GuildCast 55: Fractals Improvements and Viewers' Hopes for Guild Wars 2

Written by: Scott Hawkes (@jarimor) | December 27, 2012 8:58 am

65 Comments

Welcome to the carbohydrate recovery edition of GuildCast.

Coming at the end of January, those poor unfortunate souls who have found themselves booted out of Fractals due to the cat pushing your power button — curse you Ziggy! — will actually be able to rejoin their party. It might seem insane that you can’t do that already.

An odd oversight or could there be other reasons for this late implementation?

Another change to come along to Fractals will be the new downranking style for party members. With the new patch you will be able to group with players who are lower level for FotM and though you won’t climb up the ladder you will still get Karma rewards. Surely this is a change that will be welcomed by all?

Though it has been a quiet week for Guild Wars 2 news due to the holidays, we ensured this week’s episode will still be suitably stuffed thanks to your suggestions on what you would like to see for your favorite game in 2013.

Is a dungeon finder a necessary evil? Or is it really evil at all? Are guild halls the answer for uniting guild members in a common goal? And are guilds really necessary, especially for PvE content in GW2? We talk about all the ramifications and pose the topic that makes message boards explode: would raiding be a good thing in Guild Wars 2?

Add some more of your astute questions and you have your festive fare sorted. Joining host Gary Gannon is Richie Bogotter Procopio and ZAM‘s Scott Hawkes for a highly organized and social edition of GuildCast!

GuildCast 55: Fractals Improvements and Viewers' Hopes for Guild Wars 2

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Greibach

Good (and long!) show tonight guys. I have to say, I agree and disagree with some of what you guys talked about with guilds. I for one hate the idea of upkeeps and enormous money sinks in order to simply have a guild. The reason is that I think that there has developed a very nice niche for small guilds of very tight-knit friends and communities, and they can only thrive in a place where small guilds can exist (i.e. no upkeep costs). Chat systems in MMOs are woefully simplistic, so simply being able to have semi-private “chat-rooms” in games is a huge virtue as far as I’m concerned. Guilds are currently the only means to facilitate that.

However, I completely agree that there should be larger things that guilds CAN work toward. Having things that require a lot of communication as optional goals for guilds can do exactly what you said. They can force communities to band together and form really strong and large groups. I think both systems can co-exist, especially with a multi-guild system that exists already. I’m in both kinds of guilds currently, and I love that flexibility. Something raid-like can definitely band people together, they just have to make it yet another avenue of getting custom-looking gear, and not the only way to get cool gear, which you guys already covered.
Schirf

I’m a RPer on Tarnished Coast and a bit of a name Nazi. I will not group with characters like “Can I Haz Lootz.” I don’t want a Dungeon Finder that dumps me into random groups. A good group finder would be great. This could just let people check off which things you’re looking for, by dungeon or zone, and allow other players to search the list and send invites from the list. And the invite should show the composition of the group inviting you.

How great would that be?
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1260066056 Steven Diaz

On the dungeon finder issue, with ease of access you get LESS community interaction. SWG and WoW BOTH had strong communities and I found myself making many more friends in games that really didn’t have ease of access. This was due to the fact that we were forced to interact with one another and you’d get to know one another. When you’re sitting there trying to find a group, you get a chance to chat with others already in the group. When you get the group finder, you don’t need to do that, you just keep going about your business. It feels too streamlined.
- Kagitaar
  
  It’s not the tool at issue really, it’s the mindset of the playerbase. The tool will get you the group, but if the content is not hard enough to require communication, people often won’t communicate. On the flipside, if the content is difficult enough to require organization, it all comes down to the players to be able to work together and play smart, which, depending on your community, can end in name-calling and half-finished dungeon runs. The tool just helps fill in the gaps instead of spamming in town, the players make it work or not.
http://www.facebook.com/jan.strube.7 Jan Strube

Hi team,
nice to have been heard, though i could have phrased it better.
However you went on and went into the direction i wanted to go, so it kinda worked.

What i meant that they don`t focus their communication. Before release they collected blogs, statements, interviews etc. in a blog post, so you can go through them.
Now you have to scavage them all on your own.
While it works to some degree, i wish they would do it more focused, so they can better convey what their intend ist.

Btw. i am male, just to throw that little tid bit out.
Next time i make a video :p (you offered video questions if im not wrong)
St_Draco

I was the one in chat who said that dungeon finders/group finders are for people who want to play as a single player in an MMO. So let’s talk about dungeon finders. Why do you want a dungeon finder? Because you want to run dungeons but there aren’t enough people on that you know who also want to run them. You don’t want a dungeon finder to find friends or make contacts. You don’t want a dungeon finder to find new guild members. You want a dungeon finder so “you” can run dungeons.You aren’t interested in the people you run them with; you are only interested in the dungeon and the loot you get from them. That is why I said what I did.

