Guild Wars 2

The guild upgrades system for WvW is one of the most unnecessarily convoluted and unfunny systems I’ve ever seen in any game.

Let’s take a look on how you got hold of a Guild Catapult with the old system:

• Play with your guildmates to gain Guild Influence
• Upgrade your guild with Influence
• Queue up catapults spending Influence

I honestly don’t remember if you even needed Guild Missions to unlock access to the Guild Catapults upgrade, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t. And if you did, it was only a few missions.

Now with the new system you first need to unlock the Guild Catapult scribing schematic recipe by upgrading your guild, then you need to level up Scribing to 300 to be able to craft said schematic.
Let’s see the details, shall we?

Note: every upgrade requires materials (some only obtainable from PvE, some even time-gated), Valor gained by playing guild missions and Aetherium that is time gated. The gold cost I reported here only includes materials that can be bought at the trading post.

To unlock the Guild Catapult schematic, you’ll need:

• A guild hall (100g + pve event)
• Tavern Restoration 1 (about 78g in materials)
• Mine Excavation 1 (about 29g)
• Aetherium Capacity 1 (about 16g)
• Workshop Restoration 1 (about 105g)
• War Room Restoration 1 (about 100g)
• WvW Guild Claiming: Camps (about 45g)
• Enough guild upgrades to reach Guild Level 10 (cheapest/most useful options are about 550g)
• Aetherium Capacity 2 (about 75g)
• WvW Guild Claiming: Towers (about 90g)
• Enough guild upgrades to reach level 19 (cheapest/useful options are about 1200g)
• Scribing: Guild Catapult (about 30g)

At this point you need to level up Scribing to 300 on some player in your guild. Ideally you want it on a Guild Leader or some trusted Officer, because Scribing is a player profession and if the player leaves the guild you lose access to the ability to craft those catapults you worked so hard to get.

The cheapest way to level scribing to 300 requires more guild upgrades (I didn’t waste time calculating the prices, but it’s probably a few hundreds more gold, altho you can join another guild to use their recipes to level up Scribing):

• Enough upgrades to reach level 23 and unlock guild banquet
• Unlock the Gathering Bonus Banner
• Unlock the Gold from Kills Banner
• Unlock the Guild Ballista
• Unlock the Centaur Banner

And, of course, leveling Scribing has it’s own costs. Leveling to 300 is about 200g at the moment, using the upgrades mentioned.

Once you have Scribing to 300 and the Guild Catapult upgrade unlocked, you can finally craft schematics that are then to be queued in the Assembly Device in your Guild Hall and after a short time the desired upgrade (the legendary Guild Catapult) will be available in your guild’s Storage.

Can we say that whoever designed this lost sight of what is fun in a game somewhere along the road? Because this doesn’t feel like fun. At all. And worse, upgrading a guild to provide bonuses in WvW is – mostly – completely disconnected from playing WvW.

Being able to claim a keep doesn’t say anything about your guild’s ability to defend said keep, for example. And the same goes for everything else.
The process of unlocking these upgrades doesn’t say anything about your guild’s proficiency in WvW. They are completely disconnected from your “WvW track record”: how many hours have your players spent in WvW on average this week? How many kills? And deaths? How many objectives did they capture and defend? How much siege they built or refreshed?
What about the “totals”, instead? How many hours did your players spend in total in WvW? How many total kills they have? We’re talking long term here, to determine how “veteran” on average the players in the guild are.
Those are just a few examples of sensible metrics you could tie the access to upgrades to.
And you know what? You could make some of it even dynamic. For example, you could unlock the claiming of keeps and Stonemist only for dedicated WvW guilds that have defended keeps the week before. Or, as another example, you could tie access to Guild siege based on how many objectives the guild captured.
Make it feel like improving your playstyle and putting effort in WvW is rewarding.
And give us a reason to boast about our dedication!

This post is part of a series I made for the 4th birthday of the game. You can find links to the other posts in the overview

I never post here, i usually just lurk.Thank you for taking the time to write these posts.

Menaka.5092:

Can we say that whoever designed this lost sight of what is fun in a game somewhere along the road? Because this doesn’t feel like fun. At all. And worse, upgrading a guild to provide bonuses in WvW is – mostly – completely disconnected from playing WvW.

This is spot on, not to mention the complete loss of progress already made prior to HOT. And I want to echo the comments of the poster above thanks for these posts.