Guild Wars 2

@ogre
Well, maybe I played a little bit devils advocat here
Don’t get me wrong, I love GvGs, I love the fighting spirit and whole dynamic surrounding that setup. I love watching guilds fighting in an organized fashion and I really like doing it myself. But when I speak of a competetive game mode, I mean things like a controlled environment, regional ladder, big tournaments and worldwide championships. A year ago GW2 was released, and nothing really changed during that year. The last few months we (as a very young GvG community) made little tiny steps into the right direction, several people and guilds certainly had a massive influence on this development. We made these steps ourselves, without any help from ArenaNet. And we have to keep doing so. Thinking from step to step and not get to far ahead with our very own progress.

Indeed, our guild approach is not casual at. We try to win every fight we’re invloved in, and it doesn’t matter if its an official GvG, sparring fight or just an open field skirmish during “normal” WvW play. We’re constantly looking and talking about mistakes we’ve made and changes we need to do in order to improve ourselves.

Oh man, whenever GW1 is brought to the table I’m always wondering what the person is trying to achieve. GW1 is a totally different game, and in terms of gameplay mechanics it makes no sense to compare GvG fights from both games to each other.
GvG in GW2 evolved over the last 6 months naturally and the scene is where it is, but will never be in the same spot where GW1 GvG was. And it makes no sense to push it in that direction. Leave GW1 where it is, and move on.

The other thing is, that GvG has no strict rules (right now). Numbers, how many rounds, winning conditions and so on are all player made and based on agreement between the two guilds fighting. That’s hardly a competetive “game mode”, i would say it’s more like RP for people who like to fight other people in bigger fights.
So, will GvG ever be a truly competetive game mode within GW2? I highly doubt it, because of the underlying gameplay focus the game has. The game itself is aimed at casuals, lots of RNG and hidden stuff which is not clearly documented to get a competetive scene going.

We have a handful of top guilds left in the game, who are still trying to develop a active scene and shifting GvG in a sensible direction, that’s great. Hopefully it will get more players into GvG or even into the game to help the scene growing. Focussing on ladder points over at gw2gvg.com is (in my opinion) a mistake and just like focussing on ranking points for the server, and watching mos.millenium.org to see which rank the server has right now.

My point is: Let GvG develop. Think back to february what we had then, and now look where we are six months later. I would say, thats a pretty great evolution we’ve seen. Maybe we’ll see a few adjustments from ArenaNet to help develop this particular scene, maybe not. All we can do is what we’re already doing. Have as many organized fights as possible, thats the only thing pushing the scene forward..

Good question, hehe. From what I remember, we focussed two downed there (one of them got up or so) and called a full regroup to heal up. Scnd pulled out and was far away, the veil they used afterwards totally caught us off guard I think and was a major breaking point. So yeah, it wasn’t the best call, and every little mistake was punished. That’s how it goes, you make mistakes and lose the momentum/advantage.

You can watch all 4 fights from our (my) point of view here: http://de.twitch.tv/yiillusion/c/2657175
The video seems a bit buggy, so pause at the beginning and let a few minutes preload. Don’t know, some twitch issue…

Junkpile.7439:

Double teaming is so clear that it’s kind of hard to troll about it. Your EB players and commanders should read Wemils book EB blobbing for dummies.

Look what I’ve found. The world’s smallest violin

http://de.twitch.tv/yiillusion/c/2568936

15min of madness. Intense fights, loved it <3

If it makes you feel better.

