Guild Wars 2

I am writing this not to complain about coverage or lack of rewards for defending objectives, but to describe the meta byproduct of being unable to enjoy WvW anymore, and to see if anyone who’s been in the same situation might have advice as to how to rediscover the enjoyment.

What attracted me to WvW was not the player vs. player aspect so much as strategic defense. I like roaming and scouting, building siege, and defending the home borderland. Prior to Season 2, my server was a good place for that. There was a strong emphasis on the sanctity of our border, and always after reset it was a high priority to upgrade it and then maintain it. We even had a guild specifically created to do nothing but siege and defend, which, while may not sound exciting to all, was really cool. Whenever our garrison was attacked, we got reinforcements from EB to stop the onslaught.

Then we got hit with free transfers on the eve of Season 2, and our server profile was unavoidably changed. Our new infantry, and more importantly infantry commanders, were not bred in the same culture of strong home defense, and we sailed victoriously, effortlessly – and quite boringly – through the Season all thanks to a 24/7, nigh unconquerable EB karmatrain.

Once the tournament ended, we had risen to gold league, and began to reap our just rewards. The achievement hunters returned to Frostgorge Sound, many of our longtime commanders were burned out, and those still willing to command on home border found themselves without the numbers to face the gold league zergs. Subsequently, we lost many fine and experienced commanders to other servers.

Now, as it stands, we are unable to adequately defend our home border, and at this point it is waste of gold and time to attempt to do so. We are simply outnumbered, all the time, and anything upgraded is reset with a blob within a few hours. It is also becoming rare to get help from our EB groups because the EB commanders we have now either don’t have the men to spare or they don’t see the value in defending the home border. We lost a fully sieged, fortified garrison recently to ~15 enemies because only three were defending and EB was busy capping SM.

This is to say, we are an easy mark, and our enemies know it, so our home border is now the WvW version of Frostgorge Sound. They come in with 30 guys and 6 omegas, flip everything, and leave. There are no “fights”, just Der Rasenmäher and emote spam. This leaves me with nothing to do. I don’t want to flip camps or ram a tower every hour with the full knowledge that the bessies will never get to sups to the keep that won’t be ours long anyway. More to the point, when the enemy builds a waypoint on our borderland – something the “old server” would never have stomached without constant fighting to strip it – we mostly just accept it, because we can’t do anything. Seeing the most terrier of commanders admit in map chat that we can’t dislodge the enemy waypoint really drove it in for me. They’ve broken my spirit.

I think we should all move to the dominating server, so all the opposing servers in a match would be vacant, and we could just karmatrain the borders on a one-time trip after reset and then go for coffee for the rest of the match. This appears to be what everyone wants now. No strategy, no challenge, no effort, no reward, just a train and a champ box.

My havoc guild is moving to a different, soon-to-be-released game, but I have a lot of friends in GW2, primarily WvW, whom I’d still like to play with. It’s just that I find PvE so mind-numbingly boring. So I come to you to ask if you have ideas of things I could do within the confines of the gold league and my own playstyle to recover my passion and enthusiasm for the game. Is a server transfer the only option? Would it even make any difference? Maybe there’s some niche role I could play in EB that would make me feel useful again?

Thank you for any constructive thoughts you may have.

Read the first line, didnt read the rest.

Yes we’ve complained about how WvW is all about coverage, not skill or tactics.
Dont expect a red reply unless you start necroing old posts.

Unfortunately, that’s the way it is atm. I moved from Whiteside Ridge to Ruins of Surmia last year, and from there to Gandara before WvW season 2, because I too often found myself in the position you described, worse sometimes as some days I was the only person from my server in a borderland. The lower servers are really unstable, I might not like T2 for the size of the groups sometimes but at least it’s easy to consistently find people to fight with.

