So with the influx of tournaments, and the expanding esports scene. Shawn and I have been approached numerous times by players simply looking for teams. SOAC Gaming has a team that is practicing and putting together it’s final roster for upcoming tournaments. The GW2 reddit guys have a guild for strategy talking and build discussions.
So sittingonacouch.com and reddit.com/gw2esports subreddit is proud to introduce the GW2Esports – Practice Squad [LFG] for NA and EU players.
Practice Squad will be a rank that is designed to help players find teams, learn about comps, and scrim against teams that need practice. You will be playing against actual teams such as AIM, SOAC, ZZZZ, and so on. You will also be playing against each other. This will increase your exposure and give you and your team an idea as to how to work together.
Teams will be put together based on basic composition choices decided by Android aka Shawnbuell and the Academy of the Mists group and based on available practice schedule. Practice Squad members are required to rep the team during their practice times and be present or give prior notice to their team captain. Gw2esports[LFG] is not a guild per say nor is it going to sign you up for tournaments. It is simply a way to funnel players into teams and to get teams someone to regularly practice against. If you don’t currently have a team chances are your next team won’t be ready for the next tournament so until you get a regular team participating in practice squad against other teams and other practice squad members is a great way to potentially find a team and learn how tournaments work.
If a team plays together and really gets along and wants to split off to form their own guild than all we ask is that one member at least remains in Gw2esports and helps us with setting up teams with other players.
If you are an experienced player with a current team, but would like to help please let me know.
If you would like to be on the Gw2esports – Practice Squad please sign up with in the following manner.
IGN:
Main Profession:
Alternate Professions:
Account name:
Practice Availablity: Day, times, time Zone
Current PvP rank (Not Leaderboard):
Level of Desire: example (Active Tournament Play, Casual Play, Leaderboard hogs)
NA or EU:
Please post any questions you might have.
(edited by Bas.7406)
I will create a post with it, but we will need regular play times, and so on listed.
I am pondering if we should just start a Practice Squad Guild [LFG] and put teams together on that group based on available practice times than set them up to scrim with teams then if they want to play together they can form their own guild and we continue from there!
I rank flow because no one clicks better haha! :P
Great work as always Ysiki, let me know if I missed anyone’s videos in the playlist. BTW, everyone is posting for flow to stop clicking!!!
@ bas/bhawb, why no stream?
I’m not sure what you mean? SOAC has a stream (they were on last night). Unless you mean us personally streaming, which I’ve been looking into, but it might be a bit sad since I am far from a great player :P
The stream was not on the SOACGaming channel which I think was what he was asking about. The stream was on silven’s individual channel. The team doesn’t want us to main stream it until they feel comfortable ;p.
If you get nauseous from the follow cam, try using free-cam. This allows you to disconnect the camera from your targets facing direction by using left-mouse.
Except we are limited to what the shoutcaster uses, and I don’t think anyone knew you were able to do this as a spectator.
Is there a guide to setting up, resetting, and camera options for the Arena? If there isn’t than that should be something to look into.
Ive had enough for now and im playing an engi, its just so much better, the cond dmg, the cc, the control, THE CONFUSION lovely lovely.kittenthiefs.
I really hope that now gw2 is getting into esports anet is FORCED to actually look at this class and buff it where its needed instead of random buffs that only a small population of necros care about.Also @ thealimightyaltroll why are you arguing points about the necro being bad when its blatantly obvious they are bad since no team is using them.
@ bas/bhawb, why no stream?
I haven’t been able to get any of the top teams to reply yet, but we are working on it. BTW, I was just informed by our team captain, that we will be running Necromancer haha. However, he does require someone to watch and protect him when pressure comes.
We actually had a bunch of scrim games yesterday with a team with a ranger and Engineer, and once our guys started protecting the Necro a bit more the team got better and better.
Welcome to the 2nd episode of the Ranger podcast, Arrow to the knee.
