Guild Wars 2

Before the patch 12-18 of us would hop in vent and have a great time. I don’t think we lost a t1 or t2

After patch the fights seem harder, are harder to find since they cant be stopped, Scotts is now impossible, 2-MULT is always a massive failure even while trying to do the mechanic and their are more targets to find making even tougher then that.

Now we have lost 6+ bounties at all levels and haven’t gotten a merit since the patch. Instead we settle to do a t3 to have better chances of picking who to fight to get our personal reward after continued failure.

Our small guild has 8 Dungeon Masters and cant do a t1 bounty . . . . . Something is very very wrong here.

I’m hoping this can be rebalanced back the way it was or give a buff or less possible targets to smaller guilds.

Our small guild has 8 Dungeon Masters and cant do a t1 bounty . . . . . Something is very very wrong here.

You have 8 dungeon masters,… so what ? I really don’t see the point of this remark.

How much are you in your guild ? In mine, we failed just once (didn’t find the champ) and we are between 12 and 15.

No offense, but being a Dungeon Master does not equal all around skill. It means you’ve got the potential to learn how to beat the Bounties though. Keep trying, and learn the tells and weaknesses of the harder ones, and you’ll beat them eventually.

I would propose an alliance system where smaller guilds can team up for guild bounties.

being a dungeon master does not translate into being good at everything else in the game. On the other hand , playing WvW or SPvp regularly will increase your PvE skill assuming you have max gear.

Fiontar.4695:

This is just part of a disturbing trend with GW2’s ongoing development. When are they going to wake up and realize that players want FUN content, not content so challenging that it ruins the fun for the vast majority of the playerbase.

It’s such an oft repeated cliche in the MMO industry, the decision to cater live development to the most elite of the playerbase, on the assumption that they are a.) worth the nearly impossible effort to keep happy and b.) that that 1% is somehow more important to retain than the other 99% of us. Every MMO that has gone this route has dwindled away to nothingness. WoW may have gone to far in the other direction, but their success shows that mindfulness of casual players is the key to burgeoning success for an MMO.

I think this game has a high percentage of high play hour “casuals”. We don’t want content that can be facerolled, but we also don’t want content that is highly frustrating and most often doesn’t offer rewards any where near worth the frustration. However, we’ve spent several hundred+ hours playing the game because we love it and want more, fresh content and FUN things to do with friends and guild mates. Stop assuming that the hard-core are the only ones you will lose if you don’t find new ways to keep them happy and there are exponentially many players and potentially lost players that are casual than are “hard-core”.

If you want hardcore content, make hard core modes, in addition to normal modes, for dungeons and make T3 guild activities challenging, while allowing normal dungeons and T1/T2 Guild activities to be something “casuals” can actually have fun playing and leave feeling sufficiently rewarded for their time.

It really feels like Arenanet has had a major personality transplant since the game went live and it’s not taking the game in a positive direction. There seems to be a large portion of the company that still possesses the soul of what makes this game great, but it also seems like there is a darker faction pushing to take the game someplace that could tumble the entire wonderful house of cards that 5+ years and 300+ people built!

But some people DO want challenging content. And some people want fun content. That’s why there’s so much fighting on these forums. Different players want and need different things.

I don’t mind challenging content, but I prefer fun content. I do both, but I’d rather just have fun. That is, I like to pick my challenges. I’m at the point where I’ve done just about every explorable mode dungeon in the game and I don’t really enjoy them. I do, however, like the fractals.

It’s just that I don’t want challenging all the time. Still, not having challenging content would be a mistake. The game really needs both types of content.

And as of this moment, it’s rather light on challenging content.

You what that tells me?That tells me most if not all of those 8 got their Dungeon Master title using broken or exploity mechanics and now that they face a challenge cant figure it out . Quite frankly though i would think bounties would be easier to find cause once you know your targets you can swarm a zone in all areas of their route which is posted on line.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

being a dungeon master does not translate into being good at everything else in the game. On the other hand , playing WvW or SPvp regularly will increase your PvE skill assuming you have max gear.

Being a dungeon master means that you have spent time learning different boss mechanics and how to defeat them. It means you pay attention to tells and know how to avoid damage. It means you’ve worked on your ability to coordinate with others to have a successful run in many different circumstances and environments. It should translate very well to being able to complete the bounties.

