Guild Wars 2

I feel compelled to comment here for the first time since my first infraction/banning experience about 6 months ago. Note: my ban was received for asking ANet to explicitly state how players could report hackers in a way that didn’t result in unnecessary infractions and further contribute to the deteriorating dialogue between the company and the users. For that, I was banned. Moving along….

I have come to appreciate over time, to some extent, the position of the ANet employees who have to interact with us. Like any employees they are subject to the demands of managers, managers who are likely out of touch, or have never been in touch, with their product. I’m sure lots of us could relate. Obviously, publicly contradicting the message sent, or ideas generated, by that particular brain trust within the company means risking your employment. I’m also fairly certain that there are people working within ANet who agree with many of the things that are said here. However, their agreement and acknowledgement can only likely serve to perhaps risk their jobs and not much else. As has been stated a number of times before by different people on the forums, the best path forward is to vote with your wallet. Either you stop playing the game entirely, or you dial back your gem store purchases to send a message to the correct people.

Now, on topic, I’d be of a mind to encourage people not to support this request. Yeah, people have made some great videos, people really like the game and what they’ve managed to accomplish in it. However, it would seem to me a self-defeating exercise for the community to cooperate with the request. Part of the issue we face is ANet resources dedicated to the more casual player-base aspects, and a business model that seemingly relies on continually gaining new players to maintain revenue, while not addressing the bleeding of users out of the end game (WvW). From what I’ve read, China is not the end of the expansion, and the focus on new markets will probably continue at least for the next 2 – 3 years (last part is a guesstimate). A promo video for WvW is a band-aid solution to a systemic problem and assisting in its production is a clear contradiction to everything the community has been requesting for the last two years. In other words, the solution is not simply bringing in players to replace those who quit, it’s about addressing aspects of the game which destabilize the player base.

As much as I try to understand the position of the ANet employees and temper my comments accordingly, I have a hard time understanding why a little clarity wasn’t added here, just as a matter of simple human courtesy. I’ve been actively reading the forums since beta and asking for a favour in a vague manner from a group which on a daily basis maligns the way in which information is doled out is going to have a predictable result. Either engage the community with some transparency or continue with the communication black-out, at this point anything else comes across as patronizing.

Have a pleasant day.

This is an interesting video from May of this year featuring Anet’s head of marketing, Steve Fowler, and Josh Davis, the competitive events manager who brought us the golem event:

Building a Competitive Game Program

The context is more pvp, and a discussion about growing support for competitive pvp, but indirectly the presentation says quite a bit about their stance with wvw. From their presentation:

• Competitive players have higher than average retention rates
• Competitive players tend to play longer than non-competitive game-type players
• Players monetize better the more they play
• Lifetime value is higher for competitive players than non-competitive players

Some interesting highlights of the presentation:

20:32 – Josh discussing the concept of facilitating player progression from casual to competitive, and the need to facilitate growth. Steve follows up by pointing out that pvp can be intimidating to the casual player, and the importance of maintaining varying levels of competitiveness to slowly encourage players into pvp and thereby increase GW2 participation overall.

2:50 – Steve Fowler discusses why Anet is interested in competitive gaming.

20:15 – Steve’s sick burn of Josh

I had written once on this forum that in my mind the apparently combative stance taken with the wvw community was a missed opportunity on the part of Anet. A missed opportunity to sustain population (money), and also increase pvp participation. Everyone starts off in PvE and wvw is/can be a nice intermediate step into getting into pvp, which seemed to me was where Anet’s business plan was originally heavily invested, and supported in the video above. In my opinion, that chain of potential player development was hindered when Anet chose to view wvw as a competing format for pvp-oriented players rather than a platform to generate new pvp players.

The link between PvE and WvW was strained when the forums were removed, again when megaservers came in, and again further when recruiting forums were folded into a jumbled mass. WvW players are the only users who have to pay to transfer to keep the mode they play interesting, or accompany guild members.

