Guild Wars 2

There is another aspect to consider, that “banning”, whether officially or unofficially (by zerging duels), even when the map is queued, may not actually help the server. In terms of points, in terms of objectives, in terms of tiers, it might actually be counter-productive.

Many people who duel are players who spend 90% of their time leading groups, scouting the enemy, solo-flipping camps, refreshing seige, and they sometimes need to take some time out for more casual fun. Duelers also tend to be highly skilled players (not all of them, sure, but generally speaking). If you want to discourage, or even ban, some of your most useful and important players from doing what they enjoy in their breaks, then you aren’t helping your server.

If I understand right, OP is a Gandaran having a go at some [JDGE] guys dueling. I don’t know who OP is, but I’m willing to bet he’s probably someone of no importance. On the other hand, [JDGE] are a very useful and appreciated guild in Gandara WvW. Guess which the server needs more?

This thread….. I, I….. I don’t even…..

Stop killing my faith in humanity :/

Immolator.5640:

It kind of makes me cry inside fighting you ECL; so many and we’re not really suited to fighting decent guilds without equal numbers; you guys smashed through us quite a lot – might have to ask Dius or another source of pro wisdom how to counter you.

Change map, and go find TUP or WvW (the other one). They know how to have a good time.

I’m not even joking, this is by far the best counter.

I’m not a game developer, but I do have education as an engineer to code simulations of real-world models, so although what I’m about to say is probably wrong in some specifics, I think it’s a reasonable guess, and should hopefully explain why “technical limitations” isn’t a cheap excuse, if you have the patience to read.

Say you drop an AoE attack on a location. As far as the game is concerned, the AoE attack has almost nothing to do with you, it is now an entity of it’s own. It will have qualities, such as “I orginated from person X who has power Y and trait Z”, but if you, person X, were to suddenly disappear from the game, this AoE is going to keep going along, because it isn’t tied to you.

Every time the server “ticks over”, something it presumably does several times a second, it will run down a list of objects and events and do them each in turn. Eventually it will get to our AoE. Our AoE says “I am here, at this location, and I am going to do my damage to everyone I can!”. So the server draws up a list of players it can do damage to. But, it can’t do it’s damage to everyone on that list at once, because computers don’t work like that. It has to move down the list in sequence, doing damage to first person, then second person, then third etc.

Each time AoE says “now I’m going to do damage to this person”, the server has to do a load of calculations about what gear, stats, traits, boons, buffs the creator of the AoE had, and the gear, stats, traits, boons, buffs of the target. Quite a long list of calculations. And that’s just to do it’s damage to 1 person. It isn’t a simple calculation, there are dozens and dozens of factors to take into consideration, just to work out what number needs to be flashed up on screen and deducted from the targets HP bar.

Just for that one target. 100s of calculations.

The server can’t move on and process the next object/event until it’s finished with our AoE. Now you see the problem; if it goes down the entire list, then we run the risk of the server not being in time for the next “tick”, and some objects/events being left unfinished or delayed.

Skill lag.

The compromise is to say to Mr. AoE: “you can have the first 5 people on the list, after that we’ve got to move on”, and thus, hopefully, skill lag is avoided.

Now, whether or not it’s easy to change that magic number “5” to a different number, I don’t know. It might be simple, it might involve re-designing so much other stuff that they’d basically have to re-make the whole game.

The result will be the same though, more targets for AoE = more skill lag. Which no-one wants, it’s already borderline unbearable, and there are other, better options for dealing with zergs.

So, Riverside, are you renting out your borderlands to AG for the entire week, or just the weekend?

Quoting myself from a thread about QQing about confusion (pre-patch).

To summarise, the whole point of retaliation is to be a counter to builds with lots of fast hitting attacks, just as blind/block are the counters to single, slow, high damage attacks.

