HoT Failures: Guilds

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Deified.7520

Deified.7520

Hey,

So me and many of my friends have played this game for long periods of time. I personally have played since release. However, HoT didn’t really stand up to our expectations on many fronts. Today, I will be discussing one of those fronts. Guilds.

The Stage

The stage is set for the HoT release. Hype train is in full swing. All of us are in a guild and we’re really excited. Guild Halls, Guild sPvP teams, raids, decorations, etc. A lot of possibilities to get our guild more involved and connected. We were really hoping that is what would happen.

Release

Once the game is released, we of course immediately focused our efforts for a guild hall. We were all gitty about how we were going to decorate the hall, who claimed which sections, what each section was, etc. We got the whole guild together and did it. We thought this was going to be just the start of guild focused activities. Then we saw it.

The price. The price was huge. HUGE. People were saddened. Here is this guild hall that was asking for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of gold in donations. So everyone started asking, for what? We did some research. Tried to find out what the point of these upgrades were. A majority of them were pointless. Sure there were guild armorer 2 and weaponsmith 2, but those were months away in upgrades. The upgrades that we could get soon, that carrot on the stick. They were pointless. Some small measly 1-10% boost of some vague benefits. Gathering nodes that cost hundreds of gold and we get 1-2s a day from and a crystal for guild armor that is at least a month or two away.

But we still had hope. We thought hey, without upgrades we can at least decorate it. Right? Wrong. The decorations were just as expensive. AND they required a scribe to get high level which was expensive in its own right. This scribe was personal based too. So we’d have to convince people to donate to a person for the sole purpose of decorations.

What ever hype behind guild halls started to get sucked out. What we thought was going to be the focal point of guild related content and guild teamwork turned out to be a massive gold drain that nobody cared for. Instead of asking players to go play some obscure content that isn’t played often (jumping puzzles, mini dungeons, many open world events that aren’t endgame range), we find ourselves having to grind out huge amounts of gold just to pay for small benefit.

Then Raids came out. We did them for a couple of weeks. Then we realized that they didn’t have that good rewards. People didn’t want to do them again, they had no reason too. They had no reason to practice when they could just go do world bosses or vinewrath and get just as good as rewards. The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

Then we have guild missions. Doing the same guild missions every week of every month for 2+ years now. I’m sorry, but that can only get us so far.

There were so many better ways you could’ve taken the decoration system and the guild hall system that would have benefited the game more. They should NOT have been gold drains. They should have encourage guild pride and teamwork. They should have encourage guilds working together more. But they didn’t.

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Posted by: Swagger.1459

Swagger.1459

I was going to make a post like this so thanks.

Yes, the devs dropped the ball on guild halls big time. Their mentality was gold sink, not community building.

They care more about gold sinks than they do player experience (fixed for zenleto).

Spvp should have been gvg, not obsidian sanctum or the poor arena space in guild halls.

Some good elements, but the developers are out of touch in many areas of the game sadly.

New Main- 80 Thief – P/P- Vault Spam Pro

221 hours over 1,581 days of bank space/hot pve/lion’s arch afk and some wvw.

(edited by Swagger.1459)

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Posted by: kolompi.1287

kolompi.1287

Are they in touch in any areas? I doubt that.

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Posted by: Cecylio.1286

Cecylio.1286

That’s why I stopped representing my guild – they demanded more, and more gold. I get it, they want to finish guild hall, but I can’t afford it. I only send them crafting material, when needed. That’s my part, otherwise it would be rude to represent again after it’s finished.

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Posted by: Dashingsteel.3410

Dashingsteel.3410

Passive influence system should have stayed. The new gold sink system is just terrible. Why donate gold to a guild that could later kick you from its roster? It also places unfair burdens on the guild leader in my opinion. Do you continually beg/harass your roster into donating to the guild hall or do you depend on the generosity of your guild and never say anything? In a lot of cases if you depend on the generosity of your guild you might be waiting a looonnnggg time unless it is a megaguild. Players don’t want to part with their loot and I don’t blame them. They shouldn’t have to. That’s why I harken back to the passive influence system.

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Posted by: FrizzFreston.5290

FrizzFreston.5290

Gold isn’t needed that much. Crafting materials are much more needed. And it does get easier the more people donate. I don’t think that it always gives you something you want per say, but it does add up in the long run.

Though to be honest, it does take a good deal of sacrifice of materials to get certain upgrades. You need to decide what is worth it and what isnt. Earlier upgrades could have been cheaper. And the donation tool should be more intuitive. The rest is upto the guild. If they require donations, then they’re not very good. Our guild doesn’t require donations though we do set goals.

Scribe is being addressed already. Even if we need to wait until april q2 update. So ArenaNet knows.

“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik

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Posted by: Dashingsteel.3410

Dashingsteel.3410

Crafting materials = gold

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Posted by: zenleto.6179

zenleto.6179

Yes, the devs dropped the ball on guild halls big time. Their mentality was gold sink, not community building.

They care more about gold sinks than they do player expirience.

This bit.

(I’ll leave the spelling alone)

Fire up the Hyperbowl ma, we’re going to town!

Would you like some hard cheeze with your sad whine?

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Posted by: Andulias.9516

Andulias.9516

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

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Posted by: Sampo.9678

Sampo.9678

What else do people spend their money on??
Since you seem to dislike the costs of the guild hall.
I’m in a guild with like 5 reallife friends.
We donated a total of 6360 gold atm into our guild hall since there’s nothing to spend gold on anymore after playing the game since the beginning.

I still have 1k gold left wich im saving for scribe but im waiting for that since they announced they might change the cost of scribe.

“Be brave, little rabbit. Take a chance.”

(edited by Sampo.9678)

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Posted by: FrizzFreston.5290

FrizzFreston.5290

Crafting materials = gold

Passive influence = passive gold income.

Except now people need to be actively donating that income rather than just represent. In fact you could say people can help out multiple guilds easier.

If it was influence, you’d have alot of maxed out guilds now that really didn’t put in any effort or particularly cared about guild halls. Other than saying “It’s maxed, not that anyone actually cares” and now it’s “No one really cares, because they don’t donate”

I think the active component is definitely something that was needed. The problem is, most guilds lack direction, don’t know how to handle actively doing something together that isn’t a guild mission. The system fails when the guild fails.

