Guild Wars 2

Guild Halls have been a huge disappointment.
In hopes of getting some attention from the Devs I’ll try to point out everything that’s just plain wrong with this system. It also serves as a warning for new/small guilds – think twice before you decide to sink all your thousands upon thousands of gold into this monstrosity.
I’m not going to focus too much on the fact that all the upgrades are way too expensive because we (sadly) got used to that already. What I’m going to point out though is the fact that all the upgrades we build are nowhere near being worth the price we pay for them.

1. Guild Portal
It was supposed to be helpful , epic and fun (as advertised in the GH trailer) to use it to teleport your entire guild to Guild Missions etc. In reality, it serves no purpose at all. It teleports us to Trader’s Forum in Lion’s Arch for WvW missions (not even close to the WvW portals), teleports us to a random waypoint „near” the always contested Puzzle waypoints and so on. We used it once – had a good laugh at where it actually teleported us and then never used it again.

Ideas: It would be great if the Portal could actually teleport us near the starting point of a mission – for example – for Challenges, Races and Puzzles to port straight to the marks on the ground we activate those missions with. Of course, this can’t be done for Bounties, Treks and WvW/PvP missions, but it would at least make the Portal useful for something.

2. Treasury
The interface is really annoying and hard to grasp for regular members, thus making it harder to actually make people donate stuff for upgrades.
Here’s how it goes: You need to port to the Guild Hall > talk to the Treasury NPC > check what’s needed for all upgrades (half of which we’re not even building atm) > port back to LA to reach your Bank/TP and pray you memorized everything > withdraw/collect > port back to GH > Alt+drag the amout you want to deposit > deposit.
That’s way too much work for a regular member who just wants to enjoy the game. As a guild leader I learned it the hard way, having to build most of the upgrades alone or with the help of a few dedicated members who actually care enough to waste their precious time and gold on all this. Alternatively – having to post countless reminders (both in game and on a forum) about what we’re currently building and telling people what materials we need and why we even need them in the first place. Then I even created a special guild rank for those who contribute the most, just to give people a reason to actually do it.
No, my guild is not a bunch of randoms who don’t care. No, having access to the Bank via Scribe is not solving the issue. People are willing to contribute, it’s just that most of the time they don’t exactly know how. (Just for the record: My guild consists of around 100 members and we’re currently at lvl 27, which is still pretty nice for a medium-sized casual guild.)

Ideas: The Treasury interface needs to be redesigned! Leaders should be able to mark priority on certain materials to let people know what’s needed most at the moment. There should be another tab showing how much of what is needed for a certain upgrade. And finally – people should be able to just have access to everything they’ve got in their Bank through Treasury, to deposit stuff right there right now! (Existing examples: a) exchanging Wintersday Snowflakes to higher tiers at an NPC didn’t require us to actually have those Snowflakes in the inventory b) buying Piles of Snow at the decor merchant.)

3. Merchants
The „exclusive” GH merchants are a joke. Especially the Commendations merchant. Why on sweet Earth there’s no regular Commendations merchant in the Guild Hall? I’m talking about the one selling ascended accessories,exotic backpieces, exotic guild weapons etc. That’s what we need in the GH, not in Lion’s Arch. Wasn’t the Guild Initiative Headquarters building supposed to be mostly for guilds that don’t have a Guild Hall?
Not to mention that the „exclusive” merchants – selling minis for absurd amounts of gold, commendations and Crystalline Ore (just why?), bags of junk (it’s a joke, isn’t it?) for commendations – are useless. Nobody ever buys any of their items. The prices are way too high to even consider getting any of this stuff, simply because it’s trash.

Ideas: Add a regular Commendations Merchant to the Guild Hall! Change the prices or add items that are actually worth purchasing or just make the cost of building those upgrades lower as the only purpose they serve is getting GXP (read: gold sink). It also would be a great idea to consider adding merchants that actually sell something nice and useful.

