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Increases in task difficulty don't seem to offer any parallel increase in compensation. Could task payouts be increased for more difficult tasks?

Guild-point grinding is already mind-numbingly tedious, and after a quick look at the wiki, it seems almost everyone else gets paid 2-3x more in riln and guild points than we do per task. I can't really object to small payouts for places like Tarueka and the bog, even if the process is already tedious before the required GPs even really start to ramp. I found it particularly frustrating to discover Headmistress Seren only pays 100 riln and a headpat for making yourself an enemy and potential target of the Dunwyr. Likewise with the meadow, which is really, really far and puts you up against enemies with like 800-1k in hitrolls. I don't remember the exact details of that one, but it sucks. 50-75 GP and some more riln doesn't feel like too much to ask when assigned those locations.

It hardly feels worth it to do the ramped up tasks even when you have the means to do so, but you're still going to slog through the two steps forward one step back task system anyway if you want to advance becaaaauuuse...

Gaining guild points via combat is even more impossibly tedious, and I'm going to model it through math. Ideal guildpoint ratio gained via spellcasting seems to be 50:50 for 1 GP/cast. A decrease in accuracy means an increase in gains, but getting fewer hits over time means fewer GPs over time. This means, according to the law of averages, we are gaining at most around one guildpoint every 10 seconds, or 12 seconds if aiming in the long term. 5-6 guild points is worth roughly one minute. Okay!

Suppose you made the unfortunate mistake of not getting hydromancy first so you can't do tasks. You need 500+250*rank to advance per rank, so going from rank 0 to 5 requires 500+750+1000+1250+1500, or 5000 GP. Assuming we aren't aiming (6 GP per minute), 5000 divided by 6 (splitting 5000 GP into GPs per minute) divided by 60 (conversion into hours) = approximately 14 actual hours of straight grinding, excluding rest times for energy (which are very significant) to get to rank 5 so you can get hydromancy. At rank 10 it takes a little over 8 hours of straight grinding, excluding rest times, to raise up a single rank. These models all assume we have infinite energy and don't have to roam around for new targets, so it's actually extremely generous. My friend was grinding for like a week straight to pick up her second element. Her pyromancy went up from 0 to like 800 during that time. To be perfectly honest, if I hadn't picked up hydromancy and had tasks to baby me through, I would've quit well before then. It was a chore even with the tasks.

If you're looking to grind GP via combat between ranks 10 and 15, the entire stretch of which you get absolutely nothing for, that's a time investment of 48 hours assuming infinite energy, no rests, and immediate target acquisition of appropriate dodginess. Even finding appropriate targets can be rather difficult once you level out of Tarueka's range. I estimate the real time value at around 2-3 weeks.

I think it probably wouldn't be too out of place to just, like... Double or even treble the guild points per hit? It would still take a really long time, but you could sort of reasonably progress instead of staring at 2-3 weeks of on-off grind with no payout between ranks 10 and 15.

Thanks for reading!

This has always somewhat troubled me as well. I never actually did the math, so thanks for that. I do agree with the sentiment that the reward system for guild tasks should go up,

I unfortunately can't think of any suggestions myself to make on how exactly. I can however see the obvious issues of basing the reward on any one particular aspect, like guild rank or mancy skill level.
I do think this is applicable to most guilds though. I can remember many times where on many different characters I have turned down tasks because the reward wasn't worth the risk to me.

To jump in with a comparrison for you.

I have a Claw. I am sent out to murderize this creature that has increased skill compared to others of the same type and stronger than myself. That creature can one or two-shot me. For that creature, I got 75 guild points and 100 riln. I am also sent to Stone Canyon for tasks. As well, I am assigned assassinations that could make me an enemy of the entire player base.

When I mained my mummer, the only thing I could do to gain my guild points was storytell in inns, and that netted only 50 guild points and *between* 20 and 100 riln and that's if I perfected my storytell. If I did a particularly bad job, I could LOSE 50 guild points and gain no riln. Each storytell place has an hour reset, so no circling and grinding that out.

As an elemancer, you are asked to go to an area and survey whilst channeling. That's all. They are also completely neutral and don't care about the Dunwyr or Shadgard's reputation with the scarecrows. To quote the wiki: "As an organization, the Elemancers are neutral - they have no particular agenda or political goals." Though I did read in the discord that the GMs are looking into adding more tasks for the elemancers.

