Guild Wars 2

I was hoping to see this, but I am not sure that we will. I’d really like the option to have a “closed squad” where your commander tag is only displayed to those in your squad. Many guilds want to run with JUST their guild (like myself) to test their own skill out in the world. There are plenty of commanders that want everyone to join them, but that isn’t everyone.

I think this would help to discourage the blob mentality also, which is a much needed thing in WvW right now. Blobs all over the place are why many guilds have quit the game and why my guild runs maybe once a week in WvW now.

If there are more commanders, this should be less of an issue as pugs can be directed to one of the other tags. I understand that doesn’t solve the whole problem, but I don’t think a closed squad option is coming out due to the important information that a tag conveys. Even though I don’t generally run with tags, I base my actions on where the tags are and where they’re going.

They already explained why this won’t be happening.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Can-we-have-something-Private-Tag/first#post6554291

Also with the upcoming rewards you’ll probably see smaller groups anyways, with more commanders around and requiring at least 5 players in their squad.

XenesisII.1540:

They already explained why this won’t be happening.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Can-we-have-something-Private-Tag/first#post6554291

Also with the upcoming rewards you’ll probably see smaller groups anyways, with more commanders around and requiring at least 5 players in their squad.

The new update changes dynamics entirely and encourages people to tag up. This means there will almost always be an open tag if there are no other tags visible.

So the point is moot now.

Namer.9750:

XenesisII.1540:

They already explained why this won’t be happening.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Can-we-have-something-Private-Tag/first#post6554291

Also with the upcoming rewards you’ll probably see smaller groups anyways, with more commanders around and requiring at least 5 players in their squad.

The new update changes dynamics entirely and encourages people to tag up. This means there will almost always be an open tag if there are no other tags visible.

So the point is moot now.

How does it make the point moot?

The squad remains a feature and it includes a tag on the map. Dont want a tag? Then dont use the feature. Getting extra points when tagging doesnt change that. In fact it only further press the point that its a feature.

And just like getting kittenty coats on medium armor, you’re gonna take it and you’re gonna like it.

XTR.9604:

I was hoping to see this, but I am not sure that we will. I’d really like the option to have a “closed squad” where your commander tag is only displayed to those in your squad. Many guilds want to run with JUST their guild (like myself) to test their own skill out in the world. There are plenty of commanders that want everyone to join them, but that isn’t everyone.

I think this would help to discourage the blob mentality also, which is a much needed thing in WvW right now. Blobs all over the place are why many guilds have quit the game and why my guild runs maybe once a week in WvW now.

Can someone PLEASE perform the last rites on this Dead Horse ?

They’ve said before that they’re never going to do this. They want squads and commander tags visible because a lot of players will only play WvW if there is a tag up indicating that there’s a group, and they want to encourage those more casual players to stick around.

There are two points in Bearbow’s Berdrow’s quote:

• “Many players will not participate in WvW if they don’t see a commander tag,”
• “we try to avoid adding features that can be used to exclude players.”

It’s an MMO and should encourage players to group up in open world content. If you want to exclude, there’s tagless squads, parties, and instanced content.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Oh but trust me, SOMEBODY is going to attempt to bring this topic up again, if only because they believe the “Guild” in GW2 means that WvW should really be a GvG only arena.

BTW, thanks McKenna and other devs for being active in the WvW forums regarding this latest patch. I’m sure I’m not the only one who appreciates the communication.

K, so gonna be harsh here. I’ve lauded many aspects of the anticipated June patch, so I don’t want to rehash everthing. But one thing I’ve been dead set against is having participation rewards for tagging up with a party of at least 5. To quote you from the link you refered to just above:

“Like others have mentioned in this thread, we don’t think this would be a healthy feature for WvW. Many players will not participate in WvW if they don’t see a commander tag, and we try to avoid adding features that can be used to exclude players.”

K, so would adding tag participation be healthy for WvW? No. Why? Imagine all the flaming that is going to happen from guild gorups to the troll tags popping up everywhere asking people to join their squad. That will happen. That will turn off players. More organized people will just get fed up with all the tags and play less and less. If it gets bad, I could just imagine people saying to themselves, “if this is how Anet wants WvW to be, then I don’t want to play it.” Is that healthy for WvW?

I can see a bunch of spamming in chat for people to join their tag. That will be super annoying. How is that healthy for WvW?

What about the resentment that may creep up towards commanders because they’re getting more rewards than everyone else. Is that healthy for WvW?

