So are some of us going to miss out on some of the game?

It appears as if a certain map image represents a guild’s cape image? If that is correct, what is the reward for taking over that area and how does it work?

Yes, the image represents the emblem of the alliance that owns that town. Exclusive areas of the town will be opened up to members of the alliance that owns it.

Say your either not in a guild, or your not in an alliance that happens to be very good.

Does that mean due to this some players are never even going to see the elite missions or exclusive areas of the town?

Don’t quote me on this but I remember some where, where it was said there were only 10 guilds per alliance. That could be a hell of a lot of alliance trying to gain access to these exclusive areas.

This presents another problem to get these areas, if my guild leader does not get faction am I going to have to find a new guild or even though my leader does not have factions will she still be able to join an alliance through the guys at the guild hall?

This question I was wondering about as well... Because you are correct: its exactly what they state: if you are not in a massive alliance (more ppl to farm faction!!!) you will never see those contents.

So only alliances with 10 guilds of 100 players that are online 24/7 will see those missions...

I was hoping I misintepreted that, but every bit of info I see points to this direction.

Yes, its true...

if you never bother playing the game to its full extent you will never experience the full extent of the game

If you want to experience these areas then you either need to form your own alliance, or join up with a good alliance...

its called war

No waring faction will ever profit from the spoils of war if your side is not good enough.

The majority of guilds have less than 30people, however the uber PvP guilds are often packed at 100 each so when they join together (and trust me, they will want to) bye bye elite content for us. I gotta say, while 1 year of man hours is fine, when it comes to dev time, 6months isnt enough especialy when such vital issues are still present in release.

Only way I see anyone in my guild seeing this stuff is if we quit the guild and joined another...which kinda makes guilds pointless. Might as well just make alliances out of 1000 people vs 10 guilds.

If alliance faction was determined by say, average faction per hour per member, then it wouldnt matter how many youd have but aparently these simple ideas have passed AN by.

I think this will be a double edged sword on the large guilds as much as the smaller guilds.

Up until now, the large guilds could be okay with about 12 -24 of their members being very active pvp. I seriously doubt any of the the guilds of 100 member or so, have the majority actively pvp let alone pve. It didn't really matter before, because it was evident that those that participated got their rewards directly.

Now, I can be a casual player, let my guild's alliance win the area, then I can walk in and play tourist without so much as raising a staff or bow.

I see a lot of discontent as divisions occur between those that win the area, seeing members that contribute little take advantage.

On the flip side, 1000 members makes a big pool to find people that are willing to take on the challenges at any given time, versus the smaller guild/alliances that depend on everyone present to tackle even a coop mission.

I'm not too upset to miss areas of the map. I've played a year now, and have only seen the entrance to the underworld once, let alone seen FoW. But I do expect to see a new forum topic be created here..

"Wanted, small guild looking to merge or create alliance with same. Luxon/Kurick only need apply."

sorry wasnt guildwars about skill apparently? now it really is all about getting in with large numbers and grinding.
this just seems like a stupid stupid idea to me. some guilds play for fun and to help people, does this mean they have to stop being helpful and go faction farming all day instead just to keep up.
same old case of the rich get richer or the powerful get more power.
gj on alienating half the community, nice one

The problem I see in the future is:

"WTS Guild membership with access to Elite missions for X amnt of gold!!"

Now that would suck, but i think it's hard to hold a town, since the alliance rating of guilds are constantly changing, so you'd have to be constantly using faction to hold a town, which means you couldn't do anything else, and couldn't use faction points for other stuff (like jade and amber :0)

well I will just have a look how it goes.

I agree, and I hope that these "extra stuff" isn't overpowered etc...

See the front page articles

You still will be able to get to the town, just miss out on the elite areas. Also doing a wait and see. I still appears I get full access to most of the game from what've they said.

I see that too for better or worse.

I dont think this is going to be true! you need to find and join an alliance or form your own!

My Guild is small, but there are hundreads of small guilds out there, like yours who will band together, the VERY small ones may merge for the common interest.

As a leader you have a choice, do you form your own alliance, or do you join another?

All it will take is for some organising of members in that alliance to Donate their Factions points to the alliance all at the same time! to in-effect 'SPIKE' control at the right time.

If you join an alliance, all you have to do is make sure you have enough people in your guild cooperating.

You also have to consider that the MORE factions points an alliance has got the QUICKER it depreciates!... so its going to be VERY hard for any one alliance to maintain its control 24 hours a day 7 days a week!

