Guild Wars 2

As far as reporting trolls goes, just having a “report —> siege trolling” button doesn’t give the system or a gm quite enough information. I think it would be more useful to have a system similar to /bug, where you have to put in a description of what is happening. Maybe requiring at least 50 characters of text.

Also, what protections would be in place for a jerk who calls out in map chat “OMG! Player-A is siege trolling! Quick, everyone report them!” when Player-A is doing no such thing; the jerk just happens to someone who has a grudge against Player-A?

Other than that, I do like the ideas that:

• all siege contain the name of the person who dropped it
• the interact dialogue for siege contain the name of the siege (“build flame ram” rather than “build”)

Also, this discussion is clearly marked as being about “siege trolls”; is there any possibility of discussing command trolling? In EotM there are often commander trolls who DELIBERATELY try to misdirect the masses by putting instructions in team chat, tagging up and leading people off a hard-to-see cliff, splitting the zerg because they don’t know which dorito is the right one to follow, etc. I’m not trying to start that discussion here, and if we focus on the reporting functions rather than siege changes, it will help with command trolls. I just want to be sure that alternate forms of wvw trolling will be addressed along with the siege trolling.

all that’s needed is human intervention i.e. the dev responding to the reports made by the people on the server. there are not many trolls, but when they are active i do believe the dev would receive so much reports. dev can just log in and check on the reported troll and apply necessary ban hammer. probably not a permanent ban, but may be 2 months ban from WvW….

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

Asking questions like this make me want to play the game less than I do nowadays.

Without an active team of GMs to police WvW, you will always have problems. You need to be more proactive in your solutions. Stop being cheapskates, Anet (it’s no secret that you guys pay your employees less than the industry average). You NEED a team of GMs to actively police WvW and to a lesser extent, sPvP.

I’ve stopped playing WvW almost entirely, because you guys refuse to put in the manpower necessary to properly referee the battlefield.

I like that ANet is asking for feedback. Unfortunately, no matter what system you pick and how you tweak the numbers, it will end up hurting legitimate play and the trolls will find a way around it. And trolls innovate much faster than ANet can add additional changes to address the new method of trolling.

Exhaustion System
(From original post). This implementation really hurts commanders of larger groups. Against a heavily upgraded and defended keep, a leader or commander is dropping multiple rams at each gate, in addition to arrow carts or other siege to destroy enemy siege. I would estimate you’d want a cap of 15 build sites in 3 minutes to prevent it from infringing on legitimate play. But with that high of a cap, it won’t affect trolls at all.

Voting System
Allow players to report someone as a troll and when a player has x troll reports, they’re locked out of building siege and ordering upgrades for y duration and the account is flagged for future GM review. However, this can be abused if you get multiple troll accounts reporting a commander. Or even legitimate guilds griefing another guild that they don’t like.

Problems with Using Commanders and Squads to Tweak Systems
Trolls that want to troll hard enough will buy a commander tag. Or use an old account with a tag (players that quit, etc). I mean, they paid money or gold to transfer an account or buy a new game copy and load it up with siege…

Not everyone uses squads due to various issues with them. In particular, not being able to see other commanders is bad and there’s a size limit to them. Forcing people into a system to avoid another problem is bad design.

Supply Count System
Get x stacks of exhaustion for creating a build site and lose y stacks for each supply that someone else uses on your build site. A stack expires after z duration. If you have more than w stacks, you can’t drop blueprints or take supply from a tower/keep/castle (supply depot is okay). Because legitimate siege has many contributors, it doesn’t hurt them much. Only lone defenders may take a hit. However, they tend to build siege which uses more supply per site than cheaper troll siege and they build it further from depots, lessening the impact. The down-side is that a group of trolls can overcome this system by building each others’ sites. Possibly adjust it to count only for unique supply, but that’s more computing resource intensive.

What Would Work?
I think a combination of the supply count system and some leniency on it if you have a commander tag on your account would work best. It would rarely infringe on legitimate use, and makes a troll’s task more costly. Also, still add a more clear report choice for hacker/saboteur to the “report” choices.

I don’t have the time right now to list all of my thoughts, but I just wanted to say thank you John for taking the time to have this discussion with us. You’re actually taking the time to read though all these posts and are making a conscious effort to fix this problem. It’s honestly very refreshing to see in these forums for once.

Also wanted to reiterate that this is an issue with a very small number of players, and an even smaller subset of those players are the ones engaging in this behavior constantly. These players are like gold sellers, you can put systems in place to deter them, but they will attempt to get around them and at the end of the day need to be removed from the game.

Ideas that I like so far are a cap on the amount of supply you can take from towers / keeps in a given time interval, and a team-wide ‘report / kick from map’. Maybe instead of getting kicked, these players would just lose the ability to interact with supply and siege weapons. Make the number of reports required quite high. Even on low-pop servers everyone hates these players, they should still be able to rally the troops if needed.

The exhaustion idea might have merit if it was able to be reduced with a large amount of players in your squad as a commander…but this would seriously hinder havoc groups. I just don’t see it as something that can be balanced for differently sized groups or populations.

