Improve The Faction System

**This is a fairly long post. I have tried to condense my ideas into as small a space as possible, so I don’t want any unhelpful posts of: ‘ZOMGERS DUDE NO ONE WILL READ ALL THAT!!!!111’. And please don’t make knee-jerk reaction to anything without reading the rest first

Improve the Faction System

When I first purchased the game I remember one of the opening phrases on the back of the box: ‘Prove your worth in every battle as skill, not hours played, decides your fate’. Guild Wars set out to be the antidote to games like Runescape, WoW, Anarchy etc where you had to grind for long periods of time to ever get anywhere, and in the first instalment they did that very well. However with the release of Factions they have truly shot themselves in the foot.

Factions was a disappointment in several areas, but none more so than the faction system, which has turned Guild Wars into the very game it set out not to become, and so threatens the very future of the series.

I’m going to be realistic and say I don’t expect anything to be done about it, however I want to express my views and give an opportunity to everyone who has been thinking the same to do so as well.

Overview of the Problem

I remember when my guild first pledged allegiance to a faction (in this case the Kurzicks), we earnt our faction through alliance battles (as this was the only way we knew how). However we soon learned of certain quests that could be completed over and over again to give a relatively fast faction gain. The game advertises itself as: ‘fight for control over towns’, which I pictured as actual conflict between guilds for control over territory. However it should advertise itself as: ‘run the same quest over and over all day for control over towns!’.

The point I’m trying to make is that the faction system doesn’t do what it was intended to do, mainly because it is fundamentally flawed, and should be destroyed/replaced before it becomes too embedded into the game. Perhaps it is already too late.

Positives Of Faction

Just what are the actual positives of the faction system? So far the only one I can see is that it gives guilds and alliances something else to do, and adds replayability (if of course by that you mean endless monotony). But with the current Pvp there's no real reason to need this as well.

Negatives Of Faction

The current system rewards grinders, that is people who have considerably more time than most. With the faction system: hours played, not skill, decides your fate.

Some would argue that hatred and discontent can be stirred, particularly in competetive alliances when some guilds are seen to be underachieving.

The rewards for owning towns is awful, face it: a merchant with a 20% discount, and if you’re lucky a fireworks master. If you’re very lucky you get access to the elite mission, and then you get the privilege of taxiing everyone over there for free, which defies the point of owning it in the first place.

Possible Solutions

• Nerf the troublesome quests. This is pointless however as there are many other potentially exploitable quests out there, and Anet will continue to waste thier time goin round in circles to stop these exploits.

• Eliminate all faction rewards from quests. This way you’d only be able to gain faction from alliance battles and the challenge missions, and then only alliances with a modicum of skill would be able to own towns. However I fear that this could lead to a rise in leeching, and with more people in alliance battles this would add strain to the servers.

• Eliminate faction itself. However you would need another system to replace it, and this is where I’m open to any suggestions. One possible solution would be to tie it in directly with alliance battles, either by automatically totalling up wins or by taking the points differential into account. That way the alliances that were genuinely doing the most for their faction would gain control of the better towns. The challenge missions would somehow need to be incorporated into this, or create another reward for them aside from faction.

Drawbacks to getting rid of faction

• A new system would result in a complete reset, so everyone in control of their towns would lose everything.

• A new system would need to have something similar to the 10% degen that the faction system has, or just employ a regular reset similar to the guild wars ladder.

• No more faction means no more faction related titles, so people who have worked hard for them will be sorely disappointed. As a donator of 965k faction I’d find this hard to bear too, however it’s a small price to pay to get rid of the system.

• What would happen to amber and jadeite? Without the faction system the economy of these items would need to be rebalanced so that they behave just the same as any other rare materials do. Or Anet could come up with another system, such as getting amber/jadeite from alliance battles (e.g. 3 for checkpoint win, 2 for a points win, 1 for a loss)

Conclusion

As I said earlier in this post, I don’t expect for one moment that Anet will be brave enough to step up and say something should be done about this horrible mess they created. Guild Wars is a great game, and I would hate to see it become just another MMORPG. Perhaps Anet should think back to the ideals that led to the game’s creation in the first place.