WvW is increasingly becoming a mode that caters to the casual player, or deincentivizes organized play, and thereby stratifies the gameplay combat scale and stagnates the average skill level in a game with amazing combat potential/design. The more ‘hardcore’ players who in the past used to lead, take in, and teach new players basic skills in game have become more insular in an effort to maintain their guilds in response to the frustrations mentioned here, and declining participation. This forces new and disenfranchised players to fall back on a blob mentality which diminishes the potential for variety and development, and further, their transition into pvp.

So, as a player who optimistically pre-purchased two expansions, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed so far by the lack of effort to address the core issues relating to the deterioration of the game mode.

I believe the developers are a group of intelligent, well-intentioned individuals. But I would encourage you to engage the community on some meaningful level in an effort to keep the mode from devolving to what we see in EotM, which isn’t good for us, or your long-term profit. Working with us can help you to further your goals.

Here are some interesting counter-points to the Anet post:

- The ‘inordinate’ amount of time spent on the forum by staff might have something to do with it seeming to be one of the most active sub-forums on the site, if not the most. Review the concept of proportionality.

- The accusations brought up in the forum were done so due to exploits/hacks which have been ignored for over a year, and likely reported hundreds if not thousands of times. If you ignore it, you expect what to happen?

- A lot of the animosity you observe in the forums is directly related to frustrations within the community about population imbalances you have not addressed, and yet acknowledge as a problem.

To act like you had no hand in how it devolved in your perception, and express disappointment with us……is disappointing, to say the least.

Phantom.8130:

interestingly enough, during the first WvW CDI, population imbalance was the most listed problem with WvW. which they actually pointed out and acknowledged themselves afterwards. and it appears their solution to the population imbalance was to remove the punishments for server stacking (queues), and to add incentive for server stacking (the rewards from this tournament).

i’m guessing that there’s a proper amount of crack one can smoke to where that solution actually makes sense, because anyone with a functional brain can see how stupid of a plan it was. unless, of course, they were actively trying to kill WvW for some reason…. then that plan is the best way to go.

+1. Yes, Devs, would you care to comment on the appropriate amount of crack?

Honestly, I don’t even know what to say. The ignorance of this decision goes beyond making me angry at this point. I just think we need to study it……for science.

Chaba.5410:

Hey Wolf, you too! I saw one of you wave, I had to wave back.

That was me, I was attempting to establish peaceful relations to determine your intentions. Once a BP mesmer attempted to yank me off the tower, I realized “……..they’re not here to sell us cookies”. Disbelief and panic spread through Lake like an IoJ exodus…..we were so sure it was cookies.

As a primarily wvw player since launch, and a carry-over player from GW1 the announcement today is disappointing as it seems the decimation of the wvw population will continue unabated. With the vaguely announced timeline, I am not optimistic there will be much of a population left for the population balance fixes later this year. I have slowly moved my two accounts up through the tiers, donating more gems to Anets efforts, in order to attempt to find consistency, or pseudo balance, but it is not uncommon for myself to log in during NA prime and find no commanders tagged in either Tier 1 or 2, when over year ago I could find multiple commanders at any time in Tier 3 – 6.

The launch of HoT, for which I bought two copies, was also a disappointment – not in as much the number of features it offered, but rather the lack of insight demonstrated by the company into the combat aspects of the game, when the combat is the truly defining feature of this potentially great product. The terrain and introduction of non-player elements ran counter to 3 years of feedback and the arguable failure of EotM to attract genuine interest. The borderland waypoint changes demonstrated to myself a clear lack of practical understanding of the current state of population and organizational attrition in the game; attempting to force more play across maps on the assumption that there are actually enough commanders or guilds left to support multi-map coordination. Nothing needs to be said about the class imbalance introduced as well, which created a virtual pay-to-win structure in the game, driving both wvw and pvp further into boring metas.