But, some of the bounties are very difficult to face in group play — having people who don’t understand the mechanics of the encounter join in from map makes the boss almost impossible to take down, and since the patch some of the bounty targets are very difficult to find.

The challenge for completing a T2 bounty definitely increased with the March 26 patch. I’m just not sure whether that was or wasn’t A-Net’s goal.

Some bounties are hard to kill because of bad mechanics. Take Half-baked Komali. Frankly I think half baked is bugged, but even if she isn’t. there’s another issue.

If you hit half-baked when the fire shield is up, she stacks might. It makes her much more dangerous. The only way to really get that fireshield down is to stop attacking her.

But this is the open world. I might be able to get my guild to stop attacking her, but other people in the zone, they don’t necessarily know the fight, don’t necessarily have map chat switched on and don’t necessarily care of my guild fails or passed a bounty. So my guild could do the complete right thing and fail based on the actions of people outside the guild.

This to me is unacceptable. It’s a bad mechanic that needs to be fixed.

Another one is Sottz, who sits in a barrel. You don’t have enough time to find him and kill him, because as soon as you find him he teleports away. Most guilds who get Sottz think he’s an automatic fail.

There are good mechanics and bad ones. Even a good guild is going to have trouble working with bad mechanics.

We’ve only failed two bounties since we started, though, the very first one, when we didn’t know what to expect, and a recent one when the server reset in the middle of our last target. It was frustrating but what can you do?

Adine.2184:

You what that tells me?That tells me most if not all of those 8 got their Dungeon Master title using broken or exploity mechanics and now that they face a challenge cant figure it out . Quite frankly though i would think bounties would be easier to find cause once you know your targets you can swarm a zone in all areas of their route which is posted on line.

Nonsense. And not just nonsense, but rude nonsense. You would think bounties would be easier to find? Don’t you know?

You are making sweeping statements here, but I think you are making them from a position of ignorance. Gendarran is a huge zone — just try “swarming” it with 8 people; the same with Sparkfly Swamp and the suspicious trees. Tricksie generally takes more than 15 minutes to find, even with 6 or 7 people in that one, single area.

It should absolutely be possible to fail bounties, otherwise success means about as much as killing Jormag. But, it should also be more than luck of the draw that determines whether you can succeed. A well played boss hunt from a coordinated guild that is willing to learn encounter mechanics should result in guild merits.

I agree. There are certain bounties that are very difficult if you get them.

I wouldent call Gandaran huge but the 300 barrels is a sizable amount . Sottz is the hardest to find even for a larger guild however so probably not the best example to use . You mentioned Sparkfly where Crusader Michelle is so we’ll use them . you strategically place those 8 across the zone and search counter to the route you will find them sooner rather than later . Asking if people have seen a bounty is never a bad idea either . You take the resources you have and use them wisely , end of story.

Yep, I am in agreement. The ones that do not have paths, but random spawn points throughout the map severely punish smaller groups. While a group of 3-4 is almost guaranteed to find a pathing bounty within 5 mins, that same group could search barrells or rats and not find anything. Not to mention that if anyone of them did find the bounty, they would have to engage it, and hopefully not die in the next 30 seconds while the other players converge.

It is really too bad that they are going to continue to add bounties that are impossible to pre-scout, and require more and more people. Doing a tier 1 bounty shouldn’t be that big of an issue for 5-10 people. Personally I don’t see why upping the timer to 30 mins would be that big of a deal, that would at least help out small groups in finding the bounties (though not killing them), which is what they really need more help with.

Did my first guild mission last night with 15 people. Most of us were 1st timers at missions. The T1 bounties were Lornars pass – Bookworm Bwikki and Sparkfly – Big Mayana (EDIT: for me being idiot, we had to find the suspicious tree). Our scouts had found Bwikki and we got our people to him in time. Sadly it was a matter of not all people with map complete and Lornar’s pass isn’t the easiest to navigate. The scout group for Sparkfly simply couldn’t find the random spawning boss in time. It was fun but frustrating.
In order to get enough people for missions we asked people in map chat to join the guild temporarily so they would get rewards.
Lesson learned to pre-scout all bosses on the list, if we have enough people to do so.

