elite missions in cantha

I also find her disregard for small guilds very disturbing. She seems to think that if you enjoy playing with just a few close friends that it must be because you are a slacker, you are unskilled, and you are undeserving of the full game content.

She refuses to address that we aren't even objecting to rewards for mindless farming, but that we object to the nature of the reward.

her attitude towards small guilds and the way WE CHOOSE to play, is a pathetic slap in the face to everyone who plays in thier own guilds. they are rushing the production of the games to get as many out as possible. GW is no longer about quality, but of quantity, both in gameplay and in the number of chapters we all own. If they just released a half finished game, and are working on the third chapter already, then we are all screwed. The third chapter will have 6 months of work in it, as opposed to probably 9 months worth of work that went into factions, and likely 18 months taht went into prophecies due to it being twice as large, and being the first. Unless chapter 3 in the gw series is a free update to cantha, like tombs/sf/uw/fow, then it will likely fail miserably. thus far i am not impressed by factions. the whole faction farming is a downer, short game, and no beginners level except for the tutorial when you start a new char. though i do like leveling faster in cantha, that is nice. other than leveling fast, the story line is the saving grace of the game, it is far less involved than prophecies, which really had like 5 stories in it that all intermingled by the end. "new" skills are teh same as old ones with different names, why not just keep the old ones, there are only so many new spins you can put on skills. elites are the only new skills that are actualy new. new weapons, there arent enough new weapons for that to be a feature, only four that really stick out are plagueborn, celestial, zodiac and oni blades. other than that they are all pretty plain. there are really no new things in factions. Its main pushing point is the exact thing alienating everyone from participating, farming factions to control territory.

I keep saying this in every single elite mission thread, but nothing is going to change regarding its mechanics now that the game is released and they have your money. All complaints about it are wasted words.

Any changes they make now will be unfair to the alliances that have worked their butts off keeping the cost of towns in the millions of faction. Opening access to elite missions means a large number of these players will leave out of disgust. Anet are not going to do anything that causes hyperdedicated players to leave.

Join a faction farming mega-alliance if you want to play the elite missions, or simply realize that Kanaxai's Axe = Victo's Axe. So you have a cool skin on your weapon? Here's a hint: no one cares.

They have seperate teams working in staggered schedules. I think each chapter is given about a year of time.

I really hope the C3 team isn't developing some terrible system that's even worse than the alliance/elite mission setup because they're too busy to listen. If it gets really bad, or they start really pushing PvP, I can't say that it will be worth my money.

We can let them know it was a bad idea so that they don't repeat the same mistake. Although, they didn't take the hint from the negetive reaction to favor, did they?

Pff..Pathetic..
i have a life like u, remember.
A real pro is a dynamical player with dynamical builds for every enemy not a "guildwarsguru" build only. Tha difference between me and u is:
I study builds, u play with builds from a post in this site. And a pro can survive in battle more than a noob. Sry if u can't. That's why i can join an Elite mission and u write here

I have yet to play an Elite mission and right now, that's ok to me because I'd rather spend time doing other things. However, I know that I will eventually want to try my hand at one of these missions and from what I've read in this thread, it would be virtually impossible for anyone that is not in a huge alliance to have access to the mission.

However, I had an idea that might make the mission more accessible to smaller alliances: make the amount of faction required to control a town based on the size of the alliance. The amount of faction required to take the town could be calculated by some pre-determined formula developed by ANet. It would have to take into consideration the number of players in the alliance attempting to take control and the number of players in the alliance that already controls the town. The formula could go something like this:



Let CHAL = # of players in alliance trying to take control of town
Let CTRL = # of players in alliance currently in control of town
Let FD = Amount of faction that the current holders have dumped into the town

Faction Required To Control = (CHAL/CTRL)*FD + 2000*(CTRL - CHAL)



Example 1: Say that a 1,000 member alliance called A controls the town (and hence access to the Elite mission) with 3 million faction and a 200 member alliance called B wants to take control of the town. Then by the above formula, B would need (200/1,000)*3,000,000 + 2,000*(1,000-200) = 2,200,000 faction to take control of the town. That's slightly more than the max faction that the alliance can hold at any one time (200*10,000 = 2,000,000).

The formula would slightly favor larger alliances as they have more players that can dump faction into the town and it is likely that smaller alliances will not be able to gain and dump enough faction into the town to make the faction required unattainable. Also, the last part of the formula would give the larger alliances a little bit of a discount on the faction required as seen in the following example.

