Guild Wars 2

They wouldn’t want to tell us about the actual mechanics because that would only lead to bad kinds of meta gaming.

What use would it be to you to know the maximum player count for a map? What use would it be to know if they had some sliding cap?

That was dirt how FA snuck our north tower while IoJ was keeping us busy in southern CDBL. Any guild want to boast about pulling that off?

Ohoni.6057:

I want the aesthetic achievement, and eventually the shiny weapon (though likely not within even next year), but I want them for their intrinsic value, not to say “I’ve done everything in this game.” I truly hope that most players don’t quit right after earning their Legendaries, that would seem such a waste.

They have the same intrinsic value as much much cheaper weapons. Unless you are ridiculously attracted to “it is going to get a stat boost when they release ascended weapons” you really don’t gain any bang for your buck there.

But it’s not hard. It’s either very easy, or completely impossible, and which of those it has has nothing to do with me.

It has two very important things to do with you.
A: You refuse to change servers.
B: You don’t log on during our strongest hours.

If my own server is in control of the node, or within striking distance of it, then clearing it for map completion is effortless. If my own server doesn’t control that keep, and is nowhere near it, then it’s impossible, even if I’m a PvP god. It’s a bit foolish to try to invoke player skill in this, player skill is completely irrelevant here. It’s a bit like blaming someone for voting for the “wrong guy” in an election with a 1000+ vote margin of victory, each vote matters very little, it’s only the combination of numerous votes that makes any difference.

Well first of all thank you for telling me that I’m wasting my time and don’t count. Secondly- well no, I have enough self restraint to decide against saying that. Small contribution doesn’t mean pointless.

What other players want to do with their time is not up to me, and shouldn’t be up to you either.

Motivating people is not the same thing as forcing people to do things they don’t want to. Stop acting like you can’t tell the difference.

the past few weeks I’ve been checking in every hour or two when I was near a computer, but it’s never been in blue control during that time.

You’ll need to stay up a few hours because our regular NA players aren’t numerous enough to get things done that early.

Ohoni.6057:

But that’s my point, we shouldn’t have to. If the majority of players on the server don’t want to WvW, that should be fine. That shouldn’t prevent them from getting world completion.

And some of you keep saying that I’m “not helping.” I’m definitely helping.
-snip-
and I spend about ten times as much time doing so as I would really care to, again likely more than most.

This sounds very different from “I’ve already played about twelve hours more than I’d care to in a lifetime.” Thank you for your contribution.

But what does completion even mean if you’re not completing it?

If and when I get tired of PvE, I’ll be tired of he game and gone from it. WvW does not even factor in any way towards by positive impressions of the game, it only serves as a potential negative. At the moment I’m enjoying the game by leveling my alts, I have my main at 80, an alt at 53, 51, 35, two at 25 and two at 20.

You’re working on aesthetic achievements and a shiny weapon that both say “I’ve done everything in this game.” If you don’t want to do everything then just don’t do everything.

If you want to fight in the mists and one day breach the most unassailable defenses then do that. If you want to complain that it is too hard then get off of the hard mode server and go somewhere that has WvW that’s more like the PvE content.

I don’t want our team to lose, I want our team to control the red borderlands.

Then get some of us to stop running fractals and idling in lion’s arch.

but if ANet says “your team needs to lose in order for you to get world completion,” then Anet is saying our team should lose.

They don’t say that. You’re the only one saying that.

I checked in several times today and the Red Battlegrounds were in breakout mode, so if you’re doing as good as you claim, I’m seeing no evidence of it. Last night there were several points where the DB outer walls were breached, and yet all the three available commanders were goofing off at the NE supply camp instead of even bothering to take the inner walls or defend the blue trebs at Greenbriar.

Oh my actual state-of-the-field content from you.

Leaving open field trebs undefended is bad but not rushing-in-right-when-the-wall-drops tends to be a smart choice. These are often long time scale attrition battles where we want to eliminate the supply cache inside of a keep. Rushing in to get smacked by a prepared defense would often mean both a wipe of the infantry as well as leaving those trebuchets vulnerable while we respawned. Against a significant defense inside the bay (such that you would be repelled trying to place rams or even catapults down in front of the gates, at their respective ranges,) your best approach is one of two options: catapults up on the southern rim shooting down at the inner walls or trebuchets at the northern section between the northern gates. If you have 3 elementalists that can be bothered to carry a focus then trebuchets at the very northern tip of the water (where the dam wall meets stone) can also work, but this also requires a much more competent defense crew- mainly crown control melee that are good at what they do.

With the inner gate down it is again very risky to charge straight into the lord’s room. That place is a relatively narrow alley that frequently has heavy ballista fire and however many arrow carts they can pack in before siege cap. With the kinds of bunker melee most servers can pull to defend those rooms you need to instead approach carefully and get up on the walls to thin the siege as best you can, and then approach the ballies as a wall instead of as a line, or even just guerilla it for a long time pecking at them from range until they go down.

At that point your infantry need to be capable of wiping the enemy infantry under arrow cart fire from the back wall of the lord room, but with any luck you’ve caught a lot of players that overextended and did stupid things during the siege so you outnumber them and you’ve got a group butchering anybody that tries to run back in from spawn (players almost always trickle so just four ganky players can catch the majority of it.

If they’ve got a waypoint in the bay and their pugs know how to get in between defense events then it is significantly more difficult to clear the place- so much so that I would even say ANet needs to engineer some way to basically make the defense events overlap so that waypoints can truly only be used when keeps aren’t being attacked-
but you wouldn’t care by that point because from the inner wall of bay you can rush to the vista and poi about as soon as your team has cleared the wall.

Ohoni.6057:

Unless the tier is extremely unbalanced each server will likely have the northern holdings on their own borderlands when they have a playing population in WvW. Just pick a red server in the top few tiers, get your god kitten points and transfer back to CD in a week. If you had listened to the like 20 people telling you to do this since god knows how many weeks ago nobody will be having this discussion.

This shouldn’t be necessary. The game should work without requiring server transfers to do it.

As it so happens servers have population limits. Likewise the WvW maps have population limits, but the last month or so we’ve had a hard time filling them up, because there are so many players on the server that don’t have any interest in being competitive.

You can’t get to these vistas and pois because there are too many players like you on the server. This is difficult because you insist on fighting against the WvW players on the server by not contributing to it, and as you’ve said yourself you don’t even want to WvW once you’ve got the legendary.

This game doesn’t have raid instances and fractals is the only dungeon that remains relevant beyond some clothes you’d snag for looks- but you’ll have done them all to death by the time you’ve got a legendary… so you basically want to not have to work at WvW so that you can run out of reasons to play the game?

It’s weird how FA tries so much harder with TC gone, even though IoJ sweeps in behind them to repeatedly take objectives after FA did all the hard work of busting into the place.

Hey, it’s not like many of us in Crystal Desert weren’t also NA players. I was dead on my feet by 5am server time and the oceanics just never came. Presumably you got your hills back very shortly after that since so many of us finally started having to leave to go to work without any sleep at all.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Hekatombaion.4320:

That said I wouldn’t mind if the map colors weren’t tied to your relative position in the hierarchy. That’s not at all intuitive for inexperienced players and as elo stabilizes it will just take longer and longer for servers to swap positions.

This is something I never understood. If you’re going to set them based on the hierarchy, why not randomize which sections the colors start at? It changes the game somewhat if one week you’re defending your starting point at the southeast in EB and next week you’re defending the starting point in the southwest.

It would have been meant variable map location names if they had to adjust the south half so that red/blue/green vale showed up in the right place, but there’s a smidge of balance for the heavily populated hours with the maps as they are- against 1st place you have the theoretically better team securing the hills keep while red goes for the bay that will most likely flip more often anyway. On the red border it’s the other way around with blue in the bay while green probably keeps the hills as long as they care to. If the map spawn points went mirror image some of the time it would mean comparably easy weeks for the green team instead of the slight placement advantage for red.