Also before this first go at a guild bounty I have come across three in progress. On my warrior I buff the people around and heal/rev anyone down, same with my guardian. I even did this with my lvl23 thief in Kessex Hills. Just shadow those that are downed and rev them. I won’t touch a boss if I don’t know the mechanics.
I guess the way the general population of players thinks is that a boss just needs to be zerged to death. They don’t understand that some have special mechanics and most likely they don’t look at chat.

If Anet is going to hang the importance of completing the missions in a short period of time; they need to consider that random players can make a mission fail. And another issue: we had a second guild show up after our scouts found Bwikki. They were nice enough to concede and let us get the rest of the guild to the bounty. But they certainly didn’t have to. What if they were running out of time?

The bounty system needs a lot of work to make it actually FUN. Finding all these guys and killing them in a 2-2 1/2 minute time frame when they could possibly have HUNDREDS of different locations and such is anything but…..

Fact – Guild Missions are a numbers game. The larger the guild, the larger the advantage. From unlocking the content, to finding the bounties, to killing the bounties.

My guild can no longer grow because of guild missions. When we get new people, they see that we are unable to do guild missions and they move on. At this point, being in a small guild is equal to holding yourself back from content and gear.

laharl.8435:

Fact – Guild Missions are a numbers game. The larger the guild, the larger the advantage. From unlocking the content, to finding the bounties, to killing the bounties.

My guild can no longer grow because of guild missions. When we get new people, they see that we are unable to do guild missions and they move on. At this point, being in a small guild is equal to holding yourself back from content and gear.

They are not comply numbers games there more then just guild bounties and even they scale with more ppl. Having more ppl only lets the bigger guilds play a bit more lazily its not so much easier just most of the guild dose not have to “work” for the rewards.

We are also 8 and the bounties rely heavily on luck. It takes in general two tries to do the T1 (first try, we just want everyone to get the rewards and second one we split to find both bounties).

We got Sotzz twice in a row this week, the firs time we didn’t even get to it because of Mayana and the second time two guildies went to search for him while we took care of the other bounty. We got to searching Sotzz with 5 minutes remaining, complaining how stupid this design was. But where we happy when we found him with less than 2 minutes and killed it rather quickly.

The major problem really is that the bounties are not consistent. I’m not even talking about the fights, but about finding them.

Jski.6180:

laharl.8435:

Fact – Guild Missions are a numbers game. The larger the guild, the larger the advantage. From unlocking the content, to finding the bounties, to killing the bounties.

My guild can no longer grow because of guild missions. When we get new people, they see that we are unable to do guild missions and they move on. At this point, being in a small guild is equal to holding yourself back from content and gear.

They are not comply numbers games there more then just guild bounties and even they scale with more ppl. Having more ppl only lets the bigger guilds play a bit more lazily its not so much easier just most of the guild dose not have to “work” for the rewards.

They only scale up to 50 iirc. Also, try looking for a bounty with 8 guys, then try it with 100 and tell me numbers doesn’t help immensely. Same to be said for getting the influence to just unlock the missions.

I’ve done bounties with a 10 man guild and a ~350 man guild. There is a huge difference.

At the very least, you need 20 people for a tier 3 bounty. Anything else and you are really pushing it. Also, 20 people is by no means a guarantee of success either as a lot of it comes down to luck.

That being said, I do not believe any of the bounties are particularly hard to kill once you understand them even 2-MULT and Komali. Komali may be bugged however…

The problem is, is that I cannot be 6 places at once, and unfortunately, not everyone understand the bounties as well as I do. This means mistakes are bound to happen and even groups of 10 people killing a bounty can fail and wipe at times due to lack of skill and knowledge.

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

laharl.8435:

Jski.6180:

laharl.8435:

Fact – Guild Missions are a numbers game. The larger the guild, the larger the advantage. From unlocking the content, to finding the bounties, to killing the bounties.

My guild can no longer grow because of guild missions. When we get new people, they see that we are unable to do guild missions and they move on. At this point, being in a small guild is equal to holding yourself back from content and gear.