Example 2: Say that a 200 member alliance called A controls the town (and hence access to the Elite mission) with 1 million faction and a 1,000 member alliance called B wants to take control of the town. Then by the above formula, B would need (1,000/200)*1,000,000 + 2,000*(200-1,000) = 3,400,000 faction to take control of the town. That wouldn't be much of a problem for the larger alliance since they have a bank of 1,000*10,000 = 10,000,000 faction to draw from. I used 1,000,000 in this example instead of 3,000,000 because I think that a small alliance would be extremely lucky to even get that much into a town before losing control.

Basically, the idea here is like spiking. The smaller alliances will have a chance to use their faction to "spike" the town and get into the elite mission before one of the larger alliances use their sheer numbers to regain control of the town. I'm not saying that this formula is perfect or even one that should be used, but some sort of formula like this should allow for more access to elite missions and make it harder for a single alliance to have a complete stranglehold over these missions. There could also be a restriction placed on controlling a town with an elite mission such as a minimum alliance size.....though I think the last part of the formula presented above would pretty much take care of really small alliances trying to take advantage of the fractional part of the formula.

I apologize for the long post, but I think this would be a reasonable solution that would mostly preserve the advantages that larger alliances currently have while allowing for the possibility for greater turnover in town ownership and some access for smaller alliances. What do you guys think?

-Tom

I recently discovered ANet's planned logo for chapter 3:

Great work soccer55! Approved!

This thread is hilarious. Here we have 3 different view points:

-One says: Shut up and Grind

-One says: Grind doesn't equal skill

-One says: Factions Alliance system is flawed

Every now and then PvP heads ping in and claim that people aren't playing PvP so that's the reason...even though this is mostly a PvE matter.

I can't wait for this thread to respawn every Alliance update.

Yea that was the predicted problem. Professional Faction farmers controlling access to elite mission. However its surprising they have not yet resorted to exploiting that by running Party invites to the area, which is possible, on a larger scale.

The down side. They are Huge alliances of 10 guilds with many now doing nothing but farming faction by the thousands a day...

This is two fold. It is not possible to keep that trend up forever as eventually people will find better things to do then this.

And two Because they are securing it with so much farmed faction the Degen of 10% a day is pretty hard to keep up with let alone surpass.

In the long run Right now its a problem only because they are not allowing others to go down into the elite missions... This does not mean its not possible just that they are not doing it.

In fact all that is required is 1 member of the alliance to form a party to go down. They go through the gate and talk to the guy, (similar to going to underworld and Fissure of Woe via Spirits) and Off the entire party goes.

The worry in the past was that these guilds would charge some astronomical amount for this service. Like 10k a pop or something equally ridiculous, instead of the customary 1k like for underworld. I suspect that given time Anet will make access to those areas in other ways. But for now. Its not too big a deal. Seems a few groups are granted access every day, even without the alliance leaderships approval. Not going into who or how as I don't want to get them in trouble with their alliance, but its not impossible to get a group to go if you ask with some persuasion...

There is one major problem that is being talked about. the repeatable Faction quests... Yes they are being exploited for this purpose in certain towns on both sides. HOWEVER the Luxon side has the disadvantage of not having many standard one time only quests to fulfill Befriending the Luxons 10000 faction requirements. The Kurzicks side has Plenty of quests that is more then enough for this on their side... Its a balance issue. If they eliminate the repeatable quests, the possibility of Getting to 10000 faction is DRASTICALLY reduced.

Now many will say just play Alliance battles. which is in and of itself unacceptable to many.
1: Its not a good PvP mode to be forced into playing for the first time, in many ways Almost as bad as Team Arenas.

2: Already there is an on going requirement of Rank 6 or better to get accepted to a party... Just as bad as Heroes Ascent, if not worse.

3: Jade quarry and Aspenwood are still abandoned on both sides except for RARE times of the day. Quarry I have yet to find a time that's good to play at all. as it seems neither side want to play it... Dont know why...

OK nuff Rant. I figure this is the first month of the new title, and just like the first chapter, this one will go through Several tweaks here and there to get everything running 100% rather fast. I will not be surprised to see a new build for GW every few days for the next several weeks... Right now as far as known bugs and glitches we are only about 80% there at this point.

With Prophecies we Europeans at least had access to FoW/UW 2-3 hours a week last summer, but that didn't matter much to me because PvE in Prophecies was huge. PvE in Cantha is small and boring in comparison.

Since A-net never showed any inclination of removing the moron bond between HoH and FoW/UW access I think that the same will apply for the Elite missions. So to keep the game interesting for more than a month for those countless of people who don't want to join a guild/don't want to abandon their small guilds/don't want to grind faction to become "elite players", A-net will have to add areas, like they added Sorrow's Furnance. Otherwise it's goodbye Cantha, hello again Tyria for many of us.

