Guild Wars 2

I can only join the opinion of a lot of the people posting in this thread, and I’ve given those persons my upvote(I was not alone doing this). I can’t believe how wrongly Anet made these bounties and their recent decision to make them even tougher last patch.

I made the mistake of saying our guild got the sparkfly bounty – Crusader Michiele when in actuality it was the one you had to find in the suspicious trees -Big Mayana. Sorry for the mix up. If it had been a bounty that was on a path I’m sure we would have had a pretty good chance at success.
I was happy with getting the first one but could see so many ways it could have gone wrong had that other guild just gone ahead and activated Bwikki. Is there no way to keep this from happening. Where if both guilds somehow get the same bounty one guild is queued back up until the bounty is succeeded or failed? Otherwise there is a lot of room for grief.

Rexivus.3794:

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.

I kinda have to agree with you. Our guild there we have about 66+ people, only about 8 – 10 are on at a given time, and only about 4 or 5 of them are available to run a guild mission.

We haven’t hit Guild bounties yet, we are still trying to unlock it, but we do have Guild Bounty Training. The first one we fail, but just barely. we ran out of time, but we did capture the boss before he escaped. The second one we did we were able to find the boss faster and get to him, but even with 8 level 80’s we still barely beat the boss before the time ran out.

So when we run the full guild bounties, its going to be hard to fight 2 or more bounties with just 8 – 10 people. If it took 8 of us to take down one champion. These guys have more health and do more damage than a legendary in dungeons.

What I would like to know is, why did we get what we got with all the problems (like this) that came with what we got instead of oh, say, guild halls in which guild members (and their guests) could meet and socialize and have access to guild armorers, weaponsmiths, merchants, etc., and where guild members could select from an array of guild missions that could be tailored to the number of participants, complete with a handy guild teleportation device to send the participants into a guild mission instance in which they could undertake their mission without outside interference (and without interfering with anyone else)? Would that not have been better than what we got? Would that not have avoided problems like this?

I’m all for challenging content and fun content. But time limits take away from the fun and challenge. Remove the time limits from guild missions and they will be more fun. I’d rather lose to a skill based fight than to lose to a time limit. Then you could change it so if a certain number of fights are lost then the mission can fail. A time limit is a pathetic excuse for a design.

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.

Well that comment totally missed the point. Of course we know that if a guild has good coordination they will have better success and need less people.

Some smaller guilds are completing this content, but it takes them MUCH longer and usually has many more fails than a large guild. Very large guilds trivialize this content. It is obvious to everyone paying attention that this content heavily favors large/very large guild. I find it insane that some people can’t see that.

I’ve played the content with large and small guilds, the difference is immense. It has left a divide between small and large guilds. Small guild can no longer grow, because they can’t offer this content to their members. If you are not in a large guild, you are hindering your progress. My guild has accepted that the guild will no longer grow. We can just hope to get at least one target down for the personal reward. Other than that, we are now stagnant.

I was excited about this content but I also had apprehension that this situation would be the case. My fears were laid to rest when a dev stated small guilds would be able to do this content as well. Then the missions came out, and I was right. Before the missions we were slowly but surely getting more members and building ourselves up.

would love to see a video of Anthony’s team of 15 or less do a t3 during peak bounty hunting hours on a weekend. And not one with 6 of the easy ones either. If that was available I believe most ppl would say ok, there it is, I will shut up now.

I agree with the vast majority sentiment here. And I was really surprised to see Anet come visit this post. The problem isn’t coordination and planning, its numbers. The problem with the bounties, is not the mechanics of the fights or the scaling or any of that. It is locating the ones that you cannot pre-scout ahead of time, after you start the bounty. You have 15 mins to kill them, which would be perfectly reasonable even for a small guild of sub 20, if you knew where they were ahead of time.

But 300 random spawn points? Asumming each of you could check 4 per minute, and you had 10 people looking (VERY generous), your worst case scenario comes down to around 7 minutes to find the stupid thing. Then kill it.. say 1-2 minutes.

And that would be with MASSIVE coordination, having people all in the right places throughout the zone, then spread and search, hoping no one else triggers him, and kills him, invalidating all your searching.

The pathing mobs are fine, its FUN to know roughly where they path, go to the zone and search that area for them, with 5-10 people, kill it, move on and do the next. That makes tier 1 bounty doable for a small group.

Random spawning point bounties isn’t fun, it is frustrating for the sake of being frustrating. Your better off burning that bounty and doing another one, hoping you don’t get one of the random ones. Too bad the move from Anet has been said to moving towards MORE of the random spawning ones, making any hope of getting more than one down in the 15 minute interval a game of pure luck.

