Guild Wars 2

And it should be noted that this topic could be a lot worse. As for this being ‘the worst ever,’ – that can only be stated by someone who has never read a gaming forum before, however long they say they’ve played. The standard ‘w/e gaming company fails’ has barely shown itself here. The personal attacks on developers – non-existent. (and I’m referring to this particular topic – there’s nothing that could make me read the entirety of this forum)

Also, if we’re going to get into ‘attitudes,’ I’m pretty sure the ‘code’ stuff had to be considered offensive. This, incidentally, is the type of thing I don’t feel inclined to endure in a large guild, which has sought out members for quantity. If someone said something like that to me in person, I’d be gone so fast – there’s no reason to put up with it in a game. There’s certainly no reason to reward it with extra-special events.

In less than a week this one thread has 28 pages and almost 1400 posts….all about the new guild missions (not to mention the multiple other threads that are still not merged into this one yet).

I hope people in power are reading this and I hope we get some indication that they are listening, maybe some reasoning behind why these game additions were added as they were.

Korrigan.4837:

Velerak.8490:

I’ve ran guilds of over 200 members in the past and I do not want that level of stress, nor do I wish to go out and mass recruit only to have a massive job of keeping all of those people happy and content in my guild, thus forefeiting my own game enjoyment.

Except that you do not need 200 members to gain influence at a reasonable speed in GW2. With 20 to 30 active members, you are just fine.
We don’t invite everybody we see on public chat, we have a recruitment process with required application, since we try to maintain a community, and not just a group of people who use each other to get shinies in the game, yet we have 30ish active members and the influence builds up just fine. You don’t have to recruit everyone like a madman and make a mess of a guild in order to have enough members, friendly people are out there, everywhere, you just have to find them, and them to find you.

korrigan, i kinda backed you earlier — but here i’m going to politely point you: you’re stating, “20 or 30 active members.” many of we small guilds are truly that — SMALL. think, on a good night, four active members, with a heyday of 15 members on at the same time on a weekend day.

i think that’s where the breakdown occurred, honestly, in this whole process. everyone assumed that a “small” guild would be around 20-30 people — it seems, from the mass of communication in this thread alone, that there are LOTS of players (i.e., money-spenders who paid for the game) who are actually in truly small guilds.

Isende.2607:

Korrigan.4837:

Velerak.8490:

I’ve ran guilds of over 200 members in the past and I do not want that level of stress, nor do I wish to go out and mass recruit only to have a massive job of keeping all of those people happy and content in my guild, thus forefeiting my own game enjoyment.

Except that you do not need 200 members to gain influence at a reasonable speed in GW2. With 20 to 30 active members, you are just fine.
We don’t invite everybody we see on public chat, we have a recruitment process with required application, since we try to maintain a community, and not just a group of people who use each other to get shinies in the game, yet we have 30ish active members and the influence builds up just fine. You don’t have to recruit everyone like a madman and make a mess of a guild in order to have enough members, friendly people are out there, everywhere, you just have to find them, and them to find you.

korrigan, i kinda backed you earlier — but here i’m going to politely point you: you’re stating, “20 or 30 active members.” many of we small guilds are truly that — SMALL. think, on a good night, four active members, with a heyday of 15 members on at the same time on a weekend day.

i think that’s where the breakdown occurred, honestly, in this whole process. everyone assumed that a “small” guild would be around 20-30 people — it seems, from the mass of communication in this thread alone, that there are LOTS of players (i.e., money-spenders who paid for the game) who are actually in truly small guilds.

Exactly. I’m not sure why people have it that 20+ is a ‘small guild’ in this game. Logically, since the main number for the instance group is 5, I would have thought that would have been the average size of a guild (Considering Destiny’s Edge is 5 as well…)

Until now, there has been no need for “raid” type numbers in a guild. No need to have 50+ people on at the same time to organize something. So the assumption that everyone is in a guild that size seems like it’s a bit of a carry over from other games. Wanting this to be more in line with other mmo’s.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

If that’s the case, all we have to do is come up with every bad design decision Anet could possibly make in the future and post it here! And keep covering all the bases until the only possible course of action left is the one we actually want, which we’d have kept mum about! Problem solved!

Tachenon.5270:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

If that’s the case, all we have to do is come up with every bad design decision Anet could possibly make in the future and post it here! And keep covering all the bases until the only possible course of action left is the one we actually want, which we’d have kept mum about! Problem solved!

Be careful . . . a variant Murphy’s Law applies. The more brilliant a plan seems at first, the more spectacularly it will fail when it does

It’s just bad design. Period.

