Guild Wars 2

ColinJohanson.2394:

Or you could always grow your guild

Halls are pretty and all, but I’ve been meaning to ask a question.
Please excuse me if this was asked elsewhere.

Do I need a Hall to access my Guild Bank?
Because I don’t plan on growing my little self bank guild enough to tackle a Hall.

Atlas.9704:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Or you could always grow your guild

Halls are pretty and all, but I’ve been meaning to ask a question.
Please excuse me if this was asked elsewhere.

Do I need a Hall to access my Guild Bank?
Because I don’t plan on growing my little self bank guild enough to tackle a Hall.

No, there will be something in LA. It’s currently there, just not accessible yet.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Lord.4270:

Hi,

We are a guild of 3 guys . We love WWW.
With Guild halls , we will have to do guild missions.

So why we have to do puzzle jump and things like this , when in this game we just love killing people on the battlefield !

Why can t we play as we want .. ??

HoT will include a solution for this for both guilds that are WvW, and PvP oriented that want to build and expand their Guild Halls and need the favor generated by guild missions. Same goes for guilds that have a mix of players interested in all three. More info down the road a bit on how this will work once we’ve got it a little more solid on our end.

Edited to add: Everyone will have to do the actual mission to capture the guild hall once per hall though no matter what. If your group online is too small, you’ll need to invite friends (or pay/beg/sing-songs-to-woo peeps in Lion’s Arch!) to come with you and help you claim the guild hall to own one. Or you could always grow your guild

You know if I remember correctly your team said the same thing about guild missions. Especially before your edit. When it was released we found out that the system actually kind of left smaller guilds in the dust. So ever since then I personally despise guild missions. It was kind of like when you guys said Final Rest staff drop was not bugged and had us looking for it like a bunch of fools until you fixed the drop rate. Or the time when you guys released the Fractured update and reset our level due to a fractal leaderboard that still has never come out. Or how about those choose your own fractal weapon skin boxes that were also promised with the update and never came out. Maybe you want to tease us about Polymock some more considering we know it’s been shelf-ed (kind of like SAB atm). Instead of telling us the truth, you turn to PR spinning of “nothing is off the table” BS. Also your CDI project is still a joke especially after what happened with the commander tag system. Izzy really talked about how he felt that most of our dialogue was warranted in that particular CDI project. Yet when we got that update less then a tenth of our complaints got resolved.

You know what would have helped before you added guild missions or guild halls? A guild alliance system. However I guess no one can be bothered with that and once again the community has to fill in that gap like we did before the LFG tool took a year to build. I guess this one will take 8 years before you get the message.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

And the thing about claiming a guild hall by our own hands it’s like… Meh… Why not make Dungeons Soloable? I mean I hate playing MMO’s with others!

That is an old argument, and not really a good one. Massive Multiplayer Online game… it means nothing more than that there are other players to interact with. And there are very many ways to interact with players.

As to your solo-able dungeons: by far most dungeon groups rush through and have zero patience for people who want to actually SEE those cutscenes and read the story. So it is basically a good thing that those who want to experience that part of the content, now can. Whether ANet did this in a good way… hard to say. I’ve done Arah storymode solo, to see what it’s like (faster, still boring, way less reward), so I cannot really say how it is for a group.

I think ANet just has to work on getting the scaling right. If they do that, there REALLY shouldn’t be a reason for anyone to feel cheated. Plenty of other games have gotten it right, so there’s no reason ANet wouldn’t. One can hope…

@Lanfear
Sorry, but this is a problem with your comprehension of the argument, what you’re saying, and what they’re saying.

One person should not be a contender for running a dungeon. Some people have very specific builds and are very good and can solo. Most people can’t. Your average player can’t do it.

Your average five man guild will not be able to run this alone. And that SHOULD be acceptable. If a very specifically designed and highly skilled five man guild can pull it off, though, it doesn’t diminish anyone’s value or achievement, it just further boosts that guilds achievement.

Once again you’re saying the wrong thing. No one is “allowing” for smaller anything. Allowing for smaller groups means that ANet designed it to be done that way. That is what you are saying. It doesn’t matter if that is what you mean to be saying, that is still what you are saying. If that’s not what you mean to be saying, then you should stop using that terminology because you’re just shooting your argument in the foot.

All that said, I’m pretty sure the argument that you are looking to accomplish the “impossible” with an elite crew is untrue. Your argument consistently breaks down to imply that it should be designed with small groups in mind, which it should not.

Just because something is a major aspect of a game does not necessarily mean you should just be able to do it. I will use the WoW analogy here. Raiding is a major aspect of that game, of many games even, but they are designed for large groups. You shouldn’t expect to be able to just walk in and solo a raid because you don’t want to get more people involved. They dumbed down the raids for small groups, as I understand it, but you can’t use those versions for their real purpose which is gear progression.

Allowing for small groups to complete this would devalue the accomplishments of everyone, including the small group. If a small group can do it, then whoopy do. I’ll just PuG it for my bank guild and call it a night. Going against the odds and accomplishing what you shouldn’t be able to, though, doesn’t devalue anything.

