It just so happens that only one of the items in the list above has nothing to do with personal skill and is entirely outside of any one persons control. It is the least personal form of winning in the game.
I think spvp/tpvp as game modes are more geared towards personal contribution and small group teamwork than WvW. If I’m in the mood to really test myself in that way I go do tournaments or just participate in spvp matches and try to make my individual presence relevant. My experience has been that the most skilled players in the game are tournament players so the challenge is always intense at the top levels of play.
WvW is more about working together as a server. I didn’t always see it that way but I’ve really had a change of heart over time. Now if I’m leading our group in WvW I’ll try to steer it towards making ourselves helpful to whatever the rest of our server is trying to achieve on the map.
I guess roaming around and fighting whoever we come across can be fun but I’ve done that a thousand times and it’s never really made us useful or contributed anything to the server. So now I’ll try to get the bloodlust buffs or I’ll try to cut off enemy reinforcements to a keep or a tower. Anything that I can think of to make myself useful to my server because if I’m not being useful then I’m just wasting a spot on the map.
Most roamer’s and small group individuals that I know don’t run cheese builds in which they know they can win a fight, it derives from their experience any excitement and personal pride they might have gotten from fighting a skilled opponent.
Most of the players I’ve run into from SoR, JQ, Mag and SoS have been running meta builds. I’ve seen a lot of Prismatic Understanding mesmers, s/d/d/p thieves and ofcourse stunlock warriors of which there are a few variations. If they’re not a stunlock warrior they’re a lb s/s condi spec with apothecary gear. There are two common guardian builds, one focuses more on meditations and the other shouts, sometimes they’re a mix. Every now and then there’s a burst s/d ele or a nade/bomb engi. Sometimes people have perplexity runes but I think there’s a lot of Traveler’s, Melandru/Hoelbrak users as well.
Most of them are skilled players playing strong specs and I’m sure they take as much joy in killing as I do.
If you’re going to win at all costs, then you might as well just run around in a zerg and win with numbers alone. Why even take the risk of losing when you have the ability to make sure it never happens?
Zergs lose all the time. I’d run around with 40 guys if I knew 40 guys that thought like me and played like me.
Rationalizing your terms of winning can also be viewed as a defense mechanism to justify your own terms. Every player that steps into WVW has their own terms of “winning”. Some view sitting on a cannon and collecting bags while shooting players passing by as “winning”. Winning is simply a matter of perspective and very much subjective, if running a build that became famous on youtube and a fotm and is always being viewed to be nerfed in the next patch but will win most 1v1 encounters then by all means run it. Some like a challenge and thinking outside the box and trying to innovate new builds to counter the cheese. The question is do you like following everyone else or trying to make your own way in the world?
Every player may have their own terms of “winning” but the game itself knows only its own terms. I play the game on the game’s terms.
Moreover, if something isn’t broken why would I try to fix it?
As I said if my build doesn’t work I will endeavor to change it until it does but if a FOTM build is all I need to win then that’s what I’ll use until it’s no longer effective at which point I will discard it and look for something better.
I thought DIE left because they weren’t able to get 35 people into a borderland at the same time whenever they wanted? Isn’t that also why AGG left JQ?
Phantasm and condi mesmer are good in 1v1’s, in any other situation I’d rather have an excellent shatter mesmer.
AoN is an excellent group of players, when we used to scrimmage them when they were on FA the fights ended up being 50/50 between the both of us. ONI however did not use any “required” or “optimized” builds.
For you to use “optimization” to justify cheese for yourself or others is just strange to me. If it’s fun for you, do it and who gives a kitten what people think, but don’t try to justify it with a weak argument like that and expect us to gobble it up.
#Kyra4lyfe
How is my argument weak?
“Cheese” is an arbitrary title that players give to things in the game that they think are too strong or unfair. But the game doesn’t know “cheese” or “exploits” it knows winners and losers.
I play the game on the game’s terms. I try to find the simplest, most efficient way to win. If I lose I try to figure out why I lost and fix it. Is that not sound game theory?
What reason is there to play suboptimal builds?
If the desired end of a competitive gamer is victory then is victory not the ultimate good and loss the ultimate bad?
