Guild Wars 2

Guilds are running without commander tags and telling their server-mates to leave them alone. The community is being torn apart.

Why?
Because the rally mechanic allows enemies to rally when one of you is killed.
If you are uplevelled or running in non-tanky gear and thus easier to down, your guild groups will resent you hanging out with them and this is the main reason they run with tags turned off.
Another reason you will find this attitude from guild groups is that you can’t hear their voice comms, meaning that you will die more easily and thus be an easy rally for the enemy.

The rally mechanic as it stands is breaking WvW communities. I think Arenanet need to address the issue.

I hope this is clear to understand.

I agree, it is a problem. I’ve heard stories of people creating intentionally weak characters and running with an opposing server’s strongest group with the intention of offering a free rally to their real guildies.

I love the rally mechanic and think it is an unique addition to the game and should not be removed. And hope it will never get either.

This ain’t the main reason why guilds don’t want bambis to follow them. They want to run with their guild alone and do things as a guild. They run tagless not only to make bambis not follow you, but also that the enemy can’t focus down the leader. Mostly there is a bambi commander on the map and all bambis should follow him. Not the guild, the guild can do insane things if the bambi commander pulls away the attention.

Bambis give away location, die and rally enemy, can’t hear your instructions, group up way to late. So in other words they are useless to a guild. That is why a guild does not want them to follow them.

It’s another good reason to remove the whole downed state system from WvW. It works fine for PvE, but in WvW it just causes so many problems.

It’s not going to happen though. It’s just too integral to the design of the game.

Wow I never knew about this, yes it is a very very very bad idea, and yes it can hurt the community in wvw and is also a built in easy cheat system for the lame players.

Yea, it’s aggravating. Especially when you play a class that can’t down other targets because the class has low health or you play a class with terrible downed state options.

They should just remove it from WvW and PvP and instead make it so your corpse has a buff for 20 seconds. If someone tries to res you while you’re buffed, you heal for a higher amount (just like when in downed state, you heal quicker).

This way if you take the time to res someone, nothing changes. If players are downed, they stay down unless actually res’d. Everyone now has balanced downstate spells to choose from (none!).

i second, Rally and Uplevel have to leave the WvW maps. WvW should have a minimum req of level 75, Rally system in PvP is wrong.

Funny how people are starting to come around to this. My guild uses the community voice chat and plays with others most of the time, but the couple of times a week we go into tryhard raid mode, we go tagless and avoids people following us. The largest reason is PUGs become rally bait.

There is a much easier and better solution to this problem:

Give an option to make commander tag only visible to your own guild.

Upleveled characters should be able to access WvWvW. Player skill is more important than his level or gear.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Upleveled characters should be able to access WvWvW. Player skill is more important than his level or gear.

Lol. Tell me. When did you last time got beaten by an upscale ? xD

Master of Timespace.2548:

Lol. Tell me. When did you last time got beaten by an upscale ? xD

Today.

They come in large numbers and swarm around you like angry wasps.

But seriously as a PuG commander I have never told anybody to stop following or leave me no matter how low level he/she is. I have even had level 2 guardian in my party. Yes, his armor was paper and he had just one weapon with 3 skills, so that was bad. But he wasn’t useless. He could still carry 10 supplies and build stuff as fast as level 80. WvWvW should remain accessible for everybody.

Low level characters can beat level 80s. Just look at these videos:
Ranger 12 solo play in WvWvW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEF69Fewgmg
Engineer 11 soloing in WvWvW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQY0cK8KrVk

If you get your low level the optimal gear for his level (which very few people do), the stats actually scale surprisingly well. Stat wise you are pretty much the same, but you are missing traits and skills.

This would certainly make zerg on zerg fights shorter and probably a lot less laggy.