4. Lack of TP and Personal Bank
Yes, I know the reasoning behind it. We don’t want the major cities to depopulate. Except, it makes no sense. I know a lot of people just bitterly accepted it over time but I still consider it a D-move, it’s unacceptable.
Because of this sole reason barely anyone visits the Hall. „There’s no point, there’s nothing in there” – they say. So it stays empty most of the time, even though we invested thousands of gold into it. We built a huge jumping puzzle to make people visit and it somewhat helped. Other than that, we just gather for Guild Missions there or occasionally duel on an eternally bugged Arena.
Let’s be honest and admit what it means. People who pay with gems (Royal Terrace Pass) are allowed to „depopulate” the major cities, but those plebians who pay with thousands of gold and countless hours of in-game effort are noth worthy, they don’t deserve the slightest bit of comfort (even though they also leave a lot of money in your pockets through the Gemshop).
This also causes people to not want to contribute to the upgrades – because they simply don’t get anything out of it. Why on Earth would you create Guild Halls in the first place if there’s absolutely no use for them? The „depopulation of major cities” argument is invalid. People would still do all their crafting in the cities. Plus not everyone would choose to Bank and pick up their TP purchases in the GH. Personally, I’d rather stand next to and chat with my guild mates than random people in Lion’s Arch. Nobody cares about how many people there are in the cities, trust me. Except maybe the loading screens would be less ridiculous if there were less people there and you’d be exposed less to trolls on map chats.

Ideas: Maybe try to temporarily enable TP and Personal Bank in the GH and see if the cities actually depopulate? I’d love to have an actual proof that Anet’s fears are reasonable.
I’m not going to just eat your argument trustfully and believe that what you say makes sense if you won’t prove it. And I’m asking everyone to fight for what we want – for as long as we need! (Don’t let your dreams be dreams – DO IT!)

5. Scribing
It’s sad that we can’t afford to have more than one, maybe two Scribes in a guild. Being a guild’s Scribe is a very frustrating task – totally dependent on the mindfullness and mercy of other guild members. Usually, Scribes end up spending 90% of their time in game farming ridiculous amounts of materials to advance in their craft. Thus, they’re also more prone to eventually getting tired of all the effort and quitting the game. When a Scribe quits, the whole guild is screwed.
You guys know how it is anyway. It should just be a regular crafting discipline that everyone can level up without spending ridiculous amounts of gold on – it would be fun to be able to craft your own decorations whenever you please.

6. Time-gated resources
Personally, I’m fine with Aetherium and its design. I’m not fine with the fact that we need so many other time-gated resources – especially talking about huge amounts of Charged Quartz that is needed for Celestial Insignias and Ley-Line Infused Tools, as well as ascended materials (Elonian Leather, Spiritwood Planks etc). It just takes ages to build these upgrades and people are not really that keen on donating them. Ascended gear is practically mandatory these days, thus people would rather craft ascended materials for their personal use (especially since the droprate of ascended gear in Fractals became so low). As for the Charged Quartz – it also takes effort and a good memory to remember to mine your home nodes every day and buy Quartz Crystals on TP to craft those Charged Quartz crystals. So every upgrade requiring Celestial Insignias and other time-gated acc-bound stuff turns out to be a weeks-long project that slows down the entire progress and effectively strips all the fun, making it an unpleasant daily chore instead.

Ideas: Lower the amounts of time-gated resources needed for certain upgrades.

That’s it from me for now. If anyone’s got any other ideas of what’s wrong with the Guild Halls and how it potentially could be changed, please let me know. And please, please – let’s fight for what we want to be changed! Let’s not accept the things that annoy the heck out of us! If we keep voicing our opinions loudly enough we might actually cause a change. If we give up and accept things as they are nothing’s going to change.

This is actually a very constructive and thoughtful post, kudos, kind sir! I agree with each and every one of the points you make. In addition, I think that the War Room is largely useless and the Arena should be expanded upon – how’s about adding the option of using standardized gear like in PvP? When older players have to keep switching from their ascended gear to exotics when they fight newbies, well, nobody is having fun.

Levitating Cat.8623:

Lack of TP and Personal Bank

You can use the scribing station as personal bank.

Good post.
My guild has been stuck on lv27 for over a month, everyone has lost their interest in it.
Only the guildleaders are still donating everyday religiously. Alot of materials required straight up demotivate me.

