Guild Wars 2

Torsailr.8456:

Simon.3106:

Hmm.. CDI for GUILD HALLS…. when is the expected release date? How long does Anet usually take for this?

At least 6 months out. If they come anywhere close to implementing some of the larger ideas here then more likely 12-18 months. But that is my personal estimate. I have no inside knowledge of Anet’s development schedule or manpower.

That’s even assuming they implement guild halls at all.

As stated many, many times before, absolutely nothing in the CDI’s should be taken as a promise of any feature to come. These are simply here for us to talk with the developers over ideas we have for the game, nothing more.

So, don’t expect guild halls just because we’re having the discussion. Of course, it will be a nice surprise when/if they show up, but just having the discussion does not automatically mean they will be implemented.

daft inquisitor.1605:

Torsailr.8456:

Simon.3106:

Hmm.. CDI for GUILD HALLS…. when is the expected release date? How long does Anet usually take for this?

At least 6 months out. If they come anywhere close to implementing some of the larger ideas here then more likely 12-18 months. But that is my personal estimate. I have no inside knowledge of Anet’s development schedule or manpower.

That’s even assuming they implement guild halls at all.

As stated many, many times before, absolutely nothing in the CDI’s should be taken as a promise of any feature to come. These are simply here for us to talk with the developers over ideas we have for the game, nothing more.

So, don’t expect guild halls just because we’re having the discussion. Of course, it will be a nice surprise when/if they show up, but just having the discussion does not automatically mean they will be implemented.

Very true. I’ll be a little bummed if nothing happens. I’ll be happy if something does happen. Either way I’ll still log in to have fun with friends.

daft inquisitor.1605:

That’s even assuming they implement guild halls at all.

As stated many, many times before, absolutely nothing in the CDI’s should be taken as a promise of any feature to come. These are simply here for us to talk with the developers over ideas we have for the game, nothing more.

So, don’t expect guild halls just because we’re having the discussion. Of course, it will be a nice surprise when/if they show up, but just having the discussion does not automatically mean they will be implemented.

That’s true, maybe once the GH CDI is about to be finished, there should be a final discussion on things that could be implemented more easily first, and leave the more crazy/unique ideas for later. So we at least get something.

Baltzenger.2467:

but the guy that only plays fractals, will actually never try anything else, because the content will be designed to be “not for him”.

I would disagree, I’m going with “only plays fractals” being a euphemism for high end content. I spend about 80% of my game time currently in an instance (fractal,dungeon, some pvp etc) but I also really want Guildhalls and will spend hours if not days decorating mine. But I would expect the best items and most interesting skins/structures to be from difficult content or rare drops or hard to achieve new achievements.

Yes I want base guildhalls for everyone, but the best looking guildhalls decked with their gold and mahogany? Your guild should have players very good at every game type for that to be possible.

Summary
As a WVW player in a WVW-only guild, I would very much like guild halls to be implemented as an enhancement to WVW, by expanding upon & reworking existing WVW objectives and structures.

Goals

• add depth/freshen WVW
• provide greater incentive to retain captured structures
• introduce customisation elements/guild persistent rewards to WVW

Proposal brief
The various towers/keeps in WVW are rather lifeless, and I can’t think of a better way to bring WVW back to life than by creating upgradeable, guild-claimable structures within and around existing WVW towers & keeps.

Other areas like the skritt cave, centaur camp could/should become additional player mini-fortresses.

Eg:
Bay is easily large enough for 3-4 guild mini-fortresses (2 built into the mountain geometry, 1 underwater, maybe 1 more built into the back of the keep lord’s hall). Towers could house a single guild hall.

These mini-fortresses should all be separately capturable & claimable (by guilds of course). In general, player fortress/guild hall gates/portcullises should be equivalent to t3 doors, which auto-upgrade over time without consuming supply.

Potential upgrades (besides gates/portcullises) might include:

• guild heraldry
• guild accomplishments (statues, decals)
• protective siege, eg: well-positioned guild cannon(s)/ballistae
• player fortresses outside keeps might even have their own guild-only waypoint

The goal of all this should be to add greater value to keep and tower ownership, and increase the frequency of epic clashes.

To mitigate the loss of one’s guild hall, upgrades should be based on time only and customisation options be made to be persistent, such that upon claim, non-functional/aesthetic upgrades occur automatically (think guild “theme” that applies itself automatically based on that guild’s last set of customisations).

Iason Evan.3806:

• An Open world Guild Hall would have to have no loading screen but still have permissions on who enters.

• It would have to be seamless entry too. That’s if you wanted to do it right.

• No fixed or grid placement. They are terrible when compared to the freedom that free placement offers you.

• You’d also have to implement junk drops from mobs in the world as things to use to decorate with.

As a side note Jon, the people who are really going to spend time with this are the same type of people that Carbine totally took for granted when they were designing WildStar. They were so rigidly clinging to the raid system in that game that they lost sight of the people that just wanted to level to 14 and then play house. The bulk of the design should be around them. Why? Because the dude(me) that gets a “Fractal Guild Hall Drop” will put it in the hall and then just head straight back into the Fractals. Holly Homemaker will spend hours finding the perfect spot to place that item. That’s who it should be for.

If you are going to actually design a guild hall system, do it for the Holly Homemakers. Designing an open world guild hall system for people like me that spend 90% of our time in combat wastes what the guild hall is aesthetically. Design it for the people that want to spend 90% of their time in the guild hall.

Take that idea you had about guilds controlling points out of the guild hall system if it’s open world. Ultimately the Guild Hall has nothing to do with control points.

But in this case if you are part from a guild there only have to be a few Holly Homemakers in the guild and everybody in the guild who likes a nice guild-halls (builders or not) will be thankfully to you for unlocking the that blue-print. Just as you are now also earning influence for the guild while doing your thing.

Would also be nice if, within the Guild Halls, players could buy private chambers for themselves. No need to add a physical space for them in the guild hall either, a door titled Private Chambers would lead players to their own Private Chamber Instance. They could also invite maybe a miax 8-10 players to their own PC instances.

Baltzenger.2467:

In my opinion, content should be designed for everyone, not just those who “you think will be potentially interested on it”, at least speaking of MMOs.

When you do that, later, you suffer from splitting your playerbase, specially when the game ages and you need to shift populations toward certain game types. Maybe Holly Homemakers should be taken into consideration when making the core of the system, but the guy that only plays fractals, will actually never try anything else, because the content will be designed to be “not for him”.

I probably didn’t explain myself well enough. If you design Guild Halls in the context we are talking about(free form object placement/design options etc.) for the person that is gonna want to spend 90% of their time in the Guild Hall then it will be for everyone because it will have more options than the person who doesn’t really care(Fractals guy) will ever use. If you design it for Fractals guy only, then the person that really cares about design gets left out.

Devata.6589:

Iason Evan.3806:

• An Open world Guild Hall would have to have no loading screen but still have permissions on who enters.

• It would have to be seamless entry too. That’s if you wanted to do it right.

• No fixed or grid placement. They are terrible when compared to the freedom that free placement offers you.

• You’d also have to implement junk drops from mobs in the world as things to use to decorate with.

As a side note Jon, the people who are really going to spend time with this are the same type of people that Carbine totally took for granted when they were designing WildStar. They were so rigidly clinging to the raid system in that game that they lost sight of the people that just wanted to level to 14 and then play house. The bulk of the design should be around them. Why? Because the dude(me) that gets a “Fractal Guild Hall Drop” will put it in the hall and then just head straight back into the Fractals. Holly Homemaker will spend hours finding the perfect spot to place that item. That’s who it should be for.

If you are going to actually design a guild hall system, do it for the Holly Homemakers. Designing an open world guild hall system for people like me that spend 90% of our time in combat wastes what the guild hall is aesthetically. Design it for the people that want to spend 90% of their time in the guild hall.

