Guild Wars 2

As it is one of the monthlies to kill WVW invaders this month, I thought I would give it a try. I found a commander on the map and sure enough there were about 30 people following him, so I figured I had a good chance. For 20 minutes we wandered around, sometimes just stood around waiting for more people to show up. Sometimes we slaughtered some NPCs for whatever reason. Just as I was nodding off from boredom, a large enemy force showed up. Finally, I thought, some action? But no, not really, we immediately ran away. Only the people caught off guard were slaughtered (such as myself, foolishly thinking a battle was in order).

I caught up to our force which was defending a castle. About 100 invaders came and again our guys just ran away, but I stood my ground. My framerate on my high-end PC reduced to about 5 fps and I noticed about a 2 second delay between what I was doing and what my character was doing. I Was killed in what seemed like slow motion.

I am a former WoW player, I held a gladiator title and also had the “Battlemaster” achievement, so I have done my share of pvp. In 1 hour of playing WvW I did not get a single kill for my monthly, nor did I experience a moment of enjoyment. In fact I have been gaming since 1980s, and this “World Versus World” is the worst PVP game I’ve ever played. From Atari’s Warlords in 1980, to Street Fighter, to Doom to WoW I’ve never experienced PVP that was so boring, so unbalanced. A game where you would not even see an enemy for 20 minutes. A game where skill doesn’t even have the slightest influence on the outcome. A game won by whatever side decides to show up, and has more tolerence for extremely boring grinds.

I could pay some real money and join the server that was on the winning end of this. I can’t imagine it being fun, outnumbering a team 3 to 1 that just runs away anyway, but at least I would get my monthly done. If a large fight did occur it would be so laggy and sluggish I could not see it being enjoyable on any level.

Its really not m8. It is epic fun if you are on the stomping end of things.

WvW is not supposed to be PvP, it’s supposed to be an experience.

My suggestion would be get in a guild group, or ask a commander on the field if u can get in voip. This way you would have a lot better understanding whats going on, and why they are pulling off so often.

I’m really sorry so many first time WvW’ers get this as their first introduction to such a fun part of GW2. Please don’t let this deter u from WvW. Like I said get in a guild that runs ops, and get in voip…it’ll change everything for u.

Welcome to WvW, if you expect to fight people, you’ll be disappointed.

you must be doing something wrong then or be on a abondend server(in wvw) as if i can go 5 min without seeing a enemy and 10 min without fighting a enemy(player) then there is something wrong and i cant understand why he where not defending the thing but hey thats not my call

Only one advice for you: don’t stick to the zerg. How to have fun in WvW? Go with a group of friends. It doesn’t matter if you suck, you’ll learn how to handle things. The first weeks of the game I didn’t have a clue what I was doing in WvW, so I didn’t play it much. Then some guys in guild asked for a group, I thought, hell yeah I’m in!
And we started roaming the broad world, sometimes defending camps, defending towers against larger forces. Sometimes we just sneaked in and tried to do as much damage as possible before being killed. The fun aspect of WvW is called covert operations.

MrForz.1953:

Welcome to WvW, if you expect to fight people, you’ll be disappointed.

Ahem Welcome to WvW in Eternal Battlegrounds. If you would like to feel like you contribute please go to a Borderland. You also get a lot of stomps for defending/assaulting in Borderlands.

Esplen.3940:

Ahem Welcome to WvW in Eternal Battlegrounds. If you would like to feel like you contribute please go to a Borderland. You also get a lot of stomps for defending/assaulting in Borderlands.

It’s funny, it actually was about the Borderlands.

What server are you from? It sounds like you followed a really terrible commander tbh. Most(on my server for sure and most I suspect) would rather risk getting wiped and dig in for a good fight than just run away. :/ what you experienced is not the norm at all.

Posts of that kind made me chuckle every time.

I am not sure about the op being troll or not ,but i can asure you that i started playing wvw as soon as my 1st character was lvl 80 and only equiped with greens/yellows back in the day i used to play solo for months and still get plenty of kills in like tier 6 or so only by siting near a dolyak so you must be doing something wrong.

As for the people that say you don’t fight fights in wvw well i played from t6(maybe 7) to tier 1 and i can tell you that was never a problem.In the 3 hours i played last reset got over 600 kills last night and i must say from personal experience that in lower tiers you can get kills a lot faster and people tend to “tactical retreat” a lot less .

