Guild Wars 2

Hello devs and fellow players,

While I am generally excited about this update, I tend to feel very negative when an update makes guild operations more difficult. As a leader of Goonies [Goon] on Fort Aspenwood, and as I’m sure is true for most guild leaders, guild management is my top priority when it comes to gameplay. So that is why this system brings me concern. With all of the great stuff it brings as far as larger populations on maps and better map placement in world events (which is a huge boon for guilds trying to play these events together), it falls short with a new burden to guild recruiting.

This line of the update report is what I would like to bring to light: “For players in guilds, the world your account uses as its home world is the same world that will receive your guild influence. That system has not changed (for now).”

Take into consideration how the guild system currently works: player represents guild X, Guild X is located on a server (we’ll choose Fort Aspenwood for this example), when Guild X activates a guild wide boon only guild members on Fort Aspenwood receive the boon, when the player who is representing Guild X earns influence it only goes to Guild X if said player is on Fort Aspenwood.

Now I’m sure that the player boundaries will be torn down, as far as you won’t have to guest to play with your friends. Which leaves this system to only affect members who’s home server is not the same as the guild they’re representing. So, now on the megaserver there will be players that are from multiple different servers. This leaves us with a recruiting dilemma, now that we’re not playing with a mostly homogeneous map of players from our own server. So when a guild member recruits another player, there will be the question of, what’s the new player’s home server. If you bring in a new member from another server, you create a relationship that is not beneficial to the guild or the member. The guild receives no influence and the member receives no boons.

This may not seem too difficult to most guilds, however some, like the Goonies, allow a decent part of their guild recruit. In the Goonies, we allow all but the lowest rank to recruit, which is ~350 members that can recruit. How do we make sure that they’re only recruiting members from our home server? How do we deal with these new recruits that are from a different home server?

I would suggest to lift the limits on guild membership, as far as influence and boons are concerned. Yes, it would cause some difficulty in regards to guilds that are WvW based. However, I would assume that they already do most of their recruiting in WvW or on the web, so this system already doesn’t affect them very much. If the goal is to make a more inclusive game, then allow PvE focused guilds to have a free reign across servers. Make it easy for guilds to include every interested person they meet.

Best,
Meltdown

This happened to Goonies [Goon] Fort Aspenwood as well, same course. Is this course bugged? Should I submit a support ticket?

I would really appreicate a Dev response or someone to direct me to a post where this has been addressed.

What if they had certain servers that allowed multiguild and others that didn’t. Currently the way guilds work is that only people on the current server can get guild benefits and give influence. I don’t see why that would hurt anyone and may be a good compromise?

@Electro, are there a lot of guilds like this? This is the first I’ve heard of that. Since any race/order can assist in the missions of the others I didn’t think this was as much of a problem. When the game first launched we did Personal Story runs with people from all race/orders. Is there a game feature we’re missing out on? I’m interested, because no one has never said, “Sorry Meltdown, I’m looking for a good Asuran Krew.”

Fred Fargone.3127:

Okuza.5210:

IMHO, GW2 is severely lacking in general social and leadership tools in the UI. This is a very flawed approach for designing something that is inherently as social as an MMO. Good leaders make the game fun for everyone around them. Anything you can do to make it easier to help other people have fun is a huge win for the entire community.

If I was leading a guild, I’d absolutely need to have statistics available to support partial representation; eg. percent representation, influence earned, etc.. Without that, I’d probably just say “100%” required to make pruning the roster easier.

I guess you want a damage meter for dungeons too, so you can kick people who don’t do max DPS for their chosen class?

I think he’s trying to take care of members that actually represent his guild by identifying the ones that don’t. It’s a problem in a large guild, if you have max members and they start to move away from the game/guild, you’ve got to replace them for the system to continue to work. Or you hurt the members you have and eventually lose them.

Thanks frost. Do you know if any other of the things on this forum have been openly discussed by the devs?

As far as I can tell they made the game, worked the inital bugs out of the guild system, then started making other stuff. It seems like they’ve never taken any time to go back and rework the system. That may be a false statement and if something was in the works, I wish they’d give us a hint as to what it is.

Bitoku Kishi.8346:

But it’s impossible for me to conclusively determine who due to the lack of this ability to see when they last logged in, and as a result I’m kind of paranoid to kick people out even if I don’t ever see them log in myself.

Exactly, I’ve lost members because I was afraid of doing that!

That’s a good possibly. I think a system like that would probably help a lot of guilds out.

Sinistrad.9584:

I was told in GW1 after 1 or 2 months of absence an leader would be lowered in rank and another player of the guild would be new leader. Automatically.
That would be enough to solve our problem.

I don’t think that was actually in GW1. I recall trying to kick someone and accidently promoting them to GL. They hadn’t been on for months, we had to wait until they logged in and read the guild message and returned the Leadership. Maybe Arena Net installed something later, I did send them a support ticket.