ANet has the systems already to make either a list based LFG/LFD or a hot join based. Part of the guild roster system is just a list and flagging and sPvP already has hot join group functionality. So why haven’t they put it in? Well chances are its because such systems won’t prove to be an adequate tool. Hot Join systems rely on matching criteria to form groups. In WoW and most other games, that criteria is level, item level, role, and activity. GW2 doesn’t have item levels (or an equivalent) or roles (roles are dynamic and vary from encounter to encounter). That leaves just level and activity. I don’t see a hot join system based on those criteria being serviceable. List based systems, like GW2LFG, have the issue of not scaling well. Too few and the list doesn’t provide enough people to fill groups; too many and the list becomes unwieldy and a chore to go through. On top of this, you never know if the person listed is actually interested in grouping or if they just forgot that they flagged them selves LFG. I’ve played games with a list based system and I can tell you that more often it was easier and faster just to spam the chat channels.

All that said, I have an idea, one that I would think has already been attempted, but maybe not. Dungeon Finder Guilds. Put it on the community to use the flexible guild system in GW2 to create a guild or guilds for people looking for Dungeons. It would be quite easy, just join the guild and when ever you want to run dungeons, just hit represent and bam, now people know that you are looking for a dungeon group. It creates a list of people who are doing the same as well as a chat channel. Don’t want to run dungeons or aren’t looking for a group, then just stop representing and you are good to go. You could even create specialized guilds for specific dungeons and Fractal Levels. It takes just a little bit of effort to do and it totally in the power of the community. Yes, this is essentially a “list based” dungeon finder, but it has an advantage over a developer implemented one, player investment. Because players are in control of the system and are invested in it, it will be more serviceable and less prone to the weakness of a developer implemented system.
- Jado Cast
  
  Another reason they may not have a LFG or LFD, is they put it in GW1 about 3 or 4 years into the game and til this day no one hardly uses it. They still spam in chat. The even made it so if you start LFG in chat that it will add it to the tool just so it is actually utilized. Maybe they thought the same thing would happen in GW2. Not sure.
  - St_Draco
    
    I do want to point out something, GW2 does have an LFG tool. It is in your social tab, and you can flag yourself LFG, just type /lfg. The system just isn’t that robust and it doesn’t allow for you to specify what you are actually looking to do and you can’t really search the system. But it is there, just not implemented in a serviceable way and isn’t being used by the community.
    
    And what you said about GW1 holds to how I see ANet approaching problems. I think for them, if they can’t do something in a way that they think improves upon a system or addresses a problem adequately, then they don’t do it.
    - Jado Cast
      
      Yes, I agree.
http://twitter.com/kirzanSix Michael Coulombe

They can do so much with Fractals and that type of dungeon they really should develop them to the fullest. The best “replay value” I’ve had in SP games were infinite dungeons at the end for the ultimate loot, a nice place to grind and additional challenge bosses. They could even do low/mid level fractals type dungeons as well.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Caliolo/100003765889295 Robert Caliolo

Hehe Our guild leader doesn’t even play games hardly at all
http://profile.yahoo.com/YSVAPKVBUPTX6YS3W2DLPOBNN4 AlokP

Specialization of mechanics (IE, a raid mechanic) = pushing towards specific roles or sub-roles in a class. Want to run a raid without a water ele or support guardian? Good luck getting people to join that group. Want to run it with 10 thieves? Not gonna happen. I don’t think ANet would want to alienate players from their “play as you want to play” philosophy.
- St_Draco
  
  This is potentially one of the hurdles that ANet has when designing large scale group content. They can over come it, but they need to figure out a way to make encounter’s challenging while still being accessible. That issue is what plagues the original dungeons as well as the “world bosses”.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Caliolo/100003765889295 Robert Caliolo

As for the Home city/instance. Why has Lions Arch become the home instance/city for all? Why does it have to be that way? My suggestion is create new dungeons/instances/fractals that are located in the home cities.
Mabasploom

So when it comes to raiding, or things for a guild to do, how about something like this? You add in a new dungeon, but one that has branching paths. You can take more than the 5 people in at a time, but only 5 people down a certain path. So for example, the group going down Path A completes up to a certain point, which then opens up a door in path B for them to a bit further. The people in Path A then have to survive long enough for the Path B group to move up and do the same thing, allowing Path A to move forward, etc….

At the end, you have a large event/boss encounter, where the people who completed path A stand on the ground and fight, while the people who did Path B have to run support on the upper levels by firing siege weapons, kill adds, things like that. If you run it with a PUG group, you get your Loot chest at the end, but if everybody who runs it is from the same guild, then you get something for the guild as well (A massive Influence boost, a Free random Guild upgrade etc…) If you were going to put in Guild Halls or something like that, you could have a chance for a piece you need to drop that you need to build your Guild Hall.

A bit rough I know, just throwing ideas out there.
http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr

Still don’t fully understand the dislike of a Dungeon Finder mechanic. It’s simply another tool for completing group content. My favorite uses of a Dungeon Finder mechanic is when you have two or three guildies and need to pick up a member to fill out the group.

