Guild Wars 2

Look, I think the idea is this…

Stats and Essentials: static time/grind to achieve (perhaps with possibility of getting faster via RNG)
Cosmetics and Convenience Items: RNG (perhaps with possibility to buy through gems)

As far as I can tell, this has held true. We might not always like it – fused weapons are an example – but this game makes it easy to get stats and much harder to get the particular look you want.

I don’t really want to say, “If you don’t like it, see ya!” but… that’s the way the game was advertised, works now, and probably always will work.

It’s a “signature” from Josh Foreman who built the area. He puts those there as a way of saying, “This is mine. Oh, and you didn’t get here by accident.” The New Krytan should be his initials… JMF, I think, but I might have the middle initial wrong.

What, a 100g one-time fee is too low for a feature that allows you to CONSTANTLY appear on the maps of EVERYBODY around you all the time?

Nawwwww…

I’d prefer to flaunt my hard-earned title.

sbr.8170:

Martin Kerstein.3071:

Quick answer to one of the questions I have seen:

You will still be able to salvage weapons you get from dungeon tokens, the change only applies to vendor weapons you could buy with coins.

Could we ask what the reason for that change is?

Perhaps related to the salvage achievement and leaderboards? Or maybe to reduce the rate at which certain mats enter the economy?

Not sure that enough people bought and salvaged vendor weapons for that to matter, but you never know…

Stormcrow.7513:

I swear to god anymore BLC items only I will stop playing this game and delete my account.

Send me your gold and items first? Name’s to the left. Thanks bro! #firsttorequestitemsfromsomebodyqqing

If your build went from “useful” to “useless” because a 210s CD skill that allows your group to attack faster has been nerfed slightly, you might want to find another build.

These forums are a constant reminder of how much this community has changed since the GW1 days.

Check back on Monday, maybe? :-)

Not thrilled with the nerf, but I get it. Would be cool if TW were now considered a glamour so traits would affect it. (Given the rather substantial nerf, it seems like that might be okay.)

Join my (or some other) friendly, small-to-mid-sized guild and we’d be glad to party up and help you level. Mine’s on Sanctum of Rall if you’re interested, but there’s plenty of other options out there.

If 20 levels of the personal story (which is a small part of the game) and the eyes of an as-yet-to-be-released-in-game NPC are enough to make you quit, perhaps you just don’t like the game and are looking for excuses?

The game has a quirky sense of humor and shows it in many ways. If you prefer your MMOs to be 100% serious all-the-time, you’re right: this probably isn’t the game for you.

Harajuku.3412:

I don’t understand how people aren’t understanding the reasoning for this. Large guilds have recieved access to guild missions when they were released. This is for SMALL guilds, who don’t even have the influence coming in to even get the Art of War level 5, and such. By doing these new missions, it will help us build up the influence to acquire AoW level 4> then 5. THEN we can partake in the guild missions the larger guilds are able to partake in. Not everyone is in a guild with your hundred random people herpaderping/piggybacking off other members progress.

I can only speak for myself, but I’d say this: the change is a good one, but it’s not enough. We were hoping for more, but it seems like this is all we’ll get.

I’ll take it! Gladly! But it’s underwhelming.

Ursan.7846:

timmyf.1490:

That makes it harder to recruit.

This assumes that what a player is looking for in a guild is solely the guild missions itself. That is far from the case.

Why players join guilds is up to them entirely. But some players actually enjoy the intimate setting of a smaller guild much more than the anonymity of a huge, faceless guild. I know I do.

Didn’t say “impossible,” just “harder.” And I agree on smaller guilds. That’s why I run one. ;-)

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Brook.5263:

Very simply, shouldn’t all Guilds be able to participate in Guild Missions?

Every guild can—so long as they research the appropriate upgrades, recruit enough members or outside assistance, and work together to finish the content. This is quite similar to saying every character can kill Zhaitan—as long as they’ve leveled to 80, purchased gear, found a group, etc. Keep in mind that content is often in itself something to be achieved. In this case we’ve taken that concept from character progression and applied it to guilds, and now we have guild progression (which should read as something new for guilds to do). That’s on top of all the other things guilds are already for.

This is a fair point, but I’d like to draw a contrast: EVERYBODY must level to 80, gear up, and find a party to kill Zhaitan. Every. Single. Player. And there’s a system like this:

1) Work hard and play a lot
2) Achieve a certain level of competence
3) You get to fight Zhaitan!

Now pretend you’re an individual who is not in a guild. Two guilds are recruiting you, one big, one small…

The Big One Says: We have guild missions now! They run all the time! We have 24/7 buffs and you’ll have 5 opportunities every week to run a mission and we never fail because we have 100 people online!!!