Ragnar

On the flip-side, I play a hammer warrior, with alot of slow, long-cooldown, hard-hitting attacks. A single blind or a single aegis can completely negate a huge amount of my damage output. Having a Backbreaker or an Earthshaker blocked can be the difference between a flawless victory and a massive defeat. While you pew-pewing away with your shortbow will barely be affected by a single blind. You probably wouldn’t even notice it had happened.
Omgwtf nerf Aegis, isn’t fair to slow attack rate players
Or, accept that all builds and playstyles should have a counter, and things they are strong against. Confusion/retaliation are the counter to your playstyle, while I barely notice them; block/blind/evade are the counter to mine, while they barely affect you. This is what we call balance.
PS. as a melee character I would love the ability to set condi-removal priority. Get that frozen removed instead of pointlessly removing that harmless confusion :P

The problem, as with so many problems with WvW, is the difference between primetime and non-primetime (late night / early morning), and the effect it has on the balance between offense and defence.

During primetime the balance is very much in favour of defence; 20 players can easily hold off 2 or 3 times their numbers if they have supply for seige/upgrades. A T3 Hills keep is basically impossible to take during primetime if there are 20 defenders inside who know how to place their seige. And, importanly, they can dedicate themselves to that task because they know that the other 50-60 players on their team are taking care of the other objectives. No need to detach half your force because swords appeared on Cragtop, just keep going defending Hills, other folks can take care of it.

However, during off-peak hours, the balance is completely reversed and completely favours offense. Anyone who’s been on a night-crew will know all too well how difficult it is to hold a map with the 5-10 people you have available against a group of 20-30. You don’t have enough people to sit in every tower, you don’t have enough people to quickly build counter-seige, all you can do is respond as quickly as possible to white-swords (because it’s impossible to properly scout an entire map with so few people), and hope that there’s still some seige set up there for you to try and push them off the gate, which is most likely already at 50% by the time you get there.

This 30-second change is a buff for offense. It makes it easier to take objectives by giving you a 30-second headstart. Arguably, this buff was/is needed during primetime, because if the defenders can arrive in any sort of numbers objectives are incredibly hard to take. But during off-peak…… this is devastating.

Was this thread a new mini-game released with the patch? Spot the PvDers?

It’s a little easy tbh.

Eles and Guardians are losing their kitten in this thread, and yet I’d be surprised if any warriors take this trait (other than trolly zerker-rifles). I know I won’t (I main warrior). It simply is not worth the trait points, nobody is going to use it, so you can stop freaking out.

Free transfers to the top server was pretty kittening stupid. Did ANet even check the server population before doing this? The more I see, the more I think they don’t understand their own game.

I approve of this change in theory, but it should have come at the same time as an end to the bollocks that is tower to tower trebbing, particularly garrison → bay and SM → friggineverything

If the enemy has a treb, you should have to go, and should be able to go, and kill it.

WvW is nothing like a football league, where even the team at the bottom has half a chance of competing with the team at the top, and where all the teams in the mid-ranks are roughly equal and matches could go either way. Instead, there are vast differences in coverage and organisation even between adjacent tiers.

If the winning Tier 1 server went down to the bottom tier, it wouldn’t just be like Brazil playing the USA at football (or soccer, if you’re stupid /troll). It would be like Brazil playing against my cat. My dead cat.

As Talley said, you started this. I don’t want to be hostile to any TUP member, because you’re a very fun and skilled guild to play against, and you’re usually pretty honourable and respectable.

But you come on here talking about how dius couldn’t take TUP without hand-holding, and that we spent all night hugging the blob, then yes I’m going to counter your lies. And they are lies, whether you know it or not. So don’t act like you just came on here to give “feedback” instead of insults, and then I started on you out of nowhere because I’m “aggressive”. You very specifically insulted dius in your first post.

There’s a difference between “tedious details” and outright lies.

EDIT: You’re still convincing nobody that you’re not a troll.

I see that you can’t counter any of my points, so you’re just ignoring them now and carrying on with the lies/QQ regardless.

Do I get a medal? :P

Wamgor.9347:

And the point your trying to make is? I said there was a pug presence which spoilt the first few fights a bit both ways (i.e when you won, i.e when we won in the nw region which tainted the fights both ways) the initial few skirmishs… you really want me to go overkill in every little detail from my perspective and think im trying to troll because my wording isn’t up to your standard or liking? really?

Im just giving feedback from my perspective, like some dius guys are from there’s. Then there’s a few others trying to light fires and talk about irrelevant things and twist things to fit their agenda whatever that may be.

