Guild Wars 2

Choppy.4183:

And, for all we know, maybe the only reason it got nerfed was because an Anet employee finally came across a roaming pack of ghost thieves, saw how absurd it was, and set about to change it.

Unlikely – imho the reason it got nerfed was because an Anet employee watched that video on reddit from a guy soloing a PvE-raid-boss on his ghost thief: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5yy0yl/slothasor_solo_kill/
Took them about 6 days after the release of the vid for the nerf. How long was the WvW-crowd complaining to no avail before that?

• Separate WvW-balancing from PvE
  It already has been done for a few skills, so this is not a technical but a manpower problem. WvW is a player vs. player game mode and as such desperately needs balancing completely different from one which caters to raids or other PvE-content.

• Give people more rewards as an incentive to play WvW
  WvW-specific armor/weapon-styles, a legendary backpack etc. – at the moment PvE and SPvP-players are pretty much the only ones getting the shiny stuff.

• Re-evaluate the server-linking
  At least in the EU, server-linking a lot of time fails in creating balanced matchups. People want the easy win (that’s probably human nature) and as such bandwagon to the fotm server or if possible to the smaller partner-server. National servers can’t be linked freely. I admit this problem is very difficult to solve and replacing the server-system with something else, thus destroying the established server communities, has the great danger of driving more people from the game.

I was always wondering why WvW often seemed like Anet’s red headed stepchild. Not many MMOs in the past and present did open world PvP right and it seemed like a unique selling point (especially after culling was fixed). Sure Anet has the metrics and can compare PvE to PvP to WvW players but I believe at times WvW probably had more participants than PvP. At the end of the day PvP (in all it’s form)-players are often loyal to a product without needing a new dungeon or other costly to create content over a long period of time.

escoces.4870:

All EU servers bar BB have been linked at least twice. BB is a special case.
edit…Now I think about it, maybe Riverside or Kodash have only had the one link. I’m not sure.

Neither Riverside nor Kodash nor (i think) Elona ever had a link.
Anet stated, that they won’t link national and international worlds thus making it impossible atm to link these servers without reducing the total number of matchups.
That led to a lot of motivational problems on Elona (and to a lesser extend Kodash) with loads of peeps leaving for Riverside (which is now full as well).

Since I usually get conflicting statements when I ask around, can anyone answer me:

• How many points does a server get by killing / stomping opponents?
• Is there a point-difference between killing and stomping?
• Does the bloodlust-buff still give bonus points for killing and/or stomping?

Thanks!

Thea Cherry.6327:

Btw. the skirmish system was supposed to be the answer to the nightcapping wasn’kitten Well, guess what: it does not work.

Welp, maybe it could have worked if Kodash wouldn’t have switched to full ‘kitten-that kitten-i-am-out-of-here-mode’ this week. Despite having a lower weekend population than usual and being behind Baruch in total points, we managed to be equal in victory points on sunday evening.
This was futile ofc because Kodash then pretty much stopped playing during the week… ;-)
So against really massive nightcapping (¡Hola Baruch), this system actually might help a bit.

Anet stated here that “most” German servers would sit at around 70% target population capacity and thus would become too fat when being linked.

So why not allow the linking between national and international servers in the EU? Sure there is the language barrier, but at least for Kodash i can say that we had quite positive experiences with the few English speaking guilds, which dared to transfer to us for a while. This would also solve the problem for Baruch being the sole unlinkable (Spanish speaking) server. When in doubt, let the players decide and do a vote!

With a larger pool of pairable servers, population-imbalances in theory could be evened out better.

Being 30% (or more) outnumbered and overblobbed simply isn’t fun in the long run no matter how much or little you value PPT and scores.

At the end of the day all linking should lead to interesting ( = balanced) MUs, not to greater disparities than before. And i fear that is the case in the EU atm.

For the admittedly small field of WvW-smallscaling, imho air is an excellent choice.

