Guild Wars 2

I wanted to share this story because it was a powerful experience for my guild.

At the announcement of Guild Missions requiring Art of War level 5, my guild had been playing since launch, and had managed to get Art of War level 3, and most other things at level 4. We spent most of our influence on guild bonuses (+Magic Find, etc) and didn’t have a huge pile of influence sitting there. The cost of getting to guild missions staggered our small guild (30ish total members, not all of them very active.)

Early in the process of working to unlock guild missions, we tried running events / dungeons together, and just farming influence… but that was pretty slow. There just weren’t enough of us playing. We started to ask if people would buy influence, but very few people were happy to let go of hard earned coin to unlock content.

Finally, I proposed a notion: We would craft a high end exotic that sold for hundreds of gold, and use the proceeds to buy influence. Our target was Volcanus.

Here was the staggering thing: People who would not spend gold on influence, were happy to donate mats! The guild bank started filling up with Molten and Destroyer cores, people went out to Orr and ran from node to node gathering Ghost Peppers…. it was something to do and it didn’t require them to just flush coin into influence.

As the process went on, we ran CoF as a guild, and any cores or lodestones gathered were given to the guild, but all other drops were kept by the players. People were happy to do it, and we did it together.

When it came down to crunching cores, we found several members who were cash poor, and skill point rich. They were happy to be able to contribute in a way that wasn’t giving up mats, because it was a currency they had little use for.

Everything that went into volcanus had value. You could argue that people could have just promoted cores and sold them, then bought influence with the money and you wouldn’t be wrong. But people didn’t find motivation in that. When I would log on and update the guild: “Destroyer lodes at 57/100, Molten at 225/350, we have 60 cores to compress and 25 dust to work with…” people got excited. We had a goal, and they were helping!

It took us two weeks, the end result is that the guild has over 350g to spend on influence, and has been able to fund other guild event prizes. It made us more active, brought our guild together in positive ways, and people were happy to contribute.

TL:DR — By using crafting, people came together as a guild, contributed each in different ways to a guild effort, and the guild now has more than enough influence for guild missions.

Admirable story of a guild effort. I wish i met this kind of guilds, so much bond together on a single big goal: their guild’s status. I just hope you all are real life friends. Would be so unpleasant to be kicked..
I have good memories about it on WoW, your post made me remember some threads of people talking about the vanilla legendary/horse got with his guild, and how his guild worked hard all together for this goal.
I was for sure the last to give a kitten to contribute about nothing the guild leader was asking, like his legendary weapon, a horse during vanilla etc, hehe. Didn’t regret my choice for sure. Discovering later the guild became just a bunch of idiots where i was wasting my time, leaving. As you see, as much i admire your story, all the efforts your guild’s members made could end up just on thin air, tomorrow, when kicked/leaving the guild.
Noone will remember him, nor throw a thanks 6 months later, be sure.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Admirable story of a guild effort. I wish i met this kind of guilds, so much bond together on a single big goal: their guild’s status. I just hope you all are real life friends. Would be so unpleasant to be kicked..
I have good memories about it on WoW, your post made me remember some threads of people talking about the vanilla legendary/horse got with his guild, and how his guild worked hard all together for this goal.
I was for sure the last to give a kitten to contribute about nothing the guild leader was asking, like his legendary weapon, a horse during vanilla etc, hehe. Didn’t regret my choice for sure. Discovering later the guild became just a bunch of idiots where i was wasting my time, leaving. As you see, as much i admire your story, all the efforts your guild’s members made could end up just on thin air, tomorrow, when kicked/leaving the guild.
Noone will remember him, nor throw a thanks 6 months later, be sure.

Given that the guild has been functioning across multiple guilds for nearly 10 years…. not too worried. Half the guild is real life friends and co-workers, but what amazed me is the number of new members, people who have only been members in GW2 who also chimed in and contributed. It was really nice to see interest from the get go

So, definitively a beautiful story