Guild Wars 2

Op- too many badges would be dropped that way, it should be 1 badge per X events that you take part in- especially defences to encourage people to take this part of the game seriously.

Shadow- drop rate on killing leader in supply camps seems to be pretty pants now, I got ONE badge from taking part in 10 camp caps last night and was hitting leader every time, so it’s a bit too random and damage based atm.

Give this a timer if you have to leave it in wvw at all- so 20 minutes after you entered the JP you are removed from wvw and placed at the end of the queue, and cannot enter the JP again until 12 hours have passed.

Better still, remove JP from wvw and make it a separate instance giving no badges.

Or make an entry requirement for wvw JP of 50 kills in wvw per time you enter (20 minute timer still applies).

Prevent siege from being built in JP – people have started throwing it down just to block the chest apparently.

It’;s annoying to those that want to compete in wvw to have valuable spots taken up by griefers, campers, and people who just aren’t helping their server.

Change badge drops in wvw so you get them for every X succesful defences, bessies escorted, towers taken, guard points taken etc so it’s not so reliant on damage done in zerg fights.

It’s not a problem in wvw, most commanders only turn theirs on when there is a requirement for a commander at a particular map- except for the annoying new guild that joining SFR recently that had 15-20 camped in EB JP thinking it was funny to prevent players from doing wvw and laughing while we struggled to retain our t3 towers etc on the real map.

People obviously turn them on in pve for the attention.

What’s hilarious is that you think you’re the one to discover this and people viewing your videos is the reason they are.

It’s kinda fun doing this but also tedious, boring and dangerous as it takes a long time to take down siege this way, you need to get pretty close to the wall in order to do it and overall it takes up a slot that could be used for something else- and the cooldown on it is so long by the time you have done it once most sieges are either over or someone on the wall has noticed and second time you send a pet up it’s dead in seconds.

Durz, raven has to reach the target- which it tends not to in a group situation (or the target just moves out of range) and the raven merrily flies straight through all the aoe and burst, etc. Works quite nicely 1v1 or very small fights unless you fight an ele or other aoe class in which case the pet is dead before you can say ‘boo!’.

I love melee rangers in wvw, mainly as a good source of badges.

I’ve yet to work out how to get my pet to obey that recall button before it dies while pet swop is on cool down after it ran into the zerg and picked up 3 days worth of cripple making it useless as a damage dealer as it never catches up to the intended target, which the melee ranger will die before ever reaching either, making that 30 point in BM look a bit of a waste.

Melee rangers can be good in small battles where their pet has a chance of catching up with the target and where the intended target is dumb enough to let you hit them- but then that’s true of facing any melee class. The actual damage from sword in wvw is a bit weak for my liking.

The 30 Bm trait is also fun when attacking stuff inside towers and keeps from outside and people too- but it doesn’t take long for people to spot the pet and once they see it your fun is over.

I run a LB/SB build with a bit of toughness and HP/might foods added in, using qz and might stacking before firing off a nice barrage that slows down those pesky front zergers from 1500 range- I love being able to outrange people. Good weapon swap timing is crucial to playing it well, as is the skills you put in your slots and even your elite.

I’m moving away from quite so much toughness atm as I’m finding it fairly pointless for the type of deaths I suffer, where having 500 extra toughness might have kept me alive for 0.5 second longer.

Condition damage builds might work for 1v1 but against a zerg or a bunch of people it’s like spitting at them and hoping one of them dies from catching a disease- might happen one day but it’s gonna take a long time with the amount of condition removal available to most classes (or even worse, a necro that converts them conditions to boons and your boons to conditions..)

For pve melee rangers are great fun – sword horn and your choice of secondary and away you go.

In the end your play style will determine what’s best for you, and what you feel most comfortable playing- but there are way better classes to play melee on.

Might be of some use in Tpvp as a bunker/holder/general annoyance in standing on one spot.

In wvw you sometimes meet people running similar builds which means more badges for me, so keep running them. Healing spring is a wonderful heal if others are healing too and you can manage to stand in the same spot in wvw fights- but as soon as the fight moves or people are pushed out of it (doesn’t take long for people to counter it) it’s pretty useless and a long cooldown.

