Guild Wars 2

Heijincks.9267:

From some of the posts here, it seems like some small guilds just won’t be satisfied until they can do everything large guilds can do, otherwise it’s the same line over and over:

“This game caters large guilds only”.

If you own a corner store, do you expect to be able to be on par with a CEO of a corporation?

My guild has no problems doing the content. We have an ally that invites us for guild missions. My problem is that we have to REPRESENT ANOTHER GUILD TO RECEIVE REWARDS.

If my guild members help kill a bounty, I’d like for them to be rewarded. Ideally without having to represent another guild. I have been unable to bring that to them to this point.

None of us were complaining prior to the introduction of missions. (Well, I wasn’t complaining.) The guild bonuses were a small advantage for larger guilds (we can’t keep up 24/7 buffs), but one we could deal with. The 50s + 2 rares + commendations rewards are CONSIDERABLY more valuable to people and much more likely to push them to larger guilds. That’s the issue.

Heijincks.9267:

From some of the posts here, it seems like some small guilds just won’t be satisfied until they can do everything large guilds can do, otherwise it’s the same line over and over:

“This game caters large guilds only”.

If you own a corner store, do you expect to be able to be on par with a CEO of a corporation?

I think a better analogy would be as follows: If you are a cashier (guild member) in a corner store (small guild) would you expect to have same salary as a cashier in Walmart (giant guild)?

If you’re so worried over the reward chest, just do two world bosses ( Frozen Maw and Fire Elemental have fast respawn rates ). You get at least 2 rares and you can sell them for close to 50s. All you miss out on is fancy guild tokens.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Rhysati.4932:

So you have helped out small-guilds who simply couldn’t GAIN or BUY the influence. What makes you think these guild can then DO the guild missions as they currently stand? That’s the problem you are missing here.

Haven’t missed it. I’m fully aware of this perspective, however, we have always said that these guilds who are extremely limited in number will have to work together to attain these goals. That’s what this content is about. That’s these rewards are about.

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

In that case, can we have rewards that can only be obtained in a small guild?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Rhysati.4932:

So you have helped out small-guilds who simply couldn’t GAIN or BUY the influence. What makes you think these guild can then DO the guild missions as they currently stand? That’s the problem you are missing here.

Haven’t missed it. I’m fully aware of this perspective, however, we have always said that these guilds who are extremely limited in number will have to work together to attain these goals. That’s what this content is about. That’s these rewards are about.

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

Then maybe you can make the new ascended items cost LESS than 40 laurels pet item? Given that most big guilds can just get them in 1-2 weeks.

I realize that that anything you can do to encourage small guilds to work together to achieve a goal is indeed a bonus. However, larger guilds will get the best of both worlds with this update. What would be a nice compromise, I think, would be to reward smaller guilds better by giving them the opportunity to now only earn influence, but also a some reward for their efforts.

The major guilds won’t even notice or care for the reward and the smaller guilds would be quite happy to get one. If these rewards are just a few coins, a skins or a minor boost for 24 hours then so be it, but at least the smaller guild has an opportunity to work towards something for the home team.

Just my 2c

Tawa.3180:

All you miss out on is fancy guild tokens.

That are one of the few ways to get Ascended gear, like Accessories. And compare the cost for using commendations to laurels… 12 commendations + 5g or 40 laurels + 50 ecto…

timmyf.1490:

My guild has no problems doing the content. We have an ally that invites us for guild missions. My problem is that we have to REPRESENT ANOTHER GUILD TO RECEIVE REWARDS.

If my guild members help kill a bounty, I’d like for them to be rewarded. Ideally without having to represent another guild. I have been unable to bring that to them to this point.

None of us were complaining prior to the introduction of missions. (Well, I wasn’t complaining.) The guild bonuses were a small advantage for larger guilds (we can’t keep up 24/7 buffs), but one we could deal with. The 50s + 2 rares + commendations rewards are CONSIDERABLY more valuable to people and much more likely to push them to larger guilds. That’s the issue.

Yes, but let’s put time into perspective. Your guild will eventually get to the point where you can do the missions that give merit right? If you’re in a small guild, the end content would be more difficult to do and to attain, no doubt about it. Due to less people adding to the collective effort, this should only be expected.