With Zephyr’s Speed and Zephyr’s Boon you get the much needed mobility (apart from your Fiery Greatsword and without having to rely on Traveller Runes or a sub-par signet).
Furthermore, Tempest Defense gives you an edge (not only) against the ubiquitous roaming thieves and combined with Lighning Rod is nice extra damage.

While the fire line will probably give you considerable more damage (even after the fix of Empowering Flame), I find the extra utility in air worth choosing it after water and arcane.

A superior sigil of doom in one of your daggers (poison on attunement swap) also helps in reducing the warriors sustain with healing signet.

Lord Jim.3971:

If you are thinking of re-forming a small group to roam with in Gold League I’d be looking for a server that will match up regularly with Gandara, Kodash, Riverside and Augury Rock, Kodash and Gandara especially.

I second that. Keep in mind though, that Map-(and Community-TS)-Language on the German servers is nearly solely German (big surprise). While nearly every German player will understand English, reading the mapchat or even listening to the community TS might become problematic if you are not fluent in German.

Lord Jim.3971:

Its rather funny that after 2 years of Germans being accused of only blobbing pretty much all the EU roaming guilds outside of Gandara are on German servers.

I can only speak for Kodash, but we had a vibrant smallscale-community pretty much since release. ;-)

Why do SFR and Deso attract so many people?
From an opposing sides point of view, Gandara is quite a nice server to play against (not that SFR and Deso are particulary bad – there are just so many players on those). In my experience there is a lot of action besides PPT, they are also found in non-blob- numbers and are generally eager for a fight…

conn.2097:

Good Luck, Kodash

Thanks, but sadly luck is not a big factor with ANET’s PPT-scoring. It’s simply coverage, which Kodash lacks during certain times (compared to the top-servers)…

Due to the Swiss ranking system, standings will be quite flexible until the last rounds, so expect some movement on the scoreboard (safe to say though, that SFR will finish #1 as it stands).

Ele in Wvw:

• Zergscale (20+)
  A well played staff-elementalist is a very valuable asset here. You are the main waterfield-producer for the melees (staff 3 and 5), you have CC and you can rain havoc on the enemy with Meteor Shower. Because of that, every larger organized guild-group runs with one or more staff elementalists. Gameplay is not something for everyone though…
• Midscale (10 – 20)
  Staff is still valuable here, but you can also go D/D and jump into the fray. An elementalist can give out sizeable amount of boons & buffs to his teammates, this can be further improved if you spec for aurasharing.
• Smallscale (2-10)
  D/D (support-build as in midscale) or S/D / S/F (for burst damage) are probably your best options here. Imho the Elementalist is quite underrated as an asset in this size-class.
• Solo-roaming
  The only tier where the ele is subpar. Due to the RTL-nerfs you lack the mobility necessary as a roamer (FGS can help a bit here) and you don’t have access to other defense mechanisms like invisibility when the drek hits the fan. Furthermore ele is not exactly the best 1:1 class in the game currently (most ppl. prefer S/D or S/F in duels but as always – ymmv).

All in all I’d say that for WvW the elementalist is in a ok spot – certainly tons better than in SPvP/TPvP. You need a little dedication to play one though and it still can be pretty frustrating at times. Having said that, I love my elementalist in WvW and seldom log on with a twink.

Apathetic.2904:

I want reward for my effort, if ele is worthwhile and can actually be a force to be reckoned with thats great. I tried Warrior, it was stupid easy and didnt entertain me. Every game I play nothing is easy mode, but reward for efforts is what I want. If I never see a strong ele, besides one.

Imho at the moment you are better of playing an engineer if you want ‘reward for effort’ (at least in SPvP). Yes, by trying hard you can be Ok with the Ele, but if you put the same effort into other classes, you will usually fare better.

I also doubt that the proposed balance changes to the Elementalist will drastically change this. The class sadly has some serious design flaws which seem to make it hard to balance for Anet.

As expected Kodash is now in “workday-mode” again, which means very few ppl around after 1 AM…

While it can be a bit sad sometimes, to see all the fortifications build up during the day full of siege weapons fall with little or no defenders at all, you get used to it… Even against other German servers which all aren’t particularly notable for their night shifts, Kodash usually sits at the receiving end of the stick during that time.

