elite missions in cantha

Damn, I thought fow and uw was there for the challenge.. how wrong must I have been questing down there instead of farming?

I feel sad for the developers who obviously took precious time to make areas that no one will realy adventure through. I mean.... I went around to several towns that had ownership and did not see anyone in them. I saw one XoO person in HzH braging about being in there but that was about it. So many people includeing myself who enjoy the thrill of a challange and so few to enjoy thoes challenges. What a waste of space on my Hard Drive and what a waste of time for the developers.

You know, a hope for change is kind of the reason threads like these are made...

If I can get in, so can you:





More later when Imageshack lets me upload!

OMG read wtf we are saying, do you see anyone saying we should have these elite missions handed to us? ive been reading the new posts since i started the thread. NOT A SINGLE PERSON HAS SAID THEY NEED TO OPEN IT UP TO ANYONE. we are all saying, and have come to a general agreement that it should be available for anyone to get to, like in tombs, or hoh, or obsidien armor, anyone can get to it so long as your side has favor, and you can finish the uber hard missions to get the forger to make you armor.

people like you who vomit opinions with out even reading what we are saying are the really pathetic ones out there. faction farming is not work, its grinding and an aspect of the game that sucks royaly.

ok, so you got in, what one is that? kurzic or luxon? i know for a fact that there are kurzic guilds that have members that will invite people to go with them. as for luxon groups, unless you are a personal friend in real life with one of their members you probably wont get an invite unless you pay them, or dump 10k faction to get in.

and dont tell me for one second that you think the current requirements for getting into teh elite missions is fair, it discriminates against every person who only has a few hours a day each day or even less.

We should orgenise a 24 hour walkout when everyone who is aginst the current faction system DO NOT LOG ON. Then A-Net can see how many ppl really are aginst it and what chapter 3's player base will be like.

ehhh, i have to disagree with that, its not our fault we finished the game so quickly. ive done alot of quests with my assasin, and they are all pretty easy and quick to do. there are far less towns and outposts in cantha than in tyria, and there are half as many missions, and there are no long missions in the game except for raisu palace. the rest of the missions are all about a half hour long or so. in prophecies there were missions, like thk, that took an hour+ to do.

factions is way too short, and not enough extra stuff for us to do. people get bored doing the side quests, we've been doing them for a year with prophecies. titles arent really that important to many, some of them take no skill to earn, like opening 1200 high end chests, or being drunk for 10,000 minutes total

it would be nice if in their planning they had made an sf/uw/fow/tombs style place for the rest of us. honestly though, the missions we are faced with are no challenge really, too short, and do not keep us busy. prophecies had you usuing up the entire map, with missions that made you run long distances in order get to the next primary spot.

what we all realy want is something to challenge us, nothing in factions is challenging. all ive resorted to is re-doing a couple of missions to farm for rare weapons that are specific to that place. this is not chalenging, but atleast i have something to do and get rare skins for my warior and assasin

i honestly, and whole heartedly agree with this, because aparently talking about the problem, and bringing it to gailes attention, along with that of anet, is having to bearing on the problem being solved.

my friend was talking about crashing lions arch, we all just go in there and sit around. absolutely crash lions arch, and leave cantha empty for a day.

I don't know why everyone is being so mean to Gaile, she's just the PR person. For the most part she relates info between the players and the devs and it's her job to smile and say everything is peachy whether it is or not.

The faction system will be worked on but to what extent I don't really know. They've already made a few tweaks to make faction harder to gain (Luxon arena quest) but there are still many obvious exploits (Luxon supplyline quest). Hopefully there will be a point where the alliance battles are a viable way of making faction but for now the repeatable PvE quests are your best bet for grinding out faction fast.

As for how to gain access to the elite missions you only need a member of the holding alliance to bring you into the elite mission outpost, after that as along as you don't zone out you can do the mission itself as many times as you want.

The real problem with faction is it's too easy to get. Jade has gone from 3k just yesterday to 2k this afternoon to 1.6k tonight and that's only with the people who aren't turning their points in to their alliance.

Personally I see the whole system as a good idea that was very poorly implemented. It's sad to see AN drop the ball once again and IMO this was very predictable as many people pointed out after the preview weekend.

