Guild versus guild

Basics

As the name says, Guild versus Guild (GvG) matches are fought between two guild parties. Guild matches take place as one of the following:

Rated matches in the official guild ladder.
An unrated "friendly match".
An unrated guild scrimmage between members of the same guild or alliance.
As part of various tournaments hosted by ArenaNet and other groups. Guild Wars Factions Championship (GWFC) and the more recent Celestial Tournament are examples of other form of matches.

Matching

When setting up you can choose to challenge a specific guild in an unrated match or set up an automatic, rated guild match. Unrated matches will not affect either guilds' rating or rank, regardless of the outcome. For automatic matches, Guild Wars will try to match similarly rated guilds against each other, but will eventually match guilds of disparate ratings if necessary. Guild matches can only be started with a party of at least four members from the guild including the guild leader or an officer and three other non-guest members. The team with the higher ranking will be designated the attacker, while the team with the lower ranking will be defending. On the rare occasions that guilds are of equal rank, the team with the higher win/loss ratio is designated as the attacker.

The Playground

GvG battles take place on the Guild Islands. Each guild island features two bases and a flag stand in the center area. The guild with higher guild rating is assigned the part of attacker, thus the lower rated guild (or defending guild) plays in their own hall. On most maps the attacker has a slightly weaker position (for example, fewer NPCs or lower ground).

Depending on the type of Guild Hall there may be additional strategic features like catapults, gate switches and more. Read the Guild Island Description for details.

Objectives

The objective of a GvG match is to kill the opposing team's Guild Lord, an NPC character, who is sitting in the opponent's base and has several other NPCs who guard him. If the Lord is killed, that Lord's team loses. Alternatively, if an entire team has -60% Death Penalty, that team loses.

In GvG battles each guild has a flag that spawns in or near their base. Putting your guild's flag in the flag stand (usually near the island center) and holding it for more than 2 minutes will give your team a 10% morale bonus.

Note: In a GvG match all dead players and the Guild Thief (but no other NPCs) will automatically be resurrected by the Resurrection Shrine in their base every 2 minutes. (Provided their Death Penalty hasn't reached the maximum of -60%. At that point a player can only be resurrected by another party member.)

Team Setup

Both teams in a GvG match consists of five to eight players (In which half of the team must be part of the guild, henchmen don't count as part of the guild), plus several NPCs. These NPCs guard their own team's base:

Furthermore, in maps with locked gates, each team has an NPC Guild Thief who is able to open the locked gate to the opponent base.

Victory or Death

If a GvG match lasts 18 minutes, all the NPCs (except the Guild Thief, if there is one) will begin to abandon the Guild Lord and move to the flagstand where they will remain for the rest of the match. This may turn the tide of the battle as the Guild Lord is very vulnerable without the NPCs that guard him, and the extra NPC firepower near the flag stand also puts more pressure on combatants. Any locked gates will be opened.

Each of these NPCs carries a shout skill named "Victory or Death!". The NPCs will use this skill repeatedly starting at 18:00. This affects everyone on the map.

After 20 minutes the Guild Lord will walk to the center. There are points on the map that a Guild Lord will not go past until the enemy Guild Lord has reached the mirror image of that location on the opposite side of the map.

Rewards

The winning guild members gain faction and guild rating, while the losing guild loses guild rating. The winning guild members gain more faction the higher rated their guild is. The rating changes depend on the relative ranking of the guilds involved. If a guild with a high rating defeats one with a low rating, neither guild's rating will change much. If the lower rated guild wins, however, the change will be much larger. The change for two similarly rated guilds will fall between these extremes. This is because the Guild Wars ladder rating uses an Elo rating system which means that how many kills or deaths you managed and how long you played for are not taken into account, only the overall result is.

Player-run Tournaments

In 2007, players began organizing some of their own tournaments--including prizes. The first of these was the 2008 RAWR Cup, organized by GuildCafe.