Guild Wars 2

PRXKV.1296:

An open letter to the non-NA’s on Sea of Sorrows (ie Oceanics etc).

You put out the call to your server for NA guilds. You touted your WvW tenacity and ability and wanted help to make SoS more competitive in WvW. [PRX] and other NA guilds (RMA, FoE, TSym, AoI etc) answered the call and many of you welcomed us in a friendly fashion.

Tomorrow at our NA prime time, [PRX] will re-evaluate the non-NA of SoS. If you show up and fight between now and then and show some determination and desire to WvW, we will look to the future and stand with you. If you continue to chase down candy corn and shy away from combat, we will weigh other options. If SoS is truly just a server of PvEers, then so be it, own up to it and we will make choices based on this and will respect your playstyle.

My sincere hope is that last night was just an anomoly and you come to your senses and realize SoS can be an up and coming WvW server and you get back to fighting.

Thanks for your time

KV

GM of [PRX] The Professionals, since 1999

www.prx-guild.com

I’ll try answer your post as best I can from my perspective as a long time SoS Oceanian player.

Before the NA alliances started joining SoS, we were exactly where we deserved to be on the rankings, a mid tier server with a massive oceanian population and a lack of NA presence (this is unique because every other NA server has an NA presence).

Having NA guilds would help us climb into tier 3 and above, we are nowhere near where we need to be to compete with tier 1. The Oceanian population is not hardcore by any stretch, but we have plenty of dedicated WvWers that put all their effort in from all over Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia.

This is what happened yesterday on the Halloween patch day. Before the servers went down for the patch at 6pm Australian time (which is the start of our peak hour), we had a massive lead over the other 2 servers. By the time we logged back in it was all gone. Including those shiny upgraded fortifications and on top of that, one of the Borderlands was crashing. Australians have slow internet connections (our internet infrastructure is one of the poorest of any developed country) and it takes hours to download a 1 gig patch. I logged in to play some WvW at 8pm, I couldn’t get in until after 10pm. I stayed on to fight until 2am on a Tuesday night with uni the next day.

On top of this, there has been a massive exodus of guilds on servers such as ET and HoD. Some of these guilds have transferred over to SoR in the past 24 hours. The level of opponents that we have been fighting has changed completely in the middle of the week, one example being CRS, a tier 1 guild going head to head with Oceanian players. It’s not what we are used to…

It’s massively disappointing and demoralizing for the casuals for the momentum to rapidly change like this, there is a whole range of simultaneous circumstances that happened at once yesterday that lead to it. I along with many Oceanian players have been working our buts off to co-operate with PRX as best as possible.

On Saturday night I stayed up until 6am, while most of both America and Oceania sleep, doing everything I can for the team with PRX and SEA guilds trying to hold the Stonemist throneroom while it was under constant attack. I’m spending all of my income on siege weapons and use at least 10 per day, deployed into strategic positions.

The casual players would also make up a large chunk of the numbers that fill in between the gaps for Oceania, I’d imagine that a lot of them would be distracted by Halloween and do not cope well with losing.

Apologies for what’s happened, it felt as if I’ve been hit by a train, yet I’ll always fight. I said this last night while things were turned against us…if we’re good enough we’ll still win anyway despite what has just happened.

I have been fighting all week Fractal and I can guarantee that a lot of influential guilds have transfered to your server. It’s a bit frustrating to be working really hard at WvW and put your all in, finally take a lead and then patch day along with transfers completely ruins the balance. On top of that, during Oceania primetime a lot of people have been stuck downloading a massive patch (internet is slow in Australia), meanwhile the casual Wvw’ers that make up the numbers are distracted by Halloween.

I guess the game doesn’t revolve around WvW but I wish all this change would happen after a match up, not half way through. There is still 3 days to go, we’ll see what happens.

alcopaul.2156:

I’ve played both modes. And I must say that WvWvW is more tactical than structured PvP.

Why? If you’re a commander, you have to control your attack team which comprises of multiple types of players, communicate with other commanders, decide if you gank incoming hoards of enemies or storm a post and what not.

sPvP, you have to get to know your skills well and try to end up winning.

I could point out a real life equivalents of both types.

Imagine when Richard the Lionhart went from England to capture the Holy Land? His army were not just composed of trained men but with commonfolks too. This is akin to WvWvW mixture of types of players. You have well equipped and traited players and you have your upscaled players.