A few months ago I would have said leave it where it is, but after a lot of playing it really is pretty silly. Groups simply don’t want uplevels in their group because they are far more of a liability with this mechanic. It really creates a somewhat hostile environment to new or inexperienced players.

seems a little melodramatic

Zenjii.6819:

seems a little melodramatic

Regardless, It’s true.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Deniara Devious.3948:

Upleveled characters should be able to access WvWvW. Player skill is more important than his level or gear.

Lol. Tell me. When did you last time got beaten by an upscale ? xD

Lol its more like when was last time I killed on an uplevel.

last Friday (drinking night) we ran level 2 toons created for a theme evening and still took towers and keeps

I dunno, for me, instead of blaming the mechanic, I fight along side with it. If a teammate or enemy is down, I see it as an equal opportunity on both ends. It’s teamwork in the end on whether or not your downed teammate gets the support he needs to stay alive or the enemy side gets the support THEY need to survive. I mean, rally works for both you AND the enemy. It’s not, oh they can rally on our allies but we can’t rally on their allies, it’s double edged. I don’t see how this is “killing communities” if both sides can ultilise this function. It seems more of a “I don’t want to help other people” problem. I.e. you don’t feel like helping what you call PuGs or “weaker team members” and they should look out for themselves.

Similar topics which has debated on this is dungeon play where people say rally is stupid because people usually kill the monster to rally someone instead of reviving them. That is a judgement call and is downright not true. Most dungeons, people will actually prefer to revive or sometimes what I call half revive (give them help or enough hp to prevent a full down for an incoming rally). Same can be said for pvp.

At the end of the day, I see most people enjoy this teamplay mechanic, most players i’ve seen would try their best to save an ally and the people who complain are the more cereal type players who can’t get enough of their crunchies and like to lookout for only themselves.

Lafiel.9372:

I dunno, for me, instead of blaming the mechanic, I fight along side with it. If a teammate or enemy is down, I see it as an equal opportunity on both ends. It’s teamwork in the end on whether or not your downed teammate gets the support he needs to stay alive or the enemy side gets the support THEY need to survive. I mean, rally works for both you AND the enemy. It’s not, oh they can rally on our allies but we can’t rally on their allies, it’s double edged. I don’t see how this is “killing communities” if both sides can ultilise this function. It seems more of a “I don’t want to help other people” problem. I.e. you don’t feel like helping what you call PuGs or “weaker team members” and they should look out for themselves.

Similar topics which has debated on this is dungeon play where people say rally is stupid because people usually kill the monster to rally someone instead of reviving them. That is a judgement call and is downright not true. Most dungeons, people will actually prefer to revive or sometimes what I call half revive (give them help or enough hp to prevent a full down for an incoming rally). Same can be said for pvp.

At the end of the day, I see most people enjoy this teamplay mechanic, most players i’ve seen would try their best to save an ally and the people who complain are the more cereal type players who can’t get enough of their crunchies and like to lookout for only themselves.

Nuff said IMO. /thread

Lafiel.9372:

I dunno, for me, instead of blaming the mechanic, I fight along side with it. If a teammate or enemy is down, I see it as an equal opportunity on both ends. It’s teamwork in the end on whether or not your downed teammate gets the support he needs to stay alive or the enemy side gets the support THEY need to survive. I mean, rally works for both you AND the enemy. It’s not, oh they can rally on our allies but we can’t rally on their allies, it’s double edged. I don’t see how this is “killing communities” if both sides can ultilise this function. It seems more of a “I don’t want to help other people” problem. I.e. you don’t feel like helping what you call PuGs or “weaker team members” and they should look out for themselves.

Similar topics which has debated on this is dungeon play where people say rally is stupid because people usually kill the monster to rally someone instead of reviving them. That is a judgement call and is downright not true. Most dungeons, people will actually prefer to revive or sometimes what I call half revive (give them help or enough hp to prevent a full down for an incoming rally). Same can be said for pvp.

At the end of the day, I see most people enjoy this teamplay mechanic, most players i’ve seen would try their best to save an ally and the people who complain are the more cereal type players who can’t get enough of their crunchies and like to lookout for only themselves.

