Guild Wars 2

Preface
I posted about this 7 months ago here. I’ve decided to bring it up again because there’s talk for a new expansion and I don’t want these problems to continue to be ignored. Many aspects of this post will be similar to my previous one, but I’ve striven to not make it just a simple copy paste, so I encourage you to read it all. Now without further ado:

The Problem with Guild Missions and Commendations

What are guild missions?

Guild missions are a set of activities designed to be completed as a small or large group. Completing these activities gives you 70-80s each, rare/yellow loot, and guild commendations. Banners and consumables don’t appear to be in the reward pool anymore.

Usage
Guild Commendations are used at several merchants. They can be used to buy special guild armor, weapons, miniatures, ascended accessories, and some random items from the Guild Trader. (Mostly scribing stuff) If you don’t want to click, it’s 1-3 comms for RNG gear boxes, guild banners, and guild siege. 5 For some guild back pieces, 4-7 for guild weapons, 14 for guild hall weapons, 13 for each guild armor piece, 10 for some insignias, 12 for ascended accessories, and 20-25 for status items like minis and tonics.

On average, you get 12-15 commendations a week, and that is quite a few commendations to get weekly. So what’s the problem? It sounds like there’s tons of rewards for doing missions! There’s two glaring problems with these rewards

1. You cannot buy HoT statted Ascended Accessories (And presumably won’t be able to buy the next expansion’s stat sets), Armor or weapons. Not even the crafted ones!
2. Crystalline Ore cost in addition to requiring commendations makes these items feel far more expensive than they have a right to be. Not only are you time gated, but you also have to farm Dragonstand for hours and hours. (40-150 ore depending on the items)

So, once again, let us look at
What’s wrong with Guild Missions:

• Little variety to missions, especially after 5 years. This is getting really old, Anet. And some days, you’ll have the same mission two or three times! (Looking at you, Blightwater)
• It takes a long time (2 weeks) to afford both accessories, especially when compared with the other methods. (Bitterfrost, Ember Bat, Doric, etc.)
• No HoT stats
• Once you get some ascended trinkets and a few skins that you want, you have absolutely no real motivation to complete guild missions. Sure, you get rares and ectos, but you could honestly just go to a map meta anywhere else and get the same without having to suffer through content you’ve done hundreds of times before. Rares and ectos are nice, but I don’t think they’re enough anymore.
• Bugs in receiving rewards. (Whether it’s receiving rewards early or not at all)

Why is this bad?

• This instigates a trend towards declining group content on a guild scale. (Especially PvE guilds)
• This shows that mindless farming is to be rewarded over organized (albeit easy) group content.
• Anet has not created new missions or encounters for guilds to do. It’s been 5 years. These have gotten stale. Being forced to do the same mission more than once a week just highlights this issue.
• Only 1 accessory can be bought per week IF your guild does every mission. Smaller guilds or guilds with mixed server origins may be forced to eliminate WvW missions from their pool. Others may be unable to complete some of the harder missions. Why shouldn’t those guild members turn away from guild missions if it’s going to be faster to just farm Bitterfrost?
• People who do guild missions will generally do them with only one guild. They have no reason to help out with other guilds they may otherwise rep from time to time.
• Bugs exist currently where players get their rewards early, or not at all. Sometimes talking to the NPC at the end of a race fixes it, but plenty of times, it does not. And there is no NPC at the end of Puzzles or Challenges.

So how do we fix (most of) this?

• Add items of value for guild commendations. Some suggestions:
  • More decorations/scribing rewards
  • Yet another currency exchange
  • T6 mat bags
  • Creating new items to purchase that don’t cost Crystalline ore. (Maybe a different map currency, or just no map currency?)
• Add new random drops from missions
  • Bring back banners and consumables.
  • Mystic Coins
  • Random Scribing mats or decorations (Like how Nightmare CM can give you shards of the ocean)
  • Chance at a guild weapon/armor recipe book to pick a recipe. Or to get a random recipe.
  • Guild weapon (Baseline, not the Guild Hall versions)
• Add HoT stats to the merchants. And make room for the next expansion’s stats as well!
• New missions or encounters.
• Bug Fix. Not really going to tell you how to do that one, because I’m sure it’s probably just a lack of reports going towards y’all.

Conclusion
Adding new drops, including HoT/New Expac stats, and creating new encounters are, in my opinion, the most important points to work on. I believe they are absolutely vital to keeping the guild mission gamemode alive.

I hope that Anet reads these suggestions and takes the state of guilds and guild missions into account when they release their next expansion. These are, by no means, perfect solutions, and I encourage more suggestions and discusion on how we can improve the game-mode as a whole. If you read this whole thing, thank you for your time.

Guild missions were my favorite part of the game – cool rewarding activities to do with my guildmates and friends.

It has now been 4 years and 2 months since they added the last guild mission to the game. When HOT launched, they even said they “looked forward to what the team was doing” in the new zones.

I really hope they haven’t let this important part of the game slip away .

And, as a reminder AGAIN -

https://youtu.be/W1WBYEfJVb4?t=336

Whatever is coming in the next expansion is probably already, more or less, set in stone.
Hopefully, for you, the Devs considered your suggestions back when they were first posted.

