Goal of proposal
Making Guild Arenas accessible for sPvP guilds.
The issue, and why it’s very important
The key of social activities within guilds is going to be the arena for PvP players. Or at least it would be, but there are plenty of issues with the current implementation. Just to mention a few:
- Most PvP characters are nowhere near lvl 80, and while some of use have stacks of leveling tomes, not everyone does and it punishes multiclassers even harder.
- After leveling, people would have to buy exotic gear for all characters. Let’s say you purchase it from dungeon tokens from reward tracks and don’t buy them off the TP, you still need runes, trinkets, sigils etc. (Hoelbrak rune = 9g/ea currently, Sigil of Energy is about the same).
- What if someone has ascended armor? As it’s unfair, we’d have to make him buy exotics, put in the runes and sigils just for the sake of fair play – paying a fortune just to have a gear the person would never use elsewhere is a huge barrier of entry.
- Some PvP stat combos (for instance Marauder) don’t exist in PvE, must be combo’d somehow from other stats.
- People from different servers are affected by different WvW stat bonuses too.
- Let’s say we throw a custom tournament, how do we enforce the rules? Ask people to submit screenshots of their stats? That makes it a lot more complicated than it already is.
- Stats in PvE are generally higher, we’d have to go an extra mile to set the handicap right.
I hope this demonstrates why it’s very complicated (nearly impossible) to create a fair environment here, and I’m fairly certain that most PvP guilds/players aren’t willing to go through this.
Why not Custom Arenas?
Options in CAs are much much more limited. Terrain can’t be customized, new gamemodes/activities can’t really be created, there can only be 2 teams, it’s capped at 20 players (let’s say we want an in-house 2v2 tournament, we have 40-50 competitiors, but only 16 can spectate – and everyone would want to witness at least the finals.)
Not to mention that it costs hundreds of gold to purchase and even more to maintain.
This also wouldn’t hurt CAs at all, as these could still function as a competitive gamemode training grounds, or public duel rooms just like now.
Possible solution
My suggestion would be to add an option for the guild leader and officers to toggle on/off a “PvP mode” which makes the GH (including the Arena) use PvP gear, like in the Heart of the Mists. This way PvE/WvW/PvP people could all benefit from the guild arena.
I’m not sure, but I guess in “PvP mode” masteries wouldn’t work. As it’s not a permanent state and can be switched off, people could still glide and such when it’s in PvE mode so I see no problems here.
In conclusion
Guild Arenas could become a crucial part of the social aspect of PvP guilds, and to exclude your competitive PvP population from using a PvP feature makes no sense. If we could queue up from the GHs and duel each other while waiting for a match to start, that would be even more amazing!
PvP guilds larger than 5 man had no reason to exist for more than 3 years now, and without this option I’m afraid that PvP guilds wouldn’t be motivated to get a guild hall at all.
(edited by witcher.3197)
