Guild Wars 2

Removed – company call-outs and discussion of moderation are not allowed. Carry on! ~ Dalmarus

Coordination is fine and dandy, but smaller guilds will have even HARDER time to complete these things. It is insane to require 18+ people to watch over a select few bosses. You know what, my guild used to be very active, but ever since the patches have done literally nothing good to end game or the existing content (pre dec-patches) we’ve been losing members like flies. These kinds of requirements are starting to really become an insane job to undertake and require now RNG, OR LUCK AS YOU MAY, to complete if you don’t have people to track down every single boss.

How about you size down requirements for smaller guilds? Or is it really that you want those to disappear and have large guilds as, you know, subtle promotion to your lackluster game? The 15 minute timer as is, is an insane job for the guilds I run with, and there are plenty. Of course if you don’t give a kitten then there will be none, as you wish.

Made a similar post, and it got blocked… It seems they find it easier to sweep the problem under the rug rather then admitting there is a actual problem with the design of guild bounties.

Currently it puts 100% of the pressure on the ones leading them, while the rest of the guild is left holding a target for upward of a hour.

Only to have it grabbed by some random guild doing t1..

Not to mention the lack of groups bigger then 5, the requirement to go into the highly disfunctional guild tab to keep track of targets, etcetc.

Personally I have to use 2 sheets of paper every t3 to keep track of whos doing what, and whos in which 10 man group.. not to mention using voice over programs have become somewhat of a requirement.

And ontop of that I got to trust that no one holding a target suddenly has to take a real life break!

I am used to leading raids in games such as everquest 1, one of the harder mmos ever when it came to raiding (first kills took upward of a year), and organizing the 54 players for those raids without voice over was still a hell of alot easier, and alot less of a headache

I’m actually surprised at all the outrage over a single target. With 4-5 people and good communication between you guys, you can cover the bounty target’s route pretty thoroughly. I pre-scout for my guild in the actual guild missions, but it never takes me more than 5-10 minutes to actually spot the bounty. And this is just me and a guildmate, going across large maps like Lornar’s and relying on Dulfy’s guide.

EDIT: By the way Anthony, thank you so much for making sure these missions require coordination. Our guild has been able to get lots of active members on, and it’s a TON of fun with our leader/commanders trying to organize everyone while we joke and quip endlessly. Just from the banter alone, the experience is so so worth it.

You telling me your testers tracked down and killed 6 diffrent targets within 15 mins? that sounds completly unrealistic unless you have upward of a hundred people searching at the same time.

And even then finding them would be based around RNG.

And the zones wernt filled with testers hyped to see the encounters? that were activly helping trough mapchat by finding the targets?

Don’t get me wrong, Id love to see that.

Ursan: Even with dulfy’s path map in some zones covering that path takes longer then 10 mins.. And with some luck your target gets killed of mid route, in which case its back to spawn without you ever knowing.

Well there’s the problem, with search patterns like scallywag it might as well start basing around on luck finding them. Sure some are easier, but when you activate a mission and it gives you two massive pathings then you’re gonna have a huge problem for small guilds. The time limit is just enough to actually track down these things and then there’s the lack of dps of smaller guilds which will drain the tiem too far. I’m not saying it should be clear where they are gonna be, but to size down these things for smaller guilds would be really nice.

And I don’t know what type of conditions the testers are under, but to have a lot of people coordinate succesfully through guild chat within a 15 minute time limit is a little over the top, no?

Mm, wildcards like Sotzz and Wildman really dosn’t help the situation.

Not to mention michiele the despawner..

The current implentation really encourages you to spambuild t3’s, and simply keep restarting until you get 6 easy ones, if we are to follow Anthony’s suggested approach..

So 30 is the required number of guildies in order to be able to complete these? that assumes of course that they have the same motivation and lack of RL interuptions that testers would have had.

The problem is that our guild has something like 200-300 members, and most nights we might peak around 30 active- but some are trading, some are doing dailies , etc etc and the liklihood of getting them to run around aimlessly trying to find 6 targets within 15 minutes without being interupted by other guilds doing something similar is pretty remote.

Hence guild missions become just another reason people leave or ‘represent’ another guild.

