Guild Wars 2

Okay, let’s imagine for a second that you find what you think is some balanced cure-all to fix siege trolling.

Say you implement something that makes sieging structures or attacking structures a major hassle for the rest of us, yet supposedly will keep trolls from trolling. How do you make that completely troll-proof? These specific players are hell-bent on crippling the server they’re on as much as possible. If they can’t do what they are now, they’ll find another way to give us hell.

Why not ban the individuals? Someone brought up a good point – there are probably only a handful of siege trolls across all servers. Eliminate them, you eliminate the problem without making WvW a hassle for the rest of us.

Why is that not possible? You guys go through probably dozens or maybe even hundreds of tickets per week on people hacking or exploiting or griefing in all modes of the game – why is it so out of the realm of possibility that you could look into the very few players that siege troll? It’s not exactly a common occurrence. It’s literally just a few players.

TC has had another siege troll or two in the past, but last season and this season, there has been only one, and he is well-known. He keeps doing what he does because you guys take no action, yet here you are admitting that siege trolling is an issue. What gives?

Hi all!

Some of you knows me: i play in low pop server (ar). I really appreciate this thread: i read with interest all the suggestions, but every time i think about our fights…. BRRRR!!!

So I had a crazy idea:
When a commander finds someone that intentionally create problems on-game (throw siege, hacking etc.) he can TAG him as enemy and the zerg can kill him. So:
- the monitoring and controlling is delegated to commanders. In fights he/she can jundge the situation in real time;
- when commander tag someone as enemy, he had to report and you have only to monitor the commander choices;
- when someone is tagged as enemy has a buff so he can only wait and CANT enter in keeps and towers;
- no impact in strategies and tactics;

What do you think?

Let’s see:

- For golem destruction griefing — if player takes a significant falling damage, eject player, give him 10-30-60 minutes “Bad Operator” de-buff. This means the very first golem he/she tries to destroy would put 10 minutes “can’t use golems”, second attempt – 30m etc. As a bonus that would also prevent player from placing siege for the same amount of time Would only apply in friendly situation (i.e. falling off a cliff while in battle and being ranger-pushed would be ok, walking off a cliff — debuff)

- For dropping troll-siege while group is on the move — “Build commander’s siege” option (not sure if it’s in general UI somewhere or option commander chooses for his squad) where people in commander’s squad only see and can build siege dropped by the commander. If you’re not in the squad you can still drop it, and build it yourself if you want to (or let people not in any squad do it). But squad members just see commander’s siege — kinda like with tags.

- Siege should remember who dropped it (even if person left the map) and show it on click. “MrTroll’s Ballista”, with option to right-click – report siege griefing if there are more than 5 objects placed within keep.

- Siege capping should allow “override lower class of siege” option. So if someone did manage to get a bunch of ballistas built in keep to siege-cap it, and another commander wants to drop superior treb to actually do something useful, it should allow “override upon completion” (i.e. treb is finished and one of regular ballistas vanishes to keep within siege cap). If they are dropping superior siege it’s a bit more useful

- No ram building within friendly keep’s walls. Edge case of using a bunch of rams to fear enemies away is, well, edge. I think we can live without circle of rams :P

More questionable ideas:
- Allow 25+ players to dismantle siege. Only if 25 players try to do it within 30 seconds (so it’s an organized group of large proportions). To help with cap. This won’t prevent troll from wasting supply
- Siege Troll warning: when user’s siege is repeatedly flagged as troll siege, it gets marked with special icon, to let other users know it shouldn’t be refreshed or built if it’s a blueprint
- General “report wvw griefing” option with “dropping troll siege/ unwanted food” suboption (which would allow you to auto-filter it by checking if user actually did that)

One of our trolls was actually asking other users to build siege for him so… they are inventive and sometimes lazy

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.

basically, you need to give us the means to handle trolls:

1. effective reports
2. ways to undo what they do

pick 1.

reports will always require an official anet rep with the final say in a ban.

undoing trolling requires preventing the action (without the means to circumvent), or giving us a hammer to smash the card house they build.

the prevention track is really hard to design in a foolproof way such that normal play patterns arent destroyed/highly inconvenient because so much of the trolling is based on intent, which is intangible to the game. thus, i feel like while exhaustion could be tweaked to work… its always going to be insufficient compared to allowing a crowd to push an undo button.

please dont forget about queued upgrades while on the subject of trolling though, it seems like everyone focuses on the 5 ballistas thrown halfway up the stairs that are preventing you from dropping an ac… and were forgetting that the troll ordered guards to burn 1200 supply 2 mins before an enemy zerg walked in. we need the same crowdsourced undo button for upgrades! currently structures dont even have the equivalent of siege timers!

speaking of which, if we can eventually dismantle siege… can we please get rid of siege timers in that patch? their primary purpose is to help prevent trolling. dismantling will obsolete that functionality and there will no longer be a purpose to having a siege timer, but there will be a tangible benefit to not having one… some poor scout wont get stuck tapping siege every 55 mins. because thats boring. and people complain about it often.

