Guild Wars 2

I decided to create this post in the hopes it would get noticed and hopefully attract the feedback needed to better the system for everyone.

Firstly The current system gives a player the option to choose upto 3-5 guilds I believe and represent as they wish at the push of a button. This imo is completely BROKEN as rather then just providing the player with multiple options to run with as they feel like whether it be dungeons/fractals/pvp/wvw or what have you it has killed the idea behind having a guild and making new game companions.

It has been used as nothing more then a LFG tool and ultimately hurt the community it should be bringing together. Guilds and gamers with solid cores commonly from other MMO’s are able to create Guilds that will advance faster and provide more opportunity for new guild members whether they become part of the guilds core or not.

The effects this current system has towards small guilds after creation is massive. Three years into the game there are so many established community’s that it is pointless even using the Create Guild NPC because unless you brought with you a core from another game exodus you would be lucky to recruit into double digits and even as you do the lure of bigger guilds and what they offer is too much especially when people can join multiple but run with whichever they feel at the flick of a switch and when that switch is flicked the potential for the small guilds growth dies as you get no influence from all those members repping a bigger guild so they can do a dungeon or fractal.

This is so easily fixed without damage to any player which loves to roll or rep multiple guilds. Guild wars 1 had an amazing guild system that would work wonders in Guild Wars 2 without crippling and killing small guilds. Only being able to Join one guild at any one time and having a small stand down between Guilds would limit Guild hoppers and give smaller Guilds a chance to actually grow. That being said people still want less restriction which is where Alliances come into play. For those who didn’t play Guild Wars 1 they had Guild Alliances with a maximum of 10 Guilds. The main Alliance guild could join together multiple guilds under a unified Alliance each keeping their own guild as is but also being part of something bigger without the need to click a button repping someone else as they feel. You had all your chat options like you do now but you had Alliance chat so you could chat across the whole 10 guilds discussing anything that was happening eg’ Dungeons, Fractals etc.

Please if you support having a system people enjoy being a part of and that brings people together without stomping Small guilds out of existence show it. I truly see this as the most broken community dividing system online.

P’s Could a dev please take the time to show me this has been seen and noted so I can at least stop fighting this uphill battle if you don’t agree. Thanks anyone for your time.

Hmm… I would actually want Alliances as that was a nice feature in GW1.

But about this representing stuff… In my opinion it just opens up more choises for players. In my Guild we have 100% representation if you are not playing in a WvW guild at your server. Our guild is a PvX and Cross-server guild and WvW is a problem in our guild so I allow players to represent another guild while they play WvW. I have seen other guilds where they are just happy to have members and they give out officer titles to everyone so they can use the guild as they please. Dunno why but there are guild like that. There is or atleast where Guilds just to take down Teq.

But about this Alliance system, I “had” to leave my old guild becouse I got a request to lead the guild I am leading now, I am still in my old guild but I have a title as Ally. It would have been nice to have my new guild and my old guild to be able to talk to eachother and help eachother.

I don’t think GW2 could ever go back to only being able to be a member of 1 guild at a time.

There are so many obstacles in place:

-Most people I know have a personal guild for bank space. If people could only have 1 guild at a time, people would be up in arms about this as they spent time/money/effort obtaining the space that they need.

-GW1 had fewer game-modes: just PvP and PvE. Large scale organisation in GW1 PvE didn’t really exist because all explorable maps were instanced. In GW2, guild exist simply to organise large scale events such as WvW, SW, DT, Teq and TT.

As such, having guilds facilitate this content and actually make it playable. These guilds aren’t necessarily about community spirit, but about enjoying the content produced by A-net. They are still meaningful, just in a different way. Force people to stick with one guild and the popularity of large scale content will decline.

-Common argument against my previous point “Join a big guild that offers all of the content”. Easier said than done. I don’t know many guilds that offer all content, and the ones that do are still not as efficient as speciality guilds. Even so, a lot of folk (me included) don’t like the large guild environment- guild chat is unusable and you just feel like a number.

