Jump to content
  • Sign Up

A Few Solutions for Small/Dead Guilds and Empty Guild Halls.


Recommended Posts

Craftable Missions for the Guild Hall.Randomly placed Gathering Nodes.Visitors.The Return of Influence.

There are plenty of guilds out there that are practically dead. They have abysmal attendance, nothing to entice recruits and eventually become a second bank for the leader. Guild halls are somewhat dead content if your guild isn't super popular and active. And these guild essentially are set to the side as projects stuck in self-perpetuating stagnation. In order for a guild to grow, it needs players. In order to get players to join and remain, it needs to provide something they want. And that is usually stuff and buffs.

So I did a little brainstorming and came up with the above list as way to fix the issues I have presented. Going down the list


Craftable Missions

Basically a Node you can place somewhere in your guild hall that will create a weekly event that (a) guild member(s) can complete for small amounts of favor.The way it works is:

  1. Basic Mission Nodes are bought from a vendor. They act like decorations except their placement has a few restrictions on them, like proximity to waypoints, to prevent cheating and griefing.
  2. The node is placed somewhere in the Guild Hall and "arms" itself after a time, depending on the mission.
  3. Once armed, Guild Hall missions display on the map. Guild members may complete these events at any time, and once completed will reappear again after reset.
  4. Completed Guild Hall Missions will reward up to 20 favor. The guild will also be restricted to having 5 missions in the guild hall at any time to ensure that these guild missions do not make regular missions obsolete.
  5. A guild scribe can also craft more challenging missions that award up to 40 favor upon completion.

Defeat the InvaderThis Guild Hall Mission has you defeat a Champion. It's Node comes in the form of Bait that attracts a champion target every week you can kill for 20 favor. A scribe can upgrade it to a Legendary Creature for 30 favor or a Legendary Bounty for 40 favor. You can have 5 total.

TrackThis Guild Hall Mission has you do laps around the Guild Hall. It's Node is bought from the vendor and sets a predetermined path Guild Members must take, working exactly like mount races. There are large orbs you must pass through in order. It has no timer, but requires 20 laps to be completed which can be done multiple times by the same person for 1 favor per lap. Easy track is small and gives you up to 20 favor. Moderate (1 per lap, 10 favor upon 20th lap) and Long track (2 per lap) tokens can be crafted by scribes. You can only have 1 available.

Custom Track/Jumping PuzzleThis Guild Hall Mission is an extension of Tracks and allows the guild to customize the route taken for a particular track. This Mission's Node must be crafted by a scribe and is a held item that resembles The Anomaly. This gives you a list of skills that allows you to place Orbs which lay out the path one must take until the player reaches the final one, like how Skyscale Rifts work but on foot. Once the Custom Track is complete, amount of favor and awards received will be determined by the length of the track and it's complexity. Complexity is determined by pathing. The start of the track becomes a flag that can be interacted with. When a player decides to do the custom track, they will have the No Mounts and No Glider debuffs placed on them and another stack that goes down every time you collect an orb. These debuffs will be removed if the player dies or Waypoints. These can only be done once per member per week, but allows for an unlimited number of completions with each completion providing more favor per lap than normal.

Scavenger HuntThis Guild Hall Mission makes members search for a number of items randomly placed around the guild hall. The Node will be a Statue that automatically places items around the guild Hall every week. Members can interact with these items to add to the count and the guild will be awarded 20 favor. Scribes can craft more challenging ones, requiring the items to be carried to the statue for 30 favor or drastically increasing the number and hiding spots for 40 favor.

ETC.


Randomly Placed Gathering Nodes

Basically, turn Guild Halls into a sort of regular map that has gathering nodes placed randomly around it for players to use. This can be an upgrade from the mine.


Visitors

Allow guilds to open the hall to non-members with permission options related to the use of facilities. For example, allowing non-members to participate in Guild Hall Missions and gather from nodes. Or not at all. Visitors play into the next idea.


Influence Redux or "Proof of Influence"

Before, Influence could be bought with gold for upgrades. Now it is obsolete and isn't obtainable. But with visitors, it could be used as a way to get more out of one's guild. Like with Guild Hall Missions, the amount of influence gotten could be very small. But with enough visitations and activity, it could be an extra way guilds can acquire favor. This could also work as a Soft Alliance mechanic where guild members from two or more guilds enter their guild halls as visitors and do a mission or gather from nodes until they earn influence.


I would like your ideas and feedback if you guys would be so kind. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

They can sell guild hall...Weather packs for guild hall... Npcs for guild hall... Nodes for guild halls.

