elite missions in cantha

I realise that my opinion on this matter doesn't really count since my guild alliance has held the house for the past day or two. But what I don't quite understand is why all of the people here complaining aren't PM'ing each other and creating an "UBER" alliance to combine faction and take the house?

I see lots of complaining but nobody doing anything about it?

Sums it up.

Yes, Levi you are correct to assume that but where is the fun on just repeating one mission for faction farming? where is the competitive gameplay ? Where is the ... oh hell "Skill" here ?

Don't get me wrong i hold nothing againts XoO and i respect XoO same as i do other known guilds but hey, defending wrongly implemented game mechanics, despite beeing a member in XoO Alliance, doesn't means that you have the right to make the rules on PvE!

SB

Anyone know much about alliance faction decay? What it's based on? It is a constant number per day?

I'm thinking that the holding alliance should decay far faster then other alliances could be a potential solution. Perhaps decaying based on how many times the Elite mission is accessed?

You say it should be based on player skill to get in right? What is the point of an alliance controlling the town and having access to the elite mission when they are not skilled enough to make it through the mission? There is none, if an alliance without any skill got into the elite mission they would try a few times, and then give up. Is it difficult to access? Certainly, but it can be done.

As far as the faction farming goes, it is competitive; you are competing against other alliances to get the faction needed for control. You need to get members that can efficiently farm the faction as well as other guilds with the same goals. It is a dull and boring process, it is WORK.

For those of you who say you bought the whole game and therfore have a right to the content, your absolutely right. The only thing stopping you from accessing it is YOU. If you want it so bad go out there and earn it like they did.

Heh, Read on!

1.You have to controle the capital of Luxon/Kurzicks to be able to do access the "Elite mission".
2.To controle it you would need what? more then 3 mil?
3.To gain 3.7 mil you need to have lots of members, i mean way more then members because the other alliance would have maybe the same number.
4. So, let's farm faction, and who farms faster will have more chance to controle the mission.
5. Where is the skill here?

Yes, even ebay gold is competitive.

You as Numbers

I don't really object to the *idea* of faction/alliances - however ANets implementation leaves something to be desired.

The fact that a single alliance can (and most likely will) gain and hold house indefinitely by simply having all of the members farming faction like ants in an ant colony is the problem. If, perhaps, it was a king of the hill pvp style game much like HA, where players earned "tokens" to access the elite missions - that would be one thing. At some point, they have to go off and do the elite mission, opening up the challenge for someone else.

But as I've stated numerous times, one single alliance can dominate a challenge arena town. But even that's not so bad - but the fact you need to grind faction over and over just to maintain it, is just simply sad. Alliances already are talking about quotas for members.

People talked about lack of "grind" in GW - well, here it is.

I think what Strongbow is trying to say is that PvE players are now forced to play PvP matches to get the necessary faction points for accessing PvE elite missions.

The way I see it its an attempt of Arenanet to merge the 2 differend kind of playing styles. But something that did not work in chapter 1 wont work in chapter 2 or in any other expansion. Sure, players should prove themselves to access elite content. But as for PvE please allow it the adventuring way: by exploring the map, slaying enemies that are getting stronger and stronger as you progress... Not by closing gates or forcing people to play a completely differend kind of game.

I think Factions is based on the wrong concept. And I hope chapter 3 will return to the free adventuring style so many players like

And as mentioned before let's not forget that donating all that faction is throwing away a good bit of money since you can trade faction for jade and such. So how much jade can you get with 2.2mil faction anyways? Small price to pay for elite mission access, right?

Perhaps the problem with other alliances is nobody is willing to donate that much faction? Too busy trading it all for jade? I'm not sure, but there is a good bit of work involved, even with a big alliance, to hold the house. We lost the house yesterday and busted our buns to get it back...

No, please .... its not that

it's more simple! Pve or PvP doesnt have to do anything with that.

To farm faction in cantha is like, Get a box from here run 3 mins and get 400 factions. Do this 25 times and you have 10000 factions. Imagine an Alliance with 10 guilds doing this daily basis? Gods

Peace

At what point did I say that it took skill to farm faction? I said it was difficult, something that is difficult does not automatically require skill. The reason it is difficult is it is a boring process, it’s not something you are going to get enjoyment out of. Therefore you need force yourself to do it. Lifting a car is difficult, it does not require skill. I will reiterate my point again since you seem to have missed it. There is no point in holding a town if you cannot survive in the elite missions.

By definition farming faction to hold a town is a competition. You are in competition with other alliances for control of a town and access to elite missions. It may not be the kind of competition you enjoy, but it is a competition nonetheless. And at what point did I say anything about ebay? It has nothing to do with this debate.