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

Ursan: Even with dulfy’s path map in some zones covering that path takes longer then 10 mins.. And with some luck your target gets killed of mid route, in which case its back to spawn without you ever knowing.

You should time yourself. With my Rangers, with Signet of the Hunt, I can go from one end of Lornar’s to the other in around ~15 minutes. I’m not doing that, of course. Since Lornar’s target’s path is one of the larger ones, we assign two people to it. I search the southern half, and it usually takes me 5-10 minutes to cover everything. This is just pre-scouting of course, but it’s definitely possible.

It’s even easier if other guilds are doing it. After the weekly reset, you usually have 4-5 guilds searching for the target. It gets found in a matter of minutes. Then at the reset, all the guilds activate their bounties simultaneously. We all tag the bounty, and everyone reaps the benefits. Guilds doing our bounty never has a problem, at the reset (because of all the guilds doing it) or during the weekday (because not many guilds are doing it).

EDIT: By the way, we are a medium-sized guild, about ~20 active members when we do guild missions. We only do t1 and t2, because we don’t really see point in doing t3. t1/t2 are already a ton of fun for the guild as it’s a great excuse for everyone to get together. As we’re not the largest guild, we understand our limitations and don’t strive to overreach. What, you don’t have fun if you’re not killing those extra 2 targets or getting that little bit more of guild merit? I’m just gonna apologize, because I can’t understand where the frustration stems from.

Victory.2879:

So 30 is the required number of guildies in order to be able to complete these? that assumes of course that they have the same motivation and lack of RL interuptions that testers would have had.

The problem is that our guild has something like 200-300 members, and most nights we might peak around 30 active- but some are trading, some are doing dailies , etc etc and the liklihood of getting them to run around aimlessly trying to find 6 targets within 15 minutes without being interupted by other guilds doing something similar is pretty remote.

Hence guild missions become just another reason people leave or ‘represent’ another guild.

Way to take things completely out of context and state them as fact. He said they did it with 30, not that 30 are required. My guild has completed T1 with 5 people, T2 with 15 people and T3 with about 30. If you do pre-scout you really only need 18.

30 is probably the average, but i’m sure well coordinated groups could do it with slightly less. But if you don’t have the people then that is ok because that is why they made 3 tiers and not 1. Like I said, only need 5 people to get T1 done. Having more people speeds up your merit acquisition but nothing else.

We only ever prescout T3, it’s just a waste of time T1 and T2.

Ursan.7846:

I’m just gonna apologize, because I can’t understand where the frustration stems from.

Well those could be many. Might wanna do some self-research next time if above words dont grasp you.

I’m going to have to agree with the OP and Kilrain. As it currently stands there are definitely too many variables variables that the test group of 30 would not have encountered that effect guilds…..ie……testing in a lab =/= testing in ig. Not to mention that with the next update we will see 3 more targets which’ll have to be covered as well, only adding to the mayhem.

Gasoline.2570:

Ursan.7846:

I’m just gonna apologize, because I can’t understand where the frustration stems from.

Well those could be many. Might wanna do some self-research next time if above words dont grasp you.

You described why it’s so hard to do t3 Bounty Hunts and why it’s unfair. And that it should scale down for small guilds.

I ask you, why do you want to do t3 Bounty Hunts? For Guild Commendations? For Guild Merits? Why can’t you just do t1 Bounty? It gives you the same amount of Guild Commendations and a little bit less Merits (15 vs 25). I mean, we already have scaling difficulty with t1/t2/t3. You’ll just be earning merits a bit slower than a large guild, and I think that’s fair especially when the individualistic rewards (which you don’t even need to complete the bounty itself to get, just kill one target.) are the exact same.

Like I said, I just don’t understand the frustration. What you ask for (scaling for smaller guilds) already exists.

Tier 1 is too hard as is, do self research man. You might find something special.

