Guild Wars 2

Add “counters” to deployed siege. A “counter” is given when a player interacts with the deployed siege and clicks an ability on it that says “veto.” If a piece of deployed siege reaches 20 “counters” it is dismantled and the supply is put back into the maps spawn location supply depot. No player may vote on any one piece of deployed siege more than once.

Siege built with multiple people (3+) don’t count towards exhaustion.

Add a player portrait option right click, ignore functionality to players to not see/not build those ignored players dropped bundles.

Add “this siege is owned by” description tag and state the player name that dropped the siege on the non-fully built siege placement (if you do nothing else, add this ASAP).

We also need to consider that traps (which also consumes supply) also need to be part of the siege trolling/exhaustion discussion.

IMO, 3 minutes to fully remove exhaustion is not long enough.

The owner of deployed siege is already tracked, since owners can boot people off siege they deployed, right?

So allow people to report deployed siege itself as a troll placement. These reports would then reflect on the owner/deployer of that siege. Reports would then be handled the same as any other reported complaints about a player.

3 minutes would not be enough to stop a troll placing siege and taking supplies. Sometimes these trolls will put their stuff in places far from camps. By the time it takes for them to go from their siege to the supply source, they may have ran out.

The exhaustion system would ease the problem by slowing down single trolls, but not with entire groups of them. Siege trolls rarely go in really big groups, though.

Also, many commanders recive siege donations from other players and set the siege themselves. This would make their ob impossible.

So, that exhaustion system would need some changes to make exceptions possible for commanders without allowing a single commander to still troll.

First, changes wold have to be made so there’s no reason not to join a squad:

- Add a setting to show other tags while already in a squad.
- Make it so blocking a commander hides their tag.

This way we can have different tags on a map at the same time. People can join a squad and still see other tags on screen, there’s no more reasons not to join for those who still want to see other tags.

Then, we need to give commanders more control over their squads, so trolls can’t mess with them:

- Give commanders an extra list in their contacts panel with all members of their squad, allowing them to see their profession and their supplies, and allowing them to kick people out the squad.
- Make it so people you blocked can’t see your tag or join your squad.

This way commanders have more control over who’s in the squad and can kick out trolls, making more appealing for them to use the squad and its tools.

Now that we have that:

- Increase exhaustion duration from 3 minutes to something like 10 or 15 minutes each stack.
- Commanders will have their exhaustion cap increased by 1 for every players in the squad, up to a max of 25.
- Allow commanders to destroy siege when they have at least a certain number players in their squad (at least 20 or so). Destroying siege also adds to exhaustion.

Now, players can join squads and see other players in squads, those going solo can still put siege, just not at much, and commanders can still put lots of siege when followed by people if they convince people to join the squad. And if a troll sets a badge to lure people into joining so they can bypass siege exhaustion too, then as soon as people realize that they can leave the squad, block the troll, and get a legit commander to remove that siege.

John, I kinda like your exhaustion solution as that would prevent spamming siege, but like many people have said, a lot of servers/guilds have a policy of only having the commander throw siege. This seems natural since they are the only ones that can check supply that they are the ones managing it for their group.

There are plenty of times when I come up to a structure and will throw 5 rams or 5 catapults to try and rush a capture before the enemy server can react. And there are times that I will throw down 4-5 arrow carts/ballistae to defend something if there are a lot of enemies and my group is outnumbered, but we have enough supply. We still need this capability as commanders (or as group leaders, even without a tag), so the solution we end up with must take these scenarios into account.

EDIT: I just want to add that the siege trolls that people are mentioning are so blatantly obvious that many people have screenshots and videos of these people placing and building siege, and even bragging about it. While every server probably has these trolls, we only have a couple that are such a large problem on my server, and everyone knows who they are. I feel like these specific accounts could be reprimanded by GMs without needing to invest many man-hours into determining guilt and issuing punishment.

How about a timer on how much supply you can take from a keep? No more than 20 supply in a minute? Enough to slow down the trolls but not overly inhibit a player’s ability to defend/repair.

If you consistently hit the limit, maybe 5 times within 10 minutes then you get locked out of the keep supply for a half hour? It would stop trolls, but a zerg should still have enough people to rotate through getting supply so this limit isn’t hit.

This would be a limit on the character. So me hitting the limit wouldn’t affect my teammate or commander and vice versa.

