Guild Wars 2

Smaller guilds in GW2 have always struggled to survive in the face of towering titans used mainly for WvW and heavy PvE end game.

So how does one fix this problem?

Introducing the new Concept: Guild Alliances

Guild Alliances are my idea on how to tackle a growing issue for smaller guilds trying to thrive in a world of larger competitors on a larger scale.

A Guild Alliance is comprised of 3 various sizes that cap at a number of guilds depending on alliance rank and effort.

The Guild Alliance Ranks:

Each Rank depends on several factors that are tallied for each alliance over the course of a month.

These factors are:

- World Boss Kills
- World Events Completed
- World Vs World Captures
- Longest WvW Point Held
- PvP Rankings
- PvP Activity

Each of these are tallied by scoring a capped limit of Alliance Points that can be spent as a superior version of influence.

The Three Guild Alliance ranks, depend on the number of guilds inside each rank and can only be promoted when the guild alliance has capped its guild rank number and has enough guild alliance points to buy a new rank.

The First Rank is a Cohort, a band of five guilds comprised of no more than 50 guild members per guild is put together to form a 250 man super guild between them.

When accumulating 10000 Alliance points, a guild alliance can advance to rank two, a Legion

A Legion is a 10 Guild group of guilds comprised of no more than 100 players per guild, making it 1000 men strong at its biggest peak.

At rank 3, which costs 50000 Alliance Points, a guild alliance is converted into a Horde.

A Horde is a 15 guild strong 150 player per guild super faction full of various groups and troops, and in addition, a Horde can participate in a new WvW gametype, Horde Vs Horde.

Horde Vs Horde?

Horde Vs Horde ignores the boundaries of traditional WvW boundries and instead brings every guild in those groups together into a super clash of the titan battle of epic proportions for the right to be the best Horde in Tyria.

These Super Alliances represent actual groups of unified people as opposed to random people within an individual server, competing on a competitive play level of brutality for power over their rivals.

Each separate WvW Battleground from the borderlands to the eternal Bg supports 250 players “per” alliance making each one capped at a staggering 750 players per fight, making them true titanic displays of war on an epic scale.

In order to balance this and prevent painful lag spikes, the alliance has to specifically assign specific guilds to be available at X or Y battleground, tactically choosing who fights who in what region.

This gives that ‘strategy’ element to its finest level, allowing players to feel like part of an RTS game where they can decide where their troops move in order to fight which enemy troops.

Guilds that are chosen are locked in for an entire week and unable to leave that specific battlefield, giving a sense of responsibility to each BG as opposed to random war-fields.

After the week, the players get a 3 hour break period to decide who to put where and begin a new.

What other functions would Alliances serve?

Alliances would also act as an aid, to all smaller guilds specifically looking for aid from bigger ones while wanting to retain their identity as a group in a larger commune.

An example of this, is that alliances may perform guild missions regardless of who is apart of them, when a guild mission is activated, every guild int hat alliance shares the same mission, and the same objectives, allowing more room for smaller groups to be supported by equal sized or larger ones.

This allows smaller guilds to have absolute support in acquiring merits and medals from their larger allies while keeping a strong sense of personal identity from their accomplishments.

The guild that activates these missions also receives a “vassal” reward, giving them an increased number of personal merits for being the one to start the mission and complete it.

A refreshing way to look at Guilds and creating them

In addition, Alliances would (obviously not at launch, but possibly in later days) have access to a great personal base called the Alliance Hall.

The Alliance Hall is less of a guild housing and more of a congregation of the guild leaders and their vice commanders, serving as a political epicenter for meetings and office.

The Halls would have individual customized interiors by the respective founders of each alliance allowing for some role-play and thematic value for more social guilds.

They can be earned Via World Events, and other monumental goals the alliances accomplish.

How does one Form, an Alliance?

A guild leader from one group must approach a guild leader from another, from there they offer them a request to join a guild Alliance, if the requested party accepts, the two guilds become united and the guild leaders have an equal share in the power rather than dividing who gets what.

Adding additional alliances works in the same way, a guild leader must be approached from said alliance ‘before’ such a thing can cooperatively be agreed upon.

In order to create a level of heir-achy however, when an Alliance reaches its second rank, the first five guild leaders are considered the “founders” of the guild alliance and have a slightly superior rank to any subsequent rank members, who are known as vassal leaders.

Vassal Leaders can be promoted in the event a guild leaves the alliance, or be forcefully removed if the guild alliance does not find them adept to fit in their ranks.

Likewise, the first two founding members of the Alliance have access rights to forcefully remove any founding members that misbehave, and can also elect to remove the other original founder after a month period has passed.

However, to prevent the idea of having a tyrant dictator ruling over all the rival guilds, any creating founder that is removed is automatically replaced with one of the other founders or next in line using an inheritance system to prevent dictatorship.

Vassal leaders will not be permitted to elect in votes and will not have any rights to an elective vote when members of the alliance, allowing a degree of control that prevents coup de grace.

Ultimately, the idea was to create a concept, that, if hopefully making it in some form in HoT will allow smaller guilds a chance to equate their larger rivals and perhaps even promote more players to join and thus, more guilds to form.

You shouldn’t include objective captures for the wvw side because it’ll just promote karma training or even worse making out pvers who are grinding eotm appear to be doing a good job. Unless you include wvw player kills and objective defenses.

Edit: Just saw you have longest wvw point held xD but yeah killing players in wvw I still stand with being an important option

what would alliance offer on top of a guild? because there are already alliances in a form of big guilds, people just switch a guild representation when they want to act in the name of an alliance…

only thing which comes to my mind would be alliance chat, but we don’t really need alliances to have an alliance chat… custom channels would solve it…

on the other hand, if you would introduce some kind of alliance specific content, you would end up with the same state as now… small alliances would cry that they can’t do stuff which requires big alliance…

Sure, you could all join each other’s guilds (at least, up to 5 guilds) but that isn’t even REMOTELY the same thing and doesn’t function well for an “alliance,” I wouldn’t call that an alliance at all.

One major thing you just said is alliance chat, which a lot of people miss. Alliance chat lets tons of people from, let’s say 5-10 guilds, all talk at once. It has a lot of benefits. Also you can easily go into each other’s guild halls. I’d say those two things alone make it MORE than worthwhile. It’s something that GW1 offered and has been very much missed. It allows for easier communication, and more interaction with other guilds that are similar to your own. And if you don’t like alliance chat? Turn it off, problem solved.

On top of that there’s plenty of other things they could add. They could add special alliance missions, or allow all guilds in an alliance to do guild missions together without having to join the other people’s guilds. They could add various things you can build that are specifically related to alliances and maybe each guild in the alliance has to contribute a certain amount to build it (alliance bank perhaps). They could allow for “trading” of influence points. Like if the other guild is short a few thousand for something, or it’s a pretty new and/or small guild, then you could give guilds in your alliance some of your own influence points. There’s a lot they can do to make it fun and useful.