Nerve.9581

That's fine. Better gameplay is clearly within reach, though. Tantalizingly close. The game's fundamentals already shine in SPvP, balance notwithstanding, and very briefly come through in WvW. The combination of variables that are conspiring to incentivize trains make WvW absolute garbage to play 95% of the time, though, and I think I've made that clear enough. Alas, the game has a strong survivorship bias at this point, and the WvW player base probably has a strong over-representation of those who actually enjoy the commander-train thing.

There's also a very real possibility that what I witnessed without any commanders on any team was a level of confusion that would be an outlier in a game where commander icons didn't exist. In which case, the conversation would have to shift to disincentivizing trains and encouraging people to spread out to play the whole field. WoW brute-forced some of this by simply boosting health pools in Ashran's battleground port, but there are probably more clever ways to do this. In capture point game modes, like SPvP or some of WoW's battlegrounds or domination in Call of Duty or Conquest in Battlefield, running trains is inherently disincentivized by the objective; you can't hold all the points by staying a single blob. GW2 probably avoids this with mounts and speed buffs allowing a blob to travel quickly from cap point/boss to cap point/boss in rapid succession. So other than removing commander icons, we're probably talking about significant design overhauls if the goal is SPvP-scale fights rather than giant trains.

Most of the replies since I last posted seem to consist of: Group play will happen regardless. (I contend that it will never reach the level of 100-stack trains if you remove 1-click squadding and commander icons). 1-click squadding and 100-stack trains is good gameplay. (You're insane if you believe this.) I like being able to group up fast and have my hand held. (There's no saving you.) Number 2 is probably the most egregious. The reason I called commander trains degenerate is specifically because they suppress and hide the best interactions and mechanics in GW2's class kits and gameplay, effectively removing the need for them in the first place. May as well give everyone in the stack a single "boom" key for all the depth of mechanical interactions on display. The experience I had without commanders brought out the best interactions and mechanics the game has to offer, showing off GW2's potential. It was like a roving landscape of SPvP fights, given the added context of varied terrain and siege objectives. Absolutely sublime.

Making speculative arguments to confirm beliefs while rejecting new external evidence was your move, not mine. Yes, the game theory still incentivizes group play, but it doesn't seem to reach the scale that a universally visible icon does, and thus doesn't reach the level of degeneracy. Because of that smaller scale, of smaller squads roaming the map along with players just looking to jump in and have some fun, I think it in sum balances out. But again, conditioned on removing commander icons; that doesn't at all remove the ability for squads to form when they want. Like I argued with Strider, it just won't happen as the same scale when it's easier to find a battle and go to it.

You're making a large number of assumptions about the willingness of people to go out of their way to follow someone; you're effectively laying out a path of most resistance and asserting it's the default behavior when I can refute your speculation with the game I just participated in. Getting on voice, finding a specific player to target over and over again, and even relocating them on a map for death runs is significantly more difficult without icons than just finding a contested zone where people are fighting and going to help. The second behavior is exactly what I saw. I'm reticent to continue debating someone who believes so strongly that people will always choose the most inconvenient method possible. With icons, you get trains. I played a game with no icons, there were no trains. If you're going to argue against that, you need to convince me I'm blind.

Did I not just give an example of how people actually behave without commander icons around to draw them like moths to a lamp? I'm not going to entertain your speculation when I can believe my own eyes.

Been playing this game on and off for a long time, and had a light bulb moment that's shocking in its simplicity. Commander icons degenerate WvW gameplay immensely. When players don't have Commander icons to follow, WvW feels like the large-scale MMO PvP it's supposed to be. I just ran around in a game where no realm had a commander online. The encounters were much more organic, with individuals making spacing, pushing, aggression, and defensive decisions with the flow of the battle. People were more spread out, and there were localized encounters happening everywhere around a contested objective. It was exactly as I expected large-scale fantasy MMO PvP to be -- players making snap decisions to work together and push a hole in an enemy's defense or chase a splinter group that was isolated. In fact, there was time to make those decisions and for full fights to play out, with players actually using their abilities. Commander icons promote gameplay that is explicitly less fun and more frustrating than this. Everyone just follows a marker like lemmings, zerging into degenerate un-fun train-crashes of stacked effects. If you're at the front, you die in milliseconds. Enjoy your run back. If you're at the back, maybe you escape. But it's over in a flash. I cannot for the life of me see why new players want their hand held by a Commander icon only to be led into incomprehensible, garbage encounters like this where they learn nothing. This is all to say that I just learned how to have fun in GW2 WvW, but whether a commander is present is entirely out of my control. I just have to roll the dice and hope none is online for any side. If I were a PvP designer at Anet, I'd remove them. And I'd also make a 1-minute tutorial video explaining objectives and how to assault them, accessible anytime from the WvW window, so that nobody needs commanders.