Guild Wars 2

I’ll preface this by saying I do wholeheartedly enjoy the influence system. There’s a nice progression to it, the bonuses are useful, and overall it lends a sense of progression to the very act of being in a guild. However, I think we could do more.

Influence problems
Currently, the best ongoing uses of influence past researching new level tiers are all tied to transparent character buffs, or WvW fortification buffs. These transparent buffs are really nice passive options, and do a good job of creating powerful and useful influence sinks that benefit the guild based on activites done together. The buff systems are honestly perfect just the way they are. I feel they’re tiered well and have manageable costs which allow large guilds to work hard at attempting full upkeep and smaller guilds to specialize for what means the most to them.

However, the really meaty and fun stuff comes in the form of consumables. Any of the banners are fun simply because it’s a flag, the armor and weapon vendors are cool because they allow you a shot at something useful and guild specific, the WvW siege engines are very nice rewards for being so far along in the tree, and the banquet is a nice afterthought to the politics tree. heck, even little touches the like bank summoning yak are really great, as it creates an impression that the organization isn’t just a mess of guild tags, but actually possesses resources and connections within the world.

These items are visual markers of the guild, and easily the most fun parts of the influence system, and where I believe it could use the most improvement. I’m going to bullet point these in bold text, addressing currently existing, and a few new ideas for influence uses.

Guild Weapons/Armor
Aside from the common cry of “we need more variety and armor slots” A major problem I have with the weapon and armor contracts is that while the guild can foot the bill for the contract via influence, there’s no way to use influence to provide players with the completely cosmetic upgrades they provide. Considering there’s no way to directly translate influence in to gold (nor should there be) it falls to individual members to purchase their own identifying markers, as these items are soulbound. I’d like the ability to actuall provide guild arms and armaments to members. I’d like these items to lose soulbound status and be pruchasable via influence at a rate lower than the standard gold>influence rate used by promoters.

This allows the guild to optionally invest in its own representation, put skins in the bank, or even have guild-focused crafters truly craft sets of guild arms and armor by crafting items, applying the transmutes, and depositing them in the guild bank for members to pick up. The gold option should remain unchanged, but for a guild that opts to do so, it should be an option to spend the guild’s supercurrency to kit its members in these items. After all, they’re cosmetic representations of the guild, not the individual player’s bank account!

Guild Halls
I’m glad arenanet isn’t rushing this one. We were told they didn’t want the guild halls to be “just a place” and I wholeheartedly agree. In too many games I’ve found myself working extremely hard for something that serves little to no practical function. I’m not going to try to design these systems as I know that there are probably a few whiteboards in washington on the subject, but I’ll just say that guild halls should encourage a group-based risk/reward system.

Let people build a guild farm, plant plants they want to harvest, but on the flip side require them to defend and maintain it so that its cost in time is equivalent to gathering those resources in the open world.
Let them establish a mine but make that mine cause them to be vulnerable to NPC attack events.

What’s important is that, like Guild – Versus – Guild PvP (Which I hope comes back bigger and better with a lot of WvW-alike bells and whistles) These should be opt-in systems. A Guild wants to try and capitalize on the profits of an omnomberry farm? They should have that option, but that decision should also require and upkeep in influence and the risk of NPC attacks that must be responded to.

The Guild Hall does need to be more than a place, but not at the expense of the non-guilded solo players that make the open world thrive. Guild halls should be a place people can actually play the game, and how much time they spend there should be directly representative of what they can get out of it.

Don’t want to PvE at the guild hall? Don’t build PvE resource structures. Don’t want to PvP? Don’t que for it, don’t bother building PvP defenses. You get the idea.

The guild should have the option to be as much or as little involved with the guild hall system as possible. My guild is the type that would love to spend the majority of our time there, hargvesting our materials, defending it from mobs, entertaining the occasional GvG match, etc. however many people just want a place to have the odd meeting or party, and they shouldn’t be forced in to those systems just to have a nice looking hall.

Banners
Banners, on the surface, are a great concept. There’s a flag, with your guild tag, that gives people buffs. They see your guild tag and think “yeah, what cool guys, I’ll remember them and if I’m unguilded might even try to get in that guild.”