In EB the terrain offers some much greater advantages to the teams, with the possible exception of the water entrance to green keep being front and center instead of in a little hidden alcove you won’t see attacks at if you don’t keep a scout posted on it.

Ohoni.6057:

I thought we were getting beat last night, how is CD not red this week? I was told that’s how it works.

Quick primer on elo: way back in the day chess players started to realize that it didn’t matter how many games you won if you were just playing pushovers. Instead they made a system where you were assigned a number that would go up or down as you played games, but it would go up more if you beat somebody with a higher number than your own, or go down a lot more if somebody with a low number beat you.

-

This has spread to basically all competitive games, but especially online game matchmaking, plus a variety of modifications. Since we have the actual points in WvW it’s not just win/lose but how many points you get. When IoJ came down to this tier we were basically against a server with a higher number, so performing well against them (relatively even score split,) meant both our numbers went up a good bit.
CD hasn’t been performing well enough against TC so despite being in 2nd place our number wasn’t going up very much- but pulling the same score we did against IoJ’s higher elo FA went up that much more.

Ohoni.6057:

This is a game, it’s meant to be fun. It shouldn’t be cramming players into gameplay elements that they don’t want to play for any more than the absolute minimum amount of time. This is not working.

If you don’t have to do map completion for a legendary then I don’t want to have to do any of that mat gathering for it. Let’s not make them take any karma either, and let’s remove precursors as well. I don’t really care for any of those gameplay elements so why should I have to do them?[/dumb]

That said I wouldn’t mind if the map colors weren’t tied to your relative position in the hierarchy. That’s not at all intuitive for inexperienced players and as elo stabilizes it will just take longer and longer for servers to swap positions.

Ohoni.6057:

What servers do a good job of keeping red under their control?

The maps are meant to give you 1.5 camps and a keep fairly easily (spawn advantage) on enemy borderlands, and with breakout events you can always get a toe hold on those maps if you’ve got a handful of players that aren’t busy elsewhere. Used to be there was an even stronger presence on enemy maps because you needed at least one keep on the map to hold the orb of power (and clearly a large factor in ANet’s release of breakout events.)

So I wouldn’t expect high tiers to have anything like that.
If you’re actually checking very often you shouldn’t have any problems getting points in the lower halves of maps. Those all flip rather frequently at this tier. Getting the points in an enemy garrison and north towers would be the only places you really have to WvW a lot to get without actually switching colors. I wonder why you don’t have a hard time getting the deep points in green territory on eternal battleground though. Even when both servers would focus on TC we wouldn’t take those.

On the other hand, taking in that we are a fairly competitive WvW server and you aren’t interested in that game element what’s keeping you here? Seems you’d be happier with a more PvE focused server where jumping puzzles are the only thing you aren’t guaranteed to get after putting a lot of hours into it.

e: We took the red keep on EB so if you need that vista then you’re welcome.

Spies report that SoS does the best things we do but with more players that already know how to do them. Probably a more dedicated player base but mainly we just need to spread those tactics more, and possibly get more commanders working on the complex things.

Kman.7358:

It’s nice to see a REALLY close matchup for once, instead of one server blowing the other two out of the water. This has already been a great week, and regardless of who wins, I’m already looking forward to the next one. Keep up the good fights, and happy holidays.

… but you’re on CD.
CD winning almost always looks like a fairly even split- our players aren’t motivated to turn multiple maps one color more than a night or two out of the week. We basically have to convince servers to stop playing before we get really far ahead.

I guess you mean it’s nice to not have Tarnished Coast out of our hair so half kittening WvW still gets us a decent score?

Kerithlan.1659:

Merry Christmas to you too. Our numbers have nothing to do with it. Sad to see people still flaming us. Keep on fighting, forum warrior.

Your numbers had everything to do with it, but not because you had more people in WvW for much of the time. Your NA crews ran around in larger balls than our servers, and because they were so mobile you actually had people that count buy some time at a point until the cavalry arrived. You essentially just had greater ability to rally everyone to a specific objective.

From what I have experienced your rear line retreats faster than any other server (haven’t been below tier 4,) and your front line isn’t a very solid wall. The CD front line generally doesn’t have enough players but does some of the lockdown and burst that keeps skirmishers away from the long range classes, but any coordinated group knows there are a lot of ways to get at the back, and then our average ball of players falls apart just as easily as yours ever did.

Riddickk.7091:

We at IOJ love the current t3 enviroment. It feels Fair and right. Everynow and then the numbers seem to swing into one side’s favor over the others, but the score surely reflects how even overall that the servers seem to be. CD pulled ahead quickly, as they had a nearly 10k lead on IOJ with FA behind us by I think 3 or 4k. I’m guessing either they burned themselves out from the reset and the weekend, the holiday is taking it’s toll on their playerbase, or are tired of the constant asskicking from us. IOJ is being steadly consistant as it usually is. We pull very strongly towards midweek to friday. FA is looking impressive with a good showing for monday. We are keeping an eye on you sneaky fellas.

P.S. I can’t stand SOR or BG.

Personally I was heavily demotivated by your forces abusing the open waypoints when defense events cycle. I know that’s how the game works but using that to wipe entire server groups as CD and FA were attacking two of your keeps seemed untouchable. For how well you move large groups around like that the waypoints might as well always be up.

ykyk.2740:

take to some solid forum warfare as release. Or insult other servers when they drop by to offer advice from their new experiences.

I find your presence in this thread to be highly passive aggressive whining.

That said, we lob some pretty stupid complaints your way. I get the impression that anything but ignoring it will make it worse, and knowing the internet these things won’t go ignored. Since it’s hollow chest beating I’d suggest you not concern yourself with it and just let some other sucker waste time fanning the flames.

Riddickk.7091:

Absinth.6917:

Hek; I agree with you on the squishy, not enough getting yelled at, and the running away/wiped parts. CD is a great server but sometimes we are so disorganized that nothing can be accomplished due to lack of initiative. Our main issue is being reactive instead of proactive….well that and severe tunnel vision….and a sudden outbreak of blue doritos.

All that being said – I’m having a great time and I hope our fellows in arms as well as our current foes are having as much fun as I am.

Merry X-mas and stuff everyone. I hope Santa brings you something nice.

/salute

From an IOJ perspective, both servers seem to be a lot squishier than what we’re used to. There have been times when I(as a GS warrior) would get into your backline and you’d have people just standing there taking it in the face without moving or dodging and they drop in 2seconds. It’s also pretty appearent that most of your server is not used to open world battles because they fold so easily on force multipliers( I.E. dps focus onto a certain position). This problem is exacerbated especially to my guild since we run fairly skirmisher heavy(warriors/thieves/guardians/bomb engineers) because we can just cut a swath through your front line and as soon as 4 or 5 guys go down everyone just turns and runs.

I’ve been saying that for awhile but I’ve got no idea what to do about it. Within a guild you can break tendencies like that but are there any options for teaching the less WvW focused players or even having a zerg commander somehow adjusting that behavior?

CD is kind of skirting the line between having an excessive number of ranged squishy players and actually having the solid bunkers for the serious time large numbers battles. That or we don’t have enough people getting yelled at in chat to break those bad habits so they think running away isn’t basically just as bad as getting wiped.

It’s frustrating but you work with what you’ve got. We’re much closer to the perfect storm of players than a lot of servers we’ve been against so maybe one day everyone will know about how much more potential they could have.

Sir William PD.9615:

Will there be dolyak parades?

You know it!

Ohoni.6057:

This sucks. Another week down, another week in which CD isn’t red, and likely will never have access to most of the needed keeps on the Red Borderlands. This “world completion requires WvW maps too” thing is completely broken.

Those things aren’t that impossible to get into if you’re in WvW very much- I would think especially so with the low FA presence this week.

I can see how more limited play in WvW would really hurt for getting those points though. Your best bet would be to have some little pal whisper you when the place is being attacked/is taken.