So, as much as I can understand trying to consolidate changes, whether to raise efficiency or minimize roll-backs, I have a difficult time seeing the purpose in Anet investing another year into a cure for a patient that will be dead by then. The attrition increases at a rate such that by the time your solutions are released, they are no longer appropriate for the situation. For example, the DB map might have been a successful addition, despite the reservations of myself and others, 2 years ago when the game had the population to support the dynamics.

Your metrics are polluted with assumptions, and your game mode is on life support. If you make no plans for further intermediate assistance into QoL changes for the wvw community between now and the overhaul, including the population distribution, save your time and money and shut the mode down. Your time would be better spent with your other game modes, as you have clearly spread yourself too thin, and adopted an insular approach to your customers which serves to assist nothing other than fragile management egos.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Straegen.2938:

While I agree it should have been released sooner, I doubt they want any significant changes to WvW right before the new season.

I agree what you said makes logical sense to assume. But in practice it doesn’t seem consistent with the free transfer policy. Creating population instabilities is a much more significant change to the game right before the season than people being able to have buffs on their alts that they already probably have on their mains.

This whole thing smells like a project manager who’s out of touch with the product and audience, but recognizes a cash cow, pushing their design team to focus on items they might otherwise choose not to work on. It would be interesting to know what sort of conversations happened about recouping cash in their business model after it became apparent the e-sports thing wasn’t gonna pan out, and what sort of fraction of their income that was intended to represent.

I just can’t see the sustainability in this approach. The core wvw population may represent a small fraction of the overall GW2 population. But the ‘endgame’ is still hemorrhaging players. New sales, and people being fed into the front end of this process must slow eventually (if it hasn’t already). So, without addressing the issue of keeping pvp a somewhat competitive format, I have a hard time seeing how this F2P model can last. A large source of income right now is driven by customer dissatisfaction, and that’s something you can’t just keep going back to the well for.

I invested money and time in the game (yeah, it’s just a game) on the premise it would take pvp seriously, and keep the power creep out of the game. GW2 has failed to meet either of these. The people I know in the game keep me interested, and we lose more of them each day. It’s unfortunate, the potential being overlooked here.

Thanks for your comments. I agree, in practice WvW may not be a bridge for a lot of people. I tend to view that reality as being more a function of the red-headed stepchild phenomenon in how WvW is treated out of the modes. Over the years, Anet has made PvP more accessible/rewarding and WvW less accessible (but consistently, significantly less rewarding). So naturally, it’s probably the last thing many people get into.

My comment was more on the potential for WvW to be a bridge, as opposed to the current dynamic, if managed properly. I also view WvW as endgame, but I see PvP as a valuable asset to be played in parallel. PvP is a great way to learn and refine skill rotations and counters, and minutiae that can be overlooked in the chaos of large-scale fights.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time since beta observing players purge from a server, then rebuild, develop and repeat the purge. Player progression in WvW often goes from a person doing a lot of the more accessible things like scouting, capping objectives, building and maintaining siege, etc. Eventually you wrap your head around the idea of class builds and start to get into combat a bit more, maybe you even tag up and lead people to cap objectives. Then I see a lot of those people get their attention grabbed by the combat. Pugmanders who find they enjoy the combat more and more, and get tired of having an unstable team behind them, start their own guilds and recruit, they learn about optimal group composition and open field strategy. Eventually maybe they move on to zerg busting or gvg.

But we’ve seen the rift that can form in a community between PPT players and combat-oriented players. In my opinion this tends to be a result of combat-oriented players having perhaps played the mode a bit longer, on average, and is really more of a reflection of their frustration with the underlying futility of the mode which is traced back to the inattention that has most of us worked-up on this forum. Combat players start to identify their PPT-loving teammates with the oppressive overlords who malign their interests seemingly at every development turn. People used to respect this balance a bit more, but now, after years of neglect and PPT play encroaching more on the overall gameplay in the mode, it tends to be viewed more like a hostile takeover.

