Guild Wars 2

Kurthos.2354:

The SoS NA guilds are not giving up. We have put in 5-12+ hour shifts, myself playing for 24 hours straight. Our oceanic players have not been challenged before, so naturally they collapse underneath the pressure. I’m not saying they don’t have the moxy in WvW, I’m saying they are behind the NA players of most servers in terms of meta game. They will learn as time goes on and we will get better as a server.

With the greatest of respect, less than 24 hours after saying that, them running at 500-600 ppt is hardly collapsing under pressure. Sure, they have less people to fight than the NA crew do (although a fair few more than usual), but I think it does them a disservice to say that they can’t pull it out of the bag when they need to. A couple of easier matches against more one-dimensional worlds doesn’t really take that much away from some of the genuinely tough matches they’ve had in the past against worlds that can put out significant numbers in the Oceanic primetime.

That said, communication has been an issue and of course there are always guilds that could improve their tactics… or learn some full stop. True for any world, admittedly.

If you’re having that much trouble with bots on SoR, whilst we can’t get them to log off entirely, if you want to let us know where they are, we can at least try killing them so they’re getting no benefit.

Jack Pj.1248:

We aren’t interested in the rewards. But we would like to have our server at least maintain control of even some of the stuff we spent HOURS capping for them overnight.

We play for fun, but there is no fun is spending hours capturing stuff to just see it all turn green as soon as we log off like a plague taking over the map.

As for capturing anything with 10 players, when your up against any server with a ranking of 15 or less, they have manned defences at every tower making that impossible and making the use of a zerg + siege equip mandatory . (Which I have no problem with)

What we are looking at is the overall picture.. Our server is decaying at an unbelievable rate and pretty soon our server will be dead emtpy PURELY because of our WvW state causing guilds to leave

Whilst I can’t say that I don’t think PvDoor is too easy, I also think the idea that a lot of folks seem to have that they played for hours and hours so a chunk of their work should be there when they get back is inane. If you want verifiable rewards for your work, PvE is the forum section above. WvW is a form of PvP and outside of achievements/shiny skins, when has ANet ever gone with that sort of philosophy in PvP? In GW1, no Kurzick player ever said “omg, I played for hours yesterday and won so much to push AB to Kaanai and now it’s back to Ancestral, that’s so unfair.”. In GW2, the answer is to get back out there and retake everything – not only more fun depending on your play-style (although I concede that not everyone enjoys just playing the offensive game), but you’re also going to rack up more actual rewards along the way.

As for the question of what a handful of people can do whilst outmanned (and how much fun you can have), the attached screenshots shows what seven people can do, even with people supposedly keeping an eye on it. With another couple to run distractions on top of the cover we were getting from the third world, the first thing they would’ve known about it would’ve been when it changed colour. Sometimes you just have to be creative and take advantage of situations. Especially because no matter how many lookouts they’ve assigned, people get lazy sooner or later. >.>

Makes a change – usually it’s 6 commanders sitting in LA. >.>

Mind you, with the number of commanders on the world now, it’s no real surprise. There’s at least a couple of guilds with 5-6 on their own.

I do have to wonder where the “ignore and recap” mentality came from though. Seems like a hangover from the folks who’ve just been using WvW to event farm. Which is a really stupid thing to even consider when you’re talking about a seriously competitive match.

Has it not occurred to you that as there’s no significant benefit or rewards from WvW in that sense (aside from the gold/karma from capping, but you get that when you cap back and, if players are on, you actually get more out of it than they do with PvDoor), everything they do is pointless too? In fact, WvW for a lot of people is a loss-making endeavour. I’ve had evenings where I’ve spent 4-5g in upgrades over the space of a few hours and I know I sure as hell don’t make that much back (and sometimes only for a lot of that to get lost a few hours after I log off – I know it happens and I still don’t mind spending the gold). If they’re upgrading everything to max and the only income they’ve had is capping, they’re going to be making a huge loss every day.

Being on another server won’t make a revolutionary difference that gives WvW a point, because ranks and winning/losing count for basically nothing. Oh, sure, the extra world-wide buffs are okay, but I don’t think many players on servers that regularly win notice much of a difference between Friday before reset and the next day.

Really, it’s just a question of fun. Sure, some people aren’t going to be happy unless they’re winning. But I think the usually-silent and very vast majority of people have already learned that, yeah, sometimes you aren’t going to win no matter how hard you try for whatever circumstances that are outside of your control. Therefore, the best thing to do is ignore the score, have some fun battles and just enjoy the game. SoS has had some real numbers done on us in the past, but last week was the first week where I decided it wasn’t worth logging on to WvW so much as without people fighting on the other side, it really is no fun. Generally, no matter how outnumbered you are, with a good organised group of 10-20 or more working together, you can take basically any target on a map and there are a number of defensible spots on all maps where you can hold out against every player the enemy can send at you. But instead of concentrating on the score and needing to cap or needing to win, some of the most fun I’ve had on WvW have involved taking a small group when we were hideously outmanned, capping a defensible point and then watching the corpses pile up as we try to defend it against everything they threw at us. Always (except once) eventually ending in failure and death from between five minutes to a couple of hours down the line, but always great fun.

SoS clearly showing that orbs are for losers there.

I hope it’ll be an interesting week. The ingredients are there – Crystal Desert, a perennial B2/3 contender and solid performer. Sea of Sorrows, capitialising on its initial strengths and now with the aid of good performances in the NA timezones. Sanctum of Rall, leaping up off of the back of a crushing victory.

