Guild play options disappointing for small guilds

As someone that's just come back to the game after a 3 year gap, I find the way Guilds have been changed to be very disappointing. We were a tiny Guild of 5 people, but we were able to upgrade the Guild by logging on and just playing our chars. Now that doesn't seem to be an option any more. The only way to get upgrades is to spend ingame money, which is fine I guess, but doesn't provide anywhere near the feeling that you were contributing that you used to get. To get a Guild hall, you have to have a LOT of people to clear it judging by the Wiki, so we'll never have one of those. I have no clue whether the changes have made it better for large Guilds, but I'm feeling disenfranchised and disappointed.

You don't really need a lot of people to get a guild hall, you just need people who are skilled and know what they are doing. I think I got my guild hall with a little less than 10 people.

5 players is enough. Too many and it overscales.

Building a hall though is more geared to larger guilds though. I did it with 3-5 and got us to level 42 in 2 years and it was satisfying to do so, although to be honest so few players seem to use the halls

I feel the guild hall system is meant to encourage guilds to grow and form more of a community in its members and having members work towards helping the guild grow with donations and guild missions and such. The whole guild system is not geared towards one person and their small handful of friends being a guild.

@Mewcifer.5198 said:I feel the guild hall system is meant to encourage guilds to grow and form more of a community in its members and having members work towards helping the guild grow with donations and guild missions and such.It actually is worse at it than the old system. Especially scribing is a fail, because it pushes too much of the cost on a single player.

The old system made the guild grow a more shared effort, while the new one is way more uneven. With the new system, usually the majority of the cost and effort is being shouldered by a minority of members. This does not help in creating a community spirit at all.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Mewcifer.5198 said:I feel the guild hall system is meant to encourage guilds to grow and form more of a community in its members and having members work towards helping the guild grow with donations and guild missions and such.It actually is

worse

at it than the old system. Especially scribing is a fail, because it pushes too much of the cost on a single player.

We seem to have different experiences with how much people help out their guild. While, I can see how it can feel unfair when some people are pulling all the way. In my guilds everyone seems to do just about the same. When the guild needs something for the upgrade, such as pvp potions, people get together in teams and go do some pvp. When it comes to scribe work people donate materials or gold to the scribe. Our guild hall is open to all but the lowest rank to decorate so people each claim various little places to be their own in the hall and I give guild hall tours to new members and they can see everyone's work and play on the small JP I made. And when someone wants something specific for their little section of hall they just contact one of our scribes and they work out what materials or gold would be needed to make it.

@Mewcifer.5198 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Mewcifer.5198 said:I feel the guild hall system is meant to encourage guilds to grow and form more of a community in its members and having members work towards helping the guild grow with donations and guild missions and such.It actually is

worse

at it than the old system. Especially scribing is a fail, because it pushes too much of the cost on a single player.

From my experience that's not how it works in the majority of the cases. Most players do not have time, wealth and resources to contribute to the guild building process in a significant way, and the cost is generally carried by a number of the wealthier players. This is additionally compounded by the fact that many people just don't consider the guildhall to be all that useful (and worth investing in).Seriously, the previous boosts system was more useful, and the banners are now far less appealing (considering their crafting cost). And beyond those and nodes there's nothing really that the current system can offer to an average player.

But, back to my original point: The old system made everyone contribute a bit at no cost to themselves. This one makes contribution a personal cost - and not everyone might want (or be capable) to bear that cost to the same degree.

When it works perfectly (like in your case), it helps, but unfortunately when it doesn't work (which seems to be much more common), it makes things worse. And notice that in your case you don't need that system to help in forming the community, because yours seems to be already a closely-knit one. Which is the only reason this system works for you.

As I've come back and am now a Guild of 1 person, will never be able to clear out a hall unless I recruit more people to my Guild or other players return. Would be nice if I could throw it open to the public as an event - "come and clean out the scum infesting our guild hall event".

@"Zygus.5791" said:As I've come back and am now a Guild of 1 person, will never be able to clear out a hall unless I recruit more people to my Guild or other players return. Would be nice if I could throw it open to the public as an event - "come and clean out the scum infesting our guild hall event".

You can. If you have enough influence to convert to favor to start the trek. Just sit in LA and /map chat and put up an LFG.

