Guild Wars 2

Lately there’s been some discussion about comparatively large guilds from higher tiers clustering on one lower tier server. I felt inspired to write a story about it, which I hope you enjoy regardless of your opinions on the matter or the server you call home. I also tried to get across every point of view at some point in the story, though my overall opinions are undoubtedly not well hidden I think the conclusion bit before the epilogue acknowledges the complication of the issue.

I also had fun writing it, so thanks to all involved for the excuse and the inspiration

Warning, long

<3

It was a warm end-of-summery day. Manchester United had just won yet another Premier League title, and their famously reasonable manager Alex Ferguson was arriving at the training ground with worries on his mind.

Sure, United were sweeping all in their path in the league again, but somehow he just wasn’t happy. Maybe it was his advancing years, but it felt like everything was just a little ‘too much’ these days.

Everything was bothering him… from the lengthy traffic on match days to even GET to the game, to the critical attitude of the Premier League crowd, to the unsatisfying tactical nature of the football itself.

Lately the metagame had become for all the players to form a human pyramid, with the guy at the top having the ball, making him impossible to tackle without committing a foul. Ferguson thought this was utterly ridiculous, but he had to admit it was effective. It had swept in from the Continent somewhere a couple of seasons ago and they’d all been forced to adapt.

Yup, something was definitely up. He arrived in his office, flicking on the tv, and was vaguely making progress on his morning papers when he was distracted by the sound of a highly excited crowd blaring from his television.

What he saw filled him with shock. It was a football match from the lower divisions – Stockport County versus Tranmere Rovers, two teams down on their luck. Ferguson never paid them much attention, but he was astonished to see players passing the ball back and forth and dribbling past each other in ways he’d forgotten even happened in football. And the score! It was a full-on thriller… 3-2, then 3-3, then 3-4, then a last-second equaliser to 4-4. He couldn’t believe it. Every match he’d played for the last few years had been 1-0 to whichever team got their insane human pyramid up the fastest!

It seemed that out there somewhere people still played football, and even enjoyed it! Sure, there weren’t many crowds – in fact the stadium looked pretty empty – but the more Ferguson thought about it the better that seemed. No queues on match day! Fewer people to please, fewer expectations to live up to.

Later that day he gathered the players. They looked at him glumly, defeated expressions on their faces.

“More pyramid practice boss?” asked the captain, resignedly. The rest of the team let out a gentle sigh and – without waiting for an answer – began to get into position.

“Not so fast!” Ferguson stopped them in their tracks. “We’re going to be trying something a little different today. Take this ball…”

He handed a ball to the captain, who looked at it a little confusedly.

“Put it at your feet. That’s right. Now… kick it to that other player”

The captain looked at him warily, as if expecting a trick. “Am I going to get in trouble?”

“Nope!” Ferguson grinned, anticipating his big reveal. “Go on…”

Slowly, as if remembering an event from years long past, the captain swung his leg through the air and kicked it to his teammate. It was a perfect pass. A shudder of delight went through him, and the rest of the team suddenly went up in a clamor of excitement.

“Can I have a go?!”
“Let ME pass it!”
“Oh god, passing the ball feels so good after all those pyramids!”

Soon the team was pinging the ball back and forth in a happy funk of excitement.

Only the captain wondered what was really happening here, and he went to talk to Ferguson.

“So… are we doing this in the European Champions League tomorrow night then? I’m not so sure it’ll work against the French team…”

“Not quite, not quite. Let’s gather the lads and I’ll explain what’s happening here.”

The players gathered around. This was the most exciting training day they’d had in years and they were wondering what it was all about.

“Everyone, listen up! I’ve had an idea. And I’ve made some arrangements. I’m pleased to tell you that you’re all now Stockport County players.”

He sat back and waited a breath, and wasn’t disappointed when a wall of confused noise erupted from the players. He raised a hand to quieten them.

“Yes, yes, that little club down the road. You just have to trust me on this, but I’m sure you’ll find yourselves very happy with the new system. Our first game is at the weekend against our old rivals Tranmere Rovers in the cup. Let’s make it a good one…”

Vynt.5218:

It’s funny how you cry about unbalanced matchup. Only thing GH needs to do is to keep the morale up of the pugs and you will have nice numbers. We saw this on reset and you did a fantastic job there.