@Kal

smh

“One person should not be a contender for running a dungeon”
“Your average five man guild will not be able to run this alone. "

Why? Does it really upset your sense of self so much that someone would like to do this? Wants the option to be able to do this? That not everyone wants to pug everything just because they don’t have some huge pool of people to bug?

The entire game was built with the intention of scaling. Granted, it’s been done poorly, and needs a bit of an overhaul, but there is no reason why things like dungeons, fractal, and yes the claiming mission couldn’t be made to scale while still offering the same challenge.

And don’t give me the argument that having it scale so that the option to do it in a smaller group is viable will devalue the content or the achievements of larger groups. Those that want to do it in larger groups will. Those that want to pug it will.

This is not WoW. We do not want it to be WoW where chunks of content are only seen by 10% or less of the population. Obviously that’s not really working for WoW anymore either, considering they have been making that content more accessible.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

See, what i read was that you couldn’t own both halls in order to have access to both new armor sets. It was explained that you would have to be a part of another guild in order to have access to the other armor set your original guild didn’t choose. Can you link the blog please?

I think it was also in one of the guild hall blogs but I found it in the ZAM article, linked to in Dulfy’s Livestream notes, in the text near the screenshot of the fountain.
http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=36174

Kal Spiro.9745:

Allowing for small groups to complete this would devalue the accomplishments of everyone, including the small group. If a small group can do it, then whoopy do. I’ll just PuG it for my bank guild and call it a night. Going against the odds and accomplishing what you shouldn’t be able to, though, doesn’t devalue anything.

This argument is mind boggling. What I get from it is, “We want some tough challenging content for big groups, but if that content is easier to do with a smaller group then we’ll not go for the more challenging route that we’re asking for and just take the path of least resistance.”

Huh?

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

The entire game was built with the intention of scaling. Granted, it’s been done poorly, and needs a bit of an overhaul, but there is no reason why things like dungeons, fractal, and yes the claiming mission couldn’t be made to scale while still offering the same challenge.

This. I agree with DevilLordLaser.8619 that scaling has not been ideal (sucked hard sometimes) in any sense for most content, but I think most players would rather they fix the scaling issues anyway. That said, and maybe this is just crazy talk, why can’t they design a system to do both. One scenario designed to scale for large groups and another to scale for small groups. In the end, if the systems could handle it and scale properly to make the content challenging enough for either, would that satisfy you?

Edit: When it comes down to it, I will be satisfied as long as my small guild can get a hall and keep upgrading (or really just keep upgrading) even if that means we have to recruit help to get the hall. I really don’t want to have to grow the guild just to keep progressing after the removal of influence.

To be fair/clarify:

Yes, Lanfear, I have been reading your arguments primarily as "this content should be specifically designed for solos, and then we rely on the scaling system to just make it work for everyone who can manage to scrape up more than one guy.

If that’s not what you want, then I’m not sure you’re entirely aware of how the scaling system works.

The way the scaling system works is that there is a base point at which scaling does not occur, up or down. This is the balance point, the number of players the content was designed for. My own personal self, I want that point to be ten but am somewhat expecting it to end up at five despite the stated fifteen, but that’s largely immaterial. The main thing is that at this point the content is at its best. That’s the target number of folks you want to hit to have the best time, because that’s the point where the developers have exerted 100% control over the event.

Once it starts scaling, that’s when automated systems start making decisions instead of developers, and if you’re familiar with automated systems you know that automated systems are [i]dumber than rocks.[/I] Even googly-eyed ley-line rocks. They follow preprogrammed guidelines as to what the devs feel would be more challenging for Content In General, as opposed to this specific event they’re currently working on, as to the best of my knowledge the scaling system isn’t really tuned for specific events but is instead bulk-applied code, outside a tiny handful of very specific, high-profile fights.

Now, true, I would consider this a very high-profile fight, but most folks are going to do it once and only once per significant guild they’re in (and by ‘significant’ I mean ‘guild they care about being in’, not ‘guild of unusual size’). That’s not a high return on investment for spending many moons tweaking scaling formulas for everyone from one to a million players in this one-time guild event. I’m figuring they’ll rely on the general-purpose scaling formulas to handle it, and while those formulas don’t hiccup too badly when applied to relatively controlled swings in player count, when we’re talking thousand-percent increase or decrease over the target value?

The system chokes, and it chokes hard. Either it drops the ball and your twobie attempt crushes it like eggshells beneath a chugger, or you cannot slam your face into the brick wall often enough to ever get through. And let’s face it – no amount of scaling is ever going to stop the megaguilds from flooding the map with hundreds of bodies and just swamping the Mordrem completely. ArenaNet can’t build for those guys any more than they can build for solo bank guilds, because the guilds able to throw two hundred players at the claiming event are one in ten thousand tags.

There has to be a balance point, some base state the devs build the content around before they deal with scaling issues. That point cannot be one man. It just can’t.

