Hex65000

Thanks Matsif for making me feel thankful that I did not choose to join a McGuild.

I've gone through at least two guild implosions and may have bailed out early on a third one. The guild I was 100% repping effectively died. The leader went on to greener pastures and the co-leader discovered DOTA2. A handful of officers, myself included, were regularly on, we would occasionally recruit after a PUG run of Citadel of Flame, but nothing aggressive.

Then Guild Missions landed and that was pretty much it for that guild. Most folks left for the larger guilds. I call them McGuilds because it seems like they are giant and you -- the individual -- are irrelevant other than as an influence source. That and I'm a big fan of supporting the smaller guy. So I pulled the trigger and started looking for a new place.

The result: I landed in three places. Each group had a strength the others didn't have. I chose to pick a character and effectively park that character with that guild. I even tried to divvy up my time on each 'toon to give each guild some rep time over the course of each week. This worked out okay. I asked members to give me a shout if I was not repping and they wanted me to participate with stuff. This worked reasonably well provided I wasn't preoccupied, and able to make the time commitment.

- Then there were two.

I left one of the guilds. I didn't feel a connection to the group and even though the leader seemed pretty cool, I didn't feel that I contributed all that much and instead of just not repping I left and hope to catch the leader on at some point. I haven't seen him on for at least a week or two when I check.

Now I'm running in two different guilds. When I want some quiet time I play in my own one-man guild. Or as I like to call it "eventually even more storage space that I bloody need for all the crap you wind up having to collect in this game."

The good news is that I am apparently pulling my weight with both groups. In both guilds the leadership likes that I'm there and contributing. This pleases me. While I'm not an efficient or even all that good a player, I don't want to be regarded as that dude who just is there and nobody knows why.

There's more to the story sure, but I'm glad that I didn't pick any of the larger guilds on the server if only because everyone in both guilds know who I am and I know them too. The social bit that I missed from my old guild is the thing I really missed mostly. Things like one of the other officers told stories of the lore from GW1 in twitter format. He joined a McGuild and kinda dropped out soon after. Correlation? I dunno.

Hex.
[ Gives a shout out to all the former Brah members. May shiny things be found in your loot bags. ]

I've seen this issue occasionally. The workaround I use is just tell the person I want to invite to do a " /join "with my character name. of course, if you were one of those folks who put a ton of odd characters or spaces in your character name, it's not gonna work out so good.

I'm sure it's some odd flag not getting set or reset somewhere and ANet hasn't quite tracked it down.

Hex.
[ If you have spaces and 'x' around your name, you ar gonna have a bad time... ]

Have attention deficit disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

I'm half serious about that, because I have a good time generally because my attention span is almost zero. Guildies sometimes can catch me harvesting stuff in the middle of a bounty. I'll try to explore during a fractal when nobody is paying attention. I'm exaggerating a touch here, but I do get distracted easily.

Couple that with my desire to 'put things back in place' and be a good teammate (when I'm paying attention) and assuming I am running in a group. For the most part I solo.

I view crafting as a means to an end. It's a resource sink; no one will dispute that. However, I managed to gather a majority of the materials to get to 400 by initially just playing the game and accumulating materials on my main (guardian). I then slowly worked up three other characters to max crafting skills in the process. I looked at it as my field operative was feeding supplies to manufacturers standing around in Lion's Arch. I still will stop and harvest pretty much anything I come across. I also have been trying to collect all the karma recipes with a range of success. Some are a downright bargain if you know what you need.

Dynamic events -- while occasionally wonky let me do the one thing that GW2 and Diablo have in common: Kill things. Get stuff. Let's face it, this game has a lot of stuff to collect. Now that I've got most of my characters to 80, I'm taking a policy of dumping half of my excess materials to keep cashflow up and yet I still have at least 125units on hand if the need arises. This approach works well for me on materials below tier 5. It also appeals to my sense of OCD in that things should be in order and since nobody is willing to do it, I will. I make so much karma this way it is gross.

Dungeon running is fun if you have a good group. I do tend to stress a bit more in them, because while there are folks here who go, 'oh lol, it's all ez-mode'; I'm not one of these min-maxers and I want to be a decent teammate. If it goes well, there are cheers to go around. If it's just so bad that my repair bill is going to be sky high and it's not arah, I will pop out in the most extreme of cases or just block the offending players in hopes of never grouping with them again. Fortunately, most groups I've been with have been pretty good; I can count on one hand the number of memorable truly awful parties I've been in. I'd say read Minion's guide to dungeon running and do that. If you have uber gear and are a jerk, it doesn't make you any less of a jerk. And really, watch the cutscenes once. It won't kill you either to let others watch it once too. Simply use your head and state that you want to watch them before you start. Yeah, speedrunners won't like you, but they need to get over themselves and you should prolly look for another group at that point. Do story mode with a pug once in a while. It's not 'efficient', but it does put more potential players into the dungeon explore pug pool. For better or worse.