“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik

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Posted by: Swagger.1459

Swagger.1459

Yes, the devs dropped the ball on guild halls big time. Their mentality was gold sink, not community building.

They care more about gold sinks than they do player expirience.

This bit.

(I’ll leave the spelling alone)

I’m usually good about catching my mistakes, but you couldn’t just let that post slide?

Your sew meen and brootal!!!

New Main- 80 Thief – P/P- Vault Spam Pro

221 hours over 1,581 days of bank space/hot pve/lion’s arch afk and some wvw.

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Posted by: Deified.7520

Deified.7520

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

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Posted by: Dashingsteel.3410

Dashingsteel.3410

So nobody would care about their guild hall unless they donated mats and gold? That is the only thing that equals effort?
The passive influence system actually gave points to the guild for player effort. Sure you scored influence for just logging in but beyond that you got points for doing events. With the passive influence system, you could help grow your guild influence while playing the game.
With this new system you either give up your gold and mats or are lucky enough to be online when the guild does its missions. Nothing else helps your guild anymore.

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Posted by: SkyShroud.2865

SkyShroud.2865

accurately, the HOT is not a completed expansion
it is obvious when it was announced that raid will be delayed during launch, furthermore, the raid does not have all the wings available
it is obvious when the ending story was so buggy
it is obvious when some guild upgrades materials are items that become so rare due to certain changes
it is obvious when scribing did not have the full recipes and still missing some recipes now i think
it is obvious when it was announced that scribing crafting requirements for certain recipes dont make sense and they will correct that
it is obvious when wvw overhaul isnt part of the expansion, citing time constraint as reason

and so on….

HOT is never completed and it will take a long time to be considered “completed”.
so a lot of group contents seems to be sloppy

Founder & Leader of Equinox Solstice [TIME], a Singapore-Based International Guild
Henge of Denravi Server
www.gw2time.com

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Posted by: Andulias.9516

Andulias.9516

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

(edited by Andulias.9516)

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Posted by: SkyShroud.2865

SkyShroud.2865

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

Not trying to defend him but, you claim 90% of the core players and mentioned zero data at latter part of the post, aren’t you contradicting yourself? Where did you obtain this 90% data?

You further claim he is ludicrous and he based entirely on the idea that just because he don’t like something but aren’t you doing it the same with that 90% thing?

Furthermore, you claimed to played 13 years worth of MMO, then claim if guildies are doing this just for rewards, he is in the wrong game or wrong guild but before that statement, you said you had a 2nd GM for those who missed it, doesn’t that imply people doing GM for personal rewards as well? So what are you trying to say?

Founder & Leader of Equinox Solstice [TIME], a Singapore-Based International Guild
Henge of Denravi Server
www.gw2time.com

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Posted by: Andulias.9516

Andulias.9516

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

Not trying to defend him but, you claim 90% of the core players and mentioned zero data at latter part of the post, aren’t you contradicting yourself? Where did you obtain this 90% data?

You further claim he is ludicrous and he based entirely on the idea that just because he don’t like something but aren’t you doing it the same with that 90% thing?

Furthermore, you claimed to played 13 years worth of MMO, then claim if guildies are doing this just for rewards, he is in the wrong game or wrong guild but before that statement, you said you had a 2nd GM for those who missed it, doesn’t that imply people doing GM for personal rewards as well? So what are you trying to say?

Yes, I claim I have been playing MMOs for 13 years, how is that relevant to the rest of your post, why do you mention it at all…? I mentioned that in the context of Reddit users going down and that being normal, what exactly was your point?

Considering usually half the people doing the second run are doing it as a favour and get no rewards at all, whaddya think I meant? Let’s ponder this complicated question.

The 90% is what you call hyperbole, and I made that blatantly clear. No, I do not know the exact number. Now please look back at what happened when Anet added ascended armor and remember how many people said “I want Ascended armor and I want higher tiers as well!” Pretty sure it was about zero. Instead Anet promised they will never add another tier, ever, and that was because of the enormous backlash, and I still see from time to time people complain about ascended armor. So what does that tell you? How many people do you think want this? Yet another complicated question! In fact, this is the first time anyone has requested a gear treadmill in a very long time, people actually complained that Legendary armor could be viewed as adding gear treadmill!

You can continue to bicker about details and ignore my actual point, but this doesn’t further the discussion, does it?

(edited by Andulias.9516)

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: IndigoSundown.5419

IndigoSundown.5419

As a player attracted to GW2 by GW and by many of ANet’s advertisements that GW2 is not going to be like other MMO’s, I lament the transition from the public:

But what if your business model isn’t one based on a subscription, and your content-design motivations aren’t driven by creating mechanics to keep people playing as long as possible? When looking at content design for Guild Wars 2, we’ve tried to ask the question: What if the development of the game was based on…wait for it…fun?

If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players? Can we focus our time on making meaningful and impactful content, rather than filler content to draw out the experience? Can we make something so much fun you might want to play it multiple times because it’s fun, rather than making you do it because the game says you have to? It’s how we played games while growing up. I can’t tell you how many times I played Quest for Glory; the game didn’t give me 25 daily quests I needed to log in and do, I played it multiple times because it was fun!

So if your key metric for success of your game is fun, how do you make content that fits that goal, and how do you know if you’re succeeding? It’s easy to tell if a subscription-based game is hitting its metric of success, you simply look at the number of subscriptions; fun is much harder to define. To accomplish this, we’ve had to fundamentally redefine our development process of content in GW2 around this concept of fun, and it starts with asking a very simple question that surprisingly isn’t asked that often in game development: “Are you having fun?”

to the non-stated, but inferred by observation:

“Oh, kitten! People are leaving! What do we have to do to keep them around?”

As someone who to this day plays the game when I want to have fun, plays only what I find fun, and who laments all the effort spent to produce filler rather than fun, I very much wish Anet would revisit this statement.

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: TexZero.7910

TexZero.7910

Eh being that my guild maxed its hall, with relative ease (outside of the pain of watching our wallets and vaults empty)…..

I’d say this system isn’t any better or worse than the previous incarnation of guilds.

