Guild Wars 2

My guild is so small, our influence goes up extremely slowly.
I didn’t even realise Art of War went to level 5, I thought it finished at 4.
:’(

Skylightmoon.1079:

Why are some of you complaining so much? Ye, it caters to some more developed guilds more than others at first. It gives guilds a reason to rank up their stuff. You could make an argument that any type of content benefits certain types of people. Its like saying Explorable gear isnt fair because it caters to level 80’s. This is an MMO. You cant expect ease of access to everything. The progression is necessary for the game.

Plus, most of the small guilds nowawadays have just started out anyways. Which is not very smart knowing the game has been out for around 6 months. You have a very low chance of recruitment. Plain and simple, people dont want to join small guilds of 50 people or less, even if it is active, you only see around 10 people online at most. Its much more preferred to a lot of players to join a large active guild where you regularily see 30-60 people online at once. Thats just the dynamics of guilds so don’t complain about that.

As far as I can tell, plenty of people prefer a smaller guild atmosphere because they have no interest in being just another cog in a giant machine. So long as the guild remains active and there are people online to play with, size is not an issue.

Prove me wrong.

EDIT: By the way, the most famous guild in Tyria is Destiny’s Edge, which consisted of six original members (including Snaff). Wonder how long it would have taken them to get that tier 5 PvP unlock, seeing how busy they were fighting dragons and all.

Art of War level 5 huh? Well that means if my small guild started working toward it now…. we can join in on all the awesome fun in maybe 2 or 3 months.

Malediktus.9250:

Lol, most guilds which deserve being called a guild have everything maxed for months already, so I dont understand the fuss.
If your guild is too small just buy influence from the NPC.

What about the guild that hasn’t been created yet?

Wouldn’t it have been more sound to “gate” these things at the lower level upgrades, as opposed to a 5th tier? This way a “new” guild can work its way up, and eventually be as deserving as you and your awesome guild?

The hurdles for a new guild starting in a pre-existing game are pretty big, why make it even harder? Allowing a small newly founded guild (trying to recruit new players) to work its way up through the ranks with guild events, i mean, does that just sound way to logical, or is it me?

To your other point, when i read the tier requirement, the first thing that popped into my mind was them giving a “lil” nudge toward the gem store.

Come on, guys. It’s GUILD WARS. At least we’ll be able to get- oh, wait. Well, more guild grinding is a start, I guess.

i am also in a small guild. that’s the way i like it. i have no interested in joining a guild of 300+ with 270 offline.

this is a stupid choice.

Waage.2047:

ORGH The amount of whine and WOE is me is over the top.

Everybody sit down and relax this is what we know.

1. There different events that have different difficulties and need for numbers. Bounty was a Multi-zone event so chance’s are you will need to be in a BIG guild for it to work.

2. The different events size might coincide with different levels of the tree. A 5 man event will need tier 1 and 20 man event needs tier 5.

3. There is no talk about it only being in the Art of War tree. Only that the Bounty one will be in that tree.

4. It is something to work towards. It is a thing that will take effort and planning from your guild. IT is not meant to be a easy way for you to get loot. Yes your 2 man guild will have a hard time doing things and that is why there is the multi-guild function.

5. It is a very short passage so keep your impotent nerd rage in check until we actually know the entire picture and stop being so dam reactionary.

6. The people complaining about having to go into the wvw tree when they don’t wvw. I have to do kitten Dungeons for my monthly and Fractals for ascended gear.

IN the end relax and let’s see what happens before you blow the top of your head off in pure anger.

It’s a PvE game. That’s where 90% of the content lies. If you didn’t want to do PvE content, you shouldn’t have bought a PvE game.

The largest guild I’ve ever been in (this was in GW1) had about 50 members…and our close-knit leadership ended up kicking about 30 of those because we got tired of having so many random people we didn’t know causing all sorts of issues and drama. My current GW2 guild has 18 members, and there are about 5 of us that play together frequently, while the others play a lot less often. I’m quite happy with this, and (until seeing this ridiculous bit of info) saw no reason to have it any other way.

According to an interview just a few days ago, the Bounty missions were to be the “the one that you can get right off the bat”. If requiring AoW t5 is “right off the bat”, I’m afraid to ask what the other unlocks are going to require. It’s already been stated that “it’s literally going to take months for your guild to build up enough influence to unlock all of them”, so I can only assume this timeframe is the intended one for large guilds that already have AoW T5 and a stash of influence.

