Guild Wars 2

Just wanted to say had fun fighting BT, HOPE, CYN, and PiNK on KN BL a few hours ago. Has been a while since I’ve had the time to lead a larger group around and there were a lot of good fights to be had in the south there for an hour or two. Probably the funniest was in Ruins, despite the fact it wasn’t one that we won, since it was a massive 3-way and we had guys lamenting about how they were survivors at the end (I think a few may have PTCSD).

We’ve also invented some new jargon to hearken the coming of our TC buds, doomzerg, since zerg just doesn’t quite encompass the sheer mass of the ball of bodies and pointy objects we had the pleasure of seeing up the skirts of a few times tonight.

Anyways, with KN falling to T3 and various guilds considering their futures in GW2, it’s important to note that despite the ups and downs, and despite the less than savory group sizes the patch brought about, this matchup has been a fun and challenging one for us and there have been a lot of enjoyable moments. Shout outs to BT, RET, AVTR, FIST, HOPE, NERF, PiNK, TSL, DIS, CYN, KH, Awe, and all the other guilds we’ve matched wits and arms with over the last couple months. Keep bringing the pain.

I agree with the suggestions you’ve made to combat zerging. There needs to be elements that address both combat mechanics and the underlying psychology of zergs. For #3, a 3-letter acronym like the ones we use implicitly would do just fine (such as “KNG Soldier [TAG]”).

7) is something I think is crucial, I’ve suggested it a few times. The reason you see fewer small groups is there are few objectives for small groups to pursue. There aren’t enough dolyaks and camps to go around if you broke a 50-man into 10 groups of 5 or even 5 groups of 10. A couple suggestions for small group objectives:

1) Distributed Area Control. Think sentry points but more of them spaced all around the map, temporarily on every tick.

• The zones reset ownership every tick, and capturing a zone provides WXP/karma and PPT (say 1-3 depending on how remote the zone is).
• The zones don’t cap any faster with more players.
• They all spawn with each tick and then are owned once taken, so players will need to distribute personnel to the zones they want to control.
• No zones will be within range of ACs/ballistas from keeps.
• Each zone is attached to a nearby fortification and ownership of the zone provides minor buffs/penalties to people operating near that fortification for the tick based on ownership (not whole server buffs like orbs below).

2) Relics and Orbs of Power. Orbs weren’t a bad concept, they just had a bad implementation. Replace them with a multitude of different orbs/relics which spawn around the map every X ticks (2-4 seems good).

• Every 2-4 ticks, 10 Orbs of Power spawn around the map, 3 in each sector and 1 on the center island for BLs as an example.
• They need to be carried to a nearby keep or tower and provide buffs to the server.
• Each of the 3 side orbs provides a different buff, maybe one defensive, one offensive, one XP focused.
• The center orb provides a combination, but not enough to outstrip the others.
• Every 2-4 ticks the Orbs reset and have to be recaptured, providing a 20-50 minute window where you benefit from them, but removing the incumbent advantage Orbs gave previously.
• Orbs can’t be moved once placed, they disappear and the buff goes active, so hackers can’t snatch them, and attackers will need to capture them when they reset.
• Similarly, you cannot capture your “home” orbs near your natural keep, you can only capture the orbs in enemy natural territory. This prevents each side from just grabbing the nearest orbs and negating the conflict (unless you happen to own an enemy’s natural, in which case you have the benefit of easier orb access for said conquest).

Confusion is fine in general, it should do the same damage per hit etc. However, like others are saying, it should only proc whenever someone uses an active skill that deals damage or applies a condition. Then it would actually have the effect of being something you had to be aware of and use skills wisely, which seemed like the design, rather than “remove or deal with it”. If it turns out Mesmers are less viable with such a change, other aspects of the class should be buffed accordingly to compensate. Simple as that.

The only scenario where either system makes sense is if a magic wand was waved and all 24 servers had a similar number of people across all timeslots, making the matchups from week to week purely a matter of who played the strategy better or wanted it more. That’s never going to happen, nothing close to it will ever happen, because the system can’t be designed that way.

There are really only two systems that can work without more fundamental structural changes to how WvW servers and maps are populated. One is the current Glicko system, which over time tends to place servers in comparable coverage tiers. If you look at the scores this week, then for the most part they’re as close as they’re going to be. At time of writing, no server has double the score of any other server in their matchup. So, in theory, this system is good for point tallies since each server should feel some capacity to do well against their current adversaries. On the other hand, if your matchup is truly even then you’ll be fighting the same people for basically eternity, which bores some players.

The other system is a winners move up, losers move down, 2nd place stays system. This would imbalance the tiers in terms of coverage, and as a result imbalance the point totals and cause blowouts in points, which frustrates some players. However you’d be facing different opponents each week, so while the scores may not be close, the engagements would seem fresh each week as you encountered each different group.

So you can either bore people or frustrate them, it’s a lose-lose proposition. Which is preferable will differ from person to person. Personally I never really minded when we’ve been losing by a large margin, since I knew I could always find something to do somewhere that would result in an engagement. I found it more boring to be on the server winning by a large margin. And I’ve found it most boring of all to be greeted with the prospect of fighting the same guilds and the same tired tactics week in and week out for eternity. Fights lose some of their sheen and mystique when you know what to expect from everyone you encounter. But then they also lose their fun when you field double or half as many as the enemy, so again it’s a lose-lose.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s more fundamental than changing merely the way matchups are calculated, and it comes down to some change to how WvW servers and map queuing are handled. Changes to the WvW Progression system that discourage larger groups would also present more comparable group sizes across tiers (just more groups in higher ones) which might help fights in general (most MMOs I’m aware of cut your XP for killing someone with 50 people relative to killing them solo, this one doesn’t, so zerging is the norm). I wish Devon luck figuring it out before too many more get burned out.

If you’re referring to when FA captured Bay and we were there, we came in at the end and didn’t actually get into the circle before the keep capped. RISE pulled off since they were farther back and could, we were already committed so we had to deal w/ the zerg in circle along with a buffed Keep Lord one shotting AOE.

Not suggesting you guys didn’t do a good job capturing the keep if that’s the fight you mean, but it wasn’t a three-way really. If it’s a different fight then I guess we were elsewhere or I just forgot about it. And as you say, most of the times I saw BT, HOPE, FIST, and Shh when it was a large fight, which combined produced the numbers some were citing.

Convenant.7092:

Lol bring it up. your 20, against our 5. anytime

I guess technically it’s a 20v20 if Mesmer clones count as people.

But yeah, my midterms next week, trying to refrain from GW2 as much as possible. Would probably entertain a Fivev5 the week after, just coordinating times might be an issue.