My point was that you never said we beat you in a fair fight, with no pugs involved, when I remember at least one occasion clearly. And in your second post you say that you acknowledged wins and losses on both sides in your first post, which you actually didn’t, which is why I quoted it.

As I said, you’re cherry picking from your memory and skipping over things that don’t agree with your “dius hand holding” argument.

I remember just after we’d taken briar, OS ran in after us, TUP turned up 1 minute too late to save the tower (or were just there by chance, I dont’ know), and we ran off over towards hills to leave you and OS to fight alone, when we could have both jumped out and chased you all the way into spawn. I also remember you were engaging our pug-blob in Vale, we were gathered on the hill (the bit you have to jump to, above the wall) buffing up, could have charged you in the back and wiped you, and instead decided “screw it, let them have some fun”. Those are just the first two instances of us trying to avoid hugely unfair fights that spring to mind. Could add more. Not to mention us having to do some waypoint-hopping every 10 minutes to shake the pugs off.

You’re well known to dius as a troller, so you don’t need to convince me of anything, I already know you are. I’m posting to refute the lies you’re spreading to drag our reputation through the mud on the public forum. If you really wanted a discussion with us you’d do it in private, or at least on our server forums which for some reason TUP frequent. But instead you’re doing it in public….

Wamgor.9347:

A bit disappointed to be honest that some guilds felt the need to blob up though just to combat us… Dius & Os. The first few fights, there was pug presence which spoilt the fights a bit both ways… Then it was more even and less adds.

Just a shame that after we won a couple engagements in a row, that guild groups didn’t come back at us by themselves,

Wamgor.9347

Hey ragnar… I mentioned both of the wins and losses at the start mate in the nw tower region. Its not like im trying to bend the truth

Say what now?

Keep going, we’ll find you a new cave eventually!

I distinctly remember us engaging you several times with nobody else nearby, winning some of those encounters and losing some others. I also remember us standing back and letting you engage our pug-blob without interfering. And yes, a few times we just barrelled in with the blob, because there was nothing else to do on the map.

You’re putting alot of spin on things and conveniently forgetting certain events. So you’re either trolling or…. well I probably shouldn’t finish that sentence. If your’re unhappy with your current cave, I’m sure we can help you out

Your cave…. get back in it.

Bero.2193:

Dius <3 always in small groups much respect.

/salute

Kept trying to engage you with our 2 against your 3, but first some of your guys jumped in, then some of ours jumped in and drove your additionals off, then they ran off and left us alone, and you caught us 2v4 :<

Before anyone says it, I’ve had a good search around, but I can’t find anywhere that answers my specific question definitively.

I’m gearing a necro with staff and sceptre/dagger for WvW. Now I would like to use both Sigil of Restoration (heal on kill) and Sigil of Stamina (endurance on kill) on the sceptre/dagger pair. However, I have a feeling that only one will ever proc, although I can’t see anywhere that specifically says one way or another. If anyone knows for sure (not just “I reckon”) then I’d be grateful for clarification.

If, as I fear, only one “on kill” sigil can ever proc, then I need to choose a 3rd sigil (I’m using sigil of corruption for condition damage stacks). I would quite like to use a “on critical hit” sigil. However, these have an internal cooldown, which I think I read somewhere means that while the “on crit” sigil is cooling down, neither of the other sigils can proc either, because the CD affects all sigils. Is this correct, or do cooldowns on sigils only affect other sigils that have a cooldown?

Whether ANet like it or not, whether they intended it or not, for alot of people WvW is the endgame. It might take players months or years to realise it, but eventually running CoF P1 is going to get boring, and realise that there’s no point having a shiny legendary if the only person who sees it is friggin Magg. Ultimately, the only reason to keep grinding out awesome skins is so you can look like a kitten when taking a dump on those dirty invaders and screaming “eat rainbow-unicorn kitten!”.

Unless they release a metric kitten-ton of new PvE content (the only release so far that comes close to providing that is Fractals), the WvW following is only going to grow, and only going to become more hardcore and less casual.

Which personally I think is great, because I love WvW. I just hope that ANet realise this and shift their focus accordingly so we don’t end up with 24 hour queues.