Zania.8461

I think a better analogy would be as follows: If you are a cashier (guild member) in a corner store (small guild) would you expect to have same salary as a cashier in Walmart (giant guild)?

Guilds are a collective effort, therefore we can’t equate it to an individual level. As far as personal rewards are concerned, I prefer to compare it to a group project. You can do it with people, or you can solo it. If you solo it, your best mark on it won’t be better than someone who worked with others for it.

Rhysati.4932:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Conner.4702:

I don’t think you truly understand what makes a guild a guild.…

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion about what a guild is. Guild content, however, is designed to be about challenges that can only be overcome by working with other people. The new mission type is not intended to change that by circumventing the content that’s already in place. All it does it make it more accessible.

Look mate, I respect that you are replying here and I respect that you are trying to help folks out…but who is this change supposed to benefit?

Small guilds could amass the influence via gold-spending if they /really/ wanted to. But for what benefit? Unlocking guild bounties doesn’t help anyone actually DO the guild bounties.

So you have helped out small-guilds who simply couldn’t GAIN or BUY the influence. What makes you think these guild can then DO the guild missions as they currently stand? That’s the problem you are missing here. And by adding more rewards to them(skins), you are screwing over the rest of the populace even more because they refuse to compromise and get into a big, impersonal guild.

we did guild bounties with 7 people the other night.
It takes more luck, and it takes pre planning, but unlocking higher tiers is not undoable. I imagine that tier 1 guild trek also seems fairly doable by a 7-10 man group, guild rush im assuming yes but i have no idea.

lets be honest here. 10 people isnt a big an impersonal guild. The big guilds will get there faster, but now once you have both unlocked the same content, who are people going to prefer to hang with? probably who they would have prefered before. Essentially this is giving you the means to build your guild up to compete, though it may not be as fast, its definately more possible.

It’s a start, but small guilds aren’t limited in number – they have sadly been largely broken up by Guild Missions in their current form, but that should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. The whole thing could easily be settled by removing or adjusting the time limit and small guilds could then be a part of all this.

I re-iterate though the idea of guild missions is excellent and you and your team deserve credit for a winning idea, but I still feel you haven’t grasped that you have alienated in some way the small guilds. There is just no reason to shut out small guilds in favour of large ones – time limits and scaling are just one way to address the imbalance of challenge that you wish to address. It’s difficult to judge until they are in game, but training missions feel like over complicating an easy fix.

That isn’t to say our small guild doesn’t appreciate the step forward with this addition, we just want you guys to start looking at it from our perspective

(p.s I may havbe missed it but will we get merits at least from the training ones?)

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

The difference here being that those rewards can all be gotten by soloing or teaming up with random people. Guild mission stuff is exclusive to the guild you are in. I don’t need anyone specific to achieve dungeons.

phys.7689:

we did guild bounties with 7 people the other night.
It takes more luck, and it takes pre planning, but unlocking higher tiers is not undoable. I imagine that tier 1 guild trek also seems fairly doable by a 7-10 man group, guild rush im assuming yes but i have no idea.

lets be honest here. 10 people isnt a big an impersonal guild. The big guilds will get there faster, but now once you have both unlocked the same content, who are people going to prefer to hang with? probably who they would have prefered before. Essentially this is giving you the means to build your guild up to compete, though it may not be as fast, its definately more possible.

You must have missed my point. Let me try again: This update isn’t to help your guild. Your guild is already doing guild missions. I am a part of four guild and not a single one of them is anywhere CLOSE to unlocking guild missions. Why? Because most everyone doesn’t care that much. A couple people would like to do them. The rest are busy with roleplay, working on legendary farm, just trying to enjoy and hour or two of gameplay here and there, etc.

This update will help the couple of us that want to do this missons finally have the influence to do so, yes. But we still won’t be able to actually complete the missions themselves. I’m going to do everything I can to get my guild to run these, but I don’t have high hopes. The addition of new skins is the only thing driving me to even TRY.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Rhysati.4932:

So you have helped out small-guilds who simply couldn’t GAIN or BUY the influence. What makes you think these guild can then DO the guild missions as they currently stand? That’s the problem you are missing here.