[Cont…]

(I cannot tell you how much I despise this forum’s ridiculously low character limit…)

Now, if you’re asking for no body-count gating? Sure. Bodycount gates are annoying anyways, and I’ve never been opposed to people trying to finagle their way solo through a piece of crazy content. I am opposed to one-man bank guilds owning a piece of real estate the size of Queensdale because the concept is patently ludicrous. One-man bank guilds aren’t even guilds. Yes, I said it and I’ll say it again – one-man bank guilds are not guilds. They are a workaround people use to avoid paying gems for extra bank tabs and are an unfortunate glitch in the guild system. A guild is a group of people who associate with each other and work together to accomplish whatever goals they have.

Even the two-guy husband/wife duo guilds qualify for that statement and should get their fair crack at guild halls if they can swing the stakes-claim event by hook or by crook, but bank guilds do not. It does bother me that those guys are demanding that they basically be given full-up guild halls for free, because for one they have no reason to get it for free and for two they have no good reason to have it at all.

Frankly there’s plenty of junk in this thread that has cheesed me off, and not all of it has been Lanfear. The Three Wuvmigos that started this thread are perpetuating a trend I hate in this game, but unfortunately I’m in the distinct minority on that trend and I know it so I just get to stew. But frag it all, if they’re going to make it so that you never have to step your 1337 self into the dirty icky nasty PvE side of the game to earn 100% of the game’s PvE rewards – if they’re just going to hand Wuv or PvP guilds their guild halls and their favor on a SILVER F***ING PLATTER because they don’t wanna have to play the game to get those things – then so far as I’m concerned, the least they can do to try and sooth that particular outrage is make sure that the rest of us who do play it properly and actually earn our halls and our favor have a great time doing it.

That’s really my thing. The fragblasted PvP folks have already gotten Colin to admit that you don’t actually have to do stuff with your guild to earn favor, you can continue focusing your time on being a jerk to fellow players in the PvP arenas and still get everything the PvE guilds have to actually work for pretty much for free. That’s an enormous concession I wish like Gehenna that ArenaNet hadn’t made. Now we’ve got people demanding that the scaling balance point be set at one man and I’m sorry, but that is just too freaking much.

At. Some. Point. In this whole debacle, the guilds part of the new guild system has to come into play. Doesn’t_it?

The main concern i have is not the scaling balance. Its the addition of an arbitary player count requirement (which is what seemed to be implied was going to happen). Im happy with it being balanced to start scaling at 10+ players. But i still want the possibility of me entering and attempting it solo/duo. And i dont want to suddenly run into a switch which requires 5 players to stand on different spots.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

@Kal

smh

“One person should not be a contender for running a dungeon”
“Your average five man guild will not be able to run this alone. "

Why? Does it really upset your sense of self so much that someone would like to do this? Wants the option to be able to do this? That not everyone wants to pug everything just because they don’t have some huge pool of people to bug?

The entire game was built with the intention of scaling. Granted, it’s been done poorly, and needs a bit of an overhaul, but there is no reason why things like dungeons, fractal, and yes the claiming mission couldn’t be made to scale while still offering the same challenge.

And don’t give me the argument that having it scale so that the option to do it in a smaller group is viable will devalue the content or the achievements of larger groups. Those that want to do it in larger groups will. Those that want to pug it will.

This is not WoW. We do not want it to be WoW where chunks of content are only seen by 10% or less of the population. Obviously that’s not really working for WoW anymore either, considering they have been making that content more accessible.

I cannot solo dungeons. I’m an average player. So no, it doesn’t have anything to do with my sense of self. Why are YOU so important that YOU should be able to do something designed for more people. Does it damage YOUR sense of self that you’re denied something, anything at all?

Aenesthesia.1697:

why can’t you? will your guild dissappear if you keep playing like you have up till now?

Technically, no it won’t disappear.

But, that’s because THEY CAN’T GET ONE! So, yes, it will go away. The new rules exclude them from ever even starting the process.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Frankly there’s plenty of junk in this thread that has cheesed me off, and not all of it has been Lanfear. The Three Wuvmigos that started this thread are perpetuating a trend I hate in this game, but unfortunately I’m in the distinct minority on that trend and I know it so I just get to stew. But frag it all, if they’re going to make it so that you never have to step your 1337 self into the dirty icky nasty PvE side of the game to earn 100% of the game’s PvE rewards – if they’re just going to hand Wuv or PvP guilds their guild halls and their favor on a SILVER F***ING PLATTER because they don’t wanna have to play the game to get those things – then so far as I’m concerned, the least they can do to try and sooth that particular outrage is make sure that the rest of us who do play it properly and actually earn our halls and our favor have a great time doing it.

I think you’re misunderstanding something here. They’re not just handing anything to WvW nor PvP. Favor is not really relevant to Guild Hall acquisition, except maybe to get permission to try in the first place. WvW and PvP are both legitimate parts of the game. Parts of the game that some people and even guilds enjoy to the exclusion of all else. There has forever been a discrepancy between the three groups such that PvE usually had the easiest time acquiring things, and that forced people who did not enjoy that aspect of the game to do it. They’re just not forcing them this time, but I guarantee they’ll still have to actually go into whatever zone and do the fight like everyone else to get the Hall in the first place.

