Guild Wars 2

SniffyCube.6107:

It’s strange to me that letting pubs have free siege when you outnumber us 3:1 is so threatening. Guess we must be terrifying to you guys at SF…

They’re called principles.

Just because we don’t need coordinated small group tactics in our current matchup doesn’t mean we aren’t still practicing them despite it being overkill.

I give the PvE-only players on my own server just as much grief on my way up as I give any other server’s jump puzzle players. Only difference is, I can do much more to you guys than just give people swiftness in all the inconvenient places to have it.

I mean sure, what you say about letting others have siege despite a numerical advantage is quite reasonable. Unfortunately, that’s only under the assumption that I even want this current matchup to be fair or even. I’d even go as far as to say sure, it’d make sense if I was trying to actually be a nice person.

However I don’t.

With no intervention from Anet in sight, I actually want this matchup to be as lopsided of a bootstomp as possible so all parties involved can have a fresh matchup. Letting you guys have free toys to play with only serves to shrink our lead and lengthen the time we have to deal with the stale matchup.

No.

On EB, the map is designed to give certain offensive/defensive advantages to the respective first, second, and third place teams. Randomization would skew defensive advantages in favor of the already-higher rated team.

Letting the highest rated team have their home EB keep as Overlook and the lowest rated team as Lowlands (whose water gate cannot be repaired except from the outside, by the way, nor used by defenders at all) would be a disaster.

A decently played shatter mesmer should actually be able to instagib dagger thieves that run dagger storm or thieves’ guild elites nine times out of ten.

Basilisk venom does change up those odds a bit and puts it solidly in the realm of reaction time for activating a stun breaker, but the basics are pretty simple.

Hang around near a white/yellow mob and wait for the backstab. Mirror images + decoy + instant mind wrack shatter for 4 procs will lump somewhere from 11-16k in damage onto most dagger build thieves, and the followup blurred frenzy should put out 5-9k in addition to the (comparatively) mild confusion damage from panic button skill activation. With all cooldowns ready, that instagib timer can be as low as 0.25 seconds. 15 was just because a couple skills were still on cooldown.

A shatter mesmer with the luxury of focusing all of his/her attention on a single target shouldn’t be very high on the target list for a thief to begin with; thieves are intended to pursue distracted targets of opportunity anyway.

Shademehr.1397:

Can’t emotes be turned off from the chat box? Seems like a good way to “rise above” getting into the /dance /laugh /whatever conversation altogether.

At the end of the day though, this is war. War is nasty. War is brutal. It should be. A guy the other day on ET had a pretty eloquent comment in map chat when he said, “If you’re red, you’re dead.” (referencing the “invader” tag coloring) I wish I could recall who said it. Kudos to you. It’s the brutal but correct view imo.

Red = dead is actually quite a common motif in the WvW forums. The PvE-only whiners are quite a vocal minority, and thankfully most people in game realize that if the game lets you kill it, it’s likely prudent to proceed to do so.

I’m okay with how the raw ratings numbers are calculated, but the matchups shouldn’t be determined by simple ordering.

Just take the existing ratings and determine the matches semi-randomly as long as the standard deviation between each server’s ratings doesn’t exceed some point of imbalance.

Yes this might result in a couple bootstomps, but the higher potential point difference of the ‘green’ server means more potential mobility should the red or blue server take first place.

VOLKON.1290:

As long as a human can boot an NPC from the siege I like the idea of “man when out-manned”. But… there’s the potential numbers game issue if you barely have enough people to not be out-manned. Plus if you bounce above and below, that could be confusing. You also could have an issue with servers deliberately leaving the zone long enough to get the siege manned by NPCs then returning.

Well, in programming terms, that’s called ‘flapping’ and you can effectively shut that out by requiring the outmanned buff to be active for 5 minutes, and only removing the effect after the outmanned buff has disappeared for another 5 minutes, and enforcing a further 5 minute cooldown before it can be reactivated.

10 minutes of intentionally leaving things nearly unguarded usually results in Bad Things. Even on underpopulated T8 servers, people pick up on certain locations being undefended fairly quickly. Being able to do something about it is a manpower issue, but we do know when things aren’t defended. If it were my call, I wouldn’t have everyone vanish from the map for 10 minutes just so NPCs can man the siege at a reduced firing rate.