Explore. I love to poke around the map. Sometimes guildies will pull me to areas I haven't visited in a while, it's cool because since everything is pretty and there is always something to kill (and get stuff). Roaming the pve maps is a borderline pasttime. I suggest to anyone trying to rush to a major goal is that you may as well enjoy the trip, otherwise you will simply become bored faster. Jump puzzles are also part of that exploration. I have gotten to the point where I farm selected puzzles daily. If only because it's easy money if you know what to do.

pvp. I'm not big on pvp. The thing is, I don't like most of the folks on the Internet. Why would I want to engage the Internet in a competitive manner where you can be even more annoying? Not to mention in wvw, the repair bills. I'll occasionally go to wvw-land and try to pitch in, but sometimes it has about as much appeal as crashing hot-wheels cars together. Couple that with various blue doritos trying to herd cats (aka: milita) to do anything meaningful and sometimes important bits they should react to are just lost in all the noise -- wvw can be a fun, rewarding, exciting, and in some cases a total cluster bomb. (where bomb is another word)

Taking the long view. There are of course those BIG projects. Making a legendary, infusing things, getting map completion. These are what I view as long term goals. What I suspect is the classic MMO attitude of "gottagetthis doneinthe mostefficientway possibleotherwise u are lame" causes a lot of facepalming from me. For example, I'm very slowly working my way towards a legendary. I asked myself, what do I need and then pick at it from different angles over time. In some cases, I'm intentionally collecting for multiple legendaries. For example, unidentified dyes and silver doubloons. What about the precursor and the scavenger hunt? Yeah, I'm not worried about that. I figure by the time I collect enough stuff either I'll have a ton of money, or one will drop in my lap. I do mystic toilet torches on occasion, but I don't buy anything other than harvesting tools. Sure I could play the trading post, which does not strike me as exciting or even fun. (Read: kill things. get stuff) I could spend real money for gold which I view as totally insane. Seriously. Who are these people that actually do this?

Change it up. This is really the key bit. All that stuff I went on about creating a wall of text; do this with those things. If I'm not feeling like farming on my guardian, I can explore with my elementalist. Actually want to help defend in wvw? Grenade spamming engineer is go! Not sure what to do? Chill in Lion's arch and see if anything appealing happens in map chat. Run the jump puzzles while I wait if possible for easy loot. Not feeling serious at all. Grab / roll an alt and start a personal story.

That's how I keep the game interesting to play.

Hex.
[ Makes the pain almost euphoric... ]

Pretty much Foraging Sickles, breathing masks, food, recipes, and eventually some random gear for looks. I'm considering the 'dark shoulders' for my Guardian.

I still stockpile the drops and jugs. There is no need to use them. I generate enough karma just running around on the field. The Orrian boxes border on being a waste of resources to me, and I already have a stack and a half of Obsidian Shards... <shrug>

Hex.
[ Dear Zommoros, Nobody likes you. :P ]

Agreed that alliances or some mechanic that allows smaller guilds to tie together in a clean way needs to occur. The guild mission content flattened the guild I was running with because we all realized there were'nt enough of us to do the new stuff and recruiting for a smaller guild experiencing decline is pretty tough.

So everyone either decided to play something else or moved on to another group. Some folks joined the larger 'McGuilds'. I'm not excited by the larger guilds and as a function of that I wound up joining three different groups, each one fills a specific want. One has just enough manpower and influence to do at least the first tier of guild missions so I am not feeling locked out of that. Another is super social and are fun to run with. The third focuses on dungeon runs and when I've gone with them it's been really smooth and overall quite enjoyable.

The result is I hop from character to character to see what's going on -- if anything. It felt rude to have my characters hop from rep to rep so I keep a specific character tuned to each guild.

Of course the flipside of this is that I'm not exactly forming strong bonds with the other members because hey, I'm just hopping around.

It would be nice to be able to at least tune into multiple guild channels -- either that or perhaps Anet sat there and said, "Oh hey, multiple guilds are a mess. how do we encourage people to just pick one?" On that day, guild missions with huge influence requirements were born. (Yes, that is pure speculation.)

Hex.
[ Just can't fix any of it... ]