Guild Wars 2

Hello all,

The point of the thread is to gather up some experiences over the progress of Guild Upgrades, especially in World vs World. So please answer these questions if you will. Please only answer if you are part of a Guild that participates in World vs World.

Personally, I have not been able to really see any of the upgrades to be used extensively, nor do I even understand how any of this works, so I am wondering how it is turning out.

As always with these “serious” threads, please keep the rambling and complaints to a minimum if it’s not directly related to the topic. Keep everything to the point as much as possible.

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

1. 60 – all 60 are WvW players (WvW focused guild with no PvE or PvP activities organised by leadership outside of guild missions)

2. No

3. We’ve got Camp Claim. That’s it.

4. PvE farming/grinding. It’s not really taken time away from our WvW raids, since all the grinding has been done outside of scheduled guild activities at a very casual rate.

5. I quite like the new system. Would like it even moreso if it was less grindy. Pre-HoT, it was too easy to get guild upgrades and it didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.

6. As said above, less mats for upgrades, or some kind of scaling system depending on the roster size of your guild (which will encourage purging of inactives, meaning there will be less fake advertisements of 500 man guilds that only have 20 active players).

1. We are a 100 member WvW guild, but now only around 20 play WvW at any given point in 24 hours.

2. Auras are there but, they are not useful unless being attacked. I’d say the only useful buff is the movement speed increase, and +5 once we get there.

3. Our guild is level 32, is claiming SM today and will have +5 on the 17.12 @ 10am. It is not realistically achievable for smaller guilds. We have spent / farmed 1000’s of gold or materials.

4. At the start of HoT we were a semi hardcore guild with mandatory raids, 100% rep rules and 40+ Members turn out for raids. The first nail in the coffin was the amount of time we had to spend in PvE to farm all the materials / gold. As time went on, we had less people turning up a night, more people leaving the guild because WvW wasn’t that interesting and they wanted to play other content.

Since then we have gone back to a community style guild, with limited rep rules and no mandatory raids, however you will find very little of my guild now in WvW as most are semi-active, playing other modes or like myself (guild leader) and some of us – playing Planetside 2 until WvW is fixed.

5. Make it reliant on member participation in any kind of events, much like the old influence system. You have to earn xxxx amount of xxxxx to upgrade. Auras for claiming could be amount of tower of keep flips etc. I wrote a massive essay on what I would like the system to be so will not re-write it all again

Overall WvW is the shadow it once was, the new maps, along with anet not listening and moving our beloved reset night was many nails in the coffin. The reason we were told the reset was moving was so they could make more changes and implement them? I can probably count on one hand the amount of times they have made adjustments on a Friday night – with all the changes and patches coming on a Tuesday. Anet haven’t got long to fix WvW before the remaining majority of its core is gone.

1. 3 people
2. .
3. none have HoT so we lost all the abilities to upgrade that we previously had (Art of War level 6).
4. see #2.
5. no more ninjaing towers (no +5 at camps), so more of just roaming and looking for fights.
6. make upgrades accessible: to those without HoT, to those who don’t want to farm their balls off in PvE, and make upgrades obtainable through playing WvW.

ArchonWing.9480:

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

Around 20 active, most of them playing wvw at least half of their time.

ArchonWing.9480:

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

Movement Boost can be useful for scouts, +5 sups should be essential… but we don’t have it yet.

ArchonWing.9480:

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

Keep Claiming, Aura V, scribing is low priority as we don’t have enough gold for upgrades anyway… We have a few Supply Detonators, unlocked some more. The guild spent more gold on upgrades since HoT than before on siege/food for wvw raids. As we don’t have enough guild levels yet, +5 supps seems like a dream, achieved in a few months probably.

ArchonWing.9480:

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

Donations from members, most of us emptied our reserves to get the wvw upgrades faster (like those stacks of elder wood I saved up for sup. siege during the last year).
We “organized” guild-pve-events like Shovel/HoT area farms instead of wvw raids, to get the upgrades faster. It was daily 1-5 hours for the others, I don’t have HoT so I couldn’t help with everything…

ArchonWing.9480:

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

Pre-HoT system. We liked to get cheap guild golems, guild catas for our ninja-fun, now they are more expensive than normal, non-guild siege, making us less effective for ninja-actions.

ArchonWing.9480:

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

Get rid of the pve-mats, replace them with loot from WvW like heavy bagz, spikes…
Get rid of the scribing for guild-siege, let us make them for karma/BoH/anything obtainable in wvw.

Get Rid of the Gold-Sink for wvw-specific guild-upgrades, we don’t have the income to sustain them!

