T G.7496

This is a game. The problem with playing against a thief, is that it is fun for exactly one player. It is fundamentally bad game design.

Well, they just removed one of the few things keeping this forum alive.

You just have to accept that the world is full of exploitative thieves, negligence and apathy, and that humanity is doomed. Let it go.

People can see if you don't release. They know you can see them. If they know you're spying, are you a spy? Also, it's a game. Games are meant to be fun. Looking at a black screen, or whatever, ain't fun. Deciding not to respawn because you want to watch part or all of the remainder of a fight can be fun. Also, you can still target call. That can be fun, too. Nothing is unfair when it's available to both sides.

Ah, breaker one-nine, this here's the Rubber Duck, You gotta copy on me, Pig Pen, c'mon? Ah, yeah, 10-4, Pig Pen, fer sure, fer sure. By golly, it's clean clear to Flag Town, c'mon. Yeah, that's a big 10-4 there, Pig Pen, Yeah, we definitely got the front door, good buddy, Mercy sake's alive, looks like we got us a convoy.

Does anybody really, seriously care about points or where they come from. At all. I cannot remember a time when I was in a squad of any size or composition when there was a conversation, and a decision was made, about what to do next based on points. I literally have no idea, one moment to the next, whether what I'm doing is costing or gaining points for my team. I simply don't care. My decisions are based only on what might be most fun. Am I unusual?

Why so serious? Read the room 🙂

Self esteem?

It's a lot more common than perhaps you or I would have thought.

The landfill that was WSR at the end is not on MoL. You are conflating the misery of playing against the chimpanzee's tea party, with what is simply very poor Team-making by Anet resulting in an apparently over-stacked MoL relative to it's competitors so far.

Make a family guild. Invite your family to join it. Encourage them to select it as their WvW guild. Wait till next relink. Done.

For most people, the requirement to make a choice is painful. Because it implies a sacrifice of some kind. And, because you also have to face the consequences of your own decision, it becomes harder to place the blame for disatisfaction elsewhere. Over several weeks I narrowed my WR choices down to two, and made a final decision only in the last couple of days before the cut-off. It wasn't easy. But two things occur to me. Because I made a choice, I'm more invested. It remains entirely open to me to reverse my decision. I just have to wait a bit. Some people, it seems, just let this happen to them. They refused to make a choice. Which is a choice in itself, I suppose, and actually one which superficially makes it easier to blame everyone and everything else for whatever comes. But whose fault is it, really? And some people, it seems, characterise what has happened as the end of the world, and not simply the end of servers. Sometimes these are the same people. I don't know if WR is better or worse. For me, so far, it has been both. I'm in the late stages of my relationship with this game anyway, I think. But at least I took some positive action in determining the shape of my future. I'd recommend it.

They need to develop much, much better ways of analysing and utilising the data - that they must have available now - in the composition of Teams. But, we have to accept that however much better they might get at this, week-1 of a relink is always going to be a bit of a shitshow. It's kinda unavoidable. They then might consider adopting a Swiss Tournament approach, going in to week-2, in an attempt to accelerate the speed at which Teams might find more evenly balanced MUs. They might also consider reducing the membership limit of guilds which can be selected as a WvW guild. But this last item is gonna break eggs and lead to confusion all over the place at this point. I still think they should do it, though.

Understood. For what it's worth, after all of our to and fro, I've stated elsewhere (earlier in this thread I think) that I believe 500 is too large for a WvW guild entity.

Understood. Likewise.

To this point, specifically... Since Mirrors of Lyssa is, by any metric, the most egregious example of the asymmetry that is going on between Teams at the moment. And since you are talking about how the largest 'alliance guilds' are the most dangerous expression of that. I can tell you - from first hand experience, as a member of probably one of the largest guilds created for this purpose, and therefore probably 'the subject of this discussion' - that the environment, culture and playstyle you are describing is a fiction. If there exist other guilds - members of Teams creating the same or worse situation than MoL at the moment - which are single-handedly causing the problem you imagine, who are they?

