Guild Wars 2

I really don’t get this system
I end up being torn between guilds

I have this 1 guild which I was representing all the time and it was filled with nice people I got to know, though the problem is that it did nothing. So I went ahead to look for some guilds for WvW and occasional dungeons and whatnot. Ended up with 4 guilds, each one asking why am I not representing all the time or constantly coming to events… It’s exhausting

I just really don’t get why it’s there… can anyone please explain so I might make a better use of this?

Because sometimes you get in guilds with nice people who don’t do anything so you look for guilds that do the things you do, like dungeoning or WvW or whatnot. Eventually you can end up in multiple specialized guilds because no one guild is ever perfectly suited for doing all the things you want to do.

It’s a bit like enjoying chess, relaxing at home watching movies, car racing and reading poetry as a group. It’s not likely you will find one group of people that enjoy doing all 4 so you have to find 4 separate groups for these activities.

I’m not sure but I think the original intention was so that you could have different guilds for different purposes.

So for example you could be in a a small PvP tournament guild, but then also join a bigger, more casual guild so you’ve got people to do other activities with. Or different guilds for different characters (I believe this is popular with RPers).

The representation system does complicate things a bit. In theory when and how often you’re required to represent should depend on the guild – if a guild is for a specific activity they should probably only require you to represent whilst doing that activity with the guild whereas general purpose guilds might ask you to represent any time you’re not doing something with another one, or even all the time.

The problem, in my experience, is that a lot of guild leaders haven’t really thought about what they want the guild to do, they just create a guild and advertise it as doing everything even if the members actually only do a few things, or rarely do anything together at all. Then people join who haven’t really thought about what they want to do with their guild and you end up with a big, active group of generally nice people who don’t really do anything together. Or even a big group of nasty, argumentative people.

I had years of that in GW1 – joining whatever random guild was spamming chat at the time I was looking and said they did everything, then leaving a few weeks or months later without ever having met (in-game) or even really talked to any of these people. I think there was only one where they even noticed I’d gone.

So when GW2 was about to come out I made sure to search the forum and fan sites for info on guilds, found one with a specific focus, rules and membership requirements I liked and applied to join. It’s only a small guild (usually between 50 and 100 people) but I’ve stayed with them since launch and have no intention of leaving, or even joining another one at the same time.

For example, in my case. I have my regular guild, the one I represent most of the time (big multi-gaming guild, been with them for several games already), then I’m also a TTS member, represent them when I want to do the tequatl fight, and sometimes I get temporary guild invites from guilds doing guild missions and inviting people to help them. I like being able to do that without having to leave a guild and then asking for an invite when coming back.

Also some people might have a regular guild, a WvW oriented one, a sPvP one and so on.