1. There used to be around 5 very active players in our wvw only guild and a couple more less active ones but I have seen only 1 guildy (once) since HoT got released
2. -
3. None, don’t have HoT
4. -
5. We used +5 a lot and now HoT has made it so we can never get it again.
6. Make basic upgrades like +5 available again to ppl without HoT and make sure everybody (including small guilds) can obtain them easily through playing wvw.

HoT took away stuff that we had and made sure we cannot get it back. So should we get HoT just to get back to where we were before? (And even then it will still be almost impossible to get the upgrades with a small guild.) It feels like a scam.

1: 430, probably 400 are active participants in WvW. Either with us or other guilds.

2: I do not feel that any of them are truly essential. They are, however, very useful and the +5 supply will be greatly beneficial

3: We have so far earned 20 upgrades, including war room restorations. We have the first five auras, all four claiming, and a number of scribing upgrades. We maintain being on track for +5 next week. I honestly haven’t kept track of how much it’s cost.

4: We have been taking donations from players and so far our crew has been very generous. For the most part it’s been a fairly amazing group effort. I think having spread out our requirements over so many people it’s softened the burden. I’ve personally given up a lot of time from both WvW and PvE in order to organize the whole thing. (there is a running joke about being trapped in the mine with an abacus)

5: I would say that the actual play style in WvW hasn’t changed much. We do enjoy the new toys that we can play with and I don’t think that we’d ever have so militantly guarded a camp before the introduction of Dune Rollers.

6: I think that the system should be tied to rewards and drops from WvW. I do not mind the grind or even the quantity, but I think we should be able to get these materials in reasonable quantity from WvW. With various mats being required for the production of tactics and improvements in such quantity that we can’t be reasonably capable of getting them from the WvW playstyle, we’re being forced into PvE in order to supply our WvW playing, and that is a violation of the core guiding principles of GW2.

Our guild is fifteen players, ten active wvw players.

Our guild level is 26. We have four auras unlocked, the fifth is the next upgrade planned.

We used to raid seven days a week. We are now down to four or less since we need to farm materials and gold.

Quite frankly, if we didn’t have a lot of us log in every day and play the game for several hours, I don’t see +5 as feasible. It may not be anyway. We will hit a materials brick wall soon and the members are losing interest in wvw and gw2.

Tactics are a non starter for us. I just can’t justify the costs. It doesn’t matter a lot during late NA in our tier.(5) What happens in our timezone has such little impact on whether we win the match, it is a complete exercise in futility.

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

About 30 people, but it’s only the main guild for about 10, most members have their main focus on WvW, but also do PvE/PvP when they feel like.
90% if not more of the money and materials for the GH upgrade comes from two people, with 3-5 others donating a bit here and there.

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

Not essential, but very useful. +5 is really nice to have, but gets less important the bigger the blob is.

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

+5 Supply will be available around the 3rd of January, so less than 1 month from now. Currently we got 5 of the auras.
Considering the small size of our guild we’re doing an amazing job, especially compared to bigger guilds.

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

Some members felt forced to start silver wastes just to get those annoying shovels (Terrible design to require them without makeing them tradeable). I’m forced to harvest flax every day and I’m pretty much restricted to the Maguuma reward track in pvp to get coarsed sand. It’s annoying.
But I still play WvW whenever I feel like and don’t abstain from it just to farm PvE. Cba to do this.

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

I like the new one more, even if the costs are high.
Haven’t felt that much of an impact so far, maybe this could happen when more guilds got auras and especially tactics availabe.

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

Not require any materials that are not tradeable and force players to play certain PvE maps.

ArchonWing.9480:

Hello all,

The point of the thread is to gather up some experiences over the progress of Guild Upgrades, especially in World vs World. So please answer these questions if you will. Please only answer if you are part of a Guild that participates in World vs World.

Personally, I have not been able to really see any of the upgrades to be used extensively, nor do I even understand how any of this works, so I am wondering how it is turning out.

As always with these “serious” threads, please keep the rambling and complaints to a minimum if it’s not directly related to the topic. Keep everything to the point as much as possible.

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

1. How many people are in my guild – it’s a PvX guild so we have players from different servers.

- About 15-20 actively playing.
- About 4-5 participate in WvW for different servers.

2 Do I find the auras from guild claiming essential?

- Not really, no.

3. How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

- I recently spent 260g to upgrade ‘camp claiming’, ‘tower claiming’ and last ‘turtle banner’
- We’re nowhere near getting ‘+5 supply’ and right now it doesn’t feel like it’s within reach for us;
the material for the guild upgrade itself is alot and then we have understood that for many tactics you need to put out alot more to keep using them.