Haven’t missed it. I’m fully aware of this perspective, however, we have always said that these guilds who are extremely limited in number will have to work together to attain these goals. That’s what this content is about. That’s WHAT these rewards are about.

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

^^ This.

Thank you for providing a realistic response. Very refreshing (** edit ** - that’s not meant to sound sarcastic either, really is nice to have a rep. of a company actually address something honestly - Anet doesn’t get enough cred. for this!).

Randulf.7614:

(p.s I may havbe missed it but will we get merits at least from the training ones?)

The guild rewards are 3000 influence. No merits.
The individual rewards are nothing.

Tawa.3180:

All you miss out on is fancy guild tokens.

That’s funny, but not in a good way.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Ascended weapons may be available from guild content at some point in the future, but that hasn’t been decided yet.

I think I just vomited a little in my mouth.

Which is sad, because on the whole I like what the blog was trying to convey.

timmyf.1490:

My guild has no problems doing the content. We have an ally that invites us for guild missions. My problem is that we have to REPRESENT ANOTHER GUILD TO RECEIVE REWARDS.

If my guild members help kill a bounty, I’d like for them to be rewarded. Ideally without having to represent another guild. I have been unable to bring that to them to this point.

So you basically want the guild you are using so your guildies can receive rewards your guild can’t provide to not even have representation from the guildies who are using them?

You want the larger guild to have amassed all the influence to unlock the missions, spent the time to unlock the missions, organize the run, who goes where etc. let your guildies tag along and you are complaining they have to represent the guild who is doing the work?

I don’t understand that. Of course they should have to represent the guild who is doing the mission. This isn’t like sneaking into the movie theater to see a free movie. You want your guildies to have the rewards, they should have to represent the guild who spent the influence and time doing the unlocking.

Otherwise people would be camping out, hoping to get lucky that a guild was doing a mission and they get a few shots in and bang, rares, 50s and commendations.

Representing is the way it should be and should not be changed.

Rhysati.4932:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

The difference here being that those rewards can all be gotten by soloing or teaming up with random people. Guild mission stuff is exclusive to the guild you are in. I don’t need anyone specific to achieve dungeons.

phys.7689:

we did guild bounties with 7 people the other night.
It takes more luck, and it takes pre planning, but unlocking higher tiers is not undoable. I imagine that tier 1 guild trek also seems fairly doable by a 7-10 man group, guild rush im assuming yes but i have no idea.

lets be honest here. 10 people isnt a big an impersonal guild. The big guilds will get there faster, but now once you have both unlocked the same content, who are people going to prefer to hang with? probably who they would have prefered before. Essentially this is giving you the means to build your guild up to compete, though it may not be as fast, its definately more possible.

You must have missed my point. Let me try again: This update isn’t to help your guild. Your guild is already doing guild missions. I am a part of four guild and not a single one of them is anywhere CLOSE to unlocking guild missions. Why? Because most everyone doesn’t care that much. A couple people would like to do them. The rest are busy with roleplay, working on legendary farm, just trying to enjoy and hour or two of gameplay here and there, etc.

This update will help the couple of us that want to do this missons finally have the influence to do so, yes. But we still won’t be able to actually complete the missions themselves. I’m going to do everything I can to get my guild to run these, but I don’t have high hopes. The addition of new skins is the only thing driving me to even TRY.

So you’re in a guild that only a few of you care to do guild missions in… And your complaint essentially is that you + 3-4 other interested persons can’t accomplish these? Yawn….

ArenaNet decided that guilds in GW2 would be able to have from 1-500 players, not 20-500 players.
Shouldn’t guild missions be accessible/doable by all guilds?

Good to see anet give small guilds something as well. Id have perfered that maybe the training missions actually gave out merits and the standard bounty missions just gave more merits or something as to allow small guilds a change to get the items too.

Otherwise still a welcome change and TY anet for it.

Halanna.3927:

timmyf.1490:

My guild has no problems doing the content. We have an ally that invites us for guild missions. My problem is that we have to REPRESENT ANOTHER GUILD TO RECEIVE REWARDS.