Take that idea you had about guilds controlling points out of the guild hall system if it’s open world. Ultimately the Guild Hall has nothing to do with control points.

But in this case if you are part from a guild there only have to be a few Holly Homemakers in the guild and everybody in the guild who likes a nice guild-halls (builders or not) will be thankfully to you for unlocking the that blue-print. Just as you are now also earning influence for the guild while doing your thing.

For sure. See my above comment as it pertains to who the design aspects of Guild Halls should be aimed at. If you aim for Holly Homemaker(I’m totally naming my next character that) as your target audience then everyone gets what they want when it comes to being able to customize your Guild Hall. Holly wants all the options when it comes to what she can design with and where she can put it.

JonPeters.5630:

MajorValtiel.6310:

Would also be nice if, within the Guild Halls, players could buy private chambers for themselves. No need to add a physical space for them in the guild hall either, a door titled Private Chambers would lead players to their own Private Chamber Instance. They could also invite maybe a miax 8-10 players to their own PC instances.

What would you want to be able to do in there?

Or perhaps what happens in private chambers stays in private chambers?

A room accessable with an option from anywhere in the world where you can “hang out” and possibly have a bank-chest. Or, if you must link it to the gem store, the actual place where the Home Portal Stone takes you, regardless of a guild (guild would change the rooms feel/theme, potentially).

daft inquisitor.1605:

That’s even assuming they implement guild halls at all.

As stated many, many times before, absolutely nothing in the CDI’s should be taken as a promise of any feature to come. These are simply here for us to talk with the developers over ideas we have for the game, nothing more.

So, don’t expect guild halls just because we’re having the discussion. Of course, it will be a nice surprise when/if they show up, but just having the discussion does not automatically mean they will be implemented.

Indeed. We can even say that when they start a CDI on a subject, we will never see it implemented. I’d prefer they tell us what they are working on.

JonPeters.5630:

Iason Evan.3806:

Baltzenger.2467:

In my opinion, content should be designed for everyone, not just those who “you think will be potentially interested on it”, at least speaking of MMOs.

When you do that, later, you suffer from splitting your playerbase, specially when the game ages and you need to shift populations toward certain game types. Maybe Holly Homemakers should be taken into consideration when making the core of the system, but the guy that only plays fractals, will actually never try anything else, because the content will be designed to be “not for him”.

I probably didn’t explain myself well enough. If you design Guild Halls in the context we are talking about(free form object placement/design options etc.) for the person that is gonna want to spend 90% of their time in the Guild Hall then it will be for everyone because it will have more options than the person who doesn’t really care(Fractals guy) will ever use. If you design it for Fractals guy only, then the person that really cares about design gets left out.

This is precisely why the things we build take time. Someone earlier suggested to just list things that were seemingly easy so that maybe this could be a reality. I would suggest that the more innovative and compelling your ideas are the more likely they are to drive development because that is what we pride ourselves on.

I had responded a few pages ago that I thought open world GH’s would be way too much work and out of the scope of possibility just by the way the game is built and there fore didn’t bring it up before your “blue sky” post. I am not imagining new “GH zones” being implemented, but rather, having the ability to place a Hall smack dab in the middle of a designated “Guild Hall area” in Gendarran Fields.

Before this thread started it never even occurred to me that we would even discuss something as outlandish as that. I would much rather the discussion stay with what is in the realm of possibility but if the sky is the limit then I would love to see the following:

• Any item you can get as a drop can be used to decorate
• Complete X, Y, Z Axis placement of said object in the hall
• Dungeon and Fractal Loot Tables completely upgraded and updated with decorating items
• A statue of Evon Gnashblade and tomato baskets full of fresh ripe tomatoes, hand picked for the sole purpose of hurling at the statue

That last one is because he didn’t spend enough campaign money to beat Kiel in the election.

Proposal Overview
Guild buildings

Goal of Proposal
A building in each major city (and perhaps mid-sized settlements) serving as a location for guild halls.

Proposal Functionality

Key concepts:

- There is one guild building in each major city and perhaps some mid-sized settlements.
- A guild building is a structure in the existing world, either added or converted from a currently unused structure.
- A guild building can host an unlimited number of guild halls, with each guild hall being a separate instance, accessible by a portal in the guild building’s common area.
- A guild hall is associated with a specific guild building, thus it can only be access from one physical location.

This approach allows for a compromise between guild halls being accessible form specific places in the existing world and the limited amount of available real estate. Associating guild halls with specific structures in the existing world gives the impression of the hall itself actually being a part of a structure in that world, while at the same time this acts as a mechanism preventing the use of travel to and from guild halls as a substitute for existing methods of travel.

Additional considerations:

- To make guild buildings seem like they can actually hold significant numbers of guild halls, they should be expanded vertically rather than horizontally. To minimise the footprint, a guild building could be presented as a tower, or a structure with a vast system of underground passages and rooms. The outside appearance of the building would not have an impact on the interior. The only accessible part would be the guild building’s common area where the portal to guild halls’ instances would be located.
- The guild building’s common area could also host all the NPCs dealing with guilds such as guild registrars, bankers etc.
- Access to a guild hall instances would be restricted to guild members and their party members. This would allow inviting other players to visit guild halls.

Associated Risks
Guild buildings do not offer much in terms of displaying the achievements of the guilds in the open world.

MakubeC.3026:

Then again, do your research on ArchAge and maybe play it a while. You’ll see why is it such a bad idea.

My research says nothing. What does your says?

There are some posts here suggesting that the Guild Halls actually occupy (non-instanced) space in existing zones (airships in the sky floating above, or buildings in the zone). This is a problematic idea when looking at the large scale.

If each guild had their own airship, how long would it be until the sky in every zone was littered with an array of airships? Until they blotted out the sun entirely? I’m not sure that’s the design aesthetic they had when they designed the zones – having a fleet of airships ominously hovering above… everything ever. Unique buildings would likewise clutter the ground. And restricting the areas in which you could have them (to prevent everywhere from being cluttered) would only make zones reach max capacity even faster.

There’s also a problem with megaserver/overflows/underflows and deciding who occupies the hall when two in the same space might try to phase together (plus the issue of actually constantly phasing these halls in and out – this would be very taxing for the servers, always loading in more models, NPC’s, solids/collision items, etc).

That’s why in my suggestion I recommend that Guild Halls still be instances, but that there be zone-line entrances they developers add in to the open world. It gets players out into the world, and gives Guild Halls flavor and variety (drawing art assets from the zone they’re attached to). But any number of guilds may select that particular zone line site for their hall, and get a copy of the instance contained within. Once selected, using that zone line simply takes them to their guild’s instance.

Here’s the link to that suggestion: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Guild-Halls/first#post4454291

This way, the air isn’t flooded with airships in every zone, and numerous buildings don’t clutter the landscape.

It’s also a modular idea, meaning all it would take is adding a cosmetic door, cave entrance or tunnel (or whatever other creative entrance idea you can come up with) in the middle or edge of an existing zone, slapping the wavy watery zoneline effect in front of it, and attaching it to a new instanced map when traveled through. The game would have defined Guild Hall entrance locations attached to specific instances, but guilds can select which of those they want to use. That place has a location tied to the real world and contextualized there, but it avoids all of the clutter. They can add new Guild Hall sites as frequently as they like. It also lets the Guild Hall be a cozy instance that’s just for the guild, much like what Guild Wars 1 offered. Plus it doesn’t have the constant phasing which would tax the servers.

It also avoids people sitting in their bases and having mapchat “shout-wars” across from one airship to another (making everyone on the ground feel awkward). People are probably going to hang out in Guild Halls, and get bored and/or see something in mapchat they don’t like. And it would be really sad if the only GvG that ever got implemented was two or more guilds trash-talking in mapchat by shouting over a gap between airships.