How many of you complaining about the overwhelming number of commanders there are now are from T1/2 servers? Outside of primetime, Gandara is fortunate to have a single commander online (or, at least, one prepared to tag-up) across all 4 maps.

And I don’t see how badges or WXP are any better a measure of commanding competence. I know some excellent commanders who can only play a few hours a day, so they’d be very far behind in WXP; all it is is an indication of time spent online. Might as well not bother with the WXP cost and just go directly to making the 20 people who spend most time online commanders. That sound like a good system to you?

I suppose badges would be better than gold, except, they’re account bound. Which means it’s impossible for a guild or a server to band together to buy a tag for a worthy individual. Which, obviously, is why the cost for commander was gold from the start. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a single commander on any server, anywhere, for the first few months. People saying “why did they make it this why, omg so stupid”, well, that’s why. Think it through. Jeez.

The queue system is most certainly messy and temperamental, but ANet have said several times that the population limit is per-server, not per-map. It is not possible for you to be unable to join because the other server has too many people on the map. At least, according to what ANet has told us….

The rest is just QQ. If the enemy have more people online, adapt and deal with it. Don’t tell them they’re not allowed to play.

Map population can go down as well as up. So you’re fine with being out-manned if the people who are out-manning you were on the map early enough and stuck around?

And booting / pop-capping, there’s no real difference, it’s just arguing over semantics. End result is alot of people being prevented from playing when they want to, however you look at it.

Nevermind the fact that, outside of primetime, there is almost always 1 server absent from a borderlands. For much of the day, most bordelands are in a state of 1v1, with the third server having no more than a handful of camp-flippers. So you’re saying those 2 servers who want to get stuck in shouldn’t be allowed to because the third one isn’t there?

Population imbalances get resolved by the tier/ranking system. The solution to a problem is never to prevent people from playing. By all means suggest ways to help out-manned teams by improving out-manned buffs and defensive seige. But simply booting people out of the game and saying “sorry, you’re not allowed to play now” is a, and there’s no nice way to say this, stupid solution.

Gadzooks.4687:

In the time it takes most weapons to attack twice (2 attacks, which seems like a fair judge of when someone would break target to avoid taking more confusion damage), my shortbow has attacked 5 times. Another mesmer above mentioned how he could make someone take 5000-6000 damage each for the first couple actions someone did after he put his stacks of confusion on. 5k damage is probably an extreme uber gear case here so….

A mes with 1500 cond damage, will do 355 damage per stack of confusion
3 stacks of confusion = 1065 damage
5 stacks of confusion (very easily achieved by most mesmers) = 1775 damage

If someone with a slower weapon stops their autoattack after taking damage twice (2.5 to 3 seconds roughly), then that means they take 3550. 3550 is in no way “OMGOPABILITY”, but it is a nice solid hit. For someone with 20k life, its close to 20% of that in 1 attack.

Someone with a faster weapon, like a showbow, in the same time given (2.5 to 3 seconds), would take damage about 4 to 5 times. So while slower attacking players would take 3550 damage before they said “oh drat, I need to stop attacking”, a player with a faster weapon will have taken as much as 8875 damage. while 3550 wasnt huge, 8875 damage in 3 seconds (not counting any other damage they are doing to you), is a LOT of damage. For someone with 20k life, they have now lost about 44% of their life. Same time to react, just hindered more by the systems game mechanics because it makes no attempt to balance or compensate attack speed vs damage for this ONE specific ability called confusion.

On the flip-side, I play a hammer warrior, with alot of slow, long-cooldown, hard-hitting attacks. A single blind or a single aegis can completely negate a huge amount of my damage output. Having a Backbreaker or an Earthshaker blocked can be the difference between a flawless victory and a massive defeat. While you pew-pewing away with your shortbow will barely be affected by a single blind. You probably wouldn’t even notice it had happened.

Omgwtf nerf Aegis, isn’t fair to slow attack rate players

Or, accept that all builds and playstyles should have a counter, and things they are strong against. Confusion/retaliation are the counter to your playstyle, while I barely notice them; block/blind/evade are the counter to mine, while they barely affect you. This is what we call balance.