They are not comply numbers games there more then just guild bounties and even they scale with more ppl. Having more ppl only lets the bigger guilds play a bit more lazily its not so much easier just most of the guild dose not have to “work” for the rewards.

They only scale up to 50 iirc. Also, try looking for a bounty with 8 guys, then try it with 100 and tell me numbers doesn’t help immensely. Same to be said for getting the influence to just unlock the missions.

I’ve done bounties with a 10 man guild and a ~350 man guild. There is a huge difference.

Ya the 350 guild can do it more lazily killing most of the bounty are not hard each one has a trick to them and if you can have contort over your guild the fights are not that hard. Its a great deal harder to deal with 350 ppl vs just 10 ppl. The idea is to only scout the hard to find mobs its a very bad idea to scout them all with a smaller guild. In a big guild each person is less likely to need to even help with scouting vs a small guild where every one needs to help scout. In effect the bigger guilds are taking on all the lazily players for these guild bounties and the more active ppl are in the smaller guilds.

Guild Bounty a CHALLENGE…
I still dont understand where the “challenge” is…
If a BIG guild like 50 players want to do it it cant be considered a challenge at all.
They will spend 30mins or more searching for all possible bosses and keep following them. After they activate the guild bounty and just kill them in less than 5 minutes.
Challenge?? No way is more boring having to find all the bosses and camp/following them than anything else.

For a guild with 10 guys online, killing 6 bosses…a challenge??
No , not at all, no matter how good they are they will not suceed most of the time, no matter how good players they are.

It is sad but i have to agree that having the Dungeon master title didnt mean anything, because in most dungeons people can skip all mobs and just kill last boss, or use exploits to finish the dungeon…SAD SAD SAD
Dungeon Master was supposed to be a great title , a real challenge, but it isnt.
If they did the title without using any exploits…congratulations, but i realy doubt it.

I’d simply suggest they limit the targets per tier. There’s a good variety in difficulty to find and difficulty to kill. They could actually put a feeling of progressing through each Tier, and cater to the smaller/newer.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

Yet you created content that can be trivialized by having quantity over quality. It’s doable with less people with communication, but even more doable with more people with no communication.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

Coordination is good, but it has limited value in dealing with poorly implemented content. See the posts above regarding Sottz and Komali, for example.

Nice try Anthony. Yes, keep making the event harder so that smaller guilds have literally no chance at success. This coming from a person in a larger guild that has very little issues doing these. What was the logic behind making them no longer stoppable? Adding more bounties (some can take us the entire 15 minutes to find btw), why was that needed? Like i said, i’m in a large enough guild that can do these (accept when we trigger a bounty that another guild just killed and we have to track it down again) but i can see the OP’s point.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

I see. So poor design is now the player’s fault?

Rather buy ectos than spend 1 more second playing this ‘content’.

Still think you’ve designed a nice feature for guilds?

Coordination is a small part. Luck is the overiding factor in the whole thing. A thoroughly coordinated team in constant communication can still fail if the target is in a place hard to find in this incredulously silly time limit.

Small guilds work extra hard on coordinating and communicating and are less rewarded than big guilds who just throw numbers at the problem.

We had a situation where a big guild were scouting all the bounties, having half a dozen at EACH target then would roll the bounty. They asked us and anyone who engaged the bounty not to engage the target even though we had activated already. Out of respect, we chose not to grief them over it, but we ended up failing the bounty. And then subsequent attempts as we never found the target (and map chat ppl were trolling the location in other zones which wasn’t helpful).

Please don’t use the coordination argument. Too much luck is involved at the moment for this to be true – luck for small guilds, sheer numbers for large guilds. I’d love it to be based on skill/coordination/communication, but it isn’t.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

You’re trying to talk your way out of the corner your poor design decision have driven you and failing just as miserably as said designs.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

I get what you mean, but what you actually just said proves the op’s point.

Small guilds have to be much much more skilled than large guilds who can just zerg.

The whole gw2 content scaling system is really not living up to its promises.

Adine.2184:

You mentioned Sparkfly where Crusader Michelle is so we’ll use them .

No, I mentioned Sparkfly Swamp with suspicious trees, which is Big Mayana not Crusader Michiele — are you making the argument that Big Mayana is not difficult for a small group to find?