Kal Spiro.9745:

I think you’re misunderstanding something here. They’re not just handing anything to WvW nor PvP. Favor is not really relevant to Guild Hall acquisition, except maybe to get permission to try in the first place. WvW and PvP are both legitimate parts of the game. Parts of the game that some people and even guilds enjoy to the exclusion of all else. There has forever been a discrepancy between the three groups such that PvE usually had the easiest time acquiring things, and that forced people who did not enjoy that aspect of the game to do it. They’re just not forcing them this time, but I guarantee they’ll still have to actually go into whatever zone and do the fight like everyone else to get the Hall in the first place.

Allow me to paraphrase a conversation here:

ArenaNet: “We’ve decided that influence is too unfocused and unwieldy and difficult to work with, so we’re scrapping it in favor of Favor, which you can get by doing guild activities such as guild missions.”

Three Wuvmigos: “That’s not fair! We’re a tiny guild that only does Wuv and hates the rest of the game! We should have the exact same gigantic, fully upgraded guild hall with all the bells and whistles that will take months and months for the PvE guilds to build up! Let us earn Favor by killing, trolling and teabagging in Wuv like we always do!”

Colin: “Okay. You can earn Favor by killing, trolling and teabagging your way across Wuv like you always do.”

DLL: “Hey! This was supposed to be a replacement for the unfocused, unwieldy, and difficult to work with Favor! Why do the PvP guys get free access to Favor, or guild halls, or whatever they like, without actually having to do any sort of guild-related stuff at all?! They can already get everything PvE players have in a fraction of the time with PvP reward tracks! And when PvE players ask why PvP players get everything we get in reward tracks but we can’t get any of the PvP exclusive stuff without being killed, trolled, and teabagged, we get yelled at! Why should these guys get to skip the claiming event, the guild missions, and everything else you need to do to get a decked-out guild hall?!”

Entire GW2 Player Base: “SHUT UP DLL!”

…

Can you see where I might be upset? PvP players can get entire dungeon reward armor sets in an afternoon without even knowing where the dungeon is. They can get world boss rewards without ever seeing the world boss in question. They get free-and-clear access to every piece of exclusive gear, every skin, every special title, everything that’s supposed to indicate that one has adventured long and prospered in the PvE side of the game, without ever having to so much as step foot in Lion’s Arch. And yet they also get a big pile of special PvP-exclusive rewards nobody can ever see without stepping foot in the shark tank and getting eaten.

Now those same guys are demanding that ArenaNet ‘PvP Reward Track’ guild content so they don’t have to set one single foot in the Maguuma, or kill one single Mordrem, or engage with the game whatsoever, to get everything the actual PvE guilds have to bust their humps to get. They can just keep killing, trolling, and teabagging like they always do, not even notice the expansion hits, and they get everything Guild Halls have to offer for free while they do it. The solos and twobies are backing them up on that, demanding that everything guild hall-related be made perfectly fine-and-dandy achievable by any jackalope with a bank ‘guild’ who decides that he wants to be the lord of his own personal Queensdale without any of the trials or hardships the regular guilds are supposed to exert to earn this same thing.

It’s maddening. It’s unreasonable in the extreme and it bothers me to no end. If people want a thing in this game, then yes, I feel they should have to do whatever the action required for that thing is. If I want PvP-exclusive skins or titles or whatevers? Then I should have to go into PvP, get destroyed, and put up with the constant taunts and insults until I’ve taken my share of lumps to earn whatever the thing I want is.

If I want dungeon armors? I should have to do dungeons to earn them.

If I want world boss swag? I should have to go fight that world boss to do it.

If I want a guild hall, with all the fixin’s? Then my choices are to join a guild and help them build that hall up, or do the same activities by myself, sans guild, and deal with the fact that it takes me forever and a day to do alone what was designed for a group of 10+ folks to handle.

Is that really such a strange and bizarre thing to believe?

That what I’m saying. No one said anything about skipping anything, least of all Colin.

Didn’t they?

The Three Wuvmigos demanded the ability to skip having to do guild missions to earn favor because they hate PvE and want to continue ignoring its existence, and Colin said “sure why not.” Several players have expressed a demand for the option to skip the stakes-claiming mission because they don’t have the numbers for a big epic fight, and the general opinion of the player base seems to be “sure why not.”

Lanfear says she wants the thing to be bone-breakingly hard for solos and she’ll be fine with that, so long as it’s actually possible, i.e. no bodycount gating. She is, it would seem, in the minority. Most folks want it to scale down such that an average player can earn a full-up, map-sized guild hall to serve as their walk-in closet, and for that player to be able to do so without undue stress or aggravation.

