Guild Wars 2

Dear Anet,

Situation:
I lead a 5 to 7 person guild. We mainly focus on WvW but also enjoy PvE. Last night we claimed our guild hall and got our tavern. I was dismayed when I saw that the Mine Tiers require so many Silverwaste Shovels. We had maybe 12-15 total on 3 of us.

Problem:
Upgrade resources like these shovels place small guilds at a severe disadvantage because they are account bound, exclusive to specific content and rather rare. Which thus, greatly increases the time it will take for small guilds to get their buildings.

For example: A guild with 20 active players can do a few hours of SW and probably come up with the 50 shovels easily. Just 3 shovels per person is very doable. For a small guild like mine with 5-7 active players this will take much longer because each person needs to acquire 3 to 4 times the amount per person, thus taking 3 to 4 times longer. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. How many hours will we need to spend in SW instead of playing the new content?

This completely goes against the design intent of making it so that larger guilds don’t get upgrades faster.

Solution:
For specific resources like these shovels (and there may be others I haven’t noticed), I see 3 possible solutions:

1. Increase the drop rate of such items
2. Allow such items to be acquired via other/current content or other means.
3. Scale the amount of required resources for items like these based on guild size, time to acquire and range of availability of the item.

In fact, you might need to do one or more of these in some combination.

Summary
However, and probably most importantly, I really do not want to be spending all week in SW when there are wonderful new PvE zones and story to explore, an excessive amount of Hero Points (per character) to earn for elite specs and amazing new WvW maps to explore and play in — all of which is what I really want to be doing.

Please, find a better solution for resources like this! Something that aligns well with playing the content we want to experience. You did it with Hero Points in WvW. You did it with gathering in WvW by adding those sythensizer nodes (which are awesome btw). You can do it with these type of items too.

Heck one of those ships in Verdant Brink had to have a cargo hold full of shovels which got scatted over the zone right? :P lol

Thanks for listening!

P.S. I am LOVING the new zones and new WvW maps. Hero Points — not so much.

Yep, agreed and in about the same position. I think it’s getting less awareness because people have significant shovel stock-piles from running SW before the drop-rate changes and haven’t really had to farm these yet.

As for me, I’d just be happy to see a more reliable/predictable way to get these. Ideally, spending Bandit Crests to get shovels. Doesn’t have to be cheap; 200 or 300 crests for a single shovel would be fine by me. Since earning Bandit Crests is a much more consistent activity, it would make for a far more relaxed and predictable shovel farming experience, and the occasional extra shovel from event drops would start feeling like a bonus instead of a slap in the face.

Wow. How can there be no replies to this?! We are in a similar situation and this is completely burning my guildies out. Drops are so nerfed I can run the event myself 3 times for 1 shovel. Ran 2 groups of guildies through a zone cycle and got 8 shovels.

People want to play HoT. Putting some shovel in the new zones would be immensely helpful if you don’t want to change the drop rate. At least people would feel like they are exploring and not grinding.

Thanks.

Ooh! I like the bandit crests idea Nezroy!

TBH, I have no idea how the acquisition of shovels from bonus chests in SW has been nerfed, but I do not see Shovels as the main problem for small guilds.
You only need Mine 1 if you are patient. (get Mining rate 1 a bit later)
For my small guild Kegs & Mugs (= Linseed Oil & Coarse Sand) are a much larger problem than the Shovels have been.

ermm…

i got this member with around 150 shovels, #justsaying

I’m the leader of a small mostly WvW/sPvP guild on AR….yes the shovels are a minor annoyance, but if you grab a party of 5 or so and just go run the events in circles for a bit you can easily farm enough shovels to get the first capacity upgrade and rate upgrades. At that point, you just farm and/or purchase (If your rich) other upgrades. Aetherium is the biggest time gate for us. It did require a good bit of grinding in the beginning, but once you get the main things for the guild hall you can slow down and slowly focus on the things you want and casually grind out the things you want.

Personally, I went on farming and buying bonanza and our small guild is level 20 and pretty much on pace with much larger guilds gated by the aetherium rates.

anet is kinda hoping every1 moves into big guilds and gives up on small ones, thats why this stuff is so hard

u think, hey lets all play the way we want since my guild’s hall size/progress really doesn’t affect yours, but thats where u are wrong.

if a small guild can have as much fun as a large 1 w/o the grind/time spent, whats the pt of ‘working’ so hard on a large guild?

see dats why it has to be so hard for small guilds, to ensure the people in large guilds feel better

Right there with ya, OP. My small guild (5) was able to claim the hall and upgrade the tavern, but we’ve been working SW for a couple days (we can only take an hour of that god forsaken map at a time) and are still 26 shovels short. We get about 1 per hour MAYBE.

It doesn’t help that behind Dry Top and Tangled Depths, Silverwastes is one of the worst maps in the game. Oh well, off to grind —- err play — Silverwastes…

Large construction companies can build things faster than small construction companies.

MasterD.4790:

I’m the leader of a small mostly WvW/sPvP guild on AR….yes the shovels are a minor annoyance, but if you grab a party of 5 or so and just go run the events in circles for a bit you can easily farm enough shovels to get the first capacity upgrade and rate upgrades.

Have you actually run SW for shovels since last Nov’s shovel nerf, plus whatever additional changes might have arrived in HoT?

A party of 5 running the entire event chain from 0% to VW kill will get about 5 shovels total (not EACH, but TOTAL). Some will get a couple and some will get 0, which is particularly disheartening for those folks. That’s about 10 hours of inconsistent drops just to get the first level mine.

I mean, I dunno, maybe you’re fine with that, in which case there’s nothing more to argue about. Or maybe you just haven’t tried to farm shovels since last year.

how do you even get enough money for guild upgrade if you can’t farm some shovel.

Try to just buy it through lfg if money isn’t the problem.

I find guild upgrade to be a bit too pricy. Either the player need some senses to know those guild upgrade aren’t really worth it anyway, or hopefully Anet heard enough complaint and might make some changes.

I’m just glad to hear small guilds are able to claim halls. From reading the wiki I was thinking that was going to be near-impossible for a small guild to do. It really feels like Anet screwed us small guilds over in a big way with HoT.

You could buy them from players. I actually saw a couple posts of players doing that. I wouldn’t post on the LFG as that’s against the rules though.

It’s a pretty slow and uncomfortable bottleneck for the guilds that didnt grind SW. I’ve seen people trading craft stuff for donations of the shovels via temporary tag, but nothing consistent enough to really put a value on. Ask around, some people might just feel charitable.

They should really just make the shovels tradable. People are already using guild invite/kick as a workaround to buy/sell shovels, and it’s a win/win for the buyer and seller. The seller gets value from shovels he may not otherwise use, and the buyer gets an option for acquiring shovels that doesn’t require potentially massive amount of repetitive shovel farming.

I mean the “shovel market” already exists, and is a solid way to get around the problem, why not just make it easier to access for all involved? I mean, it works fine for rough sand right?