Now, maybe I’m acting like Chicken Little here, and maybe no one will behave this way, but knowing how slow Anet is to react to things, well not all the time, but most of the time, I think this could cause much more harm than good. That’s not healthy for WvW.

I would rather just see GM’s in the borderlands to deal with the trolls and flames. A little bit of enforced civility wouldn’t hurt the game.

So Anet is telling us if we bought a tag for 300 gold we can’t use our tags unless we have five people to group with us?

Or did I misread that little tidbit?

300 gold… I can imagine refunds will be the next thing players are going to ask for since that would be incredibly unfair on so many empty maps – and I mean empty.

How are people just logging in going to find anyone if a person who CAN tag up must spam the map or team continually to find four more players…?

The first day and first week and perhaps the first month will be chaotic. There will be the usual Nattering Nabobs of Negativity being quick to judge. Lots of people will be tagging up to gain credit. Then folks will figure out other ways of earning rewards that are less effort or more beneficial, e.g. winning skirmishes, and Doritos-for-Doritos’ sake will stop being a thing.

Put another way, we can’t really say yet what the impact of all these changes will be. That’s why the devs keep saying, “we’re open to the idea of tweaking or changing [xyz], but first, we’d like to see how it plays out with the current mechanics.”

Sarika.3756:

I would rather just see GM’s in the borderlands to deal with the trolls and flames. A little bit of enforced civility wouldn’t hurt the game.

Yes lets hire the reddit mods to do it. They do such a great job of trolling with the full support of anet already.

USE YOUR HEAD! Its impossible and unfair to deal with trolls and flames in a way that doesn’t leave some1 mistreated.
Cause people are sheep. Its a waste of time and resources to make you your safe space. Make your own instead, use the block function.

Sarika.3756:

I would rather just see GM’s in the borderlands to deal with the trolls and flames. A little bit of enforced civility wouldn’t hurt the game.

We have been asking for this since the beginning of the game.

The vileness of some people’s gossip and lies spread like wildfire – players who aren’t known by anyone can be destroyed in a matter of minutes and for all time on that server.

Trolls rule much of the time and many of them wear tags.

Anet ignores them.

atheria.2837:

So Anet is telling us if we bought a tag for 300 gold we can’t use our tags unless we have five people to group with us?

Or did I misread that little tidbit?

300 gold… I can imagine refunds will be the next thing players are going to ask for since that would be incredibly unfair on so many empty maps – and I mean empty.

How are people just logging in going to find anyone if a person who CAN tag up must spam the map or team continually to find four more players…?

You’ve misread it~

You can still tag up just like you do now and nothing changes. The only update is that if you’re tagged up and you have 4 other players in your squad, you’ll earn the new rewards slightly faster (just you, not your whole squad).

So if you’re tagged up solo, everything is the same as it is now.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less when we used to run 5 days a week, this is because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

And I’m sure this will get deleted because having any opinion other than yours is not acceptable and is hidden from everyone. Another reason I stopped coming this this forum unless I really felt like I needed to.

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Hexalot.8194:

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Current entire? Nope probably not. But the players who have left the game? They left for the same reasons. Stability changes, CC changes, and the fact that anet thinks they know the game better than the players. The same players who paid for the game, expansion and gems in the game, some or which did this with multiple accounts like myself.

You may like zerging around, but that isn’t for everyone. Many people still enjoy smaller group play and playing with just their guilds against the enemies. After all, this is “Guild Wars 2”, not “Pug Zerg wars” right? There is nothing in this game that pits guilds against other guilds, so where does guild wars come from? Lol. At least GW1 had GvG.

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less when we used to run 5 days a week, this is because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

And I’m sure this will get deleted because having any opinion other than yours is not acceptable and is hidden from everyone. Another reason I stopped coming this this forum unless I really felt like I needed to.

Well said i endorse this stance

Hexalot.8194:

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Well he speaks for me…and the guy above me……and I’m sure there are countles +1’s in the mix as well. So….maybe he speaks for a good chunk of it compared to say…you.

XTR.9604:

Hexalot.8194:

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Current entire? Nope probably not. But the players who have left the game? They left for the same reasons. Stability changes, CC changes, and the fact that anet thinks they know the game better than the players. The same players who paid for the game, expansion and gems in the game, some or which did this with multiple accounts like myself.

You may like zerging around, but that isn’t for everyone. Many people still enjoy smaller group play and playing with just their guilds against the enemies. After all, this is “Guild Wars 2”, not “Pug Zerg wars” right? There is nothing in this game that pits guilds against other guilds, so where does guild wars come from? Lol. At least GW1 had GvG.

