Update, 4/6:
In order to address certain exploits, the following changes have been made to summoning Guild Vault Transports:
Guild Vault Transports are now unlocked with Economy level 5 instead of Economy level 2. The cost has been increased from 50 influence to 1 Guild Merit and 50 influence.
Guild Vault Transports can no longer be summoned in instances.
I’m all for fixing exploits and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what the exploit referred to here was, but from reading this I see two things:
Summoning Guild Vault in an instance is an exploit? Fair enough, I can see how that could be considered an exploit. This has been fixed.
Are guilds that do not have Economy 5 and spare Merits exploiting the system? Really? Whatever a guild that doesn’t have Econ 5 and a spare Merit can do, a guild that does have those things can also do, so this isn’t fixing an exploit. This seems to be yet another way of punishing small guilds for not conforming to the “faceless members in a crowd” mentality?
Small guilds are afflicted with conditions and ANet just keeps stacking them on while piling on the Boons for large guilds. It’s not this particular change that irks me, since it is, to me, a pretty useless upgrade to start with, it’s just that it keeps getting worse and has been this way since the beginning.
At first it was the guild buffs – people were unwilling to join or represent guilds that didn’t have things like MF buffs going. Then we had the Missions, and we all know how that went. The Mission “fix” was a great idea, but it still falls flat because players want the Commendations and will join/rep the large guild that is already running “proper” Missions. And now we have a new upgrade that has been taken away from the small guilds using “exploits” as an excuse.
Last night I saw someone advertising their new guild in /map and I felt genuinely sorry for them.