At least we can get our 2 commendations for killing one and call it a day. That is all most people are interested in anyways, since that required gating has been put in place on ascended accessories.

Jski.6180:

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.

Yes because dulfy has some tips on how to deal with tarban with < 5 people.

Nope.

I am fully aware of dulfy and other resources in how to deal with it. I havent found an effective way to fight tarban as a small group yet. Partially it has to do with how confusion works, if you trait anything that procs an effect on dodge roll it will trigger that 25 stacks of confusion and down you. Same thing with any other trait proc, confusion triggers and you go down, you cant res when you have 25 stacks of confusion on you either because you go down, and you cant purge it, or you go down. Effectively you need to wait it out which is causing us to not do enough dps in the time limit.

If they scale the amount of confusion stacks he throws out it would be doable for smaller parties to take that fight, for example 10 stacks with 5 people 25 if you attack him with 10.

After reading the Red Name post I skipped the rest of the thread.

Here is a real “small guild” (we maxed at 14 members, only 5 or 6 show up on Guild nights anymore) take on Bounties and all the rest of the recently released guild content in general, from our little group.

IT SUCKS.

It is a slap in the face, knee to the groin, elbow crush to the larynx, sidekick to the knee, stomped instep, and kitten on the writhing, crippled, soon to be corpse of a small guild, imo. We were still getting two full parties before this last set of guild stuff.

We came to GW2 in mass with the destruction of CoH. Every member is an adult experienced lifetime gamer with a host of prior games. Most are married couples. We are all personal friends irl except for one new couple we met here in GW2. We don’t actively recruit and don’t want to. We detest PUGS and want to game with people we know and trust to get the job done. Is this so strange? I think the youngest player is almost 30, the eldest child of our Guild vice President. I am almost 60 and would bet I remember games many of the kid Devs I see in the videos have probably never heard of.

I am the ONLY regular daily player left. My guild leader often only plays 2 days a week, on official Guild nights. Our most active thread in our Guild forum is New Games.

We all still love aspects of the game, its beauty, its lore, and a lot of the dynamic and invidual content.

But as a Guild we feel we are being activly told to go some place else – NOW. Well message recieved and understood.

To comment specifically on the Bounty, I have been trying to do all I can to save the situation, as I Really like GW2. I am the only GW1 vet in our group, so perhaps that is why the game means more to me. I have joined two other large guilds as a casual (not full time representing) member. Out of six attempts with them I have witnessed 6 fails, and got a personal reward 1 time. Both guilds were still ‘figuring it out’ but really. Both had voip and require bounty participants to be on vocie to do these. Spending 30 min. to an hour tracking down all the targets means that darn near any other activity in the game would be more rewarding. I suppose I’ll continue to guest for bounties till I can get a few things for my main, but even if my guest guilds perfect their technique, I just don’t see these mission as ever being FUN, or even Enjoyable. I saw a lot of comments about how to accomplish them, and they are certainly Necessary for the rewards they offer, but I saw NOT ONE WORD about how much FUN the Bounty system is. Apparently even the Guilds that have ‘figured it out’ don’t enjoy them. I’ll scan the thread in whole again and see if I am wrong.

Re-read complete in entirity, and I realize it is a complaint thread, but – NOT ONE SINGLE COMMENT about “Oh our Guild Loves the new Guild Bounties.” “Thank you for Guild Bounties.” “We now have a Guild Bounty night in our Guild cause we like em so well, and it helps ensure we have enough members on to easily complete.”
Not one Defender of, or LTP wiseass, suggested that Guild Bounties are anything but an activity to be master and ground for rewards. My experience as a guest includes listening to a rage quit conversation as the guild leader and senior members tried to coordinate a T1. Oh yeah, bounties good for the game.

Small guild of 4 IRL friends here. Did Big Mayani (sp? The big hylek in trees) the other day and it was a TON of fun. We only killed him, couldn’t get to the other target (Rikkiti?) But we got our commendations and we are happy! Big Mayani is a TON of fun to fight too.

Of course, we were all on TS and talking constantly, but that’s part of the fun! This is my experience of bounties anyways. The mystery factor definitely makes it more…satisfying, in my opinion!

Draygo.9473:

Jski.6180:

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.

Yes because dulfy has some tips on how to deal with tarban with < 5 people.

Nope.

I am fully aware of dulfy and other resources in how to deal with it. I havent found an effective way to fight tarban as a small group yet. Partially it has to do with how confusion works, if you trait anything that procs an effect on dodge roll it will trigger that 25 stacks of confusion and down you. Same thing with any other trait proc, confusion triggers and you go down, you cant res when you have 25 stacks of confusion on you either because you go down, and you cant purge it, or you go down. Effectively you need to wait it out which is causing us to not do enough dps in the time limit.

