Guild Wars 2

Oreoz.2573:

Heijincks.9267:

Let’s see. 36500 influence is needed to get Art of War 5.

The conversion between gold and influence is exactly 20c/influence.

So in other words, to get 36,500 influence, it costs exactly 730,000 coppers which is 73 gold.

Let’s assume we have here a very small guild. 5 active members.

If each pays their equivalent share of work, that would be ~15g per person. That’s not a lot. 3 CoF path 1 runs already generates ~2 gold/person and only takes half an hour.

Personally, I’d pay that much for the content I will receive. In game speaking of course.

yeah I really can’t justify paying 15 of my hard earned gold to play a mission that’s probably gonna take 10 minutes and, given the sorry state of rewards in this game, will compensate you little to nothing at all.

Cheaper waypoint costs means nothing to the person who realizes a simple dungeon takes care of any and all WP costs for that day, and then some.

So 73 gold? Each guild participant best get an ascended piece of their choosing then. No? Then I’ll hold on to my money thanks.

Dropping in again to say that the reaction in my guild so far has been mixed until I pointed out you can buy Influence with coin. Then the attention turned to “so now we pool our gold…” which was better than the “well, we can wait it out I guess”.

Yeah, my guild’s a little crazy We just enjoy playing the game.

Oreoz.2573:

As enjoyable as the bounties may be, I forsee the rewards being hardly worth the effort. Better to invest influence in a track that will actually benefit you as a player and a guild instead of wasting 36k+ on, lets face it, a dynamic event.

Then why is this thread even here if the rewards aren’t worth it? See big guilds will be able to do something that doesn’t have any real rewards, good for them, why does anyone else care then?

maddoctor.2738:

Oreoz.2573:

As enjoyable as the bounties may be, I forsee the rewards being hardly worth the effort. Better to invest influence in a track that will actually benefit you as a player and a guild instead of wasting 36k+ on, lets face it, a dynamic event.

Then why is this thread even here if the rewards aren’t worth it? See big guilds will be able to do something that doesn’t have any real rewards, good for them, why does anyone else care then?

It’s again all about the Devs attitude towards casual play and the majority of players.

maddoctor.2738:

Oreoz.2573:

As enjoyable as the bounties may be, I forsee the rewards being hardly worth the effort. Better to invest influence in a track that will actually benefit you as a player and a guild instead of wasting 36k+ on, lets face it, a dynamic event.

Then why is this thread even here if the rewards aren’t worth it? See big guilds will be able to do something that doesn’t have any real rewards, good for them, why does anyone else care then?

Because some people actually play these games for the content, not chasing silly carrots.

I would love to be able to gain small bits of influence from lesser Guild Missions. Being able to open “dynamic events” that other people can join in on sounds fantastic, and a great way for my smaller guild to gain members. I don’t want the same events as the mega-guilds, but allow smaller ones to prosper as well, albeit slower, with smaller missions.

Being gated in at level 5 in what is probably the least used of all the tracks, especially for smaller guilds, well, just has a “funny smell” to it in my opinion. I won’t lose any sleep over it, but it will be something that sticks in the back of my mind for certain.

Wish I saw this before so I could have started AoW-5 a little sooner…takes 1 week to finish and 50,000 influence to speed up.

My biggest concern about guild missions, is the lack of information that we have about them. I’m sorry, but making a thread so we can voice our concerns after a blog post and 4 days before launch just shows the lack of information we get here from Anet.
Yes, say you don’t like giving information out because it might not be solid, but you’ve made a blog post (which gave very little information about it, just a lot of talking about what Anet plan to do) so i’m sure that they are set it stone by now. I mean even if we voice our opinion here and you decide, actually that’s much better then what we have at the moment, you wouldn’t even have the time to change it. But had you told us about this atleast 1-2 weeks ago when we knew guild missions was coming then any changes needing to be made would have been possible as well as have a better understanding of what is to come.

All I know about these missions is that there are 5 different types and you get them through unlocking them in the guild upgrades. I don’t have any information on how many different puzzles, events, there is, I don’t have any information about what the puzzles might include besides being a puzzle, all I know about guild rush is that some chickens was running through a cave on your video.

How about telling us actual information about it? Like how many members will we need? Are they actaully going to be a challange, or another zerg like 90% of the game currently is? Are we actually going to have to think and use our brains to over come these guild missions Or can we just pug 30 random people who have no idea what they’re doing and still finish the mission without breaking a sweat? Is there anything that only the guild can do or can every guild mission get hijacked by a random group of pugs waiting to leech off other guilds? What kind of “personal rewards” are we going to see, more crappy green items from a chest or are we going to see rewarding gear for what you call these difficult guild missions.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting tired of Anets lack of communication and information displayed in their communication. 50% of the blog post about guild missions are about Anets plan for the future, we get a a line or two about each of the different missions that provide very little information about the guild mission. We always have to wait until the patch goes live to actually find out information about the patch or to work it out for ourselves in game.