Guild rank 20 is not supposed to be attained in a week or even a month. It's a dedication and progress through your guild.

Akila wrote: ↑Thu Nov 15, 2018 11:19 pm ...

While I can sympathize with your plight, I do have some questions. Would you call mummer tasks particularly interesting? Engaging? Are interesting or engaging words you would use to describe elemancer tasks? It's good that you've powered through bad systems, but that, sadly, doesn't make them good systems. Claw tasks, at the very least, sound like they could be fun. There's an element of risk to them, and you get three times as many guild points.

I'm not sure if you're against the suggestion or just offering some perspective. In either case, I do appreciate the perspective, but if you are against:

'Mummers and some other guilds have tasks that suck even more' isn't a particularly compelling argument against improving elemancers. It just means those particular guilds, maybe, should be looked at. Likewise, 'it shouldn't change because being an elemancer should be hard and you have to earn your rank through effort' isn't all that helpful either. Tedium isn't difficulty. Effort isn't contribution. It just means the game is better played by a bot. Walk to water, execute commands. Walk back. Walk to water, execute commands. Walk back. Repeat until you can't go on. Hours and hours of this doesn't make you dedicated, doesn't make you earn or deserve the fabled rank 20, doesn't make you a better or more knowledgeable player. It just means you probably should've written a bot to supervise much sooner in the process. And you're not going to make rank 20 any other way without staff gifts, which are nice if they happen but should never to be counted on.

Speaking as a new player, I'd say my top three frustrations with Clok are the poor documentation (If you forget something from the tutorial, you probably aren't going to find it in the help files, which are near useless and there's no mention anywhere of many useful commands like join or peer, which would have been good to know regarding the next item.), the essentially-instant-death rooms (Scarecrows, spiders, Keth, probably more), and the guild point system (for elemancers because I haven't had chance to play with the others yet, though it's... not looking good.).

I'm not grind averse. I like that there's always something you can do. But my experience with guild points so far has been overwhelmingly negative. It feels like it was written to waste as much time as possible to artificially delay progression. I don't really understand why we have twenty levels either when we're only allowed to have 20 abilities, tops, and all our abilities are spread through, like, seven or eight levels. There's a ton of empty space and it feels meaningless and unsatisfying.

For a frame of reference for this post and my views, I've been playing prior to the recent changes to the Elemancers that Jirato recently implemented. I don't have much experience with other guilds. I play my PC as though she were a normal person, not Undying, so if she dies, she's staying dead. I no longer perform tasks on her because the areas are becoming too dangerous and I don't have/want the luxury of coming back if I make a bad decision with where I go exploring.

With that introduction out of the way, I do have mixed feelings about our task system. The riln rewards are high. During the transition from the old guild system to the new guild system, I made a large sum of riln, which I believe to be in the realm of 20,000, just by doing tasks to obtain Multi-Element Weaving and my third element. It's a little high, but our guild does have a number of expensive items that are 'nice to have' while playing.

The promotion points make me feel conflicted, too. Aurelia is a pyromancer, so I have to go into combat to raise her pyromancy skill. Our tasks only award points if you're using Geomancy and Hydromancy, so if you aren't using either one of those elements as your starting element, your progression is going to feel like it's nonexistent. Although it would involve another overhaul to the system, I would like to see us obtain our basic elements faster and/or for there to be tasks added for the other elements. The simplest fix that comes to my mind is to have the various Elemancers strewn across the Lost Lands give tasks only for the element that they use. Olivia, for example, would only give Aeromancy tasks. Erica, Pyromancy and so forth and so own. While I can't confirm this statement, I believe there is an Elemancer teach in Mistral Lake, Haiban and Shadgard to make this more feasible. It also gives us reason to return to the class room in the academy that has all four elemancers present if we're looking for a centralized place to train.

We can almost cast spells for a trivial amount of progression.

Since our PCs are scholars and not combatants, sending us into areas where monsters are extremely deadly is a little strange. I would like to see our tasks changed to something that is a little more creative and inclusive of what we are given for specializing in those elements. For instance, pyromancy allows you to burn objects, create a flame for cooking, fire off flares and a number of cool little things. Cooking things as a pyromancer, for example, could work as analyzing the effect of patterned flame versus natural flame on food seems like something we might do.