The Small One Says: We’re working on guild missions! We should have them in a few weeks! We’ll probably try once or twice a week when we get the 10 or so actives we need to try them! Hopefully you’ll be on then!

That makes it harder to recruit.

Furthermore, leveling to kill Zhaitan is both a competency-gate and an equal amount of work for all players. It takes everybody (roughly) the same amount of time to get there. With the structure of these missions, you can have it easy (join a big guild and you don’t have to do a thing) or very hard (join a smaller guild and have to influence farm or donate your gold.)

That’s the difference that I see.

Randulf.7614:

(p.s I may havbe missed it but will we get merits at least from the training ones?)

The guild rewards are 3000 influence. No merits.
The individual rewards are nothing.

Tawa.3180:

All you miss out on is fancy guild tokens.

That are one of the few ways to get Ascended gear, like Accessories. And compare the cost for using commendations to laurels… 12 commendations + 5g or 40 laurels + 50 ecto…

Heijincks.9267:

From some of the posts here, it seems like some small guilds just won’t be satisfied until they can do everything large guilds can do, otherwise it’s the same line over and over:

“This game caters large guilds only”.

If you own a corner store, do you expect to be able to be on par with a CEO of a corporation?

My guild has no problems doing the content. We have an ally that invites us for guild missions. My problem is that we have to REPRESENT ANOTHER GUILD TO RECEIVE REWARDS.

If my guild members help kill a bounty, I’d like for them to be rewarded. Ideally without having to represent another guild. I have been unable to bring that to them to this point.

None of us were complaining prior to the introduction of missions. (Well, I wasn’t complaining.) The guild bonuses were a small advantage for larger guilds (we can’t keep up 24/7 buffs), but one we could deal with. The 50s + 2 rares + commendations rewards are CONSIDERABLY more valuable to people and much more likely to push them to larger guilds. That’s the issue.

Lord Aargadon.4135:

Funnily enough, you can still get your commendations and rares from just killing one bounty from teir 1.

That’s a good point. And it’s probably the answer for smaller guilds that won’t be able to kill both, at least when it comes to personal loot.

rootnode.9546:

Exactly…this “solution” is well meant, but it’s half-kittened and not thought through well. But hey, at least they are responding HERE. They don’t listen, but at least they respond.

Actually, I think they do listen. Very much. Small guild leaders like myself just didn’t phrase our concerns well-enough. We said, “We don’t have the influence! We can’t do it! People will leave!”

They addressed that. And quickly! It’s just that they fixed the symptom and not the underlying problem. I think this is proof that they hear us and do not want to destroy small guilds… but the solution seems sub-optimal.

It’s not necessary for ArenaNet devs to show up here, read posts, and comment. And it is ALWAYS appreciated when they do, even when I don’t like what they’re saying. <3

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

timmyf.1490:

Yeah, so this is a half-fix. It helps with the influence-earning, but doesn’t help us keep guild members who will leave over lack of loot.

This is one of the problems that we’re specifically trying to address here. Even if your entire guild is representing another guild, you can have these training missions researching in your inactive guild and then swap back over to complete them for massive influence gains.

I hope you don’t find this offensive, please don’t think I’m being a jerk here, but this is how the conversation is going…

Me, a small guild leader: “My guild can’t do guild missions! I’m worried my members will start repping other guilds for teh lootz!”
You: “We’ve added a new tier you can do!”
Me: “But those don’t award teh lootz!”
You: “But your guild can still earn lootz by representing other guilds!”
Me: “THAT’S WHAT I’M AFRAID OF!!!”

It’s certainly a positive change, but it doesn’t address my core concern.

Edit: said another way, you helped to fix the gating, but not the incentives that drive players to large guilds.

lordkrall.7241:

Because you can only get rewards for one per tier each week?
In order to maximize your merit gain per week you need to first complete a tier 1 and then do a tier 2 OR simply doing a tier 3.

These training missions sounds like they are possible to complete and gain credit for several times each week though.

I’m talking about individuals, not the guild. Individuals are motivated by the commendations, rares, and silver. By giving those rewards to a 0-Merit Tier 0, individuals in small guilds could still get their weekly reward BUT the guild would still have to do Tier 1-3 to earn merits.

That would seem to fit well in the current system, right? I mean, it’s just that instead of tiers that award 15, 20, or 25 merits, it would be 0, 15, 20, or 25.

lordkrall.7241:

Why would anyone even bother with doing the real missions if you could get the same reward for doing the easy mode version?