Snowy.9580:

Heijincks.9267:

Oreoz.2573:

Heijincks.9267:

TsukasaHiiragi.9730:

Not really because you are still essentially screwing over many guilds. So many other people who have responded notice the direct threat with this patch. Small guilds will not be able to do any of this content period -

Guild Missions will require large amounts of Influence
Large amount of players online at all times

The small guilds will never raise up enough influence, and they will not have enough players online/active to participate in the activities. This is gating many players, forcing them to join different guilds if they want to do these quests, and because of the rewards they will abandon the small/medium sized guilds practically instantly.

To be very blunt here, this up and coming patch is a dagger in the backs of many players – and needs to be stopped.

Let’s see. 36500 influence is needed to get Art of War 5.

The conversion between gold and influence is exactly 20c/influence.

So in other words, to get 36,500 influence, it costs exactly 730,000 coppers which is 73 gold.

Let’s assume we have here a very small guild. 5 active members.

If each pays their equivalent share of work, that would be ~15g per person. That’s not a lot. 3 CoF path 1 runs already generates ~2 gold/person and only takes half an hour.

Personally, I’d pay that much for the content I will receive. In game speaking of course.

yeah I really can’t justify paying 15 of my hard earned gold to play a mission that’s probably gonna take 10 minutes and, given the sorry state of rewards in this game, will compensate you little to nothing at all.

Cheaper waypoint costs means nothing to the person who realizes a simple dungeon takes care of any and all WP costs for that day, and then some.

So 73 gold? Each guild participant best get an ascended piece of their choosing then. No? Then I’ll hold on to my money thanks.

To get the tree started, 15g is a pretty good investment, so your opinion is as worthless as mine. However, if 15g isn’t spent on a guild expansion, it’d be spent on personal expansion (eg. new inventory space), or worse, wasted on items to be flushed down the Mystic Toilet.

Oh, and it’s permanent content, not 15g/run content. Personally, I’d put my money on things for keep. On the big scope of things, I’d say it’s a pretty kitten good investment.

If I had 15g I’d take a screenshot & frame it! The most I’ve had on me after training & waypoint hopping is 6g. Thats over x2 80s and 5 other alts, the lowest of which is level 50.
The loot drops suck (but thats another thread/post/story), dungeons are hatful “die & runs!”, so making cash is abit nasty atm.
And no I can’t afford to buy gems for gold, I’m married! = no cash!

6g over 8 characters? That’s painful. I did fotm yesterday and got 5 rares, 2 cores and 1 exotic. Ended up making atleast 75+ from trash loot after selling it all and salvaged the rares to get (what I think it was) 7 ecto’s. I don’t see why people moan about making money so much, I’ve got 230g (granted I sold a precursor for 200g) but even before that I’ve spent 40gish on extra character slots as well as buying T3 for my warrior which as you most likely know is 119g. So even withoutm selling a precursor I would have still made a total of 200g+ and no I don’t do this “playing the TP” stuff, I earn my money through what I enjoy, dungeons.
I’m not trying to show off or say loot is amazing in this game, I just wonder how people can have so little. Lvling up with my friends, I had a friend that never seemed to get over 3g and struggled to buy his books, but I had around 10g by the time I had to buy my last book. My advice to people that stuggle with money, pick up everything and sell it to the vendors, unless it sells for more on the TP, but I don’t even check TP unless it’s rare or higher.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Dropping in again to say that the reaction in my guild so far has been mixed until I pointed out you can buy Influence with coin. Then the attention turned to “so now we pool our gold…” which was better than the “well, we can wait it out I guess”.

Yeah, my guild’s a little crazy We just enjoy playing the game.

Yeah… that’s pretty much what happened with the core of my guild too… they all started pooling gold to buy influence.

As I’ve said multiple times… we have no problem dealing with the unique issues of being a small guild and it’s ability to generate influence. What we have a problem with is the way this content is to be introduced and the fact that there is a reward system attached to it that made some of our more peripheral members immediately announce they would be joining and repping a big guild so that they could start earning the new currency… since we wouldn’t have it available for at least 2 weeks.

Most of the large guilds they have contacted have already told them that 100% rep will be required… even ones that didn’t require it before this content was announced. Can they find one that won’t say “we cull our ranks and don’t allow leeching”? I dunno… but I honestly can’t really blame the big guild for wanting people to rep and earn influence to help activate this content…

And this is what the method of introduction and the attachment of an exclusionary reward system has created… the content hasn’t even dropped yet.

bluewanders.5297:

As I’ve said multiple times… we have no problem dealing with the unique issues of being a small guild and it’s ability to generate influence. What we have a problem with is the way this content is to be introduced and the fact that there is a reward system attached to it that made some of our more peripheral members immediately announce they would be joining and repping a big guild so that they could start earning the new currency… since we wouldn’t have it available for at least 2 weeks.

Most of the large guilds they have contacted have already told them that 100% rep will be required… even ones that didn’t require it before this content was announced. Can they find one that won’t say “we cull our ranks and don’t allow leeching”? I dunno… but I honestly can’t really blame the big guild for wanting people to rep and earn influence to help activate this content…

And this is what the method of introduction and the attachment of an exclusionary reward system has created… the content hasn’t even dropped yet.

I really wish we knew more about the content and this “new currency”. Is it a currency, or is it like flags that get triggered that unlock content? “Oh, you finished a Guild Bounty! Now we can offer you a different activity since you proved you have some skill.”

