Guild Wars 2

For the love of God, please finally fix the skirting issue on sylvari. This is too ridiculous. (Watch gem sales for this outfit on sylvari males skyrocket now…)

Charrs of Summer.
Clips from our rally on June 30th.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5cabZguDMo

The Legion of Charrs requires the services of a highly skilled power necro who takes delight in the murder killing. Gladium today, warband tomorrow!

Personally I’m waiting for one of those Charr Tanks so I can run over blobs.

Game got nopale but still no bacon?

Change is not easy. The WvW game is constantly changing. It is not the same it was two years ago. It is not the same it was even one year ago. If you want to continue to derive enjoyment from it, you have to be willing to let go of expectations built from past experience and change with the game.

“The Great Fort Aspenwood Moa Morph Hunt for HOPE”

Yesterday FA militia had a bit of old fashioned fun with our friends. Thanks to HOPE for being such good sports.

“One love, FA” – Silo

Oega Boogabooga.6207:

BUT if you want to step in at a lower lvl with your guild you have the option to do so, its your choice who you gvg. you dont have to start with agg, ta, or any of the other top tier guilds.

Doesn’t matter which “gvg tier” the guild you’re fighting is in since even long-time pve players recently turned pvp will have ascended. There are new players entering the game still and if they have any interest in getting into GvG, they end up being way behind in terms of gear.

The power creep and pve grind for gear is antithesis to the idea of an equal fight between guilds, which GvG fights are supposed to represent. Remember the player-made restriction on stacking weapons? One could tell from the nameplate who had stacks – can’t be done with ascended gear.

Remember how the GvG scene cooled when the bloodlust mechanic was introduced and didn’t heat up again until after the OS arena sans bloodlust was made? I know most won’t agree with me, but GvG would benefit from gear normalization in any long-term GvG mode. GvGers would rather GvG, not grind PvE for gear. The short-term solution to that is to use the sPvP gear/stat ruleset. I’ll probably get a lot of hate for suggesting that because I know how important food/wrench and PvE gear stats are to the current GvG players. Fights would take longer. It takes a bit more skill to kill people without the power creep of the PvE gear that everyone is addicted to. In an ideal situation, a GvG mode would have it’s own gear/stat ruleset (because the sPvP one is meant for 5-man fights), akin to the PvE one but without the fancy PvE extras: gear that doesn’t require a grind to obtain.

What Anet needs to do is not have leagues that cause 9-10 weeks of ratings isolation.

The second coming of TANKCAT!

Wanderer.3248:

Basch.1347:

Yes, we’re getting guild transfers by the load because FA is a strong, organized community with a fun playing environment.

Looks like the PR guys from HoD also transferred.

Try checking posting history next time.

As for the comment about community, yea everyone says that and it was probably true of HoD before they got free transfers. But not everyone can prove it. It was said FA was imploding when we got stuck in silver due to guilds leaving both pre-season and mid-season. It takes community to stick through that and attract guilds to come here post-season. It just means that the FA core was larger than the HoD core and has a longer history of ties with each other than what a bandwagon core has. Sometimes whole communities transfer, such as a large chunk of SoR’s SEA going to TC.

Any discussion about conditions needs to really include boons as others have pointed out. Some of the boons and conditions appear as direct counters to each other. Like you can’t remove the heal potency reduction of poison without causing Regeneration to become overpowered. Same thing for Weakness and Vigor.

Player-created rules such as “don’t kitten-hug or use open field siege or stack or blob” will always be used against them. People can and should complain about these things since the game allows it while at the same time use them. If it gets enough people complaining and leaving as a result, then Anet will take notice. They’ll see the effect in their analytics and do something about it.

Some AGG members posted their builds in the other forum and they were using fully ascended gear. The power creep and grind for gear in the PvE ruleset is stupid for a PvP mode. Creates a large barrier to entry.

No zombie skills please. IIRC that was done in another mmo and the result was really bad. ‘Corrupted blood incident’

People go to eotm exactly bc they know how it operates. Oh, spectral wall! Give me the bags!

If it was hod-ish, we’d have been in T1 by now. Duh.

Aitadis.8269:

Not our fault it takes so long to move up a tier because of glicko.

Exactly this. Took FA a month to get out of T3. SoR is the server that had it the worst due to imploding a month before the tournament then getting locked at bottom of Silver.

Looks like our OCX and SEA held their own our first night back in T2 and are having a great time. I’ll quote GWAM from the FA forums:

“best rally in weeks. the fights come to you was fun watching SoS trying to blob us down. OvO+BEAR vs GWAM+WB”

Join in on the fun!

Contact agarkar.5782 or wombat.6123 for OCX!

Top SEA PvD server.

+1 for the response!

Mijo.3274:

If you sound like you’re smoking marijuana and falling asleep while leading people in a fight, you’re doin it wrong.

LOL! This comment reminds me of one night a guy using c-comms in the most unenthusiastic voice that rivaled Ben Stein let us all know of a keep under attack and how many enemy there were. Yea, lemme jump on that right away. /sarcasm

Emissary.3792:

Personality makes a big difference, whether you’re light hearted and joking or serious/swearing, congratulating/praising for good work, encouraging when things go wrong. Speaking confidently/decisively. In other words, morale management.

This and so much this. People management. There’s a lot more to commanding militia than spending 100g and putting up a tag. I’d also add in “conversation management”. If there’s no one else speaking in your channel other than you, try to start up a conversation with a few others in the channel.

Thanks for watching this charrtastic vid.

