Guild Wars 2

Dear Guild Wars 2 community,

I, and I bet many other, have been enjoying the addition of Guild Halls alot! I am happy to see that the developers are constantly adding improvements like the recent addition of Boss Thropies. However I feel we can together reach much further, by giving cohesive feedback and speaking out your wishes about Guild Halls.

Guild Halls are in my perspective very personal, and should have as many options to them as possible. They have a very strong purpose as relax, chat and meeting points. However currently, at least in the guild where I am in I am not experiencing this. Here are some of my suggestions to improve the ‘liveability’ of Guild Halls:

1. Name Changing : I wish we could add area names to the map. This way you could give buildings and areas a clear purpose. I can imagine a location which we could call Hall of Achievments, where we display all our trophies which we are most proud of. Of what would you think of “Relax corner”? A place where you can sit down, be afk, while enjoying a nice beverage?
2. More interactable objects : I have to admit, things like the Delux Vinewalls or the Ice Cubes interactions are cool. However I think we are forgetting one very important thing: Interact to relax. There are loads of furniture in the decorations! My wish is to be actually able to sit on them, have a bench and relax on it. Also a small ineraction improvement could be a dialogue with trophies. For example the Tequatl Tail: Upon interaction you get a textbox: “After a heavy battle [guild name] managed to defeat Zhaitans Champion: Tequatl. A souvenir could not be missed, so it’s tail got cut off”.
3. Guild Hall visits : I wish we could visit Guild Halls from other guilds. In my case we have allegiances with a few other guilds. I would love to check out their crazy jumping puzzle creations, but also have ‘business meetings’ with them! I can imagine some sort of office room where we talk about planning future events etc. Right now we have to accept someone to the guild to visit the GH. A simple ‘Invite to Guild Hall-option’ could help very much.
4. More Decorations : Now I know, I am sure ArenaNet is working on those. But throwing in some suggestions can’t harm right? What do you think about a festive sling (I hope I use the right word here, I mean the flags on a rope thing), wall carpet and if we are having creative ideas anyway: why not be able to design them yourselves with all kind of colours etc?
5. Adjustable Waypoints : I honestly do not know how hard this would be, but I am still going to throw it in. In our GH we have found some great places to create things, we have some awesome visions on them. However to make them on real importance, a close waypoint would be nice. Being able to ‘drag’ waypoints to a certain place would be excellent. This way we can’t build more waypoints, but actually move them around wherever we want. However as said before, I do not know how far the technoligy for this reaches.
6. Sports : Yes you have read it correctly: sports. Guild Halls also should fill a purely entertaining role. One thing that shoots through my head is the huge ammounts of water there is availbe for us in guild halls. How about creating sail boats and have a sailing race? Maybe some sort of parcours, or even being able to create a ballsport, being able to place goals. This could also result, in combination with proper guild hall invites, in making competitions with friendly guilds. Olympic Guild Hall tournament anyone?;)

Well those were some of my suggestions. I really would like to hear your suggestions, crazy and creative ideas! Isn’t that what Guild Halls are based on: creativity? I am very confident the devs would appreciate a thread like this, and who knows. Maybe they will see some very good ideas and implement them

I love those ideas. The guild hall visits would also be nice for small guilds to be able to have people in and show off what just a few people managed to accomplish.

My suggestions:

1. Ambient wildlife: Creatures that would make sense for the particular guild hall location such as fish, birds, maybe even an armadillo or two.
2. Menagerie: I really miss walking through the Zaishen Menagerie and think it would be great if we could have something that shows all of the tamed pets the rangers in your guild have gathered. Maybe add a title to the pet name that indicates to which character it belongs.
3. Achievement/Collection trophies: give trophy or monument options to show what achievements or collections have been completed by guild members. This could just be in interactive plaque or something, but it would be better if it were like a dynamic score board for those of us who go after skin collection or try to get all of the titles.

As to #2 for the OP, ESO has an interesting fix to the sitting in chairs etc. They have an emote that is /sitchair or something and a chair appears. You walk up to a table, type the emote and the chair appears under you and you sit in it. They could do numbered ones. I realize that sitting in the actual chair you crafted would be one of the cool parts of it, but it’s a way to do it that I think would be easier to implement.

I agree with your suggestions. Guild Halls don’t feel like they were designed with community in mind though. Community and fellowship took a backseat to guild halls being about progression and being a gold sink.

That in my opinion was the wrong way to go about it. Progression in a guild hall shouldn’t be about time and gold sinks. It should be about making it a place people enjoy building a space that the whole guild likes and enjoys together. Should some decorations take a bit? Totally!

I am glad they are changing costs to make this a better experience, but there were a bunch of us making these types of suggestions about associated costs over a year ago and we weren’t listened to. With social spaces you have the actual progression baked in. You don’t have to put arbitrary gold and time sinks. When you build spaces as gorgeous as the guild halls are, the last thing they need to be marred by is the necessity of dozens of hours and thousands of gold. Until they change that completely, it will never be about building the space you enjoy, it will always be first and foremost a thinly veiled and arbitrary gold sink that ArenaNet uses as a way to flush gold out of the in game economy which not so coincidentally is tied to ArenaNet’s real world economy.

A realy fun event we use to play in the guild halls in GW1 was hid and seek, but there was on big problem, you had to be on you honor that you have the in game GUI turn off so you could not see people’s names above their head. If there were some way as a guild event to have the GUI or the names to turn off in this event that would be really fun.

I see some really good ideas above! I would love to have pets in guild halls!