Ohoni.6057:

I wish there were some way to letting people know that you mean them no harm.

We’ve got a bit of a thing going on where you quaff ruminant potions to become a yak and then gallop about.
…
It doesn’t exactly stop very many people from killing you but perhaps one day all will remember yakgate.
It was mainly TC’s PiNK that would let you chill with them like that when they took FA’s keeps, and the point is kind of that you do the thankless parts of WvW anyway…

Sorry for spoiling the little Christmas parade in FABL but you guys should get in touch with team dolyak if you want to do things like that~

The dolyak parade did again end in tragedy, but we made a (virtually) full lap around FABL! Didn’t have that many yaks to escort though as the camps tended to be the wrong color for sending them out.

Hydrophidian.4319:

This again makes me curious about the social environment on your server. How prevalent is ongoing, public dialogue about what’s happening on the map? Do you see a lot of people asking what they can do or where they can go? ’Cuz that appears to be a fairly common occurrence on TCBL.

I learn what to do (and where to do it) usually because I ask. But I ask because the overall tone of the chat usually encourages it, and the prominent guilds don’t shut people out.

A few months back I recall people being told to leave the server if they said they were new and wanted to know where to go. This is the kind of thing I reflexively ignore as I get used to an MMO so I really have no idea how common that is anymore. We have a good deal of bickering in chat when we have several commanders with different ideas about how effective hitting a particular target will be (in T4 we would ‘waste’ a lot of time trying to get through the OMGARROWED defense at the lord room of hills. By the time we actually punched through we’d lost a lot of ground to the other server and our garrison would at the very least be threatened if we somehow hadn’t lost it.)

It’s been kind of hard to communicate to some people that being correct doesn’t mean they’re right to kitten up the chat about it.

Sunspots.9861:

But not once in all the matchups week after week have you guys ever blamed yourselves.

You must not read any of my posts.

As for outmanned you only get that buff when they outnumber you 2 to 1, approximately. The buff goes away while you’re still significantly outnumbered.
*This is based on times when the known number of CD on a map is 20-30 so it may not be a ratio but rather some flat number.

That said you don’t outnumber us that badly, but the quick changes between maps lead a lot of players to think you’ve just got groups that large everywhere, and you’re generally not split between many objectives. I’ve said it several times now, if we played better we would tie you up in one location while we won lots of smaller battles everywhere else.

Instead we mostly play terribly and nobody can take advantage of your tunnel vision.

Niim.9260:

my style of play, which is small group/solo. Admittedly the game is not designed for this style of play, but typically it provides a lot of enjoyment regardless.

Small groups are actually great, but you need some communication with the larger forces to not get trampled by enemy zergs.

If you’ve played WvW long enough you’ve probably see a few gank squads- just around five melee characters that run around stomping on the folks trickling behind a zerg, or even 20 man zergs if they got spread out that badly and don’t ever converge.

Kerithlan.1659:

Perhaps rallying against exploiters will be the Squanto that cools down our heated rivalry and brings our servers together?

Much more likely a Dolyak parade.

Shrouded.6450:

Let’s get into details then, if you truly believe that only a few major guilds agreed on an alliance and not the majority. It still doesn’t change the fact that TC got shaken about it.

Did somebody say details?
…
I’ll keep it brief this time. [KH] [RISE] [LaZy] with fought tooth and nail to take their natural tower (no wussy breakouts that week) and then pressured the bay in TC border. This pulled all of the borderland players from TC into that map and there was a lot of intense stalemate all night while FA marched up their side of the map and eventually got pushed back out, but they never made a move to take the thoroughly defended tower or participate in the heavy fighting between TC and CD (this is strange how?)

In short the ‘alliance’ was what happens to CD and FA basically every time FA decides to send a focused group into those borderlands.

There was another ‘alliance’ that consisted of zero guilds but something on the order of ten players that were dueling each other and chatting.

Derv the Monkinator had asked for an alliance early on but never even got intel on the names of CDs commanders (that week) and there was one other post claiming that every large guild on FA was in on ‘the alliance.’

No other details ever came out.

Diashame.6328:

You guys have no idea how much has changed on ioj since we all last met. We are no longer the numerical force we used to be. We are now hardened fighting against the odds type. So if we outnumber you we probably wouldn’t have a clue what to do. Gang up and outnumber us your going to be surprised because that’s when we feel at home.

Oh cool, I might learn some tricks after all, or more likely just have an easier time pointing them out to newer people on the server :/

The actual question about queues is will they return when the Summer months hit? Gaming communities wane around this time of year across the board.

I got the impression that the high tier servers tend to lose more players than they gain from demi-elitist guilds that transfer to some low server to stomp WvW several weeks in a row until they can’t carry the entire server against native populations.

The way ANet stops you from gaining WvW % bonuses for two weeks after xfer really gets rid of the most ridiculous xfer abuse so populations are more determined by players that go PvE if they aren’t winning and those that actually want to compete. For the latter group there’s unfortunately this problem where they’ve got to pick a server blindly and spend a good many hours experiencing the game before they know what WvW actually is, much less if they want to really sink a lot of time into it.

Even if it always took gems to move servers this would just inconvenience the low level (or fresh 80) players while letting the power gamers leave masses of players at utterly demoralizing odds as they spent several weeks dropping tiers with no hope of ever going back up.

For the mid tiers it is specifically enemy borders where this counts. Since the orbs were removed there has been little reason to maintain presence on every map so instead the focus went to taking your entire home border and making it impossible for enemies to ever hold a tower there- if they first took camps you would have time to come defend the tower with numbers, if they went straight for the tower there was no way to get much supply in before a serious assault (and you would be a in a bad situation having wooden walls under fire from trebuchets anyway.)

As such high population hours would largely mean stagnation as only eternal had any tug of war effect to it. If there actually was anything going on in the borderlands it would be all three servers active in just the one border that couldn’t pull together the aforementioned defense.

Obviously there are ways of wearing down those kinds of entrenched positions but even a lot of serious WvW players lose motivation when they struggle to get their natural tower only to immediately lose it.

With this you’ve always got a presence on as many maps as your players care to, without it taking quite the same effort as taking a northern tower before you’ve even got the corresponding keep. You’re basically punished less for being the first players on after a night crew took everything and upgraded it against no resistance.

Vagrant.1094:

-optimism-

I’m fairly convinced that anybody on CD with a commander tag that doesn’t think they know what they are doing just leaves it off all of the time.

I know that thing makes your chat super busy but I’ve never once got a response from whispering our commanders (excluding those in my guild/in teamspeak with me.) The hodge podge players are fairly good about whispers but I wish I could figure out who dropped this or that piece of siege so I could just offer placement tips to them.

Hydrophidian.4319:

Couldn’t this probably be said of most or all servers?

I meant it in relation to other servers. Even when our population is still fairly large we lose points really fast. As soon as the offense stops on CD we’ve got almost no ability to defend places. I’d have to guess that our players who show up no matter what have no idea how to man a mortar, and rarely think to use the burning oil.

rhyein.6172:

Andy.9137:

I’m not saying TC is less skilled than FA or CD at all. Don’t get me wrong. What you’re saying is exactly right and I would love a good fight on equal footing. I just wish TC would stop attributing their score to skill alone when it simply makes them seem foolish and arrogant.

Except nobody has ever said that (that I’m aware of),

I’ve been no-life-ing the forums pretty hard for awhile and I can throw some support on that. It’s almost always “it’s not just our numbers, it’s how we use them” as a response to people approaching “mindless zerg” name calling. Most of us seem too caught up in rivalry to catch the important qualifiers, but I would like to remind CD that after a few weeks in tier four we did start to just win with numbers. We only ever had large leads thanks to our oceanic coverage but as the same match wore on the other servers saw some serious loss of players. Being fair weather over the course of a month isn’t quite the same as over the course of a week but it harmed them to the point that our better players were neither needed for sweeping victory nor likely to see much action even if they did show up.

