Guild Wars 2

This isn’t about the costs for upgrades, which are high, but even my small-to-mid-sized guild can manage them and everybody can have ALL THE THINGS eventually.

This is about the feasability of Scribing recipes.

Now I have no problem with it being expensive to level, it’s not supposed to be a one-man crafting profession, but when Guild Banners cost more than you get from using them, something is clearly wrong.

Just one example:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Gathering_Boost_Banner_Schematic
^ Hint: click “Show base ingredients” to show the real costs, it doesn’t look daunting at first glance.

Now this isn’t the ‘most’ expensive thing to build, but for most guilds it will probably not recuperate the cost, especially since you’ve got to farm for soft wood specifically (or you buy it for outrageous prices, which, yes, will probably go down eventually) and most people farm alone and don’t run around in group chopping wood.

Maybe this is intended just for really big guilds who do organized group farm runs, and if that’s the case then that’s OK, I’ll just use it to skill my scribe and never touch it again. At least we have tavern boosts.
It’s just a shame because it USED to be feasible for small guilds when we could get them through influence.

^ Basically the same goes for practically all the WvW recipes I’ve seen so far, especially the influence bit. They’re cheaper than banners but you would use them way more often, if you could afford to.

Decorations are HELLA expensive as well, especially considering you get ONE chair for materials that by all rights should give you a throne that makes you coffee while it kills a world boss for you. And my scribe is only skill 130.
I have no idea how our guild is supposed to populate our huge hall with some ambient decorations with costs like these. Especially the flax and sand amounts for one table or some such. Should’ve bought more pumpkins. :x

Like I said, I get that scribe is supposed to take a while and lots of materials to level, but couldn’t that just mean that indiviual items give less exp and cost fewer materials? That’d make the time to level it about the same, but we could get more things for our guild out of them and make others at least usable. I’m not sure how hard that would hit material prices though, so not 100% sure about this. But a suggestion at least. A little bit but often would definitely give a better sense of progression and keep us more motivated.

But what I saw today almost made me a bit angry. Our Guild Trader (level 2) offered to give me Bloodstone Dust…for a Guild Commendation. This came to mind: http://www.reactionface.info/sites/default/files/imagecache/Node_Page/images/1287666826226.png

The new Guild Trader stuff has never been particularly enticing, but to me this just seems to bait players into making bad choices, especially considering the good things you could and can get with commendations.

All in all I LOVE the new guild system, it has pulled our guild together to build something great. We love our hall, especially the characterful NPCs.

But some things could use some tuning (not a lot mind, but some) and others are just plain insulting. Bloodstone Dust, really? :\

EDIT: My fellow guild leader just reminded me of something else: Guild Portal to PvP Lobby? Really?
I don’t really care but it is a tad pointless. ^^
Guild Hall Instances are a bit small as well, I get that you need to save server space, but 10-man would be nice? :\

Right now the few issues i have with the guild hall deal with scaling and save state.

There’s a few not so nice bugs that pseudo-reset building progress, thing is it’s per client. You may see objects blocking you, while others wont.

The other issue i have is the constant open/close non-sense. Just set the guild hall to instant open at max pop and allow players to log-in/log-out in the guild hall.

Yes scribe and its materials need proper number adjustments as well as they are astronomically off.

Also: Pigments were introduced to collect tears from scribes. When I reached 75 I partied so hard thinking I could now use red pigments instead of brown pigments. ZONK!
You need red ones on TOP of the brown ones. Back to the potato fields it is!

Had a discussion with our other alliance guild leaders yesterday.

Question: Does Favor have a use after maxing out the guild hall? Otherwise wouldn’t it be a good idea to make Scribing blueprints more expensive to build, but able to queue them infinitely after building them once, only with an added Favor cost?

That way we still see use for Favor after building all the upgrades, keep the Scribing level difficulty up and make Guild Consumables viable for smaller guilds, especially for WvW, but still keeping them gated so you have to seriously consider how and when to use them.

Also removes PvE farming for those many many WvW-players who would just like to play their preferred content type. I get wanting to get people to try your different game types, but grinding wood is not how you get WvW/PvP people to enjoy your PvE content. :P

We also used to have the problem in WvW, where wealth meant more spammable blueprints and Keep upgrades, which ArenaNet tried to remove by making the objectives upgrade free and automagically. But now those old costs were more or less rolled into the WvW Guild Consumables, so I feel the Favor cost instead of building a new scribing blueprint everytime would be a solution for that.

It could bring its own problems, like bigger WvW guilds creating smaller proxy guilds to get access to more Favor, but that is probably preferable because they can’t buy Favor with raw wealth, they would still have to invest time into all the guild missions, which seems perfectly acceptable to me.

Influence can no longer be obtained…

84 softwood logs even with pre-HoT prices would be hard to justify for a single banner.

Oh god sorry, I meant Favor, not Influence. :x

Edited for better understanding, thanks for pointing it out.