My disappointment with guilds :/
consider also: what do you actually gain from forcing people to represent you if they wouldn’t really want to?
Conversation and interaction.
Whoever thought up the representation mechanic, especially it’s effect on guild chat, needs a slap. It’s one of the most destructive and anti-mmo mechanics I’ve ever encountered.
Most 100% rep or 100% content specific rep guilds inform people about their policy before inviting. By joining this guilds while knowing that you dislike or don’t fit their policy you just waste everyone’s time.
@OP well current state of guilds is what you get when developers treat guilds like chat channels with guild missions on weekly cd. There is just no pve content that would naturally force people to play together and work like a team. Hopefully HoT will change that.
I feel it’s a false presumption that because a guild has this rule that they’re inherently a bad guild.
perhaps – but what’s the alternative? Either you demand rep which which people would not give willingly – which i would say would make you a bad guild – or you don’t need to require rep to the extent you do, because people would rep your guild anyway, which makes the rep requirement redundant.
Of course, those are absolute positions – in reality, i imagine, most of your members would rep the guild regardless, while some few rep the guild only because they are required to. I would venture to say that for those people, your guild is a bad guild.
consider also: what do you actually gain from forcing people to represent you if they wouldn’t really want to? for every person who grudgingly complies and provides you with that extra influence boost, i bet you lose or fail to recruit 2 or 3 who object to being required to exclude their other acquaintances. people with a preference also seem more likely to be veteran players who would bring & contribute more to the guild were they to join – even if their time & resources are divided amoongst several guilds.
I agree, many of your points would be a problem for us, if it wasn’t for the fact that we advertise these requirements at several stages prior to an application ever getting to us. As for losing prospective veteran members, we aren’t a shoe size fits all, and no effort is needed to try and cram as many players into our roster as efficiently possible.
Our turn around is very small, and as a result of our requirements, I know every single member of my community on a first name basis, and many of us have met each other in real life, with a lot of us having travelled to Sweden last month as a community get together. Something that takes some very dedicated people to arrange may I add. This is something that cannot be achieved in what you’re suggesting. I have no interest in veteran players, after 10 years as a community, we have plenty of those. But what I am interested in are people who are willingly looking to dedicate themselves to a single community, and achieve things together outside of the game as well as in the game.
if you want to be part of those experience, you might want to join a newly launch game or a hardcore game. gw2 is causal game so the discussion part dont really last.
or a game with frequently evolving/added mechanics. I only know of one but it is not a MMORPG.
Most 100% rep or 100% content specific rep guilds inform people about their policy before inviting. By joining this guilds while knowing that you dislike or don’t fit their policy you just waste everyone’s time.
@OP well current state of guilds is what you get when developers treat guilds like chat channels with guild missions on weekly cd. There is just no pve content that would naturally force people to play together and work like a team. Hopefully HoT will change that.
Meh … 100% rep goes away in exactly 1 month anyway.
This is not an attack on guilds, or an attempt to insult anyone. This is just an unbiased view from a player new to PC gaming.
I switched from console to PC a few months back because I refuse to buy a next gen console in their current state. I had a preconception of how guilds in MMO’s operated. Which has turned out to be almost the polar opposite of how they actually work.
I had thought joining a guild would be like joining an organised team. Set daily schedules for different activities. Groups decided on ahead of time based on a balanced mix of skill to give the highest chance for success for all the teams. So for example: I thought an event of dungeons would go something like this:
Dungeon tour 21/09/2015 @ 19:00 GMT
Dungeons: AC-1+2+3, CM-1+2+3, TA-up+fwd, SE-1+3, CoE-1+2+3, CoF-1+2, HotW-1+2+3.Team 1:
Team 2:
Team 3:
etc etc. And that that would be posted on the forums by the guild leader.I thought this would be the case for all aspects of the guild. That if you were doing something with your guild, it would be a highly organised and smooth operation. After all, why else bother with a guild?
I had also thought that TS and guild chat would be dominated by a running discussion of tactics and game mechanics.
By now you are probably rolling around laughing at how naive that notion was. My experience of guilds has been largely positive and enjoyable but they are nothing more than a loose grouping of players. It’s very difficult to sync up with guildies. I like to run dungeons and I’ll sometimes manage to party up with some guildies for one or two of them. But even then, alot of the time I find people use guilds to get away with stuff that would not be tolerated in pugs.
As for guild chat… it’s just that, people having a chat; which is fine. I don’t know why their isn’t a ‘friend chat’ option though.
Anyway to summarise: I thought guilds would be highly organised, and informative.
Reality: A way to get guild commendations for ascended trinkets.
Pug life baby ^-^
You simply joined a wrong guild, find another, you can have up to 5 in this game.
Everything you talk about is pretty much “status quo” in other PC based MMORPGs but not here. Here there are actually very few PVE guilds that understand these sort of things, but there are some still present.
The highest level of organisation here can be found in large, PVX, WVW focused guilds. They often train and their members play a variety of classes and builds in contrast to PVE only or PVP only. Also, because they often hang out on TS with other guilds, they end up knowing a lot more people within the game and have a wider pool of players to assemble or fill teams of various skill levels for various purposes and most of all tend to be more successful and on average, better coordinated at all aspects of the game.
The rest of the community in GW2 is rather sub par. There are few exceptions here and there but they are truly exceptions, due to the ultra casual nature of the PVE content here they just do not need any of the aspects which you brought up and due to casual scheduling are unable to sustain on community level for prolonged periods of time.
Content in GW2, particularly PvE, does not require anywhere near as much communication and coordination as “hard core” MMORPGs. Guilds here are not quite the close-knit teams seen in other games.
Play-how-you-want translates to a lot more AAftw.
On one hand, this means leveling is easy and solo play is completely fine for all content. Players do not have to worry about gathering a team just to level in PvE, which is a real barrier for some casual players.
On the other hand, there is a lot less challenge in PvE and WvW because cooperation, knowledge of other professions’ skills, knowledge of mobs and their weaknesses, and knowledge of combo’s are not critical to success.
(edited by Anchoku.8142)