If they scale the amount of confusion stacks he throws out it would be doable for smaller parties to take that fight, for example 10 stacks with 5 people 25 if you attack him with 10.

The trick with him is to watch your attks its becomes a big game of red light green light. Every one should run some condition removal (this is true for all points of the game).

JakHammer.7094:

Re-read complete in entirity, and I realize it is a complaint thread, but – NOT ONE SINGLE COMMENT about “Oh our Guild Loves the new Guild Bounties.” “Thank you for Guild Bounties.” “We now have a Guild Bounty night in our Guild cause we like em so well, and it helps ensure we have enough members on to easily complete.”
Not one Defender of, or LTP wiseass, suggested that Guild Bounties are anything but an activity to be master and ground for rewards. My experience as a guest includes listening to a rage quit conversation as the guild leader and senior members tried to coordinate a T1. Oh yeah, bounties good for the game.

Don’t get me wrong I like the bounties – I like the concept of tracking the mob and getting into an intense boss fight. That I find fun. Our guilds problem is that it’s luck, not skill in getting to that point. This idea that “its all about communication and coordination” is baffling when that’s exactly what we are doing and it makes very little diff to finding 2 targets in such a small time limit.

Glad for you!

Being old and experienced does not necessarily mean having great skilz, somewhat the opposite in fact, and I am the only person with full coordinated exotics and an optimised build. I doubt that any possible 4 members of our group could even scratch any of the bosses I have faced so far.

Hope a guest group I am with gets the Hylek soon, as I would like even the tiniest morsel of fun out of this activity.

Smaller guilds should stick to a tier that they can handle. The mobs all scale a several are better off fought with less people. Some of the mechanics are annoying but once you and everyone figure them out, it easy.

You can’t just zerg and facetank everything.

If your guild can’t scout out all if the scout-able targets then you should not be doing anything higher than a tier 1.

Wouldn’t it be a really easy fix to make guild missions instanced? This is how I see it working.

1. Set off Bounty.
2. Location is still open world and needs to be found.
3. Once at location and engaged everyone in said guild is sent to its own instance and scaling can now be better implemented.

This would allow any guild, not matter the size to get a Boss that scales correctly to the number of people in that guild.

Cameirus.8407:

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.

I don’t think you will see a reply from AO… I could of sworn I heard the sound of face meeting palm… can only add.. great counter!

The everything from Open world events to guild missions is completely wacko in regards to balance and scaling. imo, you only have to look at a dragon pop or Maw to see they have no idea on how to scale difficulty in an openworld environment… if you blink its all over. Guild missions for those who can encompass the maps on mass face no real hardship unless they are all on suicide timers whereas smaller guilds have to work that much harder, communicate better and seek out tactic.. not just steam roller through it and move on…

Jski.6180:

Draygo.9473:

Jski.6180:

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.

Yes because dulfy has some tips on how to deal with tarban with < 5 people.

Nope.

I am fully aware of dulfy and other resources in how to deal with it. I havent found an effective way to fight tarban as a small group yet. Partially it has to do with how confusion works, if you trait anything that procs an effect on dodge roll it will trigger that 25 stacks of confusion and down you. Same thing with any other trait proc, confusion triggers and you go down, you cant res when you have 25 stacks of confusion on you either because you go down, and you cant purge it, or you go down. Effectively you need to wait it out which is causing us to not do enough dps in the time limit.

If they scale the amount of confusion stacks he throws out it would be doable for smaller parties to take that fight, for example 10 stacks with 5 people 25 if you attack him with 10.

The trick with him is to watch your attks its becomes a big game of red light green light. Every one should run some condition removal (this is true for all points of the game).

Which is true, but at times you cant utilize that condition removal at all.

My main problem with the fight is the red-light green-light game were playing with him stretchs the fight out and often we just cant get enough damage on him to kill him in the time allowed. When you do him with a larger group the confusion goes on less people so you have more overall dps.

Draygo.9473:

Jski.6180:

Draygo.9473:

Jski.6180:

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.

Yes because dulfy has some tips on how to deal with tarban with < 5 people.

Nope.

I am fully aware of dulfy and other resources in how to deal with it. I havent found an effective way to fight tarban as a small group yet. Partially it has to do with how confusion works, if you trait anything that procs an effect on dodge roll it will trigger that 25 stacks of confusion and down you. Same thing with any other trait proc, confusion triggers and you go down, you cant res when you have 25 stacks of confusion on you either because you go down, and you cant purge it, or you go down. Effectively you need to wait it out which is causing us to not do enough dps in the time limit.