Andrew Clear.1750:

I believe kittens will be the same this week. FA will need to get to 1800 points to get that random.

Probably.

This is one of the better ideas I’ve seen put forward. These look like the tournament achievements that bring players out to complete. Bravo!

Gundams! OK, that’s going into my GW2 jargon…

Deniara Devious.3948:

There is no guesting on this game anymore.

There is. Sure, guesting won’t let you check out a particular server’s Lion Arch scene. It is still necessary though for guild missions. Megaserver is/was bugged with crediting mission rewards to members on other servers.

TLC starring in “Happy Fun Siege Time”. The fur flies when the tables turn on Yak’s Bend.

A few guilds did this on FA way waaaaay back when. No one does it much any more for whatever reason. I think it has to do with Hamster’s experience: a terribly small % of people actually learn. Mostly these days players are encouraged to join a WvWvW guild to learn this stuff.

Tibstrike.2974:

Let’s be honest. It’s really Mag’s “rule”. It has trickled up and down through the tiers.

They didn’t earn the nickname “Turtleguuma” for no reason. Not even YB has sieged up their north camp up like Maguuma used to.

GWAM (OCX), DPS (SEA), and WB (SEA) are a lot of fun to run with and keep FA’s off-hours organized and dominant with golem rushes on upgraded keeps and waypointing them for the lulz. They welcome other OCX and SEA players looking to get in on the action. Contact Strider (agarkar.5782) from GWAM for more information!

Tibstrike.2974:

it has translated to siege in general being frown upon.

Which is quite silly. Some unspoken player-created “rule” about not using siege in general is a self-inflicted weakness ripe for defeating them with.

Guilds would revolt if their members were ever forceably placed randomly across multiple shards with a restrictive way to rejoin on a single shard.

Straegen.2938:

At the very least, someone should manually promote FA and demote DB next week regardless of what the randomizer pops up.

WTB this.

I started as a PvE player. GW2 changed that.

When Anet introduced the reward tracks in sPvP, there was a flood of new players from PvE who started enjoying it. I’m sure some subset of them stayed. It happens in WvW too.

Yes, there will be people who will stay in PvE. Not everyone. Better rewards help get people who don’t think of themselves as PvPers to try it.

I agree that their plans for combining guild unlocks will remove a big obstacle for smaller guilds. Unfortunately it sounded like they won’t have that “feature” available for another 6-9 months!

And yea, if rewards were better, more people would play WvW.

Andrew Clear.1750:

But again, as far as DB rolling a match with HoD, well, HoD didn’t have that population until FA dropped to T3.

Before the start of the season, HoD certainly had the population for T2. They were queuing maps all hours of the day and probably would’ve been able to take the sixth spot in Gold above DB. And SoR’s slow decent locking them into the bottom of Silver where they had no business being… All due to glicko being unable to adjust to large population changes quickly enough.

The lack of a GvG mode is what hurts. Server transfers and tier stacking, which cause these imbalances, is primarily a result of the lack of a GvG mode. Guild movement across servers is primarily due to wanting to fight new people and gain access to certain other guilds to GvG. Except for free transfers of course.

SkyShroud.2865:

it is normal to gradually become bored with it and move on to next game

Which is the point of continuously updating “Living Story”. If only they did that with the other game modes…

Fort Aspenwood is slowly but surely closing the gap to T2. Join our dedicated OCX and SEA guilds as we make the push.

Not just your guild.

There only reason for OS to be a wvw map is for pvp with teams decided by tier match. It doesn’t contribute anything to wvw, much like eotm.

Andrew,
You kind of agreed with my point about population changes causing this and the slow glicko adjustment when you mentioned our numbers ktraining.

Without acknowledgment of the effect leagues have on rating, the conversation doesn’t advance. Pre-season there were essentially 5 T2 level servers with the possibility of ratings between them all to be close enough for matchmaking to change things up frequently for T2 and T3. The artificial division caused by leagues destroyed that because DB could never roll a match with HOD even though they had the population for it. And they would have taken some T2 rating in such a match. That’s rating isolation. FA would not have lost population both pre-season and middle of the season but for that division.

Also, I don’t log on until later.

Thank you for articulating this so well and suggesting megaserver for the OS. I’ve pointed out myself how stacking gvg guilds into a single tier (NA T2) was unhealthy for the scene. People took it as whining about FA dropping to silver…

Hrm good points.

My only concern is that servers could game the system by purposely trying to tank their matches. It’s easier to tank a single rank than a whole tier.

XacTactX.6709:

That 100 rating didn’t come out of nowhere we gained a handful of guilds because of seasons and some of them stayed

The post-season rating difference between ranks 6 and 7 is an artificial creation from leagues. Being the bottom of Gold is like saying the bottom of T8 is great because there’s no one to fight below it.

Jman.1975:

Just lower the population cap down to 35-50. This gives servers with a lower population the ability to Que all the maps constantly, and fight servers with 5x the WvW population.

Perfect! T1 advertises all the time how they no longer have queues, enticing more people to transfer there. People would leave if there were long queues all the time again.

Tier-based pricing might be better than rank-based pricing. That ensures that all servers in a single match have equal footing transfer-wise.

Fuzzion.2504:

DB was in the same problem. They were there for almost 3 months. Cant remember exactly. DB will have to tank if FA is to come up to T2. Unless the gods of RNG are on FAs side.

Not really. Everyone knows that the Glicko system is really slow to adjust to population changes. DB didn’t have such population changes as FA has had so no they didn’t have the same “problem”.

Leagues didn’t help. It caused rating isolation for servers at the border between leagues.