There are multiple types of trolling – commander/player trolling and siege cap/supply trolling.

For commander/player trolling the problem I see with Exhaustion is the troll can drop 1 ballista on every ram that a commander drops. The commander and the troll have the same level of Exhaustion. So the commander is always going to be trumped by a decent troll and may well be hindered by Exhaustion when there is no troll around. So it is at best a neutral solution, if not a negative solution.

You can’t differentiate between commanders and non-commanders as many trolls buy commander pins.

If you summarise what a commander/player troll does then I would say they are constantly trying to interfere with a player’s intentions.

• Player intention: Picking up supply
• Troll interference: Drop siege on supply base

• Player intention: Rezzing downed players
• Troll interference: Drop siege on downed players

• Player intention: Repair Wall/Gate
• Troll interference: Drop siege on wall/gate

• Player intention: Building rams
• Troll interference: Drop siege on build site

If you look at every single troll action here they all relate to players wanting to press the F-key in a certain place and a piece of siege has been deliberately placed there to interfere with that F-key press.

So the idea to stop commander/player trolling:

Disable the deployment of siege on any area where the ‘F’ key would be available (static or dynamic availability).

So this would include disabling deployment of siege on:
- Build sites where F-key build is available
- Supply huts where F-key for pick up supply is available
- Resource nodes
- Downed players (an example of a dynamic F-key availability)
- Repairable walls/doors (another dynamic F-key situation)

You would have to reduce the F-key radius for siege build sites so you could still build many rams close together on a gate but not have such a small radius that you can overlap the build sites (like a troll would).

So the algorithm would work something like this (I don’t know the architecture of your system so I don’t know if this would work or not):

• Player chooses a siege item and selects to deploy siege
• Standard siege deploy reticule is activated
• Player aims reticule at proposed location
• Client sends Server a request saying “If a player was standing at reticule location (x, y, z) would they be offered the F-key?”
• If Server responds Yes (the f-key would be offered), then reticule turns red to indicate that deployment is blocked in that zone.
• If Server responds No, then reticule turns green to indicate the deployment is allowed
• Player presses deploy siege button again and the Server validates once more to ensure the location is valid and then siege site is deployed.

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

In the end only humans can decide, if something is trolling or not. If you don’t want to involve GMs you have to involve the players. Of course the player should not be able to ban the player, but only to temporarily disable capabilities of the player.

E.g. when you select a siege, you can “vote that this is a troll siege” and you can “vote that this is a normal siege”, if 10 more player vote for troll than for normal and this happens on several different siege, the player cannot place further siege as long as these siege did not despawned.

This should be recorded and if several such disabling votes hit the same player a GM should investigate to confirm that the often disabled player is indeed a troll to be banned from WvW for this team (so he has 50 other possibilities to behave better). But also people that vote often should be investigated, if they are trolling by vote, and if so their right to vote should be taken away.

Otokomae.9356:

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.

Problem is that most of the solutions I see here are really bad for OCX/SEA play when there are no zergs, or even NA play when there aren’t enough people to fill more than one map (frequently the case below T5). I’m not convinced at all that a band-aid solution is better than nothing.

Bugabuga.9721:

Let’s see:

- For golem destruction griefing — if player takes a significant falling damage, eject player, give him 10-30-60 minutes “Bad Operator” de-buff. This means the very first golem he/she tries to destroy would put 10 minutes “can’t use golems”, second attempt – 30m etc. As a bonus that would also prevent player from placing siege for the same amount of time Would only apply in friendly situation (i.e. falling off a cliff while in battle and being ranger-pushed would be ok, walking off a cliff — debuff)

how much damage is significant?

sometimes i (and others i see) walk golems up to the lord room just because, and then jump off the wall once the structure is secure (instead of going out by the gate) because its significantly faster, we met no resistance, the golem is high health, and the walk to the next place is long. thus, such a debuff would probably need to avoid that situation… which means a troll can still suicide a golem by repeating that a few times and bypass the punishment.

There really isn’t a solution to this problem without considerate work to do. The only quick fix would be to allow only commanders to place siege. The other easiest fix would be disallow siege to be built unless in a squad.

