Guild Wars 2

Read my more recent post, as my perspective regarding SoS is changing and evolving based on the discourse here. My present perspective is that I hold the players who were server loyalists as deserving of respect, and mostly hold the transfer players in contempt – though not all of them; primarily the ones that your members are complaining about destroying their sense of community. (I.E. fairweather friend guild who rejoined recently, fairweathers who left dragonbrand, commanders & entire guilds who are rude and abrasive towards SoS server natives, etc.) I have been all too quick to judge and to vent my hostility and I am beginning to develop a more well-rounded perspective on things now.

We at maguuma are watching sea of sorrows, an oceanic player focused server, suddenly become swarmed by north-american players. They are complaining of commanders flat out not listening to the people on the server and sour attitudes prevailing, in spite of being able to crush and win by numbers. A part of me wants to enjoy the schadenfreude of these circumstances but another part of me feels very sorry for them. In spite of them winning it doesn’t feel like a real victory, whereas for us every victory we manage in overwhelming odds has cheers erupting from our tight-knit community.

We fear the day if and when joiner-ins decide to flood to our server like locusts and present a very destructive problem to our community here. We want the right kind of people joining our server – people interested in fun who will stay loyal with us, once joined, even through bad times of wvw loss. We do want to win, but we don’t want to win if that means we have to sacrifice our community spirit in doing so.

Also, I found this well-written thread OP rather enlightening about where things will inevitably be headed for any server plagued by joiner-ins: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Server-transfers-are-hurting-our-server-community-Jade-Quarry-LONG

Avatara.1042:

I cannot quote now either, and this is using firefox.

What you said is incorrect, and you know it. I much prefer being the underdog, but that is meaningless if I am unable to actually play the game due to being alone. I am not going to lose all PvE and the people I know, so I can solo wvwvw at my primetime on Dragonbrand.

In fact, what you are suggesting is little more than trolling: sacrificing the entire Oceanic community and everything that entails, to satisfy your perversion of my preference.

My mistake, then – I am, like many of my server, frustrated by present circumstances and quick to judge. As I stated, if I had a magic wand to put you in your ideal matchup circumstances with a community you can feel proud to be a part of, I would. Unfortunately I can’t so we’re just going to have to perhaps redirect our energies towards perhaps demanding Anet to fix their game. I had proposed a player wvw strike in the forums the goons come from – perhaps we could get SoS members upset with the present circumstances to participate.

Axialbloom.8109:

RE: Spacedad

I fully understand what you’re saying. The problem is you’ve been tarring all of us with the same brush with the majority of your comments.

I’m primarily standing up to you as an individual, since you have decided to be insulting and derisive of several of our members in your previous post, with exactly the broad-brushing you are complaining about no less. We are a server who never backs down from having our members trashed by insulting loose talk. If you are willing to address us like adults we’re more than willing to discuss and debate civilly, however.

There are plenty of Oceanics (myself included) that despise all the guilds coming over for a free ride when we worked so hard to maintain our position the previous weeks. Where were they last week when we fought Maguuma?

I am happy to hear that you feel shame and embarrassment for the present circumstances and this redeems you a little in my eyes. The only people feeling pride in my view on SoS are either blinded or delusional about the inherent problems with this game’s present structure. The free server transfers are an abomination and a blight on every server community – including your own.

Conversely I understand the position of wanting NA guilds on our server. What you call “night-capping” is a basic reality for us for every server we face and having a few numbers during our sleep-hours to make sure we don’t lose absolutely everything, every time, every day, every matchup would be a welcome relief.

Yes, and we are well aware of it. Please don’t take what I stated the wrong way – I was merely pointing out that night capping is an inherent problem with how the game is structured, and not really something to be proud of as a circumstance of ‘victory’ or ‘loss’ for any server, including our own. It is also something that encourages precisely what we’re seeing this week with your server – where north american servers cynically join your own in order to maximize coverage, thereby destroying the present match-ups. Not that the match-ups this week would have been entirely fair, given your server’s previous coverage last week – again, night-capping is a major problem and regrettably Anet has decided to not address this issue as of yet. (or rather they have stated they aren’t going to do anything about it)

Funnily enough the vocal majority of players over here are letting certain guilds know they are not welcome; particularly one such guild and commander who transferred off our server a while ago, mid battle no less, and had the gall to try and come back.

