Guild Wars 2

I just finished Frostfang last night… Started actually working on it in November.

I used the GW2 wiki to track my process by creating a page in my User: space.

This is November 9th: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=User:Omniomi/legendary&oldid=713602

December 25th: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=User:Omniomi/legendary&oldid=736888

Done: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/User:Omniomi/legendary

Svetli.4276:

buy or be aware they say

If I may be “that guy” for a moment it’s “buyer beware” or more accurately “let the buyer beware” (latin: caveat emptor).

It is a legal saying based on the information asymmetry between seller and buyer where the seller almost always has more information about the goods or services than the buyer. Hence, the buyer should always be cautious.

There is a flip side “caveat venditor” (let the seller beware) which applies to situations for example at a rummage sale where someone is selling an old family painting and the buyer knows it’s worth significantly more than the asking price.

Raven.9603:

the last thing you should ever do for hackers is stroke their tiny kittens to erection with “open letters” acknowledging them.

I agree in principle but I am seriously concerned for other customers in our VPS farm. My personal web servers have been casualties of DDoS attacks leveled at other customers before and I know how it feels. If this was a server in someone’s basement… whatever but it’s not; the attacks are using 10x our allotted bandwidth which means it’s coming from other customers behind the same stack. It’s not worth it for a game.

I won’t name matchups or servers but you know who you are. Our TS3 server is currently experiencing 14000% more traffic than the monthly average. Any server wide TeamSpeak server in this game is going to be on a VPS or a similar setup. Your attack is affecting other customers in our shared data centre.

I implore you to stop, you’re not just hurting us you’re hurting people who have nothing to do with GuildWars 2.

If you think that DDoSing a TS3 server over a WvW matchup is the way to accomplish your goals please know it is affecting more than just your competition.

Please… This isn’t about our TS3, this is bigger than that.

Visiroth.5914:

Reverence.6915:

Eh, we don’t flip structures for wxp/karma. We flip it because it adds to our PPT.

In the early days of WvW, people would try to defend captured objectives, for PPT. You rarely see that happen now. The invaders just leave and let the other side recap so they can take it again later for more WXP.

What server are you on? We leave scouts in every single objective we own on a map and we defend them unless they’re no longer strategic objectives and our focus is better spent elsewhere. Ie, if we own N Camp on a map that isn’t ours and it gets attacked while we’re busy trying to take a tower we’ll let the camp go but we always defend natural tower(s), natural keep, and natural camp(s).

There also seems to be a confusion about terms in this thread overall. A karma train is an unspoken agreement between servers to run the map in a circle without defense. That is, one server attacks bay while the other hills and both servers move in a circle around the map in the same direction.

When a karma train is running neither server will encounter the other because they should always be on opposite sides of the map. Karma trains generally occur in the higher tiers on Fridays when the match is decided already and there is no way 3rd place could over take 2nd and no way 2nd could overtake 1st. (Note: there are lots of commanders. guilds, and players who hate the karma train even when the match is decided and work to kill it.) The zerg meta is not “karma training;” the karma train is the WvW version of the champion train.

Friendly: My vote goes to [JINX] on Blackgate. Those guys despite their relative small size are a formidable force, are hands down the best map partner any guild could ask for, and are all around an amazing group of people. I hold the utmost respect for JINX and knowing they are on a map with us is always a boost.

That said, I respect all of the guilds I have encountered on our server and there is not a single guild I can think of that I would be down for being paired with.

Ferris Bewler.9706:

2: Thank you omniomi.7351 for putting JINX on P1 news,,, were such a quiet guild we arent used to any attention. Its kinda nice..lol

Mad respect for JINX, you are my favourite guild to share a map with.

Have No Faith In Me.1840:

BG and JQ:

Why do your guilds always blob around in 80 man tri-guild+pugs blobs?

Plzrespond.

“Always” is an unfair characterization of the BG structure on a given borderland.

To give you an idea of JQBL for the 3-4 hours I was able to play last night:

- ICoa was running one group
- GoF was running another
- JINX was running a third untagged
- There were scouts where they needed to be

Each group runs in their own TeamSpeak channel but leveraging the TS3 “Channel Commander” feature the commanders between groups are able to coordinate so when it comes to a keep defense or offense the multiple groups are able to come together.