As many said, maybe there could be a report option that somhow add stacks to a character?

If 10 people report a single player for trolling, this player is banned from WvW for 15 minutes or so.

However I do like the idea of exhaustion from non-commander players (as commanders will have the exhaustion decreased by the number of people in their squad). Even if I have to sometimes get exhaustion myself to avoid trolls, I’ll gladly pay the price!

I would add an idea to the “Exhaustion” system.

I’m sorry if already said, and for my poor english.

Currently the idea is good, but may be a problem if for instance a commander want to drop 7 guild catas to a wall (it can happen), or go for a 4-5 golems rush. As said by many, in general it’s the commander that drop siege, to prevent confusion and allow a better gestion of the supply.

What I would suggest is: after dropping 3 sieges, if the 3 sieges are manned and used then the “Exhaustion” buff is cleared. A troll is often alone, and therefore can’t drop more than 3 balista every 3 min, as the balista will remain unused, while the commanders will be able to drop as many siege as he want, the control would be that he has around him many players that will use the siege, and therefore agree with the usefulness of them (the fact it’s not a troll).

I hope you find this idea relevant, I do believe it would be a plus.

How about you can only place a maximum of half of the required supply into siege you place yourself? Blueprints deteriorate after a while of no supply being placed into it. Or maybe even only 1/3 of supply max to make it even harder. Means you need 2/3 griefers to have an impact. Not impossible but makes it kitten more difficult.

It’ll impact on people attempting to defend by themselves but that’s what siege disablers are for. Realistically it’s not often one person can build siege from scratch and successfully deter an attack on a tower.

How about each player , can place whatever numbers of Sieges they want .
When the suply deposit of the Keep , goes under a specific percentage a ‘’Npc Maid’’ will be activated .

The ’’Maid’’ will sent a small UI message (like the current New Trading Post UI) on the down-right corner of the screen with her face and the Keep’s minimap , with the excuse that the ‘’The Keep’s Suply is low , we need more suplies so the Keep can be factional ’’ .

When peaople touch it , it will enlarge and show the Keep’s area and the places you placed your Sieges .

You have 3 min to choose 3 Sieges on that new UI , while the rest will be ’’recycled’’ and the suplies from them will goes in the Keep’s deposit .

Internaly each time you conquer a Keep or Castle or Suply Deposit you get some points ….and if you have enought points you can choose to ’’save’’ 4 Sieges or 5 , or even more

Hello Mr Corpening,

The “Exhaustion” idea sounds great to me, but like some other player suggested there should be a way to aid commanders who usually carry a lot of siege.

If you implement “Exhaustion”, could you make it so if you are in a commanders squad when the commander tries to create siege there will be a short pop up to everyone in the squad. This pop up would ask each player, if they want to aid the commander in constructing siege. If any player agrees, they would get a stack of the “Exhaustion” debuff instead of the commander. The pop up could last only a few seconds (2-5?) and have some intuitive hotkeys assigned to be less or not annoying. Maybe press Enter to accept, Esc to decline. Only players in the squad and in certain range of the commander would be prompted to “aid”, so players can avoid a commander who is “trolling” and choose the commanders they want to help to.

There could be an option in the commander menu to disable this pop up and Players who choose to “aid” could also get a short karma buff to encourage group play even more.

You could also make a WvW passive that increases the maximum stacks of “Exhaustion” for a commander for every player in their squad. Maybe +1 per rank?

Keep doing what you’re doing!

Commander alone isn’t really a good criterium, now that nearly every char has a lamp. Commander with x% of map-population in his squad may work however.
Still you have to consider the lonely scout in an objective, that buildup the meaningful defense while scouting, he must not be hindered doing so.

Grinoire, yes, build and usage of a siege by other people than the owner are good indicators, that this isn’t troll-siege.

As far as a viable solution to fix siege trolls who are just trying to siege cap an area and drain supply, I am unsure that there is one that would not hinder legitimate players.

For those trolls who like to drop trebuchets on doors when a commander is trying to build rams and people who walk golems off cliffs, I believe I have an idea that could work.

Siege is already tagged with ownership of the item once the blueprint is dropped. Perhaps adding a buff icon to each piece of siege showing the owner would help to identify who the trolls are. You will no longer receive an interact option for siege dropped by anyone on your blocked list. To stop people who like to walk golems off cliffs, anyone on your blocked list will not be able to use siege you have ownership of. This system could also be used for people who like to drop troll food on top of siege that people are building. It’s not foolproof but at least a tool that players could use to combat the situation.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

If you summarise what a commander/player troll does then I would say they are constantly trying to interfere with a player’s intentions.