(Why does ’’5v5’’ after ‘’entertain a’’ trigger the filter? Some new kids these days hooligan slang?)

Convenant.7092:

Yes, I suppose that that’s about the only time RUN will ever even get close to winning a fight vs us.

Close to winning? We’d make mince meat of that spider boss. Wouldn’t know what hit him. Or her. It.

But if we’re going to exchange words rather than fisticuffs, then for your statement to hold water AoN may need to engage things besides PUGs that get left behind while stealthing in the opposite direction. :P

Best of luck organizing this. I suggest no gear, no weapons, 3v3 tag team royal rumble in the northwest BL spiders. First team to die to spider boss loses.

Blah blah blah. More killing. More dying. Good effort from BT/HOPE and DIS/TSL last night (and others). There were some good fights, there were some meh fights, there was much fun to be had to some Benny Hill music, all in all a decent night in WvW was had by all.

TC, never stop being cheeky kittens. I’m just waiting for the day when we see Omega Golems taking a supply camp.

And here’s to hoping that they implement some sort of WXP point division that discourages large groups, and inflate the WXP from a defense or cap. They have the potential to utilize the allure of points to tweak player priorities and break up the 50-man balls we’ve been seeing since the patch hit, but it remains to be seen if they’ll make the most of it.

KH, if you could please tell all of your members to relocate to the east coast and play during “normal primetime” that would be much appreciated. I’m not sure how you should go about financing the transition or informing your friends and family, but I think we can figure something out. Also, FA early rising oceanics and late staying Americans, we haven’t had many people on the last few hours tonight so it’s rude of you to be playing. Go spelunking or something, because people gaming when they can set aside time to game is ludicrous and unfair. How dare you, sirs and madams. HOW. DARE. YOU.

On a more serious note, I did have fun commanding on KN BL tonight, both during our guild’s activity and for numerous extra hours leading PUG groups. Was good to see KH doing what they do again, I recall it… “fondly”… from IoJ. We never had the manpower or coordinated groups to do much besides deflect (about 10-15 PUGs, rarely same spot for long), but I think we managed to be a thorn in your side all things considered. I was especially impressed by the reactive siege building in Bay that our guys managed to pull off while supply starved. But kudos to you guys (KH), you brought the heat and kept us on our heels for hours just trying to bide time for your raid to end, and flipped everything but Garrison once (came close). I did manage to stay on long enough to get the last laugh and cap it all back with those same PUGs, but it’s probably all Blue by now thanks to Kylia and his dirty AVTR cronies!!!! (<3)

Diashame.6328:

The problem with K-Town is there huge gap of ability outside of WM Primetime. They have some solid guilds outside but not enough solid ones to make an impact on the score.

The gap lies with volume of guilds. There are ~7-8 guilds that can field 15+ during NA prime with any consistency. If all of these were more like 30+ and daily then that would constitute full map coverage, or if there were just more guilds. Even still, we have exactly 0 EU guilds, which would disqualify us from competing as it did in this tier when BG was here. SEA resets keeps leading into EU, which can flip them just as easily. EU has the advantage because it resets them leading into NA, so whichever server has the EU has the defensive during the most active primetime.

Honestly, I don’t really care. If we get to T1 just to say we got there, fine. If not, also fine. I just login to kill people and score points, both of which are available in abundance here in T2. While we had more fun crossing swords and matching wits with the BG guilds, we have more fun overall with the T2 servers due to the variety of fights offered from having comparable coverage. Probably the most fun though was pre-transfer BG, it was the perfect combination, but alas.

Mada.5319:

Every server in the top 3 tiers has received transfers at some point. Lets leave it at that.

Looking forward to next week!

^ Basically this

Bandwagon. Stacked. Coverage. Zergs. Leet Hax. Who cares. Just fight, kill, and die. And when you’re done, fight some more. As WM is fond of saying, we need more blood!

Had a bit of fun on SoS BL. We noticed FA and SoS had been fighting over Hills for hours previously, so we were curious what was so cool about it. 4 of us built a golem and broke through outer/inner, where we proceeded to be spotted and called out. Presumably everything on the map trickled in, so we ended up fighting 4 vs however many, at least 15 all told though not all at once. I gotta say, killing a group then getting one tick off, then killing another group and another tick on cap, etc for 5m or so was one of the more exhilarating small group moments I’ve had in a while. I’m only disappointed we took no footage. Once we took it we held off two pushes against 2-3x numbers without siege, but lost it on the third push. Was tons of fun and lots of laughs either way, so thanks SoS randoms for being good sports.

And hey, the golem made it out alive! Also it turns out there’s really nothing special about that keep. I mean the decor is alright I guess, has that classic Hills look you know and love with a touch of nothing at all different, but the stench, man the stench. I don’t know what you SoS people do in the bowels of that keep, but it can’t be pleasant.

Sounds like a lot of good fights happening while I’ve been busy. Bummer. Hopefully the intensity keeps up into the weekdays, since it’s fairly obvious that some groups are pulling overtime into EU during the weekend, so I’ll be curious to see if that amount of time played can be maintained. Either way, the actual fights should remain solid, which is all that really matters.

Blrrgh.6908:

/salute in advance to Valor on Kaineng, already know there will be some good fights when I see the RUN tag. Although I doubt any of them will notice this since they steer clear of the forums.

And good fights there were. We had crazy fun and a very productive night on Kaineng Borderlands with TL. Our forces were split to deal with both servers on all but a couple occasions, but I think we managed to do pretty well holding the north and Hills for most of the night.

While we were mainly focused on the SoS side of the map, we had a fair few good fights against FA as well. Couple good fights in Vale against GODS with about 80,000 ballistas, those were some of our only wipes during the first few hours; they really wanted that camp. I also distinctly recall a prolonged and epic fight at south camp within the first hour against 20+ Drgn (w/ a couple uA/AVTR tagging along) and about 15 from SoS. We ended up prevailing, but it was pretty close right up to the end. It was interesting to see the progression of Drgn as a guild, they’ve definitely started to incorporate the high tier tactics. Also fought a large sF group; someone should tell them that “bag stacking” is so 3 months ago, but we appreciated the contributions. :P

On the SoS side of things, we had a good time sparring with Fang and friends for the majority of the night, both in and around Hills. You guys made sure that we were never comfortably in control of the keep. We noticed that you were cycling outmanned later in the night, so I guess that’s SoS struggles showing, though to be fair we only ever had half the map on that side. Was also pleased to see Tsym come visit later on, though we were rather miffed you decided to ignore the tea and crumpets we laid out for you and just go punch our gates down instead. A couple decent fights against you guys kept us honest, even if we weren’t fielding competitive numbers by then, and we appreciate the reminder to stay on our toes. We also found it kind of funny to test your reflex time when we recognized that you were cycling between SoS and KN BL.