What is that supposed to mean?

It means that I (or YOU) cannot hold a town alone. You would need numbers and that means NUMBERS of faction farmers. Quotas to be accepted in an Alliance are allready introduced.

Pictures of an elite mission (german forum):

http://gw.gamona.de/forum/showthread...threadid=91286

What is stopping you from either joining an alliance with those numbers or making your own?

I work all day. Is it too much to ask for my gaming time to be relaxing and fun? If ANet wanted to create a game that was "...a dull and boring process..." and a lot of "...WORK" then Factions is their masterpiece.

I agrre, I tried having this disucsion last night ingame with a few BkBl members. But it was useless, there were a few good minded BkBl but a few would just call us cry babies etc and could not for the life of them engage in a convo. (cavalon costs about 4 mil to buy now) So anway here I will post what I think...

At first I thought Elite missions were accesible to ALL Luxon or Kurzick if they moved the battle line over enough. But I see this is not the case, there is thes town owning system...seems like a good idea gone kind of bad, we have 2 elite missions; a kurzick and luxon each loacted on one town. Since everyone will be competeing for one town it will drive the town price to an insane level of faction cost.

Now guild like the BkBl allaince have worked incredibly hard at gaining faction to get their place in Cavalon. I did the calculations I think if I was right assuming their allaince did the Ft Aspenwood pvp thing earning 600 faction a win in half an hour I came up with these numbers: To earn 3 Mill faction it would take 5,000 wins, if it takes 30 mins a win that is 2,500 hours of gameplay. To earn this in one week you would need about 15 players playing 24 hours a day non stop in this pvp arena. So if an allaince has 500 members dedicated to earning faction it sounds not to to bad...
Anyway I congradulate the BkBl allaince for their accompleshment, I belive it is good to have an award for playing like this.

But you see my side to this is what about the small time people..you know those that like to be in small guilds where everybody knows everybody and they all get on from 5 -10 at night and play and chill. Or those people without guilds at all. These guild have no chance at getting 3 mill faction FASTER than a allaince like BkBl. The "elite" missions are not about letting the best players in, not at all, they are about letting the biggest guilds with the most time in. Sorry but gaining faction requires no more skill then pressing "Enter Mission." This is what gets me, I thought GW was a game based on player skill to achieve something, such as taking favor, and when someone takes favor a HUGE amount of the population benefit.

I understand a good allaince should get a good reward for taking a town and they get it. They get reduced trader prices, party area, fireworks. Shoot anet could give them a lot more Vanity things as a great reward. But why should 99% of the population be blocked out off a mission only because they don't want to or can't get in a huge faction farming guild?

Im afraid the only thing you and I will ever see of these so called "Elite" missions are screenshots, that is if the allaince in power does not turn into a a greedy self centered tyrant. Or wait has that already happened?

Hehe have a good day guys.

Fees and other requirements(Prices go high with each day passing)? Why should i turn myself into a Faction Farmer just to gain entrance into an alliance?

How about "WTS Elite Mission entry 100k" ?

For those that say the only "YOU" are preventing yourself from getting into an Elite mission you may not have considered that many people have out of game limitations on how much time they can devote to the game. Many people have obligations such as jobs and families to attend to. This is no reflection on the skill of the player or whether they could be considered Elite players. Guild Wars was originally promoted as a game that could be played a hour or two at a time. From what I have seen it is difficult to get into the Alliances that hold the cities and that they have requirements that can't be fullfilled with just a few hours a week. This excludes players based on time availablity. It favors single people who do not have significant requirements outside of the game. Yes, people paid to play the game and yes it is legitimate to for them to feel that they have the right to access all the content in the game. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't earn it just like earning your way to level 20 and hunting skills. However, the method by which they earn it should be available and feasable for all who play the game. It may be difficult to earn access but it should not allow players to control who has access and who doesn't in a discrimanatory fassion.

Am mainly a PvE player and when I heard there were going to be elite missions, this was an awesome idea, a new area where you would be challenged, of course overtime it is PvE, so you can create builds to beat it, but ANET is free to change the mission anything, to add even more fun for those that like PvE, expect with the curent system factions farmers (pvp or pve) get access, some or a lot of them are probably elite players, but not all. Also there are a lot of elite players and elite guilds that dont have a chance.

Kudos does goes to at least the Black Blades for their work with the current system, they organized and did what the game told to, farm factions.

I dont believe i have the solution to the problem, one idea is have a pre-elite mission area, where you would have to beat this area to get access to the elite mission and pay a faction or money based entry. In this pre-area there would be no drops, no XP, no nothing.

