Guild Wars 2 lacks guild content
The Problem: Part 2
There are certain features in the game that could be misconstrued as genuinely challenging content, so let me go piece by piece to indicate why I don’t feel any content truly requires guilds.
Open-world bosses: While the Scarlet invasion and Karka Queen were a good step forward and the Tequatl revamp looks promising, these events are far too big to warrant genuine, individual challenges.
Even the Tequatl revamp will require 80 players. At that point, the problem isn’t so much overcoming challenging mechanics as it is ensuring that 80 people aren’t completely incompetent
That’s how the Karka Queen and Scarlet invasion have played out. don’t require guilds to avoid wiping to certain mechanics; they instead require someone in map chat to tell people where they should be and what event should be completed next.
Dungeons: The dungeons in this game are, frankly speaking, too sloppy to be genuinely difficult. This is something ArenaNet said it intends to address by doing a dungeon-by-dungeon revamp, which was already done in part for Ascalonian Catacombs. But while the AC revamp was fairly promising, it still doesn’t require anything beyond five players (obviously) and those five players don’t even have to be highly coordinated to take down the fight.
With genuine guild content, voice chat is usually required to really coordinate guilds. I would also argue that groups should require 10 or more players to make it clear that it’s guild, not just group, content.
Fractals of the Mists: When they were first announced, fractals seemed like the ideal avenue for challenging Guild Wars 2 content. This hasn’t played out for two major reasons: First, fractals are in desperate need of a rewards revamp. Second, while fractals certainly become more numerically difficult, they essentially boil down to repeating the same bosses over and over. There’s no real progression; there’s just larger HP pools and less room for error because bosses hit harder. Under ideal progression-based content, there would be different fractals and bosses every 10 levels or so.
Structured PvP: Honestly, this is probably the closest content to requiring a guild. It’s genuinely challenging because the opponents are equally skilled players, and coordination is absolutely necessary at the highest tiers. But I don’t feel this qualifies because it only requires five people, which is more a group than a guild, and it entirely leaves out PvE content, which cuts a huge portion of Guild Wars 2’s player base.
Guild Missions: Guild missions are another piece of content that seemed promising first but ended up falling flat. The big problem with this content is that it can be zerged down. All of the content, even the so-called challenges, is essentially trivialized by bringing large groups of players. This inspires the behavior I detailed earlier in which guilds recruit for numbers, not skill. Whether that’s a problem with the scaling system or open-world content in general is up to anyone’s individual interpretation. Personally, I believe open-world content can never be as challenging as carefully constructed instanced content.
World vs. World: While some battles can certainly require wits and coordination, most of world vs. world breaks down into proper coverage, meaning having the right numbers to field people at different places at different times of the day. Once again, this comes down to a numbers issue. So while a guild may win a battle by out-coordinating opponents, chances are that guild will fall over to bigger numbers and, even worse, winning the battle rarely does much to win the war.
By showing all these examples, I hope it’s clear that there is a problem. Currently, Guild Wars 2’s content is either too innately easy, too unrewarding or too prone to zerging to be genuinely challenging. That means something else has to come about.
The Solution
Disclaimer: These are my ideas. I in no way claim they are the best, most perfect solutions to the problem. I’m sure ArenaNet’s designers can think of much better concepts, and I’m painfully aware that this kind of content is much more difficult to design than it is to theorize.
Dungeon revamps: The dungeon revamps could be leveraged to make dungeons much more difficult than they are today. Maybe this kind of gruesome revamp could even be limited to certain paths to leave some room for more casual players. Of course, it would also have to be matched with a big rewards revamp since even 3 gold likely won’t be enough to encourage a guild to go through trudging progression-based content when much easier content is available with a 1 gold reward.
Time Trials: Another option is adding time trials to dungeons, much like Guild Wars 1 did with some of its missions. The idea is players could be rewarded different medals and therefore different levels of gold and items for clearing a dungeon as fast as possible. The big problem with this option is it would keep the content focused on the five-man group, which requires more of a static group than a guild.
Ten-Man Dungeons: On the PvE side, this seems like the best solution to me. It keeps dungeons for more casual players while creating a whole new game type for the more hardcore. These dungeons should be stylized similarly to raids in other MMOs, so a guild would likely have to schedule multiple nights of attempts to really clear it. Of course, these dungeons would need really enticing rewards, such as unique cosmetics. This would not only give guilds a reason to field a pool of competent players, but it would also provide an incentive to retain and recruit such players.