PS.This is neither street fighter nor wow so your expectations might be a little off in this case

I had the same problem, zerging puts me to sleep, I don’t understand how people can do it. I usually run solo/with small groups. See now you’ll start running around in smaller groups, trying to get some small scale fights going whilst avoiding the massive zergs. Doing this is actually very fun… HA. It would be fun if you ever encounter other people that aren’t Mesmers or Thieves. Bunker up or roll a GC mes/thief, until they get a much needed nerf it’s the only way to go. I’m at my wits end with the hive minds that play WvW, but you can’t really blame them. When a class is simply so overpowered that you’re pretty much guaranteed victory, why not use it? Mesmers deal more damage than any other profession, and they do it from range. Thieves aren’t as bad, after they do their little burst and you’re still standing, you might sink a few hits in but they will inevitably stealth and run away if you can’t beat them down in 4 seconds. If a warrior hasn’t killed you after their very predictable burst, they’re in a whole world of trouble. With a thief? They can just run away after it fails, as well as their burst doing a lot more damage, hitting a lot quicker, and doesn’t take up all utility slots to pull it off.

Tl;dr until Mes/Thief get some balancing done, be it they get nerfed or we get some buffs to stay on par, WvW will be dull and boring regardless of how you play.

I always add the WvW tasks as part my Dailies completion, because it is so easy to complete them. I am amazed that you spent hours in WvW without getting a single kill. That’s very strange. I am curious as to which server you are playing on.

This is a pretty accurate summation of what I experience in WvW as well. No one is interested in fair 1v1 fighting. It’s all about some other unfathomable goals that don’t really get you anywhere.

I suggest you go solo and stop relying on other people to have fun. Get a good 1v1 build and go around capping supply camps. You may find an enemy or two come to defend it and you can have a good fight. It also gives you WvW ranks and progresses your character.

That’s the way to play WvW. Forget about commanders etc and just pretend you’re alone on the map capturing supply camps and flags.

Pointless go www without own guild.

bhagwad.4281:

This is a pretty accurate summation of what I experience in WvW as well. No one is interested in fair 1v1 fighting. It’s all about some other unfathomable goals that don’t really get you anywhere.

1v1s don’t win WvW. It’s those goals you don’t understand, the ones called taking and holding structures, that win WvW.

To the original poster: Some commanders suck kitten The only requirement to become a commander is to have 100 gold. There’s no quality assurance in there anywhere. Try finding your server’s community website and voice comm, trust me, it’ll improve you’re WvW experience tremendously. Trying to guess what’s going on when you don’t understand WvW tactics or goals is a slow painful process, much better to listen to the other players on mumble/ts :P Killing other players in WvW doesn’t give your server points toward winning, capturing and holding points does, so while killing people can be fun that’s only a small part of it and not the end goal.

You also have to understand, pretty much every server has times of the day when they don’t have coverage and they’re going to be outnumbered. Perhaps you were trying to play during your server’s lacking hours. Who knows.

You might say what server you’re from and chances are there’s people on this forum from your server who can help you understand the game play and have a better experience.

To the OP, I guess the best I can tell you is that your experience is extremely uncommon.

I do the kill 10 invaders daily regularly. I tend to just do as you did and pop in, find the zerg, and run with them. Doesn’t take long before a brawl happens.

If the problem is your server running away, that’s a player problem on the server, not a WvW problem.

You conclude all that out of 1 hour of play on some scrub server?

applauds

You say you don’t know WvW, so don’t talk about it than. Because you are wrong on every point. It is THE best fun I have had in any mmorpg. Skill does matter, look at 20 player groups killing 3-4x their numbers.

Two questions for you, TC.

1. Which server are you on?
2. Were you on your server’s borderlands?

And depending on which server you’re on will explain everything. Certain WvW ‘tiers’ are smaller than others, and see barely any action, whereas others see action so often that your mind will explode. And the main reason for WvW is basically a giant battle over keeps, towers, supply, etc for points. Highest amount of points wins. When the counter at the top of the screen hits 0, points for who holds what are added. Even if it seems like you’re doing nothing, if you grab a supply camp, keep, or tower and flip it to your side right before the countdown hits 0, you’ve helped your server gain points. This is more about the server as a whole working together in PvP rather than anything else, and it’s ongoing ALL THE TIME.

If you were on when the matches ‘reset’ last night (5PM PST and server time), you would have seen enemies everywhere, a massive frenzy of battles, fights, and tactical performance the likes of which are mindboggling.

You had a bad run. Look back at your post, most of the problem was the imbalance in sides and poor allies. Both of these are within your ability to addess.