If people are thinking of running this in wvw, please do, as long as you’re not on my servers, and I’ll thank you for the badges later:-)

Give rangers rifles- when you equip the rifle, your pet is stowed away and you gain the rifle skills and charged shot like a warrior has and actually have a burst…nah, never going to happen, rangers will remain the gimped ‘pet’ and ‘ranged’ class that has pets that die within seconds in a zerg, have pet skills that take longer than the fight lasts to activate WHILST STANDING IN ONE SPOT so they die to aoe and then spend forever waiting to be able to take out any pet due to the long cooldown.

I thought Qini’s comment was funny coming from a thief, and mentioning ‘individual skill’. If you want to fight 5vs 5 or whatever, go spvp or tpvp or whatever people like to call it.
There is a lot of skill involved in zerg fights when you are outnumbered or even numbers, and a lot of it revolves around running builds that can aid the group and getting off your offensive and defensive skills at the right time, in the right place, and in co ordination with others in your party/ts/guild or whatever, and even reacting to changing dynamics during the fight, or even where and when you meet up with the other zerg.

Auto looting for wvw (ie true auto loot) would be great, don’t see it as a problem in pve, in fact I can see reasons why they would NOT want to bring it in for pve – think bots.

Badges should not be given out from the JP- they should be earned.

You should get a badge for each completed event in wvw as well as randomly from kills that you contribute to, so say one badge for each successful gold defence as well as one for each successful gold attack, so encouraging people to help defend as well as attack. At the moment there is not enough incentive to defend things which results in karma trains of commanders and zergs going around endlessly recapping and then running off.

How about X number of badges for every 100 supplies used to repair (not to build siege though, that could be abused badly), X number for every 100 bessies escorted, etc – could easily be tied in o the current tiers for wvw achievements.

Make badges a part of the reward for participating in wvw and remove them from JP- or better yet remove JP from wvw entirely.

What was annoying about last night in EB was the 15-20 man group lead by a commander that I had never heard of before camping the JP and not giving a stuff about the score or the fact they were preventing wvw players from entering the map whilst we lost most of the t3 towers, and in fact laughing about it.

New tactic to prevent SFR winning a third time- get a guild to move to SFR and take up 15-20 slots during primetime? Probably not, more likely just some more server jumpers who think it’s fun to screw up wvw.

JP should not be in wvw or should have a 30 minute max stay or should only be accessible after each 50 wvw kills (for 30 minutes).

Remove JP from EB. Last night we had 15-20 including a commander camping the JP and taking up valuable slots, laughing at anyone who pointed out that they weren’t helping the score and generally being obnoxious, whilst we struggled to retain what we had on the map- and at one point we lost t3 towers and only one plus the keep left, all because of some commander I had never heard of before and his groupies who decided to stay in the JP.

It’s no fun for people actually fighting for the week to either not be able to even enter EB or to enter and find out we’re being over run due to the selfish people who enter solely to do JP and then camp it for hours not giving a stuff about wvw.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that group have come from another server just to bugger things up, as having a 20 man disadvantage means you could be facing 40 more than you have- 20 from each side, without having the players to counter.

Night capping is a feature of the 24/7 nature of wvw, and until recently it’s what kept VS at the top of the EU chart. The servers that are rising in the tables generally have a decent amount of players that play in the early hours, giving them points advantage over those that don’t.

It can be quite offputting to log on in the morning or early afternoon and see your server going from 5k points in front to 15k point behind with all your fully upgraded keeps and even garrison gone.

It’s all about attracting people from different regions to your server, or finding lots of ‘night owls’ to come and play on your server, or persuading all the pve farming types that stay up all night to farm wvw instead.

Without a decent night crew you are destined to fail in higher tiers.

OP, it’s a pvp zone, so while it is in a pvp zone expect other people to camp it and collect loot form dead bodies.

Having said that, JP has NO place in wvw and should not be there. If they have to have it then it should only be accessable after each 50 kills, once you enter a timer starts that kicks you from wvw after 30 minutes if you are still in it, and it should NOT reward badges.

If I want dungeon gear I am forced to do dungeons, if I want fractals stuff I’d have to do fractals – if you want badges you should be forced to participate in wvw.

Only going to wvw to do the JP affects your server’s ability to compete in wvw, and if you don’t compete the world buffs you gain from wvw will be less, affecting your pve experience.

Yes, go to Viz square, they are in sore need of some help after learning that not having the night time all to themselves meant they had to L2P and got roundly thrashed this week.

