Guild Wars 2

Hardcore WvW guilds and alliances that are the least bit serious will be using external means of communication (Vent, TS, Mumble, etc) for coordination in battle. My question is regarding how people who really on only in-game communication are able to effectively coordinate with the rest of their server in WvW?

- Commanders are limited in squad size. (50 I believe)

- /map and /team seem to have squelching issues that prohibit commanders and others from sharing updates with everyone else.

- There is no custom chat channel functionality that would allow people to “tune in” to be alerted about server wide events requiring communication.

Any competitive team based PvP system is going to heavily favor the very organized hardcore folks and there’s is really no way around that. However, I think the current limitations on in-game chat communication further penalize the less hardcore folks by prohibiting the effective spreading of information and coordination.

Am I missing something obvious here? While I only have about 600 WvW kills and less than 200 BoHes, but I’ve definitely spent many many hours out in WvW and yet I’ve never heard any mention of alliances or coordination via /map or /team. It was only when I came to the forums that I realized BG had some external coordination going on. In general, only a tiny percentage of players ever read MMO forums.

Anyone have any insight on this?

-Lensar

I can’t speak for Blackgate, but my experience with team chat is that it DOES work just fine… when people actually read it. Spam suppression gets in the way sometimes, but that’s only when a Commander doesn’t have anyone else helping him to communicate. Or when you have to spam local chat for a sudden portal bomb.

Some worlds have organized giant mumble servers that everyone is welcome to use. This comes with it’s own downsides, but it seems to work well for them. When you create something like this it’s important to get the word out in team/map chat on a regular basis, otherwise nobody will use it.

If people are spamming team chat with nonsense, everyone should be telling them to shut up (or just block them). Map chat can be handy for random information, but you have to keep in mind that many people simply turn map chat off in PvE (to get away from the spam), and then forget to turn it back on in WvW.

As a commander, I don’t use squad chat hardly at all. My guild is already in ventrilo with me, and I have to drop my icon on a regular basis (which disbands the squad), so getting people to re-join is a royal pain. On top of that, joining a squad makes the other squad icons on the map disappear.. which is generally not a good thing if your commanders are working in tandem.

As things stand, I get no use from commander status aside from the icon. It really needs to be re-worked so that you can turn the icon off without disbanding your squad.

I saw one ‘join this server-wide TS3 channel’ in chat.

So d/l’ed TS3 and when I joined the channel the only person there left immediately.

No help to you there, but I’m curious too.. is it only guilds use TS/mumble?

ON Sefarer’s Rest we have community Team Speak going on.
http://www.pevepe.net/gw2forum/m/6083582/viewthread/4758259-team-speak-3-read-me-access

p.s. Most of WvW focused players and guilds are using it now.