People who abuse Commander Tag

Yesterday, I was doing a Labyrinth Farm as a Commander with a squad of players for about 20min, until one player tagged up on the other side of the map and started doing doors, telling everyone to follow him for bags and loot. I was doing the Count Candy + chainsaw skeleton dude while this guy was taking all the doors and commandering. I asked if he could move to a new map, and he said he already did. He said that I did not know how to commander because we are doing the bosses as well as the other doors. I specifically advertised in LFG that we were doing All Doors. And this guy stayed tagged up up until I had to leave.

What can be done about commanders who abuse it? People were angry with this guy and he disrupted the farm. Commanders shouldn't have this behavior.

This is like teaching my 2 year... You can't control other players. Do what you want, run your own group, and if someone else is interfering with how you want to play, go somewhere else if you need to. Not everyone is nice, but you need to worry about yourself and not them.

Yes, but what can be done to stop these commanders from continuing this behavior?

@Cosminion.5042 said:Yes, but what can be done to stop these commanders from continuing this behavior?

Nothing. The only person you have any control over is yourself. Stay tagged up. Be persistent. Outlast the other commander. In my experience people like that tend to be pretty impatient. They'll give up eventually and you can go back to commanding.

inb4 someone mentions "report them" when that has never worked in my experiences with this game. I'll block them but I've stopped reporting.

The same thing you can do to stop people from cutting you off in traffic.

@Cosminion.5042 said:Yes, but what can be done to stop these commanders from continuing this behavior?

Aside from your nemesis being rude and a jerk, what exactly is that they did that is worthy of a response from ANet?

Squads in GW2 are all volunteer. People prefer to be led and they also want to succeed at whatever their goal is. If there are two commanders in the lab, one will draw more people because folks feel that commander is doing a better job at reaching their goals. Sometimes, it's going to turn out to be a jerk who is going for the easy loot, sometimes it will be the one who makes the bosses seem easy, and sometimes the one who tells better jokes.

I'm really sorry you had a bad experience. Leading is fraught with trials & tribulations without having to deal with someone jumping in. All the same, if folks were following the other tag, maybe it means that they wanted the "no bosses" run, despite your LFG.

PS as a side note, it's never enough to rely on the LFG. I strongly recommend commanders include a squad message and appoint a lieutenant to remind people in /say of the guidelines for your squad (they don't actually have to be a lieut, just someone who serves the role). People come & go to squads and many haven't read the LFG or remember whether they got into the map for no-bosses or all-doors. Even then, there are always non-tags who think they know better, but don't want to tag up. If you don't want to deal with any of that, then be prepared to cede the playing field to someone else.

He was rude but right.In order to farm skip skip bosses, except maybe steeve.

Very easy solution: re-work rewards in the lab. The entire reward structure in there is stupid.

It was pretty stupid of him to do that because it meant there were 2 squads on a relatively small map with a limited selection of activities (even more limited for him since he refused to do some of them) who were now in direct competition with each other. He would have been better off going to a different map - either one of the many in LFG which state they're skipping bosses or one without a commander which he can run however he wants.

But sadly there isn't anything you can do. He didn't break any rules so there's nothing to report him for and no way to prevent other people on the same map as you from tagging up or playing in a different way. The vast majority of the time that's not a problem because most maps are big and varied enough that everyone can do what they want, or at the other extreme there's really only 1 way to approach it. It's only the Labyrinth (and previously Silverwastes, before the chest trains were stopped) where this is a problem.

Maybe for next year they could make it so players can create a new copy of the map and only members of their squad can enter - like the guild mission versions of Triple Trouble and...is it Tequatl that also has that option? But it's highly unlikely anything could be done before the end of Halloween.

While I understand that you did not like his behavior, he did not abuse the tag. Mega-server maps are there for everyone. No one owns them. Being there first may have some advantages in terms of attracting other players, but it does not entitle one to say, "This is my map."

While it is certainly within reason to ask him to move, I would not recommend escalating the conversation past politeness. On other farms in the past, arguments in chat channels about farm ownership have often resulted in ANet removing the farming option.

@Cosminion.5042 said:I asked if he could move to a new map, and he said he already did.

