Guild Wars 2

Chris.3290:

I see a lot of snark has set in. The natural result of a match where no one did as well as they hoped they would…

Really? I thought this might be a blowout in SoS’ favour. Instead we got quite possibly the most interesting scoreline in NA servers this week – not only is it close, it’s volatile throughout the day so the final outcome is still up for grabs. Seems like an outstanding match.

abiyde.5064:

That might have been me you fought. I lost a 1v1 to a much more skilled engie that night.

We get backup because we don’t want roamers to find our BL entertaining. It’s a lot healthier for our yaks and camps that way.

I actually suggested we just party invite you (if you are the one roamer I am thinking of) and set up some duels since you were clearly looking for fights. But I had to log.

Dueling would have been better for all of us. They are more fun than babysitting yaks. We get practice. The yaks flow unmolested. And you get a steady stream of even fights.

Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for all of the good fun this past week.

Nope – I don’t run an engineer, just mesmer, ranger and guard so far. Was trying out a different setup on a mesmer that night, SEA time.

I don’t care too much about duels – against mainly LB rangers and stealth spec thieves a 2v1 gives me much better practice anyway as I can make all sorts of mistakes against those builds 1v1 and still do fine – the 2v1s are way less forgiving.

Your SEA crew seems to have pre-occupations with certain camps – they were very diligent at defending the camp outside SBI spawn, though they would have been in trouble if it wasn’t just me trying it out, and they were reasonably quick to check north camp. The rest of the map they turned up late if at all.

Not today, for a start. Depends how long their Christmas break is but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this delayed until after New Year.

That’s not just SBI’s thieves like that. I think it’s something about the kind of players the class draws. Yet to see a good one from YB or SoS either.

Actually YB BL was an amusing experience on the night of the 24th – except for one occasion, every YB scout I saw would go run for backup as soon as they saw me. Got plenty of 2/3v1 practice.

Ressing players who died in a minefield is pretty hazardous to your health, even (perhaps especially) when you have a good number of people available to keep the mobs at bay.

Heaven forbid you can’t rush through it solo on zerker gear.

You’ll need reasonable defensive stats, good healing, a speed boost, and a stun break or two. That’s it.

A lot of the time there’s a group event blocking progress where you’ll catch up to, or have to wait for, a group of players to beat it anyway. Don’t need more than about 5 for any of them.

DB SEA presence make this match worth turning up for.

And actually will probably be the reason why DB finishes ahead of BP this match – SBI has too many players over NA primetime but that all changes late night.

We were ticking for more actually.

Usually when someone drops by to spam religious nonsense I don’t expect it to be lore-consistent.

So I’m wondering if that was just the wrong thread.

Kerran has only passable armour – it fits the body, but the design leaves a lot to be desired. And the creature itself is such an abortion it even makes female worgen look good.

gennyt.3428:

LOL hey hey, the Balaur would show up and regulate. Aion isn’t really a good example of many things but a neutral force popping in to cull some of these karma trains would be hilarious.

Might actually be an interesting thing to see in a different variant of WvW.

No, the suspicious bit is 50 bots coming to post exactly the same two words with no other contribution.

I hadn’t noticed any population disparity on green BL, I’d assumed that was just the result of two other servers sending their strongest guilds our way on reset night. Fortunately, there are two other BLs to turn green while they do that.

TC for sure. Oceanic hours don’t usually have queues, and my impression of their server (admittedly the last time I played against them was January) is they’d be a fun place to be.

Well this doesn’t look suspicious at all.

Another Ash ranger. I don’t seem to have a lot of workable screenshots of this one.

Pocachubbz.1928:

SBI why you no come out of your tower to play with us. You only come when your commander comes with his mini zerg against 7 of us and throw a ballista down. It really made us laugh, and when he left you guys ran back in again.. =(

Fighting you there would pretty quickly turn to spawn camping.

Should be closer than the game against FA… maybe? The addition of a few more Koreans on SBI add an unknown to the mix – I haven’t seen them in action yet.

I actually quite enjoy this. Granted, I may be a WvW player anyway, but the way I see it, it adds another tactical element to the mix. You can finish them off – they don’t do much, if any, damage while downed – or you can leave them there while their allies run to res them… meaning you’re not taking damage… and they are.

Wow, I never knew running regen warriors was that hazardous.