You see the so called “map blob” when it is needed but there is seldom a single zerg on the map at least in NA prime which is where my experience is, there is simply good coordination between the smaller zergs.

Now, that said, the GoF zerg did dwindle at one point with a huge number of members in queue while others were departing for the night so it did merge with ICoa first under ICoa command and later GoF command but the merged group was still one of a few on the map including JINX that was still running at the time.

A single map zerg is far less effective overall than multiple decently sized forces that can hit more than one objective at once. What is important is communication between the forces so that when necessary they can be brought together.

Most people are running Bowl of Lemongrass Poultry Soup:

-40% condition duration
+70 Vitality
+10 Experience from kills.

While our condition built players run Rare Veggie Pizza:

+40% condition duration
+70 Condition Damage
+10 Experience from kills

which is the opposite of the Lemongrass.

As a guild we take donations of all of the ingredients for both and make pots/trays that are dropped regularly. We encourage our members to go hit the 5-6 potential lemongrass nodes while waiting in queue for example and deposit them in the bank at which point someone with the recipes makes the pots.

KeeZee.7312:

Exactly, BG already had beat SoR 6 out of ther last 7 matches together and still proceeded to add another guild to stack even further.

Fair enough and I don’t disagree but the start of the swing from an SoR victory to a BG victory last week happened during NA primetime when BG and SoR are pretty evenly matched. Outside of the NA timezone BG also recently lost a number of large guilds, with ZD Blackgate is at or even below previous extra-na coverage levels.

Tier 1 fluctuates a lot. Guilds come and go, fair weather players surge and recede, and the politics and game meta are constantly evolving. For SoR to blame their loss on any one factor is disingenuous at best.

Any shoe you try to put on one Tier 1 server will fit on the other two it’s how we all became Tier 1. When a server loses they need to own up to it, identify the real problem, and fix it. Creating a scapegoat helps no one.

If you read the match-up threads going back to when BG first started to consistently place in Tier 1 SoR forum patrollers have always had it out for BG; they dislike BG passionately and it’s not surprising they would look to place blame on BG and not themselves.

Hobbitz.5831:

I’ll do you one better, I’ll describe the situation.

SoR dominated BG through the first 3 days of its match up last week. Sunday night going into Monday morning Blackgate paid a Russian guild an extremely large sum of gold to transfer to their server just for the league. The guild has already stated that they have no intentions of staying on BG and are only be paid to help them win league. As SoR has no players in their particular time slot (9aPST/12pEST) the guild continues to flip all borderlands uncontested.

Now SoR players are quitting the game left and right. The league was viewed as the savior of WvW for a large section of the base but now that one server has gone to the extreme to literally ‘pay-to-win’ a lot of the player base has lost faith in leagues and ArenaNet.

The most offensive part of this propaganda is it’s a giant middle-finger to the BG guilds who converted your entire BL to paper and swung the match in BG’s favour BEFORE ZD transferred. It’s absolute nonsense that a single guild tipped the balance and everyone knows it.

Caroline.4987:

It’s not that we’re not trying to 2v1. >_> We’re usually just not organized enough to do it, and especially to do it consistently. =P

Last night BG was hitting bay relentlessly on TCBL I think (maybe it was SoRBL, I don’t remember) which was owned by SoR and T3 with a waypoint. A TC zerg was standing around on the cliffs watching and killing BG players as they ran back and doing nothing else. When a server has a waypoint in the middle of the map it is in the best interest of both of the other servers to get rid of it. It doesn’t matter who takes the keep or even if they hold it, it’s about getting rid of the waypoint.

The “not organised enough to do it” wouldn’t have mattered much in that example… stop killing the BG players who are trying to get rid of the waypoint and kill the SoR players who are running back instead if you don’t want to come down to inner and directly 2v1 them… at one point TC even trebbed BGs siege at inner helping SoR and hurting yourselves by helping them keep their WP.

There are a few videos from last week floating around where JQ was working to get rid of an SoR waypoint and BG was sitting on the waypoint to make sure SoR couldn’t get back in during the fight… does it feel dirty working with the enemy? Absolutely, but it’s necessary sometimes. There’s no actual cross-server communication or planning in these instances it’s simply understood by all parties that at all costs the waypoint needs to go. It’s map politics.