Even then.. from what I saw in the FPE there were LOADS of areas which had guild flags on and that was only from what I saw on the Luxon side!..

I think people are getting worried far too soon, I'm actually looking forward it

IF the Elite content and items are superficial anyway, I have no problems with people who play GW 24/7 having exclusive access to it.

I've been into UW exactly twice - wasn't for me. I suspect these Elite areas will be the same...

Look closely at this question


This seems to mean that everyone is getting a town just top guilds are getting better ones. This also means one alliance can only hold ONE town. However I don't know for sure.

Also remember alliance battles aren't the only way to get alliance points up

Since there are a few options to get faction for both pvp and pve we can't predict who will get the best town by looking at the guild chart.

My take on it was that the guild or alliance that controlled a town got discounts at the merchant and armourer etc - I seem to recall hearing something along those lines. However, if it turns out more like it has been suggested in this thread, then I would be deeply concerned.

My chief worry is for small PvE based guilds. They wont get into alliances with any decent PvP guilds if this is the case. Why not? Because they wont be 'contributing' to the PvP, simple as that. And of course, PvP is the only realistic way to make faction - once you've done the quests, you only have a couple of repeatable ones which will likely get very boring after a while. So, yes, I'm very concerned that the PvE gamers will be dictated by the PvP gamers even more. And to be fair, a lot of PvP players have no interest in PvE and vice versa for the PvE players, (note I said 'a lot,' not most or all.)

But like everyone else, I'm going to wait and see.

But if you have enough members "aka zerg guild" you can just designate enough ppl to gather jade and amber for the guild or the other way around with factions. (i.e Guild of 100 designates 50 members to donate every faction point they get to continue holding a town )

I don't like this, really.

I remember Gaile mentioning something along the lines of "you basically need to join a guild to enjoy some areas, blah blah" or something in the past, I don't quite remember. Here's a thought: I'm sick of looking for a guild at this point, I've been guildless for the past three months and I doubt I'll find a guild before Factions is released. And it's just so much nicer, seriously. How come I don't get to play some of the content because I don't feel like dealing with immature players that argue and spam and fight all the time?

Don't give me the argument, "but this is Guild Wars, you silly wabbit, you should get a guild or go play something else, like FFXI or Lineage II!" I can think of quite a few people that still play who are all wondering about the whole "guildless" thing because they, too, are in the same boat. Currently, in GW: Prophecies, anyone can access all of the "high-end" content (Fissure, Underworld) without being "forced" to have a guild tag next to their username.

Good job cutting out your userbase that would rather not deal with charlatans and leechers and the whole general problem of "guild drama" that seems to crop up in every single guild. The only way I see myself being able to play in some of the "elite" content under the current assumption of how the system works will be to pay for membership into a guild temporarily.

But I digress. I'm cranky and haven't slept in days, and my thoughts aren't very clear. Carry on.

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA

huh...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Sorry. But that's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. Most of the top PvP guilds don't have maxxed out of people, to be honest, at least as far as I know. In fact, most of them run pretty small. As well, they'll be too busy playing GvG to maintain their topped rank spot..they won't even be competing for control of the cities.

Sorry.

This is going to give recognition to top mixed alliances, who band together and have pretty close to 1000 people total. You'll probably see a lot of regimentation, as well as requirements to maintain in the alliance (need to provide X faction a week).

BTW, my guild probably won't ever have control of an area. We're pretty small. But I'm not complaining, I'm expecting to be able to pay some gold and have someone take me in to check it out.

What ever happened to that motto "Skill over Grind" huh?

Looks like the way Anet is leaning is that people get access to areas if they have enough zergs to grind mindlessly enough for faction points...

Oh well, I'll unlock all the new skills provided in factions, make some spiffy new 15k sets and go back to PvPing I guess while waiting for something better in chapt 3

WRONG

ONE YEAR STARTING ON RELEASE OF gw with 6 monyh staggered release

1 year actual time on this

So many problems would go away if they would cap an alliance at 1000 people instead of 10 guilds.

/agreed lol

I wonder if there will be a way to see who in your alliance contributed how much faction to the alliance? If so, I can see the light contributors waking up one day to be guildless.

If not...

How come people ALWAYS turn to immature little 8 year olds every time there is talk of a "change" ?

You lot are talking as if there is nothing in Factions other than getting into an alliance to controling a town.

