Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Gold challenges

It's been a long time since I posted a business advice. I'm tired of "hey go to Tanaris 44:146 there is an NPC there who sells some limited stock lvl 50 crap that collectors pay 200G for" tricks. But it doesn't mean I'm not looking out for new ways of making gold (as opposed to tip #46 in the same way).

MMO-champion published some 4.1 PTR data about "guild challenges". Well, not much challenge here, guilds are simply rewarded for normal guild behavior: running 5-mans, raiding (I'm afraid even Argoloth will count) and rated BGs. Well, rated BGs are not so normal, so it is possible that this feature will draw new guilds into the system, making rated BGs playable (currently long waiting followed by a devastating defeat by some world top 100 PvP guild).

Where is the business in this? They also datamined two strings: GUILD_CHALLENGE_REWARD_GOLD = "Each guild challenge completed will reward gold deposited directly into your guild bank."; GUILD_CHALLENGE_REWARD_XP = "Each guild challenge completed will reward guild experience beyond the daily cap. If your guild is not capped, this experience will extend your current daily cap.";.

It seems that, just like with player quests, this feature will award XP until max level, it will ignore daily cap (just like quest XP ignores rested XP cap) and will award gold on max level. We don't know how much gold it is. Currently a player quest rewards 6 copper (0.0006 gold) for every XP when completed at max level.

The screenshot at MMO-Champion says that a guild dungeon provides 300K guild XP and 7 can be completed. 1.5M guild XP is awarded for rated BG and can be completed 3 times. The guild raid gives 3M and can be completed once (not to disappoint the "4 fun" guilds that can't kill anything besides Argoloth). That's all together 9.6M XP every week. Counting with the player conversion factor (which is a wild guess) 5.7K gold is awarded to the guild bank. Well, it's not a fortune (57 gold/person for a guild of 100) but neither an ignorable sum.

Even if it will have a different calculation, it will be several K every week. We got profit sharing achievement about 3 months after Cataclysm start, with 10% cash flow perk it means about 1K/week guild bank income. So the guild bank will see some serious income jump. And it will practically fall from the sky without effort.

We like free gold, right? All you have to do is catch it! You shall start lobbying in the guild leadership for a favorable distribution system now. When the gold start accumulating, it will be too late. The simplest system is allowing guildbank repairs, that's what I will do in my guild.

Also, while raiding and running dungeons is everyday activity, rated BGs are not. So you can also lobby to get the gold generated by them for the team which actually generates it. This can be a nice sum. And an easy one if they implement the "queue as a 5-man team and the system merges two " as you'll be facing with a "team" that is busy arguing "why u n00bs haz no resi" and "u fukkers u didnt bring hilz".

5 comments:

Kelindria said...

Whether or not Rift came up with these Guild quests first I don't know but they certainly had them before WoW did. Generally in Rift the quests become available in the main city and choose a quest suited to your guild.

If Blizzard implements this as a, on mondays kill 100 cata heroic bosses and tuesday complete 100 bgs wins it may be advantageous to go in with a proper PvP team more so then normal. Flocks of noobs make easy honor.

What will be surprising to see would be if Blizzard manages to implement this with any QQ coming either the large guilds about them being to easy or the small guilds about not being able to complete them in a reasonable amount of time.

Anonymous said...

I doubt large guilds will QQ about these things being "too easy". Besides the fact that it is money for nothing and that large guilds get it easier, it's not something that is supposed to be a "challenge" in the first place. Sure some bosses and rated BG's can be challenging, but if you were going to do them anyway, this system only gives more reward.

The only whines will come from small/weak guilds who try to get all the rewards but fail. I predict the official forums will be heavily spammed by crap such as "OMG me and my gf have a 2man giuld and we ca'nt do all the challenges cuz we need more ppl 4 a guild run WTF BLIZZ SUCKS"

Large and/or strong guilds will be able to get all the rewards anyway if they were to go for that, so I don't think much QQ will come from that side of the argument.

Zydell said...

I'm an officer in a fairly big guild and I found another great way to generate good amounts of money for the guild bank

My guild is a very big PvP guild (I know you hate it PvP players, but I won't start that discussion again). Therefore we get quite a lot of experience with doing Rated BGs and having so many players do their dailies (PvP guilds cannot exist without big amounts of socials).

That's why I decided to start selling spots in our guild, and it's working great. You can easily charge someone 500g to enjoy our level 21 perks for levelling their alt, and since the amount of players looking for a guild like that is fairly big, it's actually good income.

They won't bother you either because you can just keep them at a low rank, kick them whenever they do something you don't like and they will usually leave once they hit 85.
And lastly, they will generate some extra guild xp aswell.

All in all, the current guild levelling system is great for making money, and it makes being an officer/GM just a little extra enjoyable.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, while I estimate that you are aware of the below story,

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/03/22/banned-wow-player-offers-1-000-for-reactivation/

I'd like to nominate the player for moron of the day. Feel free to expand the "of the day" to "of the week" or beyond. What is that guy thinking?

If I were Blizzard, I'd take him up on the offer. Heck, I'd offer anyone the chance to get an account unbanned for $1000. I just see it as a deal where the gain for Blizzard outweighs what they lose, as any player who pays so much to get a banned account reactivated loses a ton of credibility in the eyes of fellow players, goblins, socials, even M&S's. I just don't think Blizzard loses much PR status on this deal. Am I wrong?

Grim said...

@Anon
Blizzard is trying very hard to keep WoW players under their control and at least publicly claim to enforce their own rules unwaveringly. All of that is for naught if they start selling unbans. 1000$ do not even register against what's at stake for them.