4. How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

- We try to get everyone in the guild to contribute with materials but, since My Guild is not a WvW I’m the only one who’s been getting materials for this.
- I spend anything between 1-2 hours total of gathering when I can/feel like it. And thats for the ‘turtle banner’ alone; so they won’t run out of stock.
Yes I would love to be able to WvW and still be able to get the tactics and other upgrades.

5. How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

- I don’t have any personal guild experiences here. However, I like the way the new system works, but, it seems that it’s so increadibly expensive to reach anything for players to be able to give feedback.
I haven’t really seen any of the upgrades yet. They take so much time to acheave.

6. If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

- I’d either reduce the material cost for Wvw upgrades, since the amount of resources obtained in WvW is very limited.

Or.. make the WvW upgrades require WvW specific material, badges etc.

Usually we field 5-15 when we do drop into wvw.
The costs seem a bit steep compared to the loot.

Most of the auras seem overpriced anyway.
Claiming is the same issues but much worse. Good sink is vastly higher than what one earns in wvw. And this was core functionality before.

Such steep barrier to +5 supply makes it much harder for us to achieve anything.

ArchonWing.9480:

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

We have ~15 active members. It’s about the same as before HoT. Our tag is literally WvW so, as you can imagine, they all participate in WvW.

We’re up to Aura 7: Toughness right now. I don’t think I’d call them essential but they are helpful. Given the wide range that they apply over, it’s hard to complain.

Our guild is over lvl 30 and has most WvW upgrades unlocked for that level. I’m our main scribe and am a bit behind on paper farming due to the ludicrous amounts of wood needed. My guildmates have spent, collectively, thousands of gold. I’ve spent hundreds and have dedicated hours to farming. I think it could have been cheaper if more people in the guild were familiar with PvE and knew how to farm things instead of just buying them on TP.

We’ve spent a whole lot of time in PvE. Some folks spam Silverwastes for shovels and sand, others farm flax, etc. Personally, I farm both flax node farms on 5 characters daily. I mine the rich quartz formation in DryTop daily. Then, I do soft wood farming runs on 3 maps then switch characters and do it again.

I haven’t felt a huge change. The buffs were not noticeable before and we rarely ran them. We’re missing +5, but that just means we’re more likely to have to resup than before. Often, pre-HoT, I’d be knocking down walls by myself and resupping 3-4 times to get anything built…so it doesn’t really bother me. We’ve all learned/adjusted to the new maps and run there almost nightly.

I don’t think the material costs are too crazy, honestly. 10 people working 2 hours a day could easily keep pace with Aetherium gains. Doesn’t even have to be the same 10 people every day. However, I’d change the amount of Flax Fibers needed per upgrade. It, in the long run, will be the biggest reason people are pulled out of WvW to PvE for upgrades.

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

23, everyone does WvW since we are WvW guild.

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

Not really.
I dont mind them either but they have not changed anything.

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

The system is so confusing I dont even know what are World vs World upgrades you asking about. We have Objective Aura 6 and can claim Keeps. Guild is level 29. I have no idea how far we are from +5 since I still don’t understand how the upgrades system works.

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

Members have been doing specific PvE maps every day to gather materials, including flax, shovels, ley line sparks, crystals, sand and countless other items.

I am not even 1 step closer to getting any new shinies like ascended backs or legendary items because everything I get goes to guild upgrades so I have not been able to gain any gold either.

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

In the pre-HoT system we had everything unlocked. Yes, of course I would prefer NOT wasting my time and gold to get those upgrades back.

We still raid about same amount as before. But first – there is much less enemies, the enemies we see are usually big boring blobs and not guild groups. Second – our members and enemies too spend much less time in WvW during off hours (for 2 reasons, you really HAVE to do PvE maps and auto-upgrades in WvW).

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

Everything. I hate it.

-Our guild is a 200 man guild. About half of them partake in wvw weekly.

-Auras aren’t essential. I do like that they’re a lot easier to use nowadays instead of queueing them up.

-We’re not even bothering for many WvW upgrades because of how stupidly expensive they are. We can claim keeps, and have 4 aura. Not bothering on scribing because 20g-100g for a 5 minute or less item isn’t really the type of item that seems worth it. +5 is achieveable.. for a guild of our level and because we have PvErs. I dont expect many small fight guilds to have it anytime soon.

-Hours upon kittening hours in tangled depths for ley line sparks to upgrade mine. We’ve got a few awesome people that can chip in 100g worth of mats here and there, and that totally helps. Otherwise.. raffles for gold, then buy the items with the raffle gold. All the time farming this has been out of WvW, but that’s okay because the state of WvW right now is really kittening dead. Like really dead… so the only thing left to do is PvE.