Later in the night I led some Meow groups for a little while before tagging along with Fidd. Thought it was pretty funny that 4-5 former IoJ people sent me tells about seeing me in the fights; I guess my character is pretty distinctive! Good fights all around, hopefully more to come. Nobody give up before Tuesday mmkay? Gonna be busy until then.

After a long strategy meeting tonight, RUN decided that we were approaching Borderland meta-strategy all wrong. We were focusing on the cool objectives like “gates” and “walls” and “points” and “killing things”, and missing the real prize… the BRIDGE.

After hours of scouting and planning our approach, we struck hard and fast with a point blank catapult and destroyed the linchpin of BG’s strategy on TC BL: http://tinyurl.com/a2veqbt

We were surprised to find that destroying the bridge also netted us the tower. We made sure to let the guys who put a ram on the front gate know how silly they looked: http://tinyurl.com/atvkea9

But we had to make sure that the pesky yak fornicators wouldn’t take it back, so we prepared a defensive gauntlet: http://tinyurl.com/bzzcmnj

By this time they had taken BG’s last tower, no doubt thanks to us, so we deployed some stuff for them to trip on to slow their momentum: http://tinyurl.com/b7ctmjn

Turns out ballistas do not in fact trip people. This has been noted for discussion in future tactics meetings: http://tinyurl.com/asparbc

We fell back into the tower to defend the only objective that really mattered. What followed was, objectively and undoubtedly, the best single defensive stand by any military force, real or imaginary, in recorded or unrecorded history (note the inspiring speech): http://tinyurl.com/b8aq36r

And then we died. But we’ll be back with a vengeance. No bridge is safe.

(Also, to the player who asked in chat in the last pic “Sooo, is this a real plan?”… of course it was a real plan, don’t be ridiculous. It was possibly the greatest, most realest plan ever conceived by mankind. Well, second greatest, the greatest was whoever decided that everything which isn’t bacon should be wrapped in bacon.)

Miiaah.5416:

If the Kaineng crew that has coverage in BGs weak spot would transfer to BG, then BG would be a HB/Thai type guild during NA prime from being JQs equal. Then let SoR and SoS flip a coin on which server to load up to equal coverage and the left over moves down to T2, then you have 6 equal servers, good fights and such

Or the BG crew that has coverage in KNs weak spot could transfer to KN, then KN would be a WM type guild during NA prime from being JQs equal.

Or neither of those things. I’m content to keep fighting for however long the ratings keep us here. I hope that whichever server moves up to T1 does so by having to work extremely hard for it, not by getting even more transfers.

Hey TC, I’m hearing these crazy rumors from the Quaggans. They say that there’s a dolyak torture chamber in the bowels of BG Garrison. I wasn’t too sure at first, but when I put my ear to water gate I heard terrible, horrible things.

I think you should storm right over there and put an end to the evildoers. I mean I know Hills is cozy and has air conditioning and all, but you could give it the old college try one of these nights. Whaddaya say?

I’d just like to echo the sentiments some of our members have posted here. We really enjoyed the fights we got on reset night in BG BL. It definitely felt like BG threw the cream of the crop at us, and it was… an educational experience. We’ve mainly been fighting PUGs or average quality guild groups on the way up, so it was a breath of fresh air to finally get to spar with the likes of HB and LotD, even if in our encounters (especially with the former) we were left a lot of skewered corpses more often than not. We also enjoyed the few fights we had with KH here and there, a lot more fun with similar manpower than it was fighting you 10v30 on IoJ. RISE is on our home BL btw, in case you want to pay them a visit.

I’m glad that we’re finally in a tier that will test our fairweather players and force the rest of us to tighten up our group compositions and tactics. We wiped quite a bit last night against the groups with tons more experience, but we’re not discouraged in the slightest, and have already begun making tweaks to fix the issues we noticed from forcing engagement after engagement and observing. We’ll be looking to be compensated for the badges we conferred upon you in due time.

Niim.9260:

You left IoJ before it even hit T4, and your entire definition of been through hell is about point loss. People loyally stuck with ET and HoD all the way to T8, those folks get to claim hardship, you do not.

Losing isn’t hardship anyways, its a target rich environment, which is a lot more like heaven then hell in my books.

And your entire definition of hardship appears to be tier placement. Mine has nothing to do with point values, it has everything to do with the deterioration of a community. A server name is just a server name, I do not fight for names, I fight with people. The people I fought with left. By the end of it, I was literally the only person sitting in the community TS server, despite the fact I posted the information and encouraged participation every day for months. I do not enjoy talking with myself, I enjoy working with like-minded guilds and individuals, that’s part of the appeal of WvW.

I made the decision I needed to make in order to insure the health and growth of our guild community, in consultation with our members. I’m happy with it. Our members are happy with it. Our former allies are happy in their new homes. That’s all that matters. It’s a game played for fun, not some warped sense of nationality that overrides all else.

Invalid.8765:

The only time I have seen [RUN] is when they were running from us, because I remember commenting on voice chat how accurate their guild tag is. They do run well; fast too at that.

You may wish to be somewhere nearer our objective or directly in the way of it if you would like a fight. We try not to bother with anything that slows us down for a couple badges here and there. Your statements reflect your username, sir.

Besetment.9187:

But for some reason, people treat losing and falling down a tier as a fate almost worse than death. (…)

I can only speak for my guild when I say that we’ve already been through hell with IoJ before moving here. We were there when IoJ was a punching bag for whichever T1 caliber server dropped to T2. We were there for the brief stint in T1, and the subsequent departure of a ton of fairweather guilds. We were there for the 3-week beat down Sea of Sorrows dished out on their way up, and the 5-week bar brawl with SoR/BG who by then had considerably more coverage. We were there for the 4-week fights with FA/CD which tested the remnants of our coverage.

We won maybe 2 matches on IoJ during that entire time, and 1 was against two dead servers. Yet we still fought. We’d still be fighting if the free transfer deadline and the movement of others on our server hadn’t forced our hand. All of our allies who we fought with were gone, and all that was left was a server in name, filled with PvE carebears who would sooner heckle us than help us in WvW. So we decided to move somewhere that we could get a fresh start, and it made more sense to try and fit into a burgeoning community than to tack our name onto the long list of existing guilds on an established server. This proved to be the perfect fit for us. While we apologize for any skewed matchups along the way, we had to do what was healthy for our community. I think you’ll find that even in victory, RUN members will be respectful towards you, in this thread and on the field.

