Games GW2 Project "The Underdogs"

[wutae]

Project name : The Underdogs


Hello everyone out there, and welcome to the project “The Underdogs”, I will try to be as brief as possible, so I won’t take much of your precious time.

As far as every serious mmorpg gamer I know, they always hated one thing, to zerg, well I know that I hate it myself.

With the upcoming release of Guild Wars 2 and the WvW outdoor pvp Arenanet has prepared for us, I know and I suppose everyone who reads this article, knows that the area “The Mists” as they call it will be a 3 way battle between servers.

What I always hated myself, along with many fellow players I have played with, is zerging. And we all know that being in the Zerg side, is boring and dull.

This project is about gathering some very good and structured guilds together to the same server, this means, no zerg guilds, no guilds with random people just to fill up numbers, and only small group of players.

Obviously randoms will join the server, and some friends of friends, but that’s irrelevant, what we want to avoid is the Spanish, Russian and some other zerg guilds that exist through games, and that obviously will move together to some servers so they can zerg their hearts out.

That doesn’t mean I hate Spanish or Russian people, obviously there are some pretty good small groups out there consisted from only Russians for example, these people are welcome, what we don’t want is the zerg.


So what is the plan ?

First and most important is that guilds must be invited to this project, and not free to join. Guilds that love Outdoor PvP, guilds that are not big by themselves. If you have 2 good groups that have this kind of thinking, but you are inside a guild with 200 members, you are free to join us with the 2 groups, but you have to leave the rest of your guild behind.

In the end we don’t want to see 3 and 4 hours queue at the start, no reason for that. 500 good players and you know you can group with are better than 4000 players that you would never group with. And as Auction House is Global between the servers, we won’t have economy problems too. An honourable mention is that the outdoor pvp area will have player limit Caps, so better not have queue there as well.

This project will support the idea of PUGs, between the guild themselves, supports soloers that maybe want to join this kind of server but has no guild, and obviously the greater idea, is to make a strong player base, for competitive PvP, as well as Outdoor domination, and not with numbers but with skills.

What is more refreshing than winning versus full servers when you play from a medium populated server,

What is more refreshing that playing in competitive arenas, and the top 8 teams are from the same server and they talk with each other after the fight is over.

For guild leaders, what is more refreshing than losing a member, and actually have good players that you are willing to take them and fill up the loss, without thinking that, that player most probably is a bad player.

This game will become and e-sport, I truly believe this, so what’s better than being able to find replacements easy and fast.

You don’t need to have of course the best of the best guild out there, the greater idea is to gather up players and guilds for starters that don’t hide behind a zerg, that they actually want and need to fight by their own skills.

I have seen many guilds like that, back in the days in DAoC, but now days that’s something non existent, I don’t know where all these players went, even players from back then now tend to zerg, attitude changed? No idea.

For this project I/WE will need help, I obviously don’t know all the good non zerging guilds out there, remember you don’t even need to like me to join this project, you don’t even need to like each other, obviously some people will not go so well with each other, but what we all need is players that hate to zerg, small groups roaming, easy pugging, proving to players out there, that numbers is not everything, and when is some rare occasions we combine our groups, because we learned to depend on our own skills, the result will be devastating for our opponents.


If you have played DAoC and you liked to roam as an 8 man group,
If you have played WAR and you liked to roam as a 6 man group,
If you have played WoW and you liked competitive pvp on even numbers,
If you hated all other games, just because their pvp was just another zerg fest.

Then don’t hesitate to reply here with a representative from your guild, and get an invitation to this European project to gather NON-ZERGERS !!

2 Last things:

1st I hate my English and forgive me for any mistakes.
2nd Spread this article, you are free to copy paste this article, to any site you know, and I really encourage it, just make sure to re-direct people to this thread, so they can contact me. If someone wants to help with the project, feel free to PM me, as we will need a lot of coordination.

Not all guilds will be accepted, and guilds accepted will be announced. I am not someone who can judge by himself if a guild is accepted, so I will need as much help as I can get.



Best Regards to all,
Kynoko just another player in the mmorpg scene.

 

[eksdee]

Good idea in theory, it would need fairly unanimous support to work as intended though.

My issue with it, though, is that surely if the idea is to bring all these groups to one server then it means that there won't be much competition to find elsewhere?

 

[old.Tohtori]

To be fair, this sounds like a few peoples powergrab that will no doubt be used to enforce superiority on smaller guilds.

