Guild Wars 2

Hello Everyone,

We’ve all had our intitial reaction, and a little bit of time to play around with the removal of white swords. I’m hoping we can get a few responses from people in different tiers (1-8 US and EU) to describe what the experience of having no white swords was like. Take a moment to describe the context of your experience (outnumbered, fairly equal, outmanning an enemy) and how the removal of white swords impacted WvW in your community.

For me, in Tier 3 NA Red and Blue are very much outnumbered by green and defending has been the top priority for both red and blue. As i understand it green is bored.

On Defense: As I went through my afternoon trying to upgrade keeps and camps with the 5-10 others who also spend their afternoons upgrading and preparing for NA primetime, would move from keep to camp and find they were just gone. In the time it took these solo roamers to pull, kill, capture and upgrade a camp, the keep would flash green (sometimes blue) behind them.
Occasionally, one of these stalwart defenders would be near enough to the keep to see the “defense” event appear on their GUI, but with the amount of time that it takes (2 min and change) for the other roamers to converge on the keep being assaulted, it would be too late, and our numbers too few to fend off the assault, and the keeps were gone. Okay, keep’s gone, now the roamers spread back out in order to detect the next enemy movement. However, the enemy just ninajed an upgrading keep from us and they are now +5ed with supply, and they can run from their waypoint to one of the other keeps before our defenders can disperse through the map again.

Since we needed to have people everywhere in order to be our eyes and ears, we did not have enough players to respond to call-outs and maintain our defensive perimeter. This is the frustrating and tedious task that removing white swords has made of defending for my servermates, and i imagine the players for blue as well.

Playing offensively however, was like a whole new world. We tried a whole host of new confusion tactics, splitting our raid into 6 groups of 3 and hitting every camp on the map simultaneously and having the northern camp flippers meet at a Northern tower, and southern camp flippers a southern tower and flipping them both. We moved between enemy borderlands, executing this tactic every time the conditions were present for it.

Against someone who is just as outnumbered as we are, Keeps were as simple as checking : Do you have Supply? Do you have less than 25 players?
Then you just lay the rams out and PVD to get through the paper gates as fast as possible.There was no challenge involved in taking objectives like this. I despise arrow carts, but one of the only things i despise more is Ktraining. It’s boring, and makes your players lazy when they should be attentive. I’ve gotten literally thousands of kills off of players who are PVDooring or so caught up in their k train that they’re not paying attention to their environment in my 4k hours of WvW.

Against our big green brother, the towers, and the camps were mincemeat. They had similar issues to what we had with defending, but in reverse. They had waypoints in all of their keeps, and several scouts in each keep who would take turns rotating out of the keep to periodically check on the towers, but they would be gone when they got there. Assaulting the keeps was a game of cat and mouse. You would damage a gate or a wall as much as you could before a scout would appear, and a blob somewhere would turn to glare in your direction. By glare, i mean waypoint to the nearest keep and go go gadget greatsword towards the keep you were assaulting.

Most of this gameplay was done in borderlands. My time in Eternal Battlegrounds led me to believe that very little was changed there, the blob rolls in, you dont need to have the white swords anyway, because the orange swords appear first.

That was my experience playing WvW without the white swords. I’m interested to hear what other kinds of experiences players have had without white swords in other tiers. When you post, please try to make it clear what tier you are in without using your server names. (ex: Tier 3 NA, Tier 7 EU, etc…)

edits: formatted for clarity

I think its great. Before the update the EoTM wxp train was restricted to green but now we can enjoy that skillful playstyle in wvw whatever colour we are.

Tier 2 EU.

I don’t like it. For roaming, it is nice to know where small groups of players might be without having to just run around the map hoping your target is not running in the same direction. White swords on objectives like towers and camps usually were a pretty good indicator of something else then a zerg. Now, either you play during slow hours and end up searching 80% of your time, or during peak hours and end up running from the next zerg you found.

That being said, I don’t like Tier 2 to begin with.

