Guild Wars 2

Most of my community is working on some shiny or another (fractal back piece, a legendary). The content is the means to an end. Without rewards or objectives, what does any game have? Good gameplay is not sufficient to maintain player interest over the long haul.

When I speak of rewards, I don’t mean exclusively monetary. Satisfaction is important too. Fractals offer good monetary rewards, but we don’t do them (once we’ve finished the daily) because they are in no way satisfying. Many of my members are past the interesting epic experiences of exploring HoT and are on to long term objectives (making shinies, doing collections, leveling scribing), so the monetary reward is important to our continued enjoyment because it represents progress towards our goals, but there needs to be satisfaction too.

I don’t think I ever complained the new maps are hard. Sometimes they fail… that’s a fact. If you aren’t on one that organizes, it fails, not because it’s hard, but because people don’t care. As far as my guild leader’s preferences in how to play a mesmer, I don’t even think he finished unlocking chronomancer before realizing that he didn’t like the game anymore.

Linken.6345:

Why cant your guild do more then 9 fractals a day per person.
If you want to do stuff together the daily reward limit should be a limit for you guys at all.

The perceived reward for fractals drops off precipitously once the chance for ascended boxes disappears (read: you’ve done the daily). And as I said in the OP, there are a lot of fractals and mistlocks that we simply don’t enjoy. A couple reasons for that, they’re long for their rewards, they’re gimmicks that we no longer enjoy, they have historical loathing from a time when they were worse… beyond that, if we were trying to maximize our rewards, there is a best fractal to do, so it would very quickly become a grind on that one fractal.

We do want to do things together, but we don’t want to collectively grind on something that we don’t consider to be an efficient use of our time. One of my guild members who does fractals recently compared fractals to going to the dentist and opted for having her teeth drilled if there weren’t ascended goodies.

Vayne.8563:

And yet my guild is like your guild and we find things to do together. This is where guild leaders make a big difference I think. They have to set the tone, make the plan, encourage people to come along. The game can’t do that for you, you have to do that.

There were a few people in my guild who weren’t sold at all on hot maps, but I worked with them and showed them what’s what and now I see them in HoT maps quite frequently.

I have a guild event where I lead people around the new zones doing random stuff in an effort to help them get mastery points, mastery experience, and other random things done. We do achievements, metas, hero points, whatever people have an interest in. I am trying to help some of our more resistant members acclimate to the new zones (I’ve even managed to convince one of them that TD isn’t a horribly designed labyrinth, which was… a feat).

Every bone in my body wants to deny your assertion that I essentially suck at my job, but I know you’re right too. I do think the guild leaders need to try to include and motivate people, I just wish I had some better tools to work with.

Granrey.8920:

I hope it does not sound harsh but for what you guys like to do and the way you guys want to do it snd on the time you guys want.

You already finished the game.

I came to that conclusion a while ago. It’s why I’m scared for the future of my community. I’m not sure how many of my members stick around when they come to a similar conclusion. And unlike Vayne’s guild, we’re not large enough to easily replace lost regulars.

I think you misunderstand my point when analyzing meta events. I don’t criticize them because I think they’re things guilds should necessarily do together, but because they are PvE content and I didn’t want to leave things out, since we are a PvE guild. My point isn’t that my guild has to do things together, it’s that we want to do things together, but there isn’t much for us to do.

Pardon, this is a wall of text and I apparently suck at formatting on this forum.

I have recently (3 months ago) become the guild leader for a small casual guild after our leader stepped away from the game. He stepped away for a variety of reasons, but the most important is that the game itself has become stale. He had been doing the same dungeons and fractals since they were launched. He really only enjoyed one class (mesmer) which has had a tumultuous history and the build I understand he favored the most hadn’t been good in quite a while (shatter). He took a significant break from the game starting just before the HoT announcement and came back shortly after launch. Nothing had changed and he decided he was going to walk away for good (probably) and he stepped aside.