They can do a bit to improve it like stream lining the upgrades so they actually make sense as opposed to this janky everything is everywhere in this tree of who knows what non-sense.

They can also do right by players by allowing them to set an next upgrade that will automatically do it should the materials be in the storage and the aetherium & favor cost be met.

They can do a lot to help guild leaders announce what is being worked on by having the donation NPC’s dialogue be improved and actually announce the next upgrade in line. ex: Castor at the Arena can shout, “Hey, i’ve got some pretty sweet new lava floors in stock. They are sure to set the competition ablaze”

There’s various things that can be done, but i do not feel cost is one of the items that needs to be adjusted. Rather, they need to remove a bunch of the timegated non-sense. There’s 0 need for charged quartz to be gated anymore.

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: SkyShroud.2865

SkyShroud.2865

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

Not trying to defend him but, you claim 90% of the core players and mentioned zero data at latter part of the post, aren’t you contradicting yourself? Where did you obtain this 90% data?

You further claim he is ludicrous and he based entirely on the idea that just because he don’t like something but aren’t you doing it the same with that 90% thing?

Furthermore, you claimed to played 13 years worth of MMO, then claim if guildies are doing this just for rewards, he is in the wrong game or wrong guild but before that statement, you said you had a 2nd GM for those who missed it, doesn’t that imply people doing GM for personal rewards as well? So what are you trying to say?

Considering usually half the people doing the second run are doing it as a favour, whaddya think I meant?

The 90% is what you call hyperbole. No, I do not know the exact number. Now please look back at what happened when Anet added ascended armor and remember how many people said “I want Ascended armor and I want higher tiers as well!” I don’t remember there being a single post like that, EVER. In fact, this is the first time anyone has requested a gear treadmill in a very long time, people actually complained that Legendary armor could be viewed as adding gear treadmill!

You can continue to bicker about details and ignore my actual point, but this doesn’t further the discussion, does it?

I am actually reading your actual points, you call it hyperbole but same can be apply to his.

Furthermore, he only mentioned the rewards and the gears costing/benefit ratio are not worth the effort. I didn’t see him asking for higher tiers of gears. You are the one saying that.

You say half are people who offer to help, it can also means that there are people who don’t offer to help. So, what are you going to do to those people who don’t help? Are these people not doing for rewards? Are you going to kick them?

I am reading both your details and points but if your details don’t make sense, thus, your points become less convincing.

EDIT: my point about 13 years is…..nah…i will get infracted if i say it out loud, lol.

Founder & Leader of Equinox Solstice [TIME], a Singapore-Based International Guild
Henge of Denravi Server
www.gw2time.com

(edited by SkyShroud.2865)

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Deified.7520

Deified.7520

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

It’s pretty easy to tell that populations are dropping. You said it yourself that there has never been an upward trend. I’m not saying that the game is dead or dying, but I think for an expansion we’re losing players too fast. That’s great you’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. You can’t really say too much about Gw2 using that though. Gw2 is too different. There haven’t been a ton of hugely popular horizontal MMOs in the past 13 years, maybe if you consider Gw1.

I’ve played since release and every time there has been a content addition to the game or even content changes, rewards is one of the focal points of the discussion. I mean just recently dungeons were declared “dead” because the rewards aren’t good enough. I constantly see people complaining how dungeons are pointless to do because the rewards aren’t there anymore. With Vinewrath people complained about the chest farm being too good. People have complained in the past that certain dungeon paths aren’t worth it (TA). Some are too easy to do. These complaints have always been there. I didn’t mention anything about a vertical climb, don’t put words in my mouth. I said that there is an issue rewards and there has always been complaints dealing with rewards.

I have yet to see anyone in full leystone armor. I have rarely seen anyone in full bladed (that has the chest). Maybe 1 or 2. Mistward is the most popular armor set that I’ve seen people wearing. I haven’t seen anyone with the animated machine weapons. The expensive special skins on the TP from RNG drops are more common since you can buy them from the TP. I think I’ve seen maybe 5-6 people with weapons from raids. I just hardly seen any of the HoT skins while playing.

The new stats are hugely underused. Out of all the new stats, vipers/sinister are the only stats that are in the meta right now. The rest are old stats, like the eternal king zerker.

My point is that my anecdotal evidence suggest that nobody really likes the skin. Not enough for them to be as common as say T3 or other similar ones. Looking on meta build websites you’ll see that the new stats are serverly underused. So with these two in minds (i know anecdotal evidence isn’t 100%, but considering we can’t see the data on how many people have a certain skin unlocked or used, we can’t really draw conclusions from anything else. Plus we’re already using anecdotal evidence to defend the guild design), the two major forms of rewards and incentives aren’t being used. Nobody wants to go through the trouble of getting stats because they’re not “good” or in the meta. Finally, as I said earlier, if you don’t want the skin you don’t care.

Right now only 8/29 people online between all of my guilds are in a HoT zone. Last night during peak hours it was 15/74 people online were in one of the 4 HoT zones. Even if we count fractal of the mist (which I pm’d a few and they weren’t above level 50), it’s not a huge increase in numbers.

We know they did decently well with sales. They increased profits from Q3 to Q4 (Q4 was expansion released) by about 85%.

My point is that when you release an expansion for a game, many people are expecting to spend a lot of time in the expansion. If people are so quick to return to vanilla, why purchase future expansions? I mean I’m watching what all my friends and all the guilds are doing. They’re doing all vanilla content. World Boss trains, under level 50 fractals, etc. Many of them did the expansion content to get certain skins if they wanted, but got what they wanted in a month and went back to vanilla. Why? Because vanilla offers better rewards or almost equal rewards for less work.

Why do you think they nerfed dungeons? It wasn’t a coincidence that they nerfed them prior to the release of HoT. Imagine if the audience still perceived dungeons are worth doing for gold. We would probably have even less in HoT content.

But that isn’t the point of this discussion. I’m just saying that the implementation of the Guild Halls and Scribing was serverly flawed. It only was fit for a small percentage of the audience and by just looking at different guilds donation tabs and guild bank donations, you can see that relative to the size of the guild there is a small percentage of players in each guild doing a majority of the work.

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Posted by: Donari.5237

Donari.5237

The core of the OP seems to be that halls and decorations cost too much. Agreed! Many many threads on this forum agree with you. And good news: so do the Devs.