-Overall, i like guild hall upgrades. I hate that wvw requires so much of it though. I’d rather go back to pre-hot with the ability to have guilds do their own upgrades easily. Mats cost too much.

-Less Mats. That’s all.

One of the biggest problems I see with guild upgrades is that even if they are all fine – you need to do all of this every time your guild disbands.
We know how often WvW guilds disband, reform, transform or whatever. It’s not even about the money. It’s about the time you need to, in theory, develop your full tactical potential again, and the fact that you are forced to do PvE.

I do like that guilds should play a bigger role in WvW but once again they violated the most important rule in a PvP gamemode: everyone should be equal.
And guild hall upgrade grinding is pretty much exactly the WvW equivalent of the item progression they always publicly despised.

It’s ok to have a long term goal, but it shouldn’t decide a fight wether you are a 20man guild that can barely raid twice a week or a 250man guild that farms silverwastes all day long and easily invest thousands of gold in the guildhall.

Why not go for the cosmetical stuff here aswell? Let us choose which race our guards should be (E.g Quaggan just to name the most obvious one), let us choose their armor/weapon skins, maybe let us design our own banners waving high on the keep, perhaps even different wall/gate textures (e.g. charr, norn, ogre, orrian, skritt, hylek style; whatever exists in this game) and fitting cannon/mortar skins to choose. So that in the end you can truly say “this is our keep”

1. 5 on 2 diff servers. purely pvd and pvo(player versus ore)/we stack and empower before we mine.

2. Haven’t seen them used.

3. full before hot. Now 0 maybe? Not sure if anyone bothered. Too much pve.

4. Never seen any shovels.

5. It was sort of used. After HOT, not so much.

6. Give favor per kill in wvw. thats it.

1. How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

-250, WvW focussed guild, around 50 are very active.

2. Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

No, don’t really notice them. +5 will be most important when we get it.

3. How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

I think we’re around level 30, not really close to +5 from what I know because I think we’ve prioritised other things.

4. How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

We have guild events like a guild SW run and members do solo farming then donate mats. I’ve spent hours in PvE farming mats that I donate to the guild. Hours I would rather have spent in WvW. I detest the PvE focus to obtaining WvW upgrades.

5. How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

We have to spend significantly more time in PvE than WvW, we had all guild upgrades pre HOT that we lost and all members are extremely angry about that and having to re-earn them via such a grindy PvE way. Vastly prefer pre HOT.

6. If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

WvW Upgrades should be earned via WvW activities whether its gathering or whatnot. Pre HOT upgrades should have carried through to new system.

1. 6-8 rl friends. pre-hot = active wvw roaming with occasional pve content. With the announcement of HoT and the claims of encouraging small scale roaming parties we had hoped to increase our activity. Alas 4 members quit completely without purchasing HoT, 3 of us remain but are no longer able to wvw with the state that it’s in.

2. The +5 supply was the only thing that felt essential for such small roaming groups.

3. Alas the guild pretty much fell apart. But as a small ~10 man guild we did not find the upgrades reasonably obtainable.

4. With differing lifestyles amongst the guild members time management was always tricky, so any time we could all play together was precious. The need to grind pve content, events, flax farming etc to advance the guild just meant very lil actual time to play the content we enjoyed. As a guild leader i was also loathe to demand players sacrifice their own personal rewards, ascended progress and often time spent doing content they didn’t enjoy, just so they could enjoy a few benefits.

5. Well the new system has had a rather negative impact obviously. Prior to this rewards and guild progress were a byproduct of working together and having fun. I could manage the guild easily without unreasonable demands meaning what time we did have could be maximised playing the content we enjoyed the most.

6. Personally if i could change anything it would be that wvw upgrades were obtainable via just wvw if desired. Also it would be nice if guild upgrades scaled depending on the members, even if they had just a few set options 1-25, 26-50, 50+ etc with adequate warning stating that you couldn’t increase the guild size once committing for those small guilds of close friends/family who never had any intention of getting any bigger anyways. That was always the great thing about Guild Wars 2, being able to belong to multiple guilds that catered to varying content etc. Now i struggle to contribute to my own guild hall never mind belonging and donating to multiple ones.

ArchonWing.9480:

How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

About 25, we are a WvW guild but players do play PvE and PvP on their own. We also play some PvP as a guild from time to time.

Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

How could I live without MF? Seriously, no one is essential, nice addition but nothing more. (Except +5, of course)

How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

Level 31, we will be able to claim SM this friday, +5 will be our own Christmas present.

We spent quite a lot, about 4000g (considering that we had everything unlocked before expansion). It is achievable, but for less than 10 members is just too much, even with 20 is a pain.

