Guild Wars 2

Quick pt form:

- Your concept is beautiful
- In practice it is simply enormous groups of players tagging other players for XP/Badges/Karma cred
- Organizing into smaller groups it is only possible to raid supply camps; attempting a keep will have the zerg descend on your merry 5-band

PT: Please find a karma/xp/item/mechanics way to stop WvW from being 1 or 2 enormous groups training around in circles to whichever keep the other zerg is at

Otherwise WvW gets boring very very quickly

You aren’t doing it right. The main advantage of gathering lots of players in one place is they have strength and safety in numbers. They can win every battle. The disadvantage is that gathering lots of players in one place means they aren’t everywhere else on the map. They can win every battle but still lose the war by not capping and holding objectives.

Siege makes the difference because proper defensive siege allows small teams to hold against vastly larger forces, thus buying you time to split your remaining forces and take more objectives.

To counter an enemy Zerg you need to either overwhelm them with superior numbers or spread out and be everywhere the enemy Zerg is not.

Small teams can take keeps. We have done it with 5 man teams who understand how crossed swords work in this game. So you can do things like take Quaggan camps which periodically send npcs to contest keeps.

At the same time you split your force into at least 2 where the intention is to hold up or contain the largest enemy force in one location, allowing your small teams to stealth cap objectives miles away from the enemy Zerg.

You can and should be deliberately creating crossed swords to increase the amount of “map noise”. This puts strain on the enemy teams ability to relay accurate information about where you are and what you are doing because they need scouts everywhere to check if its Quaggans, a small team, a squad or a Zerg. Small team stealth ops don’t work against organized opponents unless you create alot of noise and hold up large numbers of enemy players so they can’t spread out.

This applies cross borderlands. For example, if it means you can stealth cap an east keep + orb under cover of a Quaggan attack in a dead borderland, whilst you have teams in another borderlands holding up a 50 man enemy Zerg at West Keep, thats a good trade. Everyone can die at West Keep. It doesn’t matter because you are preventing 50 people from transferring to another borderland to scout and defend your 10 man, double cat wall crew.

You can do it with 5 players but you need to create more noise because you will need to supply run to build additional cats, thus leaving your siege undefended. Only do this if you are capable of generating a threat that is big enough to make an enemy team drop everything they are doing to defend. i.e. a portal chained golem push on Garrison + Orb in their homeworld or harass/delay a team looking to capitalize on an Orb reset by trading keeps so they have no desirable location to put the Orb. All you are doing is trying to buy time to make a better trade.

Ultimately, you can trade up to get better defensive positions on the map or you can use it to reset all their upgrades and get the enemy team to waste tonnes of gold so they are forced spend more time farming PvE or something. Either way its good.

As such there are many times in WvW where you can run ops that are deliberately designed to fail. They are designed to hold large numbers of enemies in one place so they can’t do anything else. You only want them to fail slowly. You want the enemy team to believe they are winning and not check their map and not scout all the Xs. And if they break off their Zerg assault and spread out to scout those Xs? You want to call in your small terms and Zerg up where they are weakest. This is one reason why voice comms are so important – you can do all of this on the fly, across borderlands.

I am absolutely paranoid about crossed swords now and habitually try to pre empt them by gathering information about enemy movement and the time it takes for objectives to flip. There were far too many times against SoS 2.0 that I saw a 5 man group from [HUG] stealth capping our keeps and towers. Sometimes you stumble across these accidentally whilst resupplying and you see – holy crap, western wall of outer keep is down, inner keep door and wall are at 5% and theres a 2 minute timer for waypoint to become uncontested. Those [HUG] guys know how this works.

If you see a 5 man team with 2 cats up like rams on a wall, you know you have not been looking at your map enough. To get the second cat up they would have had to run to a supply camp and leave the first cat undefended. Or they sent 10 players and 5 left but nobody on your team caught their movements back and forth because they didn’t think 5 man teams running around the map were doing anything other than killing yaks. Thats a big mistake and its why you want to be playing servers that are alot stronger than you are. You learn not to make assumptions like that.

If your commander isn’t checking his map frequently whilst autorunning everywhere, hes probably not doing it right. Also, if your commander is getting lots of badges, hes also probably doing it wrong. That means hes fighting and micromanaging battles when his eyes should be on enemy troop movements on the map.

Imo, rewards from capture should scale on the amount of property you own on that particular map, to encourage holding and defending not just capping and forgetting.

The reward for defending is running off an army 3 times bigger than yours, knowing in the back of your mind that theres a stealth cat squad ganking their orb in another borderland. And they haven’t got a clue. Its immensely satisfying and all the grunt work that goes into it (escorting yaks, buying siege and upgrades) is worth it if you have the execution to pull it off.

Besetment that’s a fantastic tactical summary. I find my own server slowly growing into this form of WvW style. It’s slow but it’s getting there. It’s also proving to be way more effective than a single zerg.