From what I can tell, unlocking Bounties requires what to small guilds is probably an impossible amount of influence and even for medium guilds will take many months. However, once you unlock Bounties, your guild has access to all five difficulty levels of Bounties and they all cost the same pittance to activate.

If I’m understanding that correctly, that’s really bad game design.

Might it not have made more sense to allow unlocking of T1 of Bounties, (or any other GM line), be achievable for small/medium guilds, while then scaling up the cost for higher difficulty/reward tiers so that only large guilds would ever reach T4 or T5 for Bounties?

I mean, come on now, it’s obvious that if you want a guild reward system that gives huge guilds something to devote a lot of time and effort to, while not making it impossible for small guilds to enjoy the new content, you need to Tier the unlocks/difficulty/rewards?

Small guilds should be able to unlock T1 of a guild missions line with the same effort it would take the largest, most efficient guilds to unlock T5. Ideally, the difficulty curve would scale such that guild sizes between small and massive would each have a Tier to shoot for that would then be challenging for a guild of their size once it was unlocked.

I think Arenanet needs to re-examine the original ideals that were set for the game’s design several years ago and stop making so many crass compromises.

Haven’t we seen enough MMOs fail to know that once devs start designing to the most elite top 5% of their players, implosion becomes imminent.

ANet, one last suggestion to consider:

Please think about adding a guild recruitment chat channel specifically for that purpose.

There are players that do not use /map chat at the moment.

And it would be nice to parse out advertisements from event related chat and folks asking questions.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

I know that the user agreements in many games have provisions relative to the official forums, that ideas expressed thereon are considered to be the intellectual property of the developing company, and not the posting fan. While I do not know if the GW2 UA has such a provision and don’t care enough to reread the thing to be sure, I wouldn’t bet against it.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

I know that the user agreements in many games have provisions relative to the official forums, that ideas expressed thereon are considered to be the intellectual property of the developing company, and not the posting fan. While I do not know if the GW2 UA has such a provision and don’t care enough to reread the thing to be sure, I wouldn’t bet against it.

I could, but EULA and laws are separate and distinct entities, far as I recall . . . either way it’s “legal issues”, I am not a lawyer, et cetera

Ahura.7128:

I’m really quite saddened by the way that the guild missions worked out. There have been many good posts analyzing the problem, and so I won’t try to rehash those. I’ll just post how I feel.

I feel like I’ve been set at a disadvantage. There are other players who will have more than I have, but not through regular gameplay. Just because they chose to be part of a larger guild.

There will always be players that have better items than I do, or more things from the Gem Store, or just get lucky on a drop. But those are as the result of playing more, having more skill, more money or being in the right place at the right time.

With this update, my guild will have a near-zero chance of ever running a guild mission unless we all focus solely on the most efficient ways to get influence. Players in a larger guild don’t have to do that – they easily get the influence simply by being a part of a larger group. We have to put more effort in the game just to maybe – maybe – get the same rewards.

I’ve been in the same guild for years, in WoW since 2006. It’s a small group of friends who don’t always have time to play, but who want to get together every once in a while to have fun. For other rewards, like Fractals and ascended items, we are definitely behind the curve. But we can do them, and we can get them eventually.

With guild missions we won’t. Anet has now put me in a hard place. I can stick with my friends who I’ve played with for years, or join a larger guild in order to actually enjoy the content released in this patch. In a game that puts so much focus on players helping other players and still being rewarded – everyone can ‘tag’ a mob for loot, join in an event and still get credit, rez each other and such. But for this update, I’m essentially being forced to turn my back on my friends and my guild if I want to take part.

All my guild members were really looking forward to this, and now we are crestfallen. In all honesty, the 3rd choice of playing another game together just became much more appealing. Maybe their developers wouldn’t so intentionally alienate small guilds.

I am in the same boat for the most part, though I do not feel at a disadvantage for being in a small guild I am really just bummed out on not being able to do the new content with my small guild. But a couple days have passed now and I am over it, this game is not made for the small tight knit guilds like ours, its for the big zerg guilds, like everything else in this game zerg > all.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

At the start of January before they announced the new system for Dailies, I outlined the same system almost word-for-word.
I don’t think they have a problem taking inspiration from the community.

In addition, 27 days ago I also suggested Achievement Tracking, again which they have adopted word-for-word.

Guild Challenges is a great idea for bringing more content to the PvE player base, but I have one concern…

When WoW introduced guild perks, small guilds started to die because people wanted to get those perks and therefore left their small guild in favor for a larger guild. I’m afraid that this is exactly what will happen in GW2 too. I’ve already seen some people leaving or not representing the guild I’m an officer in, and when asked why I got answers like “guild challenges” or “not enough influence”… I’ve seen countless people asking in LA for a guild to do challenges with.