100 skill points to enter elite mission. If your too lazy to earn the elite mission yourself(whether getting into a lead alliance or starting your own) you'll have to pay an outragous amount of skill points to enter. That way the area wont be over populated with whiners and rage quiters who complain about how hard it is.
Just my two cents

sure... make people farm for 1 month to get the necessary skillpoints to get in once and die just so they can start the process of farming for a month again to get in once...

And the point of getting in a lead alliance has nothing to do with being lazy, but having a life... this game was oriented towards the casual gamer, ergo you know the entire skill over time debacle. Spending more then 1 - 2 hours a day on a game is hard when your working, having a girlfriend,maintaining the house,etc... One of the reasons why levelling to 20 is now so fast, the exurbant amount of collector items etc...

Besides even with such high requirements it won't stop ragequits nor whiners seeing that those can be easilly part of this alliance that owns the towns... or even people that farmed so long to be able to join this elite mission and be dissapointed with the 'content' they are offered.

just make it available to everyone who has the title awarded for having 5 titles... or a certain number of factionpoints (1000) to join in them which get transferred to the alliance in controll. This way everybody has a chance, but it is still earned to be able to get in the elite missions...

Without reading every single thread up until now (don't have that kind of time) I just wanted to voice:

Faction Farming does not equal "Elite". A team from any Faction Farming alliance would not last against a team that is well coordinated with a good and solid team build. (This team could easily come from a small friends only style Guild)

The only reward what so ever for "uber farming" should be immense and uttlerly worthless in game wealth.

Addition: I have nothing but pity for the Alliance / Guild that would enforce a "10K Faction" per day membership price, and for those poor fools that get tangled up in such a web.

So your proposal is to replace the insane faction grinding with... grinding for xp (to get skill points). That still seems contrary to the original game's intent and also contrary to what ANet is currently trying to do with skill points and skills.

Hi I'm in a ~40 man pvp guild however the large alliances all want ~80-100 and we do not want to recruit that many people for no real reason.

Do you know what Gaile's response to you and your guild is, scam? "Go red engine yourself, you don't deserve to have access because you don't want a max-sized guild."

people like you need to grow up. a guild, back in the era of knights, kings and kingdoms, was a group of men, under the same rule, with a common leader, that had all lived together in the same area, knew eachother well and worked better together than any comparable group from the land. A guild in this game was origlanly for people to have fun, get in groups with thier friends and make tight pvp/pve/gvg/hoh/tombs groups. In factions that has become prettymuch worthless now that a guild is urged to become nothing more than a large, if not maxed out, group of people who barely know eachother farming for one purpose, to get territory so they can get hzh or cavalon and get into the elite missions. but, now that they have access to these missions what can they do there? with such a large group, nearly 100 poeple im sure that not everyone knows everyone, and therefore cannot work toghether as well as say a guild of close friends that do uw/fow farming on a regular basis. guilds are no longer pushed to grow and develop in the game, they are pushed to max out and farm as much faction as possible so that the border lines in the new chapter change so drasticaly, like in the image on the inside of the cover, so that anet and gaile gray can boast about how successfull the game is.

This game ruins what gw was all about, playing an mmo online and getting to know the environment. after that point what was there to do? get your friends from the game and that you know in real life that play all together in a guild to battle it out against other established guilds to hold the title as the best guild. 2 months ago the best guild was the one that worked best together in any situation. Now the "best" guild, with the most elite people is the one that does supply runs all day long to hold down the main city in cavalon, seing as they have several million more faction than the guild that holds hzh at any given time. There is you're "best" guild of factions, the one that does repeatable missions over and over again. If the black blades think they are the best guild in factions i want to see a show down, them vs the winners of the gw world championships from every other country that plays, see how well they black blades actualy work together, or if they argue over who can run the flag back and forth the most times in 10 minutes.

Has anyone noticed that the borderlines are essentially meaningless? The elite missions belong on citys on the border, that take a really hard and long time to get to. which ever faction owns theses citys can play enter
Owning cities other than the capital is pointless, you get no reward other than your guild name. This way people can work cooperatively together *shock* for a common goal. which is why we loved GW:P

they are totaly meaningless, notice how they barely change day to day? the only significant change i ever notice is that the harvest temple changes ownership and sides 1 or 2 times a day. other than that the lines never change. it was a great idea, but only had 2 outcomes to begin with, either everyone would do faction battles and fight to take territory, or no one would because they either just dont care, or dont want to deal with it. this game, as a stand alone game for anyone that does not own prophecies, is a horrible game. it is too short, has a decent tutorial(the training at very begining, which i think is supposed to be pre) a horrible start where you cannot explore, and can barely do the mission in the first island unless you have max armor and a group of lv 15 and above. They tried to make this game all about fighting for territory, and added a story line(which is the only saving grace)