• Player intention: Picking up supply
• Troll interference: Drop siege on supply base

• Player intention: Rezzing downed players
• Troll interference: Drop siege on downed players

• Player intention: Repair Wall/Gate
• Troll interference: Drop siege on wall/gate

• Player intention: Building rams
• Troll interference: Drop siege on build site

Don’t forget destroying siege golems, despawning legitimate siege by spamming trash siege, and blocking keep upgrades by spamming trash siege. Preventing F-key interaction is only a part of the exploit.

Sorry ArenaNet, but this thread scares me. Before you implement any automated system that will hinder players ability to play WvW, ask yourself this:

How many times have you heard people complain about your current system, which is refreshing siege, compared to the problem of people siege trolling? For me the answer is about 100:1.

• There are situations where I am completely justified in building 10 ballistae in a paper keep.

• There are situations where I am completely justified in spending 500 supply within 10 minutes.

• There are situations where I am completely justified in dropping 25 siege blueprints within 10 minutes.

If you don’t understand this, and the fact that any automated system will only serve to inconvenience thousands of players on a daily basis to deal with 5-10 that you are too lazy to, then I am really scared for the future of WvW.

The only way you will get rid of people trolling with siege is to implement automatic restrictions that will make WvW near unplayable, or to actually go out there yourself and deal with this extremely small subset of toxic players yourself.

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

Flipscore.4597:

Put the character’s name on it.

If you see X’s Trebuchet Build Site when everyone’s putting down Flame Rams, you’ll know exactly who’s responsible.

Have a report function specifically for this issue, get X reports in Y amount of time, and you get a cooldown period where you can’t deploy siege. You can still build and operate siege normally. You just can’t deploy it.

I like this idea

i like too

My server do not have any siege trolls and we are in Silver league. So this problem is probably only happens in some top servers. Please don’t impose limitations on siege use. The trolls will find new ways to troll anyway, and it will just limit the legitimate uses of siege. Make a good reporting tools, and hire someone to ban the people on the top of the report list. It should not be that hard to identify those 5-10 individuals. It is not like gold farming, it’s not profitable for them, so they will give up after a couple of bans.

how about making the “report” action really mean something?
In gw1 I remembered there’s report function in pvp missions like JQ and FA. Once you get spam report, you are punished and are not allowed to play for a period of time.
You kittentainly use the same mechanics cuz trolls will absolutely get tons of report and it’s better to kick him off the wvw server for a good amount of time.

The idea to know what siege are you building is really good. It should display Build Ballista and we should have an easy way to select the siege blueprint we would like to be building. This should help a lot with troll siege drops at gates.

John Corpening.9847:

snip
The exhaustion idea that I kicked out there has had some mixed responses. There were some amazingly good ideas to make it work a whole lot better. For example, I really liked the suggestions that the cool down time is reduced for each member of your squad. I am really concerned though about the affects that you guys brought up on small havok groups and defenders. There were some suggestions that I think would make it work. For example, a couple of suggestions were along the lines of if you are actively playing it will clear your exhaustion. So if you down an enemy, break down a gate, destroy enemy siege etc. your exhaustion would be cleared.

If we tweaked Exhaustion to this would it work? :

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 five stacks of “Exhaustion” they can no longer place siege
4. If a player downs an enemy, destroys siege, breaks down a wall or gate their exhaustion is cleared
5. A commander’s exhaustion is reduced by 30 seconds for each member of his squad
   snip
   John

This would help limit those that keep throwing siege up on walls of their enemy, etc, but it could still cause problems for people trying to set up siege to defend.
Take a small group that is defending a tower or even a keep. Often only 1 or 2 may know the best spots to place siege, so they do it because it’s faster to show than to try to explain. 5 in a 3 min time period may minimize the chance of it actually negatively affecting a player. but at the same time, you would do little to stop actual ‘supply trolls’ or ‘saboteurs’ (which unfortunately do exist).

Writing this I also wondered something. Would tricks or traps count toward this ‘Exhaustion’? Would pulling it out but then returning it to inventory count as well, or throwing siege but it failing due to ‘cannot be placed here’ (saying it now so those potential bugs could maybe be avoided)? Would say supply trap be improved to be actually useful in more situations (as is, they are not, especially against groups. 5 supply from 20 people has no effect when the group attacking is 50, not to mention the time required to activate it and it cannot be done in stealth), and I’ve already noticed times the disabler fails to hit and activate despite throwing when there is no cata/golem bubble, nor swirling winds/wall/etc. I would swear it has failed to hit just because a guardian was standing in front (read: aegis) but it will take more time to judge whether that is happening or not, but I’ve had multiple disablers fail to do anything even though no blocks/reflects were in use.