In truth though, this could end up rather dull. It could turn out that newly-transferred people, still trying to find their feet, are no match for CD that’s actually had solid experience at this level and who are presumably used to working together by now. It could be that with the more than just numerous number of NA guilds that have moved over to SoS, combined with its already formidable Oceanic presence, they’re simply going to overpower the other two with ease simply through greater presence around the clock.

Or, with no disrespect intended, SoR could fall flat on their face. There’s a huge difference between being able to beat opposition in the lower brackets and being able to beat opposition further up. It probably would’ve been a smarter move to have cut your teeth on FA and DB in B4 first, if only to give the newly-transferred lot some more time to work things out and figure out how they all gel together. I don’t think anyone ran with that specific plan on SoS, to avoid B2, but I equally don’t think anyone was motivated to work their socks off and jump straight up there. It’s a lot tougher further up and the tricks that might’ve work against some worlds just won’t pan out. You can’t just have a small presence capping things in the off-peak to boost your points because everyone’s got that sorta presence.

Still, I hope you folks do well and it’s a genuinely interesting fight this week. Would be disappointed to see folks giving up even if it does turn into a bit of a curb-stomp for one side or another.

Cannon’s not too bad if you’ve already got people sitting on it. Seen many attacks on the keeps in EB that were foiled just thanks to the cannons. They do, however, go down remarkably quickly under fire, so if that zerg’s been nice and stealthy, then sucks to be you. The only one I’ve seen that actually almost makes some sense is the one on the right (as you look at it) of the south gate of the Hills keep in the borderlands, because most classes can’t actually hit it, so it actually takes a reasonable amount of time to destroy. At the same time, because most classes can’t hit it, it’s also rather unfair on those classes getting pounded by cannon fire with nary a thing that they can do about it.

I do agree that oil is completely redundant though. Any group worth their salt knows to go cannons > oil > ram and that whole process from start to finish can even take less than a couple of minutes with a small group. Or, heck, just ignore the oil entirely and set up a catapult and have something that isn’t vulnerable to the ’pult behind the door trick.

If it weren’t for the potential issue of griefers, I’d almost suggest that oil was entirely replaced with mobile siege. Something like where you buy the upgrade and you get a couple of some sort of weapon you can pick up from the Quartermaster/around the location of one that isn’t usable outside of the walls (maybe even make it so it’s an auto-drop and put back if so) that either you deploy where you want it (possibly with a small supply set-up cost) or is just a portable weapon that does extra damage to siege weapons, particularly rams, but minimal damage to players themselves. Would at least be nicer on the inattentive worlds that don’t leave lookouts and find all of the weapons on the walls are gone by the time they get there, even if I do personally enjoy taking advantage of such inattentiveness.

In terms of the issue of using rams/the problem with catapults behind the door, would it not make sense to just give anyone using a ram Stability? I might be mistaken on the mechanics, but I think that would neatly solve it, without making them overpowered.

Actually, it’s been the tactic of some losing worlds to specifically attack the other losing world. I would consider it to be perfectly valid for the simple reason that sometimes you will, for whatever reason, come up against a world that completely outperforms the other two worlds. In such a respect, the tactically-sound idea would actually be to obviously exploit any weaknesses in the top world when they pop up, but also to actively fight the other losing world, so at the end of it, your rating either won’t be affected or may actually go up a small amount. This means that next week, when that world goes up a bracket, your world is ready and raring to go for a more balanced fight in the same bracket.

To give an illustrative example, SoS lost against FA last week – in the end, it was much closer than it originally looked and our rating actually went up by about 32 points. That said, even when we were losing by a considerable margin, because of the gains we had made against Maguuma too, we were in no danger of losing rating and were only at risk of dropping a ranking place because of the bracket above (that FA’s win propelled them into) being significantly higher in terms of rating. The week before, again, despite being beaten soundly by TC, because of the gains made against GoM, we held our rating (a <1 increase to be precise) and ranking.

We’re certainly not the only world that has done this and, to be honest, I think where a world is consistently doing this and keeping their rating very even, that’s probably a good indication that they’re actually pretty well-balanced and belong about that point in the rankings and that the rating system’s done its job well. It’s only because you’re dealing with a small subject pool of 24 competitors (and to a small extent, the timezone difference meaning some worlds may be stronger than others but that doesn’t show in the final points), that despite a world seemingly fairly stable in their rating and ranking, the worlds they come up against can be disproportionately stronger or weaker than them. This naturally leads to scores being all over the place and huge ratings changes, because there isn’t such a gradual slope upwards in terms of skill/activity. But worlds that can face that and still come out very close to their previous rating probably are actually about where they should be.

That all said, obviously transfers have mixed it up for SoS this week and, with no derision intended, I’m genuinely looking forward to the reset on Friday/Saturday and fighting in a bracket that will probably closer match our new level. Or actually being in WvW full stop, because it’s not really been that much fun this week for my guild’s usual play-style.

As crazy as it sounds, a large point of WvW is not actually fighting other players. Population aside (assuming for a crazy second that all worlds were equal and playing at the same time of day), between three servers, the one that wins is the one with the best strategy, battlefield awareness and communication (and I guess knowing that putting your defensive carts on the outer edge of a wall is just silly helps too). No, it’s not meant to be PvDoor, but the idea is doing everything else right so when you do start fighting, the odds are stacked in your favour. In that respect, joining up with an organised group (whether a small ninja-raiding/capping team or a larger zerg) will not only mean that you’re likely to have more fun, but also makes you far more useful to your world.

Oh and if the running’s that much of a concern, that’s what ims skills are for.