Guild Wars 2

Predicted 5 years ago:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Beta_key_hunt

Why would WvW die if PPT WvW dies? T2 has show for more than a year that WvW outside of PPT exists.

And why would you alter my quote with some crap I did not post?

EDIT: Ahh, I did not know you had some personal grievance that colors your view of T1 PPT play. In that case, never mind.

It is your right to cheer for other players no longer being able to play their favorite game mode. Not the nicest of reactions though.

Xeeron.9254:

Some people may find some sadistic pleasure in this. T2 players, who looked down on PPT crazy T1 for a long time may not find anything bad about PPT’s demise. However, it was a game mode that many enjoyed and which brought a lot to GW2. Even though it may not have been your favourite, it is sad to see it go. Personally, I never cared for GW2’s GvG (which I felt infinitely inferior to GW1’s better concept). Despite that, I did not cheer when the GvG scene died.

CONTINUED

But season 2?

As you may remember, during season 2, JQ and TC organised a strict 2vs1 on BG, leading to JQ winning the season ahead of TC.

In a way, this was the last hurray of PPT play. JQ and TC realised that BG had been too big, too stacked for too long to take on. In response, they chose the nuclear option: Killing 1vs1vs1 in favour of essentially 2 teams.

The result was a win, and … incredibly boring. It also lead to the extremely unfortunate turn of BG further recruiting. They saw the JQ win as a sign of unbalance, to be countered by the usual T1 strategy of mass-recruiting. In fact, the 2vs1 was a sign of extreme weakness, of JQ and TC basically admitting “BG is too strong, we can not win this the usual way”. The unbalance existed, but it was BG that was ahead.

When BG recruited what was basically the last drop in the barrel of lower tier PPT players, the option of further balancing ceased to exist.

In season 3, the 2vs1 was not renewed. Not because JQ and TC suddenly started hating each other. The reason is simpler: There were not enough people left on JQ and TC to care. Those people who did care about PPT stopped playing during or after season 2. By now, those few left are, by far, outnumbered by the “for the fights” people. And those would not organise something such as a 2vs1. Without it season 3 was a foregone conclusion and basically decided in the first 48 hours.

Cheering the dead body

Some people may find some sadistic pleasure in this. T2 players, who looked down on PPT crazy T1 for a long time may not find anything bad about PPT’s demise. However, it was a game mode that many enjoyed and which brought a lot to GW2. Even though it may not have been your favourite, it is sad to see it go. Personally, I never cared for GW2’s GvG (which I felt infinitely inferior to GW1’s better concept). Despite that, I did not cheer when the GvG scene died.

Some BG players may also enjoy the downfall of their rivals. And, in a way, that is ok. After all, WvW was set up to be the competition of servers. And when all others are dead, when you are the last one standing, you have kind of won. Unfortunately, the feeling will be short-lived, as the death of the last opponents also implies the end of the format.

Where do we go from here? music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eJuhd9xFRg

So, what is next? The death of T1 WvW is not a sudden phenomenon. Rather, a long drawn out process. There are bound to be some ups and downs along the way, but the general direction is clear: Towards extinction.

Many will predict the imminent end of JQ and its replacement with YB. I would not be too sure of that. I was around during SBI’s implosion, and the current situation on JQ is nothing like it. SBI ceased to exist, as a WvW force, a few days after the announcement of transfer costs. It basically took less than 3 days from the first guild leaving to the last big guild leaving. On JQ, SG leaving was followed by … nothing. Not a single guild moved out. I would not even call that positive. The players simply do not care about WvW anymore. And then, why pay the transfer cost? It is just a big void of players having given up on the game. And virtually nobody believes that YB can take on BG. It took TC an awfully long time to come close to T1 level in terms of play (personally, I would say they never reached it. Instead of TC moving up, the ability of BG and JQ eroded downwards to match TC), and they had a much better starting point.

An implosion of BG is even less likely. After all, the hurt is less there, and where would BG guilds go to?

In any case, every death of a server has a cost: Not all of the players move on. Probably close to half of the player base simply gives up, stops playing, or moves to another game mode (e.g. duel based roaming). This is a big reason why the inherently instable T1 WvW could not go on forever. Everytime T1 consumed another server, the overall pool of players shrank. Together with the natural erosion over time, this has contributed to todays situation, where not enough PPT players are left to fill 3 server.

I see the efforts by Indo & friends to prop up JQ with alts over here. That is one of the facts that convinced me that PPT WvW is finally and irrevocably dead. We have reached the stage where servers have become irrelevant. Where players log on to look for fights and do not care which side they are on or how well their server does. In other words, we have reached T2 meta. The T2 meta of 1 year ago that is. Unfortunately, that is not for me. As a PPT player true and true, I am left to lament the demise of my game mode.