Caliburn.1845:

Hmm, a couple misconceptions going around.

A very well thought out post. I agree on all points. Fannwong is correct that many of our militia players have a lot to learn though.

Beyondthelol.9504:

Oh really?

TG is on Dragonbrand?!?! Dang. RUN always had fun whenever we’d run into you guys off the beaten path in the IoJ/CD/FA matchups, but we’ve been fighting Mag this week.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Not when people wake up to paper towers and keeps. Your hardcore players end up getting stuck taking back and upgrading all day. And some even give up.

That’s all part of the struggle though. WvW is a blank slate, every person has to lay their own motivations on it. Some do it for fights. Some for guild pride. Some for server pride. Some just for fun. Some fight to win the battles, some fight to win the war. Most have multiple motivations. I fight for all of those things. And when it comes down to it, demoralizing your opponent’s fairweather players is just another part of winning the war. WM understands this, it’s what they call “campaign strategy”. It’s why they choose to hold SM over our corner even if it nets a loss in +40 PPT in the short term, because it’s an important statement keep for morale, and acts as the means to pushing the front.

As a commander, it behooves me to take into account all of the forces our server fields when making strategic decisions. So when I have 10 guys on a map in between NA/Oceanic times, and we’ve lost some fortifications, I have to consider the best usage of those numbers. And it isn’t trying to take back a keep against servers where we know scouts will be present, it’s draining that keep of supply so that it’s a soft target. You call this being carried by Koreans. I call it working in synergy and taking into account the forces you have available. We would not magically win matches with no NA people on any map to leave a solid setup for SEA times.

We also hardly ever get handed down things that were taken in SEA times by the next NA primetime. Keeps flip in the EU times or in the lead up to NA time. A prime example is Saturday on Maguuma BL. When I came on the map at 8 EST we owned nothing. By a couple hours later we were having that epic brawl in Garrison. It only differed from reset night in that DB actually was able to push their front. We pushed Garrison on reset as well, but were royally screwed by the map crashing, after which we lost our foothold and both commanders to queues. We didn’t manage to take it either time, but that’s more a credit to how tenacious your defense was than any reflection on our offensive; all things being equal, attackers aren’t supposed to take Garrison. Mag’s well orchestrated rush on KN BL at reset was more the exception than the rule, as the rest of the week has shown.

At any rate, if you want to only recall the first few hours of a week long matchup, give a speech and unfurl a victory banner on a battleship, I’m content with that. Mag has fought long and hard this week, and you’ve been skillful and at times frustrating opponents to command against. You deserve to take something positive away from this matchup. But please, even though you’ve already won, still come out to humor us, because my guys still want to fight.

I would have accepted the offer for duels… if it took place in your north camp once we owned everything. WM is an objective focused group, like most of us are.

On the subject of smaller scale fighting though, I’ll give shout outs to WaR, AoN, and kitten from today. RUN enjoyed some skirmishes with each of those groups.

Monztor.9207:

Jacbo was that you who kept contesting our Garrison on Mag BL? Haha, every time I looked at the map it was contested and I’d ask on mumble and get the response. “Yeap, its the same guy poking the gates”

Making us run more

Haha, yeah it was fun trying to survive the gauntlet of L82 guards and the occasional defender to get a whirl off before dying (or living, sometimes). Was just trying to buy as much time as I could for our SEA guys to get on, every little bit counts.

And to be fair, I had to run/swim back from spawn plenty too. :P

Had a lot of fun again tonight on Maguuma BL. We started our raid (RUN/TL/friends) around 8 EST and had nothing on the map at the time. Took our half of the map and started sieging Garrison within the first hour or so, and then the real fun began. The 2-way and 3-way fights in Garrison were a blast; Maguuma put up a tenacious defense as usual. Just when it seemed like the fight was going one way, it went another.

Hopefully we’ll have fights like that more throughout the week. I’m also really anticipating how the dynamics of that type of fight will change when culling is fixed (ie. never) and the WP defense event “bug” is changed. Who knows, all I know is there was plenty of killing and dying to be had tonight all around. And Garrison wasn’t the real target anyways…. we took your precious north camp a few times throughout the debacle.

I also had a good chuckle contesting Garrison WP for about 30m or so just before logging. I think at one point Mag had 2 ballistas and 3 guys defending water gate to stop me (a Guardian, not a Thief)… so I went and tagged a different gate, then came back 3m later and they had all left. Gotta watch out for dem pesky afro asuras, dey sneaksy.

Think when I logged we had lost everything finally after 11h or so of holding our corner, but the Meow guys are starting up now so it’ll be interesting to see how it looks tomorrow morning. I may have to coin the phrase margin capping to join in the QQ with the night cap guys, since we tend to lose our foothold between NA bed and SEA start time.

We probably won’t be around much tomorrow, Super Bowl and all, so try to make due without us. Maybe upgrade some stuff so we have something to sink our teeth into. We promise we’ll come trade badges with you again later on though.

EDIT: In regards to WM on Mag BL, I asked for them to send a squad. It was no more than 10 of them at any given time, and they were operating independently in groups more than double their size. If you saw more than 10, it’s only because other tags were trying to keep up with Ssaoul at times (myself included), or they had converged at a spot where others were fighting.

saiyr.3071:

How do you like the NW tower in your borderlands, Kaineng?

Honestly? The decor could use some work. We hired a pretty bad interiors guy. Would not do business again. There’s also a leak in the claimer room, and a couple holes in the southwest wall that mice keep getting in. It’s really quite shabby.

It’ll be good for Kaineng players to get more practice this week, and for our guilds to improve upon communication. It’s also nice to know that no matter high up you go in tiers, there’s no short supply of omniscient players. What I wouldn’t give to see what you guys see, a sweeping view of every fight that has happened on every BL, sufficient to characterize an entire server as anything in broad strokes. It’d help a lot with meta-strategy if I could only achieve omnipresence one of these days.

In the meanwhile, I fought on one borderlands, I will only be fighting on our assigned map, and I will be restricting my commentary to the fights on that map. Most of the comments in this thread seem to surround Kaineng BL and EB, both of which I was not involved with. I was however on Maguuma BL, where we owned the NE tower and had made some incursions into Garrison before the map crash messed us up and locked the TL and RUN commanders out for a couple hours.