Yes, more than one person with a commander could carry siege and they could alternate placing it…but when you have 3-5 people, how much siege could you place before being completely blocked? It’s just not feasible. You’d wreck havocking.

One thing that might be a big help is capping the number of supply a single person can take from a specific structure in a certain amount of time. Generally, you aren’t limited to only one supply source, unless there’s a troll draining every camp, tower, and keep. If they were only allowed to take a certain number in an hour, it would slow their drainage of keep supply by a lot.

Maybe make it scale off the current max supply of the structure or something. This should not be a map-wide limit, or it will hinder small groups trying to siege up keeps – keep it specific to each tower, keep, or camp.

I also really like the idea of adding siege names in the interact UI – seeing “Build Flame Ram” would make it so much easier to avoid “Build Ballista.” And maybe making the interact menu prioritize superior siege, as someone suggested, would help a tad bit as well. Might not deter trolls all that much, but at least they’d have to spend more money for their trolling. Right now it’s very easy for them to spam the cheap as hell normal ballista build sites on actual siege.

Each person can use 100 suplies per hour ?

Capturing: Castles + Keeps + Suply Depops + Sentries , removes a portion of the ‘’stacks’ ?

Siege Weapons that hit Building removes some ’’stacks’’ of the debuff for nearby players ?

Sieges Weapons marks each enemy person they hit … and if the target dies(or simply hit) , nearby players a portion of the ’’stacks’’ is removed ?

Killing removes the ’’stack’’’ too ? (by a mnisculine)

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

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

I would really need to see the math on this one…

I mean, are you suggesting that Scouts are solo-building siege at a rate significantly faster than 1 piece of siege per minute?

And “small group ninja roamers”; how small is this group? Let’s say 5 people, for example: it is MUCH easier for small groups like this to coordinate throwing out siege than it is for large (20+) groups, so your small roaming group could have, say, 2 people throwing down siege instead of one. This would allow you “small ninja roamers” group to throw out 6 pieces of siege every 3 minutes, more than enough for 5 people to get into a Tower or Keep. Get to an Inner Door of a Keep and needs more rams? Have a 3rd person throw down siege. now your up to 9 pieces of siege every 3 minutes, which should be easily enough for even a larger, 10-man “ninja group”, much less the smaller 5-man group I was using in the example.

What sort of problems, specifically, do you forsee for scouts or smaller roaming groups?

How about removing exhaustion quicker when you are within a certain range of the commander of your squad? Like for example you are in 3,000 range it clears quicker for you and or the commander

I do like the exhaustion idea, but make it more refined:

-Placing a ram near an enemy gate does not or minimally stacks exhaustion

-Placing a ram far from any enemy gate stacks a lot of exhaustion

-Commanders have increased exhaustion recovery for every player they have in their squad

-Different siege stacks different amounts of exhaustion (superior and guild stacks less, since they are more expensive anyway, while ballistas and regular golems will incur a bit more)

-Dropping siege while you have unbuilt siege already will cause you to stack more exhaustion

-Killing enemy players, and destroying their structures and siege will reduce your exhaustion

-Taking supply from towers and keeps that are upgrading, are at <50% capacity, but are not under attack, stacks exhaustion

-Taking supply from camps instead of keeps and towers will reduce exhaustion a bit

-Placing a ballista when there are already many ballistae around will incur more exhaustion

-Perhaps be more lenient to those of higher wvw rank

Also:

-Taking damage while in a golem locks you out from entering another one for some time

-Allow you to salvage siege sites you place yourself that are completely unbuilt, in case you make a mistake

-Add a "placed by: " buff on siege which shows who placed it

Note that these amounts are relative and would need some working out

Also worth mentioning is “claim trolling”, where a troll claims a keep so real guilds cannot apply buffs. Easy fix is to allow multiple guilds to claim a keep, where only the first flies their banner, but the rest can apply buffs.

The Guild system is the only way I think trolling will be curtailed.

I would like to see a system in which siege is only deployable by a guilded toon of sufficient wvw rank. Golems should only be usable by the same standards.

If this were possible then the only thing needed to stop the offensive behavior would to have a guild member of sufficient rank to guild kick such offender.

John Corpening.9847:

Finally, regarding swinging ye olde banhammer, that’s an option but if we can make some reasonable adjustments that greatly reduces the need for that option it will really be the better way to go. I would very much like to steer clear of falling back to that option in this discussion.

Thanks again for all the great suggestions!
John

The problem is, you’re trying to brainstorm ideas about changing the system when the number of serious abusers worthy of action can probably be counted on two hands. We do not want a system which is has potential to impede everyone or add a greater potential for trolling. We just want the tiny minority of trolls removed from our environment because it sucks when it happens.

There is no system you could ever design that will address this which itself isn’t open to abuse or doesn’t seriously impede legitimate siege placers. It requires human judgment. I guess the best idea would be to allow players to vote on dismantling siege (and returning that supply to wherever it came from) but even that is open to abuse and voting on 20+ pieces of siege doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend time.