- Xeeron

The death of T1 PPT play (an obituary)

The game mode of T1 died. Not recently, but a few months ago. It is hard to place the exact day, but likely somewhere in the aftermath of season 2. As a big fan on T1 WvW, I feel it deserves a proper obituary.

A garrison defense music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxICg9ay-ks

Let me start with a personal success story, which happened just 2 days ago. As usual, I was pinned up during EU times, trying my best to defend JQ BL from the enemy. A big (for EU times) group of about 30 BG appeared at NE tower. However, they passed NE tower and went for our garrison. As it happens, garrison had reinforced gates, no waypoint, plenty of supply, and 2 defenders: me and one pug. While BG worked their way through the outer gate with 3 superior rams, I build a trebuchet for the north inner gate. A minute later, BG dropped 3 superior rams on north inner gate. Of course I disabled the rams, and started trebbing. After the second disabler, BG used the \cry emote and ported out. JQ garrison was saved.

A big personal success. But was it really? Garrison had no upgrade running. There was 0 siege build up. I was pinned, but only had one follower (who was not in teamspeak). Clearly, JQ did not care about defending garrison. Bad enough, but was BG any better? I know how to attack garri via NE, and putting all your supply into rams at north gate is not the way to do it. You build catas in the back. Or you go for west inner. Or, at least, you keep some supply in reserve for a cata in case the rams are destroyed.

And even after I had killed the rams, BG still outnumbered us 30 to 2. They could have man-moded the door down. Or sent away 15 people to run for new supply. Hidden a mesmer. Plenty of options. BG chose none. In the end, they cared just as little about who owned that garrison as JQ. All that was going on was a big karma train, which I, as the single person on the whole map who cared about PPT, rudely interrupted. Note that this happened early in the week. Not a Friday or Thursday.

The death of PPT

Now, a single incidence may not be enough to convince you. In that case, just compare your WvW experience today with the experience 18 months ago. Remember spawn camp scouting? If you ran into a spawn camp on reset, you could bet on a 40 person zerg appearing 30 seconds later to squash you. Remember siege teams who ran supply to keeps to build up defences, while the zerg was away fighting? Remember coordinating pushes on several maps? Remember map politics and sustained 2vs1’s against one server to break a WP? Remember the time when you did not have to coordinate pushes on several maps, because all maps were nearly queued?

When was the last time you saw all that? A long time ago. Granted, every now and then, you might catch a glimpse of what T1 WvW was, but it is usually isolated and short-lived. All-in-all, T1 now resembles what T2 was a while ago. Guild groups looking for fights; roamers duelling; a frustrated back-bones crew scouting. T1 WvW is dead.

Who killed PPT WvW?

The short answer is, BG overstacking. The longer answer, ANet’s design choices.

WvW T1 was inherently instable. It was instable because the game was designed in a way that makes strong servers stronger and weak servers weaker. Once you are stronger, you can take and downgrade the weaker servers keeps and towers, making them even weaker. The karma training ensures that the weakest server’s BL is the main place of action (keeping everything papered), not the strongest server’s BL. Players on outmanned servers have to put in more hours than players on strong servers to keep up. They also face defensive play rather than the more fun offensive play most of the time. Due to both facts, burnout is considerably higher on servers with less players, increasing the disparity in numbers.

That is, WvW with 3 servers is bound to produce an uneven outcome and “kill” weaker servers.

So why did T1 WvW work for so long? The reason was the untapped pool of WvW players in lower tiers. Whenever a server’s numbers thinned out to much, there was a replacement. This could happen in two ways: Either by the weak server recruiting additional players from lower tiers. Or by the weak server collapsing, and being replaced by an up and coming lower tier server, who now had a great positive story of reaching T1 and could use that to recruit (for example the players of the collapsed server).

This refreshing of T1 via lower tier players kept T1 WvW alive. Whenever the situation became too unbalanced, either a server was replaced, or a server mass recruited.

By now, that pool of lower tier players has dried out. Everyone with an interest in PPT WvW already plays in T1. No T2 or lower server comes even remotely close to the numbers of T1 servers. We have reached the final imbalance, which will not be fixed this time.

10 hours and a total of 4 people have stepped forward to congratulate each other on how great the season was? I guess there is no further need to comment, the numbers speak for themselves. I tend to agree with the numbers.

Jeydra.4386:

Nooooooooooooo

I spent so long sieging up Hills, and now it’s gone On the bright side, at least BG is leading again. Tenuous lead of ~60 points, but we’re still leading!

You did a good job sieging it up. I was the JQ commander there during that time, and it sure was annoying to break in, clear all your siege, and then, 30 minutes later, there are 2 trebs and 5 ACs up again at all doors. Not to mention that trying to take hills against superior numbers sucks in general … Looking for Queue … :-/

Well, we finally took it, hope our NA can return the favor by sieging up BL garrison ;-)

No.