Coordinating a zerg requires that you must know real life military tactics to actually pull it off. I would guess that good commanders in WvWvW are or have experience in the military.

sPvP? It’s a like sports. It’s controlled environment. It’s like faux warfare. And no one plays sports 24/7.

What do you think? Do you agree with me?

I agree fully with your opinions of WvWvW.

It’s absolutely amazing and I’ve been addicted to it for weeks. It requires patience, lateral thinking, teamwork, the majority of people think it’s about ‘numbers’ and ‘winning, but they’re doing it wrong. Getting steam rolled off the map, you can organize 10 people, wait it out (after the initial dust of defeat settles), go out, take a tower before the enemy wakes up, fortify it with siege, and you can hold off a zerg with it. That then sets up a platform for the rest of your server to get back into the map.

There are so many things that are beyond your control and what’s is one of the attractions of it, it’s so raw with just about zero rules, 24 hour fighting, it’s up to the players to decide how they are going to go about their battles.

I’m very very disappointed to hear the ‘exciting announcement’ regarding teams that have been wiped off the map, the biggest cause for this is impatience and not being able to deal with the loss by giving up. There is never a need to be spawn camped, there are 3 exits, the other 2 are rarely used and I’ve never seen them guarded.

Most people that play WvWvW (and it’s still very popular) are having the time of their lives, I really hope that arenanet doesn’t listen to the people that don’t even play it and prefer ‘fair’ controlled environments such as sPvP.

The only thing that needs to be fixed is server transfers, it’s destroying communities, it also destroyed the community that I held so dear back in World of Warcraft many years ago and the exact same thing is happening in Guild Wars 2. If people haven’t figured out how to play on the same server as their friends yet, then they are never going to learn.

Close between Maguuma and Dragonband. Dragonband gave one heck of a fight in Eternal Battlegrounds late tonight.

I’m fully aware of that Spacedad, however that type of situation will only happen to Sea of Sorrows if they become number 1 in the US, and quite frankly I don’t see that happening any time soon. Tier 3 most likely, and maybe tier 2.

Spacedad.2841:

Cirus.5748:

Spacedad.2841:

I can confirm that when you are 200k infront of your nearest rival and you control every single building on the map, that there is complacency, people are spread out doing their own things out of boredom as there is nothing to fight. That a 20 man group can band together and take a few buildings while we are inactive, not defending and doing jumping puzzles is hardly anything to boast about. Your servers should be trying harder during SoS’s non peak, but you don’t even try. Less sulking, making excuses and feeling sorry for yourself, more killing.

You like challenge in being outnumbered? Put your money where your mouth is then and move to Dragonbrand. Less condescension and hypocrisy, more fleeing from SoS to servers that could use the help.

I have met that challenge many times, in fact SoS has lost the majority of matchups over the past several weeks. You would understand what I’m talking about if you’re ever faced Isle of Janthir or Eredon Terrace. The truth is that when you are getting beaten badly by servers that have close to 24 hout coverage, the general population on your server gives up and then you find yourself greatly out numbered. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, just keep fighting, I’ve done this many times, it seems as if you are new to this concept. I want to play with my friends, I don’t want to play in a ghost town, I don’t want 5 hour WvW queues, SoS is perfect for me. Only a few more days and you’ll never see our server again as long as we keep this round the clock coverage.

We’re hardly new to this concept – Maguuma is a server of people who have regularly had to struggle against overwhelming odds. The only times we’ve pulled ahead is when our community decided to finally start organizing in wvw, and we saw a massive jump in both participation and in our general strategic competence. We’re learning how to struggle against overwhelming numbers for the time being.

Also, again, talk is cheap – if you really do enjoy being an underdog and fighting tough odds, then switch to Dragonbrand. I don’t care what your previous circumstances are – your present circumstances is that you are on a server flocked by free xfer-ers. If you don’t want to come across as hollow, do the right thing and change to a server who needs you more.

But your statements suggest that you are new to this concept. You do realise that every week the servers are matched with new opponents? My server has been the underdog for many weeks, I stick with it, no matter how bad it gets, things will always get better eventually.

If I moved to Dragonband just because it’s losing, that means I’ll have to move serverse again as soon as they start winning, this makes no sense. Dragonband being the underdog this week may very well be the favourites next week. I do not want to switch servers as soon as it starts winning, otherwise I will never belong to a server, you just need to accept the winning with the losing.