Not a great fan of this build as it’s damage output is mediocre, and healing spring is only useful if you get to stand in it, which i don’t find is such a good idea in any zerg battle (or near a keep that has decent siege in it.

It’s not bad for support play and is reasonably hard to kill- until people knock you out of healing spring and interupt you a bit, or hit both you and the pet with confusion (high damage pet + confusion= dead pet).

As soon as people realise you’re running this build they tend to ignore you and kill the damage dealers- most of whom won’t hang around in your spring (unless a well trained on TS guild group who undrstand the build).

try the ‘foraging’ option on other pets, and see what ‘plasma’ does- sadly it takes way too long to wait for the pet to forage, pick up and consume it as it won’t forage while your moving and most of the time by the time it’s finsihed forgaing the fight has moved on.

As a team player in wvw I run LB/SB, with the increased range, as I find this gives the best results for my style of play, although I am currently trying out sword/horn and SB or Lb (depends on situation) on my alt ranger (horn for the buff/running speed/general fun), which tends to get me dead real fast against a zerg.

For pve, use anything you like, personally I tend to swap around depending on how I’m feeling- in lower level areas sb with sword/horn is working very well as i like the speed buff from the horn.

Awww you got me pining for my gw1 ranger now- I miss being able to contribute in such a meaningful way and miss decent trap builds, etc.

Or even gaining something when my pet died- would be great to have that in GW2 in whatever format they decided to bring it in, gets old really quickly having pets dead and a long cooldown before you can swop to a live one, considering most battles are long over before you can drag another one out…

Ranger downed skills are rubbish unless you are in the water. Thunderclap is a one time interupt that won’t save you for more than a second, and lick wounds takes so long to activate that people could go off and make a coffee and come back and kill you and you’ll still be downed in the same spot.

My main bugbear is the ele, hopefully they will stop them going through gates- will be REALLY funny to watch the first time one tries and bumps off back into the damage;-)

I don’t know if anyone else feels this, but my mesmer doesn’t seem to get credit for damage caused by my bubble and for my confusion bomb that i tend to throw into their zerg- lot of pretty damage numbers contributing to dead zergs but very few bag drops and a slow kill count.

I guess this must be a function of the way the game calculates drops/damage done, as confusion is mainly damage you do to yourself.

Play what feels right to you, but remember wvw is meant to be a team game and generally you will be most effective when using a team build in a team-i’m still amazed at how few thieves in the lower tiers will use their spinning attack against a zerg and will be running backwards trying to pew pew with a bow when they could turn the zerg.

You will also realise that depending on the tier you play on, will determine what you like to play as well, as the general level of play etc will influence your decision quite a lot.

Anyone noticed, whenever a downed ele gets up in the open field (ie out of range of their ‘get out of jail free’ tower entrance), EVERYONE will make kitten sure that ele dies. You should NOT be able to get up and run off when you are downed.

Same with downed thiefs- people go out of their way to make sure you end up very dead, but not to the same extent as eles. You should NOT be able to stealth when you are downed.

Warrior gets up and runs off on vengeance- no one cares, as he is dead already.

I wish my ranger could get up and run off when downed, but then that would make a mockery of downing someone in the first place..oh wait…some people can!

Ele and thief skills need nerfing for wvw to level the playing field.

So I’m running supplies or whatever and come across two people fighting, one is on my side, the other isn’t. Do I stop and think ‘oh it might be a duel, better stand back and watch’? Don’t be stupid. Unload everything on the enemy player, get him dead, and save your team mate who can get on with whatever server helping activity he was doing before he was jumped by the opposition.

No thought process involved. Other than maybe ’it’s a trap, he’s a spy and it’s bait to drag me in before ten of them appear from nowhere and roflstomp me and pretend that they are leet’.

Glad they nerfed what was clearly an exploit. Doesn’t affect my mesmer build in wvw at all- but then I was not relying on a broken mechanic in the first place, and will be happier on my other toons not to be spiked by exploiters.

Having read all this I now understand why in wvw mesmers are too lazy to spec for something that actually helps in a group situation, like null field and the other bubble, together with the trait that causes condition on entry/exit to the area of the bubble. Far more use in wvw than shatter GC.
Try this in wvw against a zerg: throw an illusion out, f2 it, immediately drop bubble and then null field and then watch all those pretty numbers and crippled zergers and people killing themselves. Throw in a decent thief spinning in, d/d ele, stompy warrior and a guardian stopping the zerg in it’s tracks and start picking up loot bags.
Will i care if they fix the shatter bug?