If my guild members help kill a bounty, I’d like for them to be rewarded. Ideally without having to represent another guild. I have been unable to bring that to them to this point.

So you basically want the guild you are using so your guildies can receive rewards your guild can’t provide to not even have representation from the guildies who are using them?

You want the larger guild to have amassed all the influence to unlock the missions, spent the time to unlock the missions, organize the run, who goes where etc. let your guildies tag along and you are complaining they have to represent the guild who is doing the work?

I don’t understand that. Of course they should have to represent the guild who is doing the mission. This isn’t like sneaking into the movie theater to see a free movie. You want your guildies to have the rewards, they should have to represent the guild who spent the influence and time doing the unlocking.

Otherwise people would be camping out, hoping to get lucky that a guild was doing a mission and they get a few shots in and bang, rares, 50s and commendations.

Representing is the way it should be and should not be changed.

Agreed. Enough of these 5 man guilds QQ’ing that 10-15 person(s) is too much.

Ok, so if we gets influence, but not merits, why would we need the influence? Since that’s only 50% of what is needed to unlock the later content and small guilds struggle to complete bounties to earn the merits as it is. That would still mean they are locked out of the guild missions

Randulf.7614:

Ok, so if we gets influence, but not merits, why would we need the influence? Since that’s only 50% of what is needed to unlock the later content and small guilds struggle to complete bounties to earn the merits as it is. That would still mean they are locked out of the guild missions

10 people is sufficient demonstrated by some leaders of small guilds.

Yeah, 5 people makes it a lot harder. So does 4 people. Should guild missions be soloable at some point then? It’s good that there’s sympathy for small guilds, but it’d be extremely impractical to cater guilds that have 5 members or less.

Heijincks.9267:

Guilds are a collective effort, therefore we can’t equate it to an individual level.

I am merely showing that your original analogy is extremly flawed.

The bottom line is the individual rewards (paycheck/rare+commendations) given to the individual workers that participate in revenue generation (collective effort). Not the amount of revenue generated by the company (guild merits), or the salary of a CEO.

I have no issues for rewarding the whole guild as it is done by the guild merit system. That however, does not address the fact that reward to individual guild members is currently skewed toward being in a large guild.

In summary:
commendations + rares = individual rewards, should reflect individual contribution and be roughly identical between small guild member and large guild member
guild merits = guild rewards, should reflect the guild effort, and be larger for larger guilds

EDIT: I welcome the current change. Even a very small guild can now grind out influence then repeatedly fail the real t1 BH mission (one kill) and get the individual rewards. I just think its a contrived and counterintuitive method of going about doing so.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Nike.2631:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Ascended weapons may be available from guild content at some point in the future, but that hasn’t been decided yet.

I think I just vomited a little in my mouth.

Which is sad, because on the whole I like what the blog was trying to convey.

I’m pretty sure if we had ascended weapons, there would be a ton of ways to get them.

By previous experience of items, you guys have favored very specific routes to obtain ascended gear (usually accompanied with time-gates). Is this a route you guys are happy with and plan to continue using?

Edit: Unnecessarily snarky. Rephrased.

Anthony, any chance of adding a guild calendar to make it easier to organize guild missions in-game instead of on forums and such outside the game?

And since you want very small guilds to cooperate to complete missions, how about Alliance chat or custom chat channels?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Rhysati.4932:

So you have helped out small-guilds who simply couldn’t GAIN or BUY the influence. What makes you think these guild can then DO the guild missions as they currently stand? That’s the problem you are missing here.

Haven’t missed it. I’m fully aware of this perspective, however, we have always said that these guilds who are extremely limited in number will have to work together to attain these goals. That’s what this content is about. That’s WHAT these rewards are about.

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

Can we get a way to make it easier to work with other small guilds? As of right now it’s kind of a hassle. If you have one person out scouting each possible npc, and they all aren’t on the same guild then it gets all kinds of complicated trying to communicate what enemies are needed and receive information back on their locations. It’s also even more difficult trying to schedule these events with other guilds outside of the game.