I’m not sure it will happen as it may just be a hype in the start now, but I’m concerned for the smaller guilds. An easy fix would be to have some challenges available at lower levels of research.

480.000K. influence it needs to have all these missions unlocked of all trees (with my guild) i run a small guild. and this Anet …… IT AN INSULT TO THE SMALLER GUILDS !
i was realy looking forward to be doing these bounty , puzle and what not event’s , happy , fun and together with my guild , but kitten !
this is just and insane amount of either recrutement , or gold spammig we will need 2do to even get the upgrades going :o . i thought this game was for everybody , every guild and deffinatly every die hard player (like myself) who only started their OWN guild like 2 months ago this is just not right . it seems like you guyz are just helping out the realy bigg guilds ALOT more , and REALY REALY laughfing @ the smaller guilds . don’t get me wrong we are still going to push our influences and guildy’z to contribute so maiby 1 day (in like a month from now hopefully :s ) we can do our 1rst guildmission of some sort .
A shame . you give something , and you take something it alwayz seems

cheerz anywayz to all ! have a guud day ^^ (i’ll be spending some more gold on influence then LOL :p )

It feels like they misunderstood what the people wanted.

We did want more content for guilds and more challenging content that required coordination. We did want something that made being in a guild interesting.

However, we didn’t want gated progression and 2nd class citizen status. We didn’t want a situation that created conflict between people’s private guilds and the larger guilds. We didn’t want smaller guilds excluded. We didn’t want content that took weeks to access. We didn’t want artificial time extenders. We didn’t want more ecto sinks.

People want solutions instead of all this QQ’s? Ok fine here’s one, coach sign me up, I am ready for the big game, ready to work in game development at any time.

Here’s the way I think it should have been done and still can be done. Put the bounties in the different tiers create new unlock bounty tiers that each divide the current 30,000 influence, so each bounty tier unlock is 10,000 influence. This way at least the middle to small guilds can do one guild mission in the next month.

Here’s the list and what it would look like in Art of War.

Research Art of War Level 1
Increase your guild’s skill in Art of War to Level 1
500  Influence
-
16 hours

 Research Art of War Level 2
Increase your guild’s skill in Art of War to Level 2
1000  Influence
1 day

 Research Art of War Level 3
Increase your guild’s skill in Art of War to Level 3
5000  Influence
3 days

Guild Bounties Unlock Tier 1
Allows the guild to build Guild Bounty missions.
10000  Influence
3 days

Guild Bounty Tier 1
Trigger a bounty hunt for the guild. Guild members will have to track down and defeat each of the bounties within a set amount of time to complete the hunt. Each bounty is a champion, so prepare accordingly.
200  Influence
12 hours

 Research Art of War Level 4
Increase your guild’s skill in Art of War to Level 4
10000  Influence
4 days

 Guild Bounties Unlock Tier 2
Allows the guild to build Guild Bounty missions.
10000  Influence
3 days

 Guild Bounty Tier 2
Trigger a bounty hunt for the guild with one additional target. Guild members will have to track down and defeat all three of the bounties within a set amount of time to complete the hunt. Each bounty is a champion, so prepare accordingly.
200  Influence
12 hours

 Research Art of War Level 5
Increase your guild’s skill in Art of War to Level 5
20000  Influence
1 week

 Guild Bounties Unlock Tier 3
Allows the guild to build Guild Bounty missions.
10000  Influence
3 days

 Guild Bounty Tier 3
Trigger a bounty hunt for the guild with four additional targets. Guild members will have to track down and defeat all six of the bounties within a set amount of time to complete the hunt. Each bounty is a champion, so prepare accordingly.
200  Influence
12 hours

Research Art of War Level 6
Increase your guild’s skill in Art of War to Level 6
30000 Influence
10 days

Mungrul.9358:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

At the start of January before they announced the new system for Dailies, I outlined the same system almost word-for-word.
I don’t think they have a problem taking inspiration from the community.

In addition, 27 days ago I also suggested Achievement Tracking, again which they have adopted word-for-word.

In the first case, no, they didn’t adopt it word for word or a direct lift of your writings. The system you and they proposed fall into the same superset of options though. Perhaps mine will also wind up done like that, but frankly if they do Guild Halls any differently than how I laid out I’ll be shocked.

Just did the content with my guild we only had about 50 people online. I think that even if this content were given to smaller Guild’s they wouldn’t be able to do. Simply put it actually take’s a lot of people to do these missions. Their is really no way to get around it, Sure they could scale it but then smaller guild’s will just complain that it is simply to hard. Because that’s exactly what it is “Hard”.

Why would smaller guilds complain if it’s scaled, & therefore, the same difficulty as large guilds face?