Also, the exclusiveness was, unfortunately, long going on. Most advertising guilds I saw even before November wanted 100% representation. And any guild advertising active WvW want teamspeak AND 100% rep.

(I want to note, I have issues running TS/Vent alongside GW2. As in, it doesn’t work so well.)

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

bluewanders.5297:

As I’ve said multiple times… we have no problem dealing with the unique issues of being a small guild and it’s ability to generate influence. What we have a problem with is the way this content is to be introduced and the fact that there is a reward system attached to it that made some of our more peripheral members immediately announce they would be joining and repping a big guild so that they could start earning the new currency… since we wouldn’t have it available for at least 2 weeks.

Most of the large guilds they have contacted have already told them that 100% rep will be required… even ones that didn’t require it before this content was announced. Can they find one that won’t say “we cull our ranks and don’t allow leeching”? I dunno… but I honestly can’t really blame the big guild for wanting people to rep and earn influence to help activate this content…

And this is what the method of introduction and the attachment of an exclusionary reward system has created… the content hasn’t even dropped yet.

I really wish we knew more about the content and this “new currency”. Is it a currency, or is it like flags that get triggered that unlock content? “Oh, you finished a Guild Bounty! Now we can offer you a different activity since you proved you have some skill.”

Also, the exclusiveness was, unfortunately, long going on. Most advertising guilds I saw even before November wanted 100% representation. And any guild advertising active WvW want teamspeak AND 100% rep.

(I want to note, I have issues running TS/Vent alongside GW2. As in, it doesn’t work so well.)

Right… everyone who says a small guild can just rep a big guild is counting on you finding that 1 big guild out of 50 that allows you to member up but not rep full time.

We don’t know what the currency is… but we do know that there are new bonus upgrades to be activated within the guild tech and that they have said players will be able to trade it in for unique items and such.

I am not in any particular hurry… but many gamers have a fear of being left behind that gear treadmill games of the past have pounded into them. “If you don’t get in on this now… you’ll be behind the curve and spending all your free time trying to catch up instead of doing what you want.”

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Some small guilds haven’t been around long, or are broken off from larger guilds. Some just don’t do events together and are guilds in the sense of “we are friends who hang out and /guild chatter”. Some just didn’t see a point to Art of War so they left it untapped.

(Note, all except the first describes my guild most of the time :P )

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

It’s . . . apparently . . . not a matter of “can’t”, it’s a matter of “we really really don’t want to HAVE to”.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

Or…

make smaller guild missions for small guilds as well as large for larger guilds, with appropriate rewards for each case. Gate them in a lower tier, where as large guild can get right to a higher tier in a guild track without much, if any difficulty . Folks love to throw the word “progression” around in MMOs these days…

well, there ya go!

Why does it have to be “Oh, no, little pony, you gotta be THIS TALL to get on this ride!”

Why not make it so that it costs absolutely nothing to do the initial Guild Missions, and doing the initial Guild Missions awards guild influence >and< unlocks more Guild Missions, which in turn awards more guild influence and unlocks >even more< Guild Missions and so on and so forth? You know, like how when you make a new character you do those first few missions, and by doing those missions you earn experience and some coin and maybe some better gear to help you with the – oh my! – more difficult missions that come along as you progress.

Why not do it that way?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

Just to toss some numbers at the issue. You get 2 influence for completing an event solo and 20 for a guild group of 2+. IF you run a guild group at all times you need to do 25 events a day to hit 30k(15k*2) in 2 months, that’s basically 4 hours a day(~10 mins an event) of doing events. For a solo person its 125 events a day or 20 hours of grinding events, that sounds fun! Dungeons are probably the fastest though. The solo player would need to do 25 runs a day and at 20 mins a run it’s only 8 hours of grinding. For a guild group of 2+ its 5 runs per day or around 1hr 40 mins.

So you ask how guilds don’t have things maxed out? Well I’d probably assume they don’t spend 2 hours everyday farming dungeons or 3-4 hours farming events together. I certainly don’t think most players are farming 20 hours of events solo or 8 hours of dungeon running. You see the thing about being in a smaller guild is that there are less people to do things with and that translates to a lot less influence.

It gets worse though because people do things that don’t reward influence. My buddy likes to do small skirmishing in WvW and that usually doesn’t rack up events. Others might do gathering. I’m pretty sure fractals don’t reward influence either(anyone checked it?).

Finally, you ask how people havn’t maxed things out. Well even if you’re earning 15k every 2 months solo, that only gets you level 4 in any branch. It’s another 2 months and 20 days just to get level 5. That’s of course assuming you don’t unlock anything else, which you will. So if you have 4 people in a small guild all earning 15k per 2 months that’s still 4 months 20 days to get level 5 in each branch with nothing else. Considering the game is 6 months old it’s easy to see why small guilds aren’t maxed out. 15k every 2 months per person is HUGE over-estimate of what the average person will earn so even in 8 months+ most small guilds won’t be maxed out.