T7 EU here (currently in a all – T7 matchup)
Nightcapping: we have all – 695 tick, every night.
Since one server appears to be rather weak, and both go to sleep to roughly the same time, we dominate in ppt, and the sword /ppk changes have no impact there.
Primetime: blue pushes hard, and tends to blobb up, but if they don’t, we have even fights, mostly in our favor. We got a nice ppk farm yesterday, and compensated our lack of ppt in primetime quite easily. Later that night blue did smart up, breached outer bay on our homeborder with 3 guildgroups + pugblobb and only attempted in half-hearted attacks on inner gates, to bate our whole server into bay eventually. They were splitting and slaying us on multiple spots in the outer ringer of bay, farming a proud amount of kills. We eventually decided to give up the defense, since we would loose more points in ppk, than bay was worth in ppt. The rest of the evening we spend with splitting their forces with simultaneous attacks on their keeps, to get our fair share of ppk’s as well. Since all T7 servers have a good load of roamers, nothing felt different because our groups were mostly scouted, as we would know them incomming as well, so removing swords had – again – no impact.
this morning:
I was the only guy on EB this moring (literally alone) only accompanied by a red engi and a blue guardian, I myself was on engi as well.
While the guardian would just run around and flip sentries (easy kill, thx for the full-bloodlust stomps, whoever you were ), the engi would give away his position by clearing the mercenary camps first before going into a camp, therefore it was quite easy to predict which camp was attacked by him as well (again, thx for the full bloodlust stomps).
Even tho I had no white swords to tell where they were, keeping a eye on the map and just asking myself “what would I do” was more than enough to maintain EB in a green state so far.

So far the only negative aspect I expirienced is that we intentionally gave up a keep to end the ppk farming for them, but since we got our share eventually as well + no-swords makes roaming / defending more challenging, I’m quite pleased with the changes so far, and would not mind if they become permanent.

A few T2 EU servers decided to instead of playing WvW to go to OS to fight eachother.
after one server got beaten they decided to go to the winning servers garrison to farm and be farmed.

Ended up with a huge fight in Garri without the attacking server wanting to cap it because they would probably spend another x amount of time trying to find the opponents.

-As for defending, keeps are mostly untouched , we have players porting around the maps to see it stuff is being attacked.. iow not playing the game they want to play it. and we outnumber our opponents at certain hours.

Also towers are now hard to defend by a roaming borderland patrol group.
objectives are flipping and flipping making the upgrade system less important.

Upgrading doesn’t matter anymore unless you can get your keeps to T3 wich means rushing waypoints is now a valid tactic.

Defense is gone unless you are stacked or camping towers.
“Thank god our server has some really tough and dedicated defenders” and one tower never falls when they are online.

The emptyness of the borderland maps and the distances people have to run to scout becomes even more obvious and rules some classes out as a roaming scouting class if you are into the ppt thing. (Dont get me wrong ppt is nice if you have a equal matchup with something to fight about , besides server pride)

Small roaming groups can do real damage now.
Golem rushing and soloing keeps is now too easy. ( promotes pay to win indirectly)
Meta builds are more wanted then ever.

I imagine a pew pew power ranger and pouf pouf thief camping routes to attacked objectives.
But considering no one really cares about ppt anymore its annoying to get jumped when you want to reach the bigger fights in your niche setup ^^

iow, offensive roaming paradise, defensive roaming nightmare.

I mostly regret not being able to use the word “contested” much anymore.

As far as the update goes: Too little too late for many players dedicated to WvW , however it does show how these changes can have an impact. for good or bad.

Suggestion for next update:

-Server achievements and events.
-WvW reward track.
-PPK zones around claimed objectives
-Removal of Keep lord rewards
-Increase of Rewards in WvW in general.
-Keep bag drops (they are a nice extra if people bother to pick them up, or see them at all in the first place)

elaboration:

-Server achievements and events:
Each server gets a list of objectives (balanced) and a reward for completion.
The events are something like holding a keep for a set amount of hours over a day.
however the events and achievements are conflicting with the events the other servers have and thus putting them in direct conflict.

Example: One server needs to capture each tower on a borderland map and hold them for a consecutive amount of time.

