Guild Wars 2

Battle Isles (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Battle_Isles) are the home of guild halls. As such, they are not part of the mists, but part of the world.

Building and upgrades cost gold and influence rather than guild comendations or guild merits to allow smaller guilds to build a gh without the burden of having to recruit and become larger just to get merits to build a hall. Perhaps influence in the Architecture line can be spent on building a Celestial Sigil (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Celestial_Sigil), to be used in the same manner as GW1.

GH initially comes with a button on the guild list, like gw1, travel to and from the GH wherever you may be in the world or mists. Owners are able to build asura gates to each racial capitol, LA, each color borderland, and Eternal Battle Grounds & EotM. Upgrade npc’s available are guild and personal banks and BLTP. Crafting stations and Mystic Forge are not included, as this would remove many people from racial capitols and other open world crafting stations. Banners may not be used in the gh, as this would remove them from the open world.

GH designs are taken as much as possible from gw1 designs, as their layouts have been proven successful, and include new racial themes for charr, asura, norn and sylvari. Check out these layouts and imagine gvg on these maps: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_halls. The goal of this proposal is to give guilds not just a meeting place, but a place to gvg and duel. Without going into too much detail, the gvg is 10 vs 10 (attack squad and defense squad). This allows for larger fights than are available in tpvp’s 5v5.

Halls also include a Hall of Monuments to show off your guild’s accomplishments. Each champion in the world has a mounted head that can be displayed, with a counter beneath each one. Specific bonuses may be earned for repping guild members based on the number of times each champion has been killed. Your guild has participated in killing Tequatl 100 times? Your repping guild members receive a 10% gathering boost in Sparkfly Fen. Killed Claw of Jormag 1,000 times, repping guildmembers receive a 10% magic find boost in Frostgorge Sound. Certain bosses can combine kills to receive a bonus throughout Tyria. Example: 100 Zhaitan kills, 100 Teq, 100 Claw, 100 Shatterer kills = 10% magic find, gold, or gathering bonus throughout Tyria. Taking 100 Garrison, Hills, and Bay gives a similar WvW bonus.

Chris and Jon and any other Staff member reading this and contributing,

I am gonna spend some time over the next few days really brainstorming some outlandish and off the wall ideas. I think Baltzenger has a really good point with his last paragraph. I was definitely thinking with some of those “constraints” in mind. I’d like to expand on why I was like that though:

• A few of the suggestions that have been suggested by the community over the years have been implemented by the team in a way that wasn’t really in the spirit of why the community was asking for certain things.

• A good example would be Collections. Collections are in their most distilled form a Scavenger Hunt. People wanted a Scavenger Hunt not for the action but because of why it was being put in the game: As a way to get non-RNG Precursors.

I’d give other examples but there are quite a few of them as reasons why I wasn’t thinking outside the box with the Guild Stuff. Also, I would rather try and think of things that would work coherently within the existing framework of the game.

• I think when you all are reading this I would appreciate if you would really try to distill the spirit of the suggestion and really hone in on the “why” of the idea.

One last remark would be on how much of an advantage being in a large guild is over being in a small guild: Guild Missions, Boss Event purchases with Influence, Banners on a regular basis, etc. I see these as mistakes not to repeat if or when Guild Halls are put in the game.

Larger guilds have an advantage over small guilds with how they are implemented now. Is that something that should ring true for Guild Halls as well? What are the reasons for that if true? What design choices could be made to avoid that?

Thanks for your time.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

CureForLiving.5360:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Take a look at a informative preview from WoW’s garrisons (A beta player had the chance to record it in its multiple stages) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5s3E4Gs9_o

Now imagine this in GW2, each race would have it’s own “garrison” – it’s own unique flair. Whole guilds could work on upgrading their guild hall in multiple stages like in WoW’s garrisons.

Creating a static instance with some nice art pieces scattered about that you can teleport into by clicking a button is the bare minimum, and would frankly just be another home instance (which if not for the resource nodes I wouldn’t ever visit). It being a guild hall the appeal would be to get players working together, create new shared goals etc.

I think you missed some things. Garrisons aren’t like the home instance but they are a big hotspot for new missions/events as well as something that evolves. A small camp will gradually grow into a small town, depending on your doings. You can also find new blueprints for new buildings which all have an effect on gameplay and loot you receive, as well as followers.

Take a look at the posted clip, a lot of things going on in there opposed to our GW2-home instance where basically nothing goes on.

I watched the vid from your link; if we had something like that, it would be amazing and certainly great for continuing end-game content. =)

Proposal Overview
A guild hall for the guild with all the convinced of a big city plus a private home option

Goal of Proposal
With this guild hall the entire guild can work together to get a fully upgraded guild hall (like in guild Wars 1) with crafting and portals like a big city. It will be a great way for the guild to get a private place and a great project for them all to get together and work towards. Plus if there is a private home, individuals can get private place to express them self. A example of the private part will be Eir’s home. placement of object may be static but like in hall of monuments in GW1, the player gets to pick what the object is (furniture,style,statues). great way to show off achievements again.

Proposal Functionality
Getting there can be done like going to PvP – in the Guild menu – place a “go to Guild Hall” option and then have the normal city portals in the Guild hall to geth back into the world again. All crafting stations and vendors will be standard NPS and the guild hall gets upgraded. The private champers will be like the current home instance, but potentially smaller (maybe even let this be a option to the individuals) but with the option to customize the furniture style and displays.

Associated Risks
1) how to pay for it – the guild hall upgrades has to be paid for in a way both big and small guilds can make it happen without being too easy or too hard for either group.
2) private homes design made fun to show of achievements and customize – enough options for “homemakers” to play with but also automated enough for thous who don’t want to spend time setting things up.

The only request I have is: please give small guilds (2-5 people) something to strive for, too.

Not all players are comfortable in mega-guilds; some people enjoy the comfort of a small nuclear guild with just their family members or best friends. It would be a shame if guild halls were introduced and there was nothing in there for them because the feature only unlocks with merits, or somesuch.

Thank you <3

Hmmh, some ideas…

1. Guild Halls must have features in them that make it appealing to spend time in them. A library holding lore? A music box? Minigames? A monster arena? Anything goes.
2. Guild Halls must have flavor to them. A large variety of available themes, combined with visual customization. Maybe add an option to affiliate with one of the major cities.
3. Guild Halls must have benefits. Having basic services in them is not quite enough. Cheaper waypoints from the guild hall, improved crafting critical chance, nothing outrageous, but still useful benefits.
4. Guild Halls must house GvG

That’s all from me for now.

Proposal Overview
<A short description of the proposal that is being put forward>

Goal of Proposal
GW1 guild halls didn’t feel tremendously connected to the world – you’d teleport in and teleport out and never feel like your guild hall exists in a place. More immersion is always nice for getting people invested in the guild!

Proposal Functionality
Guild halls shouldn’t occupy physical space, but they should give the illusion of doing so. For instance, the guild hall should have 2 to 4 exits that connect to real locations on the map;you can walk out into the world from your Hall. Guild leaders can pick from several spots to use as their virtual location.

Retro.6831:

JonPeters.5630:

On the editing topic I’ve seen a few things listed.
. . .
Assuming everything has a cost:

What kind of thing would you be ok with static placement?