If they scale the amount of confusion stacks he throws out it would be doable for smaller parties to take that fight, for example 10 stacks with 5 people 25 if you attack him with 10.

The trick with him is to watch your attks its becomes a big game of red light green light. Every one should run some condition removal (this is true for all points of the game).

Which is true, but at times you cant utilize that condition removal at all.

My main problem with the fight is the red-light green-light game were playing with him stretchs the fight out and often we just cant get enough damage on him to kill him in the time allowed. When you do him with a larger group the confusion goes on less people so you have more overall dps.

The idea is to have one group on this guy only if he is one of your targets is becomes the main one you need to find first and make sure he is downed. So he can be one of you 5 or so that you must find and get ppl to as soon as you can.

I love challenge. The harder it is, the better it feels when you complete it. On the flip side, it does feel awful when you tried so hard, and failed. These Guild Bounty missions require a combination of skill + communication ability. If everyone knows their role to play (condition applier, enemy buff stripper, ally buff applier, etc), and learns the strategy to defeat a bounty, then it’s not only challenging, but FUN!

Currently, these bounties are meant to be hard. They separate the players with skill, from the ones who only know how to zerg. And the Devs have mentioned some bounty targets are anti-zerg.

By the way, everyone has access to these missions, but not everyone is meant to finish them. If you want Easy Mode, there are crabs, frogs, and other ambient creatures in the world for you to kill.

Tier 1 bounties are easily doable with 10 people. We do multiple Tier 1s throughout the week with maybe 8-12 people to get guild members their weekly chest. Finding most of the targets is real easy. The only target my guild has trouble finding is Scotzz. Then when we do find him it’s almost always in the caves to the west. We also find most targets easier to kill with less people do to scaling. We always divide the groups in half before we start the bounty and SPREAD OUT our search area & go the opposite direction of the target.

We also have a scheduled Tier 3 bounty we do on Saturdays a few hours after the reset. We NEVER scout out targets because it is a pointless and frustrating waste of time. You just end up fighting over targets with other guilds. It also a lot more work you only get 6 out of the 18 targets (33.3% of the possible targets). So if your guild is busy trying to scout out & find all the targets you are doing 3x the work load. We have yet a fail a Tier 3 bounty, we have come close to failing (less than 10seconds left).

Also ask into map chat if anyone has seen your target the second you get into the zone and don’t send everyone to where you are told by any replies send 1 person to check if it’s legit. We almost always get a reply on targets location and hardly ever get lied to. One of the best parts of my experience in GW2 is how much friendlier people are.

I will admit I personally don’t think small (aka Tiny) guilds should be able to do Tier 3 bounties if you can’t muster at least 15 (coordinated) people for a Tier 3 then do a lower tier you can get enough people for. My guild can do Tier 1s with 5 people. It is possible with time to spare. The extra 5-10 merits a week should be an advantage for being a larger guild! It’s the same as complaining you should be able to do a 25 person raid with 10 people. Tier 3 is for larger guild it’s just another form of scaling that’s all over GW2.

MaxLothor.3568:

Tier 1 bounties are easily doable with 10 people. We do multiple Tier 1s throughout the week with maybe 8-12 people to get guild members their weekly chest. Finding most of the targets is real easy. The only target my guild has trouble finding is Scotzz. Then when we do find him it’s almost always in the caves to the west. We also find most targets easier to kill with less people do to scaling. We always divide the groups in half before we start the bounty and SPREAD OUT our search area & go the opposite direction of the target.

I agree with most of your post, but I’d like to point out something. My guild failed a Tier 1 bounty with 20+ people. Why? We’re Maguuma, and we like to zerg. And just so happens we came across one of the anti zerg targets. He shut us down pretty easy. Lesson learned. :P

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I love challenge. The harder it is, the better it feels when you complete it. On the flip side, it does feel awful when you tried so hard, and failed. These Guild Bounty missions require a combination of skill + communication ability. If everyone knows their role to play (condition applier, enemy buff stripper, ally buff applier, etc), and learns the strategy to defeat a bounty, then it’s not only challenging, but FUN!

Currently, these bounties are meant to be hard. They separate the players with skill, from the ones who only know how to zerg. And the Devs have mentioned some bounty targets are anti-zerg.

By the way, everyone has access to these missions, but not everyone is meant to finish them. If you want Easy Mode, there are crabs, frogs, and other ambient creatures in the world for you to kill.

highlight: mine.

