WoW to Introduce Weekly Guild Challenges

Greg Tito

PR for Dungeons & Dragons
Sep 29, 2005
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WoW to Introduce Weekly Guild Challenges



The first major patch for Cataclysm will reward players for going on dungeon runs with guildmates.

Just because World of Warctaft is the biggest MMO on the market, with its fancy 12 million subscribers, its designers have not stopped innovating. The big push for Cataclysm was to get the original world of Azeroth on par with the expansion continents of Outland and Northrend, and that was a rounding success. But the other subtler push this time around was to further encourage players to play with friends. The guild levels introduced in Cataclysm were a big part of that, rewarding the group for guild-members completing quests and leveling up, but you could still be effective by playing solo. Which kind of missed the point of a multiplayer game?

Blizzard developers plan to take the group mentality one step further in the next major patch 4.1 by significantly rewarding actually playing with your guild by implementing guild challenges. These random weekly tasks will deposit money, and add guild XP on top of the current weekly cap. And all you have to do is run dungeons and fight in battlegrounds with a group that's mostly made up of guildies.

"Any guild group will qualify for Guild Challenges credit and there is a set number of times each challenge can be completed per week," said Blizzard's community manager Zarhym, aka Jonathan Brown. "There's no need to add a quest to your Quest Log or anything of that nature. Just grab a guild group eligible for any of the challenges and go."

The big patch 4.1, which will also re-introduce fan favorite dungeons Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurubis and a guild finder tool, is available for testing on the public test realm now. Knowing Blizzard, it will come out only when it's ready, but when it does, the guild rewards might be enough for me to sign back on to WoW and rejoin my guild Sparkle Motion in our quest for dominance over Azeroth.

Source: worldofwarcraft.com [http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2534919]

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oneplus999

New member
Oct 4, 2007
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I'm really concerned that all these guild-leveling features are going to get completely ignored in a few years when every guild is level 25, and if you want to start a new guild, the only way to get off the ground is to buy an old guild and pay for a name change :\

Knowing Blizzard though, they will do something to fix that when/if it comes up!
 

Proteus214

Game Developer
Jul 31, 2009
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This will be good for guilds that don't have many members and want to push for higher guild levels, but I don't think it will be much of a help to the guilds that are already over level 20 (with the cap being 25).
 

JerrytheBullfrog

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Dec 30, 2009
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AnythingOutstanding said:
...this is innovation?

Star Wars: The Old Republic - Release date TBA

Guild Wars 2 - Release date TBA

Damn it.
Ahahaha isn't that cute. He thinks that SWTOR will innovate.

GW2 has more of a chance, admittedly, though remember: Talk is cheap. I like ArenaNet and all, but I seriously doubt the game will live up to everything they're promising.
 

Vaccine

New member
Feb 13, 2010
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Exp that can't be used will most likely go into the guild bank as gold, much how Quest Exp you can't use offers extra money.

Not completely worthless for level 25 guilds.
 

PixelKing

Moderately confused.
Sep 4, 2009
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danhere said:
How exactly does adding additional ways to grind motivate you to resubscribe?
^ My opinion.
I got ninja'd :(

I really don't see why this is seen as a good thing because new guilds will take longer to get up to the current cap.
 

littlewisp

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Mar 25, 2010
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Vaccine said:
Exp that can't be used will most likely go into the guild bank as gold, much how Quest Exp you can't use offers extra money.

Not completely worthless for level 25 guilds.
I believe this is how they're handling it for level 25 guilds. Let's see. . .

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2534919

Not only that, if your guild reaches the level cap, continuing to partake in Guild Challenges will yield a much more substantial sum of gold deposited directly into the Guild Vault.
 

BENZOOKA

This is the most wittiest title
Oct 26, 2009
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All WoW needs now, are some kind of Zynga-style features, so you'd have to do something, once in every few hours in order to make something nice happen, and then of course something bad would happen if you didn't clock in at certain times.
 

tautologico

e^(i * pi) + 1 = 0
Apr 5, 2010
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Greg, sometimes I seriously doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!

Sorry, had to be done.
 

Sixcess

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Feb 27, 2010
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Greg Tito said:
...but you could still be effective by playing solo. Which kind of missed the point of a multiplayer game?
No, it doesn't miss the point at all.

You can solo everything in WoW until you reach the endgame dungeons, and, pre-Cata at least, if you didn't already have a levelling guild, or if you played casually then the chances are you would solo most of it, because the majority of the playerbase was sitting on their 80s waiting for the next raid. Maybe Cata changed that, a little, but I'm betting the dedicated players already have their new 85s. Hell, I'm betting they had them within a week or so of Cata being released.

I loathe the lazy argument of "it's massively MULTIPLAYER" for any MMO, because it's a throwback to the days when you needed a full team to pull one monster in Everquest or the other relics. Times have changed, and modern MMOs are fully aware that soloing is a valid option.

PVP focused games can justifiably describe themselves as multiplayer in that sense. TF2 is multiplayer. In MMOs, Darkfall is multiplayer. PVP needs other players, whether as allies or adversaries.

PVE focused games, and WoW is PVE focused on many of its servers, are not reliant on other players. An MMO should be redefined as a game where there are other players in the world, not necessarily in the same team as you.

I enjoy MMOs - they have a size and depth that no single player game can match. I even enjoy teaming in MMOs, but I don't want to team all the time.

Allowing soloing players to contribute to this guild system is a smart move by Blizzard. They're not idiots and they clearly recognise the changing nature of at least part of their playerbase - why else would we have 5 man Lich Kings instead of the 40 man raids of BC? People want to play their game, because it's a very slick, well made experience. They want to play it, but they don't necessarily want to dedicate their life to it in the old 5 nights a week raiding guild style that WoW is infamous for.

Of course now they're incentivising more grouping, so presumably they want to have that cake and eat it too. Being Blizzard I'm sure they will.
 

MentalBakura

Welcome To Das Oontz
Feb 21, 2009
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One can only hope that this lackluster patch is a result of Blizzard piling their resources into Diablo 3!

Yeah I'm kinda looking forward to the guild challenges, and the (reused) dungeons, but it's a bit underwhelming for a content patch, isn't it? Evidently Firelands is not ready for release yet, but not even a 100% new Cata 5-man? :(
 

Alar

The Stormbringer
Dec 1, 2009
1,356
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I'm honestly a big fan of Blizzard, and all I can think of when I see this is: meh.

Really, meh. That's it? Rewarding us for stuff we've already been doing?

Blizzard... please, for all our sakes, try harder.
MentalBakura said:
One can only hope that this lackluster patch is a result of Blizzard piling their resources into Diablo 3!

Yeah I'm kinda looking forward to the guild challenges, and the (reused) dungeons, but it's a bit underwhelming for a content patch, isn't it? Evidently Firelands is not ready for release yet, but not even a 100% new Cata 5-man? :(
I hope so too, man. I hope so too.
 

thisbymaster

New member
Sep 10, 2008
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Adding more dungeons isn't going to do it for me. Great more to grind endlessly and wait in line for. I would like more quests, yes I know that I don't need the exp but I would rather them do more solo quests/content done in the world then add thousands of dungeons.