Will they really fix it enough to make it fun? There’s no telling. But they did announce, in live streams and in text posts, that they know Scribing is too expensive and they will be revamping it. They couldn’t do it for the January update as it is a major change that needs testing and balancing, but it is coming. (soon)

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Posted by: Deified.7520

Deified.7520

The core of the OP seems to be that halls and decorations cost too much. Agreed! Many many threads on this forum agree with you. And good news: so do the Devs.

Will they really fix it enough to make it fun? There’s no telling. But they did announce, in live streams and in text posts, that they know Scribing is too expensive and they will be revamping it. They couldn’t do it for the January update as it is a major change that needs testing and balancing, but it is coming. (soon)

Something I’m scared of the “we’re too far in now” type of outlook. There are loads of people and guilds that have already spent enormous amounts of gold on this stuff. The question is how big is this population? How will the react to a sudden decrease in costs? What if instead of costing 800g to level up scribing, it goes down to like 40-100g? How will people react?

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Posted by: Ashen.2907

Ashen.2907

First, no, rewards have never been an issue.

Except that rewards have been a source of complaint since the game launched and the reward system has been altered, including adding a new tier, since launch. None of that would have happened if rewards had never been an issue. Anet seems to disagree with your assessment.

90% of the core GW2 players

So how many core GW2 players are there exactly. You seem to have access to numbers that no one else (outside of Anet/NCsoft) does.

Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

You mean in response to an issue with rewards that you claim didn’t exist? BTW, you are wrong about what nobody wants.

never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion

Does WoW, the biggest game in the western portion of the genre, not count then? It has shown upward trends post expansions up until fairly recently. It seems odd to claim, “never,” while excepting the single most popular game in the genre (in the west at least).

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: zenleto.6179

zenleto.6179

Yes, the devs dropped the ball on guild halls big time. Their mentality was gold sink, not community building.

They care more about gold sinks than they do player expirience.

This bit.

(I’ll leave the spelling alone)

I’m usually good about catching my mistakes, but you couldn’t just let that post slide?

Your sew meen and brootal!!!

Not a chance! Though I was really highlighting the first bit.

Fire up the Hyperbowl ma, we’re going to town!

Would you like some hard cheeze with your sad whine?

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Broom.2561

Broom.2561

Try having a small guild, with all the upgrades…. and then not being able to even get banners anymore. So sorry, but I can’t PAY people to do those boring ‘guild missions’, and after they heard about the cost, people completely lost interest in the guild hall. Whoop-de-doo. And then, to add insult to injury, people say ‘well, small guilds don’t count anyway, join a big one’. We’ve been around since 2003, in multiple games. What on earth makes people think that ANY of us think joining a bigger guild would be a good idea…

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Posted by: FrizzFreston.5290

FrizzFreston.5290

I still don’t understand how people can’t do guildmissions. They’re easy to complete and give like 50 silver 1 to 3 commendations (easily worth upto a gold) and two rares within 15 minutes.

And favourwise, you dont need that much favor anyway for upgrades. You basically need one mission per upgrade if that.

I wouldn’t recommend joining a big guild, then guild missions are even more of a faceroll. But if you have less than 6 people, you might want to recruit some people through LFG or invite some people. Pugs can in fact join your instanced guild missions if theyre partied with you, the same way they can for guildhalls. I heard that they can even do their own guild mission within another guild’s instance so both guilds get favour.

Banners are made through scribing btw. But i believe you can buy them with commendations as well. But yeah, if you dont do guildmissions all together….. then you dont get any guild related items.

“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Andulias.9516

Andulias.9516

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

Not trying to defend him but, you claim 90% of the core players and mentioned zero data at latter part of the post, aren’t you contradicting yourself? Where did you obtain this 90% data?

You further claim he is ludicrous and he based entirely on the idea that just because he don’t like something but aren’t you doing it the same with that 90% thing?

Furthermore, you claimed to played 13 years worth of MMO, then claim if guildies are doing this just for rewards, he is in the wrong game or wrong guild but before that statement, you said you had a 2nd GM for those who missed it, doesn’t that imply people doing GM for personal rewards as well? So what are you trying to say?

Considering usually half the people doing the second run are doing it as a favour, whaddya think I meant?

The 90% is what you call hyperbole. No, I do not know the exact number. Now please look back at what happened when Anet added ascended armor and remember how many people said “I want Ascended armor and I want higher tiers as well!” I don’t remember there being a single post like that, EVER. In fact, this is the first time anyone has requested a gear treadmill in a very long time, people actually complained that Legendary armor could be viewed as adding gear treadmill!

You can continue to bicker about details and ignore my actual point, but this doesn’t further the discussion, does it?

I am actually reading your actual points, you call it hyperbole but same can be apply to his.

Furthermore, he only mentioned the rewards and the gears costing/benefit ratio are not worth the effort. I didn’t see him asking for higher tiers of gears. You are the one saying that.

You say half are people who offer to help, it can also means that there are people who don’t offer to help. So, what are you going to do to those people who don’t help? Are these people not doing for rewards? Are you going to kick them?

I am reading both your details and points but if your details don’t make sense, thus, your points become less convincing.

EDIT: my point about 13 years is…..nah…i will get infracted if i say it out loud, lol.

You don’t need to say it out loud, your obviously aggressive stance is blatantly clear as is.

The rest of your post has nothing to do with the topic at hand. The rest are offline, can’t come or don’t want to come, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything, what the hell does that have to do with Guild Halls?!

First, no, rewards have never been an issue.

Except that rewards have been a source of complaint since the game launched and the reward system has been altered, including adding a new tier, since launch. None of that would have happened if rewards had never been an issue. Anet seems to disagree with your assessment.

90% of the core GW2 players

So how many core GW2 players are there exactly. You seem to have access to numbers that no one else (outside of Anet/NCsoft) does.

Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

You mean in response to an issue with rewards that you claim didn’t exist? BTW, you are wrong about what nobody wants.

never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion

Does WoW, the biggest game in the western portion of the genre, not count then? It has shown upward trends post expansions up until fairly recently. It seems odd to claim, “never,” while excepting the single most popular game in the genre (in the west at least).