Kimbald.2697:

Yet you get the highest ammount of badges in one go from Jumping Puzzles and killing Champion npc’s?

Well, the devil’s in the details, and I forgot to mention that I was a proponent of removing the badges from the jump puzzle and champion NPCs entirely so long as the method of earning badges is more clearly stated (even if it doesn’t change otherwise).

That’s a lot of rewarding people for not killing players in a PvP mode.

I’m all for sorting out the arcane hand-waving that determines who earns a badge and who doesn’t off of a kill, but letting PvE objectives dictate a badge that was meant to signify a PvP trophy cheapens its value.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d always been under the impression that the badges were a slightly more tasteful euphemism for ‘ears’ and spikes/barbs/needles were fingers that were ‘collected’ from kills as trophies.

Under that logic, if they actually told us that each kill would earn up to 2 badges total among all people who ‘tagged’ that kill and everyone else had a % chance at a spike, I’d be OK just knowing how it happens. Just randomly giving deterministic opportunities to earn badges off of PvE objectives stinks of putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound to the head.

You don’t find ears and fingers from walls. You find them from people.

Sounds like there’s a fairly elegant solution to this. Turn on NPC siege manning when the Outmanned buff is active.

Should help provide a fair balance from daytime negligence in leaving towers undefended and letting hopelessly underpopulated WvW worlds fall victim to a 5-man night capping crew.

Ralloff.7359:

I also saw a thief from SF wipe half of our stonemist attack yesterday single handedly.

If the thief in question was a charr wearing WWGD tags, he explicitly said he was going in for a ‘suicide spin’.

How do you guys not have the decency to grant him his wish

Flappybob.1950:

completely smash a numerically superior force of SF as you rolled in like the overconfident tools that you are.

Hint: There’s a lot of ways to tell mesmer clones apart.

Flappybob.1950:

Mend will continue to fight, and we will continue to do it alone as we already have been.

Pretty sure your guys didn’t get the message about fighting alone then. I saw plenty of their corpses alongside FC corpses around Klovan and Wildcreek during their late night assault.

Musty.3148:

Gotta love the SF guys that are sooooo great they can win when outmanning their opponents 4-1 everywhere.

Just checking, but you know what the outmanned buff means right?

Only reason why you never get to see it on us is because you’ve already gone to bed at 8PM in your own time zone in frustration. We get to see it fairly often, actually.

How’s that treaty working out for you guys?

-SF Keep? Never breached outer gate.
-Klovan? Easily retaken after we stabilized from the scramble to figure out where needed resources the most. Cute catapult line, by the way.
-Wildcreek? Taking it back after 45 minutes in a 2v1 coordinated push doesn’t feel too bad.
-Stonemist? Never seriously contested. Just a couple trebs from ET Overlook. No big deal.

At one point it felt like we were at the breaking point, but ironically quite a few PvEers came out from LA and saved the day. They took care of some repairs while the rest of us WvW veterans put out all the fires you guys started. And after we stabilized, we still managed to come in and save a few towers in breach situations from the few you had left. Must sure feel demoralizing losing a 2v1 when you’re the 2.

Stay classy, KWBH, Mend, TAC, TFoR, TSA, Yarr, and KRAK (I know there’s more of you, but those tags stuck out in my head). I know a couple specific members in your bunch are particularly vocal whiners about the T8 balance. Hitting us simultaneously is only going to serve to keep us here longer. Hope you’re happy with that happening, because I sure enjoyed that four hour marathon of running around defending almost every point on the map.

Props to WZ for having the backbone to fight for their server and their server alone.

Hope both of you groups had fun losing to one server, and thanks to all the SF who stayed on extra late to hold off the attacks on all fronts that started exactly at midnight Pacific time. Oh and thanks for letting me average 14 badges/hour tonight.

Brutus Barbarossa.1452:

Second of all, this pact is favorable to those who would like to work on their god forsaken World Completion in WvW BL maps…

Implying you’re going to own your own BLs at all once your weekend warriors go back to middle school bedtimes during the rest of the week.

I see your nefarious plan, ET.

Specifically you guys, PK.