To break this into terms you might relate to: Essentially what happened was you took a PUG group into a strategic and objective based scenario or took a team of noobs into an arena.

I don’t know why your server was that low pop vs their pop. Check into it and figure out where your forces are and when they are one. Work together with the bulk of them until you learn it. once you are familiar with your own forces and working together with them your experience will improve drastically. Running with WvW guilds and being on your server’s VOIP will also help.

Remember, you didn’t hit the ground raiding or PVPing in WOW, you had to learn a few things first. Or you learned those things in a previous MMO. The same is true of WvW, it is a different experience you have to learn and until you learn to work with it you’ll get the brick to the head sometimes. I took my lumps back in the day learning on Dark Age of Camelot. Now I feel like a major factor in my guild who brings alot to the table thanks to my experience.

If you are on the lowest tier or two, I dunno what to say. That’s just bad luck of the draw there and to blame WvW design on extreme examples wouldn’t be very accurate.

Lastly, GL my friend. I hope you try WvW again and do it on your own terms instead of randomly so you have a better experience.

A few suggestions:
Don’t just randomly follow a commander. Some commanders are more offensive, others defensive, some specialize in attacking towers, or open field fighting, defending camps, ect… some also just troll.

While you are in WvW, try to ask for a server VOIP program’s information. (Provided you’re on a server which has a server wide VOIP for WvW.)

Find a few friends or ask if some people would like to start up a havoc squad. (You will generally run into enemy havoc squads while running your havoc squads.)

Give WvW more then 1hour of your time. Yes sometimes it will be boring, sometimes you might have to scout or escort yaks, however there are also times of epic fights, and attacking/defending.

Try finding a WvW oriented guild to join if you like them.

Should just do WvW on a different server.
With better Commanders.

Like NSP.
Small group fighting with epic zerg battles too.

WoW troll … or a bad bad bad … BAD player >< lol

Xandror.2356:

My framerate on my high-end PC reduced to about 5 fps and I noticed about a 2 second delay between what I was doing and what my character was doing.

I have seen others post their “High end” pc specs and it was anything but high end and I wouldn’t even label them as average. What’s your full pc specs?

Xandror.2356:

As it is one of the monthlies to kill WVW invaders this month, I thought I would give it a try. I found a commander on the map and sure enough there were about 30 people following him, so I figured I had a good chance. For 20 minutes we wandered around, sometimes just stood around waiting for more people to show up. Sometimes we slaughtered some NPCs for whatever reason. Just as I was nodding off from boredom, a large enemy force showed up. Finally, I thought, some action? But no, not really, we immediately ran away. Only the people caught off guard were slaughtered (such as myself, foolishly thinking a battle was in order).

I caught up to our force which was defending a castle. About 100 invaders came and again our guys just ran away, but I stood my ground. My framerate on my high-end PC reduced to about 5 fps and I noticed about a 2 second delay between what I was doing and what my character was doing. I Was killed in what seemed like slow motion.

I am a former WoW player, I held a gladiator title and also had the “Battlemaster” achievement, so I have done my share of pvp. In 1 hour of playing WvW I did not get a single kill for my monthly, nor did I experience a moment of enjoyment. In fact I have been gaming since 1980s, and this “World Versus World” is the worst PVP game I’ve ever played. From Atari’s Warlords in 1980, to Street Fighter, to Doom to WoW I’ve never experienced PVP that was so boring, so unbalanced. A game where you would not even see an enemy for 20 minutes. A game where skill doesn’t even have the slightest influence on the outcome. A game won by whatever side decides to show up, and has more tolerence for extremely boring grinds.

I could pay some real money and join the server that was on the winning end of this. I can’t imagine it being fun, outnumbering a team 3 to 1 that just runs away anyway, but at least I would get my monthly done. If a large fight did occur it would be so laggy and sluggish I could not see it being enjoyable on any level.

You do realize WvW tends to have a lot of strategy behind it right? People are often communicating via TS, or Mumble or whatever. There are engagements you should sometimes avoid, and engagements you should go for. Especially in times where both servers are hammering on you. You cant fight everyone and succeed. You have to pick fights sometimes. WvW isn’t mindless.

I’ve only recently experienced wvw with teamspeak and it makes so much difference. It is FAR from being mindless indeed if you understand why your commander decided to do something (such as retreating). That said, I do agree that the massive toll zerging takes on my PC is killing the fun out of wvw and I often rage quit after my client crashes a couple of times during zerg engagements.

scootshoot.6583:

Xandror.2356:

My framerate on my high-end PC reduced to about 5 fps and I noticed about a 2 second delay between what I was doing and what my character was doing.

