Hi everyone,

We’ll be keeping the Magic Find and Gathering buffs up this weekend (we’ve actually kept them up for most of the Halloween festival for people to enjoy), and will be adding the 15% Karma Boost buff on Sat afternoon for 24h, and will try again (if we can) on Tues for 24h (since it’s a public holiday).

Daily/Monthly achievements now give “Jugs of Liquid Karma”, which are account bound (so you can transfer them between characters) and when drunk give you 4,500 karma. These are affected by Karma buffs – both store-bought and the guild buffs – so we’ll try to have a karma buff active each weekend from now on for people to use to get the most of their Jugs.

You can check the currently-active buffs in the Guild interface in-game by going to the Upgrades section of the third tab (the one that looks like an upwards-pointing arrow).

Since we’ve got the basics of the guild all up and built now (we have all Economy boosts unlocked, Guild Armorer and Guild Weaponsmith, and the first-level Guild bank), and the remaining major upgrades will cost a screaming fortune (we’re probably better to save up gold over time to buy influence with if we want them – the costs are 2 gold per 1000 influence though, so it’ll be expensive), I’m going to re-open the ability to queue/activate upgrades to all guild officers again this weekend.

Basic rules I’ve been using so that we can afford to keep buffs up when people are logged in to benefit from them:

• If you activate a buff, please immediately queue it’s replacement to be built.
• Only activate “increased influence” buffs when there are 3 or more people logged in (e.g. if we’ve got 3 people in WvW, throw up the PvP one). This is because the buff costs influence to build, so we’d want to actually get enough benefit from it to cover the build cost, and it’s ONLY increasing the Guild’s influence points rather than character stuff ;).
• Magic find/Gathering chance boost – if there’s more than one person logged in AND we can afford to rebuild them, feel free to activate them. These are the primary benefits we can offer, and we seem to be earning just enough influence on average to be able to keep them up for about 6 days out of 7. Magic find increases the chance that a drop will be higher quality (more greens, less whites = more money for you), and Gathering increases the chance for extra items from gathering nodes (i.e. more gems from ores, etc).
• XP is 5% extra on kills (not event or heart or dungeon xp)…I’m not sure whether it’s really very useful at all. If people to want it, just make sure we can afford it without having to drop the Magic find or Gathering boosts for too long ;).
• Banners: These are…in general…not very useful, as they
  • Take 4 hours to build
  • Last in the world for only 1 hour
  • Must be touched to receive the buff (so players have to get to the map where they are located to be able to use them)
  • Give a buff that only lasts 30 minutes (which is usually too short for a full dungeon, etc)

  However, the Karma banner would be useful for a “Jug of liquid Karma” drinking party – if you’ve got a few people all together, by all means activate this one so you can all share the buff while you drink your collected Jugs. Just schedule it for renewal afterwards!

• The Asuran Outsourcing upgrade is a one-use item that lets us build a 3rd upgrade at the same time – please don’t activate this one without discussing it first. While it saves time immediately, it takes a day and a half to build, which then clogs the build queues later. It’s good to use to keep things running over a weekend if needed, but otherwise… 😉

Basically, i