Seriously, your argument is similar to someone who says the just because he/she paid for the game he/she should have FoW armor with perfect rare weapons without any effort or skill.

the funny part is that a great number of the people demanding access to the ultra hardest tiny bit of content wouldnt survive the experience longer than the first UW explorers who came back saying we got killed before we could blink

well I agree that some ppl always overreact, oh well thats life

anyways, totally oftopic, I am happy there are other Hitman fans playing GW

This question may have already been asked but, with the search function the way it is I can't find it.

How many wins is it going to take for your alliance/faction to have access to these elite areas and how long do you have to get there? If I had to spend x amount of time trying to win access to these areas I may not be able to go right then and play them.

I am a little surprised ANet have decided to take this path.

What worries me most is, if I am correct if it is being implemented, is the reduced merchant prices for the controlling alliance. If they can buy cheap and sell cheaper than the merchant offers, wont this move the economy away from being balanced around the merchant prices to the top (read: large) alliances. Giving them the ability to push the merchant prices up easier than the normal player, could hand them more control on the economy.

Along with this, another problem I see is that the top (largest) alliance gets control of the nearest outpost to the Capital and the elite mission there. What happens if they decide they want control of the 5th nearest city for the mission there, will they start booting guilds out of their alliance to stop the faction farming for a short period, only to start advertising for more members when they fall back to there? They wont care about loyalty as they will have a monopoly on membership invites.

And as for the forum/ingame adverts for alliance membership for gold, I too see this will become messy, with ppl being kicked after paying their entrance fee etc.

Maybe it will turn out the 4x3 v 4x3 alliances will be able to out-farm the quest driven alliances and, therefore possibly top alliances are more organised. Only time will tell.

Being a member of a smaller guild I definately see this as a problem. Being only 12 members strong right now we aren't going to be able to drum up alliances with any guild that will allow us to hold territory or towns. We might be able to ally with some other small guilds but to what purpose? Even if we get ten guilds our size to ally that gives us a pool of only 120 people to draw from to do these competitive missions. Now take an alliance of ten of the larger PvP guilds with 100 members or more. That's 1000 people they can draw from, basically they can afford to shotgun the missions until they get it done. The smaller guilds on the other hand have no choice but to pray we can get through because if we don't we just don't have the member base to draw from to keep on trying indefinately. Granted we could continue to try various builds and strategies but we simply do not have the people to support the number of possible permutations in group builds that larger alliances will have. We get more or less shut out by the simple manpower difference. It's one thing to have the content be region specific, like UW and FoW, but to make it alliance specific is going to leave a lot of people out in the cold and pissed off. Faction specific content would have been the best way to go and I know that some of the content will be faction specific. I think it would have been a much better idea to have these special areas of town open to everyone that was allied with a certain faction as opposed to just being a member of whatever alliance holds the town.

I'm sure a lot of people will be saying." Oh but why not just ally with a PvP guild?" For one we don't have attractive membership numbers because we recruit selectively. Secondly because we recruit selectively we don't necessarily want to be allied with just some random bunch of people that someone picked up in Ascalon by spamming a recruitment message. We like to know we can work well with people and communicate effectively. It seems to me numbers, not skill, will be the deciding factor in Factions. Alliances that can shotgun missions and content areas with group after group after group are going to win, and hold more territory simply because the law of averages states that no matter how abyssmal their players are eventually they will win and hold an area.

This is ridiculous.

How many of you have access to elite content, like perfect Sephis Axes, FoW armor, and Crystalline swords? How many of you have held HoH, another piece of elite content, or been on the GvG team of a top 10 guild?

There are some people who have all of that stuff, more who have one or two pieces of it, and the vast majority of us with none of it. The elite players have all of it. Are you elite? Most likely not.

Factions is going to be different, but the same. This time, it will be PEOPLE WHO WORK TOGETHER IN LARGE GROUPS, rather than small groups of gvgers or farmers, who will reap the rewards. It, in fact, expands the number of people who will be able to consider themselves elite.

So stop freaking out about it.

Some bits of misinformationt that need to be cleared up:

1) Alliances bid on a specific town, they are not randomly assigned one. They recieve it at the end of the 24hr period.

2) Faction degrades over time, and the more faction you have, the faster it degrades. Meaning that there is a cap for major faction producers that will work against their best efforts.