I wonder if s/he had been asked to move maps prior to yours for the same complaint.

I've had that happen in lab and wvw. I won't call them out except to say she's named after the paladin on the anime Fairytail. I'm looking at you...

Unfortunately there really isn't anything anet can do about this. But wow, what a kitten that person was.

@Fluffball.8307 said:The same thing you can do to stop people from cutting you off in traffic.

Drive very close to them so they go off the road and die?I... don't think you can do that in this game. Maybe a PvP mode they can add for mounts probably.

@Fluffball.8307 said:The same thing you can do to stop people from cutting you off in traffic.

Yeah but, flipping people the bird might get you suspended from the game.

Honestly though, there isn't anything that can be done about it, other than leaving and making a new instance, or waiting for the other commander to leave.

Unless the other commander was saying anything inappropriate in the chat, he/she didn't do anything that would be actioned by a GM.

This isn't "abuse" in any way. It's just that some players feel entitled to dictate how others play the game.

This player was using the commander tag for its intended purpose. He turned on his tag and invited others to join his squad.

You do not own a map because you posted a squad in LFG. Commander is simply a fancy UI. It doesn't grant its user authority other than that which other players choose to give it.

I don't understand how that other guy abused the system. But your complaining sounds like abusing the forums in order to defame others.

@Shena Fu.5792 said:I don't understand how that other guy abused the system. But your complaining sounds like abusing the forums in order to defame others.

I don't understand why I'm in the wrong here.

@Shena Fu.5792 said:I don't understand how that other guy abused the system. But your complaining sounds like abusing the forums in order to defame others.

Based on how you read that into the original post this it makes me wonder if you have a dog in this show. OP had a legit question posed in a reasonable manner and provided details. Might be one thing to say you disagree but defame others...who/what where?

@Cosminion.5042 said:

@Shena Fu.5792 said:I don't understand how that other guy abused the system. But your complaining sounds like abusing the forums in order to defame others.

I think as others have stated there isn't a policy with comm tags. Its a free for all. But its not abuse of the tag either for more than one person to tag up. In this case I would classify it as rude and lazy since its really easy to tag up and fill your own instance if you don't like the one you are in. But there are no rules preventing from having a map full of tags either, and have seen that, its quite funny actually. As pointed out above the best you can do is keep going and try and encourage people to stay on your tag and try and keep new people joining on you. And +1 to you for posting on your LFS how your farm was running, over information is never a bad idea in this kind of thing. Good looting!

Something similar happened on a map I was on last night. I joined via a LFG message which said they were doing all doors and all bosses with no mounts. The map was full and apparently that squad had been active for some time so it seems likely the majority of people there joined via LFG rather than being dropped into that map when they entered or having been there before the squad.

About 10 minutes after I joined some guy suddenly left the squad, turned his own tag on and announced that the other commander did not know how to farm and he was going to teach us. He started using his raptor to rush ahead and open doors before anyone else got there, but only the ones where large groups of enemies appear, he skipped all the veteran and boss doors. He also kept telling everyone in map chat to leave the "loser slow commander" and join his "$$$ farm group" (his terms).

In that case it completely backfired. As I mentioned that squad had been running on a full map for a while so everyone there had chosen to join a group that was doing all the doors. Apart from a few times when people got confused about which tag to follow no one joined him. Eventually he got caught by the Horror, alone on the far side of the map and we told him we'd ressurect him when we got to that spot...after defeating the Lich along the way. He resurrected at a waypoint, tagged down and I assume he left the map.

Before that there was a lot of talk in squad chat about what we could do to stop him - could we report him and how quickly would it be acted on? Could we tell him to leave? If he got enough abuse would that make him go, and could he report us for it? Fortunately the commander kept telling everyone to just ignore him and carry on, which I think helped. No one wrote anything in map chat worse than telling him to switch maps or tag down and follow the group, but of course I don't know if they whispered him.

But it did make me think it might be helpful for next year to do something about conflicting groups in the Labyrinth. As people have said no one owns the map and no one can control who comes in or what they do there, and I'm starting to think the solution might be to change that - enable people to make private copies of the map that they can control. But I'm not sure exactly how it could work.