Guild Wars 2

Pardon, this is a wall of text and I apparently suck at formatting on this forum.

I have recently (3 months ago) become the guild leader for a small casual guild after our leader stepped away from the game. He stepped away for a variety of reasons, but the most important is that the game itself has become stale. He had been doing the same dungeons and fractals since they were launched. He really only enjoyed one class (mesmer) which has had a tumultuous history and the build I understand he favored the most hadn’t been good in quite a while (shatter). He took a significant break from the game starting just before the HoT announcement and came back shortly after launch. Nothing had changed and he decided he was going to walk away for good (probably) and he stepped aside.

Since taking over the guild, I’ve not been an excellent leader, but it is hard in the face of some daunting challenges for our style of guild. We are a casual PvE gaming community. We don’t stick to the meta, we have a lot of people who aren’t top-tier (skill-wise) players (and that really is ok with us), so the raid so far released is probably going to be a significant challenge for us to finish (we still haven’t beaten Gorseval yet), if we ever do (which is fine, not all content is for all people). I anticipate future raids will be harder, not easier, so I suspect that we won’t be able to beat them either.

So what is a casual PvE guild supposed to do when the end game of our content style is essentially unreachable for us? Well, in the past, we ran dungeons and fractals casually. We collected skins, hunted achievements, shot the breeze, and enjoyed each others’ company. We still do some of those things, but as a leader, I notice that we’re losing members’ attention. As a multi-game community, it isn’t terrible for us (though I think it’s still bad because GW2 is our primary game and the only one we actively recruit in), because they still come into teamspeak when they’re playing another game, but I think it’s a very visceral representation of dissatisfaction with the game that I know several of them love (or loved) that we have almost as many members actively playing another game during scheduled GW2 guild events. It’s not a complaint against them, the content isn’t interesting to them, I totally get that. I think every one of our members has stepped away from the game at some point. I’ve veered off course though, I want to talk about why Heart of Thorns, as an expansion, is not a successful experience, from the perspective of my guild.

Simply put, my small casual PvE guild has nothing to do together.

Why don’t we do raids? We do, but our members are burning out on them. We can beat VG, but we’re struggling rather hard with Gorseval. At this point, our group numbers are such that mustering 10 people requires effort and organization. If one person gets called into work, that might mean we don’t get to raid that night. We don’t raid every night, we raid 2-3 nights per week and adding more raids isn’t going to be adding more content for us to actually play. We’ll still only be eating 2-3 nights on raiding and if the raids get progressively harder, as I suspect they will, we’ll never see them anyway.

Why don’t we do fractals? We do, but fractals, realistically, occupy 1 hour of 5 people’s time per night. In 1 hour, we have finished all the dailies (though I imagine people can do it faster). Not everybody in the guild is interested in fractals and the investment to get into them dissuades a chunk of our members. Many of the fractals or mistlocks are dreaded (not for difficulty, but for length, boredom, historical feelings about them, the ways in which they fight against the way the entire rest of the game is meant to be played), so we mostly stick to a “quick-3” run of each tier. If we only did master tier, we’d get even less out of them. Importantly here, fractal groups are not interchangeable or repeatable. Strictly speaking, we could repeat or do more in a tier, but there’s almost no value there. There is however, no dispute that there is no reason to change members mid-tier. This is important because this is different from how we did dungeons. If we were running dungeons, we could switch people in and out and lots of people could participate based on what they wanted.

Why don’t we do dungeons? The nerf to liquid rewards has been a strong enough disincentive for our guild to basically stop doing dungeons. I’m aware of the math that shows the nerf isn’t that bad (because much of the value is in salvaged gear, champ bags, tokens etc.), but that isn’t an argument that gets much traction with my members. Additionally, dungeons are so stale, so even if the reward is decent, the motivation is low. We used to run dungeons as our go to activity for an evening. We would frequently get 8-10 members in and out of the group over the course of several hours and sometimes even had two groups running. The true virtue of dungeons for our guild was that there were so many paths that were easy enough to be worth doing. Fractals might have decent rewards, but doing them feels horrible. It’s the same 2 fractals for 7 of our 9 fractals (unless somebody needs something) because the others aren’t just not fun, they’re unfun.

