Guild Wars 2

Good Article man! +1 from me

I loved reading this. I’m in a guild that plays mostly WvW. Guilds Halls and the upgrades they would bring were one of the big plus points that ANET talked about before HoT release. Tp be honest i think quite a few people were looking forward to some of the things that Guild Hall upgrades would bring along, hoping it would add new variety and spruce things up a bit.

What was given to the WvW community was not fair (there is no other way to say it without using words that would get this post deleted). What we got was a grind fest for mats that cannot be got in anywhere near the quantities needed in our prefered gamemode. Whilst no one really likes to grind, at least the PVE guilds are able to play their prefered mode at the same time as they collect and gather the mats. These guilds dont really need the wvw badges (which can be got quickly enough anyway) and certainly dont need the upgrades for WvW.

So now we have a bunch of WvW guilds running around farming potatoes and flax and other wonderous items (Sand!! omg Dry Top/Silverwastes). All this just because ANET didnt think to adapt the wvw upgrade side of things. It is ridiculous to say the least. Furthermore, once we do get some of those new cool upgrades unlocked you then need to scribe the schematics.

So what do we need for that….yet more materials that can only be found in HoT and some of the rarer ones at that. A good example would be the good old guild catapult. To craft this you need 5 linen supply sacks…that is 125 flax FIBERS!!! errrrr just use commendations guys. (oh and it is scribe level 300…hello the number of resonating slivers you need to get that high).

One final point, Guild Hall upgrades have actually killed off the smaller roaming teams (a part of wvw tactics in general), the ones who would do hit and run moves on keeps and towers. The +5 supply carrying capacity upgrade that is needed by these small groups is at….wait for it….guild level 37!

I don’t think there was alot of communication between the WvW team and the Guild Hall team (Heavy supply bags is a good example here). This is really unfortunate as alot of the smaller WvW guilds are just giving up and going whilst the larger ones are buying harvesting sickles by the bucket load…

Thanks to the OP for your post as it shows that even less wvw orientated people and guilds are disappointed in these upgrades.

I remeber Colin saying during the HoT reveal that GW2 would never invalidate your progress. He was talking about gear grind at the time, but its ironic that invalidating progress is exactly what they did to guilds that had upgrades unlocked. Its twice as sour when you consider the goldsink/timesink involved to get back to what’s really just very basic guild utility, like being able to claim structures in WvW.

I suspect that its a sign of a move to only supporting large guilds. Scribing takes a lot of materials, with the seeming intention that the guild contributes to the guild scribe. Now, not every member wil be able or willing to do so, making it neccessary to have even more players.

The Hall itself likewise needs a lot of gold and time, favouring large guilds. And Reddit has a since deleted rumour thread that suggested that WvW will become Alliance based, with 3 large guilds per Alliance. This last bit is speculative and based on nothing more than rumour, but it does seem to fit the current direction.

This leaves small and medium guilds out in the cold. Of course Anet would not want people to quickly max out their guildhalls, but there should have been some sort of scaling depending on guild actives. We already know the game tracks this, since influence was calculated on actives.

HoT introduced a lot in the way of goldsinks, presumably to proactively combat inflation with all the new mats and items coming in. I understand the need to draw gold out of an economy that generates currency out of nothing.

However, some of the goldsinks chosen are especially punative to smaller/WvW guilds since raising the wealth neccessary to get the upgrades needed is a lot harder for them.

Pretty Pixie.8603:

HoT introduced a lot in the way of goldsinks, presumably to proactively combat inflation with all the new mats and items coming in. I understand the need to draw gold out of an economy that generates currency out of nothing.

I think this was done to drive Gem sales, nothing more. But I do like your post and the OP’s.

Great read OP. And others pretty spot on as well.

Scribing feels like they balanced it as part of the guild upgrade system but then split it off into an individual crafting profession for…. reasons, I guess (presumably so they could list “new crafting profession” on the meager list of HoT’s features), without adjusting the cost.

Black Desert is irrelevant, it’s almost upon us and less than 5% of the player base has even heard of it. Now if it’s GREAT, not good, but great it has a chance of stealing away some players. When Legion drops NEXT fall, is about the time I expect anet to announce the next expac. It’s just a good business tactic.

black desert is gonna be buy-to-play and since it seems to be more hardcore than gw2, with how gw2 is now – bad designs, plannings and such…..u will see a number of remnants of the hardcore players leaving for it. casuals wont be going for black desert and thus naturally many gw2 players never heard of it

theres already multi-gaming guilds branching into crowfalls….
gw2 or should i say anet can no longer take it for granted that they can continue to survive due to being the only value to play b2p title since many more b2p titles are coming out.

anet no longer has any rooms to perform their experiments and keep screwing players up.