There needs to be some activities that you can unlock within the Guildhall, some added incentives that people will like. A reason to go to the Guildhall besides using the Merchant NPC to sell stuff and the Scribing station as a personal bank.
Or else it’ll stay a deserted place, like so many other places in Gw2.

I think they want to focus on having the longevity that guild wars 1 had. That being said, if your guild is around long enough to see that time frame, hopefully most of your members have crafted ascended armor already and can donate by that time. I think a good bit of complaints with hot is the time it takes to actually do things, or to get things. To me, that’s part of the design and the road map they have for a really long time. They’d have to base it around something, but once you essentially get the “end game gear” then you can start to contribute, once personally you have every thing you’d need (safe for legendary tier, but i think that’s a little far lol).

I don’t know it’s weird, gw2 is not traditional in any sense (thought or play style), but i think it doesn’t make sense in a shorter time frame, which most of the players are probably accustomed to.

I feel the frustration, but, not sure if this level of frustration should actually exist this early into HOTS life.

Great summery! You boilt it down. I fully agree!
After playing GW2 solo for most of the time I finally joined a guild just the other day to be able to take part in acommunity, raids, GH etc.. After the first and a reasuring second visit to the guild hall I decided its not worth going there at all. Seen it, ok. There is nothing in there for me. Its a playground for guild leaders and officers maybe who like to decorate it (but not with my hard earned mats and gold). It also is too big imho. Hard to decorate it and make it cosy and attractive. Why should a simple guild member go there? Why should a guild gather there? We meet in teamspeak and port to the map we want. No need to actually be in GH.
Even back in very old times in DAoC where you had nice and cosy guild houses, we seldom met there. At least there you could make a trophy out of rare bosses you defeated. Was a nice little feature :-)

Everything on this post is right on. I almost never go in our guild hall. I wish I had a reason to but it actually a hassle. Need TP and Bank there badly.

As Harold noted you do have a personal bank, it’s the scribe craft station.

I think you left out a huge thing that is wrong with the system, though you touched on it in the high price of scribing: The unrealistic amounts of resources needed to craft the most simple items, when each item has to be made individually before it can be used to decorate.

It should be a wardrobe skins template system instead. You make the thing once, possibly at the current astronomical cost level. But then you can rubberstamp it all over the hall, if you want 1000 chairs and nothing else, go for it. Perhaps special things like the HoT prepurchase items or world boss treasure chests or pumpkins and snowpiles could remain limited to the numbers created, but basic furnishings? C’mon!

The war room was the first thing fully restored by the two WvW focused guilds I am a member of. We’ve been working hard to unlock and regain all of the things we enjoyed in WvW before the HoT- claiming structures, +5 and so on. (I’ve chopped so many trees between leveling scribe and donating materials that I feel like there ought to be a title for it- “I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok!”)

Both WvW guilds I’m in unlocked the Portal for no other reason than we needed the gxp to reach +5 aura. The portal is even more useless to us than PvE guilds as almost all of our missions are on WvW maps. This is the same reason we even bothered with arena restoration, market restoration, synthesizers and all manner of things that do not directly relate to WvW. That’s right, we’re pushed into unlocking things we don’t even want and hardly ever use just because they locked +5 supply aura behind guild level 37.

Upgrading the workshop cost a lot and all it has are scribing stations, not other crafting stations. Not very useful for the majority of members.

When my daughter didn’t have the expansion she could donate materials to the treasurer but not interact with any of the merchants or even access her bank via the scribing station because all of that content was locked to her.

I was so excited about guild halls (and auto looting) and I mainly play WvW. As such I really feel like all this expansion did was push me into PvE to farm mats I can’t find in WvW but the hall requires to complete WvW focused upgrades.

If I didn’t enjoy the new elite specs I’d feel justified in asking for a refund as very little of this expansion has anything of value to offer WvW players: Guild Halls are a farm full of things we don’t want and don’t use, auto looting doesn’t work in WvW and WvW is in an awful state of not knowing what GW2 is even doing to the game mode and its future.

