Guild Wars 2

The purpose of this thread is to discuss my issues with the current guild system, as well as include some possible ways to make it better. I am in no way trying to flame Arenanet or Guild Wars 2. I’ve been a fan of Anet and the Guild Wars series for a while and plan on continuing to be a part of the community for a long time to come. With that being said I do want to talk about some issues I have about some of the social elements in game currently. MMORPG’s are social games at their core. Yes, one could argue that there are plenty of players and game types that do well with solo playstyles in the online rpg field. However, when it comes down to it, the point of playing a massively multiplayer online rpg is to play with other people and hopefully feel some connection and forge meaningful friendships with the people you are playing with. In most cases, regardless if the game is outstanding or horrible, those connections forged are what keep players playing the game and logging back in every night. I feel that in Guild Wars 2 there is a bit of a disconnect there on some levels, and at its core, is the current guild system.
The first major issue I have with it is the lack of “stickyness” currently. What I mean by that is unless you’re a WvW guild, there isn’t that feeling of “we as a guild are working towards something.” or “my guild has accomplished this.” In WvW you are working together with multiple guild members(even multiple guilds in some cases) to make a difference to your server. Resulting in a sense of importance and meaning being present with that style of gameplay. Outside of that however, there aren’t that many meaningful guild specific goals to set that actually make you feel accomplished for doing them. There is no sense of guild progression basically. Which is generally what makes people feel good about being a part of and contributing to a guild. That lack of guild importance, and the ability to belong to multiple guilds, leads to members just hopping casually between guilds and making it difficult for some to form stable and cohesive communities. PvP tournaments do often require a coordinated guild effort to do. And assuming leader boards are still something that you plan to implement in the future, this gives guilds a sense of progression. And while even though PvP tournaments are limited to 5 players, most pvp guilds hop in WvW if they want that large guild coordinated effort.
In PvE currently, there is absolutely no reason that you need a guild. Sure you can get certain things done faster or easier, such as legendaries in some cases, but even those are solo-able. I understand that dungeons, specifically explorable modes, were supposed to be “guild specific” content, but currently just about every explorable can be done with a PuG group. Especially as the community as a whole starts to get better at the game. There are dyanmic events, jumping puzzles etc, but nothing on the PvE side of things that makes having a guild feel important or give you that sense of “hey my guild and I accomplished something great and here’s what we have to show for it.” Thus, PvE guilds don’t have that cohesiveness that is necessary for it’s members to remain active and to keep a guild alive. As a guild leader with guildies who enjoy PvE content primarily, It’s increasingly hard to actually give guild members a reason to log on every night and and feel like we have something to work towards. Yes it’s about having fun as well as the social elements that come into place, but aside from that there is nothing that gives a sense of guild progression that we can work towards as a big group.
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A fix for this I think would be some sort of instanced guild content, targeted at having 10 or more members involved. The first thought that comes to mind are raids. Typically this sort of thing in GW2 is looked down upon every time it get’s brought up in chat or on forums etc. However, I feel the reason for that is that people associate raiding with a hard gear grind as well. This doesn’t have to be the case. If you make the content something fun, that offers meaningful rewards(maybe awesome looking gear, rare crafting mats, titles, possibly even leader boards etc) and not something that gives you a huge stat bonus, then people would flock to it. Just from playing this game it’s obvious that it’s not the large scale battles or huge bosses people are afraid of.It’s the fact that in most games those large scale events are usually associated with a gear grind. Take that out and make it something fun and challenging for guilds to do and I feel like it would give PvE guilds something meaningful to actually progress and work on together. On the social side of things, guild halls are the first things that come to mind. It would be nice to see highly customizable guild halls that take a coordinated effort between a lot of the guild members to actually build and set up. Not just generic guild house#14566 which we saved X amount of influence towards so our guild leader just now needs to press this button and it’s ours. Have it include customizable elements that make it feel like it’s actually MY guilds home and something we can improve upon as time goes on. If raid bosses end up being a thing, maybe let us mount his head on the wall, or maybe a picture of a fort we captured in WvW, or guild specific crafters. Something a little more interactive and more involved than the current “guild upgrades” system.
This brings me to my final issue with the guild system, which is the guild menu itself. In my most humble opinion, it seems like it’s not finished. There are a lot of little features that almost seem mandatory for a good guild UI that aren’t in there.
-The first one being, not having the ability to actually see when members have last logged in. This is causing some issues trying to keep guilds active. It makes it pretty difficult to weed out inactive members, without removing someone else on accident, unless you know the account names of the people who haven’t been online.
-The rank authorizations are a little unorganized. Having the ability to invite/promote attached to the same authorization or not having withdraw amounts or withdraw specifics that comes with being allowed to withdraw items from the guild bank does not seem very well thought out to me.
-Having the page with all of your current guilds be the first one to open, rather than the roster/message of the day for the guild you are currently representing seems a little odd for those who usually only represent one guild. Not to mention that the message of the day generally gets ignored by people who don’t remember to go check it specifically.

-Lastly, the guild menu in general seems a little lack luster. GW2 has some of the best artists and graphic/environmental designers I’ve seen in a lot of current games and is easily one of the best looking MMO’s out there right now. The guild menu as it stands right now however, does not reflect that at all.
Going back to the guild upgrades however. They seem to serve their purpose, but with no other system in place to really compliment that or give a bigger sense of progression(besides some of the WvW implementations), they just seem like things that every guild is going to have at some point anyway and in turn, aren’t super meaningful when you unlock them.
I hope these concerns are addressed or at least talked about, as I feel like that would be a huge step in the right direction for some of the more social elements in the game. It would be awesome to hear the dev team & other players constructive feed back on the matters I discussed and on this post in general. I realize some people may have a different opinion than me and I’m interested to see if players are finding the same or similar issues, or have other ideas in relation to this topic, that they would like to be addressed. Thank you for taking the time to read this and comment or consider some of these changes. As always to any of the devs who may read this, thank you for this awesome game. Keep up the great work.

For anyone who was Tl;DR -Guild/social systems need a bit of improvement.

Yes. Good post.

Guilds needs more to go, like much like over 10 players parties.

PvE, Big bosses, about 20 players needed to beat Champion boss. Good rewards to guildies. Many many bosses, like you will find them and nobody elses are there, only your guild mates, only couple of more people.

I mean, Dragon battles are kind of great. But. I like to have more bosses, that you will beat them with you Guild (nearly) alone in PvE. “Yeah, today we gonna get That Champion boss, tomorrow another” – good rewards enough to have guildies to come along. Also experience is good, also rewarding.

GW2 athmosphere is very good to that kind of thing.

Guilds needs more.

As you said,“we as a guild are working towards something.” or “my guild has accomplished this.”, yes, good post, game needs this more.

Could definately use a ‘’Guild warband’’ system in PVE that could cater for up to 20 members – Must be Guild members only, with perhaps 5 places that can be used for ‘’guests of the Guild’’.

I treat the 4 guilds I am in as my guild alliance. Is there plans to implement some sort of Alliance Chat similar to GW1. Thanks for your consideration.

++++++1.
allience chat would be awsome too^^

please do these things anet

id also like to add….guild wars was ment to be PVE. look at guild wars one. there was soooooooooo much to do pve and dungeon wise. there was never a time i didnt have something to do. bring pve back anet

would be nice to have guild notes for specific ppl to

I like your suggestions, please feel free to read over my post as well: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Guild-reworking-plea-of-a-large-guild-leader some similar stuff. These are changes that need to be made.