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Edit: Fortunately, Psynister is willing to do some research for me (I’m scared of the forums, and even so, I can’t check them from work). Turns out the following rant is based on a bug, and it has subsequently been fixed. Bliz isn’t trying to keep the Small Guilds down, after all.
Now I need to find something else to make me angry…
*waits for phone to ring as I’m about to leave work*
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Guild Leveling! One of the latest and greatest features released with WoW: Cataclysm!
And I’m pretty sure that it’s seen as a positive change, all around. I know I like it – mostly.
For a pretty good summary and some numbers, check out Psynister’s Notebook.
As you can see, there are a lot of worthwhile perks for being in a “max level” guild. But as a means of reducing “guild-hopping”, Guild Reputation was another feature added. As yet another means of reducing “guild-hopping”, Blizzard implemented a cap on the amount of guild reputation you can earn in a week. It makes sense to me, and it should make both players and guilds more particular with their rosters.
In an effort to further keep balance, a daily cap on Guild Experience was set at 6.246 million XP. This is to prevent large guilds from leveling up too easily and to prevent small guilds from being left behind in the dust. Everything seems fair… until you dig a little deeper.
How they made the reputation cap function has totally shafted smaller guilds.
Here, lemme ‘splain…
It starts with how one gains reputation with the guild.
To earn guild reputation, you need to earn guild experience.
Simply put, guild experience is gained by doing “stuff”. Questing, achievements, etc. Essentially, experience you earn for yourself will translate into experience for your guild. That futher translates into reputation with the guild. And from what I can tell, this is directly linked with how much experience you earn. The more XP you earn, the more rep you earn. So, a level 80 toon will gain guild reputation faster than a fresh, new alt. And like I said before, a weekly cap on this reputation is in place to prevent people from guild-hopping and grinding to exalted in a short period of time.
Where my frustration with the system lies with how this weekly reputation cap is implemented.
As best as I can tell through observation, Blizzard didn’t put the cap on reptuation; they actually put a cap on the experience you can earn for the guild any given week. This means that once your character is maxed out on “reputation” for the week, that character can no longer contribute to guild experience. If you leveled up to 81 on your first day of Cata release, basically everything you’ve done on that character after that hasn’t helped your guild experience, at all.
So, if you’re in a small guild, this likely means your main characters are maxing out their weekly guild experience early on. Subsequently, the guid is not reaching the daily guild XP cap later in the week. And if you’re light on max-level characters or lacking high level alts, the hinderance on obtaining guild experience may be felt even more.
Basically this means that, despite the attempts for balance, small guilds are not going to level up as quickly as larger guilds. With the “best case” scenario of it taking 20 weeks to get to maximum guild level, this will leave a lot of smaller guilds missing out on some of the perks the “big kids” get. And for quite some time.
Given that I’m in a smaller guild, knowing that we won’t be making the daily guild xp cap every day annoys me. I don’t feel that if I want to help advance the guild that I should have to swtich to a different character every 1.575 million XP they get. I get the reputation cap, but the experience contribution cap is frustrating.
If you’re going to put a cap on the reputation, then cap the reputation. Not my contributions to guild experience.
Anyway, happy weekend, everyone. And be sure to dust off your alts. 
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Edit Repeat: Fortunately, Psynister is willing to do some research for me (I’m scared of the forums, and even so, I can’t check them from work). Turns out the following rant is based on a bug, and it has subsequently been fixed. Bliz isn’t trying to keep the Small Guilds down, after all.
Now I need to find something else to make me angry…
*waits for phone to ring as I’m about to leave work*
*****
DarthRegis
Brokentree
Chawa
Hmm, hadn’t noticed that you don’t contribute after you hit the rep cap. That is annoying.
On the plus side, playing the druid when solo and the warrior when paired with the other half is clearly beneficial.
Yup, it’s definitely annoying.
I started to dig deeper when I realized that TZI wasn’t going to get our daily XP cap yesterday. It was easy on day 1, and we juuust made it on day 2… but yesterday, we were well short of the daily max. And this clearly wasn’t a result of reduced guild activity.
