Guild Wars 2

RUN would make for a good web comic, me thinks.

I noticed PRO and some coincidental GoM zergs on the Orb respawn rate as soon as the orbs were hacked, funny it happened on all three Borderlands within just a few minutes. While it may not be the majority of their server, it sure kitten off my server enough to blindly focus on them at the expense of our other fronts in many battles.

I feel bad for GoM, but as long as so many people coordinate to use hacks, I can’t see it being easy to rebuild their reputation until Anet really counters the hacking problem.

I think our performance against Dragonbrand, another oceanic server… should speak as to why some oceanics ought support our night time endeavors.

I feel like my original post was completely misunderstood. It has nothing to do with the title, but about the ethics of those saying they are leaders.

TC doesn’t need orbs to kick butt. Orbs are a crutch.

Games should not be designed around bots, bots should be something that get rid of… not getting rid of content for bots.

Wow, that was awesome. TC still fighting harder then ever into the middle of the week.

WvWvW lasts so long that you do not need to fret over an allied commander making bad calls for even 2 or 3 hours. Honestly, if there are 6 commanders all over the map barking different orders, it doesn’t help. Just try to rally behind one with the most common sense, if they won’t support you.

Another part of playing it cool, just as important. Do NOT take credit for victories. It’s the entire server that helps win the war, you function only as a part of that winning. The guy firing the trebuchet to keep the outter wall down while you bark directions on the inner wall is just as important as you. If he stops firing, your army gets cut in half and things can easily go down hill from there. The militia, guildmates and alliances all play vital roles in winning battles- you are only there to help serve them. The quicker this is learned, the better and the more positive results you will see.

Sometimes it may be necessary to do some chasitising, however do it with class. Even while telling groups what they did wrong, try to offer something they do right or how to turn things around. This is still a newer game and lots of people are learning a completely different way of warfare. Play it cool… Do not simply give up on your fellow realm mates.

Ex. of doing it wrong. “omg, again?! wtf, how many times I tell you n00bs, go where I say, now look where we are?!”

Ex. of doing it right. “Look at this as a lesson learned. Over-extending without the supplies and upgrades to hold a place has put us in a bad spot; you all are great fighters, so let’s get back in the game. Here is where we can start…”

TL;DR. Communicate, Collaborate… and play it Cool Commanders. It’ll make the game more fun for you and everyone else.

Maybe not a lot of people will agree, however, that’s expected with the internet. Instead of talking about how bad the current Commander system is- how to fix it, etc, I want to see a conversation about how to improve the functionality as it stands.

1. Communicate- If you want to be the leader, then you have to lead. Make sure your intentions are known. Sometimes there are spies in team and map chat, so you may have to work around it. Talk in say if you are confident in the people around you, send whispers to key community leaders in your server.

Who are community leaders?
Obvious ones are guild leaders with some size behind them.
Sometimes there are other commanders that aren’t taking the reigns, speak to them as well.
Community leaders can also be popular people from crafting, speaking in map chats.
These people are your first priority when trying to lead a realm in WvWvW, relying on them to trickle down information.

Another aspect of communication, it goes two ways. You may think you are the reincarnation of Sun Tzu, Alexander the Great and Ghengis Khan… however, you are not and this is only a video game. Listen to the criticism and advice of others. While leading, it’s not only important to give direction… but to take it as well. The “militia” often has great ideas, as a good commander, it’s your job to help encourage and support those great ideas and pluck them from the chaos. It’s also good to know when your way isn’t cutting it and to look for a better way.

2. Collaborate- In a war where all the soldiers are voluntary, this is essential. You cannot be a dictator without a dictatorship- and you do not have the ability to force everyone into your grand scheme. If there is an obvious push towards a tactic or region that you do not support, then find a way to compromise.

Example of doing it wrong: “omg, the militia is dying against enemy spawn tower again… while our keep is getting attacked?! you n00bs, stop doing that! i r best commander, get back here now. Ah whatever, we lose to n00bs again, don’t even bother yelling at them anymore.”

Example of doing it right: “Hey Jake, can you go over there and see what’s going on? Can you talk in /say and get some of them to spawn back to support our defense? Thanks!”

Or….

“Alright guys, pull back to inner gate and get some siege defenses by the keep lord, we’ll hold them off. Let’s see if we can get some support to the militia to take that tower, so some of them will come back in time before we lose this place.”

Another important aspect of collaboration, allied commanders. It does no good to tell every other commander that you were there first, that you know better, etc. etc. Try to reach a compromise, I’ve often done attacking commander and defending commander. Another compromise is to have one directing forces in one region, another directing forces in a different region. Collaborate ways to use resources effectively, instead of telling everyone how your way is the best way, so much better results.

