My guild has started doing guild missions every day. Guild bounties are still the basis for things, but we have guild treks and guild rushes unlocked too. Yesterday we did a few bounties, wiping on the first bounty thanks to bear vs. 2-MULT, but I felt the main event was the Chicken Run guild rush in Fields of Ruin.
I had an absolute blast with my first ever guild rush. This, this is where I think guild missions should have started. Guild bounties are work. It seems I am cursed to randomly get Prisoner 1141 on almost every guild bounty, and that is a frustrating 15 minutes trying to tag down the speed demon, and communicate it. There is confusion in communication, especially since I did not have a mic ready for Raidcall. Don’t get me wrong. Guild bounties are a good challenge, but guild rushes are more about fun.
There was laughing in Raidcall. People gladly took the part of either chicken or escorts. We could timely invite the whole zone along. When we were nearing the end with only 1-2 chickens left, people were being very patient and considerate in teaching the chicken how to get to the end. Compare this to a stampede of confusion as a number of guild bounties have to be found now, now, now. Take him down, now, now, now.
A guild bounty is a guild challenge. A guild rush is a guild community builder.
Both are open to the server at large. However, the frenetic pace of guild bounties ensures little decent communication to the map. A guild in trouble might start screaming for help, and a good Samaritan would have to spend a few silver to warp to a spot where the boss is about done… to get only credit on completing an event, possibly not even getting the cost of waypointing back.
With a guild rush, a guild has 30 easy minutes to communicate with the map. They can let players know the status of the guild rush. And non-guild players that complete the guild rush get a chest to open at the end (and the event completion?). Heck, there is enough time that a savvy Samaritan could ask to join the guild momentarily, run the guild rush, get all the goodies, and leave the guild. It’s a really nice pace.
As for the Chicken Run guild rush itself, it was a nice change from the usual daily or dungeon running. Players turn in to a chicken with 3 skills: radar, invincibly run-heal, and hide. There are traps all along the rush that only affect chickens. Players have to run forward clucking along the way to see the red circles while avoiding plenty of enemies ready to have some dinner. It wasn’t hard, though quite a few players did lose chicken form (dying) and had to start over. With all the escorts we had, there was plenty of time to take the rush slowly.
I like guild bounties, and the idea of guild treks seems okay too. However, guild rushes seem like the kind of guild mission that will really help a guild. It builds positive community. This is one guild goal worth aiming for.
–Ravious
To date on Yak’s Bend I have seen precisely no Guild Rushes, Bounties or any other Guild event. I have seen exactly no guilds asking for help or information in map chat. I see the various Bounty targets wandering around often but I have yet to see any one either attacking or looking for them.
I’m not interested in doing Guild Events per se but I would be very happy to jump in and help, if I ever saw one happening.
For the most part guilds don’t want help with bounties because the scaling can be killer. If other people show up to join in on my five man team fighting half-baked I politely ask them to leave. Getting outside help escorting during a guild rush can be useful and my guild has had the fortune of running one at the same time as another guild where we were able to help each other out.
Our guild pre-scouts bounties. It’s a big guild, so we do Tier 3, and 15 minutes is too insanely short a time to track down and kill 6 bounty targets without pre-scouting. There’s already too much got-to-find-it-when-bounty-starts targets to chance it.
And we’ve still gotten ridiculous stuff like looking for Sotzz and the Rat Wrangler (where 40-50 people flooded the zones and couldn’t find a single barrel or suspicious rat, which made us think it was bugged) and dealing with Half-Baked Komali within that 15 minutes. Needless to say, that bounty was a wash.
Rush is excellent. Rush is fun. Rush builds camaraderie. And we’ve even stayed to help another guild do theirs when both coincided, whereas in bounties, we’re all sneakily giving each other suspicious looks hoping that the other doesn’t start before we’re ready and force us to pre-scout again.
To Bhagpuss: I would suggest roaming about during Saturday and Sundays at 8-9pm EST, I don’t know how many guilds are on Yak’s Bend, but those are probably popular prime times for people to hold guild events. You wouldn’t get the guild-related rewards, but I figure you’d just like the experience. :)
Somewhat spammy, for which I apologise, but you might find my Bounty Tracker helpful for coordinating guild bounty missions:
http://bounty.caer.me/
Not spam. We appreciate your developing community tools.
As a non-guildie, the one rush I happened to stumble into while grinding through a map was a blast, even though I was focused on POIs, waypoints and the skill point in the area. Didn’t complete the one run through as a spider in that one but still got gold credit for the event and the two rare items, I’m guessing just the transform and the unrelated slaughtering of mobs nearby counted. The guild itself advertised in map chat well before event kickoff and welcomed everyone and seemed to have a blast figuring out the route, and used area /say for communication which was great for non-guildies.
The only bounty events I’ve stumbled into were early in the bounty system, where the relative power and special abilities of the bounties weren’t known, and the couple of excitable players that did the initial tackle needed the passing help. I get the sense the bounty is such a mad dash no one calls out in area or map chat. If they did there’s normally a significant amount of mobile free roaming firepower on map that would gladly join in for the change of pace. Perhaps some better open rewards or even a system that in some bounty (not all) situations rewards the guild for significant non aligned player involvement.
I think the problem with guilds not advertising bounties is scaling. Certain bounties seem to get considerably more challenging the more people pile in. That adds a disincentive for guilds to advertise their presence.
I’ve participated in a guild bounty once to help a friend’s guild on a different server. We were happy to do it to help out, but I agree it would be nice if non-guild participants got *something* out of helping with a bounty. That would also make it easier for our small guild to recruit random help.
Always happy to call out a bounty target to any of the big guilds that care about them. Can’t really imagine that I’ll ever do any of these things, though.
I am not sure if you saw one happening in 3 days that would qualify or if you strictly mean saw one happening in front of you. :) Anyway, I think most of the servers have sprouted community sites since GW2 offers no community forums. A quick Internet search revealed the site http://www.Yaksbend.com. If this is like the one we have for SBI, it would be a good place to find others who are doing these events.