True, it does work for both you and your enemies.

But if you have PUGs and up-levels with you, and they do not, they will take advantage of the fact.

And success in any PvP means making sure you can have as many advantages on your side as possible. Is it any wonder the more competitive guilds are doing this?

well idk if its necessarily tearing communities apart, but i like the downed state in pve and dislike it for pvp. it will ALWAYS give the upperhand to the larger force in pvp, yes there are instances where people can use it to t heir advantage and just aoe downed guy too, but this usually never works well for the smaller force if theyre both groups are competent players.

Svarty.8019:

The rally mechanic as it stands is breaking WvW communities. I think Arenanet need to address the issue.

If 20 players tag 1 target and all 20 players go into a downed state; the second that target goes down all 20 players rally.

Probably the most idiotic mechanic I have ever seen in the history of gaming.

Calae.1738:

Svarty.8019:

The rally mechanic as it stands is breaking WvW communities. I think Arenanet need to address the issue.

If 20 players tag 1 target and all 20 players go into a downed state; the second that target goes down all 20 players rally.

Probably the most idiotic mechanic I have ever seen in the history of gaming.

Most of that tagged player is up level, I see a lot level 1-10 joining Zerg just to lechess xp and karma, contributing almost nothing to the Zerg most than rallies enemies. Level
Up In this game is hell a lot easy, a level 80 whit blue gears is more welcome for me than one level 20 character.

Bones.5762:

well idk if its necessarily tearing communities apart, but i like the downed state in pve and dislike it for pvp. it will ALWAYS give the upperhand to the larger force in pvp

I agree that this gives an advantage to the larger group, but this is just one of the many design features in GW2, which gives advantage to larger numbers:
- area healing, condition removal, sharing boons, combo field effects
- AoE limit
- Arrow Carts are most useful defense against small to medium groups, but don’t stop a zerg of 40-60 players
- rally mechanism and ability to revive so efficiently e.g. if you have just 2 guys you won’t make any kills against 10 unless you manage to do a stealth stomp, as those 10 would always have people to revive a downed player

Thus we see players running in big blobs, causing massive lag and even players dropping out of the game. The server with better coverage and superior number of players wins.

I am not suggesting to completely remove all the above mentioned facts, but they should indeed be toned down to give more viability to other tactics as well. The introduction of traps and buffs to siege miserably failed to address these issues. In fact the smart players on these forums never suggested either of them and Arenanet has been ignoring the good ideas on these forums.

My suggestions for WvWvW:
1. Remove rally
2. Give everybody just downed skill #4 (bandage self)
3. Offensive skills / AoE blasts limit should be increased to 10. Yet area heals, combo fields and buffs shouldn’t affect more than 5 players. This is reduce the effectiveness of extremely tight blobs, where players are standing inside their allies character models to gain maximum benefits from area heals and buffs, while having a small chance to be damaged by AoE. E.g. if 50 stack like this, the AoE will affect only 10% of them.
4. Certain combo fields need to have their effect toned down for WvWvW e.g. 50% less healing from water fields, only 2 stacks of might from fire field, less duration of swiftness as this allows zergs to run at perma swiftness with ease (combined with the use of waypoints, zergs can way too quickly move to different destinations, even hop from borderlands to borderland. promoting a play style where everybody just runs in one mono blob).
5. Reduce AC damage by 40% against creatures and make it do no damage against enemy siege or turrets.

Currently the breakout event places the catapults and ballistas too close to the objective and defenders can use WXP traited arrow carts to destroy this siege. If you have just 10 players on the side triggering the breakout event and enemy has more, the breakout event will fail for sure.

I agree with the op. This current system has created divisions within communities and does nothing but create server drama. Downed state altogether needs to be removed from wvw.

MiLkZz.4789:

I love the rally mechanic and think it is an unique addition to the game and should not be removed. And hope it will never get either.