All well and good, but are you saying that they also left because they cant hide a squad tag?

Because that’s what this thread is about. Not stability changes, CC changes, condi meta or whatever. If guilds actually cared this much about the tag I’m amazed they even lasted a week, considering we ran without squads and only had a single kittenty tag with no functions in the glory days of GW2 GvGs.

Dawdler.8521:

XTR.9604:

Hexalot.8194:

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Current entire? Nope probably not. But the players who have left the game? They left for the same reasons. Stability changes, CC changes, and the fact that anet thinks they know the game better than the players. The same players who paid for the game, expansion and gems in the game, some or which did this with multiple accounts like myself.

You may like zerging around, but that isn’t for everyone. Many people still enjoy smaller group play and playing with just their guilds against the enemies. After all, this is “Guild Wars 2”, not “Pug Zerg wars” right? There is nothing in this game that pits guilds against other guilds, so where does guild wars come from? Lol. At least GW1 had GvG.

All well and good, but are you saying that they also left because they cant hide a squad tag?

Because that’s what this thread is about. Not stability changes, CC changes, condi meta or whatever. If guilds actually cared this much about the tag I’m amazed they even lasted a week, considering we ran without squads and only had a single kittenty tag with no functions in the glory days of GW2 GvGs.

Usually, people quit due to a spark, or the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back. Way back when, I quit for about 10 months due to them screwing up the transmutation stones and us not being able to get our runes/sigils out of WvW / karma gear. But that was really just an accumulation of a bunch of crap; can’t really remember, think that might have been due to S2. And yeah, I quit for a while cause of the stability fiasco. Recently, I quit because I’ve been getting frustrated with the staleness of WvW, them not fixing glicko, the quality of the players, lack of teamwork, people not getting in TS, all kinds of things, much of which is server related. However, the straw that recently broke my back was my posts and threads getting deleted for about a week.

Usually not just one thing.

Cerby.1069:

Sarika.3756:

I would rather just see GM’s in the borderlands to deal with the trolls and flames. A little bit of enforced civility wouldn’t hurt the game.

Yes lets hire the reddit mods to do it. They do such a great job of trolling with the full support of anet already.

USE YOUR HEAD! Its impossible and unfair to deal with trolls and flames in a way that doesn’t leave some1 mistreated.
Cause people are sheep. Its a waste of time and resources to make you your safe space. Make your own instead, use the block function.

Thank you for demonstrating my point so beautifully, kind sir.

Dawdler.8521:

XTR.9604:

Hexalot.8194:

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Current entire? Nope probably not. But the players who have left the game? They left for the same reasons. Stability changes, CC changes, and the fact that anet thinks they know the game better than the players. The same players who paid for the game, expansion and gems in the game, some or which did this with multiple accounts like myself.

You may like zerging around, but that isn’t for everyone. Many people still enjoy smaller group play and playing with just their guilds against the enemies. After all, this is “Guild Wars 2”, not “Pug Zerg wars” right? There is nothing in this game that pits guilds against other guilds, so where does guild wars come from? Lol. At least GW1 had GvG.

All well and good, but are you saying that they also left because they cant hide a squad tag?

Because that’s what this thread is about. Not stability changes, CC changes, condi meta or whatever. If guilds actually cared this much about the tag I’m amazed they even lasted a week, considering we ran without squads and only had a single kittenty tag with no functions in the glory days of GW2 GvGs.

Exactly my thoughts. A few people (after 5 years) are still mad that ANET ignores their requests for invisible tags, and then come here and try to distill all the problems that are causing people to leave the game down to this one issue… lack of official support for private GvG fights.

If you had to rank all the unresolved problems that cause people to quit WvW (empty servers, condi meta, stab changes, stale game mode, HOT, etc…), would lack of invisible tags even make the top 10 ?

Spurnshadow.3678:

Dawdler.8521:

XTR.9604:

Hexalot.8194:

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Current entire? Nope probably not. But the players who have left the game? They left for the same reasons. Stability changes, CC changes, and the fact that anet thinks they know the game better than the players. The same players who paid for the game, expansion and gems in the game, some or which did this with multiple accounts like myself.

You may like zerging around, but that isn’t for everyone. Many people still enjoy smaller group play and playing with just their guilds against the enemies. After all, this is “Guild Wars 2”, not “Pug Zerg wars” right? There is nothing in this game that pits guilds against other guilds, so where does guild wars come from? Lol. At least GW1 had GvG.