Well hello there.

Running in a circle in ruins capping points 50 times is everything I’ve ever wanted out of WvW.

I can’t wait to do the same with the EB merc camps.

Aside from that nonsense though, it’s been alright. Actually had a reasonable match for once which I wasn’t expecting to see in NA silver league. And then came week 2 and +685 ppt…
The extra activity keeps things interesting during peak hour but over the Oceanic-SEA-European timezones it’s as much a mess as ever. The server with the best coverage gets to keep their upgrades, while the other two start from scratch every day.

Yeah… these achievements could actually be a huge problem without enough close matches. We had enough things flipping in the SBI-FA-DB match to finish the capping categories easily (mostly – I’d be surprised if anyone bothered to cap ogres/dredge/hylek 50 times yet) but we’ll be lucky to see Stonemist changing hands more than 5 times with this kind of population disparity.

The Flame Legion are A-grade idiots. Mostly. Leaders seem to know what they’re doing, it just suits them to make sure the rest of the legion doesn’t.

At this point I doubt they’ve got much time left.

Depends on the player. I have seen some very, very good players from FA, just nowhere near as many as the walking bags. But the same goes for SBI as well, and in the end individual players don’t make a significant difference. FA has taken a well-earned win based on solid co-ordination during NA primetime and pushing home the numbers advantage overnight.

Nick.6972:

Watch DB catching up with SBI and getting second place.
I’d love to see that.

DB hasn’t got the coverage for that to happen. They’re only consistently ahead in points for about 5 hours a day, and the rest of the time they’re losing too much ground.

etrigan.4213:

These SBI tears are as delicious as their heavy loot bags are.

I’m going to do a combo breaker here and actually provide an SBI post in this thread.

Good match, haven’t had one this close for a very, very long time. Would be nice if Maguuma could have been the third server in the matchup getting their keeps flipped every 30 min in the PPT war, but somehow they managed to sneak into gold tier where it’ll be happening every 10 from next week. C’est la vie.

Condition mesmer is probably stronger in WvW, particularly for PvP and sieges. Shattercat will take camps and kill many classes faster, but it’s extremely vulnerable to condition builds and does pretty near nothing to a decent guardian.

Roquefort.4160:

good fights in tonights (and last nights) oceanic in SBI BL. even though i tried all night last night, finally got your gari tonight. solid defense of bay and gari though.

We should really be giving you guys a much stronger challenge – when we faced you two weeks ago I’m pretty sure we had at least double the numbers during Oceanic hours that I’m seeing now. It’s a little odd, considering the number of complaints about queues during NA primetime, that no-one’s willing to stay late this week.

Lenador.1436:

Complaining about roamers means nothing these days espesially when you play easymode builds, T.T guardian and ranger roamers shall rise again

Ranger and guardian roamers still work.

(in this matchup)

I see the co-leaders of the SBI fan club are keeping a jovial atmosphere as usual.

Chris.3290:

Asguard.4621:

Today’s match up in a nutshell…… ouch

SBI take note of the guild tags in this picture. Those are your culprits.

That looks like a karma train – most of those tags are PvX/zerg guilds. Commander must have got the pugs to do what they’re told somehow.

Well, that’d be about the first charr I’ve ever seen wearing TA light armour, so… congratulations.

Mirsa.1628:

SBI, learn to make troll guilds. This is a pretty sad attempt.

I think I’ve actually seen that guild name before!

The tag must change every match though. Last time I saw it, it was [IoJ].

PetiteGeek.2961:

SBI and SOS, please do come take your things back. Pleaseeee!! For the love of Karma and WXP.

Looks like you need to take a trip to the ruins and get that buff back!

Chris.3290:

SBI forums are filled with people threatening to quit or sit out the season

To someone who actually has an account on SBI forums (and even visits them!) this is rubbish.

There’s a grand total of one user, who seems to be from a PvE guild (wtf?) that I’ve never heard of threatening to quit. Most of the forum users would rather be in gold league, based on discussion in public and private forums.

Amurond.4590:

Andrew Clear.1750:

Plus, this match up could get us into the gold league.

And why would anyone below 4th want that?

Because r7 and below servers are a snore to fight.

Head looks a lot like a female charr but the rest doesn’t. Structurally a charr has more in common with a gorilla than anything in Felidae.