Spacedad.2841:

I can confirm that when you are 200k infront of your nearest rival and you control every single building on the map, that there is complacency, people are spread out doing their own things out of boredom as there is nothing to fight. That a 20 man group can band together and take a few buildings while we are inactive, not defending and doing jumping puzzles is hardly anything to boast about. Your servers should be trying harder during SoS’s non peak, but you don’t even try. Less sulking, making excuses and feeling sorry for yourself, more killing.

You like challenge in being outnumbered? Put your money where your mouth is then and move to Dragonbrand. Less condescension and hypocrisy, more fleeing from SoS to servers that could use the help.

I have met that challenge many times, in fact SoS has lost the majority of matchups over the past several weeks. You would understand what I’m talking about if you’re ever faced Isle of Janthir or Eredon Terrace. The truth is that when you are getting beaten badly by servers that have close to 24 hout coverage, the general population on your server gives up and then you find yourself greatly out numbered. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, just keep fighting, I’ve done this many times, it seems as if you are new to this concept. I want to play with my friends, I don’t want to play in a ghost town, I don’t want 5 hour WvW queues, SoS is perfect for me. Only a few more days and you’ll never see our server again as long as we keep this round the clock coverage.

Spacedad.2841:

This is further confirmed by goon SoS players I am in contact with, who have stated that there are instances of SoS players just plain being sloppy about simple things like repairing, using the score disparity as justification for their bad play.

It is a shame that this game is structured at the moment (via free server transfers) to reward bad players who have no investment in understanding or practicing good strategy or tactics. You get better at fighting by facing a deck stacked against you – which is literally what’s happening on maguuma. We’re honing our coordination and tactics, and it’s showing. We already have christened a few new marvelously competent commanders in the past couple days.

Obviously not everyone on SoS is terrible and I have seen a few moments of decent tactics, but for the most part there is no real ‘strategy’ and it’s just ‘move zerg here, turn green, move zerg here, turn green’ rinse-repeat-etc.

I can confirm that when you are 200k infront of your nearest rival and you control every single building on the map, that there is complacency, people are spread out doing their own things out of boredom as there is nothing to fight. That a 20 man group can band together and take a few buildings while we are inactive, not defending and doing jumping puzzles is hardly anything to boast about. Your servers should be trying harder during SoS’s non peak, but you don’t even try. Less sulking, making excuses and feeling sorry for yourself, more killing.

Is there an “time sat on siege weapon while defending” stat?

No? Oh well.

zastari,

I can guarantee that you have it wrong. What you see is not the full picture of what happens.

We have fought lots of armies, both American and other Oceanic servers. American peak hour and Oceanic peak hour overlap. E.g 4pm in Australia is 10pm in California. And there is fierce fighting normally up until 1am California time, then it drops off and we normally over whelm the enemy and it’s ours for free unless they have also have an Oceanic community, then the fighting continues.

At say 2am AEST time, when we all start going to bed, that’s when we start to lose everything that we’ve taken and by being superiorly out numbered. And as a defender, I have defended with 5 people against 50, and lasted hours against servers such as Fort Aspenwood, and yes, sometimes they beat the door down with their hands because our siege defense is countering their attack and they just have too many numbers with us being low on supply.

I’m not going to kid myself, Sea of Sorrows Oceanic community is not the best by any stretch, it deserves to be where it was as a middle/upper middle tier. And it’s done this mostly without North Americans, making it unique server (unlike tiers 1 and 2 that have both NA and Oceania). Put it this way, if our peak starts at 4pm, and we start with close to zero buildings, and our peak plus holding the buildings lasts for 10 hours before the Americans wake up, that’s not an advantage at all. 10 hour Oceanic fighting vs 14 hour American fighting has put SoS in constant catchup. Ok sure the 2 NA servers need to share contention for the points, but when Maguuma loses badly to Fort Aspenwood, that doesn’t help Sea of Sorrows! Oceanic community is only an advantage when you have the Americans to back it up, and that hasn’t happened until now.

Harkness that’s an excellent idea regarding having one borderland to have fun in. I think that can be achieved without excluding SoS from it. There is a limit to every borderland. Get Maguuma and Dragonband communities to agree on a borderland to focus all their players on, spread the message. Sea of Sorrows can play too and we could have a real 3 way contest for at least something to do for the week.

Fwiw Maguuma, you guys have given us one of the most epic match ups to date. During the qualifying period of WvW, where we had new opponents every day, the best and most funnest match up we ever had was Crystal Desert vs Sea of Sorrows vs Maguuma. All 3 teams were very equal and it finished with not many points between all 3, it was an amazing Saturday of WvW, one that I’ll never forget. This is what I want to see in WvW, tight matchups!

