As a long-time fan of the Guild Wars franchise, I want to relay some concerns to you and your development team, on behalf of my gaming group / fellow guild leaders. I hope you do not see this letter as a simple complaint, but as a way to improve a few problems that should be addressed. While you have crafted an amazing game, there are several sections involving guilds and guild management that could use some improvement.
One of the problems that my fellow Guild Leaders and I have is member management. Guild leaders should be able to see the last time a member was online or last representing. Without this we are seeing over-inflated guilds. In my gaming group (
http://www.theoldergamers .com) we have nearly 1,500 members listed across four guilds. In an active member survey we conducted over several weeks, we received responses from only half our roster. As our membership continues to grow, we are forced to create more guilds (that will most likely end up only half used) or employ some other out of game tools to thin out inactive members. If we could see who was still playing or representing; we could effectively manage our rosters in a more streamlined manner, leading to more tightly knit and cohesive communities. One of the more questionable points is that this type of feature was available in Guild Wars 1, but strangely not implemented into Guild Wars 2.
Another problem is that the ‘guild message’ is not immediately apparent to members. Currently, guild members have to go find it, where most games it is automatically displayed when players log in. Not everyone visits our forums daily and we feel that this would be another tool to not just improve our community, but all in-game communities in Guild Wars 2. When we need to announce a contest or need to get the attention of our members, we should not have to repeatedly send our messages in the guild chat channel. Again, this was a standard feature in Guild Wars 1, but not available in Guild Wars 2.
The third problem we see is that the representation aspect needs to be overhauled. One of our biggest problems is that new players don’t know that each of their new characters needs to manually represent a guild. This could be remedied by having new characters auto-represent a guild, or having a pop-up window that tells people they are currently not representing. The other side of this is that when people leave a guild, they don’t often know the difference between standing down and leaving. We have had several people transfer between guilds and not actually leave the guild they were leaving. With a gaming group of our size, we understand that we will have a certain amount of member turn over, but this is an aspect that should be clarified for all players.
With a gaming group of our size, we feel that guild chat options and size could be addressed. One of the most important things for a guild to have is communication. For multi-guild groups, this can serve to be a problem. Because there are so many members of our organization, an Alliance style option, or a custom chat channel would be very beneficial. While my gaming group strives to effectively work as one guild, another group I knew from Guild Wars 1 has the opposite problem. In that game, they had five guilds, each with their own flavor, but with an alliance option they could all communicate together. Those guilds all carried over to Guild Wars 2, but are effectively split apart because of a lack of a cross-guild chat channel.
We hope that all of these ideas will be considered and implemented in the future; we are all fans of this game and want to see it succeed as much as possible. It is our strong belief that implementing these types of fixes (especially the first 3), would result in a better gameplay experience for the players of Guild Wars 2, which would not only benefit the players of the game, but ArenaNet as well.
Thank you for reading,
Nick / Specs.2195
Guild Leader: The Orrian Ghosts