Why don’t we do map meta-events? This is complicated. There are a lot of reasons. Some of it is that our guild is small and insular. We don’t like the pressure to join squads and several of the maps put a lot of pressure to join squads (DS, TD in particular) for head counts and other logistical crap. These maps can fail and rewards are significantly reduced due to things it is hard for our guild members to control. This is incredibly discouraging for organizing our small guild into doing something. If we spend 60-90 minutes on a Dragon’s Stand map (for instance) and get squat out of it, that’s not a good evening. Additionally, the rigid structure of these maps means that we have to get in at the right time, or waste a lot of time on a map to wait for the right time. Sometimes it’s a challenge to even all get onto the same good map. Sometimes the map isn’t in the right stage when (rarely) people feel like doing it.

Some of it is that none of the rewards from these maps feel rewarding for the time invested. If you’ve got a specific goal, it’s nice to see the incremental progress, but it can also be really disheartening to realize that you just spent a fair chunk of time (depending on the map and costs of things you want) getting only one quarter or one third of one of several things you need. If I spend an hour getting one third of one sixth of one collection, I can expect to spend twelve to eighteen hours getting one skin, which may not even be the skin you wanted, but is just one more piece of the thing you did want. And ultimately, none of the maps really reward a successful small group’s accomplishment. Either the event is zerged and our merry band of 3-7 doesn’t feel like we accomplished something (yay we beat the dungeon path!) or the reward we do get is incredibly individual (yay, I got this collection piece I needed). Put another way, there’s no reason for us to do open world content together. There’s very little group feeling to those event chains and meta-events. Even if you had several small groups running around and individuals mattered more, the map would finish way ahead of schedule and thus you’d be stuck waiting, doing nothing.

In short, why did this expansion fail, for us? There is nothing to, long-term, occupy our time that feels rewarding and fun as a group. The expansion failed to provide us with casual PvE content and took away what casual PvE content that we had. Raids are challenging for us, fractals don’t occupy time like dungeons used to, dungeons don’t feel rewarding, and the new maps are too rigidly structured with too little of a reward feeling for the time invested. Many of the long term goals introduced in HoT (read: collections) are things that you can’t even effectively help people with. They’re something for me to do, but they’re not something for us to do.

I fear for the future of my guild. I have made some great friends through this game and I’m sure I’ll stay in touch with some of them (via the magic of the internet), but I think that my guild will continue to burn out and walk away from the game if we don’t see some sort of casual PvE group content. And… I don’t have much faith that ArenaNet will provide that content to us. We’ve heard nothing to suggest that we’re going to get new repeatable casual content (sorry, fractals will probably still have the same problems after you introduce new ones).

Many of my guild members have openly stated that they only play because of our community and/or that this is their last MMO. The next time they walk away, they’re probably gone forever. That is… sad. That’s life, especially in MMO communities, but, I’d like to preserve our community as long as I can. These people really are awesome and my life is richer for having known them. I’m trying to be optimistic, but even our recruiting is suffering. And, to be honest, I have a hard time coming up with an advertisement for our guild that can really ‘sell’ our guild without misleading perspective members, after all, what PvE content are we actually doing? If we aren’t a PvE guild, what are we? We don’t PvP or WvW. We’re mostly just awesome people shooting the breeze that also happen to be doing random things in the same digital environment, sometimes together, but these days, frequently alone.

I enjoyed lots of things about Heart of Thorns, but three months later, the game is stale again and this time I have even less to do with my friends. I’m not asking for ArenaNet to fix this problem, I understand their business model isn’t about long-term constantly accessed account retention, but more of a new-account churn fueled venture, but I’m hoping that my feedback isn’t completely ignored. I’m hoping that my opinions find an ear or at the very least, that I’ve given voice to something somebody else also feels.

The description of your guild, matches the description of my guild, with one single exception. I have more people than you do.

We’re still casual. We haven’t raided at all as a guild. But also not everyone in the guild does group content at all or cares about it. Many casual guilds like yours don’t worry that we have to do this content or that content.

Twice a week we do guild missions and once a week we have a social night. Usually about 20 people show up, more or less the same 20 people who showed up years ago. There are 200 members in my guild, 100 people log in each week and 20 show up for group stuff.

This doesn’t mean the group is dying. It means the people who enjoy the group content find content to do together.

You say the entire guild has different reasons for not doing the meta, but everyone doesn’t have to be done by everyone in the guild. If five people want to do a meta, five people can do it.

I think you’re putting too much pressure on most content having to be done as a guild. It really doesn’t have to be that way.

My guild has continued to thrive, because I don’t feel forced to get together. We have our three weekly meetings. We have mumble and we talk while we’re doing more solo stuff, and that’s completely okay.

If it gets really stale, I’ll just run a guild event, for example we have our four year guild anniversary coming up in March and I’ll make up some stupid games for us to play. Glide and seek. Darts. Trivia. Mad libs. Whatever.