Why would anyone even bother with doing Tier 3 if you could get the same reward for doing the easier Tier 1 version?

Yeah, so this is a half-fix. It helps with the influence-earning, but doesn’t help us keep guild members who will leave over lack of loot.

Obviously, I very much appreciate this change, but it doesn’t quite feel like enough. If this was more of a “Tier 0” that simply awarded 0 Merits, I’d be much more gung-ho about it.

Do training missions award commendations, 2 rares, and 50 silver? That’s what I want to know.

bewhatever.2390:

I would think the server sends a command to instantiate a model, which causes a data structure to be built in the client. The client at that time pulls the details of the particular mob/player/object/etc from the disk, which includes its graphics. If the client is counting on the OS to cache the disk, and it isn’t, we would get this result.

Yeah. Exactly. But I would think that Anet would have optimized the caching process to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but it makes me wonder… I mean, they didn’t seem to think that culling would be as huge of a problem as it has been, so maybe they didn’t see the inefficiencies with texture management either?

But again, all speculation. If only Anet opened up a developer kit so we could help them test! :-D

rizzo.1079:

timmyf.1490:

There are many ways that programs can load and unload information from memory and many strategies for doing so. It is unlikely that players who you see one second but not the next are being dropped from RAM. Those textures are very likely still in RAM, or at least the majority of them.

Huh never thought of it from that angle. The server should be sending the command to display the model, but it’s not. Either way, something is screwy because I can definitely render more models than 15-20 at a time.

That’s (probably) what’s happening. There are maybe 100 or 150 characters’ textures in RAM, but due to server-side culling, your client only knows the position of 50 of them. (Or however many.) The other 100 characters’ worth of textures are in memory, but the characters are not being drawn.

Now… it’s possible that the client is handling these textures in a VERY inefficient manner and dropping textures once the server stops reporting their position. This seems to be what the original post is suggesting. That would be a TERRIBLE design, but perhaps could happen if there is a large enough number of characters all in the same area.

There’s no way that we, as players, can easily test or verify this. CPU spikes don’t really tell us whether this is happening. CPU spikes plus HDD reads might tell us this, but there’s still a level of speculation.

Rhysati.4932:

Well first…the way the stuff is handled is server-side. The server determines who you should or should not have rendered. Secondly, if it didn’t dump the information from your RAM when you don’t need it, that would be called a memory leak. The game and your computer can’t magically know when you run out of RAM and know what to dump at that point. It doesn’t work that way.

The culling discussed here is handled server side, but you are incorrectly using the term memory leak. (A memory leak is when a program allocates memory, no longer needs it, but does not properly return that memory to the system/memory manager. The system thinks it is in use, though it is not.)

There are many ways that programs can load and unload information from memory and many strategies for doing so. It is unlikely that players who you see one second but not the next are being dropped from RAM. Those textures are very likely still in RAM, or at least the majority of them.

If GW2 needs to drop textures from RAM within seconds of that character dropping from view, they have a very-poorly written graphics engine. I doubt that’s the case.

So I believe rizzo is correct here.

Tracking all the bounties before you start the mission seems like the lamest, dullest way to do the missions. No wonder people don’t like them.

While my guild is still working on the unlock (currently building AoW5), we’ve been invited to join a friendly guild on our server and participate in bounties with them every week. There’s usually about 20-25 active. When we start the bounty, we all warp to a zone and make a mad dash looking for the NPC. If somebody finds it, they ping chat and everybody warps there for the kill.

This is, admittedly, horribly disorganized, but it’s also 15-minutes of heart-pounding fun. We’ve successfully done T1 and T2 this way, though I imagine we’d have to be far more organized to do T3.

Just a suggestion in case you find the bounties to be very dull. Maybe you’re doing it wrong.

Wayfinder.8452:

Erebus.9276:

Started with 5 people… 2 more logged in while we where finding our npcs… did t1 with 7 people had time to spare… hardest part is the wait while stuff builds…

Some of the bosses are rather easy. The difficulty of the missions was never an issue for me, it’s about the rewards and the influence cost.

Exactly. I don’t think any of us are saying that small, disorganized guilds should be able to do the events. Small, organized guilds should at least have the opportunity to try. (Or do event types other than bounties…)

Warriors and Guardians are easier to play for people who don’t want to take the hundreds of hours it can take to learn a class.

(Engineer, Ranger, and maybe Necro also have some bugs that make them a little tougher, but hardly useless.)

Yeah, ArenaNet doesn’t want to get in the business of saying what is okay or not okay, but SweetFX is very likely okay. To my knowledge, lots of people use it and nobody’s gotten banned for it yet.