This whole problem needs to be kept in perspective. There have only been a tiny handful of instances where big scale siege trolling has caused a problem. If reports of these individuals were actioned, one of which has been involved in this type of conduct for multiple seasons, then I do believe we’d have no problem at all as a precedent set of removing these folks (either from the game entirely or just WvW) would be enough to discourage it. A case of an accidentally placed piece of siege is acceptable from time to time. When someone builds 10+ flame rams at a supply depot even after being asked not to do it though is just blatant abuse and they should be warned/banned from WvW as appropriate.

That’s my 2c anyway.

It would be really nice to crowd-source a solution from your players and program the code but seriously…. you are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Currently hardcore siege trolls incidents are at most less than 10 sad players. Hire an intern to investigate the players with extremely high incident reports from unique players and pass to a dev for action. Crosslink the alt account with their main (IP address) and ban for 72 hours. If behaviour persist, ban 1 week and so fro. The lack of consequences for trolling is what is causing the problems to compound.

Coding restricted siege blueprints usage with a certain time may be tricky and bug-prone and hack-able, but worth a try if your coding skills are good. But this will take a long time by Anet’s previous history ( " in the next feature patch" lol ).
The new cost of commander’s tag is 300 gold. Alt accounts that are willingly to spend this gold to troll will be doing their sad deeds for long periods of time and easily identified. If there is a dev in charge of WvW , it is his responsibility during the tournament to ensure it goes smoothly. Man up, grab energy drink and start reviewing the siege troll complaints and ban. Surely anyone can handle this small pool of hardcore siege trolls.

storiessave.3807:

The exhaustion idea might have merit if it was able to be reduced with a large amount of players in your squad as a commander…but this would seriously hinder havoc groups. I just don’t see it as something that can be balanced for differently sized groups or populations.

Yes, more than one person with a commander could carry siege and they could alternate placing it…but when you have 3-5 people, how much siege could you place before being completely blocked? It’s just not feasible. You’d wreck havocking.

One thing that might be a big help is capping the number of supply a single person can take from a specific structure in a certain amount of time. Generally, you aren’t limited to only one supply source, unless there’s a troll draining every camp, tower, and keep. If they were only allowed to take a certain number in an hour, it would slow their drainage of keep supply by a lot.

Maybe make it scale off the current max supply of the structure or something. This should not be a map-wide limit, or it will hinder small groups trying to siege up keeps – keep it specific to each tower, keep, or camp.

I also really like the idea of adding siege names in the interact UI – seeing “Build Flame Ram” would make it so much easier to avoid “Build Ballista.” And maybe making the interact menu prioritize superior siege, as someone suggested, would help a tad bit as well. Might not deter trolls all that much, but at least they’d have to spend more money for their trolling. Right now it’s very easy for them to spam the cheap as hell normal ballista build sites on actual siege.

I don’t agree with it limiting havok groups. You said:

" Yes, more than one person with a commander could carry siege and they could alternate placing it…but when you have 3-5 people, how much siege could you place before being completely blocked? It’s just not feasible. You’d wreck havocking. "

They wouldn’t wreck havok groups, because in your example of 3-5 people you guys can only carry at most 60 to 100 supply. How many pieces of siege are you building now with 3-5 people? The cheapest piece of supply is a guild catapult, if you each threw one and each had 20 supply you’d have enough.

It doesn’t wreck havok at all.

kagenin.5231:

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

Asking questions like this make me want to play the game less than I do nowadays.

Without an active team of GMs to police WvW, you will always have problems. You need to be more proactive in your solutions. Stop being cheapskates, Anet (it’s no secret that you guys pay your employees less than the industry average). You NEED a team of GMs to actively police WvW and to a lesser extent, sPvP.

I’ve stopped playing WvW almost entirely, because you guys refuse to put in the manpower necessary to properly referee the battlefield.

Its not even a manpower/cheapness issue. If Anet only responded to just the reports where people sent in video evidence, that would be good enough to solve the problem much better than any ingame system, and it would cost much less manpower.

I do agree with Cake.

There are about five people causing/have caused major problems in the past. The WvW community know who these people are, we have video evidence of it.

Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to get in there, and ban them from WvW for 30 days or something then put a ton of code time into the works that will probably be buggy and hurt the people not doing anything wrong?

Great to see that we’re finally getting some momentum on this issue!

I understand the desire to keep manpower/policing requirements to a minimum, but sadly, with griefing there will always be a need for someone to investigate the situation personally and make a judgment call. If it is not possible for ANet to do this role (completely understandable. I work in IT myself so I know what it’s like!), then I throw my support behind the “Player’s Tribunal” idea that some have proposed.

Zaxares.5419:

Great to see that we’re finally getting some momentum on this issue!

Almost 7,300 Views and 167 Replies in 6 hours… I’d say this is an issue worth tackling! I can’t wait to see how this turns out; “No Siege Trolls” would certainly be 1 less frustration in WvW, and would hopefully lessen some of the animosity that occurs when a Troll claims to be from a rival server or something like that.

Jeknar.6184:

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.

I think this gentleman here solved one of the problems.
Next would be placing build sites on top of legitimate build sites.

Rhizo.5089:

The Guild system is the only way I think trolling will be curtailed.

I would like to see a system in which siege is only deployable by a guilded toon of sufficient wvw rank. Golems should only be usable by the same standards.

