Guild Wars 2

People playing mass PvP tend to focus on one of the two possible goals, driving their sense of fun from that format. The goals are not totally mutually exclusive, one can play with both in mind, but they are a pair of connected scales – gameplay-wise, you can’t focus on both on 100%.
While there are players fully dedicated to only one of the goals, most of us are somewhere inbetween, seeing benefit in both sides of the coin. I am basing this little dissertation on the models of extremes of motivations, though, which are…

Fights.
Points.

Fights-motivated players get most fun from epic clashes with enemies. Defeating a much bigger group of enemies with their 5man party. Big fights in open field, two zergs clashing. Long defenses of single locations, often against odds, without paying much attention to what’s happening elsewhere – as long as the defended kee kitten till standing. Zergbusting in any form.
Those people organise duels under the Orchards, as well as GvG meetings, with proper agreements, fielding equal teams and fighting just to prove which side can beat the other to the ground. They burrow in remote camps with siege and farm unsuspecting players who venture there, annoying the hell out of ‘em.
The ’fighters’ are there for the ‘player vs player’ part of the format. They do not care about points or winning matchups. Keeps and towers are only scenes of fights for them, beaconing for enemies, ensuring epic clashes. Winning a battle is enough of a reward for them, but they also enjoy their lootbags and badges of honor, which they often boast about.
‘90 badges in an hour, the fights that night last week were so crazy! Had so much fun!’.

Those players, being actually focused on the inherent PvP rather than any extra mechanics specific to the game, are usually really good at micro tactics and actual ‘gaming skill’ than the ones motivated by points. They like to bust zergs, and they do, pretty often. They master the use of siege weaponry for player killing – not the most apt or dedicated treb operators, but sure as hell they can manage a ballista.
If they roam solo, they are well prepared for it, able to take out most targets in a 1v1 combat. If they run in a group, they are well organised, communicating fluently and quickly, all to ensure their success in each fight against enemies.
That kind of players camp the jumping puzzles, too. They get nothing from it but seeing some enemies wiping the floor, except for occassional lootbag or badge, yet they still can put a lot of time and effort into it. It really isn’t about griefing, not that often anyway – the jp campers really find it fun and enjoyable.

Being somewhat more skilled and dedicated to the ‘actual PvP’, they often tend to scowl at players not following their motivation. PvP with any PvE elements is automatically worth less for them; JQ back in GW1 was seen as inferior, not ‘true PvP’, same as PvE elements found in WvW are often perceived as a bad idea (even the capping mechanic with the lord and all that stuff!). They ‘leave the PvE to others’, focusing on mopping enemies and not capping locations – just because it doesn’t involve fights. By default, then, they are against PvDooring of any kind, and speak of night/morning capping in derogatory terms. No honor, no fun, no point in that – no fights.
They lose the designed gameplay from their sight, not caring about points. They easily waste a lot of time trying to save a single tower while the enemy is taking everything else. They do not think in the macro scale, forfeting overall map control in favour of their own fun from clashes.

The fights-motivated WvWers may be perceived as selfish; their zergbusting doesn’t really bring any points to the server, and even if they do defend a keep for hours, it often comes with a great alternative cost – they could have done something better, point-wise, in that time, like flipping an enemy keep and a tower while leaving only a few defenders behind to stall the enemies rather than wipe them.
They also often ignore smaller things, like escorting yaks, killing yaks, flipping sentries or just scouting the map. No fights, no reason.

An often seen argument supporting WvWing mainly for fights and kills is that wiping enemy zergs crushes their morale, making fair-weather players leave back to PvE, thus effectively impacting the bigger picture.
In theory it is nice, but in practice it’s pretty silly.
I mean, it’s like hoping to win a tournament match because you’ve been focusing one or two enemies for so long that they ragequit in despair. How glorious. Like focusing just one opponent in an FPS game, hoping to make them leave the game and fight 8v7, or 4v3, or whatever the number cap is. I call bad sportsmanship.
But even with that aside, as ‘breaking the spirit’ is in general a valid tactic in any kind of war or skirmish, it just doesn’t work. You may make five people the enemy zerg due to constant wiping, but there are some newcomers all the time. Five will go, five will come. How many people does your server lose due to being wiped in zerg vs zerg fights? Do you see much whining on /t and /m? Or do your servermates simply respawn, repair up and try again, doing something else? Why assume it’s anything different on any other server?

