Guild Wars 2

Hello all,

My guildmates and I transferred from Jade Quarry to Borlis Pass about a week ago. Anti-bandwagonners, per se. As DAOC veterans, we play GW2 for the fun and joy of WvW, and had to unfortunately leave JQ – a server we’ve been since pre-launch – due to the ever growing queue wait time.

My experience in WvW in BP has been… rather surprising, to be honest. It’s not because we are losing or because we’ve been at the bottom of its tier bracket. It’s the vibe that I get from other players, this sense of demoralization that is most surprising (and disturbing). Winning and losing is part of game and war, but when one side loses the will to fight from staying at the bottom of its tier for several weeks – I say that’s a big problem.

By all means, I’m not sitting high on a horse and judging the new server I call home. I am probably no more skilled than you are, and probably have put in just as many hours into this game and WvW activities. I am simply pointing out some of the difference I see between the two. I obviously don’t play WvW 24/7 across all four maps simultaneously so my experiences are based on a number of isolated cases, but it still outlines the overall picture.

- Morale
JQ was blessed with many things – foremost was the willingness to fight. Even after getting annihilated (believe me, these happened a lot during HOD – Titan Alliance days), /team and /map chat would fill up with encourage words, that we almost had it, that we should rally up and get back in there, or sharp critiques on what we lacked and how we would improve. Unfortunately, what I am seeing at BP is the completely opposite. Not to mention players turning their back and running away from seemingly even fights, but more disturbingly players and even commanders suggesting other players to leave the current map as it is a lost cause. Commanders are supposed to be beacon of hope (… that is somehow bought by 100g), so please act like one.

- Organization
The number one excuse demoralized players give is that the enemies outnumber us. I don’t have the stats with me to argue with proof, but my hunch is that as we are in the same bracket, they don’t have that much big of an edge. Now, this flawed belief of being outnumbered seems to lead to a very interesting phenomenon – that we all must band together as one big group (a zerg). These zergs usually seem to go around the map clockwise or counter-clockwise, capping locations only to lose it several minutes later. These acts discourage other players from upgrading the location and running supplies because most of the players run off leaving it defenseless – why invest if it will be lost? I must say, one should never underestimate the power of a well placed defensive siege or upgraded wall/gates. I often see players who just entered the map asking where our zerg is. No, don’t look for our zerg – look to weaken enemy by taking out their supply lines, look to place siege at strategic locations, look to make npcs (Quaggans, Ogres, Dredge, Hylik) our friends. (if all these are met, yea sure, join a zerg and go on the offensive). We get potential points by holding places, not taking them.

- Communication
JQ had a TS server that most WvWers used to communicate and this was extremely helpful. At the same time, /team and /chat were always filled with on-going information for those who aren’t in TS (or for those who refused/were too shy to speak). If you spot a group of enemy, tell everyone an estimate of how many you see and in which general direction they are headed. If your location is under attack, tell everyone the gate or wall percentage so everyone gets a general idea of how long it will hold out. If your location is under attack and has a portal tell everyone the event timer count down so players can waypoint in at the right time. I very rarely see any of these information in /team or /map and lack of information is detrimental to our server’s WvW performance.

I am not trying to point out how great our old server was and how bad new one is doing (well, I actually did). I simply wish to get this message out to as many players as possible so that we can work together to overcome whatever shortcomings we have. Overcoming challenges is what makes any activity fun – ask any one from Kaineng about it, I bet they had a blast last week (and don’t say they won because they had a large influx of transfers).

Holy cow, I didn’t realize I wrote this much.

depends on which alliance you’re with i guess.

we had some epic action on blue map yday, but we could see that our home map was over run.

people on this server have dropped out of the war effort nearly every single week match that wasn’t obscenely in our favour until very recently.

and a central voice and neutral forums site was offered to the server, and ignored due to competing egos.

there’s only like maybe 2 or 3 competent commanders on borlis pass, and the rest … well don’t take my word for it, run around with them for yourself and you’ll find out.

i’m not really sure why so many commanders sometimes all in the same place as well. i personally evaluated the value of using commander book as a replacement for proper raid group functionality and found it was inadequate and better to save our money and simply keep using decent communication and organization skills even if it was unecessarily busy work for an mmo in 2012.

anyways, there’s a couple alliances around, you can join in if you want. i recomend the BPA. it’s not perfect but at least it’s semi functional.

I recommend you contact the BPA. Borlis Pass Alliance. Krew normally holds the meetings in their vent.

First off welcome to borlis pass I am glad you guys decided to move here. We can always use more help. My in game name is hadann. Feel free to contact me in game so we can get more organized as a server. Borlis pass does have communication probs atm, hopefully this will be a first step moving forward. I hope the others read this post of how newly transfered players view our server, and drop their egos to come together and help as one.

You should have moved to Ebay. We have lost 3-4 matches in a row and although we are demoralized. we kitten a lot and a huge percentage of our population has jumped ship to make themselves feel better on higher ranked servers, we still have people who continue to fight for the sake of being annoying, or in the case of this week getting back into the bracket above so we can continue to be annoying again.

@ dirtyklingon, hakato, hadan:
We’ve been mainly playing in red BL and EB. We’ll look into BPA, but the main objective of my post was to get the general populace of BP informed of what the other side of coin looks like and what we need to do as a whole to get there.

@ hakato:
I remember you from last night/this morning in red BL. We took longview (tower west of garrison) and held off EB invaders. The two towers are troublesome for garrison as well-placed trebs can take down garrison walls – and this is what some of us did. Someone dropped a treb blueprint and few of us started running supplies to Arah. I ran supplies 3 times, fought off EB trying to take Arah twice, only to find our treb destroyed – either because it took too long or taken out by AoE. The ridiculous part about this story is that, the during that time, there were at least 20 BP players at longview, either taking supplies in tower and building rams inside, or standing on the wall and dancing to taunt others. The enemy at garrison managed to get their treb up before we finished ours and took down our wall. I think that if we had our treb up first, it would have checked against their counter-treb due to our height advantage. Not to mention – people were spamming /team with useless information like “lulz”.

@ pinoy:
The die has been cast and we will be stick here at BP. In the meantime, we’ll see you in WvW.

Gremlin, yes morale seems to be a big issue among our players.

In Lions Arch I constantly have to remind people that pretty much all servers but the #1 lose more than 50% of the time. The number one guys have five hour queues as of course you know. People just complain and complain about being outnumbered / not having orbs / losing. I try my best everyday to instill courage in them as well as reminding them there is no such thing as an easy victory and I hope you guys do too.

I have seen what BPA can do when we get organized even when the out manned buff is up like last night when we held Anvils Orb for hours. BPA fights regardless of the odds or the score or how many orbs the enemy has.

Anyways, welcome to Borlis Pass pass it is good to have you on board!

I don’t think it’s losing that’s necessarily the issue. It’s that one server owns 99% of the map from day one, with everything upgraded. At that point the week is over and it’s time to wait until the next week.

I have a slightly different opinion, Eviator.

I’ve seen BP take over BPBL (red borderlands) completely few times. However, as soon as that happens, everyone “zergs” to a different map leaving all the captured locations un-upgraded and un-defended. If anything, your argument supports the idea that we should upgrade and defend our holdings, instead of running away and giving up.

Another example – yesterday evening (server time), BP had a fair amount of holdings in EB and key locations (such as ogrewatch) was well upgraded and had well-placed sieges. However, the tower fell because not enough players were in it to man the sieges, while /team was suggesting everyone to leave the map.

Give up on day one and wait a week for a rematch? That mentality will never get red servers to become blue or green.