PS. as a melee character I would love the ability to set condi-removal priority. Get that frozen removed instead of pointlessly removing that harmless confusion :P

Absolutely agree that changing AoE limit won’t change zerging. It will only change how fast a battle is decided. I try and avoid zergs most of the time, but sometimes I tag along, and when I do it’s because I’m feeling tired and lazy and don’t want to have to think. I certainly don’t consciously think “man, I really want to abuse AoE cap today”.

Real reasons for zerg:

1. Bad party/commander system. There is nothing in-between 5 man party and 50 man zerg in terms of organisation UI. You either roam in a small party of 5 or less, or you follow the zerg. There is no system in place for groups of between 5 and 30 to organise themselves.

2. The ease with which gates can be melted down by 50 people auto-attacking, and dropping 10 rams on it. If you want to capture 4 towers, it is currenty far more effective to keep your group of 50 together and take 1 tower at a time, rather than splitting in to several groups. If there was a cap on the amount of damage a gate can take per-second, or gates/walls were significantly buffed so that it requires a good half-hour of attrition and blocking supply to break them rather than 30 seconds of bursting, then it might be more effective to split up.

If you’ve never experienced the thrill, the joy, of standing triumphant with your 10-man guild and dancing on the dead bodies of a 50-man zerg you’ve just wiped and building a flame-ram-shrine to mark your victory, having spent the last 20 minutes furiously yelling over teamspeak to coordinate buffs, wardings, reflections, portals, veils, constantly moving to take advantage of terrain and choke points, to feint charges to draw out their cool-downs, invising and appearing with a hammer-train on their squishy backliners……

then no, I guess you wouldn’t understand why people like WvW.

Dina Van Heyr.3018:

Gamgee.8612:

A video from JDGE from last night on AG borders (Thanks peach<3)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VYuzbU7puts

so you had fight at camp against pug which you outnumbered and where you got wiped well done
well most of you, rest got lucky and escaped

Not sure that anyone on either BB or AG has earned the right to talk that way to JDGE. Maaaaaybe TUP and WvW, the rest can only wish you were as good.

Jacky Nipper.3846:

Geikamir.6329:

Jacky Nipper.3846:

Shout out to [Dius], thx for opening for our small grp AG Hills. Strange u didnt came to fight us when u saw organized guild grp with less numbers than you, do you fight only PU zergs? Anyway we got the Hills so thx.

I’m not sure when you are referring to, but I’m sure it was out of pity.

I kid, I kid!

But for real, we have no qualms about fighting or wiping, especially in small group play. So I would assume we got called to help elsewhere or something. Was this during primetime?

You were like 10 or smt, maximaly 12, around 18-19 GMT, our grps were waving each on another. And we started to chase each other in hills (Benny Hill song would fit to that). And than I lost you from sight so we capped it after some time.

Might have had something to do with us fighting the FSP-blob that showed up to defend hills? We were ramming north-inner, you were sitting at north-outer watching us, then FSP ran in and pushed us away from the gate and chased us for a while. We wiped their first group, started to cata inner, then they came back with 4x numbers :< Didn’t even notice you were still in the keep, certainly weren’t trying to chase you, were more concerned with the FSP-bus.

The whole point of the abilities is that they should be under-whelming. If they actually made a significant difference to your efficiency, then people would be forced into grinding out max rank on a single character asap, and players coming late to WvW would be completely kitten
As it is, they’re a nice little boost, but not neccesary. Which means if you want to play alts, don’t want to zerg-ride for 8 hours a day to keep up, or are simply new, then you can still play without feeling useless.

WhiskeyJack.5839:

KinkyWarrior.1879:

WhiskeyJack.5839:

KinkyWarrior.1879:

Can you take my post anymore out of context? I wrote ‘where are your guilds hiding?’ just after reset. Even people on your own server agreed that you had a quiet reset. I’m not quite sure how that relates to today.

Regarding your second point, call us a blob, zerg whatever makes you feel better about yourself. FURY had a 30 man raid on Gandara tonight and the only time we can be seen running with other AG guilds is when co-ordinating ambushes/traps. E.g. Faithleap Supply Camp tonight by the worm.