I would guess that most of us who’ve played long enough have seen what happens when you have too many of either type of player in a server. Become too fight-oriented and the server feels isolated and unwelcoming, become too PPT-oriented and the variety of gameplay suffers as people tend to cluster together.

But, back on point: like it or not, a healthy WvW environment has players which span a spectrum of interests. That spectrum, which is unique in the game mode, has (or maybe moreso the past-tense, had) the potential to ease more people into the beauty of the combat, if taking the plunge right into PvP was slightly intimidating.

I should also point out I’m not trying to say either PvP or WvW is the pinnacle of development as a competitive player. You have good fighters in both, and more often than not, the stronger combat guilds in WvW participate in some capacity in PvP.

This thread…..

DR: I am one of the anonymous bads who has faced you many-many times over the months. To the people transferring: our servers may not have liked how the other thought the game should be played, but it’ll be unfortunate to lose you guys as competitors. Hope the new situations work out.

ET: when the mud starts flying everyone gets hit. Please keep in mind the opinions expressed on the forums by individuals are just that. I watch the progression of the servers in the lower tiers (we’re all lower tier) and have been following how things have been improving there – which is great. Nothing but good things to say about the ET people I’ve run into in-game so far.

PPT: at the end of the day is just the carrot and, until something is done to address the population imbalances, means little. It gives us something to shoot for but there are a number of ways to measure success at the end of the week.

[Bags]: You yanked me off a cliff! Thanks for the laugh even if it was at my own expense. The second time you tried it though I popped stability and took all your bait ballistas to pay for my repairs…..everybody wins.

Let’s all just chill out and enjoy some competition, in whatever form you consider that to be.

No need to flame her when she’s trying to help. And no need to belabor that point. Report with something constructive.

DevonCarver.5370:

At no point did I, or would I have, said “Fair competition” WvW is not intended to be “fair”. There are servers with more people, there are servers with better organizations and that will always be the case. This competition will be about showing how your world can do over a defined period of time, against a variety of opponents. SPvP is the part of our game that aims for a completely level playing field. WvW would never be able to match that goal.

I don’t come to the the forums complain, but I respectfully disagree with the logic behind the above statement and behind the formation of a 2-league NA system.

A quick check shows me that the “Server Match up is terrible” thread is approaching 1200 replies. Personally, when the random match-ups began I was slightly on board since something was necessary to address the artificially growing rating gaps between tiers, but I assumed once it stabilized, a more consistent system would be put in place.

The random system has taken a toll on a number of servers in the lower tiers and has led to even greater population disparity between adjacent servers. I know of two servers in the last two weeks who have had their major wvw guilds leave, and I believe it is significantly a result of the persistence of the current matching system. As nice as it is when you get a boost to your own server’s playerbase, I like a competitive environment and would prefer to see a more even playing field.

Every server has a variety of players, from casual to serious. Lopsided match-ups have a ripple effect in that they can make for a rough week for at least one server, but beyond that they impact the fairweather player base of most servers, sometimes leading to drop-off for the following weeks. The previous tier system may have been frustrating for some due to the slow progressions, but this current arrangement is simply too unstable. The introduction of the two-league system tells me that not only will the current problem continue to persist, but that it will likely get worse (especially if we are looking at a round-robin format tournament).

At least in the radomized system there was a chance for most servers in the mid-tiers to face a challenge or gain a victory. Mid-tier servers now face the possiblity of not being challenged the majority of the time, or never being able to have a winning week for the duration of a league. Both of these situations are bad for wvw on servers in the long run. Even though the guy in the Joystiq article got it wrong at first, the four league system would have probably been a healthier alternative to the two league.