Aye.8392:

If you had alliances to work with and so didn’t have to worry about the roster cap, and you had no visible report of activity, the way it is now, would you still cull members for inactivity? If inactivity data weren’t a drag on your membership’s morale, and you didn’t have to worry about the maximum numbers allowed would you let members keep their guild spots after a month or two months or a year of inactivity? If not may I ask why not? Is it just habit to cull the roster?

While an alliance system would be nice. I’ve never seen one that would fix the current problem. Every alliance I’ve been a part of was just a group of soverign guilds that allowed players to talk with each other and share one resource. In GW1 it was faction. Even if that system was in place and I filled it with sub guilds of my own, I’d have no way of moving inactive members and I’d still have a roster of names of people who aren’t playing. In honesty, if I had unlimited space in my guild I’d leave people on forever. My goal is to have at least 50% of the guild on at peak times. In practicallity, I’ll probably never have 250 members on at once. It’ll always be more like 33%. I cannot see a system in which I can continue to bring in new members without losing old members. I want to give my guildies the best chance to find a group within the guild and also give them as many buffs as I can. An alliance system would only help with part of that. Also, if half of my guild hadn’t logged on for over a month and I couldn’t move them or refused to kick them, few new people would join or stay, because my guild looks dead.

I’ve been skimming through the forums the past few days and it seems these things have been said over and over. Have the devs responded to the guild problems at all?

How does this even affect you? This isn’t a game that a the resource has to spawn again after someone else uses it. It only disappears after you use it.

That’s a pretty expensive way to farm. I wouldn’t fault them; I would pity them.

Agreed

I also know for a fact that several of my players go to other guilds for PvP directly because of boons.

Aye.8392:

Culling isn’t good for anyone — if someone has been out of game for 3 weeks and they come back to no guild, who is really served? Not the player, not the guild leader, not the guild members who enjoyed their presence, it just isn’t a very nice thing to walk back into.

That would be for the guild to decide. I don’t think I’ve ever played an MMO where a large guild would let someone sit on the roster for a month without login. The problem that large guilds run in to is that you can have a large part of the guild stop playing within the same period of time. If you don’t have a system for removing player (normally players who aren’t contributing), then you’re guild structure is weakened until those members come back. The problem my guild is currently suffering. I also don’t think it’s too much to ask a member to send someone a heads up that they’re not gonna be on for awhile. I’ve never kicked someone who gave me prior notice.

Aye.8392:

If it should be that these suggestions are implemented, please make it so that only guild leaders or higher ranking officers can see them — if someone is able to admin the rank then they could see these stats, but otherwise they could not. There is no reason for general membership to be seeing that someone hasn’t signed on or repped the guild lately. It’s just something to breed discontent without any real significance or value.

I agree to this point. A large part of greif that a guild leader recieves is about how other players aren’t doing x.

Aye.8392:

My guild has LOTS of influence points — more than I can comfortably spend, even though I keep upgrades building all of the time. I don’t know how guilds with 500 people could possibly be hurting for influence unless the players don’t actually group up and do things together. An increase of influence would be superfluous for my guild unless there were some way to build more than 2 things at once. Building more than 2 things at once would be awesome, though.

We were running 6 boons 24/7, sometimes 7. In order to do that we had to rush quite a lot. 4 of the boons require 1250 influence per rush. Doing that to even 2 while also rushing the influence boons comes out to roughly 7500 a day, in rushing costs alone. Granted 2 of those will run for more than 24hrs. In the beginning we were steadly upgrading everything, then as membership dropped off we had to stop upgrading, we’ve got tier 4 on everything but Art of War (only tier 3). We stopped so we could maintain the boons. As membership dropped further we had to decrease the amount of boons we run constantly. Until we can repopulate our roster with people playing fequently, we’ll be stagnent where we are. I’m curious to see what boons you’re running and how fequently. Also, what all of your track tiers are. I cut off the part of your message about people moving for buffs. I’ve had people ask me during recruiting what buffs we ran. I also used to be able to use it to keep my members repping. I’m not saying its the majority, but there are definitly a lot of players that want them.

Aye.8392:

Notification of someone leaving the guild being shown in guild chat — that is horrific and does nothing but create drama. There is a list on the roster history screen where you can get that information if you want to see it -- coming across chat should never happen.

I’ve always thought that was a bad idea and I prefer the log. However, I would like to see (player) joined the guild. It’s always nice to be on a recruiting spree and see everyone say Welcome!

While I’m here, I’d like to mention Guild Halls as a game element that would help keep members. Its a status symbol, something that new members can look at and easily tell that a guild takes themselves seriously. I remember pooling resources for our guild hall in Guild Wars 1. As a small guild at the time, we had a real sense of accomplishment when we got all of the upgrades. I think the things mentioned above should be done first, but this is definitely content that a lot of people want.

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.

I agree with almost everything here! I think that the guild functions that were part of GW1 should at least be added. A lot of guilds are getting bloated by members who haven’t been on in ages. The biggest reason I found this thread was because I was searching for last online. I think a Dev needs to look into this. This is “Guild” Wars after all.