Team Up for Guild Missions

Arenanet announced this:

Join your fellow guild members to take on an entirely new category of content! These missions, designed for coordinated group play, include everything from bounties to group puzzles to cross-country challenges. You’ll need to work together to complete the missions and earn new Guild Merits, which can unlock cool upgrades and rewards. It pays to be in a guild!

Sounds cool.

I can't wait! That's exactly what GW2 needs! :cheer:

Really hope this is a fully fleshed out feature! :)

Quote by Halish

Really hope this is a fully fleshed out feature! :)

So Hal, hypothetically speaking of course, if it is as we hope it will be a fully fleshed out feature does that mean you will be more of a presence for us in GW2 and or possibly leading these events?

My intention is not to single you out like this but you are the real leader of GW2. Though Elquin has done absolutely incredible work lately putting together stuff for us to do and making a truly honest effort to get GW2 guild members to participate in things, he does not have your title or your influence. As an indirect result of not being you....he struggles to put a handful of people together for anything that happens and if not a full group he has to invite outside of guild and this is happening more and more frequently and is almost common now.

I know you have discussed this with me and other members that we were free to move on to more active guilds but very welcome to stay members of SWVG for chat purposes....okay that's very nice and appreciated but the feelings created prior to GW2's release leave me conflicted about said offer.

What was a lot of people in the beginning ready to tear this game up being lead by you has turned into 3-4 people struggling in the game to keep the concept of a SWVG GW2 Guild alive and breathing. I'm proud to wear our guild's skin/crest but somehow I can't escape feeling small and insignificant running around out there...this makes me downhearted most of the time.

I want to feel excited about this change that will help guilds do more together but if you and your buddies are not going to put your phasers down often enough to support this....then "fleshed out" will ultimately become a mute point.

ps: for lack of my own inflection abilities this may sound condescending or accusatory. Far from it....I only wish to convey my feelings in a direct way and be as respectful and understanding of your needs and wants also. I can't force you to play a game that your and your friends are not fully dedicated to...(now on our side of the fence)...how do we wear our crest and maintain pride in our guild in game and represent our guild...when the leader is not with us?

It’s no secret that I haven’t dedicated the time to Guild Wars 2, since getting to level cap, that I had intended to before launch. It’s also no secret that the guild may have been adversely affected by having an absent leader and for that I can only apologize and try to explain the reasons as best I can.

I wanted a Stonewall guild in Guild Wars 2 and I brought the idea to our community leader and founder, NicholasJohn, and almost demanded that he allowed me to push ahead with it. I did it selfishly so that I would be able to play the game, which I saw as the greatest MMORPG of the past ten years, without having to turn my back on a great community and join another guild which has policies that differ from those I believe in.

Building up to launch I think Vanguard did amazing and being able to hit 200 accounts in-game and max out the influence rewards was a great achievement and something we should be proud of. But the game failed to live up to the high expectations that I had put upon it and ArenaNet shifted focus onto dungeon running / carrot on a stick content which is something that has zero interest for myself.

I wasn’t alone in feeling this way and my Majors and Commanders one by one disappeared from the game and I was left trying to pull together a team to keep things going. The reponse to my requests for help in running things wasn’t exactly stellar and at this moment in time we have two active commanders, one of which shares my disillusions and only logs in to carry out guild duties and/or dailies and Elquin who has done a fantastic job trying to run events and I have expressed my gratitude to him.

All of the Majors and Commanders I have appointed since creating the guild have been asked to do something which I have never been good at, which is running events. All of them, bar Elquin, didn’t end up filling the role like I’d hoped. You may think it’s a major flaw that a guild leader shouldn’t have and I would agree with you but if I didn’t sit in the big chair then nobody would have. I took the leadership role because I was the only choice and I think up until our membership started to decline I did a .. acceptable job at keeping things running smoothly but the games end-game didn’t lend itself to guilds and if you look around the web you’ll see the scattered corpses of many failed guilds which didn’t cope once they reached end-game.

I can’t force our members to represent us and I can’t force them to login on a regular basis. My name carries no weight in this regard and me simply being online isn’t going to affect our membership numbers.

In regards to the phaser comment, some of our members did come from Star Trek Online and have returned there but it’s not as many as you’d think. I login now and again but it’s very much a seldom occasion that I sail the stars. I have been jumping from game to game from free-to-play MMORPG to free-to-play MMORPG trying to pass the time, waiting for ArenaNet to fix the problems with the game that I see.