• NPCs, such as merchants, banks, trading post vendors, etc. There should be pre-established locations for these NPCs as they are unlocked that cannot be edited. Otherwise…
  • Players will move these NPCs to potentially inaccessible areas.
  • Visitors will have to search for wherever a guild has hidden them.
  • I’m actually in favor of NPCs being located outside of the guild hall lot, in a common area shared with other guilds in a neighborhood.
• External walls (should always appear at the edge of the property).

While I agree with your 3 post points there. (why would I put them where no guild-member can reach them?:S If I would allow a visitor in I would show him where and they are already outside of guild-halls.

However I would think a ever guild would at least be able to unlock a basic-guild hall with all the most important things in it. So in that basic guild-hall they might be at fixed location. That said, when building upon that I would imagine you can place them or at least copies of them anywhere you want.

While it would not have to be NPC’s. Maybe it are closets

Proposal Overview
Do not use gold/gems/ any convertible to either of those as the core currency for anything Guildhall related.

Goal of Proposal
Gold and by extension anything using it has a problem that is beyond fixing.
-It is completely unregulated and unrelated to game-play, a player can technically credit card in as much as they want, or a person can sit in LA and TP effectively, neither of these encourage active game play or using a wide variety of content. Worse still the main game play methods are mind numbingly repetitive farms.
-Buyable items are tainted by it deminishing feelings of achievement from completing something (Yay we did x y and z overcame the odds and got the shiny……oh the guild next door paid 100g and have it too….whelp no one will know what we achieved now.)
-It does not reward skilled play by a guild or an individual in any distinguishable way.

The Goal of the proposal is to prevent any easy mode, you get out exactly what you put into the game in terms of effort,showing competence and knowledge.

Proposal Functionality
There are a half dozen alternatives many of which don’t alienate small guilds and can be used in combination. I will preface this by saying that I base this on a small guild being 5 competent players who don’t exclude themselves from any content nor should personal exlusions be taken into consideration. I recommend using a combination of the below methods.

-The Achievement path: upgrades don’t cost anything. Each guild-members completed achievements unlocks account bound blueprints which can be dumped into the guilds available pile of items, Rarer achievements items can only be displayed in 1 guild hall and leaving should the guild should remove the item after a 24 hour period. Increasingly hard achievements could be added to offer more prestigious items.
(EDIT: just a note on this the blueprints are not a physical item, it could be a drop down box from a window for each item , contribute to , none,Guild A,B,C,D etc.)

-A Guild locked currency: (not influence it’s gold buy-able) Merits are the current suitable currency. You choose to unlock skins from the guildhall. Merits are guild locked and do not have much function otherwise currently, steps could be taken to allow smaller guilds some access to this currency.

-Guild Drops: While doing existing content with a clear completion (world bosses,Dungeons,Each specific Fractal, Capping stonemist etc). There is a chance to unlock a related item/upgrade for your guildhall at completion based on the guild you are currently representing. Notification could be a little popup skin unlocked style window.

-Restricted Currency unlocks: Dungeon tokens, PvP Tracks,Pristine fractal relics, Geodes basically the trade-able unbuyable currencies. Complete the track for PvP and buy from the vendor for the others. Each should have unique skins (encourages play verity) and there should only be a small selection available through this method.

-Event unlocks: Certain rare/randomized/obscure normal events give a guaranteed guild unlock, if you could find a way to completely randomize it so that a guide can’t be made, that would be great.

-Limited Time events/Living world events: Generally themed unlocks, some unlocked just by the guild existing others by completing a guild meta. I would ideally like this to change each year (yes lock newer guilds out of some skins only a few though) to allow some verity, I.e each year could be a new model of Christmas tree, a different pumpkin model.

Associated Risks

Several of these methods are still open to some form of buying but it will hopefully make it harder and hopefully anyone that tries gets scammed horrifically.

People may actually have to play the game. (Shocking I know).

Certain sections of players are against time exclusive items like the seasonal ones (Bah humbugs they are).

Several of the methods give larger guilds a slight edge, but so does any other method short of going you get one unlock for each week your guild exists. I tried to be fair with the methods but larger guilds will simply have more capacity to complete any method.

JonPeters.5630:

JonPeters.5630:

• How could we get the benefits of open world guild halls in a system where guild halls are instanced?

This is probably where the Guild Hall Zones come into play again, given areas dedicated to Guild Halls makes it possible for players to explore these areas and thus see and experience the variety of different Guild Halls.

This is a rather biased statement but I still prefer my proposal of having primarily instanced Guild Halls but providing a set number of open world Guild Halls for guild to war over, that way the landscape isn’t cluttered and everyone still gets a Guild Hall.

You say war over space so let’s talk about that a bit.

• On a given version of a map there are X people.
• How many players from one guild would you expect to be in a map before that guild NEEDS to do guild activities? I would say that number is between 2 and X. Let’s say for sake of argument that it is a party so 5 people.
• This means you would NEED less than X/5 places where a guild can be interacting with the world in any given map.

I agree there is still conflict here but the biggest piece is reduced by allowing any guild with 5 members on a map together to have a place of their own. This definitely is missing an element of persistence but retains a large element of the visibility while reducing a large portion of the conflict.

In this kind of system what sort of non persistent things would be compelling to you and your guild?

Jon[/quote]

I am just an individual, i do not work in a large gaming company, i do not have Money to buy ANet and tell you guys what to do, but its very close

GH should be instanced and part of major capital cities. It would open so many possibilities and help to give life to the empty beautiful cities that ANet developed. Why cant we just start there?

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

The only request I have is: please give small guilds (2-5 people) something to strive for, too.

Your post did me realize something.. What are people talking about when they talk about small guilds?

I am talking about 15 active (So online at least once every 2 weeks) people.

In all honestly I personally would think 2 – 5 is so little that would be the same as making it available to every-body’s personal guild what I would think as undesirable.

But what are other people talking about when they talk about small guilds?

I also have some blanks on the building process and I was wondering how other people did think about that.

Let me first explain how I personally see the beginning. You unlock your guild-hall (likely with influence or with some other mechanic) this is a basic guild-hall that can have all the things you really need including the stuff to expand it.

Then you unlock blue-prints for items (from walls to chairs, to decoration in the world) by doing dungeons or members unlock it for you because the unlock come basically as a drop or whatever. There has much been said about that. But one this is sure, this is where your long-term investment and progression is, getting those blue-prints.

Personally after this I would not want to see a massive grind or time-game but I would only not like to just be able to start placing those objects without any further actions.. It are only blue-prints.

So I would think in your basic guild-hall there is place where you can go to get the blue-print this would give the same animation as having siege in your hand in WvW. You then walk to the place where you want it and have a little extra help of seeing a preview, an optional 3D grid for alignment and the ability to move it a little easier then just walking. You place it and get a construction side just as in WvW when you place siege. (while it would scale to the size of the object).

But then.. Then you have the unlock and the build-side but then it gets a little vague.

How do we now build? Just as in WvW you need to get supply there. First of all I would like a little animation, not just an icon as in WvW. But where does that supply come from?

1 Maybe your basic guild-hall has the supply-plot you have in WvW as well. You go there, take supply and start building. Supply just spawns there at the same rate as a normal WvW camp would do.

