(Wp) Dojo & Clan Suggestion Compilation (Wp)

[lMasterBetal]

[WP]The Official Wolf Pack Suggestions Compilation{WP]


Hello Digital Extremes and Warframe fans. I come from a small clan known as the Wolf Pack and have run into trouble with the Dojo. We see that there are clans that are hording members only for their resources and frankly, the Dojos have created the Borg from Star Trek. There is no longer any individuality except for the high ranks while all the newbies collect resources for their masters. Some of them do not get anything in return.

I am creating a list of ideas that Digital Extremes could implement for the Dojo to fix the issues both large clans and small clans have.

#1 Proportional Costs and Time Scaling.

 

Proportional Costs

The big issue that small clans have in the game is the cost of building the dojo. Some of these clans have adapted and created collectives that horde newbies just to build the Dojo. Both clans suffer for the following reasons. 1. Small clans are forced to give up and join these collectives losing their individual power the once held. 2. Large clans seem to not have leaders knowing each member making the individual seem less important the number of members more important.

The way to solve this problem is by giving all the clans the same challenge regardless of how many members they have. Suppose that a clan has 10 members and another collective clan has 1000. The resource Forma is required to make a reactor. 5 for 10 members. Therefore. You instead require 500 forma for the collective. While this sucks for the larger clan, this makes the challenge the same for every clan.

It's a fair and balanced way to offer a challenge to large and small clans alike. That way we don't see recruiters raping newbies, demanding that join their clan. Recruiters will then look for people for gameplay reasons and not just the Dojo.

 

Timing Scale (GTG 3000 and Jytra)

 

Another approach DE could make is through a thing known as time scaling of production. In my opinion which has been influenced over the years, there is key to making micro-transactions work. If you sell weapons via micro-transactions, you make the game play to win. If it is cosmetic micro-transactions, that is fine because it is not effecting the game-play other than how great you look.

 

In this case, we are talking about a Dojo. With the Dojo, the construction of this base should be easier for everyone however would take 30 days to construct. You can then place in more resources to help the development of the building afterwards. This allows smaller clans of about 15 members to construct the Dojo but would take longer than a larger clan.

 

Of course they could always make it easy to construct the Dojo for everyone (But it would still require hard work) while cosmetic additions to the base would be able to be built with ease by larger clan and harder for smaller clans. Through this method, you are allowing all clans to receive the benefit from the Dojo while the larger clans have the beautiful stunning looks of the Dojo via cosmetics.

#2 Records of Contribution

There is currently no way to tell how much an individual contributes towards the construction of a section of the Dojo. My clan is currently creating a bond system of IOU's of resources, blueprints, and credits, or even promotions for those who contribute. This is prevented from happening because there is no record that Warlord has without the chance of being lied to by their members.

The Warlord should keep a record on what new things happened in construction of the Dojo. Suppose I contribute 60% Forma into a reactor and 50% Alloy Plates to a Lab. Someone can claim that they made that contribution and take the bonds that I deserved.

By adding a Records Book in the Dojo, the Warlord could tell if the slug is lying or not.


#3 Dojo Features

-Sitting
-Decorations to rooms
-VR Training Center (Virtual Reality)
-Barracks
-Hall of the Warlord (Warlord's Room)


#4 Vault of the Tenno (Clan Vaults)

As a said in suggestion #2, bonds are the Wolf Pack's means of IOU's that we will record for how much people contribute to the Dojo. They can spend these bonds for said materials whether they are blueprints, resources, or credits.

The best way to have this system to work is through a Clan Vault or The Vault of the (Clan Name). These vaults would be managed by people the Warlord selects and himself. There members would place X credits (Decided by DE) into the vault. They could also donate blueprints, resources, and keys to the vault. Then if someone wants a blueprint for say.... a Latron Prime. A person the Warlord trusts or himself could take the blueprint and give it to him in return for something of equal value (Could be 3 WP Bonds)
This system would spark the beginning of trading in Warframe and while it would seem to be a bad idea for DE since people no longer have to buy these items with platinum or nolife the game, they would assure the loyalty of many people and would make a larger profit in the long run.


#5 Clan Duels

-Offer a PvP environment for clans who wish to battle each other through duels. Clan vs Clan 1v1's could prove to be an interesting match to watch for both clans. You could also increase said duels to become 4v4's or 5v5's and create challenges for clans to battle others for honor and trophies.

#6 Clan Alerts and Honor Points

-With the alert system that exists now. Many people usually care for the |?| award missions but do not care for any other. The way to solve this issue is to either give a question mark or honor points for a clan. These would be simply called Clan Alerts and would be harder than the |?| missions. These missions would also require you or your members can enter these alerts and no one else.