I did reread it, shortly after posting, and I take your point about that. However, my comments still stand, somewhat - the extrapolation and catastrophising you do is just unrealistic and unecessary, based on my own experience. Playing in a squad of up to 50 players is literally a game-design feature, in a mode that aims to encourage cooperation between players. The expectation, one can assume, is that opposing teams will organise themselves similarly. That this sometimes doesn't happen - and, most recently, hasn't happened on a wildly asymmetric scale - is not a function or fault of players gaming the system, or of playing against the design of the system. It is simply the result of woeful Team-making and Match-making by Anet at the start of this WR period. If what you fear is even remotely likely, what is your proposal... to limit guild size to 50? Or less than 50? I just don't get your point.

The maximum squad size, as you know, is 50 - one might assume that it was intentionally designed this way by Anet, to be used by 50 players together. The idea, which you extrapolate from this - that any of the more organised 'alliance guilds' of up to 500 players might concurrently field 10 of these squads - is absurd. You know this, of course, it's intentional hyperbole. I'm a member of one of these larger guilds, comprising a number of smaller guilds, and we rarely, very rarely, are able or want to field more than one organised squad at a time. Additionally, such a squad most often doesn't hit the max. 50 limit. The capability - the matchup-damaging capability - you are ascribing to individual guilds is, in my recent experience, simply nonsense. What is not nonsense, however, is that Anet have evidently failed to put together balanced Teams of guilds (small and large) together with individual players. It is Anet's stacking of multiple, very active guilds together in a single Team - not the behaviour or capability of individual guilds within a Team - that appears to have caused the terribly asymmetric match-ups experience in the first 2 weeks of WR. This is Anet's responsibility. The problems to date are Anet's failures in Team-making.

Anet provided the means, expressly (and literally, with the new guild slot), for this purpose. It is, therefore, presumably how they intend the game to be played. The team-making and match-making so far has been a disaster, sadly. But don't blame the players. Blame Anet.

https://discord.com/invite/zVwYwUwd

You are mixing terms of reference. Players create Guilds. There are no Alliances, technically. Some new guilds have been created by players to come together expressly for the purpose of the new World Restructuring. We can call them alliance guilds. But these entities are limited in the same way as any other guild. This is the absolute limit of player agency. Beyond this there are Teams. The size of teams is unknown, but estimates have put it at several times the maximum size of a guild. Anet create Teams. Players have zero agency in the composition of the Team beyond the limits of the guild they select. The terrible match making we are experiencing is the result of apparently terrible Team composition. This is Anet's responsibility.

Players can only act within the bounds of the game design. The game designers are responsible for defining those boundaries. Players will, inevitably, try and find ways to break the game or bend the game to their maximum advantage. But, outside of actually cheating, the players are only able to do this to the extent that the game's designers allow them.

Teams comprise match ups. You're entrenched in the idea that players create Teams. They don't. Anet does.

No. They're stacked because Anet's match making was very poor, putting several of the largest, very active guilds on the same Teams. Anet did this, not the players or guilds. Mirrors of Lyssa is the most egregious example of very poor Team-making. I am in a guild on that team. There has been practically zero content. We hoped it might improve in this second week. It's worse. MoL is incredibly active. So many commanders and squads, from many, many different guilds, all looking to create and find content. But, seemingly, there are very few people to play with on the other Teams. This is not a choice all the players on MoL made. This is simply the Team we all found ourselves on. It's miserable for us, too. It's not as miserable as losing, I can understand that. But it's miserable nonetheless. We've been doing a lot of in-houses to relieve the boredom. I was really looking forward to WR. So far, apart from the excellent company, it's been a huge disappointment. This is Anet's sole responsibility. Not the fault of the players.

I didn't say every single member. I said beyond doubt harbouring or encouraging. That's grey, I know, but it implies a period of time, multiple instances, multiple members, chat logs, etc. I'm neither a dev, an investigator nor a prosecutor. But burning them out of refuges is a legitimate approach for me. Maybe there would be some collateral damage, but nobody would die. Perhaps that's too severe for some tastes. I think it would be pretty clear where the nests were though. I don't think anyone would countenance nuking a community guild, for example. Anyway, it was just a provocation from someone who despises cheats.