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

Nope:

To enable ArenaNet (as defined below) to make use of forum member contributions and suggestions related to its games, including but not limited to any text, ideas, art, bug reports, suggestions of any kind or other contributions (“Contributions”), all such Contributions are hereby assigned with all right, title, and interest, including without limitation all intellectual property rights, to ArenaNet, Inc. and its affiliates (including without limitation NCsoft Corporation, NC Interactive, Inc. and NCsoft Europe Ltd.), successors and assigns (collectively “ArenaNet”) and shall be deemed the property of ArenaNet.

Users agree that no further permission or payment of any kind is necessary to fully exploit Contributions in any medium now known or hereinafter invented throughout the world. ArenaNet hereby grants a limited license back to users to use, distribute, re-publish, and create derivative works from such Contributions solely for non-commercial purposes. Such license to Contributions may be revoked by ArenaNet for any violation of this Code of Conduct….

This is from the user-agreement of the forum. There would be no use at all in having a suggestionsforum if this would only limit your options to implement something because once someone posted it you would have to pay them.

Pirlipat.2479:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

Nope:

To enable ArenaNet (as defined below) to make use of forum member contributions and suggestions related to its games, including but not limited to any text, ideas, art, bug reports, suggestions of any kind or other contributions (“Contributions”), all such Contributions are hereby assigned with all right, title, and interest, including without limitation all intellectual property rights, to ArenaNet, Inc. and its affiliates (including without limitation NCsoft Corporation, NC Interactive, Inc. and NCsoft Europe Ltd.), successors and assigns (collectively “ArenaNet”) and shall be deemed the property of ArenaNet.

Users agree that no further permission or payment of any kind is necessary to fully exploit Contributions in any medium now known or hereinafter invented throughout the world. ArenaNet hereby grants a limited license back to users to use, distribute, re-publish, and create derivative works from such Contributions solely for non-commercial purposes. Such license to Contributions may be revoked by ArenaNet for any violation of this Code of Conduct….

This is from the user-agreement of the forum. There would be no use at all in having a suggestionsforum if this would only limit your options to implement something because once someone posted it you would have to pay them.

Excellent.

Steal away, ANet! I encourage it.

Okay so I’m a tad bit confused with what people are complaining about influence wise.

A guild bounty unlock costs 30,000 influence or 60 gold and is a one time investment. After that it only take 200 influence to launch a guild mission.

Are smaller guilds really saying that they can’t scrape together 60 gold to do this in the worst case scenario?

It should be relatively simple for a small guild of <10 players to come up with that type of money. If you’re small then it should be easy to get everyone working towards that goal. If you find this too difficult then the problem isn’t with your size, it’s with your members not being active enough.

I just want to know why a new tree wasnt just added for events only??? All you gotta do to balance it would be to make thiings cost a bit more influence.

I just took over a struggling guild because the leaders had some real life issues come up and arent able to devote the time to play. We also have 90 members, which only about 20% even log in any more. Of that 20%, half of them are repping the larger guilds that already unlocked their missions.

This was NOT a fair and balanced way for these missions to be introduced.

As to aligning with other small guilds to take turns and complete missions, thats all well and good except for two things – how can these smaller guilds even unlock the stuff. Its insane! I mean we had Politics, Architecture and Economy maxed out, but no one in our guild really devoted time to WvW so it was never developed. How is that fair to us a a whole? Also, there is no alliance option with other guild that gw1 had, so do you realize how difficult it will be to organize events?

Serious guys, where’s your heads? Not every guild in this game is a powerhouse of 500 members, and that seem s to be how you planned this whole thing out. I was excited when I learned about these events, and now, they seem to be nothing more than a chore.

So with that note, back to farming cursed shore for about 4 weeks straight to buy enough influence to maybe unlock one event. Thanks for the grind in a game that was not to be about grinding!

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced by the idea I posited earlier.
Why lock the last guild activity behind a nine week calendar gate?
Simple.
It’s not ready.

To announce the guild missions more than a month in advance of the update where they are “released”, then lock that content away for a further 2 months (with no warning that this would be the case)?
Well, that’s idiotic in the extreme if it really is the case.

No, the only logical reason they don’t want people playing this content right now is that it needs further development.
If it were ready, it would be insane to lock up something that could draw in potential players and also bring backs swathes of those who left.

The guild puzzle, the one thing that requires a new area and finely balanced play-testing, is simply not ready.
That’s why even the largest guilds with the most influence have to wait nine weeks to play it.

stobie.2134:

Eliyahu.1467:

Okay so I’m a tad bit confused with what people are complaining about influence wise.

A guild bounty unlock costs 30,000 influence or 60 gold and is a one time investment. After that it only take 200 influence to launch a guild mission.