People want their crap and they want it for free. Nothing new about that. What is new about it is that this time ArenaNet’s paying attention to it and giving them just exactly what they want, and that does in fact tick me off.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

[GTFC] puts together a team of ~15 on a designated “get your butts online” day and fights hard for three hours to vanquish the map and claim our stake. Everybody who was there feels awesome, as well as exhausted, at having earned our ground.

Lanfear logs on, solos the event in twenty minutes because of massive, drastic downscaling, and claims the same stake, earning the same ground for his twobie guild

Tell me – why, exactly, did we waste our three hours again, when it would have been enormously quicker and easier to just send one designated dude to go and get the unlocking out of the way?…

Your logic is fatally flawed. You are changing both the numbers requirement and the time requirement. He’s not asking for that. I don’t think any small guilds will complain about having to spend the same 3 hours, if that’s what is required.

What we ARE complaining about is that we simply will be precluded from doing it AT ALL, for the simple reason that we aren’t big enough. If implemented, that would be completely arbitrary.

Everything in this game except dungeons scales. Why shouldn’t guilds scale like everything else?

DevilLordLaser.8619:

The new Edge of the Mists Wuv maps that are also a core part of HoT are out of my immediate, and all conceivable future, reach. I’m never going to see that content, despite having paid for it.

You have a good point here. Guilds are really PvE-focused items.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I’m not trying to sound uncaring, but this game wasn’t built to work around 3 man guilds… or even 5 man guilds. It has been stated already that its initial design was for 10+.

This is completely false. The game was designed for 10 and UNDER groups. It was even documented that way, until they finally decided to embrace zerging a while back. But, many events still only scale up to 10 players. You run into them a lot during the daily event runs. 15-20 people can nuke some events in seconds (because that event still caps scaling at 10).

Torsailr.8456:

Your first point that scaling doesn’t work very well isn’t a good reason to tell small guilds they can’t have a guild hall. It’s a reason to get anet to fix scaling.

Absolutely correct! What I don’t understand is why the other side can’t see this.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

I’ve done a three-man dungeon run. It took four times longer than a typical five-man run did and was significantly more difficult. Is that acceptable to you? If it isn’t, then we’re right back where we started.

What on earth does this have to do with his points? It’s a straw argument.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Please, Lanfear. Do not wreck this for the larger guilds so the solo bankguilds can lay claim to their own personal Queensdale.

Again, completely unrelated to his points. How does his guild being able to complete a mission in any way affect your guild being able to complete that same mission with the same amount of personal difficulty (for each player taking part)?

It doesn’t.

And, to the rest of this section of words (that I didn’t quote), the scaling was the most brilliant move ever made by any MMO, period. It doesn’t always work correctly, but that doesn’t take away from the genius of the model.

Daddicus.6128:

DevilLordLaser.8619:

I’ve done a three-man dungeon run. It took four times longer than a typical five-man run did and was significantly more difficult. Is that acceptable to you? If it isn’t, then we’re right back where we started.

What on earth does this have to do with his points? It’s a straw argument.

This isn’t a strawman, this is a clarification. He’s trying to determine where he actually stands on this topic. Should being understaffed for the event cause you hardship, or should it be designed to handle understaffed groups at normal difficulty. It’s very pertinent.

Before Daddicus gets around to sextuple-posting…

1.) No, it’s not a straw argument. It’s an argument of “if you’re willing to take on the extra difficulty of tackling content designed for more players than you have, awesome! Have at it! If you want that content to be ripped out and rebuilt around numbers lower than will typically be employed in the event because you don’t like any other options available to you, we have an issue.”

2.) When, exactly, are they going to have time to fix scaling between building an entire new game and also rebuilding the entirety of this game? Or did you not notice the biggest combat system update ever on Tuesday as well as the unveiling of an entire rebuilt city, on top of resources allocated to kicking out an expansion? Scaling has been busted and half-useless since the game launched – if it was such an easy, done-in-an-afternoon fix, wouldn’t they have done it already?

3.) This thread consists of two and a half pages of small guilds complaining about having to do the same thing as the larger guilds to get the same thing the larger guilds are shooting for, and that the event should scale down down down (through a burning ring of fire) so that solo bankscrubs can handle it without issue and get their own piece of the pie. My logic is a lot less flawed than you claim it is.

Anything else?

This whole imbroglio seems like an awful lot of effort to exclude people from content.

If would be nice to see more effort spent making the game enjoyable for all players instead.

We all paid to be here. Why not design the game for all of us?

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Once again I ask you: why should guilds with membership counts higher than five lose out on their cool stuff? Why can’t they have awesome new content designed for them? Why is it bad that not everything in the game can be handled by one solo player?

Again, this is a false statement. Why do you insist that he respond to your falsehoods about what he really is saying?

You lose NOTHING if it scales. He loses access completely if it doesn’t.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

… does not mean I should have my guilds experience cheapened to accommodate you.

Can one of you on the other side please state how your guild’s experience is cheapened (in any way) by something you have nothing to do with (his guild)?

Daddicus.6128:

CorrynnStarr.7942:

… does not mean I should have my guilds experience cheapened to accommodate you.