The defending server needs to hold two towers and 2 keeps for a consecutive amount of time too.

Clear UI messaging is required across borderlands once the objectives are held and the event starts. (much like the ruins and bloodlust)

-WvW rewardtrack:
Rewards per kill add up over the week adding to the reward track.

-PPK zone on claimed objectives
-Claimed objectives can be guild buffed to reward more points and loot per stomp/kill. Adding to the reward track.
Also make npc’s patrol the borders of these zones giving a clear indication the buff is active and giving roamers some extra tactical advantages. even designating a place where they can duke it out.

Example: a border can be right on a dolyak route to a tower. one side of the road is blue territory the other side is red, both sides have the buff on giving a slight advantage to either side. “someone has to cross to either kill or defend the dolyak”

Add zones to the ruins and maybe add smaller objectives that create extra “buffed zones” (gemstore or more ruin type of ojectives)

-Removal of keep lord loot and Wxp.
Instead add to the reward track.

-Give RNG rewards or killing spree rewards (for not dying yet getting a certain amount of kills over time = rng) goes well with certain gem store items and foods. In the form of a chest like daily rewards.

-Bag drops.
Keep em, add more bloodstone dust though maybe up the drop rate of certain stuff . (you know)

Of course you will need to think about out manned servers and have some reward tracks suitable for roaming groups, upgrading parties and scouts.

T6 NA: It’s been less than 24 hours. Too early to tell.

T2 (NA): Played for a few hours last night in a 8-10 man offensive roaming group in an enemy BL. We were able to engage our targets very effectively, often maintaining the element of surprise. Groups of 10(ish) seem to be the new norm at the moment. Running into larger groups did happen sometimes, but the most we were outnumbered was 2 to 1. We were able to get some good fights over camps and towers with other such groups. We also encountered lots of smaller 2-4 man scouting groups. The new patch seems very good for offensive roaming and small-scale conflicts thus far.

I will say though that defending was much harder. Anything we grabbed was often recaptured before long and reacting in time to save a location was hit or miss. There is also a general feeling that, aside from way-point upgrades for keeps, there is little incentive to upgrade anything. I still think it’s too early to tell overall, but there are definitely good and bad points for the new system.

T1 NA.

I think it has less of an impact here than in lower tier servers as we tend to have a large number of scouts available at all times. Furthermore, it’s easy to tell if a keep is contested if it’s waypointed so the removal of swords in cases like that don’t really make a difference (although makes waypoint upgrades even more crucial than before.)

Overall it’s harder for people to hold and upgrade towers due to this change, though. I see a higher ratio of our stuff, as well as enemy structures, being kept paper as a result.

It has made small PPT-centric havoc teams more viable, since they can capture towers without being noticed in some cases which is probably even more true in lower tiers.

Overall it’s not an absolutely terrible change from my POV. This is particularly true since structures matter less now that we have a PPK option in place too; often the structures are just focal points for PPK battles to occur. I can see how it would be more annoying in lower tiers, though.

T8 NA
Just getting rolled harder than before. Trying to defend while outmanned; impossible. The random pugs have no idea whats going on, before they just run at the white swords, now I feel totally isolated when ever Im trying to do something constructive.

Our small force can ninja cap stuff, hooray… for the 3hrs of peak time. then everything is gone 20m after happy hour is over. We used to attempt heroic last stands trying to slow the zerg but now stuff just flips unexpectedly, thats the point I guess, until we’re boxed into the final keep with no supply.

T9 EU
Hard to find PvP or actually defend any location since we, like any other T9 server do not have that much people. Hardly anyone wants to spend time guarding some tower or keep. Can’t really blame them, neither do I want to spend my playing time sitting on empty tower. I used to run to white swords for some action. Now totally lost. It seems that it is now even more PvE – ninja flipping objectives.

T2 FA (need to update my info will do so soon)
Dose not seem any different often white swords where more of a trick to mess with groups. Now with out them ppl seems more awhere of map chat and passing on info i think in a lot of ways its making for a stronger comunitly for FA. I must say FA still running as major groups and not much havick but i can see a trend where havick groups become a bigger part of how FA plays because a group of 3-5 ppl can realty do something now.