How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

We had a few members that had a lot of mats in their banks, so with help from everyone we were able to overcome specific farm activities.

Members do daily flax farm though. I pretty much donated all my income since expansion to the guild.

How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

We play less WvW, but I guess it’s not because of the guild stuff but more because playing in a border has become a painful experience (and we mostly roam/ run havoc groups in enemy BL).

I like the new system that gates claiming rights (no more silly guild leaving their claim on garrison) and I would really love to play a bit with tactics & improvements, if their cost would be accessible.

I also love the claim UI.

They improved a lot of things. They just placed a huge paywall to compensate.

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

+5 must be accessible to small guild as well as big ones. A little effort is okay, a 5000g farm is not.

Scribe also needs a serious look at. Leveling scribe is even more painful and we need that for schematics. Now we are not using them and I don’t see them becoming of common use (pity) without a rework. Which won’t happen anytime soon because game economy. Yay.

Hello i will give out info on my guild on crystal desert borderland

• So we have about 15-25 active members of the guild with others randomly popping in. 10 or so use to WvW

• We dont do any of this ( very rarely did we do things on the home borderland)

• We have spent 1-2 upgrades on WvW. It is unfair to the rest of the guild to get WvW upgrades over the other stuff. We got the xp,karma,mf bonuses and nearly fully upgraded the PvP room. We are a small guild but our guild hall is at 25 atm and are waiting for atherium for the next upgrades.

• We have lost all the people who WvW. 6-7 of them have not logged in for 3-4 weeks. These were players who have over 1200 WvW levels and when these changes were put in place they did not find them fun. We upgraded the guild hall PvP area especially for them since they could goof around in there but without those upgrades they got bored and havent been around since.

To the 2nd part of this question, everyone wanted something new. We all paid $100 for a expansion and we all wanted new things for each of the areas. Not my words but the WvW members felt this was a money grab by anet. GW2 being so great when it was first released. We kind of expected something fresh and inventive so this was not as expected.

• This is not my place to make decisions. Its up to the people who make the game to change the game for the better. Many people here will have ideas but if it isnt doesnt correctly or in there vision we will once again be having this same problem.

As a guild we have not done any WvW activities for over 2 weeks now, where before we used to be there for reset night and 1 other night a week not including the new guild missions for how short that lasted.

Edit- Just a side comment about upgrading guilds halls. I find it odd that everything was PvE based. WvW upgrades needed farming PvE. PvP upgrades needed PvE. Not a little but a ton of stuff not for the upgrade which has made no sense to me aswell as the slow progression to the new class spec profession in WvW and none in PvP. Alot of what would make a guild hall great for a guild coming together wasnt there at all. It feels like grinding PvE because it is.

(1) Used to be about 5-15 active in wvw every day, these days 3-6 I guess.

(2) Not really, we have a few with MF, XP, move speed etc. Mostly stopped claiming stuff.

(3) Don’t really know, I took a look over the GH upgrades/requirements/costs and went "No kittening way!" and ignored it. Others in guild are working on it, and at level 22 I think. We’re a far way from level 37 for the +5, and we’re horrible at farming so it’s going to take ages.

(4) In general my guild mates have been in other areas of the game to farm materials and things we need, and thus spending less time in WvW. Find my guildies more often in SilveWastes than in WvW. Specific, I spent 30 minutes in SW trying to help guild farm shovels, but I fell asleep.

(5) Both and, I like parts of both systems myself. I especially like that the +5 will be a permanent upgrade, no need to stack a bunch of extras all the time. And it is nice to have the guild hall to meet up and such. I just think the order of upgrades are completely nuts, and the costs are crazy. It has impacted my guild specifically by making about half the players just ignore it an go do other stuff, and the other half grinds instead of playing actively wvw.

(6) Just one?! Ok, Change the humongous costs of mats and other items in the game away from mats and items that are already desired for everything else, and into items that are not wanted, not popular. So these items finally have a use, and we don’t have to cripple ourselves in every other meaningful way just to upgrade the GH.

Example, Most of the mats required for crafting ascended mats are needed for GH in huge quantities. Where you could make use of other things that is less desired or have no clear usage right now. I vote for "Spikes" for WvW upgrades.

1. Our guild roster is 27 people at the moment, all tho half are in-active due to the WvW changes. We are solely WvW guild

2. All of them give a nice little buff but the +5 is essential for our guild at least.

3. We have unlocked Tower claiming and are working on World Experience enchantment. So we are quite far from getting the +5. At this moment I don’t think it is achievable. We are currently lvl15. Most of this has come from our pockets as we aren’t hoarders so using kitten ton of gold was needed.