Playing only for fights, for skirmishes with enemy players, is like never capturing any spots in sPvP. It’s like having both teams play terrorists in CounterStrike, and neither ever plant the bomb, just keep shooting each other. Heck, it’s even worse than that – kills in sPvP or CS actually do accumulate points for your entire team, not just loot and some for yourself, whereas they do not contribute to the points total your server ends up with in WvW.

It’s an attitude based on short-term goals, and initial and close rewards – the more i can get, here and now.

Points-motivated players want to crush their enemies in their matchups, but crush them in the week-long point comparison. Outplaying both enemy servers by the tick, not kills, is their goal. They try to sow for the entire week, only to collect their fruit at one moment – when the matchup is won.
They actually tend to avoid open fights they are not sure they can win, and rather than pull off a 20vs30 victory, they’d dodge the enemy team and go elsewhere, just to capture more locations and up the server’s tick. Many of those players actually feel uneasy when PvPing as it is, avoiding any clashes unless they outzerg the enemy team.
Those players PvDoor and see nothing wrong about it, as it’s generating them and their server points, whether it’s sieging only unprotected towers or actually organising an off-peak raiding team, just to paint the map in their colour. Seeing an enemy map or all of EB in their hands is what gives them most joy.

Focused on map control, they check the map more often and generally read it better, predicting enemy movements fast and reliably. Map-focused commanders tend to be great resource managers, with macro overview of the map that lets them manage several teams of players all across the map rather than just flashing their own badge and making people zerg on it.
They usually know many decent spots for sieging, are aware of treb ranges and superior siege strength, and they can use it for both defense and offense. Not as apt at wiping enemy attackers with carts and ballistae, they know which spots are most vulnerable and where to pay most attention, which of enemy siege to take out first – as they already have experience from the other side, too.
One of their marks is the karma train, and a proper one – inviting people from PvE zones to go into a WvW map and steamroll through stuff together, not necessarily leaving any defense behind, just flipping it all. While it doesn’t let them hold anything for long, it does bring more people into the format.

They’re often seen as unskilled and easy to wipe, not making quick use of flanking or portal bombing – you don’t flank a tower, you siege it. They are said to be lousy defenders, losing their towers, even if they can quickly retake them.
They are faced with an epic conundrum when they have enemies at their base, with their map or EB chunk completely wiped out and defended – they try to siege a tower and take it back only to get themselves wiped.
This take generates much less gold and badges, and offers less on-the-spot fun, with mundane and often dull things to do, like escorting yaks to SM for two hours.

To my amusement, they also argue that they’re crushing the enemy spirit – constant downgrading of enemy keeps and towers, wasting their gold and time for upgrades, painting their maps their own colours.
From my and the server’s experience, i’d actually agree with them – it really is disheartening to wake up every day and see you’re down to two camps, flipped by most hardcore regulars. It does take any motivation of upgrading away – sure, at the end of the matchup your gold would still be wasted, but at least it’d help your server get some more points if your upgrades were there for longer. Why bother then?

Avoiding enemies and focusing only on the main mechanics of the format is dangerously close to planting the bomb in CS and then leaving the spot, leaving it undefended, or rushing to disarm one without first clearing out the terrorists around.

It’s an attitude based on long-term goals, and eventual and fictious rewards – the more i can help my server win the matchup.
Why fictious, you ask? Let me counter – what is the reward in winning a matchup, exactly?