All well and good, but are you saying that they also left because they cant hide a squad tag?

Because that’s what this thread is about. Not stability changes, CC changes, condi meta or whatever. If guilds actually cared this much about the tag I’m amazed they even lasted a week, considering we ran without squads and only had a single kittenty tag with no functions in the glory days of GW2 GvGs.

Usually, people quit due to a spark, or the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back. Way back when, I quit for about 10 months due to them screwing up the transmutation stones and us not being able to get our runes/sigils out of WvW / karma gear. But that was really just an accumulation of a bunch of crap; can’t really remember, think that might have been due to S2. And yeah, I quit for a while cause of the stability fiasco. Recently, I quit because I’ve been getting frustrated with the staleness of WvW, them not fixing glicko, the quality of the players, lack of teamwork, people not getting in TS, all kinds of things, much of which is server related. However, the straw that recently broke my back was my posts and threads getting deleted for about a week.

Usually not just one thing.

I’m not saying those people quit for this reason, but almost every GvG guild I’ve been a part of or talked to would have loved a closed squad tag. Almost all of those guilds quit because of the stab and CC changes. It was simply an example of anet thinking they knew what was best for the game and ultimately eliminating a large chunk of their player base because of it.

My point is that a closed squad with a tag only visible to those in it is something many people have been asking about for a very long time. By that, I mean since the beginning of the commander tag. People want to run with their own groups without having rally bots around. What anet doesn’t realize is how much of a pain it is having people follow you who don’t have good builds and refuse to change builds, play useless classes, won’t get on teamspeak, or even are spying for another server. I’ve experienced all of those things and it is why I don’t turn my tag on anymore that I paid for. Just sad that they won’t add a small feature into the game that would please so many of their players.

Hexalot.8194:

Dawdler.8521:

XTR.9604:

Hexalot.8194:

XTR.9604:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our stance hasn’t changed on this. My response that Xenesisll linked is still the same.

Then you’re just as out of touch with your players as everyone thinks you are. On that note, my guild is down to running WvW once a week or even less because of the lack of your team caring about how the players want to play the game. Every higher skilled GVG guild has quit the game because of it and almost all that is left is what you wanted there to be, just pug zergs. But by all means, it’s your game, keep on displeasing your players and driving them away since you clearly know what the players want more than they do.

LOL another guy who thinks he speaks for the entire WvW population…

Current entire? Nope probably not. But the players who have left the game? They left for the same reasons. Stability changes, CC changes, and the fact that anet thinks they know the game better than the players. The same players who paid for the game, expansion and gems in the game, some or which did this with multiple accounts like myself.

You may like zerging around, but that isn’t for everyone. Many people still enjoy smaller group play and playing with just their guilds against the enemies. After all, this is “Guild Wars 2”, not “Pug Zerg wars” right? There is nothing in this game that pits guilds against other guilds, so where does guild wars come from? Lol. At least GW1 had GvG.

All well and good, but are you saying that they also left because they cant hide a squad tag?

Because that’s what this thread is about. Not stability changes, CC changes, condi meta or whatever. If guilds actually cared this much about the tag I’m amazed they even lasted a week, considering we ran without squads and only had a single kittenty tag with no functions in the glory days of GW2 GvGs.

Exactly my thoughts. A few people (after 5 years) are still mad that ANET ignores their requests for invisible tags, and then come here and try to distill all the problems that are causing people to leave the game down to this one issue… lack of official support for private GvG fights.

If you had to rank all the unresolved problems that cause people to quit WvW (empty servers, condi meta, stab changes, stale game mode, HOT, etc…), would lack of invisible tags even make the top 10 ?

As a guild leader, I’ve tried very hard to keep the game going for myself and my team. Every screwed up thing they’ve done has caused all of us to play a lot more limited or to take an extended break. We all quit the game when desert BL was on all of the maps and didn’t come back until Alpine came back. It took 7 months for anet to listen to anyone and it took them losing the majority of their players to do something about it. I still think that if they reverted stability and removed the CC cap, many players would return to the game. If they added an actual GvG arena that wasn’t tiny like the guild hall arena, utilized WvW rules (instead of pve rules where retaliation is way stronger like in the guild hall), and made it to where you could set team limits where only X amount of people could get in the arena, it would bring people back also.