Guild Halls as airship is fine just as long as they aren’t all airships… sorry but I just don’t see myself falling in love with a floating rust bucket. Unless by airship you mean air-fortress. How about we get that whoever made the Wizards Tower to franchise a bit? http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wizard's_Tower

JonPeters.5630:

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

Well this war over land would could either thus be PvP (or more accurately GvG) or PvE.

PvE could be fairly straight forward, a plot of land is open (either it was not yet claimed or by some other mechanism is no longer owned by any other guild) and by spending or amount of Merit or Influence is able to take part in a sort of guild mission, the successful completion of wish grants the guild the area for a period of time and routinely similar PvE events need to be undertaken to ensure ownership of the Guild Hall (losing the Guild Hall by not completing one of these events is probably unfair given that not all guilds can be constantly active, but possibly damage to a part of the Guild Hall which over time could lead to the land becoming unclaimed again). Destruction to the Guild Hall can be repaired given a series of repair events or resource gathering.

GvG would occur when a land has already been claimed by one guild but another is interested in getting it for themselves. Well possibly something along the lines of a GvG arena or some other GvG style competition. A competing guild can challenge athe owner guild and at a set time of the week a set number of guild members take part in the GvG competition. Obviously the idea of adhoc competitions among guilds for land probably isn’t the best idea, since a guild might rock up at 2 o’clock in the morning and have no opposition from the current owning guild. So maybe there could be a time limit in which a guild has to respond.
How this GvG style system would work if you have 10s of guilds (or hundreds!) competing over the same area I’m uncertain, possibly these GvG competitions would occur less often allowing for some form of tournament style competition in the same way that we have WvW tournaments where top ranked guild get to choice their guild halls.

Of course this system would still require some form of instance Guild Halls (so that everyone can have guild halls), so open world guild halls are simply there for bragging rights.

JonPeters.5630:

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?

Well this system does have it’s own appeal (if I’m understanding you correctly i.e. it removes the need to compete over areas and also removed the idea that a guild has a guild hall in a zone but rather that guild hall exists in any area where sufficient number of guild members are gathered). Even if such a system is implemented I still think players would have some preference over where their guild hall is located (assuming we’re talking of a physical building and not a airship) if only because some players might likely the snowy landscape of the Shiverpeaks or the grassy valley’s of Kryta. But in this case the primary appealing aspects of a non-persistent guild hall would be easy access to NPCs, crafting, quick travel etc.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

• little nature surroundings but mostly techy stuff – little room for non-hall like areas like clearings.

My biggest concern, airships are ugly rust buckets!

Oldirtbeard.9834:

If you could tie it in to WvW some how, to build upon the Alliance/Guild server idea you’re coming up with all the better.

But not everyone likes bleeding one game type into another… it’s hard since you can go in so many directions with guild, guild halls and guild versus guild

MajorValtiel.6310:

Would also be nice if, within the Guild Halls, players could buy private chambers for themselves.

I’d rather we not sneak personal housing into Guild Halls, I’d rather have proper personal housing.

Upkeep
I would like to see the Guild Halls upkeep be determined by some PvE dynamic events in a Guild Zone. So instead of a tax or cost associated with it, it is “payed for” by playing the content.

Even losing the event shouldn’t be too punishing. Maybe have your Guild Hall over run by who ever the local enemy is (like Centaurs for a human zone) and your guild has to retake the hall in order to do more upgrades and keep guild services active.

I’d rather not see a real tax be implemented unless we are talking about adding Guild Halls to “open world” maps. The real estate would be so limited we would need some way to barrier the content… that actually give me an idea. What if we had both Guild Zones and Open World Guild Halls. The guilds who don’t want to spend the money or don’t care to can be in a Guild Zone (maybe a shared instance with alliance guilds) and Guilds that want the accolades and cool factor associated with being in a regular instance could pay a tax or Gem store thing like the PvP arena thingy.

(However, if the Gem Store option is the only way to do a Guild Hall it would be absolute garbage.)

Housing:

In GW1 my friends and I use to pretend we owned houses in our Guild Hall. It was just a bit of RP but would be AMAZING if we could actually do that in GW2. It would take a lot to make enough houses to actually allow everyone a place but would be an amazing living city to actually see.

Maybe it would just be easier to create a housing editor like The Sims 4 or something similar and allow the guild member to design their homes themselves. Obviously a few good default houses should be available for folks not interested in that level of detail.

I don’t like the editor-suggestions, the focus of the game should still be mainly on the gameplay imho, not some creation-sim.

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.

Garrisons in WoW are for solo players if I got it right. I would love to see this concept as a replacement of our home instance instead of guild halls if I’m honest,… I can’t see how it is fun for every player when only the guild leader or some officers can create and upgrade the buildings.

Prophet.6257:

Housing:

In GW1 my friends and I use to pretend we owned houses in our Guild Hall. It was just a bit of RP but would be AMAZING if we could actually do that in GW2. It would take a lot to make enough houses to actually allow everyone a place but would be an amazing living city to actually see.

If they just made it so a housing instance could be accessed from within the Guild Hall (maybe a door you could use to be transported to the customizable interior of your home) space would not be an issue. Just like using a doorway that took guild members to their specific guild hall instance (if they had their instance at that location) would work.

All of this could use the already-existing technology that sends people to their Home Instance (remember those?) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Home_instance

So I think it might be possible and reasonable to see your idea come to life, without the problem of there needing to be one separate house for each and every person in your guild (could you imagine what a full-capacity guild would look like if it needed that many actual houses in the Guild Hall? lol).

JonPeters.5630:

MajorValtiel.6310:

Would also be nice if, within the Guild Halls, players could buy private chambers for themselves. No need to add a physical space for them in the guild hall either, a door titled Private Chambers would lead players to their own Private Chamber Instance. They could also invite maybe a miax 8-10 players to their own PC instances.

What would you want to be able to do in there?

Or perhaps what happens in private chambers stays in private chambers?

I’d want to do the same things I’d want to do with player housing. Customize, make a place my character could call home, and show it off to friends. Though I’d prefer true player housing as an option on top of guild halls, and to let every alt have their own place. My rich old-money nobleman is simply going to have nicer digs than my street rat fighter who hates charity and has terrible claustrophobia …

A personalized space within the guild gives a player a feeling of some control, and allows compartmentalization if you need to reduce chat spam or have separate simultaneous scenes. I do think in terms of RP, that being my main pursuit in most any game. In my guild’s pretend-airship, guild members each have their own cabin with a personalized door and individual keepsakes inside. This works as we are not a huge guild; I’m not sure how a 500-member guild would incorporate individual spaces without being a small village or airfleet.

AlienMenace.7516:

There are some posts here suggesting that the Guild Halls actually occupy (non-instanced) space in existing zones (airships in the sky floating above, or buildings in the zone). This is a problematic idea when looking at the large scale.

If each guild had their own airship, how long would it be until the sky in every zone was littered with an array of airships?

I think you missed a part here. There would be sky-maps. This would be separate maps, while they would send information to a linked ground-maps to the ground-map could visualize the air-ships, the air-ships would not really be in those maps.

That means there could also be a max of number of air-ships in an airmap (just as there is now a max number of players) and multiple overflow-servers of those airmaps. Solving those problems you talk about here.

Proposal Overview
Protect the GH from accidental loss.

Goal of Proposal
To preserve the GH in the event of leadership changes or mistaken disbandings.

Proposal Functionality
This is similar to my post in QoL https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Logistics-and-QOL/page/3#post4397009 — I am piggybacking on that.

Similar warnings should pop up if a guild leader is departing. Also, and this may be pie in the sky, the data on a guild should be preserved for, say, anywhere from 1 week to 1 month after disbanding. Reinstatement should be possible. This would give CS the tools to aid players who are victims of hackers or rage quitters.

