This is my servers third week against Tarnished Coast/Yak’s Bend and a restriction we keep running into is the fact we have been hitting siege cap after the first day in Eternal Battlegrounds and our own Borderlands which stays with us all week. After searching around a bit, we have been finding siege built en masse in hidden spawn areas and spammed on supply depots to make us stay at the cap. This siege does not seem to despawn over time, I don’t know if they are refreshing it but I saw it last the entire week last week. As far as I’m concerned, not only is this “winning at all costs” sort of play ruining WvW for my server (and probably others) but it is a blatant act of exploiting game mechanics. I caught one of the the culprits in action this time and will also be forwarding this to exploits@arena.net. Something needs to be done about this mechanic to make it impossible to do this as long as players like this exist.
If a moderator looks at this: to prevent things like this in the future, would a possible fix be to only allow rams to be placed within a certain distance of door structures only? I would say make things despawn after a certain amount of time, but if someone wants to do that to make things harder on the server in question, they have no problems using the siege to make sure it doesn’t despawn as well…
So wait someone on Fort Aspenwood has been spamming rams inside of your keep (or where ever)? Is there an achievement or title or something that has to do with building siege items (there is right)?
No wonder you guys are having problems taking Stonemist from us. We held it for like 12 hours with no outer walls when we really should not have been able to do so.
Edit: Wait this is in your borderlands? No wonder we’ve had a fully upgraded hill keep pretty much non-stop for the past couple weeks. I’m all for winning but that’s a bit unfair, even I can see that.
Fosthe — Sylvari Elementalist
Men of Science [MoS] – Tarnished Coast
I think TC’s been hit with this as well. Couldn’t build a single thing earlier in EB, despite some of our siege having been destroyed by invaders over the course of combat.
Maybe until this is fixed, ANet can just lift the siege cap for now?
I think TC’s been hit with this as well. Couldn’t build a single thing earlier in EB, despite some of our siege having been destroyed by invaders over the course of combat.
Maybe until this is fixed, ANet can just lift the siege cap for now?
Part of that is likely because we’ve been overcompensating siege at our camps. For some reason someone built 7 arrow carts, a catapult and 3 ballistas at Rogue’s Quarry for our whopping three-man team to make use of (what?).
We don’t need that much guys, the majority of it just gets destroyed anyway.
Fosthe — Sylvari Elementalist
Men of Science [MoS] – Tarnished Coast
I think TC’s been hit with this as well. Couldn’t build a single thing earlier in EB, despite some of our siege having been destroyed by invaders over the course of combat.
Maybe until this is fixed, ANet can just lift the siege cap for now?
This might be partly because SMC currently has more siege than we can man with a full map of people
Yeah this has been going on since the start of the match two weeks ago. Its like an easter egg hunt finding all these siege in random corners of the map. It is especially compounded because the siege timers are off/messed up.
But yeah this is more of a game mechanic thing then poor sportsmanship. While I blame the players for cheating (the past two weeks have been the worst in cheating I have seen) I blame Anet more for allowing this to happen basically. Thanks for keeping the free transfers Anet, even more so to opponents severs in a match, great idea.
This happens on my server too (Ehmry Bay). Kind of lame acctually. Anyways, it’s not just rams they’re building so limit rams to a certain distance wouldn’t solve anything. They could throw up a arrow cart, cata, treb w/e. Only fix I see is to make this kind of behavior a bannable offense and hope to scare people from doing it. Besides, people who ruin the game for others are not the kind of people I’d wanna have playing my game if I was Anet.
This was occurring a lot last week and when I saw a bunch ballistas and arrow carts placed uselessly in EB I questioned whether someone was deliberately doing it to max our siege cap and waste supply.
This had a severe impact on our ability to take and hold stuff in EB, and is having the same impact this week. For example, we took both Klovan and Wildcreek last week but were unable to place any arrow carts for defence because we were at the siege cap. It was incredibly hard to hold anything we took.
The only way we could get around this was to allow our keep to be breached so attackers could wipe all the useless siege.
As the OP has stated, this is game ruining as it essentially prevents a server from being able to attack or defend new holdings (and even gives other servers the idea that we’re deliberately not defending when it’s really because we can’t defend properly).
Wombling Wombat
FA – Protectorate of Aspenwood [PRO]
Arenenet saw this coming and had a plan for it but has been dragging their feet on implementing it.
Way back in beta it was said that if you transferred to a new server, you would be locked out of WvW for at least one full round, possible two, and that’s when rounds were supposed to last 2 weeks, so 1 transfer = no WvW for possibly a month.