Had some nice smaller scale fights so far… Shoutout to [EXG] which we met on SFR home today – you guys pack a punch!

Thanks for the all the nice fights at the end of the week! While the match-up first was a bit of a hit or miss for us small-scalers, we had a lot of fun, especially on thursday.

Who was the piken (?) guild-group on sfr-home running around without tag yesterday? You guys gave out some serious kitten whooping.

Holidays surely helped us in the coverage-game. Normally Kodash’s numbers during night-time are not competitive to that of top-tier international (or french) servers, so expect a different outcome when we meet next time.

Also notable is Kodash’s traditionally good score not from tick (stomps w. bloodlust buff, ’yaks, guard-posts) which accounts for almost 100K points (30K more than SFR).

Good luck for your next match-ups and all the best for 2014!

Yrvald.8971:

yep sorry it was Birthday of the first year of BSF so we’ve done 2 hours of fun/crazy/stupid events like snowman race, speed death race, doll dance (still got footprints on my dress ), omega teamfight etc…. :p

thanks to those who supported us while we were doing that !! ^^

Ah, I see! No need to apologize – we were just a little baffled what exactly was happening…
Bon anniversaire !

Wednesday evening seemed like some kind of special fun event time for Jade on your Homelands?

Around 21:00 we encountered 20+ Omega Golems, which took our wooden bay before we knew what hit it, but then failed to tap the Refuge-Supply-Camp en route to our spawn tower and were subsequently destroyed while trying to clobber down it’s sneak wall.

Then we found a large group of Jade player’s apparently having a party at Elona’s Low-Lands-Supply-Camp with an assortment of siege weapons like a ram, a trebuchet and some guild catapults… A lot of waving and cheering and general hilarity ensued.

All in all in all we were a bit puzzled by the events, but it was a fun evening on that map – keep up the good spirit!

Well, I guess everybody wants a bit of a change in opponents now – let’s keep our fingers crossed for the next matchup!

Special shoutout to [OdS] – while I still hate the implementation of stealth in this game with a passion, you guys showed fighting spirit and were never shy of a confrontation. I had some of the longest small scale fights in gw2 so far (with respawning and re-entering combatants) with you hombres. I’d also like to tip my hat to the guild [Akgl] which were never shy of engaging with their small scale team when we encountered them.

Sorry for all the harassing we smallscalers did to the larger guild groups – I know that some of you deliberately left us alone, but due to the lack of smaller groups in this matchup we were simply bored at times. Well, at least it sometimes fun to watch bigger groups like [bull] from a distance – quite effective tactics and organization from what I did see – kudos!

And AR – you don’t seem to have lost your fighting spirit in the league – congratulations for your point comeback and finishing second.

I hope we gave everyone a game despite increasing blobbing tendencies on kodash and wish you all the best for the next matchups.

Arvibe.2394:

lol We usually run with 25-30 guys I dont think u can compare us with a Vizu zerg.

That’s why I said monotag = all flying the same guild-tag (won’t find that on Vizu in very large numbers much). I didn’t ment the word “zerg” in a pejorative way here, sorry for that – maybe very large guild group would have been a more appropriate word…

I know, that one usually overestimates opposing side numbers (pets & co.) but at least when you teared down our t3 spawntower and t3 hill on your homeland at midnight on Monday I believe you were a little more than 25…

MikeKeal.2450:

A monster for the New JadeSea. During two months, JS have endure a double focus with Elona’s Monster Blob and Kodash. When we came the morning, all was green (The colour’s server was’nt random in this time). Nightcap, double focus and opportunism for the German’s Beautiful skills.

As a Kodashian I also want to stress, that there never was any kind of intentional double teaming between Elona and Kodash (appart from the normal tactical opportunism every server shows). I don’t know why, but German servers seem to hate each other with a passion and both servers were not an exception at that time…

rainmakercano.3152:

That’s Anet’s fault: siege damage is too kitten high. That’s why 10 people (You said 10? 5 could do so) are capable of stopping a huge zerg. Don’t you think that you are particularly good or witty or anything else for hiding behind siege .