Not crying at all!

I hope you don’t mind me expressing that this matchup is undeniably less fun than the one we had for the last three weeks that was balanced.

I also hope you don’t seriously think that I – or anyone – can somehow get everyone else on GH to play with the same intensity as at reset for the whole week?

The simple fact that is our coverage can’t match RoS. I know most of the hardcore WvW population have jobs (similar to on RoF) so prime time has to be our main time.

Most of our guilds organise a big event for reset night, but none of them can have that big event be an ongoing 24 hour process, for obvious reasons. Maybe if everyone on GH gave up everything else they do with their time and just played GW2 we’d have a super balanced matchup, but that’s obviously not going to happen.

Instead we’ll just play as hard as we can, when we can, and look forward to the ladder settling back in a few weeks. Hopefully this time it’ll last longer than a month before some big guild gets bored higher up and decides to repeat the cycle!

ThomasKreshant.6572:

Genev.2450:

So, why did i get angry whispers from a GH guy saying that nobody ever comes to GH to “help” and only the servers who don’t deserve it get “help”?
(quotes added by me)

Maybe he was angry?

Or maybe he doesn’t remember the last time we got “help” and went up to T5 and back down again? Or maybe he doesn’t enjoy the T7 style that we had the last few weeks that was fun and balanced and he’d be happier on a server with lots of “help” in a higher tier?

Frankly, not sure. If you’re saying the fact that not everyone on GH has the exact same opinion somehow invalidates what people are saying here then I’ll have to respectfully disagree.

It’s also worth remembering that we only get ‘those good fights’ for a couple of hours during primetime, and only in some places. The rest of the time (and on the rest of the borderlands) it’s just a Surmian outnumberfest.

It’s not like you can’t move for epic fights in this tier right now, unlike – say – last week when we had 3 equally balanced servers and there was always a fun fight to be had.

Aneu.1748:

Biggest we have seen is around 60 players in one area which was great fun to fight with our 25 and long may it continue.

#humblebrag

Neandramathal.9536:

Hyung.6140:

Maybe if we ask Anet nicely they’ll let us ALL tier down and we can leave Surmia to tier up completely unopposed in an otherwise empty T7 – they can enjoy an absence of queues and ZERO enemy blobs, and the rest of us can enjoy a nice balanced matchup.

Come on Anet, you know it makes (no) sense!

Sorry, you’ve already convinced me to move to T13.

Mate, it’s going to be SO awesome! We can teach them (well, that one guy on the opposition server) our epic T7 tactics, and I bet the fights with them (sorry, him) will be AMAZING. All 10 of us are going to have such a great time beating them (HIM, god, sorry). I just hope he doesn’t blob up with the guy from the other server to oppose us.

Tier 13 has needed a shake-up for a long time anyway, I mean, how much fun can both of them be having down there? I can’t see any way to find out except to mass transfer our guild and see for ourselves!

Maybe if we ask Anet nicely they’ll let us ALL tier down and we can leave Surmia to tier up completely unopposed in an otherwise empty T7 – they can enjoy an absence of queues and ZERO enemy blobs, and the rest of us can enjoy a nice balanced matchup.

Come on Anet, you know it makes (no) sense!

Haha, yes, massive blobs on the opposition CAN be depressing.

Maybe I should follow the approach of the really big guilds and take my tiny guild down to Tier 13/14, where I can beat up on the one guy who logs on in primetime and then tell him how awesome it is in his tier that I don’t have to face massive odds anymore ;p

Unfortunately eventually I guess we’d just get promoted back to T7 thanks to ArenaNet’s STUPID system of matching up servers with equal numbers/organisation automatically through the ladder, so I’d probably have to pick another T13 server and repeat the process or I might end up actually fighting guilds of around our size. That would SUCK.

<3

Another good day of WvW today – and well done to RoF for squeezing us so hard, it’s gonna be a tough race for 2nd place.

Definitely hope we get paired with RoF more often as I think we make very good opponents, though I am hoping we get Dzag again soon too as I miss those guys :/

Anyway, looking forward to tomorrow already, have a nice night

Ha, I’ve certainly never seen a server-wide call to go fight VCY. Just occasional announcements that “Veil Charge Yawn” have arrived so anyone who enjoys actual combat should probably change zone.