That’s when Chawa and I started looking a bit more at the Guild Roster and the “Guild Activity – Weekly” option. I figured my DK, being level 83, would have contributed a lot more experience than Darth, who is level 81.5. But nope – both are maxed out at 1,575,002 xp contributed. Which corresponded to when I maxed out on guild rep.
That’s when I concluded they capped both, instead of just the rep.
*shakes fist in anger*
t’was a bug, apparently. See later comments.
*head scratch*
Capping your guild rep for the week cuts off your guild experience contributions?
So far we’ve nailed the experience cap every day in a matter of hours. Granted, we’ve got about 15-20 people online every day, but for the most part its the same 15-20 people. There’s no way we’d be a level 2 guild well on our way to level 3 if this were true as the majority of us were rep capped a few hours after launch.
Everyone in the guild is either pushing for 85, leveling professions, or rolling new alts.
With our current setup I don’t see how we could still be hitting the exp cap every day with the majority of the guild playing the same toons that have been rep capped the whole week.
I’ll see if I can get some evidence for/against tonight after the server reset to see if my toons contribute to the guild experience.
Well, I could be mistaken. My WoW-science is pretty weak. So maybe I’m jumping to conclusions too hastily and spreading all sorts of mis-information. XD
I just find it extremely hard to believe that there are multiple characters that are coincidentally at the same Guild Activity level (1,575,002) without being “capped”. While, at the same time, the guild reached the daily cap the first two days but was only half-way to daily cap on day three; with the same 5 – 8 people playing.
OR maybe it’s just a cap on experience from questing/leveling a character. Maybe the additional types of progression (professions, downing instance bosses, pvp, etc.) aren’t calculated in an individual’s “activity” – but they may still contribute to the guild’s daily xp. Haven’t been able to monitor that very well.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I haven’t looked at our numbers at all other than to see that we’re constantly capped for both exp and rep.
It just seems odd that it would even be possible for us to have gotten this far with the same people playing the same toons every day and yet constantly hit the cap.
It could be a glitch in the log file, it could be that you’re right and I’ve got guildies logging in to play on alts while I’m at work or something. Who knows?
It’s definitely something to take a closer look at though.
How’s that holy cow coming, btw?
Just saw this mentioned in a blue post: “If a guild maxed their experience gains for the day, subsequent tallying of individual members’ weekly and total experience gained was not always properly being saved and stored. This has been corrected.”
Holy Cow is pretty awesome, although a bit neglected since we got a bit distracted with our last attempt at Arthas and, of course, the x-pac. He’s in Desolace at level 35. Have you joined the masses and rolled your Worgen yet?
As for my rant, I should have probably put most of it in question-based form instead of approaching it as fact.
It is both irresponsible and it risks having me looking like an idiot (more than usual, of course).
OR it was a bug.
Could you please share the link if you can find it again?
This is not true. If this happened to you it’s probably a bug. There are lots of bugs considering the new guild features right now. I can say for sure that my xp contributed to guild after I hit cap. In fact, it was one of my dk’s quest turn-ins that put us to level 2.
Yeah, it was a bug and it has since been fixed. I added a little edited section at the top.
I should probably scratch out most of the post, even if I do love ranting and raving.
Wow that so doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t know this before I read it, but now I’m really pissed off. I’m already trying to figure out how some guilds are higher than mine already when we’ve maxed the guild level every day. Now that I know this, and don’t know if we’ll be able to hit the guild cap ever day, I’m really frustrated. I agree with you, I think they can still max your single rep, but you should still be able to help the guild….UGH!
Keep in mind there was a bug early with guild achievements awarding guild experience, this has since been removed and the guilds lost their XP, basically putting all guilds back to the max per day. Guilds having reached their max XP each day should be level 3 at the moment and working towards level 4.
Yes, as troutwort said, it was a bug and it has since been fixed.
That said, it seems there are still a few changes and hotfixes that are occuring with Guild XP and such. It seems they’ve nerfed individual contributions – so you’re still able to contribute after reaching your “weekly rep” cap, but how much you contribute seems to be reduced. Whether it was intentional or not, that remains to be seen.
I’m guessing that a few more tweaks to the system are still to come and that my little rant here was jumping the gun.
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