3. Play it Cool: Alright, so you were winning for the past two hours and some upstart general comes in trying to tell everyone how he’s going to dominate the rest of the map. This is not a guy or gal that wishes to communicate anything beyond their own authority and direction, they will not collaborate… and are already not playing it cool.

You can A: Begin an internal wrestle for power…

B: Rely on all the people you’ve been leading effectively to ignore the usurper or support your authority.

or

C. Let the guy have his five minutes of fame.

If A and B aren’t working, please go to C. The only ones who win while you are arguing with the other commander (commanders) are the enemy realms. Just let him/her lead if they want to lead that badly and it’s dividing the army. Either you will be presently surprised as they take objectives and hold them, or they will wipe so badly that the militia is scattered and looking for new direction. (Continued…)

Many people are commanders because people thought they deserved the rune enough that they donated, capitalistic voting at its finest.

I heard a word from Matt Witter earlier, he said they were working on better ways to report them… even acknowledged that it’s tough to click-report them due to the nature of the hacks. I know it’s only been a couple weeks, but I wish it’d get fixed fast… this game is too fun to let a minority ruin it for everyone.

The server is really great at getting their stuff together when losing, I love that. I just wish it didn’t take us getting pushed back to a supply camp to start making smart choices. When I got in the DB Borderlands, they over-extended and took both server’s keeps while letting all supply camps continually flip. While short term, it’s a point spike, no defense or supplies to build defenses meant we were left with no way to defend against two servers. They also complained of some alliance of DB and CD when they caused the double team in the first place by taking both keeps.

We fight hard, real hard. Now we have to learn to fight smarter.

The demoralize tactics by Anet’s inviso-patch have hurt TC more than anything done by any one server.

NPCs aren’t rendering, some people in my guild couldn’t even see them in the spawn camp. It’s gone from “eh, this is annoying” too… “right then, see you next Tuesday.”

Hacking against Kaineng… I mean, hackers in general on a game this scale should be IP banned and left in some dark basement with their pizza boxes. However, hacking these guys… you should simply feel ashamed.

So ashamed.

The problem I’m having with remaining a constant commander is expensive. The rune was expensive and being on the out-manned losing side, knowing we need siege to take a place…. every failed bid can cost my a gold in repair costs and lost siege equipment, while I make maybe a couple silver for each successful siege… seems like copper for defending. It’s not economically viable to play when losing so heavily.

While I love playing the underdog, I may have to resort to strike- hit and run tactics, instead of effective sieging… simply due to cost.

Yes, take advantage of the good guys. Whatever. I’d rather let them win at this point then… let Anet work with a broken ladder system as all the chivilaric players continue to stand down until they are in the “non-cheating” bracket. However, with reports of BP hacking Kaineg’s orb… well, not sure such a bracket will ever occur. Instead, they’ll just have a broken ladder system.

Either way, even as a competitive commander on Tarnished Coast, I would instruct my guys to stand down and let the orb be taken then benefit from this bullkitten. Score or no score, we can go back to fighting fairly without the kitten thing.

We sort of do… but, it’s nothing official. http://awc.enjin.com/home and http://guildwars2roleplayers.com/ are used heavily by our server for many things, AWC is WvWvW focused however, while gw2RPers is RP focused.

I agree, Tarnished Coast does not represent this at all. We would rather lose with style and heroism… then this.

I was that annoying thief that kept dragging 5+ of your guys off the treb firing on the Bay’s inner walls. The same thief that was harassing you inside Redvale.

It was fun making you chase me all over. Thanks for the game of cat and mouse!

Obviously Anet doesn’t want to reward you for defending. Just the 100+ other players on your realm in that map.

At sometimes comical moments. Last night, I was leading a fight in the Crystal Desert Borderlands as the TC army. Our zerg was getting ready for a siege in our typical fashion, ransacking some supply camps of the enemy to fuel up for a large battle. Then suddenly, we noticed that Dragonbrand was in the way of one of the supply camps owned by Crystal Desert. Well, we thought it was only a small force.

Then the rest of them appeared.

Oh, and the Crystal Desert zerg coming to meet the Dragonbrand zerg in defense also showed up. We became a Tarnished Toast sammich by two half-invisible armies. It was kind of funny, because since I play a thief, I was one of the last alive… rending + stealth = where is he?! So I saw this carnage and points where pockets of TC pushed on or retreated, thinking there was a safe spot, only to die from ghost armies.

I am sure the majority of TC does not share Twinbros’ assessment. I for one, do not.