A GH belongs to the whole guild, not just the GM. Naturally the GM has ultimate control over it. However, if guild members sink hundreds of hours into building something collaboratively, and especially if they have personal space inside the GH, they need some protection against one person’s malice or mishap stripping it all away. So long as the guild remains active, its earned and built upgrades should remain available. If the GM leaves, someone else (preferably from the next rank level) should receive control, and that someone should be one that’s repped the guild recently and thus is likely actively playing and paying attention.

Associated Risks
Data bloat, extra work for CS, issues with proving accident, takes away from the policy of not interfering in guild control. Requires systems not currently in place, as seen in the recent thread about a guild deleted thanks to its name.

CureForLiving.5360:

Guild Halls as airship is fine just as long as they aren’t all airships… sorry but I just don’t see myself falling in love with a floating rust bucket. Unless by airship you mean air-fortress. How about we get that whoever made the Wizards Tower to franchise a bit? http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wizard's_Tower

Yeah that was indeed the idea of what you could possible build as air-ship.
Two examples of air-ships in GW2 (how it could look like) is the Wizards Tower and the Zephyr Sanctum. So basically everything you can think of.

Just an idea that came to my mind when reading about followers in WoD:

When in your personal instance in a guild hall, your Alts will run around as NPCs.

• they can craft for you the things they can.
• you can trade with them player-npc without the need to log off.
• you can take 4 of them with you on your solo missions (like the living story missions)
• you can send them out to gather ressources or complete certain missions which brings you loot.
  etc.

to adapt this for guild-halls:

• the alt of any player (or the top 5) with the highest crafting-achievements will wander around as an npc and will craft things for you, even if you don’t have the profession. (But only if one of your alts has the appropriate crafting level)
• the alt of any player (or the top 5 players) who has the highest points of pvp/wvw achievements will wait as npc in an arena for you to spar with. (the owner can set the traits and weapons for this npc).
• you can choose one alt of your own which follows you around in the guild halls as npc (only visible for yourself and your party!) to trade with and spar with.

This way it could get really fun to create alts in order to immortalize them in your guild-halls.

You could take out the competitive aspect as well and instead of only spawning alts in the top 5 of a category they need a certain requirement to spawn (like mastercrafter, has at least 3 crafting professions active and 100g once).

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I don’t like the editor-suggestions, the focus of the game should still be mainly on the gameplay imho, not some creation-sim.

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.

Garrisons in WoW are for solo players if I got it right. I would love to see this concept as a replacement of our home instance instead of guild halls if I’m honest,… I can’t see how it is fun for every player when only the guild leader or some officers can create and upgrade the buildings.

A good guild would do this with it’s members.

But maybe players housing can be done as well at some stage. At this moment however we are talking about guild-halls, not player housing.

JonPeters.5630:

Iason Evan.3806:

Baltzenger.2467:

In my opinion, content should be designed for everyone, not just those who “you think will be potentially interested on it”, at least speaking of MMOs.

When you do that, later, you suffer from splitting your playerbase, specially when the game ages and you need to shift populations toward certain game types. Maybe Holly Homemakers should be taken into consideration when making the core of the system, but the guy that only plays fractals, will actually never try anything else, because the content will be designed to be “not for him”.

I probably didn’t explain myself well enough. If you design Guild Halls in the context we are talking about(free form object placement/design options etc.) for the person that is gonna want to spend 90% of their time in the Guild Hall then it will be for everyone because it will have more options than the person who doesn’t really care(Fractals guy) will ever use. If you design it for Fractals guy only, then the person that really cares about design gets left out.

This is precisely why the things we build take time. Someone earlier suggested to just list things that were seemingly easy so that maybe this could be a reality. I would suggest that the more innovative and compelling your ideas are the more likely they are to drive development because that is what we pride ourselves on.

Mr. Peters, I have to categorically disagree with you here. Guild Halls cannot be a bandaid for you guys. They simply can’t. You’re bleeding players and we both know it (NA and EU). If you burn massive amounts of development time on things that will be interesting for a couple of weeks and neglect the vast majority of other areas of your game, you will continue to bleed players. You’ll get the initial spike of everyone coming back to check things out, they’ll be excited for 2-3 weeks, and then the forum posts start and players start to leave again. I speak as though this is fact because by looking at the past, we can accurately predict the future. No more bandaid patches.

I’m suggesting that Guild Halls are a glue that not only ties game modes together, but would also have ways to occupy a player’s time unique to Guild Halls. Abandon spending any time on trying to make players see them from the game world, or having some scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that requires loot tables coded in and other nonsense. Unnecessary man hours, just keep it simple.

They’re airships (seems to be the consensus). They’re customizable (also unanimous). Beyond this, it gets rocky.

You know what, if I’m going to tell you to stray from this idea, I’ll give you things that will not only get players to come back to your game, but keep them as well. Just remember this when you’re looking at my resume for the designer position you have listed.

Here is a way to revamp all dungeons, make them replayable with endless variety, challenging enough to break the “zerker meta” yet not bring the “trinity” into the game AND do it all with minimal development hours:

Each type of mob in each dungeon is given 4 abilities. Whenever a group enters the dungeon and the instance is spawned, each of the mob types is randomly assigned 2 of the 4 abilities. Further, there are walls that prevent players from skipping past many sections. For the players to continue, they must kill the mobs present.

Now, the mobs have say, knock-downs and AOE bleeds. Maybe instead, it’s poison and boon corruption. Always something new. Sometimes, 5 zerks work. Sometimes they don’t.

To prevent frustration from the added time now needed to complete a dungeon, these much more difficult mobs now drop a silver each. There you go, it’s rewarding, challenging and infinitely replayable because it’s always something different to prepare for. These are what dev time needs to be spent on, not a massive scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that is a temporary time-sink designed to mask the problems that the game suffers from.

(P.S. To prevent players from killing mobs near the dungeon over and over and not killing a boss to allow themselves to farm high cash dropping mobs over and over, make mobs deeper in the dungeon, near the end drop 3-4 silver per mob (with great loot tables) and the ones by the door drop 25 coppers etc.)

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).

What kind of things do you think work fine with grid placement?

• Room Templates (modular rooms that come in various sizes and snap together).
• Daises, to prevent conflicts with doors. I would suggest they just be part of the modular room, but I feel like players should have more control over how they are placed.
• Carpets. Normally I would want free placement, but I have seen carpets used to create fake second floors, ramps, etc. and it tends to be kind of glitchy / ugly. Best to keep them locked to the floor.
• Water features, such as pools or ponds. They should be raised so their bottom is surface level, but I wonder about the water physics of an upside down pool.
• If “Training Arenas” are implemented, there must be boundaries in which the required mechanics (score keeping, damage enabled, teams, etc.) can function. A modular “Dueling” room would certainly work (and would open the door to non-PVP combat, such as a PVE “Danger Room”), but I like the idea of players using a grid to establish it so they can include multiple rooms to create more dynamic arenas.

What stuff would you want to have free placement?
Assuming that “Free Placement” means along all three axes:

• Furniture
  • Chairs, couches, tables, etc.
• Wall hangings
  • Paintings, Enemy trophies (mounted heads), banners, curtains.
  • Including windows, which aren’t actually transparent, I’ve noticed.
• Decorative Objects
  • Pillars, shelves, misc. decorative objects
• Landscaping
  • Fountains, trees, garden fixtures, etc.
• Crafting Stations

I’ll probably add more to this list, but that should about cover it.

Rambodacious.7495:

Mr. Peters, I have to categorically disagree with you here. Guild Halls cannot be a bandaid for you guys. They simply can’t. You’re bleeding players and we both know it (NA and EU). If you burn massive amounts of development time on things that will be interesting for a couple of weeks and neglect the vast majority of other areas of your game, you will continue to bleed players. You’ll get the initial spike of everyone coming back to check things out, they’ll be excited for 2-3 weeks, and then the forum posts start and players start to leave again. I speak as though this is fact because by looking at the past, we can accurately predict the future. No more bandaid patches.