Since taking over the guild, I’ve not been an excellent leader, but it is hard in the face of some daunting challenges for our style of guild. We are a casual PvE gaming community. We don’t stick to the meta, we have a lot of people who aren’t top-tier (skill-wise) players (and that really is ok with us), so the raid so far released is probably going to be a significant challenge for us to finish (we still haven’t beaten Gorseval yet), if we ever do (which is fine, not all content is for all people). I anticipate future raids will be harder, not easier, so I suspect that we won’t be able to beat them either.

So what is a casual PvE guild supposed to do when the end game of our content style is essentially unreachable for us? Well, in the past, we ran dungeons and fractals casually. We collected skins, hunted achievements, shot the breeze, and enjoyed each others’ company. We still do some of those things, but as a leader, I notice that we’re losing members’ attention. As a multi-game community, it isn’t terrible for us (though I think it’s still bad because GW2 is our primary game and the only one we actively recruit in), because they still come into teamspeak when they’re playing another game, but I think it’s a very visceral representation of dissatisfaction with the game that I know several of them love (or loved) that we have almost as many members actively playing another game during scheduled GW2 guild events. It’s not a complaint against them, the content isn’t interesting to them, I totally get that. I think every one of our members has stepped away from the game at some point. I’ve veered off course though, I want to talk about why Heart of Thorns, as an expansion, is not a successful experience, from the perspective of my guild.

Simply put, my small casual PvE guild has nothing to do together.

Why don’t we do raids? We do, but our members are burning out on them. We can beat VG, but we’re struggling rather hard with Gorseval. At this point, our group numbers are such that mustering 10 people requires effort and organization. If one person gets called into work, that might mean we don’t get to raid that night. We don’t raid every night, we raid 2-3 nights per week and adding more raids isn’t going to be adding more content for us to actually play. We’ll still only be eating 2-3 nights on raiding and if the raids get progressively harder, as I suspect they will, we’ll never see them anyway.

Why don’t we do fractals? We do, but fractals, realistically, occupy 1 hour of 5 people’s time per night. In 1 hour, we have finished all the dailies (though I imagine people can do it faster). Not everybody in the guild is interested in fractals and the investment to get into them dissuades a chunk of our members. Many of the fractals or mistlocks are dreaded (not for difficulty, but for length, boredom, historical feelings about them, the ways in which they fight against the way the entire rest of the game is meant to be played), so we mostly stick to a “quick-3” run of each tier. If we only did master tier, we’d get even less out of them. Importantly here, fractal groups are not interchangeable or repeatable. Strictly speaking, we could repeat or do more in a tier, but there’s almost no value there. There is however, no dispute that there is no reason to change members mid-tier. This is important because this is different from how we did dungeons. If we were running dungeons, we could switch people in and out and lots of people could participate based on what they wanted.

Why don’t we do dungeons? The nerf to liquid rewards has been a strong enough disincentive for our guild to basically stop doing dungeons. I’m aware of the math that shows the nerf isn’t that bad (because much of the value is in salvaged gear, champ bags, tokens etc.), but that isn’t an argument that gets much traction with my members. Additionally, dungeons are so stale, so even if the reward is decent, the motivation is low. We used to run dungeons as our go to activity for an evening. We would frequently get 8-10 members in and out of the group over the course of several hours and sometimes even had two groups running. The true virtue of dungeons for our guild was that there were so many paths that were easy enough to be worth doing. Fractals might have decent rewards, but doing them feels horrible. It’s the same 2 fractals for 7 of our 9 fractals (unless somebody needs something) because the others aren’t just not fun, they’re unfun.

Why don’t we do map meta-events? This is complicated. There are a lot of reasons. Some of it is that our guild is small and insular. We don’t like the pressure to join squads and several of the maps put a lot of pressure to join squads (DS, TD in particular) for head counts and other logistical crap. These maps can fail and rewards are significantly reduced due to things it is hard for our guild members to control. This is incredibly discouraging for organizing our small guild into doing something. If we spend 60-90 minutes on a Dragon’s Stand map (for instance) and get squat out of it, that’s not a good evening. Additionally, the rigid structure of these maps means that we have to get in at the right time, or waste a lot of time on a map to wait for the right time. Sometimes it’s a challenge to even all get onto the same good map. Sometimes the map isn’t in the right stage when (rarely) people feel like doing it.

