Feedback: Guild Members have no incentive to participate in Guild Missions

[ecstaseed.2109]

TL;DR - A new guild can do everything right and still fail to grow for lack of favor alone. Members new and old still DO NOT CARE about guild missions because the content is limited/irrelevant and the rewards are lousy.

 

I've played since 2012. When Icebrood Saga was announced, I decided to forget about all the criticism about the various game modes and just embrace the hype. "Finally, we're going to go fight Jormag," I thought. "I've been waiting for this for 7 years!" So, being a veteran player and having a fairly large chunk of gold saved up, I decided instead of crafting a legendary that I would finally bite the bullet and create my own guild. I wanted to fill it up with experienced players from my friends list to start, and then open it up to newer players still finding their way. The primary focus would be on the new PvE content. By playing it this way, I hoped to sweep up any active players that were also getting hyped for the new content, and that new and returning players could have a friendly group to provide answers for them about what they've missed. As such, I've gotten about 40 members recruited, mostly in the same time window. Our ranks are all set up, the message of the day is clear and concise, and links to a discord where I have all kinds of links to resources that can help players learn to play the game, and it's all very thematically fitting. The group remains active, and our guild hall has been expanding slowly. HOWEVER, the growth of our Guild Hall is coming to a screeching halt. Having just hit level 16, the need for large amounts of Favor is inescapable.

 

Guild missions are some of the oldest content in the world of PvE, and oh boy does it show. I myself haven't done these thing since years prior. There's several reasons for that... commendations are a near worthless and unsatisfying reward for the time invested, and the guild missions themselves are frustrating for new players and boring/dated for veterans. Unless and until I can recruit a few hundred more PvE players, these missions are likely never going to get done. I would _like_ to be able to do WvW missions with my guild instead, but we never really got that "alliance" patch so in order to build an active player base I would've needed to confine my recruitment to the mists instead of focusing on the new PvE content like I had planned. Now I have nobody to join me for the WvW missions which require a minimum of 3 participants. For over a month I've had to scrape what favor I can out of the easy category with one or two others, and piggyback on other guilds' races, while letting all instanced missions slip by for lack of the minimum required party size. I worry that my guild-mates will see us lose steam and decided to jump ship whenever a larger guild comes along. We play together, but there's nothing really gluing it all together and making us feel like a team in between the new maps releasing because so few have found a reason to invest time and effort into helping build the guild.

 

It feels unnecessary and wrong that promising new guilds _which are doing just about everything that Anet would want for their player base_, should become stunted and atrophy all because guild missions can't manage to appeal to anyone. How hard would it be to throw in a greater variety of guild missions? How about a dungeon or fractal clear here and there? Or if it absolutely must be something that requires lots of training and coordination, why not make _raids_ eligible for guild mission rewards? God knows Tyria needs heaps more raid training, so why not incentivize that? Guild rushes and puzzles are extremely niche content that don't translate into a healthy and skilled player base, and it's been years since any of the rewards purchased with commendations have been worthwhile. Can we put the Guild back in Guild Wars 2 so it doesn't feel like Solo Chores 2? If the goal of guilds is to promote organized community play, then why is it that I can successfully command a Dragon Stand meta or a Xera raid for a guild, and the guild has nothing to show for it save for a kill-proof? Why is the only thing reliably growing our guild hall the one that requires me to frantically port around central Tyria by myself and mashing F before time runs out?? **This needs fixing!**

[starlinvf.1358]

If you really want an analysis, its mainly the gaming culture exists today. Everything about guilds in this game (outside of WvW upgrades) revolves around personal rewards.... and thats the critical flaw in the system. Raids have decayed into this state just as rapidly, as its devolved into a weekly Routine thats only really done because the rewards are capped... and not doing them is simply giving up potential resources. We have things to spend them on- but theres an upper limit where we don't have any more "want" that the rewards were being used to push us toward.

 

Without that artificial driver, players have no reason to congregate on a regular basis. WvW doesn't suffer from this, as theres a level of social dynamics that makes the activity itself worth doing for its own entertainment. But it took bolstering the internal reward system to stop feeling like a Net Loss, because PvE rewards have stronger psychological hooks that were overpowering the social aspect of that game mode. Instead WvW's current state has an entirely different problem in that nothing is supporting social dynamics.