I’m suggesting that Guild Halls are a glue that not only ties game modes together, but would also have ways to occupy a player’s time unique to Guild Halls. Abandon spending any time on trying to make players see them from the game world, or having some scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that requires loot tables coded in and other nonsense. Unnecessary man hours, just keep it simple.

They’re airships (seems to be the consensus). They’re customizable (also unanimous). Beyond this, it gets rocky.

You know what, if I’m going to tell you to stray from this idea, I’ll give you things that will not only get players to come back to your game, but keep them as well. Just remember this when you’re looking at my resume for the designer position you have listed.

Here is a way to revamp all dungeons, make them replayable with endless variety, challenging enough to break the “zerker meta” yet not bring the “trinity” into the game AND do it all with minimal development hours:

Each type of mob in each dungeon is given 4 abilities. Whenever a group enters the dungeon and the instance is spawned, each of the mob types is randomly assigned 2 of the 4 abilities. Further, there are walls that prevent players from skipping past many sections. For the players to continue, they must kill the mobs present.

Now, the mobs have say, knock-downs and AOE bleeds. Maybe instead, it’s poison and boon corruption. Always something new. Sometimes, 5 zerks work. Sometimes they don’t.

To prevent frustration from the added time now needed to complete a dungeon, these much more difficult mobs now drop a silver each. There you go, it’s rewarding, challenging and infinitely replayable because it’s always something different to prepare for. These are what dev time needs to be spent on, not a massive scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that is a temporary time-sink designed to mask the problems that the game suffers from.

(P.S. To prevent players from killing mobs near the dungeon over and over and not killing a boss to allow themselves to farm high cash dropping mobs over and over, make mobs deeper in the dungeon, near the end drop 3-4 silver per mob (with great loot tables) and the ones by the door drop 25 coppers etc.)

“You’ll get the initial spike of everyone coming back to check things out, they’ll be excited for 2-3 weeks, and then the forum posts start and players start to leave again.”

“Abandon spending any time on trying to make players see them from the game world, or having some scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that requires loot tables coded in and other nonsense.”

You do understand that having it in the open world is what give people more reason to build / work on there guild-hall and those items (adding items to a loot table takes a lot of code time.. whut?) in the world is exactly what keep people busy for much longer as 2-3 weeks.

Also “No more bandaid patches.” This go’s in against what you just said. A new big thing, no you say we need to just make things to keep people here.. That is bandaid patches. and then you say, no more bandaid patches.

Part One
I’ve held off on the instanced/non-instanced question as I feel I’ve already pretty strongly made my case against open world halls and decay, based on my direct experience of the pain these things have caused in many other games. However, I think I may have something new to add for both sides, so here goes. I believe my bias will show, mind you.

What do people see as the benefits of instanced?
Flexibility. Both for players, allowing a much wider variety of customization, and for devs who might want to rearrange landscape. It would have been a headache to drop the Tower in Kessex if you were going to smash three guild halls in the process. The more open-world spots claimed by players, the less those spots can be changed by living content. Entry points can be set up pretty much anywhere in the world, possibly moveable as the guild desires (I do think there should be some feeling of approaching the GH to enter it, rather than only reaching it by UI button clicking).

Access. Instancing allows every guild access to the hall building content, whereas there simply is not enough open world space for that, especially with megaservers meaning that millions of players are in the mix. We avoid land grabs, flame wars, incentive to cheat, disillusion with the game, and everything else that goes hand in hand with restricting desired content to a subset of the player base.

Persistence. Instanced halls can remain for as long as the guild exists. Breaks from the game don’t destroy invested time.

Privacy. Guilds can have meetings and events free of random trolls and griefers.

What do you see as the benefits of open world guild halls?
Visibility. Guilds can share their creativity without having to specifically invite visitors. They can show off their success and size.

Investment in the world. It would increase the sandbox side of things if guilds could affect the environment. There might be more life to the landscape if wandering it one could come upon a structure that wasn’t there before, or see the hall growing.

Population. The world remains full of people, and guilds can join map chat while in their hall.

Part Two
How could we get the benefits of instanced guild halls in a system of open world guild halls?
Permissions. Set up layers of permission to enter and/or alter various parts of the hall. So the public can come see at least parts of it but the guild retains control of the space. There could even be a block feature so if someone is a jerk spamming particle effects on guild meetings or spewing filthy comments and emotes, s/he can be summarily blocked from entering the property. (It should be made impossible to set up a chain of guild properties that block anyone from crossing it).

Locations. Restrict what parts of the open world can support guild halls. Use the Mists, or a new zone, or unused edges of zones. That leaves the devs the option of changing the world. It does raise the specter of housing tracts, or the feeling of isolation where sure, your guild is in the world, but no one will just happen on it; traveling to see it will be a deliberate and perhaps tedious venture not integrated into game play.

Map Spawns. When someone travels to a zone, they get put in a map containing the hall of the guild they are repping. They do not get the empty-map-closing feature, they can stay there as long as they like, at least while within the guild hall property lines. The guild hall won’t appear if no members are in the map, so abandoned halls won’t be a thing. (Problems: 500 people won’t fit in a map – this may be a problem in instanced halls as well. Lots of maps will have to spawn and persist, perhaps more than the servers can handle. It will be harder for people to randomly spot your hall, especially if they are in a guild that appears in a different version of the map).

How could we get the benefits of open world guild halls in a system where guild halls are instanced?
Keep utilities in the open world. While guild specific things can be in the hall (e.g. setting up for guild missions, GvG, upgrade stations, all the things folks have been discussing), crafting, banking, and mystic forging are so easy to get to in cities that there’s no reason to set up private areas for those.

Many access points in the world. Similar to LotRO’s neighborhoods, have places one can go to reach guild instances. Interact with an object or NPC to “flip” through various guild facades. If you see one that looks cool, enter it (assuming permissions are set to allow that) to look around further. Perhaps have an area (a field of flags? A wall with banners?) where you can click on guild banners to see what they’ve done hall-wise. Guilds seeking visitors could have it set so their banner glows.

Map benefits based on what guilds are there. A guild could select its entry point to be in, perhaps, Brisban. Then, akin to WvW benefits, the achievements of that guild could provide (small) benefits to everyone in the map, or boon stations people could go to and see that a specific guild has provided it – if there are a ton of boon stations it would be just like a ton of guild banners, you can only get the boon once and clicking on more does nothing.

Prophet.6257:

Upkeep

I somewhat agree with the idea of upkeep in that it provides content and things to do (assuming the upkeep is something more than tax, things like events). But at the same time small guilds might not be able to have sufficient representation or numbers. So I think there needs to be some desperation between small guild halls with no upkeep and larger guild halls with upkeep. Probably large guild halls can have more advantage, be it more npcs, more zone-impact, more customisability etc.

Prophet.6257:

Housing:

I’m all for housing, but again I think housing should be it’s own conversation, although I guess mechanically there can be a lot of cross over particularly in terms of customisation…

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I don’t like the editor-suggestions, the focus of the game should still be mainly on the gameplay imho, not some creation-sim.

Well that’s a interesting conversation to have (and it’s been had several time, commonly in terms of the type of content ANet should focus on).

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.

I think that’s more or less what ANet should aim for. 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.

AlienMenace.7516:

So I think it might be possible and reasonable to see your idea come to life, without the problem of there needing to be one separate house for each and every person in your guild (could you imagine what a full-capacity guild would look like if it needed that many actual houses in the Guild Hall? lol).

Again I have to say no! XD
Well my objection to this idea is that it’s an attempt to sneak in home instances, something which I am all for but by sneaking it in we are very likely going to end up with something that could have been far more. What I’m saying is, lets rather focus on getting the best Guild Halls and the best Player Housing and not something in between.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

When in your personal instance in a guild hall, your Alts will run around as NPCs.