Hey Cooper-

I run the PvE-focused guild Super Mega Happy Fun Time on Sanctum of Rall. We’re a small but helpful bunch. Here’s our in-game recruiting message, to give you an idea…

Super Mega Happy Fun Time [MEGA] is recruiting! Casuals welcome! PvE! Exploration! Leveling! Alts! Lore! Dungeons! Fractals! Dance Parties! Vent and Alcohol! Exclamation Points!

Usually that’s enough for people to figure out if we’d be a good home or not. If you’re interested in checking us out, shoot me a message in-game (name to the left or my character, Loki Karaoke.)

Red Falcon.8257:

Actually even a guild of 10 actives can unlock missions easily in one single day.
Simply run a couple guild fractals and deposit all revenues in the bank, gold made is enough to buy all influence needed.

How much gold are you making in fractals? You’d need about 80k influence, I think, which comes out to 160g. I’ve played since prerelease and I don’t have that much gold in the bank…

None of this would be a problem if members of small guilds could help with missions and get equivalent rewards. The major problem, again, is that you cannot be in a small guild and get the rather generous rewards for completing guild missions.

Funny, ever since I started talking about my guild being too small for guild missions, I’ve had several offers to take all my members. (For free, of course.) Maybe selling my guild would have been the better option…

(PS This is terrible! Who would sell their guild?! Disgusting.)

I don’t have any suggestions for improving your damage, but I have dozens of suggestions for improving your fun…

It seems like ArenaNet thinks “small guild” means 25-50 actives/night or something, whereas to me that would be “medium” and small would be 5-25. I’ve wanted to build my guild to about 10-15 actives, but I get the feeling ArenaNet thinks we’re too small to cater to. Makes me very sad.

Mackdose.6504:

Personally, I think it’s completely ridiculous to expect a “guild” of 4-10 people to be a guild at all.

Instead of complaining about how the game screwed you over, how about you join forces with 2 other small guilds and actually have a guild community. It’s the insular nature of friends and family guilds that keeps them small, meanwhile a lot more fun and resources are at your disposal by going and branching out. Unless they build another system called “Clans” and have “clan” missions, expecting a mechanic targeted at guilds at 15+ players to cater to your clique is not very reasonable.

Disclaimer: The guild in my sig features 6 players, and I’m the only active player.

It sounds like you have no interest in what guilds offer, therefore we can’t explain why we don’t just want to combine guilds. But here goes…

1) My guild has pride in our name and our tag.
2) My guild would like to be able to police the type of player who remains in our guild and joining another guild will restrict our ability to do so.
3) My guild might not have enough influence to unlock guild missions now, but we have a huge number of unlocks we’ve been working on for 6 months. It feels a lot like giving up.
4) My guildmembers have heard the horror stories about the drama and discontent in other guilds. We have none of that and prefer to keep it that way.
5) We have yet to find a guild we trust enough and that seems to cater to the same style of play as us.

I have had four different guilds offer to join with us, i.e. take all of my members. And me. While I appreciate those offers, I would rather grow my own guild with the type of player for whom I formed my guild.

I am okay with content that is gated by difficulty and may require more players to complete because WE CAN GET HELP IN THE OPEN WORLD. If my guild is capable of organizing our map-mates to complete content, which I think we are, why shouldn’t we be able to kick off a guild mission?

A better, fairer option would have been to allow cheaper unlocks, but increasing influence per attempt at the mission per week. Let’s say 5-10k to unlock the tier 1 missions with only a L3 or L4 requirement in the tree… and then 100 influence for your first attempt, 200 for your second, 300 for your third, etc.

This way, small guilds can at least run it a couple times and large guilds get quite a few more before the influence costs become ridiculous.

Just one option among many, but the HUGE unlock costs plus cheap per-attempt costs seem really odd coming from ArenaNet. Does anybody else remember when guilds had a 50 player cap? (Or was it 100? Prior to release it was VERY small.)

Mungrul.9358:

I’ve jokingly considered griefing people looking for bounties by feeding them false sightings. I haven’t done so mind you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if others are actually doing this.

The current method of griefing seems to be standing in the area of the bounty without attacking.

Despite being VERY upset that my guild isn’t large enough to unlock guild missions yet, I’d probably have to kick anybody in my guild if I found out they were doing this.

I think the problem here is that ArenaNet would say, “Oh, small guilds can do the content! They just might not be the ones starting it.”

Which is true. But that means they also won’t get the (rather nice) rewards.

Anybody have any influence farming tips?