This is such a wasted argument. The dev is right, it certainly requires coordination, and is easily achieve if u do so. My guild is large, and on occasion ive had 20 doing one guild bounty, in the beginng, we needed 15 peoplel to do tier 1, because we did it like everyone else and tracked downthe bounties before hand, spent an hour doing so, people left, we’d get it done sometiems, fail others. I realized after 3 guild successful tier 1 guild bounties that that was a stupid idea. I can easily complete guild bounty tier 1 with a group of 5 including myself. Take the 5 people, split up them evenly amongst 1 zone, it shouldnt take more than 3 minutes to find the bounty if u do that right. 3 minutes for each bounty, 6 minutes total for searching 9 mintues for killing 4.5 minutes for killing each bounty. Its usually less than that, because first off, people spot the bounties very quickly, usually just wanderers in the zone. Secondly, I have never done a guild bounty where at least 3 other outsiders dont join in. It always helps. As for tier 3 bounty, ye, u need 6 groups of 5. But I really dont bother with it. I do tier 2 bounty at most and dont really desire the 3 extra merits that much. I think small guilds with be fine in terms of attack strategy, but not so much influence. But I can see anet has taken the first step to approaching this which is nice to see. It should also be mentioned that adding more bounties wont affect this strategy, unlike the strategy and hunting down the bounties beforehand. The ratio is pretty constant no matter what. 5 people to 1 bounty. 4 people I guess if all of them have the speed booster.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

All of the missions are designed to be completed in the fifteen minute window. The pre-scouting methods were never used by the testers. Most found it far more efficient to start the mission and the search the map by dividing up our efforts.

Some of the new bounties are designed to actively encourage this approach instead.

Interesting.

Could you tell us what you think the fewest people you could do Tier 1 with reliably ?

3 Extra Merits?

Really sky?

Also I’d love to see people reliably finding wildman and sotzz in 5 mins.

Also intresting to see more and more people who only ever do t2, claim t3 is fine.

Can you do t3 without preparing? sure, if you luck out with mobs and tracking… is it reliable or skill dependant? no its rng dependant.

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

3 Extra Merits?

Really sky?

Also I’d love to see people reliably finding wildman and sotzz in 5 mins.

Also intresting to see more and more people who only ever do t2, claim t3 is fine.

Can you do t3 without preparing? sure, if you luck out with mobs and tracking… is it reliable or skill dependant? no its rng dependant.

The only bounty that you will ever have trouble finding is sottz, because of his ridiculous spawning nature. Its the fact he can spawn practically anywhere and he is also drunk and stationary. Wildman isnt hard. You station people north, east, west, and south of the map, and go against his path, it should only take 3-4 minutes. T2 is doable with 10 people as well. T3 is very doable without hunting down the npcs before hand. Espcially if you have +30 people. Once you have 40, there is no excuse to fail. You can easily put between 6-7 people in each zone, which is plenty if thye know what they are doing. You spread out equally throughout the map. For example, tarban has a veyr straightforward path. Its practically a circle. Goig against his path as one person is difficult, and can take +10 minutes. However if you have 5 people equally split up along his path, it shouldnt take more than 5 minutes, unless he just died.

So what Anthony’s saying is that you should reliably be able to beat any given bounty with 5 people in 15 minutes without pre-locating. That makes a lot of sense to me. If the bounties reset after 7 minutes of fighting, you have 8 minutes for 5 people to find them to still have the full 7 minute fight time. Now if you have trouble with the fight and wipe, that’s a different story…

30 people doing 6 bounties in 15 mins w/o pre-scouting kinda sounds.. unlikely or only possible through sheer dumbluck. considering that gives you 2.5 mins to find and kill each bounty on average if you zerg it or 15 mins for 5 ppl to find and kill their assigned one (can be especially painfully for certain bosses), wether you split up into 6 groups or zerg each one down one by one that just doesnt sound likely to succeed too often. you have to factor in waypointing, loading screens, splitting up and communicating all this to the relevant people. im going to assume they had no material to help like dulfy maps so… yeah don’t know what to think really.

Gasoline.2570:

These kinds of requirements are starting to really become an insane job to undertake and require now RNG, OR LUCK AS YOU MAY, to complete if you don’t have people to track down every single boss

Go play TERA then come back to GW2 for a bit.

Nothing will ever seem like RNG in this game again! lol

True story.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

You telling me your testers tracked down and killed 6 diffrent targets within 15 mins? that sounds completly unrealistic unless you have upward of a hundred people searching at the same time.