HMMM … no mention of Pouch of Brown Pigment?

Yea, they need to stop keeping up the jone’s and just make solid content for their game. You have to have certain tendencies to be able to make and do certain things. It just seems like gw2 doesn’t really have that sort of brain power that gw1 had(from talking to other players) and the “might” of other game teams. They just need to chill tf out and focus on gw2.

that could be hard if you have mr. suit man breathing down your neck though…

I was actually my uncle that pointed most of this post out to me. I was complaining to him how bad MMOs have gotten. I talked about how games used to be a refuge for the imaginative and the create to explore. He responded how novelty is really only there at the start of a new thing. At these new moments what is made is part of the commonwealth.

Then the cooperate vampires come. The word of the evening was “dissipation”.

It is a word usually discussed only when a family member becomes a lout, robbing or wasting away the family’s wealth on their own selfishness. The anime Summer Wars is all about the results of this, if anyone’s interested.

Our real life economies are dominated by corporate federations: essentially independent entities beyond government or communal ties, fundamentally disloyal even to themselves. The only result of such activity is dissipation.

He brought up how his corporation is buying another that was spending 20,000 USD for a warehouse a month. He said people don’t realize that corporations don’t simply create “collateral” with people, but also create collateral in their own investments this way.

I love the saying, “Toxic black” for anyone wearing a suit. It’s appropriate.

They have sucked the common person dry and now have begun to cannibalize each other. His corporate group absorbed this other, not fully realizing the cost of the warehouse. The pencil pushers and number crunchers had a brain-storm as all they conceive is by spreadsheet which resulted in selling assets. Then someone had a lapse of insanity to realize, “Hey, why don’t we build our own warehouse?” It was done. No surprise their finances stabilized for a while. Equally no surprise that oh so insightful person was sacked.

NCSoft has essentially seem to be on the same course. WoW didn’t create Burning Crusade until it appeared that Warhammer Online might be a viable MMO. In genearl, an MMO has to survive a year before it can begin to create its own content. WoW was stable 2 years before it had any competitors. DAoC folded the year after WoW came out because it couldn’t update its engine to compete with the flusher animations of WoW. In the same manner, DAoC beat out EQ because it allowed for more solo-play and player-crafted content: Sony refused to update EQ.

NCSoft, by contrast to these, has had a slew of failures recently. Aion launched as a brilliant, but dead game. It was only its advertisements that were good. Now it’s a fashion store. City of Heroes was another flap, being too Grindy and with sometimes nigh-impossible encounters. Wildstar simply failed in all aspects save its raiding. Blade and Soul also demonstrates the company’s disconnect between profiteers and developers.
Simply stated, NCSoft is like an oil company. It seeks to create profit from its consumer base by withholding content far in advance of its capacities to supply. This promises that company need only employ a minimal staffing to maintain the momentum necessary within a set margin of active players before it begins issuing new content. Blade and Soul is probably the clearest proof of this because it’s outdated content that will hit NA and EU, about a year behind where Korea is at in its releases.

The tactic here is Time-Gating. The products (games I suppose) NCSoft is interested in creating are just holding patterns. Guild Wars 1 was their notable entry game to the market. It had the most genuine creative investment and most content that was actually gaming.
Guild Wars 2, Blade and Soul, and all of their other content is the holding pattern. A situation of stable players is produced based on data collection as we play. This informs the company what we actually are doing with our time and little they must produced to keep those of us playing here. From this content is made toward a temporal computation wherein we are calculated to be willing play so many hours based on collected data. Therefore the company can reasonably expect that if they should create that much content we will simply go for it.

Consciousness is undesirable.

The company seems to consider that we are not conscious of all of this. So, the modus operandi is to inform us that several venues of distraction are available for us to experience; mastery point collection, mastery leveling, collections for class weapons, and tokens to buy weapons cores, etc from vendors. Each of these are their own time sink, having little or no overlapping coordination we can take toward any further optimization of our time. Thus, if you want mobility masteries you may necessarily be forced to obtain from the near-term acquisition of your class’s weapon.

In spreadsheet logic the goal of creating a temporal bridge whereby we will continue to play until the company is pressured to create new content is fait-accompli.

The logic here is that NCSoft is financially secure. It has several nest eggs of games, but no commitment what so ever in the development of those games. While EA is probably a demon of some sort, it does invest in creating products which have the elements of being complete. NCSoft does not. It’s tactic lies in being able to cannibalize from any particular group of games it has going, often by producing games that compete against each other with the objective of getting players to buy their newest product just before flipping back to releasing something for the game that community had just formerly left.

This year that tactic seems to have failed. The product created with Heart of Thorns demands a grind far beyond the actual temporal scope of the gaming.

People have called foul.