Labeling the siege and having some sort of reporting option that allows players to police themselves should work.

It would have to be that you can only report in WvW and only report your own server, since it would otherwise be possible to abuse. So many reports could give dishonored and unable to join WvW or a home borderland or something. So many dishonored on an account and it brings up a GM alert or something. It would need to be structured though that so many fake accounts can’t take out an enemy commander.

There are no ways I can think of to punish siege trolls without punishing actual faithful defenders which are rare and valuable, without putting it in the hands of players.

-allow reporting of griefing/siege trolls.
-a way to track how many sieges or supplies used by a character or an account
-a human GM to investigate if there is a large numbers of reports on someone. (I heard GMs are getting more active and involved in game eh?)

I’d suggest upscaled characters should not be allowed to deploy siege.
I would also suggest restricting deployment by WvW rank. Say, you have to be over WvW Rank 100 to deploy siege.

That’s beneficial for the new players since they won’t waste valuable stuff not knowing what it is, but also for everyone else because less weird siege placements by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Siege use permissions option in the guild panel (where ranks are made)? I know there is potential for an individual to have their own guild and place using that… Maybe there are ways to deal with it, if all siege is tagged by the placing guild.

I cannot think of any preventative mechanic that wouldn’t cause more problems for people playing the game as intended; things like supply caps or siege caps per player would be unnecessarily burdensome, especially as on more organized maps all siege placements tend to be funneled through a few individuals.

This is something that is best policed by the community; there are relatively few siege trolls, and a minimal, intelligent system should be able to deal with it after the fact.

Basics being:

- Players can report other players or siege placements as siege trolling.

- Players that receive X (some small number of reports) reports, either directly or indirectly through their placements, are blocked from using supply camps and from placing siege for some period of time.

Additionally:

- Reports from the same player diminish in value with the number of reports they submit; reports from ‘chronic reporters’ have less weight than those from occasional reporters.

- Reports from players who have received many reports similarly have a lower weight than those from unreported players.

- Commanders with followers require a progressively higher number of reports to be labeled a siege troll.

The latter set being a set of anti-abuse metrics; you don’t see a lot of ‘teams’ of siege trolls out there, so pretty low thresholds should be sufficient to keep them from report abuse.

As there are many more players in the game playing as intended, isolated false positives mean very little; they can keep fighting, and are only locked out from supply interactions. Siege trolls, of course, are locked out of trolling.

With minimal intelligence (look at various honoring systems out there for diminishing returns and fighting honor trading) and escalating lockouts I imagine this would handle most of the problems without too much collateral damage.

Exhaustion would impair an EotM karma-train commander, who shoulders the burden of deploying rams for the zerg. Maybe the best idea would be to just have the reported trolls investigated, and for the guilty ones to be warned/suspended/banned from WvW

I think there should also be a feature that, if someone is found to be a siege troll and found guilty multiple times, they should have some sort of punishment or ban on building siege or even WvW/EOTM itself. No one likes trolls.

Edit: What Ensign.2189 said was good.

Skulkin.6827:

The owner of deployed siege is already tracked, since owners can boot people off siege they deployed, right?

So allow people to report deployed siege itself as a troll placement. These reports would then reflect on the owner/deployer of that siege. Reports would then be handled the same as any other reported complaints about a player.

That’s a brilliant idea. Each building site has a ‘placed by -player name here-’ so it’s easily reportable. Brilliant! I support this very much.

Dude you play with sfr ?…

Reporting won’t do anything. Anet won’t ban a player for simply placing siege. Besides, we already know their names…

Cake.4920:

TexZero.7910:

I have explicitly said defensive siege for the following reason. Siege that is used to assault ie. Cata’s / Rams / Trebs should never be inside a keep or utilized for Defensive purposes. These should have a no build indicator inside keeps as the promote stagnate and ways to defend that cripple the offensive aspect.

Trebs do significant damage to other siege for a reason you know, they are very much intended to be used for both offensive and defensive purposes.

They also negate the usefulness of having meaningful offensive siege. They also horrendously stagnate assaulting with 0 risk associated with them by means of firing through solid objects and utilizing massive splash radii.

The goal here is to make siege meaningful and tactical not abusive.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. The single biggest action that Anet can implement to reduce trolling is putting a fast trigger on the ban hammer.