Anyway, that’s just my take on it.

I think you misunderstand my point when analyzing meta events. I don’t criticize them because I think they’re things guilds should necessarily do together, but because they are PvE content and I didn’t want to leave things out, since we are a PvE guild. My point isn’t that my guild has to do things together, it’s that we want to do things together, but there isn’t much for us to do.

Why cant your guild do more then 9 fractals a day per person.
If you want to do stuff together the daily reward limit should be a limit for you guys at all.
and you can do everything else pve wise out there aswell with the exception of raid as you state yourself.

Want to do some events go to any map hot/core together and knock your self out.
Dungeons are still there you just chose not to do them.

Racurn.5921:

I think you misunderstand my point when analyzing meta events. I don’t criticize them because I think they’re things guilds should necessarily do together, but because they are PvE content and I didn’t want to leave things out, since we are a PvE guild. My point isn’t that my guild has to do things together, it’s that we want to do things together, but there isn’t much for us to do.

And yet my guild is like your guild and we find things to do together. This is where guild leaders make a big difference I think. They have to set the tone, make the plan, encourage people to come along. The game can’t do that for you, you have to do that.

There were a few people in my guild who weren’t sold at all on hot maps, but I worked with them and showed them what’s what and now I see them in HoT maps quite frequently.

The problem with HoT is that it is a radical design shift away from what GW2 was for 3 years. Dungeons certainly had problems but there were so many of them that “dungeons” was a variety of things to do. And HoT killed off dungeons and replaced them with nothing. The only equivalent is fractals, which we had before, and are one thing with one reward structure.

Because of the dailies, fractals are designed to do 9 a day. After that you’re only farming encryptions, and who doesn’t need more aquabreather recipes and t5 mats.

HoT is a theme park with 4 rides. 3 of them— meta events, fractals and Raids—have a height requirement (the metas are much more onerous than either dry top or silverwastes) and the other (dungeons) has an out of order sign hanging from the entrance.

To the OP, have you tried organizing a guild wide farm for scribing materials? Potatoes, strawberries, flax, leather, cloth, wood, more potatoes. Have a scavenger hunt for blueberries! That is sure to be a blast.

I hope it does not sound harsh but for what you guys like to do and the way you guys want to do it snd on the time you guys want.

You already finished the game.

I’m close to that stage too. As soon as I get enough gold to buy some cosmetic items for my toon.

I’ll be most likely out as well. This is just after couple weeks on HOT.

Notice, I beat the original game for what I wanted to do in couple months of play and returning every now and then

However, I do agree with you. They have changed the game into a different direction. I was complaining initially but I like the new gameplay and direction.

Linken.6345:

Why cant your guild do more then 9 fractals a day per person.
If you want to do stuff together the daily reward limit should be a limit for you guys at all.

The perceived reward for fractals drops off precipitously once the chance for ascended boxes disappears (read: you’ve done the daily). And as I said in the OP, there are a lot of fractals and mistlocks that we simply don’t enjoy. A couple reasons for that, they’re long for their rewards, they’re gimmicks that we no longer enjoy, they have historical loathing from a time when they were worse… beyond that, if we were trying to maximize our rewards, there is a best fractal to do, so it would very quickly become a grind on that one fractal.

We do want to do things together, but we don’t want to collectively grind on something that we don’t consider to be an efficient use of our time. One of my guild members who does fractals recently compared fractals to going to the dentist and opted for having her teeth drilled if there weren’t ascended goodies.

Vayne.8563:

And yet my guild is like your guild and we find things to do together. This is where guild leaders make a big difference I think. They have to set the tone, make the plan, encourage people to come along. The game can’t do that for you, you have to do that.

There were a few people in my guild who weren’t sold at all on hot maps, but I worked with them and showed them what’s what and now I see them in HoT maps quite frequently.

I have a guild event where I lead people around the new zones doing random stuff in an effort to help them get mastery points, mastery experience, and other random things done. We do achievements, metas, hero points, whatever people have an interest in. I am trying to help some of our more resistant members acclimate to the new zones (I’ve even managed to convince one of them that TD isn’t a horribly designed labyrinth, which was… a feat).

Every bone in my body wants to deny your assertion that I essentially suck at my job, but I know you’re right too. I do think the guild leaders need to try to include and motivate people, I just wish I had some better tools to work with.

Granrey.8920:

I hope it does not sound harsh but for what you guys like to do and the way you guys want to do it snd on the time you guys want.