If this were possible then the only thing needed to stop the offensive behavior would to have a guild member of sufficient rank to guild kick such offender.

This wouldn’t work at all. I could buy a new account today. Go farm EotM for X hours until whatever rank. Delete character and transfer to the server I wanted to troll. Make a new toon and a new guild. Rep my new guild with my new toon as I continue to troll. it really wouldn’t take much effort unless the rank was unreasonably high which would hurt new players. After I ranked up the first time in EotM then I have my troll account forever to continue to troll whenever I like.

JaredKincade.9761:

I do agree with Cake.

There are about five people causing/have caused major problems in the past. The WvW community know who these people are, we have video evidence of it.

Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to get in there, and ban them from WvW for 30 days or something then put a ton of code time into the works that will probably be buggy and hurt the people not doing anything wrong?

I agree these accounts should be banned. It won’t solve the problem though when you can regularly buy another account for 24.99. From what I’ve seen most people who troll siege do it on a second or third account while keeping their main account on their homeworld for regular play.

Scyntrus.2458:

-Add a "placed by: " buff on siege which shows who placed it

Yeah …. where you can right click on that siege weapon and a ‘’ timer’’ will show up .

You will have 2 min to right click and report many Sieges Weapons created from that specific guy , in order to ‘’colect 30 reports points’’

If you accindentaly report an other person Siege , the report timer stop and you cant report any1 else for 1 hour

Catapults + Trbuche + Arrow carts on the walls , awards 1 ‘’report point’ , while on the groundflloor = 5 .

If you succefully report that person he get the “Exhaustion” .

Edit: i love your idea about , causing “Exhaustion” to ppl that build , while the Keep is upgrading :P

Haven’t read through the whole thread but I like the idea of a group of players being able to dismantle the siege.

I think it should work something like this:
- Players should be able to dismantle the siege in pieces, like how we build siege in pieces not the whole siege at a time.
- Each dismantled piece of siege should return supply to the player in the form of “Supply bundle”. This bundle will not be an item in your inventory but more like a “Consumable” buff that should be drained first before being able to consume more. So only one stack of this buff per player at a time.
- Each supply bundle should be able to be donated by players back to Quartermaster NPC that handles upgrades in a structure, who shall accept the bundle and return the supplies to the corresponding structure.
- The supply bundle buff should have a timer (say 15-20mins?). Player should return these supplies to NPC within that timeframe. Once the time is up, supplies should return to the EoTM supply depot by citadel on home BL. This helps in preventing trolls misusing these bundles by dismantling legit siege so any wasted supply is still going back somewhere.
- The supply bundle should not be able to be used for building siege – either it should be donated to NPC or pools back to Citadel EoTM supplies.

I haven’t thought through in detail the repurcussions. There will be a bit of shift in meta for sure but I think it might work. Folks are free to debate on whether this will work.

John Corpening.9847:

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

Three siege every 3 minutes? Have you ever, anticipating an attack, rushed to drop siege? You’ve never seen 4 rams dropped at one tower?

I know Anet wants to deal with siege trolls in the least costly, most automated way possible but you can’t. Siege trolling is one of those “I know it when I see it” things and you’re not going to get AI or automation that can do that without hurting honest players.

Try this:

• Player GMs. Many per server. (Volunteer, no pay.)
• They can only deal with those on their own server, but can, of course, communicate with other GMs cross-server.
• They work under threat of banning if they abuse their power.
• Perhaps several layers (a hierarchy of GMs) to prevent mistakes.
• Anet only has to monitor the GMs for abuse and not the entire population of players.

I think a solution in the end has to be found . Seige Trolls/ Supply burners hurt the integrity of fair and equal play and effect servers during tournys. An unfair justice is served to us because of these type people that must use unfair advantages to achieve the goals they desire… Its really sad to be honest..

John Corpening.9847:

Let’s talk about Siege Trolls and what we can do about them. The problems that have been brought up are:

• Creating Siege to hit the siege cap
• Creating the wrong type of siege to hit area siege caps
• Spending supply on needless siege to drain supply depots
• Dropping siege on top of legitimate siege build sites

Here are some parameters and questions we should consider:

• Can we come up with a system that doesn’t involve constant policing from GMs?
• What are the characteristics of bad behavior that are different than good behavior?
• How do we prevent bad behavior without making too big of an impact on good behavior?
• What restrictions might we be able to live with as good players in order to prevent bad behavior?

THE QUICK-N-EASY TOKEN EFFORT:

Behavioral problems require behavioral solutions, the first two steps that need to be taken are:

• An official stance needs to be taken on whether abusing siege mechanics to sabotage the server is considered an exploit (thus violates rule #17 of the Code of Conduct).
• Extend rule #22 of the Code of Conduct to include WvW to further discourage this form of match manipulation.

Neither of these require constant GM policing, because a large part of what motivates these “trolls” and their defenders is the lack of clarity in the rules regarding these actions; regardless of what new system you put in place, the “trolls” will continue to find their way around it if there is no punishment for such behavior.

HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES IN THE PROGRAMMING TEAM:

Now the problem with siege exploiting is that there’s no in-game method of countering it; one person can act with impunity while a hundred watch on, completely and utterly powerless to stop it. So my proposed change is simply:

• Allow players to dismantle siege engines at the rate they can build them (so a siege troll with maxed building traits can be fully countered by one player who also has max building traits).
• Do not allow dismantling of siege engines that are in use.
• To avoid accidental dismantling, make it a kit-based ability sold by the siege vendor.
• Refund the supply from the siege first to the player(s) doing the dismantling, then to the nearest friendly supply depot.
• If the nearest depot is full or contested, the refunded supply will be wasted (this is important so you don’t have keeps suddenly being resupplied during sieges because a bunch of siege engines were dropped and dismantled nearby, outside of the siege’s scope) unless the siege engine being dismantled is inside the keep that is under siege (exploitable loophole I almost overlooked).

WILD, UNFOUNDED SPECULATION ON EFFECTS OF PROPOSAL:

So what this (hopefully) will do is allow the server to actually act once they’ve identified a siege troll: they can have someone follow them, dismantle everything they build, prevent local supply from being drained (at most it will lose 20 supply, assuming the siege troll is filching from a +5 depot and has maxed supply carry trait), and rebuild anything they catch the troll trying to dismantle.

As this change does not affect how siege is currently placed (just adds the ability to remove it), it should not have a negative impact on current gameplay strategies and experience.

DRAWBACKS YOU CAN TOTALLY OVERLOOK BECAUSE THE IDEA IS PERFECT:

Now there are two immediate concerns that come with this idea:

• A siege troll can follow a zerg around and interfere with their ability to put down siege engines, but as long as he’s outnumbered that shouldn’t be too disruptive.
• There is a potential change to group behavior where a zerg can roam for longer periods because they can resupply themselves on the go by dismantling their own siege after each successful siege (as long as they have dismantling kits), which reduces the effectiveness of the “drain the depot before they break in” strategy.

EXPLOSIONS!?

I think the fairest system would be to put a cooldown on spending supply. Somewhere along the range of 240-360 seconds (4-6 minutes). While someone throwing ballistas down on legit build sites is annoying, having proper comms is the simplest most effective way to tackle that specific issue. It might affect smaller teams trying to take certain objectives is the biggest issue I see with my idea, but short of actively policing every matchup, is the best idea I can come up with. Exhaustion simply wouldn’t work on a 3 minute timer since siege trolls build at around that speed anyway.

I believe that we should focus on a specific problem instead of trying to solve everything with a general ‘solution.’

Personally, I find the biggest problem with siege trolls is that they can burn keep supplies easily and siege cap that keep. Use the exhaustion thing only when inside your keep’s range.

Siege trolling in open field is a lesser problem since most groups use comms anyway and even a somewhat organized group will be able to tell which siege to build.

John Corpening.9847:

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

Why can’t GM’s police something that affects hundreds of players on a server? You guys are apparently policing dungeon exploits now, where people go under maps to kill bosses to sell dungeon runs that barely affects anyone but won’t police WvW? It’s not like siege trolls are that rampant either, their are very few and if you actually start banning them they will disappear.

Anet polices dungeons but wont do kitten for wvw:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Beware-the-dungeon-police/first

AcFiBu.9624:

Rhizo.5089:

The Guild system is the only way I think trolling will be curtailed.

I would like to see a system in which siege is only deployable by a guilded toon of sufficient wvw rank. Golems should only be usable by the same standards.

If this were possible then the only thing needed to stop the offensive behavior would to have a guild member of sufficient rank to guild kick such offender.

This wouldn’t work at all. I could buy a new account today. Go farm EotM for X hours until whatever rank. Delete character and transfer to the server I wanted to troll. Make a new toon and a new guild. Rep my new guild with my new toon as I continue to troll. it really wouldn’t take much effort unless the rank was unreasonably high which would hurt new players. After I ranked up the first time in EotM then I have my troll account forever to continue to troll whenever I like.

JaredKincade.9761:

I do agree with Cake.

There are about five people causing/have caused major problems in the past. The WvW community know who these people are, we have video evidence of it.

Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to get in there, and ban them from WvW for 30 days or something then put a ton of code time into the works that will probably be buggy and hurt the people not doing anything wrong?

I agree these accounts should be banned. It won’t solve the problem though when you can regularly buy another account for 24.99. From what I’ve seen most people who troll siege do it on a second or third account while keeping their main account on their homeworld for regular play.

It would curtail it though. Given, there should be a reporting system with TOS requirements. To make your situation less likely, the first thing I would do is raised the guild fee and or disallow siege deployment until your guild has X number of members.

Aitadis.8269:

John Corpening.9847:

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

Why can’t GM’s police something that affects hundreds of players on a server? You guys are apparently policing dungeon exploits now, where people go under maps to kill bosses to sell dungeon runs that barely affects anyone but won’t police WvW? It’s not like siege trolls are that rampant either, their are very few and if you actually start banning them they will disappear.

