PvE-Only Guilds, are they dead and buried?

I know we're not supposed to recruit in here, so I won't mention my guild name or anything like that, but I was wondering if anyone else noticed just how DEAD PvE-only guilds seem to be, at least in the eyes of others.

I've spent the past few days struggling to recruit in every district of every major city in Elona, Cantha, and Tyria, all to no avail.

I personally find the idea of a guild that helps each other overcome PvE milestones as a universally good idea that a many people could enjoy, but it seems like everyone is only interested in PvP when it comes to joining guilds. I'm so incredibly confused by this.

Is there any SUCCESSFUL PvE-only guild out there? If so, how on earth did you recruit people into it? I'm so stuck, with nothing left to do but sit here in my empty hall and sulk about how organized PvE is dead. :P

the thing is that most of the GW population has started playing during the first 6 months after the release. By now, most of them have found guilds (its enough time) ot are simply guild hoping.

now, unless its a realy hard mission people dont even bother to take PUGs or friends, they use heros/henchmen. they ask for help once they get stuck on something.

this is why there is less activity in the PVE area of the guilds.

This may be just IMO, but the fact is, guilds are mainly for PvPing. Everything about it is PvP down from joining a guild for Faction alignment and GvG. Maybe it's just because I've been guildless for awhile now but PvE is generally not that hard and groups are easy to find in most cases. You don't really need to be very experienced to get into a group. On the other hand, in PvP, it's frustrating to look for a good group every time so boom: grab some guildies.

I wish you the best of luck recruiting though.

The key for a successful PvE guild I think is to focus on high end missions and such. Those are where you need the help of guildmates the most. General game play doesn't really require much so most people just kind of hang out with people they know.

Also, it helps to build a strong community where word of mouth about your guild will draw in people.

I don't think my concern is that PvE is hard. Sure there are some frustrating missions where the devs seemed to have forced you to only bring this build and this class, but for the most part, if you know what you're doing you won't have a problem with 95% of Guild Wars. I'm mostly referring to just having fun in a social environment WHILE you do these things. And while I can get things done with heroes and henchmen, I'm one lonely SOB in the meantime, and I find myself not having as much fun as I could be, like I could if I was out playing the game with someone who I didn't just grab up at a random outpost.

One thing to realize is that there are a ton of PvE guilds, and not a lot of people left who are guildless. My guild has been around for a while, but we have lower membership than I hoped.

One thing that helps us is that we've become very good friends over the course of playing and have learned to count on each other. For the most part, we work on getting titles most of the time, though I still try to recruit every chance I get.

I know it can be frustrating, and no one should have to go through the game alone. If you want, drop me a message & I'll see what I can do about getting an alliance to your guild. That way you can enjoy what we have to offer, without giving up what you have already.

I recently started a PvE-only guild (and doing pretty good already =D) and I think a good way of recruiting members is to play some missions with PUGs and if you see a player you like, tell him about your guild and ask him to join.;P
Feel free to PM me ingame if you want more information.=P

I believe our PvE (mainly) focused guild/alliance is doing pretty well... we have 9 guilds and about 150 fairly active players. I must say though, we have built a community through gameplay, cooperation, and having fun. Regular alliance events (hide and seek green rewards and such) and end game elite missions are becomming the staple that keeps us working together. Many are RL friends. Seasonal events are also a big draw as folks work on their titles (lucky, etc).

Can a PvE guild work...yep! Is it challenging to build...yep ;] Is it worth it...most definitely!

personaly i'd suggest only creating a pve oriented guild if you have players you know who are ready to join from the start, otherwise your better off just hoining a ready established guild. If, however you wish to run your old guild then try to avoid recruiting by spamming in towns, the few members you get that way will only be guild hoppers who take what they want then leave.

my guild is centered around helping new players, so my officers spend alot of time in pre, shing jea and istan helping pretty much anyone who asks, that person is then added to a friends list and if they ever decide to join later we let them, if they dont wish to we still help them .

the same strategy works pretty well in high end area's for recruiting more experianced players also.

this method is rather slow at building up members, but i personally prefer it that way as it allows you to get to know the person better.

i lead a PVE only guild. the guild has been PVE only for almost a year and a half. we are also the lead guild in a 5 guild alliance of mainly PVE only guilds. each guild is between 15-30 members. before nightfall, playing in PUG groups or inviting a random person to a guild/alliance group is how we tried to find new members. with nightfall and some missions requiring a hero, that takes the spot of the random person in those missions. never did any spamming in districts for members. i would say a handfull of members in the alliance do random PVP or HoH but thats only because its something to do in the hours when hardly anyone is on or as in HoH, we dont have favor.