It would be nice it we could have an alliance panel so we could coordinate with other guilds, joint up with other guilds, and even possibly have a chat specifically for the alliance too. You could even make it so that you could have a maximum member number of 500 (so it would be the same concept of max guild size….basically the alliance would be a consolidation of many guilds into one large guild for the purpose of helping each other out without requiring that each individual guild loses its identity).

This would help out all those smaller guilds who don’t have the raw numbers to do the actual guild bounties as effectively as large guilds and those small to moderate sized guilds who have a limited number of active players/players wanting to do guild missions.

Maybe you could somehow integrate it into the multi-guild membership system….I don’t know.

First, thanks for trying to alleviate some of my concerns.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I’m pretty sure if we had ascended weapons, there would be a ton of ways to get them.

There are multiple ways to get ascended accessories, but with 40 laurel vs 12 guild tokens, the time of players in big guilds is considered about five times more valuable than that that of players in small guilds. Extending that trend to other slots is kinda discouraging.

I am glad its not a binary proposition like many MMOs (if you dont’ raid, you can NEVER get the top tier gear) but it’s still a bit frustrating. I play, I spend money in the gem store, I hang out and socialize with folks via chat and voice, I run group content with two other much larger guilds… but if I don’t kneel, I get second class citizenship in the game as a whole?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Haven’t missed it. I’m fully aware of this perspective, however, we have always said that these guilds who are extremely limited in number will have to work together to attain these goals. That’s what this content is about. That’s WHAT these rewards are about.

Not to split hairs, but the initial press on this didn’t give that impression. People felt it would be accessible to every guild. That was certainly the impression I had. I can see my guild unlocking the next guild mission type in about 9 weeks (probably more like 6 with the training missions, thank you for that!) but with a 105 member guild, I’m wondering if we’ll actually be able to do some of the other guild missions. Heck we failed T1 bounty two times this past weekend due to unlucky boss spawns and only having about 9 people available to participate.

More on point: guilds that care about being a guild want things they can do as a guild. They don’t want to have to work with other guilds, they want to do it on their own (although this is a good place to ask when Alliances will be coming back, which would solve a lot of the problems you are having with guild mission complaints from small guilds). Not to mention that it’s a big enough pain to organize a guild bounty for one guild. I can’t imagine what a pain it would be when guild chat doesn’t reach everyone participating.

And adding more bosses actually makes it even harder on small guilds since the only way for small guilds to do the bounties reliably is to have one person locate the bosses before turning on the Guild Bounty. Right now you can get away with about 13 people doing that (1 is in a really small area, and the other is so random you just have to pray you don’t get that one (over 300 possible spawns isn’t a challenge for small guilds it’s a waste of 200 guild influence unless you’re lucky). Any less than that and you start having to rely on luck more and more.

I think your real problem here is you have created content for large guilds without creating content for small guilds, did not make that clear in the initial press on this content, and continue to think that small guilds teaming up to do this should be a satisfactory response without flat out saying this was content aimed at large guilds. In all fairness to you, I don’t know how you do small guild content and give out decent rewards and create something large guilds wouldn’t get an oversized benefit from. But telling small guilds to band together, especially without an alliance system, is just not going to be a satisfactory answer to the people who are upset about this.

I know your response is that there is already a ton of content that small guilds can do with their members, and this is true, but they can do that content in large guilds too. So why not move to a large guild and have all that and the shiny new guild mission content?

Like I said, I don’t know how to fix this (maybe scale the rewards and challenges better, say by having a guild trek T1 unlock at 15k instead of unlocking all trek content for 50k (or whatever it is)) but I think it would help if would state flat out that this is meant for large guilds and you’ll have something for small guilds coming out in the future or acknowledge that the current system is not small guild friendly and this is just a first step in trying to correct this. (The current article makes it clear that you are trying to help small guilds, but it (and your subsequent posts) haven’t hinted that we can expect more to come.)

I know this sounds like a big complaint post, so I want you to know that I have really enjoyed the new content so far and the training missions will probably really speed things up for the rest of the unlocks for my guild which takes care of one of my concerns for my own guild. I just think there have been some valid complaints and I don’t think this change addresses all of them.