A few post mentions a group listing mechanic. That’s a really great tool for forming a group that is interested in creating longer term reoccurring groups.

You want to create a Fractals group that runs two or three nights a week, use a group listing tool. If you need to pick up a player because you are missing a member, use a Dungeon Finder.

Personally, they are just all tools helpful in enjoying the content.
- http://twitter.com/kirzanSix Michael Coulombe
  
  It would have to be very intricately designed. The problem with current dungeon finder features is that people just stop caring about so many things. The rest of the group isn’t on my server? Let’s ninja, troll, be an idiot. It doesn’t matter, it’s not like they’ll get on the general channels and destroy my rep! At the same time, if it’s (theoretically) same-server only, then the whole reputation thing and badmouthing someone who performed below-par in general channels becomes an issue.
  
  Either way, when there’s someone in the group you don’t want, it just delays things way too much. It springs another debate as to how much power does the leader have over other group members. If someone’s being a jackass, can the leader fully kick him without consent? Do other members need to do that? What if 3/5 people are in his guild and won’t kick him?
  
  In a perfect scenario, it simplifies everything and makes everything faster. In other scenarios, which happens most of the time, it’s a pita. There is a gray zone, where no one talks and just gets the job done, but I don’t think that’s the optimal way of playing the game. But that’s just me.
  - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
    
    I think Guild Wars 2 would make it an easy design. Loot is not a problem, use the same loot mechanics as now. Keep it same server only.
    
    The biggest challenge is to create an algorithm that doesn’t build stupid groups, i.e. no five ranger groups. But Arenanet should have the data by now on successful group compositions.
    
    Bad behavior in groups, always an interesting challenge. Leader kick, group vote kick, reporting, honor votes; all options Arenanet could consider.
  - Kagitaar
    
    I’ll give you the possibility for asshattery, but loot is already a non-issue.
St_Draco

Gary, I love the idea of a super high cost guild airship. It should take a huge amount of guild Influence to set up and then have a high Influence upkeep cost. It would be a total prestige item that requires a guild level effort to achieve and maintain. It would could be a minor element in creating that community stickiness that people feel is missing.

Regarding mounts, ANet has said they are not opposed to the idea just that mounts would need to serve a purpose other than simply moving around faster.
Joseph Winn

Raiding and “guild dues” are part of sub-based MMO design. They are hooks to keep people playing beyond the point that they normally would. You can take a break from GW2 and you don’t have to schedule your week around the game, and that’s healthy. It’s good and healthy and lasts for longer than forced play.

Unlocking Orr temples is actually much easier and fun to do as a guild, but there’s been no culture built around doing that to have it be seen as a guild event. ArenaNet is still fighting against decade old concepts and people aren’t quick learners.

Having said that and poopoo’d on people’s cries, I would like to see some more larger scale organized content and stuff like Guild Halls. Those well run, well organized guilds don’t persist based on things like raiding. Raiding guilds often break up and splinter and lose people because of all the drama associated with the forced schedule and power struggle between players that are the result of the job-like atmosphere that raids create.

The guilds that last normally have some social events and stuff that the guild leaders come up with themselves. Guild Halls would be a good place to host those sort of things. Things we’ve seen datamined like player-created treasure hunts would be a great tool as well.
http://www.facebook.com/aeon.marlunis Aeon Marlunis

Items for your guild or hall that only drop in certain dungeons/events. The chance to get it is higher with the more members. 2 required. I don’t like the idea of RNG but I could deal with this. It would be a great incentive to do stuff together.
Brimstar

I want a dungeon finder but a new tab for it, like the new tab for sPVP or WvW. Organzing options and dungeon branched trees within the dungeon finding tab. I don’t want it to be copy/pasta like WoW’s dungeon finder.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Bill-Gerrettie-Jr/1287578323 Bill Gerrettie Jr

No, no, NO! We don’t need stupid gold sinks added to guild halls. The only reason to add these gold sinks is to kill small family & friends guilds.
- Joseph Winn
  
  I was going to make a comment on this but forgot to, but I agree. Gold slinks for guilds hurts close-knit and friendly small guilds.
- Jado Cast
  
  +1
rodxuxa12

I played GW2 for a week. I like buttons, so when i peaked at lv8 on chars, it didnt hold my attention. Maybe i didnt faal in love with a class, i was hoping the guardian would be the one, but it wasnt.

Anyway, im here to say i always watch this show because of you 3 guys. Gary is awesome, no need to delve into that. But please keep the other two around talking on shows, even if it doesnt involve GW. I dont like to watch tv (only some Espn, a rare episode of big bang T) so GBTV is a major entertainment to me.

Thanks folks.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Ian-Smith/100000531128393 Ian Smith

David Cross? Or was that a joke reference?
Jado Cast

Its funny how in this episode there is endorsement for a Dungeon Finder yet they think A-net should do something to make Guilds more Relevant Kind of Ironic isn’t it? Then Gary talks about how MMO’s are getting soft and making it too easy, yet also thinks a Dungeon Finder is necessary.