You already finished the game.

I came to that conclusion a while ago. It’s why I’m scared for the future of my community. I’m not sure how many of my members stick around when they come to a similar conclusion. And unlike Vayne’s guild, we’re not large enough to easily replace lost regulars.

I don’t know if you noticed, OP, but most of what you list is because of a perceived lack of rewards. I am sorry, but I don’t really understand this and never will. Was money the only reason you guys ran dungeons? Really? Did nerfing some of the gold somehow destroy that content? I just don’t get that. You are done with fractals an single hour after starting them when everyone has done their dailies? That’s it, it’s all just for the dailies?

This is a mindset that this game has never really condoned. After all, you can get the second-best armor set in the game just by running a dungeon for an hour for 3-4 days, and the best armor offers a 5% boost.

Therefore, what I have done is mostly go for achievements, which give me a nice sense of satisfaction, and just do what I find fun. Sometimes I run a lot of fractals, sometimes I PvP, even though I am a PvE player, sometiems I do dungeons or just explore low-level maps again. I am never driven by loot (which in this game is mostly meaningless) or money. Currently I am actually running HoT maps, and I am having a blast. The night before last we, a completely random bunch of people, managed to organize a VB map and get it to T4. We did this without squads, only a single commander and a lot of map chatting, and it was incredibly fun and rewarding, with the whole thing taking about an hour and a half, my entire playtime that day. People dropped in and out, ran around doing events and just had fun figuring out how keep it all together. Last night I logged in and people were making again a push for T4. We got through the same motion of taxiing people, talking about how everyone’s doing, but this time we only got to literally 1% short of the fourth tier. Did I feel like I had wasted my time because I didn’t get a bladed armor chest at the end? No, I found the whole experience incredibly fun, and that was enough for me. Besides, I simply bought the chest anyways.

Also, as a completely zerker mesmer, I want to make two points. One, I honestly don’t get people who complain that HoT maps are hard. I am playing one of the worst classes in the game dps-wise and yet I am doing absolutely fine, not to mention that the increase in difficulty was quite gradual and started already with DT and SW. And , with the exception of pocket raptors, I’ve never felt like I couldn’t just run past mobs I didn’t want to fight or hell, glide over them. And, considering chrono was (still is) one of the best and most fun elite specs in the game, your leader leaving bewilders me.

I am not saying somehow your opinion is invalid or whatever, on the contrary, it’s perfectly valid, I am merely pointing out why I just can’t relate to it. If your guildies are motivated by reward and reward only, well, I don’t think this is honestly the game for them, it never actually was. Me, I play DS because that fight is awesome, not because I get a chest at the end.

Most of my community is working on some shiny or another (fractal back piece, a legendary). The content is the means to an end. Without rewards or objectives, what does any game have? Good gameplay is not sufficient to maintain player interest over the long haul.

When I speak of rewards, I don’t mean exclusively monetary. Satisfaction is important too. Fractals offer good monetary rewards, but we don’t do them (once we’ve finished the daily) because they are in no way satisfying. Many of my members are past the interesting epic experiences of exploring HoT and are on to long term objectives (making shinies, doing collections, leveling scribing), so the monetary reward is important to our continued enjoyment because it represents progress towards our goals, but there needs to be satisfaction too.

I don’t think I ever complained the new maps are hard. Sometimes they fail… that’s a fact. If you aren’t on one that organizes, it fails, not because it’s hard, but because people don’t care. As far as my guild leader’s preferences in how to play a mesmer, I don’t even think he finished unlocking chronomancer before realizing that he didn’t like the game anymore.

Actually by the end I think I was just generally ranting, the ridiculous (in my opinion) amount of hate HoT has been getting has put me on an edge a bit.

As I said, I just do whatever comes and I actually get a good amount of money that way. Not as good as running SW all the time, but good enough to get by and work towards a long-term goal. As for the rest – that’s how it’s always been though, hasn’kitten Before HoT all we had was SW (which is kind of boring IMO), DT (again, a specific run that’s most effective and gets boring qucikly), Fractals and dungeons. Dungeons are in my eyes a failure of game design and Fractals aren’t really THAT big a deal. And once you did all the hearts in all the maps there was absolutely NOTHING.

My point is that yes, actually the game suffers from a lack of repeatable highly rewarding end-game content and HoT didn’t address that enough, but that’s not new. GW2 is a great game to hop into, do stuff, get bored and leave only to come back when they add something new and shiny.

So in a sense yes, HoT did fail you. But how did you guys survive before? Only on dungeons?