Guild Wars 2

@Zolpidem.2851
As others have said, if you’re not stepping on that battlefield with a guild, you’re not going to have much fun.
Good intel and strategy will trump numbers (to an extent). Some of the best fun I’ve had in WvW is when we’re outnumbered and have to come up with clever guerrilla tactics.

Pretty much what Maddeth said. If you’re not in a guild with a good command structure, then your stuffed.

Guys there is no collusion. We are however watching enemy movement and coordinating attacks when your back is turned. Our attack on Tkitten keep yesterday took all of 90 seconds because we knew you guys were looking the other way, intel told us to attack from the south, so we rolled in heavy. Guys were were still defending the outer NE gates unaware that we had stolen it from them.
Seriously chaps, if you’re team ain’t doing recon and watching where the enemy is distracted and using that to your advantage, then you’ll have a tough time. You can bang the drum and claim we’re colluding all you want, but the fact is we have really good strategists and people willing to follow them.

Honestly, I’d rather be playing SoS and IoJ again. Yeah they got facerolled right at the start, but towards last Wednesday/Thursday they got their act together and came back with a vengance. That was probably some of the best action I’ve had in WvW and I’m sure those guys enjoyed it too.

I play during Oceanic hours and honestly right now is just not much fun against HoD; they outnumber us by a rediculous amount. So, I reckon go for it JQ, you’ll need a huge night crew to take on HoD.

HabibLoew.2590:

For a variety of performance reasons we limit the number of characters that are reported to any given game client. This report limiting (or culling, as it’s also been referred to) is generally distance based and limits both the amount of bandwidth and client side processing (rendering, etc.) required to play the game.

Is distance based the best method? Surely this could be changed to prioritize clusters of enemies in the vacinity or a cone infront of the player. Next I’d ask how this reporting works, is it just when a player intersects a radius around my position or do you guys cluster nearby players (e.g. a player enters my reporting range, so I also get everything in their reporting range)

Also, what’s the bandwidth limit? Is this dynamically calculated or do you have a set threshold for everyone, or is it based on player cap and your available bandwidth?

HabibLoew.2590:

In WvW one of the things that we see exacerbating the issue is this: From the moment a character is first reported to your client to the first moment that your client is able to render it a non-zero amount of time passes. During this time your client is doing things like loading textures from disk, which can be (at least in computer terms) fairly slow what with all that accessing of spinning, physical storage media. So that means that a character who is moving towards you can potentially appear first at a much closer point even than the one at which they were reported because, of course, they were still moving during that load time.

Why not load standard models into memory for each race and use those until the client can catch up?

Oh and lastly, when you clever chaps figure it out, any chance you could do a write up of it. I’m sure there are plenty of nerds like me on here that would enjoy reading it.

I’ll play occasionally, much like everyone else. Hopefully with less people playing, WvW will be fun with small skirmish warfare instead of Zerg face rolling.

Probably so. But something has to happen. This plan gives the big teams something to do to maintain their control, and the smaller teams a tactical edge in the fight.
It’s no fun dominating and having nothing to do. Much as its no fun having no impact as a small force.

I think the key to balancing WvW is to find a way to level the playing ground when teams are mismatched in population. Ideally, it should be that the bigger a server is, the more cost associated with expanding.

Here’s my idea:
1) Allow everyone the ability to lift supply from one depot and place it in another (e.g. move it from a supply camp to a keep).

2) Dolyak’s must be “loaded” with supply. Hence, a player must go to the supply point and trigger a Dolyak.

When a team takes over a keep, they must not only defeat the keep lord, but they must stock up the depot with lets say 100 supply. That supply will trickle down every minute at a slow rate. This rate will will increase for every person that is within or near the walls on that team (enough so that it’s essential that a small proportion of your force must regularly be restocking supply). The idea being that a big army needs lots of supply to maintain strength.

Here’s the good part:
Should supply fall below the threshold, you will loose control of the keep and the NPC’s will leave; you will no longer recieve any points for it. This threshhold increases based on whether its a tower, keep or castle.

If it goes down to zero, you’re team in the vacinity will get a debuff (hence your food and medical supplies are gone).

What this means is if you’re zerging around at off peak with little resistance, you can’t shoot ahead in the scoreboard by capping everything; you’ll need to setup supply runs and stock up. You won’t be able to cap everything and go to sleep knowing that you’re team is trickling in points all night. You’ll have to setup supply chains if you need a big force to hold off a resistance.

If you’re a small force, you’ll want to cut off supply and starve the occupants out. If you’re a large force, you’ll have to think about if you can organise to supply your team.

Thus, ideally, what we’ll see is smaller skirmishes, fought smarter across the entire 4 zones.

Discuss…

If by sizable you mean around 40, then yes; sizeable indeed.

Yeah we need to even this out a bit at night. It’s going to get boring very fast for you guys and us if we can’t have some decent night time skirmishes. HoD owned everything tonight simply because the borderlands were empty; that’s a hollow victor guys. There was about 20 Ruin and maybe a further 20 or so zerg when I was on. We need some oceanics to join us, so as to reduce your queues so more of your guilds can play together, and bolster our forces do we can have a fair and fun fight.

@Malarky
There’s no coordination between us and SBI; none that’s been communicated on team speak nor on map chat. We kill on sight and vice versa. As for the nightcapping, that will even out over time I think. When I’m online during Aussie evening time, we’re laughably outnumbered. It’s still good fun though, we do what we can to cause mischief, I reckon it’s much more entertaining to pull off feats of tactical genius with a small team of coordinated people against all odds than to just steamroll due to having unlimited players.

