Guild Wars 2

Dear Arenanet

I started our guild on the Underworld server when the game first came out, rebuilding a guild I had since the early days of GW1. For months and months everything was pretty good. There were loads of players, waves of new players constantly coming through and the guild was quite a lively place.
Then for some reason all the WvW guilds left Underworld and went elsewhere. The sever as a whole just seemed to feel really quiet. Gradually, even though we had many members still coming and going, overall our active numbers were declining. (There are a lot of reasons for this, some concerning the lack of polish on guilds, some to do with the ‘coming and going’ nature of play of the game, and some just personal reasons to the player.)
Anyway guild activity was low and while I wouldn’t go as far as to call the server dead, it started to feel like you rarely saw anyone else. Where once you’d do events in small groups of 3 or 5, you were now doing them alone.
Then the Tequatl update. As it became increasingly apparent that Underworld just couldn’t beat Tequatl more players upped and left the server, adding to the already useless empty feel of the server as a whole.
The WvW season then totally emphasised this with every last few people who cared slightly about wvw just going and joining other wvw servers. For the last month or so Underworld has felt so poor and lacking in anything. Trying to do some of the wvw season 1 achievements and the monthly wvw kills is impossible.
Anyway the point I am getting to is that the few players of us that were still playing decided we should move to a server with a good PvE reputation because we were sick of the guild slowly falling apart, sick of the lack of players in general and frustrated with how difficult everything is on a server where general numbers are low across all maps.

So we moved to Desolation. And everything about it is better. WvW is active and full, Tequatl is easily doable, all the difficult places to get around like southsun cove and the bottom of orr actually have all their waypoints uncontested.
However I was suddenly hit with the fact that everything…. EVERYTHING our guild had worked for over the year the game has been out, all our bounties, merits, unlocks, influence… the guild bank literally everything. Is locked to the Underworld server. Being a small guild we have always stuggled a bit where larger guilds do not in trying to do enough to unlock everything and now we have to start entirely from the beginning?! All because we wanted to move to a server where there are actually people. I don’t even feel angry about this, I just feel at a total loss and cold inside because either we have to stay in a struggling PvE server or we have to start again with our influence. This isn’t even like it’s just a year of my work, it’s a year of mine and my friends work earned from regularly playing a game we love. You’ve done a lot of things right with this game but whoever is in charge of the guild system ought to feel ashamed that they have put players in this position.

As the guild leader and the person who created this guild in the first place It would be nice to have the option to transfer things between servers. I just literally can’t believe it’s all gone. (I know it’s not actually gone it’s still in Underworld but it might as well be gone since we can’t acess it even if we guest there). You said you wante server transfers to be a serious decision and none of us took it lightly. We discussed it with each other before all agreeing to move, so why can’t we also make the serious decision of moving all our guild stuff there too? This whole situation has just disheartened me entirely.

Thank you.
Half Tooth.

Sorry for the loss of your guild updates and all.

This aspect of the guild has been in the wiki for quite some time, but you would have to think to look it up to know. It’s not exactly intuitive. The problem seems to be that the guilds are attached to servers, not accounts, so they don’t transfer when you do.

If there is someone you know and trust in the old server, you could make them a guild member and they could take the items out of the bank and mail them to you.

As to lost influence, maybe the same person can access the upgrades such as guild banners. They could get these going and at a time agreed upon, set up the banners. You could guest to that server and get the guild bonus off the banner then go back. This way, you could use up the influence until it’s gone. Of course, the tricky part is finding someone honest and dependable. But it’s one possible workaround for a bad situation.

You might look into whether or not the guild bounties can still be done if you guest to that server, if you have these already unlocked.

Maybe doing something like this will allow you to drain the influence off your old guild while building up influence in your new one.

Thanks Astral for your feedback and sympathy. We have done most of the things you suggested. Luckily we are a group of trusted friends so it wasn’t a problem for one of us to empty the guild bank and move that over. The main problem is the influence and unlocks. We had worked hard to unlock all areas up to level 6 and we were just about to unlock guild challenges (the second to last mission type available) And now we have to start from all area’s at level 1 again. The other problem is the time taken to research such things. With some research taking up to a week to complete it’s still going to take us months and months to get back to where we were.

I know that guild missions can be done on a server if you guest there because one of our members has been on the Gandara server the whole time and he has managed to do these with us. However even if I guest back to Underworld, the unlocks are not available to me to activate from the guild panel and even if they were any influence or merits earned would also still be locked in Underworld.
This whole situation is literally stupid and the way the guild system has been designed is completely flawed. Why have an instance of the same guild in each server if those instances can’t be pooled together? Or why not have the guild bound to a server like a player is since there is very little need for multi server guilds.

I would also like to address two other unrelated problems that I alluded to in my first post.
The first is in regards to the fact that WvW is having such a powerful pull over the rest of the server. Introducing the WvW season event is definitely a good idea in itself and it makes WvW more competitive and fun to play. However it is having knock-on effects for the PvE players across all servers. With WvW requiring huge numbers of payers to be able to do anything effective and long lasting, where these masses of players decide to seat themselves is game changing. As I described earlier doing WvW on a server with few WvW players is both pointless and totally not fun. As a lone player you can do nothing against a castle or a zerg, you can’t really capture anything substantial or hold it. In fact just trying to get WvW kills is extremely difficult because the entire map is void of players and when you do finally come across someone they are often part of a zerg or mini zerg. It’s borderline unplayable.
Then if you’ve got several large WvW guilds moving away from a server, that takes its toll on PvE. Player numbers are generally low everywhere, there is also an unspoken dip in moral as other players become aware that their server is always loosing or that they have been deserted. This is an unpleasant feeling to experience and I only really noticed how much it affected my experience of the game once I’d switched to Desolation who are currently doing pretty well as WvW. The inferior feeling I’d been experiencing was replaced with a sudden moral boost and empowerment which then made my overall game play experience much more enjoyable.
I don’t like that the events of WvW can have this kind of mass effect across a server, especially when it concerns players who might not play WvW at all. There needs to be some way to balance it out so that lower populated servers don’t suffer because of the actions of certain large guilds.

This brings me neatly to my second point which is in a game built to be fully populated; there is no compensation for low populated servers. Lower populated servers experience frequently contested waypoints, constant failings with Tequatl, running out of time before killing a map boss, and group events become stupidly difficult if not impossible. The game just doesn’t respond to low numbers of players, instead t keeps throwing more and more challenges at you which are impossible to do without volumes of man power. This really needs to be addressed.