Get us all drunk so we can’t fight

Seriously though. TY for throwing us this housewarming party at Overlook

I’d rather make it even harder to get map completion in WvW and make it flat out impossible to get badges through PvE means like the jump puzzle.

Darek.1836:

Extremely, extremely annoyed at how once everyone goes to bed SF just caps literally everything, then gains the points for the remainder of the night even though NO ONE plays. kittening stupid, should be changed, honestly.

I could actually say the same thing since I live in Pacific time. How dare you guys cap things during the morning and afternoon while I’m still at work. NO ONE from my time zone is playing during that time, etc etc etc.

Time zones suck for 24/7 matchups. We all have to live with it.

The population indicator on server selection is a total population indicator. It isn’t very well correlated with WvW population at all.

By ‘tier’ I also mean ranking, not population level:
http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

Lower tier servers typically have shorter queue times on reset night.

Depends on your server tier. If you’re on a fairly high tier, hope you’re okay with several hours’ worth of wait time.

That isn’t news. Quite a few offenders on [DH] have been actively speedhacking, exploiting, and otherwise glitching into structures for at least a week. Nothing you can really do other than screenshot and email Anet the details.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

I disagree.
As a thief, my map looks a little different.

You forgot a ‘whiny PvE noobs’ label on every vista. If not every vista, at least the one at the northern supply camp.

It might be fun for the guys on my server who favor zergballs, but for a small group player, having everyone focused on the last 2-3 hotspots suck.

Enemy and ally density is way too high when everyone is funneled into those remaining hotspots. Too many enemies draws the zerg, and too many allies marginalizes your ability to tag and earn badges. These past two weeks, I’ve mostly stuck to hitting borderland supply camps for commanders while a 10-20 man main zerg hits bigger objectives.

It’ll likely stay just as stale until we move tiers.

It’s okay. It looks like we’re gonna be swapping places with HoD.

Hopefully we’ll stay competitive in that tier and that we won’t have grown complacent from weeks of numerical advantage.

I know that we’d been stashing siege away in preparation for having to face Kaineng, but giving us another 2-3 weeks to prepare for going up a tier doesn’t hurt.

Truth. The longer you stay on the ground dead without respawning the more we perceive you as being mad. Spend more than 3-5 seconds dead while solo and the more likely jumping, laughing, dancing, and tonics come into the equation.

Red = dead. No exceptions.

If I’m defending any of the objectives and see 2-3 enemies near me, those going for PvE objectives like vistas and skill points get murdered first. The math is simple. They’re trying to avoid combat and probably aren’t geared properly for WvW. The faster I kill them the better my odds are at surviving a 1vX.

Solo PvEers who /bow and jump up and down as a sign of nonaggression are even more fun to kill.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Mesmers rock in underwater combat.

So true. Once I finally stopped thinking in the ‘stay ranged, I’m a light armor class’ box and started using the spear more instead of the trident, life underwater got much, much better.

If you’re looking to wear out your F key from picking up loot bags, then you should probably stray from the zerg. With the way “group tagging” works, I’m usually getting an 80% drop rate on some sort of (usually garbage) loot out of a 4-man group and a glass cannon mesmer build. I suspect in that scenario, any non-bunker ele build will fall victim pretty quickly to thieves. I personally haven’t played a necro, but the two people in my team who routinely field their necro in WvW see some decent results with both direct damage and condition builds. Having two health bars AND the highest base HP bracket really helps them out.

Spurnshadow.3678:

The only reason we dropped to T2 was because we wanted to in anticipation of the reset. We were actually slated to be second last week before we started to tank it.

PSA: Match fixing doesn’t typically work out the way you intend it to in the long run. Not only is it unsportsmanlike, you’re also still at the mercy of your opposition.

As this week winds down to a close, I’d like to give a shout out to both our neighbors in FC and ET. The first two weeks of our matchup were the most fun I’ve had on WvW in quite a long time. I can’t speak for the other servers, but for the first time in a long time while things were still balanced, we had primetime queues on non-reset evenings. Free transfers may have turned the last two weeks into a curbstomp, but the blame for that rests squarely with ANet; had there never been free transfers, I do honestly believe none of use would have been in this tier.

Good luck to everyone in whatever your upcoming matchup may be.

