Guild Wars 2

We have come to a worrying conclusion after our painful encounters with the Bounty missions: it leads guilds to alienation through competition.

In the first couple of days since it was launched, people would ask on the /map channel “have you seen Bounty Bob recently?” and someone was sure to jump to answer right away. Lately it is quite the opposite: radio silence. People, members of a guild doing preparations (aka. pre-scouting) for their bounty can be seen stalking Bounty Bob and none of them will reply to the poor guy who’s desperately looking for him.

We believe that as they stand now, Guild Bounty missions do nothing to promote guild cooperation. If I am not terribly mistaken, the primary reason they were conceived and introduced in the game was to make guilds work together, like one big team/alliance.

What are your thoughts on this?

If two guilds activate a bounty at the same time, and if they have the bounty, as long as members from both guilds tag it, both will get credit.

In fact in CD, we have 5-6 guilds who activate the bounties right at the reset time, and we pretty much all help each other tag pretty much all the targets.

It’s great that at reset time there is cooperation, but there is cooperation because lots of guilds plan to activate pretty much simultaneously: reset time.

At any other time, if two guilds are looking for the same bounty, it’s very unlikely that they have planned to activate at the same time… thus whichever guild activates first ruins the scouting of the other guild (as they may not be ready to activate).

This is really bad. One of the best features of GW2 is the extremely friendly and helpful PvE population — other players are not your competitors, so everyone helps everyone out. The way these bounties work, other players become potential competitors .. so we see behavior such as mentioned in the OP.

I agree completely. PvE and WvW has the community working together whereas these bounties do not, even though they are supposedly meant to do so. I did one with another guild and in map chat we had other people from two other guilds essentially going the “too bad, so sad” or “sucks to be you, then” when we were asking for assistance on the location. It’s not an ideal situation for smaller guilds to fork over tons of influence or whatever to do these, especially if they aren’t able to complete them. You’d think the developers in charge of this content would think ahead to these situations and realize the world isn’t all rainbows and kittens. It’s basic human nature… If two or more guilds are after the same bounty, it’s more likely going to become a competition, not mutual cooperation.