This would create a very small time-gate. If you need 1000 supply and the max is 100 you will need to do some waiting when you are there with multiple members while 1 or 2 persons might be able to go on because there walk and build time are enough for new supply to spawn.

Or 2 we need to manually full up this supply? But where does that then come from? You need to create supply packages with a (new) craft? Or do they drop in the world? And would that not create a new grind what we would not like?

Or 3 maybe we only need mats, possible even mats (and maybe basic crafting elements like boards) based on the blue-print.. (on the build-site you would see how much of any material you still need) You only need wood for a wooden wall right? This might make things a little more complex but also more realistic. It however also might create a new grind we don’t want. Except if the mats requirements are pretty low.
Another problem here is that you don’t really see the action of building. Well one guy yes but he gets all the needed material in his inventory and go’s there and build. While 1 and 2 would show the action of (multiple) member walking there with supply and then building and then getting more supply (again, like in WvW).

Or 4. That is a mix of 2 and 3. You bring different supply to the supply-plot, there you take what you need but that is limited (just as in WvW where you can have only a limited amount of supply) and maybe you can even limit it to one type of material. Based on the material you have you also see the character carrying something else and even your building animation could be different.
This would look the best and make the most sense but does make it a little more complex.

Maybe there are also other options..? (Personally from the ones I listed I would go for 1 or 4 if the requirements would be low enough to prevent a grind for mats)

How so you guys (like to) see this process?

Devata.6589:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

The only request I have is: please give small guilds (2-5 people) something to strive for, too.

Your post did me realize something.. What are people talking about when they talk about small guilds?

I am talking about 15 active (So online at least once every 2 weeks) people.

In all honestly I personally would think 2 – 5 is so little that would be the same as making it available to every-body’s personal guild what I would think as undesirable.

But what are other people talking about when they talk about small guilds?

In my opinion, 5 people should be considered a small guild.
That is the minimum required for dungeons to be completed, to tPvP teams, is the max pop. of a group, etc.
When we talk small guilds, we speak about groups of friends that do stuff together, and the minimum required for that is 5.

15-60 people is a medium guild, and over 60 active, is a big guild. I think most guilds in the game must be medium guilds, and very few compared to that, are big guilds. Then 5-15 is a small guild, less than that, and we are talking about personal guilds.

Also I would like to add a comment about a small confusion I’ve noticed we players have toward this thread. In many posts members of Anet tell us to just be creative and don’t restrain ourselves to what our ideas can be. This is not intuitive for us, because, and I think most people here, as players of this genre, this is a weird situation, not many times we are heard in this way, so we tend to try to suggest things “we think would not be rejected”, over standards that we really don’t know, like how costly this would be, or how much time it would take to be implemented, or if by proposing a complex idea, it would damage the game by taking attention away from other matters.
To that, I only can say “thanks”, I can’t speak for everyone, but at least for me, I think we are being listened, and that we are really participating, it is a bit scary, but also exciting.

Firstly, thanks for summarizing as best as possible. Secondly, in regards to your final point, I get what you’re saying. I do. My concern over this, which is pretty obvious, is that Anet might think that dumping massive man hours into GH’s is the solution to keeping players long term. I love this game – we all do – I just would hate to see yet another bandaid. With that being said and with Anet having read mine and others’ concerns, I’ll leave it be and focus on contributing!

You told us to go all out Jon Peters and Chris Whiteside, so, here’s the why before the what (Guild Halls). You’ll understand the reason for that order if you want to burn the time reading:

The Living Story starts to arc toward the stories’ NPC’s bickering, large amounts of failure, in-fighting and of course death. Death of all beloved characters slowly, over time! Sometimes in sudden large chunks, red wedding style (muahaha)! Leaderless, with certain areas/cities destroyed by the remaining three dragons, the races of Tyria have only one hope left – themselves. Guilds! The rise of guilds! Players are the only thing to stand in the way of the Dragons and total annihilation of Tyria! The only ones to hold the key, which is event-spawning via their Guild Halls.

Why this story arc? Because GH’s will come with the ability to spawn events. These events will come at a cost, those guilds found worthy on the field of battle (GvG) will have the ability, through the resource earned in GvG tournaments, to spawn the biggest, best (living story advancing) content. Other guilds can launch events as well, but without the tournament winning resource, they wouldn’t be Living Story related. Any person or guild can be involved in any guild launched event(LS or otherwise), but the top GvG guilds launch “invasion events” whereby Dragon lieutenants etc are spawned and people have to slay them all or some such.

After enough of these events have been completed (you can easily set GvG to the tune of tournaments and reward a specified amount of the event spawning resource to time-gate this as you see fit) then you’re ready to unleash the Dragon of your choice upon the populace, all of course because the players spawned the events that led to this standoff.

Over the course of another 2-3 years the players can finally defeat the last of the Dragons. At that point, you’ve gotten 6 years out of this game, a barrel of dollar bills and can decide where to go from there.

I don’t have time to look through all of the posts in this CDI, unfortunately. What I do have time for is to list what I do and do not want out of Guild Halls:

Do want:

• Functions seamlessly with existing game modes and systems (PvP, PvE, WvW, dungeons, guild missions, etc).
• Provides guild activities which utilize the guild mission system.
• Awards guild commendations for guild team-building activities.
• Increases participation in existing game content.
• Allows choice of theme/location (Shiverpeak, Krytan, Maguuma, Ascalonian, Orrian, etc.)
• Gives a physical space for guilds to meet in.
• Have guild rewards NPC’s in the guild hall space.
• Has aesthetic unlockables to work toward that decorate both the Guild Hall and the individual.
• Sets the stage for GvG matches.

Do NOT want:

• Redundancy with existing game modes or systems (especially with convenience centers, such as the Captain’s Airship).
• Instances which detract significantly from existing game maps.
• Implementations which are biased toward certain game modes (PvE, WvW, or PvP).

More concrete ideas:

• For PvE, have Guild Halls be based out of dungeons instances. Guilds first have to clear each path of the dungeon together, which represents cleaning out the dungeon. Once each path has been completed, they can spend influence to unlock the area as their Guild Hall.
• After unlocking the dungeon, guild members can teleport there via the guild UI and congregate in a separate dungeon instance which is clear of enemies.
• Completing dungeon paths for the unlocked dungeon will additionally unlock guild commendations, and perhaps increased dungeon tokens.
• Allow guilds to unlock all dungeons, select which one they want active as their guild hall, and switch between unlocked halls.
• Completing dynamic events in the zone outside of the dungeon will provide dramatically increased gold/karma awards, and a rare chance of guild commendations. Conceptually, guild members are bettering the zone outside their guild hall, kind of like a fraternity adopting a highway in front of their frat house.
• Introduce a few new dynamic events which involve “rival” guild NPC’s attacking the area outside the dungeon in an attempt to raid the guild.
• For WvW, unlocking Guild Hall locations would work similarly—once unlocked, you’d have access to a private instance which uses structures in WvW one of safe zone corners of the map). Unlocking criteria might involve claiming a keep on that map for your guild. Participating in WvW events on that map would similarly reward increased karma/gold/guild commendations. There could perhaps be increased influence benefits for claiming keeps on that map.
• For PvP, the Guild Hall would simply be a custom arena. The increased rewards would work similarly to the WvW and PvE suggestions.