(I know you guys have good senses of humour so I hope you take this in the spirit in which it’s intended despite the nuggets of truth which it may contain at its core <3)

@Anfauglith

Back when we were fighting RoF we had similar numbers to them but were able to win through really improving our own organisation and lots of hard work. At the time we were very proud of this, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Then several large guilds joined us and we became more about numbers – in the process we lost our ability to organise as well as we used to (I don’t think many here would deny that, though we’re trying to recapture that ability now).

We won a few matches purely through numbers, and now we’re in a tier where we’re both out-organised (due to losing the unity we had back in the first couple of weeks against RoF) AND out-numbered.

We’re trying as hard as we can, and lots of respect to both AG and FSP, it’s good to lose every now and then as it keeps you humble and teaches you what you can improve on. See you all on the field!

What’s most impressive to me is that FSP beat us despite getting basically nightcapped – proportionally our night squad is much more powerful than other servers of our primetime strength, so we’ve ended up being promoted to a tier that can smash us hard enough in primetime that our nightly headstart doesn’t even matter.

Nice work!

Hope we can improve for next week, although I think we’ll be badly squeezed between FSP/AG. See you in the next thread!

@Medron

Indeed, it’s an awesome game!

I look forward to hearing how you get on and adapt when you get to the more challenging parts of the game for a danger-averse playstyle – am sure you’ll come up with a good strategy

Personally I think once you’ve mastered high level dungeons, WvW and PvP you’ll look back and laugh at how you used to overthink even encounters with bandits in Queensdale, but you’ll have had so much fun in the process it won’t matter.

Good luck man.

Is this not an obvious consequence of Risen now dropping a greater variety of mats?

Barely use minis but this would make them more attractive, certainly.

@Medron Ah, thanks, well that does actually explain everything.

I would never say you’re a terrible player and should go and play WoW :p But having read your explanation I think you’ll find that that’s not the most optimal way to play and that you could be doing more damage and taking less hits by tweaking your playstyle a little.

I’m sure you’re having lots of success with this method, but you’ll hit a point where it no longer works (for example have you fought Lupicus in Arah yet? I find it hard to imagine that you could get by there without being an absolute master of dodging).

I guess an analogy would be a 6-pool or other cheesy strategy in Starcraft. Sure it works, and sure you’ll win a lot of games with it, but as soon as you come up against a good player it’s an instant loss.

Being unwilling to even put yourself in danger in GW2 is a similar strategy – it’s great for most of PvE, but it leaves you utterly unprepared for the hardest PvE battles, and is an instant loss in most PvP/WvW battles.

To do well in high-level fractals, the harder dungeon paths, WvW or PvP you absolutely have to be able to put yourself in danger (or in some cases there’s no way to ‘prepare the battlefield’ and be out of danger the whole time in the first place!) and get out quickly, and mastering dodging is fundamental to it. I think that’s why there’s so much disbelief around that people don’t play like that – there are large parts of the game where the style of play you describe just isn’t an option.

Anyway, I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m being elitist or condescending, as that’s not my intention at all. I’m glad I can see where you’re coming from now, and I hope you get what I’m trying to say and that I’ve said it in the right tone.

Happy fighting, my engineery friend

Silver.8023:

I should start a thread about how visiting an npc is not part of my playstyle.

Hahah! Yeah, I’ve been not visiting the laurel vendor ever since beta, and now ANet are forcing us to do it ;p

@Medron Reading back, my comment about skill was aimed more at Penny’s reply, although I’m still confused by yours. You seem to be implying that you only need to dodge melee attacks, which is completely untrue.

Even in PvE (Toothy above makes an excellent comment about PvP but let’s leave that aside for a second) mobs still have ranged attacks, so if you’re a ranged combat specialist you would still need to dodge regardless of whether or not you let a mob get in melee range. Unless you just tank projectiles as a matter of course I fail to see how your normal combat just running around the world doesn’t include dodging (with the evade that you’ll sometimes get by doing this adding to your achievements).