Over all i do not think white swords removal going to changes much you may lose a tower from time to time but that about it keeps are still under high guard as they where before its the ppk that the bigger part of things and i think that alone makes the current switch worth keeping in.

T5 NA
pretty hard to counter the enemies ninjas when you have a small force that gets overwhelmed by too many attacks on multiple structures. Without the white swords, i’m unable to track the enemy for a preemptive strike. Well this is the case for the server with the lowest population. T2 and up for NA shouldn’t have a problem, they have the population to sacrifice into tower babysitting.

T1 NA

Overall it is a bit to early to tell. Though so far havoc teams have been more successful in taking towers/keeps than they were previously. As for the larger guilds who focus on open field fighting, the communication between Havoc guilds/fighting or larger guilds has increased due to lack of white swords. (All are trying to be aware of the enemy movements and positioning more so now than before.)

Scouts which were a standard are now a required in WvW to know where the enemy is. (Except WP’d keeps.)

Siege use has gone up for defending. Though structure upgrading has gone down, due to how quickly many towers will flip with no scout to call enemy forces out.

TLDR:
To early to tell.

Shademehr.1397:

T6 NA: It’s been less than 24 hours. Too early to tell.

Been a pain in the kitten to find fights… Maybe it’s just Maguuma focusing PvD but in general, I don’t like it.

Kaineng NA, not sure what tier we are but we are pretty low. I haven’t played much in this new system (1 hour or so), so I don’t have a proper grasp of it, but i didn’t notice much of a change in solo roaming in enemy BLs. I personally think im there should be no white swords if you are outmanned. Deffinetly would benefit servers who are heavily out matched, and benefit small roaming groups.

oscuro.9720:

Kaineng NA, not sure what tier we are but we are pretty low. I haven’t played much in this new system (1 hour or so), so I don’t have a proper grasp of it, but i didn’t notice much of a change in solo roaming in enemy BLs. I personally think im there should be no white swords if you are outmanned. Deffinetly would benefit servers who are heavily out matched, and benefit small roaming groups.

Currently Ka is in t8 with an 80k point lead over the 2nd place server.

T2 NA
One of the dumbest changes to wvw. I know it’s great for the offensive minded people, because frankly they can either get away with taking stuff easily now or they didn’t care in the first place they only looked for the orange swords, but it’s going to destroy the last bit of play for the defensive and ppt people.

Scouts will now have a lot more work to do, keeping an eye on structures and camps, all the sneaky spots, scouting multiple groups running on the map, with not even something extra to reward them for it other than extra headaches.

I know there are those out there that will say “well get out of the towers and go kill someone”, which obviously they’ve never taken the role of a scout or they would know it’s more than just looking out from the wall of a tower. It involves siege up a place, recapping places, hunting down roamers or havoc, tracking zerg movements on the map and reporting it, delaying zerg attacks so your side has time to respond. No white swords means you need to do these things much more diligently or things can swing out of control much faster now.

Day 2 and borderlands turning into karma trains. By the end of the testing period I’m sure a lot more people will have turned away from defense and just focus on offense. Why bother wasting gold defending and upgrading structures.

PPK was a good change, removing white swords was not.

T2 and T3 NA

Terrible, terrible idea. I play late night and early mornings (for NA players), and I mostly roam. My group gave up within the hour because it’s simply impossible to find other roamers. We ended up spending our time in PvP.

As far as defending goes, it’s pretty much impossible in the T3 matchup. When we’re as outnumbered as we are, there are only two equally kittenty options: (1) split up so you have scouts everywhere, but in doing so, lack the proper numbers to actually defend/recap a structure, or (2) have people gather together to be able to defend/recap structures, but in doing so, lack the scouts to prevent backcapping by the enemy zerg. Our BL is pretty much a K-train as a result.