Actually I would think that in tier 2 you’d have people exploiting your home defense system. It happened once last week when we got our little wrecking ball into your tower and kept so many of you busy at the bay that you only had two towers in EB. Claims of that alliance overshadowed what was really going on there.

I’d definitely agree that CD is pitiful about holding on to our points during our off hours, and the NA players are pretty bad at that when they’re not even very outnumbered.

SO
I’d like to know a little more about how TC actually trains their pugs. I’ve been making gradual efforts of that nature for a good while now but it’s very disheartening as most either think they already know everything or are not interested in learning (‘somebody else will know how to do that.’)

I learned trebuchet placement very shortly before they removed the orbs so there just hasn’t been the same need to know how to defend positions, and all the fewer opportunities to pick up the precise placements for key siege- even if I could get a whole group paying attention I still wouldn’t ever get it across to that many players.

As for mapping things out do you just put those on any old image upload site and luck out that they don’t get leaked to your enemies?

We’ve got a queue for a borderland for the first time on a Sunday in who knows how long so I won’t necessarily say that we don’t have many players this week, but I think it’s just because we had to take back our garrison.

The close proximity to each other’s spawns usually puts the two servers at each other’s throats in the strongest’s borderland. If you have people just hitting whatever they think they can take you’ll get a few commanders that go after the nearby towers, and very shortly you’ve got the commanders that were more interested in heading north falling back to help defend the place, and shortly after they’re now trying to take the other southern tower (or just threaten it) so that they don’t have to worry about losing their own.

This means there’s basically two ways to keep both teams trying to march north:
A: The servers talk to each other and agree not to waste time on those towers that they couldn’t hold even if they took them. Commanders probably still have to come south to drive some riff raff away from it but they know they’ll never have to deal with a very resilient group as there’s no amplified retaliation for killing those players.
B: ALL of the commanders on both servers are more interested in being north anyway. This would either happen if one commander is in control of all the rest on their server or if there is only one commander, and they actually have basically all the players put to work.

B is pretty rare but you do see it happen sometimes, when there’s recognition of one simply concept: “they are keeping our enemies busy,” meaning “we’ll get wiped off the map or be forced to only turtle if they go to a different borderland.”

Now, I don’t think B can last for more than a night or two. Sooner or later somebody is going to take something, even on another map, and at least a few commanders will think that it’s time to fight them to teach them that they don’t get to do things like that without paying a price for it. Since this isn’t scenario A most of the players on the other server have no idea why the makeshift truce is off and they basically think exactly the same thing leading into a mafia style escalation where they are more interested in tearing out each other’s throats than toppling the king of the hill.

Or to make this even more like the game theory models I’m familiar with the unofficial alliance has optimal outputs when there are no individuals cheating the system, rapidly declines in efficiency as they are introduced (and those blighters spread f-a-s-t.) This is by far going to be the most common outcome as “cheating” is extremely advantageous when nobody else is doing it, but as you know it declines as well the more people there are operating like that- right up to the point where TC easily kicks both our kittens because we’re more concerned with each other than them, and honestly can’t handle them 1v1 anyway.

Now, the paper that comes to mind showed that the limiting factor in this sort of thing was reciprocal altruism (basically where you punish people that don’t contribute in a way that costs you more than it costs them- basically you’re not just picking on them and you think the matter is very serious business,) but I haven’t got a clue how to make that happen in WvW, or really anywhere on the internet.

*Reciprocal altruism spreads even faster if you place the punishment not just on people that leech but also on people that don’t take part in reciprocal altruism.

Anybody got any amazing ideas for this?

Kentimetre.9025:

To be honest the hostilities between both servers are all that surprising. This is a match where one server wins comfortably by 70k+ every week and will do so for the foreseeable future and the other server is one that has been stuck in this scenario for over a month. Morale drops, tension rises and this is the result.

FA doesn’t do bad enough to be in tier four, TC doesn’t do good enough for tier two. Does any part of that mean they shouldn’t fight each other for even twenty weeks in a row? There is no better place to put those two servers.

Unfortunately.5940:

TheFug.5278:

Yeah, that was the most FA I have seen to date – that was intense. Really wish they would fix the culling.

Yeah that’ll happen when you usually PvDoor in FA off-peak hours

The wasn’t much vs gate action going on. We’d been running around trying to get yaks from the three camps into the hills keep for a waypoint for a good while and then lol’d on the vulnerable trebs in the east tower before setting up our own to clear the breakout commander.

What actually happened was that we popped into CDBL for a bit to take the bay keep. Without anything significant to do there and TC turning in for the night we got to face the entire holiday population of FA all on that map.

They got their map back but did you see that sea of reds laying on the ground in my pic? The FA laying there didn’t need any real skill at counting to see how few players it took to convert them into loot bags during that inept attempt on the tower.

Hey, FA finally got a whole server of people back on. Well done guys, I haven’t seen this kind of culling to stop just KH from doing things since before we dipped into T4.

A little bit,
like this~

I saw breakout as being mostly for lower tiers where they actually give up against hugely stronger servers (like they get 2 or 3 times your score, not just several thousand points ahead of you.)

Nice to see FA having some activity in CDBL though. Maybe the other guilds can learn how to defend stuff during this ez mode week.

Sam.3645:

Great fun at FABL’s ruins with you guys (CDs) !
<3 We should do it more often.

Our apologies for the spoiled sport
on the balista but your thieves seemed to know how to deal with that.

I tried to get a screencap as a yak but I was just a bit too late so the fireworks ended and people nearly downed me all the way out there.

If you didn’t have the ire of the cool spectrum I’d say you were missing out on the easy presents laps you can do around the demon lake and south camp. I made like twenty gold today with a lucky present box and some of my guildies has found way blingier stuff than that.

Diehard.1432:

Hmm… from the score updates, it really shows that we need reinforcement for our NA coverage badly. We clearly are the weakest during that time. Time for some recruitment thread, my fellow NA CD players?

We’re full every time I look at it (got some friends that want to xfer on) but other than that we’d definitely benefit. No idea how to get the people who don’t WvW to leave though.

Usagi.4835:

Moreover, don’t bring CD into this. What’s cheap is how people from your server deliberately disrupted an event, hosted by someone from CD, then have the nerve to ask them to team up with you and focus on TC. Frankly, I don’t care if you do, but it really does reflect poorly on Fort Aspenwood. This isn’t the first time and there is a reason many people dislike FA.

FYI it’s only this Derv The Monkinator guy asking for an alliance.

uhohhotdog.3598:

Jayne.9251:

I suggest those FAers ticked off by all this, direct their anger in the proper direction. Read the antagonistic responses from the perpetrators …. Then let your server know these guys pulled this nonsense and did nothing to help defend your borders in the aftermath (read the replies carefully, they avoid answering definitively). They basically stirred the pot and left the rest if you to clean up the mess.

Where is it?

Last thread closed after I quoted stuff for a request like this so I think you have to read the thread on your own bro.

pkilla.2534:

So, I looked a bit back and see that a handful of FA ruined some event put together by a TC player. That’s expected, really, considering most players don’t read the forums and have no idea that people actually do that kind of thing. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous how some of you guys are stroking your egos over getting an already, always outnumbered server down to 0 points in the middle of the night for most of us. Especially considering the fact that you know we’re tough as nails when we actually have people online. Where are these mature people your server claims to be populated with? Tsk.

I have two things to respond to this with:
A: People from your server had been advertising it to the point of suppression, and others were saying to stop in chat as it happened. The people responsible came in here, declared they knew exactly what was up, and bragged about killing the parade.
B: I think TC intends to focus you guys into next week over this. I’m sure some players from CD will eventually do something offensive enough to regain the ire of TC but until that happens things are looking particularly bad for FA.