Some of it is that none of the rewards from these maps feel rewarding for the time invested. If you’ve got a specific goal, it’s nice to see the incremental progress, but it can also be really disheartening to realize that you just spent a fair chunk of time (depending on the map and costs of things you want) getting only one quarter or one third of one of several things you need. If I spend an hour getting one third of one sixth of one collection, I can expect to spend twelve to eighteen hours getting one skin, which may not even be the skin you wanted, but is just one more piece of the thing you did want. And ultimately, none of the maps really reward a successful small group’s accomplishment. Either the event is zerged and our merry band of 3-7 doesn’t feel like we accomplished something (yay we beat the dungeon path!) or the reward we do get is incredibly individual (yay, I got this collection piece I needed). Put another way, there’s no reason for us to do open world content together. There’s very little group feeling to those event chains and meta-events. Even if you had several small groups running around and individuals mattered more, the map would finish way ahead of schedule and thus you’d be stuck waiting, doing nothing.

In short, why did this expansion fail, for us? There is nothing to, long-term, occupy our time that feels rewarding and fun as a group. The expansion failed to provide us with casual PvE content and took away what casual PvE content that we had. Raids are challenging for us, fractals don’t occupy time like dungeons used to, dungeons don’t feel rewarding, and the new maps are too rigidly structured with too little of a reward feeling for the time invested. Many of the long term goals introduced in HoT (read: collections) are things that you can’t even effectively help people with. They’re something for me to do, but they’re not something for us to do.

I fear for the future of my guild. I have made some great friends through this game and I’m sure I’ll stay in touch with some of them (via the magic of the internet), but I think that my guild will continue to burn out and walk away from the game if we don’t see some sort of casual PvE group content. And… I don’t have much faith that ArenaNet will provide that content to us. We’ve heard nothing to suggest that we’re going to get new repeatable casual content (sorry, fractals will probably still have the same problems after you introduce new ones).

Many of my guild members have openly stated that they only play because of our community and/or that this is their last MMO. The next time they walk away, they’re probably gone forever. That is… sad. That’s life, especially in MMO communities, but, I’d like to preserve our community as long as I can. These people really are awesome and my life is richer for having known them. I’m trying to be optimistic, but even our recruiting is suffering. And, to be honest, I have a hard time coming up with an advertisement for our guild that can really ‘sell’ our guild without misleading perspective members, after all, what PvE content are we actually doing? If we aren’t a PvE guild, what are we? We don’t PvP or WvW. We’re mostly just awesome people shooting the breeze that also happen to be doing random things in the same digital environment, sometimes together, but these days, frequently alone.

I enjoyed lots of things about Heart of Thorns, but three months later, the game is stale again and this time I have even less to do with my friends. I’m not asking for ArenaNet to fix this problem, I understand their business model isn’t about long-term constantly accessed account retention, but more of a new-account churn fueled venture, but I’m hoping that my feedback isn’t completely ignored. I’m hoping that my opinions find an ear or at the very least, that I’ve given voice to something somebody else also feels.

Looking for a guild? You might belong here!

We are Binary Alliance [BA]… a small casual (fully awesome) PvE gaming community. Most of our members are sarcastic punks/crazies/weirdos in their 20’s and 30’s who like to joke around and have a good time while gaming.

What makes us special? In all seriousness, our biggest concerns are compatibility and community. When recruiting, we like to find people who are a good fit for our guild – that means fun, friendly, semi-casual-ish, and a willingness to be team players. Legendary weapons, map completion, mastery total, and achievement points are not how we judge applicants – serious, leet-core gamers do not get preferential treatment.

We recruit in small batches, chat with new applicants and get to know people before giving them full membership.

We care about who we recruit and therefore don’t accept all applicants. This doesn’t mean that people we reject are bad players, but it simply means that they aren’t the right fit. Please don’t mistake this for elitism – our occasional little “struggle squad” has been known to fall flat on its collective face from time to time, but we pride ourselves in having a really fun time while doing it.

We have a great website with a forum, a Facebook group, and a Teamspeak 3 server for all of our members to enjoy with each other.