We never run below 60. Always with commander tag, to get as many pugs as possible.
And we have 80 melees of course, all spamming auto attack. Sometimes we have so many people, that we fill two maps at the same time.
:)

Raniri.6178:

yiishing.9057:

colesy.8490:

I had great fun last night with Raniri’s zerg, every time we came across anyone from the other servers it was just “hey lets get some loot bags” and we just wiped you all every time

http://de.twitch.tv/yiillusion/c/2536376

And we you don’t wipe 22 men, you run away and switch maps. Because you are looking for fights, not PvD empty keeps. Right? Right guys? Aww common

hahaha 2:35 am – Never more than 8-10 ECL- Guys against 25 + GD TARDS – u are so bad mate And on my picture are a lot of GD not visible .
And u are a mathematics genius and a liar not more
kkthxbye bro

Go blob on EB. Please do us a favor and stop talking about guild and guild raids. ECL can’t provide a guild raid anymore. Thats why you lead PUGs everyday.
Let the big boys play the game and have fun with your skill lags, playing the zerg game like Vizunah for points and PvD empty keeps. Your double standards make you look like a fool, it’s just pathetic.

colesy.8490:

I had great fun last night with Raniri’s zerg, every time we came across anyone from the other servers it was just “hey lets get some loot bags” and we just wiped you all every time

http://de.twitch.tv/yiillusion/c/2536376

And we you don’t wipe 22 men, you run away and switch maps. Because you are looking for fights, not PvD empty keeps. Right? Right guys? Aww common

whatever you say, captain capslock

Probably an AC in front of the door. L2P, this has been around for ages…

Special thanks to CoN and BOOM too. Every fight we had was very enjoyable and exactly what we are looking for in GW2. We learned new strats and tricks as well, were able to implement and improve new tactics and most important of all, we had fun all the time, no matter if we wiped or won the fight. Keep on and hopefully we’ll meet again soon, to push each other even further. In these times where several good guilds stop playing or moving on to other games, we have to relish every moment and fight we can provide each other.

Also kudos to small guild groups like aZm, Fry and many more, who despite beeing constantly outmanned went for the fight every single time and didn’t blob up. We don’t see that very often, thanks and all the best for future matchups.

Thanks to BOOM, aZm, CoN, DK and many more for a great evening on JS BL. Awesome fights around the clock, great fun. Hats off to everyone involved

kBoom.3748:

Thanks for the good fights. Its realy nice to fight strong and good opponents like you.

We feel the same. Awesome fights against you guys, I feel like both guilds pushing each other quite a lot. We learned a couple of new tactics and I’m looking forward to our organized fights with even numbers. Most of the time we have a slight edge in terms of numbers, but you certainly know how to fight, have great movement and a lot of CC aswell. It’s a pleasure to fight CoN, and thats why we were roaming a lot in your part of the map.

That fight in the small cave was freaking awesome, even Jade Sea fancied to join in

General Ragefist.3952:

Best thing is about that picture is that outmanned buff on the deffenders and the fact that allready 3 Waves of elona got shattert by only 25-30 guys :O
[GD] Elona Reach – watch out for low flying flames.

Our zerg was killed by 10+ superior arrow carts, not 25-30 people. Massive difference, you’ve yet to understand. Fighting a zerg with 25 people actually requires teamplay, coordination and skill. Nothing of that was shown by Riverside in these fights. Fighting a zerg with more than 10 ac requires no skill and tactic whatsoever. Even NPCs or dolyaks could do that. But go on brag about it. It only shows that you want to do something like this. You want to wipe zergs with 25 men. You feel strong when you do it. But you can’t, because you refuse to learn and understand actual game mechanics and the only way you’ll ever accomplish this is by building more than 10 acs.

I honestly thought, TUP and other guilds/servers exaggerated when they told stories about Riverside. Fighting my old server for two evenings now, I start to understand all these forum posts by them. Sad to see how Riverside devolved from server with a “never give up” spirit to a server hiding behind walls and ac’s, running away from fights, swithcing maps after two wipes and focussing on “playing for points”…

Dranul.2094:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOVC8Hkm5lM

Love your videos <3 Hopefully we’ll meet again someday, and have som rp funzies and organized fights with even numbers. Until then, best of luck to TUP

Thanks to Baruch Bay and Desolation for a great week full of fun and good fights.
Guilds like BuLL, sIN, GoD, DsD, Scnd, Unit, CS made the matchup one of the best for us. Even though the raid times of spanish guilds are quite different, we had a lot fun everytime we met on the field. Sometimes we outnumbered you by 5-10 players, but you still destroyed us if we didn’t played well.
Kudos to Desolation, you guys are awesome. Still fighting everyday, hopefully you will be matched against servers with similar population soon. Anyway, we had some of the best three-way fights I’ve ever seen, and it felt like “that’s how WvW should be” to me.