Good luck.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Whatever is coming in the next expansion is probably already, more or less, set in stone.

There’s nothing preventing them from doing Guild Missions revamp outside of an expansion.

Nope, but the OP’s post was about the upcoming expansion, if the second sentence was anything to go by.

So, sure, a few months after expansion/Living World Season Four…good to go!

We do guild missions each week and its always a lot of fun.

That being said, the crystalline ore for the new guild armor was a horrible design. No one in our guild has that armor even now due to that cost. I remember when we were all excited when we got them unlocked by leveling up the guild and seeing that cost, the unanimous disappointment, was a shame. Such a waste for something many of us looked forward to.

For the vendors not selling gear with HoT stats on them, I get that but I would like to see a better design to it. Maybe something along the lines of stats getting added as the guild levels or do something similar to them like the laurel vendor where they get added as you unlock them through the story or achievements.

I really hope you post gets looked at. I would love to see some attention be made to guild missions

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Nope, but the OP’s post was about the upcoming expansion, if the second sentence was anything to go by.

So, sure, a few months after expansion/Living World Season Four…good to go!

It was inspired by both the end of the season and by my previous post (Which was over 7 months ago). You’re correct that it’s probably a bit late, scheduling-wise, but I feel that showing Anet that the community still feels strongly about the sad state guild missions are in might get them to not abandon them further. If the next expansion releases even more meta-worthy trinket stats, and doesn’t release them for guild missions, I fear that missions will be even more desolate than they are right now.

Well, like I stated, perhaps the Devs saw your (and others’) suggestions back then, and have implemented them in upcoming releases, be they expansion or Living Story.

Good luck.

I agree with the original poster. People’s perception of guild missions has changed over time. The lack of new content and the lack of hot stats versus the easy manner in which you can farm living story maps for hot trinkets lead people to believe that this content is old and unrewarding.

I do hope they are adding new activities specifically designed for guilds, afterall, guild is the only reason I left to play this game.

I don’t mind the wait to get the commendations, but, yeah, we need new GMs and they really need to fix some of the bugs in the current ones (Yanoka, for example). Unfortunately, this seems to be just another feature that was created and abandoned like dungeons, environmental weapons, etc…

The problem with Guild Missions is that, just like a plethora of other cool elements of the game, they have been entirely forgotten by the development process.

Extra Credits called what ANet is doing “development by accretion”, a process in which, instead of developing an existing system further, fixing it up, expanding on it, you take the lessons learned from it and build a better, new, system, then add that on top. It’ll soft-replace the old one because it’s functionally superior, but you don’t need to keep working on the old one.

It has tons of downsides, but also a few upsides to make up for it. Though, in the case of Guild missions / halls / anything, there are actually no upsides because there are no successor-systems either (maybe raids would be one, actually).

But yeah, if Xpack2 brings no new GMs either, please just remove the system entirely ANet and add the items from the vendor to say, Karma vendors. Because frankly it just feels sad to see this dusty outdated guild missions system in the state it is in now.

The items bought with commendations do not have any consistency in their values.

Take Sigurlina Jonsdottir’s items. One can argue that a Divine Lucky Envelope, a Guild Catapult Blueprint or a Guild Siege Golem Blueprint may be worth one commendation. Maybe even a box of WvW supplies. But the other items? No way. They’ll have to be stacks of 5-25 of them to be worth that, depending on the item. And one of her fixed stock items should definitely be a Mystic Coin, since her stock has a daily purchase limit. That will encourage both doing guild missions and donating to the treasurer to get the Guild Vendor’s upgrades.

The cost of Kresh Defttalon’s minis is kind of Absurd. Will new expansions instroduce new minis? Then when will people have time to get them all, and the new stuff? Every week players can only get about 5-12 commendtions. A cost of 75 to get a mini is ridiculous. The high cost should be on the parts that are not time-gated. And they already cost a lot of gold. So something like 5, 7 and 15 commendations but 100, 150 and 250 crystal ore would make more sense. Keep people making guild missions sicne they can see the minis can be acquired reasonably, and keep them making dragon stand too to get all that crystalline ore.

The cost of weapon and armors and weapon and armor recipes is reasonable, but being soulbound is not. That forces players to remember to buy them with the character that will use them to equip or craft, and wastes support time when players make a mistake when they do not know this beforehand, and have to request a ticked to solve the problem. Soulbound items not beng usable in crafting recipes is also a huge problem. You buy one of them to use them with a character, then try to use them with another to craft, boom, have to contact support and waste their time again to solve the problem. Either soulbound items are usable by any character to craft (maybe with a warning in the crafting panel when one of the items is soulbound to another character), or crafting discipline progress is made account-wide altogether, or there’s an option to talk with a master and pay gold and materials to get the discipline fully trained with extra characters when one has already maxed it.

Stalwart Ben’s commendation trader’s prices are mostly ok, except the sentinel inscriptions and the accesorries. They should take at least half the amount of commendations, even if the price in gold is increased or another additional cost is added, like globs of ectoplasm for the accessories. so it doesn’t take too long to make use of them.