Guild Wars 2

Some thoughts I had on how scaling guild hall costs could be achieved.

I think the biggest hurdle is avoiding exploitation … for example a large guild sends all its members to a side guild leaving it’s main guild very small, gets cheap upgrades, then invites all its members back.

So, here’s my idea to avoid that and also not invalidate work already done …

First, define some size options. Let’s say …

• Small guild – 50 person cap
• Medium guild – 150 person cap
• Large guild – 300 person cap
• Very Large guild – 500 person cap

A guild could change their size at will up or down, assuming they do not have more members than the cap. Guilds at lower sizes have appropriately reduced costs for upgrades. The game will remember the cost that you have paid for each upgrade.

When you increase the size of your guild, any upgrades that have not met the new cost are temporarily disabled until the difference is deposited. Perhaps you could continue to deposit towards already bought upgrades so that you could immediately have them available after a size increase.

Oh, and unrelated … could we get the ability to shift-click items in the treasury to link them? This would be handy for both discussing the next upgrade to be pursued or just checking the wiki.

That would create a serious disincentive for people to grow their guilds. Imagine the guild at 49 people who wants to invite a friend in but doesn’t want to pay the enormous fees to make their previous investment work again?

Or people will have a temporary guild while they build their main one up at reduced costs. Or just create an entirely new guild and not move players over until it’s complete. They can just cycle players through for donations.

Edit: Read the post a second time. I agree with the poster above this that it removes any incentive to grow guilds as they’ll now be losing what they had already purchased.

Lucky Shot.8740:

That would create a serious disincentive for people to grow their guilds. Imagine the guild at 49 people who wants to invite a friend in but doesn’t want to pay the enormous fees to make their previous investment work again?

Yes, that is a disadvantage. Hopefully the costs could scale easily enough that it’s not a huge leap between each tier (perhaps more tiers would help?) and some of the cheaper upgrades might have very little scaling at all.

I don’t think there’s a way to avoid this with any kind of scaling and also avoid the kind of exploitation I mentioned above.

Also why I included the bit about continuing to contribute towards the next tier for upgrades you have purchased.

An earlier thought was that you’d pay the difference all at once to increase your cap, but that would get very expensive when you have a lot of upgrades, so thought it better this way so that guilds could increase right away and then prioritize what to activate.

Another thought … maybe delay the deactivation for a while … maybe a week, maybe a variable amount depending on level. That way you don’t lose stuff right away.

It could also be that there just isn’t a way to reasonably scale the costs, but a lot of people do seem to be looking for that, so just exploring how it could be done.

Scaling is nice until you realize it comes with two(maybe more) very negative things.

1) it encourages kicking less active members, a less active member will be less likely to be contributing to the resources but they are scaling up the cost
2) it encourages guilds to demand contributions from all members, if your membership is going to increase the cost then you should help pay for it

Note: Encouraging is not the same as forcing but it still not a good direction to head towards.

If the influence system didn’t scale upgrades costs based on guild size, a system that actually generated influence just for having a larger guild, what logical basis is there for the new materials based system to do so?

In terms of raw gold it is a far cheaper system.

people like to tout the 20k gold cost of upgrading everything. Did you ever break down the gold to influence cost of the old system? The one that was supposedly more friendly to small guilds?

It was massively more expensive, and it also required not just playing guild missions, but playing types of missions you didn’t even want to play in order to unlock missions you did The difference was that nobody cared because it could also be played passively.

Passively awarding guild hall advancement would be a horrible system saddled with the same exact problems the influence system had. It becomes free for large guilds and only ever costs gold for small ones. The guild hall system costs the same amount of gold and mats for everyone, and that’s just fine.

You don’t get cheaper vendor fees or TP prices because you invest less playtime and gold in your characters. Why should a guild get discounts because its members invest less time and gold in to it?

As of now small guilds actually have the ability to upgrade and use their guild, in stead of working like crazy for upgrades and then figuring out they don’t make enough influence to actually use most of them.

My idea to fix it is to remove all the gold sink from it and put it back to the old way of getting influence. Except this time do not allow gold to be used to buy it. This would make it so that large guild with lots of repped players will advance fast and small guilds can still advance but at a much slower rate. There would be no way to exploit it and both small and large guilds would take a while for the upgrades, its just that large guilds would be done faster.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

My idea to fix it is to remove all the gold sink from it and put it back to the old way of getting influence. Except this time do not allow gold to be used to buy it. This would make it so that large guild with lots of repped players will advance fast and small guilds can still advance but at a much slower rate. There would be no way to exploit it and both small and large guilds would take a while for the upgrades, its just that large guilds would be done faster.

Influence exploited itself based strictly on the way it worked.

It creates a system that had no limits or purchasing decisions for large guilds, and was almost completely unusable for small ones.

It in no way awarded prioritizing the guild over oneself.

It completely undermined the multiguild system by requiring people to maintain specific tags for long periods, preventing them from contributing to guilds as they swa fit if they were in multiple guilds for different kinds of activity.

It only allowed you to use upgrades by slowing down or completely halting progress to further upgrades

Influence was not only a lazy system. it was a fundamentally broken system at its core that only served to completely shaft small guilds and give large guilds far too many benefits for zero effort or time spent playing together.

The whole guild hall cost scaling thing is a lesson in capitalism. A cooperative entity will always out perform and have access to higher levels of capital. Hence, larger entities always have access to more amenities.

I get why smaller guilds are distraught that they will not have higher levels of access to guild amenities, however, part of the appeal of being in a smaller guild is overcoming the challenges a larger guild faces but with less people.

The reality is you have access to everything a large guild has access to, it just may take you longer to get there. That is the exact same it was prior to HoT.