This ain’t the main reason why guilds don’t want bambis to follow them. They want to run with their guild alone and do things as a guild. They run tagless not only to make bambis not follow you, but also that the enemy can’t focus down the leader. Mostly there is a bambi commander on the map and all bambis should follow him. Not the guild, the guild can do insane things if the bambi commander pulls away the attention.

Bambis give away location, die and rally enemy, can’t hear your instructions, group up way to late. So in other words they are useless to a guild. That is why a guild does not want them to follow them.

I’m pretty much with you here, my guild has done some great things as havoc squads, but also fields a few commanders regularly. Part of being a responsible wvw guild is recognizing the need for commanders in every zone, but also recognizing that only one or two commanders should be running in a given zone at a given time. When my guild’s commanders are in a zone, they don’t just pop their tags, they check with the other commanders, and get a sense for who is in charge, and whether they are comfortable with sharing/ceding leadership – and whether this would be useful. The commander leads the zerg, and ideally is in some sort of communication with leaders from guilds that may be performing alternate operations. Too many commanders means the server gets split into small groups and then we may as well have no commander.

The commander leads the zerg, full of random players (we call them “militia” on TC), while guilds are like special forces teams, sometimes operating on their own, sometimes coordinating with the commanders, sometimes doing boring, thankless tasks, sometimes running with the zerg or fielding their own commanders, creating a strong core of the zerg.

While the rally mechanic does make a few mindless stragglers less welcome, I believe we all recognize that there is still value in numbers, and leaving 20+ people in a borderland to wander leaderlessly is a waste of resources. It’s better to risk a few rallies and have someone wear a tag than leave the whole server a patchwork of unaffiliated tiny groups who all get swallowed up by the enemy zerg 1 by 1.

While the rally does punish fools, and their associates, it also allows for battles to turn, rather than simply going to the bigger force, or the one that struck harder first. If a group is losing a battle, a quick focus fire and rally can give them a chance to regroup and change things. Meanwhile it makes stomps an important element of cementing a victory. If you just steamroll through a group, you may down many of them, but if you don’t take the time to finish them, it won’t matter. This adds richness and depth to combat, and the social consequences are not very dire at all.

Far too many times I’ve lost a kill because a person begins reviving their buddy before I can get a stomp off. I used to love the downed state, but I’ve recently grown to despise it due to preferring to run in 2-3 man roaming squads. Countless times we run into other groups and it becomes a rezzing stalemate, because having 2 people reviving one person gets that person up in roughly 2 seconds.

The very, very best “downed” system I’ve ever played was that of Star Wars Galaxies and its incapacitated state that worked as such:

When your health hit 0, you became incapacitated for 10 seconds. No one would be able to help you during this time, and you were open for an enemy to death blow you by clicking the corpse, which was instantaneous. If the death blow was not delivered, you revived with roughly 10% health and the “Weakened” debuff, which remained for 60 seconds; dying with this debuff would circumvent the incapacitated state and result in an instant death.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Deniara Devious.3948:

Upleveled characters should be able to access WvWvW. Player skill is more important than his level or gear.

Lol. Tell me. When did you last time got beaten by an upscale ? xD

Should I post some screens of me beating higher levels? It isn’t hard for people that actually PvP (spvp,tpvp) to beat people in wvw even with an uplevel. Just because people are in wvw doesn’t mean they know how to pvp. In fact it seems the opposite is mostly true.

Sure level makes a difference, but to say you can’t beat someone when you are upleveled just reeks of carebear.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Should I post some screens of me beating higher levels? It isn’t hard for people that actually PvP (spvp,tpvp) to beat people in wvw even with an uplevel. Just because people are in wvw doesn’t mean they know how to pvp. In fact it seems the opposite is mostly true.

Sure level makes a difference, but to say you can’t beat someone when you are upleveled just reeks of carebear.

This thread is not about 1v1’s and small scale wvw, in case you didn’t know.

