February 26 Update Changes

Hello again intrepid Norrathians,

We are inching closer to our February 26 Update and we have some news to share.

In my Producer Letter in our forums on Feb. 5, I listed the features we had planned for our Feb. 26 update. One of them I referred to as a Loyalty Program that centered around daily, weekly, and monthly objectives. We have been working on the feature and don’t feel it’s up to snuff yet. We want more time for testing, feedback, and iteration to ensure it’s fun. That in mind, we are going to hold this back for a while.

That said, we hope to have an unexpected addition to the February Update!

Guilds, take notice! We are introducing Guild Achievements to track and reward your guild’s accomplishments. In the new guild Achievements window, we list raid targets and their point value and we will track -- including time stamps down to the second – the achievements for your guild. And if your guild wants to participate by including its achievements in our data feed, the information will be shared with the community at large. We are working on solutions for displaying the data and sharing this news with the fan sites.

Sincerely, as always,

Holly Longdale
Producer, EQII

That's an excellent addition (assuming it works). Hopefully that makes it easy for a fansite (Feldon) to work up a progression page off that.

Guild achievements! As I said in another post a few days ago, I think that's a really great idea. I've been kind of on the fence as to whether or not I'm going to eventually join a guild, but this pushes me a little more in that direction. Whether I join a guild at the top or not, knowing that I can help contribute to a guild's standing in the community is an appealing thought. Similar systems have been implemented in other MMO's to great success. Let's hope it helps to activate the community some more.

Guild Achievements? That sounds amazingly close to a final way to get an official progression thread where guilds can accurately show their progress and match other guilds. One of the worst offenders of GuildProgress.com was that it was all player based with no real measure beyond "a persons word" for validity. Timestamps will greatly help achieve a more accurate and hopefully competitive EQ2 Raiding community.

How many in the guild need to be present for it to grant the guild the achievement?

sounds to me just like a way to smother the non raiding guilds by making them disband and join a raiding guild so they can see the achievements. and I bet they'll be some nifty things like free amenity slots or the like for some of the achievements to make it even worse for a non raiding guild to be looked down upon.

I would hope that it needs to be at a minimum the majority of those in the raid (my personal prefernce would be over 75% of those in raid). Sounds great to me regardless if we can finally have official progression stats.

Pickups and alliances will whine, but hopefully they will get ignored. If you are killing something with only a few members of your guild then it should not count as an achievement for the guild, as it's way too easy to have a few tag along with a top-tier guild to skew the rankings.

This needs to benefit the most people possible, and having accurate progression stats for guilds should require a majority of that guild there in the raid to count. There may be someone's alt in alt guild that needs to come because a chanter can't make it or whatever, so I would be against 100%, but anywhere close to that seems like a good idea.

Not all mixed guild raids are pick-ups. Penalizing raids that don't force everybody to be in the same guild is a poor idea.

Further, on our server are a lot of raid communities where people from different guilds come together. How would their progress be measured?
I suppose there is some 'skeleton guild' that serves as raid com hub, however, the majority of raiders mostly comes from other guilds.

Regards
Berg

The same way it's measured now? I think just giving the achievement to every guild in the raid, regardles of how many of them there are, makes the guild achievement worthless. The point is that, "as a guild", you get the achievement, not that some random person joined some raid and got an achievement for the entire guild. That's what personal achievements are for.

Why I said pickups and alliances...

See the above post. Personal achievements /= Raid achievements. Handing them out to anyone accomplishes next to nothing to measure progress, as the achievement becomes worthless because so many guilds have it.

A majority of those in the raid should be the minimum, if you can't get 13 people from a guild to raid then why are you worried about the guild achievement.

Yes, I would like to ask about it as well - what about alliances? Will you add any possibility to track those achievements for alliances?

How could they do that. Allow 3 people to count as an achievement? You would have guilds selling updates because you know they are going to tie this into the new "rewards" system.

If a guild raids they should get the update. If a few people from a guild tag along on a raid they should not. Simple as that.

All of us should be able to gain said achievements for our respective guilds, why should it be for one type of player only?

Because that is a solo achievement not a raid a achievement.

1 person could pay for updates to get the guild the achievements, completely skewing the system. If it's implemented that way it will fail because people will question the validity of guild kills, just like they did on Guild Progress.

Why would my guild care of someone didn't think we earned a kill? Who cares about what happened on guild progress, dispute whatever you want, my guilds achievements have no bearing on your gameplay whatsoever in fact you won't know what achievements we have unless you specifically go looking for them.

Why do you care so much?

Because I am playing an MMO, and one of the aspects that is interesting is that I am playing with other people. As such, we are clearing the same zones as other guilds, and it is somewhat a measuring stick of where we fall compared to others.

This is the same reason that sports have leaderboards, hell even online poker has a leaderboard...lulz.

Why do you care so much. Roleplaying guilds usually do not look at leaderboards, so I think they would be mostly unaffected. The only people I see that would want to update a whole guild for one person making one kill would be those that want to P2W. If you don't care about the achievement then why do you need it. If you want it then get a guild raid force and kill it.

This is a guild achievement, not a personal achievement. There is no point in tracking "Guild" achievements if it is updated no different than personal achievements, by a single person. It's not an accurate representation at all of a guild achievement if only one person in the guild even got it. There needs to be a minimum guild attendance requirement or this is as useless as tracking guilds progress by looking at individual kill achievements. There's a reason nobody tracks guilds through personal kill achievements available now.

Alliance have choosen the freedom to stay in their guild. No GUILD achievement is the price to pay for this freedom.

I am the only active member currently of my Guild. I raid with a force that has approx 3 groups from the host Guild and the remainder loyal friends. It would be rediculous for my Guild, Lioncourt, to get a Guild achievement for killing say, HM Oligar when I am the only person who did it.