Now, with respect to your comment that wvw is not intended to be fair: just because a system can not achieve a perfect balance doesn’t mean that efforts shouldn’t be in place to strive to do so. If a game is not intended to be fair then it is also not intended to provide a competitive environment. People choose wvw over pve because they are looking for competition, without it we become complacent, bored, and look for something else. Recent match-ups that I’ve been in often start with some statement similar to “let’s all agree the scores mean nothing anymore and try to have some fun fights”. Server pride means less and less as the current system forces people to leave their servers in search of balance, and enforces the understanding that tiers are becoming less competitive.

Allowing wvw to become a contest where the best coverage/numbers wins makes the game a political one rather than one based on combat.

A little devils advocate…things got a little heated in our last match-up thread and someone from an opposing team made the comment, something like “let’s all keep in mind the majority of the players on the other side are the same generally fun/helpful people you find on any server”.

We should acknowledge that references made to DH in regards to the above are probably, reasonably limited to a guild or individuals within a guild + groupies, and not representative of the server’s attitude as a whole. That’s what I take out of this from reading, and from experience.

In my opinion, a large part of the problem is the response time of Anet in regards to exploits in general. Some have been around, and have been reported, for months with no action. One example that comes to mind is a post from last week where an Anet employee posted in WvW discussion he had discovered you could glitch through the door at NW tower. Considering the number of reports, through forums and in-game, I think that speaks volumes about where our expectations should be. It’s on us to a large degree as servers to regulate ourselves if we expect ‘fair’ match-ups.

These sorts of lingering oversights would likely result in a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” philosophy for a minority on any server who had to put up with it every week, with no response in sight.

That said, I played GW1 for years and hope this one will survive its growing pains and become something as balanced and fun as we know it can be. Using Anet’s universally acknowledged inaction as a rationalization is a cop-out.

Aside from that, I just wanted to say thanks to DH/FC, I can’t remember a match-up where people have been as polite/respectful in-game. Playing a week free from emote spam has been a change from the last couple months and it didn’t go unnoticed.

That’s all I’ve got to say. Best of luck to you both in your match-up next week.

If I was transferring, this is a server I would be looking at. Good roaming/small team and some guilds that have been around as long as I’ve been playing, which says something in wvw.

Jski.6180:

What i do not get why don’t most of the come T3 worlds (not SoS or FA or even DB they are more on the lines of T2-T2.5) get ppl from T4 and lower worlds to come to T3. Part of wvw is comunitly and if you cant build one then your world will die or simply be crushed by the odd T worlds.

This isn’t entirely directed at you, but just the general group of sanctimonious players in T2 who roll down and offer advice and complaints.

The rift formed in T3 started long before IoJ and NSP got into the tier. All the servers preceeding in the months before us had guilds siphoned into T2 and fell afterwards – CD, SBI, HoD, etc. The introduction of a heavily PPT-focused server, and people choosing to jump to a fourth server historically carried by a single timezone caused a sort of cold war in the tier which has switched the focus from fights to doing whatever is necessary to stay afloat in T2.

When IoJ got to T3 we had roughly 8 guilds that could field 15 – 20 people, through all of our timezones. About 2 of those decided the number difference wasn’t for them and left, which is to be expected to some extent. That left us with 6. Fort Aspenwood’s community approached IoJ and offered to buy the server because they needed to strengthen their off-hours coverage. Obviously people had mixed feelings about that, 3 guilds stayed and 3 guilds transferred to FA – 2 of the guilds that left covered timezones that are typically weaker (OCX, SEA).

So, that’s where IoJ is now, we have about 2 guilds that rally in NA, and 1 in OCX. And we recently picked up another guild in NA. These guilds don’t typically overlap that much, so at any given time through NA prime into OCX there is 1 guild covering all maps, with whatever pugs are still masochistic enough to log in. For comparison purposes, a quick check on the FA website lists 26 guilds, and that doesn’t include the 2 guilds they had transfer from T1 this week.