I love the idea of being able to run into my alts!

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.

Let us use our merits for guild hall to purchase items for the space. Currently, we have very few upgrades to spend our merits on. As the result, every week we would max-out on our 250 merits cap and waste merits because we can not spend them fast enough.

Having something in guild hall to encourage members to visit GH would prevent it from becoming a ghost-town like it was in gw1. Maybe allowing people to have a garden (omnomberries or mithril mine, etc.) which the guild can queue up using merits.

Most of our guildies really enjoyed gvg. We tried to make arrangements with other guilds for friendly battles in Obsidian Sanctum, but it’s very difficult to set up. Maybe we can adopt a similar gvg system from gw1 through guild hall.

Thanks,

*As always, we appreciate your hard work.

Themes:
Drawn from each dungeon, racial city, and maybe a couple from places like orr.
Stuff:
Multi-room or chamber, especially one for a guild bank
A large court yard or meeting hall where we can gather prior to missions or WvW runs so we can visually organize into teams, without any cramping or confusion.
A trophy room for guild statistics, like how many challenges were done successfully (bounties, rushes, puzzles, ect).
Add a small portal like the one found in Sorrow’s Embrace that leads to LA or a home city the guild hall theme is based on.
Have an array of custom upgrades that can make a CM style hall look like a classy gentleman’s home or on the other hand a frat house.
Add a couple of plant nodes, mining nodes, and logging nodes that change places every day and has a chance to be any mat, one day being iron, the next being mithril
Add an interface button in Guild UI that takes you to the currently repped Guild Hall

What I would want a guild hall to be is a place to chill when I’m doing nothing, so I don’t have to see a ruined LA, and a place to meet up before GM, without having to deal with a chaotic Might and Main when every guild on earth decides to run missions at the same time.

Devata.6589:

Rambodacious.7495:

Mr. Peters, I have to categorically disagree with you here. Guild Halls cannot be a bandaid for you guys. They simply can’t. You’re bleeding players and we both know it (NA and EU). If you burn massive amounts of development time on things that will be interesting for a couple of weeks and neglect the vast majority of other areas of your game, you will continue to bleed players. You’ll get the initial spike of everyone coming back to check things out, they’ll be excited for 2-3 weeks, and then the forum posts start and players start to leave again. I speak as though this is fact because by looking at the past, we can accurately predict the future. No more bandaid patches.

I’m suggesting that Guild Halls are a glue that not only ties game modes together, but would also have ways to occupy a player’s time unique to Guild Halls. Abandon spending any time on trying to make players see them from the game world, or having some scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that requires loot tables coded in and other nonsense. Unnecessary man hours, just keep it simple.

They’re airships (seems to be the consensus). They’re customizable (also unanimous). Beyond this, it gets rocky.

You know what, if I’m going to tell you to stray from this idea, I’ll give you things that will not only get players to come back to your game, but keep them as well. Just remember this when you’re looking at my resume for the designer position you have listed.

Here is a way to revamp all dungeons, make them replayable with endless variety, challenging enough to break the “zerker meta” yet not bring the “trinity” into the game AND do it all with minimal development hours:

Each type of mob in each dungeon is given 4 abilities. Whenever a group enters the dungeon and the instance is spawned, each of the mob types is randomly assigned 2 of the 4 abilities. Further, there are walls that prevent players from skipping past many sections. For the players to continue, they must kill the mobs present.

Now, the mobs have say, knock-downs and AOE bleeds. Maybe instead, it’s poison and boon corruption. Always something new. Sometimes, 5 zerks work. Sometimes they don’t.

To prevent frustration from the added time now needed to complete a dungeon, these much more difficult mobs now drop a silver each. There you go, it’s rewarding, challenging and infinitely replayable because it’s always something different to prepare for. These are what dev time needs to be spent on, not a massive scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that is a temporary time-sink designed to mask the problems that the game suffers from.

(P.S. To prevent players from killing mobs near the dungeon over and over and not killing a boss to allow themselves to farm high cash dropping mobs over and over, make mobs deeper in the dungeon, near the end drop 3-4 silver per mob (with great loot tables) and the ones by the door drop 25 coppers etc.)

“You’ll get the initial spike of everyone coming back to check things out, they’ll be excited for 2-3 weeks, and then the forum posts start and players start to leave again.”

“Abandon spending any time on trying to make players see them from the game world, or having some scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that requires loot tables coded in and other nonsense.”

You do understand that having it in the open world is what give people more reason to build / work on there guild-hall and those items (adding items to a loot table takes a lot of code time.. whut?) in the world is exactly what keep people busy for much longer as 2-3 weeks.

Also “No more bandaid patches.” This go’s in against what you just said. A new big thing, no you say we need to just make things to keep people here.. That is bandaid patches. and then you say, no more bandaid patches.

No Devata, the addition of visible guild halls in the open world requires massive development time for very little payoff. Your logic of people being encouraged to work on their guild hall is not significantly boosted simply because their GH is visible. People will work on them to obtain the benefits that come with working on them, not because someone else could see they have portals etc. in their GH.

The bandaid patches I refer to are what’s been coming out for the last 1.5 years. Little to no new content, minor balance changes, leaving game-changing bugs in the game for the 6 months until the next patch – these kinds of things. (Please know I’m not trying to hate on the dev team here, but am trying to make a point about where dev time should be spent!) They need to burn dev time on changes that revitalize, in a permanent fashion, old content OR create new, highly replayable content. Building up a GH will take a few weeks and then players will be back to the same complaints.

Hopefully I’ve explained myself a little better.

Proposal Overview

I have a few different ideas:

1. Make Guild Halls expandable, so you can build on them and upgrade them.

2. Allow guilds to pick a “pack” of NPCs, so that all-charr guilds, for example, could pick charr NPCs for their Guild Hall. This also benefits the RP community.

3. Unlock unique, themed decoration packs by completing all-guild runs of each dungeon. For example, if you completed Story Mode and all 3 Explorable Modes of Citadel of Flame, with an all-guild party, you unlock a CoF-themed decoration pack for your Guild Hall. Similarly, decoration packs could be awarded for WvW and s/tPvP.

4. Guild Story Quests. This would work like Personal Story Quests, except with your guild. Your guild gets to help out with various problems, maybe even up to fighting an Elder Dragon. It’d be like a new type of Guild Mission. Rewards for these Guild Story Quests would be things for the Guild Hall (maybe even needing to complete the first couple quests in the series to unlock Guild Halls at all), such as extra rooms, decorations, even secret passages.

Goal of Proposal

1. Guild Halls will get boring if they are a one-time creation and stay the same forever. Making them expandable lessens this.

2. GW2 has great lore. It really wouldn’t be right to force a patriotic, all-charr guild into having human NPCs in their Guild Hall. (Might not be safe for the NPCs, either.) Allowing guilds to pick their NPCs (from a pre-created pack) gives more choice and preserves RP norms and the game’s own lore.

3. Running dungeons/WvW/PvP to unlock decoration packs encourages guilds to try content they may normally avoid or re-play content they haven’t tried in awhile. (Much like the “complete Story Mode to unlock gear tracks in PvP” that was recently implemented.) Plus, think of how cool it would be to have a Guild Hall styled after Honor of the Waves?

4. If Guild Halls are a one-time thing, they could get boring. But if your guild can go through Guild Story Quests to level up the Guild Hall, unlock new designs/decorations, etc., it keeps things more interesting and even lays the foundation for extra quests like the personal Living Story content. Plus, those Guild Story Quests can involve things like obtaining your NPCs (maybe in a quest you meet a Black Lion Trader who ends up agreeing to be on your payroll in your Guild Hall).

(Continued.)

(Continued from above.)