Despite heading off on that tangent, with those situations, if it counts towards exhaustion, legitimate players could hit that 5 and have to wait for a stack of exhaustion to wear off, hurting a small defense. Yet, a ‘troll’ would just have to space out the time they are building siege and even if they don’t have to run far, they won’t be affected by exhaustion at all as each stack would still roll off, which in turn defeats part of the point to this ‘deterrent’. It would, however, limit the spamming of build sites, but a lot of the ‘troll’ use of it isn’t from spamming but just 1 or 2 sites.

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

http://i.imgur.com/zhAu034.png

These are the type of trolls that need to be banned. Their sole purpose of having multiple accounts is to troll servers they are against.

If players can provide clear video evidence of players walking multiple golems off cliffs on purpose, building 10 balistas right next to the supply deopt. Would we be able to get them warned and banned for multiple offences?

This requires little time for GM checking players in-game and allows players to police and provide you the evidence.

EFWinters.5421:

Sorry ArenaNet, but this thread scares me. Before you implement any automated system that will hinder players ability to play WvW, ask yourself this:

How many times have you heard people complain about your current system, which is refreshing siege, compared to the problem of people siege trolling? For me the answer is about 100:1.

• There are situations where I am completely justified in building 10 ballistae in a paper keep.

• There are situations where I am completely justified in spending 500 supply within 10 minutes.

• There are situations where I am completely justified in dropping 25 siege blueprints within 10 minutes.

If you don’t understand this, and the fact that any automated system will only serve to inconvenience thousands of players on a daily basis to deal with 5-10 that you are too lazy to, then I am really scared for the future of WvW.

The only way you will get rid of people trolling with siege is to implement automatic restrictions that will make WvW near unplayable, or to actually go out there yourself and deal with this extremely small subset of toxic players yourself.

Exactly, these are actual situations that do come up, and concerns me about ideas I’ve read here. All I see are things that could hurt and limit legitimate usage while not doing anything about the actual problems. Part of the problem is that people don’t see all the different aspects because they haven’t done those things themselves. I see these ideas, and think of how it would severely hinder defense of a tower or keep that is about to be zerged by ~50 while there might only be 15 defenders. Or even defending a tower against just ~20. Trust me, people don’t need encouragement to zerg down an objective, they do it far too much already, which some of the ideas would only encourage more of.

(offhand comment but there are reasons behind these even if actions won’t ever be taken on them: If you want to limit some troll siege, remove cannons from outer wall of Stone Mist and prevent trebuchets from being built on the top floor.)

If you think there’s a simply solution to this problem where a single change solves siege troll problems you’d better think again when is there ever a single change to fix anything?

You have to think in terms of redundancy, tiered solutions to limit the effects of unintended consequences and when all else fails you absolutely have to have GM’s available to intervene after all its YOUR game, YOU are the caretakers of it, its YOUR actions or inaction that makes this a successful game so quit shucking the responsibility of policing it.

I think the easiest idea would be to put name on the account that summoned the siege equipment. And make us able to report abusers of the system.

The ban hammer should not be just one hammer. It can be a full spectrum of things.

• time: a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, a few matches, permanently
• capabilities: not enter a golem, not able to place siege, not able to take supplies, not able to start upgrades, not able to enter WvW for a specific team, not able to enter WvW, not able to play gw2 with this account.

As soon as there is a grade of punishment things can be delegated to

1. automated systems, e.g. 100 to 0 damage of a golem by fall damage disables golem driving for 24h
2. player votes, e.g. a majority vote that this and this is trolling disables this and this related capability for that and that time (maybe long the more decisive the vote)

Combined with logging and manual inspection of collected evidence in repeated cases it will likely work.

OR

make an option to ‘flag’ a friendly player (not enemy) as troll available. have the trolls auto-kicked from WvW (with 30 minutes cool down to enter WvW) if they are flagged by 30 other players in a space of 5 minutes.

Sieges should be used and destroyed by every color on the map. Preventing troll and acidental destroying, 5-10 players shold hit the same thing to damage on it.
You should rise the cap aoe of the sieges. 2-3 trebs, 9 ac, 3 ballista and 2 cata in a tower while you can disable with 1 trick every rams? I think this is also a kind of siege trolling. The objects have a guild buff radius, maybe tie the siege limit to that radius.
If you want to prevent troll supply spending add a 20 supply limit in 1 min cooldown what you can use (20 is the max cap of the supply what somebody can carry)

siege troll = people who spam sieges and waste resources

so the problems here is not the spam of sieges but the waste of resources.
if i have X resources i can build Y sieges but if trolls spend Z resources our server can use only X-Z resources.

