Guild Wars/Battles should be a thing

In addition to (or instead of) the quest-based rivalries, guilds should be matched up against each other in combat.

The details and rewards still need to be worked out, but there could be predetermined time slots for each war and your guild members can signup/back out of the 5 slots for a team. Then once that time slot hits, the lobby opens and you battle your opposing guild. This would allow for a more direct war where the best man wins rather than the indirect rivalries that we have right now that don't care about skill and only care about time and money.

If entire Wars would be too complicated, then Guild Battles should at least be possible. Make a 2-5 team fleet with guild-mates, then click the "Guild Battle" button and it matches you with another guild group with the same number of fleet members and similar infamy. Battles should have big rewards though.

If you have ideas on how to avoid exploitation or on how to implement/improve these ideas, feel free to post them.

Edit: To add onto the Guild Wars idea... If it would be too difficult to get 5v5 from two guilds on at the same time, why couldn't the same structure as Clash of Clans be used? Active players attacking inactive "bases".

You get into a guild war with another guild. Each of your members' active setup is "entered" into the War. Then whenever your guild has 5 members on (could be less than 5, maybe even 1v1), you fleet up and challenge the other guild. The system automatically matches members from the opposing guild based on a variety of factors... infamy, ship type, item levels, captain level, etc... in order to make it as fair of a fight as possible. Then you fight against their ships, which would be controlled by a very difficult AI.

You would get points by defeating the other team and by defending against the other team. The points system could show you how many times your ship won on defense, so you could adjust your setup if needed. This would also be interesting because you could coordinate with your guild to all run certain combos.

The most challenging part of this would be properly setting up the AI. It would have to move and play just like a skilled player. I think the best way to implement this would be to setup a test server and let players/fleets challenge AI teams, then tweak their play and difficult until it is basically 50/50... or until the AI wins slightly more than 50% of the time to make it harder.

This would also be a fun, limited time mode that could be a special event to go play against AI teams.....

 

Both ideas are good mate

 

dropped 500 infamy last night grinding enforcer / ball park mortar quests.
My ballpark mortar is only T2 rare as I dont use it, only for quests, same as my enfo only being level 3.
I ended up dropping the 1.4m gold to get it to MK4 so I could stand a fighting chance but still was a painful experience lol.