Can one of you on the other side please state how your guild’s experience is cheapened (in any way) by something you have nothing to do with (his guild)?

could you please link that information, because what I am reading is contrary to what you are saying, and I would like to see the source to determine its authenticity.

Daddicus.6128:

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Once again I ask you: why should guilds with membership counts higher than five lose out on their cool stuff? Why can’t they have awesome new content designed for them? Why is it bad that not everything in the game can be handled by one solo player?

Again, this is a false statement. Why do you insist that he respond to your falsehoods about what he really is saying?

You lose NOTHING if it scales. He loses access completely if it doesn’t.

Incorrect. If it scales large guilds lose content designed for large groups instead of single groups or no groups at all. You have the entire rest of the whole game to be solo. Guilds in a game called Guild Wars have very little content intended for Guilds, meaning larger groups of players.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Because GW2’s event scaling system is extremely dodgy. It can handle some moderate swings – say, twelve guys instead of fifteen or eight instead of ten, or the other way around – but the system just does not, and never has, coped well with drastic swings in population count. If four guys tried to do an event designed for fifteen, the normal scaling system would make it either the next best thing to impossible, or ridiculously easy to the point where downscaling the event to four guys would basically count as a quick-clear exploit.

I’ve done VW on a completely full map, and I’ve done it with 6-7 per boss. It scales almost flawlessly (you can’t afford to have any newbies, though). Jormag I’ve done with about 12 and with a hundred. Again, same amount of time and effort per person. Champions, small bosses, all those “group” battles seem to scale very well.

There ARE flaws in the system. But, it works very well in most boss instances.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I disagree with you… because you are small you should not be entitled to the same things a larger guild has…

Why not? Give us a reason for your opinion.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I cant expect to get the same tax break a major corporation gets. nor should i get the same tax break a family of 6 gets, for my family of three.

This is a particularly bad attempt at a justification. In the US, families get far more tax breaks than any corporation does, and corporations are also saddled with rules families do not have to follow.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Someone will always be dissatisfied.

Why?

Majic.4801:

Good Lord, look at some of the posts in this thread. And you wonder why so many people don’t want to deal with larger guilds?

Just look at what they have to look forward to.

YES! You NAILED it!

If they really do make a minimum player count to do it such as the old Arah story that won’t be fun. Halls don’t seem to be targeted to personal bank guilds and that’s fine. Doesn’t mean I won’t try to claim my hall going in solo if able.

The Guild Wars in the game’s name is about guilds warring with each other in the past over Bloodstones/power/etc. The previous one ending with the Searing. Wonder if we will see a small scale one pop up in the story since guilds may play a more important role going forward lore wise. Though on that I’m going off topic.

Seems ANet is keeping in mind the different play styles. The change to utility and elites shows they are taking our feedback.

Daddicus.6128:

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I disagree with you… because you are small you should not be entitled to the same things a larger guild has…

Why not? Give us a reason for your opinion.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

I cant expect to get the same tax break a major corporation gets. nor should i get the same tax break a family of 6 gets, for my family of three.

This is a particularly bad attempt at a justification. In the US, families get far more tax breaks than any corporation does, and corporations are also saddled with rules families do not have to follow.

this is my reason…
I cant expect the benefits that a large corporation recieves without BEING a large corporation. thus I cannot expect the benefits of a 6 member family if my family only includes 3 members… How can you feel justified to recieve a reward that took 20 people to get by doing it by yourself?!?!? A family of 8 on welfare receives xxxx amount of money a month due to dire circumstances… should every person in the U.S. get xxxx amount of money too just to make it fair and equal? please say yes… i dare you…

Kal Spiro.9745:

The main problem here is that you’re in the wrong argument. Every time you say, “a five man guild should be able to complete the content,” it gets read as, “the content should be adjusted and balanced for a five man guild.”

The problem with this argument is that it’s not a decision between those two statements. You have violated the principle of the excluded middle.

We’re asking for it to be built to be played by 5-500 people, and have the scaling working correctly. That fits into neither of your two statements.

We know they can do it correctly if they want to, because they’ve done it perfectly where they felt they had a need (Vinewraith, Teq, Jormag, Great Jungle Wurm, etc.) They’ve also screwed it up royally in many events, but I think they can do it correctly if they want to spend the effort.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

No, there will be something in LA. It’s currently there, just not accessible yet.

What happened to it? I was just in it yesterday.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Didn’t they?

The Three Wuvmigos demanded the ability to skip having to do guild missions to earn favor because they hate PvE and want to continue ignoring its existence, and Colin said “sure why not.”

I don’t see how you are so limited in your view of possible options. I would love for some PvP or Wuv Wuv related Guild missions. Maybe that leaves finally some room for some Guild team vs guild team with the reward of some favor. Heroes Ascent → Favor of the gods.. Hey! Not so far fetched at all. (Dead obvious to me but whatever) Plus it would likely grant around the same favor reward as PvE guild missions once a week. Or something that’s balanced. Maybe there’s a weekly cap of favour people can earn. The ideas are endless if you have some basic creativity.