Tbh I still love playing my thief for roaming, and my ranger for zerging (I’ll roam on it when I L2P a bit more), and I vary which I play depending on the matchup. I’m here for the skirmish fights more than the strategic defence though. If you play another class with less mobility, being constantly outnumbered sucks balls.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Read the first line, didnt read the rest.

Yes we’ve complained about how WvW is all about coverage, not skill or tactics.
Dont expect a red reply unless you start necroing old posts.

I don’t need a red reply; I wanted ideas from people who actually play this game mode.

Thank you for your input, I guess.

The OP must play on Gandara. The Gandara I knew doesn’t seem the same any more. It was called Gank Dara for a reason. Lots of decent sized guilds and tons of roamers, ambusers and gankers. Fighting like a terrier, sometimes stubbornly instead of going for the easy PPT. Then came the free transfer and massive influx of bandwagoners and the karma train blobs (yes, Gandara does them as well).

Gandara isn’t doing that badly in the gold league, but it clearly lacks coverage to be in the TOP3. Note: I am talking about coverage, not quality. I can imagine the frustration of those Gandara players who are playing outside their prime time. The times of the easy wins and wins by over 400k are over.

Most of the small roaming guilds are on Kodash and Gandara. If they are not matched against each other, a typical Gandara roaming team will most likely face just enemy zergs or solo roamers, lost zerglings or disorganized enemy PuGs. The likelyhood of “fair” small scale fight are small, because the players who like this type of WvWvW stubbornly stacked on these 2 servers instead of spreading out to multiple servers (which would lead to more fun play).

Gandara lost weeks 28 and 29, but not by a large margin. As a player on the opposing side, I can tell you that we have experienced exactly the same: being outnumbered even on own borderlands and EB (yes, and Gandara against us). I consider it normal. What we lose, we capture back at night. I am actually lifting up my battle spirit when I see the outnumbered “buff” on us. But if a TOP3 EU server sees this regularly I can imagine how empty the game is in silver league outside the peak hours.

If I were on Gandara I would actually tank a bit on purpose and enjoy the summer while it still lasts, but that is actually up to the leadership of your server. We have already seen a lot of servers lose the fun, get internal struggles, many important players getting a burn out and then servers crashing down. And if you stack on the winning server, it might just be the next one on the list of that happening.

Any case, I have personally had a lot of fun in recent weeks. I wish you luck and fun games!

Deniara Devious.3948:

The OP must play on Gandara. The Gandara I knew doesn’t seem the same any more. It was called Gank Dara for a reason. Lots of decent sized guilds and tons of roamers, ambusers and gankers. Fighting like a terrier, sometimes stubbornly instead of going for the easy PPT. Then came the free transfer and massive influx of bandwagoners and the karma train blobs (yes, Gandara does them as well).

Very possibly. Like I said before, I’m one of the aforementioned bandwagoners (the prospect of the then silver league server which seemed to be fairly consistent score wise for zero transfer cost was very attractive) so I wouldn’t know what it used to be like. I do roam primarily though, so hopefully I don’t give the place a bad name :P

That being said, it’s pretty good here, I’ve had more fun here than I did on the lower servers. As you said, coverage vs servers like Desolation is a problem sometimes, but that’s to be expected really, and it’s not like we’re being steamrolled every week. And honestly I’d rather come second or third and have a good week’s fighting than win by 400k, that’s just boring for everyone.

Sure, fighting a zerg with small numbers isn’t always fun, but at least on Gandara there’s always someone willing to go on a suicide mission with me ^^

The worst thing is that by karma training they don’t gain nearly as much PPT as they would if they really tried fighting and that ends up being reflected in their glicko score.

Some of the servers could easily paint the entire map one colour, and hold it for the whole matchup if they really tried. But they’d rather let the lose take their BL back, so they can train it down again. They only really try hard if it looks like they might actually slip behind in PPT.

So next week you end up in the same scenario – you fight a server that could wipe the floor with you, but instead they prefer karma training.

Learn to play to have fun.