If the speculation from the smaller guilds is correct, there is no questions this will completely destroy them. They will lose a majority of the their players to the large and super guilds. (which may be a reason why so many people in large guilds want this update.) And for the people in larger guilds that cannot see the problems, because for them the problem does not exist. imho must have blinders on. It may not be anets intent for this to happen, but it certainly will. As it is already starting. Just watch map chat on several servers. It seems the smaller guilds are calling for equality to be able to gain items for their guilds. As was mentioned, do the smaller guilds put in less time? or do less in game? But in the end, anet owns the game and we have to play by their rules. If this is the type of content to be added, it will be a sad day for the smaller guilds. End the end, it will come down to, be part of a large or super guild or you will not get to enjoy new content to its fullest. There is no question people in guilds that are 1-15 players that will not join large guilds will cease to play. I’m from a mid size guild of 130 so my comments are not coming from said small guilds. Just I can clearly see their point.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

Yeah you are kinda missing the point a little. The “Bounty” Mission which is PvE content, is locked away in tier 5 of Art of War. Art of War is ALL WvW. If your guild doesn’t do any WvW, there has never been any reason to unlock it. A small guild then needs tens of thousands of Influence to first unlock stuff it will never use to get to something it wants to use. You have to wait weeks to get it. The devs are also sending a very clear message(Intentionally or ignorantly; for the sake of argument I will go with the latter and cut them some slack) that WvW guilds or multi-faceted guilds that dabble in all areas of the game are going to get a significant advantage for doing guild missions solely based on the fact that they like WvW and unlocked Art of War. Make sense now?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

While you splitting your time running events with your 400-man guild, you 5-man guild isn’t progressing at all. You realize that right? So if your goal was to build up your small guild over time until it had the influence to open the events that the larger guild has, you aren’t going to do it.

That’s the point. Yes, you can (theoretically) join a larger guild for their guild-based content, but that is going to do SFA for your little group. And I say theoretically because I expect those larger guilds are going to crack down on membership and force representation all the time. You won’t even be allowed to moonlight with your smaller guild. That’s what’s going to kill those little groups.

As for paying 75ish gold to unlock the PvP track — kitten that. That’s the biggest and most egregious money sink ever, if you don’t kittening PvP! I would say it was fair if it went into something that everyone would find useful like Architecture. Show me a single guild that couldn’t use more storage space. It has nothing to do with PvP or PvE, therefore excludes no one based on the game they play. If they really wanted to be fair and NOT interfere with how a guild chooses to improve itself, the gate would be based on nothing more than total influence earned. It should have nothing to do with the way it’s spent because it’s nothing but an arbitrary gating mechanism to start with. The unlock requirement should be just as arbitrary.

What we have now is a reward catered to PvPers but presented to the whole community, ostensibly because PvP otherwise sucks and ANet needs some way to shoehorn more people into it, whether they want it or not. Might even work too since who wants to be reminded of all that wasted money or effort in unlocking a tree that they never use. The fact is (and it is a FACT), that far more people are interested in PvE than PvP and ANet knows this, proves this is an attempt by them to push players into PvP by forcing them to invest HEAVILY into a PvP only reward track.

Bloody social engineers. There is no corner of hell hot enough…

tic.7425:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

Or…

make smaller guild missions for small guilds as well as large for larger guilds, with appropriate rewards for each case. Gate them in a lower tier, where as large guild can get right to a higher tier in a guild track without much, if any difficulty . Folks love to throw the word “progression” around in MMOs these days…

well, there ya go!

Yeah, there used to be this little thing called scaling that GW2 was known for. I guess that got left on the design floor sometime post-launch. At least it doesn’t appear to have made it into the design discussions for guild events.

Small guilds need to stop complaining. If you decided to start a guild in the last month, which is late in the game, then thats yur fault and its not a smart move considering how difficult it is to grow when so many big guilds are out there. One thing that is currently not understood by all the community is that guild missions and unlocking them is intended to take months. Im quoting Colin on that one too. Its a new type of progression system. Bounty is the first one, obviously. It gives you a reason to gain influence, and spend it. It brings more purpose. If you don’t like progression systems then you probably shouldnt be playing an mmo.

Blacklight.2871:

What we have now is a reward catered to PvPers but presented to the whole community, ostensibly because PvP otherwise sucks and ANet needs some way to shoehorn more people into it, whether they want it or not. Might even work too since who wants to be reminded of all that wasted money or effort in unlocking a tree that they never use. The fact is (and it is a FACT), that far more people are interested in PvE than PvP and ANet knows this, proves this is an attempt by them to push players into PvP by forcing them to invest HEAVILY into a PvP only reward track.