Yeah, I feel sorry for your server in that regard. From what I have heard it is a nightmare of bad attitudes and uncooperative idiots. I am glad we really don’t have to deal with that at all on maguuma.

Aussies and Kiwis are a proud bunch. We enjoy our server and the greater portion of us will not be leaving regardless of whether we go up in the tiers or drop down several rankings if the fair-weather guilds hop off to wherever it is they go. Which is why we get so incensed when you dump on all of us collectively.

Good on you – but it’s not your server loyalists we take issue with. It’s the gaggle of recent joiner-ins who have flooded your server. From what I am hearing a lot of them are very uncooperative and nasty towards server natives as well. I’m sorry you have to put up with their nonsense.

If I had a magic wand to fix this, I would make it so that servers were locked down and arranged strictly by average player coverage. This would mean you would have gotten matched against 2 oceanic-coverage servers rather than suddenly get a swarm of unwanted NA players. Free server transfers are destructive to not just our community but yours.

It’s truly unfortunate that (this week at least) we happened to be the server that so blatantly shows the effects of all that is wrong with free transfers. It’s equally unfortunate how your boys seem to be handling it.

It’s bad blood all around – the well has been poisoned for everyone, and there will be bad attitudes by players who are fed up and disgusted by the circumstances brought about by free server transfers. As I said, my role as a Maguuma community leader is a little like a little dutch boy with a swiss cheese dam, That said, I’m proud of the members who have actually exhibited stronger morale in the face of overwhelming dolyak feces circumstances.

Also speaking as an ACTUAL community representative of maguuma, I have to say that thanks to free server transfers, the role of people like us is like trying to plug holes in a dam with our fingers like little dutch boys with a swiss cheese dam. Here we are trying to build up community morale and participation in wvw – and it’s a real struggle to begin with. We have had some success doing so in the past few weeks, and this has resulted in us rather enjoying ourselves and building friendships between the guilds on our server.

It is unfortunate, then, that we are then (along with dragonbrand, who is suffering even worse than us for several reasons) made to face up against a server which is sadly now a poster child for why free server transfers should be ended from the game. Ironically several of those now on the server are from titan alliance – who broke up for several of the very reasons that community leaders like myself are now struggling to maintain server morale and player enjoyment as well as participation in wvw. When I read the original reasoning for the TA breakup, I thought “good, maybe those TA guilds will spread themselves evenly around servers in good faith of not trying to ruin the balance in lower brackets.” Apparently not.

It is not entirely the fault of everyone who transferred; this is a problem with the game itself right now, and renders the tiers meaningless. It also further makes the game unplayable for the higher tiers when joiner-ins clog the server and make the queue times rocket up.

I am actually very impressed with our community here – we are being crushed but our spirits aren’t. The behavior of my fellow maguumannes even in the wake of this week’s game-design-travesty has been really inspiring. We have a great bunch of people here and they say struggling through hard times is where you really find out who your friends are.

That said, it does make our work cut out for us as community reps – we have to struggle extra hard to hold the line of server morale and keep people in. I’m proud of the maguuma players who are playing wvw in spite of the complete hogwash going on this week. I’m further excited to see them become a lot stronger tactically as a result of fighting against superior odds. The few objects we do manage to take and hold have been satisfying and entertaining, as we observe the obvious – that numbers don’t translate to play skill or strategic vision.