People keep talking about spawn camping as if there’s only one spawn exit. People are gonna go where there are kills to be had if the map is completely dominated. If all the enemies are congregating at only one of the spawn exits, of course people are gonna be there. Go take a camp or two and they’ll all scatter.

Aquilus.9423:

Y’all need to sweep for Mesmers better XD

Echoing this sentiment. I’ve only had success hiding in keeps in this current matchup. I’ve stayed hidden in ET Overlook and FC Lowlands fo upwards of 30-45 minutes during last week’s match casually waiting for the zerg to finish capping everything on its way to me and twice in towers during the week before that :X

Gisei.5749:

When we attack, all we do is zerg. Commanders try to use strategy, but most don’t go along with it.

For what it’s worth, for the past two weeks or so I’ve been coordinating with commanders to hit camps with my small group while the main zerg tackles larger objectives. I’d love to take and hold camps, but with only one organized small group actively communicating with commanders we’re stuck with doing laps and keeping track of flip times so we arrive just as RI expires. 50% uptime on camps while hitting a keep or tower is still better than letting them have 100% uptime.

Regarding all the PvDoor comments, as much as I resent seeing that directed at us, it really is true. Until we can shape all the brute force we have into an actual coordinated attack, we won’t get very far from T8. Very few of the players in our main force are doing anything but hitting the door and/or targets of opportunity. I’ve made it a point for my group to drop back a bit further to try to hold something of a perimeter and hold nearby supply camps, but when everyone else sits there autoattacking the door, the reaction time to an incoming zerg is laughably bad. I know every side is just as guilty of it as well; I’ve broken zergs of 20+ all autoattacking a door with just a group of 4 simply because nobody was really paying attention, but that’s all part of the process of learning how to play smarter against higher ranked servers.

—

Re: the 2v2 in the JP: it just so happened we were in the “right” place at the right time, lol. I had just jumped down after getting a port up to the top when the mesmer at the top reported a couple incoming blues from the dome area so I stuck around instead of joining the keep assault. As an aside, I really do hate being downed vs a downed ranger. That pet heal almost 100% wins them the exchange unless I play it absolutely perfectly while they get a much bigger margin of error. It was at least an entertaining 2v2 duel though.

Re: the video of the “spawn camp”: I was actually puzzled last night what the point to the whole thing was till I saw that video since a spawn camp doesn’t quite make sense with uncontested waypoints in play. That call on voice chat of “we’re on EB doing very stupid things” was hilarious though. Hopefully it was as fun for you guys as it was for me and that charr thief in my group — we were the first responders to seeing the orange crossed swords on our keep and I can definitely hear when we dove into your zerg.

Pretty sure that two-hour long siege was what the concept guys over at ANet had in mind for WvW. Bravo to ET for getting that much siege down despite running out of supply. That stalemate held out for a lot longer than any of us expected.

They just did that to us on our BLs as well. It wasn’t DH there but TAC though. Both guilds doing that were present in Banjo’s post earlier. but it looks like they split up and each took a keep with that.

You mean literally just four of us holding the bridge leading from the Redwater supply camp to the keep we had a zerg currently assaulting?

That’s called blocking reinforcements, not spawn camping. Literally a third of the map distance away isn’t spawn anymore.

My team typically gets tasked with holding/taking objectives that don’t take a whole zerg to do, like holding 15 of you off with only 4.

That’s the thing though.

There shouldn’t be an alternate source of badges for people who don’t play PvP. Simple as that. You should be completely denied access to badges if you don’t play WvW.

Every enemy camping the jump puzzle is an enemy not fighting in the battlefield. I’m okay with this because the only people who whine about this are the “PvE Noobs” for whom I have no respect for.

Your point about a level 1 alt is irrelevant as well. Thats part of the whole problem. Don’t bring underleveled characters who can’t take the heat into the puzzle.

Stop acting like you deserve to get a legendary without actually playing WvW the way it was intended.

Don’t get me wrong, I hope your guys do your best to kill our guys in the puzzle as well. In fact, blues, reds, and greens alike all lose my respect if they don’t attack enemies on sight. Absolutely nobody on any side deserves free siege and badges, and I constantly berate the PvE only whiners who complain about jump puzzle camping who fill team/map chat with irrelevant crying.