Nevertheless, besides having good defenses (which I commended Maguuma on in my last post), there wasn’t much to brag about from the other servers on our map. The only incursion into our keep happened while we were in Garrison and it was summarily dealt with. DB either failed miserably to take the NW tower or didn’t try for strategic reasons, thus negating the dual pressure dynamic that existed on the other two BLs. Besides taking Lake while we were north when I wasn’t on the map, they mostly just skirmished with us and sat in their corner (based on the fact the yaks on their side to Garrison almost never died until we sent a team). The only interesting thing I saw was a treb site hitting inner hills that I wasn’t aware of before and have noted for the future. The rest of the night consisted of field or camp fights where the side with more advantageous terrain tended to win.

Had fun tonight on Maguuma BL even though we could only get at most half of our guys into it at any given time, and most of those were drunkards (Friday is shots night, apparently). Hopefully the queues will be reasonable later in the week, since I look forward to more action.

I saw some [GOON] out there and a few other tags (I’m delirious, you know who you are) holding it down for Mag, along with a strong militia. You had quality defensive tactics and were good about intel gathering; it was refreshing to see that type of play once more. Also a shout out to the invisible people, since sheesh was the culling in certain places outrageous (did they break it even more recently?). I’m sure we culled in on you plenty as well. One of these days we’ll have people fighting people guys…. one of these days. That or it’ll break more and you won’t even see your own character model.

We didn’t run into the Dragonbrand guys much besides [AoN] who were pesky as usual. They sure seemed to like pushing towards us though in the early going, we must smell nice. Don’t you guys know you’re supposed to push north only on enemy BL? Sheesh, you’d think you were trying to make up some points on the server that has a ludicrous amount of Oceanic coverage. But that would be, like, sensible meta-strategy…. err, I mean… double team QQ!!!!

But yeah anyways, [RUN] had fun and hopes to see more fighting tomorrow. Maybe we’ll sober up a bit in the meanwhile and the idea to repeatedly suicide charge invisible people won’t seem quite as hilarious to us in vent. Or maybe not.

EDIT: Score Update, for those interested. Featuring a salute from the sexiest asura in his own mind:

Been some good fights so far. The Mag BL crashing was pretty lame though, lost a forward tower due to pure distance and both of our primary commanders are still bugged in queue. Getting back on track now though, hope to be joining the fight again soon.

Keep bringing the heat Mag and DB, it’s nice to be in an actual contest again.

Kaineng is a strong server. It will require a deeper level of coordination and it will hit some speed bumps along the way, but you learn from any defeat and become better. For those that say we lack high tier experience, maybe you’re just seeing the PUG groups that sometimes prevent us from getting half our guilds into a map. Or maybe you’re just seeing us spam ram because we can, and because it’s the most efficient means when there’s nothing to resist. Either way, I think the real strength of Kaineng will lie somewhere in between the hype and the trolls once the dust settles.

As to our placement, it isn’t advantageous for Kaineng to go to T3 instead of T2 if it’s left up to us, desired matchups or not. Glicko is fickle. I’ll leave it at that.

@ “Maguuma beat us better!!!!” posts:

Isle of Janthir is a fairly dead server as far as the top tiers are concerned. I would bet that Maguuma basically steamrolled right over them and got all of their possessions nearly for free. This means they were left with a 1v1 against YB, and if they outnumbered them, well, the conclusion seems obvious. Here’s what happened back when SoS got a 1v1 against IoJ during HoD’s descent: Link. Now compare to the following week, with a competitive third server: Link. IoJ still lost, but by a ratio of less than 2:1, instead of nearly 5:1. I guess that means SoS was a doubly better SoS the previous week?

Our guild was on CD BL at the reset, along with TL and SoS (the guild, not the server), and we were constantly under fire from all sides. Yak’s went north once to grab Cragtop, and spent most of the rest of the time hitting us at Bluebriar. That’s fine, this is good strategy. The same good strategy was employed on KN BL, and on EB. So yeah, understandably it will take longer to overcome a larger net opposition…

Anyways, best of luck to our opponents in future weeks, and thanks for what fights you’ve brought. We had fun at least.

The funny thing about this matchup is look at the tiers below us and how they’ve balanced out since we left them. With the exception of some disparity in T8, they’re all pretty even matches. I wonder if next week another even match will be left in this tier when IoJ moves down. I doubt that, though, since IoJ probably needs to fall down a couple more tiers before they find their sweet spot.

First of all, I appreciate the players on Ehmry Bay and Devona’s Rest who came out strong at reset and are still fighting hard as we speak. We understand that currently Kaineng is misplaced in the rankings due to the coverage we currently enjoy, so hopefully we’ll all have more fun next week with new matchups. In the meanwhile, make the best of it, or do some other activities if you like.

@ “WM doesn’t work with the others on EB” comments:

I was the acting commander on Eternal Battlegrounds last night at reset for most of the night, outside of War Machine (the rest were WM, except for a Freelancer cameo). They were very communicative and responsive throughout the night, not to mention brutally efficient in their engagements. They encouraged everyone who was out from other guilds to come help me out as we pushed other fronts or converged for key fights, and when our forces dwindled they were more than happy to send a contingent to assist us. So anyone who suggests that they weren’t working with the other forces on EB has a patently false understanding of the situation.

@ “KN has bad tactics and just zergs in circles” comments:

Every person runs into different competition, so I can’t speak to everything. But I wonder what those who think this would like us to do with the four queued maps worth of players we had at our disposal. Tell them to leave so it’s fair and we stop rising in tiers to find our spot? Ask them politely to stand aside while we count heads for an even fight and go in turns?

Here’s the thing. I know plenty of ways to siege a given fortification, plenty of ways to defend it, and plenty of ways to pursue an open field fight. But strategically it costs me nothing to check if spam ram will suffice before resorting to any of this, and saves time. The same is true for defense. If force projecting to a besieged location and wiping the group outside works, why should time be wasted with other methods? We have plenty of other methods at our disposal, but being a commander is about knowing what’s sufficient for any given situation. Our guys have more fun bouncing around doing what’s sufficient and a bit more than they would overcompensating.

If I had a magic wand to push us up tiers to where we’d be more competitive, I’d use it. But I don’t have one. In the meanwhile, we work with what we have to the extent necessary.

@ “Fairweather transfers will just leave once KN hits a wall” comments:

Maybe so. It’s certainly happened to other servers before. I can only speak for my own guild, and say that we didn’t come here with a win or bust attitude. We spent three hard months working to try and keep IoJ competitive until it all fell apart in the last week or so and we were forced to reconsider our situation for the enjoyment of our guild (when we moved, the community TS was empty and most other guilds we had worked with were gone, yet the server was chocked full of PvE players).