It is regrettable that this play mode and its present issues stack the deck against us (and dragonbrand) but we are still able to squeaze blood from a stone and have a good time. This server is excellent and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Guild Wars Fan.3249:

Velladin.2578:

Whatever, this week is a waste of time. Not going to bother going in. I want to try and cap things but there is no way we can win when we are outnumbered 20 to 1, they have fortified walls EVERYWHERE, defensive siege weapons at every 3 feet and being camped at the spawn. Oh and I forgot to add about those kittening stupid orbs. The winners totally needed more buffs to win.

hahahah…good post…and so kitten true….the winning buff needs to go….should be HARDER when y’re winning, not easier….stupid idea that. Maybe ANet thinks that the score incentive for the orbs isn’t enough?

This is a good point.

Team fortress 2 has the right idea – it’s harder to hold onto defenses than it is to attack it. It’s also a good game design principle.

In this game it’s easier to defend than it is to attack, especially when the defender controls almost everything, or literally everything.

Ideally this game should have been structured to allow servers who control less to defend easier, and defenders who control more to have a much greater difficulty controlling it all.

This is part of what I was getting at in an earlier post in how the wvw play more carries a lot of the anachronisms that came from essentially using the dark age of camelot model of large scale pvp.

Mind you the anachronism in this instance cuts both ways – servers that are inactive at certain hours basically can’t hold onto anything, while servers that can defend everything 24/7 are virtually impenetrable.

Stopping free server transfers will partially fix a problem that merely exaggerates issues inherent with the DAOC model of play. It will not solve those problems nor will it address the many anachronisms inherent with that play mode.

Overall the wvw mode, while fun, feels like it wasn’t designed for the gameplay in guild wars 2 (this is apparent if you play spvp – it’s practically a different game entirely) or the game engine itself. (lag, invisible players, door clipping, etc.)

I’ve stated this since around launch – it feels like Anet, while very forward-thinking in both their pve and spvp content for their core game, didn’t really follow their own stated manifesto with regards to ‘re-imagining’ how wvw might work.

This is a shame since a well-designed mass battle mode is ideally what the ‘endgame’ of this game should be – but in its present state it leaves a lot to be desired. The little I have heard from Anet has been discouraging towards the notion that they might try to think outside the box on how to address the problems with wvw, so at this point the ball is in their court with what they will do to make wvw a more satisfying experience for all the servers.

The end result of course highlights the issues of the free server transfers, and how it has an effect on servers at all levels – higher tiers were ruined by it, so they come to the lower tiers and then ruin the matchups there. Meanwhile the server they left gets itself left high and dry. It’s a big cycle of ruination and anti-fun for everyone. If SoS has a meteoric rise it’s going to also have a meteoric fall for all the same reasons henge of denravi did.

Ideally you shouldn’t even be needing to ask people to come to your server, and the matchups would take its course to balance out – but that’s not really how things work at the moment thanks to server transfers.

All the bickering we’re engaged in is part of the inherent problems with wvw in general – the entire model of play is based around the dark age of camelot style of open world pvp, and features a great deal of anachronistic problems (such as nightcapping and server population) from that rather old style of play. I enjoy the pitched battles and the strategy when the teams are poplocked and it’s a challenging struggle. But I can’t help but feel like the structure of the game mode is not something made for this kind of game – even the game engine can hardly handle it. (invisible players, etc.)

In my view an ideal scenario would be something like a hybrid of guild versus guild with wvw. Large scale pre-arranged battles where organized guilds are queued up into games in pre-set numbers of people. These might play out over the course of and hour or two. This way it comes down to player skill and strategy rather than who poplocks a zone and who has better coverage. This would also mean a lot more maps presumably with a smaller number of people – but still have enough people to convey the feel of an epic war.

Renegret.3564:

…until there’s a new cool server to stack on.

The entire root of the current problems with wvw play summarized in a single sentence.

Oozo.7856:

24/7 coverage trumps any amount of what might be called “skill” in WvWvW.

That’s for sure. I don’t think we’ve ever killed that many alpha siege golems due to enemy incompetence before.

I like the idea of that if you transfer, you cannot participate in wvw for the server you transfer to for the next couple weeks. (Presumably for around the proposed amount of time that it takes for a new server matchup to occur. Except with off-timed overlap to prevent transferring just before a new matchup.) This would allow players to transfer to servers their friends play on to enjoy the game with them in pve.

