Guild Wars 2

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 gold, rare/yellow loot, and guild commendations.

Guild commendations are used to buy the items listed here. 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, 10 for some insignias, 12 for ascended accessories, and 20-25 for status items like minis and tonics.

The Guild Trader (guild hall upgrade) allows you to buy 3 items a day. It sells a random ascended recipe, the crystal unique to your guild hall, a karma item, a random rotation of base decoration ingredients, and worthless bags of loot or minor sigils. That seems like a lot of variety, right? Wrong. The main use of guild commendations for the majority of players is buying accessories. Heart of Thorns stats and certain other special stat sets are not available for purchase from these merchants. Instead, you must obtain them through raids, Fractals, Ember Bay farming, and Bitterfrost farming.

So let’s look at

What’s wrong with guild missions:
• Little variety to missions
• A Maximum of 12-15 commendations may be obtained a week.
• It takes a long time (2 weeks) to afford both accessories, especially when compared with the other methods.
• No HoT stats
• As time goes one, fewer people will need to come to missions, because they have fully geared their characters and no longer need commendations. This means that fewer people will want missions and more people will be forced to or turn to mindless farming in Ember Bay/Bitterfrost. This is a natural decay that should be refilled by new players.

Why is this bad?
• This shows 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 4 years. These have gotten stale. Also, we had 3 bounties and 3 treks this week. What a lousy way to spend an hour. The system needs more customization at the very least.
• 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 do so?
• 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.

How do we fix (most of) this?
• Add items of value for guild commendations. (More decorations? Buffs? Yet another currency exchange? T6 mat bags? Leather/Wood/Mineral specific bags? Com to laurel exchange? How about those skins with guild insignias on them?) Creating new items to purchase should be priority number 1.
• Add HoT stats to the merchants, even if you have to place them in HoT only zones.
• New missions or encounters. That bullet-hell thing in Nightmare Fractal is really cool. Hint Hint.

These solutions will give people more reason to come to guild missions, and more reason to use commendations. My suggestions are only suggestions, and are not perfect solutions. There is certainly plenty of room for discussion on how exactly these problems should be fixed, but I think we can agree that adding items, encounters, and HoT stats are a good first step.

You think they could at least overhaul the loot, even if they can’t add new content / missions.

If you could get desirable materials and items people would bother coming along each week. You could even tilt the pricing towards the guild versions ever so slightly, so it would encourage people to show up.

At the moment the rewards are sorta crap in the current game.

Main problem with the fix is that once people have unlocked the stuff that they wanted you are right back at where you started.

I believe the main purpose of guild missions is to earn Favor for the guild. The favor is used to upgrade the guild hall. I belong to 2 guilds. One has completed the guild hall and rarely does missions. The other is level 25 and does every mission possible in order to get the guild hall built.

There are many other activities in GW where a lot more loot can me earned.

Only 12-15 each week… I remember the start when we got 3 each week.

Honestly the big problem is how like so so many systems, it was dumped into the game them promptly forgotten and never supported again.

As a result, we’re still running the same boring guild missions years down the line.

If at least each new zone would – as you would expect it to – bring new targets for Bounties, new spots for Treks, and every so often a challenge or puzzle, there’d be a real sense of evolution to this.

Khisanth.2948:

Main problem with the fix is that once people have unlocked the stuff that they wanted you are right back at where you started.

Yes. That situation is pretty unavoidable in the long term. I’m hoping that by adding more consumable purchases or late-game purchases that this effect is lessened. I am also hoping that the addition of more guild missions would help refresh the experience.

There seems to be no clear-cut solution, but leaving it as it is is stagnation.

If you are not playing WvW to have commendations rain all over you, you are doing it wrong.

With loot going across all your guilds, you can be running closed raid with guild X and still get a commendation because guild Y finishes a mission. This is part of why community guilds are great.

Since WvW is the only gamemode where the guild system is required to even compete and where it literally killed small guilds, I find it acceptable to see poor PvErs squirm for lost loot opportunities. Because its not like PvE give more loot otherwise or something.

Carighan.6758:

Honestly the big problem is how like so so many systems, it was dumped into the game them promptly forgotten and never supported again.

Exactly. They always add new things then forget that they exist.

If at least each new zone would – as you would expect it to – bring new targets for Bounties, new spots for Treks, and every so often a challenge or puzzle, there’d be a real sense of evolution to this.