To introduce a siege cap is not a good idea because if the cap is X and trolls uses Z supplies to build sieges and also people with stacked supplies (for example supplies obtained the previous day) could not build anything.

So here are my 50cent:
1) when you leave WvW you lost all you remaining supplies
2) every time you pick up supplies you get “exhaustion” malus which block you from pick up again for 10mins (or 5), if you pick more than 100 supplies in the previous 10×10mins (or 5×10 mins), you get a stronger version of exhaustion which prevent you from pick up again for 1 (or more) hour. This way those lone players can build arrow carts and rams but siege spammers get only 2-3 sieges in 100 mins (or 50) and then are out for 1 hour.
3) introduce a dynamic siege cap: let’s say 100 is the max number of sieges per server per map, when the 101st siege is deployed the 1st vanishes (maybe returning some supplies to the nearest camp… like 25% of supply spent).

My idea around siege troll is that when you claim a building you can set a % off supply player can take when building is not in combat, something like 20, 30, 40, 50, 60% were 60% is highest you can select, so a fully upgraded keep can hold 1700 supply then players can take supply down to 1020 if it set to 60% after that they get warning and if they still take the guards see them as enemy and gate turn red so they can’t enter/leave.
For a guild to claim a building they need at least 1 buff running and when all buff run out they lose the claim.

Here you can also add a guild buff that makes timer on siege longer. (should be under Art of War lvl 3 or 4, cost 200points)

Then buffs guild can add on supply camp should be +5 supply, faster regain off supply in the camp (here you cannot set limit off how much supply you can take).
More a reward for Doly protection, were you get a buff that last for 1hour that do so you can carry more supply, bronze +1, silver +2, gold +3 supply and the doly must finish it run to get the buff.

A small observation:

It seems that an improved entity targetting system could actually take care of half of the issue. Maybe allow group choices for interactables within melee distance? Ie. when a siege is placed on top of another interactable like, another siege on building process, or when two NPC vendors are at the same distance forcing you to manually target with teh mouse or moving out, instead of having a single key to interact with the closest item, show a list (ie.: F, Ctrl+F Alt+F…up to 4 maybe?) with further names of what are you going to interact with, so the player can avoid interacting with the entity thei do not wish to. (If a troll builds a different siege type than required, players wil lbe able to select the correct type of siege. Because people will then not fall for the worng type of siege, the siege will not complete and will not hit construction limit).

This would also change slightly PvE, as a very minor addition. Just disable this feature if “AoE Loot” is selected on options.

Of course, a troll could still try to deploy several copies of the correct siege to an atetmpt to dry resources off. Build percentage should be added to construction sites to counter this, since the first siege deployed is going to be the one the commander placed.

My vision of a solution to the problem.

Provide Siege UI for nearest sieges and put it under the list of events.
Shows who set siege(build progress) and allows you to choose the right one.

These ideas are all great but I think we are overcomplicating things a bit.

The cures seems worse than the disease.

What about adding a report option and simply Banning toxic players?
It can easily checked by logs i guess.

Once you banned some it becomes a detherrent.

My idea is, that the commander (only) is allowed to dissipate (not sure if this is the correct word) the unwanted sieges. The wasted supplies would go back to your owned keep or tower if it was placed there, but not in the openfield and not to the player.

I don’t like the idea of debuffs for building sieges, that will only hurt defenders, not the trolls.

Allowing to dissipate/destroye unwanted siege would lead to a massive troll. Having a tag now is fairly easy, and you would find players destroying all siege on keep and tower.

What will work to get rid of siege trolls is to name them, shame them, and temp ban the worst offenders.

A convoluted system isn’t needed if anet is willing to ban offenders.

Just put guild tags on siege, so players know who threw it, or restrict siege use to commanders (so the whole map sees who is responsible)

What if the players could vote to add exhaustion onto another player? Similar to the report function, but community monitored. Players could call out a troll in map chat, confirm the troll, and add exhaustion points to that account. As a result that individual can no longer lay down siege, or pick up and spend supply. Perhaps increase the exhaustion based on number of players reporting. If an account has frequent reports, an automatic email could generate to the devs and they can take whatever appropriate action. This way, legitimate players don’t get penalized and only the trolls get affected. It also allows the community to police itself.

Lord Kuru.3685:

LordByron.8369:

The cures seems worse than the disease.