I would also like a caveat that if you transfer BACK to the server you just came from before that time expires, you will be able to participate in wvw on the original server.

This will have the effect of putting a damper on spying as well as encouraging server loyalty. If you really like a server that much that you want to wvw, you have to commit to it.

A ‘server guesting’ system for this would probably sort this all out. Guesting for pve should be allowed. Then put in place restrictions however severe (such as charging money or a time limit on wvw participation) are necessary for wvw.

Deranged.7139:

lol, so much crying from all sides. they need to stop free server transfers, and to those that say well they need to balance the servers. well you know what the servers will never be balanced at this rate.

The consensus is that free server transfers are a problem on all sides. Players who transfer-to-win are symptoms of the problem. Right now it is difficult to build and maintain any sense of community or loyalty between servers due to the temptation of transfer-to-win. About all we can do is mock and ridicule the people who transfer for being the disloyal cowards they are, but we really can’t do anything to stop them beyond that.

I actually feel sorry for sea of sorrows because a lot of the people on your server will likely disperse when things go sour. If they do not and you wind up with an actual community on your server that takes you into the highest tiers, good on you – but the root problems with free server transfers still exists.

Agreed. It’s a mess that is destructive to server community in any sense and just leads to headaches on all sides. This issue really needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

Avatara.1042:

SoS beat you easily last week as well, Maguuma, and you can hardly say people transferring to us are joining the winning team or ‘fairweather zerging’ seeing as we have not moved from 10th for ages, and our only significant movement until now was to drop places.

You mean the player versus door stuff? Yes, we’re well aware that you had better numbers than us during off hours last week. We’re glad you were able to give some decent fights during day too, but you really should have at that time been bumped into a tier that was more oceanic-focused.

There’s a lengthy post on this page of the nightcapping thread from the other server we were matched with that week which brings up the same grievances we had with that matchup: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Night-Capping-and-YOU/page/20

I suggest you read it because it wasn’t just us that was annoyed with being two mostly-NA servers matched up with people that would clean up the entire map overnight.

We have been advertising for US and Canadian assistence for a long time, and we were one of the first victims of the free transfer WvWvW flaw, when a major WvWvW guild transferred IN THE MIDDLE OF BATTLE, to the very world we were currently fighting.

As for ‘sore winners’ it is more likely you are projecting your own sore loser attitude onto us. I mean, really, sabotaging Dragon timer sites? Planning sit-ins on the SoS server? Transferring to SoS to clog our queues and afk? These reek of a sore loser.

GOOD WILL SQUANDEREREDED!)

We don’t want your good will; we want Anet to fix their game so we can have decent fights.

We have sympathy for dragonbrand’s current state of affairs but this will not stop us from attacking you if we deem it strategically viable to do so.

As someone who values server loyalty in a game where we are pitted against one another each week like college sports team matchups, I am regrettably saddened by how this game is unfortunately structured to favor bad players and sore winners who join the winning side en masse. It is not completely the fault of the playerbase – I don’t think Anet completely knows what to do to make the wvw game fun and less volatile in its matchups yet.

That said, those who are joining the winning servers just to win are not the kind of people we would want to have here on maguuma. We want people interested in fun and who will join us for the long haul – not fairweather zergs that poplock our zones and bring terrible commanders with them who refuse to cooperate with our native commanders. We want to get to know the guilds on our server and become good friends with them.

Eventually anet will get the server transfer issues sorted out. For the time being, those who are engaged in server transfer round-robin are going to do nothing but increasingly earn a reputation as unmoored hypocrites. When the servers do finally lock down, you’re not going to be viewed in favorable light. You’re also going to have nowhere to run to (presumably without shelling out real world money) this time when things don’t go your way; instead of learning to adapt and rely on the community of your server, you will be unable to transfer and be forced to deal with people who by that time will likely hate your guts.

The damage has been done for this week. But to the fairweather guilds who transfer-to-win; we are watching you, and we don’t forget. Have a nice day.