Ged Kealmen.7210

That sucks man... some people just plain suck. Perhaps they've been bullied in school and they need to take their frustration out on anybody. Perhaps something just doesn't work right in their heads. Did you see this happen several times or just once or twice? I do Obs Sanct almost every week and only once have I found an enemy triggering traps, but even then I got an apology whispered to me from their leader.

My humble opinion, after mostly solo roaming for 3800+ ranks and fighting countless thieves of all build variations and skill levels... stealth needs to be nerfed a bit. Not too much. Thief damage is fine, my issue is the lack of counters to stealth and the abuse of attacking from stealth and popping right back into stealth or just running away. Either increase cooldowns on stealth generation just a bit, or cause forced reveal after attacks. A heavy first attack from stealth is fine, it makes sense, but constant stealth-attack-restealth-attack-restealth-attack ad infinitum is excessive. If the idea is to make any thief player with reasonable skill and no suicidal melee-til-death instincts unkillable, Anet has succeeded. If the idea is to have a thief in a keep force 10+ enemy players to spend 15 minutes hunting him down using traps, sniffs and reveals... and MAYBE killing him (mostly if the thief messes up) or getting bored and letting him port his zerg back in, then Anet is doing a bang-up job.

Just a side comment... when did havocking become roaming? As far as I know, roaming is solo... running around in a small party is havocking, and zerging... well zerging is just that. Lately I've read a lot of posts with people calling "small groups" roamers, that's not roaming IMO.

I've been roaming for years, solo most of the time. I tried joining guild "raids" and pugmander squads, never found them to be either skilled enough to respect, or active enough to enjoy so I always go back to solo roaming. Usually regular roamers end up knowing each other, and you get a feel for who might be on map at certain times, who will respond to callouts when you need a hand to get rid of an enemy group or want to defend a keep or whatever. During the betas, the only difference I've seen is that most of the roamers are unskilled noobs or just plain poultrylike runaway sentryflippers with not an ounce of fight in them. Other than that, I've had no issues at all roaming just as I did before. So I have no reason to bemoan anything, except perhaps being chucked into a team with no skilled roamers, which should be a matter of luck. My suggestion, to avoid this happening once WvW changes the system, is to join a roamer guild and select it as WvW active, so regular roamers can roam together but separately, if that makes sense. Everyone can do their thing, but you will have a much better idea of who is roaming in which maps at which times and who you can rely on in a pinch. IMO this new system will be much better for roamers, allowing what I described above to happen without people needing to be on the same or linked servers. All this talk about roaming being dead sounds senseless to me.

Another factor for midweek population imbalance are the effects of morale breakdown after a couple of days of noobish players participating in a clearly skill-imbalanced matchup. People get tired of being rolled over and stop playing until Beta is over and they can go back to the relative safety of their usual teams' zergs. So then you can add increased pop imbalance to the original skill imbalance.

It depends. I've not yet seen specific info on what it is they are testing in this last Beta. They might be testing the team assignment issues or who knows what, but not necessarily pop balance. Having said that, I agree that pop balance is completely wrong. As a roamer, twice now I've been Beta assigned to what turns out to be the crappiest team in a match BY FAR. And this "by far" is the issue, I don't think we've won a single skirmish yet. Not only that, but it seems like this team got virtually no large groups assigned to it. We seem to be mostly made out of noob roamers, noob tags, and unskilled fighters with a tendency to die instantly when engaging or run away as fast as they can. It makes me think that maybe as a single roamer we just get chucked into the "whatever's left after assigning the other teams" team, which doesn't speak well for whatever Anet is doing to spread out the population. If single players are meant to fill the gaps after large guilds/alliances are spread out as evenly as possible, this is definitely not evidence of that being done correctly.