Once the mission is completed. The clan is given Honor Points. These points can then be spent by the Warlord for a variety of "Upgrades & Boosts" that could enhance their clan. These boosts could include
-Decreased Dojo construction cost of a building site
-10% Affinity Increase
-10% Credit Boost
- More |?| Alerts for all members (Only members would see these alerts if they are not made for the public)
-The list goes on

These alerts could then be used as an incentive for teamwork oriented clans to get honor points to have a better experience on Warframe.

Comment Ideas (Only ideas involving #1 are added to #1)

 

#1 Law_Abiding_Engineer: Add in a message board for Warlords to make announcements on. (A better way to make announcements than on Clan Chat) llMasterBetall: " Add in a pop-up annoncement like how certain MMO's have when announcing hotfixes and updates"

#2 laurentiud: Upgrades to constructed buildings. (Level 1 Reactor 10 Energy. Level 2 Reactor 20 Energy) Decrease cost of buildings in return for long construction times.

#3 TANKER_06: Guild Progression: Like how there are skill trees for your character in MMO's, there should be Skill Trees and specializations for guilds that way no guild can be better than the other based on size.

Guild skills could range from unique recipes to guild-wide buffs that increased rates and stats. 

In summary, this would:

1) Create an economy between guilds.

2) Remove the "oldest/biggest guild is the best" mentality.

3) Small guilds would exist, and have a purpose, as the number of members would not be so much of an issue.

#4 Law_Abiding_Engineer (2):

-Cosmetic changes that include dyanimc lights or ambient music (Preferrably choose the music) that is added to the Dojo (Could tie in with #1 Ideas). 

-In-Game maps for large Dojos

-In-Game Barracks that offer bonuses for resting for X hours (Think of RPG's that do this as well)

-Personal Living Quarters

-Awards for Clan Feats (Construct X Weapons, Do X Alerts); rewards could be cheaper resource cost for construction

-More Rooms and Chat features: Command Chat (Generals and Warlord), Dance Floor, Debriefing Room, Announcement Board)

 

Conclusion

While the Dojo(Alpha) is great, there are still many flaws with the system and many features that need to be added. I hope that this post will not recieve negativity from people and instead will gain more ideas. I will also continue to read the replies to this post to alter or add on more ideas that people have in the comments.

Thank you everyone for reading this and please keep this thread on the top 10. We need Digital Extremes to hear our voices.

Edited May 28, 2013 by lMasterBetal

[SirMelf]

Nice ideas.

[lMasterBetal]

Thanks. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them here.

[ThreeEight]

This is a bump to keep this thread on top for at least another second. Your welcome; i hope for your ideas to spread accordingly.

[TANKER_06]

I was actually reading an article on Massively which questions if a bigger clan should be rewarded just based of size. While thinking about that, I came up with this response:

 

 

I think the current guild mechanics in most if not all games would be considered basic at the least. The one game I was hoping to do it well (if anything, because of the name), Guild Wars 2 has started to explore that, but the game mechanics then contradicts it.

 

Guild Progression, when introduced, was a great idea, it gave to each guild goals that they can only achieve together. However, the basic and simple goals promote having or joining a larger guild for increased speed. 

 

Guilds progression is currently basic, and very linear. If you would imagine a guild is a character, it is akin to playing in an adventure (or social) game. Why not give guilds a complex progression system? Why not look at alternate modes of progression, via time and meaningful, one-off achievements instead of arbitrary ones?

 

For example, let's just imagine each guild had half the skill list of EVE. From there, guilds can research skills but would be eventually forced to specialize. Guilds are allowed to trade researched technology for money, materials and even personnel (on a temporary or permanent basis, subject to the member's approval of course). Big guilds would potentially enjoy more benefits, but would not make small guilds totally obsolete.

 

Guild skills could range from unique recipes to guild-wide buffs that increased rates and stats. 

In summary, this would:

1) Create an economy between guilds.

2) Remove the "oldest/biggest guild is the best" mentality.

3) Small guilds would exist, and have a purpose, as the number of members would not be so much of an issue.

 

 

 

To apply it specifically to Warframe, I would imagine it as a research meta-game, quite akin to the foundry, for unique recipes, buffs, crafting and even creation of resources. 

 

Research-focused guild

Research-focused guilds would research...research, and produce resulting blueprints of said research. This would result in the unique items exclusive to guilds, as well, as slightly buffed items that are currently on the market. A research-focused guild would have the added benefit of creating special blueprints unique to this type of guild, which produces items for members of such a guild, while they are in it. 

 

Buff-focused guild

Buff-focused guilds would research into buffs, creating both personal and guild wide buffs as well as relics. These could be temporal versions of powerful buffs, as well as permanent versions of the current relics used. Ideally, most should be temporal for the continued existence of these types of guilds. Added benefits for this guild would be unique buffs only for that type of guild.

