I asked you the other day, but you didn’t reply… How much real money have you put in to get as far as you have? I was trying to make a point in this thread… Because that’s really what it would take for any small guild to be competitive… dollar bills…. lots of them.
I can’t say because I don’t account it separately. Over the 3-odd years off and on I’ve certainly put hundreds of $ into gems and gold in general. With HoT and the guild hall I definitely liquidated most of my long term investments and holdings; all my Black Lion skins and stored mats went into upgrades for sure. Several thousand gold at this point, certainly.
But we’re talking about a game where vets will spend 5000g on a single cosmetic weapon just to have shiny footprints. I am much happier to have invested my accumulated wealth into a hall that others, especially noobs, get to enjoy too. I think it was a brilliant way for ANet to suck the vets dry and level the wealth gap a bit between old and new players in a way that has communal benefit rather than simply pandering to vets’ personal vanity.
You’re right about me being a solo completionist. But it’s why I played this game to begin with. That’s my whole point. I can’t be that any more, so my primary reason for choosing this game over others is gone. GW2 is no longer my refuge. It’s just another MMO. It’s the fluff that matters. No fluff is why I quit Wildstar (other than rosterboss). Fluff is why I play games.
It was never possible to get all GW2 vanity items alone. Do you have all the fractal or dungeon skins? If yes, I guarantee you didn’t two-man all of those. If no, how is that inaccessible content (except by grouping) any different than the guild armorer/weaponsmith 2 content being inaccessible except by grouping?
I mean if all they added in HoT was guild halls and raids, you’d have a point. But they added a ton of solo content too; just look at the legendary collection stuff.
I don’t see the point at all in having a guild hall when I can’t have weapon/armor smiths 2. It’s not the hall itself I care about… It’s the benefits therein. The fact that I stand to put in 2000 times the mats (that’s a reasonable number, too, looking at everything) of any average big-guild person and have the same access (but way way down the line) is just stupid.
This is just… confusing. If you don’t care about the hall itself then you likewise don’t care about 90% of the upgrades, so why would you ever invest in any of that in the first place? The arena, the WvW upgrades, and all the support upgrades that go into getting those… they are all irrelevant to you.
I mean you are basically complaining that ANet added NEW guild skins that are only accessible to non-solo guilds, even though they didn’t TAKE anything away from you. But they added skins only accessible through raiding too, as well as a ton of new cosmetic stuff accessible to EVERYONE, on top of a game that already had skins gated behind some pretty exclusive group content (fractals) long before HoT. I’m just not seeing the paradigm shift you claim took place.
Effectively, I get to choose between playing the game as they’ve allowed and even encouraged me to for the last 3 1/2 years and not have a guild hall OR join a big guild.
I don’t get where you’re being forced to choose at all. You aren’t being forced to join anything to maintain access to your existing bank or weapon/armorer skins. Sure, they added NEW skins that are inaccessible to you, but it’s far from the only content in the game gated off by stuff you don’t want to do.
As for banners, level a scribe the same as everyone else is being forced to do; big guilds aren’t getting off any cheaper here. You know full well there is no chance people in the majority of large guilds are pooling their resources to level a single “guild scribe”, as logical as that might be. It’s just one dude spending all his money the same as it would be for any small guild.
I’m not thrilled about this change either but it doesn’t ding small guilds exclusively at all. All the banners you had access to before, you still have access to the patterns to build now; the upgrades for these patterns were grandfathered in to any existing guilds. You just need a high level scribe now, which is an equal opportunity suckage.
Lastly, buffs… join one faceless guild to get buffs, which was basically what everyone in solo guilds did before anyway with how they ran missions and whatnot. The only difference pre-HoT is you weren’t technically forced into the guild, but most people rode other guilds’ bounty/mission trains to achieve this. You only have to rep the faceless guild for all of like 5s to get the 24hr buff and then go back to anti-social mode
And your own guild hall would be upgraded to full buffs in less time than you think anyway. They are actually really accessible. You don’t need resto 2 in anything to unlock all of them, as far as I recall. Honestly the fact that they made it so only HoT owners can get the buffs is a WAY bigger issue to me than the minor gating behind some guild upgrades.
I agree that lvl 40 and resto 2 upgrades for a lot of things and, by extension, the level 2 armorer and weaponsmith, are quite inaccessible for small/solo guilds. But this other utility stuff; claiming the hall, getting all the buffs, getting the anvil/merchant… it’s all just as accessible and affordable as any of the crap that was ever gated behind fractal or dungeon content.
You know me… what do you think I’m gong to choose?! Can you see me joining a big guild when I won’t even join your guild (a person who I know and like (except when you come into my threads being mean))? I said this earlier in this thread somewhere… I will be the last one standing in any guild I’m in and it’s going to be my own or my husband’s guild so one of us has control over it when everyone else leaves.
Spend your mats and time slowly upgrading your own guild hall at whatever pace you want. Exploit a faceless guild to deal with the mechanics of getting buffs and skins until you have it unlocked yourself. I honestly cannot see how this is any different than the 50/50 harvesting circles in Wildstar that popped up to efficiently take advantage of those mechanics, or people doing their solo guild bounties/missions/races in GW2 on the backs of other organized guilds that were doing it at the same time. It’s just using the mechanics to your advantage…