Great advice, all depends on whether you spot them coming- they can easily catch up to you whilst your running on your signet, bas venom, cripple, poison, etc all while you are rooted to the spot and dead in under a second before they even render. Even if you do somehow manage to evade steal/mug which can hit for 8k, you’re still at a disadvantage as he can disappear , heal up and come back to try again before you are anywhere near to healing and now with skills on cooldown- and you probably don’t have the right weapons equipped when you entered combat anyway, unless you are running a solo build in wvw.

If you are wide awake then you can beat them with LB/SB, but if they manage to land steal/mug and another skill you are going to struggle with 14k off your HP bar and some slow heal ticking away.

Practice using sword/x and you might be able to avoid dieing in group fights, but you’re missing out on some nice LB skills by equipping melee weapons in wvw.

As a pet build ranger, how useful are you in wvw when facing multiple enemies? I’m interested in knowing how u magically avoid your pet being dead within 2 seconds after you send it in against an enemy, then switch pets, send that one in, dead, now no pets as they all on cooldown.

Also, F2 skills on pets really need a revamp so they are instant, not stand still for 3 seconds for something that lasts 5-10…

No. Ele’s can already stack a pile of boons if you know what you are doing, they really don’t need any more of a boost.

I’ve got to thank TUP for something- the use of skale venom from a level 51 active quest thing is inspired, and it stacks with foods too.
Until last night I didn’t even know you could get it as I thought it was only a thief skill, definitely one for the learning curve!

I like watching TUP, they remind me of playing on tier 1 (which I now mostly do) as they are organised and all attack at once, it reminds me of SFR play and tactics. Great synergy in the group and piles of buffs and everything hits at once.

Gandara needs to get it’s act together if it wants to continue rising in the tiers (or even staying where it is), starting with the simple things like shortening those 300 yard long zergs that impact like a wet rag, and finding commanders who actually realise that they are the ones responsible for it and do something about it.

I see too many solo builds on people in groups, thiefs that stand at the back and use bows, backing off all the while (your spinning elite in a well co ordinated attack will wipe a zerg or at the least break it up a bit), mesmers without bubbles and unable to throw a confusion bomb or know when to use their speed line skill to pull people around, guardians that don’t know when to use bubbles, blocks, etc or have a tome equipped as elite if we’re lacking healing, eles that haven’t heard of water skills, necros that haven’t heard of wells that turn boons into conditions (try it against TUP, they all have 5-6 boons running, makes a nice mess…), rangers that just fail and a general tendency to back off in fights leaving people exposed and allowing the opposition the advantage.

Top that off with commanders who don’t realise that having NO ONE attacking AR and Piken borderlands means they can hold their own BL with two people and concentrate all their forces on Gandara, resulting in the slow inevitable loss of almost everything in our own BL, and no server wide TS system to co ordinate things, and it’s a testament to the skill of most of the players (regulars, you know who you are) that Gandara is doing as well as it is.

Just imagine how much better we could be if we fixed all of the above.

Remove JP from wvw, or make it so access is only once per 50 enemies killed.

Fix culling so that I can at least see the thief that just rofl stomped me and finished me from stealth.

Add portable cannons and remove trebs – cannons cannot be placed, moved to or built inside any keep or tower.

Fix the outmanned buff so it actually gives something that is useful.

They need to speed up these activations….three seconds to activate a buff? By the time the pet has finished this the thief has killed you, made dinner, had a beer and watched a movie.
The F2 skills need to be instant to be much use.

Nothing dodgy about it- it’s a feature of the ranger class that they are more effective when downed and in the water or just in the water than most other classes, which don’t make up for the fact we’re not so good on dry land.

You’re probably just hurt that you couldn’t instastab him and actually had to try to use some skills to figure out how to kill him- and failed.

Being able to finish from stealth needs to be removed from the game- it would be funny then to watch downed players kill thiefs who try to finish them with their glass cannon ’i’m so leet 1 second your downed build go QQ more’ builds and might encourage them to try something that needs a bit more skill- like pistols, had a great battle against one yesterday and although I lost (skritt came along and attacked me…) it felt like a real battle not a ‘instastab’.

yes, steal needs a buff- it’s not good enough that it can hit for 8k before the fight even starts while the person hit for 8k can’t even see you?