Truearrow.3527:

Dear SBI, we couldnt leave the matchup without giving you a proper goodbye. Love Maguuma. To give an accurate account, there’s 50 of them

I approve of this.

Hexin.5603:

Wow, guested to SBI to do Shaterrer … 15 guys and we beat it with a whopping 1 minute to spare.

Biggest mistake of my week. Wanted to see how big they were, but its dead over there.

If you want to PvE at that hour of the day you’ll have better luck on a Euro server.

Andrew Clear.1750:

But, it seems every zerg from mag runs a necro train.

It works until any zerg at all from SBI learns how to deal with them. Necros aren’t particularly hard to squash as a group, but if you keep running over marks…

linfurong.9032:

Please understand we’ve been getting rolled by 100,000-200,000 point leads against the T1 servers, and you’re running very similar coverage.

I love the way we are apparently as big as a T1 server and nowhere near as big as a T1 server at the same time.

Four posts in a row? Seriously?

I’ll grant you that the male charr look a bit weird – teeth everywhere is the primary reason only two of my 12 charrs are male. It’s still far, far better than that abomination from EQN though.

Skyrim almost got it right with the Argonians. The heads looked plausible, which is what you see most of the time. Problem is, once again, they got lazy with the rest and slapped a tail on a reskinned human body – same as they did in Oblivion – and still had the gasping-for-air sound effect when you leave the water. For a water-breathing race.

Arenanet has still done a pretty good job compared to other recent games with comparable detail in their characters, but it seems more by accident than good management. They put together a few good NPC clothing skins early in the piece, and from then on it’s just been a rush of stretched human armour skins that don’t fit the aesthetic at all. The running animation doesn’t really make sense, but most games wouldn’t have even attempted one. Yet footprints are still backwards or sideways.

I’m not going to read too much into the layout and infrastructure in charr territory since to be honest the entire world map has serious problems with a lack of continuity. The walls between every zone should never have been there – they turn a world that could have made sense into a bunch of disjointed chambers with only a veneer of realism. It’s pretty hard to make a convincing ‘living world’ when the environment was never lifelike to begin with. The whole place feels like a theme park.

EQ2 really isn’t better in terms of beast race design. It’s got more of them, for sure, and maybe they don’t clip. That’s not really a high bar. Problem is, where they’ve succeeded in those areas they’ve thoroughly dropped the soap in the main issue, which is not making them look stupid. Only the Iksar don’t look like lame cuddly toys, and even they are pretty hit-and-miss in appearance.

Exactly how EQN’s versions can look even worse is beyond me, but they managed it. Thankfully GW2 hasn’t backpedalled quite that far since getting it pretty well right with Pyre in EotN.

A variety of faces that more closely resemble him might get more interest in the makeover kit than the hairstyles did.

Can’t actually run dumb builds against FA’s roamers. That’s a nice change.

It’s difficult to pull off a SM ninja against a server that’s present on the map, and SBI would have been if their opponents consistently held territory in EB. It’s an artifact of our population being too low on those hours to properly defend four maps – though if we had more scouting it would certainly have helped.

That Kerran looks bloody awful. Probably won’t stop me playing one, but the appearance sure isn’t an improvement over charr.

EQN mainly sounds interesting because it’s trying to give players more of an active role in the world. Whether they’ll succeed, I couldn’t guess. It does look promising. That said, with Sony’s record on personal security I’m certainly not going anywhere near any cash shop.

You realise that no-one’s dying of bad charr art, right?

(Yet.)

Ignoring charr armour is still inexcusable for a company of that size, and the argument can certainly be made that the reason why less people play them is specifically because the art isn’t up to scratch. You’d figure that if 10-15% of people play them, they might actually make 10-15% of new armour skins – at least – work properly on charr.

The current figure is 0%.

I think that sort of attention to scouting only occurs when there’s not much going on to scout for.

Going to be a quiet week I think.

Because less people play them.

Being non-humanoid hasn’t got anything to do with it, their artists aren’t amateurs.

Yeah… this is not a sensible matchup.

YB and KN are doing well with what they have though.

I thought Ash Legion was a perfect fit for a mesmer, actually, so that’s what my main is on both accounts.

That would be like January all over again actually.

Still, at least we have experience in that sort of situation.