Are smaller guilds really saying that they can’t scrape together 60 gold to do this in the worst case scenario?

It should be relatively simple for a small guild of <10 players to come up with that type of money. If you’re small then it should be easy to get everyone working towards that goal. If you find this too difficult then the problem isn’t with your size, it’s with your members not being active enough.

The problem for us isn’t the money – we can do that, & are already on it. (it would have been a lot nicer had this NOT been in the pvp category – but we can do it.) But once that’s unlocked, the bounty missions apparently require full raid-sized efforts.

The other problem is the increasingly negative attitude & behavior of large guilds. How can a smaller guild recruit when all benefit is now being part of a huge guild – and I mean really huge? A lot of people prefer small guilds – a lot of us have endured mega guilds in other mmos, & that was reason enough never to play one again. GW2 specifically presented itself as something different – a step away from raiding games, from gear-based games. And now where are we? Forced to join big guilds (because recruiting is no longer a likely option) or not do the content, or get the gear that really does make a difference.

This has nothing to do with working for unlocks, or wanting things handed to us. It has to do with preserving the quality of a game that wasn’t supposed to be another Warcraft. Now, maybe these Guild Missions are just a small fragment, designed to please the huge guilds who have been squeaking about something to do en masse. (though I think small guilds would have loved to have missions, too) If that’s the case, I’m sorry to hear it, because it seems to me that missions could easily have been designed to fit all sizes, & why we have to unlock a raid sized set first, I don’t know.

I’d like to hear if this really is their chosen direction. Are we seriously being aimed at joining a few huge guilds per server? They haven’t set up Guild Alliances, for instance, where linked guilds could benefit from the same mission. We can try to talk people into helping us, but that does defeat the purpose of doing things as a guild.

The real problem, it seems to me, is having the large guilds suddenly dwarf & overshadow small ones. A person might prefer a small guild, but realize there’s no chance of doing these missions – the easiest way to get the new gear. I personally wouldn’t choose this route for anything – I really, deeply despise large guilds, & given how unpleasant they’ve been here & in game, I’d much rather not play at all than join one. But a person who wants to do all the content & advance with gear will pick the large guild simply for that reason. That undercuts – or even negates – any sense of community, & is an awful step toward being just another WoW.

A small guild is perfectly capable of completing a tier 1 Guild Bounty. And guess what? All tiers of guild missions have the same personal rewards — the only difference is that the guild gets more merits which does not affect the individual players at all.

So if a player in a small guild wants Guild Commendations he definitely does not need to join a larger guild. If he wants his GW2 experiences to revolve around Guild Mission variety and frequency, then he would look for a larger guild.

Yet I’ve been hearing that the bounty missions take at least 20 people. That’s not my version of a small guild.

Well, stobie, as much as I can understand the problems you are having I don’t like this perception split of big guilds beeing the evil entities and small guilds beeing the good guys. Big guilds may be designed to please different people but that does not necessarily mean people in big guilds are mean arrogant and what else per se.

I agree that the current setup of those mission might support this split in the community, but it’s still the people who make the community beyond everything else.

Pirlipat.2479:

Well, stobie, as much as I can understand the problems you are having I don’t like this perception split of big guilds beeing the evil entities and small guilds beeing the good guys. Big guilds may be designed to please different people but that does not necessarily mean people in big guilds are mean arrogant and what else per se.

I agree that the current setup of those mission might support this split in the community, but it’s still the people who make the community beyond everything else.

It’s too bad that some people have had really bad experiences with big guilds that color our perception of them. Perhaps if people representing these big guilds and those speaking on their behalf acted in a more polite, less condescending, rude, elitist sort of way, our perception would change.

However, I have not seen anything as yet to change my opinion on their behavior. Quite the opposite in fact. Especially seeing the behavior big guilds have been showing since the guild missions. I have not seen any of this “joining together” but I have seen rude, abusive behavior that is very reminiscent of WoW.

Oh, lol your prejudices are leading you in a quite strange direction. I am myself in a three-people-guild, but I still refuse to jump on the “all big guilds are bad” band-wagon.

Arrogant and mean people are arrogant and mean people no matter what size their guild is having.

Possibly I wasn’t clear enough. Sigh. Giving large guilds this much power, and this much advantage, allows for abuse. I, personally, haven’t seen much to like, but I certainly did not say they’re all ‘evil.’ I have said several times that a large group works for some people, as a matter of taste & comfort. It’s so irritating to have my words twisted about to mean something I didn’t say, didn’t intend, & don’t actually believe! I mean, what’s the point? Is it so hard to grasp another person’s meaning?