Personally, I agree with the LFG finder that will allow you to LFG for events, dungeons, sPVP, etc. I also think they need to let people on the map know about the Group Events that are up all over the map when you enter a zone, so its easier to know what’s going on, which is similar to Rift. More people will interact for those event if they know about the big group events. I also don’t want RAIDS, but I would like 10 man dungeons that are more sophisticated. I also want to preview items from the Trade Post. Guesting needs to come out soon. Also WvW needs some serious attention because the player base is shrinking fast.
- St_Draco
  
  Yeah I agree that some of the sentiments expressed feel a bit contradictory, but then many things in life are.
  
  The large scale events like The Sunless, The Shatterer, and Jormag have zone wide announcements as do other zones with large scale meta events. Guesting may get shelved due to the exploits that were mentioned on the show. WvW is getting love come Jan/Feb. and it already saw some small attention in the Wintersday patch.
  - St_Draco
    
    I just went back and looks and I was incorrect, the World Bosses don’t have proper zone wide announcements. They have local ones. I didn’t realize it because when I go back to those zones I usually just stay near where those events are set to spawn so I get the local announcement. So yes, this would be a nice thing to have since these events are suppose to be “epic”.
    - Jado Cast
      
      Yep, and even the Group Events that are not World Bosses that require more than one person because they do not skill, like the Krait Witch etc., would be nice to know from anywhere on the map. A lot o ppl are good about telling others in chat and putting put the way point as well.
      - St_Draco
        
        You bring up something that has me second guessing whether I would want a map wide announcement system. You point out that a lot of people are good about telling others in chat and putting up the way points. This is community involvement and is a good thing to see. If you put in an automated UI element that alerts people, then you may have less community involvement in these sorts of things. I know it seems small but these little sorts of things help build communities. Think about older MMOs that didn’t have these kind of features and how much it was put onto the community to educate and assist one another. Unfortunately the encounters aren’t that complex, or rather don’t require you to use the complex elements that exist to succeed. So you loose some of the required community interaction.
      - Jado Cast
        
        Good Point. But there are some smaller group events in obscure locations on the map, and so a lot of people don’t even realize what’s going on because they are just passing through a high traffic area out of the way. I think if more people knew what was going on in those areas, they would go just to fight the boss.
        
        If there is a boss in the Forrest, but no one around to hear it, then does it make a sound? :)
- ScottHawkes
  
  I don’t think there’s anything contradictory at all about it. Having a group finder helps those who want a group move away from spamming /map or just going alone. Making finding a group more awkward doesn’t promote social interaction.
  If it doesn’t promote social interaction it won’t negate the allure of good guilds who you would rather run with because a) it’s more fun and b) there’s content that requires the kind of communication and organisation that you won’t get easily through a group finder.
  Having content that makes guild cohesion more vital would not be diminished by a group finder.
  LFR in WoW made guilds less necessary because the LFR raids are so ridiculously easy that you don’t need strong coordination or comms. Also the barriers to progression in regular raiding put pressure on smaller guilds who found members moving upwards to “more serious” raiding guilds when they became frustrated at not dropping the next boss.
  If you don’t want to group with a guild (for whatever reason) having to search in /map chat or dungeon finder won’t make a huge difference to making you spend time with guildies.
  In other words, the reason it isn’t contradictory is because we are talking two different problems that have often been judged as the same.
  - St_Draco
    
    Scott you are correct that there are two different problems at hand here. Unfortunately the two problems impact one another. You mentioned LFR making guilds less necessary because the LFR raids are so easy that you don’t need strong coordination. Right now as it stands, GW2 dungeons and events are in a similar boat. The group related content is lacking key design elements that make that content require strong coordination. Without that content, as you pointed out, guilds end up lacking utility in the game. If you put in an LFD/LFG system into the game as it is, you diminish guild utility even further. If guilds have little or no serviceable utility, then people have little to no reason to create bonds or build community. We already see signs of what that kind of lack of content is doing to the game, LFG/LFD will just exasperate the situation. Imagine WoW without Normal or Heroic Mode Raiding. Think of what impact that would have on the WoW PvE guilds.
    