In reality most players find themselves just going “oh, banner, click it and walk off” and guilds not dropping banners because… they already clicked someone else’s banner and have the buff.

How about granting influence for banner uses by guild members? Nothing drastic, perhaps 2 influence per banner-tap on your guild’s banners, and cap the banner-gain to a reasonable number per 24 hour cycle (200-500 cap) This would encourage banner use as a whole as they could potentially pay for themselves depending on use, largely offsetting the fact that their provided buff is less intuitive than the guild-wide buffs. In addition it would do a lot to ensure that the sight of a guild banner in the world is more often accompanied by members of its guild. Somehow that just feels right.

In addition, how about letting us define custom text for those banners? In stead of “enjoy this complimentary service of our guild” Which people immediately skip because they’ve already read it on every banner EVERYWHERE… what if we could pass along a tip, give the name of a recruiting officer to mail, or just share a joke or something memorable? These are political tools by nature and suffer for being identical in every instance they are placed aside from a largely forgettable guild logo and tag.

Guild Logos
While better than GW1’s systems, logos as a whole are still extremely lax in terms of customization. I’ll just point to EVE Online’s logo system and leave it there. This adds avenues for influence and guild-based unlocks use in terms of unlocking more layers, more colors, special borders, and all sorts of things guilds can use to make that logo intrinsically say something about their guild that’s memorable rather than a forgettable combination of a stock logo and a few colors.

Environmental Weapons
So, the art of war tree has these really awesome guild siege weapons. They work just like normal siege weapons, but are purchased with influence and better than the mundane version without being game breaking.

This is a massive boon for WvW, but why can’t the PvE guys have something similar? Take the consumable environmental items found at karma vendors or lying around the world. Any player has access to these for a bit of coin, and often can simply find them lying about in the world. Now, kick them up a notch by improving skill recast time, damage, or some other facet of their function. Sure, they’re still not as good as your skills, but they’re better than the (already quite situationally useful) stuff you get from karma vendors or the floor.

Call it a supply drop, complete with guild-logo-crate full of X improved environmental item. Imagine being able to spend all that influence on boxes of spawnable elementals, flamethrowers, charrzookas, or any number of useful items for PvE, and hey, maybe even a few that are balance-approved for WvW as well. This is a high visibility, fun use for guild influence that players would adore both for aesthetics and function, because lets face it… who doesn’t want to just spawn a box of rocket launchers, bombs, elemental powders, or whatever else you can come up with every now and then.

Hirelings
Imagine you could use that hard earned influence to convince someone that isn’t you to gather metal, wood, or plants. Of course, influence isn’t money, so you’re going to need to buy the materials when he’s done, but he’s a good contractor and he’s heard how great you are, so he’s willing to cut you a deal.

Specifically, hirelings would be guild-specific merchants that could be targeted at any given map and directed to harvest wood, metal, or plants. They would randomly populate a limited inventory over time for as long as their contract lasts from the materials avaliable in the zone, and at the point of sale would sell any member of the guild resources from their inventory at the weekly average market value -10%

In short, hirelings will gather less resources than a player would over the same time period, have a more random supply due to hitting everything in the zone, but will afford the guild the ability to get some small stacks of material at a discount in gold by in stead spending influence.

I don’t think this is an economic break, as it is an influence sink for a minor gold discount on something that is extremely easy for players to pick up for free. It’s a “hard” economic perk for the economics tree, which currently consists of largely randomized economic benefits of questionable economic effect. You could do a whole line of these in varying skill levels, and for added fun points, it would be nice to see them actively appearing at and using the nodes in the zone every now and then as server load permits, again to increase guild visibility.

Love the ideas, some i can see problems with such as the banners being placed in lionarc to be farmed by people if you gain more then they cost. but that can be offset by rules. but seems they all add good stuff.

Jiiub.7135:

Love the ideas, some i can see problems with such as the banners being placed in lionarc to be farmed by people if you gain more then they cost. but that can be offset by rules. but seems they all add good stuff.

The original idea was rewarding for non-guild banner-taps, but it was pretty evident that that would be a similar mess.

Honestly if the mechanics were unchanged but they got some custom text functionality/logos were made a bit more customizable it would still be one hack of an upgrade to the banner system.