Except what you are saying is a blatant lie. Anet added Ascended armor because Exotic was too easy to get. Not because rewards were bad, since Ascended armor isn’t even rewarded, apart from a VERY low chance of a random drop.

The rest of your post I answered before. Please do read first, I know it’s hard but do try.

WoW always had short peaks ad slight drops during and after expansions, aside from the core player-base growing. But in any case, that is again NOT the topic at hand, is it?

It’s becoming more and more clear that you are not the least bit interested in being objective and want to whine about random stuff that will never make it into the game. Again, ANET promissed they will never add anything above Ascended. Obviously they seem to “agree” with me, not with you. So if you don’t like that, go play another game.

Again, did you forget this?!
http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/26/guild-wars-2-staff-tackles-the-ascended-gear-controversy-head-on/

(edited by Andulias.9516)

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Te Nar.7450

Te Nar.7450

I still don’t understand how people can’t do guildmissions. They’re easy to complete and give like 50 silver 1 to 3 commendations (easily worth upto a gold) and two rares within 15 minutes.

And favourwise, you dont need that much favor anyway for upgrades. You basically need one mission per upgrade if that.

I wouldn’t recommend joining a big guild, then guild missions are even more of a faceroll. But if you have less than 6 people, you might want to recruit some people through LFG or invite some people. Pugs can in fact join your instanced guild missions if theyre partied with you, the same way they can for guildhalls. I heard that they can even do their own guild mission within another guild’s instance so both guilds get favour.

Banners are made through scribing btw. But i believe you can buy them with commendations as well. But yeah, if you dont do guildmissions all together….. then you dont get any guild related items.

Well as been mentioned, doing the same GM’s for 2 years is quite freaking boring. And most people don’t play GW2 to grind away at stuff that’s broing, and yeah I consider ALL Guild Missions to be boring repetitive content by now. ArenaNet have destroyed this game pretty harshly I’d say with their neglecting of WvWvW and Guilds. Where’s new Guild Missions?? Where’s a propper GvG? The cost of Guild Halls?? Pre-HoT the guild I’m in had about 30 active players out of 50. Everyone was hyped about the Xpac and especially the guild content. HoT came, everyone played for about a month, got sick of the maps (by the time they got to Tangled Depths, that map is a freaking kitten hole), stopped showing upp for guild missions because of the dissapointment of no new content. We’ve been heavily focused on dungeons and fractals in the past but with the crappy rewards and once again the lack of new content everyone was to dissapointed to keep playing either. So now we have about 5 active people, the rest moved on after 3years of playing they were just to sick of dissapointments from this so called “developer”. I myself still play but less and less. I don’t like grinding and I don’t like having to dedicate hours upon hours to one specific event in one map with random people. I’m not even going to touch the story or the WvW more in depth because there’s really no need. I’d like to try the raids but yeah pugging isn’t really an option as the classes I play aren’t welcome in puggs and I have no guildies left. I’ve played GW2 since launch and before that I played all the GW1 content for years. I’m utterly dissapointed and let down by ArenaNet over and over and over agian. They focus on bullkitten instead of real content. They don’t communicate any real important information, just pr-talk and showing off their developers.. like wtf?? How many cares about the kitten sound design?? They just keep f*****g up over and over again. Heres some stuff they SHOULD have been doing for the x-pack:

More Conquest maps. (they want spvp to be big but cows will kitten gold before they implement som new maps that isn’t a kitten mini moba)
More Fractals.
More Guild Missions.
Better and longer story. (Wasn’t horrible and a step up from vanilla but yeah, short af and I’d prefer more old lore ties like loads of others)
More, less complicated maps like in the core world (I’m looking at you Tangled Depths, you piece of garbage)
More, shorter events in the new maps.
A GvG map (It’s not that freaking hard to implement. GW1 had it god kitten it and it’s freaking called GUILD WARS my god……..)

Side notes*
They also crashed their own kitten economy which they are sooooo found of by implementing scribing and legendary journey and in that way creating enormous material sinks, like common if they didn’t see that coming they should revisit high school.
Over powered mobs. (now I think it’s good that they make stuff harder but seriously, I was a main thief but there’s 0 fun in being 1 or 2 shoted by everything in the jungle so now I’ve rerolled necro)
Severe lack of solo content. (Close to nothing in the new maps can be achived alone or with one other person, exceptions are some hero points and the adventures.)
Balancing took ages.

Now they did some things right of course:

Raids.
Verdant Brink (in my opinion the best map they created as it has a good balance in how complicated it is)
The elite spezialisations (power creep and balance issues aside but that’s expected)
Spvp Leauges
Precursor crafting (The material sink factor aside it’s a better system than rng)
Gliding
The story telling in events
The META events (only if you have a lot of time though)
The Squads
The adventures

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: FrizzFreston.5290

FrizzFreston.5290

SkyShroud was far from being aggressive, he’s just pointing out the flaws in your arguments. Which, if you think about it, would just help you make your argument stronger if you hadn’t posted alot of unrelated biased points about what the game is to you specifically. If someone has a different experience than you, then your experience isn’t automatically superior.

Funnily enough, you’re being more aggressive by telling people to scoot when they don’t fully agree with your vision of the game, even if some of them are overly exaggerated.

The problem here is more that players see this huge mountain of stuff they need to put in, and barely attempt to work towards the goals. Or think the goals aren’t worth it, but still want those goals regardless.

It definitely takes alot of effort to put in the guildhall to “max” it. For some it’s easier than others. But this doesn’t mean the system fails. It just set the bar pretty high from the start,and not every guild is capable of organizing themselves to have a go at these goals. (Which is what I meant with that they “fail”) This doesn’t mean they are bad players or even a bad guild, it just means that organizing to upgrade the hall is a alien task for certain guilds. Hell, even my guild has problems to properly organize proper donation flow. It’s just that we have a few stubborn guild leaders (myself included) that press on through, without nescessarilly demanding everyone donates. If i need a break, I luckily am not leading alone and can share said burden with my fellow leaders.

“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Ashen.2907

Ashen.2907

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

Not trying to defend him but, you claim 90% of the core players and mentioned zero data at latter part of the post, aren’t you contradicting yourself? Where did you obtain this 90% data?