    Understand I’m not entirely against a LFG/LFD system. I’m just against such as system for the game as it is now. If ANet can figure it out with their encounter design and can manage to juggle and prioritize their philosophies so that we get the type of content that was indicated to us pre-launch, then yes a limited LFG/LFD system would serve the community well. When I say limited I mean something like a Fractals Hot Join system and a Story Mode Dungeon Finder. LFG systems don’t work for content that requires strong coordination (What Explorable Mode Dungeons are suppose to be). Until then, the community needs a challenge to collaborate around. If that is the LFG Boss, then so be it. I mentioned in an earlier post an idea that I am surprised hasn’t been widely implemented and that is a Dungeon Runners Guild. Why people who are always looking for dungeons don’t just form an open guild that creates a list of like-minded people is beyond me. I think it may have to do with people being too accustom to limited guild systems and LFG systems in other games.
    - ScottHawkes
      
      If GW2′s encounter design doesn’t improve LFG will be the least of its problems.
      Any diminishing in guild unity in the current game due to a LFG tool would be negligible in my view, my evidence coming from /map spam as plenty of people aren’t using guilds for groups anyway.
      Not fixing one problem because it somewhat highlights another isn’t really a tenable reason to do nothing.
      Both areas need fixing.
      - St_Draco
        
        I understand where you are coming from, but I have to ask you Scott, what will having an LFG system accomplish? You bring up chat spam. Well chat spam will always be there, it may not be LFG, but it will be there. Will it make it easier and faster for people to find groups? Possibly, it depends on how well the community takes to using it. If people aren’t using guilds and the open guild system to form groups, what says they are going to use the LFG system? Even if people use the system, if the system isn’t fast enough or timely enough, people will just go to spamming chat in addition to using the LFG tool.
        
        To understand why people want an LFG system you have to look at what is causing the problem of people finding and forming groups. The actual act of forming a group is very easy in GW2. The criteria to enter and complete dungeons and group events is also easy. So what is keeping people apart? Is it the awareness of other people who also want to do dungeons/group content? It shouldn’t be, simply because there are so many people who want to do this content. All those people looking for groups just need to friend/follow/guild invite all the other people who are also looking for group and bam, they have a list of people who they know that want to do dungeons.
        
        The way I see that it comes down to the community and their unwillingness to actually play and be social in a social game. Scott you mentioned wanting to have the tool so you can find that 1 additional person to run a dungeon with. So why doesn’t your guild/followers/friends list have enough people to fill that 1 spot?
      - ScottHawkes
        
        It’s not for the 1 person, it’s for however many you need. Why doesn’t your list have four more people? Because it obviously doesn’t or you wouldn’t be looking for more people.
        And, of course, any competent LFG tool will make finding a group for a specific zone or dungeon easier. Asking whether it will be better if its not built very well seems like a question designed to answer itself.
        I’m pretty confident ArenaNet can make a tool to find groups that’s better than /map.
      - St_Draco
        
        I used the 1 person example because so many people who were championing LFGs were saying how useful it was in finding that 1 extra person that kept them from doing group events.
        
        But my question is still valid regardless of however many people you are looking for. You say, “because obviously it doesn’t”, but that doesn’t answer the question. The question is why doesn’t it? If there are so many people looking and the chat is full of spam, then each and everyone of those people should be on each others following/friends list or if there are too many then a guild should be made. It makes sense right? I mean those are people interested in doing the same things and they are looking for other people do to them with. The game has the functionality to create lists and group people according to interest. So why aren’t people making the effort to use those systems?
        
        Are you sure that any competent system will work? I’ve seen plenty of systems that developers thought were competent and even met the demands of the community, but the community didn’t take to them and ultimately didn’t serve the purpose they were made for.
        
        I never asked the question “whether it would be better if it’s not built very well?”. I asked if it would make it easier and faster. And then I asked if people aren’t using tools that are designed to help facilitate grouping and social experiences now, what will make them use an LFG system.
        
        Scott I agree that ANet can make a better system for finding groups and doing group content than /map. The systems already exist in the game. So why aren’t people utilizing them?
        
        I hope that I’m not coming off as combative. And I agree with you that there is a problem. It’s just that we feel the problem stems from different sources. I see it as a community/culture issue and you see it as a developer/game functionality issue.
      - ScottHawkes
        
        There are many reasons why friends lists and guild groups don’t always supply the players at the time you need to fulfill the requirements for a group.
        As GW2 is such a casual game, one that, due to its content focus, doesn’t require people to be playing consistently in order to achieve specific goals, it’s highly likely that people won’t be able to fill groups constantly from their guild or friends.
        In games where a more constant engagement with the game is required there are still plenty of times where your guild can’t fill up a group at the specific time you need it.
        GW2′s strength for many people is that they can pick it up and put it down on their own schedule, an LFG tool is specifically used for that purpose.
        And I struggle to think of a well implemented, well designed LFG system in a game that wasn’t used by the players. A well designed tool is made to fulfill the needs of the players. If it is not being used, it hasn’t been designed well.
        You seem to believe that people just don’t know how to use friends lists and that is why so many are spamming /map. I just don’t agree with that.
        And we don’t think the problem stems from different sources, we’re talking about different problems.
        There is definitely a community issue because there is not content to form a community around a lot of the time in PvE. That’s one problem.
        The content that is available can be inconvenient to access because there is not a tool to assist players who are without the required social support structure at the specific times it is needed. That’s a different problem.
        Improved, engaging PvE content will make those players more available, but there will always be times when friends/guildies are not around and an LFG tool is just a common sense way to bridge that gap.
      - St_Draco
        
        Scott I agree that in other games friends lists and guilds don’t always provide the resource pool of people you may need to run group events. This is a limitation on how those systems work in other games. In most MMOs you can’t be a part of multiple guilds, you can’t be part of multiple groups of people. You are set in a limited group, either buy guild or by friends list. In GW2 you don’t have those limitations.
        