My guild has been 4-manning explorables and feels locked out of this content. We certainly have the skill. Including the “skill” to coordinate communication among ourselves and with other players. After 13 years playing together, raid leading, etcetera through 7 MMOs, we certainly understand a variety of game mechanics, strategies, tactics and gimmicks.

I am sure there are other small guilds out there who have similar experience (including those posting in this thread.)

There was no reason to insert the highlighted comment into the discussion. It’s a tad disingenuous and deflects from the main issue at hand being discussed in the thread.

Your comment on anti-zerg is noted.

Glad, however, that you are finding them fun. That’s what the game should be.

goldenwing.8473:

My guild has been 4-manning explorables and feels locked out of this content.

This is an interesting statement. If you do content and fail at it, do you define that as being locked out of the content?

I won’t lie, my small guild has failed as much Bounties as we have succeeded. But we have DONE bounties, and each one of them is unique and fun in their own way.

Ursan.7846:

goldenwing.8473:

My guild has been 4-manning explorables and feels locked out of this content.

This is an interesting statement. If you do content and fail at it, do you define that as being locked out of the content?

I won’t lie, my small guild has failed as much Bounties as we have succeeded. But we have DONE bounties, and each one of them is unique and fun in their own way.

No we don’t feel locked out of content as a result of failing.

We have successfully 4 manned content designed for 100+ people in other games. We have done 5,10, 20 man content. Sometimes with 2 of us literally 2 or 3 boxing (the old fashioned way with separate mice, keyboards, etcetera.. no hardware of software help).

The fun, as Raph Koster says, is in the learning process. Challenge is fun. We have no problem with an iterative process (failing along the way), as long as learning and progress occurs.

goldenwing.8473:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I love challenge. The harder it is, the better it feels when you complete it. On the flip side, it does feel awful when you tried so hard, and failed. These Guild Bounty missions require a combination of skill + communication ability. If everyone knows their role to play (condition applier, enemy buff stripper, ally buff applier, etc), and learns the strategy to defeat a bounty, then it’s not only challenging, but FUN!

Currently, these bounties are meant to be hard. They separate the players with skill, from the ones who only know how to zerg. And the Devs have mentioned some bounty targets are anti-zerg.

By the way, everyone has access to these missions, but not everyone is meant to finish them. If you want Easy Mode, there are crabs, frogs, and other ambient creatures in the world for you to kill.

highlight: mine.

My guild has been 4-manning explorables and feels locked out of this content. We certainly have the skill. Including the “skill” to coordinate communication among ourselves and with other players. After 13 years playing together, raid leading, etcetera through 7 MMOs, we certainly understand a variety of game mechanics, strategies, tactics and gimmicks.

I am sure there are other small guilds out there who have similar experience (including those posting in this thread.)

There was no reason to insert the highlighted comment into the discussion. It’s a tad disingenuous and deflects from the main issue at hand being discussed in the thread.

Your comment on anti-zerg is noted.

Glad, however, that you are finding them fun. That’s what the game should be.

I made mention to that because people like to complain things are too hard. They are hard for a reason. I see these missions more like Elite Missions. Unless you have the skill and/or numbers needed, you can’t finish it. Like in GW1, the Elite Missions required 12 players. Without that, you couldn’t move on.

Spending 15 frantic minutes running all over a zone trying to find one stupid mob who never shows, or died before you got there, is the opposite of fun. Playing Where’s Waldo in a constantly changing landscape with mobs attacking you which you do not have time to fight off is the opposite of fun. You can be as coordinated and organised as you like – we have split our team up between the relevant zones and then searched in quadrants from there, starting with known/previous spawns and moving on, all whilst communicating on Mumble – and end up with nothing. I am in a small guild (about 5-7 active players) and I will not be bothering with guild missions anymore.

For very large guilds who are actually able to encounter and engage the guild missions content, I’m sure it is just super-duper. For the rest of us, Anthony, I’m afraid it’s just a fail.

These aren’t and never were meant to be only elite missions though, thats why there are diff tiers to cater for diff skill groups.

Jski.6180:

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.

Sadly for that terrible line of reasoning, my guild completes Bounties Treks and recently Rushes with little difficulty. That doesn’t change their poor design in the slightest.

Laurelinde.4395:

Spending 15 frantic minutes running all over a zone trying to find one stupid mob who never shows, or died before you got there, is the opposite of fun. Playing Where’s Waldo in a constantly changing landscape with mobs attacking you which you do not have time to fight off is the opposite of fun. You can be as coordinated and organised as you like – we have split our team up between the relevant zones and then searched in quadrants from there, starting with known/previous spawns and moving on, all whilst communicating on Mumble – and end up with nothing. I am in a small guild (about 5-7 active players) and I will not be bothering with guild missions anymore.