You further claim he is ludicrous and he based entirely on the idea that just because he don’t like something but aren’t you doing it the same with that 90% thing?

Furthermore, you claimed to played 13 years worth of MMO, then claim if guildies are doing this just for rewards, he is in the wrong game or wrong guild but before that statement, you said you had a 2nd GM for those who missed it, doesn’t that imply people doing GM for personal rewards as well? So what are you trying to say?

Considering usually half the people doing the second run are doing it as a favour, whaddya think I meant?

The 90% is what you call hyperbole. No, I do not know the exact number. Now please look back at what happened when Anet added ascended armor and remember how many people said “I want Ascended armor and I want higher tiers as well!” I don’t remember there being a single post like that, EVER. In fact, this is the first time anyone has requested a gear treadmill in a very long time, people actually complained that Legendary armor could be viewed as adding gear treadmill!

You can continue to bicker about details and ignore my actual point, but this doesn’t further the discussion, does it?

I am actually reading your actual points, you call it hyperbole but same can be apply to his.

Furthermore, he only mentioned the rewards and the gears costing/benefit ratio are not worth the effort. I didn’t see him asking for higher tiers of gears. You are the one saying that.

You say half are people who offer to help, it can also means that there are people who don’t offer to help. So, what are you going to do to those people who don’t help? Are these people not doing for rewards? Are you going to kick them?

I am reading both your details and points but if your details don’t make sense, thus, your points become less convincing.

EDIT: my point about 13 years is…..nah…i will get infracted if i say it out loud, lol.

You don’t need to say it out loud, your obviously aggressive stance is blatantly clear as is.

The rest of your post has nothing to do with the topic at hand. The rest are offline, can’t come or don’t want to come, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything, what the hell does that have to do with Guild Halls?!

First, no, rewards have never been an issue.

Except that rewards have been a source of complaint since the game launched and the reward system has been altered, including adding a new tier, since launch. None of that would have happened if rewards had never been an issue. Anet seems to disagree with your assessment.

90% of the core GW2 players

So how many core GW2 players are there exactly. You seem to have access to numbers that no one else (outside of Anet/NCsoft) does.

Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

You mean in response to an issue with rewards that you claim didn’t exist? BTW, you are wrong about what nobody wants.

never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion

Does WoW, the biggest game in the western portion of the genre, not count then? It has shown upward trends post expansions up until fairly recently. It seems odd to claim, “never,” while excepting the single most popular game in the genre (in the west at least).

Except what you are saying is a blatant lie. Anet added Ascended armor because Exotic was too easy to get. Not because rewards were bad, since Ascended armor isn’t even rewarded, apart from a VERY low chance of a random drop.

The rest of your post I answered before. Please do read first, I know it’s hard but do try.

WoW always had short peaks ad slight drops during and after expansions, aside from the core player-base growing. But in any case, that is again NOT the topic at hand, is it?

It’s becoming more and more clear that you are not the least bit interested in being objective and want to whine about random stuff that will never make it into the game. Again, ANET promissed they will never add anything above Ascended. Obviously they seem to “agree” with me, not with you. So if you don’t like that, go play another game.

Again, did you forget this?!
http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/26/guild-wars-2-staff-tackles-the-ascended-gear-controversy-head-on/

“Exotic,” (a reward tier) was, “too easy,” (an issue)…

I never claimed that Anet intended to add a gear tier above ascended. I dont want a tier above ascended. I pointed out that Anet felt the need to fix an issue that you claimed didnt exist.

An argument that Ascended isnt even rewarded except for when it is rewarded is ludicrous. The fact is that Ascended gear is a reward drop.

You, in one sentence, state that WoW has seen post expansion population increases while stating in another that such has never in the history of MMOs happened. For a period of approximately six years WoW’s population, saw a trend of growth fueled, at least in part, by expansions.

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: SkyShroud.2865

SkyShroud.2865

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

Not trying to defend him but, you claim 90% of the core players and mentioned zero data at latter part of the post, aren’t you contradicting yourself? Where did you obtain this 90% data?

You further claim he is ludicrous and he based entirely on the idea that just because he don’t like something but aren’t you doing it the same with that 90% thing?

Furthermore, you claimed to played 13 years worth of MMO, then claim if guildies are doing this just for rewards, he is in the wrong game or wrong guild but before that statement, you said you had a 2nd GM for those who missed it, doesn’t that imply people doing GM for personal rewards as well? So what are you trying to say?

Considering usually half the people doing the second run are doing it as a favour, whaddya think I meant?

The 90% is what you call hyperbole. No, I do not know the exact number. Now please look back at what happened when Anet added ascended armor and remember how many people said “I want Ascended armor and I want higher tiers as well!” I don’t remember there being a single post like that, EVER. In fact, this is the first time anyone has requested a gear treadmill in a very long time, people actually complained that Legendary armor could be viewed as adding gear treadmill!

You can continue to bicker about details and ignore my actual point, but this doesn’t further the discussion, does it?

I am actually reading your actual points, you call it hyperbole but same can be apply to his.

Furthermore, he only mentioned the rewards and the gears costing/benefit ratio are not worth the effort. I didn’t see him asking for higher tiers of gears. You are the one saying that.

You say half are people who offer to help, it can also means that there are people who don’t offer to help. So, what are you going to do to those people who don’t help? Are these people not doing for rewards? Are you going to kick them?

I am reading both your details and points but if your details don’t make sense, thus, your points become less convincing.

EDIT: my point about 13 years is…..nah…i will get infracted if i say it out loud, lol.

You don’t need to say it out loud, your obviously aggressive stance is blatantly clear as is.

The rest of your post has nothing to do with the topic at hand. The rest are offline, can’t come or don’t want to come, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything, what the hell does that have to do with Guild Halls?!

Lol. You are ridiculous, you call me aggressive while you have been putting words in people’s mouth and at the same time, bragging about your 13 years worth of gaming. Mind you, I have played more years than that

You made several contradictory arguments while being denial of the ironical portion. If you just gonna post for the sake of winning a debate, maybe it will be better to just play your game because you can only win a debate if it is convincing enough and not by forcing it upon others.