Thank you for holding this CDI, ArenaNet. Despite trying to be concise, my post ended up being much longer than I hoped it would be.

Devata.6589:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

The only request I have is: please give small guilds (2-5 people) something to strive for, too.

Your post did me realize something.. What are people talking about when they talk about small guilds?

I am talking about 15 active (So online at least once every 2 weeks) people.

In all honestly I personally would think 2 – 5 is so little that would be the same as making it available to every-body’s personal guild what I would think as undesirable.

But what are other people talking about when they talk about small guilds?

Well, let’s look at the game itself. Ask people to name one important guild in GW2, and most people will give the same answer. “Destiny’s Edge”.

With that as our in-game example of a small guild, 5-6 seems fair. The biconics fit that as well. But, do they have guild halls?

Well, for Destiny’s Edge, I’d look at Eir’s house. It’s a big house, with extra land around it, and statues of important people (including one guild member) decorating the area. Sounds like a small guild hall to me, and I’m sure they’ve held meetings there.

The biconics have The Dead End. They may not own it, but they’re using it. I’m sure there’s some rooms in the back and cellar that they can use if need be. Again, sounds like a small guild hall to me.

How do we make it work? Let’s assume that there’s not going to be an upkeep charge, first of all. (Seriously, let’s avoid that, it sucks.) If there’s a range of small guild halls starting small and growing up, then the first one can be pretty cheap, and the price can climb with each size upgrade. A larger guild will get a bigger hall faster, but even a small guild can save up some influence to get there eventually.

When we move into large guild halls, you can charge merits as well as influence. These can be the long term goals for bigger guilds, and smaller guilds will still be able to have a guild hall for themselves. It’ll just be smaller, which is really only logical.

Guild Halls and Housing would be good in the game maybe getting some crafting going with it

JonPeters.5630:

Something I haven’t seen much discussion on that I thought would be interesting. Not saying you have to go this way but.

What current aspects of guilds would you change to integrate them more with guild halls? If you would change something, how would you change it to work more with a physical Guild Hall?

Jon

NOTHING!

Again, I repeat, other things should not become locked behind guild halls. Not everyone will want to mess with them. Making a guild work differently in expectation of a guild hall is just asking for problems.

What current aspects of guilds would you change to integrate them more with guild halls? If you would change something, how would you change it to work more with a physical Guild Hall?

Jon

I think guild halls should only add, not take away. I think that they might become a more convenient place to access guild features like guild bank and guild NPCs, but the existing ones should all remain in place for guilds without a hall.

Do you mean some form of Guild Crafting? How would you expect that to work?

I think it would be fine if Guild Halls could unlock permanent crafting stations so that members could have access to them without leaving the hall, but I am VERY opposed to any ideas that would involve making guilded crafters better at crafting than non-guilded ones, such as having unique recipes that can only be unlocked through the guild system, or bonuses to crafting speed or something. A member of the biggest guild in the game, standing in front of his guild hall Weaponsmithing station, should not be in any way better off than an unguilded player standing in front of one of the ones in LA.

I’d like to see what value you all might envision a guild hall could bring to things like Guild Missions, the current Guild upgrade system, etc.

As for this, for guild missions they can provide a good place for players to muster before heading out on the missions, particularly if they’re instanced in such a way that they can fit a hundred or more players in the hall. For the guild upgrade system, it might be interesting for the guild hall to physically represent each of the steps in guild advancement, like workers building the vault as it goes in, that sort of thing, but I assume that guild halls will be near the top of the construction tree, so it would likely go in after all those advancements are made so it would be a lot of work to implement a function most players would never see.

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t remember saying locked. I said how would you change some of the current functionality to be more integrated with guild halls? I don’t think functionality has to go away to do this and I’d like to see what value you all might envision a guild hall could bring to things like Guild Missions, the current Guild upgrade system, etc.

Jon

If you think of an improvement to something like Guild Missions, fine. Go for it. I’m sure a lot of guilds will thank you for it.

But, if you need to have a Guild Hall to get that improvement, then there’s a problem. Make it work with guild halls? Fine. But it needs to have a non-guild hall way to work for the other guilds. Otherwise that improvement IS locked behind a guild hall.

Let’s take an example: Guild vs Guild. A lot of people seem to want this to involve Guild Halls. Fine, but it also needs to work for those that don’t have a Guild Hall. Maybe, if one’s required for you to defend, then a guild without one is given a generic hall to defend for the duration of the match. That way, even guilds without a hall are not locked out of GvG.

Do you see what I’m saying? Any changes or improvements need to stand on their own, and then they can be integrated into Guild Halls.

JonPeters.5630:

• What makes you think Guild Halls are difficult to acquire?
• Try to brainstorm ways in which Guild Hall acquisition could be fun.
• Think about some rewards a physical Guild Hall might give you that couldn’t be done without it and how the ability to give those rewards could create a version of an improvement to a system that previously was considered impossible and is now instead very simple, clear, and compelling?

Responding to #1 – I think the assumption is going to be “guild halls are limited by cost or number” until otherwise stated to be not the case.

I’ll respond to the other two as I think on it a little more tonight.

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t remember saying locked. I said how would you change some of the current functionality to be more integrated with guild halls? I don’t think functionality has to go away to do this and I’d like to see what value you all might envision a guild hall could bring to things like Guild Missions, the current Guild upgrade system, etc.

Jon

I could see Guild Halls benefiting Guild Missions
This idea would require GH’s to have an Asura gate with customizable destinations:

1. gate is set to a specific destination so all travelling through it go to that one destination OR
2. upon interacting with the gate, a list of options pops up (e.g. Travel to Lions Arch, Travel to Guild Mission)

Before each mission is started, a guild would all gather in their GH. When a mission is activated, the Asura gate is able to zone you into the map where the mission is.

• Now if a player (more specifically the character they are on) has that waypoint next to the mission, they are taken to that waypoint (or the closest uncontested one).
• If a player’s character doesn’t have the waypoint closest to the mission, they are taken to the closest one.
• If a player’s character doesn’t have any completion of the map the mission is on at all, then they are still taken to the map (but a waypoint at the bottom of the map or ‘one of the first entrance portals’ to a map).

