Guild Wars 2

I’m attending a family reunion this weekend, and got to witness both sides of a server match up. My cousins play on Sanctum of Rall, and I play on Tarnished Coast. We stayed up all night in WvW, playing with our respective guilds and talking strategy.

SoR plays by the “get as many into wvw and run the biggest furball” strategy, which is what Anet encourages, based on the current way to win WvW.

TC typically has far fewer players in WvW at any given time. So by necessity we typically have high levels of coordination and much discussion of tactics, etc.

Watching the match up from behind the scenes, it was interesting to see how, with Anet’s current state of WvW, sheer numbers totally obliterates skill and planning.

Hopefully this is something Anet is wanting to change in the future, though I’m not sure how they’d go about it.

We are probably going to have to abandon the server vs server vs server matchup system if we ever want to see equitable WvW. We all know that WvW population trumps all else (unless siege is buffed even more to the point that it completely dominates the game), and ANet forfeit all control over that when they set up matches by server. Instanced matches make more sense, in my opinion, but ANet would have to get creative to preserve any sense of community and what are the chances of that happening?

Somebody a couple of months ago suggested a handicapping system based upon ratings, where a server with a lower rating would start out the week with a higher point score that the higher rated server would then have to struggle to overcome throughout the week. That might work with enough randomization of matchups to make the Glicko-2 ratings semi-accurate, but I will be very surprised if anything like that get implemented either.

Great reply! Though tbh I’m less interested in the score or who “wins” and far more interested in being able to coordinate multiple small or medium sized groups and have it achieve something. Right now the server that gets more people in (and kudos to them, truly) and the biggest zerg wins. Strategy is nearly nonexistent.

Arkenrath.4367:

I’m attending a family reunion this weekend, and got to witness both sides of a server match up. My cousins play on Sanctum of Rall, and I play on Tarnished Coast. We stayed up all night in WvW, playing with our respective guilds and talking strategy.

SoR plays by the “get as many into wvw and run the biggest furball” strategy, which is what Anet encourages, based on the current way to win WvW.

TC typically has far fewer players in WvW at any given time. So by necessity we typically have high levels of coordination and much discussion of tactics, etc.

Watching the match up from behind the scenes, it was interesting to see how, with Anet’s current state of WvW, sheer numbers totally obliterates skill and planning.

Hopefully this is something Anet is wanting to change in the future, though I’m not sure how they’d go about it.

It just seems that way to you becasue you are out numbered. When the enemy greatly outnumbers you they don’t need to be as tactical. Just throw a few rams down and beast mode the gate they wont be able to stop us even with all of their arrow carts…. But if you think there is no coordination and SoR are just mindless zergs your going to get steamrolled though becasue of underestimating the enemy. We fought JQ and BG the toughest servers in the game for months and for much of that time we were in your same position out manned and out numbered. We don’t give up, we are a relentless force.

This isn’t true in all cases blackgates eu at peak had 2 25 man guilds and would smash 2x or more there number. I am not sure what guilds run in eu now as I am not often in that tz but wage and the rest of our eu players do a killer job outnumberd. Family reunion? hope you get lucky.

There are some pretty big variations in playstyle among TC players. Ive noticed some are quite organized, whilst others aren’t. This is from me playing since reset until now and yet to take a break. But there is one thing that seems apparent and that is it seems the vast majority of TC build glass cannon. You guys go down really quickly in comparison to other servers I have played against. I have been exclusively rolling my thief and with this class I don’t do team fights, I don’t even like running with a havoc group (only solo roamer), but with TC I feel comfortable getting involved in the ZvZ because everyone is glass cannon and I have a frontline to protect me. You guys did impress me that your into stacking buffs and moving together, but Im yet to see the formation. And as said above, we don’t really need to work on this because we usually have larger numbers, but the few situations I have been in where we have had less, its not a problem.

From what I’ve seen, SoR seems to use siege weapons significantly more than I’m used to. And really, just from playing a few hours, I’ve been struck by how coordinated they are in general. No offense to SoS, but I was similarly struck by how un-coordinated they were at the beginning of last week’s matchup. So basically, I disagree with the OP.

When SoR made its way up to Tier 1, we also had this same experience. How much, and what sort of siege was being used was an obvious one. Stacking, turtling, portal bombing, veils, keep tapping, toughness/vit, whatever was the tactic at the time, whatever the formula necessary to obtain victory was being realized and utilized.

These new server matchups might be hard going for the “weaker” servers, but rest assured that by weaker servers playing tougher, more experienced ones the general skill level of your average WvW’r across all servers will be raised.