The ability to “ninja” towers and keeps is the only thing that keeps uneven matches somewhat interesting.

Remove that, and every single match will be a big zerg spawncamping a small camp.

If it takes longer to open the gates, the outnumbered server will simply get rolled by the bigger team that has enough time to run to the place of action.

Do not listen to anyone telling you to join this server, or that server. Any difference in server mentality pales in comparison to the mentality of different guilds.

I suggest you look for a guild that fits you style and go to whatever server that guild happens to play on.

style.6173:

and roaming is NOT the same as on lower tiers. You have some roamers, but no where near the numbers as on lower tiers.

You will have, on average, ~10 players running in groups of one, two or three, per server, per borderland map. Mainly at the new center nodes and south of there. And then another 1 or 2 groups per server of 5-10 people, who might be capping camps.

If you have more than that, props to you. It is plenty enough for me: Want a small scale fight? Run to south ruins. Works any time, any map.

Like it or not, if you want consistent large scale fights, you have to go to T1. If you are happy with small scale fights, lower tiers are perfectly fine.

That is not anyones fault, but the automatic outcome of having the current ranking system, and WvW scores that are overwhelmingly determined by numbers.

- Xeeron

There is quite a bit of hyperbole (both positive and negative) around T1. So, as we enter the league soon, here is a little info on T1.

Queue
Not nearly as bad as everyone outside of T1 makes them look like. The only serious queues occur on reset night, and even then, they are usually less than one hour.

During NA and SEA prime, you might encounter queues of a few minutes on some maps. During 75% of the weekdays, you will not have any queue at all on the borderlands.

Skill lag
Used to be horrible, still is pretty bad. Not sure whether the slight change for the better is due to some changes in servers, or the fact that we are having less big three-way fights.

Coverage
With the latest recruitment drive by JQ, all three servers have now constant “basic” coverage. Meaning at least one large team that can respond to threats. Depending on the server and timezone, overall coverage varies between 40-80% of the total number of WvW places. The only time zone below that might be very late NA (which I do not know very well).

The coverage by T1 servers is hugely bigger than that of any other server from T2 on down. I would suggest that the difference is large enough that even a coordinates, weeklong 2vs1 by two lower tier servers could not stop the T1 server from winning.

Roaming
Always existed, and got an additional boost from the introduction of ruins. Roaming in T1 is very similar to lower tiers. One difference is that T1 roamers need to watch out for zergs that might run them over, but given their usual location, that happens only very rarely. Zergs have better things to do than chasing after single players.

Skill
Individual player skill is incredibly hard to measure, and mostly swamped by pure numbers. From what I have seen, I would argue that low level roamers are on the same level as T1 roamers (Note that there is a big distinction between zerg players and roamers in T1). However, lower tier commanders are not as skilled in large zerg tactics as T1 commanders (because they have less experience in them). Thus, T1 servers usually win big fights with even numbers on both sides.

2v1
Happens, depending on map goals of each server. Everyone knows it, everyone is hit by it at times, everyone participates in it at times. However, there never has been anything even remotely close to a successful “conspiracy” to 2v1 any particular server over a long period of time.

All in all, T1 differs from any other tier in having consistent large scale engagements at any time of the day. While differente coverage still changes the PTT, “nightcapping” is a thing of the past.

Refresh.4386:

oh Jade Quarry is in top 3? your zergs seem smaller then BG and SoR prove your selfs and destroy SoS home lands or maybe Tarnished Coast will take your spot in the big 3 (there trying hard to get people and overpower you)

Careful. You will summon an army of angry forum warriors here by suggesting that BG and SOR might actually be more stacked than JQ. ;-)

On the other hand, the differences in population between SOR and JQ are nothing compared to the differences between any T1 server and the rest. Don’t get me wrong, T1 has the most fun WvW by a long shot, just pretty bad when we are matched with non-T1 servers.

Titan.3472:

Was great match this week. BG won. See you at reset XD.

Must be because MERC moving over to Jade Quarry left JQ completely stacked, while BG setting up war chests and recruiting guilds by the dozen over the last months does nothing.

Err, wait, am I late for all the “OMG you are stacked”, “No, you!” QQ? Sorry, will try to be quicker next time.

How the matchup between JQ and BG is decided.

Glad to see SBI picking up some guilds. And doubly glad that the new guilds seem to come from mid/lower tier servers and are not some top tier bandwagoon attempting to form the “next T1 server”.

SBI was a great place for SF to learn and get better at WvW. If the community is still the same, I have no doubt that we will hear more of the guilds that transfered over in the future.

HvH has improved a lot during the last months. They have gone from good to excellent and are definitely a recommended place for players who value top level WvW.

Ahh, the SOR golem rush of Garrison water gate. Must be 10 o’clock EU time.