There have been several situations where massive numbers of people were banned due to exploiting market/crafting bugs. Due to these situations, the entire playerbase is now (rightfully so) extremely wary of exploiting things that smell like bugs, for fear of getting banned.

On the other hand, I literally have not heard of a single instance of a troller/hacker in WvW getting banned, from the beginning of the game until now. What this means is that Anet is sending a clear message to people: “We will not ban you for any reason, please troll/hack/grief as you like.”

In order to change that message, there needs to be an incredibly strict banning policy with regards to trolling/griefing/hacking. Once people start getting permabans for this behavior, the number of people doing it will drop off precipitously.

I think a big thing would be education on what siege engines do and where they are useful. When I first got to WvW (at like level 40ish) I was building trebuchets in really stupid locations because HOLY CRAP I CAN BUILD A TREBUCHET!!! and I didn’t know better. Having some sort of tutorial/testing map to actually understand why they exist and what they do would be really nice for new players and cut down on some unintentional trolling.

TexZero.7910:

Cake.4920:

TexZero.7910:

I have explicitly said defensive siege for the following reason. Siege that is used to assault ie. Cata’s / Rams / Trebs should never be inside a keep or utilized for Defensive purposes. These should have a no build indicator inside keeps as the promote stagnate and ways to defend that cripple the offensive aspect.

Trebs do significant damage to other siege for a reason you know, they are very much intended to be used for both offensive and defensive purposes.

They also negate the usefulness of having meaningful offensive siege. They also horrendously stagnate assaulting with 0 risk associated with them by means of firing through solid objects and utilizing massive splash radii.

The goal here is to make siege meaningful and tactical not abusive.

Sure, they probably weren’t meant to fire at rams on gates, but they’re purpose is to counter enemy trebs/catas. If they couldn’t be used for that, attackers would pretty much have a free way into every tower/keep as long as they outnumber the defenders.

The game currently tracks siege and siege deployment but at present only the Trebs are shown on the map. I mentioned this before but I am going to alter it slightly to suit our purpose here.

A map of each tower/keep is created as an interface tool. One of the upgrades for a tower/keep grants you a siege mechanic. This siege mechanic’s interface, once open shows each piece of deployed siege under his control, where it is at and the time left on it before it decays. Remember this is already done behind the scenes by the game.

So now we add a radio button to refresh or dismantle each piece of siege. If 3 people (number is open for debate) click to dismantle the piece of siege is dismantled returning 50% of the supply back to tower/keep. Selection to refresh/dismantle have to be made within the first 10 minutes of every hour. The names of each person who elected to refresh or dismantle is logged in the same way Guild bank transactions are logged.

So you have 3 keeps and 4 towers per map and 3 people would have to visit each one at the top of the hour to refresh or dismantle siege. You can even extend that to 2 hours. However the person would not have to wander all over SMC for example looking for siege, it is a one stop affair.

Most of the above mechanics are in the game already, they just have to be pulled together to do what we want it to do.

Edit: As an added bonus for a nominal fee of let us say 10 Silver the Siege Mechanic will on the hour perform all repairs required to Cannons and Oils cause face it, it is frustrating when a couple of enemy, not enough to raise swords, take the cannons down to one hit remaining.

what about a credit based system, where credits are world bound, and awarded as drops? consuming world resources would consume credits. you’d give your credits to the guy you trust to build your siege.

lioka qiao.8734:

• A group of 10 or more players may vote to dismantle a siege weapon. They do this by each getting on the weapon and using a new “dismantle” skill on it. A dismantled weapon will distribute 50%(balance this return as you see fit, down to 0) of its supply cost to all nearby players once enough votes are in. If a weapon is dismantled inside a structure it will provide this return to the structure’s stockpile instead (balance this as you see fit too, to prevent “storing” supply in siege weapons).

This is still probably the Top Suggestion here, imo, and it is an idea that was brought up in early 2013 at least on these forums. People have long wanted to see something like this implemented, and there needs to be some sort of “vote process” to it, requiring at least more than 1 person for the siege to be dismantled.

(Sorry, right now I can’t read ALL the suggestions above but just want to throw mine here:)

How about giving some (more) responsibilities to the commanders? Wait, I don’t want to be polemic here, these are my ideas:

If you’re in a squad

• As you try to place a blueprint, the commander must confirm (like a yes/no join party question) its placement.
• Everyone can build on commander-allowed placed blueprints, being on squad or not.