MY own P vs E guild is doing quite well. I have in fact gotten a few members that are actually sick of the you must donate X amount of faction each day or have been burned out on the P vs P aspect of the game. Everyone wants to belong to the LEET ranked guilds but at what cost ? Unless your 15-18 years of age live at home with your folks, have no job, or zero real life responsibility then it's extremely hard to meet the requirements of those guilds. I would say that a P vs P guild would burn itself out quicker then a community based P vs E guild. The game was meant to be fun, make it a job for people to play it and see what happens.

I also see a lot of gamers say I've beaten this X amount of times and that " I'm bored ". I've seen these same gamers unable to defeat missions without the need for the skill specific classes helping them. The P vs P crowd in any game I've ever played in has always followed the norm and done what everyone else does. How long until that gets boring ?

Nope give me a small P vs E comunity any day over P vs P guilds.

My guild, [boat], is 99% PVE, and we were recently on GW.com as Guild of the Week. PVE guilds do exist, but like guilds in general, for every good guild that exists, there's at least 100 bad ones.

I'd follow the advice of one of the above posters, that if you start a guild yourself, play through quests and missions with randoms (those who aren't so antisocial to use heroes and hench 100% of the time at least). My previous guild often picked up new members this way.

We're in the middle of developing our small guild built from a group of friends into a larger guild. We're a PvE guild that focus on things like title development, further character development etc and it seems to be going well.

I'd argue long and hard with anyone who claimed that PvE guilds were dead.

I've created my own PvE Guild about two weeks ago. I'm still alone but I could care less. I find it hard to find GOOD players who are interested in joining a PvE guild because of the appealing emotes for people are are into Tournament PvP. Since 70% of the Guild Wars community is made up of PvP fanatics, there aren't alot of people who are easy to find and recruit for a PvE guild.

I think you're approaching it from the wrong angle. PvP guilds have something to offer right off the bat to people who PvP, and that's likeminded people interested in the same thing.

A successful PvE guild should offer the same thing, which isn't so easy to aquire as you first have to find likeminded people who's PvE interests are similar to yours. Once you find a few players that you mesh well with (personality wise moreso than game interests) it gets muche easier to attract more members.

Though, you shouldn't be looking just for members to boost your rank, but for people you get along with, which is why spam recruiting in towns is not the best way to recruit. I personally only recruit people that I believe will mesh well with our current members. We've been around for almost 2 years, and I've yet to have someone I recruited leave the guild.

The point?

Get to know people before you send an invite, ask questions based on what you'd look for in a friend before asking anything relevent to what you'd expect in a guild member. That's the best advice I can give you.

I'd say ours is doing well, its all about community, teaming up for specific things (DoA, Urgoz, UW, Tombs, various missions, etc), helping people, and just participating in the life of the guild in general. Sure we have "soloists" within the guild but we have plenty who help others when needed.

We also have RP teams meeting once a week and working through each chapter and that's been a lot of fun.

That's impressive that no one has left your guild. I wholeheartdly agree with your advise, spam recruiting is not really the way to go if you are looking for members who you want to "fit" in with your guild. I can tell you a year ago, we a few active members in our guild. Over a time period of about 6-8 months we grew to about 50 members. This is not to say everyone we recruited stayed who joined our guild, but if you put up front and are honest about your guild and where you want to go with it, you can do it. Most people who end up leaving because their expectations were not in line with the reality of what they found. So the more honest you are at the beginning the more likely people are willing to stay, reagardless of how few people you have in your guild.