All we want are good fights and high level tactics, in epic large battles, around the clock. So we had to choose either an existing high tier server, or a server we felt had the potential to make it there. We chose KN due to its great community and the prospect of a server with a higher WvW population than PvE. We’re in it for the long haul, not the quick victory.

Jacbo
Guild Leader of Valor [RUN]

Personally, I think they need to expand on the World Bonuses everyone receives through point accumulation. This is in effect a bonus to winners, since the more points you accumulate, the more bonuses you accumulate.

They should also make it blatantly obvious to everyone on a server what the buffs they’re getting are, and how they’re getting them. I’m talking a shiny buff on your buff bar which basically says “WvW Realm Bonuses”, lists all of them, and explains how you can help earn them.

If you do that, not only do you provide better server rewards, you increase awareness of WvW as a source of them. Then if, for example, you could work up a +20% Karma buff or whatever throughout the week, you’d have people wondering how they can help increase points through WvW, rather than how to farm Karma in it, since the % buff gain from effective point acquisition will outweigh event farming that doesn’t also increase points. This will make the hardcore WvW group happy, since they’ll have casuals out there who want to help do the sensible objectives.

As for the winning server in a matchup, maybe give them a multiplier to the bonuses they receive the following week, and provide everyone who participated in enough events to result in a certain amount of point accumulation with a small amount of a new currency at the end of the week, which can be used to buy Account Bound items.

@ Handin: Yeah just to be clear, I’m just airing ideas for what I think can be done vis a vis portal to improve the meta and make it more interesting. Wasn’t suggesting you’re a portal apologist or something! :P

1. is an interesting idea, but if it only became targetable when others could already go through it, then for the most part it wouldn’t change how portals are used by semi-organized groups.

2. not sure what you mean. It would be interesting if a Mesmer who placed an Enter left a particle effect trail, similar to how Necros look during Spectral Walk, that could be seen through stealth, possibly as a supplement to other ideas.

3. would be pretty hilarious, but I don’t think it’d be very friendly to its PvE uses. It’d also be pretty hard to implement I would think, since the game would need to generate other potential coordinates and may throw people into walls. The odds of actually landing at a disadvantageous spot, when the game doesn’t know how to determine that, are also pretty low, so people would still use them. Another possibility is having a chance to take damage or get downed from using it.

4. would only really change the efficacy of long portal chains with golems. If anything it’d be a nerf to Time Warp since less people would have it on at a given time.

But yeah they’re inventive ideas, along with others like color coding portals. Hopefully ANet does something to refine the skill and bring it more in line with other skills.

@ Drederik: This is true in some cases, but bear in mind that with culling and particle effect spam in larger fights than the one you indicate, it’s not so simple as everyone being able to trace it. Thus you need to call where it’s at and have people converge, and by the time that happens a good group should know to spread out, since stacking at the portal exit no longer works. But again, you’re right, there are lots of ways to counter it, I just find it boring as the primary focus of the current meta.

You’re correct that we won’t see everyone immediately refine their movement and tactics, and PUG zergs as a rule generally are limited to low difficulty plans, but it will present more situations for innovation. I think the example of Hills keep Lord’s Room is a good one. If it’s sieged to the teeth, and the defenders are using area denial and other skills on the choke, it’s pretty hard to faceroll zerg into it. A PUG zerg would get wiped out by a smaller force effectively utilizing their environment, as it should be.

Right now as it stands, I just stand a bit to the side of the choke, have a mesmer place a portal, and just like that everyone is on top of their siege emplacement. Even if the attack fails, irreparable damage is generally done to the efficacy of whatever remains. It’s not gradual, through planning or attrition, but instantaneous. Few keeps really feel like keeps in this game, and part of that has to do with the impact mass teleportation has on negating the effectiveness of well placed and defended siege.

As others have said though, if removal or mechanic changes aren’t desired by ANet, another possible solution is changing how portal is executed, rather than removing it. Currently you can plan to counter people as they come out, but you have little to stop an invisible mesmer from pressing Blink and being inside your formation. If portal was an induction, or it made it so the only skill the Mesmer had access to after placing Enter is Exit, or something similar, it’d make portal placement itself more difficult and counterable, which would also spur innovation (multiple people with the mesmer for stealth/stability/etc needed?). The problem is this still doesn’t solve the keep issue, since when you place the Enter in the keep, you can afford to induct an Exit outside in the comfort of your zerg.

For me it comes down to one simple question. Should there be a class in the game that has a skill which makes it valued and planned around substantially more than any other class? The answer, for me, is no.

It’s an interesting mechanic, and one I’m plenty guilty of using, a lot. But it’s not good game design. No class should be feared over any other, individually, if left alone in a keep. No class should be feared over any other, individually, when defending a siege emplacement. The game is built around combos and how classes play off each other; portals undermine that dynamic.

Stacking, or turtling, or whatever you may have called it, was a widespread tactic for a time. It was especially used in conjunction with portals. When it started surfacing, we devised ways to counter it. And the stacks refined their builds, and the counters refined theirs, and so on.

Stacking was basically removed when the healing cap was changed to 5, bringing it in line with the intended game design. I’m pretty sure that the game did not combust in a ball of flame when that tactic was made less potent. I’m equally sure that the people who employed it best found new ways to show that they were more tactically dominant than their opponents.

So personally, the reason I’d like changes to portal, aside from the relative class balance issue, is that it will open the door for more interesting personnel movement tactics. The meta right now has gotten stale, the answer to breaking any fortified area has basically boiled down to the repetitious usage of teleportation. Without portal, the guilds and commanders who employ it best will find other ways of approaching the variety of situations that portal currently “solves”. And I for one want to see what else people can come up with, because little pink circles on the floor make me yawn. I can’t remember the last time I fought in Hills Lord’s Room, for example, and the attackers used something besides portals to break the emplacement.

Portals are neither inventive nor difficult to execute, but due to their relative efficiency they stifle innovation. Why organize squad training, formations, and movement patterns when you can just yell at everyone to stand on a circle and press F, and get more out of it? If you remove them or modify them substantially, what you’ll find is actually a wider gap in effectiveness between organized groups and disorganized ones. Even a PUG can press F.

Just out of curiosity, is Invulnerable meant to apply to class abilities such as Guardian’s Renewed Focus or Warrior’s Endure Pain?

Either way, the other changes are welcome.

Great move.

Also I can’t really support a change to give the orbs a substantial non-combat bonus. All that would do is cause the people who are concerned with actually winning the matchup, which is most of the Commanders, to be in a constant struggle with the people just out there to farm karma/experience/etc, who will spam attacks on orb areas and ignore commands that actually benefit the server’s overall score.