I would much rather have the match we had two weeks ago before the whole fuss about free transfers started a transfer frenzy. That was actually a fun, balanced matchup that all three sides had a chance at winning. Funny enough, we deserve to be in the bottom tier. That’s why it took falling to T8 to finally have a balanced matchup for exactly one week before free transfers ruined it for everyone again. At this point, I just want the server ratings to settle out where everyone belongs be it high or low so we can start having balanced matches again without guilds bandwagoning to winning servers left and right.

Regarding the “free ride” comment directed at my server, you’re absolutely right. I despise the fact that all the PvE-only players on my server now feel like they deserve to go through the jump puzzle uncontested and manned at most hours with portal chains that take you directly to the chest. I hate that the last minute rush of transfers turned what was a balanced matchup in the first week we had it into the curbstomp I didn’t want to see. I’d love to frequently run into enemies to kill in the puzzle (especially ones who are actually interested in killing me) and the greens, blues, and reds who spend north of 15 minutes dead in the jump puzzle whining about campers deserved the grief they got. In fact I actually lose respect for blues and reds who don’t immediately try to murder me on sight in the puzzle.

TL;DR: I expect and actually want everyone on every side to do their absolute best to kill any and every enemy they come across in the puzzle. In fact, I hope the PvE-only players from my server get some extra grief from everybody for trying to get badges while we have an unfair numerical advantage.

stereoblind.4736:

Is that where you guys were when we just took SM? Glad you got the jumping puzzle secure, honey. Missed you </3

You might wanna check on the Fergs cause I think they borrowed some of your stuff while you were giggling in the dark room by yourself.. oops

Wouldn’t know :X

I’m still at work, itching to play when I finally get home. That result isn’t too far off of what I expected, though. Our US East primetime isn’t nearly as strong as our US West primetime.

Not really. People who refuse to attack people in the puzzle or actually sit there and camp for hours are the actual odd bunch in my opinion.

Going out of your way to let your enemy acquire weapons to use against you? Without a fight? Sounds illogical to me.

Going out of your way to sit in one spot for hours on end just to kill passers-by? Stinks of camping in odd places and I’ve hated it way back from when I just started playing FPS games. It was dumb when I started playing those, and it’s still dumb now.

Killing everything not-friendly if you happen to run into them seems like the only logical course of action.

Iskandor.9415:

And brownie points for bowing (instead of short/longbowing) in Jumping Puzzles!

Good thing you didn’t mention 1H swords or foci! No green nameplate = kill it, and pop tonics and/or /dance on every corpse for me. Everyone is a ‘waaaaaaaahhh I don’t PvP’ PvE-only scrub just trying to get badges unless proven innocent, and as such don’t deserve a free ride up top, ever. Extra funny points if they just spent 2 hours trying to do the cage room.

insanemaniac.2456:

at least 90% of SF players attack in puzzles
at least 75% of ET players dont

…in my experience

its a different culture for SF, and one of the things i miss most about Kain/DR.
and SF has the balls to proclaim their superiority when the free golem rushes they try end up being promptly stopped at the first gate with oil or mortars. well whatever.

I’ve always had a policy of red = dead, even in weeks we were getting stomped on our way down to T8. Letting enemy teams have free siege that they should be earning through kills or coin is bad taste and anyone who thinks otherwise just wants to lose. I don’t even care if someone doesn’t want the siege and just wants badges for their legendary. That only gives me more incentive to kill them. Zero respect for PvE only players in a PvP zone.

Unfortunately this means I attack into 1v8’s all the time and have a love-hate relationship with the dark room. Mad King book OP.

Labarge.1439:

The 6-8 Arrow Carts we had pelting them sure didn’t hurt either. Sooooooo many loot bags.

Some of us actually look for defenses before putting down siege. That single catapult put down in the only corner without arrow carts was me and finally brought the inner wall down.

Slamz.5376:

WvW needs content too!

CS 1.6 hasn’t had new content for years.

Still alive and kicking. Something designed for infinite replayability doesn’t need a constant infusion of new content. That simply serves to upset the state of balance at regular intervals.