For very large guilds who are actually able to encounter and engage the guild missions content, I’m sure it is just super-duper. For the rest of us, Anthony, I’m afraid it’s just a fail.

We are about the same size, maybe slightly smaller. The conclusion we’ve come up with is that to finish these the basic strategy is just build a stack of tier1 bounties(10 is the max). The rest is luck. Last week we got Devious Teesa + Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler followed by …. Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler + Devious Teesa THEN we got Big Mayana + Short Fuse Felix.

In short the basic strategy for a small guild is just to burn Influence and hope the RNG works in your favor. That was pretty much what Anthony’s suggest amounted to in another thread.

The training missions are supposed to support that but the build time seems to be in conflict with that goal.

The Guild Wars 2 devs have fallen into the same trap that most mediocre gaming devs find themselves. Guild Wars 2 is all about the zerg, in PvE and WvW.

They want to believe otherwise and will tell you to your face that it isn’t so. But the proof is in the results.

My guild gave up on the game a long time ago. Some of us log in for the special events, those are actually fun. But the rest of the game is very poorly designed and easily beaten by having the biggest zerg. Tactics and skill are not needed in GW2, just massive amounts of players to beat content a two year old could design.

GW2 still has potential, but most mmos have “potential”. Unless that potential is actually realized then most gamers will be somewhere else.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Jski.6180:

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.

Sadly for that terrible line of reasoning, my guild completes Bounties Treks and recently Rushes with little difficulty. That doesn’t change their poor design in the slightest.

No it means your kind of a fake from your point of view you where able to do it but ppl with legitimate problems and asking for help will not be helped with your calling it poor design. Its just as bad as saying do not do it if you cant it simply helps no one.

My Guild (Brannigan’s Roughnecks [DOOP] on WSR ) drew Big Mayana . The tree we found it in was was right next to the United Arcanist Laboratory in Splintered Coast . Unfortunately this was where about 20 people were waiting for Tequatl to spawn and then the Krait attacking the lab event kicked off as well. This didn’t go well for us ……

Randulf.7614:

These aren’t and never were meant to be only elite missions though, thats why there are diff tiers to cater for diff skill groups.

This is just plain wrong. The only thing that changes are the numbers required, that is all.

Khisanth.2948:

Laurelinde.4395:

Spending 15 frantic minutes running all over a zone trying to find one stupid mob who never shows, or died before you got there, is the opposite of fun. Playing Where’s Waldo in a constantly changing landscape with mobs attacking you which you do not have time to fight off is the opposite of fun. You can be as coordinated and organised as you like – we have split our team up between the relevant zones and then searched in quadrants from there, starting with known/previous spawns and moving on, all whilst communicating on Mumble – and end up with nothing. I am in a small guild (about 5-7 active players) and I will not be bothering with guild missions anymore.

For very large guilds who are actually able to encounter and engage the guild missions content, I’m sure it is just super-duper. For the rest of us, Anthony, I’m afraid it’s just a fail.

We are about the same size, maybe slightly smaller. The conclusion we’ve come up with is that to finish these the basic strategy is just build a stack of tier1 bounties(10 is the max). The rest is luck. Last week we got Devious Teesa + Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler followed by …. Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler + Devious Teesa THEN we got Big Mayana + Short Fuse Felix.

In short the basic strategy for a small guild is just to burn Influence and hope the RNG works in your favor. That was pretty much what Anthony’s suggest amounted to in another thread.

The training missions are supposed to support that but the build time seems to be in conflict with that goal.

And it just so happens to be that influence is one of the things small guilds have an abundance of… oh wait. And those training missions take a long amount of time to build, indeed.

One other thing about those training missions. Yesterday, my guild got Multi to battle. We were with 6 so we managed to find him within 5 minutes. We started fighting him and all went well, until a whole lot of random people started joining, upscaling the event so much it became too much for us to handle and it failed. Those people didn’t kill the sparks, much less throw them back at the boss.

I appreciate the open world thing Anet wanted to have, but for guild missions(hell, anything challenging), it’s just one big fail. And oh yeh, being a kick in the balls for smaller guilds too of course. But hey, we are happy if we manage to at least complete the lower tier after a dozen of prayers we get some decent targets.

Ayrilana.1396:

Smaller guilds should stick to a tier that they can handle. The mobs all scale a several are better off fought with less people. Some of the mechanics are annoying but once you and everyone figure them out, it easy.

You can’t just zerg and facetank everything.

If your guild can’t scout out all if the scout-able targets then you should not be doing anything higher than a tier 1.