 

Craft-focused guild

This type of guild would enjoy a major acceleration to crafting speeds of anything related to crafting, as well as a steady supply of crafting resources every day. While seemingly less attractive then the previous two, they are required for quick production of blueprints from the research guild. Additional benefits, could include being able to produce 1 more item from a blueprint, resulting in 2 from the final product. 

 

This would then open up the game for a trading market, which Warframe may or may not be ready for at this point of time. It *might* hurt monetization, but it could also assist it if done right.

 

Edited May 27, 2013 by TANKER_06

[lMasterBetal]

Neat idea Tanker but I still support my proportional cost idea.

[Law_Abiding_Engineer]

I have a few but one of the simple yet smal ideas, is have a message board.  Somethign that leaders (warlords, or whatever is the top dog in ranks) can write on.  I know I would like it so I can write "Hey guys, focus on X building, instead of Y"  or something like that.

 

 

Also, something for the clan leaders, is a place where you can seee who donates what.   Also, where is this guild bank that stores resources?    Can't seem to find it.

[laurentiud]

I have also a ideea for Dojos. 

Buildings can be upgraded. E.g.: rank 1 cost 1 forma, rank 2 cost 2 forma etc. When the building it's upgraded, it produce more (eg: reactor rank 1 produce 10 energy, rank 2 15 energy.) 

Or buildings be more cheap, but needs a lot of time for building (eg: 3 days for reactor). 

Sorry for my bad english xD

[lMasterBetal]

I have a few but one of the simple yet smal ideas, is have a message board.  Somethign that leaders (warlords, or whatever is the top dog in ranks) can write on.  I know I would like it so I can write "Hey guys, focus on X building, instead of Y"  or something like that.

 

 

Also, something for the clan leaders, is a place where you can seee who donates what.   Also, where is this guild bank that stores resources?    Can't seem to find it.

I'm adding the message board idea. That's a good idea.

 

There is no guild bank that exists but we know that they will probably add one if we act it exists :P.

[GTG3000]

As I suggested on that other thread:

 

I guess best solution would be a big overhaul for many things.

1 - Add levels of decoration to the rooms. Sure the new rooms would look not as good, but it would be cheap, even if the final cost would be about same, and smaller clans could have functionality over looks.
2 - overhaul the rooms to make the most utility ones (eg reactor and laboratories) limited in their function, but cheap. So, you could make a reactor room, that provides some power rather cheap, and you could continue to upgrade it as you require energy. Same goes for the laboratories - the oracle system could be used as a base for different research facilities. Or even have the separate laboratories be like the upgrades. This way, if your clan is small, you would build an oracle and only three cheap labs to equip everyone, but it would take way too long for a big clan to do the same without having multiple labs. The system could be used to either have a line of blueprints, or unlimited abmount of blueprints in production, with the research speed gettng decreaced if the amount of blueprints exceeds amount of labs.
3 - research cost overhaul, to make it work with 2.
4 - introduce limit of clan size, based on the dojo size. Of course, giving the big clans a month to build enough member rooms to support their size before culling.

Or, alternatively, DE could postpone the dojo until the system to trade items makes it into the game (or prioritise differently, eh), and make it so that the rooms for clanmembers would give the Warlords a number of dojo key blueprints. In the beginning, every clan would receive a number of key blueprints, based on how many members the Dojo can take. This way, the bigger clans would have to work to get all their members into the dojo, and prioritize, who gets there first (since the keys, once built and claimed, can't be exchanged). Of course, it would also require the costs to be toned down so that the initial group (or a small clan that isn't going to grow any time soon) would be able to build this all in their lifetimes.

Of course there would be big, flashy rooms like the grand hall, that would take huge amount of resources. But that's what they are - big, flashy rooms.

[Jytra]

One element you need to also consider is the expandability of a clan/guild. If a clan of 5 can create a complete dojo in a shorter period of time and using less resources than a larger clan, then what's preventing the leaders of a potentially large clan from inviting the minimum amount of people needed to construct the Dojo for the lowest resource cost, then rapidly expand it with more members?

 

There was a post somewhere that provided a very good method of balance, which introduced production time as the scaling method. If a large clan wants to build quickly, then they can "overcontribute" resources into the construction to speed up construction time.

 

As an example, say that a clan has between 7-10 members. These members maybe play 2-3 hours at a time, mostly after work or on the weekends. In it's current state, the clan would be unable to construct a cross connector for a few months due to the cost of materials and the current drop rates of Void Keys and Forma. Even though the time it takes to construct something is 12 hours, these players would basically be regulated to joining a large clan if they wanted access to the new weapons and features of this patch.

 

However, let's say the costs were significantly reduced, maybe to a tenth of what they are now, but conversely, the build time was increased to five days instead of twelve hours. This clan can now start construction, and continue to gather up resources for the next section, without having to worry about amassing a large pool of items that only drop in quantities of 50-150 per run. 