Both takes have their strong and weak sides. They work best when combined, but in a conscious, organised way, based on mutual understanding and respect. You can’t win a matchup using only ballistae and carts, and obviously those two siege engines are much better to kill enemies than rams and catapults.
Think of the fighters are the Zergbusting Vanguard that can pave the way for the cappers, the Engineers of Destruction, let them cap while sheltered from flanks, and then have some of the PvP fighters stay for defense.

It all sounds nice on paper, but are there any practical points, you ask? Quite some. Keep in mind the whole essay is based on assuming theoretical extremes, which are almost never to be seen in actual game – we’re all somewhere between. So, what based on that?
Identify and understand your motivation. Are you more of a capper or a fighter? Do you prefer winning here and now, wiping enemies and looting their bags, or do you prefer seeing your server winning matchups? I know you probably like both, but – which one more? Would you forego points at all, having your server end up third with thousands of points to both rivals, if that meant epic fights every day on the way?
Understand and respect other players. This of course goes beyond this little duality we have here. Whether your servermates PvDoor and capture empty towers or they win agreed GvG meetings, they’re your allies and they’re doing something for everyone, even if it’s not seen at the beginning.
Communicate and work together. Find like-minded players to do stuff together, but also communicate with those doing something else. Plan ahead and utilise your skills, of both sides, to help the bigger picture.
See your shortcomings. I’m a point-oriented player and commander. I know i suck at micro level during field fights, especially when it comes to any management. I don’t like burrowing in one spot and defending it for hours, even if it means epic lootbags – and i often trade one of my towers for one of the enemy’s, believing offense is the best defense. There were situations when it lost me, as i simply underestimated or wrongly predicted the enemy numbers and movements.
Practice the other approach. Yeah, you read it – even if you’re a fighter, focusing on wiping enemies, get your team to organise a karma train from time to time, or play one evening like you were following the other extreme – avoid fights and focus only on capping. This will not only help you develop yourself and your team as well-round WvWers, rather than just PvPers, but it will also help you keep a broader perspective of how it all works.

But most importantly – remember you’re all allies, if you’re from the same server that is, and even if someone’s into PvD it doesn’t mean they’re scrubs who need to learn to play, and those who go for GvG at the Orchard don’t just waste your queue slots. Respect, peace out!

Good read, certainly gave me a lot to think about. I think you’re a little harsh on combat commanders though, there’s a lot of map management and grand strategy involved for us as well. In many ways we need to know and understand the layout of the map even more so than objective commanders. Objectives are stationary, they are driven by setpiece attacks, “piece of seige A goes here, piece of seige B goes there, now hammer on the wall for 10 minutes.”

Combat commanders need to know precisely where the enemy is, sure scouts are often helpful but most of the time we work by analysing the map. “We had orange swords here 5 mins ago, a scout saw them run this way, but that camp just flipped so they will avoid it,” intercepting the enemy isn’t always easy and it takes a lot of experience to do successfully.

Then when we do find the enemy the game changes completely. We have to plan where we want to fight, do we wait in ambush? do we attack? how do we approach them without being seen? For that we need a high level of map awareness. We need to know every contour, every hill, and every chokepoint, otherwise all the work we put in to finding the enemy goes to waste and i have 30 very kitten off players waiting for me at the Waypoint.

Aye – but it’s on-the-spot knowledge and experience. Fighters are focused on picking the spot and tactics for that specific, incoming fight; they wipe the zerg and… then what? Do fighters, and combat commanders, have specific plans for hours ahead, involving positioning and overall resources management? I may be wrong, but i doubt so.

It’s actually pretty similar to real war, and there’s a reason the highest command rarely leaves the main headquarters. Objective commanders, as you named them, are more of map managers really, focusing much more on both the current and possible/upcoming map control shift, and as such it’s much more important that they’re listened. I find that best fighters are made of single guilds, or constant parties, or familiar faces – who do not need a commander badge to operate, unless only to signal their location for the ‘main commander’, who could just as well sit in a keep and manage three other ‘field commanders’, who in turn have their own teams of people around them, best if two are zergbusters and one is dedicated to sieging.