My guild has practiced running tagless and want to continue to do so. We use the poor man’s tag in this situation where everyone groups up and call targets the raid leader. This puts a red Tag on the target that is only visible to us. There are a few benefits to this.
1. When there is another commander on the map with his tag up you can have the militia (pugs you call em) go to that commander so that the resources are better split up.
2. We’ve had issues with spies on our map giving away our position. It is blatantly obvious when a certain guild manages to ambush you every time perfectly. Therefore we tag down, do a random waypoint to lose any spies that might be pugging in our group, then keep going.
3. It lets those of us who don’t have a commander tag lead a raid.
4. For supply camp raids we can avoid angering commanders on the map who are trying to do something more productive.

It’s not for the rallying, at least for me, that I would run tagless. It is for the reasons above.

GSSBlunaspike.4153:

Should I post some screens of me beating higher levels? It isn’t hard for people that actually PvP (spvp,tpvp) to beat people in wvw even with an uplevel. Just because people are in wvw doesn’t mean they know how to pvp. In fact it seems the opposite is mostly true.

Sure level makes a difference, but to say you can’t beat someone when you are upleveled just reeks of carebear.

One significant problem with uplevels is that crit magnitude hits like a truck dropping on them. In our skirmish group when I am running fully stacked, I one or two shot most greenies. Skill cannot easily compensate for a 12k crit. I am sure a good player always has a chance, but the DPS on a green player is massive compared to an exotic’d 80. It is bad enough that most times I will down state them and then walk away because it isn’t fair (course not all on my team are so kind).

Almost as bad is that most greenies hit like a wet noodle. I see that green up arrow and it is like chum in the water because 999 times out of a 1000 (probably more) I win that fight. It isn’t skill either because my build is running with a lot more of every stat and higher damaging weapons.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Lol. Tell me. When did you last time got beaten by an upscale ? xD

Today.

They come in large numbers and swarm around you like angry wasps.

But seriously as a PuG commander I have never told anybody to stop following or leave me no matter how low level he/she is. I have even had level 2 guardian in my party. Yes, his armor was paper and he had just one weapon with 3 skills, so that was bad. But he wasn’t useless. He could still carry 10 supplies and build stuff as fast as level 80. WvWvW should remain accessible for everybody.

Low level characters can beat level 80s. Just look at these videos:
Ranger 12 solo play in WvWvW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEF69Fewgmg
Engineer 11 soloing in WvWvW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQY0cK8KrVk

If you get your low level the optimal gear for his level (which very few people do), the stats actually scale surprisingly well. Stat wise you are pretty much the same, but you are missing traits and skills.

^^This guy knows whats up.

Uplvled people are useful in wvw for many things, running supplies, repairing, building and managing siege.

I’ve seen plenty of uplvled people hold their own better in wvw than a lot of non up lvled people I have seen. Stats scale pretty well in general.

I lvled my mesmer from 30+ in wvw a lot and never had much trouble, sure 1 on 1 up lvled vs non the nons going to win most of the time but I was able to win periodically on my uplvled. Not to mention it helped me develop a play style for my mesmer I would not have been able to develop in pve. Now I can wtfpwn on my mesmer in wvw.

Removing downed state seems silly to me, its not all that bad in wvw.

We are an organized guild on voice coms, but we encourage pugs to jump on Team Speak and run with us. It’s not that the other team will rally off of one person, we just want to teach our entire server the type of combat tactics we use to better everyone else. In fact, if a pug can keep up with us and not die so easily we use that opportunity to try to recruit that person, at which point we help them get their build straight and show them how we roll.

If your organized guild group can’t handle a couple rally’s, youre doing something wrong hahaha

I think it shouldn’t be removed tbh; normally guilds don’t run with commander tag up anyway cos that means blobtown – might be different in NA, but here in EU we dislike blobtown… Well mostly… Cough cough Germany cough… some people enjoy playing without constant skill lag and feeling like they’re playing on PowerPoint rather than GW2.