Here we are over 3 months after launch and you can still transfer for free every week, meaning every matchup the miscreants can simply transfer to the new target to cause all the same problems.
It only takes a handful of these people to effectively ruin matches by sucking all the fun out of them. These people call it “meta gaming” and think it’s perfectly legit. Arenanet needs to bring down the banhammer to show them it’s not. (Log siege placement. Review logs for people who place a lot of siege or place them far out of the way. Permaban those who are obviously abusing the game.)
Is there an achievement or title or something that has to do with building siege items (there is right)?.
Theres 3 Achievements for using supply in WvW;
Realm Defender (Total supplies used)
Repair Master (Supplies used for repairs)
Master of Disaster (Supplies used on siege)
However all these of these titles can be worked on by building up burning pots of oil, cannons and mortars around towers & keeps and repair running in EB.
What this dude is doing is pure non-exploit exploiting and running down supplies in a garrison so its harder to defend when people attack it aswell as forcing the total map siege lock to trigger.
This is yet another reason why ANet need to start the 2000 gems to transfer fee instead of allowing it to remain free.
Yeah but flame rams is obvious sabotage. If someone just wanted the achievement what is wrong with using arrow carts? At least they’d have a use inside the keep.
This issue does need addressed. My server seems to get away with it for the most part but just the potential for it alone is enough reason to address it.
It only takes a handful of these people to effectively ruin matches by sucking all the fun out of them. These people call it “meta gaming” and think it’s perfectly legit.
They call it that? really? its about as legit as winning a chess match by hiding your opponents pieces so he cant put them on the board. Glad that we havent seen this on European Server yet, or at least, not on the Tier that we are in.
I think TC’s been hit with this as well. Couldn’t build a single thing earlier in EB, despite some of our siege having been destroyed by invaders over the course of combat.
Maybe until this is fixed, ANet can just lift the siege cap for now?
Part of that is likely because we’ve been overcompensating siege at our camps. For some reason someone built 7 arrow carts, a catapult and 3 ballistas at Rogue’s Quarry for our whopping three-man team to make use of (what?).
We don’t need that much guys, the majority of it just gets destroyed anyway.
actually that’s part of the exploit too. someone built around the supply depot at inner garrison 5 balistas and 3 arrowcarts and i wasnt able to place any siege near the gat or hallway to the gate.that is sabotage for sure.
and eb….omg have u guys when you took our keep from us how much siege was in there? i couldn’t even count it and all of it only at inner and never at the watergate or any useful place…actually our commander was kinda hoping tc or yb would take that keep already and destroy that useless siege.
i wish we players could destroy our siege too or sort of unbuild it to get supply back or so.could be a solution…
Lv 80 glamour Mesmer Triforce Mesmerpower PU mes,Lv 80 power necro
[AVTR]
Isle of Kickaspenwood
Saw this during a previous match in EB. Someone built as much siege as possible in our keep even though we had SMC. We couldn’t build defensive siege and we couldn’t assault YB’s keep where they had trebs up hitting SMC. The siege in our keep would never vanish since the keep had a waypoint guaranteeing the timer would always refresh.
The best way to fix this is by putting a cap on individual players. Each player should be allowed to have a max of (6) pieces of siege up at one time so they can place them around a keep, and move as needed. When they want to replace this siege somewhere else, they should be able to savlage siege they have down, recover some supplies, and begin placing siege at another location.
The best way to fix this is by putting a cap on individual players. Each player should be allowed to have a max of (6) pieces of siege up at one time so they can place them around a keep, and move as needed. When they want to replace this siege somewhere else, they should be able to savlage siege they have down, recover some supplies, and begin placing siege at another location.
This makes other, normal behaviors more difficult though. Guilds will no longer be able to have designated siegemasters. Oftentimes (at least on my server) you’ll see one person managing the siege pieces for a large group and it doesn’t take long before they’re up over 6 pieces.
While it could be a workable solution, it certainly has downsides.
The best way to fix this is by putting a cap on individual players. Each player should be allowed to have a max of (6) pieces of siege up at one time so they can place them around a keep, and move as needed. When they want to replace this siege somewhere else, they should be able to savlage siege they have down, recover some supplies, and begin placing siege at another location.
This makes other, normal behaviors more difficult though. Guilds will no longer be able to have designated siegemasters. Oftentimes (at least on my server) you’ll see one person managing the siege pieces for a large group and it doesn’t take long before they’re up over 6 pieces.
While it could be a workable solution, it certainly has downsides.
The best way to fix this is by putting a cap on individual players. Each player should be allowed to have a max of (6) pieces of siege up at one time so they can place them around a keep, and move as needed. When they want to replace this siege somewhere else, they should be able to savlage siege they have down, recover some supplies, and begin placing siege at another location.