Also narrowing zerg guilds to russian/spanish is awfully narrowminded and the kind of "elitism" i try to avoid in MMOs.

 

[Ctuchik]

To be fair, this sounds like a few peoples powergrab that will no doubt be used to enforce superiority on smaller guilds.

Also narrowing zerg guilds to russian/spanish is awfully narrowminded and the kind of "elitism" i try to avoid in MMOs.

It's gonna be DAoC all over again..

wutae, please let us know what server group you end up in so i will know which NOT to pick. Because i had quite enough of that crap in DAoC...

 

[Gahn]

Keep us informed Wutae i'd like to get some fg - small fg action over mindless zerging TBH

 

[Raven]

Who would you fight though if everyone who plays fg v fg is on the same side?

 

[Gahn]

Who would you fight though if everyone who plays fg v fg is on the same side?

You wouldn't know anyway since Open PvP it's 3 SERVER sided, hence
I read it more on the line of having organized fgs picking up on the zerglings ^^

 

[eksdee]

Who would you fight though if everyone who plays fg v fg is on the same side?

Exactly.

I play in a guild of ~10 people and we will no doubt be hoping to roll on the most obscure server possible with the logic that we'll have more opponents to face from the other servers.

 

[wutae]

The more your server wins, the better servers you face, so in the end, you will have the action you need. It;s impossible to grab all the fg minded guilds anyways, what i am aiming for is to grab a decent amount of fgvsfg guilds, and go in a low populated server, friends of friends most propably will come, and we will end up a medium server. so nps at all.

to collaborate on that , every person here try to think about himself, if you come to "ABC" server, how many friends of yours will come to that server, even if they most propably will never group up with you? a low populated server, that has quite a good amount of good premade groups, will be healthy in no time and go medium one,

to answer the above mentioned questions, are you telling me that if we dont organise sthing like that, the "15" guilds i am trying to gather, if they split in 15 different servers, then you gonna have what? fighting 1 different premade group every 2 weeks? on the other hand with my suggestion, you will have a lot of people to choose from for arena games ( remember competitive arenas are not like wow, you can actually change settup every day, and the only thing that matters is the personal daily tournaments you manage to win in one month duration), plus you will have what you always wanted, playing in the underdog side, and killing heavy populated servers. if "daoc" guilds split, it wont help, the only other suggestion i can think of, for your above statement, is to actually gather the guilds and split them between 3 servers, and hope these 5 guilds per server can make the difference to make them after 3-4 months duration to be on the top 3 and fight each other, that's sthing that imo cant be archieved. There is a reason i posted this here, and not to any other forums, dont try to "kill" my idea, as i mentioned again above, i suggested sthing, and i request for help to fix this as good as possible. if you have a good idea, shoot it, by saying you suck, it sucks, daoc sux, you dont help, you are just trolling.

adding to that, because we wont choose a medium server and end up with 2.000 people queue, but instead we will choose a low server, we wont have queue neither for server nor for the mists.

 

[Soazak]

As WvW is server against server, for wouldn't competative guilds want to be on different servers? I know I wouldn't want to be on a server that has no good competition. Just by statistics chances are good guilds will develop on most servers anyway.

Good idea overall, tbh I think co-ordination between guilds is what ArenaNet want, but until you have some idea of how WvW works, and what impact a guild has it's probably best to wait and see

Who knows, zergs may rule supreme in winning the WvW so the teams at the top of their ranking may not have the best 'PvP' guilds.

 

[wutae]

As WvW is server against server, for wouldn't competative guilds want to be on different servers? I know I wouldn't want to be on a server that has no good competition. Just by statistics chances are good guilds will develop on most servers anyway.

Good idea overall, tbh I think co-ordination between guilds is what ArenaNet want, but until you have some idea of how WvW works, and what impact a guild has it's probably best to wait and see

Who knows, zergs may rule supreme in winning the WvW so the teams at the top of their ranking may not have the best 'PvP' guilds.

they already announced almost everything about wvw, as they had it open for the media beta, as well as they did an AMA(ask me anything) on reddit. you can find the links on the official site, as well all the wvw coverage in mmorpg.com forums about GW2. So yeah, the general idea is that arenanet has made a system that splits the zerg as much as it CAN be splitted. Zergs will still exist, but if a player has even a tiny bit of brain, he will try to avoid it, as well as arenanet claimed that game mechanics DO allow to win uneven fights, with only problem beeing the combat resses. anyhow you can read for yourself in the above mentioned websites, so gogo read and entertain yourself

But why i am even bothering, if you arle intrested to this project, let me know, if you are not, you can still discuss your opinions here, but there is no reason for me to collaborate, i have no reason to convince anyone at all, it's whoever wants contacts me, and i will let u know if you are accepted, ofc miri's guild and gahn are more than welcome.

P.S i want to clarify sthing again, i am not trying to gather all fgvsfg guilds in one server, that would be stupid, what i am trying is to coordinate 10-15 guilds to go and join a DEAD server, so we can be the underdogs, but at the same time have the team8s to play with.

Arenanet made sthing brilliant, servers rotate every 2 weeks, i believe that attracting 10-15 guilds in a dead server, will still help us have awesome action, as eventually we are going to face, all fg guilds that exist if not in the world, at least in europe.

 

[Soazak]

My point is, without knowing how the mechanics work you can't be sure if 15 guilds will be neccessary, or if 2-3 guilds and a zerg will be the people that often win. Yes AN have announced what they envisage, but until people have really experienced it, it will be difficult to predict. For example if seige contributes more to WvW victory, what you consider a good PvP guild may not be what actually does well (and therefore moves up the rankings) in the actual game.

They say it will be based on skill, but do they consider a skillful guild one that can take and hold a keep successfully or one that enjoys to roam and find even numbered fights, in nearly every game I've played competative PvP has usually existed outside of the mainstream objective based PvP.

Don't get defensive if people are asking questions about your idea, I'm simply suggesting it may be worth waiting to experience WvW before you make plans for it - like I said it sounds like a good idea, but if a dead server ends up bottom of the rankings simply due to the fact that greater numbers win (while they want 2 teams to combine to beat zergs, that hasn't always been the case in daoc), then you're going to be left fighting poor guilds

Also, if the idea does work, a dead server will probably become an overpopulated server once it starts winning, as I presume there will be nothing to stop people rerolling there to be carried? (GW2 version of relic hoppers )

 

[wutae]

I have played all mmorpgs that released after daoc, what i have seen for myself is that it's common sense that good players get along together, and that the basic group you start playing with, almost 100% of the times is not the final one, having a healthy playerbase of good players is never a bad thing.

I said 10-15 guilds, that makes 10-15 premades, let's assume that we get the maximum numbers that is 15 premade groups, that makes it 75 players, that's not a big number isnt it ? how many will stop, how many will not like the game? how many will suddenly go vanish mode to go and play on a different server with some irl friends?

In WAR, i lost a member, in a 6 man group, checked all playerbase, couldnt find a single player that would fit my group, in the end we were forced to find a player who wasnt even playing the game.

In WoW, when it launched and we were playing for Grand Marshal/High Warlord, we were all in Stormscale, a player left from a 15 man premade, we were able to find immediately a player, but at the same time stormscale had like for the first few months a 1-2 hours queue,

and believe me in wow it didnt matter, but how you will feel when you go to join game, and see 1 hour queue, and after that you try to join the mists and you find 1 more hour of queue, while your side is losing terrible? and you have your group w8ing for you to come online?

as i already said twice, i am trying to fix a server, with a healthy playerbase, and at the same time beeing the underdogs. i prefer to have 400 players that know how to play instead of 2000 that doesnt, all tries made in the past to gather pvp guilds in the same server were all wrong, because they were either "FFA" open to the public, or they announced server of choise way too fast,

and about your thoughts of a dead server becoming overopopulated, that is false, believe me some players will do transfer, but majority wont. if you check servers in almost all mmorpgs, for example swtor, we are talking about 70 empire for 30 republic, did it got even a little bit balanced? No, 70-30 is still the balance between the 2 factions even know, from 3000 people only like 10 people will switch, and most of the times these 10 are the people who go towards the losing team, and not the winning one.

moreover daoc had powerlvl, games after daoc didnt, if my calculations are correct, an average player will need 110-130 hours to get a character lvl 80, that's not fast enough, character transfer will be paid, as they announced already.

i mentioned russians, no i am not a racist, believe me i am a korean living in greece, i have met racists way too much to be one of them, but it's not a secret, what russians tried to do in 2 big mmorpg releases, and how the players involved in gathering pvp guilds, had to change server of choise at the very last moment to avoid them,

we are talking about some russian guilds that exceed 2000 members.

 

[old.Tohtori]

The problem i have with this organised supergroup of...erm...underdogs is the terms; "good players", "not all will be invited", "know how to play" etc.

Just smells like a way to gather elitist jerk supergroup on a dead server so that "newbs" don't bother you and you can control your server.

Not really "underdog" mentality.

 

[Gahn]

I wonder y i'm the only one who understood Wutae point

 

[Z^^]

Not intrested at playing GW2 at this time but, 8v8 was always more fun then being part of the n00bzerg. I don't like how they announce servers for rift and how it ended up also, like all pvp:ers pick this server its mile long ques and full of idiot sweeds. (sorry) Russians isn't much fun to play with either because generally they dont speak good english. Stormscale horde was an absolute nightmare to play on when Wow was released, swedish shit kids and just annoying people in general.

 

[wutae]

And let's not forget the fact that GW2 is B2P model, which means that millions of kiddos who were unable to play other games because of subscription model will come along

 

[wutae]

The problem i have with this organised supergroup of...erm...underdogs is the terms; "good players", "not all will be invited", "know how to play" etc.

Just smells like a way to gather elitist jerk supergroup on a dead server so that "newbs" don't bother you and you can control your server.

Not really "underdog" mentality.

I am putting all this effort, to reply to all of you, hoping that other people will bother to read replies, and they get their answers.

Reply to old.Tohtori
At the same time i said that it's not needed to be the best of the best, as well as i said that not all going to be invited because this is not open to the public invitation, if you "apply" here ( i dont believe it's like an application, it's more like informing me that your group is intrested ) what me and the other people who decide to help me will do, is to check if that guild actually has the mentality of "WE DONT WANT TO ZERG".

If you see me do 1vs1 or 5vs5, you will NOT add to the fight, where is the fun anyways ? I have lost a huge amount of 1vs1 games when i start playing back in 2003? until i smashed my head on the table, did a huge amount of theorycrafting, and in the end, it made me a better player letting me win even 1vs3/2vs8/8vs32 fights, which i inform you is extremely fun, if people were keep adding on my fights, i would never lose, or i would lose way too fast because an enemy added, so i would never become a better player.

Do you see my point ? except to zerg or not to zerg, the greater idea is that equal number fights, in the end make you a better player.

oh my god i did it again, i start typing and i then i CANT stop.

 

[LordjOX]

Oh I think everyone here understands your point.

Thing is, with GW2's popularity you can't really avoid that type of gameplay in WvW. It's part of human nature and regardless if you band together and create a clique on a server, you will always face zerg opposition from the other servers. Then it comes to the question if you want to eat grass all the time, or up your numbers to counteract.

I think you should stick to 5v5 in structured PvP, as you will always have competitive PvP there, with no chance of other people "adding".

And yes I agree with others, this reeks of the elitism that in the end killed off EU-english DAoC servers. And I was one of them silly people yelling at others that didn't play the game the way I wanted them to. Fuck that.

 

[eksdee]

Why is it elitism to enjoy a certain type of play? He's not saying anyone can or can't do this because they're not good enough, just that he'd like to promote a playstyle he and many others enjoy. So stupid that this kind of idiotic argument still happens in 2012.

Regardless, personally I think people should just join whatever server and let nature run its course. Every 2 weeks you'll be matched up against new servers with different guilds so it hardly matters if for 2 weeks you get zerged to hell or get farmed constantly by high-level small man groups does it? The beauty of this system is that it will keep things fresh all the time.

 

[Soazak]

Why is it elitism to enjoy a certain type of play? He's not saying anyone can or can't do this because they're not good enough, just that he'd like to promote a playstyle he and many others enjoy. So stupid that this kind of idiotic argument still happens in 2012.

Not all guilds will be accepted, and guilds accepted will be announced. I am not someone who can judge by himself if a guild is accepted, so I will need as much help as I can get.

I think that gives the message that some people won't be able to do it if they don't meet certain criteria - which people would assume is if they're not good enough ^^


I do think it's a good idea to get a lot of old pvp guilds on the same server fighting for a common goal. Not that I disagree with his post, I just think it's a little premature to assume getting 15+ guilds together on one low populated server will be a good idea - personally I've always found the best PvP tends to develop on the busiest servers.