UnrepentantProcrastinator.7420:

Do these 30 min+ queues actually exist, or is it another case of people not being able to count, like the 20 man blobs? Because not since HoD at launch has queue exceeded half an hour, even on weekends…

I was in queue today from when we finished guild missions at ~4pm until I gave up and logged off at ~7:45. By my count that’s 3 hours and 45 minutes. A number of my guildies were queued for less than 30 minutes (while I was still waiting) and some were waiting with me the entire time. The queues are entirely arbitrary and yes, they really are over 30 min for lots of people.

We’ve been trying. We run a 1000 client TeamSpeak server and have plenty of room for the new players however right now on Green BL there are a grand total of 4 people on TeamSpeak not in established WvW guilds.

We post regular map chat messages with the connection info, how to get verified, and the benefits of TS3 including the fact you’ll get most of the achievement points faster by following a commander. Last night I was in charge of posting the message on the BL I was on and after posting it ~10 times over the course of a few hours do you know how many people contacted me for verification or joined the room not from one of the guilds that was in there? Zero.

We can only do so much through map chat not only because it requires someone to stop and type in the middle of a fight and requires people to read it but also because we need to be cautious of spies and tag watchers.

Someone above also mentioned not getting worked up about the jump puzzles but when you run by them and see 25 people just standing around in the JP not even doing it and taking up precious queue space it’s frustrating because you know you have 40 guildies in queue.

BG TS3 Sys Admin chiming in here…

Ayusaki.6739:

The resource is available to everyone, free. You can host it on your home computer if you so choose to. We decided it’d be best to host ours on a VPS, and yes, that does mean we had to pay for it. This was one of the options open to us. The fact remains, the option is there for someone willing to set it up for others to use, free of cost. I do not think this is a valid excuse at all.

You’d be hard pressed to find a residential internet connection capable of running our TS3 server. I am not talking about monthly upload caps here either I am talking about the Mbit/s upload transfer speed; your average home internet connection has an upload speed of 5.86 Mbps and although services like FiOS go higher even their 20 Mbps upload package is $144.95/mo w/o phone service and that would not be enough. A VPS or co/lo is really the only way to do a TS3 server on the scale that we do.

The math is:

DOWN: people_speaking_atm * selected_codec
UP: people_speaking_atm * (people_in_channel – 1) * selected_codec

So in a WvW channel with say 70 people on reset night you’re looking at

1 * (70-1) * the codec speed

and then that times the number of active channels. We also use codecs that range from 6KB/s to 10KB/s depending on the channel (per listener).

Ayusaki.6739:

http://npl.teamspeakusa.com/ts3npl.php

“Non-Profit License registration is for NON-PROFIT entities who wish to increase their TeamSpeak 3 Server’s capacity to allow a maximum of 10 virtual servers and 512 slots. Non-profit entities include but are not limited to organizations such as online gaming clans, guilds, or friends and family who utilize TeamSpeak software in a manner in which profit or gain of any kind is NOT intended. "

I have recollection of us trying to get an NPL and having to pay for it anyway but my memory is shaky. I just set it up, it wasn’t my credit card.

Looks like the top to bottom priority of commander tags, party dots, and player dots was reversed. The green dots are covering my party members and the commander tag.

Fair point, I am going to completely rip out the caching though and use the caching built into Joomla/JAT3. That way I can add a LifeTime variable to the module config page which if unset will use the Joomla global lifetime and so that if necessary people can disable caching on the fly.

Once I’m done people should be able to install the tar-ball and do all the config from Extensions -> Modules.

Here’s a screenshot of the module.