This makes other, normal behaviors more difficult though. Guilds will no longer be able to have designated siegemasters. Oftentimes (at least on my server) you’ll see one person managing the siege pieces for a large group and it doesn’t take long before they’re up over 6 pieces.
While it could be a workable solution, it certainly has downsides.
It would be better than what is happening now.
Not at all. The server I’m on has absolutely no problems with this, so we’d see absolutely no benefit from the change. We’d suffer through the negative aspects without any possible gain. Those few servers that are having issues might see a slight improvement, but everyone would pay for it.
i don’t think limiting the siege to each person is a good thing as there are commanders that put down the siege when needed. i think we sould simply be able to take unwanted siege down that could fix the issue.
Lv 80 glamour Mesmer Triforce Mesmerpower PU mes,Lv 80 power necro
[AVTR]
Isle of Kickaspenwood
i don’t think limiting the siege to each person is a good thing as there are commanders that put down the siege when needed. i think we sould simply be able to take unwanted siege down that could fix the issue.
That will only allow those putting up the siege so you lose, to take down siege so you lose.
I play on Tarnished Coast and in my experience the vast majority of WvW’ers there would rather have a good fight than have an unfair advantage.
I am not in any guilds but my suggestion would be to try to contact one of the TC guild leaders if you are hampered by a siege cap. You could probably arrange to have TC take whatever tower or keep is packed with garbage siege, destroy the siege, and then let FA take the keep back.
The 2 guilds I see on regularly that take leadership roles and that I would trust to make such an arrangement are [TV] and [PINK].
I also saw flame ram build sites put down in the middle of the rode. I took screen shots, but honestly they could have been kitten rams, although I doubt it.
There was only 2 at the spot I saw, so not a huge deal…
I play on Tarnished Coast and in my experience the vast majority of WvW’ers there would rather have a good fight than have an unfair advantage.
I am not in any guilds but my suggestion would be to try to contact one of the TC guild leaders if you are hampered by a siege cap. You could probably arrange to have TC take whatever tower or keep is packed with garbage siege, destroy the siege, and then let FA take the keep back.
The 2 guilds I see on regularly that take leadership roles and that I would trust to make such an arrangement are [TV] and [PINK].
on a non reenforced keep that would be a good plan but the problem comes with the randoms. the people that we have no control over and do as they please. they will not simply give up the keep.
Is the siege pool shared by all teams or is this spies coming in and building a lot of inert siege weapons to cripple the other certain teams?
no its per team i think its in eb 200 per team and the regular bl 100 or so so yeah the spies come in to cripple us. we also have random people yelling something 15 + tc inc at spirit u dont see sword but people head up there …no enemy there but all of the sudden garrison under attack and stuff like that. i don’t trust anyone in chat anymore.
Lv 80 glamour Mesmer Triforce Mesmerpower PU mes,Lv 80 power necro
[AVTR]
Isle of Kickaspenwood
We on TC have our own similar moments but not to this extent. We call them “shame rams”. We even build some (1-2) even now, just for lolz, but only when we are in huge lead and all our towers/keeps are at full supply. But this is just overkill. Many have suggested good points on how to tackle this, and I hope Anet fixes this soon enough.
just had 2 guys try to sabotage us on SBI. They dropped an alpha golem plan in our east tower, drained 40 supplies from the tower on it while the tower was upgrading, and waited for the next yak. we saw them and rush built it and waypointed it to the start area and hid it. So their plan failed and we got a free golem.
Sanctum of Rall
The Mord Sith [MORD]
(Borderlands Stationed Commander)
Simple fix, Remove all XP, Karma and the Achievement for all Siege matters. Take out the Siege reward from JP’s, Make all Siege Guild built based with influence and tagged with the guild tag
Co Leader & Founder “Privateers Uk” [PUK]
Gandara
Eno Live (Ele)
Simple fix, Remove all XP, Karma and the Achievement for all Siege matters. Take out the Siege reward from JP’s, Make all Siege Guild built based with influence and tagged with the guild tag
While that would be effective, I personally don’t think it’s a good option. I’d rather put up with this than be forced to rely on influence purchases for siege.
Why not make a new item called siege scrap and make it so that destroying siege drops a few bits? Make it so that any siege weapon that has not landed an attack in 15 minutes or that is not within 5000 units of a fight can be dismantled by the team that owns it to salvage some siege.
Make it so that we can throw these siege scraps at a vendor to buy more siege. Example, dismantling an arrow cart gives you 1-7 scrap. To buy a new arrow cart, you need 25 scrap. This gives other servers incentive to destroy your siege (as they can turn it into more for themselves) while providing home servers the option to rebuild/fortify elsewhere.