In this episode, Chopps joins us for a discussion about the Ranger and it’s performance in dungeon type play. We start out by adressins general considerations for dungeons overall. We had planned on focusing all the dungeons currently in existence, but since we dished out so much specific information and strategy on how to play your Ranger, that an hour was simply not enough. In the future, we will endevour to talk about the remaining dungeons we did not cover on this episode. We did talk about Ascalonian Catacombs, Caudecus Manor and Twilight Arbor, mainly. Chopps also shared with us the secret behind pet swapping in Lupicus (The Ruined City of Arah) to avoid grub spawns on your pets.
We hope you will enjoy this episode and also benefit from it.
Next week we’ll have Xsorus on for a discussion about the Ranger’s performance in WvWvW type content and we will also be discussing the Beastmaster build.
http://sittingonacouch.com/guild-wars-2-ranger-podcast-arrow-to-the-knee-episode-2/
SOACGaming is going to try and be there! Oh and frozire!! I heard you were looking for me, and I sent you to shawn haha!
So many new names and people making it hard to remember who is who! But indeed I was! Will catch you tomorrow a little late now!
just realized this is EU and so I can’t be there haha
SOACGaming is going to try and be there! Oh and frozire!! I heard you were looking for me, and I sent you to shawn haha!
Alright.
I think that- with your and SOAC’s permission- we could combine what teams we have already set up (I know that Mighty already has some people down for him) with whatever you guys may have pulled as of now.
I’m just loving this idea more and more.
EDIT: also, Mighty and I discussed that these teams could function as a sort of Minor League, with the top-tier, high-level teams being the Major League of a sorts. I think that using this as a transition between casual play and professional play would be a really neat idea.
I like your ideas, and I respect your attempt to do this on a bigger level. I will not blackball or work against you guys in your attempt to mimic our tournament. However, there are certain attitudes required to do what we do and work with SOAC, and unfortunately there are certain players if they were included half if not all of my players would immediately walk out. They have no interest in playing or working together with certain players.
This is the unfortunate side effect of having a very caustic and abusive attitude toward players you disagree with. It’s a hard lesson many of us have to learn over time. I am all for you continuing to grow your idea. We are going to keep doing things our way. We have the coaches, and will separate the tournament into two brackets 30 and up rank, and below 30 rank to better help new players.
None of our coaches want to do this as anything more than a fun enjoyable way to pass the time between competitive tournaments. This is simply a gimmick tournament where people can come represent their class. I respect you Ag, and respect Altroll’s work with Myrmidian on their other project, and the sheer volume of help that altroll has done on the Necromancer side, but bridges burned cannot be repaired as easily as me saying, “Can’t we all just get along?”
What is wrong with that? They are meant to be the highest damage dealers. The best teams that work well together will use a necromancer well and it will obliterate the other team. This game is about balance. If they are going to be the highest damage dealers than they also have to have a drawback. What is that drawback? Lack of evades, stun blocks, and the like. This makes them balanced. If they had the blocking abilities other classes had, people would be crying OP necro OP necro.
Except they aren’t the Highest damage dealers, they are the highest amount of individual conditions. They are not a condition damage class or a high damage class. They are a condition management class. Chill/Blind/Cripple/bleed/Posion and reapplying them all with easy, but they are far from the highest damage class. The reason they are scary when left alone, is because you could end up with an entire team chilled, crippled, poisoned, burning and bleeding.
The drawback is greater than the benefits currently. They can’t escape a fight, they can’t disengage, and with extend cast times and easily spotted animations they are easy to control.
For the 10th time, as someone stated before, I understand the matchups, the Round Robin style tournament would eliminate that problem. Granted it would take much longer to find the grand champion.
Round Robin will still lead to the same issues. Some classes hard counter others.
With the recent influx of tournaments, I would like to get a running list of active tournament teams in order to be able to get some of them in for podcast guests and to do matchups against the new SOAC team. If you have a current Tournament Team that you are on and or are representing please post in the following manner so we can keep track of everyone.
Team Name: SOACGaming (SOAC)
Players: Silven, Zombify, Voz, Nettles, Jsu
Website: coming soon
Stream or Youtube: http://www.twitch.tv/soacgaming, http://www.youtube.com/user/SOACGaming
[b]NA or EU:[b] NA
We are looking for an EU team to promote.