This community never stops to amuse me, when i argued for AR and MF gear check (for High lvl fotm) i was called elitist this, elitist that. Now when they introduce yet another thing that separates community and it’s clearly some raid clone, same guys just shout:“Join big guilds, pay if in small and so on.” Fanboys are so easily manipulated.

Sovta, I’m not a hundred percent sure if your post is directed towards my previous statement, but if so I would kindly ask to read my previous posts on this matter. I’m able to agree on the critics about this feature in general but I still do not have to follow every single argument which got brought up here. That has nothing to do with Fanboyism or beeing manipulated easily.

How about an alliance system, wouldn’t that solve the problem a bit?

Sovta.4719:

This community never stops to amuse me, when i argued for AR and MF gear check (for High lvl fotm) i was called elitist this, elitist that. Now when they introduce yet another thing that separates community and it’s clearly some raid clone, same guys just shout:“Join big guilds, pay if in small and so on.” Fanboys are so easily manipulated.

Your statement is entirely wrong. While FotM provides higher rewards at higher levels any play can level up to 10 and get an ascended ring of his choice in a 10 days period with some chance of getting random rings. What we are talking about here is the fact that you have to pay 30 days + 50 ecto (which is really a joke given that the ecto prices are kittenedly low now). It’s all about the time period for getting BiS earrings.

I am not talking just about small guilds… 6 weekly’s for 1 earring ? Really ?
30 days is infact only ~4 weeks so small guilds have the upper hand here until big guilds unlock more content.

Quite frankly the more I read about this crap and think about it the more hilarious it is given the minimal stat boost those items give you. For me it’s a matter of restricting guild content, if they allowed small guilds to do rank 1 Bounty runs with lesser rewards (lets say only 1 token per weekly) maybe this thread would be at least 5 times smaller. We all know people will always whine about everything anyway.

I’d like to raise another point here.
I’m not that interested in the Ascended reward for this content, or the potential of receiving a legendary pre-cursor.
I’d just like to have more content to play with my guild. Not with someone else’s guild.
It’s not about the reward. It’s simply about having more game to play with my friends, and I’m being prevented from experiencing this content with people I know and love thanks to arbitrary gating mechanisms.
The bounties sound the least interesting if I’m honest. The Puzzle though? ArenaNet only need to check the logs associated with my account to see how frequently I play jumping puzzles. I love ’em.
And the guild rush looks a hoot.

All of this exciting new content, locked away from my guild with no likelihood of ever being able to access it. If we do want to play it, we probably have to rely on the charity of larger guilds.

Utterly ridiculous.

Martin The Brave.8731:

Just did the content with my guild we only had about 50 people online. I think that even if this content were given to smaller Guild’s they wouldn’t be able to do. Simply put it actually take’s a lot of people to do these missions. Their is really no way to get around it, Sure they could scale it but then smaller guild’s will just complain that it is simply to hard. Because that’s exactly what it is “Hard”.

Players in small Guilds are not “bad players”, and they can do any content regardless difficulty. The only difference between a small Guild player and a large Guild player is their Guild’s size-not their dedication, active status, experience, or skill playing their favorite characters.

Why would I want my small Guild to take part in a huge 100 person mission anyway? A developer claimed that T1 missions would be ideal number would be ten, which admittedly, requires lots of active players for a very small Guild. The problem is that there are ZERO missions available (in practice) for smaller Guilds to enjoy, “hard” or otherwise.

Mungrul.9358:

I’d like to raise another point here.
I’m not that interested in the Ascended reward for this content, or the potential of receiving a legendary pre-cursor.
I’d just like to have more content to play with my guild. Not with someone else’s guild.
It’s not about the reward. It’s simply about having more game to play with my friends, and I’m being prevented from experiencing this content with people I know and love thanks to arbitrary gating mechanisms.
The bounties sound the least interesting if I’m honest. The Puzzle though? ArenaNet only need to check the logs associated with my account to see how frequently I play jumping puzzles. I love ’em.
And the guild rush looks a hoot.

All of this exciting new content, locked away from my guild with no likelihood of ever being able to access it. If we do want to play it, we probably have to rely on the charity of larger guilds.

Utterly ridiculous.

That was basically my point. By locking this stuff in an arbitrary linear path they completely removed any sense of individualizing guilds or allowing guilds of variant sizes to tackle content with variable participant number requirements. They removed any point in having research trees at all. Guild missions are a linear upgrade path that retroactively makes every single guild unlock a linear upgrade path.

That’s like suddenly deciding you have to level a ranger to 80 before you can play a thief, and then level a thief before you can play an engineer. You removed choice and individuality from the system.

It’s not about the influence. The influence is fine. The missions should be a rward for climbing all the way up a research line. That’s simply not the way it works.