Feel free to add any other ideas you may have.

N.B Before you say it I’m not someone who’s whining because he can’t be bothered to earn faction. The alliance I’m in at the moment is currently the 3rd best Kurzick alliance, my guild itself maintaining close to a million faction, and many people within this alliance who I have spoken to say the same thing.

Im in the oOo alliance and i say-- yes, control of the town revolves around hours played and such, but i like the faction system with rewards and owning towns. although i would like a bigger discount or other things for owning HzH

*Clap clap clap clap*

15k, 1.5k, collectors, those were awesome examples to reinforce the quote : 'Prove your worth in every battle as skill, not hours played, decides your fate’.

A nice fix to the problem would be whenever Anet is adding a new feature, they should at least remind themselves of that quote and see of the feature applies before intruducing it.

What their doing to Factions is like almost violating the User Agreement ><

Though my guild has stopped particpating in the crap of alliance faction, meaning I wouldnt be at as great of a loss as you guys, I would stil like to see this done...Also they could cut down on the monotony if they added a couple more levels to AB's, I only get faction for amber now. But thats for the monotony of AB's( I personnally think they are monotonous). They could also have some sort of actual territorial gain like: whichever side has the most faction by the end of the week gains so much land or somethign like that.

We have quests,missions, AB to grind faction. I was in the DTH alliance and all I can say is spam fest of people, well spamming alliance chat as, well of guild chat. I don't get what your saying, but to nerf faction farming?

Faction farming is not hard, I belive its a total of 10 guilds in an alliance,100 per guild, yet in DTH we maintained 16-18 mill faction, it's really not hard.

All I read is a plead from a guild that doesn't have enough faction to own a town, and to nerf faction altogether?

well your idoicy disgusts me, you obviously read nothing of the post, as we control amatz basin and have close to 10 million faction in our alliance and its not about nerfing faction farming but changing the system for the better so its not a grind but about skill. I am totally behind this and share the same thoughts. It should be about skill who owns the towns not about who has the most free time to do runs.

I don't mean to be Devil's advocate here, but it took you till now to realize that the faction system is flawed and completely goes against everything Guild Wars was originally for? I don't want anything to do with it, never had, never will. I get the faction from quests or ABs, and turn around and trade it for jade/amber. That's it.

I like the rest of Cantha and what Factions have to offer, but the faction system itself simply has to go. Hell, I still don't understand how you can have faction with one group or another, and have faction with a god at the same time. How are they even related and can be put into the same category? Just makes no sense. Shoulda been called something different.

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make, that faction farming isn't hard. All you need is close to 100 members and to run the same stupid quest over and over again. All this proves is that the top alliances (including the one I'm in) have lots of members and plenty of time to grind. And the system rewards this.

As Prince Daniel said, you clearly didn't read the post, so I'll quote the bit you missed again:

I’m not someone who’s whining because he can’t be bothered to earn faction. The alliance I’m in at the moment is currently the 3rd best Kurzick alliance, my guild itself maintaining close to a million faction, and many people within this alliance who I have spoken to say the same thing.

Well I haven't ben playing Factions as long as others, yet I have been thinking it for a while. I've only just now decided to voice my opinion about it. Anyway thanks for your support

Totally agree that the system is worthless and broken due to "everyone giving free ferries".

They can't eliminate faction, though. That would really get people who have Faction titles quite mad, as well as people who use Faction to make their money because they don't like to farm or engage in hardcore trade spam.

You can't remove the Factions quests. That is the only thing that keeps people playing PVE in Factions. Remove that, and Factions PVE would become just as dead as Tyria PVE is.

The changes listed in the original post would probably take way too much dev time and manpower to implement anyhow, hence would not be done for that reason.


I think what they should do is either:

1. Automatically funnel money into the accounts of every member of a holding Alliance; so as to give holding a town an actual point.

2. Implement an in-game mechanic where charging a set fee to be able ferry someone is mandatory before they can be ferryed.