        I accept that you don’t agree with my evaluation that people don’t know how to use the friends/follow/guild system effectively. If you did we wouldn’t be having this discussion =)
        
        Ok, so you say you struggle to think of a game that has a well implemented LFG system where the community doesn’t use it. I can understand that, because part of the criteria for a well implemented system is community use. So name MMOs that have a well implemented LFG system? What were the problems that they had that the LFG was successful in overcoming? From what I am able to see, the top issue was finding players that met a particular criteria that was needed to access/complete the group content. The games had plenty of people who wanted to do group content, they even had strong social structures, the problem was those structures weren’t able to provide enough of the types of people (class/role) needed to consistently do group content. Does GW2 suffer from this same issue?
        
        You say we are talking about two different problems. I don’t believe we are. We are talking about people having problems finding groups to do group content. From your perspective the solution lies in putting in a tool that better facilitates players forming groups. From my perspective, the tools already exist, the community just isn’t using them/recognizing them. This is where we disagree, but we are still talking about the same problem.
        
        You are correct that there are going to be times when friends or guildies are not around to do group content, but when that is the case, the issue of an LFG system should be minor and not a major concern of the community.
  - Jado Cast
    
    I guess my point is, many guilds exist for the sake of running dungeons. And since you can join more than one guild, then that kind of makes being a part of that guild more relevant.
http://twitter.com/TheFeyLife Fey

GW2 will never be as hard as Dark Souls.. But it SHOULD be.
http://twitter.com/TombstoneX Jason C Matzke

To Jason comment. I understand what saying. I think is the purpose of Leveling in the first place. if your gonna be about the level all mobs in the world why level in the first place. Since your never gonna over power the mobs in some zones. But I understand other side too and I don’t have problem with this.
- http://www.facebook.com/juuso.maksimainen Juuso Maksimainen
  
  But the thing is you don’t get upscaled in higher level zones it’s only if you go to lower level zones that’s where the scaling system kicks in. If your lvl 10 going to lvl 50 zones you will still be a low level noobie getting absolutely 1shotted by higher level mobs.
http://twitter.com/Kelphumin Mietze Kätzchen

Family (small guild)> 100 friends I don’t even know the names (big guild) <3
I don't like the word "raid" since only know it in PvP terms, so youre already able to raid wvw as a guild, but the idea of a raid ini, it's only meant for bigger guilds i guess :<

Btw, rp Guilds are always fun, they got a lot of activities i guess <3 I can only speak of my own Guild atm tho

But our hole guild still wishes for a guild hall to decorate with avtivities and stuff ~
also what we wish for are alliances with other guilds <3
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  What I think Scott is looking for is a Guild Story for the guild, similar to the personal story. Something or anything that would require the guild to compete. Your guild could enter an instance and complete a story similar to the personal story and end up with one or more boss fight that requires guild cooperation.
HartsHope

thank you GUILDCAST! Thank you for consistently diagnosing the experiencing of playing GW2. you’re frank, honest, and insightful about the experience of playing the game. It’s no flattery to say that the Arenanet devs would be wise to watch this show and consider strongly your commentary.

Especially concerning the lack of social stickiness and guild sized PVE events and the lack of interesting, challenging content, you are 100% accurate. Every PVE and social guild I’ve joined has largely lost interest in the game. And listening to the voices of these players – they always say they feel like theyre “playing a single player game.” PVE guilds are just chatrooms with a different text color… its pretty weak. My WvW focused guild however is always buzzing with interest and activity.

I like my guilds in the 20-30 player sized range. And i would love even a 10man sized event or just something to make my guild create some memories or something to cheer about… not just another night of ridiculously easy dungeon runs and trading armor dyes… boooooooring. I would raid or event for a single brick in a guild hall… i would raid for a JUG OF INFLUENCE.. i would raid for a crafting recipe called “guild cupcakes” effect = “your character temporarily gets fatter”.. dont care about stats dont want sword of awesome…
http://profile.yahoo.com/OHWQGNJD7ATU5YSO3C4BKOJQTI Learning-to-Fly

Currently, my pve guilds gets like 2 players a night online. Used to have 20+ at launch. Theyre bored and killing the World Dragons (we call them World Salamanders hehe) is lamely easy. Too much of the game feels cheap and easy. It’s quite a forgettable experience.

Gary: “MMOs have gone soft.”

Scott: “Used to be the difficulty of something used to be directly proportional to the amount of achievement you felt. And that doesnt exist anymore.”

Richie: “Nope.”