What about adding a report option and simply Banning toxic players?
It can easily checked by logs i guess.

Once you banned some it becomes a detherrent.

Reading the OP, it seems Anet is not willing to spend the effort/money on GMs (which would easily solve the problem overnight). Yet they are currently doing exactly this for catching dungeon exploiters.

They probably don’t want to have to move to live monitoring of their players. From what I’ve seen between this and GW1 – they really don’t like interfering without just cause.

Unfortunately, sometimes you do have to roll up the sleeves, grab hold of the Might Banhammer +6 . . . and whack-a-troll.

Ok,,

As far as I can tell, most are ok with the exhaust thing just that no one wants a general implementation. I for one am against any global supply/siege limitation, and letting the community decide.

Again, focus on a specific problem and implement a solution for that. (Yes, banning the well known trolls would be great)

Siege trolling is a complex issue because people can easily siege troll and depending on the situation, it can be fun or really damaging.

Lord Kuru.3685:

LordByron.8369:

The cures seems worse than the disease.

What about adding a report option and simply Banning toxic players?
It can easily checked by logs i guess.

Once you banned some it becomes a detherrent.

Reading the OP, it seems Anet is not willing to spend the effort/money on GMs (which would easily solve the problem overnight). Yet they are currently doing exactly this for catching dungeon exploiters.

Its not as hard as for dungeon.
A siege troll receives a huge amount of report (but we lack a reporting option).

So in this case GM are not needed, they can just check logs whenever they have the time.

Only work would maybe be some sort of search engine to extract data from log, and its still less than implementing anything.

Also can be reused for many other exploits.

How about a world vs world prison of shame if enough people vote him to be a troll then the accused must spend the allocated amount of time in that prison and are turned into an enemy for the time being and we can just farm him over and over as a loot bag!

Jerus.4350:

Require 10 or so members of a guild to be present for a tower/keep to be claimed.

Only that guild can place siege in the tower

Make sure the time on a claim is reasonable so that the guild has to remain present on the map to maintain the claim to prevent issues.

Additional siege cannot be placed if the tower is not claimed, but already placed siege will remain.

I realize sometimes people change scouts and want that new scout to be able to place siege, well the players would then have the power to temporarily invite them to a guild if it’s necessary… it’s not perfect but I believe the main downsides would be things players could mitigate themselves. If a troll did get a guild large enough together to claim things he’d still have to beat legitimate guilds to the punch.

You just killed sieging and claiming in 99% of the servers….

Sieging IS NOT DONE by big guilds, but mostly by small ones and individuals, EVEN in T1.

Best case scenario, each server will create a “super guild” for the purpose of sieging, but even that won’t really work, since it will mean only one objective sieged at a time, when it’s usually several at a time.

Stop thinking putting HUGE hindrance to sieging is the solution, it’s worse than the problem at hand.

insanemaniac.2456:

whoa, didnt expect this.

[..]

Taking LoL’s Tribunal as the “best example” of what to do when it’s the most broken, useless, exploited, toxic system EVER made in a game to moderate the community is insane.

The Tribunal has made things worse and worse and worse, to the point pretty much all group of 4 players is deciding who and when they send to the Tribunal (for punishment since it’s 90% of vote for punish since it’s the easiest way to be “right” and most people that do the Tribunal learned it when you were earned rewards from siding with the majority…..).

Please, never ask for something like that in any other game.

I would even prefer a bunch of people “elected” by the community in charge of moderating and bans, it would be less toxic, less exploited, and less manipulated (and that tells a LOT).

Gob.3964:

Filovirus.6258:

Gob.3964:

Make regular blueprints account-bound while superior and guild siege can remain tradable. Siege trolling is so easy because ballista blueprints are 50 copper each. The average WvW’er is already swimming in enough badges of honor to keep themselves supplied with whatever regular siege they require. A majority of the time, superior siege is preferred anyway.

You’re just penalizing players….. and have no clue honestly.
This would break the economy for once. And on top of that most people actively sieging go through stacks of siege on a daily basis, and they aren’t earning 1/10th of the badges they would need for it.

On top of that you just killed a common practice that guild members send their excess siege/donate siege to their guild/commanders, so those can use/upgrade them if needed.

(we sure have a whole guild tab dedicated to donating normal bp and the mats to upgrade them in our guild, and we aren’t the only ones….).

That’s why I said superior siege should remain tradable. Even if you are upgrading siege for your guild, the skill points are account-bound. I would think that someone generous enough to donate their skill points wouldn’t also mind donating their badges of honor.