Special thanks to BuLL for the awesome GvG yesterday evening. Every fight was so kitten close and intense, massive respect to you guys, it was a pleasure to be part of it.

Best of luck to everyone for the next week, here is me hoping no one of us will get matched against Vizunah. After weeks and months of playing against Kodash, Jade Sea and Vizunah, Baruch Bay provided the best week we had in months. Never had this much fun. Keep it up.

PS: Quick shoutout to the leaders of RNV and CS. Hope you don’t mind the moa treatment you received one evening while attacking our garrison. It was just for the lulz

oaagamer.6594:

With all do respect only thing what i see here is Blobbing?
Better fights are guilds vs guilds fights to be honest.

Screenshots will never show the full dynamic of this fight. We fought as a guild group with exactly 25 people, and my guess would be that Baruch had around 35-40 people, but two different groups. [CS] were around 10-15, the rest was a random group with some DsD in it. Desolation had around 30-35 people too, but not all of them coordinated in one teamspeak I think.

That fight went on for about 15-20 minutes, and there was a lot of movement and flanking, splitting, trying to get a better position, engaging and disengaging.
Only a video would show the awesomeness.

Great fun for everyone, and best of all: no skill lags involved.

Looking forward to a week full of interesting GvGs and meeting sIN, BuLL, Scnd and DsD. Hopefully we can provide good and even fights.

Points don’t matter anymore, with the new matchmaking its all about fights and discovering new tactics, improving yourself. Sadly some of us still dig this morning cap nonsense and gladly PvD all night long when there is no resistance, but cry about the very same things when we are matched against Vizunah.

It’s a proper 1v1v1. Nobody is teaming up with anyone. Guilds or raids are always trying to take advantage of certain opportunities which will evolve in a short term 2v1, but it’s nothing to cry about.

Thanks and respect to MN for the GvG tonight. Looked like you had main lead on the map, hopefully that didn’t caused any troubles. We’re looking forward to more fights and are glad that all the rumors about french guilds hiding in keeps and towers are not true at all. Lots of open field action the past days/weeks, keep it up.

What happened to ECL vs KoA? Couldn’t find something, is there some footage?

Norreka.8407:

its easy to counter a “whole server packed to one commander”:

attack 2 points on the map

Actually, its not.
Because of the small maps, the giant 80 man blob can walk across the map within one or two minutes. It would be nice if attacking 2 objectives simultaneously would force the blob to split up, but it’s not necessary at all to successfully defend your objectives. And that’s why we need bigger maps…

Elona can learn alot from Vizunahs fake attacks. Extremly well organized and timed, probably some of the best distractions you will see in WvW. To lure the main force away and capture a different objective quickly and efficently is very hard on these small maps, especially on EB. Even though we had two different raids with constant communication between both, they still managed to distract us a couple of times. Well done. After a while we were really paranoid when we saw Vizunah attacking something. “Is this a distraction? Where is the main attack?” Good fun

@Ins
Thanks for the nice words, but we know we still have a lot to learn to compete with the best guilds out there. Pug raids have a natural disadvantage, because you never know what build your mates are playing or what gear they use, that difference is noticable all the time (on every server). But an organized Desolation pug raid is quite the pain, you have many skilled players and cope well with different situations.

I believe many players from Desolation are sick of the past weeks and beeing constantly outmanned. Hopefully you can recover your strenghts and get people back/together again, maybe a drop to T2 wouldn’t be the worst thing for Desolation…

Anyway, looking forward to more interesting fights this week.

Dranul.2094:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i357dprYug

Action from Sunday versus the germans. Enjoy.

