Suggestions for WvW activites once league play commences

As many of you know, wvw league play is right around the corner, which means soon we will be facing off against low population/low tier servers. Since even Tier 2 servers have difficulty preventing SoR from owning 90% of objectives, I shudder to think what it will be like when we are facing servers Tier 3 and below. Chances are they won't even come out to fight and we will have the zones completely to ourselves. However owning an entire BL is not all bad. It gives us an opportunity to have some really fun activities. I had a few ideas.

1) Zone-wide hide and seek. The winner is whoever can stay hidden the longest.

2) Free-style cliff diving competition from garrison vista. Points system TBD.

3) Long distance treb accuracy competition. Winner is whoever hits the target in the fewest tries.

4) Race through the 5 new spvp capture points in the "lake."

Anyone who has any other good ideas please share.

I feel like a terrible person for laughing at this list, but I couldn't help thinking up some additions

5) everyone stands in the middle of the field near an enemy spawn. No attacking, just healing and dodging allowed. Whoever lasts the longest wins. (similar to the commander roulette game our server plays on Fridays) bonus points if you do this while /dancing

6) chicken scavenger hunt. Whoever can find and kill the most chickens on a map in 10 minutes wins. 

Also most of these activities can instantly be upgraded to hard mode if completed while transformed as a quaggan  :3

DID SOMEONE SAY DANCING WHILE IN COMBAT IN WVW?    I'M ON THAT LIKE A LEAF ON MY NAKED SYLVARI!

Yes! GSCH roulette! I would totally do that in quaggan form lol :) I approve of this post!The only thing that I would say about the roulette thing is to do it in the back of the south camp instead of right outside of the spawns. Or maybe up by the centuars towards north camp. Hide a seek would be fun too.

Honestly, when I read the article announcing this "WvW league" thing, I just shook my head, wondering what ArenaNet is thinking.  

One of the main reasons that I stopped playing is the sad, unchallenging state of WvWvW and the zergfest GvG that it has devolved into.  Toss in the server imbalances, the strict population limitations for each map and you can't help but wonder ... just what are they up to?  If I didn't know that the WvW devs play just about every weekend with Fog's ClubNight, I'd be wondering if they're misinformed about the actual state of WvW.  However, they do play and evaluate, so I know that they must have a plan in mind.

That said, although I left the game on a disappointed note, I'm reserving any further Sekkjudgement until I see what ArenaNet delivers with these new changes to WvW.  At least they're trying to make WvW better, a lot harder than EA Mythic tried with Warhammer, so I have to give them credit and a fair chance.

All I will say is never - ever - take any thing for granted or become too over confident.  It is a road too often traveled and one that only leads to Disaster - a city where you were much better off before you reached it's city limits and joined the population and  even just visiting can lead to calamity.

Whether joking or not we don't want to be seen as "one of those" servers and especially "one of those" guilds.   We don't laugh at other players, dance on their corpse, taunt,  attack players too close to their spawn points, or have victory parades.  Take pride in a good clean victory and move on.  And I am with Sek on this... I really believe Anet wants to do a better job of WvWvW and I will hope they accomplish this yet I do believe they have a long way to go to make it competitive for all.

In an ideal world no server would ever be outnumbered and zergs just constantly swarming through a battlefield like a cloud of locusts would be stopped.  Posting Champion Guards at control points and in supply camps would go along way to choke up movements.  No one should be able to solo a supply camp or even a Check Point - imho.  Allow the controlling server to hire additional guards - including champions for these areas.   Allow them to hire siege drivers with arrow carts and ballistas for defense.   Make taking these points really mean something and based on the occupancy of each server on a map - automatically supply additional guards and patrols that would roam from controlled point to controlled point - with elite guards that don't drop in mere secs as a horde sweeps through.   There just needs to be something - or the fun will cease for all.

However it would be a good time to get your objectives for map completion - on old or new characters and also get some good leveling done on those low level characters that need some love.

Safe journ-

Agreed with the overconfident point morigana:) if we become complacent we will fail at the things we are good at and do more harm than good. A little bit of grand fun together is great, just make sure we keep an eye on the map. The weeks that we are playing low population servers we could use for training as well. Teaching people how to fight in WvW and proper siege placement would be a good thing.

Agree with the training aspects - siege placement - proper order for keep upgrades - placement of traps = when to spread out - when to stack on the commander - back ways into control objectives - how to ninja towers and keeps = how to cut the tail off a zerg... all great things to teach.

We just need to make sure we do our job on the field of battle and do it the Gaiscioch way - with PRIDE and HONOR.   

On the point of overconfidence, don't confuse the PPT game with open field fights. When it comes to PPT we will win the matchups against lower tier/underpopulated servers because, simply put, SoR will have more coverage around the clock. However, much like FA and DB this week, I expect some tough open field fights from the other servers in the league. Though we do win a lot of those fights, it's often not very easy. But in the end, this league system spells death for lower tier servers. I believe the leagues should be split up in to at least four groups to make things a bit more fair, imo. It should be interesting to see how this all plays out.