Having an invisible tag isn’t something a lot of people are quitting over, but it is an annoyance enough to me after putting up with the stability/CC changes, 7 months of being out of the game due to deserted BL, no GvG arena which killed off a lot of groups I liked playing with or against, and the fact that they’re still not listening to player suggestions which have been brought up many times. Again, it isn’t as much about the tag as it is about terrible customer service.

One would think that they’d want to hear from the people who are guild leaders in WvW, have thousands of hours in WvW, and spent a ton of money in the game. But clearly their priorities aren’t on improving the game in the image of the players who have kept it alive, it is on whoevers image whom I’m sure has less hours actually playing and probably has never led a single WvW raid.

Also, just to kill anets argument about how an invisible tag would discourage group play for people who don’t have a group: WE ALREADY RUN TAGLESS TO KEEP THE PUGS AWAY. They’re not losing out on anything. Any group that doesn’t want pugs are the people you’re excluding from the features a squad provides. You’re excluding my guild and any other guild from having access to things that are a part of the game like being able to target multiple people in a squad and having an easier thing to follow. Currently, and since the start of the game, we put a Target on the leaders head and follow them. That is the closed squad we currently have. It has been going on since the beginning of the game. So how’s about helping those of us out who are going to run without a tag anyway for a change.

Put the commanders with thousands of hours in WvW who are still actively playing in a room, and you aren’t going to come up with consensus on what should be changed and when.

Sarika.3756:

Put the commanders with thousands of hours in WvW who are still actively playing in a room, and you aren’t going to come up with consensus on what should be changed and when.

So like three people? +1 to Asphyxia’s posts.

XTR.9604:

Any group that doesn’t want pugs are the people you’re excluding from the features a squad provides. You’re excluding my guild and any other guild from having access to things that are a part of the game like being able to target multiple people in a squad and having an easier thing to follow.

Except they are not excluding you. You are perfectly free to use the feature. You just want to use it for a thing its not intended for. You are basicly trying to argue that you should be able to drink from the bottom of a mug. Using the opening at the top is just for those lowly pugs.

Why is it OK then to be excluded in sPvP and PvE raids and fractals but not in WvW?

I’d love to be in one of the cash sPvP tournaments with one of the top teams except I suck at sPvP.

I’d love to join one of the top raid guilds to get legendary armor but I don’t have the right gear for raids.

I’d love to do the highest level fractals but I’m still at fractal lvl 2.

So why is it OK for the totally unprepared to join a squad of one of the elite WvW guilds?

Do the commander markers persist after a commander steps down? Can’t those markers be used in place of a tag if so?

Swamurabi.7890:

Why is it OK then to be excluded in sPvP and PvE raids and fractals but not in WvW?

I’d love to be in one of the cash sPvP tournaments with one of the top teams except I suck at sPvP.

I’d love to join one of the top raid guilds to get legendary armor but I don’t have the right gear for raids.

I’d love to do the highest level fractals but I’m still at fractal lvl 2.

So why is it OK for the totally unprepared to join a squad of one of the elite WvW guilds?

Excellent point, very glad you brought that up.

Ayrilana.1396:

Do the commander markers persist after a commander steps down? Can’t those markers be used in place of a tag if so?

Unfortunately they do not. If they did, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. But as soon as the commander steps down, all lieutenants are demoted and all markers are cleared.

XTR.9604:

Ayrilana.1396:

Do the commander markers persist after a commander steps down? Can’t those markers be used in place of a tag if so?

Unfortunately they do not. If they did, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. But as soon as the commander steps down, all lieutenants are demoted and all markers are cleared.

Perhaps having them persist would be a good compromise then for the markers.

Dawdler.8521:

XTR.9604:

Any group that doesn’t want pugs are the people you’re excluding from the features a squad provides. You’re excluding my guild and any other guild from having access to things that are a part of the game like being able to target multiple people in a squad and having an easier thing to follow.

Except they are not excluding you. You are perfectly free to use the feature. You just want to use it for a thing its not intended for. You are basicly trying to argue that you should be able to drink from the bottom of a mug. Using the opening at the top is just for those lowly pugs.

Except they are excluding us because if we do use the feature, it will hurt us more than help us since bad players will flock to my tag and cause us to lose fights by running bad builds.

Here is a quick little example of a bad player following me causing us to lose fights. I have a full heal ele that runs in my group. His regen is excellent, keeps everyone in the frontline alive very well. Now, lets throw some bad player in the mix who has a skill that gives regen, lets say a guardian running “hold the line”, they use it and now their regen with no healing power behind it over rides the heal ele’s regen. We effectively lose a MASSIVE amount of healing which ultimately may cause us to lose a fight. That is just one small example of how they hurt us more than they help.