Current NA Teams
SOACGaming (SOAC) - Silven, Zombify, Nettles, Voz, Jsu: http://www.twitch.tv/soacgaming, http://www.youtube.com/user/SOACGaming
Current EU Teams
(edited by Bas.7406)
Why don’t you put the tournament teams on But of Corpse podcast and ask them why they don’t take Necros?
That’s a great idea. I can tell you right now, that on the SOAC Touranment team there is no Necromancer.
For every reason Kravick said, plus here is a list and it’s by Zombify though he doesn’t know I am putting this here and he told me this a month ago.
1). Lack of Mobility in a highly mobile fight
2). Lack of Stability for stomps unless specced into our second worst trait tree.
3). Lack of boon access and a horribly healing ratio making them pointless bunkers.
4). Engineers have better condition damage, and better CC with stuns, and dazes and confusion.
5). Fear is the worst possible CC currently because it has a really short uptime and a really long downtime.
6). Every class carries two condition removals at least including aoe (Guardians and Ele’s have a ton). Which means you may get a fear off, but a shout will clear it.
7). Zero ability to burst
8). No ability to disengage and brake off (the only class who can do this)
9). Death Shroud while amazing is completely inadequate to handle Burst as it takes a long time to build up and a second to be gone. You can’t be healed in it, and you can be knocked out of it by any knockdown and ele’s, mesmer’s, guardians, and Warriors all carry knockdowns.
10) They have to be baby sat constantly by at least one class with a knockdown which means one of your roamers can’t roam.
I love the Necromancer, but these reasons are huge in the ability to live through a fight. The reason the Necromancer rolled to the semifinals in the second tournament is because they faced the Guardian (they hard counter them), and Rangers (no ability to consisitantly chain knockdowns). They got demolished by Mesmers – too much pure burst to destroy Ds, and too much condition cleanse to kill damage.
It’s only after working on these different podcasts and listening to other classes that I realized while the Necromancer has more viable builds than anyone else. It’s deficiencies are so big that there is no build that cover up our lack of mobility. Since the one tree that could Blood magic doesn’t scale well.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Necromancer, and find it to be my favorite class, and proper use of Death Shroud is amazing, but in a high end tournament where thieves, ele’s, and mesmer’s are gunning from you from the get go, death shroud is extremely underwhelming, and so your team instead of focusing on point control is focusing on keeping you alive.
(edited by Bas.7406)
Ranger is the best SPVP class atm par none.
Go on the Warrior forums and tell them they are balanced in PvP.. LoL
Because of that massive AoE damage right?
A team of 5 rangers all running the allegedly OP BM would get stomped in any fight greater than a 2 v 2 because of enemy AoE.
This, and in the current state of tpvp, stability, reflection and vigor are huge. This means that there are only two classes below all the others.
1). Warriors
2). NecromancersEvery other class is pretty fairly strong even if in the case of Engineers limited to one build.
Unfortunately with no ability to escape and the inability to handle Hard Control both the Warrior and the necromancer can get manhandled and are one of the main reasons we saw so few of them in the last Tournament. Warriors and Necromancer require constant babysitting.
Actually, I completely disagree. I played with a team that had two necromancers, a mesmer, a thief, and elementalist. We completely destroyed the other team every single game. No one could kill the necromancers holding the points with their minionmancer builds. Our thieve, mesmer, and ele would kill the second person fighting them. It was an easy game most of the time. The necro could sit on a point and fight 1 person and kill them easy. In addition, he could also fight 3 people for awhile before getting killed. Necros are in a great place and this was before the update.
GZ, you play’d vs some noobs – atm necro even in MM/bunker builds are very bad. It’s like random buff, you never know will your minion do what he has to do or is he going to sit there like a mini pet. With all my love to Necro class, it is still too weak and only few players are managing to play it effectivly [still not so effective ,as you take other class]. Yes they can easily take bunkers down, but thats pretty much it.
-no escape mechanics
-hard buffs (mostly over DS)
-DS skill bug’d
-Corruption Boon and Epidemic are bug’d after last patch
-the worst mobility
-etcSo we played noobs for 10 games in a row? I agree they need work, but they really aren’t as bad as people think they are.