So, yeah, WvW has really just been trashed. I keep watching more and more of the little roaming guilds and their members just outright quitting Guild Wars 2. Borderlands is dead. The devs are back to being despondent. And really, who can blame them? If toxic black says they this is going to be what Guild Wars 2 is then that’s that. The only realistic option is to quit buying into this kind of thing.

Blizzard front-loaded WoW’s expansion at E3 with hype and promises of content. Then in the months leading up to the expansion said, “Some things will be delayed.” NCSoft has taken the same tact with updates.

Simply, the companies have you figured out. This is what you bought. This is what it’s going to be next year. You can’t affect this. You can’t change this. You don’t own this product.

Here’s our logic.
Anet: “Hey, I’m making an expansion for GW2. Want to help me out?”
Us: “Erm, really?”
Anet: “Yeah, but we got to hire some peeps.”
Us: “Yeah?”
Anet: “Yeah. Think you can spot me some change?”
Us: “What have you done with all that gem store crap we did last year? Server costs?”
Anet: “…”
Us: “…”
…
Us: “You’re really doing an expansion?”
Anet: “Uh-huh.”
Us: “…Let’s start out slow?”
Anet: $$!! …&%#… =^^’’=
Us: “Whatever… here. Now get away from me.”

How’s Black Desert going to be? Same thing. This is what games are now. Keep in mind, too, these are not Western based games. There are 2 billion people in Asia. There’s 1 billion collectively between NA and EU. They could care less about us and have even less reason to do so.

Guild halls – the black hole that’s suppose to help stretch content for 10 months, with the added bonus of scribing, the crafting sinkhole.

Arenanet and NCsoft are partners. ArenaNet does need to keep NCsoft happy, but in no way do they determine the details of when and where updates are going to be.

That said. Some long term goals in an MMO are required. It really just need to be optional or less of a deal to actually do. The problem with many of the guild hall updates imo is that certain things were taken away and then you need a large amount of stuff justto get previous options back.

That and to me it feels like the economists in ArenaNet are looking too much into gold valueson the TP and very little into how materials are actually used by various recipes. Not everyone likes trading. In fact I bet alot of people favor getting materials themselves over buying them. It’s like the Eco devs are “Yay. All stuff has a considerable value on the TP.” While I’m thinking “Why do I need to farm this kitten so hard just to get this one thing I like to have.”

Good points, Frizz.

Yeah. There’s a real feeling that someone did this all by spreadsheet. No actual play was involved.

My largest gripe with the entirety of Heart of Thorns is that is basically an alpha state. The further you play the more it’s just “This content contains Time-Gating.” It has variety.
- Farming is Time-Gating
- Scribing is Time-Gating because it requires the guild to be get so far for the scriber to get further (Thanks Solomon, for that confirmation).
- The costs of everything can be relieved by how much gold you have (profits to anet if someone dumps 500 USD+ to get gems, but realistically there is no economy for gamers.

It all comes down to an absence of content to actually GAME. WoW might demand it’s players to dump 500,000 runecloth into something (exaggerating), but WoW lets you game. You can go out into the world and kill Ogres of this or that level and wolla~! You have runecloth consistently dropping! Return to Garrison and on you go… WoW players are gaming because they’re actually using the whole game to do their thing.

Guild Wars 2 isn’t really a game right now. It’s Maguuma Jungle. And Maguuma Jungle isn’t really a game right now because the ‘jungle’ is just 4 maps we can barely use unless meta event is going. Thus, the only end game content is raiding. And raiding we can barely use because you have to have an in-crowd… an in-crowd that can consistently be on… an in-crowd that can consistently be on when you are …and lastly an in-crowd that is consistently on who needs you this rotation.

Effectively this means most of us are really only playing anything once a week. The rest of the content is just pushing around a wire cart asking for donations: that’d be your Guild Leaders and certain-to-be-online officers.

Summary, Anet didn’t make this expansion to be a game. They just made a stable alpha state and called it quits.

I said in one of my other posts this was going to really hurt the game. I believe the words were, ‘kill it’, but I was being sensational.

At this point I’ve actually watched all the little roamer guilds I have known for years implode. So, sensational is now prophetic.

These people don’t play their game. They don’t respect gamers. They’re milking us.

Well, I wouldn’t draw that conclusion, tbh. =P I just think that the focus on economical value on the TP seems to be more important than it to be fun, which leads to people thinking they are just manipulating us by making material costs for certain tasks “not fun”.

Of course it’s entirely subjective. But as a small(er) guild, you rather want to look at going slower than a huge material cost you cannot afford. It’s mostly psychological.
Materials come in equally, but when the materials needed basically tell the players to make a decision between donating to the guild, making your own armor/legendary and other goals, then smaller guilds have a huge disadvantage as they simply cannot focus on all the things. A smaller guild cannot get the same amounts of linseed oil, and also use it for armor, special recipes, making decorations, upgrading other guild stuff.

