Guild Wars 2

I love megaservers, but hate the effects of them. So much that I think our guild is better off without them unless some changes are made.

Adding my persepective on guilds and community as guild leader:

1. Guild missions. Trying to do even a simple Bounty is ridiculous – there’s way too much time wasted during an active Bounty trying to get into each other’s maps. Timers should be adjusted to accomodate this, if not fix the megaservers. To be honest, this is the LEAST of my worries – they are not integral to how our guild is run. The next two topics are.

2. Allow all guild members from any server to share in the upgrades and influence pool. Many guilds like ours only recruit from the same server (equal benefit, no worrying about member activity per server, max. resource pool utilisation, etc.). The community we have to continually build, the upgrades we constantly run – it’s collapsing and we can’t do much about it. Which brings me to my next point…

3. Recruiting for WvW is now way more difficult, because we can’t really find those players amidst masses of other people from servers. Our WvW presence is difficult to maintain – and one could even say megaservers will affect the performance of servers with fewer large WvW-dedicated guilds. The outcome of the Spring Tournament – I don’t know if it can even be fair anymore. One possible solution could be to change how server transfers work – maybe a player could swap to a new guild’s server for free but then isn’t allowed to join other guilds for a month. Or lower the fee. Or new players are not considered server-bound until they join a guild/make a guild for the first time but float around in limbo. SOMETHING. Server selection isn’t based on the popularity of associated activity (e.g. RPing) anymore.

If megaservers are making our servers redundant in a few aspects, the rest of the aspects should be made redundant as well. Change the concept of a ‘world’. A handful of mechanisms for handling player communities need to change along with the megaservers implementation. The very name of this game draws attention to the community aspect, the guild – one would think that mechanisms supporting guild communities would take priority. Currently, they do not.

- Tabs

It’s things like that that really highlight the charm GW1 had over other games. Our alliance was a particularly culturally -diverse one that merged into our guild from GW1, and because of the GW2 is structured has since been disintegrating. Not that we mind being tied down to a server, but a bunch of our players have patiently been waiting for guesting across EU/NA worlds so we could play together – expecting the similar region access as GW1 (through guesting this time), particularly because most of them are GW1 players.

I mean, things like this exercept from their Facebook page really paves the way for disappointment:
‘And don’t worry — we want you to play with your friends wherever you are. This policy only affects where you can login from — not which worlds you can access. People from NA will be able to play with people from EU at launch…’

Not that it’s wrong to do handle it this way, many games do – I just wish it was made clearer that players in NA/EU would never have been able to interact with one another in the first place. Region-locking should have been made clear back then, or even partially implemented as a restriction from moving between NA and EU servers. If a day limit between transfers, so could a server selection list.

I wondered if anyone else feels that the Deep Cave and Treasure Trove should have separate desposit/withdraw options for the guild ranks. That way you can have:

- a central area that all members can withdraw and deposit to
- a central area everyone can deposit to but only certain members withdraw from
- and a central area that has both limited desposit and withdrawal privileges

Great list, by the way.

Bug: Guild registrar won’t upgrade the guild license past 100. We qualify for it, it congratulates us and says that we’ve been upgraded, but we’ve not been upgraded and the money is still there. We’ve tried with multiple players in-guild to no avail. The bug was not here when we set up the guild during Headstart, but now it is.

A bit disconcerting when we’ve 20+ members still waiting on the same server to join us.

Guild: The Dragonfly Effect [Phi]
Server: Dragonbrand