Guild Wars 2

For clarification:

Small guilds = 15 ACTIVE members or less at any given time.
Medium = 16-30 ACTIVE members
Large = 31+ ACTIVE members

I hate to say this to a good idea, but guild bounties are a mess. Several things that I have found while speaking to other guilds and their members are:

1. Small guilds with attendance of less than 15 members active (simultaneously) tend to get screwed out because of the tremendous influence costs.
2. Guilds go with the pre-scout tactic first and then switch to the map spread tactic if they can’t find a particular bounty.
3. Other guilds can kill off a bounty which causes issues with needing to locate said bounty again.
4. Guilds don’t tend to have all the explorable areas unlocked on all participating members thus causing issues with the time limit.
5. Not being in the guild and participating either lends to potential griefing or people not bothering to participate because they only get regular event rewards.
6. Some bounties take far more coordination to complete and with the time limit granted, some guilds tend to fail easily against these bounties.

So what am I suggesting?

1. To address the issue of small guilds and guild attendance, I suggest adding tiers to each bounty target. Since there are currently 18 targets, I suggest splitting the main bounties into groups of six and splitting the three groups (total of 18 bounty targets) for each tiered bounty hunt.

2. Each tiered bounty mission will feature at least one enemy from the same tier list and one enemy from the lower list (if applicable). Example:

• Bounty hunt tier 1: Two random tier one bounty targets from the tier one list.
• Bounty hunt tier 2: AT LEAST one random tier 2 bounty target and one random tier 1 bounty target. The third bounty target is randomly selected from the two lists.
• Bounty hunt tier 3: AT LEAST one random target from each bounty tier. The remaining three (of the six targets) will be selected from the three lists combined.

3. Separate the guild bounty training targets into their own specific tiers—this gives developing guilds an idea on what to expect for(of the six targets) will be selected from the three lists combined.

4. Repeating a specific bounty tier will not allow for commendation or merit rewards (once you reached the cap) but instead will reward influence:

• Tier 1 training: 1500
• Tier 2 training: 1750
• Tier 3 training: 2000

• Tier 1: 2500 (1250 per target)
• Tier 2: 4500 (1500 per target)
• Tier 3: 10500 (1750 per target)

5. The time limit for guild bounties will not start UNTIL the first bounty has been spoken too and engaged.

6. Non guild members participating in the bounty will receive a non member’s reward of 25 silver (half of a member’s reward money and there is a reward cap of 50 silver total per day).

7. Certain tier enemies will only scale up to the GUILD MEMBERS that are fighting them. Half-baked komali, I’m looking at you and you’re insane fire shield.

To be continued in the next post:

Edit: Fixed some typos

Explanations:

Ok, so first off, the reason why I suggested splitting bounty targets into their own respective tiers is to allow small guilds to be able to tackle guild bounties and actually have a chance to succeed. With only FIVE main targets in each tier, a small guild should be more than capable of locating the targets because there are only five bounties in tier one.

Tier one means less time scouting and more time engaging/enjoying the darn bounty hunt. This will also significantly ramp up the time it takes to complete a bounty mission because small guild will have less to worry about.

Tier two is where things get serious. You have at least one target in the tier two list, and one from the tier one list. This leaves room for guessing who will be the third target. The goal for this tier is to add challenge while still keeping the bounty mission doable.

Tier three is the biggest of them all. You have at least one target from all three tier lists and you have three others that you don’t know who will pop up. This provides the greatest range of challenge because the three random bounties could be from the same tier. The idea here is to add tension when you find out the three other targets.

Second off, time limits are bad for guilds who commonly employ the pre-scout tactic. Let’s face it, Anet’s internal test teams employed the opposite strategy of spreading out the explorable zone and hunting the target. There needs to be a middle ground where both tactics should be viable and not a punishment to the players.

This leads to my suggestion of starting the time limits when you engage your first bounty: Players have time to reach said bounty but once the bounty is engaged, the 15 minutes start ticking down and players will have to scramble their way across the world map to reach the next bounty. The time limit freeze should allow guilds who encounter other guilds with the same bounty to have time to search for said target again.

Another possible solution is to double the time limit to 30 minutes and reduce the time limit as you go for higher tiered bounty missions.

Third off, non members need to have some sort of incentive other than just a regular event reward. The fact of the matter is that players can skip or grief by not participating. To prevent this, I recommend adding a 25 silver reward to entice other players to help out if a bounty starts. There would also need to be a 50 silver daily cap because we wouldn’t want the reward to be TOO high to the point that players start selling their services as mercenaries… Do we?

Fourth off, repeat bounties yield influence gains. Guild bounty training targets yield influence rewards so that small guilds should be able to get to the guild bounties. But what about repeating said bounties for those who have the ability to run them? What’s the point of running a bounty the second time if you hit the merit/commendation cap? Shouldn’t guilds still get some sort of reward if they repeat a bounty again?

These suggestions are meant as a way to improve and help smaller guilds (and medium/large guilds) with bounties everywhere. The goal is to enable guilds a “get together” event or mission that enables them to work together as a team. These events SHOULDN’T be frustrating or require a crap ton of preparation for the lowest end of the missions but with its current state, they are really frustrating to some end.

TL;DR: Please click the back button your browser. I have no time for people who don’t read.