 

Expanding guild missions to Raids is pointless, because it doesn't address the underlying problem; and in reality is more likely to increase Guild toxicity over time, once individuals get bored with "helping the guild for personal benefits", and going back to the current "I got mine" attitude. Making the game harder to force group play won't work either. WoW Classic's spiral into "just like retail" took less then 3 weeks to happen. Nearly everything was meticulously recreated to reflect the actual state of the game in 1.2, EXCEPT Player attitudes are vastly different then they were back in 2005. Players were initially more cooperative, and displayed a level of empathy no longer thought possible. But as more and more people starting hitting the "end game" stride, the community began to break down. Apathy is growing, and no would expend effort unless it directly and immediately benefited them. Competition for farming spots started getting heated. Etiquette once at the forefront, steadily fading in favor of opportunistic behavior. Not everyone is a jerk. But there used to be a clear difference between Classic and Retail that everyone was hoping for; but now that difference is barely noticeable.

 

Gamer's attitudes toward Guilds has changed massively in the last several years... even in the last few years. Reduced to just another social circle of "acquaintances", organized by how much benefit you gain from them. Not a lot has been done to understand this new dynamic. And even among the strongest "guilds" floating around operate as if they are simply a Fanbase for some central personality that everyone rallies around. On its face this sounds like its always been..... but I mark the difference as Guild "Leaders" used to (and had to be) competent leaders. Where as now, they are handled more like Celebrities.

 

 

But since you're still caught up in the excitement of leveling a Guildhall (an easy goal to establish for the guild to focus on), you're blind to the destination you're heading to. I'm part of a 9 Guild Meta-Guild, with each guild hall maxed out. A grand total of 2 dozen players still play on the regular, and most of them are part of the same Fractal/Raid static group. We still do guild missions weekly to cap out favor.... and the only reason for that is to keep making Guild Banners.

 

Ultimately theres nothing stopping you from succeeding in leveling the guild hall. But theres no reason to be in a rush to get there. Maxing out a Guildhall doesn't improve your guild beyond personal benefits to each member. In fact, the Guildhall itself is, by design, just a money pit.

[Mewcifer.5198]

There is plenty of reason to do guild missions, you just have to make sure people know about them. Make sure people are aware of what they can buy with commendations and that they can resell items bought with them for gold.

[Gop.8713]

I agree that guild missions would benefit from some developer attention. I'm not entirely sure that attention will be forthcoming, so I have two points . . :

 

First, you could try pointing out to your guildies that the guild needs to complete guild missions in order to gain favor for continued upgrades. If they don't find that a compelling reason to do guild missions, then that means your guildies are not interested in growing the guild hall and you've pretty much solved your own problem right there . . .

 

Second, be aware that it is always a small minority of guild members who actually do the work of building the guild, maintaining it and keeping it healthy over time. The rest are just hangers on and freeloaders :)

[ecstaseed.2109]

How jaded are you guys? It's not 100% about grinding out rewards. You know people play games to have fun too right? And that's just it: while a select few guild missions _can_ be fun, most are just irrelevant mini-games that have nothing to do with actually playing. Even the fun bounty missions pale in comparison to the satisfaction that comes from a well executed raid clear. I got my legendary armor. Know why I keep doing the raids? Cuz it's fun! Guess what else; the rewards are relevant! That magnetite piles up, and soon I can gear out a new class in ascended gear of any stat combination and start playing that if I choose. Meanwhile if I show up to all the guild missions I can get some berserker trinkets... or a marginal increase in gold if I jump through some hoops...

 

Please don't over-complicate my gripe. It's simple, I just want the game to reward a guild with favor when its members get together to do a big ol' thingy, and put the guilds of Tyria to work bridging the ever-widening gap between newcomers and veteran players by giving them an incentive to interact with each other. Kind of like how influence used to work, but limited to co-operative activities. Fun and relevant ones! Like raids, and maybe some of the old standby meta events that don't get enough attention anymore. Give commanders a reason to tag up. Fix what's broken and breathe some life into your community!

 

I'm not even gonna address that comparison to WoW; the whole reason I played Guild Wars 2 is because it fixed a lot of the things WoW did wrong by promoting a friendly community and doing away with subscriptions and shared drops and gear treadmills and level cap grinds and and and

[Danikat.8537]

1) Tell your guild members that you need Favour to upgrade the guild hall and need to do guild missions to get it - that is their motivation. And if they don't want those upgrades maybe it's time to talk about what they want from the guild, how you see it progressing and make sure everyone is on the same page. (Not every guild needs a fully upgraded hall. My raid guild doesn't have one at all or any plans to get one because it doesn't offer any raid-related benefits and if anyone wants the other stuff they have 4 other guild spaces. But if your members do want a guild hall then they need to be prepared to contribute to upgrading it.)