As for the expedition on capturing a guild hall, I don’t see why many are only seeing paid mercenaries that raid your guild stash. I would say it would be no different than pugging for a raid/dungeon. Just invite some randoms that either want to see the mission, want to help out out of their own free will or otherwise. That is the most likely. How that is going to work is a developers concern. But in the end of a dungeon or guild mission, both guilds or all party members got the reward of that mission. SO why is it so hard to see that everyone involved get a reward , I don’t understand.

On top of that, most guild missions are fairly short, and for some tiny bit of extra favour while it might make building your guild hall slower, it would NEVER be impossible. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they let you PUG for those guild missions as well.

In the end you get much further with creative solutions than complaining at something that doesn’t even exist yet. (Or well, isn’t finished to be created yet)

Or maybe I’m naive and most MMO players have the social skills of a potato, but I seriously doubt that.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Your average five man guild will not be able to run this alone. And that SHOULD be acceptable.

Why? One logical reason will be acceptable. So far, nobody on your side of the argument has articulated any kind of reason for your statement.

Our side, however, has articulated a very good reason: we paid for this game, and are therefore entitled to play it.

I’ve articulated plenty of reason, Daddicus. You just don’t like it.

The content must be balanced around a given number of players, which the scaling system treats as its target number.

The scaling system is dodgy and unreliable, and tends to work very erratically for situations not involving gigantic megazergs a’la world bosses. It cannot be counted on to present a properly uniform level of challenge for all player counts.

It is unlikely ArenaNet will have time/resources to fix their scaling system while working on the million and one other things they need to get done for Heart of Thorns.

As such, whatever target point the system is built for should be a good middle-ground number between the rare five hundred-man megazerg and the solo banker. A number which appeals to the broadest spectrum of guilds – remembering, in this instance, that guilds and guild content are designed for groups of players to do, and that one-man bank guilds are essentially an exploit not truly intended by ArenaNet.

This middle-ground target point will, obviously, be subjected to the scaling system. There should be no artificial bodycount-gating mechanics in the event if at all possible, such that smaller numbers of players can attempt the content free and clear. However, given the scaling system’s issues, expecting it to be able to smoothly and flawlessly encompass vast swings in player count is unrealistic.

Ergo. something like a +/-50% swing in player count from the target point – say, a range of 5-15 players optimal, from the ideal target point of 10 – would be the wisest course for ArenaNet to take, with additional player counts above or below that invoking the normal GP scaling algorithms, and thus letting the game’s automated (lack of) intelligence decide how your attempt will go.

Redesigning the content with a balance point of two players, as many have suggested, results in a +/- 50% swing range of 1-3 players optimal range. For taking and holding a map-sized zone from heavy Mordrem control and building what amounts to a small independent town in the jungle.

Does this 1-3 player range strike anyone whatsoever as reasonable or fair?

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Several players have expressed a demand for the option to skip the stakes-claiming mission because they don’t have the numbers for a big epic fight, and the general opinion of the player base seems to be “sure why not.”

Unless you quote someone, I believe your statement is false. I just read the whole thread up to here, and nobody has claimed that.

Except YOU! Of course, you were putting words into our mouths which we did not say, but you said it several times.

WE ARE NOT ARGUING THAT! So stop saying we are.

I simply want a guild hall, no matter if its for 1 person (solo) guilds or huge quest based guilds. It’s a game! No restrictions here please. It’s meant to be fun!

Kal Spiro.9745:

This isn’t a strawman, this is a clarification. He’s trying to determine where he actually stands on this topic. Should being understaffed for the event cause you hardship, or should it be designed to handle understaffed groups at normal difficulty. It’s very pertinent.

You are correct now, but at the time you wrote that she had not yet stated that. And I don’t agree with her that dungeons should work for fewer people (except Arah, which IMO should never have been a dungeon in the first place). I think content designed for exactly 5 is fine. Scaling is a great idea, but focused counts of enemies has its place as well.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Before Daddicus gets around to sextuple-posting…

1.) No, it’s not a straw argument. It’s an argument of “if you’re willing to take on the extra difficulty of tackling content designed for more players than you have, awesome! Have at it! If you want that content to be ripped out and rebuilt around numbers lower than will typically be employed in the event because you don’t like any other options available to you, we have an issue.”

A straw argument is when you make an argument that you say your opponent has made, and then refute that argument. If your opponent never said that, then it’s a straw argument. Since we hadn’t.

And you keep excluding viable options. It is not a choice between those two things. But, I’ll deal with that in your next section.

Albadaran.1283:

I simply want a guild hall, no matter if its for 1 person (solo) guilds or huge quest based guilds. It’s a game! No restrictions here please. It’s meant to be fun!