The full interview can be found here http://dragonseason.com/Front/tabid/124/EntryId/210/Lunch-with-Colin-Johanson-Part-I.aspx

mrstealth.6701:

The largest guild I’ve ever been in (this was in GW1) had about 50 members…and our close-knit leadership ended up kicking about 30 of those because we got tired of having so many random people we didn’t know causing all sorts of issues and drama. My current GW2 guild has 18 members, and there are about 5 of us that play together frequently, while the others play a lot less often. I’m quite happy with this, and (until seeing this ridiculous bit of info) saw no reason to have it any other way.

According to an interview just a few days ago, the Bounty missions were to be the “the one that you can get right off the bat”. If requiring AoW t5 is “right off the bat”, I’m afraid to ask what the other unlocks are going to require. It’s already been stated that “it’s literally going to take months for your guild to build up enough influence to unlock all of them”, so I can only assume this timeframe is the intended one for large guilds that already have AoW T5 and a stash of influence.

The full interview can be found here http://dragonseason.com/Front/tabid/124/EntryId/210/Lunch-with-Colin-Johanson-Part-I.aspx

I ran a 100 man guild in Ultima Online, the single other person in my (current) guild ran it when i just couldn’t deal with the drama any longer. Thats no longer what we are looking for. We started a guild here, with just the two of us, we don’t “actively” recruit, but i have had folks ask to join after grouping with me/us. When i tell them we are casual, and especially that theres only currently two of us, well you can imagine the reaction :p

A very large percentage of people i run into are (obviously) guilded. I was sort of hoping that this content would be gated a bit lower. I more than realize my “guild” is hardly “deserving”, and I more than understand that the way we operate is very limiting. I have no problem with that. I know that we aren’t going to be able to do what the larger (or even medium) guilds do. I did however, think this was going to be some sort of tool to help recruitment efforts (as opposed to spamming LA which i really refuse to do). Ah well.

With that said, anyone looking for a very casual guild, with a couple of old guys, who don’t care what your spec is, send me a shout :p We almost at AOW4 ; )

How……annoying.

So much for “great recruitment” for guilds…
When small guilds cannot even get enough influence to research aow5.

So in other words we either need to move to a major guild or we cant have our own missions…

Nice logic arena net you seem to disappoint 1/2 your player base and look as though you don’t even play your game, seriously, you have major competition a net with other games, step up your ideas or you will be losing players to rival companies.

PS. Officer of a small guild who is kitten at this post.

guild of 16 active members and have AoW maxed out for a while now. we can’t even organize a WvW group of more than 4 people.

anyone want it so badly and quickly, you’re free to join mine.

The complains about small guilds not being able to get influence fast is bs.
do CoF p1 every day.. it takes 10 minutes and you get 100 influence
spvp together with 1 guildmate for 1 hour gets you around 300 influence.
Yes it’s still gonna take a few days but so is everything else
You can’t get 30 laurels in 1 day either..
If you want max everything right the first day you play go play a private server of runescape or something

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.

This makes me sad. My guild is primarily PVE, so we havent really leveled anything in Art of War (which includes mostly WvW upgrades). We are a mid-sized guild and were really looking forward to guild missions next week – but it looks like it will be considerably longer before we can do these missions.

The initial barrier to entry seems prohibitively high – especially for PVE guilds that didnt care about Art of War in the past.

Also, like others, the other chain we haven’t completed is politics lvl 5 (because there was nothing there). Any chance you could let us know if any of the other mission types will require maxing out that line?

Smaller guilds are going to need some love. Im not worried about mine, because we are pretty tight knit, but I could see these changes as a guild killer for some other small guilds – which would be a shame.

Love everything else Im seeing about guild missions, btw.

This is actually the first time I have found myself so negatively affected by something they’ve done. I was in a guild pretty much from launch… but one day not long ago we came to the realization that none of the guild leadership had logged in for a long time… and no one else had the power to queue and activate upgrades and the like. We had been thinking of changing servers anyway… so when we did we simply started a new guild at the same time.

The guild I had dedicated 5 months to from release was already small at around 40 member… but now we have roughly 20. And we haven’t invested any of our influence into the WvW upgrades because a guild that size has absolutely no business claiming keeps and camps. Besides… we haven’t even gotten a treasure trove built yet.

I’ve been waiting for guild content to come out since release… looking forward to it… and when it was announced I was really really excited. The recent blog post showing the chicken race and whatnot telling us about some of the content had me looking forward to it even more.