Personally, I welcome the blobs and enjoy the challenge of taking them on.

Yea and then what about Hills on your borderlands when you stood in Hills outnumbering us with your ‘30 man guild raid’ (Maybe smaller by then in fairness, but we were 11) and didn’t run out til Rddt hit us? What about reset specifically when all we saw was FURY + Kiss together? Im sure many other people who don’t post here could bring up many many more accounts.

Tonight we started on Gandara Bordlerland due to queues on AG so not sure when you would of seen us on AG hills….(I logged off at 11pm gmt btw)

In relation to your other point. I’m not going to indulge you in trading examples of when we have seen enemy guilds co-ordinate to wipe us. It’s a game. Gl, hf, enjoy the rest of the match-up, it promises to be a good finale

Kinky’s getting confuzzled. He meant Hills in Gandara, where you were most certainly grouping up with rddt and pugs (see attachment), and not just “the only time we can be seen running with other AG guilds is when co-ordinating ambushes/traps. E.g. Faithleap”

I’m not saying this make FURY “bad”, you’re actually one of the guilds I have most respect for on AG. Blobbing happens from time to time, sometimes by accident, and is sometimes neccesary. What does get on my, and other gandaran’s, nerves is when people claim “oh, well we never blob up, it’s just you guys”, and I think that’s what Kinky was getting at. That, and trolling. Dius tries hard not to blob and to seek out smaller scale fights, but it does sometimes happen that we’re fighting alongside the blob. I think that goes for most guilds.

If you want to contribute to the team effort, then either guardian or mesmer. Guardian throws out alot of boons and heals, and line/ring of warding can be a gamechanger. Mesmer just has ridiculous utility with portal, veil, timewarp, null field, feedback.

However, if you just want to tag lots of hostiles for epic lootz/XP, then any range class will work. Thief shortbow, Ele staff, Necro, Engineer grenades, Ranger longbow, Mesmer GS/Staff, even Guardian staff/sceptre, can all tag plenty in large group actions. The only classes that struggle there are melee classes, because in zerg battles you can’t stay in melee range hitting things for very long. Even full-bunker guardians will eventually have to fall back.

Roaming alone or in small groups (less than 5) is a whole different story, but you said that doesn’t interest you.

Fairly sure the skins vendor was released 6 days early.

Should also be noted that, despite this being “the WvW patch”, it’s PvE that gets new skins….

To be fair, it’s pretty impressive work from ANet. To come up with a list of skins that nobody wants, can’t have been easy.

I mean, daaamn, I wouldn’t even have thought of adding rawhide skins. That’s some serious lateral thinking.

IMO the most important thing is a deep and thorough knowledge and experience of siege placement, the capabilities of siege, and what siege the current flow of supply will allow either yourself or the enemy. You can learn Sun Tzu off by heart, you can get a degree in group psychology, but still the difference between success and failure can be a treb placed a few feet out of position or an incorrect assessment of how much seige/supply will be needed to handle a situation. Best commander can with a single glance tell what seige will / won’t work on an enemy keep, and knows all the best spots to counter enemy trebs etc. Bad commanders build trebs too far away to hit a tower, try to build rams under enemy superior AC, and send golems at enemy cannons.
Battle tactics, war strategy, and charismatic leadership are completely useless if you don’t have a complete mastery of game mechanics.

WvW is very back-and-forth. There is no such thing as a server “which controls most territories”; server map control can change huge amounts in a matter of hours or even minutes. On Gandara there are times of day when we control almost none of the map, and there are other times of day when we control almost all of it. Over the past week we have at one point or another owned every single keep/tower on the map. We just don’t control them all the time :P

Easy solution to map completion is to keep logging into WvW several times a day, even if it’s just for a few minutes. If you log in once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the late evening every single day, you’re pretty much guarunteed to get map completion in less than a week. Unlike PvE, you can’t grind it all out in one eye-watering session.

PS. And I’ll thank you not to judge gandara’s WvW community based on one fleeting visit.

Get back under your bridge Casta

I love how some people are saying “oh you’re just entitled whiners, some things should be hard to get”. Yeah, there’s hard, and then there’s literally impossible.