Have to agree with cardboardbox. I’ve been in Ruin for a week during off peak and it’s just really well organized and fun. They think tactically, play fairly and enjoy a good fight.

As one of the offpeak, casual RUIN crowd, I’m enjoying the match-up at the moment. We’re completely outmanned and it’s made us have to fight quite tactfully.
I’d really like to see more Oceanics come bolster our forces, but they seem to be all at HoD; I’m pretty sure most of Asia is there as there’s just millions of you guys at every turn. I can’t imaging those queue times would be much fun though.

Arasuki.6094:

pants, at least have enough decency to not hijack threads.

It’s just a game mate, chill out.

Just putting it out there…

If we oceanics all had our own servers, then there wouldnt be much of a nightcapping problem for the rest of you guys. Might make it more fun for everyone.

If cost is an issue, we’ll pay for it. Get a kickstarter program going and see if the community can come together. Not only would we chip in, but a lot of US people might as well if it got us off their servers.

Discuss…

We really need an oceanic guild to come bolster our night crew. If you go to SBI, you’re gonna get quite long queues for WvW. Come to ET, we like to have fun:

Is it just me or is RUIN taking on almost a mythical status in these forums?

Those guys at ET are just soo mean. I heard they eat babies.

I agree with the OP.

I think it would bring more tactics to WvW if we could reset traits and customize our build while OOC just like in sPvP.
I think it would be that way except that they need a carrot on a stick for people to do objectives. I’m sure there are ways around this though.

@Strange.9607
I’d leave discussions of technical feasability to the devs; that’s their job. We don’t have access to their code and therefore can’t jump to conclusions about the cost of LOS calculation. Unless they’ve publically commented on this issue, in that case your point stands.

As for counters, it’s a slippery slope isn’t it? It’s a shame that any commander would have to know all the counters to every exploit in order to get traction on the battlefield. IoJ got their act together, they deserved that keep and an exploited game mechanic lost it for them (IMO). I would have preferred that they stormed in, tore the place apart, celebrated their victory and thus influenced more people to come join the fight.

When ANet fix this, we (and, by the sound of it, many other guilds) will have a tough time defending a keep.

I watched you guys hammer the IoJ keep, and to be honest you guys deserved it. However, we had someone on a treb hitting the gate from behind, thus destroying your siege; I think this is a crappy tactic.

Let’s be fair and open here, it’s an exploit; it’s safe to say that ANet did not intend for splash damage to leak through the gate and give the defenders a massive advantage. No doubt ANet will patch it, but our command in our guild, and in any other respectable guild should step up and say it’s not allowed.

Just thought I’d tip my hat to those chaps on IoJ for last nights battle. Whatever you guys are doing, it’s working. I got to play for a few hours (with RUIN) and we had a blast trying to counter your multi fronted attack on EB.

@maximumpanda.5178
I’m fine with your guild actively recruiting. I’m in IoJ and in a large guild (+300), but no more than 10 are on WvW at a time and about 5 show up in vent. The rest of our server is in disarray, people just run about in a zerg.
I could name a handful of players (including myself) on IoJ who come on during Aussie prime time and try their best to focus the zerg, and sometimes we do break your lines, but we have an angry mob, not an army and ultimatley it crumbles.
I can’t blame people for wanting to jump ship and I’m contemplating it too; it’s not that I have a childish need to win, I’d just like to have more structure and strategy. I’d like to play with people who understand warfare tactics, maybe played a strategy game or two or spent some time playing EVE.

@Samfisher.7942
The alliances are temporary for the week based on matchmaking. From week to week, different guilds would be shuffled around.

Firstly, only post how you would fix it. Keep it brief and don’t comment on other suggestions unless you want to expand apon it.

My Suggestion:
There should be 2 WvWvW instances, one server as normal and one matched up by guilds (AvAvA – Alliance vs Alliance).

It works pretty much the same except you have to be representing a guild to join. Automatic matchmaking will group guilds across servers into sets of 3 Alliances and match them up over a week. Then at the end of the week, shuffle them round to balance.
For example, week 1: my guild and serveral others are bunched together as an alliance (matchmaking would try group us together with guilds that fill out the times that we’re not playing at). We would then be matched up against 2 more alliances.
At the end of the week, the matchmaking will look at the results (e.g. points, activity time, participation, bottlenecks) and do the matchmaking again for the next week.

Pros:
Does not depend on server population.
Matchmaking would profile participation and time that the guild was active to match them up against similar opponents (this would also reduce queue time).
Fights would be fair and balanced.
Would mitigate night capping.
Would make server hopping redundant.
Would be awesome!

@Michael
Not very constructive mate.

@maximumpanda.5178
IoJ here. Trust me, we’re playing as tactfully as we can, but we’re out numbered. There are quite a few of our guilds working as an alliance, but it’s of no use. We’re going to have an empty WvW if this continues.
If you guys are serious about wanting a fair matchup, get some of your guilds to transfer out to SoS and IoJ and lets even the odds. I know it’s hard to walk away from the winning team, but it’s the only option I can see.

Agreed.
I’m a support person myself, spend a lot of time organising the zerg, putting down healing turrets and rezzing people. I think we should get badges for each keep, tower, supply point we capture.

Guys,
I’m on Isle of Janthir, we’re having the same issues, but slowly getting everyone organised. You might have noticed we’re making a big push the last few days. However, we’re wanting to make an Alliance with you guys against ET. If you’re up for it, can you get in contact and we’ll set up a vent/TS server.