Here is another, said pug has a bad build and doesn’t get on teamspeak. My team secures a down player and we go to stomp him, but bad player who is not on teamspeak doesn’t hear the call to focus on this downed player and is instead being focused because he wasn’t with us, then he dies and rallies our downed player. Depending on the downed player, that rally may be enough to end us. Now we have our bursts on cooldown from focusing this person and they now have the chance to heal up and fight back.

Another fun one, my group running 5 people was fighting a group of 9 people. We were doing well and winning the fight, we had 3 of their people down and another small group of pugs jumps in to “help”, the pugs instantly die because their positioning is bad and they’re not on teamspeak and have bad builds. They rally those 3 people that we worked hard to down, then we lose the fight because we coordinated our attack on those people because they were the enemies with the highest damage output, now we die because we have nothing left to save us from them. You can go ahead and argue that we were just bad and it is why we lost, but 2 times prior to this fight, we beat them 5v9 and then 3 times after that fight, we did it again. The fact that the only time we lost to that group was when bad pugs jumped in tells all you need to know.

I could go on and on and on with reasons why we don’t want pugs running with us and examples of how we’ve been screwed over by pugs following us. But just as Swamurabi.7890 stated, all other game modes allow you to have your squads be exclusive except for WvW for the players with the right builds to join in the action.

There is no reason WvW is excluded besides the WvW dev team being out of touch with their game mode and players. The fact that we make an excellent argument as to why it should be a feature compared to their argument of why it isn’t going to be a feature leads me to believe they either don’t know how to do it, don’t want to do it because it is too much work, or don’t care about their customers.

We already have the ability to have a “closed squad” where people can only join if invited, so what is the harm in making that tag invisible to those not in the squad? I don’t understand.

Swamurabi.7890:

Why is it OK then to be excluded in sPvP and PvE raids and fractals but not in WvW?

I’d love to be in one of the cash sPvP tournaments with one of the top teams except I suck at sPvP.

I’d love to join one of the top raid guilds to get legendary armor but I don’t have the right gear for raids.

I’d love to do the highest level fractals but I’m still at fractal lvl 2.

So why is it OK for the totally unprepared to join a squad of one of the elite WvW guilds?

The difference is that ArenaNet is not enforcing those instances of ‘exclusion.’ You can’t be in a top PvP team because the team won’t let you join them. You can’t join a professional raiding guild because the guild won’t let you in. You can’t do tier 4 fractals because you don’t have agony resistance, and that’s the only instance of a barrier created by the developers themselves.

It is not okay for the totally unprepared to join an elite WvW squad – you can still do invite only or prevent people from joining altogether, and boons are prioritized in your party and squad before being passed onto PuGs, so that also helps. But people can still follow you around, just as they can in open world PvE. You think commanders in PvE want people to join them that don’t know how to break a defiance bar but scale it up nonetheless? No. And sometimes they fail because of it.

Not saying it’s okay either way, but it’s something you have to deal with in an MMO. They want new players in WvW as well, and many will be turned off if they find all they can do is run around solo, only finish half their dailies any given day, and flop on the ground as soon as a group of five finds them.

XTR.9604:

But just as Swamurabi.7890 stated, all other game modes allow you to have your squads be exclusive except for WvW for the players with the right builds to join in the action.

I read what he stated and I have no kittening idea what its even supposed to mean. Exclusive squads? What? Its the same system in PvE as WvW. Are you talking about locking the squad? Because you can lock the squad in WvW.

Even so, there is absolutely nothing stopping pugs from following you into battle if thats what your goal is. Hiding your tag wont make your group invisible.

It is unfair to the squad to not allow them an invisible tag.

Tags make it obvious where a squad is.

Lacking a tag makes it difficult to follow the commander.

This puts people leading a closed squad into a conflict of interests.

Either be forced to use a tag and make it easier for out-of-squads to follow, rallybotting the squad or ruining the small group experience zerging/blobbing people down.

Alternatively, don’t use a tag and make it extremely difficult to follow the commander, putting themselves at a great disadvantage.

I don’t support a WvW game mode that is about forcing people into mindlessly blobbing people down. This is what is killing the game mode, a lack of skilled gameplay whether it be from blobbing people down or getting blobbed.