Realm Avenger is hard, the average player would have to keep playing for about 8-10 years to get it, while the most skilled and committed players might achieve it in less than 2 years. That is a reasonable level of difficulty for a “hard” achievement.

Then there are other achievements where there is a very high probability of you dying before you ever achieve them, even if you’re a committed player currently in your teens, who consciously tries for them. That is an unacceptable level of difficulty.

Can you not see the difference?

I don’t have a problem with zergs in open-field play. If they want to do that, then they’re welcome to have a boring time chasing around several smaller teams capping camps. IMO the problem is that a zerg of 50-60 can come up to a T3 tower/keep that your group of 5-10 has been defending for hours, melt the doors down in a matter of seconds, down the lord, and cap the place, all in under 2 minutes, certainly before any reinforcements can reach you.
A T2/3 tower/keep really shouldn’t be able to change hands so quickly, they should require at least a good quarter of an hour of seige-work.

So I guess to fix that you’d put a cap on the amount of damage a gate can take per-second. If a group of 50 couldn’t cap a tower any faster than a group of 20, it’d make a massive difference.

IMO the gear doesn’t make nearly as much difference as traits do. When I level alts, it’s mainly to get access to master/grandmaster traits, not to be able to use higher gear. Certain builds are entirely transformed by a single trait. That’s where upleveleds are weak, gear is very much secondary.

Wreckdum.8367:

There should be more aiming and focusing of individuals and less dropping bombs on zergs. Would provide so much more depth to large group fights. You actually would have to learn to fight classes instead of masses. <—-Dr Seuss baby.

Please do go on telling us about how single target attacks require aiming (they don’t) and how AoE attacks don’t need to be aimed (they do).

Voting for commanders sounds like a great idea. Until you think about it for more than about 3 seconds. I don’t know about your server, but on Gandara there are only about a dozen commanders with the reputation to be reliably voted for. Voting would be all well and good when they’re online and willing to lead; being able to tell other commanders to shut up and let the pros get to work without distraction would be great.

But then there are large parts of the week when none of those players are online, or are online but don’t want to command. What would happen then with voting can best be described by the word “clusterkitten”. You’d have random guilds trying to promote one of their guys, you’d have trolls doing what trolls do, and you’d either end up with no commander at all, or being landed with a commander who’s vocal and has alot of guildies, not the one who’s best. So yeah, voting would be great if you wanna kill off organised play.

I always get a whiney jealous vibe off these posts asking for changes to how commander is acquired. That’s not to say I don’t think some changes would be good. But you open with “Some of these people need their privileges revoked.” Maybe we’re just lucky on Gandara, but I’ve yet to see a commander who’s actively a detriment to the server. Certainly some are better than others, but none of them actually make things worse by turning their tag on. Infact all our commanders seem to have a good understanding that if another commander is already trying to do something, then don’t turn your own tag on and start talking all over him. During parts of the morning, when there’s hardly anyone about and often no commanders, you’ll see the morning crew crying out for someone to come on and turn on a tag so they can at least get a group gathered, even if the commander does nothing more than act as a signpost.

So enough with the whinging and the jealousy and be grateful that someone’s shelled out 100 gold to provide your server with a marker on the map at which to gather.

If you do eventually get your commander tag, you’ll realise that it’s one thing to talk about flank or feint attacks, and quite another to get them done. They can be done, but they require very good communication and explanation from the commander, and a disciplined and intelligent group of players following him. Sometime players seem determined to scatter rather than sticking tightly together, to engage in pointless skirmishes with thieves rather than getting to that objective that needs defending, to either not bring supply or waste it on useless seige, to…. well I could go on.

And on top of that you have to put up with the armchair-generals who are sure they know better because they’ve read a few lines of Sun Tzu. Which is totally applicable to a video game.

Three things for a good commander: 1. Communication, both listening to scout reports and properly reacting to them, and also explaining your plans and reasoning to your followers. Nobody can read minds, and people don’t like following blindly either. 2. Deliberately underestimate the guys following you. The best commanders always assume that if they go within 100 metres of a tower, a good portion of their group will break off to auto-attack the gate until they get wiped, so they either skirt well around them, or they deliberately move that way to leave the less intelligent players there as a distraction for the enemy. 3. Patience. Just accept that things won’t go as well as you’d like, that players will ignore you or mess things up, and that some will blame you personally for the failings of the server. It’s no use raging about it, that just results in things getting worse and worse.