So yes this would totally break the economy for badges of honor, making them actually worth something other than unsalvageable gear.

People donating siege and upgrading them aren’t the same most of the time either…..

You didn’t read what i wrote. If it was the same people donating the bp and the mats and the sp, we wouldn’t need a guild tab dedicated to it, we would need a few gbank slots to stockpile the superior sieges…..

Same with people sending sieges bp to commanders and such.

You are punishing players and killing the sieging, and removing the ability of dedicated siegers to do so (i don’t know how or why those people find it fun and fullfilling to do that most of the day, but some do and i’m quite grateful for them, enough to send them bp/gold and such when i can, and i’m not the only one. Your idea kills that).

Why the heck would you make sieging more painful and expensive when it’s already a problem ?.

Please people, if you aren’t the ones sieging on a daily basis, stop offering silly ideas punishing siegers and making sieging an impossible nightmare.

The oppening Dev had the right idea, getting to hinder/punish siege trolls as much as possible WITHOUT making sieging/siegers’s life harder or impossible….

Gloam Drifter.9158:

Make siege only throwable by commanders. This is kind of a rule in WvW anyway since it keeps things more organized. If someone wants to troll drop an AC on a gate you will see them tag up, this will probably discourage a lot of people from even doing it.

Exhaustion – This is not a good idea to do on deploy because, as it was mentioned before, siege is often dropped by a single person. It however would maybe be a good idea for BUILDING siege but not placing it. I like the idea that this could be mitigated if others help you build the item.

I also think forcing siege to be clicked on BEFORE you build might be a good thing. I’ve seen trolling where people will throw siege over a supply depot (so people would accidentally build it) or over a mesmer portal for example. I wouldn’t do this though unless you make siege easier to click on, particularly when they are close together.

None of these things will really STOP a dedicated troll but would probably curtail a considerable amount of casual trolling that some people do for a giggle now and again.

Annnnd you just killed all the guild only groups that don’t tag up, all the groups that are organized enough to not need only the commander to have and drop siege, all the havoc/ninja groups running without a commander (why would you need a commander when you are under 10 ??) and so on and so on.

WvW isn’t only 50+vs50+ pug commander groups you know….

Just being forced to waste time sending siege to the commander so he can put them down is silly.

1) Make siege build sites easy to target the one you want when stacked on top of each other.
2) Put the account name of whoever drops the siege somewhere when you target it. (build site and completed siege)
3) Give players the option to report siege and build sites as troll siege when they are targeting them. This is a report against the account that placed it.
4) Once X number of reports come in of this account siege trolling. Get someone to watch the person and then ban them when it is confirmed they are doing it.

Also the option of being able to toggle the ability to only interact with your guild or squads build sites would be nice too and could be implemented along with 1-4.

This wouldn’t eliminate an account building worthless siege to hit cap or wasting the supplies. It would make it more costly to them when they will probably get banned for it. This will discourage others from doing it.

There may still be trolls out there that find it worth 24.99 to troll the enemy. They will be a lot less than when they don’t have to worry about being banned.

Filovirus.6258:

Gloam Drifter.9158:

Make siege only throwable by commanders. This is kind of a rule in WvW anyway since it keeps things more organized. If someone wants to troll drop an AC on a gate you will see them tag up, this will probably discourage a lot of people from even doing it.

Exhaustion – This is not a good idea to do on deploy because, as it was mentioned before, siege is often dropped by a single person. It however would maybe be a good idea for BUILDING siege but not placing it. I like the idea that this could be mitigated if others help you build the item.

I also think forcing siege to be clicked on BEFORE you build might be a good thing. I’ve seen trolling where people will throw siege over a supply depot (so people would accidentally build it) or over a mesmer portal for example. I wouldn’t do this though unless you make siege easier to click on, particularly when they are close together.

None of these things will really STOP a dedicated troll but would probably curtail a considerable amount of casual trolling that some people do for a giggle now and again.

Annnnd you just killed all the guild only groups that don’t tag up, all the groups that are organized enough to not need only the commander to have and drop siege, all the havoc/ninja groups running without a commander (why would you need a commander when you are under 10 ??) and so on and so on.

WvW isn’t only 50+vs50+ pug commander groups you know….

Just being forced to waste time sending siege to the commander so he can put them down is silly.

To add something to this, trolls can have a commander tag too to seige it up. We on Gunnars Hold have such an idiot tagging up just to throw tons of rams in lords rooms etc. I personally dont think a debuff like exhaustion will have a great impact on avoiding siege trolls, though it would have a great negative impact on those people spending lots of their time sieging up stuff. Something most people dont bother with.