Playing offensively is also mind-numbingly boring. We never hit a structure unless it’s to draw out a fight, and now there are just no fights. Now, we don’t even bother to hit structures, since we just end up spending our time in PvP.

This change promotes the worst aspects of WvW and discourages fighting enemy players. It’s so bad that my guild, which is primarily composed of roamers, has pretty much given up on WvW since it’s gone into effect.

T7 NA.

I haven’t played WvW since the change as I predicted in advance what a horrible change this would be for PPT defenders like me. And going by the feedback I read here, I see I was quite correct.

Oh well, back to Elite Dangerous.

T3 EU

Removal of white swords has already proven to be an ‘anti-community’ feature. White swords provided a means for players on opposing servers to come together and enjoy the mechanics of WvW together through competitive play.

Myself and many people in my guild are very disappointed with this change. Last night we were switching between maps hunting a larger group of enemies that were attempting golem rushes on various upgraded structures. It reached a point where we missed them and they were flipped a fully upgraded keep before we could arrive to defend. Where usually white swords would provide us with a means to find fun enemy sieges to take part in, we are now missing out on so many potential battles and it’s really quite disheartening.

MMOs are supposed be about participation. This change diminishes this for WvW greatly.

Impossible to defensively roam your own bl. Rediculously easy to roam on other bl offensively.

Maybe its a new l2p issue that we need to figure out?

Maybe a new cheap wvw trap/mechanical sentry device we could deploy (1per player) anywhere that will “whisper” player how many foes just entered its sensor range or something?

Simonoly.4352:

T3 EU
Myself and many people in my guild are very disappointed with this change. Last night we were switching between maps hunting a larger group of enemies that were attempting golem rushes on various upgraded structures. It reached a point where we missed them and they were flipped a fully upgraded keep before we could arrive to defend. Where usually white swords would provide us with a means to find fun enemy sieges to take part in, we are now missing out on so many potential battles and it’s really quite disheartening.

MMOs are supposed be about participation. This change diminishes this for WvW greatly.

In case you didn’t know:
A fully upgraded keep (which means having a waypoint) will show if it’s under attack by your waypoint being contested. (It’s always done the same, just now the map doesn’t show white swords on the keep icon, but only the waypoint icon.)

T1 NA.

While this seems to be a good thing for offensive roaming, the whole PvD aspect of it sucks. Even as an offensive roamer, when I’m taking a paper tower with a group of 5 with no resistance, it’s not much fun. With white swords, you at least had an idea of where to find fights; now, seems like I’m often running around scouting randomly hoping for a call in map chat or voice comms.

It’s pretty early to come up with a definitive judgement, but I don’t like it so far.

T6 EU

We have had some crazy blowout match ups like the one we have now. Before removal of white swords it was already a pain to find a fight, as of now its completely dead. Even our hardcore stubborn scouts are not willing to put up with this stuff as it was already boring before the whole change.

Might aswell reconsider this dramatic failure asap to keep some of your players and yes even it is wvw, people buying gems to get your outfits and whatnot.

Offair.2563:

Might aswell reconsider this dramatic failure asap to keep some of your players and yes even it is wvw, people buying gems to get your outfits and whatnot.

A red post after 4 weeks be liek:

“The WvW thing was a great success. More people now play PvP. That is why we decided to keep this as a permanent feature. Next “test” will be 6 months long. We will try how WvW will feel without a world map and minimap and no team/map chat. Have fun, lol."

Pavel.8531:

Offair.2563:

Might aswell reconsider this dramatic failure asap to keep some of your players and yes even it is wvw, people buying gems to get your outfits and whatnot.

A red post after 4 weeks be liek:

“The WvW thing was a great success. More people now play PvP. That is why we decided to keep this as a permanent feature. Next “test” will be 6 months long. We will try how WvW will feel without a world map and minimap and no team/map chat. Have fun, lol."

Knowing Anet and their stubborness this would not surprise me at all. Also Anet, how you going to get results from this test? By asking us or your own dedicated wvw playing devs that got trained by your players during last season?

oscuro.9720:

Kaineng NA, not sure what tier we are but we are pretty low. I haven’t played much in this new system (1 hour or so), so I don’t have a proper grasp of it, but i didn’t notice much of a change in solo roaming in enemy BLs. I personally think im there should be no white swords if you are outmanned. Deffinetly would benefit servers who are heavily out matched, and benefit small roaming groups.