I like the bounty bosses idea. From what I’ve seen in both of my guild’s (guilds I’m a member of, not an officer or leader) experience, I’d keep the “easier” bosses in the lower tiers (Poobadoo would a great candidate for Tier 1) and the hardest for Tier 3 (Yanonka, hidden inside a suspicious rat, I’m looking at you!). That way, I’d keep the time limit lower for Tier 1 bounty mission and up it for the higher levels.

I have no problems in keeping the 18 bosses in (that would mean groups of 6 or so and may mean rebalancing for some bosses so they fit within their group).

For the record, here’s what makes a boss “easy”: Easier to find, Easier to kill without specialized tactics or the need to bring specialized builds/professions using specialized skills.

One of my guild has around 100 members, the second one a bit over half of that. Each can field about 10 members (if we’re lucky) for a weekend bounty, at a time when both North American and European can reasonably be expected to be awake and (if RL doesn’t intervene) playing. In the last few weeks, we’ve too often failed the bounties, even at Tier 1 (heck, we failed some trainings too because we were looking for Yanonka)

The first few weeks, there were 15-20 of us each week. We could pre-scout most of the bosses and succeed at the bounty. You (the general you) might think that pre-scouting is the easy and lazy way of doing the bounties, but the truth is that it does show guild team spirit and organization. Don’t forget, you might be slowly following a boss for an hour until everyone’s done scouting and end up leaving it because it’s not on the kill list in the end. It is a thankless job, sometimes frustrating, but no more than trying to find an elusive boss at the drop of a hat.

The truth is that we don’t have other guild missions unlocked just yet (Economy was researched only to level 4, for example, and we didn’t have much influence to spare since we had to rebuild after the great server migration preceding the pay-for-move limit date). Both guilds were in an alliance in GW1, so we’re considering making the guild missions a joint effort. By the way, coordinating such efforts between small-medium sized guilds would be much facilitated if we had alliance chats. As it is, we rely on the members who are in both guilds to pass the message and ask if anyone’s interested (in exchange for a guest status in the other guild).

Those are the problems that people have been encountering. That’s also what my suggestions are trying to alleviate. The issue is that the bounties are far too spread out and open ended for small guilds to complete.

The bigger of my guilds has well over 200 members, and I regularly help out an allied guild that is nearing the 500 member cap. Both of them have trouble successfully doing a tier 3 bounty. Even with it being a regularly scheduled event each week, the guilds seem to only be able to pull in about 10% of their total roster. This is enough people to track down every single bounty before beginning (which takes longer than the actual bounty). But even with them all found ahead of time, taking down 6 in 15 minutes is pretty hard. I like the idea of less potential targets on lower tiers instead of just upping the number to take down, as tracking down the enemies is probably the hardest part to coordinate. I do like guild bounties and the other missions for the most part, but the tier 3 difficulties are currently a waste of time when 2 easily achievable tier 1 or 2 bounties will hit the cap just as quickly.

I agree about the lack of incentive for non-members to help people out. I believe a non-member can still open the grand chest at the end of a rush, so something similar should be done. 25s would be great, but I think just extending the world boss daily rare chest to all group events would be enough incentive for passers-by to help.

The Talcmaster.7391:

The bigger of my guilds has well over 200 members, and I regularly help out an allied guild that is nearing the 500 member cap. Both of them have trouble successfully doing a tier 3 bounty. Even with it being a regularly scheduled event each week, the guilds seem to only be able to pull in about 10% of their total roster. This is enough people to track down every single bounty before beginning (which takes longer than the actual bounty). But even with them all found ahead of time, taking down 6 in 15 minutes is pretty hard. I like the idea of less potential targets on lower tiers instead of just upping the number to take down, as tracking down the enemies is probably the hardest part to coordinate. I do like guild bounties and the other missions for the most part, but the tier 3 difficulties are currently a waste of time when 2 easily achievable tier 1 or 2 bounties will hit the cap just as quickly.

I agree about the lack of incentive for non-members to help people out. I believe a non-member can still open the grand chest at the end of a rush, so something similar should be done. 25s would be great, but I think just extending the world boss daily rare chest to all group events would be enough incentive for passers-by to help.

Hence freezing time limits until a bounty is actually engaged, this allows the guild time to prepare for the attacks on the targets. Also, the reason why I suggested splitting off targets into three tiers is BECAUSE guild have a hard enough time finding the bounty.

While the hunt for the target is important, it’s only fun if the targets were selected from a small pool so that less time is focused on hunting and more time is focused on beating them down.

Lets face it, pressure is important to bounties because it adds tension and to keep things moving. But the current state is just far too much for the average guild who doesn’t always have a tremendous amount of active and representing members.

If anything, by splitting the bounty targets into three tiers, Anet would allow guilds to pick and choose their battles wisely because they can accommodate for several factors:

1. Active and representing members currently participating
2. The patrol routes of said bounty targets can be narrowed down. In other words, guilds will know what to expect for a tier two bounty because there would be at least one target in the tier two list and one in the tier one list. The third would be an element of randomness and is selected from the pool of both lists.
3. Guilds will have time to find and engage bounties with less frustration and hectic running around on voice chat programs and/or guild chat.

This sort of change to the bounty system would make it much more flexible and forgiving for small guilds but still keep things interesting and challenging for larger guilds. At the same time, the changes would allow for small guilds a better chance at unlocking and preparing for higher bounty tiers (through the training changes).