Sad to see that Riverside has not developed since I’ve left 2 months ago.
Big <3 to TUP, awesome video. I can feel for you, always in the middle of two zergs.

Kudos to MN and Meta on EB. Great evening, lots of intense fights and some nice tactics.

You know, not so long ago catapults were fixed that they couldn’t shoot against their own doors and deal damage to the rams.
With the latest buff two superior AC need around 15sec to destroy a superior ram behind a gate. That’s the point where many people get angry, rightly so.

I’m not necessarily against higher damage against a zerg (although I think they should buff the damage from trebs/catas against people, superior ACs were fine), but it’s flat out insane how fast rams/golems are destroyed by ACs.

Not my pics, sadly. It was a fun event on easter sunday. I think two mesmer were the only guys without a golem. Captured 2 fully upgrades keeps, wiped completly while fighting for the third. Good times

challenge accepted.
around 60 golems from elonas reach – easter sunday

How about an area loot option? Press F – collect all loot inside 600-900 range or something like that. Would make things a little bit easier.

Cactus.2710:

You do know that GW2 runs on totally different servers for EU and NA, right?? The two server groups don’t talk to each other at all … ANet has said they are totally independent.

So, they are totally independent, but yet it is still impossible to reset them at different times? Seems legit.

EU T2. Jade Sea (owned Hills) vs Kodash vs ~35 of us Elonians. And yes, we went into the lordroom, got the lord down and managed to get like two ticks, battled against Jade Sea for like 10min inside. Awesome fight.

You need to be aware of the different approach monolanguage servers tend to have.
There are literally no language barriers, allowing people to unite under one commander. It’s easier to play together when you know the dude on the other end will understand everything you say. There is much more focus on a strong community on these servers, atleast in WvW. [DE]/[FR] servers gather up hundreds of people in one teamspeak, coordinating with each other. These people are not in special guilds, often have some friends who they PvE casually with and/or looking for a place inside the community.

Of course this is not an excuse for megablobs, but it’s an explanation why servers like Vizunah Square, Elonas Reach or Riverside are more likely to “zerg”. From what I’ve experienced, there are more small/big guilds on EU servers, which tend to do their own thing, but the community aspect across the server is not as big.

All that flame, hate and trash talk about ratings and tiers. Looking bad, some people must be really proud now.

The majority on Elonas Reach has massive lags and dc’s today. It’s not playable most of the time, skills won’t activate, rubberbanding and sometimes you freeze for 3-10 seconds.

Does Deso/Vizunah have similar problems?

Edit: Looks like a provider issue with the Telekom here in Germany.

It will not stop nightcapping, as I said. But it will reduce the impact a small player group has at night during weekdays compared to weekends. There is an imbalance in player value. 15 people playing tuesday night have so much more influence on the scoreboard than the same 15 people playing on saturday night.

Caid.4932:

yiishing.9057:

edit@ Parthis
I’m not saying we don’t have any players, but we don’t have enough players to stop Gandara from ticking 500 or more points during the night. That is the problem we are facing.

We’re not ticking 500 points during the night, AM are probably the strongest of the 3 during the night actually.
The middle of the night is pretty even actually. You guys usually take your bl back by 3am or so and the only things that swap on any bl from that point on are camps or maybe a breakout tower.
The only difference points wise at nightime comes from SM.

dude, to bad i take screenshots. nearly 2 am on tuesday morning, when i logged off. what were you saying again?

piso.7238:

Friday night -> Riverside’s domination
Saturday day -> Riverside’s domination
Saturday night -> Riverside’s domination
Sunday day -> Riverside’s domination
Sunday night -> All three servers were pretty much even
Monday day -> Riverside and Gandara’s domination
Monday night -> All three servers were pretty much even
Tuesday day -> Gandara’s domination
Tuesday night -> Gandara’s domination
Wednesday day -> Gandara’s domination
Wednesday night -> Gandara’s domination
Thursday day -> Gandara’s domination

It’s pretty clear that Riverside got a lot more people playing @ weekend and Gandara got more players for the rest of the week.