This would allow at worst, having to run from the edge of a map to the mission, rather than for a character that doesn’t have that map needing to run across all of Tyria just to get to a mission.

~~~~~~EDIT:
A customizable Asura gate would also be useful for preparing for a WvW guild raid: everyone gathers in the GH, Asura gate is set to ‘Borderland X’.

JonPeters.5630:

Something I haven’t seen much discussion on that I thought would be interesting. Not saying you have to go this way but.

What current aspects of guilds would you change to integrate them more with guild halls? If you would change something, how would you change it to work more with a physical Guild Hall?

Jon

Isn’t the entire concept of Guild Halls completely integral to Guilds? Are you talking about adding (or changing) some feature that would make it more worth it to own a hall?

In as far as having this discussion about open world versus instanced halls, it’s pretty much a no-brainer that open world halls wouldn’t work in this game, unless you really expanded the real estate and you also made them extremely taxing to maintain.

I’m thoroughly of the mind that the original game addressed guild halls and their functionality quite well. So much so that if i could just drop my guild hall into GW2, i would do that and be rather pleased.

One thing to note (since it’s been discussed to some length) one thing you guys did in the original, with factions and control, was interesting, but ultimately more of a bother than fun. Adding in content (Urgoz and The Deep) and “locking” it behind guild ownership, in hindsight was probably not a great idea. I’d say take that lesson and run with it.

JonPeters.5630:

I think the only good assumption here is that we are talking about to bring up the positives and negatives of a system. What are the benefits to guild halls having a large cost? What are the drawbacks? I’m saying this because I think it has both and am wondering what your take is.

My take is no matter what you do, the forums will be on fire afterwards about how the decision is obviously wrong and ANet is “once again out of touch with what players want”.

There isn’t a way to do any of this which is going to get a 100% approval rating, no matter what you read here in the forums. I’ve inferred such to Chris several times before we started down these CDIs.

And so, I’m trying to think around that particular blocking thought – because it’s become an increasingly stressful problem on trying to come up with anything useful.

JonPeters.5630:

Do you mean some form of Guild Crafting? How would you expect that to work?

My idea about crafting items: ‘Build and Unlock Items’ (if you haven’t read it already).

The Guild Hall should contain a map of the whereabouts of all Guild Members and the events that they are currently doing. In addition, Guild Leaders can put markers on this map, and these markers will appear in every Guild Member’s personal world map.

Try to brainstorm ways in which Guild Hall acquisition could be fun.

While I was thinking, I came up with several ideas. However, I also came up with reasons why each one isn’t fun and people would complain.

- Simply buy it with money, like a land grant? “Promotes gold farming, and Gem sales.”
- Purchase through Guild Upgrades with Influence or Merits? “Bigger guilds have an advantage with more Influence gain, more Merits to burn, etc.”
- Require doing something a la quest or Event? “Required gating through un-fun stuff.”

There’s no method which is going to make it “fun” for everyone, so really I guess it boils down to combining them in my idea:

Purchase in the Guild Upgrades a special Mission (requiring only a particular Level in “Architecture”) and the Mission is adjustable on difficulty for a bigger/better Hall at the end of it. You can always upgrade the structure later by doing the Mission over with an additional purchase. Balance the mission so 5 people can easily do it, and design it so there’s a lockout on over 30 people zerging it (I know it’s possible, the Assault Knights did it).

And after you win, you get a “Guild Hall License” and now can work on whatever hall structure you decide to go with.

Think about some rewards a physical Guild Hall might give you that couldn’t be done without it and how the ability to give those rewards could create a version of an improvement to a system that previously was considered impossible and is now instead very simple, clear, and compelling?

Mostly I see rewards in intangibles and convenience, much like how I saw it in GW1 and in other games. Anything beyond those two things risks unbalancing the game in favor of those who have more to pour into Guild Halls.

What I’d like to see as a benefit is, well, a Bounty Board. It would basically update with Bounty Targets which have been “apprehended” and allow members to look and see where they are when the Bounty missions are started. Not exactly but they could see the general areas like how a Scout will show nearby Hearts, showing maybe at most the nearest waypoint.

Heck, you could even roll it in with some older and other options of having them pick up bestiary pages of sorts to describe them in lore-couched terms.

JonPeters.5630:

Actually I’m not sure I see what you are saying.

I’ll give it one more go.

Let’s say someone brings into the office the best, most awesome chocolate cake in the world. Free for everyone to have a slice or three. Plenty to go around.

Anyone that simply doesn’t like chocolate cake, though, will pass on it. Is it great? Yes, but it’s not to their liking. They simply don’t want it.

I’ve already been posting ideas (feel free to read them, I think they’d be enjoyable) on how to earn and unlock things for Guild Halls. But it doesn’t matter how fun you make Guild Halls. Or PvP. Or World vs World. Or Dungeons. Some people DO NOT ENJOY IT. It’s simply not to their tastes.

This is another situation like requiring WvW for map completion. Or sticking a group dungeon onto the end of the personal story. Or leaving WvW players scraping together gold and skill points to unlock traits if they don’t want to PvE. Some people will simply not want to mess with Guild Halls, so requiring them to access an improvement to other areas of the game … is par for the course, I guess. Never mind, full speed ahead.

One version of Guild Crafting is some way for your guild to craft stuff, as a Guild, not people crafting in your guild hall but some sort of guild factory. Could influence or merits or other aspects of guilds be improved by integrating with this “factory?”

I’m not sure exactly what sort of products this would entail, but if it would allow say ten members in a single guild to craft more dollar value in product than ten individual crafters over the same period of time, then I would be entirely opposed to it.

I appreciate that you have limits on what you feel able to say on the boards, but talking in vague abstracts is very confusing to me. I would much rather talk about specific examples of features, like “what if we had [this specific product crafters could make], and [this is how it would be made], would that be a good idea?”

I think that by restricting the discussion to vague generalities, you may get the wrong idea about what we want, as at least one dev claimed that we were the ones that wanted the disastrous spring Trait changes, when of course nothing could be further from the truth, but that’s the sort of misunderstanding that can arise when we waste time talking around an issue rather than through it.

• What makes you think Guild Halls are difficult to acquire?
  * Try to brainstorm ways in which Guild Hall acquisition could be fun.
  * Think about some rewards a physical Guild Hall might give you that couldn’t be done without it and how the ability to give those rewards could create a version of an improvement to a system that previously was considered impossible and is now instead very simple, clear, and compelling?

1. Because a lot of current guild benefits are difficult to acquire. It took me around a year to unlock the max vault capacity for my personal guild, and I still haven’t unlocked guild missions. If you’re going to just hand out guild halls with minimal effort then that would be great, but that was not my assumption going into this CDI.

2. There are all sorts of ways to make it fun, though it would be hard to balance between different sizes of guilds. A type of unlocking mission that would be fun for a 100+ player guild would likely be impossible for a 10 man guild, and even one designed for a 5-man guild would be impossible for a solo guild. Anything that could be soloed would likely either be trivial or tedious for a larger guild (the latter if it were locked behind time games or something).

I suppose you could have different lockouts based on the size of the hall made available, a solo guild wouldn’t need a massive castle, and could have a solo-based quest to unlock it, while a massive guild would want a massive castle, and could require an epic campaign across Tyria to unlock it, involving dozens of parties completing smaller objectives, and massive raids completing others. The important thing though would be to keep the tangible functions of each hall balanced so that those in a larger guild hall do not have access to practical features than smaller ones lack.