 

2) Find out who is interested in doing guild missions and then make sure you're doing them at a time that's convinient for as many of those people as possible. In my experience that's a big barrier to getting enough people together. It's always difficult for me because I play on EU servers and I'm in the UK so I'm at least an hour behind most of the continent and many guilds start their missions before I even get home from work. But I know I'm not the only one. One of my old guilds had this problem - the leader ran missions every week and hardly anyone turned up - it turned out almost everyone had other commitments at the same time, so the missions were moved a day earlier in the week and an hour later in the day and more people were able to come. (This might also mean changing the time from one week to the next or running two sessions, as very few people have exactly the same schedule all year round.)

[Teratus.2859]

It's true there is a pretty severe lack of guild based content in this game in every game mode.

 

I really hope this will be remedied in the next expansion.

At the very least could we get some more bounties with unique rewards in expansion and living world maps or something?..

[Lamont.5973]

While I agree guild missions, and guilds in general, could use a lot of work, favor was never my problem. I pretty much built our current guild from low 20 level to max on my own because I love to decorate it. Favor was the easiest part of it. One person can easily do the easy trek. By watching for other guilds doing the races a lone person can get the credit for a guild by piggybacking. Same with puzzles. You can enter with a larger guild and then, once inside, switch rep. Some of the guild challenges also can be done with as little as 3-5 people. And the easy bounty, also, can be done with 1-2 players, especially if you call for help in map chat.

 

What I would love to see is some true guild vs guild opportunities. But I doubt that will come - sigh.

[Reverielle.3972]

I think guilds and the mechanics of them have really fallen by the wayside in the last couple of years. Hopefully development will allocate the time to give a pass over guilds and their function and update/refresh things. Who knows though? Perhaps guilds in-game are working just how they'd like them to already? I'd like to think not though.

 

I really liked that system (one of various) they had in place initially; the one where you would get guild influence (or whatever it was called) for completing events whilst representing your guild. You would get bonus influence if you and a guild member were together completing the same event, etc etc. I really don't know why they moved away from that model in the game as it gave two important incentives: a) to join a guild with like-minded players who enjoy playing together, and b) to provide another reason to complete events.

[ugrakarma.9416]

WvW missions should be removed and put another thing instead of it like beat some world boss.

If is hard recruit Pve players to do pve missions, on WvW missions u need also covince them to **migrate to another server**.

[Turkeyspit.3965]

> @"ugrakarma.9416" said:

> WvW missions should be removed and put another thing instead of it like beat some world boss.

> If is hard recruit Pve players to do pve missions, on WvW missions u need also covince them to **migrate to another server**.

 

??

 

If you are on a different server than other members of your WvW guild you can't even play WvW with them unless you are on their server link. So yeah, the WvW game mode convinces people to migrate to another server...at least until Alliances that is.

[ugrakarma.9416]

> @"Turkeyspit.3965" said:

> > @"ugrakarma.9416" said:

> > WvW missions should be removed and put another thing instead of it like beat some world boss.

> > If is hard recruit Pve players to do pve missions, on WvW missions u need also covince them to **migrate to another server**.

>

> ??

>

> If you are on a different server than other members of your WvW guild you can't even play WvW with them unless you are on their server link. So yeah, the WvW game mode convinces people to migrate to another server...at least until Alliances that is.

 

some WvW players like me are "stick" to their server, in my case SoS, i wont leave it just to do guild-wvw missions. i mean this kinda of playerbase.

[Glass Hand.7306]

The Guild I am in does Guild missions as social events every week. We all get on Teamspeak and have a lot of fun. At times we have had a full squad for the missions.

 

We have prize drawings too but that is really intended to attract the new members to the social event.

 

It's an old guild and has been around from the days of the original Guildwars. When Guild Halls were launched we had a full squad for the Guild Hall claiming the day the expansion hit. After the claiming the Guild Hall assembler was running 24x7 until the Hall was max level.

 

What is needed to get people to come out for missions is having a good social base in the guild.

[LucianDK.8615]

I see absolutely no reason to participiate in such worthless content.

[Vavume.8065]

You have a 40 man guild and you are struggling to get favor? I have solo built my 1 man guild hall to level 66, favor is available to you even if no one else in your guild is willing to help with missions, many are soloable...

[ProtoGunner.4953]

Put it on the list of so many projects in GW2's history that never got any further development and left behind a rotten trail of half-finished features. Absolutely symptomatic for this game.

[Friday.7864]

It's kinda worth doing them.

You get ~1g per mission (silver + rare gear).