Necro’s aren’t bad. They are extremely powerful, but they provide the least amount of utility as abunker, and with limited to zero access to stability they can be easily controlled. They are amazingly strong in damage, and have more versatility than any other class, but they have zero mobility and so require a babysitter to help keep them up and effective.
Ranger is the best SPVP class atm par none.
Go on the Warrior forums and tell them they are balanced in PvP.. LoL
Because of that massive AoE damage right?
A team of 5 rangers all running the allegedly OP BM would get stomped in any fight greater than a 2 v 2 because of enemy AoE.
This, and in the current state of tpvp, stability, reflection and vigor are huge. This means that there are only two classes below all the others.
1). Warriors
2). Necromancers
Every other class is pretty fairly strong even if in the case of Engineers limited to one build.
Unfortunately with no ability to escape and the inability to handle Hard Control both the Warrior and the necromancer can get manhandled and are one of the main reasons we saw so few of them in the last Tournament. Warriors and Necromancer require constant babysitting.
Haha, steppen we just sent a list to Anet that compiled the issues we had during the SOAC Tournament, and the reset issue, forced map change, and password disappearing were all on that list :P.
Better link to youtube channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/SOACGaming ;p
The audio to video uploads are really alot of work. We may do audio only podcasting, and use the youtube channel to upload the tournaments, streams, and other live stream podcast events.
I just wanted to say this was a lot of fun with del onasi.
It was a lot of fun being on! I didn’t really know what we would talk about for an hour, but as you mentioned in last week’s podcast, it really flies by faster than you expect.
P.S. The episode isn’t showing up on itunes yet (not that it’s a big deal, this is probably the one BoC podcast I won’t listen through the whole way; hearing yourself talk is weird).
Haha, I found it quite odd the first few times, but now I do it like a hmmm, what did I say wrong type of listen haha!
I know that this isn’t entirely on topic, but since you’re talking tourney ideas… something I think could be a repeating deal is the idea that we bounced around of a draft tourney of “amateur” players (with a strict rank cap) coached by higher ranked players.
That would give a lot of newer people exposure to a tourney scene without getting crushed by premades, and might inspire some new teams to form up and practice. They would get coaching, and every team would have a varied class comp.
I will talk with you later about this on skype if you want. I was talking with Pyro and Zoose about something like this last week, but not quite to the same level.
^ Diversity of play styles isn’t in question, it has to be reactionary. You don’t get to be competitive without being essentially competitive, watching your opponents and building around what they normally run is a great way to get ahead. I’m not talking about a ladder, I’m talking about a player-run competitive scene. Arena net isn’t going to hand you a great system on a platter, they have to see the profit before they’ll do anything. Creating a system through the community will get you there a lot faster, and will mean more to the viewers than having nothing. You guys are talking about solo queuing pvp and I’m talking about a legit community based league system. Two completely different things.
It’s getting there. The initial problems are two fold, but there are steps being taken by several bases that will benefit the game.
1). Arenanet mistakenly stated they were going to be an Esports game, but did not have the tools in place to be one on release. This infuriated a large portion of the competitive NA scene. Months later we have leaderboards, but they are in such a state, no one cares about them. This leads to custom arenas, and spectator mode which just launched.
2). Custom Arenas are still in beta, they are buggy, have weird camera angles, and the camera is quite touchy for the shoutcasters. This can lead to weird gameplay footage.
3). Because Grouch for the longest time was alone in his fight to keep the esports conversation alive most of the NA community delved into solo queuers who began to bicker like little school girls amongst themselves. I have a lot of good friends in the tournament scene, and if any of them disagree on this I will smack them. It’s like dealing with grade school girls trying to form a team. It’s ridiculous some of the petty little squabbles that go on.
So what can we do to fix it.
1). The SOAC Profession Touranment and king of the custom Beta shows there is a desire for esports.
2). We need practice for the shoutcasters, and more highly organized tournaments. This scrim when you want and get me the record of the game won’t work if you want things to work. Your point about bad shoutcasting is ridiculous at this point. GW2 just got spectating, how do you expect people to figure everything out already. Please leave the shoutcasters alone for a few months.