This is an awesome idea! Others should definitely signal boost this suggestion. Devs take note please.

Also, props to Kaineng. Used to be there before my guild transferred to FA (Kaineng has a small, but awesome WvW community); best of luck to you guys!

Well looking at how majority of the WvW community was against siege disabler and Anet still implemented it and what was the result? “I told you so” response from the community and they changed/nerfed it slightly months later. Likewise, the removal of white swords will probably be the same. Jan 13 can’t come fast enough

T1 NA

Times I’ve played: some EU and NA/late NA.

Both time zones, you will be able to take anything as long as there is no scout. This means, you can take it without a fight, which is boring. I don’t wander into WvW thinking, yay, now I can fight more doors! We all like to knock on doors to get people to come out and fight us. Now, well, they can’t come out if they can’t hear/see us knocking. Even small havoc groups, there was always some excitement involved. How much can our group get away with? Well, that’s kind of out the window as it turns out: a whole lot.

If you want a vision of the future of WvW, imagine a ram pounding on an undefended door- for ever…

evildan.8260:

If you want a vision of the future of WvW, imagine a ram pounding on an undefended door- for ever…

Then their plan must be working, that’s how hard this game can get, and innovative.

oscuro.9720:

Kaineng NA, not sure what tier we are but we are pretty low. I haven’t played much in this new system (1 hour or so), so I don’t have a proper grasp of it, but i didn’t notice much of a change in solo roaming in enemy BLs. I personally think im there should be no white swords if you are outmanned. Deffinetly would benefit servers who are heavily out matched, and benefit small roaming groups.

You are fighting us (SoR) and I’m not too surprised to read how little impact this has for YOU. For SoR what was bad just became worst. It was already very hard to keep anything but now it is pretty much impossible period.

As with pretty much any new thing that was tried, the big server is left stronger while the weakest weaker still.

I’m still spending on all upgrades without looking at prices but it’s depressing and doesn’t motivate defense when you don’t have the resources to go on offense and defense at the same time.

t2 na
seems like karma train. before tuesday it was an exciting and competitive match up. today, all of our towers keep flipping, and we are running around flipping them back. There hasnt been much fighting and our normal scouts seemed to have just given up. It appears to just be an eotm style competition for who can back cap objectives faster.

This change sucks. This is not fun.

I question whether or not a change that encourages more offense given that many players felt that defense is undervalued and the already “pure offense” that EotM offers.

I’m in T2 NA and while our tier has been affected less than lower populated tiers, this change has not provided any benefit. Meanwhile, the PPK change is very nice and appreciated.

T1 NA

Didn’t play very much, but i was already used to EotM, so it wasn’t too bad of a change. I haven’t joined the zerg yet, so i can’t comment on that.

It appears Havoc Squads are having a great time though.

It also feels like the zerg and map blob strats may die out to guild groups if this continues.

TBH, i feel the best way to protest this is to simply stop logging into EB or the borderlands. If no one is doing anything in WvW, it may send the message to ANet that the change is unwelcome. EotM 4tw! lol

Server blobs now can divide into smaller groups and attack all several tower/castle at same time, if the servers have just a few scouts and everything being turned paper every time, if one of their groups find resistance they can still blob up and take stuff easily due disparity of population and supply needed.

If server has low WvW population it is freaking worse. (wich might be all except t1 and t2)

Personally I always thought that the delay on the swords and people tagging the gate was ridiculous. Perhaps if whites swords would show up when a gate is at 50% it would be the best compromise?

Havoc groups are running the PPT show now that it only takes 4+ players to quickly flip an objective.

Zergs take out WPs and then there is nothing to indicate an objective is under attack. Hidden cata spots for the win!

Straegen.2938:

Havoc groups are running the PPT show now that it only takes 4+ players to quickly flip an objective.