My experience with running a guild (never too big, we maxed out around 110 players) is that the vast majority of players who join up when they see recruitment mapmsgs only do so to see what they can get from that guild. Some expect specific activities in specific timeslots, others expect help with achievements/story/fractals/raids/whatever, others expect help with their legendary crafting... but very few actually want to be part of a community and collaborate. A quick tell for this is asking new recruits to join Discord. If they care about meeting people there's no issue with that, but most will avoid or delay it as much as possible. The result is that very few people (sometimes only the guild leader) are willing to organize activities, donate to guild hall, help others, and when said person gets tired of the entitled genpop expecting them to do everything without help, the guild begins dying off. Finding a good core group of players who actually enjoy playing together, who want to help out other players, coordinate activities, help develop the guild hall, or even just chat on Discord while doing their own things, is hard, takes a lot of time and quite a bit of luck. If you find such people, value them and cultivate the friendship because it's a rare thing.

Could OP be trying to suggest "remove 1 condition on dodge roll"? Just guessing here.

Right. Well, I play a lot throughout the day so that's kinda hard to pin down. I guess I'm usually most active in the early morning, which for me is around 1PM - 6PM server time (I guess that's SEA timezone, correct me if I'm wrong) but I usually log on here and there up to my early evenings, more or less 3AM server time. I'm on PST timezone but I'm an abnormally early riser. I guess the only timezone that doesn't quite work for me is late EST. And the lack of roamer teamplay that irritates me so much usually gets worse as maps are more and more populated. The early morning minicrowd is usually way more cooperative, whereas the heavy pop timezones are mostly full of zerg-bunnies trying to get their easy loot by blending in with the crowd without having to acquire any skill.

Thank you for your advice... grass will not be greener and wait for alliances are the best points. Make the grass greener by cultivating it where you are instead of looking for it in other people-s gardens, I guess. Time to start a Roamer Combine guild and wait for alliances to kick in so we can roam together, though not necessarily in a bunch. My idea is that maps with good roamers are usually very well controlled and tags that choose to run in them usually get great support. Good roamers will roam, yes, but converge on callouts and back each other up. So I'll try to get some people like that in my empty guild and hopefully that style of gameplay will follow us wherever we get placed once alliances are active.

After spending over a year in SoR, I've decided to hop. Kinda tired of roaming and getting constantly into 1v3 fights defending home camp with not a single friendly showing up, but when that same camp is losing RI there are suddenly 5 players just sitting there waiting or valiantly rushing in to kill the yaks. I'm looking for a server that has a roamer population with at least some players who will actually try to fight the enemy instead of running away from them and waiting until they leave so they can flip a camp and pip farm. Zerging is completely secondary, but of course having a few tags that run organized and find balance between fighting and map control would be good. Low map toxicity, a minimum of server pride and teamwork, having players that respond to callouts, and a decent level of fighting skill would all be pluses. Any recommendations?

I don't believe Anet is purposefully ignoring cheaters. I think Anet is trying to be careful to not step on any privacy infringement toes by scanning for running processes, and to avoid cheater-generated negative publicity by not punishing anyone for botting/hacking unless they have rock solid evidence. But their process to observe potential cheaters and gather such evidence is extremely ineffective. This might be due to lack of interest, lack of capabilities, or lack of personnel. Anet has active devs in game regularly. Anet also has trusted player/partners whose reports should carry a certain degree of weight. IF Anet were truly focused on eliminating hackers in real time, all it would take is a report system that authorized devs could look into as reports ocurred. Most games have some form of moderators, as forums do (which BTW Anet does police with significant zeal, applying bans to people for simply not being nice even when not directly attacking someone), so why do PvP and WvW not have any form of Real Time Moderation? It's a mystery.

It absolutely seems to make sense, except for the fact we have alternative verification methods and are using them added to Anet not attempting to contact the owner in any way and simply blocking. It makes sense, but it's strangely radical action coming from a management system that seems to be very patient, methodical, cautious, tentative, when dealing with bots or hackers.

And sadly I need to add data again. After a couple of hours using the VPN, testing different server locations for ping and having to do the annoying sms 2 step verification every time... my account was "blocked for security reasons." So Anet servers have lag issues, they have server latency issues, and if you try to find a way to improve those through VPN, you get blocked EVEN when using their own verification methods. Very annoying.

And will big fat bearded norns be known as Night Mothers too?

