Guild/node should be tied to accounts

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I think the issue there is that Mag thinks that you don't play a character that gets the benefits. You play as yourself, a player, that is somehow benefiting constantly from all those benefits from different guilds. Even though that is not the case at all.

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Nah, I'm completely the same way. Which is why I've been arguing against this suggestion this much. The "oh you just want all those benefits, and that's wrong" argument has been the main one so far, yet it makes 0 sense because you're not benefiting at all.

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That's the feeling I got from it? As in, "it falls onto the player to always contribute to the guild they've chosen, with any and all resources at their disposal", instead of "every guild is free to choose who's worthy of being their member and who's not".

To me, as a GL, that just seems like a way to make life easier for GLs. Why worry that your members might be "cheating on you", when you can literally see all of the alts in your guild and know exactly when they're online. Why try to be the best GL with the best guild you can be, when you can be a dictator who oversees everything.

And like, I know I've been a GL dictator before, but my dictatorship only succeeded because I tried my best to reward all the players who gave their all to the guild. And if I saw someone slacking, my first thought wasn't even "are they in another guild on an alt", it was "they probably don't feel as rewarded for everything they do" and I'd discuss it with that member.

And I don't think I ever even heard of people double-guilding their game time. Maybe I was just lucky or maybe it was how L2's players felt about being in a guild and about being their own character on the server. The server would know "xXxMomPounderxXx the greatest Gladiator" and not "Max the greatest owner of xXxMomPounderxXx, D1kTw1st3r, Maximiliarmous, MaximusDecimusMeridius and M3xH3x characters who were all different classes, with none of them being all that great".

It was what you wanted to make out of yourself in the game and not what you were irl. And no one even saw this as PRing or anything. We were all competitive as fuck and all about pvp. But our character's image meant way more to us than our own. Saying that "it's not the character that benefits from the guilds, it's the player is just silly to me".

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Good to know that ~20% of the posts I've seen in the last 2 years were purely in my imagination.

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Maybe my previous arguments didn't translate well? Or maybe I should've stated them more clearly.

What I meant is, if you have 6 characters on an account and they all get the guild's benefits just for existing, and w/o taking up 6 slots in the guild - that's bad imo.

As I've said multiple times before, if we operate under the normal rules of alt guild association - each alt would take up extra slots in the guild. Any competitive guild would then require you to put out as much action/resources/time investment as those taken slots would've provided were the filled by other active players. If you, with your alts, manage to do that - that is completely earned imo (and what's more important, guild's opinion).

If you're worthy enough to be invited into a high lvl competitive guild - you've earned those benefits. If you've helped a guild to get the benefits - you've earned them.

But the difference here is that if you had several alts in several guilds, all those guilds would require you to invest a particular amount of time/resources into them, which would depend on how hardcore the guild is. And in order to stay in all those guilds, you'd have to spend a shitload of time in the game across all your alts - and that is fucking difficult and for some people even impossible.

But if your whole damn account of 6 characters joins just 1 slot of any given guild - now you have 6 characters that benefit from the guild's bonuses w/o putting in 6 times the investment. I mean, in theory a guild could be so god damn hardcore that it asks you to play at least 4h on each of your alts a day to justify their existence in the guild and them benefiting from its bonuses, but I'd assume most people would see that as quite unreasonable.

And this is why I'm saying that having guilds be account-locked is a "I want it all and I want it now"-type of deal. Any singular player benefits far more from the guild, than the guild does from said player, because the player only has a limited amount of time to invest, while he reaps way more benefits for it, because no matter which alt he chooses to play - he'll have guild benefits. In a non-account-bound system that is not the case.

Hell, I could even tie this to the "risk vs reward" system. Let's say a guild is 40 members. It could be 40 live people who provide the guild with their own maximum input of each class. Alternatively I could risk failing some content or pvp by having one of my alts take a slot in the guild. Now I have 39 live players and one alt. Yes, that's a risk, but now the reward is 1/40 bigger, because 2 slots represent one person (and because alts are usually sub-optimal in their builds). If someone else wants to benefit from the guild on their alt, it's now 38 live members. And so on and so on. The more alts - the higher the risk of failing, but greater the reward per player.

But if we have 6+ god damn characters per player taking up only a single slot - we have a 240-member guild with full benefits of a 40-member sized guild. There are now no risks that have to be taken. You now always have 40 live members that effectively represent 240 characters. And even if we say that the reward stays split among the 40 people, the overall strength is now way more diluted between those 240 characters because the guild is not making use of pure <=40 top lvl classes - it's making use of 240 characters on the reward amount of only 40 members, while also providing the benefits to all those 240 characters.

And I'm counting all 240 because we're discussing a competitive guild here, so all those characters will be meta-based, they'll have to get geared properly to be switch-to-able on the spot. And all the players will have to learn several classes instead of perfecting one, so you're not only diluting the gear/resources, but the mental capacity of each player too.

Here's a question for you, as a hardcore pver. How many people in your EQ(2) days could perfectly (and I mean perfectly) play several classes at the same time, w/o prior "warm up" on any given class? Because I'd assume EQ(2) was even more taxing for its players than L2 was, and in L2 even the true top lvl players could maaybe master 2-3 classes and go between them freely w/o losing their power output. Yes, all top players had the general (or sometimes detailed) knowledge of what other classes could do and what their abilities were and all that kind of stuff, but executing all that shit at top lvl across several classes was beyond absolute most people's capabilities. Yet a system where a guild could require from you the mastering of 6+ characters, in order to freely change their class setup before any given encounter, would definitely lead to guilds doing exactly that because they can.

Which is why I said that I only see toxicity coming from this kind of system. And it'd be a closed loop. You want to be super serious about the game? You gotta join a guild that would require that stuff from you, and you'll never have the time to just chill. You want to have a mainly chill time in the game, with maybe a few hard encounters here and there? You'd have to find a very particular guild for that kind of gameplay, because you don't fit a purely chill guild and your preferred amount of chill definitely doesn't fit a hardcorish guild. In this system a player's options become very limited.

And as a dude who used to declare war on literally his whole server just to have some real competition, I know I loved my chill time on an alt. Yet I would not be able to do that in this kind of system.

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Literally what I've been saying for the past god knows how many hours.

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Exactly. L2's roles functioned roughly in the same way in pvp. The gameplay was really different in itself, and on top of that you'd have multiple different matchups between classes so you'd need to adjust your playstyle there too. And even within any given role, different classes would sometimes require you to play a bit differently from another class of the same role.

And this is why I put so much emphasis on a player mastering their chosen archetype/role. And I forgot to even mention the class possibilities, considering that we'll be able to change between 8 classes, on top of any potential alts having 8 more classes to choose from. All in all, I truly see no damn point in making guilds account-bound.

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Pointless shit. As we always do on here.