Guild Wars 2

I will try to keep this brief as I am tired right now:

I have been a guild leader since gw1, and the guild I currently have has been up and running since the GW2 launch. It isn’t dead but always hovers around 20 active members with an average of 3 -5 people being online at any one time.

There are several problems, some which have definately been mentioned before. I will elaborate on each point in a little more detail below.

1) There is no way of telling when the last time that someone logged on was.
2) Non representing players make is difficult to run a guild.
3) The record of people who have been invited only goes back 1 month.
4) Guild missions do not scale with the amount of people in a guild.

1) Has been mentioned before, but Myself and officer’s cannot be online all the time, it’s impossible to know whether to kick someone for being inactive if I don’t know when they were last on. As someone who see’s a lot of people it’s also difficult to keep track of names, so when I see a list of account names I often can’t link the account name to a character name, or I am in danger of linking it to the wrong one. So I may end up kicking the wrong people and not kicking out people who have been inactive for months.

2) Non representing players just make running a guild even more hard work than it needs to be. For a start they appear by default at the top of the roster as online but not representing. This means they are in full veiw of any guild member who presses G. (because of this if there is a member who is always online but never represents I see their name regularly and when I am trying to work out who to kick from the guild I am less likely to kick a name I recognise, and I can’t always remember why I recognise it.)
Seeing people not representing is demoralising for members who are representing. It means that even when myself and officers really put effort into recruiting, it only takes one time for a new member to sign on and see 6 – 10 other people not representing that they get disheartened and leave, or join another guild and then add to the list of non representatives.
It would also be helpful to see the last time a player represented us (when you hover over their name for example) because I do understand that one guild can’t offer everything so some people might want to be in different guilds but it is so hard to keep track of how often a person is representing, especially when also keeping track of how often people are online.

3) In my guild the ranks are based on time spent in the guild combined with activity. However I cannot precisely promote people due to the fact that I cannot see when a member joined the guild. Keeping track of this ontop of everything else is impossible.

4) Guild missions are something I was really looking forward to, but they really do not scale to the size of the guild and I think this is where they really fail. I was hoping guild missions would be a new focussing point for the guild, something to keep people coming back. However for our guild they are ridiculously expensive, it took us 3 weeks to unlock (including buildingtime) guild bounties, and due to most members being busy at the moment it’s taken us over a month to save up the 30k to unlock the next level 6 upgrade, let alone the 50k to unlock the next type of mission.
The missions themselves do not scale either and this is a problem. We regularly have 5 or 6 people online which is about right for a bounty training but impossible to do a bounty tier 1. The one time we managed to get 20 people online to do a tier 1 we were fine but no reward chests spawned. It was also an awful lot of effort to get everyone organized just for something that lasts 10 minutes. New players felt left out because they could not particpate due to not having enough map completion, feeling excluded when you’ve only recently joined a guild and brought the game is not ideal.

I believe there should be a ‘Vote to Start’ part of a mission. A leader or officer should start a mission but the mission should not start immediately, in this time all guild members should be visibly informed that a mission will start shortly and then asked if they want to participate. On the guild mission tab there should be a check box for members to check if they want to join in and then a list of names of people participating would begin to form as people checked the box. When an officer is satisfied that all the people who want to play have checked the box they would start the mission. A counter counting down from 5 or 3 would appear on the screens of participating members and then the mission would start.
The game would scale the mission to the number of players participating so that guild missions can be done by any number of players greater than 3.

All of these problems are making it so difficult to keep a guild going and active. I haven’t even begun to mention the lack of guild halls or the fact that the message of the day doesn;t sow up in chat like it did in gw1 everytime a player logged on.

I know this isn’t what you’re looking for but it can be a workaround for identifying inactive players.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/achievements

If you log in to the leaderboards and filter by your guild, hovering over the achievement points gives you the last date they earned a point.

This only goes back to March 26th however (when the leaderboards were created). If people haven’t earned a point since before then, they won’t show on the list. Since your guild is fairly small, I imagine you could send them an ingame mail to contact you.

Just remember, just because someone hasn’t earned any points doesn’t mean they are not active. Hope that helps!

This does help in regards to knowing the last time a player got an achivement point thanks

However we are currently in this horrrible cycle of we recriut people, they see people offline/ not representing and leave, so I want to work on getting guild missions so that we have something to center our guild around and give the veterans a reason to come back, the influence takes so long to save up, no guild missions, so people leave, people see other people leaving and leave, the fact that people have left means it’s quiet and then more people leave.
Obviously I can’t stop everyone from leaving but this situation could be avoided and made much easier to deal with if a few things were changed.

Hmm those leaderboards don’t seem to be working for me. Everytime I try to filter to EU it just goes back to NA. :/

Half Tooth.1867:

I will try to keep this brief as I am tired right now:

After starting with that line you ultimately go into two full posts on the subject. Failure on keeping it brief

As to your topic, you are right on much of this and the need for these and other features. So much so if you look through the forums you will find a plethora of topics that address each of these issues as well as others.

Even in guild wars 1, you could tell when was the last time so and so logged on. Why isn’t this feature available in game.

Is ArenaNet scared to field complaints from players that have been kicked for inactivity when they suddenly reappear in game after a hiatus?

Thanks for the tip on the leaderboards, I will be using that from now on. But more in game listings would be even better.

This covers everything I would write, including the ‘I will be brief’ comment.

Invictus.1503:

Half Tooth.1867:

I will try to keep this brief as I am tired right now:

After starting with that line you ultimately go into two full posts on the subject. Failure on keeping it brief

As to your topic, you are right on much of this and the need for these and other features. So much so if you look through the forums you will find a plethora of topics that address each of these issues as well as others.

I can only apologise for saying I would be breif and then I wasn’t. I planned to write bullet points, then realised they needed some explaining and then got carried away in my explaining.

What our guild is about to do is kick based off the skill achievements and just send them a mail explaining te reasoning and to whisper one of the officers for an invite. I started the game when our guild started a couple months ago when the game had a big increase due to the sale. Plus the game seemed to lack some marketing, a lot of people never heard of it. We usually keep our guild around 495 right now to allow room for friends and family if needed but in the next month we will do a pretty large roster redo when achievement boards are a little older. Finding new members might be a chore but oh well. We’re running about 50-60 actives at peak times so we usually run guild bounties then. We try and advertise 30 minutes before guild bounties activation to get people ready and the time for those who want to pre find. I also try and run map clears once a day to make getting waypoints easier since the biggest problem sometimes is people not having the map. Yes the game could use the last log on feature but its all possible. And for smaller guilds, a little more conordination with times might be needed. I can’t see anymore then 10-15 really required for a bounty.