Now I find out that I have to have spent tens of thousands of influence into an upgrade line our guild has no use for…. to activate fun leisure activities for us to do together…

Well… I cannot possibly find the words to describe how incredibly disappointed I am. I’m not mad… I’m not going to rage… I’m not going to sell my freedom to a mega guild just so I can see content along with a giant zerg of other players I don’t know and never play or chat with…

So I’ll just say this… Thanks… really… and kitten you too Anet.

Sampo.9678:

The complains about small guilds not being able to get influence fast is bs.
do CoF p1 every day.. it takes 10 minutes and you get 100 influence
spvp together with 1 guildmate for 1 hour gets you around 300 influence.
Yes it’s still gonna take a few days but so is everything else
You can’t get 30 laurels in 1 day either..
If you want max everything right the first day you play go play a private server of runescape or something

And then it takes 15 days and 16 hours to upgrade from zero to level 5.

A few thoughts.

1) Any guild, no matter how big or small, can buy influence. 20g per 10k influence. You want to get this upgrade, but can’t farm the influence, there’s your solution.

2) Influence gain scales massively when you have multiple guildies completing content together. If you can regularly field 5 people who aren’t just online at the same time but actively doing content together, influence gain should not be a problem, even for a small guild.

3) The guild missions that we’ve seen all seem to require 5 to 15 coordinated players. If your guild cannot regularly field at least 5 people who play content together, maybe you’re not able to complete these missions anyway. If you can do that, you shouldn’t have a problem farming the influence.

4) You’ll still get to play the content. You just can’t create it.

Sampo.9678:

The complains about small guilds not being able to get influence fast is bs.
do CoF p1 every day.. it takes 10 minutes and you get 100 influence
spvp together with 1 guildmate for 1 hour gets you around 300 influence.
Yes it’s still gonna take a few days but so is everything else
You can’t get 30 laurels in 1 day either..
If you want max everything right the first day you play go play a private server of runescape or something

The AoW5 barrier itself isn’t really the problem, it’s fact that AoW5 is the initial barrier. Anet considers unlocking them to be some sort of progession, and we can be fairly sure that the first step in this “progression” will be the smallest. Just how much influence is the next thing going to cost us?

A guild of 35 members here, not big, although all very active (we do not keep “dead souls”). The guild was created about a month after launch and now we got all trees maxed for some time and little to spend our influence for. The influence goes quite quick if you just group for events and www, i.e. if you really play with your guildmates. Personally I like the idea of devs. Finally they added some long awaited meaning to guilds. The unlock cost is accessible for smaller guilds like ours, but can be hard to obtain for all those “party-style guilds”… But… it’s hardly to call a group 3-4 friends a Guild…

So in my opinion – good job!

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.

That’s backwards. If anything, doing Guild Bounties should help guilds level up their Art of War. Having to have Art of War already leveled to get to the new fun stuff… uh… I leveled Art of War. I leveled Art of War again. Hey, hey! I leveled it again! How about NO to all this boring grind to get to the fun stuff.

Come on, guys. If you need inspiration, there was this really cool game trailer type thing making the rounds a few months ago. I believe it was called ‘the Manifesto’. It’s still on youtube. Maybe give it a look.

bri.2359:

The clue is in the title of the game, people, and seems Anet is looking to consolidate the player base. I say this is about time …

You clearly don’t know the ‘lore’ of the game if you make a comment like that. You also seem to be yet another player who’s played since release and therefore don’t care about those who didn’t.

Hint: I didn’t and maybe I don’t want to join a huge guild started on day one where I feel I’ve nothing to contribute because it’s all been done already.

Skylightmoon.1079:

Its much more preferred

You’ve confusing what YOU prefer with what I prefer: stop thinking what you like is the only thing that matters.

I play in a guild with 5 friends. considering how relatively easy gold is to make with CoF runs, I’m not terribly worried.

The only thing we really need to worry about is the upgrade time for each level of Art of war. It’ll be a month before I can host one myself.

Hmmm looks like small guild’s get ripped on this issue, grind. grind and more now more grind….I have a rl also. Make a great game and now people in small guilds will have to sit out or pony up cash (gems) to get up gold to upgrade, great job! Maybe the peeps thinking all of these new ways to trill the gramers sound open ears and eye’s to the player base, seems like a good suggestion. large guild’s do get easy reaping try a a small guild under 10 and do some math. just tought for food.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.

Well darn, guess my RP guild will miss out on this content…………. =/

Guess I have to ignore getting more guild bank space to waste influence on Art of War (none of us PvP…….)

This is really horrible news Anet.

I was so excited for this upcoming patch. I’ve been starving for some new content. But now I learn my small PvE oriented guild can’t experience it? Great…

SkyyHigh.4950:

A few thoughts.