Thanks for reading,
-David

It appears that it’s time for:

• Guild Calendars
• Last Online Feature
• Alliances

Those three things will make A LOT of the “problems” in this thread go away.

Very simply, shouldn’t all Guilds be able to participate in Guild Missions?

Heijincks.9267:

I made an addenum addressing this shortly after I posted a response to your previous post.

While it’s nice to be compensated for effort proportionally, there’s problems with it when you put it into contrast with bigger guilds. If rewards were distributed by the amount of effort used, then bigger guilds shouldn’t be rewarded as well as smaller guilds. After all, in big guild missions, an individual exerts very little effort into getting their reward.

If the question is just a simple matter of being rewarded better, then big guilds have that exact same benefit as well. It scales both sized guilds up a notch, and in the relative sense, makes it even more unfair.

I prefer to equate individual effort within a guild to a group project, like I stated in my addenum. On the guild level though, that’s when you compare shops vs corporations.

The way I currently view the system is as follows: small construction company vs a large construction corporation.

You won’t ask the small company to build a skyscraper (do a high tier guild mission). They have neither resources nor the manpower to do so in timely manner (hur hur, run out of timer on BH). Thus if only the large project is available, big corporation gets paid, small guys sit on a curb. This is fair, as long as ‘if only’ is in place. Up to this point, while I feel that the system is excluding, at least it makes sense. (This is in-line with project effort)

But now, if a small project is available (training mission), that either of the companies can do…why does the small guy still not get paid? Only houses with 5+ stories are covered by the contract?

As I said in my edit, the current system allows the small guy to amass the necessary resources (influence) to start the giant construction project, even if they know they are going to fail it, just to get personal rewards.

So, a guild can kill 1 target in 15 minutes and get 3000 influence and no personal rewards in training mission or kill 1 target in 15 minutes, get no influence but get personal rewards.

Seems like it would have been more intuitive to give personal rewards for training missions, but, as I said, I’ll take what I can

Brook.5263:

Very simply, shouldn’t all Guilds be able to participate in Guild Missions?

If your guild is 1 person - should you be able to - really?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I’m pretty sure if we had ascended weapons, there would be a ton of ways to get them.

Judging from the examples shown so far, the “ton of other ways to get them” will mean buying them for 1000 laurels each and nothing else.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Ascended weapons may be available from guild content at some point in the future, but that hasn’t been decided yet.

Oh Good God please no Ascended weapons please. T_T

If the rewards scaled based on numbers involved then it wouldn’t matter what the size of the guild is. Trying to get lots of small guilds to work toegther will not work. Partly because the infrastructure doesn’t exist in the game to allow it and partly because you simply can’t force that mindset on a large base of players. Some yes, but only some

So another thing to add to the research queue. Will there be any thought to add a secondary asuran outsource or something of the like. As it stands smaller guilds will have to forego other bonuses to attempt to gain access to needed influence. Thus indirectly getting the shaft again, unless this thing is separate from the limited building queue.

BladeDVD.6234:

But telling small guilds to band together, especially without an alliance system, is just not going to be a satisfactory answer to the people who are upset about this.

You hit the nail on the head.

This “fix” isn’t a fix at all. Bounty Hunt Training missions only give smaller guilds a faster way to earn influence. Small guilds still have no practical way to DO the “real” content to earn Merits and Commendations. Anet just shrugs and says, “band together with other people”—which may as well translate into “join a larger guild.”

Guild Missions (and the rewards) should be scaled. I don’t oppose large-scale content for large guilds. But where is the small-scale content for small guilds (that is, content that rewards Merits and Commendations)?

If you want to fix this problem, give small guilds a way to earn Merits and Commendations so they don’t feel like second-class players and/or disband.

docMed.7692:

Brook.5263:

Very simply, shouldn’t all Guilds be able to participate in Guild Missions?

If your guild is 1 person – should you be able to – really?

I agree with you, but
ArenaNet made Guilds 1-500 players
Guild Missions should be able to done by all guilds.
They could have made different Guild requirements.
They did not have to call these Guild Missions.
But they did.
Small guilds should be able to do guild missions.
In my opinion, Its ok if it takes my small guild much longer to achieve something, but its not ok that a Guild cannot participate in Guild Missions

What a wonderful solution —- giving us a guild activity that earns influence rather than loot.