4. We have been going out of our way and done PvE on the off hours to get materials to ease the gold sink. I would have rather been playing WvW if it would have given me all the stuff needed. 5 hours of getting shovels doesn’t even come near they feel like the biggest obstacle at the moment.

5. We would definitely prefer the pre-HoT system where you would contribute to your guild by just playing the game and not having the need to do something you don’t enjoy.

6. One thing I would change is making the amount of needed materials scale based on guild roster. To avoid exploits you could track the roster for example two weeks so massive guilds don’t kick everyone to get cheaper cost. To balance it with the massive guilds with lots of people not playing the game you could track the active amount of people along the roster size.

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?
  - 500 on a given day +/- 5 , usually about 80-90 online at a given time. Most people WvW , some almost exclusively.

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?
  +5 Supply will be the most important
  - Objective Aura 8: Supply Capacity +5 … nobody has this so far this will be a game changer
  Yes , +100 Power and vitality replaces guard stacks to an extent. Magic find makes the drops less horrific a bit.
  - Objective Aura 4: Power +100
  - Objective Aura 7: Vitality +100

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting + 5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?
  - +5 supply is only achievable for the largest guilds ( 150 + ) , it’s ~ 7000g as per someone who did the math on reddit and a few other guilds’ leaders I have discussed this with.
  - Lvl 32 guild with Sabotage Depot , SMC claim, etc

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.
  - We have ~500 people , some people prefer to PvE more than WvW. We ask for donations from players. The first 2 weeks of WvW were incredibly dead .
• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?
  - The new system has made small guilds cry murder, rightfully so. The new system has made one of the guild leaders spend thousands on gold on random garbage for scribing.

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?
  - Make WvW upgrades separate such that you don’t need to get a keg station and other non-WvW stuff. You can start a war planning station in the middle of the desert with a tent. You don’t need a whole furniture collection , a market, arena, resource nodes (workshop), and a brewery.

I’ve worked out the availability of the +5 Supply upgrade myself in theory.

I began with the [Guild Hall Upgrade Calculator tool](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3r3lq3/guild_hall_upgrade_calculator_v10/) and fixed one minor mistake in it (price of Bottle of Elonian Wine is too low).

After that, I worked out two upgrade paths to achieve the necessary constraints:

1. Guild Level 37
2. Aura 8 (Supply)
3. Auras 1-7, which are required according to the War Room Proprietor interface, wiki, and spreadsheet.
4. Claiming: Stonemist Castle, required for Aura 7
5. Aetherium Capacity 5 (Required for Claiming: Stonemist Castle)

From this basis, I worked out two sets of guild upgrades. One that takes the cheapest/fewest possible upgrades and never upgrades Mining Rate (mining rate upgrades are expensive).

The second also rushes up Mining Rate to Rate 4.

The cells at the bottom of my spreadsheets (row 170) total up the Aetherium cost and calculate the time requirement for base rate (every 60 seconds) and — relevant for the route that features rate upgrades — also Rate 4 (every 25 seconds).

Cheap and slow upgrade set (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mugfDr0KhsGnV1BUJloXsjAvxqq_6zwvCViT4y3vk3s/edit?usp=sharing) – 5197g 46s 27c and 161 days at base rate.

Expensive and fast upgrade set (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EE0SSa5xoefpKyYhWohu0XVogBe5lHAiCjaMTHUroJE/edit?usp=sharing) — 7185g 05s 44c and 72 days at Rate 4.

I also know that my fast route isn’t the absolutely fastest possible. If I’d optimized for the best rate of Guild XP to Aetherium then the fastest possible time would be closer, possibly down to 55 or 60 days of mining time, but the gold cost would be higher.

Here are my specific replies:

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

I believe our roster is about 180 people. Our WvW nights (3 per week) typically get 10-15 participants.

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

The +5 supply aura is absolutely crucial for our style of play.

Our players typically have supply mastery, so if we have 10 players we can carry 150 supply as a group. That’s enough to build 3 superior rams or 3 regular catapults. It is not enough to assault a keep with a reasonable chance of success.

We have worked around it so far by running supply from camps, but that increases risk to our group and saps our momentum.

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

I think we have gotten through tower claiming and a few other WvW upgrades. Our guild level is 32 or 33 right now. It feels like we are far from getting +5 supply, as it still requires a long series of upgrades between where we are and that +5 aura.

We have definitely spent thousands of gold in resources, mostly in upgrades to our tavern, arena, and mine.