Also, you say you need to be “not killing” the mobs in order to get this achievement. This isn’t true either. Just fight the mobs as normal – when you see them throw a projectile at you (plenty of mobs have ranged attacks as mentioned above so even if you’re somehow keeping ALL enemies out of melee range this still applies) dodge before it hits you. Keep hitting the mob. It dies, and in the process you’ve successfully evaded an attack. Within a few minutes you’ll have done this enough to get the achievement without even trying or doing anything different.

And as many have said, if you ever do WvW or dungeons it’s practically impossible to NOT get this achievement by the end of it. Ranged combat specialist or “truly exceptional ranger” or not, you can’t just stand out of range of mobs/other players and never get hit UNLESS you make a habit of dodging out of AoE, projectiles, and even the melee attacks that will get close to you regardless of your ability to stay away from them.

Haha, and now according to Penny and Medron people don’t like the dodging achievement because they’re so skillful they don’t ever need to dodge. Must be horrible to have ANet drag you down to the level of other players by making you do something that your grand fight strategy normally never requires

(no offence intended to you two, I’m just amused at the implications, and I’m sure you’re both fantastic players! Hope you both got your laurel yesterday and are saving it for something awesome <3)

Crafting = you’re already doing daily gathering so you must have some wood/ore. Refine a few bits of wood/ore. Done in less than a minute.

Reviving = Go to literally any zone and find an event with a dead NPC. Revive him/her. Do it a few more times. In Orr you’ll regularly see 10s of dead NPCs so you’ll get this done in a few minutes.

Dodging = Fight literally any mob. Press ‘V’ when they’re about to hit you. Repeat 9 more times. Done in a few minutes.

Seriously, if you’re shouting about how you’re going to quit the game over this, and how ArenaNet are somehow forcing you to socialise (none of these require other people, and even the Combo Killer would be done in one dungeon run or 15 mins WvW without particularly trying) then I think you’re missing some understanding of how these achievements and the game actually work.

In short – all is well, relax, the apocalypse is not yet here, and laurels will be bestowed upon you all in great bounty and for little effort.

@Amadan
Yeah they said it was bugged – you were just meant to be able to trigger combos while killing a mob and have it count. We got it in our guild by taking turns to place fields and do finishers, but it should have worked for both the field-placer AND the finisher. As you say if they fix it it’ll be a fun achievement.

@Amadan Hopefully they’ll bring it back once they fix the bug with it though, I think anything that encourages group play is a great idea, and it’s not hard to create a few combos to kill 10 mobs.

As the rest of this thread shows there is a surprisingly vocal group out there who don’t even do basic moves like dodge 15 times in a day of play so expanding the horizon of the playerbase through dailies is a great move from ANet.

The Ash Legion Spy Kit is currently the same icon as a Crude Salvage Kit, and the Order of Whispers Spy Kit is randomly a bomb without a background.

Homonavn.6348:

Ok so to clarify things:

2. I know for a fact that we have been fighting Gunnars Hold for the past month or so… The matchups have never changed. I have been trying WvW for like 4 weeks now, everytime i join, we are against GH.

But oh well.. i just wait for like 2 years until the match up changes, believe me… i know ANet, they wont change the match up, because they dont see the problem. They are probably on GH themselves, so they are “Pfft! This is balanced!”

I think you misunderstand: the matchup WILL change next week. For the past few weeks GH/RoF were more evenly matched but this week GH received a massive new guild which tipped it into being completely unbalanced (for what it’s worth completely ruining WvW for us as well, just in a different way).

If you check http://mos.millenium.org/matchups you’ll see that next week you won’t be facing GH anymore. However, unfortunately, RoS will probably give you even worse of a beating. In a week or two they’ll get promoted and then you should have much more even matchups.

Frankly the latest wave of server transfers will take a month or two to ripple through the ladder and get everyone back to the most balanced possible matchups.

We just have to hope some big guild doesn’t decide they’re bored again then and want to ruin the ladder for every other server by jumping from T1 to the bottom! Hopefully paid transfers means this will be less likely in future.

Can confirm RoF are an excellent server who’ve provided great opposition for the last few weeks, sure they’d make a great home for small – medium guilds who like good WvW fights.

I think it’s pretty likely that the number imbalance has switched from RoF’s favour to Gunnars – as we’ve said many times publically we’ve made a big effort to get more players involved in WvW from within.