Fosthe — Sylvari Elementalist
Men of Science [MoS] – Tarnished Coast
Why not make a new item called siege scrap and make it so that destroying siege drops a few bits? Make it so that any siege weapon that has not landed an attack in 15 minutes or that is not within 5000 units of a fight can be dismantled by the team that owns it to salvage some siege.
Make it so that we can throw these siege scraps at a vendor to buy more siege. Example, dismantling an arrow cart gives you 1-7 scrap. To buy a new arrow cart, you need 25 scrap. This gives other servers incentive to destroy your siege (as they can turn it into more for themselves) while providing home servers the option to rebuild/fortify elsewhere.
That to could be exploited by saboteurs as they could simply run round and remove all defensive siege.
I know what I posted before may seem harsh but blame the bad apples for it.
They are the ones that have found this exploit and sadly the rest of us have to suffer and the only way to solve it is to do it the way I suggested.
They could even add it so guilds could build siege in a separate section of the guild panel that allows them 2 build slots per AoW level and time thus for standard siege and leaving the unlocked guild siege as it is at the moment as a bonus for unlocking them:
Rams & Arrow Carts = 1 hours @ 50 influence each
Batista’s = 2 hours @ 100 influence each
Catapults = 4 hours @ 200 influence each
Treb’s = 8 hours @ 400 influence each
Golems = 16 hours @ 800 influence each
Co Leader & Founder “Privateers Uk” [PUK]
Gandara
Eno Live (Ele)
While I have no doubt this is just a couple bad apples from TC or YB and do not in any way represent those servers as a whole, Arena.net really needs to get its act together and figure out ways to stop a couple bad apples from ruining the gameplay of thousands of people.
Suggestion:
Let everyone take down two siege machines per day.
A single griefer could do only limited harm. A crowd of well intentioned people could quickly and easily undo these silly siege machine farms that keep sprouting up in useless places in our BL and EB.
Perhaps, allow a maximum number allowed to be built per person concurrently. Allow the owner to destroy their own creations. This would limit the griefing.
While I have no doubt this is just a couple bad apples from TC or YB and do not in any way represent those servers as a whole, Arena.net really needs to get its act together and figure out ways to stop a couple bad apples from ruining the gameplay of thousands of people.
Suggestion:
Let everyone take down two siege machines per day.
A single griefer could do only limited harm. A crowd of well intentioned people could quickly and easily undo these silly siege machine farms that keep sprouting up in useless places in our BL and EB.
Until this happens, just about the only way you could fix this is to team up with a stealth group from the enemy forces, let them into your base, help them get to the siege weapons and destroy them, then kill them so they can safely port back to base.
It could be an impromptu police force – and it would go a long way to undoing the damage, because the griefers would effectively be costing their side several good, honest players who are competent enough to do their job.
Call them Siege Cops.
Partly because that sounds cool.
Why not make siege equipment show who built them so it’d be easier to report who commits these acts of foul play. And perhaps give option to remove Battering Rams when not in use or in a combat situation. Or the option for Commanders to reclaim equipment as a portion of supplies to the nearest stockpile when they’ve been acting as a commander on the server for a month and have a number of tower and keep captures under their belt.
Why not make siege equipment show who built them so it’d be easier to report who commits these acts of foul play.
The problem is, you can’t actually “report” these players, as it wouldn’t help. Its not exploiting the game mechanics, but rather doing a disservice to your server by misusing the resources.
After the initial assault on Hills keep earlier by FA zerg, before the hills waypoint was uncontested, we had no choice but to use supplies from hills depot to repair and build siege. But after FA left to Bay and waypoint was open, we immediately announced on map chat continuously to take from garrison and not from hills keep since both Foghaven and Redwater camps were flipped by FA. Yet some players kept using the supplies nonstop despite asking not to, either they don’t read chat, or just didn’t care and kept using keep supplies to build siege. Atlast I called a guy by his name in CAPS and he stopped. After that I logged off so not sure if we managed to stack enough supplies, but yeah, basically that’s how things happen. Some players don’t read the chat, some don’t care since you can’t kill a traitor from your own server or kick some bad apple from the map until points tally.
Why not make siege equipment show who built them so it’d be easier to report who commits these acts of foul play.
The problem is, you can’t actually “report” these players, as it wouldn’t help. Its not exploiting the game mechanics, but rather doing a disservice to your server by misusing the resources.