3. Remove all faction decay; which would lessen the need for endless farming.

4. Give the holding Alliance massive discounts on things that actually matter (ie: Ectos).

My idea: Add one more luxon vs kurzick style PvP. (Like 20v20 chaos ). Then remove the repeatable quests(you still get faction reward from non repeatable quests) and add a new anti-leech system in F aspenwood and J.quarry and also allow PvP characters to get there, so the pupulation there increseas.
Then, for more exitment. Add a new FoW eqvilant instance in HARVEST TEMPLE. The place that changes owner between luxon and kurzick fairly often. When luxons own it, and you are a luxon its free to enter. But if you are a kurzick it will cost your party 1 platinum.

Thoughts?

I hold a faction title myself, however I realise that all it shows is that I enjoy monotony. It would be a necessary evil I feel, unless if a new system was brought in (along with new titles) it could be somehow converted.

You wouldn't remove the quests, just the faction reward.

This would be much worse. The decay is in there to ensure that guilds need to keep working hard for their towns. Otherwise an alliance could just race away and no one would be able to catch them, like in those horrible Kings Of Chaos games. Your other ideas on town ownership are good though.


Sure, there needs to be more varieties of luxon vs kurzick pvp, and Fort Aspenwwod etc eeds to be more accessable. As I think someone said earlier, alliance battles are monotonous due to the constant shifting between Saltspray and Etnaran. As a Kurzick I am oddly thrilled to see the Grenz Frontier as we don't get to play on it often, even though it is just the exact opposite of the Etnaran map. More maps for alliance battles would be great.

EDIT: I overlooked this section before but:

Earlier I suggested that perhaps amber/jadeite could be awarded automatically for winning alliance battles or acheiving decent scores in the challenge missions.

bumpage

I have to agree, I don't like the endless grind, and I don't like the way it encourages leeching in Fort Aspenwood.

I do, however, like the idea of taking a side and fighting for it. And I do like that Factions lets you change sides.

But I do hate the endless grind, and controlling towns is nothing but "how much time have you spent gringing recently?". That really isn't fun.

And I joined an alliance, even an alliance that said it was only there to socialize, and eventually they started giving us a hard time for not faction farming more (we eventually left for other reasons). I do like Alliances in general, though, because they give my guild an opportunity to branch out and meet new people without having to give up our current guild.

The only other thing I hate about Factions is how split up the players are; there's never enough players to do anything in particular. Jade Quarrey never goes, ever, in America, and Hall of Heros is so empty I can't get a group; everyone there doing pick up groups wants rank, which you only get doing HoH.

Perhaps have it that the method devising who controls the towns actually involves fighting, as the top allliances just do repeatable quests mainly lut running. Alliance battles are more of an enjoyable slower alternative, i was expecting when i first bought faction for it to be actually fighting for the town but all suggestions mentioned so far are good.

Not that i don't think your suggestions aren't good, but you're pretty right about a-net not changing the way faction earning works much (if at all). Personally i enjoy alliance battles and don't find it a grind at all. I would however like to see more npc's tossed into AB, just for the added challenge. Regardless of that little tidbit, AB still ranks up there with what i feel is a fun dynamic to the overall gameplay.

I never faction farmed quests after the intial times i did the quests for befriending. It seemed far more boring and insubstantional to bother running supplies over and over, especially when they didn't impact the enviroment whatsoever. Perhaps joining the supply quests with AB would be a little more fullfilling- but I'm quite certain they won't be modifying the faction system. I think factions will be (in the future) concidered the black sheep of the GW saga, hopefully c3 will be groundbreaking enough to capture the worlds attention again. until then, we have what we got.

What about if they introduced battles between alliances to determine the owner of towns. For Example; Komalis Protector alliance(defender) Vs. We Are High Online Always alliance(challenger) when the challenger is 500k faction less. GvG style.

If the defender wins, they keep control of the town for a definate 24 hours before they can be challenged again. If the challenger wins, the defender has their faction reduced by 500k and the challenger(now defender) cannot be challenged for 24 hours.