The nightcap argument is pretty much useless counting you “nightcapped” us for 2 days (yes people do work during the weekend too) :P

Anyway it was a good matchup, keep up the good fights everyone.

See. Now put the weekend in the middle of the matchup and it would be a totally different match. I have nothing against nightcapping, as it is a 24/7 mode. All I was saying that a smaller nightcrew has much more impact during weekdays than the same nightcrew during weekends.

This screenshot is from saturday, 21pm GMT 1, that would be 20pm GMT. We are ticking with 370+. So yeah, you got the highest ticks at weekend, “consistently” I forgot.

edit@ Parthis
I’m not saying we don’t have any players, but we don’t have enough players to stop Gandara from ticking 500 or more points during the night. That is the problem we are facing.

Change the matchup reset time. The current schedule will always prefer servers with a better nightcrew to have a huge influence on the scores and ladder.
For US servers the matchup reset is friday afternoon and for EU servers midnight GMT. For many EU players who like to participate in the hours after reset it’s not really ideal. We heard a couple of times that these two regions are located in different datacenters and are not related to each other, so why make a simultaneously reset for both regions?

When the reset takes place on wednesday afternoon/evening, for both US and EU, the weekend suddenly would be in the middle of the week and give servers with low player numbers during the week an opportunity to catch up and play down the impact a good nightcrew has right now.

11pm is midnight for us. And at this time we cannot field the numbers to hold structures anymore. Many people log off at around 11pm – GMT +1, so an hour before you start “nuking”.

And I’m not complaining, I’m stating how it is. The problem is not about our strategy, it’s about the reset time. Put the server reset at wednesday afternoon, so a whole week of nightcapping has not the relevance in a match is has right now. As we are easily dominating Gandara with equal numbers during the weekend, it would give us an opportunity to catch up to what you guys can field late nights in the week.
Sadly, we will not see such a change.

Esprit Dumort.3109:

We are slowly closing the gap with RS… 2 days left! Please get unlazy, I don’t want to move up tiers. :P

Correction. 2 Nights left. Go go, you can do it.

So boring to fight Gandara. Only sitting in keeps and manning cannons, mortar, oil and siege. yawn

Big question. Will two more nights be enough to close the gap? I think so.

I’m sorry if anyone is offended, but it’s hard to hold fingers still when reading “paper dolls/wipe wipe wipe/ omg so much loot/” and watching pointless videos – even more so after this weekend. As I wrote, with a wink, don’t take it to seriously One more…
Oh, and please consider that I’m speaking for myself and expressing my opinion most of the time. I’m not a official representative, as I clearly marked in my text

Anyway, Gandara looked very furious to me this evening. Running around like crazy, attacking everyone and everything like a angry horde. To bad Abaddon’s is nowhere to be seen, it’s getting annoying to jump across the BL and it’s only Gandara attacking or defending something.

Well, and THAT golem attack. priceless

This boat is going nowhere, you forgot your sailcloth. But you are fast swimmers and quickly got away before our first arrows could find you. Don’t worry though, the weekdays will come where you can cap stuff undefended. Maybe work out an escape plan for your golems though, you never know if we bother to show up.
;)

Immolator.5640:

Heheh I’m glad you guys are proud of your wiping our 16 guys once in Hills!

Maybe we should make a video about it… oh wait.

Immolator.5640:

was fun repeatedly wiping them, thought they’d break quickly, but they kept coming back again and again, not that my growing badge stacks mind, nor the money I get from selling the loot. I just wonder when they’ll run out of money for armour repairs…

Sadly, the story goes a little bit different.
After taking your garrison, we deliberately left a wall open to invite you guys over and come play with us. Unfortunately, you “broke” quickly and after 3 wipes you changed BL and tried a golem sneak on our garrison. There were only a few players left, but luckily they told us what was going on, so we switched and caught you right in time. Only to see you guys switching BL again after two fights. Then there was a little bit off time, bay changed hands a couple of times – until we decided to left the wall open (again, duh…) and invite you to our lovely bay. We had a great time in our TS, everyone was in good mood, making jokes about diminishing returns because we hardly got any loot bags and badges of honor anymore.