Steal should do just that- take one random skill from the player targeted but do NO damage (I know there is no chance the DEVS would do this as it might cause thiefs to QQ).

My ranger loves it- but that’s because it’s the one area where it’s great to play a ranger!

Depending on your server and if you can find a decent camp capping guild, you can level up pretty fast in wvw- I’ve levelled 4 characters up in there, only doing skill points when a map is above my level- there are plenty of low level maps so don’t forget to grab them all so you have all your skill unlocked faster.

Seems most of the ’it’s easy to counter a thief’ answers are coming from people who mainly play THIEF. Tells you everything you need to know really.

For a lot of players being basilisked, then hit for 8k steal/mug, 6k, 6k cnd and being dead or almost dead within one second, can’t even see them while they finish you isn’t their idea of fun (with 1800 toughness and 22k hp).

Defend it all you like, but in wvw thiefs hit way too hard, have way too much space to kite away if you do manage somehow to guess EXACTLY when they are about to hit you whilst being invisible, and by the time you managed to avoid something your HP is so low you’re as good as dead anyway- as they can kite around 5/6 people all throwing aoe and swinging like mad, pop up and finish you off.

They don’t have much affect in the overall scheme of wvw (except when they hunt in groups of 5 or more), but they do annoy a lot of people into quitting wvw or at least contributing to them not enjoying the game and hence going to play another game which might be more fun.

Thief class I guess is where the usual ’i’m leet’ (for which read ’I’m a chicken ganker’) players go- every MMO has a class which attracts this type of player, and they will usually defend it’s OPness by saying ‘l2p’ or ’it’s easy to counter (play a thief)’.

I read the OP as ‘I have farmed fractals for hundreds of hours and have just realised I have all this useless junk as you can’t trade it, please solve this by making me gain lots of gold’.

Did I miss something?

Personally I’d like to be able to trade for the fractals/ascended gears as the liklihood of me getting beyond level one on fractals is pretty low, so by all means make it all tradeable and lower the price for all that gear.

Amazing number of night players in VS tonight, big grats to you guys for mustering up huge zergs in every map- I expect I’ll log on tomorrow and see everything green with a touch or two of red.

Please remove JP’s from wvw, that is all.

Got to agree with Bluejay- it’s an Ok class in pve, where your pet is somewhat effective at tanking the mob/s.

In pvp, especially wvw, it just feels mhew. Does some damage, has no real burst damage, need to lose quite a bit of damage to get to a survivable toughness level and in a lot of situations your pet is worse than useless (ie dead and on a minute cooldown). Having said that, it is still the class I like playing most of all as it suits my playstyle and I’m not built for soloing.

Problem is there are several classes that do MORE damage than rangers with bows and that get better skills with them!!

Ranger has no real finisher, and if you are downed you’re probably dead. The pet heal thing takes so long to recharge you will be dead and buried long before it’s cooldown ends unless they just can’t be bothered to finish you off this month and want to watch you suffer for a minute or two.

It is a good class underwater, where the skills are actually quite decent (take a shark with you) and comparable to other classes.

At the moment it feels like half a class, not being able to be an effective BM nor an effective bow wielder but stuck somewhere in the midddle without the benefits of either.

Support skills are pretty much non-existent or gimped and many trait lines and skills don’t fit well together.

It’s still a fun class to play and when i want to go pew pew I’ll jump on it. But when I want to be useful in wvw I’ll jump on my mesmer and if i want to hunt thieves I’ll use my necro:-)

For aoe damage, especially in raids in wvw, forget your pet- by the time it reaches the people you want it to aoe it’s either crippled, bleeding or already dead.

The problem with spiders etc is their range seems to be very short, they fire so slow that it misses 90% of the time and it will chase after whoever you target, missing all the while.

Pets are great in wvw- when you are facing a very small group that stand in one spot! As soon as they move your pet will start missing, and unless you specc’d in BM your pet is so squishy it will die to any decent damage.

+1, guild backpack looks terrible and you can’t dye it!

