Guild Wars 2

So I just came back to GW2 after nearly a four year hiatus, and I’m happy to see that even low-level zones have a decent player base. That said, there can always be more to draw players into zones on a consistent basis without the one-time surges that dailies bring in. My proposal is based off the faction system in GW1: Factions.

Simply put, completing events within a certain zone will earn your guild influence in that area. The guild with the greatest amount of influence would “own” the zone which comes with individual rewards, guild rewards, and the prestige of having your guild’s name displayed on the world map and in loading screens. In addition, guilds that have the most influence in an overall region would own that region’s hub city.

Thoughts? Any comments on possible rewards would be greatly appreciated because I haven’t been playing the game enough to know what is of real value to players. Hopefully this hasn’t been discussed before.

I would rather not. It’s not an inherently bad idea, but as a player who plays with a guild only occasionally, I’d never interact with this system other than seeing some random name plastered on all of the maps. I don’t mind seeing guild names on other players, but I’d rather keep a world that feels wilder and more open.

Also, since you’ve been gone, you may have missed the change to megaservers. Instead of having Jade Quarry copy of Queensdale, a Blackgate copy, etc., everyone is mixed together in maps that are created/destroyed based on player population. This is important, because it means that a guild taking a map would apply across all servers, meaning only the 33 largest guilds in the whole game could really participate in the system, and that’s assuming they don’t take multiple maps.

We sort of already have this system in WvW: the border is determined by the outcome of the fighting in each BL and guilds can claim objectives, ‘owning’ them until they are taken by opponents (or the guild allows any ally to claim them).

The faction system in GW1 imagined a power struggle between two major groups, with the outcome of pseudo-PvP (Alliance Battles) determining the location of the border. The owner of towns within the borders was determined by which guilds had the most influence.

Owning a town offered two things: bragging rights and a discount on various consumables, most notably lockpicks (which could then be sold for profit, splitting the difference between the retail and discount rate with buyers).

The biggest reason this would be a problem in GW2 is that it introduces PvP aspects to PvE, something that the developers have gone out of their way to avoid. Competition in PvE is limited to leaderboards (for individuals) and guild arenas.

The second problem is that there are a lot more guilds in GW2. Singling out the top 10 or even the top 100 seems even less fair than it did in GW1.

Maps have individual map rewards now – that already is enough to maintain interest in an assortment of maps.

I don’t see any beneficial gains to this Vs the amount of resources required to do it. It also doesn’t really make an awful lot of sense to have Guilds, who’s primary concern is battling in WvW and fighting a war against the Elder Dragons, to be competing for zones in the open world.

It would also cause further unnecessary friction in the already sensitive small vs large guild debate

Maps could be rejuvenated with refreshed events and side story campaigns, but even that is something they are reluctant to do for various, legitimate reasons.

Given all the drama I’ve seen over alliances and faction in GW1 over the last 6 years (which is still going on!): no. Please no. I know how many bots were keeping the 2 #1 alliances afloat, I know people who had over 40+ accounts to bot JQ and the like for faction (which helped to kill JQ for legit players who got sick of being 1/8 in a team of bots), I know people who had guilds spiked and accounts compromised, and I know how much high school bullcrap drama was (and is) caused because of it.

The only thing I personally ever cared about with regards to faction was teaching people MTSC and being able to buy cheap picks. Sadly a lot of people took it muuuuuch further than that and I’d hate to see a repeat. So yeah, it’s a no from me.

Sounds like you’re wanting to see SWTOR’s conquest system added. There every week you can do either the flashpoints (dungeons basicly), raids, crafting, pvp, or the weeklies for points that go towards control of a zone on the selected planet for that week. Really all its for is bragging rights, and to get items to unlock more areas of your guild’s starship. There are in game achievements and titles with it, but unless you’re in one of the major guilds, you may be able to make the top ten for the week, but unless you’re guild places first, you’ll never see some of the achievements or titles, and it does get pretty repetitive and boring quite quickly

It might bring back the pressure for rep requirements. I like that it’s now really only something a guild asks during official guild activities.

Gw2 is pve oriented, your idea will not fit into that.

I didn’t really like “guild map ownership” in Guild Wars 1. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like it in this game.

My reaction when i read the title
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oRPcnpD7ycw

Do not want.

No.

PvE in GW2 is designed from the ground of up NEVER be competitive.

I’d love a territory control warfare system, but the PvE map is not the place to do it. Some sort of sharded off/more interesting version of WvW with actual loss and consequences would be a better way to accomplish this.

PvE is not a good place to add competitive systems. GW2 PvE is completely cooperative 100% of the time, and that does not need to change.

Id rather not. Had enough land/guild drama with my one year of ArcheAge.

But I would like to see guilds have a larger role within the game.

I do not mind the idea of a guildbased reward for completing stuff in a zone. But I disagree completely with the “ownership” part of it. It’s completely against the GW2 style. Instead, every guild should have a reward, based on activity in all zones, if this was made a thing.
There should not be guild vs guild competition on the maps, rather I would love to see guilds being rewarded for helping each other out, like the philosophy behind the loot/exp system.

It would be interesting from a lore perspective since that’s exactly what happened during the guild wars.

But (in lore) it caused far more harm than good and the end result was that the various (at the time human only) governments took the extreme step of making it illegal for guilds to own land on the mainland (exiling them to islands off the coast, and later the Battle Isles) and sized all their property because they suddenly had much bigger problems in the form of a large-scale charr invasion.

If I remember correctly the reason behind this was that in real life they tried building a system like this into GW1 and concluded that the game would be better off with PvE and PvP kept seperate. They tried bringing it back in a slightly altered form for Factions (without PvP in PvE maps) and then scrapped it again when making GW2.

I don’t think it’s likely they would bring it back again. And as other people have said it wouldn’t really work with the mega-server system since all maps are shared and copies are constantly being opened and closed as needed.