The new zones require HoT and for some reason they don’t want HoT zones to have guild missions.

maddoctor.2738:

The new zones require HoT and for some reason they don’t want HoT zones to have guild missions.

Obviously because not everyone in every guild has HoT (shame on them) But still getting some new bounties/challenges there or even a new puzzle (since there are only 3) would be awesome.

Crescendo Forte.4821:

Guild commendations are used to buy the items listed here. 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, 10 for some insignias, 12 for ascended accessories, and 20-25 for status items like minis and tonics.

The Guild Trader (guild hall upgrade) allows you to buy 3 items a day. It sells a random ascended recipe, the crystal unique to your guild hall, a karma item, a random rotation of base decoration ingredients, and worthless bags of loot or minor sigils. That seems like a lot of variety, right? Wrong. The main use of guild commendations for the majority of players is buying accessories. Heart of Thorns stats and certain other special stat sets are not available for purchase from these merchants. Instead, you must obtain them through raids, Fractals, Ember Bay farming, and Bitterfrost farming.

In your listing as well as your link you forgot the guild armour and weapon recipes for the ornate guild armour and tenebrous/shimmering weapons as well as the necessity to buy the old guild weapons to upgrade them to the new ones. And the new minis that cost between 25 and 75 as well as scribing which uses commendations as well.

I personally thing there is more than enough use for commendations but people seem not to value those thinks like skins and minis enough. :/

So far I agree tho with all your points. There seems to be not enough incentive to keep on doing guild missions every week. I run guild missions in my guild (80-ish people) and if we’re a 5man group we’re a lot. Used to do them on my own. :/

maddoctor.2738:

Carighan.6758:

Honestly the big problem is how like so so many systems, it was dumped into the game them promptly forgotten and never supported again.

Exactly. They always add new things then forget that they exist.

If at least each new zone would – as you would expect it to – bring new targets for Bounties, new spots for Treks, and every so often a challenge or puzzle, there’d be a real sense of evolution to this.

The new zones require HoT and for some reason they don’t want HoT zones to have guild missions.

Would that matter though?

Quite a few of the guild missions are instanced, so they could make some new guild missions set in HoT instanced zones, containg HoT mobs and assets, that could only be accessed via the guild hall portal.

It would even be a way to advertise the expansion. Players without HoT could join guilds, and experience some HoT stuff in a controlled area. Then when they leave the instance it ports you back to the guild hall or the LA guild place.

Guild missions definitely need some attention. It has been 3+ years since we saw the last new pve guild mission added to the game. Personally, while completely new missions are needed, I would like to see them add all of the world bosses to both the guild mission system and the guild flag trigger (the item that only currently starts the TT, Tequatl and Karka Queen fights). In fact, I could see them adding pretty much any significant dynamic event chain anywhere in the game. And, as we’ve said many times, it would be the perfect way to bring back things like the Marionette, the Ancient Karka (abbreviated), Breachmaker, etc.

As for reward, I think it is far less important than new content in terms of getting people to keep doing missions, but one thing I would like to see them add to the reward system is guild hall decorations. It is really strange to me that the new fractal drops hall decorations (at the 100 challenge mote level) and guild missions do not.

exactly! this is a very important component of guild activity and has been forgotten for so long!

Bump.
Totally agree with you man, as an officer of a small guild it’s really frustrating to organize such content abandoned by Anet, WvW is a joke if you have members from multiple servers.. really Anet what the hell its been 4 years… revamp this already!
The only thing we got with HoT was losing all the stuff we had already (karma/exp/etc bonus) and a insane Guild hall grinding upgrades for small guilds…
The only purpose of GMs now is maybe socializing and helping new players in the game.. which can’t even enjoy the Guild hall to fullest if they are F2P.

Reposting myself from reddit:

Guild missions are a disaster. They should be one of the game’s most important aspects, for they are the only community-driven events with a real impact in the game (Aside from hardcore world bosses).

I fear the reason they don’t make more of them is that they can’t be experienced by everyone, but that has a simple solution: Merging them with other aspects of the game.