If you’re not in a squad

• You can place whichever blueprints wherever and whenever you want.
• People can only build on a blueprint placed by someone not in a squad if they’re not in a squad either. If they want to build on that blueprint they’ll have to leave their squad (and then join again if it’s the case).

Why this would be good?
Commanders are there to command and organize. Ok, we know that much of this concept at WvW is sometimes applied as a pointless zerg magnet, even more after the 300g announcement. Still, they must have some control on how siege plays on certain attack/defense scene. With a commander restriction on what can be built on that battle scene things will probably go more as intended by the commander.

But most people aren’t in a squad, they’ll continue to place blueprints and, since most people aren’t on squads, everyone will build. What gives?
As I understand it, people go on zergs for two reasons:

1. Protection, after all you can’t face an enemy zerg alone.
2. Strategy, they trust someone (the commander if one is present) is creating something worth doing.
   And it’s just too easy to do it. You join a zerg, maybe go intelligently as the group approaches things or maybe YOLO it and do your thing alone (probably dying in the process). I believe that, with the commander having more control on how things go inside his/her squad, it’ll make people want to join the squad. After all, things are actually managed there.

That said, let’s pretend this was implemented:

1. Commanders start to build squads that place and build only intended siege pieces.
2. In time, it’ll be known that Commanders actually control how attack/defense siege strategies go.
3. People joining WvW worried about winning it will probably follow commanders zergs as usual. Blueprint placed? They will be “safe” from accidently buiding troll siege blueprints if they’re on commanders squads. If they’re not in squads they’ll eventually learn they should be on one by /map chat or game guides. If even then they can’t figure that out, well – sorry but that’s too clueless for WvW IMHO.
4. If the above is confirmed, people not in a squad will see that most people don’’t build their siege blueprints, since most are on squads.
5. Siege trolls will be there and still placing blueprints, but the people who actually are with the commander and following the commander strategy won’t build it because they can’t – unless they actively leave the squad.

Ok, I know this would demand a lot of new stuff, but in my honest opinion: it’s what being a Commander is about. If a Commander can’t control how siege is placed on attack/defense then I think it’s really a (now colorful) dorito on the map being a zerg magnet. Good commanders deal with this lack of control and make things happen, but kinda hard for them sometimes.

I really think there must be some way to Commanders have some control on siege placement (and no, I don’t have a tag myself, but I trust 70% of the commanders I’ve met so far).

Tiffany.8576:

See, I knew this would happen. Rather than just dealing with the tiny minority of people who perpetuate abuse by handing out bans (trust me, only a few bans would be enough to make people think this wasn’t so cool anymore), we’re gonna end up with a convoluted system which penalizes everyone and makes it a lot more annoying to legitimately siege up our towers and keeps.

gg.

That may deter some people. But when the game goes on sale for 24.99 regularly it is easy enough to buy an extra account or two. Some people may not see this as worth it if that account gets banned. To many though, that extra account being banned would be worth the damage they caused before the ban.

Also totally agree these accounts should be reported, then checked on, then banned when caught. It still won’t fix the problem though.

Maybe vote to kick system? if 10, 20(?) ppl vote to kick someone, he cant join Wvw for 20 minutes?

Only took 2 years for the first useful post from the WvW team. Thank you.

Siege trolling hardly seems like a problem. I have yet to see it having an impact on the matchup end results.

Here are my thoughts for prevent trolling/taking of Keep/Tower Supplies.

First, Allow the claiming guild lock down keep/tower supplies to 3 options, Locked for All, Open for Guild, Open for All. This will prevent trolls from draining supplies from keeps/towers.

Second, add a claiming cost of guild influence for guilds to have a keep/tower claimed. This will prevent a trolling person from claiming and holding a tower/keep since they likely won’t have the guild influence to do so.

lioka qiao.8734:

• A group of 10 or more players may vote to dismantle a siege weapon. They do this by each getting on the weapon and using a new “dismantle” skill on it. A dismantled weapon will distribute 50%(balance this return as you see fit, down to 0) of its supply cost to all nearby players once enough votes are in. If a weapon is dismantled inside a structure it will provide this return to the structure’s stockpile instead (balance this as you see fit too, to prevent “storing” supply in siege weapons).

