Wargames?

Wargames?

in WvW

Posted by: Lynx Rufus Californicus.2958

Lynx Rufus Californicus.2958

So I’m curious, and interested in players thoughts on this. It’s been said by more than one player that WvWvW is war, and war isn’t fair. I think there’s a large portion of the WvW community that would concur.

There’s some mechanics in place, however, that minimize the warfare aspect of WvW, and that’s been something I’ve wondered about for awhile. The Seasons rolling out finally motivated me to develop this topic.

Specifically, we’ve all been exposed to zerg karma trains. On Anvil Rock, we have some very good Commanders who excel in taking our rag-tag guerrilla forces into places, wreaking a little chaos and havoc, and bugging out before the generally larger opposition returns for some vengeance of their own. We never seem to hold on to points for long, but when we’re organized enough, we can generally flip camps and towers readily enough. If we’re lucky and have done so enough to keep supply for the other side a question, we can take keeps. Stonemist is a welcome victory, but not one that happens often for us, at the moment. In open-field, if we’re evenly matched numbers-wise, we generally do pretty well.

It’s too easy to blame lack of active WvWers for AR’s issues, but in looking at some of the things that have happened in the past few weeks, it’s hard not to blame lack of participation. We’d had some pretty nice successes for a server that until recently spent many a period of time Outmanned on any map you cared to check, and at prime time. A few diehards carried the torch until many of us got in there to contribute. For us, all the evidence we needed was plain to see recently: NSP stomped a mudhole in both GoM and AR, holding all of EB and their own Borderlands, in addition to a sizable portion of both GoM’s and AR’s. Success on that scale is what we expect going up against a server ranked as high as NSP is in comparison to ours – we just didn’t have enough to counter both them and GoM. We’d hit one keep, knock the door down, and get stomped by the third side’s zerg. Certainly not what anyone would consider “fair” but war is war. Good on them, frankly – they save the resources by letting another server do the work, then move in and take the weakened position. That’s sound strategy.

So here’s what I’m wondering: There appears, from time to time, strategic aspects to the WvWvW scene, but those seem few and far between. Certainly, a large marauding zerg, while great for flipping (and reflipping) camps ad nauseam and the supply ripples that causes, it doesn’t defend anything.

The question I’m wondering is, assuming higher tiers have better participation, are those tiers stationing a garrison force to hold positions against attack? Or do they also just rely on zerg-might to swarm a position to reclaim it over and over again?

I can’t help but wonder if the resources being spent to take the same positions over and over again wouldn’t be better spent upgrading and reinforcing it once, and staging a force to hold (or delay the attacker long enough for more defending troops to arrive) instead.

It seems like there is a strategic element missing from WvW, and I wonder why that element doesn’t seem to be a factor, when it could be a force multiplier in the right hands.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your thoughts.

Wargames?

in WvW

Posted by: Madora.9340

Madora.9340

I can’t help but agree that there’s a bit of strategy missing in WvW, and I think that in part comes with an overall lack of defined roles. I mean, when you look at a game that utilizes a commander (Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Natural Selection 1/2), there are defined roles that each player ends up picking and going with.

In Guild Wars 2, that isn’t as apparent. Anyone can pretty much play a healing class, a supporting class, a DPS class, or an AOE class depending how you set things up with your class. With that in mind, there is no real party make-up (1 tank, 2 DPS, 2 healers), and taking territories really lacks strategy (Hit the supervisor until he dies).

The guild I am currently with is more of a casual guild, we often have two commanders split up to attack either team. Rather than relying on dedicated people to follow them around, the pubbies follow them and we essentially get two armies to attack two different sides of EB. When a tower or keep gets hit, the alarm is sounded and everyone runs to defend it…usually. We don’t really have dedicated teams, but everyone is willing to pitch in and help out, and we always seem to manage to do well against double our numbers. (Except when Yak’s Bend swarms us with five times our numbers and we can’t do anything. -_-)

I’ve had some ideas distilling in my head for the past couple weeks when we were consistently getting hit with higher ranked servers, like NSP, Kaineing, HoD, FC, IoJ, etc. and while I’m not going to discuss them here, I will say you should start small and get everyone into a Voice over IP (VOIP) program of some kind. (Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrillo, I don’t care.) Start thinking of ways you can use your group to your advantage, how you can break into a tower or how to approach a zerg, etc. I’m sorry for not being incredibly specific, but it is hard to develop strategy for a game few defined roles and having everything be in a gray area.

Wargames?

in WvW

Posted by: thatmaskedman.4508

thatmaskedman.4508

The way things work in Tier 1 (at least theoretically, even Tier 1 hasn’t always got the dedication or coverage to pull it off) is that when a commander wants to hold an objective, they will drop defensive siege pre-sited to cover positions that attackers will try to assault. Defensive siege generally consists of arrow carts and trebuchets.

They will then leave 1-3 people behind to scout the objective, depending on which objective (bay is a lot harder to watch than a tower), and how many people they can get to accept scouting duty (not many people are willing, even in Tier 1). The scout’s job is to refresh the timers on the defensive siege emplacements and watch for an attacking force. If they see any substantial forces approaching, they’ll contact a commander via whisper or teamspeak to turn back the attackers, and crew the defensive siege to help delay the attackers until the commander can arrive.

[REV] – Blackgate