Try 30.

We do it with roughly 10-15 people.

Works just fine.

Honestly, 30 people for tier 3 bounty is reasonable… if those 30 people all can easily communicate with each other, know exactly what they are doing, and can take initiative to get it done.

I run bounties for a very large guild that can generally get 40-50 people out for a bounty. However, I am lucky if I can get 30 of these people on teamspeak, and even luckier if 15 or more even know what the hell is going on….. let alone being able to take initiative if something goes wrong.

T3 is very time consuming from the fact that unless you have the most perfect team ever (apparently the beta testers), you have to go out and find them beforehand to make sure you have enough time to kill all of them.

So as a leader, I have to make sure that people volunteer and go out to find the bounties beforehand, and have to repeatedly explain to people what we are doing and why. Not being on teamspeak or another communication program really makes people utterly useless as well, since 1)I cannot reliably assigned them to find a target beforehand and 2)cannot depend on them to go to the right place when the bounty is popped.

My guild has completed a tier 3 bounty every week since release, and the only two times we have ever failed it was because of a certain NPC called Half-baked Komali. Now, this NPC is a very special case because unless you zerg her with 50+ people, you will not kill her unless you understand her gimmick. She is a boss where you need a certain party build in order to actually kill her (i.e. at least 2-3 necros/mesmers). Having to take this into consideration and create a special party just for 1 of the NPCs is just another thing you can add to the list of things that need worrying about. Komali is a very anti-zerg boss once you understand her mechanics and she can be unintentionally or even intentionally griefed by other players who do not understand her mechanics.

Sotzz is not a problem for our guild, but this is because I find him hours in advance to the appointed bounty time (Sotzz never ever moves and will literally stay in one place for days at a time, the only time he can actually move is when he is engaged by a guild when he is a bounty target). Also, most people rely on Dulfy’s map, which, let me tell you, is really bad and should probably not even be looked at with the amount of locations its missing. I spent about a week going out and tracking down Sotzz and suspicious barrel locations and as such, I have a map that shows every single location he can spawn. Most guilds do not do this however…

T3 bounty can be done, it is not impossible and the only real luck actually comes from Prisoner 1141 and her pathing (surprised no one mentioned this). The rest is just time consuming and trying to organize people. I really hope the new bounty targets do not need special attention like Komali does, and hope that any group of 5 players can actually kill them without a predetermined party.

Keirion.9105:

So what Anthony’s saying is that you should reliably be able to beat any given bounty with 5 people in 15 minutes without pre-locating. That makes a lot of sense to me. If the bounties reset after 7 minutes of fighting, you have 8 minutes for 5 people to find them to still have the full 7 minute fight time. Now if you have trouble with the fight and wipe, that’s a different story…

Diviner.7405:

My guild has completed a tier 3 bounty every week since release, and the only two times we have ever failed it was because of a certain NPC called Half-baked Komali. Now, this NPC is a very special case because unless you zerg her with 50+ people, you will not kill her unless you understand her gimmick. She is a boss where you need a certain party build in order to actually kill her (i.e. at least 2-3 necros/mesmers). Having to take this into consideration and create a special party just for 1 of the NPCs is just another thing you can add to the list of things that need worrying about. Komali is a very anti-zerg boss once you understand her mechanics and she can be unintentionally or even intentionally griefed by other players who do not understand her mechanics.

Sotzz is not a problem for our guild, but this is because I find him hours in advance to the appointed bounty time (Sotzz never ever moves and will literally stay in one place for days at a time, the only time he can actually move is when he is engaged by a guild when he is a bounty target). Also, most people rely on Dulfy’s map, which, let me tell you, is really bad and should probably not even be looked at with the amount of locations its missing. I spent about a week going out and tracking down Sotzz and suspicious barrel locations and as such, I have a map that shows every single location he can spawn. Most guilds do not do this however…

Ok, these two posts are making me rethink my position on this.

Now it’s true that those 5 people will need to be a good working team who have a good handle on the (soon to be) 18 boss paths and boss mechanics. Now that’s not really very realistic to start out with (especially given how hodgepodge a guild group can be), but it sounds more like an attainable goal for a small group when you break it down like that.