I think this is a about the best idea I’ve read so far but to make it a lil better I think you should get some type of counter each time you vote to dismantle a piece of siege. After you get to 3 or 5 even, you can’t vote again for 1-2hrs. This way you couldn’t have a 10 man troll squad come into a server and just dismantle all defensive siege on the map.

The solution is simple: use players rank

Use the player’s WvW rank to allow the amount of supply they pick up based on a timer. For example a rank 10 player is allowed 1 supply per 1 hour. A rank 100 player is allowed 10 supply per 5 min and so on….

Wow a post talking about a problem player have been complaining about for 2 years! I almost died! Or is it April?!

Well it’s a pretty complex thing to fix really. We cant report them, we cant kick them, so what can we do?

Well you could add a reporting option for siege trolling in the report options (also for hackers!). If a player receives too many reports, they are kicked from WvW for 1 hour. But then what happens in busy servers?
I have heard of guild reporting players from others guilds for selling gold, when they werent, but those who were falsely reported, some of them ended up banned from the game and had to contact support.
So when there’s a big queue, this reporting function will be abused by some guilds to help reduce queue times, or kick members from other guilds they dont like; just because you’re in the same server doesnt mean you are all friends.

But truly, the only way you are going to get through such issues is to have dedicated GMs who can be contacted ingame and who can then go to the player in question and see for themselves.

Though seeing as we’ve not seen fixes for so many other issues, I have very little hope a fix will be made for this either.

This isn’t that common a problem.

Put the name of the builder on the siege, have a reporting option and then actually police the reporting system instead of just ignoring it

Quells.2498:

The player only has to claim ignorance and then Anet as a company is liable for discrimination.

Uhh… I really doubt that anyone, anywhere at Anet is worried about this. GW2 has seen more players banned over short periods of time than any game I have ever played, for things that oftentimes were not the most obvious exploits. I’m not suggesting banning people (though I VERY MUCH liked someone’s “Ban them from WvW-only for a few weeks” idea), but I don’t think any sort of “liability” issue is what’s preventing Siege Trolls from being banned. It probably has more to do with the number of people required to police WvW.

John Corpening.9847:

Let’s talk about Siege Trolls and what we can do about them.

Thank you! As you can see this is a big problem in WvW and has been from the beginning. After four hours already so much feedback.

John Corpening.9847:

Can we come up with a system that doesn’t involve constant policing from GMs?

This is the biggest issue we have. Trolls make only use of the game mechanics. They act inside the rules while doing things that offend most other players. Solutions based on the game mechanics will in almost every case have a bad effect for the “regular” players as well.

Example: Your first attempt to solve the problem was, to make all siege disappear after 30 min. This also effected the regular players because one had to check for the defence every 25 min while defending. There was some support from the player base for this solution, but the timer was too short and was increased to 60 min. (except rams). Still this solution has a bad effect on the regular players because good defence can despawn in times of inactivity. This causes the need of a player restting the timers regularly and getting no rewards for it. (Scouting is one of the most important jobs in WvW and is not rewarded at all. In contrast it is the most pricy and boring way of playing the game.)

Almost every tecnical solution can be misused by trolls as well. Some solutions mentioned here have an additional democratic aspect to their tecnical function. As trolling is a community issue this is maybe where we have to search for a final solution. When thinking of solutions, always try to think about:

1. How does this solution effect regular players in a negative way?
2. How can this solution be misused by trolls?
3. How will the solution help with the issues caused by trolls?

Threfore let’s give the problems you mentioned a nuber:

1. Creating Siege to hit the siege cap
2. Creating the wrong type of siege to hit area siege caps
3. Spending supply on needless siege to drain supply depots
4. Dropping siege on top of legitimate siege build sites

Assigning this way of thinking to your solution:

To kick off the brainstorm I’ll throw out this idea:

1. When a player places a piece of siege they receive a stack of “Exhaustion”
2. A stack of “Exhaustion” expires after three minutes
3. If a player has three stacks of “Exhaustion” they can no longer place siege

1. Negative issues for the community?
Offensively a commander places siege. He has info about the supplys in his squad and knows how many supplies he can spend. With this solution he can only place 3 sieges within 3 minites. When attacking a garrison in higher tier during prime time, 3 rams are a joke. The community would probably have to apply ram throwers within the zerg. maybe this would work, but it would add some additional organization needed for running in larger groups.
Defensively mostly one player is dedicated for building defensive siege while upgrading a tower. If he wants to build some arrowcarts for defending he has to wait some time to place all of them, but three defensive sieges within three minutes is ok, I think.