The basics:
- Small sized (20ish active and 20ish semi-active members) guild on Crystal Desert (North America based)
- Run fractals and dungeons
- Raid-curious: we’re trying our hand at raiding to mixed success
- Fun event schedule with a custom arena night, guild missions twice a week, high-five sessions, hair braiding, and more!
- Most active in the evenings primarily in the Eastern and Central US timezones
- We have a website, a forum (www.binary-alliance.com), and a facebook group.
- Our Teamspeak server is our primary mode of communication, how we organize events, and the heart of our community.
- Female / LGBT / Everything friendly
- New and Veteran players welcome
- Age 18+ preferred (though maturity is a fair substitute)

If you are still interested in joining us, please feel free contact us! We are looking for friendly gamers who want to friendship and explore PvE content with a great community.

Best contacts:
E-Mail: denravi[at]binary-alliance[dot]com
In Game:Denravi (Racurn.5921)
Oak Strongarm (Oak Strongarm.9287)
Scrribble (Scrribble.7496)
Mikey (Mikeyiskuma.2958)
Mingus (Mingus Dew.8620)
Jordan (Gurgurant.3281)

Thanks!

Rose Solane.1027:

The beta had a lot of warping, both allies and enemies.

I only experienced warping enemies, but it was frequent and notable because I almost never experience it in the main game.

Rather than make a new thread, I will post my feedback here as well;

After 2 hours:
Mastery System is poorly explained. After getting out of the PS, I had 2 unspent mastery points, but couldn’t spend them because I needed to train the ranks of the mastery before I could spend them. This seems like unnecessary double-gating to me, but it may fit a bigger picture we can’t see yet. I certainly think the experience totals were WAY too high to effectively test things. I got to spend one of my points by the end of the first two hours.

A suggestion for the future, rather than give everyone celestial, let us choose our stats. Celestial rev felt so slow because we had a ranged power weapon, melee condi weapon, and only 3 of our trait trees. Definitely rerolling for the second time block. Noticed one visual glitch on the hammer faux-leap thing. When it jumped, if something died, the exp gain was displaying over it, not me.

Vine Pit Salvage appeared to be a challenging waste of time. It wasn’t clear what to do with the salvage to get credit or what reward I could expect. I got to 10 and safely out at least twice and got nothing. The other one, Bugs on the Branches, that I could find didn’t seem active even after we’d liberated the village (though we didn’t quite get enough food to feed them).

The “front” portion of those giant beetles makes them very very rough to kill in large groups (and with large groups of players). I think scaling for them and for the escort missions should be examined. Vet beetles and champ mobs made the escort/hunt missions very challenging (in a stupid, not fun way) to finish within their time limits.

The sniper rifles on one of the events in the beginning of the zone are functionally useless once you get past the large immobile target stage. A small AoE circle placed with a significant cast time?

I saw some things that were in the beta but not yet coded, like mobs, text blocks, etc. with ((ABCDEF)) and items that were just ??? with no real text, but I imagine that’s WAI.

The Verdant Brink map was interesting, but the lack of both coordination and knowing what we were doing meant that my map got… I dunno, 10% of the bar filled. I didn’t notice any rewards for doing the events beyond standard event rewards, which frankly aren’t enough to make the map worth doing for more than whatever achievements wind up getting tied to it.

Story: To be honest, I wanted to skip it (and preserve it for release). The only comment I have on it is that the one scene with Rytlock was really ugly. I hope that gets touched up before release.

It gets you more loot and more loot of better quality.

And from the opposite perspective, I only have 2 WvW and 2 sPvP options? I’m generally a carebear, but this hardly seems fair.

Vaultnishi.4209:

7. Repair costs removed: I put this under a nay because the idea of repairing being removed meant nerf anything that had a chance to make gold in the game (Or trying to mask nerfs with the “repair costs” scapegoat).

That was always my analysis of it too, I’m really unhappy with this patch. Very little to like in it for me.

“Boss chests in dungeons are now limited to once a day. Champion loot bags and dungeon tokens from the bosses themselves will not be limited in this way.”

What problem did this fix? Why would you punish somebody (more) for being the fifth in a run to help their guildie fill out a dungeon run that they’ve already done once that reset cycle?