Preceeded by the predictable “SOR takes NW tower while BG hits NE tower”. I am not even suggesting that you guys coordinate, it is just such an daily occurance that BG knows when SOR will keep JQ busy.

And happening simultaneous with the equivalent SOR attack on EB keep. Do you guys actually give it a countdown in TS, or does it just happen because so many log on at the same time?

Finally, sorry to the dancing SOR in our garri, you do not get epic defenses everyday. Sometimes, hitting an outmanned team just turns out to be autoattacking doors for 2 minutes.

- Xeeron

JQ is clearly outmanned, but SOR will be the ones who will regret the stack more in the end.

I know for sure that all those 40 JQ who defended garrison with me learned a lot. And not a single one of them is a bandwagoneer. They are the hard core that keeps running back from spawn to garri to keep the circle contested against the 70 SOR that are roaming around there with Omega golems. SOR’s EU guild will get used to outnumbering their opponents, will get soft and sloppy, and will eventually be caught out cold when some other server recruits enough EU players to even the numbers. You get better at WvW from being outnumbered, not the other way round.

- Xeeron

Israel.7056:

I dunno I’m having fun. We’ve been trying to take JQ garri for a while now, some epic fights.

Clearly SOR needs more EU guilds to take JQ garrison.

- Xeeron (the Charr warrior commander)

You will know the answer to your question next week:

Kaineng is scheduled to go up to T2, where they will meet SoS, BG or possibly SoR. In any case, they will have a real fight on their hands.

Everyone knows that WM is one of the best guilds in the game. Next week, we’ll know how good the rest of Kaineng is.

Kiltor.9362:

for months we on SoR know what it feels like to wake up the next day only to be down 25k over night. I feel for you guys in SBI atm and i hope you guys come back strong. Been an amazing matchup so far.

This is not something new. SBI has not won a match in more than 2 months now. It is a fact that we have not been T1 material number-wise for as long, too.

At first with LoD leaving, the disadvantage was not too serious. WM started playing more, some others started playing more, and we could hold our place in T1. Then WM left. SF started playing longer, SBI guild started playing longer, and we could still hold back the enemy to prevent a fast drop. But that was just will (and some skill) disgusing the fact that SBI should not have been in T1 anymore. I see other servers talking about queues. What is that? Friday reset aside, we have not had queues in months. Btw, when I say outnumbered, I am counting dedicated, serious WvWers. The obvious tendency of non dedicated WvW to stop playing when losing only aggravates that.

On SBI, guilds are no longer assigned to maps. The simple reason: You have to switch from map to map every 30 minutes to stop another attack by the enemy, while hoping that those you just left unopposed on the old map do not catch on. Then they do, and you hop again.

Of course, both other servers sooner or later smell the blood, so being outnumbered means that not only do you have to fight the larger numbers of 1 server, but the larger numbers of both servers.

The morale held out for 2 months, which I feel is a lot longer than some other servers that tanked, but we have been living above our means all that time. And now there is an earthquake in the form of the end of free transfers.

Guilds had to choose whether they want to go on fighting when for the one big WvW guild we have, there are 4 enemy big guilds trying to kill us. Fighting an outnumbered last stand is fun and all, but several months of an outnumbered last stand, less so. In a way, SoR’s good current showing killed us: We all come from weeks of being outnumbered in T1. Realizing that T2 will be more weeks of being outnumbered ended peoples hopes.

Then, we see the trend in server transfers. Do people go to the servers that actually are outnumbered? No, they tend to flock to the places where already plenty of WvW reside. So the perspective is more of the same in the future.

I think the bottom line for many WvWers on SBI is: We fought the good fight for a long time, now it is time to have the numbers on our side for once. Personally, I prefered the good fight.

- Xeeron

You see all these nice posts about “close community”, “great place to be”, “join us in our efforts”. Tons of sugarcoating for a simple message:

“We win in WvW by outnumbering the opponent. Join us so our advantage gets even bigger.”

SoS is recruiting. Really? The No1 server that has won all matchups in the last 2 months bar one (and usually without much trouble). What are you trying to achieve? Build HoD 2.0? We already had a completely broken T1 competition before, it was fun for neither side.

Kaineng recruiting while they 600+ curbstomp their opponents? Really? Are those doors too vicious for you to handle? Need more help with them?

Now, it would be bearable if people were actually honest and straight out admitted that they are in for the win, and will do whatever it takes (fun side note: The servers that get bandwagooned to by people who value the win most, also have the highest numbers of hackers on their sides. Remember BG when they first went up to T1 …).

However, all the sugary “community” sales pitch sounds exactly like that: The attempt by some win-hungry players to dress their selfishness into words that will attract others to ensure their own easy victory without having to fight.

I hope you all get what you deserve: Months and months of unbalanced and boring WvW.