3. I don’t think there really is anything tangible that a guild hall would be necessary for. All functions a hall can provide can technically be achieved in the open world, and generally should be. The benefit of the guild hall is more an RP thing, you’d have a unique space that you could hopefully make reflect the flavor of your guild, give a unique and easily accessible place for them to meet up, provide convenient access to basic services, that sort of thing, but anything that you can do in a guild hall, there should be places within the open world where you can also do those things, it just requires traveling to those locations.

Proposal Overview:
a mists based instance implementation for guild halls with tiered upgrades that would be fair to all guilds of all sizes (sorry for those who want a in world solution but it just doesn’t seem feasible to me due to size and spacial limitations.)

Goal of Proposal:
to address small guild concerns that it would be very difficult for them to build a guild hall in comparison to the larger guilds. (done by a tiered system for construction)

Proposal Functionality:
currently in GW2 building an upgrade requires the guild to have advanced a tier in said discipline.
My proposal would fit into this current system for example: the initial construction of the guild hall would require architecture lvl1, after this the following would be unlocked: guild hall lvl2 -increased size etc- (under architecture), merchants lvl1 -a general outfitter- (under economy), WvW merchants lvl1-seige merchant- (under Art of war), guild bank access -regular bank access would come at a higher level- (under politics). These upgrades would progressively get better, yet more expensive, for each tier of said discipline. (note each lvl for upgrading is just an example and will most likely need to be modified to balance cost/benefit to the ease of access)
This design style where each upgrade progressively gets better allows small guilds to create a guild hall with low cost. however the functionality and size of the guild hall will be low at first but will improve as each tier is upgraded to the point where there would be access to trade post, bank access, crafting stations, general merchants, and other implementations such as portals to WvW, PvP, Fractals and other new content appropriate for the guild hall, maybe even portals to each city.
Getting to and from the guild hall would be used by a button in the guild panel and perhaps a given location/s throughout the world
Additional functionality that would be nice would be the idea that the guild hall can be customized to reflect the tastes of the members ie. allow varying textures for the walls roof etc. even going so far as to have a few different models to chose from. These being changeable with the construction of an upgrade (most likely under architecture)

Asociated Risks:
We all know that there is alot of “bank guilds” out there and the possibility of each of these constructing even a basic guild hall could create some issues for the servers to host them all. To combat this i propose that to begin construction of a guild hall there must be at least 5 ACTIVE players within the guild, ie having logged on several times within the last few weeks or so.
Additionally there would be far fewer players out in the world once they had a guild hall to call home which could have a detrimental affect on inter guild communities. perhaps allowing the guild to invite lone players or members of other guilds (guild alliances perhaps) into their guild hall would allow the in game communities to stay together(it saddened me to see the mega-server pretty much destroy server based inter-guild communities outside of WvW.)

thanks for reading and feel free to give me some feedback

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

JonPeters.5630:

I think the only good assumption here is that we are talking about to bring up the positives and negatives of a system. What are the benefits to guild halls having a large cost? What are the drawbacks? I’m saying this because I think it has both and am wondering what your take is.

My take is no matter what you do, the forums will be on fire afterwards about how the decision is obviously wrong and ANet is “once again out of touch with what players want”.

There isn’t a way to do any of this which is going to get a 100% approval rating, no matter what you read here in the forums. I’ve inferred such to Chris several times before we started down these CDIs.

And so, I’m trying to think around that particular blocking thought – because it’s become an increasingly stressful problem on trying to come up with anything useful.

What i’ve seen with these CDI’s in general, is the basic fact that we as players don’t really know what our constraints are, so we make all these elaborate proposals and brainstorm around them. Which works amazingly well when you know what is technically feasible. So we get a lot of great ideas floating around, and people say “wow” that’s great, but then we get either a shell of the idea or something radically different.

It’s definitely a bonus to “think outside the box”, yet if you don’t know how big the box is, it’s very difficult to think outside of it. I know it’s their goal to build off the elaborate discussions we have in these, it just seems to typically lead to additions or changes that end up being more frustrating than fun. Add to that the rule of what’s discussed here is just for the sake of it, really doesn’t give anyone a clear design goal.

I got the concept behind all this, but they really need to be more open and focused with us than just have us run with wild ideas. I mean we are going to get those anyway, even when we have a tighter constraints. That’s just how discussion among a large group tend to go.

JonPeters.5630:

What current aspects of guilds would you change to integrate them more with guild halls? If you would change something, how would you change it to work more with a physical Guild Hall?

Since we’re just spit-balling here;

• There are many buffs that aren’t run just because they aren’t exceptionally useful. Those could be completely removed as something that has to be built and instead integrated as permanent buffs tied to a guild hall’s “Comfort Level.” For example, as the quality and quantity of furniture, trophies and amenities goes up, the guild hall becomes a more relaxing place to visit, providing players with a “Comfortable” buff that incorporates many of the existing, superfluous buffs. Obviously your internal data will show which of these guild buffs aren’t being utilized; those would be your prime candidates.

• Currently, Guild Banners are a consumable, though players aren’t able to enjoy their benefits unless they are in the immediate vicinity when dropped. Without changing that mechanic, when a Guild Banner has finished building, perhaps adding a copy of it that remains in the guild hall for a few hours would be more useful. I do not believe they need to be changed from a consumable, as this would remove them from being publicly accessible to all players (something I particularly enjoy seeing).

• Bounty and trek seem difficult to implement, but it’s certainly possible that a few guild challenges could be developed that take place entirely within the guild hall. Depending on how much players are able to edit the structure of the hall, rush and puzzle could be included as well, though I would prefer editable layouts over having hall-based missions.

• “Guild Weapons contract” would obviously unlock that vendor for the Guild Hall’s benefit.

• The various “Research” unlocks do not actually unlock anything themselves; they merely increase your level in a given upgrade type (Architecture, etc.). This would be a prime place to drop in free Guild Hall upgrades.

JonPeters.5630:

Do you mean some form of Guild Crafting? How would you expect that to work?

I think perhaps they meant that crafting could receive a shot in the arm with a ton of new housing-centric items like furniture.

But that reminded me; one of the more enjoyable features of Vanguard was gathering in teams to get enough granite for a guild hall. While I do not believe that game’s method would work the same here (for one, nodes were not instanced), something similar might. Off the top of my head, once a player hits a gathering node, a countdown starts; if another guild member hits that same node, it’s considered a “group gather” and some of that material is deposited into the guild’s Building Materials storage automatically.

It would essentially turn gathering material for your guild hall into a guild activity.

JonPeters.5630:

Jon

Can I answer for this?

1) What makes a creature interesting and challenging? Is it their skills, and would a combination of two random skills be balanced, rewarding, challenging?
Choice. Choice is what make not just creatures, but content interesting and challenging. Right now, we lack choice, because there is a “best way” to approach creatures and it is heavily set by one, only one, alternative: DPS.
I interpretate Rambo’s suggestion as, if creatures get stronger against certain specs, then bringing only DPS focused characters is detrimental, because one thing they lack, is adaptability. A tankier spec can kill a monster, maybe slower, but can, and certainly can adapt too. The same goes with Condi specs (those tend to be tankier), or even, CC focused specs.

1a) How do you make sure that all 6 combinations of skills are similarly balanced, create a variety of tactics, work together, get used in a way that makes their synergy work. Don’t create problems of triviality or difficulty when combined with a different creatures randomly chosen combination of skills?