Founder & Leader of Equinox Solstice [TIME], a Singapore-Based International Guild
Henge of Denravi Server
www.gw2time.com

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: pepsis.5384

pepsis.5384

Deified.7520 your posts are on point and your points are valid and eloquently made. Lets hope there are still folks at Anet who listen and understand.

HoT Failures: Guilds

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Tiger Ashante.1792

Tiger Ashante.1792

Artists once again, did an amazing job. The Guild Halls are beautiful. But the system to upgrade them is a mindless, grinding borefest. Totally unimaginative, unrewarding numbers game. The sheer volume of materials required is staggering and most of the upgrades are totally useless.

To add insult to injury, they allowed guild members that own core game, but not HoT, to visit the guild hall and to contribute toward it’s upgrades, yet the measly few buffs u get from these upgrades have been denied to them unless they buy the expansion. I never thought Anet would sink so low, but sadly they have with this system. And frankly, i don’t think it should be your decision which of my members get the guild buffs and which don’t. This is a blatant blackmail on your part.

This system is beyond awful for small guilds, who were not considered here at all. I have a small guild and i’m expected to fork out as much as a 500 member guild. 100g to claim the guild same as they pay, same amount of materials, endless grind for elder wood/mithril/ectos/flax and the list goes on and on. Who thought putting in 1000 elder wood planks and 1000 mithril ingots + 200 ectos, just to list a few required for just 1 upgrade, is a fun task? Even if your guildies did contribute, which mine don’t, as most of them are fairly new players and are still lving their chars etc, it’s still a mindless boring task to have to do as a guild.

And then u got to look at another upgrade and it’s a repeat of the above. I guess designing fun content in gw2 is long gone. Now they just throw 1000’s of material numbers at you. Its easy to do. Just draw a number from a hat and add lots of 0’s at the end. No wonder ppl are leaving this game for better pastures. I can’t blame them really. They’ve turned us into mindless drones and ruined all the fun and expectations of these amazing guild halls and the game as whole.

It would have been much more fun to have some guild quests that guild members could do together to unlock certain aspects of the guild hall and upgrade it that way. Some material contributions would have been fine too, but not solely and that’s it. By the same token, due to a huge demand for these materials, the prices have gone through the roof, making it very hard to get guild members to part with these materials, especially if they’re lving their crafting, or trying to make a bit of money. And is it really fair to ask ppl to part with their hard earned gold and materials, when those guild upgrades offer them very little benefit?

I mean just to restore the workshop, they want you to throw in 50 Elonian leathers! among ofc many other materials on the list including yet another 200 ectos, tons of ori ingots and the list goes on and on. 50 Elonian leathers =900g alone! So they want u to use materials that directly compete with crafting ascended gear and ofc are daily gated. Yet, no use for silver or gold, my bank is full of it but only one very early upgrade required just 20 gold ingots. No, Anet has an expensive taste and has only gone for the most valuable stuff here. GG. Anet but i think if it hasn’t already, it will backfire at you in a long run unless u make some serious changes to this system. I havn’t even touched the scribing, so far not bothered with it, got enough gold/mats sinks to last me the lifetime of this game, but we’ll see how they “fix” it.

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: misterman.1530

misterman.1530

To me, I had hoped that Guild Halls would be opened AND upgraded via a series of missions for the Guild Hall. Keeping out mobs, winning over NPCs (saving them, doing something for them) out in wider Tyria so they will move to the GH, Guild dungeon missions (different path in a dungeon) to uncover special artifacts. Things like that.

Instead, we got “grind these mats” and “grind mats to level this scribe”. Bleh.

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in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: misterman.1530

misterman.1530

It would have been much more fun to have some guild quests that guild members could do together to unlock certain aspects of the guild hall and upgrade it that way.

Didn’t see this part of your post. You made my point, but more succinct.

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Posted by: Vayne.8563

Vayne.8563

It would have been much more fun to have some guild quests that guild members could do together to unlock certain aspects of the guild hall and upgrade it that way.

Didn’t see this part of your post. You made my point, but more succinct.

And it might well have set the expansion back another six months to a year, when you consider the number of quests that that would have entailed. This is not the way businesses run.

I mean yes, I would have enjoyed questing more than what we ended up with. That’s obvious. But every single game development lab has a schedule and a budget and clearly that fit into neither. If there a hundred upgrades that means created and testing 100 new quests. The best they could have done was send people to existing content in the open world, which they already did with precursor crafting and people would have complained about that too.

In my mind, as nice as it would be, it’s simply not realistic.

My guess between PvP, WvW and PvE, and now Raids, there wasn’t enough resources to do much more than was done within budget and time constraints.

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Posted by: Dashingsteel.3410

Dashingsteel.3410

Anet could have saved some of their development time by keeping the passive influence system for guilds. Unfortunately, they insist on reworking things we already have instead of working on solely new content. I guess the gold sinks were a priority.

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Posted by: Enko.6123

Enko.6123

We finished maxing our guild hall last night as well. We’re currently sitting at 33 members (after we cleared out some inactives and people who didn’t want to do raid).

I’m wondering if guild favors and aetherium are going to go the same way that merits did. Heck, at this point they would be even more worthless than merits since merits were still needed to make some things.

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Posted by: TexZero.7910

TexZero.7910

We finished maxing our guild hall last night as well. We’re currently sitting at 33 members (after we cleared out some inactives and people who didn’t want to do raid).

I’m wondering if guild favors and aetherium are going to go the same way that merits did. Heck, at this point they would be even more worthless than merits since merits were still needed to make some things.

You’ll still need Aetherium and Favor as there’s still missing features from guild halls (Anthem’s come to mind first). So, no not for the short term. Long term, it’s possible however, in the long term everything loses it’s initial value.

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Posted by: Vayne.8563

Vayne.8563

Anet could have saved some of their development time by keeping the passive influence system for guilds. Unfortunately, they insist on reworking things we already have instead of working on solely new content. I guess the gold sinks were a priority.

As a guild leader, I hated the passive influence thing. Really hated it. It meant I either had to insist on higher rep or just be casual and let other people rep other guilds that require more rep.

In a game with 5 guild slots, passive guild influence made no sense, and it caused many guilds to be more mercenary than their natural tendencies.

I’m glad I never gave into temptation and made a rep requirement for my guild but I’m even more glad I don’t have to think about crap like that any more.