Changes will be made but I wouldn't hold my breath with E3 going on and even then I doubt it will allow everyone to enjoy the elite missions to their leasure. So for now your best bet is to find someone in an alliance that reads the Bible alot (Do unto others yadda yadda yadda) and is nice enough to let you in or wait for things to change as they will inevitably.

The system is flawed anyhow. It needs to be changed. As a previous poster said, people log out from the area, and log back into the area. "favour or faction" or not. There is a flaw whether by fairness to all, or by the greed machine it has become. I admit I love the perfect items I'm getting from the mission, but I guess you don't realize how much of the game you are missing when you are spending 4+ hours a day running the same pattern in any given faction map.

It's tiring.

Im up for a 24hr walkout.. It should take 3 weeks to cordnate one. Say June 3rd. Its a saturday and a day most people would be on.

What don't we wan't
GRIND!
When don't we wan't it
NOW!

i have 2-3 hours mondays, wednesdays, and fridays..if i dont have a lot of homework. im in the cavalon alliance.

Hey, how about a third "elite" mission on par with the others that you can only enter if you are NOT a member of an alliance that is controlling or has recently controlled a town?

Really, I feel like access to elite missions is not a reward for... doing "well"... rather, I feel like denial of access is a punishment for not enjoying things in the game that the devs feel that we should enjoy. Like they want to force us to "want" to be in a huge guild and alliance with a bunch of strangers.

I think that this is more than fair, again, it gives the rest of us a chalenge, because we all know how challenging the rest of the game was.....

Congratulations?

I don't get what you are saying. So you are on for about 6-9 hours during the week (your numbers). Does that mean everyone in the Cavalon Alliance is? How many people are in the alliance? Just because you play only a limited amount of time, all of a sudden overtaking Cavalon is easy?

Here's an idea, since you are so good. Leave your Alliance. Start a new guild, then a new alliance. With your newly built alliance, take over Cavalon. Then, post up that you have done it. Only then will I see that it is actually possible to overtake a holding alliance.

/signed, amen man. that is exactly what we have all been saying about faction farming. it will be impossible for any new guild/alliance to take cavalon, and i highly doubt this guy will take up your call to arms, because he knows that it will be impossible

All I have to say on the subject is: Watch out, ZoO and BkBl, as the small guilds will be at your throats once everyone is up to speed. Our alliance has around 40,000 faction at the moment, but we've not got started, because most of the players are still not at house. As has been mentioned already, faction isnt hard to come by, one way or the other, so my mind is set: We're coming for your elite status, prepare yourselves!

I am taking my time with Factions, and so none of my characters have yet reached end game, so what goes on there is still unknown to me. But I have heard from my guildmates that this indeed seems to be the case: elite missions are only open to those who control the key towns. We also realize that, as non-grinding players, we as a guild or alliance will never ever have the opportunity to control these towns.

What on earth was Anet thinking when they designed this? With no end-game equivalent to UW/FOW/SF/ToPK in the Factions chapter, many users will very quickly become bored with the game and, well, just leave.

Maybe this is Anet's plan? How many people can their servers accommodate at a time anyway? Maybe better to have many many people buy the game, play it for a while, and then stop to make room for the next?

I for one do very much hope that Anet is rethinking what they have done here, and then drastically change how access to elite missions is done. Or add new content giving us a Factions version of UW/FOW, etc.

This is how i see it. You bought this game. Did you buy it for the elite missions? no. so what do you think gives you the right to demand access to elite missions. There is an increasingly worrying trend in gamers, especially MMOs that says 'i bought your game, i own this game, i own you.' There are a limited number of towns, and a lot of alliances out there. Some, just like the top ranked gvg guilds, are going to be fanatical about claiming these places. let them have what they deserve.

However, The problem as i see it, is that claiming elite missions is not down to skill, but rather how much you play, which is the opposite of GW motto. Becuase alliance standing is largely down to the number of members in the alliance, it seems that large farming communities are the ones who will get the highest standing. Whats more, in order to compete with these alliances you must play about 20-40 alliance battles a day, assuming a 50/50 win ratio. Most people simply cannot manage this.