2. Possible abuse by trolls?
Trolls can not force someone to throw a siege. Therefore there is no misuse possible.

3. Problems solved?
This solution may decline the effect of problems no 1, 2 and 3, but not neglect it as it takes time to drain a supply depot anyway. It will result in unfirable trebouchtes rather than bad placed ballistas, but it won’t solve the problem 2 and 3 completely. Problem 4 can not be solved with this at all as 3 sieges every 3 minutes is enough to troll the others.

My conclusion: Your solution will not solve the problem and the negative offensive effect neglects the small positive effect by far.

Let’s think about the opposite solution:

How about exhaustion be applied upon using supplies instead of dropping the siege? I can pretty much drop 3 trebs and waste 300 supplies under the 3 minute frame.

1. Negative issues for the community?
The negative effect is found in repairing and building good defence. For repairing a Wall/Gate a huge group of players has to stay in the building because it will take ages for one player to repair. On the oppsite side the attackers have no pressure and can restart their attack. For building good defence a huge group has to come as well, because it will take ages for single players. Result: Attacking will be much easier than defending comparing the time to be invested in building siege. This measure will change the way this game is played completely.

2. Possible abuse by trolls?
Dropping siege on top of legitimate siege build sites will become a bigger issue, but mainly for defending. Placing a ram on top of an arrowcart site causes defence to be built much slower. Because building defensive siege is seldom a thing that needs to hurry, this is not as much of an issue.

3. Problems solved?
Problems no 1, 2 and 3 can be declined with this measure because a site despawns faster if no supplies are put into it. Problem no 4 can become a bigger issue for building defensive siege as well, because defensive siege needs to be built with a bigger group.

My conclusion:
Repairing walls and building siege/golems will become a problem for smaller groups. This will shift the game, but this will not be gamebreaking. Some people will be complaining. Thinking about a limit of 50 supplies within 2 minutes, it would take 68 minutes to drain a garrison with 1700 supplies. One player can not take out more supplies than 2 dolyaks are bringing in. Commanders have to take care about defensive siege and repairing as well and can no longer delegate this work to single players. This solution would give attacks from range on a fully spplied tower or garrison a higher success rate. Repairing walls in small groups until the supplies are drained would be no longer possible.

this may be a solution fo building siege and draining structures from supllies, but it is not a solution for placing wrong siege

How can placing the wrong siege be addressed?

I found no good quote, but the idea was already mentioned: Give a limit to the amount of siege a player can throw within a time period depending on the players that support him.
For example:

• One siege every five minutes for sigle players
• For small groups adding one siege per five minutes for every group member
• A commander can throw as many sieges as he has squad members within five minutes

1. Negative issues for the community?
The issues are very similar to the issues of reduces materials spent within a timeframe. A sigle player can no longes build either a good or a bad defence within a short period of time. He will need the support of a group or the commander to build up the defence. This means more control by other players, but also more time/players invested in building up defence.

2. Possible abuse by trolls?
Act as a troll commander and get as many people in your squad as possible and you can still throw wrong siege. Or join a group with the lfg and throw up to 5 wrong sieges within 5 minues. But it will be easier to find out who is trolling, because there are always people who can see where the troll is and have a look what he is doing an report it.

3. Problems solved?
This solution effects mainly players who act on their own. They will be limited in their effectiveness. Problems no 1-4 are all being solved or at least reduced. Trolling by single players will decline a lot. There will still be problems with bigger groups of players that are trolling.

How can small groups that are trolling the community be addressed?

The bigger the group that is trolling the more it becomes a problem. They throw more sieges, they build them faster, they comunicate with each other and celebrate their trolling. The more the marrier.

I can’t think of a solution for this issue.

1. An easy to use reporting function. Not the mess we have to go through now.
2. Log who placed siege, and where
3. Make an example of the worst and most blatant offenders

One thing that seems to cause so many problems is the size of the build site. If a person or persons drop several siege, you can’t click around it. What about making it so, when it is first dropped, it is a small box, with an arrow and the name of both the type of siege and the person dropping it. Then, when someone else (not the same person) clicks it that has supply, the build begins, and gets bigger, so more can click? If the person that needs to build it is the same person, they have to wait 1 minute or so before they can start the build. Since someone doing it solo would be planning to run back and forth to supply, this should create no hardship.