Daendur.2357:

Ragnar.4257:

Are the guys claiming that the rendering issue has been fixed trolling, or do they just not spend much time in WvW? I guess all those pistol volley’s and backstabs coming out of thin air for a full 3 seconds before rendering were just in my imagination huh? I guess they were really rendering on the screen, but my eyes just aren’t l33t enough.

I don’t think thieves are nearly as OP as some people claim, but don’t try and claim the rendering isn’t still a problem.

stealth is broken when damage is done.
You can see bullets coming and evade/block them and thief will not render.
This is not a render issue it is how it works.
Ppl complaining against thieves are just ppl that don’t know how the class works and they prefer to come here and QQ instead of L2P.
Here the anti-thief guide:

1. log into the game
2. roll a thief
3. use it

Now you are able to counter thieves with the profession you prefer.

I have a thief, and I know perfectly well how the revealed debuff works. The problem isn’t “L2P”, I know very well where the thief is, because as you say, animations are happening, so even if I can’t see the thief I can follow where his attacks are coming from. That bit isn’t the problem.

The problem is that I still don’t have anything to target. Sure I can fling AoE and auto-attack in the area where the attack animations are coming from, but some attacks require a target, and by target I mean the game recognising that there is something there for the attack to trigger on. Even if you know where the thief is, some attacks just will not work if the game client doesn’t know the thief is there. That is the problem.

Like I said, I have a thief, and I know perfectly well how to counter them, so drop the L2P bullkitten. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still a rendering problem.

Are the guys claiming that the rendering issue has been fixed trolling, or do they just not spend much time in WvW? I guess all those pistol volley’s and backstabs coming out of thin air for a full 3 seconds before rendering were just in my imagination huh? I guess they were really rendering on the screen, but my eyes just aren’t l33t enough.

I don’t think thieves are nearly as OP as some people claim, but don’t try and claim the rendering isn’t still a problem.

What about guilds that want to band together and buy a commander tag for them to organise with? Account-bound badges don’t work for them.

Does a currency that can be got from jumping puzzle guarantee a better commander?

The problem here is you’re getting far too worked up about points. Lopez’s argument can be pretty well condensed to “points > fun”.

The argument that “botters enjoy botting and griefers enjoy griefing therefore enjoyment and fun are not valid measures for what should be in the game” is stupid beyond words (quick, quick, you can say Ad Hominem Lopez, that way you can ignore everything else I say).
Enjoyment and fun are always the only meaningful measure of whether something should be in a game. That’s the entire purpose of a game. The reason botting and griefing are not encouraged is that they have a greater negative impact on the enjoyment of other players than the positive enjoyment they bring for those that participate. If botting didn’t screw up the game’s economy and ruin the fun of those who enjoy farming or playing the trading post (not to mention filling the pockets of gold-sellers), then actually botting would be perfectly acceptable.

But if enjoyment isn’t a good enough metric for you, why don’t you tell us what should instead be used to measure the validity of ingame activities? Please, please say points and confirm what I said at the start.

Another thing to consider; duelers are usually amongst the best players on a server. I’m not saying all the best players are duelers, don’t misunderstand. But these are the guys who can bust open zergs with a quarter their numbers, ninja keeps, and solo all the camps in under 15 mins. And then they take an hour or two out of their week to duel for a change of scene and to hone skills, and you think this should be stopped? If you think driving away and killing the motivation of some of the best players on your server is going to help your server…… I won’t finish that sentence, otherwise Lopez will whip out Ad hominem again. ‘cos if you use latin, you don’t have to engage with the rest of someone’s argument

You are backtracking Sovereign, you absolutely did imply that people who enjoy duels are people who don’t help with defending their server.

Some will opt to serve their server. Some will opt to duel.

Just that the more vocal people in this thread are duelists, while those who do wvw to serve their server are in game defending.

Did you not say those things?