Brief Introduction
Hi Everybody,
I'm @shawnnft. Today I wanted to discuss everything about guilds. This information isn't anything new but I found that the information was all over the place so I thought it would be neat if I discussed about it all in one blog post. This will be super helpful to new players and players that are deciding whether to create a guild in Splinterlands. I will be covering how to create a guild, how to upgrade a building within a guild, guild ranking, brawls, future of guilds and my own thoughts of being a guild leader.
Creating a Guild
Creating a guild is very easy in Splinterlands. You just have to go to the guild page and create a guild. You need 10,000 DEC to create a guild otherwise it won't let you go to step 2. Then you need to fill in the information for your guild name, tagline, membership type, primary language, choose your banner and symbol for the crest and have a description of your guild. I recommend putting the requirements to join your guild in the description. There are three different membership types. One is open which lets anybody join. The second is by request meaning they have to request to join the guild but it's still possible to invite them into the guild. The third is invite only which doesn't allow people to request to join and the only way to join is through invitation.
Step 1
Step 2
Guild Tabs
There are five guild tabs in the guild section if you are in a guild. The about, members, tavern, buildings and brawl. At the top right on the image below, the pencil lets you edit the details about the guild. The person icon will let you invite people to your guild. The icon with a red arrow pointing out is where you can leave the guild.
About Me Tab
This is where you can see information about your guild. You can see information such as when your guild was created, the guild rank, guild ratings, how many members, crowns, main language, brawl stats and the description of the guild.
Members Tab
This is where you can see all the members of the guild. You can see their rating, when they joined and how much they contributed. If you have the required rank, you can also promote, demote, kick, see join requests etc on this tab as well.
Tavern Tab
In the tavern tab, you can see the members online and there's a place to chat within the guild. I honestly feel like this tab isn't very useful as most guilds are communicating through discord.
Buildings Tab
In the buildings tab, you can see the level of your building as well as the bonuses it provides. This is also where you will contribute to upgrade the level of your buildings. You can also see the history for the contributions made for each building. You can also visit the guild store from here which will allow you to buy gladius cases with your merits provided your store is level 2. Currently, there are 32 gladius cards able to be obtained. Spy glass is useless so don't worry about that. The stones are good to have to open your gladius packs if your guild is high enough level to buy them.
Brawl Tab
This is where you will fight other guilds. You can see the other guilds participating in the brawl. Take note you do need a level 1 arena to play in brawls. You can check a summary of your estimated brawl rewards on the brawl buttons button.
Upgrading a Building in the Guild
To upgrade buildings in a guild you need DEC and crowns. Crowns aren't needed for town hall and level 1 buildings. The only way to get crowns is from brawls. The upgrades to buildings are a long-term play as the costs to upgrade each level higher gets progressively more expensive. It will take years to max out these buildings as this was intentional so don't be surprised. It's pretty straightforward to upgrade the building. You select the amount of DEC you want to contribute and confirm which will prompt you to sign using your hive wallet.
Guild Ranking
Guild ranking is determined by highest to lowest guild rating. The guild rating is the sum of the highest ranked rating out of modern or wild whichever is higher among all guild members. During this moment of time, I feel that guild ranking isn't the best indicator of which is the best guild because some guilds have more players so having a higher total guild rating isn't a very accurate indicator of a guild being better or not. As of now, guild ranking means nothing; however, it does play a bit of an important role when deciding tie breakers in brawl which I will explain later.
Brawls
Brawls is the place where you fight other guilds. There is a max of 10 guilds for each brawl. There's five different tiers of brawls which depend on the level of your guild arena. Take note you need to have at least a level 1 arena to play in brawls. Tier 1 brawls need at least a level 1 arena, Tier 2 - level 3 arena, Tier 3 - level 5 arena, Tier 4 - level 7 arena and Tier 5 - level 9 arena.
Each tier will have a different set of frays which are harder the higher tier you go up. I won't be breaking down each fray in this blog post. To see the requirements for each fray for each tier, you can go to this blog by @Splinterlands here.
Brawls are usually in 5 day cycles. There's a 2 day preparation phase where you have to choose the frays you want to play in or assign them for your guildmates. Another 2 days for combat phase where you submit premade teams. The beauty of this is you can battle anytime you want as it's not a live match. You can see the battle once the opponent from the opposing guild submits their team. Finally, you have the results phase which is usually 1 day but sometimes it will be 2 days if there's maintenance or something.