And if you think you are good enough come fight [siN], [BULL], [imp] or [RNV] instead of bragging for repelling a group of randoms. They’ll teach you the respect you admit not to have.

A little sad, that the first bitter post in this thread comes from a Kodashian, but in his defense: I suppose it can be a little frustrating for some of the few players on our server who play during night-time to witness such onslaught, without the option to do something meaningful in the PPT department (albeit Kodash as a former “between-brackets-server” should be used to that).

It seems, that all German servers seriously lack the personal during night-times to be competitive in the Gold-League. Some players might ponder over that, some others just try to have fun and give good fights. We also lack the really large monotag-zergs like [bull] but as Jade and Vizu clearly show – they are not a key factor for PPT-success…

Regarding siege-damage – I personally don’t think it is too high because it goes both ways. At the end of the day, omega-golems are THE solution for every numerical superior attack force, who doesn’t want to bother with more time-consuming trebuchet-sieging. The updated siegeram-skills also allow larger groups to withstand a substantial amount of arrow-cart-fire and batter down quickly even reinforced doors…

Just my 0,2 € – have fun for the last days of league #1!

Vincent.9621:

Anyway, weekends are usually our weak spot, im afraid we might not have enough to be able to come back this week like the last MU ^^

Seeing your Night-Quotas I beg to differ…

majos.8503:

Well i just can compare you for the first week of season, and you improved a lot since that day… Maybe you have reason (i’m sure) but at least you were stronger than the last time we faced and i think that i have to congratz you Also you have reason, annoying to fight your blobs… full of necros…

Kodash had a rather massive influx from a couple of other servers in the past weeks, including several well-organized WvW-Guilds.

While this led to an improvement to our PPT-play especially during the morning, it also lengthened WvW-queues during prime-time by a substantial amount (which were not much of an issue for Kodash in the past). What it didn’t change (by much) was the amount of players during night-times, where all German servers seem to lack numbers on the battlefields.

Whether true or not, Kodash always took pride in it’s “play-culture” and there are worries from some old-timers that this perceived “character” would now change to a more zerg/blob-happy style. There are indeed Kodashians, who just want “good fights” and don’t look at the PPT-ticks that much.

As a result of all this, we are in a period of transition at the moment with some internal rambling and arguing…

Thyophelis.8035:

ohhh isn t that nice to hear. Vizuna are all a big happy family holding hands together. If there s a fair fight to be had we run. If we don t outnumber our enemys 2:1 we call for reinforcements. I can list a lot of good guilds from different Servers. Not sure how many times we had matches against Vizunah but still I cannot list one good guild that impresses me.

Can someone from another Server name me one? Maybe I ll find the tag between the other 70 Vizus one day.

Point is: PPT-Success in WvW is 90% numbers over time, 10% organization – guilds are not part of that equation (and individual skill isn’t either). Furthermore Vizunah is always honest about their goals: They don’t want to have the leetest guilds – they first and foremost want to be #1 on the matchup-list (in contrast to SFR for example who wanted both).
Call me anachronistic, but since the days of DAoC I am actually a fan of a thing called server-pride which seems to shine through a lot of Vizunah posts. Since there are no different factions in this game and at the end of the day most servers are pretty much interchangeable, the number of server-hoppers is not surprising, especially on international servers.
I don’t know the French servers, but the German servers seem to be fueled by an as irrational as grim hatred against each-other (just look at the focus on http://gw2wvw.org/ for this matchup), which seems to restrict the number of Inner-German server-transfers to servers which didn’t have much clashes in the past.

Is VZ fun to play against? Certainly not (especially for small guilds) but I like the fact that Vizunah refrains from posting a lot of “we are the greatest”-stuff as a number of forum-warriors from certain other servers do.

Dranul.2094:

I hate lemons and I hate curries!

(Some flame for you!) [both not true though!… mmm vindalooo!]

http://youtu.be/qKhit2nsoq4 (Yes, I am that old)

Great week with loads of awesome fights for us!
Kudos and big thanks to the numerous guilds/ppl we met on the AG and GH Homelands – the fights were generally tough and interesting.