As an expansion, its basic selling point, the faction battles, have been a flop thus far, the only people that rigorously do the faction missions are the ones looking to keep their towns, not anyone looking to sway the border lines. if this is any indication of how chapter 3 is going to look then the story line better be amazing if im going to buy it. putting all you're hopes on one selling point is not a good idea gaile. prophecies had multiple selling points(free online play, guilds, story line, story line, story line, detail, pvp, hoh,, etc) factions just asks us to farm for faction so we can do the elite harder missions, or try to take territory from the other side in order to skew the border lines.

I personally don't see why and alliance with hundreds of members that can get all their members to work together to get enough faction to hold a main city shouldn't be allowed the reward of exclusive elite mission access. For anyone in a large guild, you'll know how tough it is to organise this sort of thing. To have 800+ members each contributing faction every week on a regular basis so that you can hold the main city is quite a feat in itself.

There is no way to controle 800+ member except Tyrany. And most of the players will accept to join "Out of love or devotion" just to gain the prize "Elite mission".

This fact alone will put in doubt the whole concept of GuildWars, let's name it "AllianceWars" or rather "MonopolyWars".

I have said several times that, I love the idea of controlling cities/capitals but the implementation is faulty, abusable, and biased on rewarding artificial Alliances.

Infact, the more i think of ... GuildWars "Faction Slaves" anyone?

I personally dont regard those 12vs12's as 'farming' or 'grind'.. they are not easy unless you can time 3 teams of 4 on teamspeak to join all at the same time!.. even then its not easy, certainly not 'farming' or 'grind'

I'm running my own UK alliance at the moment... doesnt anyone know how god damn difficult it is to organise your own guild plus 9 others??

Truly elite are the people that can do this I am green with envy tbh, but I LOVE the challenge of trying to make an alliance work, its a far great challenge than any of the PvE.

If your bored with "beating the game" (such a laughable term anyway) then try forming your own guild, and then try forming your own alliance!

If your so 'pro' try doing this.. I guarantee you, you will never be bored of GW !

We're not talking about 12vs12. That would be PvP. We are talking about PvE methods to accessing a PvE mission.

I'm a current officer in one of the leading guilds that partnered up with the blackblades since day one.

All i have to say is that it took hard work, plenty of mission and questing to get to where we are.

This isn't about who has a lead, but about who actually organized their guild and gets everyone on the right track.

It has taken a lot of sacrifice to own cavalon, and i believe that anyone who does more than others should always be rewarded.

thank you

.- deuz machina

You make a good point and I respect what you and your fellow alliance members have accomplished. However, I'd like to know a few things: Do you find your time spent earning all this faction to be an enjoyable use of your gaming time? Also, what's the future direction of your alliance? Will you continue to farm 10k faction daily per member and try to maintain a hold on Cavalon/House Zu Heltzer? If so, why? (I assume it's to have good farming access to the elite missions, or is it only going to continue until you have beat the missions?)

Ultimately the question I'd put to ANet is if this is how they really intended the Factions end-game to be played? It's currently relentless grinding for faction while the whole "territory" Kurzick vs. Luxon concept is completely ignored. I haven't actually seen the border change since the first or second day after release.

I want to know why just about everyone here thinks the only way to earn Faction, is farming it with one of the repeatable quests. Another very healthy and less tedious way to do it are faction/alliance battles. It's not anywhere the degree of an arena fight, and even a PUG of 12 has an equal chance of victory against the same odds. Hell, there's an element of surprise to it all, even a well made team can have problems with a nicely made PUG consisting of even maybe five good players. Factions battles are a lot of fun, and if anything needs to be fixed it's the rate at which these can happen.

Point is, Factions offers people two ways to make faction. These quests, and these unique factions/control battles. If people are so narrow minded as to avoid these battles, just because of some kind of cowardly fear of facing another player in combat, when some of the most thoughtful and unique ways thinkable have been implemented to make this form of "warfare" doable (even by players with little or no experience), I'm thinking the farmers deserve their places. Although in the same regard, I think if you have to farm 10K faction a day on these quests alone just to gain access to these missions, you deserve your life behind a PC in a dark room. You earned it.