Because of the 4 servers trying for 3 spots in T2 over the last 2.5 months, whoever rolls into T3 is typically PPT’ing as hard as they can to drain glicko. This means map queues blobbing on multiple maps, people building siege in our camps and leaving teams in them, and all the trolling that goes along with that, etc etc.

There’s no real need to question why the T2 servers do it, we get why they do it. They want to survive in the current situation so they buy and recruit more and more guilds. In general, people are lazy, just want to enjoy their gaming time and they transfer in the path of least resistance. People on IoJ and NSP have, in my opinion, been pretty good about making the best of a bad situation and not complaining too much. The bulk of the complaints come from the T2 servers about why they can’t find fights, or how poorly we fight, when they can clearly see the situation they created – not us. It’s not our job to keep you entertained while you play in the most toxic ppt-driven way possible while trying to purchase our remaining guilds.

I’ve played on a mid-tier server since the game came out, the same one, and have weathered the ups and downs. My opinion is you need a balance between the fight/PPT mindsets or several things can start happening.

I started off like most people, focused on PPT, joined a PPT-focused guild and spent a lot of frustrating time upgrading keeps, flipping camps, etc. I then went more to roaming for a while and joined a guild that did zerg-busting and GvG.

I play on IoJ, which spent a couple months getting beat down at the bottom of Silver during season 1. So, on a server that had historically been more focused on PPT, people had to find other ways to keep interested, generally I think people began to focus more on the battles (fights) instead of the war (PPT).

Focusing on fights is a great way to get through a hopeless match-up, but there really needs to be a collective understanding on the server when shifting focus away from defending, otherwise your guilds that build your waypoints for you and other nice things will pack up and move to T1/T2.

Also, completely abandoning PPT activities will also generally abandon any rebuild efforts you may need to do on the server. As mundane as those activities may seem after all this time, they’re also simple things that help get new people into the game. The turnover in the mid-to-lower tiers necessitates keeping some focus on this or your server will simply bleed-out experienced wvw’ers over time.

The other extreme is being too PPT-focused. In which circumstance you develop a bad case of the fairweathers. A server running a karma train on your nicely upgraded stuff can cut your population to a third or a quarter of what it can be on a good week. That kind of instability is another short-cut to an exodus, and because of the overwhelming odds that it can lead to, the fight-oriented guilds face potentially boring fights if the numbers become too lopsided due the fairweather drop-off.

So, while either of these views can be fun, depending on the player. There really needs to be a mutual understanding between the two sides on what happens when you run into a really difficult week. PPT guilds need to understand sometimes a good defense is good offense, and that on some weeks, the upgrade game is a lost cause. When facing a lost cause in terms of PPT, have a plan to use the week to practice other things in wvw.

Fight-oriented guilds need to keep in mind that fights can be found on almost any map. Responding to calls in your BL before the enemy gets a strong foothold can potentially save you time in the long-run and allow your guild more freedom to map hop through the week. The waypoints your PPT counterparts build allow you to get to your targets faster, and the siege they maintain protects your map mobility.

tl;dr – it takes both for a server to be successful, however you measure success. Showing a mutual respect makes the game more fun for both sides, the fighters and the PPT players.

at the risk of being trolled….spca/xoxo…fun fights about an hour ago in IoJ BL. Reminds me to raise the bar each time.

Travelling the rest of the week, so:

NSP – nice grab of hills today. I hope you guys get a funner roll next week.

IoJ – highlights of the week for me were seeing everyone pull together for these defenses. Really impressed with the effort I’ve seen.

SBI – your comments on the forum provided me with much joy, thank you

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

Even more concerned as the mods have just removed the thread where people were posting the invisible and invincible ele!

Keep your heads in the ground anet, you’re doing a bang up job driving people away from your game!

Did the thread get deleted, or did it get hacked and turned invisible too?

I’m scared, someone hold me.