While the commendations you can exchange for:

- banners (useful if you wanna provide buffs for others)

- ascended zerker gear

- daily stuff (last time i bought 2 large bags of obsidian, 1 commendation each)

 

Make that clear to everyone, especially to newbies. And what they will have to do in those missions.

If you wanna encourage people more organize some sort of lottery for participants.

[Swagger.1459]

> @"ecstaseed.2109" said:

> TL;DR - A new guild can do everything right and still fail to grow for lack of favor alone. Members new and old still DO NOT CARE about guild missions because the content is limited/irrelevant and the rewards are lousy.

>

> I've played since 2012. When Icebrood Saga was announced, I decided to forget about all the criticism about the various game modes and just embrace the hype. "Finally, we're going to go fight Jormag," I thought. "I've been waiting for this for 7 years!" So, being a veteran player and having a fairly large chunk of gold saved up, I decided instead of crafting a legendary that I would finally bite the bullet and create my own guild. I wanted to fill it up with experienced players from my friends list to start, and then open it up to newer players still finding their way. The primary focus would be on the new PvE content. By playing it this way, I hoped to sweep up any active players that were also getting hyped for the new content, and that new and returning players could have a friendly group to provide answers for them about what they've missed. As such, I've gotten about 40 members recruited, mostly in the same time window. Our ranks are all set up, the message of the day is clear and concise, and links to a discord where I have all kinds of links to resources that can help players learn to play the game, and it's all very thematically fitting. The group remains active, and our guild hall has been expanding slowly. HOWEVER, the growth of our Guild Hall is coming to a screeching halt. Having just hit level 16, the need for large amounts of Favor is inescapable.

>

> Guild missions are some of the oldest content in the world of PvE, and oh boy does it show. I myself haven't done these thing since years prior. There's several reasons for that... commendations are a near worthless and unsatisfying reward for the time invested, and the guild missions themselves are frustrating for new players and boring/dated for veterans. Unless and until I can recruit a few hundred more PvE players, these missions are likely never going to get done. I would _like_ to be able to do WvW missions with my guild instead, but we never really got that "alliance" patch so in order to build an active player base I would've needed to confine my recruitment to the mists instead of focusing on the new PvE content like I had planned. Now I have nobody to join me for the WvW missions which require a minimum of 3 participants. For over a month I've had to scrape what favor I can out of the easy category with one or two others, and piggyback on other guilds' races, while letting all instanced missions slip by for lack of the minimum required party size. I worry that my guild-mates will see us lose steam and decided to jump ship whenever a larger guild comes along. We play together, but there's nothing really gluing it all together and making us feel like a team in between the new maps releasing because so few have found a reason to invest time and effort into helping build the guild.

>

> It feels unnecessary and wrong that promising new guilds _which are doing just about everything that Anet would want for their player base_, should become stunted and atrophy all because guild missions can't manage to appeal to anyone. How hard would it be to throw in a greater variety of guild missions? How about a dungeon or fractal clear here and there? Or if it absolutely must be something that requires lots of training and coordination, why not make _raids_ eligible for guild mission rewards? God knows Tyria needs heaps more raid training, so why not incentivize that? Guild rushes and puzzles are extremely niche content that don't translate into a healthy and skilled player base, and it's been years since any of the rewards purchased with commendations have been worthwhile. Can we put the Guild back in Guild Wars 2 so it doesn't feel like Solo Chores 2? If the goal of guilds is to promote organized community play, then why is it that I can successfully command a Dragon Stand meta or a Xera raid for a guild, and the guild has nothing to show for it save for a kill-proof? Why is the only thing reliably growing our guild hall the one that requires me to frantically port around central Tyria by myself and mashing F before time runs out?? **This needs fixing!**

 

In what ways would you improve, or fix up, guild related things?

[Hannelore.8153]

> @"Friday.7864" said:

> It's kinda worth doing them.

> You get ~1g per mission (silver + rare gear).

> While the commendations you can exchange for:

> - banners (useful if you wanna provide buffs for others)

> - ascended zerker gear

> - daily stuff (last time i bought 2 large bags of obsidian, 1 commendation each)

>

> Make that clear to everyone, especially to newbies. And what they will have to do in those missions.

> If you wanna encourage people more organize some sort of lottery for participants.

 

Current map farms make 30g/hr. Dailies, guild missions, etc. mean nothing and haven't for a long time. The rewards that people buy with guild commendations max out within the first few months and they never do them again..

 

These kinds of activities have become exclusively newbie content due to reward inflation.