So I want to start my wall of text by saying thank you to Anet. Thank you for noticing and dedicating development time to supporting the GvG community with this feature (small note, for now and the rest of my post, the GvG i am referring to is the current 15v or 20v deathmatch, not the Gw1 GvG of old). I really do mean that. This feature should allow our community to flourish and grow, increasing both the competitiveness in large scale Gw2 pvp combat, but also should help WvW by reducing the constant transferring of a chunk of the WvW population in order to pursue the fights we enjoy. I’m also excited about the bigger arena that is in development, and I appreciate that it seems like there will be continuing development in this area. I look forward to working cordially with Anet on this.
However, I am worried about the accessibility of Arenas for many WvW guilds. I am a member of [BMO] Adventurethyme currently located on Crystal Desert, one of the guilds in the “GvG Scene.” I have been involved in GvG/WvWraiding guilds for about 2 years now. And I think that this two-month delay really will hamper much of the enthusiasm for this feature.
Currently, many of the players who have engaged in GvG in the past are on hiatus, waiting for HoT, and watching to see how guild halls effect the scene. Many of these players have been involved for almost 3 years, found the Obsidian Sanctum a godsend, and have been active in feedback and the online community to try to facilitate a better, more healthy GvG scene. Many players are waiting to buy HoT until they see that the arenas work and are effective. If the arenas are so heavily timegated, then many of these players that would return will probably skip buying the expansion, and in the two months that it takes to unlock these arenas, these players may not see what they want, and may forget about the game entirely.
In addition, while many guilds remain for longer periods of time, the typical lifetime of a GvG guild is about 5-6 months. If for the first third of their existence new guilds are unable to fully participate in this system, and can only play against guilds who have been together for at least two months, or borrow time in an arena of another guild. This heavily impacts the accessibility of GvG, as new guilds will have a very hard time starting and sticking.
Also, GvG guilds, and many of the smaller WvW guilds in general, will have big problems producing these guild halls. Most PvE guilds tend to have tiers of involvement, with some number of players on every day for many hours, bulges in population during NA (or EU) Prime-time, with guild members mostly doing their own things, aside from organized guild events (Teq, TTW, Guild missions, champ trains, etc.) This allows guilds that have players that rep and hang out for several hours a day to rake in influence, and often times those players accumulate in game wealth through many of the ways PvE offers.
Most GvG guilds, however, are smaller, and often spend much of their time in WvW, seeking out fights in openfield, or GvGing in Obsidian Sanctum. In most cases, a given guild’s population trickles in, to whatever the guild’s size is peaking at the guilds scheduled raid time. Then, the raid lasts for 2-4 hours, and then most of the players go to bed.
It may seem frivolous to talk about guild schedules and attendance for bigger guilds, but most of the guilds who would utilize the arenas regularly, and specifically for this team deathmatch functionality, have a HUGE disadvantage in producing a guild arena. WvW isn’t very rewarding in gold, and GvG is even less so, which is fine as that’s not the purpose of those game modes, but buying influence to speed the guild hall requires huge amounts of in game gold and influence, which most of the guilds for whom this arena is targeted are sorely lacking.
A combination of these factors may lead to a diminishing and eventual disappearance of the community that all of this development time and effort (which I say again is MUCH appreciated) was intended to benefit. And that is not an ideal situation for anyone involved, game designers or players.
Now, I am DEFINITELY not saying that these arenas should be free and on demand at 12:01 pm PST on launch day. There absolutely SHOULD be effort expended in getting these arenas, and that is an important thing for the implementation of Guild Halls. I get that. I’m just worried about the scale of this SPECIFIC time for this SPECIFIC area of the Guild Halls and unintended consequences occurring.
In terms of constructive ideas, maybe make WvW kills or location captures a way to speed up the process somewhat. Or perhaps have competitions in a neutral guild hall with guild arenas as the reward. I am not a game designer, so my ideas may be stupid, but I have faith in both Anet and the community to come up with a smart solution that makes having a guild arena an achievement for any guild that has one, but is not un-achievable for many guilds who DESPERATELY want them.
tl;dr : I think that a long timegate on Guild Arenas will make them ineffective at addressing some of the concerns of players who are pushing for them the hardest, and I hope that we can find a smart way to address this before the expansion drops. Hopefully we can get a feedback thread started for ideas.