I used the SDK to create a simple Joomla module.

mod_wvwscores.php

<?php
/**
* WvW Scores Modules
*
* @version              $Id: mod_wvwscores.php 172 2013-05-23 01:44:00Z omniomi $
* @license              GNU/GPL - http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
*/

// No direct access
defined('_JEXEC') or die;

// Required
require (dirname(__FILE__).'/src/vesu/SDK/Gw2/Gw2SDK.php');
require (dirname(__FILE__) .'/src/vesu/SDK/Gw2/Gw2Exception.php');
use \vesu\SDK\Gw2\Gw2SDK;
use \vesu\SDK\Gw2\TwitchException;

$gw2 = new Gw2SDK(dirname(__FILE__).'/cache');

$matches = $gw2->getMatchByWorldId(1019);

foreach($matches as $match):
    // This grabs just the scores from the match details
    $scores = $gw2->getScoresByMatchId($match->wvw_match_id);

?>

<div class="wvw_match">
    <div class="server red" style="color: #b80202;font-weight: bold;"><?php echo $gw2->parseWorldName($match->red_world_id) ?>: <span style="color: #fff;font-weight: normal;"><?php echo number_format($scores[0]); ?></span></div>
    <div class="server blue" style="color: #3d63d1;font-weight: bold;"><?php echo $gw2->parseWorldName($match->blue_world_id) ?>: <span style="color: #fff;font-weight: normal;"><?php echo number_format($scores[1]); ?></span></div>
    <div class="server green" style="color: green;font-weight: bold;"><?php echo $gw2->parseWorldName($match->green_world_id) ?>: <span style="color: #fff;font-weight: normal;"><?php echo number_format($scores[2]); ?></span></div>
</div>

<?php
endforeach;

// END

?>

mod_wvwscores.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<install type="module" version="1.0.0">
   <!-- Name of the Module -->
        <name>WvW Scores</name>

    <!-- Name of the Author -->
        <author>omniomi with SDK by Sorrow.7384</author>

    <!-- Version Date of the Module -->
        <creationDate>2013-05-23</creationDate>

    <!-- Copyright information -->
        <copyright>None</copyright>

    <!-- License Information -->
        <license>GPL 2.0</license>

    <!-- Author's email address -->
        <authorEmail>REDACTED</authorEmail>

    <!-- Author's website -->
        <authorUrl>http://www.REDACTED.com</authorUrl>

    <!-- Module version number -->
        <version>1.0.0</version>

    <!-- Description of what the module does -->
        <description>Provides WvW Scores</description>

    <!-- Listing of all files that should be installed for the module to function -->
        <files>
        <!-- The "module" attribute signifies that this is the main controller file -->
                <folder>src</folder>
                <folder>cache</folder>
                <filename module="mod_wvwscores">mod_wvwscores.php</filename>
                <filename>index.htm</filename>
        </files>

    <!-- Optional parameters -->
        <params />
</install>

The src file from the git repo is included in the mod_wvwscores folder and the structure is untouched. The only change I made was the cache time down to 10 minutes.

When I have a bit more time I will integrate joomla caching and make the server ID an option on the module page; for now it’s hard coded in mod_wvwscores.php.

WvW completion is easy if you actually play WvW which is the point. Even a losing server will take the tower you need the POI from a bunch of times during a week it’s the not holding those locations that makes the server lose. If you actually follow a group around a map for a whole night you’ll probably at least break in to most of the locations you need at least once.

The Vista in East Keep (Hills) is outside the inner wall all you need to do is get into the court yard to get it for example… You just need to actually be there when the wall is breached and it’s easy to get.

I think a lot of the complaining about WvW completion comes from people who never do WvW, they pop in for 5 minutes, check all the maps, see they don’t own the places they need and then leave…. Set a day for each BL and follow a commander on the BL and actually do WvW and you’ll likely get most of the POIs/vistas. That’s why they exist, to encourage you to play… not just to hope you own everything when you log in.

I have 4/5 daily categories completed and when I complete my mystic forge daily item my client crashes and my inventory reverts to before I started using the forge. I tried in Lions Arch and our WvW Bl.

Why not work with larger guilds? Not an alliance but temporary cooperation.

Most if not all of the high tier servers have community TeamSpeak where you should be able to meet commanders from the larger guilds and organize a night where you work with them and split the command.

Personally when my guild is not running as a group I dislike following commanders from other guilds unless they’re on the community TeamSpeak. Everyone is so afraid of spies that no one uses map chat and I am mindlessly following a blue dot on the map because they are communicating nothing about their objectives unless we’re on VOIP of some kind.