This is a hard question, but I would say: Mimic players. The game is old enough to have certain guidelines towards how different “styles” work against others. The scenario has changed since the last years, now we can respec on the go, and the BiS type of gear, can be used on multiple characters, that means, we “could” expect players to bring more than one set of gear, and adapt to the situation. Also, you don’t really need to have all combinations being random, look at what Diablo 3 did with their “elite monsters” and the special abilities they get, the system has a lot of randomness, but they made it so, certain abilities go together, or don’t, because certain combinations weren’t smart, and didn’t encourage smart gameplay.

2) One thing that makes difficult content satisfying is mastery. How does this system allow players to develop a sense of mastery?

This is a tricky question. I don’t think even reknown speedrunners feel completly satisfied with the current “mastery” they have towards dungeon content. I’ve heard them ask for “gambits” on dungeons. I bring this up, because mastery isn’t necessarily remembering an algorithm used to finish a certain task as quick as possible, being able to adapt, in my opinion, is true mastery. Being able to “see” what is going, and knowing “hey, the mobs in this instance got x and y abilities, this are the traits/skills I need to face them, and I know how to make this build work in this situation.” = mastery

2a) How do we develop a clear visual language for 4 skills and how they combine into 6 patterns for creatures using the already limited set of creature animations and effects?

You can introduce icons, like you did with gambits for the queen’s gauntlet, you could use the text under the entity’s name.
But again, if we are limited on animations and visual effects, you need to focus on numbers and mechanic effects (which you have done before, with gambits.)

3) Many of the dungeons already have walls, and requirements for completion that players have found workarounds in the system to get past. How does your system actually solve those problems?

Adding more walls, is part of the solution. But the other thing is, stacking on corners makes content trivial, it removes any choice at all from it too.

4) You suggest some aspects of skill ideas, namely the outcome but you do not discuss what the player experience is in getting to that outcome. How do you propose to build those creature skills in a way that allows players to use a variety of tools to gain mastery over them? How do they force the players to use strategies that enforce what we think are the important pillars of GW2 combat.

The idea isn’t to force players to use certain strategies, but to have a choice in what strategy to use. And I’m talking about depth, because if out of 10 options, one is the best by a huge margin, then I don’t really have 10 options, I have 1, and 9 unreasonable alternatives.
I’m reading the book of your new AI designer, and I think there are great ideas there to achieve what you are asking. It’s all about choice, and making the combat, an interesting problem.
Right now, what I can say, is that, we have many mechanics in the game, very interesting, and very fun to use. But most of those mechanics, are irrelevant on PvE, why? well, there are either barriers for them to be effective (like condis caps, and CC caps), or because monsters lack responsiveness towards certain actions, like having a stack of monsters on the corner of a pillar, and them not moving out of there (even if some of them are clearly ranged monsters).

Sorry for derailing :P

Halcyon.5340:

The Guild Hall should contain a map of the whereabouts of all Guild Members and the events that they are currently doing. In addition, Guild Leaders can put markers on this map, and these markers will appear in every Guild Member’s personal world map.

I wasn’t going to comment because I am sure my ideas already appeared many, many times in this thread. But this is the one idea that I think would be very useful in a guild hall and really benefits from the guild having its personal space. With a map like this, when you are bored you can take a look at the map and see where some of your guildies are playing, and go play with them.

This giant map of Tyria could take a “wall” of the guild hall, while the guild calendar could take another “wall” and maybe another hall could be decorated with “photos” and a brief commentary of notable people from the guild (this last one has the risk of leading to narcisism).

Well, since I started commenting, I will give my take on guild halls.

I like the idea of them being floating islands on the mists, like the Dessa Observatory.
A guild would start buying an island with more or less the same size of the Dessa Observatory, and would be able to include only a house-sized guild hall.
With further upgrades, the island could get bigger and bigger, and the halls possible would be bigger too, until a limit like the size of Stonemist Castle (well, that one may be too big with its outer halls).

But the best part of the idea, is land-locking.

By some kind of interface, the officers could choose to (temporarily) landlock their island to a mini-map. A mini-map is also a floating island, but it has no owner. Up to 3/4 guilds could land-lock to the same mini-map. And guilds would have a way of choosing to share the same mini-map, so they could play together, or fight against each other.

Depending on its interests, the guild would choose between many kinds of mini-maps.

• PvE map – this kind would have events and challenges for the guild to complete. There could be one type for each biome Tyria has to offer!
• Vacation map – pretty beaches, a beautiful forest, just some nice views for the guild to enjoy together. Maybe some jumping puzzles!
• Activity map – maps suited for a special kind of activity. How about a map suited for laser-tag?
• GvG map – a map with camps, keeps and garrisons so the guild can fight another guild(s) for dominance.

Guilds that just want to share a common space with other guilds would choose a PvE or vacation map to share, while guilds who want to go to war would schedule with rival guilds the battle they want.

I envision this mini-map as something with, let’s say, 1/4 to 1/8 of a common Tyria map, but this is implementation detail.

Well, got that out of my chest. What do you guys think?

We all know that there is alot of “bank guilds” out there and the possibility of each of these constructing even a basic guild hall could create some issues for the servers to host them all. To combat this i propose that to begin construction of a guild hall there must be at least 5 ACTIVE players within the guild, ie having logged on several times within the last few weeks or so.

Ok, I’ll start this by saying that I have a “bank guild” and I want a guild hall for it, so any attempts to prevent me from getting one will not be appreciated. That said, I don’t think this method would work. I also belong to a regular guild, I’m not super active in it, but there are some good people there. If it was a requirement to have five people in my guild “regularly” for several weeks, I could likely convince at least five of the members to join rep my guild for at least an hour a day or so for a few weeks, and then I’d get my hall and they’d be able to leave. I’d just need to make sure to lock down back access beforehand (a circumstance that I imagine would lead to a lot of bank fraud ANet would have to deal with as they might not be so careful).

Now, they could prevent this by making it so that you’d need to keep at least five or more active players even after the hall is created, or the hall would lock out or something, but I imagine this could get in the way of legitimate guild use for the more casual small guilds.

Ohoni.6057:

We all know that there is alot of “bank guilds” out there and the possibility of each of these constructing even a basic guild hall could create some issues for the servers to host them all. To combat this i propose that to begin construction of a guild hall there must be at least 5 ACTIVE players within the guild, ie having logged on several times within the last few weeks or so.

Ok, I’ll start this by saying that I have a “bank guild” and I want a guild hall for it, so any attempts to prevent me from getting one will not be appreciated. That said, I don’t think this method would work. I also belong to a regular guild, I’m not super active in it, but there are some good people there. If it was a requirement to have five people in my guild “regularly” for several weeks, I could likely convince at least five of the members to join rep my guild for at least an hour a day or so for a few weeks, and then I’d get my hall and they’d be able to leave. I’d just need to make sure to lock down back access beforehand (a circumstance that I imagine would lead to a lot of bank fraud ANet would have to deal with as they might not be so careful).

Now, they could prevent this by making it so that you’d need to keep at least five or more active players even after the hall is created, or the hall would lock out or something, but I imagine this could get in the way of legitimate guild use for the more casual small guilds.

I agree, having these restrictions in place would likely turn a bunch of people off. I think an initial capital investment would be sufficient. They could probably take some metrics on how wealthy most of the small guilds are and base an up front cost on that.