So better influence options for small guilds and T1 bounties being realistic for groups of 5. I think it would have probably helped if it had been revealed that they tested these with decent 5 man teams soloing each boss (assuming it’s fair to extrapolate that from Anthony’s “30” answer). At least everyone would get the boss reward, and with quick spotting and killing, a good chance at the merits too.

Oh, Diviner, you can attach images to forum posts if you felt like sharing that map of yours! ^^ lol, Awesome work though.

I might release it in the next few days either on here or Dulfy. It just needs to be redone since it is visually unpleasing to look at.

30 people for t3 is a good margin, should even be possible with 25 but requires some luck with the picks and leaves a smaller margin for errors. My guild has an activity of 15 people per bounty and we run T2 with ease, not looking up as many bounties as possible, sure it doesn’t always work out exactly as u want butin general it is certainly doable.

And if you have trouble doing T3, well.. the solution is simple. Do T2. The difference in merits isnt humongous, and the personal rewards are the same.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

All of the missions are designed to be completed in the fifteen minute window. The pre-scouting methods were never used by the testers. Most found it far more efficient to start the mission and the search the map by dividing up our efforts.

Some of the new bounties are designed to actively encourage this approach instead.

I guess the main reason for complaining here is that most people don’t want the guild missions to be challenging. They rather want their reward delivered instantly, with 0% chance of failure. I for one would be happy if you can succeed in making the outcome of a guild bounty a little bit less predictable in advance and in shifting the focus more towards the collaborative action.

For instance, in my guild, we are diligently scouting and planning a guild bounty for up to one hour before we start them (because there are always that one or two potential bounties missing). Most of the “action” is just waiting until the last potential candidate has been found. Once we start the mission, the bounties go down in parallel in well below five minutes. I don’t find this particularly rewarding, and I am quite sure that the fun will wear off quickly.

(Yes, of course, we could deliberately not pre-scout, but since this is a larger group effort, I am not sure whether we would find a consensus in that discussion. I’d rather like to see the guild bounties fixed in general.)

~MRA

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The pre-scouting methods were never used by the testers. Most found it far more efficient to start the mission and the search the map by dividing up our efforts.

Wait… Did you just say that scouting is far less efficient? Lol, um, well… no.

I’m in a rather small guild with mostly less than 10 people online during prime time. We made an alliance with another similar and like-minded guild and have been helping each other out with manpower for our guild missions the past few weeks.
We can usually do tier 1 missions just fine with about 10 people and voice communication.
Have tried tier 2 without success so far, but I don’t think it is impossible. Just requires some more practise and experience probably.

I really do wish there were features to encourage guild alliances though. We need at the very least a common chat or something, because the way it is right now it makes things a bit of a pain in the.. to organize.

Nevertheless I can only encourage other small guilds to look for similar guilds in the same situation, and keep checking on people on your friend list as well. From what I’ve seen there are lots of people out there who aren’t able to do guild missions on their own and are happy to help/play the content/get the rewards.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

You telling me your testers tracked down and killed 6 diffrent targets within 15 mins? that sounds completly unrealistic unless you have upward of a hundred people searching at the same time.

Try 30.

Did those 30 play in the same room? And did they talk to each other instead of using the map chat?

@Anthony Ordon:
Did you see the post linked below, referring to the February 26 patch?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guild-Missions-merged/page/14#post1522077

And do you share the concerns addressed there?

(I am sorry I can’t quote it in its entirety. It’s 4 full posts long.)

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Jornophelanthas.1475:

@Anthony Ordon:
Did you see the post linked below, referring to the February 26 patch?

I’ve read every post in that thread, yes. Please stop trying to fling it towards my face. I share some of the concerns, but I don’t agree with everything every player says.

The new guild training mission is meant to alleviate accessibility issues for smaller guilds. We’ll continue to look at methods of making sure that everyone can access the content and has the necessary tools available to complete it, but I don’t believe that down-scaling the challenges to accommodate for one-person at a time is the right solution for group content.

Thank you for acknowledging the concerns raised. If you say that you will continue to monitor whether everyone (every guild?) will have the necessary tools available to complete the new guild content, I have faith that the interests of guilds who cannot field more than a full 5-player party (but would still like to have access to Guild Merits and Guild Commendations) will not be forgotten.