1) Any guild, no matter how big or small, can buy influence. 20g per 10k influence. You want to get this upgrade, but can’t farm the influence, there’s your solution.

2) Influence gain scales massively when you have multiple guildies completing content together. If you can regularly field 5 people who aren’t just online at the same time but actively doing content together, influence gain should not be a problem, even for a small guild.

3) The guild missions that we’ve seen all seem to require 5 to 15 coordinated players. If your guild cannot regularly field at least 5 people who play content together, maybe you’re not able to complete these missions anyway. If you can do that, you shouldn’t have a problem farming the influence.

4) You’ll still get to play the content. You just can’t create it.

One flaw I notice with your logic though. My guild is an RP/PvE guild, we have very little PvP time, so art of war seemed pointless to get. While I can rally my people together to go do a mission or even PvE it’s still a grind for influence that people wouldn’t be willing to do. As for buying 10k influence, that is reasonable, but why should my guild have to pay to be able to unlock full content, it’s a bit ridiculous.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.

wtf were u guys thinking.

this is horrible.

stop forcing us to play in predetermined ways.

You are overreacting.

A guild should work together for a while before going for Guild Missions.

Otherwise people could simply make their own guild and start them solo.

Well that wasn’t well thought through…. I’ve had a guild with friends since day one and not all of our stuff is maxxed out to lvl 5. If you only have a small group of friends that play casually then they don’t get any of the new stuff. What the heck is the point of making them so difficult to get. Furthermore, how am I supposed to get friends to play more if this is the case. “Hey guys they implemented a lot of new stuff! Unfortunately, we can’t do any of it unless we grind our guild points up..”

This doesnt bother me in the least, influence is easily earned and can even be bought straight up. now at least you can start queing your upgrades.

Jereguy.3498:

Well that wasn’t well thought through…. I’ve had a guild with friends since day one and not all of our stuff is maxxed out to lvl 5. If you only have a small group of friends that play casually then they don’t get any of the new stuff. What the heck is the point of making them so difficult to get. Furthermore, how am I supposed to get friends to play more if this is the case. “Hey guys they implemented a lot of new stuff! Unfortunately, we can’t do any of it unless we grind our guild points up..”

I guess we should treat this more like facebook… and make sure we have 500 random people on our friends list… I mean in our guild… in order to open up more content… and then all we need is 1000 random people in our guild (friends list) to open up that next tier of content after that. Or you know… spend our hard earned cash/gold on Zynga bucks… I mean gems… to buy influence so that we can play with people we actually know and would want on a friends list.

Welcome to raids… Farmville style…

I apologise for my initial post sounding abit angry but the revelation that my small 15(ish) man guild of dedicated if a little dis-organised social gamers would now have to stop saving influence towards unlocking our treasure trove and instead waste it on research into a tier none of us have any use for(seeing as only 2 members have even tried WvWvW for anything other than the required for capping of exploration reasons) came as a major kick in the gutts to me and has essentially blown any guild event based plans we had been working on to pieces before we even got to try them our.

Seriously why couldnt you have at least made the first one abit lower in the art of war tier? its not like it would affect anything were it lowered to say tier 2 or 3 would it?

I guess we’ll just have to change our plans to something else for now(no doubt dungeon runs or world events like temple runs or the dragon fights or something) and carry on with the treasure trove research plans in the hopes that the next batch of guild related upgrades arent so stupidly hard to unlock.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.

If I understand it correctly you have to research level 5 of Art of War to start the research of Guild Bounties. At the moment we even do not know how expensive this research will be. 5k? 10k? even higher?

The Guild Rush will then require Guild Bounties, Politics Level 5 and another 20k of influence? And for Guild Trek we need Guild Rush Economics Level 5 and 50k influence? I hope not. But who knows at the moment. Maybe angst without any reason.

Cannot wait for the update coming online.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Each guild mission type becomes available through an upgrade that is researched in the guild tech tree. The first one is Guild Bounties, which does require Art of War level 5.

What were you guys smoking when you decided that what appears to be a PvE system (guild missions seem to have nothing to do with WvW atm) would require a guild level up a tech tree no-one but WvW guild bothered to touch?

And level five?!?!?! I’d love to see the stats, but how many small guilds have level three, let alone level five. I was kind of excited to see this feature added to the game, now that I’m looking at all my guilds and the research they’ve done, none of them will be able to participate. This is simply confusing.

I don’t want to judge something i haven’t seen myself, so we will have to wait for the update anyways. But just some thoughts.