Grimpaw.7493:

Seems like we may want to organize some other cross server events for otherwise slow Thursdays.

Well if nobody comes up with anything else I’m sure we could try to escort other yaks through the perilous pathways of WvW and see who comes to wreck the party- I bet one from north camp to garrison on any border would give the saboteurs less excuse to have just been in the area playing normally anyway, and more time for us to block out the sun with our fireworks. I know appledainty still has tons of ruminant potions so we could aim to have twice as many yaks in the parade each time we do it.

TC didn’t exactly demolish two other servers at the same time. PiNK and the people that follow them destroyed FA while CD did some light raiding. CD eventually pulled back to handle the rest of TC who had decided to come to our borderlands because “Hey, our server is active. Let’s do this!”

Plus CD is really low motivation by Thursday anyway. We tend to think this day doesn’t count, or at least the NA players do.
-Not to devalue anyone that’s trying to hold TC back, but there just isn’t the population tonight. You might as well hang out in Eternal if you want actual fights.

Arcadio.6875:

sceptus.9415:

Arcadio.6875:

sceptus.9415:

Except.. We beat you for a month straight with better tactics

Having more people is not really a tactic.

Unfortunately, its just a reality. We have more people. We also have good tactics. Like how you left that part out of your quote.

I suppose throwing people at the opponent is a good tactic if the opponent will get overwhelmed hours later. Not very efficient though.

Don’t pretend what TC does makes you better tacticians. Any server that has your population would be doing the exact same things you do. I do have some fun fighting TC though. Wiping out zergs with smaller numbers is a bit thrilling. Yeah they are going to eventually take whatever you are defending (or they will take back whatever you plan on taking), but it is still fun during the moment.

They really don’t do exactly the same thing as anybody with those numbers. They started this “I own my entire home borderland” thing before the orbs went out and removed the incentive for the strongest server to have a keep in each map.

Edelweiss.3206:

For Fluffyhooves.
RIP

kitten? I have a screenshot in this very thread of the yak parade not being completely wiped out.

appledainty.8127:

Wow. Look at that lone FA Tower. :x

What tower?

Odaman.8359:

phaneo.4597:

Odaman’s post makes it pretty clear though. If we are zergs that throw our bodies for our server, you guys are just farmers that don’t give a damn if your server loses. No wonder you guys keep losing. GG!

That’s pretty accurate actually. I’ve seen tc throw their bodies at keep gates for hours getting stomped over and over and never give up. Personally I’d rather have fun killing than hitting auto run for 3hrs just to win.

Nah, TC zergs are a hell of a lot smarter than that. Given the size of these groups they are extremely well coordinated.

I can grant that the players in their zerg would probably lose at 5v5 fights with random people from the zergs of the other servers but their elite guild crews are roughly on par with elite guild crews I’ve seen on CD (and I haven’t spotted the elites of FA since we seem to primarily fight each other while I’m not around.)

But it should be clear that excellent dueling skillz aren’t an important trait for the general zerg of any server. TC fields an impressive force that does a lot more than bang their heads on gates, and really shines defensively. Admittedly they also walk golem armies under burning oil pots fairly often but I don’t doubt the CD zerg would do the same given the chance.

And FYI: having some small coordinated groups go snipe yaks or take camps while the zergs are keeping things busy at a wall actually does quite a bit to undermind that position. Having those kinds of groups with a lot of immobilize type effects out a ways on the road in front of towers also really changes the game.

What you need to do is get off your kitten and actually put those kinds of groups together while your zerg swarms a location. If there aren’t parties like that put together then you are the one responsible for it just being a boring zerg. Don’t order people to do it in chat, just send invites to people and kittening explain the goal to them. You just need one person at the place telling you that it’s about to fall so you can rush back and not miss out on the karma- but you got more lootbags while you were waiting.

For every Dolyak that gets escorted a skritt bottle lobber gets his wings.

As many of us were in the DOLY guild for the event I don’t know which FA guilds/players were participating nicely. If you lot haven’t hopped off the roster yet maybe we can figure out which FA guild/players should have a magical protection bubble? If you were trying to play along and want to not suffer the wrath of the roleplayers for the next however-long-it-lasts you might want to rock the DOLY tag, though who can say how well we will be able to communicate to the pugs that we’re trying to not kill you lot specifically.

Despite the noncooperation of a lot of FA people that-don’t-read-the-forums and/or hate-yaks a very very reduced yak parade did safely get the yak through. The yak will no doubt suffer from depression due to missing the fireworks but maybe an artificer can whip up some medication to help it cope.

Kerithlan.1659:

HenryAu.7523:

Well call me old and cynical. I’m calling it here that the parade dolyak is going to die and a massive brawl will happen.

Yes, I have lost faith in the humanity of online FPS and PvP gamers a long time ago. Go ahead… prove me wrong. =)

Calling it here and now, since both CD and YB appear to be on board with this yak march. Fort Aspenwood players are going to kill the yak because of their blind rage toward Yak’s Bend. I’m surprised they don’t camp dolyaks 24/7 just to get another shot at killing a yak.

Well then we’re in luck because YB is in some other kitteny tier and we’ve only gotta get TC involved.

I hope the closed thread doesn’t stop us from planning our glorious trichromatic parade behind the noble Fluffyhooves as this match winds down.

phaneo.4597:

Hekatombaion.4320:

phaneo.4597:

Nobody on TC is crying about 2v1,

Saw quite a lot of people on TC crying about it, and assuming it was a thing. Also saw some embracing the challenge but the point is you don’t speak for everybody.

Care to quote the posts than just shooting in the air that “quite a lot of people on TC are crying about 2v1”? The majority, hell 99% of posters here that I know from TC, don’t even care if its 2v1. If you want to see real 2v1 accusations and crying, perhaps you should take a look back to the last 3 weeks of TC/FA/YB? OR… more familiar example that I’m sure you could remember was TC/CD/YB where CD JP campers were kitten that TC & YB wouldn’t kill each other out there. We have lots of evidences to prove it, numerous posts, every week the threads got closed due to continuous derailing of discussion with endless rants about some imaginary alliance; here some CD & FA commanders or whoever have clearly admitted or just trolled about 2v1 AFTER WE, TC, HAVE BEGGED for an alliance to keep us feel challenged. Now here we are, again discussing about it making some baseless ridiculous statements that “quite a lot on TC are crying over 2v1”. Quote the posts kitten that proves quite a lot are crying and only a few are happy about the challenge, where I can prove its the opposite.

Edit: Wow, F F S got replaced by kitten, gg Anet!

Weird, you kept the part after it where I explain what the point is but you miss it anyway?

Hell, I’m not doing anything important right now:

FA and CD is trying to form an alliance against TC? Wow, that is definitely not intended gameplay.

If that alliance worked, and TC moved to 2nd or 3rd place at the end of the match ups, what would that do exactly? Cause all three servers to play against each other for even more matches, which would force FA and CD to keep their alliance.

Does that make sense? I understand it may be hard to fight TC right now. It may be tempting to form an alliance to “crush us”. But in all honesty, it will just be hurting you in the long run. And it may even hurt T4 (if you were to push TC down a tier due to 2v1) because TC would COMPLETELY demolish that tier. Do you see how this creates unbalance?

DivineBeing.2086:

I do understand that random pugs aren’t going to know about the alliance most likely. And that’s expected. But if an alliance does form, than the result will still be the same (outlined in my original post). This result is not good for ANY server.

Do not try to control the market :/.

Sunspots.9861:

Why do you guys care about the score anyways. If it was a case of not even being able to leave your spawn because the cruel TCers were camping all spawns and holding everything on the map, then I get the angst, but its not that way at all.

Karuna.1357:

So FA . . . I see that CD has wiped you off the face of Eternal Battlegrounds. How is that supposed alliance working out for you?

sceptus.9415:

I wouldn’t mind if we lost a match at all. We could use a lesson. The question is, will it silence all the ignorant posts or we will just be subjected to more chest-bashing and insults?