Skylightmoon.1079:

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

3 Extra Merits?

Really sky?

Also I’d love to see people reliably finding wildman and sotzz in 5 mins.

Also intresting to see more and more people who only ever do t2, claim t3 is fine.

Can you do t3 without preparing? sure, if you luck out with mobs and tracking… is it reliable or skill dependant? no its rng dependant.

The only bounty that you will ever have trouble finding is sottz, because of his ridiculous spawning nature. Its the fact he can spawn practically anywhere and he is also drunk and stationary. Wildman isnt hard. You station people north, east, west, and south of the map, and go against his path, it should only take 3-4 minutes. T2 is doable with 10 people as well. T3 is very doable without hunting down the npcs before hand. Espcially if you have +30 people. Once you have 40, there is no excuse to fail. You can easily put between 6-7 people in each zone, which is plenty if thye know what they are doing. You spread out equally throughout the map. For example, tarban has a veyr straightforward path. Its practically a circle. Goig against his path as one person is difficult, and can take +10 minutes. However if you have 5 people equally split up along his path, it shouldnt take more than 5 minutes, unless he just died.

Who ever said I was failing t3? Like I said before the problem with t3 isnt difficulty, cause lets face it. Its a joke like the rest of guild wars 2 content, the problem is the amount of time required just sitting around planning and organizing to get a reliable win.

I would cheer to see each of the bosses become 2-3 times more difficult, if we were just given the proper ingame tools to organize teams etc, the current tools are beyond horrendus, A good example is the need to go into the highly disfunctional guild menu just to see whos your target, thanks to the frame issues caused by having 400+ members, just doing that takes upward of 30 seconds, and then theres the lack of properly sized groups.

Not to mention that for the average player more then a few zones can take upward of a minute to load, especially if there a boss event going on.

My issue is not with the actual difficulty, its with the “difficulty” that is caused by bad design decissions and overall sloopy worksmanship.

I am not a game designer, so I am not gonna claim I could do a better job designing it, I have however been a mmo gamer for over 15 years, and I know rushed content, and bad design when I see it.

Guild Motd is a perfect example, It has a lovely “edit” button that dosnt actually allow you to edit, but instead you have to write it all over again.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Jornophelanthas.1475:

@Anthony Ordon:
Did you see the post linked below, referring to the February 26 patch?

I’ve read every post in that thread, yes. Please stop trying to fling it towards my face. I share some of the concerns, but I don’t agree with everything every player says.

The new guild training mission is meant to alleviate accessibility issues for smaller guilds. We’ll continue to look at methods of making sure that everyone can access the content and has the necessary tools available to complete it, but I don’t believe that down-scaling the challenges to accommodate for one-person at a time is the right solution for group content.

Thank you for acknowledging the concerns raised. If you say that you will continue to monitor whether everyone (every guild?) will have the necessary tools available to complete the new guild content, I have faith that the interests of guilds who cannot field more than a full 5-player party (but would still like to have access to Guild Merits and Guild Commendations) will not be forgotten.

Did you realty do all of this for this?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guild-Missions-merged/page/45#post1685982
If your doing T1 bounties you can maybe get away with one pt of 5 if they are fast at finding the targets but your more likely to just kill one guy off you will get your weekly but you will not get any points for the next level of guild events. The idea is to have guilds bigger then just 5. Just think about how bad it would be if every guild or group of 5 ppl wanted to do these guild events you would have to spawn camp the bounties. Is it realty that hard to work with other guilds or maybe add a few more ppl into your guild and stop being so inclusive?

@Jski:
“Work with other guilds” how? Co-operation between players is supported, but co-operation at guild level is not. There are no alliances.

“Add more people” how? If people looking for guilds can choose between Guild X with Guild Challenges and Guild Puzzles unlocked, and my guild, who can only do Bounties, where do you think they will go?

Gasoline.2570:

Tier 1 is too hard as is, do self research man. You might find something special.

This is where i stopped reading the rest of the thread.
There are countless 5~10 man guilds, in total and not necessarily online at the bounty time, who complete t1 with no issues. I have a befriended 10man guild here on GH that succeeded several times in a t2 hunt, no prescouting.

