World of Warcraft Classic’s latest expansion, Cataclysm, launched last week, bringing Deathwing’s familiar destruction to Azeroth once more.
As with any Classic expansion, some of the less successful aspects of the original release are addressed and improved. One of the features targeted by the Classic team was guilds. In an interview with Game Rant, lead software engineer Nora Valetta and principal game designer Kris Zierhut addressed the changes to the guild system.
Previously, a levelling system was added to guilds, but the thresholds for levelling up were not adjusted proportionally to the number of members a guild had.
Guilds, Big & Small
“The guild levelling system incentivises you to have a guild with a lot of members,” Zierhut explains. “It didn’t change how much experience you need based on the size of your guild. There was initially no way to do that without adding perverse incentives, so small guilds would take forever to level and have a hard time with it and very large guilds were maxed out very quickly.”
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It should probably come as no surprise that an MMO community would find the most efficient way to farm rewards. This unfortunately had a knock-on effect on small and new guilds, which struggled to keep their members versus the instant rewards of “mega guilds.”
“After launch, this was a really difficult problem,” Zierhut continues. “People in smaller guilds started quitting those guilds to join the bigger guild so they could get more perks. People who wanted to form a new guild couldn’t find anybody to join their guild.”
The new system is built on reputation, the same as any other faction. You build up a personal reputation with your guild, encouraging people to stay in their guilds and not disadvantaging smaller guilds.
Most of the perks earned via the old guild levelling system are now instantly available to anyone who joins a guild, a couple like ‘Cash Flow’ have been removed entirely.
World of Warcraft Cataclysm Classic is currently available.
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