Guild Wars 2

After doing guild missions for around 10 weeks now, one of the things I’ve noticed is that non guild members can tag along. They get no reward for doing so, but then again, doing things for fun can be rewarding in itself. I think it’s nice when someone wants to tag along for the fun of it, especially in Guild Rush and Bounty because it can be beneficial for the guild itself for people to help you.

However, in some of the Guild Challenges and Guild Puzzles, it is possible for the non-guild members to disrupt the mission, potentially causing failure for the guild- specifically in “Branded for Termination” by killing mobs too early and in the guild Puzzles by starting the timed events early. Our guild requires TS for the missions and we coordinate everything to make sure nobody gets left behind, and we do so quite successfully. However, we have been messed up occasionally by PUGs because they don’t pay attention and aren’t on team speak. Sometimes they will do this deliberately to disrupt the mission. Tonight, we had to repeat a section in the Angvar’s Trove puzzle because a very rude and uncooperative PUG kept running ahead and starting the sections early, and the door closed before everyone was through thanks to him.

Now I don’t want to get into a discussion on the morality of trolling. The question I have is, why is it possible for non guild members to join in the missions whether you want them to or not? There’s no way to deal with them, and if they feel like trolling, you have to deal with that handicap and try to work around them. And the only way to stop is to ask them nicely to leave, but that doesn’t always work.

I also have a solution- I feel that Guild missions should be instances, like dungeons and personal story. There is no need for outsiders to be in the missions unless you want them to be, and if you do need extra people to help you, give them temporary invites to the guild- they should get the rewards too and there’s always topics on this forum of people looking for guilds to run missions with, not to mention multiple LFG websites.

Am I alone here in this opinion? I feel like this is a serious issue. GW2 has put in a lot of effort not only to prevent trolling in PvE, but also to provide opportunities to allow trolling in controlled environments, such as WvW. So why is it possible to troll entire guilds during their missions?

tl,dr: Guild Missions should be an instance for guild members only, there is no reason trolls should be allowed to disrupt the missions.

It’s a real shame this thread has been dumped in this forum. Yes I know it’s about Guild Missions but nobody uses it to discuss them, just to spam for public missions.

I entirely agree that at least guild Puzzles should be instanced. As it is having them open world just leads to conflict between guilds trying to run the same puzzle or rampant trolling by random subhumans.

An instanced version of all the missions would be absolutely ideal. No competing to activate a mission if you need the merits, no trolling by randoms, no larger guilds storming through your puzzle leaving you trailing after them bored. The only missions that wouldn’t benefit from instancing are Trek and Bounty.

I’d never done a guild mission before because my guild fell apart after their introduction and their practically exclusive access to accessories which we were too small to compete with (what’s left of my guild is a handful of remaining people on my friends list). I was exploring Snowden Drifts today and I noticed the mission was open. I was curious to see content I’d never seen before so I jumped in. I had seen the beginning of Anthony’s Angmar’s Trove video one the GW2 live stream so I knew about the icicles and bows part so I helped out with that. I didn’t watch any further so I was puzzle solving or following what they others were doing for the rest of it.

I noticed no-one was saying anything and everyone was in the same guild so I assumed they were all on TS (there was at least 40-50 people in there). It was a lot like a WvW zerg where lots of people are stacked together and a few stragglers are off fighting things or pushing forward. Finally in the Ice Drake room I had no idea what was going on, everyone was just standing around waiting. I knew whatever was next probably involved the drake to produce fire so I picked up an egg. Things seemed to go smoothly from here to a certain extent, people began to light torches etc but I guess it has to be synchronised or something? I ended up kitten ing off some people because I lit a torch and then I started getting abuse from the guild. It was a pretty awful experience and I completely lost interest in playing the game.

I was kind of having fun poking around and exploring things and trying out parts of the puzzle, but in hindsight I suspect this guild has done the puzzle multiple times now and have it down to a science. They just wanted their commendation and I was in their way so they were abusing me for my attempts to help them (which apparently hindered them). It was easily my worst GW2 community experience this year. To be singled out by a group of 40-50 people and become the focus of their scorn for what was an honest mistake in my attempt to participate, it made me feel awful. I was actually humiliated as a result.

I hate guild missions. I hate what they do to small guilds, I hate that they are forced on you to obtain ascended accessories (yeah, 40 laurels and 50 ecto is a totally reasonable amount of resources compared to 12 Guild Commendations) and now I hate that in an attempt to help, you can hinder people. They are clearly designed for guilds who are communicating with each other and accountable to each other and the reward as a pug for the puzzle is a freaking blue from the chest.

I think they allowed pugs to join guild missions so they can tell themselves that they aren’t excluding people from fun content. You might miss out on rewards (which is the driving incentive in Guild Mission design) but at least every player can participate at some point in time. That’s what the devs told themselves. But they designed missions so that pugs get nothing out of them aside from an experience and they can hinder (even with good intentions) guilds doing them, resulting in a bad experience for everyone.