My only hopes are that rendering becomes fixed during this week’s match, because as a commander who loves tactics… the only counter to the invulnerable loading army I’ve found is to run away, then come back after some loading time with similar numbers (and running away is not a fun tactic). OR to fight from a wall where a mesmer rendering attack can’t work.

Personally, I play as a tank thief. Dagger storming in WvWvW doesn’t do as much damage as a glass cannon dagger storm, not by far. However, enemy zergs don’t know my build. They start running away or awkwardly focusing me with attacks that don’t do anything, allowing my zerg to wipe them out. It has a nice morale effect, like the Ranger AoE that makes people believe that arrow carts are raining down on them.

People are transferring from the t1 servers since they are kitten’d off at queues. lol. I don’t call this a dramatic drop off of players from the game, I call this smart. Some of our other servers have actually started getting -more- people instead of less, creating more zone coverage in WvWvW than we had originally.

From all servers they need to be blacklisted. This happened with GoM last match-up. It makes me wonder if those GoM guys traveled to ET with server transfers and are just intent on ruining server reputations. This is stupid. They took all three borderlands maps’ orbs in the same way this happened with ET. I hate to see entire servers’ get bad raps from a few bad apples… that with server transfers free can just hop on to any old server they wish.

Oh, I hope we can keep it the way it is. Lol. Just was being punny.

Sure it does. Get enough people complaining about daggerstorm, giving feedback to Anet and they will nerf it. Once it is nerfed, then you will see how effective it was.

We almost completely pushed Dragonbrand off the map inside the Crystal Desert Borderlands, was fighting until…3am, when we started getting sleepy and had to log off. That’s EST, btw. More reasons why we need more folks like TSG.

I understand my opinions won’t be popular on the forums, at least not as far as the three in my original post. However, I did want a thread that wasn’t complaining or asking something to be fixed. Most those who agree with me are likely playing the game, or waiting for the match reset like me.

I crawl the forums a lot, it’s easy to do from my mobile while doing other things. World vs World vs World has been a ton of fun and I see only potential for it to get better. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot suggestions by people who are losing to give them an edge, to fix the game because their losing must mean the game is broken. I would hate to see things go in a direction that rewards me more for losing than winning, because… at that point, why bother the relentless struggle to the top?

1. Night capping actually makes the game more fun for a lot of people. How? It’s not all that fun to run around a map you dominate for four hours, waiting for the enemy to get a supply camp to take. Night capping means there is an entire map’s worth of enemy points to capture, kill and otherwise raid.

2. Orbs. When losing, it sets a clear objective for the map. People complain about the winning server having all three orbs, but it’s been also as clear when the winning server with 3 orbs is attacked by two servers, they cannot adequately defend both fronts. The balancing mechanic is fine. Fixing this does not help the game overall, it helps those who refuse to work to win… or don’t know how to work with the other server without some sort of steady stream of communication.

3. Guards. It’s important to allow small guilds and people who aren’t looking to jump into a group of 50 to have something to do in WvWvW. NPCs are strong enough to give those small 5-man parties some annoyance but still have the ability to take a capture point, they don’t need to be buffed to fight off a zerg—- siege equipment and defenders can do this quite well. Cannons, arrow carts and ballistas can turn a team of 10 into a team of 30 in strength when defending.

TLDR; the game is fun, let it continue to be really fun.

Such a Naysayer. When we were getting stomped against Dragronbrand, people didn’t simply give up. Maybe in the borderlands or Eternal where you were, Azmodyus, but the 40-60 man zergs I rolled with were having a blast. Our guild also had no problems digging in against both Mag and Drag when we had too. I also did have some RPing the loser, because there’s only one direction… up, at that point.

Indeed, if you want to talk bad about one server, then expect them to defend themselves in rhetoric. Server pride is a big part of WvWvW.

Dude has a point. Going undefeated before we get to the 2 week matches, during the time server transfers are still free, the ladder system only having a couple weeks of work… not really much to brag about.

I like this MCL guy.

And you know, my guild hates stomping other servers into the ground. We enjoy being the underdog, clawing our way up through the masses. When we are winning, it gets tough to motivate 15 guys to jump on. We start losing, suddenly 25+.

There is something extremely gratifying about being 20k under, 3 orbs and a full map of the enemy before you. Every tower we take, every keep just means that much more.

People need to understand just how rewarding it is to scrape out even small victories from enormous odds, instead of asking for the game to cater to their poor skill.

When I lead, I will commonly listen to reports and make decisions based on those. I will not direct everyone my way, but rather encourage which way seems the most wise and tactical.

I feel as if Sea of Sorrows and Tarnished Coast were a close match, if only we could stay awake long enough to fight each other.