To determine the winner of the brawl, it goes by total points earned by the guild. Each win in a brawl gives 3 points to the guild. Each draw gives 1 and losses give nothing. To break the tie if points are the same, the system will look at the below metrics. Provided you tie with another guild in wins, draws and losses, the system will look at guild ranking which I mentioned in the previous section of how that is determined.
- Most Wins
- Most Draws
- Fewest Losses
- Guild ranking
- Brawl Rewards
You can get SPS, crown, and merits from brawling. SPS will have a pool for each tier you are in with higher tiers having a bigger pool so it gives incentive for guilds to move up. This pool will then be divided among all the guilds participating within that tier. As for crowns, crowns are added to the pool for each win from any guild. The amount of crowns added to the pool will depend on the arena level. After the brawl is over, the crowns will be divide among the guilds based on their rank with the top 3 guild earning additional % shares of the crowns so it helps give incentive for guilds to give their best performance in brawls. 15% for first, 10% for second and 5% for third. You can find more specifics on how to calculate your crown earnings from splinterlands doc here. To calculate merits, you can use the following formula: Merits = (Crowns won X 500 X Store bonus multiplier) / (number of Frays in the Brawl). These merits are crucial in buying gladius packs which give gladiator cards. These gladiator cards can be super game changers in brawls as some are super OP and can just win you the game such as Quora. Soon gladiator cards will be in tournaments and possibly ranked play as well so better join a guild if you aren't already and start collecting.
Future Of Guilds
There's still more to come to guilds. I believe what we are seeing now is just the surface level. There has already been discussions in recent town halls that there will be guild alliances which would mean cooperation between guilds and having guild alliance buildings which will give another sink to DEC. There's so many options and possibilities for guilds and if you aren't in one right now, you are definitely going to be missing out.
My Thoughts As A Guild Leader
I decided to make a guild because the guild I joined at the time didn't seem to be progressing. I didn't want to upgrade the buildings and then see it come to no fruition. This made me take the initiative to crate my own guild. Luckily, I had some friends from Balthazar scholarship that were interested in joining my guild. Speaking from my experience, it's actually not that easy to manage a guild. It's super expensive to upgrade buildings. Personally, I didn't make any of my members contribute. Other guilds might require contribution by season or daily. You have to recruit players to join your guild. This is probably the hardest part along with managing them. It's not easy to find active and responsible players. Most experienced players will join the top tier guilds so if your guild is not there, it will be difficult to find good players.
Most likely you will have to take in new players and cultivate them to be a better player. Speaking of new players, there has been a huge lack of new players since we are in a bear market. In addition to that, the new player experience isn't great as it is slightly complicated to get started which can be quite overwhelming especially if the person is new to web3. On top of that, there's bots in bronze that have already the best lineups which would definitely give new players a good beating and ruin their experience in the game. Lately, the lack of gameplay updates has started to make people lose interest. I have three guildmates now that have stopped playing for now; hopefully, they will come back and play once they get interested in the game again.
I also noticed that a lot of the other guilds are having a hard time getting new guild members from the #guild-recruiment on Splinterlands discord so I think it's not just me. Because of this issue, I created some alt accounts just to fill the frays for these brawls. It's really tiring but I also have a sense of relief because I know that those accounts will be playing their brawls since I'm the one playing them! Despite all the issues mentioned above, I have already committed to creating a guild so there's now way I can stop here after contributing slightly over 400k DEC.
Conclusion
Hopefully, I gave insight on everything related to guilds. I tried to be as specific as I can as well as not overkilling you with information. It's not easy being a leader and I hope my experience helps you decide whether you want to be a leader or to just join a guild. Apologizes in advance if I missed anything. Any questions you have feel free to ask in comments and I will do my best to answer it for you.
JOIN A GUILD TODAY. Don't miss out. The game is more fun to play if you have friends to play and talk about the game with and guilds is where you can find and make these friends.
Thank you!
Past Blog
If you made it here, thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Feel free to follow me if you like my content. In my one of my latest blog post, I discussed about some strategies regarding low mana sneak using only MAX CL and MAX CL rewards cards. If you are interested in this, you can find the blog here.
Referral Link
If you are interested in trying Splinterlands please use this link here. If you did use my referal link, let me know in the comment section, I will do my best to help whether that be delegating you cards, sending you cards and teaching you how to play. Once again, thank you so much.
Credits
Thumbnail photo I created using Canva
Photos of Guild I took screenshots from my laptop of my own guild
Blog Dividers I got from thepeaktudio