This faction/alliance battle idea is ingenious. Win or lose, you get faction, a considerable amount based on how many victories made. Let's say a Kurzick party wins out a Luxon one 426 to 319. Luxons net themselves 319, Kurzicks gain 426. This isn't farming, this is pure engaging fun. This is doable multiple times without becoming tedious. Random "monsters", same idea, but almost always a different approach. This is the very basics of RPG's, with a little Anet salsa thrown in. Okay, let's say you do these battle and average 300 kills. 300 faction each run through, and these battles take maybe 20 minuets each go. You're talking about 9,000 faction in an HOUR. Let's say your team sucks all the time, and loses with 300 kills average, same deal. Now a dedicated guild can raise a very formidable amount with this formula.

Same time formula, and let's have a guild alliance of maybe eight or so well composed guilds. At max faction for each member of these 8 guilds, at an hours constant (dedicated individuals), and you'll have enough to own a city in no time, and all of this is with a relatively small community. Only time will tell how big people are going to go in the spirit of competition, and that's what the games about, and that's why these missions are elite. You'll have to be the cream of the crop to go at them. It's pretty sad that farmers get first dibs on these missions, but the opportunity to grab them is there for the entire community. If the community does not utilize these means to obtain these missions, the farmers have effectively earned their places. If you want it, and don't want to farm, you'll have to do the faction/alliance battles.

The elite missions weren't designed for the casual player in mind, rather they were designed for guilds with elite standings in faction. If you want to be special, earn a title and call it a day. The game by itself is a very fine product, but if you want to join these elite missions, you'll have to do so as it is required, and there are two ways to do it. Farm it, or fight for it. I find it disgusting that farmers are winning that bid, but they deserve it all the same if people won't take up arms and fight for it. These elite missions were designed for people who are willing to fight for the faction they chose, and making these missions available in other ways deters from that original idea.

These repeatable quests for faction weren't actually designed to be used as they are. These were designed maybe to get a few extra Amber/Jade, and to sway your current personal ratting with the Luxons or Kurzicks. It's very sad that these types are actually winning out, when the more effective and easier way to earn it isn't being utilized. It's a shame. Perhaps these repeatable quests should be nerfed, to such a degree it would be irrational to try and farm them for city control purposes. Maybe they should be taken out all together. Maybe they can put in some farming control for faction in terms of the repeatable quests? Thoughts?

Wow, my post got long.

Elite missions?


I was brought into one of these missions as a guest, once. That was, until the holding guild's leader said that outside people could no longer be brought in. The reason was that supposedly, some guild members were having people pay them in amber to be brought in.

A result of this? We lost three members of our guild, including the guild leader to the holding guild. They're no longer "allowed" to play with the rest of us, who they'd played with for months.

So yeah...I'm a bit bitter about the elite missions. Thank you ANet for ruining the game for me.

Pay for join? pathetic..

All players of GW must read my post.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...3027855&page=2

Have fun

The alliance leader of the blackblades did not only organize everything 6 weeks before the game came out, but held meetings with every officer to get everyone up to page.

I think that the reason why some of these alliances are starting to own towns is because they are starting to realize that the way to do this, is to get every guild member to help out as a whole.
You also have to look at the fact that most of the players in a regular guild, either farm, pvp or pve endlessly.

I find it enjoyable to farm 10k a day wether it's missions, pvp or quests, because in the end, you can farm the deep all you want.

I can truly say that as we get more faction, the 10% loss each day will have a major effect on us and in most alliances, it will give other players time to catch up, to the point that we might even raise our quota for the day.


p.s. the first weeks of factions, a lot of our members went sleepless for a while to get as far as we could. we pvp'ed, quested, and did everything possible to get the ownership of cavalon.

My strongest suggestion is that you get your guild up to speed, and instead of making it look like a job to earn faction, encourage them to help our the alliance, because in the end this game is about teamwork and time.

And one thing to note: most of the guild leaders in the alliance don't have very huge lifes, so that's one of the reasons why we're so ahead and far up in the competition.

thank you for your time

.- deuz machina

It's still farming and as such, tedious. If I want to do work, I'll go to work (and earn some money as well). When I play games in my free time, I'd rather not do something very tedious like faction farming all the time, even though "it would help the alliance" and whatnot.

I guess the whole deal is for more hardcore gamers than myself (but I'd still want to take a look at an Elite mission sometimes).

oh right, in that case your not playing the whole game in the first place!

If you refuse to play all of the game, then you cant really complain about not having access to all of it.

sorry, I agree with Gaile on this one, they are Elite missions for Elite players who get involved with everything the game has to offer...

Alliance battles and even those Faction battles (Fort Aspen etc) require skill to win consistently, as opposed to grinding the one or two repeatable missions.

My point is that to win these places does require alot of skill which justifies them being call 'Elite' as opposed to the 'grind' or 'farming' words being used to describe it in this thread.