Wayfinder.8452:

This thread is still being ignored ? Why ?

I doubt it’s being ignored. There just hasn’t been a response yet. My guess is ArenaNet is surprised at the massively negative response (like they seemed to be with Ascended gear) and are trying to figure out how to respond.

Seren.6850:

KatiesAura.5928:

since the last patch my guild has sank dramaticaly i.e everyone leaving to or repping large guilds only (large guilds taken over from our small guild which we had for almost 8 years?)

people you knew for 8 years, left you in search of shiny earrings? kind of sad

People consistently underestimate the power of a carrot on a stick.

Keep in mind the main problem here: those 8-year guildies can join and rep another guild while still remaining a member of the old guild. The guildmember justifies this as, “Well, I’m not abandoning them, I’ve just joined another guild so I can participate in this content!”

Meanwhile, the small guild sees a whole lot of green squares with gray lines and the time before they’ll be able to unlock these missions and complete them go up, up, and away…

I’m not saying the solution should be “you can only rep one guild,” of course. It’s just that the incentives lead people to rep larger guilds that already have the missions unlocked.

I still believe the solution is to allow anybody who completes a guild mission access to the same rewards, or perhaps the same rewards except Commendations. The 50 silver and rares and chance at precursor drops should apply to everybody who helps in the event.

Irony of the whole Ascended/Lost Shores update? That’s what made half of my guild quit the game. If those guys were still playing, I would have had the influence for Guild Missions and I wouldn’t have to deal with half my guild quitting again (though this time just quitting my guild, not the game.)

They don’t need to answer in this thread. I don’t care about what ArenaNet says to a limited number of users on a forum post. I care about what they do. They need to answer by updating the system to either…

1) Address the incredible unlock costs that force you into a specific tree (AoW) that many smaller guilds don’t care to unlock, or
2) Address the incredible inequality in rewards between guilded and non-guilded players

I wouldn’t have a problem with the unlock costs if my guild could participate in another guild’s mission and be rewarded equally or near-equally – but with the HUGE difference in awards, not having Guild Missions is a nail in the coffin for my guild… and many others.

Give me easier access to the missions I want to do or give me rewards so we can play with other guilds without feeling cheated.

Leohan.1096:

What are you even talking about? Your guild name is " Super Mega Happy Fun Time" and you took offense to me saying “mega super fun time”?

Because it was a play on words in my post to make fun of the situation Anet as created, where if you want to have fun in the game and want perks, you better be a part of a guild with 500 people in them.

Until now I had no idea your guild existed until I searched it in the forums and even then you only have one post telling someone in January about your guild. Also looked you guys up on google, very little activity if at all.

Did not realize a guild actually used a stereo type Japanese to English saying. It was however in no way directed at any one guild, but the situation and state of the game is in now.

Yeah, like I said (in our private messages), just a misunderstanding. Sorry for the confusion!

Jski.6180:

Agen its inactive guilds that are going away not small guilds there always going to be ppl who want to stay with small guilds it may be a bit more work but if you want it you CAN get to that point.

Out of curiosity, how many people are in your guild? Total roster and active?

Leohan.1096:

This is what people telling the small to medium guilds to just join large guilds or to merge with others guilds are telling others to do. To throw away months of hard work and dedication to boost the numbers and egos of the “mega super fun time”, guilds.

I hope you didn’t mean it this way, but as leader of the 53-member (about 5-10 active per night) Super Mega Happy Fun Time guild, I’m hurt. Our core mostly knows each other in real-life, the remainder from playing together every day, and while I’ve resorted to doing some recruiting to try to build our ranks, we have every intention of capping ourselves at about 15-20 daily active members.

Mudfin.4637:

I just think that a lot of smaller guilds would be okay with the effort it took to get there if they could choose the starting path. Being forced down one path they don’t care about and then being told it will cost a lot of influence, feels like a smack in the face.

Yeah, but now that I’ve already blown 15k on Art of War 3+4 for a guild that barely ever WvWs, it’d feel like yet another smack in the face for them to change it after-the-fact. (Of course, we don’t have the 20k yet for AoW5, so I guess I’d take it.)

My two cents:

1) As a small guild leader, I am terrified that I won’t be able to hold half of my members much longer. (The other half is real-life friends, so we’ll stick together.)

2) It sounds like there’s some major griefing going on with folks being in the mission area and not helping.

3) You could solve both of these problems by increasing the rewards for non-guilded players to match the rewards for guilded players minus commendations. That seems high enough to entice others to help, but still is enough of a benefit for guilded members to want to start the content themselves to earn commendations.