Brutal Arts.6307:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

You’re trying to talk your way out of the corner your poor design decision have driven you and failing just as miserably as said designs.

Sounds more like your trying to talk your self out of any type of blame for failing an event.
I know when i play a game of chest i only lose because of the op queen! I mean realty she can move as much as she wants and even if you kill her any pawn can become a queen what where they thinking such a bad game design.

How about a guild with 25 or less members with only 10 online gets a tracker that pings the location of the bounties? This way at least they don’t need the sheer numbers it takes just to hunt most of them down.

At the risk of extreme backlash, might I suggest that it’s ok to lose? The chance of losing makes it thrilling. I like a challenge, don’t you? If you are still convinced you need more numbers, ally with another guild and get help on bounties. Make sure you understand each bosses mechanics and the best way to counter their defense. Happy hunting!

munkiman.3068:

How about a guild with 25 or less members with only 10 online gets a tracker that pings the location of the bounties? This way at least they don’t need the sheer numbers it takes just to hunt most of them down.

Well you take 5 ish ppl to find the hardest 5 to find. Start the bounties now depending on what T your on will changes how you run it. If it just T1 then you see if any of the 5 looking has the “harder” one for the bounty if not and if so split the group of 10 into 2 groups one going after one of the bounties and the other group of 5 after the other. If it was not any of the 5 you found then have the group of 5 split up in the zones to look for the target. Post wp when you found them for the group your in to kill the target. The idea is your doing 2 targets at once. If your only doing 1 target at a time you WILL most likely fail your event. This is true for T2 and T3 you MUST be doing more then one target at a time or there is no hope.

Now if your just going for commendation or person rewards i say run a T3 and go for the easiest target and go as one big group. The T3 gives you more to chose from but you will not get the marines reward.

Keep in mind treks give you no person reward rushes only is 1 commendation but you get a “big ish” chest at the end of them each time you run them.

It all comes down to your goals with guild missions if you just want the new earrings you do not have to win the event if you want to do all the guild missions then you need to win these event.

Chopps.5047:

At the risk of extreme backlash, might I suggest that it’s ok to lose? The chance of losing makes it thrilling. I like a challenge, don’t you? If you are still convinced you need more numbers, ally with another guild and get help on bounties. Make sure you understand each bosses mechanics and the best way to counter their defense. Happy hunting!

I agree that it’s okay to lose! I want the possibilty of a loss, but I also want a fair shake at a win. There are a few bosses that don’t give that, especially for a small group.

Chopps.5047:

At the risk of extreme backlash, might I suggest that it’s ok to lose? The chance of losing makes it thrilling. I like a challenge, don’t you? If you are still convinced you need more numbers, ally with another guild and get help on bounties. Make sure you understand each bosses mechanics and the best way to counter their defense. Happy hunting!

You are in part correct – I’d hate it to be like the Dragons where it’s a guaranteed win. But the bosses themselves aren’t the issue. I have no issues with their mechanics. The issue for small guilds is the finding of them. That is pure luck/numbers. Nothing else.

@anthony

I think the problem stems from having more and more targets of increasing difficulty. Would it be possible going forward as you add targets to only make them availible in certain mission types? IE this is a T1-T3 mission, this is a T1 only mission, this is something you can only get in T3. The targets with really long paths are more unforgiving to small guilds trying to complete T1 missions, if you get 2 with long paths it can take a good chunk of time to find them even with good coordination.

Randulf.7614:

Chopps.5047:

At the risk of extreme backlash, might I suggest that it’s ok to lose? The chance of losing makes it thrilling. I like a challenge, don’t you? If you are still convinced you need more numbers, ally with another guild and get help on bounties. Make sure you understand each bosses mechanics and the best way to counter their defense. Happy hunting!

You are in part correct – I’d hate it to be like the Dragons where it’s a guaranteed win. But the bosses themselves aren’t the issue. I have no issues with their mechanics. The issue for small guilds is the finding of them. That is pure luck/numbers. Nothing else.

You mean the one in Gendarrin Fields?

25 instastacks of confusion makes it real hard for groups of 5 to complete it.