I wouldn’t have as much fun. 1 week gives us a chance to retake the lead by the oceanic server, get our 5- hour energy drinks, snacks—- you get the idea. 2 weeks will give us even more time to swing things around, learning from previous matches. Maybe combined with the slow down of free server transfers as well as ability to move guild upgrades (-fingers crossed-), we can even begin stabalizing a 24/7 community in many servers for WvWvW as people finish their PvE content.

OP”

—B: Leading with the idea that not everyone will listen. How many of you have seen the people who start talking bad on people who aren’t following? (STUPID NOOBS, I SAID DON’T FIGHT AT SM, YOU WONDER WHY WE LOSE? IT’S BECAUSE YOU STUPID NOOBS). This is not an effective way to lead in my opinion. How about (Hey guys on SM, we could use you more over at ogre watch if you would like to come. We have about 15 assaulting the keep and could use a few more.) Or explain why SM is not a valid target at this time, without trash talking them. People are new and do not fully understand everything, so by being patient and explaining, it helps the overall realm in a positive manner.——-

This, so much!

I honestly don’t tend to lead unless the server is looking for leadership. As many like to proclaim themselves commander, it doesn’t do the battlefield a lot of good to try to shout out the other guy (even if his tactics are flawed). It’s better to acknowledge that not everyone will listen.

When I do take command, I often break things into a North Commander and South Commander. (Or East and West if the map calls for it) In Vent, I have guys scouting the South and typically ask the South Commander to call hotspots, needs for reinforcements, weak targets, etc.

Vice-Versa with the North Commander, if I’m in the South. We’ll then take turns establishing objectives, mounting squads, etc. etc. Sometimes someone will come in and try to out-shout me, at that point, I let others decide whom they wish to continue following. I won’t speak directly to them unless necessary, allowing others to advocate and therefore solidifying our forces instead of dividing them.

OR if another commander is currently leading and another comes to attempt to divide our forces, I will speak for that commander towards the usurper. Better to have a unified force with moderate skill then a broken force with expert skill. The commander should not be focused on keeping unity, he has enough duties with coordinating individuals, guilds, ‘zergs,’ siege equipment, etc. etc.

TC may be guilty of this at non-primetime. However, I know my guild and a few others love to push out when the server is losing. It creates epic moments to be remembered, more than when we are simply circling the map in hopes an enemy gets bold enough to attack one of our holdings.

Judas.5432:

Go to Kaineng. They are in desperate need and have a fantastic WvWvW attitude.

I agree with this statement.

There are quite a few guilds with a long history as well, which improves stability since their records show they have a higher chance of continuing through any growing pains the server might have.

My guild loves watching a well geared warrior/guardian melee on a tower/keep ramp or in a choke point. Just watch the zerg die around them, while they knockdown and keep the enemy off our squishy ranged that blow up the rest.

People get demoralized without any trolling. SoS and TC were having these swinging exchanges between night and day. However, SoS was the first to throw in the towel and now TC has an insurmountable lead. Soon as people quit showing up to the fight is when the real loss starts.

Lots of the TSG guys are also very funny gamers if you ever have the luck to be around part of their strike forces or commanders. TC wants more guys with good humor and sportsmanship, not just bodies.

Orbs alone don’t make the winning team undefeatable, anymore than they help a losing server gain ground. Several times, we had a server in our matchup hack all the orbs. We still crushed them into tiny hacker dust.

I like WvWvW being a group effort instead of an individual accomplishment. The whole nightcapping thing is just part of it, on my server, we’ve often tried various ways to help the people that will be there after us when we know they will be outmanned. We set up weapons, upgrades, etc. and give them every possible advantage before going to sleep.

To those that argue spies are a legitimate war tactic, just remember that caught spies in war are easily tortured, made examples of and killed.

That’s right, Kaine. Though I did see a dev post that they are trying to alleviate some of those problems, one of the reasons I think they’ve not axed server transfers. Once they have a way for guilds to transplant without losing all their upgrades, we may see server transfers start to cost or come at a slower intervals.

GoM could have been a contender if it wasn’t for that public debacle where they stole all three orbs with hacking within 15minutes of each other. Even the other servers with their hacking, generally are one orb here and there. GoM managed to kitten off both servers in every single borderland within about half an hour’s time period. That’s an impressive way to invite a gangbang and tarnish a server.

I don’t think GoM deserves the reputation, it could be the same three or five people that are just q’d for each borderland. However, it’s odd that one runs into entire guilds camping the orb respawn area right after a hack into another’s keep to reset the orb. It makes folks believe there are more than just the three or five hackers trying to cheat their way to victory.

In any case, I hope GoM comes back into the mix of things after all hackers are dealt with. Given the first few days of fighting, I think they have some decent WvWvW guilds and can be a fun fight.