First the ‘my guild will never see this content’ argument. Everyone can participate in these events, even players without a guild. So you don’t loose out on the content. You just don’t get the guild rewards, just the personal rewards for participating, but that’s nothing new. In a small guild you already don’t have the karma/exp/magic find buffs running all the time, so by playing in a small guild you already descided that you don’t play in the guild for buffs. Yes, you can’t descide when you kick off the event, but in a large guild you can’t either, because the leader(s) in the guild descide when to start it, and there won’t ever be a time when 100% of the guild have time to participate. 1-2 weeks after the patch, the regions in which the guild missions take place will be known, and you can expect to have some event from some guild running there whenever you want to play, so the content is there for everyone.

And then think about why you are in a smaller guild. Probably because you prefer to be in a close-knit group of poeople. And there is no better social glue then working together for a common goal. Make your fist guild mission the mission to get the influence for the required upgrades. If my math is right, you need 73 gold to buy the influence for Art of War 1-5. If you are a guild of just 5 people, you can run dungeons together, and afterwards everyone spends some of the earned money on influence. Playing as a group already gets you more influence then playing alone, and spending some of the earned gold on influence will speed up the process a lot. Yes, it’s harder for a small guild than for a large guild that has more influence than it can spend, but think of how proud you are as a small guild after you have pulled it off. And running 2-3 dungeons a day , and then everyone spends 2 gold on influence each day is already enough to get the influence for AoW 5 within a week with just 5 people. A guild reward for a guild working together for a common goal. And you can keep all the fun you had together while working on it. This is what keeps small guilds together. Large guild mostly are people who play solo but want the buff’s, or who want someone available 24/7 whenever they need someone for some content. Smaller guilds play together becaus they have fun doing something with each other. Both can get what they want from the missions. The players in the large guild get the buffs and the loot from the missions, and the small guilds get a common goal to work towards as a group.

Cathach.5807:

I don’t want to judge something i haven’t seen myself, so we will have to wait for the update anyways. But just some thoughts.

First the ‘my guild will never see this content’ argument. Everyone can participate in these events, even players without a guild. So you don’t loose out on the content. You just don’t get the guild rewards, just the personal rewards for participating, but that’s nothing new. In a small guild you already don’t have the karma/exp/magic find buffs running all the time, so by playing in a small guild you already descided that you don’t play in the guild for buffs. Yes, you can’t descide when you kick off the event, but in a large guild you can’t either, because the leader(s) in the guild descide when to start it, and there won’t ever be a time when 100% of the guild have time to participate. 1-2 weeks after the patch, the regions in which the guild missions take place will be known, and you can expect to have some event from some guild running there whenever you want to play, so the content is there for everyone.

And then think about why you are in a smaller guild. Probably because you prefer to be in a close-knit group of poeople. And there is no better social glue then working together for a common goal. Make your fist guild mission the mission to get the influence for the required upgrades. If my math is right, you need 73 gold to buy the influence for Art of War 1-5. If you are a guild of just 5 people, you can run dungeons together, and afterwards everyone spends some of the earned money on influence. Playing as a group already gets you more influence then playing alone, and spending some of the earned gold on influence will speed up the process a lot. Yes, it’s harder for a small guild than for a large guild that has more influence than it can spend, but think of how proud you are as a small guild after you have pulled it off. And running 2-3 dungeons a day , and then everyone spends 2 gold on influence each day is already enough to get the influence for AoW 5 within a week with just 5 people. A guild reward for a guild working together for a common goal. And you can keep all the fun you had together while working on it. This is what keeps small guilds together. Large guild mostly are people who play solo but want the buff’s, or who want someone available 24/7 whenever they need someone for some content. Smaller guilds play together becaus they have fun doing something with each other. Both can get what they want from the missions. The players in the large guild get the buffs and the loot from the missions, and the small guilds get a common goal to work towards as a group.

Agreed.

It takes ~39000 influence to get to WvW level 5 from 0.

20g for 10,000 influence
2g for 1,000 influence

That means from a guild that was just made, it will cost 78g to get to level 5.

This is a mountain made from a molehill. If a group of 5 people can’t or doesn’t want to pay 78g (or less) to start having the ability to put events in the open world…then it really wasn’t worth it to them in the first place.

And that’s perfectly fine. You are a most likely a small guild because you WANT to be. It’s fine if you think that 78g is not worth the hassle to potentially expand your guild. 78 divided by 5 is 15.6…that’s 15g and 60s that a FIVE MAN GUILD will be asking per person.