Bleh

Randulf.7614:

We had a situation where a big guild were scouting all the bounties, having half a dozen at EACH target then would roll the bounty. They asked us and anyone who engaged the bounty not to engage the target even though we had activated already. Out of respect, we chose not to grief them over it, but we ended up failing the bounty. And then subsequent attempts as we never found the target (and map chat ppl were trolling the location in other zones which wasn’t helpful).

Respect? Why did they deserve respect? They were griefing you, not the other way around.

We have a <50 player guild. We are healthily at 30-40 accounts, and about 20 people on throughout a day for influence call, but only maybe 8 people online at a time on average.

We even have a small group of allies that we call on to help with the guild bounty.

We don’t even consider trying to do a Bounty without 10 people on, and even then, not all people are 80 nor have all the waypoints.

Even with 3 groups, we barely have enough strength to find the first bounty, let alone the second, and if we find them, kill them fast enough for people to run to the other zone and find them again. Different people have different computers, so they can just waypoint and waypoint without long loading screens.

Luckily, our guild is tight enough to not care that we fail, but it doesn’t help the guild feel like we will ever progress to unlock all missions. And to say “you dont need number, you need communication” is kind of offensive. So… we aren’t good enough… thanks!

And to give Guild Bounty Training for influence but no rewards… that doesn’t make us any better at the 2 targets in 15 minutes. Even if we find the bounties, we have to make sure everybody is there to help out and get credit.

We don’t need the devs to get defensive about their design… we are asking for help from a smaller guild sake. Otherwise, without 100+ people on the roster, we just have to accept our defeat and not care about guild missions at all.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

IMO, this is the wrong answer, because you are essentially saying “if players can’t do it, it’s their fault and if they quit the game, who cares, we don’t need them”. Yes, you do in fact need them, unless the financial success of the game runs contrary to your goals.

There are ways to introduce more challenging content with out forcing it on everyone. For Guild Missions in specific, T1 should be straight forward and not require people to memorize the wiki to complete. T2 should require a little more pre-planning and T3, well, that’s where you can put what ever challenging mechanics you want.

Same with Dungeons. Want more challenge? Add an expert mode and make normal mode more accessible. Worried that accessible Dungeon content will allow non-elite players to, gasp, earn decent coin and drops? Well, take a cue from the recent fix to world event boss chests, i.e. standard rewards for all Dungeon Runs, but a bigger reward for the first successful run of a dungeon each day, per account.

I get that you want to create content and balance difficulty around your personal preference, but GW2 isn’t some niche title where “revenues be kitten I’ll make it as difficult as I want it to be”. You have responsibility to a great many people, NCSoft, Arenanet and the millions of fans of the game to find ways to offer challenge to those who want it, while keeping all aspects of the game “casual friendly”.

This game has $Billion+ revenue potential over it’s lifetime, but it is never going to happen if you keep designing content with broad appeal to be only enjoyable for elite players.

I am pretty sure that if you got 100 guild members scouting an area for a bounty boss, they will find it within a minute.

With 10 members, I wouldn’t even attempt tier 2 or tier 3. Tier 1 will be luck if you make it.

Fiontar.4695:

This is just part of a disturbing trend with GW2’s ongoing development. When are they going to wake up and realize that players want FUN content, not content so challenging that it ruins the fun for the vast majority of the playerbase.

It’s such an oft repeated cliche in the MMO industry, the decision to cater live development to the most elite of the playerbase, on the assumption that they are a.) worth the nearly impossible effort to keep happy and b.) that that 1% is somehow more important to retain than the other 99% of us. Every MMO that has gone this route has dwindled away to nothingness. WoW may have gone to far in the other direction, but their success shows that mindfulness of casual players is the key to burgeoning success for an MMO.

I think this game has a high percentage of high play hour “casuals”. We don’t want content that can be facerolled, but we also don’t want content that is highly frustrating and most often doesn’t offer rewards any where near worth the frustration. However, we’ve spent several hundred+ hours playing the game because we love it and want more, fresh content and FUN things to do with friends and guild mates. Stop assuming that the hard-core are the only ones you will lose if you don’t find new ways to keep them happy and there are exponentially many players and potentially lost players that are casual than are “hard-core”.

If you want hardcore content, make hard core modes, in addition to normal modes, for dungeons and make T3 guild activities challenging, while allowing normal dungeons and T1/T2 Guild activities to be something “casuals” can actually have fun playing and leave feeling sufficiently rewarded for their time.