(PS. Thanks for the infos and updates on that Anet. I feel informed as usual, and confident as a regularly paying customer that future TP purchases will see the profits invested in the mode I spend my primary game time in.)

adjusts blindfold

Should it be added to the list of known wvw bugs?

The upcoming leagues should be interesting. But I think the interesting part will actually be what happens after the first season.

Some servers are in the unfortunate position of still having to face higher wvw pop servers week after week, despite all efforts to point out to Anet the detriment of that decision.

The interesting thing is going to be the transfers that come after the first season. People in the lower end of the gold league, regularly facing maybe even larger imbalances, may finally say enough is enough and transfer back down. That means that if people can stick it out, some servers in silver are going to be in a good position to absorb those transfers and you could see some interesting changes in the second season of the silver league.

In my personal opinion, servers to watch will be NSP, HoD and ET. Each has a solid wvw core, recently stable evolutions, and can probably make the biggest moves with the fewest additions. Not that I think this all about ppt, but it would just be nice to see some servers rewarded for their patience/tenacity.

Fun fights so far this week HoD/ET. If we can continue to keep things friendly, I’ll definitely be adding a recommendation to your recruitment threads once the sky starts falling in the gold league.

I think it would be appropriate for one of the devs to spend the season on Maguuma.

Won’t be on again before reset, so wanted to say congrats GoM on the win. After playing against you guys the last couple weeks, you seem like a nice, chill bunch. Best of luck with the roll and match this coming week.

DR, a close match-up, thanks for some memorable fights this week. Cheers.

I ask myself the same question too, or did. At this point it should be pretty clear to all of us how much time and energy Anet plans on investing in this mode, essentially nothing. WvW is a sandbox gamemode which probably exists in essence to provide developers and other employees with a logical time to take vacation (during seasons) from the living story. The existence of a competitive form of WvW, and further GvG, runs counter to the plan to make pvp a sponsor attracting game mode due to the fact it would siphon competitive players away from the mode into which they’ve sunk the larger part of their investment.

Employees don’t answer here because, despite personal views which may contradict their employer, their company is publicly traded and undermining the confidence in their product will only threaten the parent company’s bottom line which is somewhat a function of the perception of customer contentment, and get them transferred or fired.

Any positive changes that come about in the game will likely need to be spearheaded by players taking the initiative to correct things people are displeased about. However, due to the prevalence of human apathy, anonymity, and the F2P structure, there is little motivation by players in a general sense, and our expectations about whether players will right the ship should reflect that.

I always liked the part about Zergs the best. Most of the changes to the mode are counterintuitive to what DC expresses there. But, I have to admit he said a lot of the right stuff.

Had a tough time deciding which 2v1 QQ thread to post in, so many to choose from.

2v1 is a strategy which, as it has been pointed out above, has been explicitly stated as being acceptable by the developers. Personally, I’d rather win and lose on my own terms, but I’ve come to accept the arrangement as another way of players policing the game themselves, to an extent. Whether that be a response to imbalance, or just karma coming around to people who run their mouths too much in the forums.

There was one particularly memorable day this past season where we (IoJ) were 2v1’d in our BL. Two guild groups came into our BL for a GvG and when it got out they called in some friends and decided to troll the PvE server (large servers get so bored). They sat across from us, not engaging one another, both with groups larger than our own (maybe 15 in our guild plus 5 – 10 militia), using one another to try to flank us. To be fair to them, they didn’t all push together at once, most of the time. They did feel open field siege was necessary though, something we get trolled about all the time. Did we come to the forums and whine about it? No (not until now if you consider this whining, which it isn’t). That might have had something to do with the fact we wiped them both over and over for four hours in the open field, or perhaps because every match is a virtual 2v1 for us. But, I like to think it’s to some extent because we try to discourage whining and chest thumping.

Those pointless threads come down to people from a stacked server whining about having to fight outmanned for a few days. You people should be embarrassed for even posting those threads.

Miss Firesss.3704:

You know, with all this complaining about zergs, you would think us in SBI created this matchup, not Anet…..

