Guild Wars 2

SUGGESTION
Change scribing from being a character-bound discipline to a guild-bound discipline:

HIGH-LEVEL DETAILS

• Guild Members with the Guild Scribe (new permission) would be able to use the discovery and crafting panes of the scribing stations within their guild hall.
• The discipline, like any other, would be leveled up via crafting with at-rank recipes and discover of new ones.
• The scribing level would remain bound to the guild, regardless of whether members leave.
• Members newly granted the permission would have the same scribing level as any other.

BACKGROUND
We all know how difficult is to level scribing (even without the bits that are mechanically bugged). However, there are other issues, some that we won’t even notice for a while:

• Scribing only has value to the guild, but it’s still bound to a character.
• Even discounting the costs of leveling crafting today (when demand for its mats outstrips the supply), it’s going to be 5-10x more expensive than any other discipline.
• Many of today’s scribes will have maxed their ranks through donations from the guild. However, if they leave (or return to RL), the guild cannot easily replace that ability.

All of the above would be addressed by making the discipline bound to the guild: it won’t matter if the scribe leaves/disappears, the costs (like the benefits) are shared by the guild, and no guild has to level this up more than once.

ISSUES

• Costs: I suspect that this wouldn’t be trivial to set up: devs would have to overhaul the existing crafting mechanics to allow any player (with the right permission) to craft or perhaps start from scratch with a new mechanic.
• Retroactive consolidation: ANet would have to figure out how to give guilds the proper rank based on members ranks at the time of any update. Or just acknowledge that it would add unreasonable delays to implementation. The “best” solution might end up forcing us all to start from scratch.
• Compensation: some people have purported to have spent 5,000 gold or thereabouts. Many have spent 100s. Should they be compensated? If so, what would be a fair way to do this? I suspect that any solution offered by ANet would be met with jeers by a noticeable portion of the community. Plus, this would also stretch the time-to-implementation out, so it might take a year before we see the change. Again, the “best” solution might be to ignore this.
• Other: This doesn’t address any of the issues around costs or design for the things that scribes can actually produce.

tl;dr make scribing guild-bound instead of character bound. This solves shared costs issues. It creates some transition issues and ignores issues around guild decorations and their costs.

Yes please. The idea of the guild scribe deciding to change guilds, leave the guild or even leave the game could be a big issue. I could even see a highly leveled scribe start to try to extort the rest of the guild.

The leveling rank should be a guild property. The experience though should belong to the scribe – they are doing the actual work so they should get some benefit too.

Very tricky one to balance or change now that people are spending gazillions on everything for it… one way might be to add some guild-bound products to other professions as well. And modify scribes so that they can create some things that aren’t just for guilds.

Swift.1930:

Very tricky one to balance or change now that people are spending gazillions on everything for it… one way might be to add some guild-bound products to other professions as well. And modify scribes so that they can create some things that aren’t just for guilds.

Yeah, I don’t really think there’s a “fair” way to balance it, without upsetting one group or another. I’d really just rather they started from scratch soon, with a new mechanic (even if nothing like above). Later, they can work with the community to explain why they didn’t make it retroactive or how to compensate.