It really feels like Arenanet has had a major personality transplant since the game went live and it’s not taking the game in a positive direction. There seems to be a large portion of the company that still possesses the soul of what makes this game great, but it also seems like there is a darker faction pushing to take the game someplace that could tumble the entire wonderful house of cards that 5+ years and 300+ people built!

Super Adventure Box

Anyway, I have more of an issue with the fact that another guild can kill our mark before everyone in our guild and also in the same zone can get a tag on it. For example, our crew was working on the bounty where you had to search barrels for the mob. We were spread out search the map. Another guild finds it and starts the fight. Only our members that were nearby to tag got credit even though members all over the map were helping by searching for barrels. I don’t see why this is the case. Tag a barrel and in the same guild should get you a personal reward.

Vayne.8563:

Some bounties are hard to kill because of bad mechanics. Take Half-baked Komali. Frankly I think half baked is bugged, but even if she isn’t. there’s another issue.

If you hit half-baked when the fire shield is up, she stacks might. It makes her much more dangerous. The only way to really get that fireshield down is to stop attacking her.

But this is the open world. I might be able to get my guild to stop attacking her, but other people in the zone, they don’t necessarily know the fight, don’t necessarily have map chat switched on and don’t necessarily care of my guild fails or passed a bounty. So my guild could do the complete right thing and fail based on the actions of people outside the guild.

This to me is unacceptable. It’s a bad mechanic that needs to be fixed.

Another one is Sottz, who sits in a barrel. You don’t have enough time to find him and kill him, because as soon as you find him he teleports away. Most guilds who get Sottz think he’s an automatic fail.

There are good mechanics and bad ones. Even a good guild is going to have trouble working with bad mechanics.

We’ve only failed two bounties since we started, though, the very first one, when we didn’t know what to expect, and a recent one when the server reset in the middle of our last target. It was frustrating but what can you do?

I’m in a small guild. 4 of us. I won’t ever do this content. That’s ok. My guildmates and I have provided feedback regarding social impact and incentive structures surrounding this content (see: that thread Matipzieu[KyA] for our combined input.)

You bring up a good point regarding non-guildmates affecting these encounters which further highlights some of the social issues.

I was standing in the fort at First Haven, Gendarran last week, leveling an alt, going about my business trying to fill in the heart there. Suddenly an event erupted within the fort. Obviously a guild mission. I’m faced with a sudden decision: do I stay and try to complete what I am doing, including talking with merchants in order to empy my backpack? Do I look like I’m trying to grief by not joining in? Do I leave until the event is over (being considerate of others)? Do I join in on a boss fight I do not know?

If my guild had been standing there, we would have had the same question. The reward we would have gotten for helping would have been far more easily attained with a regular event. Yet we technically had the right to stay there and do the business we needed with both merchants and with the mobs that are part of the heart we were trying to complete.

We do not run with map chat on due to the ever increasing number of immature new players to the game. We only turn map chat on when doing event dailies, to help announce events and locations for other players. After that, map chat goes back off.

I noticed there were a few other players parked in front of merchants that appeared to be afk. I do not know how many extra players it takes to scale up an event. The fact that the event occurred inside an area where merchants existed made me shake my head.

So, in light of the vaunted “community building exercise” that guild missions were supposed to encourage, any suggestion for how to handle the situation where other players may be inadvertently included in the event?

Don’t join the fight? Leave?

Ensure that the boss, once tagged, belongs to the guild that tagged it and no one else can attack it? Will that encourage griefers?

These aren’t questions aimed specifically at you, but at the player base in general and the developers.

I’m concerned about my already small guild getting even smaller. My guild members are repping other bigger guilds to do missions, most of which end up staying there and not coming back.

Draygo.9473:

25 instastacks of confusion makes it real hard for groups of 5 to complete it.

Bleh

LoL you do not want to attk him when he has his shield up if your just zerging like fighting your going to do and you do not want to attk in to mobs when they have some type of shield up.

http://dulfy.net/2013/02/27/gw2-guild-bounty-guide/
This will help out a great deal if you want to do these events as effectively as you can.