This- Maybe instead of having to recruit other players/beg/buy and what ever Colin mentioned, have mercenary NPC’s for hire or temporary recruitment to assist smaller guilds to enjoy the Guild Halls also.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

2.) When, exactly, are they going to have time to fix scaling between building an entire new game and also rebuilding the entirety of this game? Or did you not notice the biggest combat system update ever on Tuesday as well as the unveiling of an entire rebuilt city, on top of resources allocated to kicking out an expansion? Scaling has been busted and half-useless since the game launched – if it was such an easy, done-in-an-afternoon fix, wouldn’t they have done it already?

The fact that they haven’t fixed it all over Tyria is irrelevant. That’s what needs to happen. We’ve been arguing that all along, so please stop leaving it out of your two-option-only choices.

Majic.4801:

This whole imbroglio seems like an awful lot of effort to exclude people from content.

If would be nice to see more effort spent making the game enjoyable for all players instead.

We all paid to be here. Why not design the game for all of us?

Exactly. Thanks.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

Daddicus.6128:

CorrynnStarr.7942:

… does not mean I should have my guilds experience cheapened to accommodate you.

Can one of you on the other side please state how your guild’s experience is cheapened (in any way) by something you have nothing to do with (his guild)?

could you please link that information, because what I am reading is contrary to what you are saying, and I would like to see the source to determine its authenticity.

What do you mean? I quoted you, and responded completely to your text.

You stated that your experience is cheapened. I’m simply asking why.

You are not in his guild, so his and his guild’s experience has absolutely nothing to do with you or your guild. It cannot possibly cheapen your experience, unless one of you changes to the other one’s guild.

On the other hand, what you are advocating would forcefully prevent small guilds from even playing the content at all.

FrizzFreston.5290:

[snip for space. FRAG the stupid forum character limit…]

This is actually calm and reasonable (mostly. #starch), so I’m going to respond to it. Thanks for that, Frizz.

There’s nothing wrong with PvP or Wuv-centric guild missions, but the general notion seems to be that three-beer-buddies guilds like the Three Wuvmigos should be able to get the same access to the game’s new guild functions without having to do guild missions at all, of any sort. That while other folks are trekking across the Maguuma to stake their claim against the enemy’s armies and then pitting themselves against the new missions system to earn their upgrades, the penny-packet Wuv or PvP guilds shouldn’t even have to change their behavior or go out of their way to earn the same rewards the rest of us are busting our humps over.

As for hiring folks to help with the stakes-claiming, either informally or through LFG – again, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with hiring extra people to fill out a guild mission if your own guild is too small to do them regularly, at least in my mind. A lot of small guilds balk at this, wanting to be able to build up their halls themselves without outside interference, which is valid. Let me say this, though.

Back in GW1, I was on the opposite end of this stick. I was a member of a small, generally not tremendously capable guild consisting of a batch of longtime friends, like many in here. We had a hall, we had a number of merchants and services unlocked in it, though not all of them. We (and by ‘we’ I mean mostly me T_T) bought those merchants over time, much slower than the large guilds did, because we were small, had few players to donate to guild services, and generally we weren’t as much of a well-oiled machine as the big, organized second-job guilds. We never got to do Urgoz’ Warren or the Deep because we didn’t have enough players, though we had some good low-man runs through the Underworld or the Fissure of Woe later on when heroes were a thing.

We lost out on content we could’ve otherwise had/done because we weren’t really big enough to do it. And frankly? That was our problem, not ArenaNet’s. Towards the end of the game’s lifecycle we ended up in an alliance big enough to take a stab at some of this stuff, but even then it never really materialized. The time had passed. The main thing is that we had just as much access to this stuff as the rest of the game did, we could go and try it whenever we wanted – and we did, to sometimes hilarious, sometimes depressing results. But for the most part we would have been bothered to no end if ArenaNet went back and crippled these instances, dialed their difficulty down by huge amounts, so that lowball guilds could handle them without issue.

At that point, if we’d cleared a kneecapped fiver-friendly Urgoz’ Warren or whatever, could we really say to other folks that we’d cleared it?

I’ve been where the little guys are. Speaking from that experience, I would be angry if the content was dumbed down specifically for me to do. I don’t need the game holding my hand and giving me hugs; if a given piece of content is too difficult for me to handle on my own, then either I find help, I get good enough to do that content, or I don’t get to see it.

I have the same chance at it that everyone else does. Doesn’t mean I get the same results. And that is the crux of the matter, really. Should small guilds have the same chance as everyone else? Absolutely! Should they have a dev-signed guarantee that their chance will always be as successful as the larger groups for which the content was designed? Nope. Not even remotely.

Same for guild missions. Same for PvP and Wuv for that matter – I get the same access to those modes as everyone else who Paid For The Game. Is it those guys’ fault that I hate the PvP modes and can’t derive any benefit from my purchased access to them? Should ArenaNet gut the existing PvP modes specifically to put them back together in a way that makes me happy?

Of course not. The PvP/Wuv playerbase would find my apartment and burn me inside it if I tried to make that happen. Why is it completely okay, then, for PvP/Wuv players to do the exact same thing to the rest of us?

Does that make any more sense, Frizz?