Any of the 4-player SC2 maps that have seen significant tournament play can be adapted to WvW. Just use 2nd/3rd/other base locations as guidelines for supply camp/tower locations and spawn positions as keep positions. Maps with rotational symmetry easily allow for random spawns every reset, also shutting up the PvEers whine endlessly about being the same color just so they can get their map completion.

The unused 4th player spawn and its associated towers/supply camps can either be removed for that cycle or left as secondary objectives aside from control of the center.

EnRohbi.2187:

Shatter builds especially work very well for roaming, and are wicked DPS in a group situation too

+1 to this. I have tons of fun playing a shatter build in small roaming groups. It’s actually harder to zerg surf with a shatter build since your options are limited to picking at the edges of a group and taking out stragglers (thieves do this better) or jumping headfirst into the middle of a group, unloading shatters, then immediately taking whatever option you left open as an “exit strategy.”

I specifically like using the lightning hammer to synergize with the mesmer sword kit.

If I see a lightning hammer around, cooldown permitting, I add Lightning Leap → Static Field to my chain before Illusionary Leap → Swap.

It lets the clone apply a dazing strike when it hits and then get a second proc of dazing strike combo when I activate swap. Including that into my opening chain lets me hold on to my F3 shatter for a little longer and gives me an additional escape option should bad things decide to jump me.

From what I saw from screenshots of my friend’s level 20, if you have 3-stat gear, stats are just scaled up to same-quality gear at level 80. If you have 2-stat gear, it seems to be same scaling, plus a small amount of ‘celestial’ prefix (aka all stats, see rune of divnity for clarification), and if you have 1-stat gear, you get more of ‘all stats’. I believe it now also scales the stat gain from your traits up.

While in reality a green arrow enemy will hit you a little harder and probably live through a bit more, an 80 in full exotic+ascended (where applicable) gear should still splatter an upscaled. My friend’s Blurred Frenzy (mesmer sword 2) does about 2400-3600 to one of the trash mobs outside of the garrison, while mine does upwards of 6000 to the same target after it respawned.

You aren’t going to have the hitting power or staying power of having full exotics, but it should be slightly more comfortable to level an alt in WvW now, especially with XP rewards scaling perfectly with your actual level.

Baladir.2736:

There is very little capability to ambush in this game, …

It’s amazing what that 50% fall damage reduction trait does for small groups when it comes to zergbusting. Downward facing widescreen viewing angle for most people combined with a free combo field/finisher paid for with only a thousand health or so (don’t lie — if a thief was going to instagib you, being short 1300 health wouldn’t have helped you) lets you literally get the drop on an enemy group quite frequently.

Mesmer/Warrior/Thief/Ranger all dropping off the same cliff in that order nets some amazing fight initiate results. Chaos armor for everyone (who’s now stealth, by the way), slow field combined with chaos storm can already get the ball rolling to disorganize a zerg that has their noses stuck in the map or mashing their swiftness skill over and over.

SniffyCube.6107:

Rotate maps – three different maps for first second and third place in a match up, the third place being more easily strategically defensible than the first place map because if a server is in third place they are most likely already fighting the odds

Technically, EB at least was intended* for Green (first place) to have defensive disadvantages having to fight uphill to SM with attacker-advantage ridges, front facing water gate relatively unguarded by NPCs compared to the other keeps, Rogue’s quarry having the least defensible outer chokepoint compared to Danelon/Pangloss, no outer ring tower bridge/gully terrain (Anzalias/Durios defensive advantage) an obstructed neutral camp approach to an outer ring tower, and a couple other intended* defensive disadvantages.

Blue team has a neutral camp within siege coverage of a tower (easily defensible), a mild downhill approach to SM with defender-advantage outer walls (easier treb placement), a narrow outer ring supply camp chokepoint (but open ground inside to partially mitigate defensive advantages).

Red team has the highest elevation keep on EB with defender-advantage wall placement, the easiest to defend inner supply camp, a tower/camp/keep layout that places the inner ring closer to spawn and other reinforce paths, clear approaches from all neutral camps to spot for surprise attacks to outer ring towers.