A proposal is to perhaps to make alliance to elite missions possible after earning, say 1,000,000-5,000,000 faction from either side. This is high enough so that its hard to get to, but equally it is attainable with enough hard work. Currently the RATE of faction accumulation is rewarded, not the actual total. As a result smaller alliances, which tbh tend to be comprised of a small number of pvp players, and could be considered the more elite of GW players, will never ever ever get a chance to crack these missions. While one can get to rank 9, with enough time and hard work, and perhaps get into the top 10 guilds, competing with faction farmers is going to be impossible. Cavalon and House Zu Heltzer will be forever owned by alliances with the most amount of ppl possible, forever farming faction, and not really playing the game, or even contributing to much of a community. That is what i beleive is wrong with this system, its a double standard, and is clearly rewarding the wrong people. All i can say, is that whatever these people get will be shunned by the vast majority of the community.

I hope a compromise can be reached, that still rewards those who earn it, but is still accessable to the people that actually play the game, rather than farming it for all it is worth. ANET has made some big design errors with factions, i hope they are rectified

Peewee, you just don't get it. Did I buy this game for elite missions? Why, yes, I did! Its part of the game! Just like Fow and UW are part of the game. It is poor game design to have these missions only open to players who grind, grind, grind for it. Because a lot of us do not have the time or patience for that.

And if the elite missions are considered to be something that is simply too difficult or impossible for a player like myself, then what is there left to do after reaching end game? Fighting factions battles to help the Luzons or Kurzics makes no sense if there is no attainable reward, is there?

I don't complain about GW like many other posters; I enjoy this game immensely and think a lot of the redesigns and nerfs underway were justified to make better game play. But it looks like this time someone at Anet may have let their imagination get away from them a bit, heh heh.

Disclaimer: Many other similar post & threads
I'm not too worked up about the elite missions, but the requirements for holding towns seems all wrong to me. The name of the game is Guild Wars, not Guild Farming. It should be that Kurzick Alliances fight Luxon Alliances, and control towns based on victories... the current system actually pits Kurzick against Kurzick / Luxon vs Luxon in a farming competition.

About time ppl UP their skills and play the game.

1. As for the argument, the lame one the casual players use, you see you cant finish the Elite mission in the 'oh i got less amount of time'.

2. Casual players simply dont have enough experience and skills to play the mission anyway so please stop moaning.

The current system is fine, it gives excellent rewards for those who deserve it and allowing every tom dick and harry into the game is going to ruin the drops for those who have spent more time and effort and skills in the game.


Cheers for Anet for providing a system that generates the ZEAL in you to stop being a n00b and play the game the way its meant to be played...like the elites.

The Elite system should be accessable to only highest skilled players, in every sense, Huge Alliances mean excellend coordination and control over hundreds of members to get you the elite town.

This isnt meant for casual players, dont ruin the fun for others just becuase you want it. Cry Babies ftl.

ANET should keep the current System...You hear that Gaile?

TY

I think the underlying flaw with Elite missions is Anet's assumptions about player mentality.

We are all aware of how competitive pvp can be. You are trying to beat another human being. You must assert your dominance over others in order to win. By its very nature, pvp MUST be competitive.

Pve, on the other hand, is rarely competitive. The point is to achieve a certain goal. It could be a mission, location, quest, item, plot advancement, skill, etc...Although the goal can be difficult to achieve, rarely is there competition with another player to achieve that goal.

These conditions have bred two very different types of gamers. Pvp gamers who love competion and pve gamers who love non-competitive, goal-oriented gameplay. With Elite Missions, Anet has introduced HIGHLY competitive gameplay into the pve environment. This means most of the non-competitive pve gamers are S.O.L.

It's not an issue of grind. I'm sure many pve players would grind day and night to achieve some goal (FoW armor, for example). I'm willing to bet they would form guilds and alliances to farm faction in order to have access to elite missions...As long as they weren't competing with other people to get it. That's the problem. Having to compete with other people to get access to content is foreign to most pve players and they are crying foul. They aren't willing to do it.

Whether this is what Anet envisioned, we don't know. But we do know most pve players don't like it. I'm not suggesting they change it to a non-competitive form, but they could implement some tweaks to make it non-monopolized.