These bounties maybe be of little interest to large guilds, but they will make it possible for our small guild to earn other guild content. Last month’s content was discouraging for our guild – bright shinies far out of reach. With this new approach, you have brought us back into the game.

Thank you for targeting some content toward the guilds with less frequent players. Thank you for supporting small guilds!

Mwerevu.4013:

If it doesn’t reward merits, commendations, rares, or silver, then what’s the point?

So they can say “hey, it’s fixed” without actually fixing anything, i guess.

I’m glad this was added to help small guilds, that they reward influence and that they are repeatable. I am glad for all of that, but to release Guild Missions as they were sends a message of developmental oversight on the company’s part.

I also worry about how much incentive determines player behavior. If the personal rewards are still with big guilds then it will still cause problems for small guilds.

Also, and this seems important, but small guilds are often more personal, tight-knit groups. They are specifically the types of people who don’t want to work with other groups. It’s actually larger guilds already in the business of amassing more people that are more likely to want to ally with other guilds. Small guilds are less prone to ally with strangers because it goes against the nature of their existence.

Also, (once more), you are sort of introducing a problem into the game and telling your customers to solve it for you by allying with each other when you don’t even have a system for guild alliances in place yet.

But they can’t research the grades because they can’t get the merits. This fix doesn’t help that. So no, they can’t all participate. That’s what we want to communicate back to the appropriate team

Saying we have to work together is a noble idea, but there’s no infrastructure in place allowing that to happen

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Rhysati.4932:

So you have helped out small-guilds who simply couldn’t GAIN or BUY the influence. What makes you think these guild can then DO the guild missions as they currently stand? That’s the problem you are missing here.

Haven’t missed it. I’m fully aware of this perspective, however, we have always said that these guilds who are extremely limited in number will have to work together to attain these goals. That’s what this content is about. That’s WHAT these rewards are about.

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

Here’s my problem with the bolded statement. Before ascended items became part of this game, all of those things that you mentioned were cosmetic and/or on the same scale of power. All the different ways of getting gear all gave you the same quality of gear (exotic). The skin was different, yes. Walking around in full Arah dungeon armor was earned, and was respected. Having that little star next to your name for world completion was neat, and respected. If you didn’t want to do those things, you could still be on the same level as them when it came to statistics.

When ascended gear entered the game, we saw a shift in methods of gear attainment. Ascended gear is flat out statistically superior to exotic gear. When fractals came out, it was no longer a question of being able to play the game the way you wanted to play and still be on a level playing field, it was “Play fractals, or be worse statistically”. This was a massive departure from the pre-ascended tone, message, and motto. Before, you could earn something cool by doing something hard. It was cool, but it wasn’t better. You could earn other cool things by doing other tasks. Again, they did not improve you, they merely let you show off the work you had done.

When laurels came out, there was finally a new way to get ascended items. Except that it didn’t cover back slots. So really, you still have to do fractals to get an ascended back slot. When guild missions came, so too did yet another set of ascended items that were unique from there (and laurels). For those of us in small guilds, the message was basically “Nope! Better join a big guild and leech off them to earn these.”

Laurels are an inadequate solution to providing alternative methods of gear. They are heavily gated on IRL time. In order to get one character geared using Laurels you have to spend ~5 months of getting every single daily and monthly achievement. By the time you’ve done that, I’d wager that ascended armor and/or weapons will start entering the game. For someone that has played over a thousand hours, if you don’t like Fractals or are in a small guild, you will never be able to gear multiple characters in ascended gear unless other methods of attaining them are introduced. Again, pre-ascended there were a multitude of ways that you could invest time to make your character unique, cool, and maximally geared. It’s not a matter of not wanting to put in the time, it’s a matter of not wanting or being able to do one specific kind of content and not having any realistic alternatives.

So to wrap it up, my problem is largely with ascended items. There need to be more ways of acquiring them than whatever specific new content you come out with any given month + laurels. There has been a paradigm shift with regard to how players are awarded for their time, and in my opinion, it is for the worse. I don’t care if I can’t turn into a guild banner because I am not in a large guild, I care that I am gated from getting earrings for two months per character.