Bloody social engineers. There is no corner of hell hot enough…

To this I will add that for a WvW focused guild… this type of content is absolutely of low interest since as the dev them self clearly stated this is a PvE content… so WvW guild that has easy access to this content shold go and do PvE content and have PvE reward (in WvW waypont cost 0 … ) that they will probably find useless… while PvE guild that are obviously interested in this content have to invest in something that is otherwise useless for them…

well… I don’t know if calling this the strangest marketing strategy I’ve ever seen is better than giving it a more apropriate name that will certanly bring me a warning from the moderation staff ^^’

Skylightmoon.1079:

One thing that is currently not understood by all the community is that guild missions and unlocking them is intended to take months.

except that a WvW focus guild (like the one I’m into…) already has all the requirement and the abundance of packed influence to start the new upgrade as soon as the patch go live (thing that we’r not sure that we will be doing since it will be locking up one of our research slot for something that I’m not sure will be of our interest instead of researching more usefull buff and siege weapon…)… while a normal PvE guild (that will have use and interest for this content) will have to spend the above mentioned month in reserching something that is absolutely of no use for them… in order to acquire the access to a content that will make no use of the research that are required to unlock it ^^

rizzo.1079:

Medazolam.3058:

rizzo.1079:

I’m concerned that our guild has been hard gated out of building this new content ourselves. At our current rate of influence gain, without mass recruiting people which we will not do, we’re looking at 60+ days of influence gathering plus build time to get AoW to lv 5. Please reconsider introducing missions that smaller tier guilds can initiate, possibly starting around 1k influence to build. With that floor, even single person guilds can amass enough influence in a week or two of casual playing to at least initiate one mission.

Why dont you just buy influence with gold?

To some of us, 78g is quite a bit. Running dungeons and farming mats are both unfun, as well as TP flipping…as I said in the previous thread, if I wanted another job I’d get one, video games are supposed to be fun.

Same here. We are 12-20 people in the guild, which is not the smallest guild out there. But the news of having to have Tech Lvl 5 in any given tree for the first stuff of guild missions killed any excitement for the coming update. Nobody will now care enough to spend money on guild influence. Noone in our guild owns enough gold to even consider buying influence at this level. For us this update failed.

We are pve centric either. I don’t think Bounties will ever make it for our not that small guild. Like Rizzo told here, we don’t farm(work), we play. And this won’t change due to strange update features of the game.

Bad move, ArenaNet. I am sorry to see this happen.

Skylightmoon.1079:

Small guilds need to stop complaining. If you decided to start a guild in the last month, which is late in the game, then thats yur fault and its not a smart move considering how difficult it is to grow when so many big guilds are out there.

There ya go… !

no more new and upcoming guilds, why bother? its too difficult and not a smart move. Thats just brilliant!

Instead of making your MMO accessible to new guilds that would like to grow, lets make it even more difficult.

/facepalm

Skylightmoon.1079

Small guilds need to stop complaining. If you decided to start a guild in the last month, which is late in the game, then thats yur fault and its not a smart move considering how difficult it is to grow when so many big guilds are out there. One thing that is currently
———————————————————————-

I would venture to say it is the small guilds that were created at launch who are the most upset. just because black dogs bark doesn’t mean all barking dogs are black. They are more upset that the content appears to be catered to the large guilds. And feel left out on enjoying the content as a large guild would. Having played gw1 for 7 years, I am used anets shenanigans. Learn to live with it and move on. It doesn’t make their argument less valid though.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

In the end, our goal for all of this content is to give guilds new goals and challenges to accomplished once they have researched deeply into each line, as well as require guilds to have researched multiple lines to unlock some upgrades. We expect guild members to have to work together as a guild to earn the influence needed to unlock these new missions, as well as overcome the challenge of the missions themselves.

In the future, we plan to continue to add more guild upgrades, as well as continue to add challenging guild missions, as we don’t want guilds to run out of goals and accomplishments they can achieve.

~Izzy @-’—-

You show with this, you only care for large guilds. We have 12-20 people playing casually, doing RP, having fun exploring the world and even a dungeon every now an then. For people like us, your system ist discouraging. Though we were eager to see the guild missions/content before, we now are on the brink to ignore it alltogether.

It wouldn’t have hurt anyone to add first further guild content at around lvl 2 progressing in size and level up with the guilds. Especially in the PvP tree. You won’t get more people playing PvP/WvW by forcing them to put influence in that tree.

Sad to see this update. Really.

Vorch.2985:

bluewanders.5297:

Vorch.2985:

You want content that can be done by a guild of 5 people or less?

Please see the rest of PvE.

That is a very good point Vorch… the whole rest of the PvE. So what we should be suggesting in this thread is that larger guilds disband and fracture into smaller guilds… rather than suggesting small guilds disband to be absorbed by larger ones.

Or since there is no content for big guilds… they can just rep a small guild when they want to do small guild content.

After all… what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

This way the devs can concentrate on the same sorts of content they have already been producing… only make it more interesting and complex with greater depth… instead of scaling things up to create content that the typical in-game group cannot complete.

/satire

You don’t need to disband to join larger guilds…just represent during the guild missions.

However, that would kill the guild pride that the small group has, I guess.

There are plenty of solutions. What it appears small guilds want are solutions that:

• Do not require them to play with any other people/guild outside their group
• Do not require them to change their current playstyle
• Do not require them to use influence on anything they haven’t used influence on already
• Cause them not to be able to participate in content on DAY ONE.

That, I just don’t understand. That is, I know the reasons why small guilds are upset, but those reasons just don’t seem to be very upsetting.

People should be able to play the way they want to play and enjoy the game, hence why arenanet is releasing the choose your own dailies thing. People should be able to enjoy the guild missions in smaller guilds.