I am afraid it’s more a matter of (a) wanting to bite more than you can actually chew (can’t do t3? do t2 – half as many targets, same personal rewards, almost as many guild merits; i mean, what’s the fuss?) and/or, sadly, (b) l2p.

I’m the guild leader of a pretty big guild – with up to 110 members online and representing during guild events, including guild missions. We started doing bounties when we had 70 people online for them, tho, and our first bounty run was t3, completed with 8 minutes to spare. Ever since, our every t3 merit run was succeeded with 7~9 minutes to spare, and the only problem has been culling and fps drops.
Doing a t3 with 20~25 people is VERY possible, with no VoIP coordination and with kittenty targets, like Gendarran, Marches or Southsun – but you should prescout. Dulfy’s site has been a great help with everything gw2-related and she’s been rightfully honored with having an NPC named after her in the urban fractal – make use of the knowledge and plan properly ahead.

If you do not have 25 people online for a scheduled, earlier-agreed bounty time, just do a lower tier one. If you can’t even do a t1, whatever you try, because you’re not skilled enough or don’t have enough people even for that, join forces with some other small guilds and get more people on board, at least for the missions – everyone will be happy.

I mean – all in all, it’s like crying that you can’t solo a dungeon, how unfair it is that it’s designed for a 5man team; and how you don’t have enough guildies for SE3, which no pugs want to ever do to help you. It’s like whining that you can’t 3man liberate the Grenth Temple – just because you don’t have more people available, so it should be handed to you the way YOU want it, ignoring the way it’s designed.
Some stuff here is soloable, some needs grouping; some groups are small, some have to be big. Deal with it and go with the game how it’s designed, that way you’ll enjoy it much more, not banging your head against a wall.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

@Jski:
“Work with other guilds” how? Co-operation between players is supported, but co-operation at guild level is not. There are no alliances.

“Add more people” how? If people looking for guilds can choose between Guild X with Guild Challenges and Guild Puzzles unlocked, and my guild, who can only do Bounties, where do you think they will go?

Well you can do it 2 times they only take 15 to 7 mins kind of you scratch my back i scratch yours idea. Its a bit inconvenient but its far from being imposable.

Well if you only have 5 ppl showing up to do guild events a higher wanted events i think its time to stop being so inclusive to other ppl they would like to join guilds too.

I’m curious as to what was the minimum number of testers it took to complete Tier 1 bounties without pre-scouting. Our guild can get around 10 people online when we schedule the bounty missions, but we tend to stick with the “safer” method of tracking down all the difficult to find bounties before starting the mission. If we can get some kind of assurance that it’s doable with our numbers without pre-scouting, then we’ll try without it for our bounty sessions moving forward.

I’m assuming that this will require splitting up the group between the two maps, correct? However, the way personal rewards are implemented right now, only the group that successfully killed the bounty on their map within the time limit will be eligible for their weekly personal reward, which is a bit unfair to the other group who spent the same effort scouting for theirs, but happened to take more time due to longer paths, more difficult mechanics, etc.

Would it be feasible to give out personal rewards to everyone in the guild who are on either of the maps that the two bounties appear on, when either one of them is defeated? I might be overlooking some kind of possible exploit with this approach but I feel like the issue itself does need to be addressed in some form.

Also, does the addition of the new bounty training missions mean the actual missions will reward influence as well?

How about just scaling the rewards based on the challenge presented? I don’t think smaller guilds would mind working a little extra as long as there was something to work towards but making commendations unreachable just seems like a decision lacking foresight and considering it’s following right in the footsteps of Ascended gear I’m growing really confused as to what exactly the current design philosophy is. Is excluding players really what you guys want to be doing right now?

but making commendations unreachable just seems like a decision lacking foresight

You don’t need to complete a bounty to get commendations. Just kill ONE champion.
Go with a t3 bounty run, choose the easiest to find champion (no scouting), find it, kill it. Get commendations for everyone. Fail the bounty.
Do and complete t1-t2 to slowly wrack up merits for new sources of comms.