Match-up-thread contained a frightening all-time-low amount of flames also…
If Silver-league is like that – I for one want to stay Silver-league.

Godspeed for your next match-up AG and GH!

Deniara Devious.3948:

Glad to see that Kodash has gotten their act together again. You can still make it to the Gold League

For the love of god, please no!

Edit:

Epic fight against MS Kodash guild tonight on Deso border! You were outnumbered but still provided a great fight and didn’t back off for a second! P.s. don’t focus me I like to bait

Thanks, was fun for us too!
As a side note: I’d love to have name-tags for enemy WvW-players (as in warhammer) in this game… PvP with “arch-enemies” you know, love & hate is much more fun!

Vanz.5976:

More importantly, we would like to thank the people of Kodash for hosting us these past few weeks. Kind and respectful, many even went as far as using English in /m just for our guild. We wish your server all the success possible in future matches.

Was a pleasure watching you guys on the battlefields. While it was clear from the start that your stay was temporary, you will be missed.
All the best for your future endeavours from Kodash!

soulsugger.5726:

Its kinda sad u have to plan an 20 Omega Attack against rank 13 server.
Was it personal whole week? More focus on kodash.

Seems like u are helping them…

But hey fair tactics, gj people

I can assure you, they did not only focus you (see attachement)…

As for the match-up – going against Vizu was a lot more fun than expected! You guys showed a lot of fighting spirit and it was often possible to meet groups willing to fight outside of the larger zergs.
Same can be said about AG, albeit less unexpected.

I am afraid Kodash is not much of an enemy these days regarding the point-game (if ever). Due to the league-system lurking around the corner, a lot of active WvW-players on our server actually are looking forward to being relegated to the silver-league rankings and don’t exactly work their finger to the bone collecting server-points…

Thanks for some nice fights and good luck to your next match-ups!

Dranul.2094:

To the kodash blob (need a new term to define mass of players) Surprised with your number how you sat in your third and did not a great deal, was a shame. Got some action in drips and draps when we provoked your spawn tower but alas no real action.

Aside from the big numbers two or three times, few defeats few wins, but why build superior acs and a lot of em when you outnumber your enemy 2-1? Curious.

Are you talking about the fights around 22:00-23:00 CET on AM homelands? I kid you not – when you started building the trebuchets in the ruins we were [outnumbered] and around 20 peeps. Kodash’s WvW population drops rapidly at this time – we only have a limited number of off-time-players during normal work-days.

We had to call in reinforcements from other maps but still had clearly inferior numbers when AM took advantage of your attack and took the hill from us (no scouting on our part coupled with too few defenders left in a fully upgraded hill filled to the brim with supplies and defensive weapons – meh).

Deniara Devious.3948:

Kodash and Miller have huge number of players. The reason for their loss is not the numbers. They are losing because they prefer ganking over the objectives, which give their server some points. And once the enemy has huge lead in points (like Desolation now has) the merry weathers go back to pve.

Sorry to say it bluntly, but this is nonsense. I don’t know where you get the impression that we sport ‘huge number of players’ with [outnumbered] on 3 of 4 maps even at primetime and no queues whatsoever…

Apart from EoW, Kodash hast not many active bigger WvW guilds left and Random-Zerging/Blobbing (outside EB) during primetime has pretty much ceased to exist because we simply don’t have enough players for that.

The small roaming-teams you see, are the leftovers of more higher-tier, higher-populated WvW-days and mostly compromised of the diehard-WvW-players still active here. They prefer this style of gameplay and usually don’t form bigger groups.

Contrary to popular belief, a small havoc-squad actually can contribute pretty much to the point-score of a server in capping camps before the timer ticks, disrupting enemy supply lines, or doing sneak or diversion attacks. Of course this is only one side of the coin, if you want to win a matchup you also need bigger groups but, well – we don’t have enough of them atm.