Even on a reset night you’re the perfect number to be an effective response team… If you put yourself in communication with other commanders you could be out responding to emergencies and so on and call for reinforcements from the other commanders if necissary… Let’s say you flip a supply camp and a zerg is incoming, call out for 10 more people and now your 10 is 20.

It can suck a lot less for small guilds that are in communication with the bigger ones and I don’t mean following their orders, I mean working with them… You may even get to a point that when the bigger guild has no commanders available their members will follow you.

Kerithlan.1659:

Did all four of your participants attempt to join the same map, or were they joining separate maps? Did profession seem to have any bearing on speed in your extended data pools?

What about latency or distance from server in terms of real-world location? Wireless internet versus wired internet? Connection speed?

What color were they this week (red? blue? green?)? Is the server they represent winning or losing when they queue, and does this seem to be a factor?

- All were trying to join the same map (did not queue for any other maps either).
- Not sure about profession data but I can find out.
- Latency / Distance : all US players, one Canadian player (actually got in the fastest).
- Connection speed/Method: Again, would need to find out.
- We’re the green server this week and we’re winning in points so far.

I suppose there could be a number of moving target factors for queue times… It would seem unfair though.

One interesting data point but I doubt it was related:

- The person who got in the fastest was the highest ranked member in the guild (Lt), the rest were all members though.

PariahX.6970:

The whole queue system being screwed up and a game-able crap shoot has been known about for quite sometime. Your observances were rather common during the first month after release and there are a bunch of old threads you could sift through if you wanted to add to the data set.

My bad… I’ll do some forum searches.

VoxShatterfall.5470:

I think we need more research than this to make a good conclusion as to whether not Ques are FqFi or LqFi

The que times are rather annoying in the grand scheme of things especially for prime time WvW

I agree, this is just a small example of the 5 minute person getting in before the 50 minute person and the other 2 as well… I have a larger data set… Just not going to type out for the 20+ members who were in queue tonight… I can tell you though some were seeing >35 minutes while some were seeing ~15 quite randomly…. As soon as someone would tell me they popped at ~12 minutes and I’d relay it to TS a bunch would pipe up that they’d been waiting over 20-30…

It’s hard to come up with an average, or to reassure those waiting when the order seems random… Also hard to tell if we should be getting people to requeue or not… could pop at any second, is it really worth resetting your timer? But what if you’re the 50+ minute guy?

Our guild runs a red team and a blue team during Friday reset and I track how many people each team has… Part of that is tracking who’s in queue and for how long. I have come to the conclusion over a number of weeks that the queues are completely arbitrary.

Now, I am not talking about the amount of time as I realize someone needs to leave to get someone in so the time will not be consistent; I am talking about the order.

One data set from tonight:

Four people queued up…

Queue order:

1: Queued from Lions Arch (not over flow) using the “b” WvW menu.
2: Queued from Bloodtide using “b” WvW menu.
3: Queued from Lions Arch using “b” WvW menu.
4: Queued from outside Lions Arch using “b” WvW menu.

Order in which they got into the map:

4: 3-5 minutes
1: 50 minutes
3: 30 minutes
2: requeued at that point (35 minutes) and they got in after less than 5.

All four individuals were level 80. There is nothing about the location they queued from or their level that explains why the order happened this way.

This is just a small sub-section of my data points from tonight and the last few weeks.

ANet: Is the queue first-in first-out or not? Is it supposed to be?

EDIT: corrected an error from my notes.

I think a number of people are missing a key point: All teams have access to mesmers if they so choose. If an opposing server ensures they have a mesmer who knows how to do a portal bomb and can coordinate a stack to pull it off, your server can do the same.

This is not some class vs class issue where one can seriously destroy the other and the weaker class has no recourse. This is server vs server and both servers have access to the same strategies; whether or not those servers take the time to perfect those strategies is up to them.

Portal bombs difficult to defend against? Then use them as an offensive strategy against your enemy. If the enemy has guns and you have sticks do you ban guns and force everyone to have sticks? No, you go get yourself some guns.

If it works offensively for them, it will work offensively for you and if you’re stuck in a position where you’re always in defensive mode then sorry but it’s a simple L2P, move to another BL and get on the offensive.

Something is only an advantage that needs to be nerfed if the advantage cannot be leveraged by everyone.