And what if you can’t even find that 1 boss during the 15 minute limit? Happens to us on a regular basis. Or rather, if we don’t find them within 10 minutes. There’s no point in engaging a boss if you have 1 minute left on your timer.

Finding 2 bosses with a 10-man group with time left to defeat them is tough. Finding just 1 boss for the 3k influence is undoable at times.

So get off that high horse of yours. The only thing it shows is that you get carried by your big guild. Big whoop.

I really wish we had access to something other than bounties. My guild isn’t exactly small (around 130 members) and we tried our hand at a training mission just to get the hang of it. We had a group or 6 ish and atleast 5 people from the map helping. We did the scouting fantastically, had two targets between us, found one remembered and estimated its path when we were finding the other.

When everything had been found we got 2-MULT as our target, found him in 1 min and he proceeded to wipe the floor with us. Seriously why does this thing cream 10+ lvl 80 ish people? We found him twice in the time frame and we just died, that permanent stun ape made it impossible to ress anyone and do anything (I also noticed the sparks despawning right in my hands!!!)

So yeah, first intro to missions and it wasn’t a pleasant one. Why do we need to do bounties to gain access to the other missions? Why? We have the resources to get all the other missions but we can’t because we need merits. Very few people now want to do these bounties now. We’re trying another one but what if we get half baked, sotzz or MULT again?

These really need a complete overhaul or if they’re not getting touched atleast make one other mission type available without merits.

Vewen.8016:

Randulf.7614:

These aren’t and never were meant to be only elite missions though, thats why there are diff tiers to cater for diff skill groups.

This is just plain wrong. The only thing that changes are the numbers required, that is all.

OK fair point. Having 3 tiers should represent different skill levels then, even if its 3 harder bosses exclusive to that tier. Each tier having its sub set of bosses it can pool the bounty from. That would eliminate the time limit, allow better rewards for each tier and potentially alleviate the bigger issues here.

what about the fact that even if you run a t1 bounty you may happen to have a champion to fight in an high level map, like teeza… it always leave behind low level guildies.
why can’t we chose the lv range of targets at least?
we made 2 guild bounties and 1 guild training and we happen to have 2 times (in guild bounty of course kimali the half kitten! second time we knew what to do, stop attacking strip boons and pull…
we pull a lot, but she stayed perfectly safe in her fire shield. seconds later she had again her stability because of the pull. so you cant use a pull that is also an attack…
we managed to get her out of the shield once, and seconds later she had it again on…
challenging you say?

The GB’s have just gotten more annoying, imo.
I don’t mind that they keep walking – that part does actually make sense. But the upscaling? It’s just silly.

The “challenge” of the fights is that the bounties have huge health pools, and scale up to the point where it’s actually faster to kill one with 4 people vs. 8 people. That just doesn’t add up to me – as opposed to lots of guildies jumping on that one last bounty to down it quickly before the timer ends, we have to have those that killed previous targets back off so that the people who didn’t have a chance to have a go at the other ones can down the last boss within the time limit, hopefully getting them their commendations (my guild doesn’t ultimately care about the “success” so much as helping members get their comms weekly).

In no universe should a boss take longer to down with more people. I’m not saying we should be able to swarm them, and just get one hit off, but at most it should take about an equal amount of time.

^^I think it would be a wise move to put the toughest bounties (toughest to both find/conquer) in the highest tier of bounties. Cut down the pool of possibilities in training & T1.
It’s nice that some of these bosses only need 5-10 to beat them but you still need at minimum 18ppl to pre-scout.
This doesn’t solve the issue of more than one guild drawing the same bounty or random people causing failure but it’s a step in the direction of giving small guilds a chance.
And communication with voice is not a guarantee. I would like for the dev’s to test out their bounties with some mid-level chars. Some without map completion. You know like guild makeup tends to be. You’re not always going to be made up of all lvl80’s all with map completion.
In their defense I am pretty sure this content can be fun, fail or succeed. The problem is that they have put commendations into the mix. Without the reward of ascended thrown in; this would be a more casual guild activity. As it is people are really serious about getting their 2 commendations per week and failure creates tension that wouldn’t be there in a testing session at Anet.

After failing Tier 2 bounties 5x this week (2mult 3x, Sotzz 3x)with around 40 people trying all kinds of different ways of doing it i can honestly say ANET devs are either clueless or incompetent or both.
This is not fun, not rewarding, scales horribly and is utterly dependant on numbers and/or luck. I would link to an article written by Colin called “Is it fun?” but that has been taken down from the ANET website as have the many principles this game was designed upon initially. They are being ignored for the sake of progression, time wasting and luck based elements even though the game has no sub and was supposed to be casual friendly.