IMO if the orbs are re-implemented they should simply affect PPT. Either a raw base value for each orb owned, or a small multiplier applied to the PPT gained on other maps (if it was same map it’d have the same rich get richer effect since the strongest on a given map tends to own the orb anyhow).

Thanks for the feedback.

Fred Fargone.3127:

- Players NEED to drop lootbags. Its part of the idea of being able to level up in WvW. And as I previously stated, I’m making a bunch of gold by playing WvW. I don’t want to lose that.

A fair point. I’ve removed the stipulation that they don’t drop loot.

Fred Fargone.3127:

- I especially liked the idea of making healers affect the kill tagging. I mean, I do tag a lot of kills with my elementalist, but I also want to support the team. When I am in the supportive mode, I more often have a greater impact in in the battle, but gain absolutely no reward for doing so. No wonder nobody tries to actively keep our team alive. People you are currently healing should forward some of their dps to the healer. (No, they wouldn’t do any less damage, but the healer would just get a copy of it for kill tagging.) And remember, the players with 100% hp don’t get healed anyways, so you can’t just camp support.

Agreed. Certain skills like Guardian’s Wall of Reflection can double as DPS, but support is usually undervalued. Healing and buffing (as important in GW2) are undervalued. I play a support Guardian in WvW most of the time, so that may explain our disparity in money earned:time spent that precipitated my original comment on money.

Fred Fargone.3127:

Claiming:
- However, once claimed, that should be it. No back and forth. The guild who initially did the most to cap that keep is the one who… well, did all the work. So what if someone else managed to buy that WP for the keep, That’s trivial compared to capturing.
- Also, the guild should have like 10 minutes time to state their claim. Then give the next in line change, and move on to third. After that, just make it free for all.

Can’t really modify it as such since they’re two separate ideas, but your alternative is certainly another possibility that would also be an improvement on the current system.

Fred Fargone.3127:

Outmanned:
Definately needs a change. Pretty much like your suggestion, however there should never be 100% reduction in repair cost. People from PvE would just visit WvW to repair and save 0.1g Do it ten times and you’ve saved 1g

Good point. I’ve changed it from reduction in repair cost to a reduction in armor depreciation. So if you had repairs from out of WvW you’d still need to pay money to repair, but if you died in WvW it wouldn’t result in armor damage so you’d never need to repair. That should solve the monetary exploit but keep the incentive to be willing to die.

Fred Fargone.3127:

Queue info:
- Definately needed. I have also suggested this during the BWE2, BWE3 and at the headstart. Some dev stated that we absolutely need one, maybe they are working on it, or then they are just overwhelmed with everything else. Just a info on how many people are before and behind you would be perfect.

Any indication is better than no indication, for sure. Glad to hear they’re working on it.

Fred Fargone.3127:

Oh, I guess some people would react like that to tl;dr. But I just use the summary to see if there is anything interesting to talk about. Then go find it in the actual text, see what you mean by it and then, well, talk about it.

Since I can’t add more text due to character limits I went through and bolded a lot more areas in the text bodies. If someone were to skim and read only the bold text they’d get the general idea of each section. Added a tl;dr note suggesting as much at the top. Hopefully that will help make it more accessible.

Fred Fargone.3127:

If your idea needs 3 posts, it also needs a summary O.o

Separate ideas, separated by italic titles, not one contiguous idea. I’ve entirely removed the sentence you took issue with since it has no bearing on the idea. Whether or not money is gained or lost is immaterial to the changes suggested. Thanks for the feedback, though. I’ve changed the formatting in the posts to make it more obvious where the separations occurred and used the list formatting of these message boards so it looks less like a wall of text.

As far as a summary goes, I find adding a tl;dr just means people read that and miss the important details. Then we can’t have a discussion on the actual suggestions and why they’re actually bad (which I’m sure they are), but rather waste time clarifying things that were already explicitly stated in the non-tl;dr.

A couple more, simpler additions:

Queue Changes

It’s not possible to have an ETA on a queue since it’s dependent upon when people decide to leave a given map. However it seems easy enough to display the position in the queue to the player as a number. Also, enable a background audio queue notification where you can choose to have GW2 play some sort of sound when your queue is ready (something simple first, possibly customizable .wav file later), since not everyone wants to sit around in the game the entire duration of the queue.

Siege Weapon Tutorials

Add a place where players can learn information about the various siege weapons and try them out. The Heart of the Mists allows players to test builds and play around with trebuchets and cannons because they’re featured on the maps, it doesn’t force players to feel them out within a match. The same should be true of the WvW siege (though not their Superior versions), enabling you to get a feel for each weapon and read some basic information (ie. ballistas are player targeted, arrow carts rely on line of sight, rams cannot attack walls, etc).

Guild Fortification Claiming Incentives

The second part of the change is in the way that guilds are rewarded for their WvW claims. Notoriety is already covered in the top five claimant listing and the already present banner system. However, guilds should also get some tangible benefits for their investments in time and resources. A rough outline of such a system would be:

• A fortification claimed by a guild grants that guild bonuses, similar to the world bonuses the gradual accumulation of points grants. As a rule these bonuses should have minimal effect on combat effectiveness in WvW.
• The greater the fortification, the greater the multiplier on bonuses. Stonemist > Keep > Tower > Supply Camp.
• The bonuses gradually accumulate the longer the fortification is held. A guild thus has to decide if changing claims to a new fortification due to strategic value or increase in multiplier is worth wiping out the bonuses from the previously claimed fortification, making claims a more thoughtful decision.
• If the fortification claimed by a guild is claimed by another guild with higher claimant power, the bonuses the first guild has acquired begin to deteriorate at the inverse rate they accumulated until either the fortification is re-claimed or they switch their claim to another fortification.

Again, I don’t list specific bonuses here because the specifics are less important than the principles of the system, so I don’t want to get caught up on those.

Outmanned Buff Changes

Institute a tiered outmanned buff for when you have 75% of the people of the leading server, 50% of the people, and 25% of the people. The goal should be to encourage fighting on the part of the losing servers, without creating a grossly unfair gap in combat effectiveness during even numbers fights.

