I use spies to determine where the enemy will attack next. There are typically three kinds of spies:
1. The map opener: This guy will park a low level toon on map spawn area and open up his map on a second monitor, then log into his main account and play — alerting his enemy teammates where the commander is on the map at all times.
Counter to this: Since this player is effectively afk and often using heal regen to prevent logging, just right click report him as botting. Anet pays particular attention to the bot report, with good reason. Have your teammates report this guy in a similar fashion. It will soon be resolved. Do NOT falsely report people who may be afk for 10 minutes to deal with RL stuff. But definately report the ones that are afk for hours. They are patently obvious at your spawn. Another solution if it’s been verified that this is happening is have commanders drop their icons on the map. It’s hard to report enemy movement while parked at spawn if there’s no visible icons on the map.
2. The siege griefers: These guys will try to cap your siege count on a map by building useless siege in areas that will never get used.
Counter to this: You will need patience with this one. Siege despawn timer is 1 hour. Take screen shots or fraps of this person building the useless siege. Document it for about a week. Take plenty of screens, take note of which map, what time and which server and account name of the griefer (you add them to friends list). Watch the siege after the hour countdown timer is up and see if the player comes back to refresh it. Document that as well. Attach all this evidence and send in a support ticket under “violations.” You can do the same with these guys who drop siege over top of your rams and other blueprints. The key is here is documenting a pattern of behaviour and showing a chat log conversation where you at least attempt to explain this isn’t the proper way to do things. If, after the conversation, this person still does it, you have a solid case for Anet.
3. Enemy scouts: These guys will go and scout out empty towers and keeps, then group up with their teammates to relay this info via teamspeak or simply showing up as a blue dot on the map. You can usually tell these guys by the fact that they stand in empty towers or keeps for long periods of time and never refresh siege, but run past it constantly.
Counter to this: Not much you can do reportable wise, but you can certainly buddy up with them the minute you see them zone into a map, meaning that they’re never alone and neither is your tower or keep. Most players welcome another teammate along to help. This kind of spy will avoid you and even sometimes tell you to go away. These guys are especially the most useful of spies, particularly if they don’t know you are on to them. Tell map chat not to announce their presence, just watch them. Typically these guys will scout out an empty tower and within a short time the enemy will attack it. They are useful for predicting where the enemy will attack next and are best left unexposed to the map so you can counter the enemy push easily.
There are also, of course, the morale eroders, but you can report those guys for verbal abuse — same thing as #2, document it and submit a ticket via violations.
L’enfer, c’est les autres
Or if anyone else wants to test his mettle against shout warrior pre patch to get a taste of post patch xD – pm me! No d/p thieves though and mesmers please leave your Moa at home.