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 dont know what is worst… the guild bounty in Tier3, or the developers not having a clue that a small guild with 10 guys, no matter how good they are, or how easy they comunicate will NEVER be able to do a Tier 3 bounty…

Even worst, for ANET a guild is a bunch of 100 people????
I can understand that a guild with 2-3 guys will not be able to do some of the content.
But should be ANY content ANY ANY ANY content that cant be done with a minimum of 10 guys.

You guys still remeber the Pillars that you used to build Guild Wars2??
Now this game is becoming a game for BIG guilds with people that dont know eachother , that are in a guild ONLY to be easy and have NUMBERS.
I could even say that in some parts of the game is for hardcore players ONLY, but if you look carefull, isnt for hardcore is for people that like to use exploits ……..

Dear developers… do a thing that could be fun… PLAY the game and 10 of you try to do a Guild bounty in Tier 3, and keep in mind that a guild with 10 players online , have 20 players at least, and in ANY game today is a more than acceptable guild size.

One last thing….
Are the developers aware of the meaning “challenge”, “hard” or “dificulty”?
I can say that dont mean, “only doable using exploits”, “skipping content and kill one boss” , “doable only by LOTS of players (no matter the skill)” or “can die in one shot without even realy why”.
And being bored will never replace challenge.
The need to be searching for ALL bosses before activate a guild bounty, isnt a challenge is BORING and i cant believe that is the way you planned the guild bounty’s.

I think for me the worst thing is feeling like I/we can’t even get to the challenge. If we find the bounty and can’t work out the tactics or don’t perform well enough and fail, that is one thing. When failure so often hinges on the fact you didn’t get a chance to try, either because someone else has tagged or killed the target or the target can’t be found in the time limit, it’s intensely frustrating and disappointing. I at least am not expecting or desiring to have a win every single time, but I don’t want to spend the whole season on the bench, either (if I may use a sports metaphor here.)

Changes to the time limits and the bounty spawns would help with this, or some kind of instancing system to prevent multiple guilds going for the same target and one or more losing out. Alternatively, a method of organising guilds to cooperate on targets rather than it being a mad dash to tag/kill as fast as possible.

I hope the devs are able to take on some of the constructive criticism and feedback that people are providing, rather than sticking their fingers in their ears and saying “LA LA LA it’s fine, just play better” to anyone who isn’t gushing praise. The responses thus far have not given me much hope, however.

Ioflux.4369:

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.

From what I have seen, larger guilds often complain about failing because a lack of coordination causes them to flood guild chat with irrelevant info, burying the important information like the nearest waypoint to the bounty.

Coordination wins this content. A sufficiently large group can make up for their disorganization, but 20 people who all know what they are supposed to do beforehand > 100 people who all just sort of show up with 4-5 who know what they are doing trying to direct them.

So we did another one and got Sotzz, can you guess what happened next? I bet you can. We had 15 people plus everyone in the map and nothing. One person did find him but he insta teleported. These are so badly designed it makes me cringe.

goldenwing.8473:

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 would actually say just don’t worry about stuff like this. You weren’t griefing and the guild could absolutely have tracked the bounty out of the location with the merchants/other players before activating the fight. Out of curiosity, did you notice if they won?

So we did another one and got Sotzz, can you guess what happened next? I bet you can. We had 15 people plus everyone in the map and nothing. One person did find him but he insta teleported. These are so badly designed it makes me cringe.

When you find him you need to tell your squads the location and start the fight immediately and just focus on staying alive until more people get there. It is completely doable.

Sotzz isn’t the toughest bounty on the list by a long shot.

I have taken part and watched bounties. They’re not hard as some of the people are saying. You know me I’ll throw something under a bus faster then a Final Destination movie. However, right now I see people not understanding the fights and just complaining. Common sense and patience wins the bounty fights. You can zerg them to a extent but you still need to be aware of mechanics. My suggestion would be watch some videos. A lot of them are out there showing how to properly do it with minimum people.

To the guys who had people quit because they felt it was too hard….Maybe those people are not meant for challenging mmo’s. And they are just casual players to begin with. Also the OP said something about dungeon masters. 5 people in a dungeon you can zerg is far different then 15 in a open environment. A whole bunch more can go wrong you have more hidden slackers. Or plainly people who don’t know what’s going on. So again I would say hit up a guide or you tube video. Because this isn’t hard it’s almost laughable once you get it down. Just keep trying at it, and you will be like how did I fail to this?

Silentstorm.7531:

You can zerg them to a extent but you still need to be aware of mechanics.

Please oh wise one, enlighten us as to the mechanics a small guild can use to find these NPC’s.