I have seen others post their “High end” pc specs and it was anything but high end and I wouldn’t even label them as average. What’s your full pc specs?

Exactly what went through my mind when I read this.

I run a 3570k @ 4.2, 7850 @ 1000, etc. I wouldn’t even consider this high-end and I never hit 5fps. Even in the largest zergs, I never drop below 15-20 fps.

OP, please post your specs.

Lol, you found a Commander that specializes in PvNPC and PvDoor apparently.

KStudios.2850:

Lol, you found a Commander that specializes in PvNPC and PvDoor apparently.

Yeah, guy hooks up with a karma train and is shocked to discover that they run away from fights. I think it’s funny that he goes through his previous PvP history which has absolutely nothing to do with him being a GW2 WvW noobie.

As a commander, you kinda have to work with what you got sometimes. Its a vastly different experience running with your guild in TS and running with random people, that may or may not be able to understand English. If I command a zerg consisting of 50 upscaled zerker rangers with longbows and see 20 DeX or VotF in a distance, I know for a fact that we stand absolutely no chance of winning, unless there’s a wall between us and them.
Also, as others have stated. Some commanders just suck.

I’m wondering if OP was playing wvw at the higher graphics settings, too. Turning them to low helped me a lot with my battle lag problems.

Op, there are basically two ways to play wvwvw.

Firstly, join the zerg, rely on your zergs ability to ball up, focus attacks on a small area, mitigate aoe by being grouped close and moving like that, and to react quickly to changes to cut apart enemy zergs and flip objectives quickly.

Or

Get a small group of skilled players together and go for surgical strikes, cap towers and camps, hit unorganised groups and move quickly to avoid being zerged to death.

The first when done well can net you hundreds of kills, and rack up points very quickly, but can also be boring as hell if the commander is bad (like yours sounded) or if your zerg is bad. The worst thing a zerg can do is fail to commit. Dont split up, dont break apart, keep together and push through the enemy, if not you will be wiped out piecemeal. Sure you may die anyway, but at least you all die together, ao the zerg reforms quickly at a waypoint and is not spread out halfway across a map!

The second can be more fun, and more like small scale pvp in other games, but will usually net you less rewards.

Sounds like you got a bad commander and/or bad timing. I’m on the last place server and I got my monthly kills in about 1.5-2 hours of weeknight primetime.

Regarding the FPS, I ran Best Appearance from headstart until the anti-culling patch. With the exception of the Lost Shores debacle, I never notice a drop in frame rate. After the anti-culling patch, my FPS drops to an unacceptable level in zerg-v-zerg battles. I just change to Best Performance and manually raise WvW Character Limit & Quality to High. That works OK for me.

Yesterday someone told me to try this Legend of Grimrock game, telling me it was quite well done. So I started the thing and the first sound I heard in the loading screen was terrible. I uninstalled it quickly and sent the devopers hate mails, as that clearly is the worst dungeon crawling game ever made.

It’s kinda dumb that you jump into the team aspect of the game expecting a single player experience. Get on a team, find out what’s going on and what you need to do, and kills will follow. Otherwise stay out, because players like you screw with our teams. This game is called Guild Wars… you may wanna try being in a guild and being part of that team. It’s a lot of fun.

Sounds like to me it was RESET yesterday :-) We’re busy building and upgrading. Which to some of us is actually fun too.

WvW is not sPvP.

WvW is not just about killing other players.

WvW is not WoW.

I suggest that you find out if that group was on a voip and if you can join it, if not then either roam around on your own, or find another group. There are a couple of things you can do solo in WvW.

Lol @ op , time for you to hang up the keyboard and mouse.

WvW is lots of fun. You dont even have to be on the winning side to enjoy it. I play for Isle of Janthir so I know. We dont have a lot of people, but we work together. It’s all about working together. That includes small and big groups. One person can make a difference if they know what to do. Killing other players is fun but you contribute the most to your team if you help take areas and defend them. Somtimes running is your best option. It can take you a long time to get back to an area if you die. I dont understand though why a big group would retreat. If you have skilled players you can defeat a group twice your size. One reason I can thing of for a large group to retreat is that they have to defend a tower or keep from the invading forces and they are going to re group behind the walls and defend from that point.

