So, uh. (Elite Missions)

Using this thread as a reference, it seems everyone's fears came true--and worse. Only the controlling alliance has access to the Elite Missions, and to compound on that, there are a grand total of two.

Two.

Bullshit. I asked Gaile about this roughly a week before release, her response was to "wait and see before I complain". Okay. I waited. I saw. I'm complaining.

Bullshit.

I knew it was gonna happen and what will also happen is maybe a grand total of five alliances get to do the missions the entire span of the game. Bugger the zodiac skins. I've got bank and someone will sell them for the right price. What I can't get through play I get with plat.

Yeah, I remember when everyone was worried about this, and anet refused to give us any solid information about it.

I guess I can safely say that I'll never be able to play an elite mission then.

yeah, kinda gay of GW, now about 3 diff alliances will be goging the towns, also when i asked gaile about this, she said "Im sure every alliance will have a chance" ... i laughed and knew it was complete BULLSHIT
elite items = GG, get ready to pay millions.

This is the reason that my guild leader refuses to ally with my friend's one-man guild. The three of us all know each other in real life, and I thought it would be great to have us all in the same alliance, but no, "he doesn't have enough members in his guild to earn faction."

I paid for the content in those missions, but I'll likely never have a shot at them; and, to add insult to injury, they've created another system of exclusion.

Very few alliances will control the capital cities. It's a simple fact. Being that there are only two, and you have to get more faction than EVERYONE ELSE, it's not going to change hands often--and when it does change hands, it'll only do it among a few different alliances.

It's not only unfair, it's horrible game design. Sure, design some awesome elite missions but only like three thousand people ever, out of hundreds of thousands, will ever get to see them. It's the (incredibly shitty) Favor system taken to even worse extremes.

And they didn't even toss in any other new tough dungeons to compensate--sure, you can access FoW and UW from Zin Ku Corridor, but there's literally nothing new.

What the hell, Anet?

They did exactly the same thing at the end of beta's for the original release. They played all coy, told us to wait, we wouldn't be disappointed, blah, blah, blah.

Then they all shut up and suddenly Grey was the ONLY one you could talk to, and she simply ignored any post that wasn't a handjob, or if she did reply to something negative she usualy got sarcastic, dismissive, and in some cases downright rude to whoever had the nerve to complain.

The ONLY difference I can see this time around is that she seems to have learned her lesson about being rude. Well, that and the fact that all the decent PvP guys have already quit, so there probably won't be any mass exodos this time around.

But really. If you actualy thought this time was going to be different, you deserve what you got. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me". This is clearly part of their business model. It seems to be along the lines of "these kids are so hopelessly stupid they'll buy whatever we decide to give them".

Why on earth did you give them your money without waiting to see where they were going to screw you this time around?

Didn't enough people complain about that? Why would they make something worse?

It's like they only listened to the complaints about how PvP was affecting PvE, and thought they had a really great idea about how PvE players could get in on it, and didn't really think about how exclusive it still was, and how it shits all over smal guilds and casual players.

I thought the complaints about favor expressed not so much that people had a problem with PvP controlling PvE, but that people *just don't like* exclusionary systems like this.

I wasn't there at the original game's release, how would I know what their attitude was like then?

I'm probably just making a sweeping generalization based on very limited experience with PvP, but it seems like the hyper-competetive players have hearts of blackened stone. I wouldn't count on kindness.

You know, the game is not even a week old at this point....

Allow things to develop a little bit.

When the whole "Favor of the Gods" thing started only America had favor with Korea getting it late at night and Europe getting it about once a month. Now Korea rarely has it, Taiwan and Japan pop up once in a while, and Europe and America fight over favor. I can't believe the amount of crying there is in ToA when it is after 8:00 PM Pacific when America doesn't have favor.

This is a new system of the game and things have to evolve. Give it time to work itself out.

I haven't bought Factions (yet) but from what I've been told the majority of faction earned will be from PvE. If this is true, competitive PvP guilds will not have an advantage over a big PvE guild.

Even the massive PvP guilds still have PvE characters for skill unlocks. Even if every member had only one PvE slot they kept at a time the math is still in their favor. The largest guilds win because they can shotgun the high faction missions with group after group after group. Smaller guilds have no chance unless they team up with a larger guild which is a virtual impossibility unless, as was mentioned earlier, the larger guilds feel kindly disposed and implement a rotation system.

I heard you just need one member of the controlling alliance to be nice enough to take you down there... anybody try that yet?

Seems like this might not be so bad. Anyone that is controlling will likely have buttloads of people, and the odds of you not knowing at least one person in that alliance would be pretty small amongst a full guild of people.

It's not even the better guilds that dominate here, but the guilds with more people. No 12 man uber-dedicated and uber-skilled team will ever compete against a 1000 man behemoth alliance. Kinda goes against the skill over grinding principle that Anet is so proud to advertise.

I saw this coming a long time ago and posted on our guild forum about it, and our general consensus was that they'd never be foolish enough to make it actually work like this in the final product, but I guess we were kidding ourselves. I agree with the OP that indeed this is straight from the bull and kinda smelly. Lots of things like little mission bugs, armor not upgraded right 85 armor on platemail for example, all those things I don't care about, it's just small bugs that will get fixed. But this is a system at the very core of the game. They must have thought about this. This is a concept that just excludes 99.9% of the playerbase from content in the game, and that actually encourages faction farming on a massive scale. Is it just me or does that sound like it goes against everything that guildwars is supposed to stand for? No matter how good you are, you will probably never play elite missions unless you join a guild in a huge alliance.

There may be hope yet..

as of earlier today..the alliance controlling Cavalon had 1.2 million faction.

Yesterday, a different alliance was controlling it with 2.4 million faction.

Maybe we need to analyse how alliances are awarded control.

yes, but with favor, if you are are say from korea and you're now pissed you never have favor, it's very easy to switch your account over to american server where you almost daily have favor. with elite missions, how exactly am I going to switch my account over into the controling guild so i have access.

I don't know, and although i like that theres much more high-level content, I don't see anything at all to keep a pve player interested in factions. i'm very disapointed and as a pve player i'm personally loosing interest very fast

Who cares about fireworks? This thread is about Elite Missions, and the shitty system in which NO ONE GETS TO GO.

There is no high level content. That's the thing. Sure, the missions are on the whole tougher than in Prophecies, but there's no "uber dungeons" (FoW, UW), save for these Elite Missions...and 99% of people can't even try them out.