3). We need to stop having every tom, richard, and harry creating tournaments. There are so many people trying to create tournaments that it will splinter the very small community. We are all trying to get a piece of the pie when the pie hasn’t been made yet. We need to get together and work together.
SOACGaming has no interest in dividing the community. It’s why we are in constant contact with Grouch, Blu, towerdivetv, and Arenanet about what we are doing, and to make sure that we aren’t battling with each other, but rather working together. We have offered to host weekday fun tournaments to help shoutcasters. We are working with Grouch on the Esports scene. We are working with Blu, Android, and towerdive.tv on helping shoutcasters get the experience needed.
This is our goal. If we work together it can happen. If we don’t, than it will fail.
Nothing was mentioned of you having one! Besides, what more is there to hear you talk about that we haven’t already talked about before? :P
I’m scheduled for later this month. And… I don’t know. Maybe… something. >>; I mostly just get on your case for being squishy in WvW, haha.
I actually changed my spec this morning, along with a few other things and I think I min/maxed a bit better than before. Gained a bunch of health but lost a bit of damage, so we will have to test it later. And just no picking on me during your podcast! You know I have my uses!!
We are working on getting everyone in at one time or another to talk about the various aspects of Guardian play. While tournaments may not be your thing, that doesn’t mean there isn’t amazing information in the podcast that we can glean.
Our first audio only podcast will go live this Friday! We are excited and pumped about this Podcast team!
As fun as the SOAC tourney was, I’m not sure how I feel about single profession tourneys being played out over and over.
They can’t really ever be anything more than for fun. There are inherent limitations to single profession teams where they will always be disadvantaged against another. If these get done too often, you will see people start complaining about balance when they shouldn’t. This will happen even if you tell people not to, especially if it’s streamed with lots of viewers.
That, and the novelty will probably wear off as well. One time would probably be fine, but I hope it’s not repeated.
I feel you’re definitely correct in saying how the novelty will only last so long. I’d hope that it’d last long enough to do a higher level Single Profession tournament as it would be a lot of fun. As imbalanced as it would be.
I think a good idea would be to have a once a month or fortnightly SOAC tournament which applies a different constraint to the teams playing. So something like no utilities or no armour. Maybe a fun constraint like that and see how teams cope.
Of course people will probably disagree with me and want more actual tournaments but it is a suggestion!
Haha, we already have shoutcasters setup for an event we are working on that works down that line. Trust me, as soon as I lock down the details we will be working with Blu on doing weekday fun/interesting and gimmicky tournaments. We just need to finish up some details, and figure out some small things before we announce anything.
I think “professional team” matches would not be as fun because glaring profession mechanics would show face and some teams would be at extreme disadvantage.
It’s all about matchups. If Guardians faced Warriors, warriors are done. If Mesmers face Necros, Necro’s are done. If Guardians faced Necros, Guardians are dead. It’s a giant circle. Some classes just hard counter others all things being equal, and facing off in a group setting.
The fun part of the amateur one was that a lot of the new players got to experience the high intensity and scrutiny that comes with being in a tournament.
Haha, yeah, the recent tournament, mother’s day, and spending all day Fri and Sat with the GF (You have to spend time away from the game sometimes).
Here is the way SOACGaming is going to work for future endeavors. We want to help everyone grow as a it will better suit the game as a whole.
1). Any personal videos taken during the events we promote or start are free to upload, we will create a playlist, and place your video on the playlist. This will give both the players a chance to get their name out, and we will have the opportunity for to incorporate a larger pool of viewers.
2). I do all the video editing myself currently, and I am really slow and not very good at it. I am a talker, a planner, and an organizer, but my limited skills with video editing is widely evident in the fact that our production value is subpar. I would love to have a volunteer who is looking to practice producing on our SOAC team, but I feel that the sheer amount of work involved would be a bit much for me to ask someone to do for free.
3) We are looking for an SOAC Rep on the EU side. We have a half dozen different things we are doing, and I can only do so much haha. I know that flow is helping to organize the BoC events, but we have quite a few EU wide projects that we will need help with.
Welcome to Mesmerized, our Mesmer only podcast!