WvW is all about tactics. If you dont know what is going on use the map chat and find out. For instance today I was asked to watch one of our towers due to a large force advancing, I know it sounds boring considering we havent seen any invader activity in the area for a good 20 min. The invaders ended up attacking one of our keeps. I would have been fun to join in on the fight. Our group headed out to defend it. The invaders at the keep ended up breaking and disappeared. All of a sudden they where at our doors trying to ram down our gate. There where just two of us holding the tower. We unleashed our arrows on the battering rams and invaders at the gate. We where able to hold them off till our main force came to the rescue. If no one would have been at the tower we would have lost it.

Just my two cents worth.

I’m sick of facepalming to these posts. People have been WvWing for over 7 months now, and some newbie to it comes in, follows the wrong commander, and complains that the game is broken and that it’s the worst PvP out there.

Experience is the best knowledge. You lack the experience of doing WvW, thus, you have no knowledge of it, thus your opinions on it are invalid until you take the time to actually play the gamemode.

What do you want us to do? Stop playing because you couldn’t figure out what to do or kill anyone? I imagine most regular WvW players finished their entire monthly in a single sitting.

Raven Paradox.1860:

I’m sick of facepalming to these posts. People have been WvWing for over 7 months now, and some newbie to it comes in, follows the wrong commander, and complains that the game is broken and that it’s the worst PvP out there.

Experience is the best knowledge. You lack the experience of doing WvW, thus, you have no knowledge of it, thus your opinions on it are invalid until you take the time to actually play the gamemode.

Yes, to flip his majestic WoW gladiator experience back on him it would be like someone brand new to WoW PvP joining a pickup arena group in Season 5 and then complaining that he lost all of his matches.

You don’t have to get wvw kills for your monthly. It is one of a bunch of options. Lots of good advice above if you genuinely want to try wvw, but you are not forced to play it.

If you moved to a higher tier server its a lot of fun. currently in T2, and its about even forces. win some you lose some, part of the game.

inoshiro.6580:

You don’t have to get wvw kills for your monthly. It is one of a bunch of options. Lots of good advice above if you genuinely want to try wvw, but you are not forced to play it.

True, you don’t. But for me it takes all of two-three days to fill all four tiers of the monthly WvW “kill-o’-meter” lol. You have to get to know your server. Find out who is good to run with, who isn’t. The role of the Commander is often a surprisingly great one, and a lot of people with that big blue hat simply don’t fill those shoes well.

I have a guildmate who doesn’t WvW either; I took him to EBG tonight and he got his 50 kills from a single fight outside Durios. vOv

OP , troll , 20,000 kills in wvw and i’m on the low end for a wvwer

Large scale fighting has long since evolved from the, “old smash our heads against one another until someone loses”. Battles are won by tactical decisions, which quite often involve either running away or retreating to regain a favorable position. Just mindlessly running at one another requires neither skill nor tactics, only numbers. In your world, the group with the most numbers wins, and they ALWAYS win. The little guy has no chance. After a while, the little guy just quits, and no fights happen for anyone. In the real world, the group with the best execution wins, with numbers playing a still significant, but no longer absolute, role. You can keep your mindless zerging world. I like the real world better.

WvW is not for everyone and it is certainly not for me anymore either.
(I do hop in occasionally though, hoping to get a few fights)
I will NEVER understand why Zerg vs Zerg battles are fun, the individual does not make a difference at all. You can be lucky and get a few kills or be unlucky and get focused by 30 people. The way WvW works right now it really favours zerging, and i think that is intended.

A lot of smaller guilds are also running around in groups of 10+ people just killing off single roamers on the map.
And YES they do this because they are generally worse players than the solo-roamers out there.
I’ve tried getting spawn-blocked by around 5-10 people from the same guild. I then called one of my guildies to aid me. We somehow managed to get a 2v2 and we just completely facerolled them. They had been so kitteny for 15 minutes, using laughing emotes, cry emotes and spawn-blocking because they outnumbered me 10:1. But in an actual 2v2 they hardly damaged us.

This video sums up how the general mentality of a WvW player is:
I assume most people get what im trying to say, but just in case there is one guy going full kitten
Stan’s team is the group of 5 people or the single-roamer getting completely squashed by a huge zerg of 50 people.
The point is: Even though the group of 5 people never stood a chance, the zerg (or outnumbering group) is taking pride and honor in killing them.

Every single time this happens, i share the facial expression of Stan at 2:08. I simply cannot comprehend what the kitten is going on.

I present to you, the WvW mentality:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/104347/we-are-the-champions