Remember the guildhests?

Beyond having obviously been designed back in early ARR as tutorials of sorts and a lot of the earliest ones are just in and out, I do feel they're a glimpse of what the game could have been about: adventure, RPG little missions with a lot of flavor, and very different things to do to complete them (and not just dunk on a boss in a circle arena for hours).

And, well, I guess that's not the game we've been getting and that's that, but it still did occur to me that if the MSQ was actually structured around those types of designs as solo duties (and not, once more, "go fight a boss in the middle of a circular arena and do DDR"), it could bring a lot of freshness to the game. It could also steer the MSQ from getting bogged down too much into traveling between NPCs and talk to them back and forth ad nauseam. Sure, we've had some duties like In From the Cold or some of the Thancred infiltration missions, but they've been far and few. People will obviously say that it may actually wall some players and I do agree, and that's why "very easy" mode should be able to be done close to doing them in god mode (it hurts nobody).

Heck, imagine you could do those in groups with friends? There is so many new players that start playing XIV with their friends and progress together and yet nothing beyond dungeons allows them to do that. This could also alleviate the problem of people being walled by such duties if they can be helped by friends to do them.

In any case, I strongly urge people to take a look back at guildhests and some of the encounter designs they had. You'd be surprised of the flavor they can have.

Guildhests could still be revived by doing two things:

1): Make the roulette rewards worthwhile
2): Introduce new guildhests that teaches players new mechanics (This could be a grounds for the devs to test out new mechanics and how the playerbase perceives them, without it being involved in high-end content)

I have thought they could make guildhests really cool and challenging, with each one being unique. My main ideas are replicating all the trailer fights. The morbol guildhest is essentially the fight from the 1.0 trailer, but compared to that trailer, it's pretty underwhelming. Now if they removed the morbol's aggro list and upped the damage it would get chaotic with the Morbol moving around a lot and casting Bad Breaths from random locations in random directions.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Beyond having obviously been designed back in early ARR as tutorials of sorts and a lot of the earliest ones are just in and out, I do feel they're a glimpse of what the game could have been about: adventure, RPG little missions with a lot of flavor, and very different things to do to complete them (and not just dunk on a boss in a circle arena for hours).

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I definitely agree with your stance on them. And if you look at other dungeons in the base ARR, it all somewhat came together. The guildhests taught you to pay attention to a couple of things during encounters, and help you prepare yourself for what is to come. They also had some interesting mechanics going on in some of them, and looking back, i recon that if they had better rewards, they would have been more popular.
As it stands, they still show parts of the game that I fell in love with all those years ago.

They purposely killed this off in Heavensward when instead of picking them up and dropping them off near the location you perform them at, they instead had you pick them up and drop them off alllllll the way in Ishgard. Making a <5 min turnover rate into something moronically longer.

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Originally Posted by Ryvick

They purposely killed this off in Heavensward when instead of picking them up and dropping them off near the location you perform them at, they instead had you pick them up and drop them off alllllll the way in Ishgard. Making a <5 min turnover rate into something moronically longer.

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We are talking about guildhests. Not guildleves.

They need to go back and rebalance guildhests.

The enemies die so quickly the whole thing usually takes about 20 seconds to complete.

Pepperidge farm remembers.

I don't know if guildhests are necessarily needed to be fixed if used for their current purpose, which is to be tutorials about mechanics. Those can nowadays very easily be reworked to use duty support for a single player to learn.
It would be neat if they were repurposed as mini-dungeons of sorts, maybe give junior content developers as Square a way to make lots of just small adventures for parties of four players to go on :D

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

Guildhests could still be revived by doing two things:

1): Make the roulette rewards worthwhile
2): Introduce new guildhests that teaches players new mechanics (This could be a grounds for the devs to test out new mechanics and how the playerbase perceives them, without it being involved in high-end content)

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I agree with the idea, I'm just filled with dread thinking the only thing the devs currently seem to understand is remaking old content that "stands out" into the same DDR slop.
Imagine the damage they could do if someday they suddenly decide that it must get the same treatment they gave to some of the old dungeons...

They should add new guildhests! They are fun to jump in and just do a very short encounter.

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Originally Posted by Wasselin

They should add new guildhests! They are fun to jump in and just do a very short encounter.

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I don't mind them myself. I think it's kinda funny watching how people respond to them if I get any babys first MMO players. Guildhests would certainly be a better means of teaching -- and enforcing -- players learn and understand combat mechanics better than the Hall of the Novice, IMO.

HOneslty they could make guild heists be required for people brand new to the MMO along with the hall of novice. This way they can do hall to learn new things and guildheists to practice said mechanics with other players

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Originally Posted by Mercury_Grey

HOneslty they could make guild heists be required for people brand new to the MMO along with the hall of novice. This way they can do hall to learn new things and guildheists to practice said mechanics with other players

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The problem and I suspect that's why they've given up on them and left them like that: they do not teach anything relevant to current pve, or barely, while Hall of the Novice does.

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Originally Posted by Underscore

They need to go back and rebalance guildhests.

The enemies die so quickly the whole thing usually takes about 20 seconds to complete.

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Unless you get stuck in the worst guildheist which is the one where you have to kill enemies at the same time (those void flying creatures). That is the one that can last for minutes if players never understand what to do and trust me, it happened that one guy ragequit and left it because he said that "we are idiots" and left. That's the only one where I regularly see players raging.

Guildheist now serve as a speedrun mechanic to become mentor. People spam this so they can gather 1500 recommendations in one day and become a mentor.

I think Yoshi's team would have long removed guildhests at this point, its a outdated system from a time long ago. The only reason its still present is because trying to remove something from the code could break something in the game by accident.

I wouldn't be surprised if they want to remove the way Grand Companies operated too since that is also abandoned.

As a new player I love Guildhests!

I usually que up for the duty finder roulette, find a nice scenic spot in-game and read irl. It's perfect for me :)

I do hope others get what they want out of it through an update one day though.