• 75% Buff (“Disadvantaged”): +5% Magic Find, +10% Experience Gains, +10% Currency Gains
• 50% Buff (“Outmanned”): +5 Supply Capacity, -5% Damage Taken, -50% Armor Damage from Defeat, +15% Magic Find, +25% Experience Gains, +25% Currency Gains
• 25% Buff (“Overwhelmed”): +10% Movement Speed (stacks w/ buffs), +25% Damage to NPCs, +10 Supply Capacity, -15% Damage Taken, -100% Armor Damage from Defeat, +25% Magic Find, +40% Experience Gains, +40% Currency Gains

The magic find, experience gains, and currency gains are transferred from the current buff, except you get to benefit from some degree of them sooner than 4:1 odds. At 2:1 and 4:1 odds you take half and no damage to armor, thus mitigating the monetary weight of constantly dying. Similarly you take a small amount less damage passively, which should offset the orb buffs a little. Your supply capacity is increased so that fewer people can still make siege weapons a factor in their tactics. At 4:1 odds you get a movement speed buff and an NPC damage buff to approximate the notion of “guerrilla warfare”.

Temporary Siege Equipment

In addition to the changes to the Outmanned Buff, a new vendor can be added to the starting spawn of every server on each of the maps. This vendor sells certain temporary siege equipment (no golems). The characteristics of the equipment are as follows:

• All of it is free of charge. You can buy it at any time.
• You can only deploy Temporary Siege Equipment when you have the “Outmanned” (2:1) buff or greater.
• Temporary Siege costs 50% of the supply cost of normal siege and has 75% of the effectiveness (damage output, weapon health, not range).
• After 30m, if the Temporary Siege has not been destroyed by opposing players, it is dismantled (think counting down debuff that causes it to explode).
• (Optional) When the server no longer has the “Outmanned” buff or greater, a second dismantle timer will dismantle it in 10m from when the buff is no longer present.
• (Optional) Temporary Siege cannot be deployed in and around Stonemist Castle.

Access to siege helps to level the playing field for the outnumbered servers. The siege is weaker but quicker to deploy, potent but countered by rushing it or the use of existing, more powerful siege. It opens up interesting possibilities for servers with the 4:1 buff however to really be a nuisance using lightning warfare tactics, due to increased speed, supply, and access to siege. This in turn encourages greater communication on the part of the stronger servers, and presents them with more interesting scenarios than “farm spawn, repeat”.

Those are just a few thoughts I’ve had on how the WvW system could potentially be improved. I tried to stay away from the normal topics of bickering like server balance or point accumulation or etc and focus on the other aspects of WvW that aren’t as subjective and could result in quality increases for all types of servers. Interested to hear other’s thoughts on these suggestions or completely different suggestions along these same lines.

Cheers

tl;dr: Skim through and read the bold to get the general ideas. Read non-bold for specifics.

Changes to Currency

I feel that changes to WvW currency are necessary to increase its accessibility and interdependence from the other aspects of the game. WvW would benefit from a system much closer to glory or karma than to dungeon currency. Here’s my thoughts on an “Honor” system (using same name just to illustrate):

• Honor is rewarded like experience for performing a variety of actions in WvW. It is not collected in bags but ticks above your head passively in the same way as experience, or is given through event rewards.
• Honor is used to purchase siege equipment, barter items, and fortification upgrades. Gold is still used for repairs and karma still for the non-exotic vendor.
• Every player you contribute to the death of grants you Honor in addition to Experience. Buffing or healing players who in turn kill enemy players should also count as death contribution.
• Dynamic Events grant either Honor or Karma in addition to Experience and Gold. Events like killing an NPC or capturing a sentry point, basically anything that’s unlikely to involve opposing players actively preventing, grant Karma. Fortification assault/defense, capturing an orb, killing a dolyak, and other such events grant Honor.
• In addition to personal Honor, a certain percentage of all Honor gained by a player while representing a guild is also added into Guild Honor.
• Guild Honor can be directly used to purchase Guild Siege Equipment and is the only currency that can be used to purchase Tier 3 Keep/Tower upgrades and Tier 2 Supply Camp upgrades. Guild Honor can also be converted into Influence.
• Guild Honor is used to purchase the Commander’s Compendium, rather than gold. This enables guilds that contribute to WvW extensively to field commanders to represent them, while keeping the cost prohibitive enough.

I’ve not put specific numbers to the relative cost/reward in any of this because that would take the focus away from the theoretical basis of the system and put it on potential balancing issues.

Guild Fortification Claiming

It’s fairly obvious that the fortification claiming system needs work. Anybody can simply claim a keep if they’re the first ones to click claim when it’s available. The keep then flies their banners even though they may not be the ones putting in the money to defend the keep, or actively defending the keep. The changes I propose are:

• Every fortification has a sphere of influence. This is already dictated by the range on the dynamic event for defense. Actions by a guild within this range count towards their Claimant Power to the fortification.
• Actions which increase Claimant Power include but are not limited to: assisting in the capture of the fortification (moderate), placing siege weapons within the fortification (low), killing players/siege within the range of the defense event (low), purchasing lower tier upgrades for the fortification (t1/t2) (high), purchasing higher tier upgrades for the fortification (t3) (very high).
• The top five guilds in Claimant Power can be determined by talking to the claiming NPC. Any member of the guild with the top Claimant Power at a given time who has the permission to claim fortifications will be presented with the option to do so.
• If the fortification is already claimed, a new claimant needs 25% more Claiming Power than the current claimant in order to claim it, to curb back and forth trading.
• A guild may still only claim one fortification at a time, so if they claim a new fortification the previous claim reverts to neutral.
• If the fortification remains neutral for a certain number of hours, any Top 5 claimant can initially claim it, to prevent the scenario where the top claimant has another claim and passively prevents anyone from claiming it.

This system still has its flaws I’m sure, but it ensures that the guild flying its banners on a fortification is always the guild who has put the most work into the capture, maintenance, and defense of that fortification. It also enables guilds to move their claim around to some extent, so that a very large and influential guild that initially claims a borderlands keep might shift their focus to Stonemist Castle if captured and become the top claimant in that more prominent and important location. You may also say that this could result in internal conflict between guilds, to which I say great. Having the potential for internal conflict as well as external makes things all the more exciting.

(Continued [character limit])

5/10

Was getting tired of my guild bugging me to run CoF with them over, and over, and over, and over, and over because it was the path of least resistance. A little variety never hurt anyone. I find it hard to believe that everyone in this thread who’s complaining about CoF have run every explorable path of every dungeon and determined that the second path of CoF was the only viable run. I have done quite a few other runs and can think of at least 4 paths that didn’t take us much longer than CoF runs were taking. Hell I can think of another CoF path that we found comparable without involving any mechanics exploiting.

I also think the nerfs to running the same thing over and over are warranted. However, I disagree with nerfing efficiency. If you can run multiple different runs quickly then your reward should be quicker accumulation of currency. I’m also annoyed that it seems like the base dungeon rewards were reduced, since for those of us doing non-farm dungeons the money made over repair costs was minuscule enough as it is.