Maybe there is something in the works. Maybe there is some grand plan that I don’t know about or is taking longer than expected. All I know is that as it stands, I’m giving up on gearing my characters despite playing them for hundreds of hours because I don’t want to be funneled into one specific kind of content in order to earn the most powerful rewards. I respect that you’re coming on here to talk to us about this, and I respect that you are trying to find a solution that benefits everyone. I think this goes a long way towards helping, but I feel that this entire Guild Mission drama has really highlighted how problematic many players feel Ascended items are and where they might be going. I hope I haven’t been overly aggressive or offensive here, I’m just trying to express my frustrations in a clear and cogent fashion.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Brook.5263:

Very simply, shouldn’t all Guilds be able to participate in Guild Missions?

Every guild can—so long as they research the appropriate upgrades, recruit enough members or outside assistance, and work together to finish the content. This is quite similar to saying every character can kill Zhaitan—as long as they’ve leveled to 80, purchased gear, found a group, etc. Keep in mind that content is often in itself something to be achieved. In this case we’ve taken that concept from character progression and applied it to guilds, and now we have guild progression (which should read as something new for guilds to do). That’s on top of all the other things guilds are already for.

My team is content-focused. Calenders, alliances, and other features are a bit outside of my scope. All I can really say is that those features are all being discussed and evaluated against everything else we’re trying to do.

Just a reminder, try to stay on topic. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any information or anything else to say about ascended items.

The big problem is: there is absolutely NO incentive to help other guilds because I don’t get anything from it, except a bit of silver….

Rhysati.4932:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

There’s a huge variety of content and rewards available in the game. And while some rewards can be attained several ways, others are reserved as merit for specific tasks. This is no different from dungeon armor, achievement titles, or the map-completion badge. Certainly we would never give you those things for completing guild content.

The difference here being that those rewards can all be gotten by soloing or teaming up with random people. Guild mission stuff is exclusive to the guild you are in. I don’t need anyone specific to achieve dungeons.

phys.7689:

we did guild bounties with 7 people the other night.
It takes more luck, and it takes pre planning, but unlocking higher tiers is not undoable. I imagine that tier 1 guild trek also seems fairly doable by a 7-10 man group, guild rush im assuming yes but i have no idea.

lets be honest here. 10 people isnt a big an impersonal guild. The big guilds will get there faster, but now once you have both unlocked the same content, who are people going to prefer to hang with? probably who they would have prefered before. Essentially this is giving you the means to build your guild up to compete, though it may not be as fast, its definately more possible.

You must have missed my point. Let me try again: This update isn’t to help your guild. Your guild is already doing guild missions. I am a part of four guild and not a single one of them is anywhere CLOSE to unlocking guild missions. Why? Because most everyone doesn’t care that much. A couple people would like to do them. The rest are busy with roleplay, working on legendary farm, just trying to enjoy and hour or two of gameplay here and there, etc.

This update will help the couple of us that want to do this missons finally have the influence to do so, yes. But we still won’t be able to actually complete the missions themselves. I’m going to do everything I can to get my guild to run these, but I don’t have high hopes. The addition of new skins is the only thing driving me to even TRY.

you ever think your just not a good fit with any of the guilds your in. I mean why be in a guild if there not intorested in the same type of content you are???

my close nit mid sized guild runs about everything.((and we run it together)) I dont have to worry about any one dropping from my guild even though its takeing us longer to unlock missions, just because we are all so close ((well as close as a video game will let us be))

OK, but what about the rest of the missions? They need merits and are incredibly difficult to earn the way the time limit is set up on the bounties. To be honest the rewards are second. You clearly have decent content and we want to play it, but after the bounties, we have and probably will never access to those. 250 merits for the puzzles is simply unattainable for small guilds like us, yet we really, really want to see them, play them and enjoy them – they after all sound like great fun.

Here’s one suggestion – take the tier 1 of bounties down to 1 target not 2. That’s challenging, but doable for a small guild on a weekly basis. It’ll take a while to get the merits, but the possibilty exists.