Guild Wars 2

There has been a HUGE amount of backlash on the forums and in game about the amount of influence required to unlock the guild missions. i understand that the idea is to create a sense of progression for guilds, but looking at the 330k influence i need to boost my guild to have access to the guild missions, (and more specifically the guild puzzles which is what i was looking forward to the most) it’s daunting and scary.

I suggest that somehow you link the level of the guild to the level of research needed to access the missions. For instance, if you have a level 2 guild, you only require level 2 Art of War upgrade to unlock the Guild Bounty Unlock. that way the smaller guilds are not required to attain such huge influence in order to access the same content available to the larger guilds.

Any way that you look at it, this has been shatteringly devastating to the smaller guilds that have members that want to have access to this content, and are leaving to join larger ones.

Clearly for something like this to work it would have to have some sort of qualification for this to prevent people from making smaller guilds then levelling them up once they have unlocked the missions with the lower influence (perhaps bought with gold for ease). Another solution would be to permanently link the required level of upgrades (Art of War/Politics/Economy/Architecture) to do missions to the level of the guild! For instance if there is a smaller guild that is level 2, that only requires 1500 influence to get to level 2 Art of War, then unlock the upgrade to do Guild Bounty (which may still require 50k or perhaps lower that also). Then when they level up to level 3, then make it so they cannot access those missions until they level up Art of War to 3.

Some system like this would help maintain the smaller guilds without having a mass exodus to the larger guilds.

I don’t know if this will even be read, but i would hope that options would be considered with sincerity.

tl;dr
link the level of upgrade (art of war/etc) required for the guild missions unlock to the level of the guild (the size).

(this is clearly open to critique and opinions, so don’t hold back)

I agree that the current emphasis is on big guilds to a very large extent, which is a real shame.

I don’t think the influence required should be linked to size – as people will kick all from guild to get low costs, buy upgrade, then reinvite. Instead I think link the influence EARNT To the size of the guild.

The smaller the guild the more influence you earn or the larger the guild the less you earn (so that proportionally it stays the same). I know Warhammer Online managed to do a similar system with guild XP – if you had say 1 member then 100% of the XP you earnt went to guild, 10 members then 10%,100 then it was 1%, 500 it was 0.2% etc.

It’s already difficult for small guilds to keep up constant WvW buffs etc, but this is just silly

aye, this implementation was very poorly done. I created a guild with a few mates right after release, and I`m not sure we`ve even HAD 50k influence from then til now.

this didn`t get me to want to play.

But then wouldnt people just leave and rejoin?

In regards to leaving and rejoining, i don’t think that would work if this was implemented as the guild would ALREADY be leveled up to fit all the people in before they leave.

That way it can’t be abused by the large guilds that want cheaper upgrades.

Neandramathal.9536:

Instead I think link the influence EARNT To the size of the guild.

The smaller the guild the more influence you earn or the larger the guild the less you earn (so that proportionally it stays the same). I know Warhammer Online managed to do a similar system with guild XP – if you had say 1 member then 100% of the XP you earnt went to guild, 10 members then 10%,100 then it was 1%, 500 it was 0.2% etc.

This could be interesting, but I’m not sure about the complexity involved with this. Although they seem to have nailed the dynamic scaling side of formulas, so it could work. I just hope that they realise there is a huge portion of the community being severely affected by this.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Influence

This is the link for guild influence. My guild gets tones of influence a day because the main five that play we always group together. Over the past few days we have all been on. If you want free influence buy the items from the guild promoters.

Agreed, coming from a small guild with barely any Influence – we’ve been talking about pooling our gold and buying Influence to unlock the first mission.. but what about the next one/s?
At least the influence costs should scale with Guild size, Atm this is stopping smaller Guilds experiencing the new content.

One of my fellow guildies and I were discussing this idea last night as well. We’re a small, relatively casual guild, and aren’t interested in disbanding just to be able to gain access to new content. And like other small-ish guilds, we’re a little conflicted with the gateway to that new content.

From our thinking, the dynamic generation of IP (Influence Points) couldn’t be based on the number of members. You couldn’t accurately calculate those who represent all or some of the time, or deal with guilds that kick members just to get lower IP costs on upgrades.

What we thought might work was something along the lines of a dynamic calculation based on how much influence the guild is already earning. For example, a smaller guild with 5-10 active members earns 10k IP per week, the cost of upgrades is determined based on that number. It’s still problematic, and I’m no programmer by any stretch of the imagination, since there are issues to figure out in terms of consistency again, as well as what duration to base the calculation on. You couldn’t calculate the cost of guild upgrades from the average IP earned by a guild since its formation, because maybe the guild was more active during the beginning. Also, a recruiting push that brings in temporarily active members would skew the numbers a little.

The greatest catch, is that what to do with a small guild that has managed to unlock this elite content. As it stands, Anet is just now testing a few dynamically scaling events. Events which scale in difficulty based on the number of people participating in the event. The patch notes mentioned that there are a few in the game they’re testing this out on. Now, consider guild events. I’m sure in their current form, they’re not dynamic, in that if a small guild manages to unlock a guild event, they’re just going to be upset that they can’t complete it due to its difficulty.

My hope revolves around a number of potential future upgrades that sort-of fit these suggestions.

A dynamic scaling system for smaller guilds that not only scales the cost of the upgrades based on the IP earned, but also scales what we can buy or unlock with those IP.

An alliance system where any guild who unlocked any event could participate in another guild’s event so long as they were in the same guild alliance, and earn the rewards as if they had completed the event in their own guild.

Admittedly, none of this is trivial to implement. There are a myriad of bugs and other things that need to be worked on in other areas of the game. Like the dynamic world events scaling, I’m trying to take this whole guild events addition as a sort of beta test.