This really is a mountain meets molehill problem.

This is ridiculous. My guild has a ton of influence stockpiled, luckily enough, but just… seriously?

Why does the ENTRY LEVEL Guild Mission need Art of War 5?

Why does PvE content need Art of War at all?

I really wish you guys would stop taking good ideas and implementing them in completely nonsensical ways.

bluewanders.5297:

Art of War level 5 huh? Well that means if my small guild started working toward it now…. we can join in on all the awesome fun in maybe 2 or 3 months.

It takes you 2-3 months to earn 78g…as an entire guild?

So at the rate my tiny guild gains influence, we ought to be able to start doing these missions sometime next year. And here I was getting excited about new content…

Vorch.2985:

bluewanders.5297:

Art of War level 5 huh? Well that means if my small guild started working toward it now…. we can join in on all the awesome fun in maybe 2 or 3 months.

It takes you 2-3 months to earn 78g…as an entire guild?

No but it was much easier before drops were nerfed into the ground on nov 15 and before we also found out drops were based on how much damage you were doing to a mob so basically anyone who wasn’t wearing berserker gear was getting kittened out of drops.

Magic find is also kittened which effects how much you can make from drops as well and before you try and say I don’t know what I’m talking about I have 4 level 80’s and 2 of them have exotic jatoro gear and my gaurdian has exotic yakkington’s gear.

This is just one more example of really bad decisions and bad timing on Anet’s part to make a cash grab for gems when all they need to do is add more cosmetic items to the cash shop.

Thankfully there are MANY new mmo titles coming out so Anet’s will have a good reason to stop making bad decisions and stop doing really bad events that are beyond boring and add real content to the game and also:

1. Fix culling and give people more reasons to wvw.
2. Make dungeons more fun instead of doing things like adding 40 more spider adds to the spider boss in AC.
3. Balance the classes and make it so thieves can’t be perma stealthed in wvw. Tone down warrior dps and fix the issues with rangers, necros and engineers.
4. Make fotm part of the rest of the game instead of a grindfest where people have to grind with obnoxious former (insert that game we all know here) players.

And the list goes on……

Vorch.2985:

Cathach.5807:

I don’t want to judge something i haven’t seen myself, so we will have to wait for the update anyways. But just some thoughts.

First the ‘my guild will never see this content’ argument. Everyone can participate in these events, even players without a guild. So you don’t loose out on the content. You just don’t get the guild rewards, just the personal rewards for participating, but that’s nothing new. In a small guild you already don’t have the karma/exp/magic find buffs running all the time, so by playing in a small guild you already descided that you don’t play in the guild for buffs. Yes, you can’t descide when you kick off the event, but in a large guild you can’t either, because the leader(s) in the guild descide when to start it, and there won’t ever be a time when 100% of the guild have time to participate. 1-2 weeks after the patch, the regions in which the guild missions take place will be known, and you can expect to have some event from some guild running there whenever you want to play, so the content is there for everyone.

And then think about why you are in a smaller guild. Probably because you prefer to be in a close-knit group of poeople. And there is no better social glue then working together for a common goal. Make your fist guild mission the mission to get the influence for the required upgrades. If my math is right, you need 73 gold to buy the influence for Art of War 1-5. If you are a guild of just 5 people, you can run dungeons together, and afterwards everyone spends some of the earned money on influence. Playing as a group already gets you more influence then playing alone, and spending some of the earned gold on influence will speed up the process a lot. Yes, it’s harder for a small guild than for a large guild that has more influence than it can spend, but think of how proud you are as a small guild after you have pulled it off. And running 2-3 dungeons a day , and then everyone spends 2 gold on influence each day is already enough to get the influence for AoW 5 within a week with just 5 people. A guild reward for a guild working together for a common goal. And you can keep all the fun you had together while working on it. This is what keeps small guilds together. Large guild mostly are people who play solo but want the buff’s, or who want someone available 24/7 whenever they need someone for some content. Smaller guilds play together becaus they have fun doing something with each other. Both can get what they want from the missions. The players in the large guild get the buffs and the loot from the missions, and the small guilds get a common goal to work towards as a group.

Agreed.

It takes ~39000 influence to get to WvW level 5 from 0.

20g for 10,000 influence
2g for 1,000 influence

That means from a guild that was just made, it will cost 78g to get to level 5.

This is a mountain made from a molehill. If a group of 5 people can’t or doesn’t want to pay 78g (or less) to start having the ability to put events in the open world…then it really wasn’t worth it to them in the first place.