As a casual wvw player with no guild on the current server, once i join EB instance and see no tag i will ask chat if there is any(maybe a public blue comm is defending home bl). If there is none i lose my interest and join the edge of the mists where most likely there will be a tag and i will have some fun there.
If you don’t like to command for large groups, then don’t tag at all. And if your guild is dead is probably becuase those responsible don’t even try to reclut new players inside the guild.

As someone who frequently runs a small tagless squad, I have to say that an invisible tag would not be excluding anyone.. from the game mode. They can still be on the same map, doing whatever they want, on my server pugs like Verthurnax are in the minority and will respond to callouts or go siege something without their hand holding. Someone happening to be on the same map as you with an invisible tag isnt stopping you doing anything.
What it is doing at the moment, is stopping that tagless squad from using features designed to help them, that they helped fund by buying the game and gems. Why is it ok for Anet to say you MUST have a beacon for all strangers to flock to you because exclusion is bad, but then exclude people from features they asked for and paid for?
MMO does not mean everyone has to be in the same place playing together like some fantasy happy family that never argues. It means that there are other players also in the world you are traversing. Some you will like and want to play with more, some you wont.

I’ve been playing WvW almost exclusively (had to PvE to get elite and durability runes) since Seasons 1. I’ve been in fight guilds, GvG guilds and PPT guilds. Now, I pretty much run guildless because of the intra-guild drama that inevitably happens.

It pains me to hear all this “elite guild” stuff. That’s not what GW2 is about nor what makes WvW so blasted great. I’ve been in guilds where we would run tagless, trying to shake the pugs. Bottom line is it doesn’t work (pugs still follow) nor does it really affect things in the long run. Sure maybe we lost a fight or two that we would have won otherwise, but no big deal.

We then tried running half our raid time closed and tagless (announcing it to the map…but also saying we’ll be opening it up in an hour). That worked OK – people would mostly respect it. Then we started to always run tagged and invite the pugs in. Our driver would teach builds, positions, rotations, etc. Over time, the overall quality in pugs got better and we had built in recruiting tool.

GW2 is about inclusion, not exclusion. WvW isn’t closed ended like PvP or raids..it’s open to everyone. Maybe if the “get gud” guilds would spend some of their time teaching, they might get some good fights and some good recruits to boot!

atticus.5284:

I’ve been playing WvW almost exclusively (had to PvE to get elite and durability runes) since Seasons 1. I’ve been in fight guilds, GvG guilds and PPT guilds. Now, I pretty much run guildless because of the intra-guild drama that inevitably happens.

It pains me to hear all this “elite guild” stuff. That’s not what GW2 is about nor what makes WvW so blasted great. I’ve been in guilds where we would run tagless, trying to shake the pugs. Bottom line is it doesn’t work (pugs still follow) nor does it really affect things in the long run. Sure maybe we lost a fight or two that we would have won otherwise, but no big deal.

We then tried running half our raid time closed and tagless (announcing it to the map…but also saying we’ll be opening it up in an hour). That worked OK – people would mostly respect it. Then we started to always run tagged and invite the pugs in. Our driver would teach builds, positions, rotations, etc. Over time, the overall quality in pugs got better and we had built in recruiting tool.

GW2 is about inclusion, not exclusion. WvW isn’t closed ended like PvP or raids..it’s open to everyone. Maybe if the “get gud” guilds would spend some of their time teaching, they might get some good fights and some good recruits to boot!

Only open world PvE is inclusive. Everything else in GW2 has players that want to get better and there are some that want to get better with a limited, exclusive group of players.

Dawdler.8521:

I read what he stated and I have no kittening idea what its even supposed to mean. Exclusive squads? What? Its the same system in PvE as WvW. Are you talking about locking the squad? Because you can lock the squad in WvW.

Even so, there is absolutely nothing stopping pugs from following you into battle if thats what your goal is. Hiding your tag wont make your group invisible.

Sounds like a reading comprehension problem. Let me break it down for you.

In PvE raids, you can CHOOSE who can come with you and exclude anyone who you do not want to join you. It is instanced with the squad, so pugs can’t just come in to your instance and cause your group to wipe. In WvW, pugs can come to your tag rather they’re in the squad or not because they can see your tag. So PvE has a choice of which elites to let in to their squad for raids, but we do not in WvW. Understand better?

Verthurnax.2784:

As a casual wvw player with no guild on the current server, once i join EB instance and see no tag i will ask chat if there is any(maybe a public blue comm is defending home bl). If there is none i lose my interest and join the edge of the mists where most likely there will be a tag and i will have some fun there.
If you don’t like to command for large groups, then don’t tag at all. And if your guild is dead is probably becuase those responsible don’t even try to reclut new players inside the guild.