Hmmm, we will be blue next week. Back to my favorite color =)

Grats to SoS for a second win, hopefully this will shut up some people on the forums. Reading this threat is painful at times. Also painful to play against you at EU times, but I must be masochistic: The bigger your zerg gets, the more I am inclined to play =P

@SBI players: Nice showing this week. You all know what we achieved.

@JQ: Lest amount of QQ from the three servers. JQQ moniqer is very undeserved and needs to be buried. Now, if you only would show up more often ingame …

@SoS: I dig your scouting. Except when I am trying to ninja your towers that is.

PRXKV.1296:

Few things:

1. This victory belongs primarily to the hardcore Oceanic WvWers of Sea of Sorrows,

You are selling your NA and especially your EU players short. Whenever I looked at late Asian-Oceanic times, SBI usually did pretty well. Not the 600+ we might have had in some matches, but solid leads. It was always the EU SoS team that turned the table around and left us with an uphill battle during NA times (when SoS NA defended very well). Without your great EU players, you would not have such a large lead, and likely have lost the match.

In T1, you need good coverage in all 3 time zones, 2 is not enough.

- Xeeron

Congratulations to SoS for your first T1 win.

You came with the burning desire, you played when others PvE’d, you had the morale not to rest on your early lead, but kept on pushing. Therefore you deserve the win.

In terms of skill, this week has shown that SoS belongs in the top tier. Pretty organised groups. Maybe missing a tad here and there in tactics, but your response times were absurdly quick. Your commanders surely know what they are doing.

I usually do not bow ingame (too busy killing the next red name…), so let me do it here:

::bows::

@JQ: Didn’t see too much from you this week. Maybe you were (like SBI) a bit burned out. Maybe you just played different borderlands than I did. In any case, I am hoping for lots of fun 3-ways (with all sides having equal numbers) in the next week.

Bay clearly is the worst of the keeps. However, that does not mean it should be buffed. It is good to have one hard to take keep, and one easy to take keep.

That way, third place servers can simply hold onto “their” hills, giving up “their” bay. While strong servers can prove their mettle by trying to defend bay.

All those claiming that SBI is miles ahead of JQ, you are wrong. And those claiming BG belongs in T2 are wrong as well.

The match currently is pretty close. Sure, we might have a lead in points, but in WvW small differences in coverage and skill translate into large differences in points. The points difference is not huge, and the servers are even closer together than the points difference suggests.

I would not at all be surprised if one of the next weeks goes to some other server.

That was an amazing fight indeed. Place was BG borderlands, at the start, all 3 sides had their “share” of the map.

Then, both BG and JQ converged on bay and never left for 3 hours. BG trebbing from Garrison, JQ from our spawn tower, which they had taken. For a good hour or so, both BG and JQ were inside our inner walls, trying to push into lord room. I know I spent a good 20 minutes arrow carting the same spot at the stairs to prevent that.

Meanwhile, we had no supply camp, and JQ was harrassing our players trying to run back into Bay from spawn point.

Funny enough, the day was won for SBI by a JQ turtle: They got together and portalled into the lord room. While they killed most of us, we eventually took them down. And after the south side of inner wall was clear of JQ, we could also push out BG of the north side and secure our inner walls again.

Very intense match, and well fought from both JQ and BG: You had us bottled up for a long time, and we nearly wiped a few times.

Coming from an SBI player who was very pissed off by BG:

The problem was the combination of the amount of hacking (higher than other opponents we faced) with the lack of posts by BG players coming out against hacking.

The removal of orbs should definitely help, since it will stop the most glaring and annoying hack.

Something else you need to do is to turn your silent majority of people who do not condone hacking into a posting majority. Every time there is an accusation of hacking, there should be 5 BG players posting that they hate hackers. NOT 5 BG players calling into question whether hacking happened.

Speak out against hacking often and loud, and people will trust you that you do your part on your server to prevent it.

- Xeeron

I love running with WM commanders. Not only are their tactics great, they also make a big effort to communicate with the map and the pugs running with them. I know that Jang Gun types more (in a foreign language) than a lot of native speaking commanders. Great to have you on SBI.

- Xeeron

People are talking mostly about the turtling and the hacking, but imho, they are not the most annoying part of this week’s WvW.

The hacking is done only by a few people. It sucks, it has serious consequences in terms of power shift, but I understand that there is not a big lot honest BG players can do about it (report it whenever you see it!).

Turtling is a cheap strategy, that should not be possible, but is. However, I was rather looking forward to countering it. Finding a counter so some FotM cheese is rewarding in its own right.

What gets me infuriated, however, are the perma stealth thieves. This is not just one hacker, I meet these guys everywhere … and always BG. And it is clearly also not working as intended: Culling preventing the thief from showing is a bug. And designing a build around this bug is bug abuse.