-Shortly, representing won’t matter as influence will be removed and you’ll be able to talk to all guilds you belong to without having to rep.

-Conclusion: Being able to join 1 guild at a time made sense in GW1. GW2 is a whole different beast and does overall benefit the game. If a player wants to find a tight knit community, they will be able to find one.

PS: There was a thread very similar to this a week ago. All points were well explained and examined. I’ll edit the link in when I find it, it’ll be an interesting read for you.

EDIT: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/5-Diffrent-rep-chats-and-one-guild/first

In my experiences with guilds – in any game – the guilds I have joined in gw2 are more likely than others to break up for no reason. This includes F2P games. I have no idea why this is, but there’s something about gw2’s manageability of guilds that seems to make them more volatile unless they’re massive or extremely tight-knit.

I don’t think the ability of having up to 5 guilds is what hurts the community. In ESO you’re also able to join up to 5 guilds – and see ALL their guild chats at the same time. Until one changes the colour of the guild chats (they’re all the same shade of green by default), it can get pretty confusing.

I’ve just had my 5th medium sized guild in gw2 break up since release and I’ve given up on joining 100% reppers. My guilds consist of a personal bank, a wvw guild, a fractal guild, a guild mission catchup guild, and the remnants of the guild that just imploded because I still semi-manage it. I’ve never had so much productivity from any guild as I have with these specialty guilds.

i run a silverwastes-specific guild that requires 100% rep while on the map so that we can properly coordinate active event maps, chest trains, commanders, etc. when our members are off the map, we don’t care whom they rep.

this is one example of a niche role that repping multiple guilds helps enable. i was originally reserved about the system, but i’ve come to appreciate it

This topic has (as noted above) come up multiple times lately, and I have to admit I don’t understand your reasoning. If people can be in two guilds and choose to represent the other one rather than yours most of the time, what makes you think they’d even be in your guild instead of the other one if you forced them to choose?

Alliance chat wouldn’t do a thing for me, since my two guilds are made up from people with totally different interests, many of which don’t even speak the same language and wouldn’t be able to communicate on an alliance chat. I’m glad ANet has given me the chance to be a part of both, since I value both communities and have a lot of friends in both.

Why do you want to take that choice away from me and force me to stick with one group of friends or the other instead of being friends with (and playing with) both? Btw, both guilds are in the 20-50 member range, and slowly but steadily growing just from people we get to know while playing the game. We wouldn’t want guild members that get lured away by bigger, better guild buffs instead of true community anyway.

I agree.
I’ve all but given up hope in making a guild and I’ve been a guild leader for many many years in WoW and was in GW1.
It’s impossible. With this system there is hardly any loyalty to a guild. And when you kindly ask someone to rep, they leave or get mad. And you get told you are a limiting guild and that nobody will want to be in a guild that wants a tight close knit community that actually reps.
It’s so frustrating.
I give up.

As a guild leader, I don’t like the one guild at a time. I think they should completely remove the represent and let you represent automatically all 5 guilds like they do in ESO. In ESO, there are chat buttons for all 5 guilds, you can chat with everyone, you can play with all of them. That is the best system I have seen in any game.

Not to mention, I think they should completely abolish influence. If you want a guild hall, fight together to get it. If you want stuff in your guild hall, fight together to earn it. Don’t have influence based on who logs on and represents which guild. There should be no influence. It would make alliances and guilds more enjoyable for everyone.

Tere.4759:

As a guild leader, I don’t like the one guild at a time. I think they should completely remove the represent and let you represent automatically all 5 guilds like they do in ESO. In ESO, there are chat buttons for all 5 guilds, you can chat with everyone, you can play with all of them. That is the best system I have seen in any game.

Not to mention, I think they should completely abolish influence. If you want a guild hall, fight together to get it. If you want stuff in your guild hall, fight together to earn it. Don’t have influence based on who logs on and represents which guild. There should be no influence. It would make alliances and guilds more enjoyable for everyone.