Proposal Functionality

1. Making Guild Halls upgradeable is in line with the current design of the game, as GW2 encourages progression goals.

2. GW2 has rich lore and an emphasis on personal choice as you create your character. It seems in line with this to encourage guild choice in matters like NPCs in Guild Halls.

3. GW2 would need to implement decorations for this to work, but it could go hand in hand with crafting. Maybe certain decoration or design packs end up being recipes that are awarded at completion of the content.

4. Since Personal Story Quests are already implemented, and Guild Missions are already implemented, it seems like it would be in line with current design to add Guild Story Quests. In the Personal Story Quest, your character is just starting out and isn’t well-known, but by the end, you’re slaying Zhaitan. The Guild Story Quests wouldn’t have to involve any coding or design mechanics that aren’t already implemented.

Associated Risks

1. If building a Guild Hall takes materials, and then you upgrade the Guild Hall, what if you want to down-grade it to the previous version? How would the adding-on process work, and who gets to decide? The guild leader? If you decide to start all over in making a Guild Hall, can you “salvage” it like you can when you craft gear, and if so, what would you get?

2. I can’t see many problems with this. The design team would just need to make several different NPCs for each role (Black Lion Trader, banker, vendor, etc.) and maybe create “packs,” like a charr-only pack, or a randomized pack. Maybe with the option to trade packs later in case you get NPCs you don’t like, or you change your mind and decide that your charr-only guild wants human NPCs so you can harass them all the time?

3. Some guilds will probably complain that some decorative content is only available through certain paths. But that’s not really anything new. A bigger question is: if these are awarded as recipes to craft items, who will be awarded the recipe? Will it drop for everyone in the group? It would have to be account-bound, otherwise it defeats the whole point because guilds would just buy them off the Trading Post. But what if it drops for someone who doesn’t have that craft discipline leveled?

4. Will the Guild Story Quests be time gated like the current Living Story? How many people will you need in your guild to complete them? Will they be a type of Guild Mission? Will you be able to replay them? Will they scale with how many people you have in your guild, so that the experience will be as challenging for a 500-person guild as it would be for a 15-person guild?

Thanks for asking for our opinions.

JonPeters.5630:

MajorValtiel.6310:

Would also be nice if, within the Guild Halls, players could buy private chambers for themselves. No need to add a physical space for them in the guild hall either, a door titled Private Chambers would lead players to their own Private Chamber Instance. They could also invite maybe a miax 8-10 players to their own PC instances.

What would you want to be able to do in there?

Or perhaps what happens in private chambers stays in private chambers?

Would be a great place for individual player costumization of their own place. We would also be able to furnish it either by buying on the tp or crafting (could also be a good oportunity to release the ocasional furniture on the gemstore) or maybe specific timed events that would happen throughout a week or two that could reward us with unique items for this space. Living story could also give us recipes for these furnitures – or even the pieces of furnitures themselves – via achievments after the 1st playthrough. (Eg: Finishing each part of dragon’s reach, would awards us with two pices that combined together would become a table with simbols of the 5 races in it for us to put in the private chamber).

Maybe even add some QoL features embeded into this chamber. Like a chest specific to store toys like kites and musical instruments and tonics.

This private chamber could also be a great place for RPers.

Aidyn.9783:

1. Make Guild Halls expandable, so you can build on them and upgrade them.

2. Allow guilds to pick a “pack” of NPCs, so that all-charr guilds, for example, could pick charr NPCs for their Guild Hall. This also benefits the RP community.

3. Unlock unique, themed decoration packs by completing all-guild runs of each dungeon.

4. Guild Story Quests. This would work like Personal Story Quests, except with your guild. Your guild gets to help out with various problems, maybe even up to fighting an Elder Dragon. It’d be like a new type of Guild Mission.

1.) awesome, I support this. Progress should be visible, halls becoming bigger and have more “slots” for new buildings/activities.

2.) give those NPCs functions too, so that you get a different experience depending on the family of npcs you choose. Charr are very battle-oriented folks, so a warband could go out on an event to hunt down oppressors. An event where every non-guild member could participate but guild members would earn some ressources needed for the fortification of the halls. Humans could start trade-route events etc.

3.) all-guild party rewards: I don’t like that because it punishes non-guild players. LFG… oh, quite an empty queue today. Guild players are the “better” party member. Meh.

4.) I like that one. It’s better than 3.) because you don’t have to have a full party in order to complete a story mission – it scales. Most people, I imagine, do story missions on their own or with just a friend, many forget that you can do them with a whole party. It would be a great incentive to do repeatable story missions (season 2 missions so far) with a full party in order to unlock new stuff for your guild.

One of the problems I see with guild halls would be that personal effort could have little impact on the whole guild. The BIG COLLECTIVE gets all the stuff, all the ressources and you – as a player – get everything for “free”.

Proposal Overview
The guild unlocks the “buildings/activities” but the player has to put in effort to make them work for him.

Goal of Proposal
You as a guild member should have an increased feeling of accomplishment and enough to do. The guild might be big enough so that you haven’t done anything in order to create all the upgrades in your guild. Earn the reputation in your guild in order to use the unlocked possibilities.

Proposal Functionality
So your guild unlocked a defense-bunker including some juggernaut-armor which can be worn in close proximity of the hall in order to fight off invading enemies (events). This armor (costume) provides a good bonus to your defensive stats without decreasing your offensive stats, but reduces your stamina regeneration. You can man free turrets and bunkers in your halls.

BUT you can’t access it from the get go. The defense-NPCs won’t let you – you haven’t proven yourself yet. There are a lot of defensive events where you have to be successful in order to earn your reputation to unlock this feature for you.

Associated Risks
Unlocking everything might be too fast, so that it’s really not that satisfying to unlock things in the first place. Each personal unlock should have things you desire. A bad example would be Southsun, where you get Settler’s Gear but everyone who isn’t interested in this gear won’t find much else.

By making it very difficult to unlock stuff for you personally there could be specific roles in the guild for players. A few could become defenders (among a few other things) which would specialize in keeping your halls safe (e.g).

Proposal Overview:
Guild halls should be acquired by three different methods, one in the mist war, one in PvE and one in sPvP.
Customisation of the guild hall should be acquired through all the available activities in the game and the activities to come.

Proposal Functionality:
Guild hall should not be located inside the existing maps, rather located off tyria (Airship or realm in the mist). I propose that guilds buy mansions in “shards” of the mists.
- How to acquire a shard of the mists ?
Turn an item to a special npc to unlock a guild hall. This item can be acquired by three different methods so that specialized guilds are not at disadvantage.
E.G : One should be a random reward for defending stonemist castle (or doing something that is desirable for wvw but rarely done outside of tier 1).
An other method is to create a new reward track whose ending reward could be the special item.
The last way to get the item is a random drop of the evolved jungle wurm.