I am sorry that you as solo roamer feel the pain of being ganked by small groups of people, but part of a havoc squad’s job is to make the life as miserable as possible for enemy roamers. I can assure you, that we don’t cheer over your dead body on TS (unless you are a thief of course).

<rant>
From a Kodashian perspective, the matchup was rather sad so far – i have never seen so few fellow mates online on a weekend (which used to be the strong days of kodash).

Last week, when we played against (lower ranked) Gandara and FSP, hordes of players flooded the borderlands. Now, you only see the tags of the ‘usual suspects’ on the battlefields and even those become rarer and rarer.

What I always liked about Kodash was that we had a kind of diversity in our play-style. We had the evening blobs for the after-hour-casual-players, we had a number of dedicated WvW guild groups like [ADAC] (moved to Abaddons) or [KoA] (moved to SFR) and we had small scale roaming/duelling guilds like [Buka] (moved to Millers).

Maybe it’s just the beautiful weather here in Germany atm, coupled with school-holidays. Most people I talked to seemed perfectly okay with moving down a couple of ranks (‘less zergs, less lags etc.’) – I hope they are right. And I do hope that Kodash maybe gets attractive again for some bigger WvW-oriented guilds which tend to have a flagship-function for the server.
</rant>

tl;dr
Kodash lost a lot of people.

Parthis.2091:

Lemon! We never did get that little MS vs JDGE thing going. Stay awesome chaps, see you next matchup.

Well, I hope we’ll meet again soon – keep on rocking!

Same problems – different servers… Interestingly, the disruption of a GvG on Kodash a couple of weeks ago led to considerable internal ruckus and ultimately the exodus of a huge WvW-guild from the server. Considering the fact, that after several departures (for different reasons) Kodash is not exactly blessed with loads of big WvW guilds any more, we felt that loss.

Maybe it’s not such a good idea after all to try to discuss disputes like this on the official message boards…

As for the matchup – thanks to both Far Shiverpeaks and Gandara for the fun fights we had this week and good luck for the next one!

[Buka], now (unfortunately) on Miller’s Sound (EU).

Boy, do they hurt. Look for Vashury on youtube – ’nuff said.

Parthis.2091:

Yeah, it was fun trying to take you guys down – in the end there were just too many randoms with you (not to mention it being 2/3am :P). I hope we meet again though, you guys were tough cookies and really play well.

Would you be up for some small scale fights at the windmill, or some 10v10 GvG any time this week?

Sure, feel free to contact me here or ingame at any time. We are totally inexperienced in GvG though, since in the upper tiers Guilds seemed to prefer 20vs20 or more – so this would be our first one.

We also tend to run around like beheaded chickens when more than 5 team-members are present (individualistic players, not a single commander in the guild and the absence of a 5+ group-interface like we are used to in warhammer)…

All in all a nice evening/night for us with loads of great clashes! Gandara seems to be on the rise during the week, while Kodash (always better on weekends anyways) is beginning to loose some of it’s fair-weather-players. Keep the good fights coming!

FrouFrou.4958:

Thanks to [MS] from Kodash for nice skirmishes @ GBL earlier today :>

Funny, was about to post the same, but you beat me to it.
So, thanks [JDGE] for some great skirmishes (great fighting spirit, despite being outnumbered on several occasions btw.)!

Magnetron.5823:

Hmm this was not a blob, this was just a guild with some random pugs.. But yes i agree, you guys were outmanned.

A blob is everything on the map combined in one PC destroying machine rampaging over the map.. not letting the other server press skills because of skill lag. Thats a blob

When is a blob a blob – your mileage may vary, but for me that’s just semantics.

I somehow doubt the server will discriminate between 60+ ppl consisting of ‘just a guild with some random pugs’ and 60+ ppl consisting of several small guilds and random pugs when it comes to producing lag.

The only reason no lag was felt in that particular situation was that we simply had not the same amount of people for a PC-destroying machine rampaging clash on that map (and i usually try to hide as far away from that as possible, while the lag seems to find me anyway)…

GorHanis.7563:

Now double blobbing… Gz krautz!