It’s about having to unlock things your guild may not be able to accomplish because of size before you can access things you can. That’s just really screwed up.

Eliyahu.1467:

Okay so I’m a tad bit confused with what people are complaining about influence wise.

A guild bounty unlock costs 30,000 influence or 60 gold and is a one time investment. After that it only take 200 influence to launch a guild mission.

Are smaller guilds really saying that they can’t scrape together 60 gold to do this in the worst case scenario?

It should be relatively simple for a small guild of <10 players to come up with that type of money. If you’re small then it should be easy to get everyone working towards that goal. If you find this too difficult then the problem isn’t with your size, it’s with your members not being active enough.

Im sorry but I disagree. Are you in a large guild. To me the problem is Art of War is in WVW tier and not other unlocks and the sheer amount of influence required. We can get it but it will take forever to get as we are a small guild.

Plus 60g between 5-7 active ppl. Im sorry for me that’s impossible as we used most of our money gearing people up. But 60g is for one unlock not all of them.

And I would say our current members are active and on everyday. But we be lucky if we get 1k influence a day.

And historically, people do not react well when you advertise something to them, claiming it’s going to be awesome, only to “release” it preventing access to all but a select few.
I shouldn’t have to say this, as it’s blatantly obvious, but I’m not sure ArenaNet even understand this simple rule any more.

I’m not talking about gear, who cares, game is easy anyway, outside FotM you don’t need even exotics in PvE, i’m talkng about gating content.

I wanted to throw an update out on how I feel now after a couple of days of playing after the update. I still agree with my Original Post but wanted to also express my feelings towards what I like about it as well.

What I do like is that this update has pushed my guild to be more group oriented, we have a goal and progression to work towards and that is something that we like. We have been grouping more while just levelling and things like that to maximise our Inflence gains. This is all good.

As a guild of about 5-10 active players though we get about 1000 influence a day and need to open the T5 items at 20k each and then the missions at 30k each. So we have in excess of 250k influence to gain which simple maths tells us will take around 250 days…that’s a long time to hold on to players.

We actually want the progression, we don’t want to be given everything tomorrow but I feel that 250 days is a bit extreme. I’d be happy if we gained enough to open up one a month (and I know we could by buying it and stuff but that feels wrong).

All in all I like the idea but would prefer an influence system which was based more on active player participation and not directly on how many players you have.

Note: I do think larger guilds should be first to get these things but not by quite such a time frame. Example: larger guilds (25+ active players) 4 weeks to get something; smallest guild (4 active players) 6 weeks to get same thing. That sort of time difference.

Dude, progression by waiting to activate mission? I had that progression while instaling game.

Here’s the thing with money for us:
1) All 3 active members have 7 or 8 gold each (yeah, I can earn it faster now, but I don’t want to force it on my guildies or earn 60 influence myself just to get bounties for my guild).
2) We don’t want the guild bounty mission. We want to start with the puzzle, then earn the trek. Which, with the system, is impossible. So we’d consider it a waste of gold to go for the bounties.
3) We’d much rather put gold into PvE things like armor/legendaries than these. Smaller guilds shouldn’t have to buy influence when larger guilds don’t, especially since gold is much more scarce amongst smaller guilds.

I’m not going to do these unless they get rid of the requirement that you have to do them in order. Just put cool stuff in AoW and we’ll go for it, but please don’t force us to do bounties. They seem the least fun. We’re only putting it in Architecture because it’s the most useful and we can’t afford to invest in other lines.

And with small guilds like mine, sometimes you only have 1 active person at a time. It was the case last month. I think a couple others will start becoming more active soon though and hopefully my recruits will help. My ideal is that I can get at least 5 active people concurrent on the weekends and ideally always a couple on each day during the week (which is why I want to recruit, but sadly, I think I’ll have to wait for a fix from ArenaNet so that recruiting isn’t stigmatized). I really really don’t think they thought of the consequences thoroughly and how it would cause a divide and bitterness in the community.

I also don’t think my guild is all that abnormal. I just “allied” myself with another similar guild.

I’m reading and reading a lot of great ideas in this trehad.

Even Blizzard introduces an entire new system on Diablo 3 (paragon system) based in one player ideas. Why you dont ANET?

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

I know this reply is several pages old, but I just started back scanning through the thread so sue me.

It’s actually very common in many forum ToS’s and other similar places around the world to have language in there that makes any ideas or contributions you put into the forum (or suggestion box, or whatever) to be the property of the company and to absolve them from responsibility of compensation to you. So it’s likely you signed away the rights to use that idea to Anet in perpetuity. No making your own game with that system.

Chaosgyro.6023:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Lorelei.7809:

Pardon me (I was referencing your unpopular ideas)! Your ideas sound fantastic. This certainly sounds like a way for any guild of any size to be proud of their accomplishments and reasonably attain them.