All these map features are intended* to put green at a slight defensive disadvantage for outer ring objectives, neutral inner ring, and slightly more vulnerable keep. Blue is supposed* to get a neutrally defensible keep, a slight defensive advantage for outer ring towers, neutral defense camps, and neutral inner ring towers. Red is intended to have a slight defensive advantage at outer ring towers, clear defensive advantages at their chokepoint supply camp, and the most difficult to assault keep (that curved ramp is murder even for golems, and the water gate does not bypass that defensive feature).

For each side to win, it pretty much plays out like this:
Red: defensive stance can maintain the status quo + ranged siege pressure for center control
Blue: balanced stance can maintain their outer ring objectives + attacks of opportunity since siege placement for SM is fairly limited
Green: almost required to constantly be on the offensive to keep pressure off of outer ring towers due to the lack of chokepoint control at inbound routes + lower elevation on SM approach means siege placement has to be closer to hit.

The reason why that was littered with asterisks is because some of these things don’t play out the way ANet (presumably) intended.

In my experience,

• Very few people take the side spawn exits to bypass a spawn camp — green’s side exits lead to pretty much open field, blue’s exits have valleys/water to help sneak out, red’s take you pretty much right up to towers.
• 5 people can hold Pangloss against a far larger force especially with ogres and vets because of the tunnels and small inner chamber, but more often than not, it’s completely undefended. Superior ballistas and one or two arrow carts are great force multipliers.
• One of each side’s outer ring towers only has one destructible wall that faces away from SM. Very few people combine that defensive strength with the bridge chokepoint to force attackers to take the long way around what could be a killzone around the red team Anza vista or the gully/river/hill features around the attack path to Durios.

It might just be because I’ve been on Sorrow’s Furnace since early access and haven’t ever been on a T1 server, but I feel a lot of the map complaints would be addressed if people know how to use terrain to their advantage and realize that the three colors are suited to different sets of tactics. Doing the same thing week after week despite your current team color shouldn’t work.

TL;DR: Map is designed to give 1st/2nd/3rd place respectively increasing defensive advantages on EB. Use them properly and you can outsmart a numeric advantage in many cases.

Sounds like ANet accidentally reverted map labeling when they re-enabled the settings for the “test” culling. Database revert gone bad I’m guessing. Meaning probably a WvW server restart right in the middle of peak hours with no warning :P

Richard Nixon.6573:

Jayne.9251:

Just wanted to point out something odd I’m seeing on mine .. conflicting info about file size …

The file itself says KB .. but if I right click properties, it says MB. (Both are too big and likely I’ll start getting the sound bug soon, but wanted to post this).

~1000 kb = 1 mb.

So 54,000 kb is about 54 mb, which is exactly what your screen shows. Nothing odd there

To be exact, 1kB = 1024 bytes, 1MB = 1024kB.

Computers use powers of two instead of powers of ten. Metric system says kilo is 1000 (10^3). Binary system says kilo is 1024 (2^10). That’s why your 250GB disk is actually 232GB to your system*

*Unless you run OS X 10.4 or newer, which stupidly enough displays disk capacities in base 10.

If your small group is having difficulties, then spend some time patroling off the beaten path. Roads are far too open and clear. Communicate with active commanders and pay attention to the map/team chat to figure out where the zerg (both enemy and yours) is. You’ll want to be anywhere but where either zerg is.

Finding the enemy teams’ active waypoints and finding tactically usable terrain in a straight line between the waypoint and their zerg denies reinforcement very easily and swings the fight in your team’s favor quite often. With the terrain advantage in open field combat, you can typically hold off 1:4 odds, and if a 5-man group is keeping 20 enemies busy, you’ve already done your job. Whatever it is you’re doing, if you get zerged, you’ve already won.

Sure the armor repair costs are higher, but your badge earn rate should be significantly higher as well as your XP. Badges are worth about 1 silver apiece because of siege prices, and each skill point is worth about 57 silver based on a couple profitable trade post strategies.

Before I had my build figured out, I stuck to zerg surfing and netted maybe 8-10 badges/hour and 2-3 levels/night. After I polished up my build, my guild (3 active people) and a couple friends started roaming to apply backfield pressure on whichever side was trying to push our side of the EB map. Others might not get similar results right off the bat, but I’m earning about 15-20 badges/hour and 8-9 skill points/night. That’s easily in excess of 5g earned/night even without taking (garbage) loot into consideration.