Zergs take out WPs and then there is nothing to indicate an objective is under attack. Hidden cata spots for the win!

Well said. I know the havoc groups I run with are now able to take an amazing amount of things before we’re even spotted. It’s kinda refreshing not getting zerged over all the time, to be honest.

Now that I’ve had time to think about it. For those of us who play for PPT, it seems that we have a new opponent: The Clock. In other words, “How much can you flip right before the clock runs out in order to capitalize on PPT.” Zergs pretty much have to split up to take as many things as they can in the smallest amount of time. Maybe this was a clever way to get the zergs to thin out a bit? To some extent, many havok groups always did this with camps. Hit a BL with 5 minutes left and take all the camps so you have them for the tick. But now, it’s not just the camps. Everything is in play.

Thanks for the thread. One thing that would have been nice to understand is what metrics they were expecting to see out of the change. I like the idea of trial periods so that things can be tried in a real environment, it by itself has some value.

So for those replying:

• Are you seeing more soloers?
• Are you seeing more havoc groups?
• Are you seeing more or less upgrades?
• Are you seeing more or less upgrades on particular structures?
• Are you seeing more roaming scouts?
• Are the main zergs smaller? If so any idea why?
• Are you seeing more stationary scouts?
• Are you doing more scouting than normal?
• Are you seeing more or less fighting than normal?
• Are you seeing people communicate more/less?

Need to see a bit more and will share from T4. Good hunting!

T4 NA, late-night experience so far:

Have been doing a lot of solo-roaming and small-man havoc. It is much easier for small groups and havoc to take things now.

The good:
-I was able to solo all the fully-upgraded camps in an enemy BL (it takes like 5-7 mins to do this when there are like 10 veteran guards at level 82). This means I was single-handedly able to give my server +30 PPT. That is empowering. With white swords, 90% of the time someone would show up after ~4 mins and take me down with the help of the 4-5 remaining guards. Now, they have no idea their stuff is being taken.
- Small group: was able to ninja some towers from larger servers even while they were attacking us.

The bad:
- Hard to find other PLAYERS to fight now. While its great that I can take all the camps in a BL without being wiped by a blob, I only got to fight 1 other person while flipping all this stuff.
- Harder to defend, as its easy to evade other groups fighting.

Net result:
- Its great for offense, and small-group is more effective than megablob.
- Its tough for defense, at least with out current strats. Its harder to keep tabs on other server’s havoc groups, but there are more small groups so when you do locate them its easier to get into a skirmish.

Does anybody have any idea on how to better track enemy havoc groups and get some more fighting between these groups?

BlackBeard.2873:

Does anybody have any idea on how to better track enemy havoc groups and get some more fighting between these groups?

Either track them out of spawn, or wait till they take an objective and predict where they will go next, the groups are still very predictable on what they will hit. That will probably change eventually as groups play with the freedom they have now.

Or straight up contact them if you really want to fight someone.

T8 na
A few hours ago our small forces reset nearly everything on a maps. It felt taking all those T3 keeps! The best defense is a good offense and its not like we could effectively defend before. Outmanned defense is a losing battle prolly 75% of the time.

The sneak attack pretty much ends all the old expectations but there is opportunity in change.

Previously, ninja-ing an upgraded tower with a small group was often exciting because it was rare and you never knew if/when foes who show up. Even if it did end up being PvDoor with no one showing up it was fun.

It seems some commenters still find it fun right now, but give it a few days: when everyone realizes it’s the norm that no one ever shows up to defend, it’ll just be boring.

Just reading through this topic it seems that from tier 5-6 and lower people are experiencing frustration and problem without the white swords. Higher tiers don’t because they have more scouts.

So for the higher tiers, there is no difference, whereas mid-lower tiers have taken a step back.

Awesome change.

T3 NA

It’s only the first week so its hard to really have a real sense of how things are.

But for me, when I first read the Sneak Attack event, I was excited, “Finally, a chance to hit the larger servers!”