You guys also did a good job last week despite the odds being stacked against you, respect.

My personal understanding and history of SoS

Part 2

A lot of the commander’s on here have been courageous and have refused to give up, no matter the scores, no matter what’s going on, this I like. Even when we are losing badly because of our lack of NA presence, we continue to fight, it doesn’t matter how much we are out numbered, we will always fight as long and as hard as possible. 5 vs 50? No worries. We can take them on.

So yes, we’ve continued to fight in mid tier matchups, we’ve come second in our bracket for a few weeks in a row. Some opponents have a decent Asian/Oceanic presence and are enough to keep us entertained, others are so tiny during our timezone that there is no contest and it’s not that much fun.

The typical WvW 24 hour clock for SoS has been this, during the Oceanic day while people are at school and work, and with our lack of NA presence, our server is crushed, has ~5% of the pie total and falls behind, anything better than this is a bonus! When our peak our comes, the tide turns and we take back everything unless they have resistance, then there is a tough war on our hands where they start with the advantage of defending. Generally by later at night we control more than half, sometimes everything. When we start getting sleepy and go to bed, say after midnight Australian time, this is a similar time that North America wakes up and takes everything away from us, rinse repeat.

I’m very excited for these new NA WvW guilds to be transferring over to balance the population. I hope that they stick around and we are not just flavour of the week. Looking forward to the weeks ahead, it is a massive shame that this current matchup has no contest, I hate this and if it were a permanent feature I would transfer off. However these types of things can happen to any server, and next week is when it will get interesting. I can’t wait to have a rematch with IOJ once again, I’ll be aiming for revenge on the damage they inflicted on us.

No matter what happens, myself and many others, will remain on SoS, no matter how ugly things may get if our server collapses once again, it wouldn’t be the first time, probably won’t be the last.

TLDR summary, SoS has had it’s ups and downs, it’s now going up again. SoS for life.

I’ve been on SoS since the beta. Let me fill you in on some of the history that we have endured. We’ve had our ups and downs, now it looks like we’re going up again.

This is my understanding of it.

Part 1

In the beta we were winning everything and it was touted as being one of the main, biggest, meanest and best WvW in Guilds Wars 2. However many of the key WvW guilds and 1 particular alliance transfered off to Northern Shiverpeaks and other alliances also transferred to various servers early in GW2, NS suffered the classic bandwagon winning syndrome and collapsed as quickly as they rose thanks to the queues and transfer rush.

As for SoS, our morale was battered and the expectations of ourselves quickly fell. There were many holes left in the Oceanic PvP community, and it was up to the remaining to pickup the scraps and build this server into something. One particular guild called Dark Immunity (DI) was mass recruiting people from various guilds, to unite as DI in WvW and co-ordinate together. No joke at least half of the people I would see in WvW were from DI. We went through a good period of wins, and then some bad periods of crushing defeats to these random servers that we never have heard of. These include Eredon Terrace and the supposed overflow of Sea of Sorrows called Isle of Janthir. Both of those servers stomped us completely, even in our own prime times. Morale was crushed and then there were infighting amongst some of our guilds. The leader of DI decided that SoS was not up to his standards and moved to Fort Aspenwood, in an attempt to “make FA stronger at night”, to me this was impossible as his impact would be like a drop in the ocean, that was weeks ago and I don’t know what has happened since. It left a massive void once again in our server, but the remaining SoS Union picked up the pieces and continued to fight hard.

During this time I also lost my guild leader (to transfers) whom I respected very much and admired his tactical understanding and leadership of WvW, he would literally inspire everyone around him. I wkittentered and had to have a long hard think on where I should go to next, to me SoS was dead and I needed a server that suits me. I weighed up my options.

- I want a server that has a strong presence in my timezone, many of the top tier servers also have this.
- I also wanted a server that didn’t have 5 hour queues due to over popularity, that wipes out all the top tier servers as options.
- I want to be on a server that has an Oceanic presence and has competitive matchups, this rules out the tier 2 servers as they get stomped by the remainder of the “top 4”
bracket every week,
- I looked at other servers in Tier 3 and the winner of that goes to Tier 2 to get stomped, and the others didn’t really have a very strong Oceanic presence… So the server that best suited my wants was still Sea of Sorrows…

Did you guys have the numbers on Monday and Tuesday? I’m not sure if you did but that’s the impression I’ve gotten.

I have been in this situation many times before, we’ve had lots of servers crush Sea of Sorrows, even during our own (Aus) prime time and then the rest of our server gives up and the queues are empty, even in prime time.