And I think I speak for all IF when I say we don’t care about armor repair. We are looking for fights. Yes sometimes you got the jump on us. Sometimes did we. There is always room for improvement for everyone of us.
Sorry, but your comment after this saturday afternoon/evening battering – is actually hilarious.
Don’t take it to seriously though..

With all that money you’ll make from wiping us, hopefully you can send some to your mates from the WvW guild. Pretty sure they got a high repair bill this afternoon, even switching to an empty boderland didnt helped them.
Good fun all around.

Yes, Riverside doubleteamed both Gandara and Abaddons Mouth. Alone. Thats how we roll.

Yep, I have connection issues since the update too. FPS are usually fine, but when big groups fighting each other I have massive lags, culling and sometimes disconnects. Never had so much problems before, it’s definitely worse.

Edit: Kudos to KISS from IF . Great play at Gandara-BL. To bad we had the blue helm light over our head because we had only 7 people left. Most “randoms” are not used to fast movement and quick decision making from our commander, but I think you had fun as well

Well, that will happen if you leave the spot [pic].
In my opinion the problem is that you can’t go back to spawn the way you came from. Sometimes there are superior numbers in the camp, and you have no way to fall back. except to the inv-spot. So I have no problem with people standing there.

Anyway, pretty awesome week, and some of the best three-way fights we ever had. Sunday evening we had an epic fight in AG-Garrison for like half an hour, until Gandara took our Bay uncontested. Although the culling really hurts our teamplay (loosing sight of the leader in fight is bad), I hope the battles will continue all week.

I can’t say anything about hackers/cheaters/bugusers on our server, but it’s always dissappointing when this issue comes up. I heard about a “new” buggy the spot in the inner ring of bay yesterday, but please remember as always, a few people don’t represent a whole server.

Anyway, we had a lot fun after the reset, and i think its a very even matchup. [IF] were running on Aurora Glade BL with around 10-15 people, and I hope we gave you a good run for your money Although we encountered the enemy zerg quite often we had a good time. There are no friends and great battles everywhere, thats always a good sign for a nice week. See you guys on the fields

I don’t want to offend anyone and have a lot of respect for the guilds on PS, but yesterday we were wondering what the hell you guys were doing. It did not made any sense to us, thats what I’m trying to say.

the raidtimes from organized guilds on RS are between 6-9pm, especially during weekday. after the raids are over, the majority of players will leave and do something else, and with only an handful WvW-guilds there is not much power left to be competetive.

@katiechops
The second screenshot is from RS-BL at 2pm, where we had like 20 random players on the map.

The story this evening is a little bit different. We came to the map with nothing, PS had our tower and camp. We took it back and went for the bay [T3] – massive defense from BB, (thats why you took hills btw ). PS tried to get in our back while we worked on the inner ring, but failed. After quite some time we finally took it, and went north to attack BB tower/garrison. Again PS attacked us from behind with a huge force. While we were spread out and regrouping, PS took Bay [T1] uncontested. I understand that we are the weaker enemy to you, with inferior numbers and no upgrades, but PS is essentially stealing our points all day long. Yesterday night both servers were on Riverside BL, fighting over our keeps and towers. BB, despite being a “weaker” server is always in the lead and no one is challenging them for place one. I know this is caused by design flaws in the score system, but it should be natural to “team up” against the server in the lead.

I remember when people from PS complained about huge zergs, rushing over maps and speedcapping all the stuff, because they were looking for intense fights. Nowadays, when it gets laggy and skills take 10s to activate, we know a Pikenzerg is around the corner, doing weird stuff.

Well, thats not Piken Square I used to know anymore. You guys changed from small scale guild fights to hit and run zergs, without any strategic focus. Just running around the map, capping this and that, hitting here and there. It’s sad, because I absolutely loved the matchup we had a month ago.