Introduce an Alliance hall (this could be a requirement to owning a town) and make it so that you have to challenge the above alliance or have faction subtracted. Give an alliance 7 days to successfully challenge (both teams must accept that they have enough players, if they defender repeatedly refuses could be reported etc) and they suffer consquences if they dont

These battles could be like 16v16 and stedily increase depending on what your trying to take over (16v16 for towns,24v24 for a challenge mission,32v32 for capital?)

You could keep all the crappy repeatable quests, but it'd put skill into owning towns and all that.

Its just a random idea.

I agree with your statements.

I am part of the [Dth] alliance and frankly I am bored of doing an hour to two hours of AB a day to put in my faction for the alliance. I think there should be a big change in the faction system, but it shouldn't be gotten rid of.

As for a PvP idea to owning towns, I would have to disagree because then the great GvG guilds would own the towns instead of the PvE players, which the towns are there more for.

Owning a town should offer more to the owning guild.

I think the repeatable quests that give faction should be taken out, as for taking faction as a reward for all the quests, I would have to disagree with that also. People who dislike doing AB battles should get the awards of gaining faction, and what about people who don't have a guild, and don't want one.

My suggestions are:

-more ways to gain faction, be it through PvP or PvE
-allow PvP characters to get to Jade Quarry and Fort Aspenwood (mentioned earlier)
-more awards for owning bigger towns
-actually take over land, and example is towns that you can only visit if your faction owns that area, that way there is a point to the struggles of AB rather than just to get faction
-improve the way faction is gained so that people who only play an hour a day can keep up with people who play for six hours a day

I definitely think there isnt enough advantages to owning a town at the moment, ok great we get a small discount from the usual items. Was it worth farming a million faction for that. Maybe you should be allowed to choose which town you own or introduce a battle between houses, to spice things up.

Im going to have to disagree here.

I consider the faction system flawed, but i think youre a bit too extreme in your fixes.

Imo: The faction system DOES reward those who grind. I feel that this is the POINT of the faction system.

The initial 10k faction to get past Cavalon or HZH is what i would consider the only mandatory faction grind, and more akin to a player leveling up to reach lvl 20. In reality, the 10k faction grind is there to get you to check out the various PvE-P maps and Alliance Battle, because the quests alone (if done once) will not give you enough faction.

After the initial 10k faction grind. It becomes optional grinding. Completely and utterly optional.

1.5k Luxon/Kurz and 15k luxon/kurz armors are VANITY skins and not mandatory to beat the game. Kaineng center offers maximum stat armor already.

Owning a town is not mandatory to beating the game. The Deep and Warren are both accessible via ferries and will gain new methods of access soon.

Reaching lvl 20 is incredibly fast.

Guild Wars Factions gives you optional grinding opportunities. You dont have to take it

I dont feel that it should be removed because i LIKE to grind and i love that that i dont HAVE to grind. I can jump into game, grind for jade, go to bed. Yes, thats fun for me.

Now if only they would remove those gates, almost all mandatory grinds would not exist XD

That will drive away a lot of ppl who will have nothing at all to do with PvP, non reapetable quest's are not enough to complet the game story.
The way things are being done now by A-net they need to keep as many ppl as they can (nerf bat's been out again).

Bumpage

/notsigned TOO LONG

/signed, all my thoughts are in the OP's post.

Plus: RPG should be about advancing your characters, exploring exciting places, having fun with friends or solo if preferred.

Faction system forces ppl to grind inhuman amount of time if you want to hold a big town, well of course there is a chance to just ignore town control and play the game as it is, but that would leave a big part (or at least it was hyped to be big part), of the game alone.

The whole Faction-System should be related to adventuring & battling against the other side, like most of us in PvE want to do.

Not just do repeatable quest after quest after quest after quest after quest.

** We all know though that Anet knows what players think about the system & Anet has even said to re-design Town Control/Faction System somehow (there was couple post from designers in May/June).
**

So don't give up all hope, I'm keeping fingers crossed for some new innovative solutions.

I might've signed this on the first week of the game's release, when I still cared. Now, I've come to realize and accept that faction is nothing more than a means to acquire crafting materials.