And that’s perfectly fine. You are a most likely a small guild because you WANT to be. It’s fine if you think that 78g is not worth the hassle to potentially expand your guild. 78 divided by 5 is 15.6…that’s 15g and 60s that a FIVE MAN GUILD will be asking per person.

This really is a mountain meets molehill problem.

But I thought Anet wanted players to play the game how they wanted to play it?

Actually your wrong it’s making a grindfest out of a molehill :-)

Also I will be in the guild I want to be in and the size of said guild is irrelevant or should be.

My small guild has been active since almost the start of the game. With 4 members and 3 still active we have Art of War 3 and that’s only because we wanted to be able to claim keeps and put buffs on them.

So I’m forced to do one of the following:
1. Join a big guild and hate it
2. Dump a ton of money on influence and spend my time farming that money(sounds fun?!)
3. Zerg recruit
4. Don’t participate

Once again I have to question what the heck is going on over at ArenaNet. Every single time they announce something they have taken the absolute wrong route. It’s like they fired all the people with common sense. Why would they make the baseline guild mission at rank 5 of anything? You should get a baseline mission just for making the guild and have it stupid easy. Then with each rank in each area you can get a new mission, of course they get harder with each rank but the rewards are better. Was that so hard? Give me 40k a year and I’ll tell you how to fix all your new updates before they reach the public and people think you guys are insane.

Distaste.4801:

My small guild has been active since almost the start of the game. With 4 members and 3 still active we have Art of War 3 and that’s only because we wanted to be able to claim keeps and put buffs on them.

So I’m forced to do one of the following:
1. Join a big guild and hate it
2. Dump a ton of money on influence and spend my time farming that money(sounds fun?!)
3. Zerg recruit
4. Don’t participate

Once again I have to question what the heck is going on over at ArenaNet. Every single time they announce something they have taken the absolute wrong route. It’s like they fired all the people with common sense. Why would they make the baseline guild mission at rank 5 of anything? You should get a baseline mission just for making the guild and have it stupid easy. Then with each rank in each area you can get a new mission, of course they get harder with each rank but the rewards are better. Was that so hard? Give me 40k a year and I’ll tell you how to fix all your new updates before they reach the public and people think you guys are insane.

I couldn’t agree more!

aw, this is disappointing. Looks like my small pve guild is sol for a while on guild missions because we haven’t touched art of war yet, we’ve been focusing on maxing everything else first.

Distaste.4801:

You should get a baseline mission just for making the guild and have it stupid easy. Then with each rank in each area you can get a new mission, of course they get harder with each rank but the rewards are better.

Seriously, give me a base mission for like 100 influence that gives some blues and some silver for a reward. I don’t want crazy exotic stuff for doing easy missions, I just want my guild to not be totally locked out of content, which is what this will do.

rizzo.1079:

Distaste.4801:

You should get a baseline mission just for making the guild and have it stupid easy. Then with each rank in each area you can get a new mission, of course they get harder with each rank but the rewards are better.

Seriously, give me a base mission for like 100 influence that gives some blues and some silver for a reward. I don’t want crazy exotic stuff for doing easy missions, I just want my guild to not be totally locked out of content, which is what this will do.

I don’t even want loot from them since it will just be porous bones like 75% of the rest of the drops. I just want to have fun with my guild mates.

Drew.1865:

Vorch.2985:

bluewanders.5297:

Art of War level 5 huh? Well that means if my small guild started working toward it now…. we can join in on all the awesome fun in maybe 2 or 3 months.

It takes you 2-3 months to earn 78g…as an entire guild?

No but it was much easier before drops were nerfed into the ground on nov 15 and before we also found out drops were based on how much damage you were doing to a mob so basically anyone who wasn’t wearing berserker gear was getting kittened out of drops.

Magic find is also kittened which effects how much you can make from drops as well and before you try and say I don’t know what I’m talking about I have 4 level 80’s and 2 of them have exotic jatoro gear and my gaurdian has exotic yakkington’s gear.

This is just one more example of really bad decisions and bad timing on Anet’s part to make a cash grab for gems when all they need to do is add more cosmetic items to the cash shop.

Thankfully there are MANY new mmo titles coming out so Anet’s will have a good reason to stop making bad decisions and stop doing really bad events that are beyond boring and add real content to the game and also:

1. Fix culling and give people more reasons to wvw.
2. Make dungeons more fun instead of doing things like adding 40 more spider adds to the spider boss in AC.
3. Balance the classes and make it so thieves can’t be perma stealthed in wvw. Tone down warrior dps and fix the issues with rangers, necros and engineers.
4. Make fotm part of the rest of the game instead of a grindfest where people have to grind with obnoxious former (insert that game we all know here) players.