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Posted by: TheLastNobody.8319

TheLastNobody.8319

Deified.7520 your posts are on point and your points are valid and eloquently made. Lets hope there are still folks at Anet who listen and understand.

Everytime I think they are they prove me wrong. Only time they even relatively listens was with elite specs, and that was just with reaper and Chronomancer I find. After that SILENCE when it comes to anything other than PvP, with the occasional “soon”.

Seriously I have gone from being an ANET fanboy to an ANET cynic. I have no confidence in them anymore if it isn’t grinding or gold sink related.

A knight in shining armor is a man who never had his metal truly tested.

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Posted by: Dashingsteel.3410

Dashingsteel.3410

I understand where you are coming from Vayne. I just don’t think gold sinks are the way to go with guilds. Let’s say you are a guild member that has donated a lot of mats to the guild that are worth a lot of gold. Then there is a disagreement or some kind of rift in the guild. The guild member gets kicked out of the guild or because the environment is so hostile they choose to leave. Now their massive donations in mats(gold) have been for nothing. With the passive influence system, a player getting kicked is still not great but at least they aren’t robbed of their gold and mats.

There are a lot of competitive people in this game. The urge to have something first drives some players. I just wonder if this was in Anet’s thinking when they changed to the gold sink guild halls. Was there a thought that players might buy gems and convert to gold to have the first fully decked out guild hall?

I just think the new system is cynical. There have been tons of threads about how loot sucks in gw2 and now they implement a system that demands players part with their loot if they want the guild boons they used to get for just playing the game.

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Posted by: Vayne.8563

Vayne.8563

I understand where you are coming from Vayne. I just don’t think gold sinks are the way to go with guilds. Let’s say you are a guild member that has donated a lot of mats to the guild that are worth a lot of gold. Then there is a disagreement or some kind of rift in the guild. The guild member gets kicked out of the guild or because the environment is so hostile they choose to leave. Now their massive donations in mats(gold) have been for nothing. With the passive influence system, a player getting kicked is still not great but at least they aren’t robbed of their gold and mats.

There are a lot of competitive people in this game. The urge to have something first drives some players. I just wonder if this was in Anet’s thinking when they changed to the gold sink guild halls. Was there a thought that players might buy gems and convert to gold to have the first fully decked out guild hall?

I just think the new system is cynical. There have been tons of threads about how loot sucks in gw2 and now they implement a system that demands players part with their loot if they want the guild boons they used to get for just playing the game.

I don’t know…we don’t seem to have that kind of guild. I think we’ve kicked 2 people from the guild in 3.5 years. And there are enough people in my guild where very few people have do donate in any kind of quantity. Nor are we in any sort of rush. I think we’re level 42 now. We’ll finish it off at some point.

I agree that gold sink is not the best way to go, but gold sinks are necessary in games, as much as they suck and this is a big one.

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Posted by: FrizzFreston.5290

FrizzFreston.5290

I understand where you are coming from Vayne. I just don’t think gold sinks are the way to go with guilds. Let’s say you are a guild member that has donated a lot of mats to the guild that are worth a lot of gold. Then there is a disagreement or some kind of rift in the guild. The guild member gets kicked out of the guild or because the environment is so hostile they choose to leave. Now their massive donations in mats(gold) have been for nothing. With the passive influence system, a player getting kicked is still not great but at least they aren’t robbed of their gold and mats.

The same could be said for influence. It’s not as obvious, and I guess it doesn’t interfere with personal goals as much, But then you don’t account for buying influence with gold. Oh wait… that would also turn guild halls into gold sinks. Except because it was a system players already had, it would still be a gold sink. Or a time sink in most cases. It would just mean waiting long enough. And it favoured big guilds just as much as small guilds.

And if a player keeps repping one guild and then gets kicked out all that time repping one guild would also be lost. They “passively” gave all their influence to one guild, which then kicks you, for whatever reason. They can’t upgrade multiple guild halls either if they wish to do so with the influence system.

It’s really not all that different, if not a worse system.

EDIT: I agree that regaining old functionalities or slightly different functionalities that are being sold as completely new ones is a huge disappointment though. Worse if old functionalities are being taken away from customers and demand that they buy an expansion to regain them. That’s just the lowest of tactics, even if the functionality isn’t a huge deal.

“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik

(edited by FrizzFreston.5290)

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Posted by: Dashingsteel.3410

Dashingsteel.3410

At least with the old system buying influence was purely optional. With the new system, gold is the only way to get those upgrades. Mats = gold

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Posted by: TexZero.7910

TexZero.7910

At least with the old system buying influence was purely optional. With the new system, gold is the only way to get those upgrades. Mats = gold

While you are not wrong, the old system had it’s fair share of cons. Granted a lot of that could have been solved with proper cross guild chat, an alliance system (ala GW1) and some fine tuning to representation/roster status’. We have to live with what we have now another system with a few cons, but ultimately more pros.

Either way, it’s out of everyone’s hands now. Time to wait and see what the next major quarterly update does for Halls/Scribing etc…

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Posted by: FrizzFreston.5290

FrizzFreston.5290

At least with the old system buying influence was purely optional. With the new system, gold is the only way to get those upgrades. Mats = gold

For smaller guilds buying influence was just as optional as buying materials for the guild hall.

“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik

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Posted by: qbalrog.8017

qbalrog.8017

Great comment.

I think they identified a need to suck some mats and money out of the game. Plus regarding all of HoT, a recognition that they didn’t make all the content that they wanted (maybe they spent too much time trying to get raids right?).

Their solution was to set slow mastery rates, make content gates, make guild hall stuff cost a lot. Sure, if the players would accept that, that would keep us busy for a long time. Trouble is, this is a game. We don’t have to accept it. And mostly, we haven’t.

This isn’t the first game that this has happened to but what was really disappointing was that the GW2 devs had seemed to previously demonstrat that they understood that balance was important: sure the good stuff can’t be too easy to get but it can’t be too hard, either. It has to feel like you are making progress at a reasonable rate.

HoT just feels to me like it is completely mis-tuned. The recent AMA gives me hope they recognize that and will do something about it. It gets hard though- if, for instance, you drop guild hall costs, what do you do about all the stuff already purchased?

(edited by qbalrog.8017)