Guild Wars 2

Yes, about a month ago, WSR lost its two dedicated WvW guilds who moved to find better fights. Following this, it lost two to four more semi-WvW guilds who were pessimistic because the other guilds had left. Before the first wave of leaving, we were dominating FoW and fairly equal with respect to Blacktide in matchups. Before the second, we held our own against FoW. Currently, we are about equal with Vabbi and losing quite poorly to everyone else.

Now, a lot of the players on the server have a rather sour opinion about WvW. Towards the end, many players were frustrated by the occasional elitist behavior of a few members of the dedicated WvW guilds, who were getting a little irate at their relative lack of competition. With them gone, many players are now not playing WvW out of pessimism.

The problem isn’t entirely a numbers issue: we have easily accumulated zergs of 40-50 people during the hours each night when we are doing “well”, which is a decent number considering the tier we’re playing at.

I think a far greater problem lies with morale and attitude. When we finish clearing our own border, the 40-50 people present becomes 4-5 in a matter of minutes as other people either leave or head to EB (where their reduced numbers often means that things don’t go well). This is despite Blacktide often responding and bringing a zerg to attack the border within half an hour or so (so staying and defending would not be a dull activity for long). Similarly, the loss in numbers after one of our zergs gets wiped is huge.

With that said, I think this wave of pessimism will draw to an end. Once morale improves, more players will be active. Already we have had multiple guilds coming together to arrange server-wide ‘WvW nights’ which I’m lead to believe have been quite successful. We still have a handful of WvW guilds, both of the ‘casual’ variety and the ‘organized’ variety. More players have started trying their hand at commanding, and some of them have done a decent job at it.

I am somewhat fearful that the WvW league idea upcoming will be somewhat negative for us. I imagine that when the leagues are announced, some WvW guilds will want to relocate into the servers ranked 10-12 and 19-21 where they can use their influence to push a server to the top of that league. These are guilds that might have otherwise considered moving into the lowest ranked servers where they’d be superstars instead.

Still, I think WSR is capable of recovering from this, once people start to cheer up and try it out.