See, this is part of that blob mentality I was talking about. You assume that because my guild runs 5 people because we can’t recruit or because my guild is dead. We WANT to run only 5 people because it is so much better of a challenge to see what a single party of people can do together. We enjoy it. We turn people down ALL THE TIME that ask to join our guild because we don’t need or want more players. We’re a tight group of friends who have been playing together for years and we have excellent group synergy because of it.

Also, not every tag is going to run closed if ANET added this, it would still be the same guilds that already don’t run a tag running a closed squad.

atticus.5284:

Maybe if the “get gud” guilds would spend some of their time teaching, they might get some good fights and some good recruits to boot!

Look, I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to teach pugs and guilds how to build characters properly for best group synergy and in my forum signature is a link to my website where I’ve shared a lot of my builds that I run and would find acceptable for anyone running with me to play. But at this point in the game, I really want to play exclusively with my guild only. I don’t like running more than 5 man groups and I have enough friends lol. Plus, my guild is definitely an acquired taste on teamspeak and we’ve trolled a lot of people away from running with us because they couldn’t handle us lol.

I’ve played with several of the old GvG guilds back when I enjoyed running with 15 people, yes they were very elitist and that was okay with me because I fit in well with that. Back then it was all about being as tryhard as you can be, which is not the case anymore. Now we run 5 man casual and still look like we’re trying hard because we wipe groups 2x+ our size if they exist.

Anyway, there is little keeping me in this game since my entire guild plays several other games together, but I mean come on, at least make an effort to keep people around. I’d like to continue playing and between my 3 accounts, I have put over 5000 hours just in to WvW alone. I think that I may know what I am talking about on what the guilds in WvW have been asking for, this is one of those things. ANET have made themselves pretty clear that they don’t care what the players want since they’ve lost so many people to the stability/CC changes, lack of GvG game mode, no closed squad commander tag, leaving 3 maps of deserted BL for 7 months, not fixing the big balance issues like condition builds being able to be incredibly tank and deal more damage than full zerk players, and the list goes on and on. Paying attention to your players that know the game best is something that they should put for focus on if they want to stop hemorrhaging players as they have been for the past 2 years.

XTR: I can understand you want to run closed. But if it is just five of you, what part of the squad UI do you actually need? With five, between VOIP, party comp, etc, I can see no benefit of the squad UI to you.

In what way would that UI actually help?

Strider Pj.2193:

XTR: I can understand you want to run closed. But if it is just five of you, what part of the squad UI do you actually need? With five, between VOIP, party comp, etc, I can see no benefit of the squad UI to you.

In what way would that UI actually help?

Having a tag on my head or some kind of symbol besides the target that we use to focus players down would be pretty useful for keeping the group closer together. It is easy to lose me in a fight some times, especially when we’re fighting very outnumbered as we usually do. The ability to use the special markers from the squad would be incredibly useful for targetting multiple enemies, that way each of my guys can be lieutenants and each have their own target marker that we could each use to call our own targets. Like if my marker that I designate for me to use is the X marker and I says “my target on the necro”, they know to go to the one that has the X to focus down the necro first. We can also keep track of where the enemy driver is to dodge front line trains as they push while we focus the backline out. I can also put a marker on our heal ele so that we all know where he is in a fight easily and get to him if we get split up for heals. So many advantages.

The thing is, MOST groups in this game do not utilize the features of the squad because skilled groups are a thing of the past in this game. My guild would make FULL use of it and it would make us incredibly stronger as a group to have those abilities.

XTR.9604:

We already have the ability to have a “closed squad” where people can only join if invited, so what is the harm in making that tag invisible to those not in the squad? I don’t understand.

The features come with the Tag, not the squad. The link to their reply as to why they don’t want invisible tags sums up their thoughts on tags and why they exist. Your walls of text are not going to change their minds after almost 5 years of this, and I would not be surprised that if you keep pushing they’ll change squads to disband after 30 seconds of being commanderless.

XTR has summed up perfectly how every true hardcore WvW player that is still left in this game feels. Hopefully one day Anet will wake up and realize how wrong they are in their way of thinking about this mode, before they drive more of their more dedicated players away. The other 2 modes have their hardcore endgame in the form of raids in PvE, and tournaments for Spvp. The fact they keep denying WvW a way to truly have hardcore groups is baffling and very ignorant on their part.