That would make it harder for the siege trolls to bury supply depots or block legitimate siege with their trolling.

John Corpening.9847:

3. If a player has five stacks of “Exhaustion” they can no longer place siege

For how long?

John Corpening.9847:

4. If a player downs an enemy, destroys siege, breaks down a wall or gate their exhaustion is cleared

These are all things that generally take more than 3 minutes after you’ve built a piece of siege anyway, their positive effect will be minimal.

John Corpening.9847:

5. A commander’s exhaustion is reduced by 30 seconds for each member of his squad

THIS! This will work very well on many servers, although I do not know if it will be a problem for low-population servers or not. If we had an exhaustion system that combined “A commander’s exhaustion is reduced by 30 seconds for each member of his squad” WITH the ability for a group to vote to break down siege for more supply, I think we’d be on the right track. This would significantly lower the effect that Siege Trolls have on WvW (even though it doesn’t really stop them), while not ending the way many servers currently play (such as having Commanders throw out siege when attacking).

I think anything that potentially hampers legitimate placement and building of siege is likely to be very counterproductive. As an example a guildee and I have often quickly sieged up an empty keep before and tried to cover as many possible breach points as we can. That can involve up to 8 trebs and 16 superior ac’s, which we’ve completed in about 20-25 minutes. The initial depletion of supply from this can be quite substantial but we’ve never had complaints from the server about it as the benefits are greater than the negatives. We also often take responsibility for upgrading and sieging a keep on reset so i’m all to aware of the problems that lack of supply can cause

Conversely I’ve also seen keeps emptied to build rams an walls and all the other types of griefing mentioned in the thread so far.

My suggestions

add an identifier to siege prints when dropped “press F to build trebuchet” etc or even a different base appearance to a siege site when placed for different siege weapons which would make it easier for people to be selective about what they build.

A claiming guild (keeps towers etc) should be allowed to dismantle troll siege and similarly to avadore suggests have an option to lock down siege placement within that keep or open it for all. This would also give guilds another incentive to claim keeps.

Have a system that would enable the forced “unclaiming” of keeps if , for example 10 guilds voted to disallow the claim then the keep revert to unclaimed. This would hopefully avoid siege trolls claiming a keep to drain supply and allow servers to in some ways police themselves (reducing the amount of GM involvement)

Add “griefing” as an option in the report options because unfortunately there will always be those who think that its fun to throw down 20 ballistas on a ram build site. While that might increase the workload on GM’s in the short term, if the sanctions for griefing were significant then people would be less inclined to engage in this sort of behaviour anyway?

Exhaustion just sounds like it would take a troll longer to troll and doesn’t actually solve the problem.

If having a GM go around in WvW all the time is hard, get somebody like me who will work practically for free to address these problems on the spot. Make it simple. First offense is a warning (GM’s text could be a different color as well as an Anet guild tag to show they are legit). Second is a ban from WvW for 24 hours. Third strike is a week long ban from WvW. You need to show trolls that their activity is unwanted instead of just giving them a slap on the wrist or slowing them down with “exhaustion”. Be precise and firm with your actions and if there is a problem, and the troll tries to appeal a ban, let support direct the ticket to the GM who warned/banned the player.

I’m very serious in ‘hiring’ me. I’ll make sure things stay clean and swift action is taken to cure the community of trolls. I’m unemployeed and would be more than willing to work something out with you guys.

Rashmika Els.8215:

A claiming guild (keeps towers etc) should be allowed to dismantle troll siege and similarly to avadore suggests have an option to lock down siege placement within that keep or open it for all. This would also give guilds another incentive to claim keeps.

This is another suggestion that I think works well, though it is hampered by the fact that 2nd Account trolls can still start their own guild. It would, however, give larger WvW guilds an incentive to claim Keeps and Towers quickly, and a “Despawn” or Timer on Guild Claims is a good idea (every 12 hours, for instance, things need to be “reclaimed”)

Maybe start ban a few of them that are obviously involved due to enough videos on youtube and stuff as an example and people get scared and stop to “troll” and grief.

Pertaining to dropped siege, even providing more info on the build tool tip would assist. I really don’t care who dropped the siege if it is the right siege at the right place. So instead of just “Build” on the tool tip, if it said “Build Superior Flame Ram” or “Build Arrow Cart” players would be able to self filter what siege they build.