They are getting rid of influence with HoT. They are bringing in favor which is gained by doing guild missions.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/rethinking-guilds/

The core players of our guild has been playing together for quite some time, We were some of the core members of another guild on aurora glade that was 500 strong and created a second one but the main guild only saw a 10% rep rate and we decided to move along and do our own thing. We have now been around just over a year and we see quite a big representation in our numbers (100). We didn’t advertise and every one in the guild was found via friends or long term dungeon buddies ( wow that sounded wrong ) . What we were left with was a guild members that are there for each other. Players that will port in anywhere any time to help the new . PVP vets WVW vets and loads of PVE players. A new player hitting level 80 got new armour and weapons for the way they play by donations from other members. And we have a good sense of team work.

So before it sounds like im boasting about my guild lets get back to your story. The problem her is that you need to recruit proper players. IF they start to constantly rep other guilds then tell them to stay in other guilds. There for you create a close knit community that is fun to play with. you will need loads of team work with guild halls. So you have a month or 2 to start weeding out the stragglers.

I think it’s a great system personally. It lets players pursue their own interests.

For example, I mostly WvW, so I’m in a WvW guild, but we don’t require representation all the time because some people do PvE too. That way they can be in a PvE guild and our guild if they want. Works out better for everybody.

I see some valid arguments and respect that so the only way to please everyone is to remove the REPPING button so people can have multiple guilds and actually help all of those guilds they chose to join. Thanks for the feedback my friends

Yakuza, the thing is, with influence going away in HoT it’s not going to be the same problem. As far as your comment: “killed the idea behind guilds”, this is only if your idea behind guilds was formed by games you’ve played before. Because I belong to multiple guilds in real life. A guild is a group of people that get together for a specific purpose. Not necessary an exclusive guild.

In real life I belong to a writer’s guild, but I still have other groups I belong to that fill the same function for other things I do. In Skyrim, you can belong as a single character to every guild at the same time and even run them all. So the idea behind guilds is really just your specific idea of guilds, rooted in the experience you’ve had so far.

However, in most MMOs, even though you can only join one guild at a time, each character could join a different guild and many did. Just not on the same character. When I played WoW, I had light side characters and dark side characters and each were in separate guilds. When I played Rift, I had characters on two different servers, and had one character in a US guild for when I was on in those hours and one in an Australian guild for when I was on those hours.

More to the point, in those other games, you didn’t have an account that was on a friend or guild’s list only a character. So your guild/friends didn’t even know you were on when you were repping another guild. It was less honest. Done completely secretly but make no mistake, it was done. A character may have been locked into one guild but not a player.

The only thing Guild Wars 2 does is make it so you can do the same thing many of us used to do openly. It doesn’t change that function of guilds, because there’s nothing in the word guild that means exclusive.

I completely agree with this post. I’ve played GW1 since it came out and it had a great guild system and when Factions came out, you could make guild alliances, which was probably one of the best ideas for any MMO’s. With alliances your guild could team up with up to 9 other guilds and you could visit eachother’s guild halls and do events together and it also had a shared chat. It was perfect.
Now, in GW2 all of that is gone and replaced by a poorly implemented Rep system that doesn’t work, because players abuse it non-stop. I’m the leader of a guild in GW2 and it’s incredibly frustrating having to explain this system for new players everytime they join my guild and then forgetting to represent whenever they switch character. I’m not asking for 100% rep either because i believe everyone is free to do what they want, but whenever somebody from the guild isn’t representing anymore, i’m asking myself “What could the reason be for not representing? Has he switched character and forgot? Or has he found a different guild and doesn’t want to represent mine anymore?, etc.”.
Plus, the relationships between the members isn’t as strong as it was in GW1, mostly because there isn’t time enough to establish the relationship since some players don’t represent most of the time, and you don’t have the sense of belonging in a community anymore. They should’ve just taken the Alliance system from GW1 and put it in GW2, with a shared alliance chat and one guild per account and all of these problems would’ve been solved and it may have also been a lot more fun.
Maybe it’s too late now, but i still hope that one day they will change this stupid Representation system and return to the one from GW1, i’d love to see a poll about it somewhere.
That’s my opinion on the matter, enjoy the game!