Monday, May 14, 2012

Master Musings: Guild Crop


The musings of a guild leader are always full of drama. I wouldn't deny that my own musings aren't free of the dreaded drama bug, but we're all human. It's just that guild leaders are more exposed to those sort of things. What makes you different though, is your ability to come back from cloud nine to the people you love.



Oh... Guild Crop... I love you so much... Guild Crop is probably the most fun, the most rewarding and the most stressful guild activities.

In the golden days of low leveled Inflation, Guild Crop was the major way that the guild members would bond. We would hop on alts and do a few spas and gather at Ases and turn in Guild Points as we complain about how our hands are cramping and how our days were going. It was a such a fun time. It was rewarding to bond with the guild and it was rewarding in terms of the wealth and prosperity of the guild. People were getting things to sell, we were leveling up, our maximum capacity was also increasing. What we were doing was benefiting our continued friendships and gameplay. But with the fun and rewards, there was stress. It was the good type of stress. Time and project management, keeping a schedule of our own guilds' crops, collaborating with crop hop guilds... But all those things, the fun, the rewards, the stress... It's all gone.

Let me introduce you to the Guild Penalty. Three days of guild abstinence after leaving or being expelled from a guild. Three days of lonliness. This needless thing destroyed the Guild Crop market in order to perserve "guild ethics." Well, let me tell you one thing. There's no such thing as guild ethics in a video game. This isn't Fairy Tail in which guilds are tangible things that don't consume our lives. It's just a game. That's like saying one has business ethics in a game when people get scammed and undercutted every day.

Anyways, crop isn't dead, it's crippled by a feature that cuts into OGPlanet's profits. Because crops aren't as spontaneous as they were prior to the Guild Penalty, players don't have a high demand for Crop Seed Boxes, which in turn cuts into OGPlanet's potential profits. This argument is very much so a valid one, but always the dismissed one. So let's focus on argument that makes more sense for the players: maximize the potential of every feature of the game. OGPlanet has the ability to take away the Guild Penalty, we've seen this as a glitch in a past past pastttttttttt update, and yet, they continue to insist on such malevolence. If you want to cripple GP contribution, then make a maximum GP limit per day. That way, more GP ores will be in circulation, the flow of Guild Coins doesn't have a handicap and other functions of guild affairs are not disturbed (recruitment, haphazard expulsion, management of alts).

Although people will focus on only Spa as a good aspect of Guild Crop, I tend to see the good in anything you get. I mean, Boss is fun in it's own right. You get to kill and lag with your guild members and, although you probably won't get much, it's still really fun. Mine has its moments too. You have to work together with a few other people strategically to get the digging steam to pop up and you can run around aimlessly in the mine, mining rocks alongside your guild members. But spa, we all love spa. There are a few problems with spa though. If you choose to save your buff, it can be painfully lonely to just hit away at chests for an hour. If you choose to do the spa immediately, it can be painfully competitive to just hit away at the chests for an hour. But we can all agree that, even though spa comes with two conditions, it yields the most profit and the most fun.

Ah Guild Crop... If it weren't for this invisible concept called guild ethics, you'd thrive a little bit more...

But I'll save that for another day.

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