Just adding data here. Playing from Mexico with a nonVPN ping that usually fluctuates between 130 and 170, while stable. Activated Surfshark VPN and using an Atlanta-based server my ping stays under 100ms now.

Mallyx traitline had a well thought synergy working resistance with the condi absorption from mates, adding the enemy condis and allowing you to collect them, if you were good enough even with Pact of Pain active... then twice transfering to the enemy through Permeating Pestilence and Mallyx version of True Nature with the addition of Herald Core Value. It was really fun to play as a roamer against all those condi cncer builds Anet seems to protect so much, like the mesmer and scourge variations, or the stealth condi thieves that put tons of condis on you and blink out of sight to scratch their bellybuttons while you try to cleanse and heal. It was particularly satisfying to turn all that Anet lopsided "balance" against them for once. Collect, resist, bounce condis back, season with some extra torment and burning and watch em melt mostly from their own hmmmm... stuff. Well, Anet totally messed up that synergy with the changes to Resistance and Resolution, basically destroying the main condi control worked into the Mallyx traitline and stance and probably the best counter to condi abuse builds. I wonder if the dev team that developed and implemented this even understood how Revenant Mallyx functions. Then again, perhaps they did.

Only if all maps share the same com system or servers. Plus, I did not say it was "the servers". I assume it's something on Anet's side... what? I have no idea, servers or anything else.

I'm having the same issue in Mexico. It started around the time the festival update came out. In most maps I only get normal ping (100-140) about 20% of the time and the rest of the time it fluctuates from 500 to 1900+, completely unplayable. Latency is all over the place constantly. HOWEVER, the instant I go into a WvW map both ping and server latency go back to normal and remain steady. If it were an issue with my ISP the communication problems would be constant, regardless of where I was.

Some legendary trinkets have pretty ugly effects. like that horrendous silver disco ball from Conflux. The visuals also pile up when you get several items and they can look pretty gaudy and annoyingly excessive. Of course this is a matter of personal taste, and people should like or dislike the visuals according to personal preference. So perhaps adding a visual effects checkmark to the trinket selection boxes like the ones for weapons or the helmet, so we could turn legendary trinket visuals off, would be good?

Best of luck to WILD. You guys have some nice people there.

I agree with commenters that Anet claiming a garrison is not evidence of collusion or favoritism. I also see the motivation behind the OP for this post, though I don't agree with the hard conclusions it calls out. I have played in 4 different servers: GoM, SBI, NSP. and SoR, and logged a lot of hours playing WvW in all of them. Only in SBI have I seen frequent Anet employees playing. In the others, maybe an occasional one here or there. In SBI it was frequent. It is also unarguable that the server linking that gifted SBI with an overwhelming supply of bandwagon players is annoying, unfair, frustrating and detrimental to WvW morale. If this excess population was increased even further by migration to SBI or FC is beside the point. Both servers had a lot of WvW players when linked anyway. So I can see how these things would give way to suspicious looks and accusations from conspiracy theorists. No evidence... but sure looks fishy.

@Jilora.9524 you misunderstood or I wasn't clear... I didn't say anything about a server ban. I meant the guild that claimed the keep could ban/block players who troll tactics from using them. That's all. When tactics get trolled, the guild officer goes through the log, finds who did it, and adds them to a guild tactic block list. True, the bandwagon issue is annoying AF as well. But that doesn't mean we should let other problems go without looking for potential solutions.

Tactic-pulling trolls have always been around, but lately it has become a standard HoD practice. They will send trolls to pull all the tactics, then build a bunch of siege blocking supply piles, and then attack keeps. This is a garbage tactic that brings nothing to the game. and added to the increased number of hack-suspect players around it is no wonder that team chat is more and more often expressing anger at it. If tactic pulls triggered an event on a log for the objective, so we could SEE which player pulled them, and then the claim guild could ban such players from tactic usage, this lame coward tactic would be finished. What other methods can u guys think of to stop the garbage players from bringing this garbage practice to WvW and muddying up the game even more?

I just hope they make the first premium Warclaw skin a serious, menacing, impressive thing. Not a #%$ cute fluffy design like they have putting out way too often.