BG’s reputation took a nose dive for me when I saw how many BG players were willing to do this. The number is BY FAR larger than on any other server we have played so far.

And yes, BG players can do something against this. You can tell players on your forums to stop the abuse, tell them to leave in /map. And you can stop defending these abuses on the forums.

- Xeeron

Steadfast.5827:

I just finally made the connection that the spartans were the first RL exploiters. History naturally refers to them as brilliant tacticians who brutalized and nearly conquered their entire known world.

Got all your history knowledge from 300? Reality check here: The entire known world was much bigger than what the Spartans conquered.

The analogy is as botched as the mechanics you abuse ingame.

- Xeeron

Stenia.9623:

Please guys refrain from any comments about hacks etc its a known issue you don’t need to call people out every minute and get the post closed.

No problem. Just limit all discussion to SBI and JQ then.

- Xeeron

So, in 2 days, I have already seen more exploiting (of unpolished game mechanics) by BG than in the full 2 weeks before that.

You can talk about “not an abuse” all you want BG, at the end of the day, we will all remember that JQ and IoJ are fun and honorable opponents to fight.

And we will remember that BG are not.

Wizzey.7845:

@people talking about the orb being taken at SBI borderlands. I’m not sure why the indicator wasn’t working but the orb carrier was hiding inside the keep for at least 5-10mins before he left for bay. I missed exactly what happened because I died but I did catch the carrier and about 10ish members of his guild swimming through the entrance to bay. wouldn’t be surprised if there were chain portals involved.

in case you were wondering I think it was Thai Alliance that took it

So apparently, after BG broke into the inner gate, in some way the orb bugged such that SBI defenders could not see it anymore. Someone (likely thai alliance) knew that it was bugged for SBI. Unless you know that SBI can not see the orb, hiding in garrison makes no sense at all. They used that knowledge to keep the orb save inside our garrison, and finally moved it to bay.

Quite sad really. Sad that ANet does not get very important game mechanics bug free. Sad that SBI did not get a fair chance to defend the orb. And also sad for all players of BG who worked to break into garrison, and who deserved to have a clean orb raid, instead of the bug use that happened.

- Xeeron

How Storm lost their orb just now:

SBI borderlands, orb in garrison held by SBI. JQ not present on the map, BG pushing hard, breaking into Garrison, via north inner gate. They go for the orb right away, SBI defenders rush to the pit.

So far so usual.

Right after they take the orb, the orb disappears from map. And the orb timer starts ticking. 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes. Meanwhile plenty of fighting inside garrison. We slowly clean up, repair inner, then outer gate. All that time, no orb carrier to be seen inside the garrson. 6 minutes, 7 minutes, 8 minutes. Garrison is almost cleared now. All those 8 minutes, no SBI even ventures south of garrison.

While we all prepare for the orb to reappear at north, it suddenly pops up in BG’s bay.

I am not claiming a hack happened here. BG broke into the inner garrison, so they grabbed the orb fair and square. However, it does not make any sense that the orb took so long to reach bay. I want to hear BG’s side of the story. The orb carrier was not inside garrison fighting, so what was going on? Standing next to Bay altar for 5+ minutes afk? Taking a trip around the unpopulated map with the orb?

So please tell me what happened, so I can convince myself that everything was legit.

- Xeeron

On SBI, we have quite a lot of commanders, ranging from mediocre to excellent (but even a mediocre commander is a lot better than no commander!). Some are offensive minded, some defensive minded, some are great motivators.

The one that stands out in my mind is Jang Gun[WM]:

- He was the first to consistently use a moving defense among the SBI commanders (the only other server I have ever seen use this tactic at the same extent was prime time HoD)
- He excels at flanking and using local concentration of forces
- Among the WM commanders, he is trying the hardest to bridge the language barrier
- I have seen him lead his group against an larger enemy force and win, time and again

but most importantly, running with him is incredible fun. If you start following Jang Gun’s icon, you can be sure that there will not be a minute without fighting.

What a great match! It just keeps getting better. Not only did we have a very even weekend and almost even weekdays, now we will have (for the first time ever!) a tier 1 match that is not decided yet on the last day of the week!

The evening on the IoJ borderlands was incredible. Both bay and green spawn tower flipped hands at least once an hour. We also had JQ attempting a golem rush on garrison (when they did not own anything else), SBI holding the northern towers for short periods of time against huge IoJ masses, fun three-ways in supply camps…

Huge props to the Asian team, which managed to turn this around and cut the distance to JQ in half.

And for once, I am really proud to be in the EU part of SBI: Usually our job is to enter a map owned by the enemy and secure a camp and spawn tower, so the NA team has something to work with, while being hugely outnumbered.

This time, we managed to hold onto almost everything that the Asian part of SBI got. We went down from 450+ to about 350+, but kept all three orbs despite being occasionally outmanned.