Yeah, something doesn't fit. Every time I observe that player interaction is diminished or diminishing in the game the retort is, "You need to find a good Guild and play with guildees!"

So, which is it, lol?

My, personal; opinion is that the Heroes trend has impacted guild play on the PvE side as well. It isn't only PuG's that have suffered. PuG's have always been inferior to guild play or playing with friends, for obvious reasons. I prefer to playing with people I know in real life or through online experiences and PuG's don't provide that, of course.

It seems to me that the game's "society issues" are even impacting player interaction in Guilds.

Agreed, the combo of heroes and play spread over 3 continents has thinned out participation in general. Over the weekend I missed several opportunities to team up with guildies simply because I didn't have characters where the action was happening (DoA, later NF locations, Gayala [I took Kurzick route], etc).

Part of that is my "fault" obviously because I haven't taken the time or perhaps focused on a single character to get to those locations, but the fact that there are many different activities to choose from between PvP and PvE spreads out the guildies all over the place.

I'd like to echo obastable's sentiments -- you simply have to find people with whom you get along. To me, this applies to both PvE and PvP: it's difficult for me to conceive of a successful guild, regardless of its aims, that doesn't have that personality-chemistry that takes group gaming beyond the mechanics of cookie-cutter builds and standard farming techniques.

And yes, I have recruited in LA (very successfully in some cases) competing with whatever else text might be flying by. Honestly, in a game so engineered towards tight gaming groups (8 player-per-'team' maximum per 'game', elite missions notwithstanding) it's extremely hard to find like-minded people, especially if you're a hermit or misanthrope by nature. In other games (read: more stereotypical MMORPGs), I've experienced moments of desolate loneliness in some obscure zone broken by wanderers or random events. You simply won't get that in GW, at least not as it stands.

Whether your goal is to master every mission with a bunch of good players, dominate HoH or, I dunno, just hang out in guild chat with a bunch of loonies up with whom you occasionally actually hook, you won't do it embracing the full quotient of solitude that GW offers, because it offers a heck of a lot. When everything's instanced, Tyria can be a big, hollow world.

And as an aside, I want to add that I don't believe purely PvP or purely PvE guilds are ideal for the scope of Guild Wars. Yes, I resisted the horror of PvP for as long as I could, but there are interesting sub-elements to PvP that Arena.Net have no doubt implemented as part of their their unending struggle to unite the yin and yang of PvP/PvE. In this case, I cite Alliance Battle, which we as a guild do quite often. The infinite rezzes and zero DP really helps reduce that 'competitive-killer' attitude most PvP scenarios require -- but of course it's still PvP and there's still a distinct competition going on.

So, is the PvE guild dead and buried? Absolutely not. I will concede that the mentality of a purist PvEer, that is to say their requirements and ideas of enjoyment, are most likely catered for more substantially by other games (games which naturally lack the fine-tuned pvp of GW and, to wax subjective, the beautiful graphics ) -- but the fact that a lot of PvEers *have* remained and remained in guilds to me is fine testament that Guild Wars still has a lot to offer the PvEers at a guild level, not necessarily as a commander of Henchies and their slightly less retarded kin, Heroes.

If the PvE guild, generally speaking, ever does die, it won't be because of the players. And if a PvE guild 'has' to dip into other forms of play, such as AB, to remain interested, to maintain coherency as a guild, then...so be it. Gosh, they might actually *enjoy* it. Is being a 'guild' without that label of 'PvE' or 'PvP' really going to do any harm?

Sometimes, in real life, the best of parties can be ruined by the worst of company...

But if a party has the best of company, who cares what the party's like? Moreover -- doesn't *that* make it the best of parties to you anyway?

^_^

Happy Apple

PS Regarding your recruiting techniques, Dingo, I suggest you think very carefully about what sort of players you want, rather than focusing on what you might be offering as a guild. And then advertise accordingly -- in such a flooded market, you simply have to be unique. To this day I've no idea why some guilds recruit with statements of 'have guild hall cape' etc...I mean, is this somehow going to *impress* anyone anymore? I give these suggestions only because they've worked for me, to some greater or lesser extent.

Good luck. ^_^