Jski.6180:

Jornophelanthas.1475:

@Jski:
“Work with other guilds” how? Co-operation between players is supported, but co-operation at guild level is not. There are no alliances.

“Add more people” how? If people looking for guilds can choose between Guild X with Guild Challenges and Guild Puzzles unlocked, and my guild, who can only do Bounties, where do you think they will go?

Well you can do it 2 times they only take 15 to 7 mins kind of you scratch my back i scratch yours idea. Its a bit inconvenient but its far from being imposable.

Well if you only have 5 ppl showing up to do guild events a higher wanted events i think its time to stop being so inclusive to other ppl they would like to join guilds too.

I already posted something in a different thread that can serve as an answer to this.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

As a mechanism to help small guilds meet the Influence threshold to unlock the other guild mission content, Training Bounties will absolutely work. All you need is about 5 members who are dedicated to developing the guild further.

However, Training Bounties do NOT help small guilds in their ability to actually complete “real” Guild Bounties (and earn Guild Merits and Guild Commendations) with a relatively small number of members.

There could be a workaround, however. My small guild of 3 active players (who are real life friends) is considering unlocking Guild Bounties, and to fill out our numbers temporarily by recruiting players who are primarily interested in the rewards. These players would be temporary members for the duration of the mission only.
(Granted, an alliance system with several small guilds banding together would be far more elegant and potentially better organized.)

Added for clarity:
The players who are to be recruited would be those who do NOT want to make a commitment to any guild (due to playstyle preference), but who WOULD like to play the guild content.

What bugs me is that most of the time, guilds aren’t doing the bounties “blindly” : they use guides. Which is understandable because the hints don’t really match with the routes of some monsters.

Gasoline.2570:

Tier 1 is too hard as is, do self research man. You might find something special.

Yeah, no. If my guild can do it with 5 people, why can’t you?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

As far as 30 vs a T3, yes they were coordinating over voice and guild chat. They absolutely failed plenty of times and they tried lots of different tactics before they found what worked for them. But they were mighty pleased with themselves once they got it done, and that’s exactly the kind of group content that we’re aiming for.

Call me crazy here but having the devs/testers claiming the ONLY way they completed content they brought out in a game was via using voip programs seems asinine to me. Yes I use voip programs and have been for years while playing mmos. BUT NEVER should devs claim the ONLY way to successfully complete some pve content is by using voip. It should ALWAYS be possible using only the in game tools available. I’d suggest some REAL ACCURATE testing be done by 30 people for a T3 using nothing but guild chat, map chat, etc. Using voip is meant for us; the players, to communicate better and is a 3rd party program. If the testers are going to use voip while testing any content of the game perhaps the devs need to fully integrate voip into said game and make it an actual requirement in order to play the game.

Now mind you I am in a large (300+) hardcore wvw guild in Blackgate so we don’t have these issues that others have. Our biggest issue is that so many people in our guild have under 25% of world completion done and thus struggle to find a close way point once we find the targets. Our voip/guild chat convos are like “where the hell is that, what the hell is that, wow I’ve never been there, how the hell do I get there, man this map sucks/looks cool, wait guys I’m almost there I just found a way point on the next map over and I’m running to you, etc.” Personally I find it funny and yet embarrassing at times at some of these people who bought and leveled and only stay in wvw 24/7.

No Walking.6349:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The pre-scouting methods were never used by the testers. Most found it far more efficient to start the mission and the search the map by dividing up our efforts.

Wait… Did you just say that scouting is far less efficient? Lol, um, well… no.

Time = Money.

He didn’t say “effective”. He said “efficient”.

If you spend an hour and 15 minutes doing a Guild Bounty that means that you wasted an hour of your ENTIRE guild’s time. Time they could have spent doing dungeon runs to make money for the guild. Or time they could have spent doing 4 other guild missions.

If your guild is skillful like Anthony’s, then by launching the bounty and finding/killing them in 15 minutes, you are being more efficient.

@ Jornophelanthas.1475
Have you even tried them? Because there are a lot of guilds who are small that are running these. There are answer to your problems and i posted them if your unwilling to try them out then there is no point in talking with you because its like talking into a wall.
Tell me what is your guild that your in? Size activeness etc..