I feel that I have justified my position. I feel that it is a rational, consistent position. But I cannot force anyone to accept the same premises that I have.
you think the t1 roamers got there by being bads like magumma? get on their level
When I played with AoN they were very focused on optimizing comps and builds. I actually learned a lot of smart theory from them. If they’re bad then we’re all bad.
Sure, this would be a valid statement… if anything remotely approaching real balance existed. Where’s the fun in intentionally exploiting bad mechanics 24/7? How do you not get bored after an hour?
Switching to the newest FotM isn’t something to be proud of. Just shows that you have little creativity.
Plus, it’s far more impressive for someone to kill people as a non-FotM build than it is with an FotM build. Also shows that the person is actually good at their class.
My goal isn’t to be the most creative player I can be, it’s to be the most effective player I can be. Sometimes creative new builds outperform old builds and in that case they quickly become the meta. Sometimes people try new things and it underperforms and doesn’t make it into the meta at that time. If I discover a new build that I believe will outperform my old build I switch immediately. If a new build underperforms my old build it gets dropped.
My goal isn’t to impress my opponent but to beat them. I don’t care if they think I’m good or bad or anywhere in between that’s not my problem and it’s not something I can control.
I make a serious effort to never complain about enemy builds, tactics whatever. If someone beats me with something I just try to find a way to beat them. If I can’t figure it out that’s my failing not theirs.
Phantasm is 100% training wheels. You can be absolute garbage, and all you need to do is set up a few phantasms and then hide in stealth while whoever you’re fighting dies. 0 respect for people who run these kinds of builds.
Put an experienced mesmer behind that build and it’s ridiculous though. I have more trouble with that mesmer build on my warrior than almost anything else in the game right now, including the perplexity rune builds.
I have no respect for people who run subpar builds because it’s “more of a challenge” or whatever I think that’s a terrible gaming philosophy. I mean I could run around with an armorless trap ranger in WvW but I’d just be bringing my team down trying to prove a point.
Every build for every class is competing for a handful of roles on a team and if people decide to bring less than optimal builds all they do is hurt their teammates and the overall effectiveness of their comp and I personally find that unacceptable.
What is with everyone on Badgegate running bunkers when they roam? I realize that you dudes are terrible and face tank everything, but you’re never going to get better if you play such forgiving easy mode builds. Strap on some damage and let’s have a fight that doesn’t last 10 minutes.
Everyone’s running tanky builds, they’re the meta.
PvP: Focus squishy and/or easily disabled targets first, res teammates when downed, stomp enemies when downed, learn to read buff bar.
EDIT: Sounds simple and yet downed state management is one of the most crucial differences between what I consider to be good players/teams and bad players/teams.
Requires reactions, reading of tells, and knowledge of class mechanics. Pretty similar skill set to PvP. You actually learn more valuable tools by playing PvE than you do by running around in a blob.
Yeah you’re right I misspoke, they’re not totally different skillsets.
Going by the same logic, could you let us know how long ZDs will play out of their timezones? Just so we can have some hope of slowing or stopping the arms race even further. BG NA and OCN have been extending hours for the last few months and the rest of T1 suspects that this will continue till the season ends. If you can clarify BG guild’s extension of playtime that will help all all the T1 servers.
This is a war game. It seems safe to assume that the “arms race” will stop when people lose interest in trying to win the war game.
After this whole fiasco there is no way that SoR/JQ does not double team you in week 7. You guys are good but you’re not good enough to stop 160 players on every map.
Anyone can be a good anything if they put time into it but a player who plays in zerg fights exclusively is not going to get a good chance to learn the roaming meta and will probably just get rolled by people who are more practiced as is the case in every competitive activity.
I’ve done a fair bit of zerging on several different professions ( but mainly ele and warrior) and I’ve found that there are three basic tenets that every zerger needs to know:
1. Follow your commander’s instructions
2. Keep an eye on enemy melee trains
3. Know where the water fields are
This is far less complex than the small fight meta.
On the other hand, 2 % of the people know medium well, 6.5% know it pretty well, 11% know it but, only as eles, while another 45% don’t know it, but do under the right moon phase. Also, 99% of statics are true and only 1% are randomly made up.
It seems to me that many people feel that they ought to be given special privileges/more input for any number of reasons. Instead of arguing why not try to get a job with Anet like Powerr and Grouch have done? At least then you’ll be privy to the inner workings of the process and not just another guy on the outside screaming to people on the inside that you need to be heard.