 

At the same time, say the members of Clan BigMcLargeHuge also start construction on their Dojo. Resource gathering is a non-issue, so beginning construction is a cakewalk. However, because five days is a long time, the "Rush Order" button becomes available, at the cost of additional resources. By paying incremental fees to reduce the time -- say, by 12-24 hours with each contribution, all the way down to zero -- Clan BigMcLargeHuge can have their entire Dojo fully operational in a fraction of the time as the casual player.

 

That way, smaller clans of friends who are only playing the game at a casual pace can still build their Dojo like any other, but only time itself is the impeding factor, not how many hours you put in farming an unreasonably large pool of materials.

 

 

 

I agree with some of the other points in your post, but I have a feeling that because the Dojo itself is still in Alpha, much of what you're suggesting/want are probably going to be added at some point. This patch was more or less "get it out the door because we're running late already", with refinement to come later.

 

That said, there are a few things that I honestly don't see as major issues. You have to remember that this game isn't like any MMO that's out there. In fact, putting it in the same category as an MMO is a bit of a disservice to the game. The combat is small squad focused, with no physical lobby to adventure to, and in turn should have led to smaller clans rather than surrogate "servers" that are +500 people, if you get my meaning. The clan advancement and trade ideas are good, but I don't know if they're really meant for a game like this in it's current state.

[Law_Abiding_Engineer]

Other ideas, I would say other minor ideas would be that unique music is played throughout the Dojo, and/or that rooms could have additional furnishings, such as a water fountion, or dynamic lights.  Another idea, is a map in the central area that shows where everything in the dojo is and where things are being constructed.  Heck, maybe have one that stands in the middle of the main dojo area, and then for every hallway or three-way hallway, have a map that is attached to the wall.  Of course it would have a dot saying "You Are Here".  With some clans *cough* large ones *cough* :P, they will be having tons of rooms so it is easy to get lost.

 

 

A rather extreme, yet plausible add, could be that there are bunkers for tenno to sleep in.  Lets say that a person "sleeps" for X hours, maybe he/she would have a small, minor buff for an hour or so.   Buffs could be +5% increase in end mission rewards (credits that is), +X% of any positive stat or -X% of any negative stat/buff.

 

Personal dojo room.  This goes partially in hand with the previous idea.  When I thought about dojos and then about small clans, I thought, why not allow there to be an already made door, that leads people to a personal "dojo" for which they can do all sorts of things.   Its like having your own personal living quarters.  In there, you can have a variety of things.  You can have a trophy display which showcase all weapons you won and their levels of mastery and kills and other stats.    You can have an interactive "picture frame" that shows you your rank and other stats too.   If you are able to sync it with your real-life timezone, you could have a personal clock or something.   Maybe have a thing that shows you the progress of an item that you are building in a foundary.   Other things, are that the room is only accessable to the individual player, and no one can enter anyone else's personal room.   As for things to add in there, you can have buildables that require high amounts of credits, for things like a personal elevator, a small water fountion, more lights (possibly controllable lights), more windows to show space, a personal wall running room (accessable in the basement of the room once elevator is made).  But since there are so many ideas that could be thought of from that, I'll cut it short for now.

 

 

I think this was already mentioned, but have personal goals for clans (scaled of course) and whenever these goals are met (such as participating in events or doing things like 'Build X number of weapons, or X number of rooms'), the guild will have a new room that is unlocked (or ready to build, but make it cheap) where various trophies can be displayed.

 

Another room that could be made, is one that has a video or info displaying moniter that shows and explains in detail, all of the enemies for any particular faction.  Helps to show weaknesses and other things.

 

Although its technical, maybe have a personal chat for clans where only the Warlords (or whoever has complete control over things), are able to talk amongst each other, without others being able to read it.

 

And to add to my previous idea of having a central board where things can be announced, perhaps ahve one where non Warlords, are able to make posts about whatever it is that may concern them.

 

And finally (for now at least), why not have a buildable room that has like a disco ball, strobe lights, thin neon lights, fog and loud dance music.  In there, you can just have fun and dance and stuff.  Make a few tracks so the songs don't get too annoying.

 

 

 

Thats all for now.  Hope some of them sound good

[lMasterBetal]

I added what I thought was necessary from the last 3 comments before this one.

[Numitor]

I suggest to add access control system for the Dojo, mean areas restricted by clan ranks.

 

Sorry for bad english.

[lMasterBetal]

I suggest to add access control system for the Dojo, mean areas restricted by clan ranks.

 

Sorry for bad english.

I guess. I'm not sure that is a good idea or not. Truthfully, any clan should have access to the gameplay features the Dojo offers while cosmetics is a different issue.

[littlefurness]

They need to add essentials like a kick command or if you have been afk for x amount of time you will be kicked from the dojo and you could change x.

these are needed as if someone stands in the dojo for long periods of time it can mess up so things cant be accessed