So, NA SBI team: You can make it happen! Only 3k more to go till we overtake JQ! Gogo!

- Xeeron

JQ’s days numbered? I would not be too sure of that just yet. The even match this week should have given them a lease on life, since they will have gotten less bandwagoneers than they would have with a 400k-50k-50k result.

However, I am very happy with the position of SBI right now. We really have it golden: Tons of tier 1 matches, lately very competitive, too, but we never got hit by the bandwagon curse … neither the “joining” one, nor the “leaving” one. We might not have the omph to win against the high population server of the day, but the scores are getting closer (while our ques are staying low).

Oh and special props to IoJ: You really proved that you can fight in T1 during this week.

- Xeeron

Funny really. When HoD was dominating, everyone and their mother demanded a JQ-SBI-ET match, because it would be the most even one.

Now we have JQ-SBI-IoJ, and it is the best WvW match since the 1 week matches started.

- Xeeron

Plenty of good recommendations. Nice post.

- Xeeron

Erasculio.2914:

The Outmanned buff need to be completely reworked, beginning with its name. Right now, being seen as Outmanned is almost like having a “Fail!” symbol stamped over your character – the game is telling you that you are likely going to lose, and everyone knows it. The name of the buff and its description need to be changed to something else; just to give an example, it should be called something like “Determined”, and its description should be something like “Never surrender, never retrear”, giving the idea of fighting against the odds, not of being on the losing side.

I like that idea a lot. The stats need to be changed for sure, but something purely “cosmetic” can make a difference, too. The name and description of the buff should induce players to keep on fighting, not induce them to log off…

And changes that are purely cosmetic will definitely not break the game. It is costless to try this.

- Xeeron

Palefire, I agree that the fix should not be knee-jerk. I’d rather have them take that time and come up with a good fix, than a quick and dirty one that makes matters worse.

They should start with small and easy fixes. That is why the orb and outmanned buffs are such an clear first step. Changing these requires almost no programming effort and is easily reversible. They could also address the other issues, but these would take much more time to properly fix.

However, we have seen that WvW is hurting atm. Large amounts of people are not playing for more than half of the week. With HoD one very successful server has already been destroyed (although free server transfers are much to blame here too). JQ is showing worrying signs as well. We simply can not affort to turn many people off of WvW. Maybe they will come back, but maybe they wont. So the sooner matches are made more equal, the better.

- Xeeron

Nokaru.7831:

Hope you guys are enjoying this week’s matchup. Thanks to the power of the auto-matchmaking (AND SCIENCE) we will get a rematch of JQ/SBI/HoD next week!

According to http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA IoJ is only 23 points behind HoD atm, based on current scores. Definitely possible that they will overtake HoD by the end of the week.

- Xeeron

Edewen.8304:

I understand your frustration.

No you don’t. My frustration is with WvW being unbalanced, not with the fact which side of the unequal balance I am on (obviously, being on the losing side is bad, but winning is very boring too). And the score chart proves me right: WvW is unbalanced. There is not a single close match right now.

- Xeeron

Edewen.8304:

Ok. Someone is tired of losing.

Last week, SBI stomped IoJ and BG. We won by a long mile. The week before that, we lost by the same amount. I have seen both the winning and the losing side of this, and I like neither.

- Xeeron

part 2

Mechanics that hurt the underdog

These are more, and unfortunately, more powerful than the above.

*Supply
One of the worst ways the underdog is hit is supply denial. Playing against a stronger enemy zerg, it becomes impossible to ever hold a supply camp. You may hit and run one, but you can not keep it once the enemy brings all their force. This, in turn, means less siege to start attacking their towers and keeps with. Less siege to defend your tower once you get one. And never, never, enough supply to upgrade the first structures you get.

*Upgrades
If you start taking structures on a map that previously belonged fully to the enemy, you face a dilemma: Your newly taken tower or keep is not upgraded at all. Meanwhile, all of the enemies structures are upgraded. If you chose to defend your non-upgraded structure, the enemy can concentrate all his forces against you. He has supply, you don’t. Therefore, equal forces on both sides, you will lose the structure. You can also chose to attack some other structure of the enemy. However, that is upgraded, yours is not. So the enemy zerg can retake your structure faster than you can take something new. You lose your structure and are hit behind by the zerg before you can get something new, taking you back to square 1.

*Orbs
Giving more health to the team already on top is just bad.

*Loss of moral
Probably the worst off all mechanics hurting the underdog. Losing is never fun, but it is especially unfun in WvW when you are the underdog. With no supply, no structures to fall back to, and the enemies having more health (orbs…), playing as the underdog is not some epic defense a la 300. It is a slaughterhouse. With the underdogs in the role of cattle.
It is not fun, and people stop doing it. That way, population inbalances are getting more pronounced. And, since the raw number of players is so hugely important in zerg vs zerg, this means the winner gets stronger, the underdog gets weaker, and even more people leave.