Enough said. There it all is in a nutshell. You guys rock. This is the only credible video game commentary site around.
Rich E.

The most poignant and important Guildcast so far. Glad you guys are saying these things since youre celebrity and get taken more seriously. I post these comments on the GW2 forums and get zerged by fanboys.

Anet!! watch from 1:20-1:21 and LISTEN.
MMO_NewSkool

Everquest 1 with GW2 graphics and combat system tweaked for more group dynamics…. HELL YES. i’d be dodging my ass through Blackburrow like a pro!

Im with you guys. I have more memories from my three years (99-2002) in EQ1 than I do from all games combined since. Without danger, without risk – there is no thrill and no fun. Until Guild Wars 2 becomes something more than a fashion show collecting outfits for my virtual closet, I wont be spending a penny. I barely play anymore but i still watch Guildcast haha
Vikram Gupta

makes my head hurt when hosts say GW2 lacks challenging or epic content.

Have these guys done Arah ? CoE ? or Fractal 20+ ?

And for a game hoping to enter esports, dueling is a MUST.
- Senatic
  
  I will give you arah path 4 is hard, but as far as CoE and fractals 20+ go (maybe if you had said fractals 40+) they’re a joke and can be completed with any semi intelligent pug. CoE quite frankly is incredibly easy, I have the entire armor set for that dungeon so I’m not just saying that. You can basically face tank subject alpha for the most part, except one or two encounters where you simply spread and dps him down at range. As soon as you learn to recognize the circles you can stand in without taking damage the entire fight becomes incredibly easy.
Chris Martin

@59 DDO has a system like that were you need a Mage to access totems on the wall to open a secret door. Since they have high intelligence they are the only class that can do it.
http://profile.yahoo.com/Y4GM7QYNNFITZHQKF2A2XLRBWM David

i don’t know if anyone suggested this or not, but here goes. arenanet has already shown the ability to do events where everyone has the same gear, powers, etc during the hunger games event. why not do a raid the same way? give 15 or 20 players (maybe restrict it to guilds) the same gear and powers and set them loose. eliminate gear requirements completely for raid, instead focus on player skill and tactics. it would also make balancing much easier -

maybe you could time it or something, and have a leaderboard for guilds – maybe give better rewards or something for getting a top time or getting the farthest, etc.
integerx

MMORPGs no longer feel like worlds. They feel more like amusement parks. Guild Wars 2 suffers the same problem. Instances, quest grinds, the event carousel of GW2, and even things like the dungeon finder all are aspects of this.
pedro gava

The GUESTING problem that was mentioned, like being able to kill and get the loot of different wolrd bosses (3 dragons) in each server you switch would be easily solved by:

- put a buff to the person that killed that world boss “This person killed ‘blablabla’ ” – then he wouldnt be able to get any loot if he killed that same boss in another server. SIMPLE AS IS SEEMS
http://twitter.com/Khelendross Chris Black

The guild discussion is hugely important. MMO’s now adays a guild is really a group of people who hardly speak to each other, don’t know each other but sometimes pvp or run dungeons together.

In DAOC and EQ a guild was a big deal. My DAOC guilds all were very segmented. You had people in charge of raids, pvp, and crafting. It was a family. And guild activities were taken very seriously. Even modern day raiding guilds which retain some of that structure lack the sense of family that the great guilds from classic MMO’s had.

With how WvsW works Guild Wars is a prime target for this. And its also a prime targets for raids. People confuse raids with progression. They are not the same. DAOC had many raids but no progression. The level cap was never raised in the history of the game. You did have Master Levels which was a huge controversy simply because of the large amounts of power that ML abilities could grant. But that was related to pvp. GW2 could easily make raids based on a DAOC style model. And honestly I think as the hosts said, these large scale activities are gonna be important to GW2′s long term survival. Its worth noting that the best raids in DAOC were in Shrouded Isles expansion, before ML’s were implemented. And encounter design has moved so far forward since then. Its an untapped well of awesome that Arenanet seriously needs to consider drawing from.
http://twitter.com/Khelendross Chris Black

Another thing in regards to raids in GW2. The idea of encounters with special profession jobs is very doable but only in the context of a raid like I mentioned above (and since I used DAOC as an example I’ll stress that raids in classic MMO’s had no cap of say 10 or 20 man. It was however many people you wanted to bring). I love the idea of needing to have an engineer to make a boss a little easier to handle. If anyone played vanilla WoW, I’ll used the big Corehound in Molten Core as an example. You needed to have a hunter (preferably 2 or 3) to use Tranquilizing shot on the boss when he went into a rage. You could kill him without it but it was very very difficult.
Daniel Eden

Personally, I don’t want raids added to the game.

I have a hard enough time getting five people to play dungeons/fractals without resorting to randoms. I really don’t want content to be gated by guild size or to be forced into playing with unknowns (many of whom will quit halfway through if things aren’t going their way).That being said, I would like to see some content that requires a bit more coordination. The fractals are a step in the right direction, but they’re not quiiite there.

