Guild Wars 2

The icon is great for gathering people and making sure people are seeing you properly. However it also shows up brilliantly on the map, and that means some bored guy sitting there in your keep crafting or whatever could tell his friends on another server where you’re going. So could you turn it off when you’re carrying out a “surprise attack” please? You can always turn it back on for the gathering purpose when it’s useful.

While I agree that this scenario is plausible to an extent I’m sure it happens frequently between the servers — I don’t think convincing a player to turn their icon off would solve the issue. Especially during prime time or comparable participation, and especially not in the circumstance of a coordinated surprise keep assault.

Chances are that “guy sitting there” can simply read in /map or /team what the plan is, roughly where the zerg is at about any moment, and what everyone has to contribute to the assault. Everyone is too overtly vocal about this sort of thing in an open chat in the first place.

Anyone at all could ask what the zerg is planning, and they’d get every detail without any or much hesitation from the players. It isn’t entirely our fault: There is not a good ingame system for large group coordination. The commander’s squad system trys to fill the role, but misses the mark. It’s essentially a chat channel open to 30 random members of the public who choose to join at will, and there are still so many people left out in the first place.

Even if everyone were able to stop dropping the ball in open chat; maybe he’s in a VoIP channel for your server. Perhaps he’s mindlessly following the zerg into lower levels of boredom, and is the asuran running along beside you on your left: leaking detail after detail to the enemy just to foster his id.

Surprise strikes seldom work on a server with equal representation or greater than your own during the time between peak and late night hours. It’s very unlikely but not impossible. This is because these assaults are rarely a true surprise, with or without a mesmer portal, due to little to none of the planning or precaution necessary for such strikes having been taken. Guilds and alliances tend to be the most successful at such efforts. The exception to this is the siege golem sneak, in which many alpha/omega/guild golems are constructed and are mesmer ported to close proximity to a mostly undefended structure, or in the very least near the most obscure gate of a keep, and then proceed to destroy reinforced gates in disgustingly little time.

The last SG sneak I experienced first hand had 18 total golems, comprised of the 3 different versions, and 6 supporting players. They managed to get through two reinforced gates of Ascalon Hills and defeat the Lord in just under a minute — 51 seconds, actually. Two nearby players were the only ones able to arrive at the keep in time to also watch the enemy enter the Lord room. This is perhaps the absolute easiest way to capture a keep without having a mesmer exit portal inside the keep walls; however, both the SG sneak and ninja portal strategies are considered extremely cheap, or even an exploit, by a great number of players since, barring some extremely unlikely circumstances, there is no imaginable counter for either.

The success of a surprise assault when active informants are on the map doesn’t lie on the visibility of the commander icon, but rather a myriad other preparations, considerations, and precautions that justify turning it off in the first place. However, much of what constitutes sufficient concealment from the enemy and your own team in order for a successful surprise attack, resulting in a captured structure, is likely impossible to expect from anything less than a guild group:

- The commander should be working with a squad group and those squad members alone.

- The (up to) 29 other players in the commander’s squad are identifiable to be as trustworthy and reliable as at all possible. They must have a fair amount of experience playing their characters in WvW and know a great deal about the particular map, their objective and its layout/upgrades, the exact route of approach, and recent enemy activity.

Each player should be carrying maximum supply and preferably at least one siege weapon blueprint for reserve. They must be given a priority on arrival (cannons, oil, guards, build siege, etc.). They need to know how many rams to expect on each gate, initial layout of other siege and particular roles to fill after the initial priority is completed (operate a ram, operate other siege, wall suppression, attack gate, engage a second gate, protect flank/rear, supply run/portal, revive, aid revival, port released players back, etc.)

- Experienced, level-headed scouts, who can provide timely and accurate, unexaggerated information, from the squad are necessary in order to observe the objective and the route the squad will take to reach it — providing the most assurance the squad will not make contact with or be spotted by enemies or nonparticipating teammates. Such intelligence is immeasurably more valuable than anything provided in the open chat channels

They should preferably have high mobility and a means to hinder detection. In case they may be spotted doing so, the scouts should approach their posts from a direction other than that of the squad in order to discourage enemies and other players from scouting in its direction.

Members of a renowned WvW guild are a poor choice to scout since if spotted and recognized by a clever or cautious enemy group, they’re very likely to be perceived as a scout and not a solo player, straggler, or random wanderer.

- No information about the assault has been, or is it to be, stated in any public or outside chat, nor on any unverified and possibly compromised VoIP channel. Instead, all textual communication has taken place in /squad chat, or at the very least, via local /say with great precaution and at an absolute minimum.

- Any rendezvous point for squad members must be somewhere where neither enemy nor nonparticipating teammate would at all likely be or travel, as to not view the squad group. It must also be in a practical location for the squad to secretly leave the location, build initial group coordination/formation, and quickly reach its objective while receiving as much sufficient cover from the surrounding terrain as possible.

- Any contact with any enemy sentries/guards must be avoided, and circumventing as many areas of high mob density as reasonably possible is just as essential. Pulling a sentry or a guard can easily put skirmish markers on the map and announce the squad’s presence and location, or even possibly a direction of travel and ultimately its intentions.

Running into camps or large numbers of mobs results in members of the squad losing pace — prolonging the entire squad’s travel time, lest those members be separated and the squad perhaps become uncoordinated as a whole — resulting in a higher likelihood of being seen by others. It’s possible those and other members may even have to halt to kill the mobs, adding a lot more time between departure and arrival.

Even if it isn’t necessary to stop, those mobs will follow the squad members for some distance. Mobs are viewable from a far greater distance than player character models. Several mobs running in the same direction will quickly draw the attention of surrounding players.

- The commander and all squad-members must be capable of moving and coordinating a siege by instruction and squad-specific map waypoints alone. Using the waypoints available to the commander allows the squad an effective visual aid, usable to orchestrate a very detailed siege, while avoiding publicly pinging the map and drawing the attention of any nonparticipants.

This matter is more than a map icon being there or not. It’s a matter of choosing an approach to the assault in the first place — based on what’s necessary, practical, and ultimately feasible when weighed against the unlikeliness that the offensive could ever be realistically ensured secrecy from such informants and spies, ambiguous amongst their own team.

I turn the “zerg-o-matic” off when I am doing a small group mission because I don’t want 10,000 people following me when I am going to take a supply depot and come back.

Sir William PD.9615:

I turn the “zerg-o-matic” off when I am doing a small group mission because I don’t want 10,000 people following me when I am going to take a supply depot and come back.

Would sure be nice to turn “off” a commander pin and still retain all the squad functions and leave the squad intact! If they need someone to lead you can turn it back on without reforming everything.