Its fine if we cant play the guild missions content on day one, but guilds shouldnt have to get their art of war up to level 5,especially when a good number of pve guilds havent invested in that tech tree cause it has been pvp oriented until now. I think the for guild bounties the art of war level requirement should be lowered. IMHO, I think art of war level 3 is probobly the best fit,through i would be happy even if they only lowered it to level 4.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I must be missing something in this discussion. how do 5 man guilds not have all the research done at this point? I joined a guild 2 months ago and have contributed 15,000 influence to my guild in that time. Even if you have a 5-man guild, if you formed near the start of the game you should have earned around 200,000 influence by now assuming you haven’t spent a single gold to buy any extra.

Also why can’t these small guilds join a bigger guild and do the events as a 5 man group within the big guild while they work up the research in their small guild? I mean that is the entire point of being able to join 4 guilds at once isn’t it? I’m in a smaller guild but i’m also in a 400 man guild and we have 300,000 influence just sitting in the bank. Just run with your friends in a larger guild and earn the rewards there until you can finish the research in your small guild.

Our day 1, 4 person guild has full bank slots but is otherwise not very far on the trees. We play normally, not to gain influence. Our progress is very much limited by the rate at which we earn influence. We generally have been ping ponging between explorables and leveling alts, optimizing to run the hard 5-player content with 4.

So we’re not earning influence at nearly the rate you are.

tic.7425:

Skylightmoon.1079:

Small guilds need to stop complaining. If you decided to start a guild in the last month, which is late in the game, then thats yur fault and its not a smart move considering how difficult it is to grow when so many big guilds are out there.

There ya go… !

no more new and upcoming guilds, why bother? its too difficult and not a smart move. Thats just brilliant!

Instead of making your MMO accessible to new guilds that would like to grow, lets make it even more difficult.

/facepalm

The thing is, it also effects long term casual guilds not just small guilds in general. My guild for instance, It was created back in closed beta and thrived at launch gaining about 150 members and our influence grew fast too, since we was a primarily a PvE based guild and a democratic guild, we voted on the guild upgrades and surprise, almost all of the beneficial PvE upgrades was finished first, we didn’t bother going for some rank 5s such as Politics since there wasn’t anything in that tree yet. But we finished everything possible except Art of War, until we started to get some WvW members, and knocked that of to rank 4 – however in the meantime, we was losing members rather rapidly – far faster than we could recruit.

Come Lost Shores//Wintersday events, we had literally went down to maybe 15/150 signing on regularly – and some guilds had completely died at that point. And these days, we struggle to get 10 people online and thats counting the people who are not repping since our guild never required it because it was a casual PvE based guild, so after all the struggles building up our guild, trying to make it survive – this patch will most likely kill the guild. This is one of the reasons why I totally oppose this patch and many others feel the same way – and as for rewards, no one really knows the extent of them yet…for all we know, they could be ascended armor rewards with new currency…boy that would really cause a crapstorm then lol….

Also you have to understand, people don’t want to rep other guilds just to do content – they want to do content with their guild. They want their guild to reap the rewards of finishing this content. Basically, bluntly put – this content was rushed, and not all bases (the consumers) was covered – this content was aimed at select groups and guilds, most likely to keep them occupied until more content could be rushed, at the expense of the majority of the rest of the players. I even started a peti.tion to try to stop this (yes, certain words are probably flagged so they can be checked by mods..most likely how infractions are handed out) but then I realized something, looking at anets track record from both gw1 and gw2 – this patch will be go live regardless on the 26th no matter what – so my drive to attempt to stop the patch pretty much stopped and more of a mourning process set in and pretty much gave up trying to save this game, since then I’ve barely logged in at all – and like many others, will probably bow out completely on the 26th. Obviously, the developers have no clue – or are just plain arrogant and are unwilling to compromise.

At the moment, in some ways I feel bad for anet – on one hand they have all this backlash with the Feb 26th patch, and on the other hand a growing storm about condition damage – not good for the company, not good for the developers and certainly not good for the game.

A more logical step in Guild Missions would be how other games approach this method.

1) Kill 100 Skritt in Iron Marches
or
2) Kill x Boss in x Dungeon
or
3) Kill x amount of mobs
or
4) Kill x amount of mobs + players

And have a slowing evolving difficulty + rewards as you unlock higher ranks

Well… any Kill X amount of X creature wouldn’t be accepted here either because people will then say it’s grindy.

I think they could try making guild missions available at Level 2-3 of all branches, so whether you invest in Art of War, Politics, Economy or anything else, you’ll be able to get started on guild missions. That might mean they’ll need to add more guild mission content to smooth the reward progression.

But if it’s super easy to get levels 2-3 or they intended the effort put into getting the first mission be something of level 5, then they should make it so it’s level 5 of Art of War, or Politics, or Economy or whatever other branch there is.

Either way, any sort of reward system and progression in guilds will destroy weak tiny guilds that have no guild pride to start with, and it’ll strengthen tightly bonded guilds and give them more things to do. Large guilds are going to finish it faster, but that’s not something you can get around (More people = more hands = more workforce = things get done faster. That can’t be changed really…)

Seems to me, if it really needs to be based on the “Art of War” track, the missions could be seeded at all levels of the track; i.e…. make Guild Bounty require Art of War, level I, then the next type of guild mission require level II, etc, versus requiring a guild who may not even be interested in WvW to gain the maximum level, before they can even begin to do these mission as a guild activity.