My excitement was washed away in the first weekend. It feels like the ‘no white swords’ punishes the smaller populated WvW servers. We either don’t have enough people scouting/defending our BL or we have too many and not enough people applying pressure elsewhere.

I might be a little optimistic in thinking that Sneak Attack was devised for smaller/lower-tiered servers. And it just backed fired.

If, later, I find out that Sneak Attack was intentionally devised solely for karma trains in the top-tiered severs…

I’ll rage.

As in regards to home borderland:

Are you seeing more soloers? No

Are you seeing more havoc groups? No

Are you seeing more or less upgrades? Upgrades?

Are you seeing more or less upgrades on particular structures? None

Are you seeing more roaming scouts? No

Are the main zergs smaller? If so any idea why? Yes it became smaller because people got tired of the same stuff going on in WvW. iow nothing.

Are you seeing more stationary scouts? Yes, in citadel afk because why would one bother?

Are you doing more scouting than normal? No i stopped defensive scouting.

Are you seeing more or less fighting than normal? Less . way less.

Are you seeing people communicate more/less? More communication, mostly about how awful this “event” is.

Sneak attack event?
Bad idea is Bad, predictable and as many things considered a substantial update for WvW wich it is not.

If you want to test removing white swords, just go EotM.
The results of removing white swords were known when that “testing” map was released.

T3 NA

Just like ChoChoCho I had some high hope but so far it turned everything into EotM. I like the occasional tactical advantage it offer but the drawback is just way to big. I don’t like the change.

I’m gaining a lot of ranks but very few fights. (I want more fight)

I think that they could make a trap that shut the white sword on a siege weapon for a short amount of time. Just enough to give a head start and add a layer of tactical strategy at a certain cost.

T8 NA

Haven’t played enough to really make an opinion yet. What I have seen is that it is way to easy to take keeps from enemy servers, and that they rush to get waypoint and no other upgrades in order to try to spot attacks. Defense is harder but our server (Kaineng) was never to good at that in the first place, so no real difference.

We don’t really have any large enough guilds to split up and run different teams, and we where already used to small groups go and take/cap stuff. I did notice that one of our enemy servers split their main zerg (SoR, GSCH, love you guys!) and ran a couple of groups of 20-30 players to take smaller objectives, before gathering up to take down our Garri combined, was fun to watch and play against.

But outside of a few hours in prime time, none of us servers down here have enough people to do anything like this for the rest of the day. Cheers!

Are you seeing more soloers?
-Nope
Are you seeing more havoc groups?
-Nope (we already have lots of those)
Are you seeing more or less upgrades?
-Less, no points upgrading tower, camp (save fat yaks), keep (save wp).
Are you seeing more or less upgrades on particular structures?
-Less, no points upgrading tower, camp (save fat yaks), keep (save wp).
Are you seeing more roaming scouts?
-Scouts ? What’s that ? Welcome to T8
Are the main zergs smaller? If so any idea why?
-Zergs ? What’s that ? Welcome to T8
Are you seeing more stationary scouts?
-Can’t remember ever seeing one.
Are you doing more scouting than normal?
-No
Are you seeing more or less fighting than normal?
-Unfortunately, less.
Are you seeing people communicate more/less?
-No real change (which means not much, most of our groups work well independent)

Are you seeing more soloers? rarely
Are you seeing more havoc groups? nope ( cause can’t find them lololol)
Are you seeing more or less upgrades? way less most of time towers at north not even T2 when i’m on
Are you seeing more or less upgrades on particular structures? less on side keeps ( hills & bay, and sometimes garri when lucky)
Are you seeing more roaming scouts? nope cause lack of eu roamers
Are the main zergs smaller? If so any idea why? yes cause people cba to play anymore
Are you seeing more stationary scouts? if we could spare some maybe but nope
Are you doing more scouting than normal? i still do my regular map calls when i see zergs
Are you seeing more or less fighting than normal? way less used to find a fight every camp i flipped now i run around the most stacked server on my tier which is DB and barely see one.
Are you seeing people communicate more/less? i’d say more but don’t quote me on that since i play on offtimes

EDIT: T3 IOJ