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

We replaced one of our weekly guild event nights which was often World vs World play with a Silverwastes/Dry Top farming night for sand and shovels. This has brought lower turnout and is the opposite of fun. Typically we have 5-6 people turn up for this and grind materials for 2 hours once per week for the first month or so of HoT. Our guild leaders may have given up on this recently, I haven’t bothered to show up to most of them.

I have personally donated hundreds of gold worth of materials to guild upgrades, despite it detracting from personal goals with legendary weapons and ascended armor.

Talk of guild upgrade management occupies a moderate amount of time and attention in guild chat and on Teamspeak.

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

The pre-HoT system was vastly superior. I easily spent 3 times as much time in WvW before HoT.

I checked warscore first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and almost always responded to whispered call-outs from commanders. I would log on before work to re-capture some camps, tag siege, and queue upgrades on our structures or to assassinate some enemy yaks or even sneak-build a treb in SW camp to harass bay walls.

Since HoT, I couldn’t even tell you what color our team is for the week, have no idea if we are winning or losing for the week, and don’t know or care how our Glicko ranking has evolved.

It’s a night and day difference. I can’t remember how or why I used to enjoy it so much.

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

It’s shockingly expensive and most of it can’t be achieved in WvW.

Cut the costs of getting a +5 aura and claiming a camp to a maximum of 200g. Just sell all WvW upgrades from the Guild Initiative office NPC for gold only. They should not depend on a Tavern, War Room, Workshop, and claiming a Hall.

Small WvW guilds should be able to contribute and participate and capture walled objectives.

1) this is from two guilds, WvW guild ( has about 167 people and only about 50 really do any WvW). PvE guild (has 77 people and only 4 WvW, with 1 of them not WvW for the last 2 months or more).

2) NO! Was like the biggest waste of time in the whole guild upgrade crap.

3) WvW guild at Level 31, and has like 6 or so different things, we don’t actually use them.

4) Obtaining them by spamming PvE areas, and spamming PvP matches for PvP pots… As for WvW specific, we don’t even hardly use the synthesizers, so we almost always just roam around maps farming in PvE or buy from trade broker.

5) Well, first, was in a small guild of like 5 or 10 people max, we did WvW but once the new Guild system came out we ditched our guild setting it up as a private guild for guild bank only. We went on to join a larger guild and under the new guild system, even it is like all play PvE and PvP, no play WvW except for guild missions in WvW only. Which sucks.

Pre-HoT we had fun claiming objectives getting +5 easily and moving our little roaming guild group to towers and keeps and taking them or at least being a good nuisance. Now, Post-HoT its like zerg vs zerg, not many roamers… and then most go PvE to get mats for guild upgrades YAWNS! Many in one guild asked, why even play WvW anymore? I don’t have an answer except its the only game mode I enjoy in all of GW2.

6) Remove the new guild system in its entirety… Okays, so that’s not just one thing… okays make it friendlier for small guilds to do WvW stuff. I mean seriously. A small havoc group should be able to do +5 supply, get anything useful from guild auras… etc. And not be bound to play with larger guilds period.

• How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World?

>> An active core of around 12 in a PvX orientated guild (and about 4 times inactive, or non regular representing members), Active WvW players are down to about 4 since HoT.

• Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential?

>> Not essential for basic game play, but at least something you have to pay for only once. +Attribute or +5 Supply seem to be out of reach for us.

• How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent?

>> We currently have Camp Claiming and Aura 1 unlocked; The “daylight robbery upgrades” + charges from Scribing we will not get, unless Anet reduces the “charges” to something very cheap (from its insane status now) or to a time based thing (see below); We will never unlock the +5 Supply, we could easily use before HoT.

• How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc.

>> WvW gameplay does provide nothing for GH upgrades; Badges we still have from before HoT, Flax comes once or twice from the pitiful harvesting nodes in the structures per day and we have a total of 6 Heavy Supply bags in the treasury now (an item Anet had to re-introduce, because it slipped through QA – like Vet slayer and ruin capper dailies); 99% of guild upgrades are provided by more or less grindy PvE play and taking stuff out of hoards of players (including gold for tons of Runes of Holding). I have taken charge of guild upgrade management and “begging” for donations. It eats up most of my in-game time (mostly PvE) and has reduced my WvW time to easy dailies for a few weeks now.

• How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system?

>> Seeing we need to research Claiming (for free once) and recharge Tactics and Improvements with insane costs is dumb (just compare the cost of a Supply Drop to just waiting …) As a small guild we feel robbed of our former possibilities.
The new (unlock) system is OK (in the long run), even the crazy unlocks in the War Room are tolerable to an extend, but recharge costs have to go completely and be replaced either with a timer or a timed resource that has to work like the guild mine Aetherium gain (which you can speed up to be 10% or 20% faster). Stop making us grind mats to enrich the WvW gameplay ! In terms of “new system / auto upgrade” experiences, dolly escorts are pretty pointless and the automatic WP in Fire and Air Keep have changed a lot. I think people need to treat home BL more like EB, where you should hold your corner (in all 4 maps now).