Large scale guild events could give us something to do on-mass at least once a week if that’s what it turns out to be. But how am I meant to plan? how am I meant to schedule anything when ArenaNet only detail a patch once it’s actually in the game. I can’t make and I don’t make promises that I can’t be sure I’m going to keep. I have done and always will continue to be as honest and open as possible and I simply can’t guarantee things are going to get better.

I stand by my word that if you feel you need to leave for your enjoyment to continue then you can. I would hold nothing against you for it as it’s your hard earned money you spend and it’s your enjoyment which is paramount. If you stay then you’ll probably end up doing what I have been doing for the past few months. Crossing my fingers and hoping that the next patch actually improves things in a real way and doesn’t add more small-scale carrot-on-a-stick content.

I should also mention that I happen to be British and that puts me at a direct disadvantage when trying to organise events for NA players. I have commitments in my everyday life and it makes it hard for me to promise I’m going to lead an event seven days before it’s due to run. Honestly I wish I could but it’s just not how my life is right now and staying up all night and going to work tired isn’t an option for the job that I do.

I wish I could do better. I wish that I did better. But this is the state of affairs and once again I can only apologize for failing you and Vanguard.

Quote by Halish

I have been jumping from game to game from free-to-play MMORPG to free-to-play MMORPG

To be fair, I think the free-to-play and freemium business models are a double-edged sword for MMO communities. On one hand, these models support a greater number and variety of games with both broad and niche appeal, many of which benefit from larger and more diverse pools of players. On the other hand, these game communities seem less stable as players race to max level and burn out, then hop from game to game to game to rinse and repeat, and generally consume content faster than it can be created, particularly so for "theme park" games like GW2 as opposed to "sandbox" games.

Thank you so very much Halish for your response, it was what I'd hoped it would be. Every part of it was very respectful and informative but above all....it was pure honesty. Your willingness to be openly honest with your members is what spurred my/our loyalty in the first place/beginning. I, like you, struggle with some of the more important aspects of this game and what it is truly missing.

Though I can't literally shake your hand. Please know that if I could I would. It takes a real person/man to go to the depths you took to explain things and admit the behind-the-scene mechanics of what happened. Thank you. :)

I can say this much without hesitation and with pure conviction. You have a true gem with Elquin, he loves this game with an unmatched passion. He has been there for everyone time and time again and he may very well be the glue for the moment that holds what's left of this guild together. We'll see what this new content improves for all of us...or not. But in the mean time, if Elquin requests something so that he can keep applying that glue...then my advice would be to give it to him. This is the only game I play (outside of checkers with my mother) and it is made very enjoyable when I'm able to team up with Elquin...and his enthusiasm! :woohoo:

Hope to see you in game more Halish...but in the event I/we don't...at least we know why now.

Have a blessed day. :)

Here is some more info on the upcoming changes.

A few quotes:

The guild mission system allows people in a guild to work together to unlock guild upgrades that allow them to go on missions together. These missions can be kicked off by the specific guild that has researched that mission, but once they are activated, anyone can jump in and participate to help the guild finish the mission if they wish. The missions are designed such that some components of the mission can only be completed by the guild themselves, but each of them has aspects other players can assist with as well.

There are multiple categories of guild missions that a guild can kick of. To give an example, one category is the guild rush. When a guild creates a guild rush in the world at one of the rush locations, a timer begins and the rush has to be completed X number of times within the allotted time in order for the guild to succeed.

For personal motivation, anyone who completes the rush at least once will receive a personal reward regardless of if they are in the sponsoring guild or not. Also, anyone who was in the guild that kicked off the mission receives an extra different type of reward, which can be traded in for a new category of personal guild rewards that can only be earned through the guild mission system.

One thing I would blame is the system that when you're not representing a guild, you are also cut off from the guild channel. This basically stops your interaction with that guild completely. And people would tend to stick to bigger guilds, probably for the guild bonus or population. Eventually smaller half dead guilds become more and more dead... :(
The upcoming guild missions seems nice. But I'm skeptical to how effective it will be to bring guildies together (well since launch the updates don't seem to be going to a good direction). So I really hope there is an option for you to choose which guild channels to turn on, whether you're representing or not. :unsure: