Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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I wanted to post a bit on here because I was playing last night at a time where our numbers were dwindling and the influx of enemy players from another region pushed our server back to basically its last tower/supply camp. I spent a good portion of my time split between a few different things.

1) spamming, stay here and defend in team chat once ever 15 seconds. Please if your team only has a small foothold please get it supplied up and upgraded before trying to take a keep on the other side of the map.

2) Organizing a small group of people (5-10) to make targeted raids on supply camps to slow down enemy supply gain. Synchronizing taking all supply camps right around the score tick is a good way to mitigate some of the overall score damage being done by not holding any keeps.

3) Chatting with various people about night capping. This third one was time consuming, especially because I wished I could have posted what I was telling them on the forums. Well now I am trying to do that. Let’s assume that my private chats were much more compelling, eloquent, and well reasoned than this because it was midnight and I was frantically chatting in /whisper with 3 people while simultaneously fighting off hordes of enemies.

First of all I just want to say, the game is young. We know there are areas that we want to improve. Being steamrolled into a corner of your map is not the only problem in the game and not even the only problem in WvW. We are working on these areas, but I know it’s still possible to have lots of fun playing, and as the game matures these areas are going to get better and better.

I know we all know this, but it is nice to remember that WvW is persistent. This is one of the best things about it and we don’t want to inherently make logging in at non peak hours less rewarding than logging in during primetime. We already have long queues and off-peak is a chance to avoid those and still play the game. That being said, there are some things we need to do to encourage you to log in even when your world is being dominated by a massive rush of enemies who live in a part of the world where they aren’t checking their watches to see if the sun is about to rise.
We have been talking about this since about 2 or 3 days into launch and have some ideas. The problem is many of them require resources which we do not have right now as we work to keep the game stable and bug free in its infancy. However some of these ideas have some traction and we are working on them actively. They will still take some time to implement and time to test, but we are not ignoring the fact that players want to feel like their late night efforts are worth more than just a pat on the back.

• Players need more rewards for WvW.
• Players need to be given opportunities to break out of their base when they are trapped in by a wall of arrow carts.
• Guilds need a better reason to claim and HOLD objectives.
• Commanders need to be rewarded for their success and need to be able to reward their followers in turn.
• And so and and so forth.

We are just as into playing GW2 and WvW as you guys are, and we welcome and appreciate all of your feedback. Just know your feedback is going to a good place where we are constantly trying to improve the experience for each and every player. I hope this helps clear up our position and ease your concerns about the long term health of this part of the game. I know this was really long so…

TL;DR Night capping is fun, WvW is 24/7 but getting steamrolled is not fun and we need to work on that to make it better.

OK, time to get back to Bluelake Tower in JQ Borderlands, there is bound to be a mass of HoD invaders at the front door!

Jon

NOTICE: We had some technical difficulties and towards the end, the audio becomes out of sync with the video.

This week get all up in the Tier of Tears as we talk with Marstar of Elite and Ritsuko of Synapse; two big guilds of the Titan Alliance. These two guys give us the low down of what happens in the middle of the night when North America is sleeping.

All throughout the week, every forum was buzzing about night capping. The first weekend of last week’s T1 matchup (HoD vs. SBI vs. ET) was killer for HoD but as the week progressed, the server pulled out a win on Tuesday. Find out all about their strategies and the differences between night and day!

Continue reading to watch the show.

Originally posted by RamonDomke (Source)

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Hi Everyone,
All is fair in love and war – and as love, WvW is a battlefield.

There are exploits, I’ll give you that – but then there is coordinated effort to ensure your world or your team uses each and every resource they have to their advantage.

War is not fair, war is not pretty, war gets out the worst in us – and the best – and even if we have excluded open world pvp from the rest of the game, this is exactly what happens on the WvW maps: It is the ‘playground’ for strategists and great tacticians, it is the place for coordinated efforts and mean ideas in the middle of the night.
Night capping is one of those valid tactics to score some points in a lasting battle – to get your world the upper hand, or cancel out daytime supremacy by another well coordinated opponent.

As Guild Wars 2 will progress in time, so will world vs. world and core gameplay mechanics. But for now, night capping is one valid possibility to ruin your enemie’s days – pun intended.

Night-Capping has been a huge point of contention this week. In the top tier competition this week (HoD vs. SBI vs. ET), HoD has been able to catch up to win, in part, because they have a strong Oceanic presence on the server. The dev quote above goes to show that all is fair in love and war.

If you’ve haven’t been following the saga on Guru or the Official forums, there has been a raging debate, and cry of unfairness, that ET and SBI servers only lose because they don’t have a big enough presence over night. Unfortunately for them, as shown in this thread on PRX’s public forum (key guild in the Titan Alliance on HoD) you can see all top tier servers had either high or full statuses almost throughout the day.

Of course, players on ET would decry that they always won North American Primetime hours and that is all that matters. However, the rebuttal on HoD is that since it’s the most populated server, it is more difficult to get core guilds in side the fight in larger numbers. Because of this, their coordination and their force was effected. This could of been evident as HoD did not take the lead until approximately Tuesday.

Where do you stand on this debate? Is it fair or not? Who really won this week’s matchup?

Keep an eye our for this week’s show, as we will discuss Oceanic guilds and their effect on the game.