- What could we customize in this guild hall ?
The shard comes with a mansion that is presented as “naked” : minimal functionnality and appearance of the regular buildings in borderland.
> The first step is to choose the “general style” of the hall.
These styles should be based on the actual aesthetic of the races of tyria (high legions, flame legion, Kodan, Norn, krytan palace, ascalon fortress, asura compound etc…). Ideally you want one style for each dungeon + one style for each major race of tyria + zephyrites + elonian + canthan + mists/hall of heroes
> Second step customize the inside of the hall.
Furnitures, tapestries and crafting stations should all be selectable individually and have dyfferent available visuals. One reference in terms of degree of flexibility should be Skyhold in Dragon age: Inquisition. Aim to provide as much combination as possible.
> Step three : add in some trophies.
Trophies should come in a variety of ways. One guild could display the tequatl tail if they host the guild world event and complete it. Trophies could be obtained by completing dungeons with a group of only guildies. Jumping puzzles could be included. Trophies earned at southsun survival and other activities should be included as well. e.g Include a “Maudrey III” trophy if 20 guildies give avay their Maudrey to an NPC. Trophies are shinies and could also act as gold/material/whatever sinks.
Trophies should also include statues of the guild founder/actual leaders/high ranking officiers (same presentation as the Hall of Monument in Eotn).
All in all everything that provides a reward in the game should have a trophy (if one or 2 guildies are top players of keg brawl, create a keg brawl trophy and anyone who interacts with this trophy should see the name of the players who earned the trophy for the guild).
> Step 4 : Allow the guild master and high ranking officers to purchase dedicated alcoves where they can show off their personnal feats.
Similar to the HoM. Some titles can unlock specific trophies that can be displayed in these alcoves.
> How to acquire the shinies ?
Visual styles based off dungeons should be obtained by spending a massive amount of tokens. Others by completing guild challenges etc… Be creative in your rewards. Do not hesitate to create special guild triggered events (smaller in scale than megabosses) that unlock skins and assets for the guild hall if completed.
As a general rule : trophies are “unlocked” by challenges and then purchased at a special NPC with merits, influence and gold. The gold should be taken from the guild vault (everyone can contribute).
- Include a voting system to allow the guild to vote if a customization choice is controversial.

Associated Risks:
Rewards becoming too grindy to be purchased.
Lots of heavy lifting and coding. Basically you need a technology to be able to generate on the fly a map based on some parameters (what is inside the hall tec…). The hall should be very large to host as many members of the guild as possible.
Possibility of purchasing extensions for the hall to host additional players.

Final thought : Get creative and allow us to mix and match. The more choices we have on what to display, the better. PM me if you want other ideas on rewards and how to unlock them.

Rambodacious.7495:

JonPeters.5630:

Iason Evan.3806:

Baltzenger.2467:

In my opinion, content should be designed for everyone, not just those who “you think will be potentially interested on it”, at least speaking of MMOs.

When you do that, later, you suffer from splitting your playerbase, specially when the game ages and you need to shift populations toward certain game types. Maybe Holly Homemakers should be taken into consideration when making the core of the system, but the guy that only plays fractals, will actually never try anything else, because the content will be designed to be “not for him”.

I probably didn’t explain myself well enough. If you design Guild Halls in the context we are talking about(free form object placement/design options etc.) for the person that is gonna want to spend 90% of their time in the Guild Hall then it will be for everyone because it will have more options than the person who doesn’t really care(Fractals guy) will ever use. If you design it for Fractals guy only, then the person that really cares about design gets left out.

This is precisely why the things we build take time. Someone earlier suggested to just list things that were seemingly easy so that maybe this could be a reality. I would suggest that the more innovative and compelling your ideas are the more likely they are to drive development because that is what we pride ourselves on.

Mr. Peters, I have to categorically disagree with you here. Guild Halls cannot be a bandaid for you guys. They simply can’t. You’re bleeding players and we both know it (NA and EU). If you burn massive amounts of development time on things that will be interesting for a couple of weeks and neglect the vast majority of other areas of your game, you will continue to bleed players. You’ll get the initial spike of everyone coming back to check things out, they’ll be excited for 2-3 weeks, and then the forum posts start and players start to leave again. I speak as though this is fact because by looking at the past, we can accurately predict the future. No more bandaid patches.

I’m suggesting that Guild Halls are a glue that not only ties game modes together, but would also have ways to occupy a player’s time unique to Guild Halls. Abandon spending any time on trying to make players see them from the game world, or having some scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that requires loot tables coded in and other nonsense. Unnecessary man hours, just keep it simple.

They’re airships (seems to be the consensus). They’re customizable (also unanimous). Beyond this, it gets rocky.

You know what, if I’m going to tell you to stray from this idea, I’ll give you things that will not only get players to come back to your game, but keep them as well. Just remember this when you’re looking at my resume for the designer position you have listed.

Here is a way to revamp all dungeons, make them replayable with endless variety, challenging enough to break the “zerker meta” yet not bring the “trinity” into the game AND do it all with minimal development hours:

Each type of mob in each dungeon is given 4 abilities. Whenever a group enters the dungeon and the instance is spawned, each of the mob types is randomly assigned 2 of the 4 abilities. Further, there are walls that prevent players from skipping past many sections. For the players to continue, they must kill the mobs present.

Now, the mobs have say, knock-downs and AOE bleeds. Maybe instead, it’s poison and boon corruption. Always something new. Sometimes, 5 zerks work. Sometimes they don’t.

To prevent frustration from the added time now needed to complete a dungeon, these much more difficult mobs now drop a silver each. There you go, it’s rewarding, challenging and infinitely replayable because it’s always something different to prepare for. These are what dev time needs to be spent on, not a massive scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that is a temporary time-sink designed to mask the problems that the game suffers from.

(P.S. To prevent players from killing mobs near the dungeon over and over and not killing a boss to allow themselves to farm high cash dropping mobs over and over, make mobs deeper in the dungeon, near the end drop 3-4 silver per mob (with great loot tables) and the ones by the door drop 25 coppers etc.)

i would actually play dungeons if your idea was implemented……fun and rewarding.

At this point is kind of hard to summarize everything that has been posted to date, because of how diverse and innovative some ideas can be, and I wouldn’t want to cut parts from an idea that was designed as a whole. So for the sake of helping those who want to join the discussion from now:

Guidelines about what we expect from Guild Halls

1.- Progression: One thing that replicates itself from one suggestion to another, is how we want to add progression to the game, this might have many origins in how the game currently is, but the main consensus is that we want to add progression onto different aspects to the game, relating them to Guild Halls.

2.- Self Expression: The sole idea of customization is tied to the ability of self expression in the game, from being able to decide the “theme” of your Guild Hall, to being able to decorate it, be it with freedom of placement for elements (like furniture), to being able to plan themed rooms, services. Guilds in GW2 have a huge variety of purposes and themes, and their Halls should resemble this.

3.- Interaction with the World: Many suggestions include ideas that would affect the way Tyria “reacts” to the presence of guilds, from having your “airship” parked on a map and by doing so, affecting the mechanics of how it works (like adding bonuses to the map), to the idea of competing over land plots for having control over a certain map. Players from GW2 want to leave their mark on the world, and with the current premise of a Living World, this makes sense.

4.- Deeper social interaction and identity: In GW2 guilds want identity, players join guilds not just to get the mechanic benefits of being on one, but also because of how the content is improved when you play with people you know. Dungeons get easier and more profitable, huge world events too, WvW requires this as a basis for success, and so on. Guilds then require every tool out there to help them in the process of bonding and organization. Guild Halls help to this cause greatly.

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.

MajorValtiel.6310:

JonPeters.5630:

MajorValtiel.6310:

Would also be nice if, within the Guild Halls, players could buy private chambers for themselves. No need to add a physical space for them in the guild hall either, a door titled Private Chambers would lead players to their own Private Chamber Instance. They could also invite maybe a miax 8-10 players to their own PC instances.

What would you want to be able to do in there?

Or perhaps what happens in private chambers stays in private chambers?

Would be a great place for individual player costumization of their own place. We would also be able to furnish it either by buying on the tp or crafting (could also be a good oportunity to release the ocasional furniture on the gemstore) or maybe specific timed events that would happen throughout a week or two that could reward us with unique items for this space. Living story could also give us recipes for these furnitures – or even the pieces of furnitures themselves – via achievments after the 1st playthrough. (Eg: Finishing each part of dragon’s reach, would awards us with two pices that combined together would become a table with simbols of the 5 races in it for us to put in the private chamber).

Maybe even add some QoL features embeded into this chamber. Like a chest specific to store toys like kites and musical instruments and tonics.

This private chamber could also be a great place for RPers.

This sounds great, I think you’re right, Guild Halls could also offer a personal space for each member.
I wonder if one could have a room like the one Scarlet had under Prosperity…