DemonCow.5328:

I also can’t wait to see when you guys finally turn on each other if it starts to look like Yak’s Bend might move back up into 9th.

Teege.4623:

I’d like to take bets on who will backstab who first, CD or FA?

Six pages in and I’m losing the will to keep scanning for this crap. I was trimming some of them to fit but I didn’t even make it to the part where TC players decided to retaliate for “the alliance.”

phaneo.4597:

Nobody on TC is crying about 2v1,

Saw quite a lot of people on TC crying about it, and assuming it was a thing. Also saw some embracing the challenge but the point is you don’t speak for everybody.

I still can’t get a straight answer about who exactly was in on it, if anyone. Got some “FA is willing to sabotage themselves if it means TC isn’t first place” but that’s still not the cross server communication I’m looking for.

Does anyone on TC consider it a 2v1 alliance against you if both parties are just doing their own thing independently? If so I’d like to start up my QQ about the TC FA alliance against CD, and make it known that the CD TC alliance against FA is well deserved- they know what they did.

Jayne.9251:

Personally I think we should all make a big 3-server marching parade with Appledainty at the end of this week and walk with her and her Dolyak.

At last! The diabolical TC CD FA alliance! Now there’s truly no combination left!

Bullkitten conspiracies aside this sounds like a fun little (HUGE) goofything to do. Anybody got some video recording software ready?

fishergrip.4082:

I don’t really want to go up to T2, but I do think its kind of absurd you can win your matchup for 2 months straight and still not be close to moving up. Losing points when you win your matchup is a bit dumb.

The thing is they are winning less than they were before. Essentially they are getting closer to losing. It sucks for the other servers to not win for so long but currently we’re doing better against TC. Whoever was leading them in CD BL has shown that they have some bigger guns to bring out when they’re threatened but against the general population we’re still a better match than TC vs the T2 servers would be. Do you think they should be mismatched just to stop them from doing very well for a week?

Stonesolid.2706:

I have a lot of respect for TC and honestly CD has brought better fights than YB but they should’ve left their drama and alliance offers in T4.

FA made the offer on page 2 by Derv the Monkinator. I have no idea if he is a commander on the server or even in a reputable guild.

Usagi.4835:

Because people are painfully aware that, though TC has the numbers required for T2, there is still a lot of work to be done with regards to teamwork and organisation?

I would like to propose… an alliance…
in figuring out how to get better play from the general populace of our servers.

How willing do you think you average player would be in learning another class?

Raf.1078:

Niim.9260:

Hekatombaion.4320:

It’s presumed that as a corpse you are spying for a larger group. It’s dirty to not release, you have only sinister reasons to not release.

Is it just me, or does anyone else always find these good times to go afk, get a drink, use the bathroom, talk with the wife, etc, etc. I love coming back to people still standing around my corpse while I was eating my supper and watching TV.

Thats when I take my breaks. Spying?…please…its kitten video game…I’ll map when I’m ready to play again. But I really don’t care what you’re doing while I’m taking a few minutes to do whatever.

Get off my lawn.

Awesomesauce.9528:

Lol, basically. Staff eles are great for tower defenses and the ilk, but in terms of fighting like 1v1, I feel useless.

Eles just don’t have much to look forward to in my opinion. Scepters? They’re okay, but not great. Focuses? Looks like it’s treb guard duty for you. Staffs? Plant dat AoE fire, plant dat AoE heal, plant dat AoE… you get the point. Daggers, to me, are just way more fun.

I thought d/d was for running away from groups.

phaneo.4597:

Wow! This thread has spiced up for all right and wrong reasons!
First of all, I applaud people like Shinhwa and Shadow Gathering to come out openly and admit the temporary alliance/truce or a few commander-level coordination between 2 servers or a couple of guilds from both servers or whatever it is you call it. And yes, we asked for it. And it did make things a little interesting.

Looking through Shadow Gathering’s posts I don’t see anything but discussion of why it would be good. Shinwa does openly declare an alliance, but for the life of me I can’t figure out which commanders from CD are in it.
If a majority of FA just did map chat to decide not to attack CD that’s not exactly an alliance. Is there something more than this THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?

In my own detective work the largest alliance I’ve been able to detect was about ten CD players (no commanders) and however many members were playing in one guild on FA.
Well, I guess that’s that. Certainly worthy of server sized retaliation.

Cosec.9802:

HEY JP Griefers .. I used to have respect for both your servers .. i have none now. Kill some one that’s fine but /laughing and " teaing " the corpse is just childish when you obviously attack them in mass numbers – Yeah you got skill.. LOL .. Your weak!

It’s presumed that as a corpse you are spying for a larger group. It’s dirty to not release, you have only sinister reasons to not release.

If you’re hoping for a rez in the jumping puzzle when there is a large group of enemies fighting your players then you’re an idiot.

Been over it before but I’ll make this post anti-long-winded: if TC is attacking one of us it isn’t worth very much to the 3rd server to also attack that target- TC is just going to take those points away from you once they deal with their first target.

We’ve seen that at least some of the time (North America) CD can hold off the entire TC armada, and this makes their holdings everywhere else into very vulnerable and very juicy targets.

This applies to almost every metric of “things people in WvW want prefer to attack.”

We get more people that know how to coordinate themselves like this and/or FA figures out how to stalemate TC too and suddenly this match becomes really exciting, unpredictable, and fun- all without any communication between commanders on different servers. Don’t bother figuring out how to do that and the match will be exactly what you expected it to be back on Saturday.

Raincrow.1840:

You shouldn’t need to know about an aliance to realize it’s a good idea to focus on TC.

All you have to do is look at the score to realize that 2nd and 3rd place working together against the 1st place server is the only way to give yourselves a shot at winning.

That’s better reasons than that. We capture more stuff fighting TC and get A LOT more lootbags.

DivineBeing.2086:

So many people who fail to read prior posts in this thread. Its not even worth explaining the alliance that was made between CD and FA where it was conveyed publically in this very thread along with other witnesses, oh well.

Might as well stop talking about the alliance since it is now being compared to the whining of normal 2v1 when in reality its completely different. TC never had a party full of TC and YB commanders strategically planning their attacks together against FA, fyi….lol big difference.

But I am tired of explaining this difference and constantly referencing the post about it, so this will be the last post and hopefully everyone from TC will just keep it to themselves too. That way we can’t be categorized as a server who complains about 2v1 when its expected in a 1v1v1. Not an alliance, big difference.

I saw it suggested but saw zero “yeah let’s talk to each other to make this happen.”

Can you point me at the post so I can puzzle out how I missed it?

Sunspots.9861:

TC is too good to sink to t4 and the only thing this alliance would do is guarantee us staying in t3 forever. Cd is clearly stronger than FA, so FA and yak are the only real variables here. An alliance seals FA’s fate as a tier 4 server because the only guarantee in this matchup is a third place for FA.

Me personally though, I don’t mind. The purpose of having 3 sides is to encourage temporary alliances for sure, I just don’t think they planned on both sides commanders attacking one homeland as a single force, but rather both servers pursuing their own self interests independently. Either way, the system will compensate and things will fall back into place…whether that’s cd soaking up fair weathers from all servers or us.

I’m going to have fun either way, and I take pride that we defended as well as we did and protected our garrison. Maybe next time we won’t be as lucky!

I think with a real alliance with mutiple commanders on both servers would move FA into second place. You couldn’t hold much at all if we had everything but the players that ignore commanders only aimed at TC round the clock.

Sunspots.9861:

Raincrow.1840:

Sunspots.9861:

What’s the point of an alliance where you still get last place lol

If you watch the score you’ll see that during the times when FA and CD work together that all three scores are much closer, with FA many times getting the most points per tick. It’s helping you guys have a better chance at 1st and 2nd.