I would like to see two (or even all three) servers simply get 50-80 people lined up and charging into each other, a la Braveheart. No compacting, no tactics, just a straight up line up in a long line and charge for a movie style battle.

They need to remove travel speed enhancements from WvW.  The main reason that zergs work so well, is that a lot of people can move very fast across the maps.  So taking your entire map force to assault a keep holds little risk of loss for your other assets, when you can move 80 player to any point on the map within a matter of minutes.

Remove the travel speed boost element, and now you have commanders that need to figure in player placements to try and balance out offensive and defensive manning across several objectives, rather than just pointing the entire map to a single objective and zerging from objective to objective with little risk to failing to take the objectives.

There are several little tweaks that the WvW team can make, but the first one that *I* would make would be to disable all travel speed boosts.  Its going to be UN-POP-U-LAR, people are going to scream, as they do when anything EZ-mode gets taken away from them, but the benefits of removing speed boosts far outweigh any negative player reaction and would make the developers's job a lot easier in breaking the mapzerg mentality and bringing more importance on assaulting and defending objectives.

That's the one thing that I will miss about Warhammer... taking and holding keep objectives actually mattered.  This "field zerging GvG" crap has to stop for GW2's WvW design to really shine.  Otherwise its nothing more than sPVP arenas with a crapload of players.

Sek,

As unpopular as it might be - I totally agree.  I have actually never been a fan of speed buffs in any games (unless you are a super hero).  Do I use them - of course - I'm not fool enough to put myself at a complete disadvantage.   If the field of battle was really huge - that might be a different story - but it just isn't that hard, as you say, to move from one side of the map to the other which allows the "swarming zerg" to just - well swarm.  

One solution to zerging would be to reduce the zerg's max speed proportionally to the size of the zerg. Military fact is the larger the force, the slower it moves. However, the result of that change is so obvious that it will never happen; commanders will start yelling at any pugger who dares to join his zerg and map chat will turn ugly really fast.

Not sure if anyone else noticed, but I see a lot of commanders tagging down now when they run with a guild group just to keep puggers away.  

Totally agree with Saryx. 2 leagues is ridiculous. I would go one further to suggest that anet do some statistics and find what the average wvw population is by server and combine several of the low pop servers together when they face a T1 or T2 server. I tend to think that the AVERAGE level of skill in wvw is not horrendously different across servers. It really comes down to numbers. 50 bodies on a map will lose to 100 bodies 99 times out of 100. 

Boy was I wrong. Thanks anet for adding wvw achievements which are pulling every pve'er in existence into wvw. Now that I see the result, I think anet should have made the achievements really easy so those who are interested in them can check them off and leave. I actually kind of feel sorry for them. The achievements require a fair amount of grinding and if you are a pve'er in zerker gear, you are going to be feeling some frustration. 

It's not going to be that bad folks. Only one week will we possibly have a cake walk - week 5 v.s. Maguuma and Tarnished Coast. In every other week we face JQ and/or BG and either server can give us a hard run. I'm not convinced we can beat BG being that they're so incredibly stacked 24/7. They make up a lot of ground on us starting in the late NA timezone going through oceanic. This week (week 2) will give us a good idea of how we're going to fare as the season progresses.

It doesn't help that in some ways we've been our own worst enemy either, which may bring about more 2v1 against us as the weeks progress.

My point is that this season will be quite challenging and I think it adds a lot of interest to WvW. The size of the queues is a clear demonstration that the league has brought a lot of previously dormant players back to WvW. This is a good thing IMO.

Yep, BG zerg is running 24/7 and we can't keep up with that.  I've been on at 2 or 3 a.m. pst and we own practically nothing with no commanders running on our fields of battle.  As someone stated in map chat - the server with the constant coverage will win.  At this moment that is BG.   I'm pretty sure we won't drop out of "gold" but I have little hope we finish as #1 - and you know.... I'm ok with that since I'm still having fun.

One thing I have learned is that I am either "o.k." on all my classes or at least I "suck" equally no matter what I play.  I've been playing with my ranger in WvWvW using a build from one of the people in the dagger squad - and I get just as many kills and just as many deaths as my Necro and my Engy which I have played a lot.

Yeah the BG dominance is not surprising. WvW has always been a coverage game and BG has managed to maintain a very active recruitment machine for over a year. They're constantly refreshing their numbers with guild transfers and this has served them well. They also play a bit smarter than us in many respects, from supply strategies to holding the bloodlust bonuses more consistently. While their greater population helps I think we could be doing better. It's still only week two but unless something changes BG is going to walk away with the #1 rank.

Who wins #2, be it us or JQ, will be far more interesting. Week six will be very interesting as will week seven. Meaning week five v.s. Maguuma and TC will be a good week to rest up for those who have been burning their WvW candles at both ends.

Real life has been downright hectic for my business and family going on five months now. This has kept me from being able to participate. Not to mention a certain amount of apathy on my part with regard to SoR's WvW leadership. But that's a topic best left for another time.