Agreed. Complaining in the match-up thread is pointless, the numbers are what they are and noone here controls the RNG.

No sense wasting time getting frustrated about a situation where your score is < 50% of the leaders and the Glicko tells you statistically “yes, this is all going according to plan…..goooooood…..goooooood”.

I was scouting our BL about 8 – 10 months ago, south of Bay, just outside of vale. Heading west to take a look in vale, I come up over the little hill near the south bay sentry and find 60 golems marching out of vale towards Bay. Slightly panicked, I put out a call in map chat which is followed by a half-dozen others calling out golems and for people to call in other maps and guildies.

People quickly start to arrive in the area to what we realize is not a golem rush, but 50 – 60 people in mini golem tonics.

A close second would be the mesmer map zerg an opposing server rolled on a theme night. Double-stonemist-scale lag in a camp fight.

Legion.1569:

congrats ioj on taking your hills back right as we got a waypoint. Only took you bringing more golems then we had defenders and another 40 people on top of it lol

but wait based on how ioj views things that was an even numbers fight and you outmaneuvered us gg.

Next time we’ll take a headcount and send the extra people back. Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks for some fun fights HoD and ET. Best of luck with the roll and match-ups this reset.

First post eva….

Just wanted to say thanks to DR and ET for a fun week. You all demonstrated a lot of class, skill and non-zerginess that made this one of the better weeks of late.

When I started wvw it was DH/DR/IoJ each week and I thought after the first few weeks that the home team was just always blue……so young, so naive. So, if we finish behind you guys once again I’m not gonna be too beat up about it. Nice push especially later in the week. DR runs some of the better 10 – 15 man groups I’ve run into in terms of organization so far.

IoJ forum warriors, a mild week for you guys. Nonetheless, temper your comments, you might just be having fun but your attitudes reflect on everyone else and leave others feelin’ kinda stupid when our collective bite doesn’t match your bark.

Ultimately, we will need more people interested in wvw, and more people consistently interested, for us to be successful. Representing ourselves in the best possible way can only help to facilitate that.

Best of luck this coming week guys, whoever that may be against.

Cheers

Atreidies.6257:

Btw DB and Ioj ocx if u are feeling all alone wondering around the bl scouting and calling out FA’s location to the other 3 people on your server in that timezone and you are unhappy. Feel free to contact me we can sort you out.

Unsure if challenging the three people, or if openly recruiting in a match thread against an outnumbered opponent. Please consult proctologist about last known location of your head, some of us are concerned over here. Get better soon.

When EotM was announced I expected a couple impacts. First, as a mechanism that addresses que times in T1 rather than the game, the vertical migration of players would continue, and increase. Second, if you’re playing T4 and below (at a minimum) and you play in a wvw-focused group, the declining/lopsided participation in wvw will likely drive people (who choose not to transfer) into EotM on a regular basis in an attempt to find steady fights, and avoid the increasing futility of PPT.

So far, I’ve played on a server that’s ranged from T7 slowly up to its current spot in T4. For me, the funnest fights in that time have been those where you get ~15 decently organized people against the same.

I jumped into EotM for the first time yesterday with thoughts in my head of how it was supposed to encourage fighting more, smaller groups etc etc. What I found was the opposite. The map is amazing to look at, the designers did a great job. But wow, the blobs, the karma train.

Between the combination of the neglect of the mid-lower tier population stability, and what looks like the plug-and-play edition of what’s worst in wvw, I’m beginning to wonder if all fights will begin to progress towards blobbing now that we all have easy access to a communal EB, in essence.

I fully expect they’ll start closing/folding up wvw on servers within the next 4 – 6 months. Players will probably be offered a one-time free transfer to one of 6 – 9 servers they keep it open on.

TL;DR – the addition of EotM may yet further decrease the variety of fights available. Farming pug blobs will only keep organized groups amused for a while.