• If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be?

>> see last paragraph + re-work Scribing costs completely. Guild decorations are as insane as WvW upgrades. Precursor crafting looks almost good to what we have now in Scribing.

The WvW upgrades are well out of our reach. We’re shooting for the Level 2 Arena and probably calling it quits on upgrades thereafter.

How many people are in your guild, and how many of them participate in World vs World? 239 total with 200 active, 150+ are WvW players (as we are a WvW guild)

Do you find any of the Auras from claiming essential? I find the +5 aura is essential because it enables smaller groups (under 25) to make a single supply run rather than tag-teaming back and forth between supply camps/objectives that group is attempting to take.

How many World vs World upgrades has your guild earned, what level are they, and how close are they to getting +5 Supply, in particular? Do you feel it is achievable? How much have they spent? We only achieved War Room Restoration 2 a few weeks ago, so we have not made it too far. It seems that our main time gate on this is the aetherium and desire for other guild upgrades that would benefit us in the immediate rather than a recipe unlock which then requries the single scribe in our guild (me) to then crowdfund the recipe’s required materials from the guild who just contributed to the recipe unlock itself. From a guild scribe’s perspective, it feels like I am constantly begging my guildies for materials.

How has your guild been obtaining the upgrades? Do you feel that this has taken time away that you would have rather been playing World vs World? Please be specific, such as “I spent 5 hours getting shovels”, etc. We have eliminated 1 out of the 4 nights we used to run in WvW as an organized group. That should say it all. 25% less time in WvW as an organized group as well as 100% less time in WvW as individuals/roamers due to sandbagging in EBG and lack of players on the other maps to fight when roaming.

How has the new system impacted you and your guild’s playing experience in World vs World? Would you prefer the new system or the pre-HoT system? Continuing my response to the previous question, the new upgrade system for both the guild-claimed upgrades and objective upgrades/defense system as well as the sheer size and layout of the new borderland maps have all been deterrents for our guild to participate in WvW during organized event times as well as off-hours.

First, the upgrading system a.k.a. “objective auras” have been literally unobtainable since the expansion pack dropped. All the time and effort our guild put in to raising our IP so we could expedite guild upgrades that we have had access too for the 3 years previous was literally thrown away and there was no recognition that we had those previous upgrades, and thus were not unlocked. That was unacceptable from a WvW player’s perspective—especially in a small/medium-sized guild such as ours.

Second, the upgrade system on objectives. Regardless of the whether yaks make it into an objective, that objective will upgrade. This disincentivises the entire WvW population who enjoyed objective defense to play the entire game mode. Their only option now is to join the zerg or try to enjoy a different style of play from that which they have enjoyed without interruption for nearly 3 years. The complete disregard for the havoc/defense community in WvW is plain as day. The complete disregard for all guilds under 25 people is also apparent. So, should these guilds which have been together for nearly 3 years, have grown and developed a community together, suddenly be forced to join a larger guild and participate in a style of play in a game mode (which they previously had no issues participating in for—again—3 years)?

Lastly, it takes about 5 minutes to run from your spawn on your home borderland to defend either the air (east) or fire (west) keeps. Additionally, the logic of enemy waypoints automatically added to my server’s home borderland is lost on me. Waypoints should be upgraded into objectives rather than automatically added. The way in which objectives upgrade as well as their sheer size and design have made the new borderland maps more eye candy than sustenance.

If you could change one thing about the Guild upgrade system, what would it be? Reduce cost of upgrades or eliminate the need for a scribe completely in the case of WvW auras. They require guild members to devote a significant amount of time to PvE game modes which is not consistent with the ‘play the way you would like to’ mentality. WvW players should not be forced to farm 100+ seaweed for a single-use item (as is the case with assault rollers).

For what it’s worth, I’ve been on Yak’s Bend since the game came out, have 10,005 hours of game play, have enjoyed countless hours of WvW, PvE, and sPvP content and I can soundly say that WvW is the game mode that has kept me playing this long. That, and the fact I have been able to be a part of a growing community of friends and colleagues for the last three years. Additionally, I have been very active in my server’s WvW community and am also a commander and co-leader for my guild. I hope this lends some credibility to what I have to say, as I do have extensive experience. I also hope our overall WvW community’s posts in this thread and others are heard and heeded by those who can make a difference in this.