It’s fair to hop on the assumption that bigger guilds get by because of more people contributing to the Treasurer to upgrade a hall. In reality, from my experience, larger guilds have a clique of 10-20 core players that do the most if not all the material/gold donating. There may be a few outliers in that, but that’s my pov.

My guild is level 59, our numbers have sank from 20 actives to roughly 5, most of those 20 didn’t donate a huge amount either, and most stopped playing 6months into HoT when the guild was about level 25. That’s the downside of running a friendly casual, single rule, no rep necessary guild. But it is still doable, even with so little people.It may take longer, but you also have to remember you don’t need all the upgrades. My guild seemed happy with all the Enhancements and Workshop nodes, our other upgrades are simply bonuses the few of us worked on.

You can ask for help claiming a hall in map chat to where the hall is located and you may get a few players that way, also advertise in LFG. It will scale difficulty every 10th player, so for an easy time take 9 players who know what to do with you.

@"Zygus.5791" said:As I've come back and am now a Guild of 1 person, will never be able to clear out a hall unless I recruit more people to my Guild or other players return. Would be nice if I could throw it open to the public as an event - "come and clean out the scum infesting our guild hall event".

You can use LFG. People can assist you without joining your guild as long as they're in a party with you. Many people who have only 1 or 2 people in their guild get help from the community to claim their guild halls, without ever inviting anyone to their guilds.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Mewcifer.5198 said:I feel the guild hall system is meant to encourage guilds to grow and form more of a community in its members and having members work towards helping the guild grow with donations and guild missions and such.It actually is

worse

at it than the old system. Especially scribing is a fail, because it pushes too much of the cost on a single player.

this is very true after anet changed the guild system back in the day . from what worked to now super fully broken guilds !!! back then you had something you could work for towards that helped the whole guild . but after anet did all that and other things the so called community was its down fall right there and the day it began its death and now in the last 4 years given how anet has done the so called community is a laughing JOKE !!! and anet can not understand how it lost so many players of the game

making guilds worthless and useless and just another mining node pit stop at the very best !!! with noting else to offer at all making it even more use guilds using hackable chat apps like discord and the likes

thus these days guilds mean noting at all and just plan worthless with noting to offer

If I remember correctly e.g. in WoW there is a guild-feature that groups with a majority of members of the same guild earn points for the guild when completing dungeons together. A similar feature in GW2 would be great in dungeons, fractals and pvp and especially for smaller guilds to have more options than the weekly missions on easy-level-of-difficulty only. Such feature would make guild-activities more present every day aside the weekly mission-dates and also could help not concerning that much about the huge amount of materials that'd take small guilds years to accumulate to buff and expand their halls.I'm in a small guild too. We do fractals and dungeons together, but these activities do not contribute to guild favor or experience at all, which is a pity. We try to do guild missions weekly too, but we can only do the easy ones. Any other missions require to many players and/or have a to short time limit for us to accomplish them successfully.Well, another suggestion would be to just increase the amount of weekly missions.

@Mewcifer.5198 said:I feel the guild hall system is meant to encourage guilds to grow and form more of a community in its members and having members work towards helping the guild grow with donations and guild missions and such. The whole guild system is not geared towards one person and their small handful of friends being a guild.

While true in practice (as Anet has more or less stated that they could basically care less about 5 man guilds) I still point out that in their own lore, Destiny's Edge was exactly that, so to make a system that basically poo-poos on that idea is just this side of really annoying on Anet's part.

the current system is IMO garbage, it forces gold costs and allot of guild resources to do anything.anyone in a friends guild or smaller never has any chance on getting anything done, it feels like everything up untill the new system has bin for nothing.