Just that would bring diversity, currently any guilds with same guild hall have nodes at the same place, arena, mine, assembly, mission portal at same location too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Zacchary.6183 said:

@Westenev.5289 said:A lot of your ideas sound fun, but could become an issue depending on how you have decorated your guildhall!

How so? I have a few ideas of what you mean but some clarification will be appreciated.

My guildhall houses my pride and joy - an annually growing snowfort surrounding the guild crystal. If Anet chose to use this area as a pre defined route, or drops a node within the walls, it's very possible I would need to take it down... otherwise it wouldn't be fair on the other members of my guild.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

@Westenev.5289 said:

@Westenev.5289 said:A lot of your ideas sound fun, but could become an issue depending on how you have decorated your guildhall!

How so? I have a few ideas of what you mean but some clarification will be appreciated.

My guildhall houses my pride and joy - an annually growing snowfort surrounding the guild crystal. If Anet chose to use this area as a pre defined route, or drops a node within the walls, it's very possible I would need to take it down... otherwise it wouldn't be fair on the other members of my guild.

I would figure the circuits would be more around the center. Possibly on the lower levels of the Hall.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really appreciate the effort put in to the post. Unfortunately, I believe that when Anet changed the guild structure and really hosed the small guilds that it had been their intention to have players migrate into larger guilds. I haven't seen anything since that time that would lead me to think that Anet has any concern at all for the small guilds.

Which is unfortunate.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@kharmin.7683 said:I really appreciate the effort put in to the post. Unfortunately, I believe that when Anet changed the guild structure and really hosed the small guilds that it had been their intention to have players migrate into larger guilds. I haven't seen anything since that time that would lead me to think that Anet has any concern at all for the small guilds.

Which is unfortunate.

Sometimes developers do things and those things turn out to have unintended consequences. For example, mentor tags were not supposed to be commander tag-lite but everyone treated them as such.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really like a lot of your ideas and I think they would go over big. I just don't think we need to disparage small guilds to achieve it. In a small guild it's much easier to put a precursor in the bank and still find it there tomorrow. Both have their own sets of value to us as players.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wouldn't mind some QoL ways to build up the guild hall for sure. More content is generally speaking better than not more content. I can say with certainty, however, that one or two people is technically all that's needed to build a guild hall to max level, as myself and only one other person are in my current guild, and we have done so. Even in quite large guilds, in my experience, it's still just a very very very small number of members that actively contribute to building the hall (between 2 and 5 even in 200+ person guilds)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@EmmetOtter.8542 said:You have some worthwhile ideas but none of that will help a guild unless the guild master and officers are investing the time and effort into the guild community.

Active/involved gm=active guilduninvolved gm=dying guild

I figured that was a given. Still, guild halls are sorta dead content and are not really useful beyond Arenas and upgrading buffs. Thanks for pointing this out though. It makes sense.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

Everytime I run a Dungeon and see all that "Free realestate" I wonder... Why not add an option to it like: "complete all paths and get available as guild hall"?

Honestly, our current guildhalls are huge and dead... Maybe more variety would fix this, and if you look at pretty much any dungeon, you add an arena area (most of them have suitable areas for arenas), add a couple of merchants and BOOM, 8 new guild halls.

One other good change would be the possibility of placing the merchants and NPCs where we please, like decorations, I understand some only make sense in one area, but even so moving the NPCs (and nodes for that matter) could be an easy solution to bring more variety to the GHs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some of those ideas sound interesting. I would like to see it coming. But as others have already pointed out, an inactive guild cannot be reactivated with a fancy guildhall. Even the members of an active guild cannot be attracted by a fancy guildhall. The guildhall is what it is, an instanced map that has a few gathering nodes, vendors and a cheap-bank access. If there was a way to relocate the scribe-station and the gathering-nodes around the lobby waypoint, everyone would do that. The guildhalls the community actually demand fit into Ellen Kiel's office. The halls are huge and empty, decoration is fun. But people rather want housing.

About giving people incentives to use the guildhall

I have tried a lot ideas, nothing worked. In the best case, I managed to motivate 3/100 people to participate in a guildhall-related activity. Have put a lot into advertisement and even more into valuable loot.