This is the server problem, people give up on fighting too easily when they lose.

There are always the few people who continue to fight, no matter how bad it is, and you can still achieve things and have a lot of fun against the zerg.

The point is though that you can build siege with camp supply, you cannot upgrade the tower with camp supply.

You should be building the siege weapons as soon as you claim that tower. If that tower can’t last 5 minutes while you run between supply camps, then that is the fault of your team.

I agree with what you are saying. There is nothing worse then walking into a tower with 0 supply and 0 siege and the walls only halfway upgraded. The thing is though that the supply in the tower are dependent on the yakks, there is no other way. These should be used for upgrades or last minute defending and repairing.

Walls/gate should be the first things upgraded because the amount of supply in the walls is limited and it’s the only method of upgrading it. With siege weapons, you can have people supply run between camps to build them, you don’t need to use the tower supply for that. Siege weapons should be built and ready in place before the enemy comes. And by running between supply camps after to build the siege after you take the tower, there is more than enough time to do this.

To Maguuma, it seems as if some of you here are trying to claim the moral high ground. From what I’ve seen of these posts it’s been “our server hasn’t had any queues in the last few days and we are out numbered, if we had more people we’d win”.

The problem with that theory is, you’re also suggesting that you actually did have the numbers and you did have queues in the first few days of the matchup. Because your server was coming 3rd and the rest of your server decided to give up and not queue for WvW is no-ones fault but your own. Never give up, and you’ll always stand a chance.

For those that been joining WvW just trying to have some fun while being hopelessly out numbered, I understand the situation you guys are in and it’s normal to make some fun out of a hopeless situation, there is nothing wrong with that. Some of the most fun I’ve had in WvW is while we’ve been hopelessly out numbered. The question is how much of an impact so few can make on so many
Example, once my server held Etheron keep for 8 hours, we had no camps to continue feeding the supply and we were out numbered 5:1, it was all team work and resilience that kept us going.

World vs World vs World is really fun.

Yes it is just a game, but it’s war in a game. It’s really fun, it’s not about winning, it’s about killing, attacking, defending, surprises, tactics, massacares, the amount of possibilities that can happen are endless. You can be last, control nothing on the map, and still get a great rush and sense of pride when you take a mere tower, you then build siege weapons and defend this tower like no tomorrow

By the way, winning and controlling 100% of the map is boring, there is nothing to do, nothing to take, no action. Why people think that this is the most important is beyond me. Oh and also, try having 5 hour queues, yeah that sounds like fun hey! Because the most important thing is winning!! And one last thing, fighting hard during your prime time and doing well is not a waste of time, you still get to keep every point that you earn, that never goes away. So you log in, play for x hours, have fun battles, then log off, your server falls behind while you sleep and go to work, so what? Who cares. You still have your fun and get what you want to get out of WvW when you play.

LOL!

This is so funny because it’s all true. Not because what he says is right, but because it summarizes the self centered logic of all the complainers on here, well done! LOL

A perfect summary of the WvW forum.

The majority of complaints and solutions I’ve seen so far have been self centered. It’s like “Do whatever you can to benefit me, and punish everyone else”. It’s madness!
As an Australian that loves to play World vs World, I think it is fantastic the way it is, it has it’s ups and downs but overall it’s amazing. If you have a little patience, it can be very rewarding and entertaining. Be it assaults, defending, patrolling, surprise attacks and diversions, it’s a very fun experience and the possibilities of how things happen against another server vs another is endless.

My server struggles during US times and it’s normally always last, sometimes with crushing defeats. But during Australian peak time the tide begins to turn in our favour and we have aim to make up the lost points and catch up. Sometimes we win fast enough to gain a good lead, other times we come back but it’s a case of too little too late. Our current week of WvWvW is very tight between all 3 servers, it’s had brilliant battles and it’s more closely matched over the 24 hour day, I can’t wait to see what will unfold over the coming days between us.

If a US based server is having trouble against well organize Oceanic servers. I suggest 2 solutions:

1: Your server players better during your peak times and the interlapping period so that your lead is unassailable.
2: You organize yourselves and defend better when you face the Oceanic wave. Delaying them is worth double, for every point you hold on to, they will also lose.

If you play during the Graveyard shift and it’s a case of 50 vs 400, I suggest go queue up for Eternal Battlegrounds, that is the hardest fought and tightest of all the battlegrounds, it is the hardest to both gain and lose ground in and the servers often cancel each other out.