*Siege blueprints
The winner, especially once maps are 100% can easily do jumping puzzles, or farm the grub. Leading to more blueprints, that will make life harder for the underdog. The underdog team needs to spend money to buy blueprints. Since you can not make any seizable amount of money in WvW, the underdog team has to spend more time in PvE farming than the winner. Meaning that the population of underdog players actually in WvW takes another hit.

*Fighting for place 2
There is usually already a huge lead for the winner after 2 days of the weeklong match. Given that place 1 is out of reach, it is tempting for the loser to fight for second (to secure a place in the higher tier). So 2 vs 1 happens, but not against the winner, it happens in favor of the winner.

What are the results of unbalanced WvW?

It is no fun. And since it is no fun, people stop playing. We do not have any recent que data, but I am sure that if they published it, you would find that there are almost no ques anywhere. We are fighting in tier 1, the highest, and HoD never seems to have ques. We ourself almost never have ques (even on the weekend prime time, there is always a map without que).

Another unfortunate result is boredome on the side of the winner. You might remember the last days of the fight against IoJ and BG. A lot of people spend their time running around getting map completion rather than having any actual fights.

Finally, with server transfers still being free, you get bandwagoneers flocking to the top server. And you get dedicated guilds fleeing from the top server in an attempt to balance the unbalanced. HoD already was destroyed by their success. JQ is looking bad, too (check http://www.jadequarry.com/forum/m/6492678/viewthread/4574996-guilds-leaving-jq). We are seriously considering NOT going for No1 spot while transfers are free, just to avoid that fate.

Quo vadis WvW?

Where does this leave us? Personally, I still enjoy WvW. However, it is clear to me now that we are not experiencing some “starting pains”. The unbalanced matches are not due to some servers receiving so much better players, and some servers receiving so much worse. They are due to the mechanics of the game. And there is nothing that the player base can do against it. Even in a matchup of equal servers, one server will have a starting small advantage. And that small advantage gets exaberated by the way the game is set up.

Neither the winning side, nor the losing side of an unbalanced match is much fun. So I hope that Anet starts changing the fundamentals to make balanced matches possible. A very easy first step is to change the orb mechanic. If nothing is changed, games will only be competitive for the first few hours or days, and then be boring for the rest of the week.

- Xeeron

(I wrote this originally for the stormbuffisle forums, but I guess it might be of interest for others, too)

This week, JQ leads by more points than HoD and us have combined. Last week, we lead BG and IoJ by more points than they had combined. The week before it was HoD. Look at just about any tier (http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA) and you see that there seems not to be a single close match right now. And this was the same the week before, and the week before that. In fact, close matches are rare oddities in GW2. Why is that?

WvW is unbalanced
The reason is that WvW is structurally unbalanced. It is not that there is always some server that is much stronger in every tier. However, there is always one server that is a little bit better than the others. This small advantage is multiplied by the way WvW is set up and leads to total domination each and every time.

What is broken is the balance between mechanics that favor the winner, and mechanics that favor the underdog. You want some spoils for the victor (to keep players interested in winning), but you NEED some help for the underdog (or the winner dominates). In WvW right now, the former outweight the latter. That is, on average, the winning team gets stronger, while the losing team gets weaker. Since the winner was already the strongest team, this is a vicious circle.

Mechanics that help the underdog

There are three mechanics that help the underdog in the game at the moment. Outmanned buff, easier sieging on the home map, and 2 vs 1 against the winner. However, only the last one is off any effect, this is what everything depends on.

*Outmanned buff
Theoretically, this buff should induce people on the server to play WvW when we are losing, since the rewards are higher. In practise, doing PvE leads to much higher rewards, so the outmanned buff is not fullfilling its purpose. To the contrary, it is almost a signal of a lost cause that leads to players leaving the map.

*Easier sieging on the home map
When pushed back to your spawn, you can siege the NE and NW tower quite easy from your spawn point, giving some advantage to teams that are pushed back. However, at this point, the losing team is severly starved off supply. And, it is still much to easy for a zerg stationed in garrison to run left and right and retake those towers.

*2 vs 1
This is the big mechanic that ANet must have banked on. If one team pulls ahead, the others team up on it, effectively making it twice as hard for the winner. This still works to some extend on the EB map. However, on all other maps, it is overshadowed by all the disadvantages for the underdog.
Worst of all, losing leads to a loss of players, such that the 1 winning server outnumbers both losing servers combined, breaking the 2 vs 1 mechanic.

Wish I could simply edit the top post, but the video captures it probably better than a ton of pictures. Close to 2 minutes of running along flame rams ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TR9wt99WyEQ#!

- Xeeron