It's been said many times but NPCs are also people. I look at them IC and OOC, and I try to think what their progression towards mastery of an element must have been like. Many of these people aren't Undying, so I believe their progression included much less combat and danger on their end. I would like that option to be available to us, too. The point of view may also exist that Jirato WANTS us to have to risk something for progression. That's fair, too, and if that's his design intent, we should respect that and keep it in mind when making suggestions.

Akila wrote:I have a Claw. I am sent out to murderize this creature that has increased skill compared to others of the same type and stronger than myself. That creature can one or two-shot me. For that creature, I got 75 guild points and 100 riln. I am also sent to Stone Canyon for tasks. As well, I am assigned assassinations that could make me an enemy of the entire player base.

When I mained my mummer, the only thing I could do to gain my guild points was storytell in inns, and that netted only 50 guild points and *between* 20 and 100 riln and that's if I perfected my storytell. If I did a particularly bad job, I could LOSE 50 guild points and gain no riln. Each storytell place has an hour reset, so no circling and grinding that out.

As an elemancer, you are asked to go to an area and survey whilst channeling. That's all. They are also completely neutral and don't care about the Dunwyr or Shadgard's reputation with the scarecrows. To quote the wiki: "As an organization, the Elemancers are neutral - they have no particular agenda or political goals." Though I did read in the discord that the GMs are looking into adding more tasks for the elemancers.

Something to keep in mind with the Claw and Brawlers is that these are combat oriented archetypes. They exist to fight in some capacity, they are given a lot of tools to do so and they're rewarded for it, too. Even though I personally dislike highly powerful creatures that can kill you in one or two hits, I believe most players playing an assassin go in to that experience knowing that theirs is a combat focus. I believe Brawlers also have a similar arrangement, where they have to go somewhere and find potentially lethal enemies for progression.

Mummer progression should probably be looked at, too. I think Jirato said that they're one of two remaining guilds that don't use promotions to obtain abilities. However, they can lead a non-combat life that I would like to see available to Elemancers, even if it comes at the cost of us losing guild points.

To address the last statement, I do want to point out that, while the Elemancers don't necessarily care about the Dunwyr or the scarecrows outside of Shadgard, those things will still kill you if you walk into their areas. You may have no political agenda, but that doesn't mean that they're going to let you go exploring in their area to analyze those elements. I believe this is comparable to asking a neutral mummer with no affiliation to Corvus to go to an inn in Corvus and to tell a story.

I used to be frustrated and not do tasks for a long time because all you needed for the abilities was the skill so I love the new ranking system, even if it is frustrating to watch it slowly climb up which I get is the point but I do agree that the reward for certain tasks is not worth the trouble and I just remove them, especially if I've been there recently and it's a particularly difficult area I don't actually have any suggestions except to increase gp payout riln can be gained in other ways so I'm not that worried about it the trouble will be to not have stuff obtained to fast so feel free to take your time if it's something your inclined to do, if not I'll work my way up eventually

I am personally offended at the comment about guild rank 20 being unobtainable without "staff gifts". This post is full of biased misinformation. The only time a GM ever adjusts the guild points of a character are in direct result to an event, or (more frequently) they are negatively adjusted as a punishment for going against the guild's ideals. On the extremely few occasions when guild points are manually awarded, it's always a nominal amount equal to what could easily be gained from grinding tasks for no more than an hour. It's not a "staff gift", and we dont just arbitrarily toss out guild points to characters that please us.

If you're looking to grind out to rank 20 in a guild in less than 6 months play time, then you've got your goals set unreasonably high. Guild progression is something meant to happen over time as you do other things and enjoy the day to day life of CLOK. Guild progression isn't THE one and only game system we intend our players to work with. If your only reason for playing is to chase numbers, CLOK probably isnt the game for you.

Again, this kind of thinly veiled suggestion that anyone who is rank 20+ received some sort of favor from the GMs is just increadibly wrong and insulting not only to me, the rest of the GM team. but also all the players who invested the hundreds of hours of actual playtime to accomplish it.

I am disgusted by this topic and am locking it. We'll investigate the guild point balance of Elemancers, but it is my belief that it is in line with other guilds. I have plans for the pyromancy task, but it isnt a priority at the moment.