Has it occured to you that while defending our own lands as best we can, TC could simply choose not to attack CD and only destroy FA on their own homeland? I’m pretty sure if we couldn’t get first we’d just guarantee ourselves second until Fort Aspenwood got tired of being third and gave up on helping CD get first. An alliance is really on phase 1 of a changing war and we plan on playing smart, not emotionally.

Moreover, while FA can affect who gets first, it is TC who would get to decide who is last. Think about that.

You heard it here first folks- the new TC CD alliance is totally official.

DivineBeing.2086:

-alliance conspiracy-

Do think a little bit about angles of attack. If you’re red and you know that blue is hitting green’s keep there are only a few things that can happen if you try to join in on that.
1. You choose a different gate and green farms twice as many people for badges until one of you breaks through, takes the place, and demotivates the other force because they did a whole lot of work for nothing.
2. You stand near them and hope they don’t attack, inch closer and closer, and then if lucky you are both hitting the same gate or otherwise presenting a much bigger blob of red names to green, and they get real mad at both of you for outright rekittensing to fight each other.
3. You wait until the other guys bust down the door and almost have the place, but then sweep in behind them and take it for yourselves because your troops are fresh while theirs had to do all that hard work just to get in the place and maybe lost a few along the charge into the place.

1 and 3 are more the kinds of thing you see the opening night when people are trying to establish which server is top dog. Later in the week they can still happen but forces tend to be split fewer ways so you can’t as easily predict that you’ll be able to get the place, and really you end up failing more often than not simply because they started sooner.

Option 2 I’ve never really seen have the slightest success, and when commanders had out and out worked out alliances they still don’t really get into places so much as they manage to somehow magnify the stalemate.

This leaves a strategic choice that is quite obvious, and very much in line with what your server wants: go take a lot okittennmanned towers and/or keeps from the larger server. If they are already defending one keep they won’t be particularly alarmed by the fact that another keep is being threatened. Given that one keep was so threatened as to drawn the majority of their forces to it, and that they can’t simply repel the invaders pushing them into their spawn, it stands to reason that they won’t significantly split their forces to come stop you- that would mean losing the keep they have been actively protecting all this time.

If you go on to threaten their garrison they may surrender a side keep to the initial attackers, because that keep grants ridiculous levels of trebuchet coverage on the top half of the map, has huge supply stores, and is a very important waypoint for them.

Plus it’s obvious that green will hit you a lot harder if the other guy is pushed off the map so why in the world would you want to contest that tower? Friday night there are queues all over the place and lots more players than at other times so there’s no worry that anybody will be pushed off any map- naturally it works differently then.

-

If there was an alliance two nights ago I’d have expected FA to do just that and for CD to have known right when they could rush the walls to wreck the defensive siege that had held us at bay for so long. We took the place in the early morning/late oceanic night so maybe they’ve got something set up but then again they were at each other’s throats just a few hours later after some golem based attack we performed poorly.

Yesterday I don’t know of anything strange going on. CD held bay for most of the night despite an open wall (and pugs that couldn’t seem to grasp that it wasn’t a good idea to take supply from the depot to repair it even as they watched the constant treb fire that would undoubtedly bring the wall back down before they could even run back to the depot.)

We farmed a hefty pile of lootbags off of the unthreatening mob of squishy TC from the early hours but when they finally pulled their good players out from EB to come handle the place the eternal CD crew unfortunately turned their eyes to red territory instead of wiping the rear towers in the lowlands to kittenlly push TC out of that map and give them that much worse of a return when they finally finished with the bay.

This seems to doubly rule out said alliance with the oceanic commanders and as I’m in the teamspeak with many of the NA commanders we really weren’t sure enough of what was going on on the other side of TC BL to ever feel like we had a good time to bust into the garrison and knock down the trebs on the bay.

Thus the fighting shifts back to being primarily in CD BL because the bulk of our players have downright slothkittenl response times to attacks, few of our guilds claiming towers bother to upgrade them or refresh siege in them, and because FA actually does those kinds of things well enough to have their borderland locked down much of the time.

All in all this looks like a bunch of people independently assessing the map attacking the targets that are both vulnerable and strategically sound at the most basic levels.

sceptus.9415:

Being underestimated is the best thing about being on TC. As long as people continue to write paragraph upon paragraph of well-written forum posts about our supposed “zerg” strategy, we will continue to be underestimated.

TC does have great guilds. We have great, skillful players. We work together and we don’t give up. If you think our strategy is as simple as sending a massive zerg to the hotspot then you are sadly mistaken.

You definitely deserve more credit than that. You’ve got really fast response times and a good network of people constantly watching your front lines while the main forces are absent to fight elsewhere.

PiNK is the guild I specifically recognize as the strongest contributors to that, even though it seems much of the system is composed of other guilds. If I understand correctly they serve as the middle man that actually gets so many people connected and cooperating to actiely work on these tasks instead of the kinds of karma train behaviors I’ve seen in other weeks of WvW that I would say actually deserve to be called mindless zerging.

Not sure if some other guild is intricately involved in this system but I’d be happy to see some of our commanders with this kind of control over our zergs. I think a server that combined with with some of the key strengths of certain guilds in CD (must-resist-gloating) could really carve out a place in tier two- and not the diminished numbers type it apparently is now but tier two the way it was when CD began it’s decline all those weeks ago. I don’t know how tier one actually was back then so I can’t comment on the viability of said hypothetical server.

-

Little bit of advice though- apparently a lot of GW2 players have a 12 year old mentality so if you deny being a mindless zerg they’ll label you as one specifically because they think the term bothers you. It became our title for the long tier 3 matchup against maguma and completely forgettable server.

By the end of those weeks we became it just because we didn’t have to try any harder than that to get 1st place and the other two servers had switched to hardcore turtle mode the prior week.

Karuna.1357:

So FA . . . I see that CD has wiped you off the face of Eternal Battlegrounds. How is that supposed alliance working out for you?

So far as I know we never established an alliance.
Timeline from CD perspective:
10-11pm we take bluebriar and the nearby camps from a very persistent skeleton crew. TC draws numerous defenders to keep us away from the keep and pressure our supply camps.
11pm-2am FA sees a greatly reduced TC presence on borderlands and takes supply camps up that side of the map away from where TC and CD are fighting. They capture several towers while the bulk of TC forces are now leading large pushes into bluevale to down our trebuchets, apparently because the four elementalists are getting bored blocking 90% of the shots. The bay is low on supply though so fussy players that don’t want to keep running supply from camps and fortification stockpiles likely have some incentive to stop the trebs.
2-3am TC diverts their forces to reclaim land from FA, pushing them out of the map, but lose their elementalist shield as CD forces are now able to wash over that section of the wall. To make up for the trebuchet damage TC puts forth a large supply train effort.
3-5am TC can finally again focus their efforts and manage to remove the trebuchets as well as pressuring locations on other maps, but both servers are up past their bedtime so activity dwindles. I go to bed.
5am to ? FA takes a lot of land during a poorly planned CD attack on TC, CD retaliates until maybe noon.
*I tried to keep these close to server time but I bet I’ve got details out of order all over the place :P

OneBloke.7264:

Today we’ve taken SMC four times and I’ve personally stayed all four times with dozens of other to sweep it thoroughly. I killed quite a few mesmers but then all four times there was suddenly a TC zerg inside the lord room and a few seconds later SMC was lost.
I also heard multiple reports of mesmers going through walls or under the ground but I was always looking for mesmers on the upper parts of the castle so I never saw anything personally.

I’m not gonna say that TC is full of hackers or exploiters, but considering the size of the zerg which kept suddenly appearing in SMC out of thin air taking advantage of this and considering that they did it four times while I was playing….I’ll just say that TC’s gameplay leaves a lot to be desired.
If this is how they’re planning to win this week’s match then it’s really sad because I know that there are a lot of good players and good commanders in TC who are capable of fighting for the first place without resorting to these “tactics”.