They added Sorrow's Furnance and later TOPK

ok, so anet doesnt want to piss off 800 fans that have plenty of time to farm faction, thats good. in the mean time they are pissing off probably 800,000 fans that dont have the time to farm all that faction. hmm, seems to me that changing the requirements to getting in the elite missions would be in the best interest than not doing it. and you keep posting this, but you dont get it, some of us dont want to have to farm faction 8 hours a day to be considered elite. farming faction is not an elite thing, i dont care what anyone says. when i get each of my chars down to the jade sea i can get my 10k faction in about an hour doing all the quests. Why dont i give my guild all 10k and do it again so we have a chance at getting into the elite missions? because it gets boring. the quests you get add up to about 8000 faction, the last 2k i got from doing zos shivros and supply runs and scouting runs. the 12v12 is so poorly organized that i wont even try it anymore. you cant chose your team, and you cannot see the other members of your team from teh other 4-person teams. as a monk this makes it more frustrating than it is worth. organizing an 800 person alliance and setting that up is impressive, but again, not worthy of elite status. ammassing over 4 million faction, again, impressive, but not worthy of elite status. Elite status, and therefore entrance to elite missions, should be reserved to the top 5guilds in gvg, the guilds that have won hoh 10 or more that month, and a special requirement, like a 5-level "tomb of primeval kings" style level that anyone has to pass in order to open up the elite missions. and make it difficult, so that something like a 55 ss necro, or a 2man uw team, or a bp group cannot make it.

Again, its 800vs800,000; take your pick gaile and anet

Don't give them ideas for Chapter 3. You want to restrict access to high-end PvE to players that (almost) never play PvE

Welp every other opinion is represented in here so here is mine. I have no problem with the alliance system. There are good uses of it, especially for smaller guilds to band together and help each other without losing their individuality. Unfortunately, we are suffereing through the worse uses of it right now until the shiney wears off.

That said, what I see FLAWED is...

Why are the elite missions in the capital cities that will never be controlled by the opposing side? Wouldn't it mean more to the controlling alliance to be wrestling it away from the OTHER faction on a daily basis?

This would make controlling a city or even a sacred area to both factions more meaningful. To me right now, it appears the motivation is to keep it out of the hands of others in the same faction. Shouldn't it have been more about keeping it out of the hands of the OTHER faction? Then the missions could be openned to all members of the same side while held by their controlling alliance.

There has to be other rewards systems that could be unique to the controlling alliance. Perhaps new armor or weapons only availabe from an exclusive crafter customized so it couldn't be sold? Perhaps with the mark of the controlling alliance applied to the breast piece as a perm reminder that their alliance once held the top most exclusive area? Frankly, what is there to record a past achievement when the faction dies away and the alliance falls apart? Forums? A rare skinned weaopon that can now be purchased in auctions by someone that never even stepped foot in the town? I think the developers definately dropped the ball on this one. C minus for attempt but poor follow through in keeping your CUSTOMERS from factioning.......

Anyway just a thought, and perhaps one that would ease the tensions between people that are suppose to be on the SAME side? Anet, I hope you are reading. I love Guild Wars, but I'm not loving this new chapter like I had hoped I would.

Can't say I agree with this first part. You want to tie access to elite PvE missions to your PvP abilities? Isn't that the major complaint of the favor system? I'm willing to bet that most of the people wanting to enter these missions have nothing to do with a top 5 GvG guild.
I do like your last idea. Provide a challenging unlock mission, or something along those lines. Set it up like a FoW area that has to be cleared in order to access the elite missions, but still allow holding alliances to enter without taking the "entry test." That way there is still a significant advantage to holding the city, but the self-proclaimed elite PvE players will have a chance to get in.

Hey! Now THERE is a great idea. NOT.

Not only do I have a problem with the way this has panned out (for all practical purposes this is the same thing as spawn camping in other MMO/MMORPG's), but now the "elite" guild(s) want to charge other equally paying Anet customers to play the game. Get a life.

I hope that Anet can resolve this issue in pretty short order as the "no spawn camping" type issue is one of their selling points. (yes, I am aware that this is not a "spawn point"....but it is the same premise).

My guild is not a super large one but we have some damn good players that I am sure could beat these elite missions. We are organized and know our builds. But there is not going to be anyway to see unless we can beg/borrow/steal our way into the good graces of the controlling guilds.

Come on Anet...you have done a superb job in every area so far. Keep up the good work. Rethink this one.

Wow....I hope my alliance, bomberboys orks, will come back to the house soon... XoO shouldn't have this house -_-

Btw, i went few times with some Esoterics/Evil/RenO players... They are cool

ehhh, i never said that. tombs/uw/fow are pve and are very dificult. anyone that can clear those places out imo is a pro and an elite