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.
that’s content