This doesn’t stop the trolling or address the supply issue, but does address the issue when trolls drop siege without negatively affecting other players,

My suggestion would be to put the name of the siege above it, instead of having to find it among the mess of siege thats been thrown down. On top of this, also put the name of the person that threw down the siege with the name of the siege, so people can themselves keep track of whos throwing down what, and whos being a troll or not. If someone is found to have thrown down a ton of siege and generally being a troll, we can report them and have them dealt with. Stopping people from throwing down a large amount of siege by mechanics would be problematic, because commanders do this alot.

An alternative solution would be to scrap blueprints outright. And use WvW abilities to determine the ability to ‘drop’ plans thereby aleviating the problem of commanders having to drop everything. Basically when you put 1 point into say ram mastery, it would allow you to drop rams, if you put in the full 75 points you would be able to drop superior siege rams. This would make it so that only those that are actually spec’d into it would be able to throw down the siege and would stop some of the trolls. Along with this you could also make it as you had with exhaustion to top anymore trolling.

even if you reduce commander exhaustion it is going to be detrimental to scouts and small group ninja roamers.

I am a huge fan of the player tribunal idea that’s been thrown out there. I would say that empowering the players to police themselves is probably the easiest way to solve the issue. The way I see it working is this:

1. Add siege trolling to the report menu.

2. Once a player is reported X number of times they are put on trial by their peers.

3. Map information would have to be recorded at all times, which I imagine you guys do anyway. It could be very simple, with just a birds-eye view of the map, the location of the offender, and the location and type of siege dropped over a given period of time(the past 5-10 minutes). The “jurors” would be able to watch the simplified “replay” and determine by majority rule to pardon or punish the offender.

4. If punished, the case would move to higher review.

5. A juror “ranking” could be established by tracking how often a juror makes a ruling that aligns with the final GM ruling. The highest ranked jurors could be separated into a second tier court, to further ease the burden on GMs.

6. Pay the jury… a daily achievement point, gold, gems, wvw tournament claim tickets, black lion scraps. As long as the reward matches the time it takes, people will be willing to do it.

Otokomae.9356:

Rashmika Els.8215:

A claiming guild (keeps towers etc) should be allowed to dismantle troll siege and similarly to avadore suggests have an option to lock down siege placement within that keep or open it for all. This would also give guilds another incentive to claim keeps.

This is another suggestion that I think works well, though it is hampered by the fact that 2nd Account trolls can still start their own guild. It would, however, give larger WvW guilds an incentive to claim Keeps and Towers quickly, and a “Despawn” or Timer on Guild Claims is a good idea (every 12 hours, for instance, things need to be “reclaimed”)

I was thinking there should be a cost so a lone/small group of trolls cannot support a claimed keep. Typically trolls are not with the real players that take the tower/keep so the real players will have first chance to claim.

The siege placement trolling problem would be reduced as well if we can prevent them from getting the supplies to build the siege in the first place.

From day one I always wished there was more guild control over WvW objects which this lacks in GW2.

No solution will be perfect but Anet is looking for some way to resolve or minimize the problem without direct GM intervention.

I admit I haven’t read every response to this thread, however:

I think the exhaustion idea is an ok start, but the largest problem with it is commanders that throw down four or five rams, or 10 golums, or arrow carts for defense.

I am a regular commander for a server in Tier 1. Currently in my inventory I have 400+ superior rams, 400+ superior ACs, 250 alpha golums, 100+ omega golums, 100+ guild catapults and 250 stack of every other type of siege including super trebs and regular siege. I have this because as a commander I’m responsible for throwing down the siege based on the strategies required of the map.

My solution:

Implement exhaustion as stated by the first post, however add to it an exception for tagged up commanders with a certain number of players joined to their squad. I would suggest no less than 10, no more than 20.

This would mean that any organized group, that are trusting their commander to throw the correct siege would also trust him enough to join his squad and allow him to throw unlimited siege. Sure any troll can buy a tag, but can they get 10 or 15 people to join their squad and be complicit in trolling their server? I think that is much less likely.

Sure it is a pain in the butt for commanders, we would have to make sure everyone joins squad, but it will build to a habit soon enough, and if it is kept at 10 to enable unlimited siege, I think that is a small price to pay to limit trolling.