This week our two hosts, Kylia Deprigen and Pyroatheist have no idea what they are doing (what else is new?) and bring you a podcast of whatever comes to mind, with a little help from the official forums Kylia and Pyro manage to address some of the issues plaguing our Mesmer community while coming up with some new ideas for our class.
As always Pyro and Kylia bring you differing thoughts and opinions but ultimately provide you with a podcast that is about and for their favorite class… The Mesmer!
http://sittingonacouch.com/the-gw2-mesmer-podcast-mesmerized-we-dont-know-either/
Just to let you know. SOAC is already doing something like this. I just wasn’t going to announce it until we got the captains in place and their list of teams. It’s fine if you want to do it. Just letting you know that one of the things we actively talked to with the coaches and several of the top NA and EU players about a top Player tournament Handpicked players.
I don’t mind you doing one, just figured you would want to know.
I would say the success of the SOAC Tournament is major props to the casuals who dont play on teams who showed up to take part and play. Yes we did have a few non casual players cough stunning styles cough, but 80 percent of the players who participated were sub rank 30 and on thursday at least 20 percent were players who were sub rank 10. I do believe the Engineers on sat had a rank 5 a rank 7 and a rank 10.
The entire warrior team was made up on thursday with players who either hadnt played a tournament or were simply farming spvp. The Necro team players went from all casual play tournaments when I feel like it to hardcore tpractice for two days, and several of the guys are getting together to practice.
Devilschoice (a guardian) went from a player who had given up on tournament play period to being so excited he is out trying to put together a team. if anyone is looking for a solid guardian, devil would like to try out. Your negativity has done nothing to help anything even the casuals. All whiners like you have done is drive players from the pvp, while several of us are yelling come back its fun! Lets tear it up.
are leaderboards working? No! Is solo queueing even remotely fun at the moment? No! Are tournaments a blast and is GW2pvp on the rise? absolutely, so lets get working on making things work instead of laying on the crowd throwing a fit that it isn’t. Do something proactive? Be positive, Keep MOVING FORWARD! and someday you will look back and say wow I was a part of the beginning of something awesome!
who won the tournament?
awesome!! If it wasnt mother’s day, I would be watching this haha! Congrats on getting this up and running. I look forward to watching the videos!
We at SOACGaming are actually working with the Devs from anet on doing a show like this. We will have our Engineer podcaster ask engineer questions, and then get to follow up. It is coming soon, probably next month once I get my entire list together.
Im quiting aswell. Today on 7 games: 5 where a 4v5, and 2 where i had lvl 1-10 in my team vs premades :/ Cya gw2
See ya later, but you are about to miss the amazing tournaments being held by soac, towerdivetv, and curse! There are some amazing moments coming up!
if you are playing, please come online
Awesome craziness!
So how do we communicate. Is anyone in game practicing? Is the team already formatted?
Talk to Bhawb or Gibbly
Lets do this! 3 and a half hours
Live today in 3 and a half hours! Don’t miss it
3 and a half hours to go. Don’t miss it!
3 and a half hours to go. Don’t miss it
3 and a half hours to go! Come on Mesmers!
3 and a half hours to go. Come Cheer on your team!
3 and a half hours to go come cheer on your Engineers
3 and a half hours to go
so same teams for sat?
We aren’t sure yet. We may have one of the guys from Thursday coach Sat, and some of the guys may not make it. so be ready to jump in!
Thank you to towerdivetv for editing the videos for me. I have the full playlist put up now.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?feature=edit_ok&list=PLu11h1Ww5XJThyddYU5kFIA44XhoDDYR3
Be sure to subscribe to both youtube.com/SOACGaming and youtube.com/towerdivetv
Thank you to towerdivetv for editing the videos for me. I have the full playlist put up now.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?feature=edit_ok&list=PLu11h1Ww5XJThyddYU5kFIA44XhoDDYR3
Be sure to subscribe to both youtube.com/SOACGaming and youtube.com/towerdivetv
Thank you to towerdivetv for editing the videos for me. I have the full playlist put up now.
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?feature=edit_ok&list=PLu11h1Ww5XJThyddYU5kFIA44XhoDDYR3
Be sure to subscribe to both youtube.com/SOACGaming and youtube.com/towerdivetv