Guild Wars 2

So far, I really like most of the upcoming changes for the second feature pack – but as the latest blog post shows, there is still no concept for activities for large guilds. The guild missions may be fine for medium sized guilds – but even the guild bounty, which has different ranks, doesn’t really “scale up” beyond a group of 30 players or so. There may be ways to enhance the existing guild missions through various additional challenges, but I’d like to suggest an independent concept which I’m going to call Guild Fractals.

Since the Fractals of the Mist and, even more, the Story Journal, ArenaNet gives us the chance to revisit parts of past events like dungeons and story instances. What’s still missing, are the huge “open world” events, like the Tower of Nightmares, the siege of Lion’s Arch or the Crown Pavillon’s Boss Blitz.

What I’m suggesting is to bring back these events for large guilds and to replace their typical rewards (like toxic spore samples or blade shards) with an own, general currency, similar to Guild Commendations, which then can be used to purchase rewards.

This would not only preserve the already created (and otherwisely thrown away) content, it would also give back value to merits and influence. My idea would be to create a new guild upgrades and consumables for each of these Guild Fractals and let these consumables work like time tokens for custom arenas (probably per hour, instead of per day).

I think the implementation of such a feature would give a huge boost to large guilds, as it would finally give them the chance to organize and beat really big events, a challenge to organization and teamplay. Sure, we’ve got Tequatl and we’ve got the Triple Trouble. But on the one hand, there’s a huge lack of diversity and on the other hand these things are mereley large guild-organized events. What I dream of are large guild events!

And, last but not least: Many of these past events have been pretty good farm spots. I don’t want to suggest to give large guilds (and large guilds alone) the opportunity to farm champions and such more efficiently than in the open world, but I like the idea of giving these farm-oriented players an opportunity to team up and be on their own. Blix and Queensdale have shown what happens when “farmers” and “casuals” clash, so I think it might be good to create an alternative to the traditional open world farm zerg.

So: What do you think? Is this a good idea or the worst you have ever heard of? Let me know!

Disclaimer: This isn’t the most inventive of all ideas and I’m pretty sure I’m not the first thinking or posting about it. If the topic has already been discussed I’d be thankful for a link!