@wutae - Based on what they have announced so far, and the points that a castle/keep gives towards your server score, it seems WvW will be more of the seige related play from daoc, rather than 8v8. Because of this, I think there is a good chance that the 'top rated' servers will be the servers that can muster together a good zerg, as well as small gank groups. There has been very little footage so far from the Press Beta Weekend that suggests gank group style play will even be any good in WvW, (we will probably see this in the rumoured stress test at the end of March..) the official announcements seem to put competitive pvp in the Structured PvP mode only, which as it stands is just Conquest (which to me isn't really a suitable game mode to have competative arena style PvP...and Anet have not mentioned any plans for the Random Arena that was so popular in GW1).

Also, they say that servers will be matched against servers with a similar strength, this may end up being in terms of population. Thus a small server with a load of top guilds on it, may end up just fighting the pathetic cast off servers that suck at the bottom of the rankings - the arguement for queue times doesn't really count, as every MMO released in the last 10 years has queues on release, and 2 weeks later they're always gone as the devs raise server caps, and the people that don't enjoy the game leave.

On the flip side, if it does work, it wont stay that way long - people will change their home server (fee based) to be on the winning team, so it's likely any successful server will end up being a busy server regardless.

A group of people that respect a certain playstyle is a good idea, if the PvP turns out as we hope it does that is. On a low pop server however, it's probably a good idea to wait and see how it turns out

I do agree with Uncarian though, that trying to force a playstyle on an entire server is probably what killed excal - it's always good to tolerate every playstyle, one of the fun things about daoc is all the pvpers would be in the same zones, rather than splitting the population like MMOs do nowadays.

 

[eksdee]

I think that gives the message that some people won't be able to do it if they don't meet certain criteria - which people would assume is if they're not good enough ^^

Assumption is the key word here. Speaking from experience, it's important if you want to try something like this to 'vet' the guilds involved. I played on an Aion server that was supposedly going to be 'THE PVP SERVER' and somehow the internal signups allowed two Russian guilds with 300+ members who zerged the living shit out of the server.

 

[Vasconcelos]

Black or white (or grey), GW2 promises.

Will it deliver?

 

[Hawkwind]

Why is it elitism to enjoy a certain type of play?

It's not, but believing your type of play is better than someone who prefers to play the game a different way is.

The elitist attitude of a minority pretty much killed off Excal and Prydwen. Never really saw the problem with the zergs in DAOC, they were easy enough to avoid if you wanted to.

 

[old.Tohtori]

Why is it elitism to enjoy a certain type of play? He's not saying anyone can or can't do this because they're not good enough, just that he'd like to promote a playstyle he and many others enjoy. So stupid that this kind of idiotic argument still happens in 2012.

First, it -sounded- like that and i do believe it was fair to say so. It was then explained it's not, but Hawkwind brings up a good point; zerg is a playstyle like any other.

Elitism is indeed saying "do things like X because it's better", where often those who don't wish to go by cookiecutter are shunned.

 

[eksdee]

To be honest I'd say that perceived 'elitist' groups/guilds are usually the ones doing the least cookie-cutter things at the time because they're most often the ones trying to find what will become the new cookie-cutter.

 

[old.Tohtori]

Oh yes, it shouldn't be assumed that everyone is an elitist jerk, but when they start telling other people to do so, then it is.

 

[eksdee]

Sure. The sad thing is that, furthermore, the one's who shout the loudest are most often not anything like as good as they think they are.

 

[wutae]

who talked about forcing things ? who talked about all these things you people assume ? ;o

I said two things clearly.
1. I like to be the underdog, i do believe that zergs will prevail at some point in this game, so to be able to remain the underdog while fighting the best servers out there, you must have the same "FIRE POWER" as the opposing server with less people, so you can always have action, and advance in this server matching system.
2. I like to have good players around me, to be able to choose with whom to play with, instead of having to choose for a replacement i may need from a pool of players that are counted in the fingers of my hands. But still you dont need to be the best of the best, you just need to be above average, so you can actually increase the "firepower/person" in the server, but the "bar" is actually quite low with the playerbase you see out there ;o

I am not saying that your points are not valid, but dont overthink this. I just see this game releasing soon, and gathering various guilds takes way too long, so i have to start from now, and see how it goes.

 

[pez]

Servers move up and down ranking depending on how successful you are at taking and holding keeps.

So you will never be the underdog.

If you are trying to get a server together of people with no interest in taking the objectives then you will find yourself fighting against the servers with the least co-ordination and worst players and will therefore always have the advantage and again, never be the underdog.