Feedback: Scribing and Guild Hall Decorations
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: quietscribe.1573
I wanted to post some feedback on the Scribing profession and the Guild Hall Decorations because it was, and is, something that I was super excited about for HoT, but I feel it has fallen short of its goal in some aspects.
Scribing was meant to be a crafting skill that was, unlike other crafting professions, one that players would learn to help other players, not themselves, by making decorations for the guild hall, and consumables for the guild, such as WvW blueprints, guild banners etc. This was an excellent idea and one I was both happy and excited to hear about.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that the resources required to level this crafting skill are based, not on an individual’s resources, but on the fact that your guild will help you attain those resources. This makes Scribing horrific for an individual to learn alone, or indeed someone from a small guild. Not only are the resources required to learn the craft so hefty as to be a miserable grinding experience to get them, but it also requires many Guild Hall upgrades that a small guild will struggle to ever attain.
To make a fancy chair, the cost for making one chair is, at the current prices (crafting everything that can be, and using order prices, not buy-instantly prices) around 8 gold 86 silver, as well as 2 crystalline ore which are account bound. That there is a hefty price, since it would take a player few hours to make that much money, or longer, depending on what they are doing.
Consider then that this is just to craft one chair. How many chairs and other items will the scribe need to create in order to level up the craft? Can a small guild really expect to fund such a thing, let alone an individual? Clearly not, or at least not without vast amounts of money thrown at it. The cost just does not correlate to other crafting professions. A weaponsmith, for example, only has to fork out under 16 silver to make an item of the same crafting level, that is over 55 times less than that of scribe.
Does Arenanet then consider that there should be 55 guild members all helping to fund this craft? And if they do then that is a slap in the face to small guilds, but there is also the problem that having a guild-funded crafter causes. Unlike the guild hall treasury, there is nothing stopping a scribe levelling up his/her craft via the guild if they are so good as to throw vast resources towards them to do this, and then merely leave the guild. The crafter might also just end up having things to do in real life and leave the game for extended periods of time. Without the craft itself being tied to the guild, like the hall upgrades are, it is open to exploitation or merely just non-function.
These problems aside, to even be able to craft this one chair, the first decoration item that is available to scribes to make (skill 25), the guild hall must also have built:
Tavern Restoration 1
Mine restoration 1
Aetherium capacity 1
Workshop Restoration 1
Market Restoration 1
Guild Hall Decorations Merchant 1
To upgrade these buildings and merchants in order to make the chair, it cost us around 668 gold 62 silver (crafting everything ourselves etc). If we were to purchase the items at current instant-buy market value, it would cost hundreds of gold more.
And this is only to get to the very initial levels of the guild hall. To actually be able to craft more and level scribing, the guild hall has to get further upgrades, and those are not only locked behind large resource walls, but also behind guild hall experience walls as well. Even if a guild only wants to focus on crafting, they will need to upgrade other aspects of the guild merely to get the guild hall experience bar up enough to unlock the option to upgrade the Workshop or Market. How much our guild will have to upgrade of things like the arena and war room that we have no interest in is not yet known, but I expect we will have to do some of these, and that is horrific for small guilds, considering the resources required.
So, the requirements for the scribe seem vastly too high. I think one of the issues is that the scribe has to make his tools every time he crafts something. This could be mitigated somewhat if the tools did not disappear after use, or even had say, 25 charges on them. This would cut down some of the cost for learning and make it more accessible. I would also question why so much level 80 zone resources are needed for the lowest end of the craft. The resources should ideally scale with the level of the craft, much like every other craft. Forcing players to use piles of coarse sand and vials of linseed oil every time they try to craft an item is just needless at the learning stage. By all means make the really good items need good resources, but surely crafting a couple of chairs should not require such vast resources when Artificers have been making wonders with wood for centuries without it.
And then there is the variety of guild hall decorations, which is sadly lacking. Hopefully vast swathes of crafting decorations will be added soon, but for the moment there really isn’t much to choose from unless you like chairs, banners or pillars. I had been hoping for items that could be used to create free-standing structures, like Krytan walls, stairs, doorways, arches, roofs, floors etc so we could build stuff for roleplay. There really is very little architecture being offered right now, and while what is being offered is okay, temporarily, it is limited in choice, and really difficult to get anything without the huge cost of upgrading the guild hall.
You see, that is the problem we were having last night. We finally managed to get enough resources to upgrade the guild hall to get the Guild Decorations Merchant, so we could learn more scribing to make guild hall items. When we looked at the amount of resources we had thrown at the guild hall, and how much we would need to put in merely to get one lousy chair, we were forced to ask ourselves if we really felt it was worth it. A vast guild, with correspondingly vast resources will have little trouble no doubt, but to ask a guild with around 6 active members to invest that much just to get the first item of decoration is so disheartening. There is no way to buy guild decorations from the trading post since all scribe items are account bound, and trading for them is so risky, both for the buyer and seller, since there is no come-back if one goes back on the deal, if indeed that is even possible.
I feel there should be more decorations for sale from the start, ones that don’t require the guild upgrades. These could be ones that cannot be used with scribing, like the holiday pumpkins, but more general, because players that are not in a huge guild will have no way to really experience guild decorating for a long time. Too long a time, especially as newer or more casual players will not have nearly as much money to throw at the guild as we have. I am fine with the guild hall being a long-term project, but I feel it is detrimental to the game to make decorating it such an unobtainable goal. Many players will spend a great deal of time and money on building vast things in the guild hall if you only give them a chance to do so, rather than making it so huge a mountain to climb that they give up before they even have a chance to start. Leave fancy items for scribing, but give players something to do with the guild hall other than throw money at it.
So yeah, I guess that is my feedback. I hope that the balance between decorations and resources needed is improved, as well as the variety. As an aside, I would also desperately wish for scaling options, non-collision when placing, and tilting like they have in other games like Rift. Rift did a lot of things wrong, but their home instance game mechanics was not one of them.
Looking forward to what Guild Halls will offer in future.
(edited by quietscribe.1573)