Other games use this as a counter to stealth being an overpowered effect- when in stealth, they can only move slowly (or not at all-but that wouldn’t work here).

What we need is either this, so you can just run from anything stealthed (they have a faster run speed than you unstealthed, so reveal and catch or sit and watch them run away), or thiefs must reveal (using a reveal skill, cooldown five seconds) one second before being able to do any damage, giving people a chance to render them in as they attack.

Simple solution without nerfing them too much- I can think of many ways to still use a thief effectively, and this doesn’t nerf the huge burst damage they are capable of, just gives other classes a fighting chance of seeing them before you are spiked.

I find the fact that 5 or 6 can jump off the wall, all d/d eles, run around killing flame rams, catapults, etc and build huge stacks of boons, finally be downed, then hey presto up, run back through gate (if they were even downed in the first place) whilst laughing their heads off) rinse and repeat pretty annoying.

I also find it annoying that when they are downed half way into our zerg, more times than not they can get up, whizz back into their own back lines and either heal up whilst whizzing or be healed from downed well out of range.

Having said that, the only thing that needs changing is to make mist and vapour form slow you down to half speed and the problem would be solved:-)

Remove JP from wvw, make each one an instance accessed from Lions Arch that you can only enter once per day (so you can do 4 a day) and remove a pile of people from wvw that have no interest in wvw and can royally screw your server’s wvw week by preventing wvw’rs from defending their lands.

There was one point last week when EB was showing as full, yet we had 30 actually doing wvw, all the rest of the spots were taken up by two PVE guilds and their commanders doing the jump puzzles. Needless to say map chat was filled with ‘any mesmer in JP’ and none of them came to help even when overlook was attacked and taken (as they knew we had few actually wvw’rs at that point).

JP ruins wvw and has NO place in it- please remove it (and stop making more jump puzzles, this is not Jump Puzzle 2)

I think thief armor should make them look like a cartoon character, with bulging muscles like popeye and daggers that look 10 feet long, so they have no option but to perma stealth as being seen would be too embarassing. Oh wait, they can perma stealth already- who cares what they look like when no one can see them?

I’ve worked out what the big update is :

Added new jump puzzles to every map, now you can have twice as many people not helping in wvw as you currently have, and even less chances of entering and playing wvw at busy times as the pve’rs (with commander badges on) dominating numbers while you lose all your upgraded towers and keeps! oh and placing their siege on top of the reward box in the puzzle and spamming chat asking for mesmers to portal them in the jump puzzle.

Any more jump puzzles and this game should be ‘jump puzzle 2’.

It got very tiresome when they tried the culling ‘fix’ which actually made thiefs completely unseeable due to the culling issue. Being hit for 8k,6k,6k with 1800 toughness in one second on my ranger got me very frustrated.

Let’s say i do manage to dodge after the first hit, I’m 8k down already and he’s invisible..dodge after second hit I’m down to one decent hit to being downed..throw on a heal, still badge food. Running away isn’t an option. Fire off barrage? really? 1 in 100 chance to even hit him he could be 2000 distance away by now and laughing at the ‘aoe counter’ that Anet say we should use. Oh there he is…pew pew pew oh look he’s 75% health and disappeared again, meantime I’m back to 50% hp, heal on cooldown, he pops back up and finishes me in two hits.

Now they removed the culling fix i can just about see them when they dancing around and I have a good chance of annoying them enough to send them on their way (on ranger).

Don’t have a problem with one against my mesmer, guardian (ha u really attacked a guardian!) or warrior, necro usually survives, my staff ele fails completely against one (he ignores everything and just splatters me before I get much in the way of damage off), d/d ele just laughs and mists away, I don’t really play engineer any more so couldn’t say and ranger if I’m not asleep I’m getting there.

The bigger problem now as i see it is these solo’rs are now partying up- seen a couple groups of 3 or 4 thieves running with a necro, or necro and mes, try combatting that amount of stealth, healing, freezes, conditions etc with a party of similar size, it’s not remotely fun unless u are in a skilled guild group- if there are randoms fighting with you, forget it, you’re all going to die fairly quickly.

There needs to be a counter to stealth- there is for almost every other aspect of the game.

The problem is for newer players or casual players (who will generally go into wvw) being 3 shotted by something you can’t see with no counter gets tiring very fast, and they quit and go play something else that doesn’t have this broken mechanic (as they see it).