OK I see that I need to clarify something. I used the example provided by Sabull because yes, his comments were refreshing, especially in the idea that guilds fighting each other improves WvW rather than just casual blobs of players. He was against the idea of GvG as esports.
“My assumption will be that by focusing on guilds, you presume that there won’t be mega-blobs because the guilds will be running separately. As a result, other players are ‘protected’ from blobs because there are no blobs.”
So my background in this game, I started out playing havoc mostly on the BLs, trying to do the strategic thing called “map politics”, as a direct result of playing on a laptop that couldn’t handle the large lag-inducing blob fights. Zergs would seek out other zergs to fight and thus would create “spaces” or “protections” for havoc guilds to do stuff like cut off supply lines or ninja towers in support of a public tag’s zerg. As guilded zergs died off, it became such that servers were left without a main force to effectively tie up another server’s zerg. This lead to a die-off of havoc-sized guilds and other roamers who either quit or moved down to lower tier servers to get away from the frequency of the casual public tag blob. When you’re a small 5-man guild and you can’t find other similar sized guilds to fight against your options are reduced to either finding a public tag to “zerg surf” off of (exacerbating the blobbing) or a lot of boring PvD against the lone hopeless scout on the other server who is crying on teamchat asking for the 50-man EBG blob to respond.
I also have spent a lot of time in this game as a public tag, especially during Season 2 when I lead without a guild, and many times wishing for a small 5-man havoc guild to support my main force on a defended map. When I didn’t have such support, especially when trying to defend, I called it “sucking wind”. It is very difficult to get a few militia to form a separate party off your tag and doing some havoc in the southern or northern half of a BL to support you. You get put into a reactive position where you cannot dictate your opponent’s movements at all. In my experience, guilds invested in such activity do a much better job at this function than militia.
As well I’ve also participated in the so-called toxic GvG scene that used maps as personal battlegrounds. These types of guilds really only flourish during so-called prime time timezones like NA EST or OCX Prime because those times of highest population activity provided a type of high activity luxury where people could ignore playing WvW “as it was meant to be” because servers tended to have relatively even population during these times. Prime times are also the times when the most guilds tend to be rallying. When your guild rallies during an off-time, you don’t get a lot of playstyle options, especially if your guild is the only one during that time. While I’m not opposed to what GvG became, you have to understand that that was not WvW because it was too structured for WvW. A healthy structure of WvW requires a diversity of guilds/playstyles (see RTS comments below).
So about mega-blobs, yes guilds will “voltron” up sometimes. That’s up to individual guilds to manage as they seek the kind of sized fight they are looking for, but the important thing to remember is they have a higher probability of managing that than militia who generally play really conservatively and won’t take the kinds of risks in fights that people in the same guild and voice comms will. And yes, I too get frustrated at guilds who do this blobbing up against opponents just for an easy win while they are discouraging their opponents from playing to their own detriment. My point is that guilds have a greater potential for managing numbers than casual militia do and a lot of that is because the leaders of these guilds are more likely to contact each other in PM to arrange fights than militia will.
I’ll bring up EOTM again because EOTM most of the time looks like what WvW is without guilds.
So in the end, “guild-centric” means an organized WvW with a diverse option of playstyles. Militia by their nature do not provide the organization and diversity that guilds do. When a team has more militia than guilds, that presents a particular problem for both that team and their opponents.
Some of you are trying to say something about Anet not wanting to cater to what I’m trying to describe, but remember Anet once said that WvW is inspired by RTS where you are the unit around the time HoT came out. You usually need to build different kinds of units to be successful in an RTS. That’s always meant to me not only the different class builds but also the playstyles. I’m not going to go into WvW as RTS here. You can Google that for some insightful discussions that took place on this forum in the past.