I’m almost scared to find out what the requirement is going to be for guild halls (something already officially discussed is coming).. a precursor? a full legendary? Maybe a certain amount of people in the guild? All the trees maxed? Yeah.. I’m not feeling it either.

Add my name to the list of people who think PvE guild missions have no place in the Art of War track. More than that, requiring level 5 of any track excludes so many guilds that it just seems like a really bad idea.

Why not move the first guild missions to politics III? It seems a better fit, and it’s more likely the small and medium guilds can get their in a reasonable amount of time which means new guilds will still be able to use these missions to recruit people.

Well, from a technical standpoint, Just looking at the names of each tree Art of War is actually a fairly logical place to put something like a bounty hunt, at least it makes far more sense than Architecture, Politics, or Economy.

Placing it at tier 5 however is Godzilla facepalm worthy.

They could easily have started it at tier 2 with basic Hunts and put larger more rewarding hunts in higher tiers. All they needed to do was throw us small guildies a bone to gnaw on while we worked on the larger content they wanted to bring us (and really, no ones upset about new, big content.)

Consider, if they had placed a tier of bounty hunting in each tier of AoW we wouldn’t be having this discussion, and things would work like this.

Small guild starts into AoW to unlock first bounty hunt, big guild with AoW5 already starts unlocking T5 bounty hunt.
Big guild starts a t5 bounty hunt. Small guild “Hey, lets join in and see whats up while ours researches”
Bounty hunt finishes. Small guild says “wow, that was humongous wondrous, I can’t wait to get to tier 5 stuff, and hey, participating earned us some Influence towards our own!”
Small guild does their T1 stuff, and while it’s not as cool as the T5 they’re still excited because it’s a first step.

But no, everything is locked behind T5, so reality is going to work more like this.

Small guild out grinding influence towards AoW. Big guild starts bounty hunt in the zone they’re in.
Small guild says “Great, the [Censored]‘s are going to clutter up the zone with their crap, rubbing our faces in the content we can’t access”
Big guild comes on map chat telling people to gather for the bounty hunt
Small guild reacts “Why the hell should we drop everything to help them do content and earn rewards we don’t have access to??”

That sounds horrible I know. I myself have no problem helping someone else work towards something, and I have to say this is one of the best communities I’ve ever been part of. But being expected to help someone else earn rewards I don’t have access to at all is more than a little insulting.

Yes yes, Every guild can access it, hurp de kitten
/facepalm
That is only true via technicality. Meaning every guild can access it….eventually
New content should never, ever, ever, have eventually attached to the entire thing. (there are rare exceptions to this)

Now, to be completely clear, they could still have put 80% of this content beyond T5, but it would have been so freaking simple to start it off lower, just thrown us a bone with some basic stuff, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

This is going to sound mean, but I’m not going to sugar coat it.
Idiots.

Borikitty.1302:

I’m almost scared to find out what the requirement is going to be for guild halls (something already officially discussed is coming).. a precursor? a full legendary? Maybe a certain amount of people in the guild? All the trees maxed? Yeah.. I’m not feeling it either.

Architecture 5. Or higher if they add another rank.

What, that’s the logical place they’d put it. And I can even guess the logic which led them to put Bounty in Art of War. (Note, making a new tree probably would have gone over much better.)

“So, we need to attach this to an existing tree, but Politics doesn’t quite make sense. We can’t stick it in Economy, what does that have to do with hunting down things . . . wait, we have this whole tree about battling! There, it wrote itself!”

Guild Hall will need tier 8, which will take a year to research taking up 2 research slots

Flamenco.3894:

Guild Hall will need tier 8, which will take a year to research taking up 2 research slots

Well then they could release it now and the Halls would be ready to choose from when the research is done. Someone find this person a spot working at ArenaNet!

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Flamenco.3894:

Guild Hall will need tier 8, which will take a year to research taking up 2 research slots

Well then they could release it now and the Halls would be ready to choose from when the research is done. Someone find this person a spot working at ArenaNet!

The small and casual guilds will take years just to reach Rank 8 at the current turn-over rate of Influence. So again, gated content at its finest. Someone mentioned a godzilla facepalm – honestly, it is will deserved now.

Most of your influence is gained via dungeons. So non dungeon diving guilds have a lot of trouble with the influence reqs. Even a small guild can generate a ton of influence if everyone is in dungeons together.

TsukasaHiiragi.9730:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Flamenco.3894:

Guild Hall will need tier 8, which will take a year to research taking up 2 research slots

Well then they could release it now and the Halls would be ready to choose from when the research is done. Someone find this person a spot working at ArenaNet!

The small and casual guilds will take years just to reach Rank 8 at the current turn-over rate of Influence. So again, gated content at its finest. Someone mentioned a godzilla facepalm – honestly, it is will deserved now.

Also add in a “sarcasm fail”. Since I apparently did. Oops.

SteepledHat.1345:

Most of your influence is gained via dungeons. So non dungeon diving guilds have a lot of trouble with the influence reqs. Even a small guild can generate a ton of influence if everyone is in dungeons together.