One thing that could be kind of cool is to have multi-group dungeons — where your five man group teams up with say two other five man groups. In such maps, each group would be tasked with performing different activities simultaneously — essentially different sub-paths within the dungeon that involve either one, two, or all three groups.

For example, one group might be required to defend a door while another escorts an NPC to a control panel within a facility. Meanwhile, the third group might have to sneak into a separate compound and steal the macguffin that is required for the next step of the adventure.
Kagitaar

Since I believe I understand the downleveling question, I’ll clarify it: it is about the constant level fluctuations as you run through a zone, and the inherent weirdness that that entails. I know personally I have had it put me at 15 fighting level 10s, and been 17 and having 20s tossed at me. It’s very obnoxious to me, and I assume the person who asked, to have these massive fluctuations with no rhyme, reason, or indication of a border crossed.
http://twitter.com/Vanagorn Vanagorn

Hello, GuildCast

Hitting on the subjects seen in your show, that being “What I
would like to see in GW2”, LFG option, and more guild participation”. First I have
played wow since first release and stopped playing in Cata the reason “I was a
Dis priest nothing more needs to be said” but really I just grew out of playing
WOW and need a change. What I used to do with guild members in the guild I was
in was plan events like Baby races “level one characters run from point A to
point B in high level zones top 3 people who die closest to target get a prize
usual gold or free pets”. I would also set up scavenger hunts for gray items
around the world for gold and prizes.

So, what I would like
to see in GW2 in a guild environment is the ability to set up a form of daily
quest with a weekly quest collecting items for what the guild may need. Prizes
can be money, patterns, extra buffs that the guild could use to enhance game
play. A guild hall would also be nice
but I would rather like to see guilds building forts or structures and have the
ability to fight other guilds that have a forts or structures. A guild story
line would also be exciting to run as a guild. I would like the GW2 name to really stay true
to that name adding effects like those mentioned. With the LFG option I would
like to see that also but with a little twist since you can be in multiple
guilds and represent your main guild how about a LFG with-in the guilds you
have on your guild list that way you could cause more people to want to join a guild
and have multiple guilds in there list.

Thank you for reading my 2cents worth of thought.

AKA Vanagorn
DoctorOverlord

There was one point in the large guild content discussion that wasn’t brought up.

How many times have we heard burnt-out ex-raid leaders who swear they will never -think- about leading a guild again because it was so time-consuming and so stressful doing what was essentially a second job that entailed being den mother for a bunch of drama-queens and whiners who showed little to no appreciation?

Historically, large guilds often chew up and spit out their leaders and officers. Maybe the people doing it feel the cost was worth it in the end but the final result was that they still quit leading a guild because they couldn’t stand doing it anymore.

Perhaps that’s what ArenaNet considered when they looked at large guild content.   One of the central themes of Guild Wars 2 was to remove the mechanics that were tedious and annoying.   Maybe they didn’t want to make a game that would encourage their most dedicated players into taking a second job that would burn them out.

Now that’s not to say I didn’t like Gary’s idea of guild housing or Richie’s idea about guilds spawning world bosses. Perhaps ArenaNet will surprise us and show a way to have large guild content that requires tactical coordination and brings out the positive aspects of the social interaction yet somehow doesn’t become a second, unpaid job that crushes the souls of guild leaders.

Or perhaps it’s like Scott says and the stickiness that large guilds once provided in MMOs has been replaced by the regular content updates. Perhaps even ArenaNet couldn’t find a mechanic for socially coordinating, managing and organizing a bunch of emotional, irrational and unpredictable MMO players that was anything other than a spirit-sucking chore.
tym01

Scott asked what PvE content do we need to get organized to work on, held his hand up like he was listening to the silence, and then went on to say that there is no PvE content that requires organized groups.

Scott, have you ever tried to solo content in Orr? How about the trains of events to open up a karma vendor? On my server this entire zone is covered in Risen that swarm to the players. Holding the monsters off long enough to move to another way point is nearly impossible, and most of the way points are “under contest” all of the time, and so even when I do manage to reach a new waypoint I can not resurrect there anyway. This results in in spawning at the one “safe” waypoint on the whole island, and trying again to get back to whatever objective I was working on.

My guild has twelve players, but only five of us have level 80 characters, and we rarely have a chance to play at the same time, and so none of us have explored much of orr, since whenever we try, we simply die again and again. On one single night I found a large group of players working together in Orr to follow a karma chain, and it was much fun. there must of been twenty of us, and it was brutal. Maybe this content would be do-able with fewer players, I must admit I have not tried it with more then three of us. However when Scott asked what content requires player organization, I just could not imagine how this zone was not brought up.

GuildCast 55: Fractals Improvements and Viewers' Hopes for Guild Wars 2

Last Stand At Southsun May 28th

GuildCast Ep71:
Blue Flowers

Guild Wars 2 Microtransactions: Still Consistent and Strong

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