Guild Wars 2

I promised a comprehensive study of the experiment I did with a few friends, so let’s get this rolling shall we.

THE EXPERIMENT, PHASE 1: Maguuma VS Tarnished Coast VS Ehmry Bay. Ehmry Bay takes a very strong early lead, which makes them a prime target for the other two servers until the lead is taken care of. Acknowledging this, I, and three other players, start a thread and false rumors of an alliance between TC and Mag. Ehmry Bay players quickly start believing it (to the point where they still believe it to this day) and it spreads into their /map and /team chat very, very heavily. Their morale drops, they resort to flinging insults at Maguuma 24/7 instead of fighting, and ultimately they go from first place to last place.

THE EXPERIMENT, PHASE 2: Maguuma VS Yak’s Bend VS Ehmry Bay. With Ehmry Bay utterly and completely kitten at Maguuma and throwing threat after threat that they’re going to own us and wipe the floor with us in a fair rematch, many of their players try to focus on Maguuma exclusively. This has for result to open their unarmored belly for Yak’s Bend to smash, while Maguuma stomps all over both servers, to the point that the scores are currently 200K (Mag), 100K (Yak), 70K (EB). Ehmry Bay claims that a single bugged keep is making them lose (one keep = 130K point lead???) and that they’re stopping to WvWvW for now.

THE RESULTS: Morale, people. In a situation where your server may end up fighting the same server for two weeks in a row, there is no weapon more effective than crushing their morale and making them believe the deck is stacked against them, even if it’s not. In this state of anger, whining, and low morale, not only will they play poorly but they will probably take extraordinarily bad decisions, like focusing on the server that broke their morale instead of on winning.

Ehmry Bay: get a thicker skin, you allowed us to troll you so hard your players stopped playing because things were “unfair”. You went from having a strong early game lead to being the underdog two weeks in a row, and you spent more time complaining on these forums than you did trying to win.

Tarnished Coast: looking forward to a rematch, you guys were amazing.

IN CONCLUSION: Proper demoralization and trolling of a server can have devastating effects on the way they play if you do it right and if you ensure that it sticks; i.e. you need to make sure it’s not only on the forums, but that it spreads to their /map and /team too. In this case, making sure that this fake alliance wasn’t just called out on the forums, but in their chat too. This resulted in lines like “why bother playing TC and Mag are allied against us” “lol they are too weak to fight us 1v1v1 instead of 2v1” “we will pwn Mag next week” etc etc. This causes poor playing, underestimation all around, and many other very nice side-effects.

To any future server that goes up against Ehmry Bay: remember this work well. Making them believe there is an alliance in play is the best way to crush their morale, it’s hilarious.

I hope by now Anet has moved beyond and realised the implications for not having adequate systems in WvW.

In any event this thread comprehensively discusses it:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-Self-Balancing-System/first#post327649

This article has some genuinely interesting solutions to offer:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/How-to-combat-folding-in-WvWvW-Constructive/first#post337466

That is not an experiment. You lack any variables. This isn’t even a case study as you did no naturalistic observation. If I squint really hard, it can be a correlation but that defeats your causal statement at the end.

So instead of actually debating the merits of your “experiment”, I link to the Rules of Conduct:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-rules-of-conduct/

“While playing Guild Wars 2, you must respect the rights of others and their rights to play and enjoy the Game. To this end, you may not defraud, harass, threaten, embarrass or cause distress and/or unwanted attention to other players. This includes posting insulting, offensive, or abusive comments about players, repeatedly sending unwanted messages, reporting players maliciously, attacking a player based on race, sexual orientation, religion, heritage, etc. Hate speech is not tolerated.”

“You will not exploit any bug in Guild Wars 2 and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits) either directly or through public posting, to any other user of Guild Wars 2.”

“While participating in Plaver-vs-Player (PvP) gameplay, you will not participate in any form of match manipulation. Match manipulation is defined as any action taken to fix or manipulate the outcome of a match or alter or manipulate the rankings or ratings of the ladder. This also includes disrupting other people’s game experience by not actively participating in matches in good faith, a.k.a leeching.”

As it stands, it is known by your post that you actively sought to disrupt the gameplay of others and mock, embarrass, or bring unwanted attention to players (here, EB). It is also a fact, admitted by Maguuma, that they took full advantage of a bug with the Garrison. Finally, an argument can be made that you opted for match manipulation through alliance, but I think that one’s definitely less arguable. I think what Maguuma did is completely fair, but it was still underhanded as a tactic.

So, you’ve admitted to trolling: " Proper demoralization and trolling of a server " and the server admits to taking advantage of a bugged garrison.

There’s a pretty big difference between winning and doing your best to mock, insult, troll, and embarrass a server because of a win. Accordingly, I reported your post. I hope others do the same. Your behavior is the exact behavior that turns PvP from a fun challenge to a constantly antagonistic area of play. It takes the fun out of the competition and simply leaves the harassment, insulting, and community-destroying animosity that has made other games analogous with having a horrid community.

You really have to wonder many of these claims are being made after the fact. Like a guy showing up last second to a brawl and claiming he turned the tides.

The point about morale is all fine and good but there’s easier ways to demoralize an enemy regardless. I’m not really buying what the snake oil fella is selling.

Well, Drium did post at the start of the TC, EB, and Mag battle that Mag and TC were going to enter into an alliance.

A surprisingly large number of EB players began to post in the TC, EB, and Mag threads about how it was unfair that EB and Mag were allied (which, in reality, they never were) and that people on their server were talking about it regularly in /team and /map.

Many EB players who post here in the forum continue to believe that Mag and TC had an Alliance although some have loosened their belief a little to say that it was “only during the start” of the match-up – which, again, it wasn’t since it never existed.

The idea that TC and Mag were in an alliance is still maintained by many EB players and it did cause many players to not join in the fight. As to the numbers – who knows. Was it 10? Was it 100? Was it 1000? Was it just one? I have no idea and I don’t think we have any real way to quantify that.

All that I can attest to is that this post by Drium did have an impact and continues to have one now – by the fact that many EB posters continue to believe that there was an alliance between TC and Mag.

Silly attempts at meta-gaming like this are..well..silly. This isn’t Eve, most people just want straight up, fair matches with no drama from people with too much time on their hands. This game isn’t even remotely designed with meta-gaming in mind and I have to agree that starting petty crap like this for any reason is just wasting everyone’s time. It’s a game, to be played as such, you get nothing from winning by demoralizing your opponents in this game, except a boring match.

People get demoralized without any trolling. SoS and TC were having these swinging exchanges between night and day. However, SoS was the first to throw in the towel and now TC has an insurmountable lead. Soon as people quit showing up to the fight is when the real loss starts.