munkiman.3068:

Ohoni.6057:

We all know that there is alot of “bank guilds” out there and the possibility of each of these constructing even a basic guild hall could create some issues for the servers to host them all. To combat this i propose that to begin construction of a guild hall there must be at least 5 ACTIVE players within the guild, ie having logged on several times within the last few weeks or so.

Ok, I’ll start this by saying that I have a “bank guild” and I want a guild hall for it, so any attempts to prevent me from getting one will not be appreciated. That said, I don’t think this method would work. I also belong to a regular guild, I’m not super active in it, but there are some good people there. If it was a requirement to have five people in my guild “regularly” for several weeks, I could likely convince at least five of the members to join rep my guild for at least an hour a day or so for a few weeks, and then I’d get my hall and they’d be able to leave. I’d just need to make sure to lock down back access beforehand (a circumstance that I imagine would lead to a lot of bank fraud ANet would have to deal with as they might not be so careful).

Now, they could prevent this by making it so that you’d need to keep at least five or more active players even after the hall is created, or the hall would lock out or something, but I imagine this could get in the way of legitimate guild use for the more casual small guilds.

I agree, having these restrictions in place would likely turn a bunch of people off. I think an initial capital investment would be sufficient. They could probably take some metrics on how wealthy most of the small guilds are and base an up front cost on that.

Absolutely. I’ll agree with the agreement. My guild is me who plays every day, my mate who plays 3-4 times a week, another who plays for a short while every few weeks (and absolutely loves the game), and a fourth who reps for us for about half an hour every six months. We aren’t unhappy with his arrangement and I’d really dislike being blocked from having a guild hall because of our set up.

Guild Fractals

• Unlocking
  • Guilds would have to research guild fractal access. This allows guild members to talk with Dessa and visit empty guild fractals to check them out.
  • Then they craft a Fractal Challenge ticket, and talk with Dessa to choose the fractal they are aiming for. Spend the ticket to create an attempt. Guild Members and Guests can then go to the Fractal of the Mists gate and use it, and they’ll see there an additional option to join the Guild’s Fractal challenge instance they all will travel to the same private fractal map. When they are ready, they can start the event, a guild challenge. These challenges are often scaled versions or world bosses and open world guild challenges. If they complete the guild fractal challenge, they earn that particular guild fractal, influence, merits, commendations and other guild challenge rewards. Guilds can craft more tickets to attempt different challenges to unlock additional Guild Fractals, but the rewards are only weekly. These challenges also work as a form of “Private Guild Raid”.
• Progress
  • Guild fractals will start with just a generic merchant, portals to Lion’s Arch and The Heart of the mists, and the NPC.
  • Guilds can spend influence and merits to slowly unlock all sorts of functionalities and NPCs.
  • Some would be added for free as players perform tasks. For example, unlocking a different fractal will add the NPC with that provides the service to switch between unlocked fractals, and enough guild members completing that story chapter will unlock a gate to Fort Trinity (still only usable by players with permission to use the order’s asura gates)
  • Some researched guild upgrades would also add the services. Unlocking the guild vault would add it to the guild’s fractal.
  • Guild members can pool together gems to get fancy decorations and unique version or NPC models, like Wintersday themed NPCs. The system would work like this: “Leader or official with permissions chooses the upgrade to ‘propose it’, guild members check the panel and see the upgrade, then they pay anonymously as many gems as they want” if the transaction is canceled before enough gems are pooled, the gems are refunded.
• Ties to content:
  • PvE. Guilds would get a third ‘currency’ variable that reprensents their PvE rank. Called something like “distinction”, “prominence”, or “acclaim”. This PvE rank is based on influence earned per day. Similar to Faction in GW1, it goes up as the guild earns influence and merits, and down over time. Guilds claim PvE one single hub among all the allied locations like Lionguard havens, order outposts and pact forst. A claimed outpost gets the guild’s banners, gives a free waypoint to the guild, a discount merchant, and guild members can travel to and from their guild hall though a private portal. Outposts are not automatically given, guilds have to manually claim them (they’ll get 1 hour of protection), and a higher guild can always claim an outpost claimed by a lower rank guild after the protection is over. Outposts are claimed by region, so a guild will have their claimed outpost across all chapter of a map. This allows guild members to save coin when traveling to distant regions if their guild has an outpost claimed nearby.
  • PvP. A form of GvG would be introduced, or at least a tournament system with normal PvP maps with existing PvP modes, but only for teams composed exclusively of players of a single guild.
  • WvW. Guilds would be able to choose home worlds/alliances. Bloodlust obtained directly by controlling ruins would be replaced by hourly GvG tournaments. In WvW, each borderlands map would have its own hourly tournament with 24 slots for Guild teams. First 14 min round of 12 2-way battles, then 6, then 3 and the 3 remaining teams fight in a 3-way battle in the last 15 minutes. Each round gives PvP track rewards to all teams, and whoever wins the last round gets some nice personal rewards, 1/3 supply drop for their world’s Citadel, and also claims Bloodlust for their world. Each world would get 3 guaranteed slots in the tournament, and the remaining 15 slots are obtained by controlling ruins, 3 slots per ruin. These slots give priority when joining tournament to guilds from that world, but if a world does not present enough guild teams for their reserved slots, the slots become “free for all” and are randomly given to the other 2 worlds. Guilds with enough members who participated in a ruins control event also get priority over one of that ruin’s slot for as long as they have enough members within that runs, and their world controls that ruin. Players that have won the last match of the hourly tournament more often will get slightly decreased priority, to leave room to other guilds and guild members.

JonPeters.5630:

I wanted to dig into the instanced vs non-instanced debate a bit. Here are 4 questions I’ll pose:

• What do people see as the benefits of instanced?
• What do you see as the benefits of open world guild halls?
• How could we get the benefits of instanced guild halls in a system of open world guild halls?
• How could we get the benefits of open world guild halls in a system where guild halls are instanced?

I’m not sure if this has been mentioned, but instanced Guild Halls would be a huge boon to Roleplayers. We’ve been really, really desperate for something to help our situation out, and to be honest you guys have really only taken away from us, never given. Uninstanced Guild Halls would be another missed opportunity to help out a very strong community who’s been doing their best to adapt in the face of things like Megaservers. If Guild Halls aren’t instanced to give us a safe place to RP, then other features need to be implemented to help us out.

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t remember saying locked. I said how would you change some of the current functionality to be more integrated with guild halls? I don’t think functionality has to go away to do this and I’d like to see what value you all might envision a guild hall could bring to things like Guild Missions, the current Guild upgrade system, etc.

Jon

Let’s go all the way.

Your guild instance map is seperated into four sections: Politics, economics, art of war and architecture. As you upgrade these things through the I-VI lines, the sections will get grander; for example, if you have level 0 politics, you have no building on that section, if you have level 1, you have a basic lodge, all the way up to a palace at level 6.

The other smaller upgrades have smaller effects on the plot. For example, if you build a guild workshop, you have an actual workshop on your architecture plot. If you have Outsource Asuran Contracting, an Asura hangs out in your Politics building and you can talk to him. If those upgrades are actually doing something then they’re doing something in the guild hall; for example if you’re building something at the workshop, the machinery is running and you have a few NPCs running about working, if you have the Asuran Contractor working, he’s fiddling about on one of those computer things they have. Every upgrade should have something along these lines actually happening in the guild hall to correlate with it.

Also a few upgrades could have added functionality, or new upgrades that come out of them. For example, you can upgrade your Guild Workshop to have crafting tables.