Certainly we haven’t had any major guilds transfer since last week so that should be the same, but I expect RoF are more demoralised than last time, and from the sounds of the posts so far in this thread you’re not very happy about WvW at the moment so that might mean you have less of your guys involved than normal. Kind of a negative-bandwagon effect.

Anyway, I’m sorry you feel outnumbered and I hope you manage to find some good fights this week – see you back in game

judge.8754:

Thursday Evening:
Unfortunately can only recall a part of the license plate, GH and some big number. That bus seemed to be driving for a long time in RoF.

Eventually that bus disappeared, we did restore the map, repaired gates & got some cannons up on the keeps. Due to this sudden change of enemy numbers, we decided to check where these went.

Hehe, I think it’s a great compliment that you think we have huge numbers, it means we’re using our numbers to their fullest Of course it leads to the weakness you’ve already noticed – it only takes a few people to log off and we can no longer hold onto all the territory we’ve taken.

Been a fun week again, hope next week lives up to the standards set by the last few weeks. See you at reset

zastari.1730:

Your server sure must be some low-tier mecca. Why do I see so many posts about it yet you’re still T7?

As a relative newcomer to GH I may be well-positioned to answer this.

From what I can gather Gunnars has struggled with numbers over recent months as they fell to their current tier. Various guilds got fed up and left, and those that remained decided to up their game in terms of organisation, ability, and recruiting from within.

I arrived a few weeks ago and was staggered to find that they were light years ahead in terms of tactics and co-operation, and bringing people in from PvE to get involved and show them the ropes. The atmosphere is crazily helpful and good-natured.

I was also pretty surprised that they were so low – only a few places above the server I had arrived from! But it seems that I came at a good moment as all the work they’d put into organising was really just kicking off.

(that said, saying “Actual WvW is lacking” wasn’t true even in T9… even FoW/Vabbi/RoS were having awesome battles a few weeks ago before all the T1 wannabe noobstompers showed up)

TL DR; very good organisation has only just started to bear fruit – currently we’re beating a server that’s historically had higher pop (Ring of Fire) for the second consecutive week after losing to them only three weeks ago.

Nothing but respect for FoW – anyone who’s stuck with them all this time despite them consistently being the bottom-or-near-bottom ranked server has some serious dedication.

It’s a shame they were starting to really get their act together when some T1 guilds decided they wanted to drop to the bottom to stomp low pop servers for a while – I hope you guys can stick it out and that balance returns to the lowest tier soon.

Good luck

Agreed, this isn’t a good description of EU T7-8 at all! We have epic battles, occasional queues, lots of people who know exactly what they’re doing and great commanders. Even in my time in T9 EU we had decent WvW in primetime, it was just round-the-clock coverage that was missing.

In short the principle of this thread is excellent but the actual facts are somewhat misleading.

Coming soon – the 6 signet warrior!

This might sound incredibly silly advice, but the solution really is just to not die. I play WvW for hours most days and tend to average 1 death an hour, if that. And I don’t play conservatively, I charge into groups and fight hard!

Yes I’m level 80 in full exotics/ascended (which helps) but the key skills here are a) knowing how and when to take a fight, and b) knowing how to escape once you’ve determined you need to. Jumping into a larger group, getting a quick kill, jumping out, repeating.

If I die it’s almost always my own fault for taking a fight I shouldn’t, or for failing to scout.

So repair costs are maybe a few silver an hour, while in that time I’ve probably made a gold or more from event completion, kills, loot, etc. I seriously doubt anet are hoping people will buy gems to cover their WvW repair costs!

As for griefing, I almost never see griefing of any variety, so I don’t know what server you’re on, but in the mid-EU tiers it’s a pretty friendly environment. Especially given it’s almost impossible to actually grief someone from an opposing server as you rarely get to talk to them and standing on someone’s corpse or even jumping on it is barely fun so hardly anyone does it.

The real joy of WvW is the constantly shifting battle lines – the moment when you finally take a tower that’s been a thorn in your side by constantly trebbing your keep or castle. Pushing an enemy back to defend a new location, or getting pushed back yourself and having to quickly put up siege to defend as they try and establish a proper attack on you.