After the initial assault on Hills keep earlier by FA zerg, before the hills waypoint was uncontested, we had no choice but to use supplies from hills depot to repair and build siege. But after FA left to Bay and waypoint was open, we immediately announced on map chat continuously to take from garrison and not from hills keep since both Foghaven and Redwater camps were flipped by FA. Yet some players kept using the supplies nonstop despite asking not to, either they don’t read chat, or just didn’t care and kept using keep supplies to build siege. Atlast I called a guy by his name in CAPS and he stopped. After that I logged off so not sure if we managed to stack enough supplies, but yeah, basically that’s how things happen. Some players don’t read the chat, some don’t care since you can’t kill a traitor from your own server or kick some bad apple from the map until points tally.
I think you’re misunderstanding the issue here. It’s not that people are taking supply from keeps, it’s that players are constructing useless siege in places they cannot be used, and are unlikely to be destroyed both to drain supply and to effectively lower the siege cap. Building 50 flame rams in a lord room would drain 2000 supply in building them, but they also cut the total number of deployable siege on the map. (Well, I’m assuming the cap numbers people have been quoting are accurate. A quick google search didn’t give me a solid answer on that.)
I’m not really sure how they can fix this. If you allow people to disassemble siege, then “spies” will just run around busting it down (and you know they would). Alternatively if it just despawned after a time that could really damage defense on a map that’s inactive for a few hours. Obviously the cap serves a purpose, but how best to fix it?
I think you’re misunderstanding the issue here. It’s not that people are taking supply from keeps, it’s that players are constructing useless siege in places they cannot be used, and are unlikely to be destroyed both to drain supply and to effectively lower the siege cap. Building 50 flame rams in a lord room would drain 2000 supply in building them, but they also cut the total number of deployable siege on the map. (Well, I’m assuming the cap numbers people have been quoting are accurate. A quick google search didn’t give me a solid answer on that.)
I do get the point here, I was just quoting an example of how some people don’t just care what they’re doing and how it affects your server overall. My point was you can’t report these as exploits either since what that player did was genuine as per existing game mechanics, but was a disservice to their server, either intentionally or unintentionally (which I doubt isn’t the case, since OP said they didn’t despawn whole day and siege usually despawns in 30mins if not used and this player must be continuously tapping it, so its one of those bad apples). But yes, if a player tries to place rams in random places, just throw an error message “You cannot deploy here” that should partially solve the issue, unless he decides to build it at the gates. Then someone with commander icon should have option to salvage their own siege so that solves the issue.
I think a good way to fix this ‘sabotage building’ would be for players to be able to report the pieces of siege do have it de-spawned faster, ‘x’ amounts of reports by different ACCOUNTS will remove any siege.
Bronade – Guild leader of TERROR[TG]
Homeworld = Home Borderland!
I think you’re misunderstanding the issue here. It’s not that people are taking supply from keeps, it’s that players are constructing useless siege in places they cannot be used, and are unlikely to be destroyed both to drain supply and to effectively lower the siege cap. Building 50 flame rams in a lord room would drain 2000 supply in building them, but they also cut the total number of deployable siege on the map. (Well, I’m assuming the cap numbers people have been quoting are accurate. A quick google search didn’t give me a solid answer on that.)
I do get the point here, I was just quoting an example of how some people don’t just care what they’re doing and how it affects your server overall. My point was you can’t report these as exploits either since what that player did was genuine as per existing game mechanics, but was a disservice to their server, either intentionally or unintentionally (which I doubt isn’t the case, since OP said they didn’t despawn whole day and siege usually despawns in 30mins if not used and this player must be continuously tapping it, so its one of those bad apples). But yes, if a player tries to place rams in random places, just throw an error message “You cannot deploy here” that should partially solve the issue, unless he decides to build it at the gates. Then someone with commander icon should have option to salvage their own siege so that solves the issue.
I think you’re making arbitrary assumptions that aren’t necessarily true though. There is no justifiable reason for doing what was done in the OP. If Arenanet believes this is unacceptable behavior (and I’d have to think they probably do) they can make it explicitly a reportable offense. In order for the abuse to actually be meaningful, there has to be a large number of siege built, so situations would likely either be easily classified as obvious abuse or ineffective. Punishments for the obvious abuse should mitigate the abuse, and ineffective attempts at this would be ineffective.
From the solutions people have offered up so far, I think this would offer the best efficacy to player cost ratio. Now, the additional cost to Arenanet for policing such things might be another story.
>.> simply make it bannable offense and stop allowing such easy server transfers into WvW would solve the majority of the issue. while it wouldnt stop everything most of the serious ones should be stopped by that. of course… this is assuming anet even bothers, havent seen anything about WvW in general, certain not their focus it seems considering free server transfer sucks for WvW in general.