Anet polices dungeons but wont do kitten for wvw:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Beware-the-dungeon-police/first

Showing siege’s owner name would help with that, people could even report them.

arkealia.2713:

Aitadis.8269:

John Corpening.9847:

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

Why can’t GM’s police something that affects hundreds of players on a server? You guys are apparently policing dungeon exploits now, where people go under maps to kill bosses to sell dungeon runs that barely affects anyone but won’t police WvW? It’s not like siege trolls are that rampant either, their are very few and if you actually start banning them they will disappear.

Anet polices dungeons but wont do kitten for wvw:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Beware-the-dungeon-police/first

Showing siege’s owner name would help with that, people could even report them.

Players already know who the siege trolls are though, they get reported and nothing happens about it, simply putting there name on the siege thats dropped won’t fix anything.

I don’t think that implementing mechanics that will effect legitimate players is the answer. I think the answer here is better GM policing, and giving us options for more detailed reporting. If the same player is getting a lot of reports, a hidden GM needs to be observing them, and issuing either verbal warnings or bans. Most of these characters are probably alternate accounts, but losing your $45 account might be enough to stop some people.

For others, perhaps you can look into linking IP addresses to multiple accounts. Most people won’t risk their main account to a banning.

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.

Same goes for cata’s. A guild cata can be built a lot quicker than a treb to counter the enemies siege. I also almost always build a cata next to a treb to use the defensive bubble.

Torsailr.8456:

Blockhead Magee.3092:

The exhaustion idea has merit, however, a limit of three seems a bit small considering you may want to quickly build a number of defensive siege when you see a blob storming your keep. I’d wager the griefers won’t be dissuaded no matter what cap is put in place. They’d just wait it out.

One small tweak, perhaps, would be to not allow flame rams to be created inside a tower, camp or inner keep (SM & Garrison). At least force the griefers to use something that has a modicum of value.

I think a system that allows siege to be destroyed by the player base would be a better way to go. Some sort of approval where some number of players concur that a piece of siege should be destroyed in any given area. It would be a lot harder to get a group of griefers together to remove siege than it is for them to create it.

Allow a squad to salvage siege for a percentage of supplies used to build it? Share those supplies among the squad members that aren’t full?

Then trolls could salvage your legit siege equipment.

I’ll put in my 2c. I like the idea of exhaustion, especially if it recharges with more people around.

But for wvw tourneys, maybe you should have Refs that can disable the ability to use or build siege, or kick players for the duration of the tourney for greifing or hacking. honestly, I don’t think you can come up with a metric to slow down grifers without hurting normal players. That is what refs are for in sport. People don’t like playing organized sports or pick-up games if there are grifers or cheaters that get away with it. Either they police themselves, get Refs, or play somewhere else. In a dungeon you can leave your party. In wvw… you get the idea. Imagine playing basketball with someone thought it was funny to deflate the basketball. What would you do? In wvw, what can we do? That is why refs are needed in wvw over basketballs that are harder to deflate.

Pretty much any idea with cooldowns on supply/siege usage is going to be really bad for players outside of primetime.

Plus, how are you going to do an automated system for preventing stuff like griefing by buying merchants during an attack?

Like it or not, the solution is to have GM, whether volunteer or paid, or a combination of both.

But from the looks of it, we’re going to get some terrible automated system (3 siege in 3 minutes limit, seriously?) … if so, at least put it in EotM first so we can gauge how bad it is before it’s put into WvW. Isn’t that what EotM was supposedly for in the first place?

Instead of beating around a dead bush, siege trolling needs to have consequences. Just like in real life. I don’t understand what is so hard. If so many people have reported the same thing; taken pictures, sent video, proven with documentation- i.e. reports, do something to them. Why must everyone else suffer for it? If you want to say that they don’t understand how to play the game. Then after “siege troll” has been reported so many times a email via in-game or to their account says that their conduct has been deemed inappropriate and if they continue with their behavior will be banned. When a name is deemed inappropriate you get contacted to fix it, why can you not do the same with siege trolling?

I really loved Ultima Online, if you had a problem you qued a GM. You were given a que # and a real life person would come into the game to discuss the situation. If you don’t have resources then only allow GM’s for certain situations, ie hacking/trolling.

It is very disheartening that this problem has been around at least since last season and still has not been addressed. The same person is still doing the same things on TCBL and have admittedly said are being paid by “x” server to do it.

Make this game enjoyable again by honoring the player base you have – JUST BAN THEM FOR REPEATED OFFENSES.

Make their actions be accountable.

What if there were implemented “Hard Points” where if siege is thrown at those particular places it does not count on the siege cap? I feel that this would allow siege-happy commanders to toss a great deal but that there would be guaranteed placement outside the cap limitations.

To better clarify…
On gates, you could have 1-2 siege ram locations (where blueprints for siege rams only wouldn’t count towards the cap), Walls could have a similar thing added with catas. The idea behind this is that it would allow players to continue siege as normal without being hindered by griefers (and without being punished with a form of exhaustion).

dtzy.5901:

I believe that we should focus on a specific problem instead of trying to solve everything with a general ‘solution.’

Personally, I find the biggest problem with siege trolls is that they can burn keep supplies easily and siege cap that keep. Use the exhaustion thing only when inside your keep’s range.