Guild vs. Guild: On the PvP side, this is the obvious solution. While structured PvP and world vs. world have elements that invite guilds over, instanced 10 vs. 10 or 15 vs. 15 guild battles would seal the deal. Because opponents would be players, this content would have high replay value and demand individual skill and coordination on top of requiring guild-sized numbers. Obviously, this kind of system would require leaderboards and its own rewards — maybe through the new, revamped system that developers are promising for structured PvP.
Conclusion
So there you have it. Those are my ideas. Do you agree with my stated problem? Do you like the solutions? What are your ideas?
The main issue atm is that small guilds have to do guild bounties to get to any guild content. Maybe its about time to take the gates away and let us choose what content we can do and when. ty
There are plenty of games full of elitist guilds with heavy requirements to join. Feel free to play them, I dont think this game needs that. I think its good that the game encourages people of all backround and abillity to play together. We do not need more systems in place to encourage gear checks, and people being excluded from content instead of taught how to play it.
Yes I do hope they add more guild based content, though i enjoy the guild content thats in and hope its expanded as it is, not in the elitist way you describe how things should be
Every open world event atm is zerg win, most of the dungeons are very easy and all are pug-able, and guild missions are just for guild open world zerg events.
This game needs a cosmetic gear progression with some kind of raid content like what lopez said with 10 main dungeons.
There are a number of improvements we need to the guild system beyond just content. New mission content (more challenges, more puzzles, more rushes) could be built by the design teams while the programmers work on the laundry list of guild QOL items: last seen online, better permission control (split of invite and kick, for example), a better guild panel UI, officer chat, better MOTD (show MOTD on login, show MOTD on change, remember MOTD when editing), built-in areas for website/voice comm info, etc.
I would expect we’ll get an update with a bunch of these features in the next few months. Whichever team of coders that did LFG should now be done with that feature, so hopefully they’re free to work on guild UI updates.
www.getunicorned.com / northernshiverpeaks.org
It also lacks pve content, wvw content and spvp content. So Guilds lacking is nothing special.
For all that’s lacking. Many of these issues are a matter of play style. Just like with the Scarlet event. Zergs are not required, if you don’t enjoy them. Don’t join them. My guild has about 10 people and we enjoy guild content without the massive zergs and work hard to earn our influence/etc. Its a rewarding experience.
To hell with those that enjoy the glorified chat channels we’re used to calling Guilds.
The content is what you make of it.
(edited by Genreninja.8516)
Nothing about GW2 is remotely about guilds. It’s a new game that simply ripped off the original Guild Wars for lore and names, including the game’s name. Everything else is 100% departure. Don’t expect Guild content to be high on the list of developers of GUILD WARS 2, which was misnamed purely for marketing purposes.
Welcome to Grind Wars.
smack..Wut?…smack…smack…
Nothing about GW2 is remotely about guilds. It’s a new game that simply ripped off the original Guild Wars for lore and names, including the game’s name. Everything else is 100% departure. Don’t expect Guild content to be high on the list of developers of GUILD WARS 2, which was misnamed purely for marketing purposes.
Welcome to Grind Wars.
The name does not, nor has it ever, had anything to do with player guilds, go read the history of tyria and you’ll figure it out
TL;DR
There are guild challenges.
Guild challenges aren’t even that difficult in small groups, to be honest. Bounties and puzzles are more challenging, but not in the traditional sense of playing a class well.’
The real TL;DR is that the game has zero difficult PvE content.
Do jumping puzzles together or grind together that’s content
There are a number of improvements we need to the guild system beyond just content. New mission content (more challenges, more puzzles, more rushes) could be built by the design teams while the programmers work on the laundry list of guild QOL items: last seen online, better permission control (split of invite and kick, for example), a better guild panel UI, officer chat, better MOTD (show MOTD on login, show MOTD on change, remember MOTD when editing), built-in areas for website/voice comm info, etc.
I would expect we’ll get an update with a bunch of these features in the next few months. Whichever team of coders that did LFG should now be done with that feature, so hopefully they’re free to work on guild UI updates.
^This.
Once we have the tools to work with, recruitment and organization will follow. My remaining wish? Actual GUILD wars….
The lack of both PVE and PVP guild content/tools is a glaring problem that the developers rarely even discuss. Every time I see an interview with the developers posted online this is the question I hope gets asked. Several big budget MMOs are in development and if they provide this type of content I expect a significant portion of the population to leave the game. I do enjoy GW2 and it’s my game of choice but you can produce living content until your blue in the face and it won’t make-up for this weakness. It would be encouraging if the developers would at least address the issue.