Scores are one thing but our EU time is pretty much our early NA/ late SEA. This being said no guild as a whole stays up late or logs on early but people from all guilds come together. So while we may be doing ok during EU time it would still help to have a EU guild to run in their timezone.
Should probably shop around on EU servers I’m sure someone would bite if they were offered the right carrot.
JQ has enough people during EU and NA to ride out the PPT spike gained during the OCX/SEA timezones. Time has shown that round the clock coverage isn’t the only way to win. A two consecutive timezone foundation/spike can be just as if not more effective if you have enough presence to ride out the weaker timezones. SoR was able to win with EU/NA setup/spike. JQ has been getting a solid foundation during OCX, spiking during SEA and then riding out EU and NA.
JQ’s SEA forces used to have to start fresh everyday which prevented them from spiking the PPT. Now they’re logging in with a solid foundation. The income evolution chart on Millenium tells the story.
Before you actually transfer I would advise looking into guilds that you might be interested in joining to see if any of them are a good fit. I transferred to SoR a while back and though the community was nice I wasn’t able to find a guild or group of peers with similar interests and as a result I really had no one to play with.
I used extreme examples for sarcasm. Sorry you couldn’t see it, I should have expected lower intelligence from a poster like you. But I’m sure rest of us average human beings, know that the examples I use are people who have no regard for others well-being, and intentionally disrupting other’s enjoyment and peace, which is what you were saying on your original post.
Next time, use a better analogy. Also.. sorry to hurt your feelings, I’ll go soft next time, okay?
So first I get a strawman response and now I get ad hom. Charming. You should know that insulting me doesn’t strengthen your argument. It’s true that your analogies all involve disregard for others but the degree of disregard in each of your analogies is clearly out of proportion with the level of disregard the person with the anet tag showed towards the people trying to GvG and thus the analogies are inappropriate. This guy was just being rude. I do not believe that the response has been proportionate to the offense.
1) I run into a EPL game, run around and shoot people with a pistol. One guy, wasting many people’s time. Big deal, grow up.
2) I run into a uni lecture and start to take a large dump and sing Friday. One guy, wasting many people’s time. Big deal, grow up.
3) Hotel, midnight, most people are sleeping. One guy decides to shoot up some fireworks and sound the alarm. One guy, wasting many people’s time. Big deal, grow up.
I wonder who needs to grow up.
What an excellent example of a strawman argument.
I don’t think any of your analogies are even close to being appropriate or relevant. You’re comparing apples and firetrucks.
The pistol analogy is a particularly egregious example of this. No one was shot during this episode. What are you even thinking posting something like this?
When using logic it is important that one attempt to compare like with like lest the conversation become meaningless.
In my mind this guy’s actions are akin to a guy honking his horn needlessly in traffic. It’s annoying but it can be ignored relatively easily.
Heres is the proof asked for before on the Anet dev attempting to stop a GvG. Please discuss Tier 1 and 2 servers
My natural bias against this whole GvG scene makes me kind of laugh but at the same time I also think that this little episode is being blown entirely out of proportion. One guy wastes some people’s time. Big deal, grow up.
From what I’ve observed it actually looks as if quite a few MERCs stayed.
I personally think buying large guilds is an excellent idea but I also hope that offers are made to some of the smaller roaming guilds left on other servers so that BG will be in an even stronger position to hold the bloodlust buffs.
I think most people at heart just want to win. In my time with MMOs I’ve seen a lot of people talk big about honor and loyalty and then take the path of least resistance when the chips were down. Also money talks in even in a video game. Stacking all the talent on one server makes sense now that they’re introducing match-win rewards into WvW with the leagues. They’ve also said that they’re going to be adding new WvW achievement lines with the onset of the leagues so being on the strong side in your timezone will make it a lot easier to get those done. Personally I’m strongly considering a transfer to JQ I just can’t decide if I care enough about WvW to spend money on gems.
When I first started in wvw there was culling, no wxp system, no ascended gear whatsoever and one armor set which cost way more badges than the current sets do.
The recently added champ upgrades and the essence of luck farm have made WvW farming much more rewarding than it used to be. So it’s not as if nothing has been added to WvW since launch.
I’m interested to see what happens with the new bloodlust dynamic. I think it might be fun.