And the list goes on……

Here’s a few ways of making 3-4 gold a day taking 1-1.5 hours a day. At that rate, NOT including drops, you will be able to afford the ENTIRE Art of War level in 5 days with a 5 person guild group.

1) AC exp paths 1-3

2) CoF (Path 1>1>2)

3) Tradepost flipping

4) Ori-ore farming in Frostgorge Sound or Orr

5) Material flipping from Mystic Forge (granted, has RNG)

I’m sure there are more ways…but it will take a guild of 5 people 5 days…at 1.5 hours a day.

Some of these small guilds sound more like cliques rather then guilds and shouldn’t expect to harvest all the rewards some of us have been working at for months. That said, Anet needs to acknowledge the difficulties smaller guilds have. Our guild hit the ground running with 40+ players at launch and so we have lots of influence to burn through and everything is fully upgraded. We’ve been sitting on a lot of influence in the hopes guild halls will come at some point. (Hello, Anet. ) However in the last few months, I’ve seen good guild leaders, who had thriving guilds in GW 1, unable to get their guilds off the ground because of the way guilds are set up, i.e. players able to belong to multiple guilds, and difficultly in recruiting new players into their guilds.

Hopefully, there will be things small guilds will be able to do when the release comes out next week. It would be terrible if small guilds could not participate. In the meantime small guilds will really need to team up with one another when they are logged in. A lot of players don’t know that if you complete an event by yourself the guild gets 2 influence, but if you have 2 members teamed up the guild gets 20 influence. If a full guild party completes a dungeon the guild gets 100 influence. Sorry if lots of people know this but a lot of players don’t. Small guilds you will need to team up, team up, team up!

Added: Another thing players don’t know is if you log in daily with every character you made, you’ll potentially get 50 influence vs. 10 during the daily log check. I’ve heard you need to complete a event or heart quest for the character to get the 10 points and count, but I’m not certain.

Vorch.2985:

Here’s a few ways of making 3-4 gold a day taking 1-1.5 hours a day. At that rate, NOT including drops, you will be able to afford the ENTIRE Art of War level in 5 days with a 5 person guild group.

1) AC exp paths 1-3

2) CoF (Path 1>1>2)

3) Tradepost flipping

4) Ori-ore farming in Frostgorge Sound or Orr

5) Material flipping from Mystic Forge (granted, has RNG)

I’m sure there are more ways…but it will take a guild of 5 people 5 days…at 1.5 hours a day.

And during that time they’re not having any fun whatsoever. If I wanted more work I’d pick up a second job, this is a game.

Vorch.2985:

bluewanders.5297:

Art of War level 5 huh? Well that means if my small guild started working toward it now…. we can join in on all the awesome fun in maybe 2 or 3 months.

It takes you 2-3 months to earn 78g…as an entire guild?

Sure… why not… I’ve never bothered to tax the members of my guild… I don’t know what they earn beyond our dungeon runs… although if you had bothered to read the entire thread you would have seen that we had to start over as a guild because leadership quit the game. And it was just recently… and we haven’t managed to get much else upgraded since then… although our original guild was well decked out.

You also aren’t including the 16 consecutive days of build time that 0-5 in AoW requires… and that is if we aren’t upgrading much else…. and remember to activate each of the upgrades directly after one another.

Do you know why people don’t like raids? It’s because they don’t want to work a second job when they come home and boot up their entertainment.

You might also like playing in a large guild where you are nothing more than a number… we like playing among people we have vetted to be competent in content and able to avoid acting like a complete moron in guild chat. Why invite people that we don’t like? That means a guild where everyone freely interacts with each other, understands their talents, and works together tends to stay fairly small for all the right reasons. A 500 man guild is nothing more than a pug hub with its own chat channel.

You miss the point entirely… it is not that we cannot get the upgrades eventually… it is that the guild content (especially the first tier content) should not be prohibitively gated for accessibility to mega guilds and old established guilds only. It makes it harder to start and maintain a new guild when all the content designed to create guild loyalty and cohesion is only easily accessible to guilds that are already established with a large active player base. They don’t need the extra perks as much… they already have some of it through their ability to maintain guild buffs. The ones that need this content (again, especially the first tier guild content) the most are the smaller guilds that earn less influence and need more avenues for creating guild cohesion to avoid bleeding good players to mega guilds that already have all the content unlocked.