A full guild group gets 100 Influence for a dungeon. A guild group running a chain of three events . . . say, the Cathedral of Silence run, successfully will earn 20 Influence per event, and if you start from the first part of that line you can rack up 100 Influence easily. Or storming the gates of Arah will yield 80 Influence unless I’m missing my count.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

SteepledHat.1345:

Most of your influence is gained via dungeons. So non dungeon diving guilds have a lot of trouble with the influence reqs. Even a small guild can generate a ton of influence if everyone is in dungeons together.

A full guild group gets 100 Influence for a dungeon. A guild group running a chain of three events . . . say, the Cathedral of Silence run, successfully will earn 20 Influence per event, and if you start from the first part of that line you can rack up 100 Influence easily. Or storming the gates of Arah will yield 80 Influence unless I’m missing my count.

Okay, so you do the Cathedral run…then what? The problem with dynamic events is the downtime. The full chain of grenth also takes longer than 20 minutes that an AC normal run might take or the 10 min speed runs of AC/CoF. It is the down time and time to complete that makes dynamic events worse for influence farming.

What is the point of gating this content with gold/time barriers? We don’t pay a sub for the game, so I don’t see a reason that you would need us to spend a week plus to level AoW to 5 by saving influence or spending gold. What are going to be the reqs for other guild missions?

Overall, it seems pointless to have these gates.

At least make a tier 6 gate. We already have tier 5 researched and not having to research a new tier for this content just puts us off playing it. It feels unworthy of having our time spent on.

Ok im a casualish player. I have a hectic work and social schedule that means im not sure when ill be player and when i wont.

Theres a few things I understand about my position within guild wars 2.

- I wont be getting a legendary any time soon
- I wont be the richest player or will be able to afford every piece of gear, shiny or treat i see in the game
- I will have to spend real money in order to buy bank/chars and anything else i see in the cash store i like the look of (quaggan backpack)

What im saying is i know my style of gameplay means i am limited in scope to what i can achieve within a MMO. I have accepted this. Its not a big deal as it means I can still have fun at my own pace and the game never feels like a chore or a job. I actually love that guild wars 2 allows me to play all content, because high tier raids, arenas and tournaments would also be on my list if i were still playing other MMOs.

Now, in my opinion small guilds will have to take a page out of my book. Your a small casual guild, you took the sacrifice in quantity to keep player, friendship or role player quality. You dont have to put up with morons or people you dont like in the game just because they are active more than others you like. Unfortunately a sad fact of life and anything in it is you just cant have it all.

But wait! gw2 has another option, you guys can join multiple guilds so if really want to be part of a high tier guild mission then you could all join a larger guild and play the missions together anyway. Ok so it wont buff your own guild reputation (which is something that i cant really see small and casual guilds caring about) but at least you got to have fun and do some content that wasn’t designed (unlike anything else in the current game) for 5 man guilds.

Overall, id say this entire argument is ridiculous.

Parlourmeatflex pretty much provided a strong argument for Anet and I whole-heartedly and with entire backbone support, endores and agree with him

My main concern is that it’s in a branch that is utterly useless to most PvE focused guilds.

Those that honestly could care less about PvP/WvW. If they want to truly improve the guild system then they should think about why the heck a “Guild Mission” done in the Open world requires AoW a PvP centered tree to begin with.

They should honestly have just created a new PvE tree if their main concern was flushing out the Guild System instead of coming up with a half baked solution.

Flamenco.3894:

Parlourmeatflex pretty much provided a strong argument for Anet and I whole-heartedly and with entire backbone support, endores and agree with him

Thank you very much good sir, im glad to see another person who doesnt jump off a cliff backyards at every decision a game company makes about development.

Flamenco.3894:

Parlourmeatflex pretty much provided a strong argument for Anet and I whole-heartedly and with entire backbone support, endores and agree with him

Not really, the exact reverse is also true. Why should guild members be forced into repping with other guilds to complete content, their primary guild will not receive any benefits from? Along time ago, the aspect of being able to be in multiple guilds at once was a major cause of concern – and now we are seeing one of the major reasons why.

The idea of being able to join multiple guilds sounds really good on paper, but the implementation of the idea isn’t – I think what would have been better for the game in general would have been to scrap that idea, and limit the amount of members who can join a guild to 50 instead of 500 – this would have created a far more varied guilds.

This is also why GvG would and could never work in GW2.

There’s a problem with making it too easy though. Since Anet has to consider your average guild, not your smallest guilds, I can imagine it being a tough spot to balance…

On one hand, they want the guild mission content to satisfy guilds a decent amount of time. Making it relatively a decent reach goal for your average guild size keeps people playing and active in the game. If they made it available at the first rank like AOW 1 or some other branch level 1, it would be WAY to easy and people will complete it much too quickly.

I think a nice compromise would be to have it at either Architecture level 5, Art of War level 5, or Politics level 5. All 3 of these require similar amounts of influence and work to accomplish.

I’m excited about guild missions though :P. My small guild of 5-7 friends won’t leave the guild anyways since we’re very close. All it’ll do for us is give us something extra to work towards…