I agree the whole post whole-heartedly.

Why is GW2’s GH so much worse than GW1’s?

Being the person in our guild who took up the mantle of taking care of the guild hall and is the guild’s scribe, I can support pretty much everything the OP has written down in his summary.
We are currently at lvl 28 and reached the stage of unlocking more building upgrades to gain access to guild XP.

What the OP did not mention is the variety of decorations you can buy in its basic version, who are not tied to further upgrades., e.g.. there are no plants or basic wall parts you can erect to make the GH different from every other hall out there.

I agree with everything

About the only thing i agree with is priority marking for upgrades and the absurd over use of timegated materials.

Everything else meh….

If its of any concern the guild i have is level 51. So there may be some bias.

Another issue that may arise is what do we do once we finish leveling our halls. Can we expect more upgrades in the future? More uses for Aetherium and Favor or are those two going to go the same way merits did? Even merits had some use for them as a cost for some of the consumables. Aetherium and Favor don’t have a use at all once you get to lvl 64. We’ll be there on Feb 28.

Quite frankly, hardly anyone from my guild is ever in the guild hall. It is just so much more convenient to chill in LA or PvP lobby, where the bank is next to the mystic forge or TP.

And what’s up with different instances of the guild hall? It is just so irritating that we can end up in different instances of the same guild hall. I mean, come on, why is there more than one instance?!

I think we will be much happier if we are given just a very small hall where everything useful is actually conveniently placed near each other and we can stand around and chill.

molewall.7943:

Quite frankly, hardly anyone from my guild is ever in the guild hall. It is just so much more convenient to chill in LA or PvP lobby, where the bank is next to the mystic forge or TP.

And what’s up with different instances of the guild hall? It is just so irritating that we can end up in different instances of the same guild hall. I mean, come on, why is there more than one instance?!

I think we will be much happier if we are given just a very small hall where everything useful is actually conveniently placed near each other and we can stand around and chill.

Would be nice to be able to customize where the NPCs are like if we can place them just like decorations.

harold.3526:

Levitating Cat.8623:

Lack of TP and Personal Bank

You can use the scribing station as personal bank.

And the Workshop fellow takes treasury donations.

Still, excellent suggestions. All for them.

My guild just got to level 32 and its really about 5 of us doing it. The other people in the guild couldnt use the xp boosters. We were all pretty kittened about that. The guild arena doesnt work for anyone. Im the guild leader and i cant place any thing down in the PvP room, seriously. We have everything but torches and the flame turret and we cant use any of them.

Heres the most disgusting thing about guild halls. 1 member put 1000 gold in the guild bank for us to buy mats and upgrade the Guild Hall. So we used it and we are a 25-30 size guild but only 10 play together and everyone else kind of just adventures on there own. We get all these upgrades and 1/2 of the guild cant use because they didnt buy the HOT. We upgrade the PvP room next because we want to troll each other and we have a family in our guild. Its a mom and dad and their 3 kids and they asked why they couldnt place turrets down and i had to reply i cant either atm.

The 5 of us who really wanted to make the guild hall a nice for place everyone are get extremely frustrated. We have put over 3,000 gold and the mats needed for upgrades and seriously the Guild Hall is the last place anyone goes. There are no mini games, there are no crafting stations, the PvP room is broken, we cant build houses or sit in the fancy chairs we crafted.

I would seriously like anet to refund guilds for the guild hall mats and gold. My rage is because we just unlocked guild trader 3 and 4 and it came with more crap to do for scribing. WTF is this, its like a sick joke.

Levitating Cat.8623:

1. Guild Portal

As far as I know, the waypoints next to puzzles are not contested if you activate the mission prior to opening the portal and race waypoints are never contested anyway. I think for races it’s not an issue but for challenges it would be cool if the guild portal teleported people inside the challenge instance (once the mission is active of course).

One thing I’d like to see in the GH is the ability to make a “personal instance” inside the guild hall. It would be like a personal space, an instance within an instance. Why I want this? To put everything from the home instance in there so I don’t have to port to a city just to gather some daily materials.