There’s just one hitch. Since I laid this out, there’s probably a high chance ArenaNet can’t use it.

Possibly, but it’s also possible that they can do something similar and/or be inspired by your ideas. I don’t think there’s any reason they can’t use at least a similar idea from yours, if not the same.

I should explain.

Writers are usually highly discouraged from listening to a fan who has “this idea for a character” or reading fanfiction (even if it’s really good) because you run into a very real legal matter over where the material originated. I don’t know if it falls under “plagiarism” specifically, but you can get in a lot of trouble for even subconsciously winding up using someone else’s idea in your material.

I’d put Gold down that there’s similar provisions in software/game design preventing them from directly taking or in other ways apparently modifying, something submitted as an unsolicited idea.

I know this reply is several pages old, but I just started back scanning through the thread so sue me.

It’s actually very common in many forum ToS’s and other similar places around the world to have language in there that makes any ideas or contributions you put into the forum (or suggestion box, or whatever) to be the property of the company and to absolve them from responsibility of compensation to you. So it’s likely you signed away the rights to use that idea to Anet in perpetuity. No making your own game with that system.

Technically any idea I came up with in the back of my head while working at a retail desk counter would also be the property of the company, which would include the couple published works of mine. I don’t think it works quite so simple

Here is an idea.

Since everyone says that the whole rest of the game is for small guilds and blah blah blah… why don’t they just add the currencies into the rest of the game? Then when a guild group with a membership of 50 or less completes a dungeon, meta event, de, or jumping puzzle together… they get the same rewards that these uber awesome and ultra important mega guilds get for all the content they do together that is designed for them.

Maybe that isn’t exclusive enough… maybe it should only work for guild groups completing “all the rest of the game” together with a membership of 20 or less.

Eliyahu.1467:

Okay so I’m a tad bit confused with what people are complaining about influence wise.

A guild bounty unlock costs 30,000 influence or 60 gold and is a one time investment. After that it only take 200 influence to launch a guild mission.

Are smaller guilds really saying that they can’t scrape together 60 gold to do this in the worst case scenario?

It should be relatively simple for a small guild of <10 players to come up with that type of money. If you’re small then it should be easy to get everyone working towards that goal. If you find this too difficult then the problem isn’t with your size, it’s with your members not being active enough.

The question often being asked and the concern raised, is this: “Should I have to?” Although it’s noted larger guilds had it worse to do the content “day one ready” since they had to sink a lot of influence just to rush to doing it. It’s their prerogative.

I still say the goal wasn’t to gate this so small guilds couldn’t ever do it, I believe it was to have another long-term goal for them to focus on. Or not if they chose to.

stobie.2134:

Yet I’ve been hearing that the bounty missions take at least 20 people. That’s not my version of a small guild.

I think there’s another issue here, that “small guild” has a different connotation to different people. To me a small guild has been 5-20 people and any larger than that is a “raid guild”. Of course, the last game I had to differentiate was EverQuest. Alliances in GW1 rather completely sidestepped that issue by allowing many small guilds to band together.

(N.B. that would be a good mechanic here, in theory. In practice it may not actually work.)

What could have happened is when the developers thought “small guild” they meant 15-50 people since the upper limit is 500.

Also, it’s been said that the big hurdle on the Bounties is getting there, more often than not. That’s something which can be slowly alleviated as familiarity creeps in.

bluewanders.5297:

Here is an idea.

Since everyone says that the whole rest of the game is for small guilds and blah blah blah… why don’t they just add the currencies into the rest of the game? Then when a guild group with a membership of 50 or less completes a dungeon, meta event, de, or jumping puzzle together… they get the same rewards that these uber awesome and ultra important mega guilds get for all the content they do together that is designed for them.

Maybe that isn’t exclusive enough… maybe it should only work for guild groups completing “all the rest of the game” together with a membership of 20 or less.

Earlier, I made the suggestion that full guild groups doing the meta-events or dungeons could earn Merits/Commendations.

I think the missconception here is that content for more than 5 people, which is probably highly appreciated by many people is linked to guild-content which is also highly appreciated. What they did not take into consideration is that this might be two different groups.

Guilds CAN have like 10-15 or up to 500 people but do not HAVE to. This leads to the problem that small guilds feel set back, because the content aimed at 10 or more people is advertised and designed as "guild"content. And while small guild fall into the guildcategory they fail on the “many people” category. Strange enough they took this into consideration for the missions itself because the small guild could try to get people to help in the open world but did not take it into consideration when calculating the costs for the mission, or at least they aimed at very determined players who speedrun a dungeon 20 times in a row or something.