Kulldam

In the recent Beta build, Blizzard disbanded and thus reset all Guilds and also implemented actual Guild Experience earnings from Guild Achievements, and I must admit, I'm pleasantly surprised by the numbers we see.

Originally Posted by Mumper

[...]We are in the process restarting the beta realms to wipe all guilds. There are a number of lingering bugs that can only be fixed by a full wipe. We also want to take this opportunity to see guilds go from level 1 to 25 with a fresh start now that we have everything implemented.

We have also boosted the experience and rep gain for guilds by x5 the normal amount. The daily and weekly caps have also been raised to correspond with this. We are doing this to allow us to get more testing on as many things as we can before ship. Please remember that this increase is ONLY for beta and we will be going back to the normal values when Cataclysm ships.[...]

I should take a moment to point out that all the numbers reported here have already been adjusted by me to account for the 500% boost currently seen in the Beta as mentioned above by Mumper. Therefore, everything we see here should be assumed to be actual, live values.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Guild Reputation in particular was a very tedious process, as the earnings rate was only 1 Reputation per 15,000 Guild Experience. Luckily, Mumper acknowledged the previous build had an issue with the Guild Reputation calculation and thus it has been fixed as we see in this current build.

Originally Posted by Mumper

We realized we were calculating reputation gain incorrectly and fixed it in this build. Glad to see that it's working correctly now!

At present, the current Guild Rep rate is 450 Guild Experience per 1 Guild Reputation. However, I very strongly suspect when Blizzard implemented the 500% boost this build to Guild Rep/Guild Experience, they didn't account for the 500% bonus being applied twice to Guild Reputation gains, since Guild Rep is earned based on Guild Exp earned, so 500% Guild Exp means 500% more Guild Rep, plus a flat 500% modifier on Guild Rep means Guild Rep could be at 2500% modifier, rather than the intended 500%.

The reason I expect this is the case is because if 450 exp per rep was the actual value, simply leveling from 80 to 85 while in a Guild would earn approximately 45000 Guild Reputation for that individual, which would easily place them at Exalted status. Therefore, I think it's a much safer bet to put money on the following conversion rate, which is 500% lower than the current Beta rate:

2250 Guild Experience = 1 Guild Reputation

This would mean leveling from 80-85 would give a player about 9000 Guild Rep, putting them just into Honored standing with their Guild, which seems much more likely to me.

Heroic Dungeon Guild Experience

I finally got a chance to see what the Guild Experience/Guild Reputation gains are from doing a Guild Run of a Heroic Dungeon, and the normal values seem to be:

Trash Mob: 1620 Guild Experience or 0.72 Guild Reputation
Boss Mob: 27000 Guild Experience or 12 Guild Reputation

Running through Heroic Halls of Origination gave me about 200,000 Guild Experience, which was about 89 Guild Reputation. However, remembering that each Guild Member involved in a particular Guild Dungeon Run earns Guild Experience toward the daily cap, it seems a single 5-man Guild Dungeon Run will earn about 1 million Guild Exp for the Guild, or about 16% of the Daily Cap value.

Guild Achievement Experience Earnings

Another very interesting implementation to witness this build is the values of Guild Experience earned from Guild Achievements. Beta Max, the massive Guild I've been hanging out in on the beta realm, reformed after the reset early October 1st, and after spending about 3 hours online messing around, I was able to witness and track the Guild Experience earned values for a handful of Guild Achievements, as seen below:

Achievement	Guild Experience
Shadowmourne + Thunderfury + A Legendary Collection	18,834,000
Heroic: Grim Batol Guild Run	7,500,000
Sulfuras + We Are Legendary	6,466,000
Call of Battle	1,562,000
Night Elf Slayer	900,000
Draenei Slayer	900,000
Razorfen Kraul Guild Run	100,000
Razorfen Downs Guild Run	100,000
Scarlet Monestary Guild Run	100,000
Scholomance Guild Run	100,000

As before, those values have all been adjusted from the current 500% boost, so they should reflect actual live values. Also note that some Achievements that are listed together (the legendary ones basically) had to be chunked together since they were earned simultaneously in-game, and thus there was no way to determine the actual Guild Experience value of the individual achievement.

As we can see, the actual values are quite adjusted based on the difficulty for the most part, though I don't know if I agree with the relative values assigned to some of these. For example, we see that the Heroic Grim Batol Guild Run is worth, on average, MORE than an individual Legendary achievement of any kind. Obviously getting something like Thunderfury can be earned by a single player, but it seems fairly obvious to me that the actual man hours required to complete a given old-world legendary is FAR BEYOND that of five people doing a heroic 5-man dungeon!

I hate to just constantly sound like I'm complaining about each new iteration of the Guild Rep/Exp/Perk system, but the implication here is that it takes a Guild less overall effort to acquire a Shadowmourne than to run a level 85 heroic dungeon, which is obviously fucking ridiculous! It makes me wonder and worry about what sort of Guild Experience we'll see from something that actually takes massive effort, such as Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel or Master Crafter.

Obviously, it could be argued that Blizzard will explicitly make Cataclysm-based Guild Achievements worth significantly more than any older-content achievements (and in fact such a thing was casually mentioned by Mumper in a previous blue post), but it still seems a bit out of whack. Completionists such as myself will still be inclined or interested in getting as many Guild Achievements as possible, regardless of their actual experience value, but I suppose I can't blame Blizzard for that -- clearly they want to discourage someone from running Razorfen Downs Guild Run to actually earn a noticeable chunk of Guild Experience.

In spite of that minor gripe, I'm quite happy with the way the Guild Achievements system is working out. As mentioned, since the earnings from Guild Achievements do not count against your daily cap, we can easily see that an active Guild that wants to push their level up a bit faster can go for a number of Guild Achievements and earn quite a few days worth of Guild Experience.

For example, a single Guild Group could run all 9 Heroic 5-mans and quickly earn about 11 days worth of Guild Experience! Of course it must be remembered these are all one-time bonuses, but if a 5-man dungeon is giving 7.5 million, we can pretty easily expect a Cataclysm Raid Guild Achievement to be worth 15+ million, which is quite a sizeable chunk!

Guild Earnings UI

Finally, I thought this was pretty sweet. I stumbled upon part of the new Guild Roster interface, which features a couple new drop-down options to view the Guild roster based on earned Guild Experience (called Guild Activity). We can see both the total earnings, as well as a weekly snapshot, which is a cool way to see who is contributing and specifically how much!