3) Although there are two million accounts, there are far less players, and they are spread between 5 regions. That means what, 10 towns per faction per region to control? At 200 towns, and 1000 people per town, the numbers start to make sense. 200,000 players, not 20,000. So 1/10th of all accounts (assuming an erroneous even distribution) will have the opportunity to access all elite content.

*I also remember reading somewhere that faction can be spent by individuals to enter at least some cool parts of an Alliance controlled town. I would be willing to guess that this includes the mish. However, I do not have a source to back up my memory, so buyer beware.

I wasnt refering to the top ranked guilds but the large PvP guilds.

How do you get/keep faction? By winning in PvP. I don't like the idea of having to win at PvP, GvG or whatever, just to move a line on the map so I can play there only to have the line moved back before I can get there to play.

As for elite areas within the cities, not really that big of a deal. After all I can go to ToA any time, I just can't go to UW or FoW unless we have favor. Of course why else would I want to go to ToA?

I see clear downsides and good sides for this new system, depends on point of view...it could be interesting, it could be disaster...we dun know.

Though I have few worries conserning this "new system" Im still looking forward to give Anet a change and see how this goin to end, for sure there will come many complainments as well i think there will be many modifications and updates when its out. So c'mon, go with the flow

You can also get faction doing specific quests for each faction. So not just PvP.

Il second that, i prefer smaller guilds but i also want to be able to compete in factions and see the game.

Sorry, I didn't know that eBaying could make any person "elite." I'll get right on that. Got a link? /sarcasm

Maybe there are, y'know, reasons for people wanting to play in smaller groups. So those that are just as good as yourself don't get to play just because they don't feel like dealing with kiddies? Somehow, I see this as alienating a part of their userbase (anyone buying the game regardless of playstyle = $$$), but nobody else seems to think so. Seriously.

Sorry, if I wanted to play a game where you had to be "zomg l33t sauce" to play a particular portion of a game, I'd have picked up something else off the shelf at EB last year. Maybe they should mention that on the side of the box of GW:Factions, then?

Then again, what do I know zomgamirite? I'm just a crappy/annoyed and unguilded player that has no idea what I just wrote because I'm drugged up. Seriously.

I think you're overstating a bit.

Some points:

1. No one knows exactly how hard or easy it will be for small guilds to join Alliances and take over towns.

2. We don't know how many "Elite" quests there will be, or even if most of us will notice we don't have access to them. I've never played HoH, and I've never missed it, for example.

3. If the system totally sucks, and enough people complain, you can bet your Quarter Three profits, Anet will change it.

Better yet, if this works -

Guest membership, access the elite area for 'n' time!
Only xyz Plat! We'll pay the 100 gold for the invite!

It's simple math there. We do know that versus the larger"super guilds" we won't stand a chance. It has nothing to do with skill in the missions or anything like that. It's simply a matter of them being able to keep a more or less constant flow of people in the missions that bank faction up and allow them to hold towns. So yeah it will be hard for the smaller guilds just because they won't have the manpower base to constantly farm faction like the larger guilds will. You simply cannot apply the Roman maxim to this situation. Normally I would be the first to say that superior tactics and superior weapons beat numbers every time but in this case I don't think so.

For an already long discussion of this topic, refer to http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s....php?t=3002566

Actually Koneko I agreed with and feel the same way as most of your post.
The kicker is I'm in a *very* cool guild of mature friendly people that work together. The 'problem' is really no one else is as far along as I am, I'm not hitting the areas I'd like to as much, and it's alliance will be a collection of other small casual guilds. I probably fit into 'hardcore casual' - I have a job, a life, a wife but GW is my gaming time and I'm averaging a little over 100hrs a month Still that pales in the face of what some other guilds will be doing and to become a cog in that wheel I'd likely be too casual and/or quite frankly, too mature to deal with what I'd find

But I'm the type who wants to see/do it all. I'm also realizing though for at least chapter 2, this may work out poorly, if at all. And it may make absolutely no sense to bring the wife into the world of chapter 2 in the least, being a 'casual casual' to be sure.

One also wonders what chapter 3 and beyond will bring, more craziness of the same model or something different? And when that comes along will that pose the opportunity for the more casual to finally get somewhere with the previously locked off gems in chapter 2? So much up in the air, though at least that Korean interview finally answered more of the questions. But perhaps generated easily that many more to boot...

It's a bit of a crap shoot. They've shown at times they watch the pulse of the fans here, but other times they've shown they either don't care or won't do anything about particular issues as well. T-minus 17ish days.