This requires familiarity with the maps, with the way enemies tend to go, a feel for when a tower defence is going to work and when it’s a lost cause – or nearly one! As people have said if you just rush right in and expect it all to be laid out for you you probably won’t have much fun.

If you fancy a reference that hardly anyone will get, you could think of it like cricket – if you turn up on day 1 of the Ashes vs Australia without knowing how the game works you’re not going to have a lot of fun. But by day 5 if you’ve followed the ebb and flow of the match you’ll be hanging on every ball even though before you saw them all as pointless and inconsequential.

Sigh. This is the problem with WvW, and it’s sad that you think you’re part of the solution. Oh well. Hopefully with both Vabbi & RoS getting this influx it will just create a competitive matchup at the bottom, though I feel REALLY sorry for Fissure of Woe who now have zero chance of ever enjoying themselves in WvW.

Hi Demannu,

I think you misunderstood what I was saying – I wasn’t pitying at all, I’m sure you’re all very good players. All I meant was that beating low-pop servers with a guild of 500 people is pointless and proves nothing, it just ruins the experience for the low-pop server and for every server you fight on the way up.

By the time you get to the top you’ll have the exact same problem you have now – a high-tier high-pop server with massive queues. And it’ll take you two months of boring one-sided stomp matches to get there.

Anyway, I hope you and everyone else somehow manages to have fun despite destabilising the ladder balance for the next couple of months.

I don’t see why there’s any respect at all for jumping to the lowest tier. Vabbi have a WvW population of around 50 (or less) at any one time.

Adding 500 active players to that and of course they’re going to win. You haven’t proved anything, you haven’t earned anything, all you’ve done is ruin the matchup for all three servers – one server gets an easy win, the other two get stomped.

Repeat this seven times and you get back to T1, and the whole time you’ve proved absolutely nothing except massive numbers beats less numbers. Gratz!

This sounds like a great idea! I’d love to join you and have seven/eight weeks of boring one-sided matches as we tier up from tier 9 to the high tiers. It’s especially good that for those two months no-one from any of the three servers in our tier will be able to enjoy a nice balanced match.

I think it’s great when massive guilds from the top tiers get bored and play with the server balance for their own entertainment, and I wish you massive success with this endeavour! I bet in years to come we’ll tell stories about how awesome this will turn out to be.

Everyone knows the most fun in Starcraft is to get to Grandmaster then tank your account down to Bronze and kill noobs forever, and I’m glad this mentality is coming to the GW2 WvW ladder. Look out Fissure of Woe, the former Blacktide alliance is going to teach you a serious lesson down in tier 9!

Don’t get us wrong Korsbaek, all servers have bad people on, Gunnar’s included. And I would HATE for us to cap towers or keeps using hacks, so if we do have hackers on our server I want to know about it so we can report them and get them banned.

Personally if I knew for sure we’d capped a place using hacks I’d be all for arranging for you to cap it back uncontested.

But there’s no way in hell that [Imp] are exploiting, I wouldn’t believe it for a second. Anyway, I think we’ve all made our point enough, and if you do see anyone hacking then please post evidence and we will do everything we can to report them and get them off our server.

Hope that helps clear your mind, and let’s all get back to some epic fights

I’m not in [Imp] but I know them very well and can vouch that they are excellent players and wouldn’t exploit even if they could. They play fair and hard and like to seek tough challenges like taking on bigger forces and ninja’ing keeps from under enemy noses.

I don’t know what you saw but it’s either not genuinely the [Imp] guild or you mistook a very well-executed ninja for a hack (which has happened already in this thread if you read up!).

As you’re from ICON you might be interested to know that there are alternative ways to taking keeps than building 10+ golems and walking them straight at a gate

(I’m joking, it’s meant in a friendly way in case it’s not clear…. really you guys play very well and I want to echo the above comments about this being an EXCELLENT matchup. Very excited for next week!)

Yeah, we’re all trying to fraps him too, but he waypoints when he sees someone from our server coming. We’ll definitely continue to report anyone who does this, and apologies on behalf of our server. Sorry that there’s bad sports on every server now it seems

We already had a couple of people from our side (RoS) see this guy and screenshot him and report him. We definitely hate hackers here too, am ashamed to see one playing on my server.

Very much enjoying the matchup so far, and just had a really fun experience in the EB jumping puzzle!