I know why they couldn’t add things like the gem store gathering nodes, krait obelisks, bandit chests etc on the guild hall, because they want them to be “gated” and per character, but making an instance within an instance would solve that easily. Guild Leaders (or someone with permissions) could give each member (or category of members) a different place to make their “home”, a different place for the officers, different for common members etc. Then you’d be able to decorate it on your own and make that home place more personal.

So, what is there to do in a Guild Hall?

I mean, my large guild has a lvl 40 guild and I’ve been there a few times to check it out. Yet I have still not understood what a Guild Hall is actually used for.
Why should I go there, what is there to do?

In GW1 the Guild Hall was also just a personal meeting instance to set up your groups in peace. Or it could be used to teleport people into exclusive instances. But other than that it was also rather limited in use.

Good points. Especially scribing and the horrendously ridiculously overpriced minis, what the kitten were they thinking with 30g (!!!!!), 75 Guild Commendations (!!!!!!) and a ridiculous 150 Crystalline Ore (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Even one of those would be absolutely ridiculously overpriced but no, it is all three for one kittening mini, what the kitten??!?!?

the mini are made of golds

Excellent points, all of them. I’m especially frustrated by the limited interface of the treasurer. I want to donate to my guild, but you make it sooooo hard.

Donari.5237:

As Harold noted you do have a personal bank, it’s the scribe craft station.

I think you left out a huge thing that is wrong with the system, though you touched on it in the high price of scribing: The unrealistic amounts of resources needed to craft the most simple items, when each item has to be made individually before it can be used to decorate.

It should be a wardrobe skins template system instead. You make the thing once, possibly at the current astronomical cost level. But then you can rubberstamp it all over the hall, if you want 1000 chairs and nothing else, go for it. Perhaps special things like the HoT prepurchase items or world boss treasure chests or pumpkins and snowpiles could remain limited to the numbers created, but basic furnishings? C’mon!

Good point!
I didn’t touch on Scribing too much because (luckily) I’m not the guild’s Scribe (I think I’d go nuts being both the leader and a scribe) so I don’t know as much about it. But you’re completely right about the decorations – if they were just a copy-paste thing it would make it so much easier, cheaper and more enjoyable.
Also, someone on reddit pointed out that it would be great if they removed all the Finishing Kits required for decorations upgrades – it makes no sense there’s a Finishing Kit for every stage of the upgrade. Instead, the Kit should be used for the final upgrades, which would make so much more sense and would be much less of a pain in the bottom.

Excellent post Cat, totally agree.

We are a midsized guild (around 100 members) and our guild hall is deserted for the reasons you mentioned.

I remember the first time we met in the hall at our weekly guild mission time to form groups for Guild Bounty. Everyone ported in the guild hall, but I only saw five of our members. It took around 10 secs and some chat in TS until we realized, that we were scattered over several instances of the map. We had to taxi people on one map to continue … I don’t know what I should say about that …

Pre-HoT I was really looking forward to Guild Halls. I stopped donating materials last week, as I don’t see a point in having a Guild Hall anymore.

This is sad .

I’m still trying to figure out why in world Potions of PvP Reward are required for the WP discount upgrade when the only place you pay to use WP’s is in PvE areas. I find myself quite irritated that we (our guild) seem to be forced to play a part of the game no one in our guild has shown any interest in.

Jimson.5168:

I’m still trying to figure out why in world Potions of PvP Reward are required for the WP discount upgrade when the only place you pay to use WP’s is in PvE areas. I find myself quite irritated that we (our guild) seem to be forced to play a part of the game no one in our guild has shown any interest in.

THIS! Good point!
Since the nerf of droprate of PvP Reward Potions from Reward Tracks (you usually get 4 Potions from dailies and that’s about it) it proves to be very difficult to motivate people to donate those at all, not to mention the ridiculous amounts and even more ridiculous upgrades it’s needed for. I can understand it being needed for Arena upgrades but WP discount and other PvE-related upgrades should not require these Potions.

Have to say i agree with most posts.
Although a tad too negative on some views, which is understandable, specially since i’m not as negative simply because i’m used to using workarounds (like using the scribing stations to compensate no banks).