Guild Wars 2

Hi ANet,

Let me start my first post on these forums by saying thank you for such a lovely game. My wife and I play daily and we are enjoying the many and varied aspects of GW2.

Now my request for some guidance or a roadmap to a resolution on a particular issue my guild and I are encountering.

I belong to a Guild on Yaks Bend. It is a big guild, so big in fact we are split across 4 guilds (last time I checked). We are called the The Older Gamers or TOG (Never too old to play games is our motto!). This splitting of guilds is necessary due to the membership cap on Guilds.

So yes we have got around the guild cap but at a price. Now the crazy first few weeks have calmed down, people are naturally logging in less frequently making it more difficult to leverage the advantages of a bigger guild due to our active membership being strewn across four segregated guilds.

We have the Squadron channel in WvW however by definition that portion of the game is more organised anyway. Is there anything available or coming soon for when we are in PvE? Ideally we want everyone to be able to ask in one unified channel that all our guild members have access to, if anyone is up for a dungeon or wants to take part in a guild event like we did a couple of nights ago where about 50 of us got together dressed all in pink (It is Breast Cancer month don’t you know!) and marched across the map in order to ensure everyone knew about the dragons and their spawning points and could take part in killing these beasts in the future.

I know you have a lot on and have to prioritise so many different issues but, I am hoping you would agree this functionality would help to build community both for our guild and the others out there in a similar position. People play online games over the long haul not just for the great game itself but because of the people they meet and play alongside. Please help us cultivate a persistent thriving community for years to come.

Thanks for reading and look forward to hearing from you.

Iren

So…

Guild alliances with an alliance channel?

Sounds good to me.

Hey, glad to see you guys are enjoying the game. That’s awesome.

While alliance channels may happen, I suspect that the devs figure the current member upgrades are enough to accommodate a more-than-functional number of people in one guild.

In the meantime, consider a VoIP program such as ventrilo, teamspeak, or mumble? It sounds like your population is too high to support in just one channel, but a number of specific-usage lounges and an LFG channel would probably be good. Downsides are potentially paying money to whoever, and encouraging people to use the program if it’s not mandatory.

Barring that, you can start moving the active people to the guild with the highest member upgrade, and kicking inactives/people frequently non-representing while leaving them standing invites to one of the satellite guilds for when they come back. I’m pretty sure you can do that, and if not you can probably just send them mail explaining what’s up.

Neither of those options are ideal, but they are options.

As has been suggested/requested many times, I feel that custom chat channels will solve your issue and many others. They will offer the most flexibility of use to answer most of the communications problems about which so many have posted.

I don’t think they even need to be moderated, so long as they are easy to create, join, view, and leave. I’ve seen abuses of such channels in other games (notably a channel used to find RP that got hijacked and locked down by a griefer guild when one of them got mod privileges) but nothing to make the basic idea of having them a bad one.

A custom channel will allow inter-guild communication, event coordination, and larger groups within WvW. It can be semi-permanent or exist just for a few hours for an event. Every MMO that I’ve played for the past 10 years has had such an option; GW2 needs it as well.

Alliance chat, custom channels or a much higher guild cap would definitely help guilds such as our tremendously. We do already have Teamspeak but unfortunately many people do not log in unless there is already something going on, so as a planning tool, it is not optimal. The best way to reach everyone who is available in game at a given time that belong to our community would be to have an in-game tool to do so. I know many large communities are suffering with the same issues so hopefully at least one of these suggestions can be considered.

As a member of the guild Atreyu is referring to, it is an endless source of frustration knowing on one hand that you have 1500+ guild members spread out across 4 guilds, yet still struggle to find people for certain events/dungeons/etc due to communication issues.

It’s not necessarily that we need bigger guilds (I agree that forcing 500+ guild members to share the same guild chat would be a nightmare), but in scenarios where you do have multiple guilds like we have – there needs to be better ways to communicate and collaborate across them. This could be via additional cross-guild chat options, such as customisable alliance chat channels for pve/wvw/etc, officer only, and so on.

So it’s not necessarily guild size, but enhancing cross-guild communication options to make it easier for us to collaborate.

Edit: One thing those reading this thread might not understand – this guild is global, so we have players from North America, Europe, Oceania (Australia/etc) and Asia. So it’s not a question of everyone on at US peak hour – but rather spread out across timezones.

What your asking for is a return of alliances from GW 1 essentially . I see no reason why this couldn’t happen and the lore would certainly support it with the Human/Charr treaty and all .