And in case someone from Anet reads this I’d like to request that they have a look at what’s happened today and find a fix for it

TC’s playstyle probably amplifies the player culling issue somewhat. I very rarely encounter it with groups just running around in the fields anymore but do still see it with TC groups semi-frequently.

Outside of chaining mesmer portals I don’t think groups can really make it happen for combat advantage anymore, and having a chain of those isn’t something many groups can set up fast enough.

Raincrow.1840:

Kerithlan.1659:

I love how this entire topic has devolved into pot shots against Tarnished Coast. And here I was about to complement our opponents for keeping us busy in our EB third all morning/afternoon. Typical.

CD player here….. If you want my opinion, all I see is TC playing smart and using top tier tactics that might eventually get them there as well.

In the meantime, FA and CD continue to waste man power fighting each other.

TC kind of wins using what I think of as early starcraft strategy. People are probably somewhat aware of the later crazy stuff that emerged in starcraft and how those strategies beat the earlier ones, but actually pulling these things off is much more challenging when trying to orchestrate so many players, many of which don’t have any particular interest in listening to you, unless you have a reputation of running effective karma trains.

*Not to say that early starcraft strategy is bad. The best players could do it well enough to defeat experienced players trying to do all of the “advanced” tactics and such without any fancy extras. Lots of room to optimize all the things we do in this game.

…I’ll hold out on talking about what exactly I think each server does poorly since that kind of criticism is too difficult to distinguish from just being an kitten. Happy to ask specific questions anyone has though.

ryan.3915:

Not sure if CD has that much to share, since you guys are obviously advanced in your tactics. One of which is using ele focus skill 4 to protect siege and keep walls. I don’t know why our eles hardly ever do that. We just sit there and let the siege get hit by other ballista.

The high cost of having a bag slot devoted to a focus.
Really. It’s frustrating trying to find an ele with a focus on our server. Bunch of times we’ve had to hunt down an ele to try and get them blocking shots but it’s always the same story. I don’t get how we (as a server) don’t know about this after all this time.

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Where’s our oceanic crew tonight though? The late late night NA people are all succumbing from exhaustion trying to wait for the next shift to come relive us.

ryan.3915:

Kerithlan.1659:

Are elementalists supposed to be able to target inside of enemy towers using Dragon’s Tooth? I’ll assume that’s a no, right?

Dragon’s tooth kinda auto targets, so it can hit things that are not in line of sight. There are several skills like that.

Used to be the Mesmer greatsword 4 worked like that. People hated having to actually kill things outside of walls when they hate otherwise untouchable trebuchets and such. Throw a big fit about it and maybe ele’s will get nerfed to need LoS for that.

Derv The Monkinator.4915:

Crystal desert Guild Leader? I need to talk to you about a CD/FA alliance to take down TC. This alliance will be public becuase if we do not make an alliance, TC will thrash us like they did to FA and Yak’s for the past 3 weeks.

Honestly I don’t think that outright communication is necessary. We just need to pay attention to when the other server is hitting TC and then go take something else from them. They don’t handle WvW very well when they have multiple fronts they have to defend- they actually can’t split the zerg up very much for some reason. Maybe all of their melee is glass cannon build?

Arcadio.6875:

Unfortunately, the game designers don’t seem to understand game theory so what they want players to do and what players will actually do because of game design doesn’t match.

Actually this week game theory plays to the advantage of both of us magnificently. TC is significantly easier to fight if we are both hitting them than fighting each other, even if TC is focusing on one of us. Their class makeup, numbers, and general strategy aren’t grown from “underdog” tactics (at least not that I can see) so in situations where they have fewer players their goal is only to delay until they can pull large numbers into the fight- which works magnificently (maybe too strong a word?) when they are assaulting a borderland but then need to defend their holdings against a single group. It largely demoralizes small groups on the 2nd and 3rd place servers because there is so little time to try and capture anything.

They will need to modify this system greatly to handle small groups that actually coordinate with each other to go places at the same time and actually tell each other decent estimates of how big the enemy group is then it becomes easy to run them around in circles. Multiplying this so that there are actually several forces large enough to actually take towers from skeleton crews (well not so much about size as having somebody that knows how to do it and handle priorities,) simply taxes this tactic beyond the breaking point. Add in the boon of motivation because our servers are doing well and our numbers in WvW will swell to the point that we can make even more simultaneous combat locations happen.

So in summary game theory makes us it better to attack each other while there is only one active group at a time, makes TC a viable target as soon as they can’t play whack a mole fast enough simple event rewards make TC the more desirable target for both of us.

Several other dominant servers have static groups doing serious defense so this doesn’t apply and knocking them off of the top position would have to be purely for the sake of competition, and thus you don’t see it very often.

The portal used to have massive range to it and the nerf to the mesmer berserker basically just said “you don’t hit any siege on walls besides the cannons and burning oil.” These haven’t seriously changed the class, but the range decrease on portals seems to have been meant to just give clients more time to render players as they get near them.
As I understand it the whole player culling issue mainly resulted when they increased the player caps in WvW over what they had in the testing period. Perhaps what’s needed more is a map redesign so that we can have this many players in at once but reduce the potential size of zergs. This would be a rather huge undertaking but then again having these fortifications within trebuchet distance of each other boggles the mind.

As for nerfing the portal I see a really sensible way to do it- give it five or ten charges that get eaten up every time somebody uses it. You would then require multiple mesmers to move a zerg. This would mostly do away with the single person that stealthed through your defenses to allow the entire zerg to circumvent them- the exception being if the other mesmers stayed behind and used the initial portal to easily place their own portals. Generally this would still allow smaller groups to leverage a good plan for assaulting larger enemy groups but not totally stop the skill from being useful to players that are not in your party (a design decision I heard a lot about before I started playing and am very much a fan of.)

If people want to not have all the enemies stacked so that you can’t choose which ones to focus down with aoe (kind of a wtf statement there but oh well, game mechanics) then just forcing the portals to not overlap would remedy that. If the devs don’t want to complicate things for mesmers simply having them snap to a nearby position on the same walkable surface would result in a web of portals with enemies hopping through at different points. Furthermore this would stagger the arrival of uncoordinated enemies quite a bit as portals vanished out from under people that had not bothered to count themselves and only send the right number to any particular entry portal, and the obvious way for players to do this would very obviously telegraph their intentions allowing the defenders to scramble to try and prevent the mesmer from placing their portal.

Downside would be all the testing to make sure that this didn’t allow mesmers into places they shouldn’t be able to reach- though dagger elementalists can jump a lot of otherwise uncrossable gaps so maybe they wouldn’t really mind.
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But if the devs find those two changes to be both practical to code and effective ways of altering the gameplay it would still probably take months for them to put it together, do a proper bug hunt, and actually test to see if it helped at all. Until then stack a lot of AoE right on the exit portal and you’ll easily foil a majority of portal bombs.

The only really cruel thing I’ve seen done in WvW with portals is to get players above the lord room in garrison keeps and speed build a bunch of arrow carts. When doing this or laying down a lot of siege fire on open choke points definitely do things like put up some chill/cripple AoEs and those guardian walls to make it harder for us to sneak through to some safe position. If I understand how Warlock’s fear skills work that would also result in a hilarious fail for the mesmer trying to lay down their portal, but I’ve yet to play that class.

The rest of the time it’s basically just open field stuff and the group stealth options are diverse enough that you’re not so surprised to find enemies popping up right in the middle of you.

This leaves mesmers porting people past walls but by this stage of the game we know to sweep for mesmers after we push invaders back and lock them out. Still got the rare exploit/hack that gets them past walls but I actually see people reporting ally mesmers that do that these days. Practically not problems at all imo.

People used to put flame rams on the water gates right when I started playing a few months back but then one patch we suddenly couldn’t target those gates normally anymore. A few weeks back I found out that the grates were still targetable in the lowlands keep in eternal, and at first they seemed irreparable but if you stand in just the right spot you can still repair them.