I think guilds are entitled to play with who they want, if they’re arrogant and mean about it then yknow, that’s their problem… I have a leg on either side of the fence, and never had any misgivings, you get the infantry and you get the guilds, it’s conventional warfare In my opinion it is healthy for guild’s commanders to get involved in the community a lot and lead infantry relatively often, as well as their own guild, that way fingers can’t be pointed at them for being ‘isolationist’. A good attitude is helpful as well…

The only time I dislike the rally thing is if fighting 2+ decent thieves alone, because he dual shadow refuge, stealthed and downed skills make it impossible to win, plus they can just get out of the fight whenever they need to. (Normally 2 or more I’m struggling to survive anyway if they’re of backstab/hs spam variety.)

Limit number of possible rallies per kill to 5. Priority to those who have caused damage to the target while themselves in downed state. Second priority simple proximity.

Fixed and balanced.

Now gimme a cookie.

Calae.1738:

Svarty.8019:

The rally mechanic as it stands is breaking WvW communities. I think Arenanet need to address the issue.

If 20 players tag 1 target and all 20 players go into a downed state; the second that target goes down all 20 players rally.

Probably the most idiotic mechanic I have ever seen in the history of gaming.

I notice that this kind of argument is MOST predominant for justifying that rally is breaking the game. Let I tell you that, if one player allows 20 players to TAG him in amongst a crowd (not to mention the HUGE amount of damage 20 players would do on 1 single player) and still be alive long enough for the 20 other players to DOWN and rally off him, that player is either doing something RIGHT or the 20 others are doing something very wrong.

In reality, a single player is at most tagged by <5 players in a RALLY situation. Also this is where teamwork comes to play, I don’t let that 1 player down so that 5 others will rally. If a player does die, I don’t go “omg that noob player is making us lose”, instead I think, kitten , I couldn’t save him before it was too late. That is how a team-player should think. When a group fails, it’s no individuals fault, the whole group all has to accept some responsibility.

Also, big groups will always naturally have an advantage against smaller groups because.. enough said.

One last thing is, why do people always assume that only they have PuGs and others don’t? Everyone has pugs, a lot of this game runs on the ability to be pug friendly…

Unless you are running with your guild exclusively then maybe not. But to be honest, the advantages of an extra dpser/support/player farrrrr outweighs the disadvantage of them being down. That 10 extra supplies alone that they carry is OP already.

Just think about it the next time you down and there is a healing rubbing right above you… then you gasp in horror as you realise it is a up-leveled pug player saving your kitten.

Upleveled is awful for anyone who actually wants to win WvW.

If your Commander and his group doesn’t want upleveled, then you shouldn’t be there. Why are you imposing yourself on others? (In this case, probably the majority) Especially when you know you cannot perform on the same level?

You guys must all be on high tier servers where you have so many players that you get to choose who and what you want. Down here, we fight with what we have and welcome all to join. I must say though, im glad I’m down here now.

Lafiel.9372:

You guys must all be on high tier servers where you have so many players that you get to choose who and what you want. Down here, we fight with what we have and welcome all to join. I must say though, im glad I’m down here now.

Desolation is EU rank 6 and strangely it seems our rank won’t even fall from this (maybe stops to rank 7). So this would imply that we are a high tier server. But I can tell you that as a PuG commander I am very happy to get anybody to join, especially if they can follow orders and do their job.

We normally have no queues to any map, except Eternal Battlegrounds, in prime (EU evening time). In fact outmanned “buff” is our best friend, +10% more WXP.

I can imagine the situation is totally different in NA. And I know most other top EU servers have queues and full maps and today noon I was once again admiring 40+ ER group vs 10 of us. I heard that Visunah players usually have 2-3 hour queue to enter the map in the evening. With so drastic difference in number of players and being mostly just PuG teams one could assume we are losing by many hundred thousand points per week, but we aren’t.