I have to agree with OP.I've been a guild master since 2005, and honestly, although i love GW2, it's the worse game i've played as far as guilds go. Everythign else, top notch. Guilds? Not so much.Guild halls were a great addition, and have a great QoL. They're also easy to capture even with just 5 players. But they're still too lacking, there's not that much to do inside the guild hall. It's just there, and while it's awesome to have, it feels heavily underused. Also lack of dedicated bank, trading post and other crafting stations that aren't just scribing is a big negative on Guild Halls.Another big negative is locking a lot of features inside the guild hall behind owning expansions. I mean even people that bought the original got locked out of using guild bonuses which they had available in the past after HoT. Why not allow guilds to get new players into the game and eventually upgrade. Instead of locking stuff behind the expansions that most people that own the expansions won't need.Lack of new missions and proper guild-oriented content doesn't help, as it doesn't help that you can have 5 guilds, and switch between them, which kills the feeling of belonging.And with the removal of influence based on representation, anyone that asks for 100% representation are just being a-holes, since there's no actual reason for that.I mean why would you build your own small guild's guild hall if you can just join a big lvl 69 guild, get the bonuses from that one, and still play with your low lvl guild friends anyway? Why bother? Especially since requirements don't scale with guild size, so a 500 strong guild has to donate exactly the same materials as a 5 member one.

Strangely, Guilds were always the estranged child of Guild Wars 2. And the changes that came out with HoT, like just about everything that came out with HoT were rushed, incomplete, and will never be addressed any more.

@Randulf.7614 said:5 players is enough. Too many and it overscales.

Building a hall though is more geared to larger guilds though. I did it with 3-5 and got us to level 42 in 2 years and it was satisfying to do so, although to be honest so few players seem to use the halls

This is the issue I think with Guild Halls.

They are monstrously big, extremely time consuming to fill and expensive to even try for small guilds.

Getting the Guild Hall is mor than doable, small guilds can ask for PUG's or alliances with other small guilds, it kinda defeats the object but at least they can be gotten.

Scribing is the killer for small guilds.. time cost and then with such a large open space to fill, its hard to even start visualising how to lay the guild hall out..Unlikely to change now though as ANET have killed the Guild Team internally.

As for so few using it.... large empty hall .. small number peeps, makes for a lonely place :)Large Hall for large guild... numbers then get prevented being in the same instance so kinda moots large guilds wanting to congregate there also..

It comes across as something they mocked up to try to appease the growing call for guild halls, but lacked the time, resource and creative input to put something together that rivalled even MMO's 5-10 years older than GW2, which is a real shame

My guild has 5 active members. We all know each other. Its a family guild. The five us managed to claim without much difficulty.We have gotten our guild to lvl 22. Influence is the big problem for us. Many we do only the small of medium guild treks.Smaller guilds should have a small guild hall with lower costs to build stuff. Not including scribe.Limit there rooster to 20 or something allowing them to only have the smaller hall.Why not bring back alliances like Guild Wars 1? Smaller guilds can band together or with larger ones to improve together.

It IS kind of ironic that the Guilds in "Guild" Wars 2 appear top be it's weakest, least well implemented feature. I personally would like to see a building system perhaps somewhat akin to RIFT's, where you can build entire large items at a time, and can scale them to fit your idea of the space you have - could make these more time and money intensive by having to build them using resources perhaps, unlike RIFT where you just put them in instantly.

When you upgraded it to have almost everything, you may start to think it is nothing special. You are just getting fomo into it.

Guild is never the focus of gw2, I got shill into it thinking it was. Gw2 is just a content focus game, pretty much pve content while having other things as compliment.

Guild in mmorpg are always towards pvp side of things and any mmo that focus on pve will not have much focus on guilds. Guilds in those games usually end up as LFG or chit-chat groups.

I for one don't see why Guilds couldn't be built around PvE activities, particularly in a game like GW2 which has a lot of large scale mobs and events that require large groups of people to fight, but even beyond that, would be great to be able to have a decent sized Guild bank which also had a resources section, social areas to allow people to meet and with activities that people could do while standing around waiting for others, etc etc. Some MMOs I've played have had very functional activities that you could do in Guild halls. The limit is really only the imagination of the designers.

@Zygus.5791 said:I for one don't see why Guilds couldn't be built around PvE activities, particularly in a game like GW2 which has a lot of large scale mobs and events that require large groups of people to fight, but even beyond that, would be great to be able to have a decent sized Guild bank which also had a resources section, social areas to allow people to meet and with activities that people could do while standing around waiting for others, etc etc. Some MMOs I've played have had very functional activities that you could do in Guild halls. The limit is really only the imagination of the designers.

That would've probably made people deal with Guild Halls even less.