Complaining about blobbing is completely, utterly pointless because:

a) every server seems to do it in this state of the game if they have the numbers
b) ppl only seem to see the other server blobbing – not theirs
c) the argument that you are only forced to blob because the evil other server is doing it, is childish at best.

I can assure you, players do indeed exist from here, who hate blobbing too (maybe not on Elona :-P ) . As a side note – I also absolutely hate (Sauer)Kraut!

Attachement: The other point of view (notice the outmanned buff, it was 23:30 CET and we had around 10 people on the whole map) – and no, I am not complaining about that.

Deniara Devious.3948:

I cannot stop the Germans or anybody else from blobbing or playing WvWvW, but Desolation simply cannot muster more players to WvWvW. I just hope that at least some of our enemies would have a bit of human soul left in them and feel a bit of pity. You maybe someday be in the same situation.

I can tell you a lot of Kodashis will feel your pain. We got hammered week after week by Elona in T2 back in the days of quasi-locked tiers when you guys fought it out with Vizu and SFR in T1. Together with some internal quarrel this lead to the departure of many big WvW guilds – at the moment you will have to search very hard to find monotag-groups with more than 20 ppl here.
Luckily we seem to still have a substantial playerbase consisting of smaller guilds…

Loco.4561:

Why don’t Kodash players EVER let people 1v1??? You always just gank, you have no respect whatsoever for anyone trying to do some solo/small scale stuff. I have lost count of the amount of times I have had duels interrupted by groups of Kodash who then corpse jump you or do /laugh emotes. I was trying to 1v1 a very good Kodash Engineer earlier and the duel kept on repeatedly getting interrupted by numerous groups of 5+ players going for cheap easy kills, even when your own people ask you not attack you still do.

Honestly I would be embarrassed if I had to get cheap kills from interrupting arranged duels/small group fights.

Well, for my guild I can say that we respect the unofficial duelling-area next to the windmill on all borderlands. Other than that we see part of our ‘job’ as a small roaming guild, to make life as miserable as possible for all enemy roamers. If we don’t see a /bow or blatant passiveness by enemy players, we go into “Red-means-dead-mode” – even if that turns a fair 1:1 to an unsporting 1:6. You won’t see corpse-jumping or laughing from us though and if a Kodashi is involved in the 1:1 asking us to leave we will respect that of course.
On the other hand we usually don’t avoid fights when not greatly outnumbered ourselves.

I know of other roaming guilds on Kodash like [Buka], which have a more sportsman-like and less point-oriented approach and seem to usually don’t interfere in 1:1 fights regardless of location on the map.

I can’t talk about EB, since we usually avoid that map.

I would also like to say thanks for tons of great fights we had this week against both SFR and Baruch. Kudos to all Baruchis for your fighting spirit!

I’m afraid, since Kodash is lacking more and more big Guilds, the Server is slowly becoming more Blob-dependant to get things done. The reason you don’t see Zergs more often is simply, that we don’t have the amount of players necessary apart from a small time frame between 19:00 and 22:00. :-)

Don’t take it as a complaint, but compared to some awesome evenings we had, night-time was not all that satisfactory from a Kodash player’s point of view. We are lacking the numbers (by a large margin) to in any way counter the amount of players Baruch could bring to the table at these times (which is perfectly OK but – well, not exactly fun when you sit at the receiving end of the stick).

As a small group you had several options:

• get steamrolled by Baruch’s nightshift
• hop over to EB, ignoring all borderlands
• take some camps right before timer tick and run
• do some boring PvE
• log off

To give you an impression: this is how our main SFR-borderland spawn exit looked at times (0:30 CET – SFR country was completely in Baruch’s hands so i guess you guys got bored ;-)…

Anyways, hope to see you again sometime soon!

Catastrophin.3928:

The same Mesmer hacked himself in the kodash spawn tower on sfr as well. So yes, he most certainly hacked.
Of course it’s never a server, but if you get a port into a t3 lord room you should sometimes aks yourself how the mesmer got in there. And the comment about nightcapping as more or less an excuse for hacking is just sad…

The guy (guildtag [PvP]) made several attempts to take over both spawn towers by hacking his way in during the night. He was sometimes accompanied by an elementalist with a [PRM]-tag who he seemed to have ported in.

