Peegee77 wrote:I posted this in another thread, but does this feature of personal claims not allow you to do what you need ?
https://prnt.sc/hdm0am
No it does not. First of all size is a limiting factor. If you want a group less then 10 it would be painstaking to manage multiple claims to have a decent size. Why should 9 ppl be in worse situation than 10? What does make 10 a magical number to suddenly make something a lot easier? There is no objective way known to me which suggest 10 is the way to go. If there is no reason for 10 to be magical we can keep going down and keep asking the same question decreasing the number by 1 - what makes 9 special over 8, 8 over 7 and so on until we reach 2 over 1. In that case there is a clear game mechanic called Personal claim, and i could easily agree that there is a big difference - personal means for one person, 2 players are more than one person.
Second problem is the current personal claim - guild claim interaction. Guild claim is stronger meaning guild claim overtakes personal claim. That makes the problem even more severe. Why?
Imagine there are 9 or 5 or 2 of us playing together (so basically 2 - 9). Each of us can have a claim of 100 grid units max. This means that we can have 200 - 900 units of area if we do the painstaking job of placing our personal claims to maximize the efficiency. Then, there are people who are about to place a monument and make a guild claim, or they have at least 20 ppl in the guild and want to expand. Instead of finding a proper land, prepare it and do the construction, they can just find our... err... "group personal" settlement and plop a monument a have most of the work done for them. We couldnt do anything to prevent them.
The third problem is artificially forcing players to do a certain thing developers want players to do. For some reason, i strongly believe, that devs want majority of player base to be in arbitrary big guilds. I conjecture this by the magic number 10, which is the minimum for the guild monument. Instead of placing hard caps on systems that are not obviously requiring a hard cap (like skills having values 0 - 100) there should be soft caps. How does that work? Both soft and hard caps are in the game - example is the personal claim size - 100 units is the hard cap, upkeep is the soft cap.
Make the guild monument upkeep reasonable that makes it harder for the smaller groups if the desire is to have more than 9 players in the guild. The guild claim has its own soft cap by default - the less players you have, the harder it is to protect and develop your claim.
The common arguments for "keep it at 10" that i have seen are either non-sequitur or completely missing the point:
1. Join a bigger guild.
- If players wanted to join a bigger guild they woulnt be asking to be in a smaller. The reasons why they dont want to join the bigger guild are irrelevant. The fact is they want to be in a smaller guild.
2. Find more players to join you and you can form a guild.
- Pretty much same as number 1.
3. Get alt chars and form a guild.
- This is actually a really good and a really bad argument. It is good because it explains how the system i flawed in the first place and how it can be bypassed, but it is bad because you would need to pay for more characters just to bypass the arbitrary magical number 10.
4. The devs are doing this to protect you from the larger guilds.
- I find this argument quite unsettling. This is a survival mmorpg game. Let us try to survive the way we see fit. There is no certainty that guild of 10 players will do better than a guild of 4. It comes to experience, organization, skill and diplomacy.
5. There would be guild monuments everywhere, a lot of griefing and stuff like that.
- The mechanic of guild monument could be tweaked as i suggested in some other thread - make it so that the newly placed monument doesnt overtake personal claims until it has grown at least by some size and some time has passed (eg. lvl 2 monument + 1 real day after it grew), allow all the people that have rights in the personal claim to have no penalty fighting the oppressors and give an alignment hit on the oppressors collectively if personal claims dont belong to the guild members . This would allow ppl on the personal claim to fight back for their land and make stealing personal claims a bit of a risk.
TL:DR
Any group should be allowed to make a guild claim. Guild claim mechanic should be slightly tweaked as explained to prevent spam and griefing.