Before you can actually start to decorate, and even then with a very limited amount of options, you have spend so much materials that you also need to actually make stuff.

So instead of looking at a “relatively small” cost for decorations, the amount you need to put in before you get to that point is 20-30 fold (more if you want more options) before you can actually start scribing.

I think scribing is too expensive relatively compared to all the upgrade costs you already need to put in before you can even make stuff.
It’s basically the same with the gathering nodes (for smaller guilds) that you put in the amount of materials that basically set you back by a full stack of the material you’re actually starting to mine once upgraded. With a RNG factor on top of it.

It makes it all very discouraging to upgrade the Guild Hall, as you get very little immediate result from any upgrades other than the market upgrades which actually add new things to the gaming experience.

This seems to be a theme within some of HoT, by the way. Instead of actually getting a reward after doing/spending/making something you need to do even more to actually get your reward. Which feels very double.

I think this is a CEO issue. If you look at Glassdoor the negative views start coming in after Chris Whiteside left. Mike O’Brien appears to micromanage while missing the vision of Whiteside.

Eirdyne.9843:

I was actually my uncle that pointed most of this post out to me. (…)Then the cooperate vampires come.

Yes, corporations (can) suck. Maybe your uncle should look for a different job because he does not seem happy where he is…

MMOs is all about long term goals. Also guild halls isn’t the biggest feature, it’s the raids, the masteries and the new specs.

The expansion is out for about 2 months… My experience from complainers is as follows: new releas/feature, crybabies everywhere 6-8 months later: ’THERE’S NOTHING TO DOOOOOO.’

Oh and about black desert; goes down the same road with every single korea grinder and other stuff people were talking about. 1-3 months into it and it’s going back to niche. Remember Wildstar, Archeage etc.? You see people even talking about?

Raids are the biggest feature to you. That’s entirely subjective to everyone.

While long term goals are needed. There still is different ways to go about them. If one goal you set as a player involves farming a big load of flax seeds, then that goal is very grindy and really only involves pressing F on a few plants every day. I’m not sure about you but that isn’t fun gameplay.

I don’t understand why maprewards in the jungle don’t follow the same fashion as MainTyria map rewards. That way the replayability seems much better even though it’s limited to a map or two. But their reasoning for maprewards seemed to not come from that but more from “high prices” on the TP.

Ofcourse you can also say everyoone is just a crybaby.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Black Desert is irrelevant, it’s almost upon us and less than 5% of the player base has even heard of it. Now if it’s GREAT, not good, but great it has a chance of stealing away some players. When Legion drops NEXT fall, is about the time I expect anet to announce the next expac. It’s just a good business tactic.

Which would be when I hopped off the hype train. This “xpac” took away what I enjoyed and ruined the features I was most excited for. I have not touched pre crafting and won’t and the guild hall is a massive gold sink. They removed gold from dungeons, failed to make a single new dungeon or fractal for a paid expansion. They added a handful of new armors but had loads ready for the gem store. They also went FTP which I as a consumer will never forgive.

Great post OP.

ProtoGunner.4953:

MMOs is all about long term goals. Also guild halls isn’t the biggest feature, it’s the raids, the masteries and the new specs.

The expansion is out for about 2 months… My experience from complainers is as follows: new releas/feature, crybabies everywhere 6-8 months later: ’THERE’S NOTHING TO DOOOOOO.’

Oh and about black desert; goes down the same road with every single korea grinder and other stuff people were talking about. 1-3 months into it and it’s going back to niche. Remember Wildstar, Archeage etc.? You see people even talking about?

If that’s the case, we should just let Anet turn the numbers right up, need 250 of something? Sod it make it 2500, long term goals for all!

True, no one talks about Wildstar, it’s a shame it decided it would focus on hardcore and turn the difficulty up… uh oh…

Pretty Pixie.8603:

I think this is a CEO issue. If you look at Glassdoor the negative views start coming in after Chris Whiteside left. Mike O’Brien appears to micromanage while missing the vision of Whiteside.

I agree 100%. It seems to me that those who could keep things in check are now gone and they are completely bound by what their leader says, hell it’s his policy that keeps people from talking including Colin. Think about how different things could have been had they been able to communicate about their content beforehand and how different this expansion could have been but in the end, the CEO micro managed it and ensured it was designed the way he wanted so when it fails and it’s well on it’s way the responsibility lies directly with him.

Nobody who loves this game wants to see it fail, but the truth of the matter is this isn’t the same game at all now and there are many of us who despise the new path. Unfortunately at this point unless there is a change in leadership, this will never be the GW2 of launch and that’s just a terribly sad thing.