to gear since you left, if you'd like me to fill you in on how it works now, let me know!" I don't think I've had a person say no to that yet.

Exactly! Studies have actually shown that if you are trying to change someone's mind about something, showing them facts has little effect. (Yay confirmation bias!) What HAS been shown to work, though, is positive affirmation on the front end. Makes total sense, doesn't it? Our brains tend to close off when someone tries to tell us that we're wrong about something. Not so much when we tell them they're great, and hey, I know of something that might help you be even better! Not to say that you should BS people, but there's usually at least SOMETHING you can find to say that they've done well. Edit: Brendan Nyhan's studies, for those who are curious.

You are technically quite correct, but I think that I probably would have approached the situation differently. If I felt like I absolutely had to say something, instead of questioning him, I'd have tried to offer help doing it the right way. "Hey there. I see you're using endurance stims...I have a few resolve stims in my bank if you'd like to try running a few warzones with those. You had some good dps last match but you might do BEAST DPS with those on!" (If you don't want to blow 20kish on some random stranger you could switch it around a little to and offer to craft some for him if you have a toon that can do that.) What this does is not make it come across as you telling him what to do or flat out telling him that "you're doing it wrong." Which, honestly, people don't like, for logical and obvious reasons. Instead, what you've done is give him a compliment (which is true, because he did have decent DPS according to what you said.) You get your point across (your DPS will improve if you do this instead,) and you've done it in a way that he's free to take it or leave it and not feel insulted to boot. At that point, if he says "no thanks," then you drop it. Worst case scenario, "no thanks," you still got your point across. Best case scenario, he takes a couple of stims, notices the DPS increase, and switches. Either way, you've gone (in his head) from that guy who was hassling him about his stim, to the guy who was trying to give him something for free. The latter is much more likely to get the result you want.

I've got a question for you, and it's a genuine one. When you're going back and forth with folks like you describe, where are you trying to go with it? What's your desired end result?