Siege trolling in open field is a lesser problem since most groups use comms anyway and even a somewhat organized group will be able to tell which siege to build.

This is actually a pretty good point.

Otokomae.9356:

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

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

I would really need to see the math on this one…

I mean, are you suggesting that Scouts are solo-building siege at a rate significantly faster than 1 piece of siege per minute?

And “small group ninja roamers”; how small is this group? Let’s say 5 people, for example: it is MUCH easier for small groups like this to coordinate throwing out siege than it is for large (20+) groups, so your small roaming group could have, say, 2 people throwing down siege instead of one. This would allow you “small ninja roamers” group to throw out 6 pieces of siege every 3 minutes, more than enough for 5 people to get into a Tower or Keep. Get to an Inner Door of a Keep and needs more rams? Have a 3rd person throw down siege. now your up to 9 pieces of siege every 3 minutes, which should be easily enough for even a larger, 10-man “ninja group”, much less the smaller 5-man group I was using in the example.

What sort of problems, specifically, do you forsee for scouts or smaller roaming groups?

the purpose of this thread is to stop solo troll siege builders wasting supply and maxing siege for the map… so if it does not affect the solo scout siege builder or the small group roamers then it is not doing what is intended.

Vayne.8563:

Torsailr.8456:

Blockhead Magee.3092:

The exhaustion idea has merit, however, a limit of three seems a bit small considering you may want to quickly build a number of defensive siege when you see a blob storming your keep. I’d wager the griefers won’t be dissuaded no matter what cap is put in place. They’d just wait it out.

One small tweak, perhaps, would be to not allow flame rams to be created inside a tower, camp or inner keep (SM & Garrison). At least force the griefers to use something that has a modicum of value.

I think a system that allows siege to be destroyed by the player base would be a better way to go. Some sort of approval where some number of players concur that a piece of siege should be destroyed in any given area. It would be a lot harder to get a group of griefers together to remove siege than it is for them to create it.

Allow a squad to salvage siege for a percentage of supplies used to build it? Share those supplies among the squad members that aren’t full?

Then trolls could salvage your legit siege equipment.

A SQUAD of Trolls? Has anyone actually seen, or even HEARD OF, a 10-20 manTroll group running together on a map, all at once?

Otokomae.9356:

A SQUAD of Trolls? Has anyone actually seen, or even HEARD OF, a 10-20 manTroll group running together on a map, all at once?

I have heard of one guild, which I shall not name, which is nothing but organized trolling.

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

Something like this would be Horrible to say the least.Speaking for myself i can be really siege hungry,since not many people on my server are actively spending time in sieging towers up,I can spend 30m – 2h sieging up several towers. Trebs behind gate,catas behind gate,10+ ac’s.Limiting Me in doing so,would not hurt the siege trolls..you would hurt legit players properly sieging up towers.

I can already see it happening…

“My exhaust just popped in,cant siege up WC now,someone else please siege up wc”"
No reaction*
“Anyone want to siege up WC please my Exhaust just started?”
No reaction*
“40+ Blob at WC !!..and we have no siege now”
Wc lost.

I have not read the posts above me. The following may have been suggested/dismissed already.

Let the people on the map dictate who can/cannot place siege.

• Anyone who wishes to place siege, starts a timed in-game poll.
• The players currently on the map vote for or against it.
• If the vote passes, the person gets permission for period of time to place as may siege as they like. [e.g. 1-2 hour buff]
• If the vote fails, the person is not allowed to place siege and cannot start another poll for a period of time. [e.g. 0.5-1 hour debuff]

Possible issues:

• When not many people are on the map for a meaningful poll. In this scenario, allow anyone to place siege but with the initially stated ‘exhaustion’ debuff which would limit siege spamming.
• Enough people are on the map but they don’t participate in the poll. If a (few) polls time out due to lack of participation, then fall back on ‘exhaustion’ debuff.

For the issues of siege caps, area siege caps, and draining supply, there are two possible generic lines of solution. One is to limit siege placement, and one is to limit supply spending. I think limiting siege placement is not palatable, given that commanders ought to be placing siege; they have supply info that no one else does, and they are directing things and thus have an idea as to timetables, other constraints, etc. However, I think that limiting the rate at which supply can be spent can be done in a way to discourage trolls, minimize their impact, and not seriously effect legitimate play.

Apply your exhaustion mechanic (with some tweaks I’ll get to) to taking supply from unique supply sources. Reset any exhaustion for a unique source when that supply is used to repair the structure (i.e. defenders repairing a gate effectively ignore the mechanic). I would suggest that the mechanic be per supply taken (given sources can be upgraded to give more supply, and there’s also the ability that allows you to take more supply) and per supply spent, so that a troll couldn’t spend 1 supply out of the 15 they took to repair a gate, and then 14 on a useless flame ram, and repeat ad infinitum.

In practice, this would make the troll run all over the map to build their troll siege, taking supply from many sources. This solves the issue of trolls draining supply at critical locations that need to retain that supply. It also makes trolling very inefficient time-wise for the effect it will have, and opens the troll up to being attacked by players on other servers as they run. It will take much longer to reach siege caps. Furthermore, the damage any troll can do will scale with how much stuff you own. If you’re not doing so well, their maximum potential damage is significantly minimized.