• Remove guild rushes and make them adventures. Now the guild mission is to complete an adventure X times in a limit of time, and you can play them whenever you want.
• Remove guild challenges and make them “advanced hero points”. I hate how simple hero points are, they could be much more than a “commune” or “kill a boss” event. Let players obtain hero points by completing them at bronze, and then ask guilds to get gold to complete their guild mission.
• Remove guild puzzles and make them minidungeons. Complete them normally for the guild mission.
• Remove guild bounties and replace them with a “worldwide hunt daily”, a new activity where players must accept a challenge from an officer, and hunt a series of bounties, kinda like the GW1 Zaishen missions and the Shining Blade bounty hunts of LW3 Current Events. Add many more bounties, and then for guild missions, ask for many more targets than normal, with a time limit. Focus more on the fights than in the hunts, too.
• Remove guild treks… And I don’t know. They’re a really bad guild mission. Might be fun at the beginning, but later it’s just “open wiki take waypoint”. Many of the locations are cool, and it’s good to have an incentive to discover them, but treks isn’kitten
• Hardcore world bosses could be integrated into guild missions, but first we need more hardcore world bosses. There’s only Tequatl and Triple Trouble, which isn’t enough in any way.

And of course, then come the rewards. I agree Mystic Coins could be nice, but I think the problem with those is much more bigger, and needs to be fixed globally.

We need new rewards too, and the ones introduced with HoT are absolutely absurd regarding prices. They also ask for crystalline ore and crafting at 450, to make things worse.

I think the quickest way to solve this is to allow using guild commendations to buy any type of ascended gear, like you can do at raids or Fractals of the Mist. This would let people gear outside of those two modes, and incentivize participation.

Also, split player rewards and guild rewards better. Give players a weekly cap of commendations (With a notification like Magnetite has), and let them earn their commendations in different ways. Don’t force people to complete all guild missions to get as most commendations as possible, and let people get commendations by participating at different points of the week, instead of making guild missions be a 100% attendance in the same day gathering. It’s good to play together, but this can leave players out. It wouldn’t hurt anyone if there was a guild mission about, I don’t know, completing a rush 30 times in a single week, and you could participate whenever you want. This is specially important for PvP missions, which are garbage since only 5 players can be doing it at the same time, and WvW missions, where time-limits don’t make any sense.

Been complaining about these problems since forever, and I’ve pretty much lost hope by now.

Why not just add Mystic Coins to Guild Missions?

Romo.3709:

Why not just add Mystic Coins to Guild Missions?

That would also be a short term solution

Khisanth.2948:

Romo.3709:

Why not just add Mystic Coins to Guild Missions?

That would also be a short term solution

Yea. But it’s also more incentive than “Letting the economy fix itself”. Resonating Slivers are now near worthless as it’s used for only 1 thing and 1 thing alone: Scribing.

Mystic coins on the other hand have multiple uses throughout the game. With very limited ways of getting these. And Anet themselves ask for HUGE quantities of those to make practically… anything.

Resonating Slivers on the other hand have very limited usage to a tiny portion of playerbase that actually took up Scribing. And quantities needed for any recipes are now very small compared to what they were at HoT release. Also getting them from multiple sources on top of that, lowers the need for them from Guild Missions and thus lowers the need for attending them as they really have no need for Commendations after doing the same things for years.

You can always turn the commendations into gold.

As a dedicated WvW player, I use Guild Commendations constantly, for purchasing Guild Siege blueprints (mainly catapults) and Guild Hero Banners. I was thrilled to see the merchant for these items (and the Ascended Accessories) added to our Guild Halls in a recent update.

Crescendo Forte.4821:

• As time goes one, fewer people will need to come to missions, because they have fully geared their characters and no longer need commendations. This means that fewer people will want missions and more people will be forced to or turn to mindless farming in Ember Bay/Bitterfrost. This is a natural decay that should be refilled by new players.

Totally agree that we need more missions (especially puzzles), but I need to disagree with this one point. Sorry to be nitpicky, but remember that, aside from commendations, players also get a bouncy chest which pretty much always includes at least one rare. So you’re getting a chance at ectos (if you salvage), a chance at mystic forging something, or between 20-50s per mission.
You don’t even need to successfully complete all the missions: Races, as soon as one person completes, everyone gets the chest; Trek, as soon as you personally complete it, you get the chest.

Part of the reason this discussion doesn’t really subsist on the forums is that there isn’t really a good subforum for it. The general subforum sees posts pushed off the front page almost as fast as they are made – especially when the community mostly agrees on a topic (as is the case with missions – most everyone agrees they need work).

It makes it hard to keep the conversation alive.