  • Races: Created a couple of tracks, advertised a few dates & expensive rewards (20g+). We always had two participants, including myself.
  • Jumping Puzzles: With the introduction of the SAB chest decorations, I placed a chest at the end of every custom JP with a monument and a treasure-code. Mail me and you get a treasure. I get an e-mail once every 2-3 months. Advertised the event and the loot (discord, guildchat, motd). That increased the number of participants by 0.
  • Treasure Hunter I: Placed random SAB chests + treasure-codes in the guildhall. Again big announcement and adverts. I had 1 mail in the past 8 months so far. The chests are not well hidden, many can be reached without executing a single jump. People just do not care.
  • Treasure Hunter II: "Thieves have stolen [decoration]. They tried to escape through one of the portals, did not make it to the end and escaped without loot. Find the lost decoration." We started with 3-4 participants (yay), but the item was not found. After giving a couple of hints it was finally found. When I re-tried the event a couple of weeks again, 0 participants.
  • SAB Treasure Hunt: "Moto has lost SAB decorations in the guildhall. Help him find them!" This was a list of 10-15 objects, advertised in discord. A huge list of loot and a permanently edited progression list - very time consuming. We had a total of 3-4 participants, most did more than one object. When I limited 3 objects per player max., participation dropped to 0. One of the objects is still waiting for a finder ;_;.
  • Pirate Treasure: A pirate-related jumping-puzzle (behind the waterfall) with an NPC giving hints about a buried treasure. The treasure was found once, by my guildleader.

Other failed attempts to attract our members to the guildhall:

  • Winter/Snow decoration in the lobby: I was flooded by people reporting eye-seizures, due to the white-reflections caused by the snow.
  • Snowball Arena: The design was similar to one of the old quake maps, plenty of snowball-sources and nice snow decoration. Total visitors: 1 (myself).
  • Djinn Portals: Easy access to the upper levels of the Gilded Hollow, just go to the tavern and enter one of the portals. Those get used sometimes, but the costs are just ridiculous. Took me weeks to get my gold back.
  • Beetle Race Track: It is hard to miss, yet most of our members know it exists XD. It is frequently used by two players, one is me. Never done any races, due to the lack of participants.

The loot in the treasure-chests was always worth 5g or higher. Some of the events had loot worth 30g or higher (for a single item). Especially the later events had drastically reduced difficulties, some of the treasures were advertised with "you do not even need to jump!" No chance. People are not interested in guildhalls, at least not ours. I doubt anything would change by increasing the loot or lower the difficulty even more. I actually ran that experiment once. I placed a stack of 100 items in our guildhall and advertised "free, everyone can grab one." At the end of the day, the stack was at 97. When I re-tried this a couple of weeks later, not a single item was taken.

Too much effort? I know people have serious issues with the guild-bank mechanics. You cannot just pick up one item of a stack. You have to get the entire stack into your inventory. Split 1 out and put the stack back. That is too much trouble. Ok. Tried it. So I have emptied a bay of the guilbank and put in single items into the slots - same result. If I am lucky, 2-3 players grab one item - which are usually the same people, leader + fellow officers.

This is absolutely frustrating. I finally quit trying. People who play Guildwars 2, want to play the game and are not really interested in community created minigames. The problem with the node-system is simple, most guilds would stack the nodes at the waypoint in the lobby just to offer free loot to their members. There is nothing bad about this. But I can understand why ANet puts so little effort into the guildsystem.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@ElChupaCabra.1379 said:Honestly, our current guildhalls are huge and dead... Maybe more variety would fix this, and if you look at pretty much any dungeon, you add an arena area (most of them have suitable areas for arenas), add a couple of merchants and BOOM, 8 new guild halls.And you would totally miss the point of why guilds halls are dead.

The only reason I personally go to my guild hall is to get a 12 hour buff and hit the synthesizers. I'm in. I'm out. The rest is just scenery to me and if you've seen it once, you've seen it a million times...

If I was in your guild why should I, John Q. Public, go to the guild hall and hang out?

Does it have the services of a city? Mystic Forge, crafting stations, Trading Post, etc...Would be awesome if they did, but alas anet...

Until those kind of changes happen... Are we having a meeting there? A fashion contest? Celebrating monthly birthdays? Group up there before a Guild Mission? Are you hosting a Fight Club in the Arena?

Nothing Anet allows in a guild hall encourages players to just hang out. The GM and Guild Officers have to be creating events that draw people in. And when the event is done, they'll leave and get on with the rest of their play time.

And as you can see from the guy above me, that's really hard. It really comes down to understanding what players want and seeing how the guild can fit into it. It's a long term community building process and a guild hall doesn't enable that. Game Guild Chat and Discord do way more for enabling community than a guild hall.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...