Spoken like a true elitist. I fail to see how mass-farming is in any way SKILLED. Is farming trolls in the Forge area skilled? Is farming minos in Elona skilled? Was griffon farming skilled? No, not in any way is that skilled. The only skill involved was on the ones who originally designed the build. Any idiot can farm those monsters, just like any idiot can farm faction. Does that make them more skilled than everyone else?
Casual players don't have enough skill to play these missions? Are you kidding me? I know casual players that hold halls. Hmmm. I guess winning favor is effortless too.
Your other point shows your main concern in-game: money. "Don't let everyone in. They will all farm the mission and make my Zodiac weapons worthless." As I said, spoken like a true elitist.

Use of the word "noob," let alone the "n00b" format = insta-fail. Get off your high-horse.

well if you had read the quote above me, you would have understood my reason for posting that. ok lets see here to take over cavalon youd need about 4.5 mil (last night at least). if you have 100 people who can make 10k an hour for 2 hours, thats 2 mil right there. the problem is that the people in the cavalon guild are going at the same rate, so i see what you are saying, it would be near impossible to do, quickly at least. but this game has only been out for near a month. blackblades wont have cavalon forever...maybe

edit
well...wasnt that the Black Blades alliance who originally designed the build and where to do it?

I did read that post, and every other post in this thread. What I am saying is that the casual player, who only has 2-3 hours a night, at best, doesn't want to log on to farm all night. I'll admit, I do my share of farming, but maybe a half hour tops, because it is extremely boring to me. I'm sure several PvE players agree. I'd rather be questing, doing missions, skill capping, helping others, or going for my explorer title. The only way that us "whiners" can take control of any city would be either hire us some bot farmers, or completely abandon the way we play the game - the way Anet originally designed the game to be (you know, their sales pitch that in this game, skill is GREATER than time played).

I'm going to go with no here. I bet everyone and their cousin knew about these quests during the FPE. I know I did. That, and there is no required skill setup, or a certain character class required to do these faction farming runs. It is like telling everyone in your guild to do Fires in the East over and over, and over, and over, and over...
The execution and coordination of this is impressive though. I do applaud the holding alliances for their time spent toward the cause. Our complaint is that time spent in-game does not make you elite. You want to find out who is elite? Open up the mission to everyone, and make it a time trial. Make the drops all suck, but if your team clears all floors in the alloted time, give them a perfect, rare skin weapon/item of their choice. Put actual "skill" back into it. Then we'll see who is elite.

Why not simply allow each Alliances to impose a tax on access to the elite mission they control?

The tax is Faction-based.

I have some friends who have a small guild. 12 Members. They are casual players and enjoy GvG on weekends. They don’t care if they lose they have fun and win 50/50% of the time. They have cleared UW and FOW a few times before and had fun doing it. They remember the first time they cleared UW and FOW and how much fun it was. It took a while but they did it. They considered joining a large guild so they could compete for the elite missions in Factions. However they did not want to join a larger guild or an Alliance for several reason’s.

1 Most large guilds such as XoO will not allow GvG to their PvE players. I know I was a member of their PvE for a time. (rude arrogant controlling people IMO so I left)

2 Loss of an Identity (Capes and private TS) of who they are.

3 Loss of Leader and Officer status means they could be kicked out for not Grinding Tribute as most of the Large Guilds require.

4 Did not want to fill out an application process because it’s stupid. These are adults and don’t want to fill out an application to play a game they play on a casual basis.

5 They have real lives and don’t want to set up and manage a 90 person Guild. They just want to play with friends and family when they are online.

ANET…. This small guild makes up over 90% of your game. If you continue to snob the small time gamer you will loose in the end. DO YOU ACTUALY READ YOUR GUILD’S OF THE WEEK. MOST OF YOUR GUILDS OF THE WEEK ARE THESE KIND OF GUILDS.