Even after defeating both, the mesmer came right back into the tower (don’t ask me how – I didn’t see that unfortunately) and tried to troll us again.

When encountered in combat he seemed to constantly warp himself over the ground – immobilizing (and killing) him was possible though.

I would never think of making a whole server responsible for the action of one (or two) morons, but to say “ah well, you will take back the tower anyways” is not a sportsmanlike attitude when dealing with cheaters.

Inc wall of text, sorry!

Thx SFR for some of the best small-scale fights (2-10 ppl) I had in gw2 so far – and most of my guildmates think the same!

Regarding the problem of mega-blobbing – I can understand, that from a big dedicated WvW guild point of view being steamrolled by a much larger skill-lag producing perceived “zombie-herd” is not much fun. However you must also see the other side – being farmed by an equal or smaller-sized guild group as a random-group with no group-wide-voice-coordination, no hammer-train, suboptimal zerg-classes/builds etc. is no fun either, so people tend to clumb together.

Furthermore, servers have a different amount of big WvW guilds (as mentioned earlier Kodash lost some good ones a few weeks ago to Abaddon), so the side with more random or small guild players tends to blob more (* cough * Jade * cough *).

Speaking of Jade, i’d like to say Au revoir! and Bon courage! in T1 against the two giants (at least till the new ranking system kicks in next week).
What always puzzled me was the amount of night-time-players you could bring to the battlefield (and Vizu is notorious for that too, of course). Just have a look at the income evolution chart of this week!
I always thought, a multi-national-server would be more capable in this regard (take SFR’s russian guild for example which surely adds a few more time-zones to the active WvW-playerbase).
Is this because of Canadiens français guilds, or players from Départements d’outre-mer? I somehow doubt, that French servers simply have a higher number of shift-workers, students or unemployed players who can afford to play at night than the rest of Europe….

Anyways, great fights so far – I am very much looking forward to next week!

The guilds who left Kodash (to Abaddon’s Mouth – not to Elona btw.) in the last week of the Elona – Jade – Kodash – matchup made up quite a significant amount of our dedicated WvW guilds. I’d say our “big guild” WvW – playerbase shrinked by ~ 25% to 35% due to the exodus.

While Kodash still has a lot of capable small to medium scale groups as well as bigger WvW guilds (KoA et al.) we are still feeling the loss. Random-zergs are simply not as effective as guild-groups, especially when facing opponents who outnumber you on a regular basis.

The biggest problem Kodash has though, is the huge discrepancy in prime-time / non-prime-time player-numbers. Between 19:00 and 22:00 CET (leisure time in Germany) we do okay – apart from that it’s (at best) fewer numbers on EB, even fewer numbers on our homeland and [outmanned] everywhere else.

At the end of the day, what makes a server win or lose in WvW is simply manpower coverage. Good tactics, a nice community, voice communication usage and capable players/guilds sure do help, but players tend do overestimate their own servers in this regard and underestimate the adversary. And because these “soft” factors are more or less equally distributed on all servers with a certain dedication to WvW, it’s the number of players during all hours a server can bring to the table which makes the difference.

A very welcome change to the same ol’, same ol’ being stuck with Elona for weeks!

SFR, I hope you stay for a while – the fights have been much fun for me and all mates I talked to.

Jade have seem to improved in tactics over the last few weeks. Scouts in nearly every Tower, a quick reacting emergency-response-squad and the usual superior numbers during night time do hurt us!

As for Kodash – we are in a bit of a reorganization and lick-your-wounds-phase right now. In the last week of the Elona / Jade / Kodash – matchup we lost three big WvW-guilds to Abbadon’s Mouth due to internal quarrel with other large guilds. This is definitely noticeable, as those guilds made up aprox. 20% of our pool of organized WvW-centered-guilds and also had capable, well-respected commanders.

Looking forward to the battles ahead!