I’m on RoS, and was going through the puzzle with a guy from my guild and also a few guys from Gunnar’s – we reached one of those gentlemanly agreements with them through emotes to travel together, just for fun.

After a while they were joined by another GH guild called Personae Non Gratae (PNG) who started attacking us (which is fair enough), so we killed them (and didn’t kill our friendly GH bros who also didn’t join in!). PNG came back, so we killed them again, and then all moved on through the puzzle still together.

At one point we encountered a couple of Dzag guys were camping the colosseum room but we were able to pull them down and finish them so the group from RoS/GH could move on.

Me and my friend finished the puzzle and came back to cheer on our GH friends who were still in the colosseum room. All was going well, they were getting further, when PNG turned up again with a mystery friend they’d brought seemingly for the express purpose of killing us as we cheered on people from their server!

We tried not fighting back but they didn’t get the message so we killed one of them and hung back again, but their mystery friend kept attacking and killed us while we were busy ressing each other & trying not to hit any of the friendly people from GH by mistake.

Anyway, much fun was had, so a greeting to my random friends from GH, and a massive lol to PNG and the guy they brought in to help them kill the nasty non-aggressive duo who kept killing them :p

To the UW thief who bowed at the end of an extended 1v1 battle outside RoS hills – well played. Very impressive – especially as I pride myself on my 1v1s vs thieves Hope we get to duel again!

Also I’d be interested to see your build – I’m never able to stealth so often and so consistently on my thief so I’d love to know how you’re set up.

Happy roaming.

I think this level of detail is great – really useful for those of us who have very busy holiday periods and want to catch as much of the event as possible. If you don’t want to know details then don’t read the details!

The other thing is that this is a time of year when many people are away from home – I won’t be able to play GW very much over the holiday period as I’ll be visiting various branches of my family. Not many people travel for Halloween in the same way so it makes more sense they can rely on their player base being around!

FourTwenty.4268:

are you saying night caps are pushing people completely out of the map?

Can’t speak for the other poster but that’s exactly what happens in our matchup. We’re up against servers with small night coverage, and we have almost non-existent night coverage so we get completely wiped out and have to start from scratch the next day! Makes it more of a challenge, but perhaps breakout events will help us get our momentum going in the mornings.

Haha, it’s not a ‘troll tactic’. I literally don’t care if someone alt-f4s on me: I get plenty of badges and drops, and that player is completely wasting their time restarting GW2. Time in real life > 1s repair bill, easily.

The fact that they think they’re causing anything other than pity from me is laughable.

And the idea that I should do it to them because they might do it to me is equally pathetic. Play the game, enjoy it, if someone is so sad they want to quit the game to avoid a 1s repair bill then that’s up to them.

Haha, yeah, I just laugh whenever anyone alt-f4s – it’s so pathetic imagining them sitting there chuckling to themselves how amazing they are that they avoided getting killed by closing the game!

Of course if they were truly good players they wouldn’t be downed in the first place. I only die a couple of times an hour in WvW at most, and when it happens you just click to respawn and get on with it. The idea that I’d close my client just to deny someone a kill is so tragic.

We’re in EU tier 8 and are having an incredibly fun even match with all three servers fighting strongly. Tier 9 is a bit more imbalanced but it seems like all the other scores aren’t blowouts so far. In other words, things mostly seem fine even at the bottom two tiers, so I’m not sure what prompted this post?

Really enjoying this match so far – Underworld stretching out a small lead, but all three teams really holding their own. Credit to everyone on UW and Dz, you both have some strong players and I’ve enjoyed the fights a lot already.

Defiant actually works really well and makes the bosses more interesting. For example on the grawl fractal with my guild we plan how to remove the initial 5 stacks (as many have pointed out the bosses have 1 stack per person, which resets after a successful use of a CC skill), then call a person who’ll use a particular skill to interrupt/pull the boss to where we want him to be once the stacks are down, then the process repeats.

It takes teamwork and skill, and means that your CC skills are still useful without being utterly overpowered. I’m not sure what better system you could come up with.

Note – while this is certainly easier with a good guild group and voice comms I’ve had similar unspoken teamwork with a good pug group where we all instinctively removed the stacks and held off our final CC skill until a good time to use it.