It won’t impact smaller roaming groups that may want to use supply every so often. These groups are all over the map anyway. It won’t impact defenders so much, as although they will build siege slower if there are low numbers of them, that defensive siege can simply be built by a larger zerg shortly after taking the objective. It won’t impact larger zergs much either, since they have a large supply capacity given their numbers, and they will presumably also be bouncing around at least a little bit.

As for trolling by placing siege on top of other siege, preventing useful siege from being easily built or trolling others into wasting supply on that useless siege, I would suggest that this is largely an issue with the allied/neutral targeting system and the nature of interact, which many players have been complaining about for a very long time. Perhaps this issue could be fixed? I know players in most game modes would appreciate it if you could find a way to do this. I would suggest that if you’re only going to target this particular issue though, you place clickable nametag (when moused over, have it do something to let players know that one will be selected) for each unbuilt siege weapon, to allow us to target specific weapons. The nametags shouldn’t stack on top of each other, even multiple unfinished siege weapons are stacked in that spot. Perhaps that’s an easier fix? Perhaps even one that can be carried over to other game areas? Give neutral items a permanent nametage/name box, have it highlight/fill in when moused over, and if one clicks on it, have it become selected as the target to interact with. This could even be done with downed/defeated allies, too. (It’s really quite awful when you’re in a dungeon and there’s the dungeon NPC, a neutral item you don’t want to pick up (say a banner), a downed/defeated ally, and a conjure weapon. Which one do you want to target/interact with? Well, good luck, because you’ll likely need it. This kind of feature would definitely improve the playability of the game, in an admittedly minor area that’s a bit lacking at the moment)

Stupendous Man.4920:

I have not read the posts above me. The following may have been suggested/dismissed already.

Let the people on the map dictate who can/cannot place siege.

• Anyone who wishes to place siege, starts a timed in-game poll.
• The players currently on the map vote for or against it.
• If the vote passes, the person gets permission for period of time to place as may siege as they like. [e.g. 1-2 hour buff]
• If the vote fails, the person is not allowed to place siege and cannot start another poll for a period of time. [e.g. 0.5-1 hour debuff]

Possible issues:

• When not many people are on the map for a meaningful poll. In this scenario, allow anyone to place siege but with the initially stated ‘exhaustion’ debuff which would limit siege spamming.
• Enough people are on the map but they don’t participate in the poll. If a (few) polls time out due to lack of participation, then fall back on ‘exhaustion’ debuff.

What if Siege needs to placed in a hurry ? For e.g im someone who just entered a tower to scout,i see its not sieged up and i see a zerg coming towards me.I want to place a treb behind the gate but i cannot.Do you want me to start a Poll that takes Time…Time in which the gate will be rammed before i can even put the siege up ? That really won’t work out well either.

You stop siege trolling, they’ll buy merchants during an attack. You stop that, they’ll suicide golems. You stop that, they’ll run around your towers, turning all your siege backwards (yes, I’ve seen this).

You have to stop the trolls directly.

Just look at the dungeon exploit situation in this very game. Band-aid fixes like invisible walls for two years did nothing but temporarily slow down exploiters. And now (finally) Anet has GMs joining parties to ban people.

Yeah, as I said earlier, as much as we can try to automate the process, at the end of the day, we will still need someone to come in, evaluate the situation, and make a judgment call on whether somebody is being a troll and take punitive action. If it is not feasible for ANet to provide a team of GMs to do so, then perhaps some of the monitoring could be turned over to the community, by way of a Player’s Tribunal, volunteer GMs etc.

Lord Kuru.3685:

You stop siege trolling, they’ll buy merchants during an attack. You stop that, they’ll suicide golems. You stop that, they’ll run around your towers, turning all your siege backwards (yes, I’ve seen this).

You have to stop the trolls directly.

Just look at the dungeon exploit situation in this very game. Band-aid fixes like invisible walls for two years did nothing but temporarily slow down exploiters. And now (finally) Anet has GMs joining parties to ban people.

So far I’ve been championing what I see as the better ideas in this thread simply to avoid getting any obviously unworkable ideas (such as an across-the-board limit on throwing siege for everyone), and because this thread was started with the premise that we needed to find ideas OTHER than banning the known siege trolls, some of whom have been around since launch.

However… I have to admit, the best solution is, of course, the most obvious one, which is to have some sort of system for reporting people who are obviously trolling WvW on alt accounts, and banning them ASAP once enough evidence has been gathered. Bans really are the ANSWER, the rest of the ideas here are mostly just putting a band-aid on a missing limb; however, if a band-aid is all we can get, I’d like the best, cleanest band-aid possible please! One that doesn’t introduce a whole new set of problems.

Cake.4920:

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.

Not as free as you think if the defenders actually did more than sit on their keep. It’s not about siege humping and creeping. The most successful way to stop an attack is to go to its source. This is when WvW is its most fun. Getting out and getting your own hands dirty. Not sitting pretty behind walls that are crumbling and because your to busy stumbling and picking your nose.