What a crock of sh**! casual players have just as much skill as diehard 24/7 players. and im sure that any casual player can set aside enough time in a single night to farm tombs, or fow/uw. so dont give us any of that crap.

and for everyone that says "you bought their game, they can do whatever they want" yes i did buy this entire game, and i want a chance to explore the entire game. This game is wayyyy to short to be entertaining to anyone for long, we need elite maps to challenge us. i am bored with uw/fow, and with tombs. and since the gear nerf in sorrow furnace no one really wants anything but b/p groups, and ive been a healing monk in a b/p group in tombs, not exactly challenging or much fun.

so before you say we casual players have no skill you should just not talk and save us all the trouble of reading your trash

For everyone saying that casual player can't finish elite missions & they are only for the Skilled über players: if one is capable of clearing FoW//UW, then Elites aren't problem at all. It's about pulling - only extra is those -4 degen rooms or so, but in the end they are just fun addition, nothing more.

I haven't done the missions yet but I've spoken with people that have & I'm quoting their comments.

If Guild Wars has to have elitism, then please lets leave it to the PvP side of the game only. I can't really see any other places where one can actually even try to say he is ELITE (Flashy phoenix) & even in PvP it's really childish to behave like that.

About lack of high-end content: I agree totally, that is a problem :/... Would be great to have dungeons/crypts/castles etc. that are situated to far corners of Cantha & there shouldn't be limits to get there. Only the challenge factor should be high. I don't see why there has to be very limited access to possibly greatest challenges of RPG.

I don't want to borrow ideas from other mmorpgs or mention them when subject is GW, but Factions/Prophecies has little high-end areas in PvE compared to some other hit mmorpgs that dominate the market. *cough*

Of course I did. I bought it to play every single mission and quest that the game has. The advertised ability to complete the game is why Guild Wars is better than WoW.

How is this worrying? What's worrying is the number of people that _don't_ demand this. I mean, why wouldn't you demand gameplay that's equal to, or better than, what you would find in a single player game? If a single player game wouldn't let you access areas except for arbitrarily determined times of the week, then that game would be panned by the critics.

Hi My Name is Masque Eye leader of Fiery Knights a medium Size PVE Guild (kurzicks) to all those who want to access the Elite Missions, my suggestion would be ask your guild leaders to join our alliance w/ us or vice versa. I am not sure how many guilds you can have in 1 alliance but if all the guilds that are unahppy combine in 1 alliance we should be able to access the elite missions. Picutre this 8 members * 5 ff quest trips (400 points each quest) would equal 16,000 faction points each trip for the entire alliance, and it only takes about 2-3 mins to finsh the quest (im sure you guys know what area im taking about) and thats only 1 group in the entire alliance, if u guys multiply that ff alliance group we would create, we can easily own House of Zu in less than a week. Now Who's with, pm me so we can get it started. Thanks.

I thank you for your offer.
But it is still Grinding for something, thats the point ppl are trying to make. I'm still working on getting 10K factions so I can make friends with one side, and it's boring as hell, and the drops suck but I'm going for 10K so I can get to end mission, no way in hell am I going for 10K a day. 20k next week to keep up, 40K the week after that, 7 day's a week I have a life and a job, not realistic to get that kind of factions every day and still enjoy the game.

But THANKS for offering.

/agree with Stockholm

And in addtion:

Farming is *not* Elite
Farming is *not* fun for everyone (myself included)
Farming should *not* be a means to an end
Farming is defnietly not *skill*
The only reward for Farming should be completely and utterly worthless in game wealth, whether that be wealth in items or plat.

Why some people can't seem to see this is beyond my comprehension.

Control of a city should only grant the nice asthetic appeal of having your Guild's (or Alliance's) name on that city. And if access to the Elite missions were granted to all ala paid enterance fee (in likes to FoW/UW) then perhaps the city ownership could also grant free access for that Alliance as a small reward. Bottom line, Farmers should not control access to end game content.

Bingo

As i see it ive beat the game and i have the following options.

Play it again (yea right, couldnt stand the slums the first time around)

Play PvP (now that im PvPing im finding myself very limited to what i have unlocked, so basily i have to play it more to get competative, sod that)

stop playing (to be completly honest the ONLY reason im still playing this game, is because its free, and i cant afford another game at the moment )

Notice that Gaile and Alex have taken the time to drop in several comments in recent threads, but they won't say a word on this subject.

Well sometimes the music is hard to face.

the fact that they wont comment either way on this subject makes me wonder if they even care at all about thier customers.