Opinions on organized FA/JQ/AB

I'm curious to know what people think about pre-made teams in Fort Aspenwood, Jade Quarry, and Alliance Battles, if only as a weekend event. Do you think it would draw more players to these modes? What about your own personal feelings?

A few positives from the tip of the tongue are:

1. Players who crave a more organized setting would finally get to put their ideas and teamwork together in a different gametype.

2. Friends, guilds, and alliances have the chance to play with each other and include more of the same in a match.

3. A new metagame is likley to appear with (semi-)organized teams. Imagine a team in FA spec'd specifically to defend and push amber VS one dead set on breaking through bonds, spirits, wards, weapon spells and the like to assassinate Gunther. Or a Kurzick team so overloaded with offense that they catch an invading Luxons squad offguard, forcing a change in strategy and playstyle.
Also, split possibilities would make for crazy Alliance battles where everyone has to react to all the different maneuvors of the other team.

4. New things are usually fun for a while if for no other reason than they are simply new.


Obvious negatives to this would be:

1. Many players like the random team matching as it eliminates the stress and time of finding and organizing a group. I also feel this way at times.

2. If any actual map imbalances exist they would come to light, be exploited, and ruin the enjoyment of the other teams, especially if there's no way to overcome or outplay this advantage with tactics, or player skill.

3. Party wide skills like triple-aegis, heal party with hb, light of deliverance(?) etc. would need hard counters. To a lesser extent so would spirits and minions. Spikes are minor as they can be beaten with smart splitting. Soul Reaping, however, would be a MAJOR issue


These are just a few things from the top of my head. I'd really like to hear what the rest of the community thinks and what other positive or negative issues you think may pop up.

"BLOOD SPIKE GLF 2 MORE!!!"

"TRAPPER GROUP LF 2 MORE!!!"

"SF SPIKE LF 1 MORE!!"

"balanced party looking for 7 people"

"PETWAY GLF MORE!!!"

Nah. Random is fine.

I'd like to see some weekend events on this actually. It could be interesting.

I kinda agree with the OP, it would be nice to actually see what it would be like, but there are the downsides. I for one though would like to try it anyway
Organised would make it far more challenging, and would hopefully cut down on all the useless quitters you get in them just because wammos get their enchants removed or a touch ranger keeps touching them inapropriately.
But as people have said in the long run certain builds would probably just dominate and you'd get more imbalanced pvp shouts

If you had to organize your own party (say, 2 4-man groups), it would probably cut down on the leechers, since word of mouth spreads fast and people usually remember the names of the usual AFK'ers. Or they would just make their own AFK'er party.

Looks like a great idea!
I don't like these areas being random, with all those leechers and nubs, it's usually worse than random arenas.
But such an event weekend would be awesome, finally some fun refreshing pvp, just add some neat rewards that would make top guilds want to play it too.
There's really nothing against it, if you don't like this idea simply have a weekend off these areas.

LF R9+ for Ab,no ty

That would make it even worse than it is now. Aspenwood is just a nice place to relax and get some quick pvp with good rewards. If a team leader had to form everything, it would turn into GvG or HA, two of the worst parts of guild wars. No one wants to wait an hour just to form a group only to play for a few minutes and lose. I can imagine AB's if this happened...

"GLF 3 more must be Ally or above!"
"ALL MM GROUP LF 5 MORE MMS COME ON"
"WMO LFG LFG LFG ! SHIFT ONE! ONE! ONE! ELEVEN! NO HAVE MENDING!"
"Will someone please take me? I've been trying to get in for two hours."
"haha u n00b u dun have friend of the kurzicks lmao haha noob"
"Leecher LF all-leech group! Invite me!"
"GLF air spiker and RC prot must be r9+ ally or above TS req mic a must"

Voice chat, a mic, elitists, snobs, playing what other people impose upon you, ugh... if I want to waste half a day on that, I'll go play HA. Whenever you let people form teams, you will always have elitism.

tbh thats better than nobody ever playing i bought factions after nightfall and have never got into jade quarry or fort aspenwood

I was thinking about this the other night.

I kinda like the idea of more structure, often you have some poor sod trying to organise the team.

However my guild is somewhat defunct now and we never get enough players to form a solid 4 man team let alone anything bigger.

I was wondering if you could have two streams of people. One is a team of 4/6/8 whatever. The other is a group of single person randoms.

This would add some structure but still mix it up for people who just want to jump in without the prejudices and grind of trying to get a team that isn't 90% dumb.

How can elitism be problem during a 3-day event?? Rotfl, just play with your guild/alliance or play RA during that weekend.
These modes don't make much sense being random and that's why few people play them. Having organised teams with voice comm could make them completely different, much better imho.

I think AB is just right as it is. Small squads with an overall random "mosh" feel. Poorly played pvp, but fun.

Organized teams in aspenwood and quarry would be an excellent idea. I say try it out as a weekend event.

I've seen elitism spring up in under 3 hours. From your avatar I can tell that you are completely used to elitism, and from the way you speak, I can tell you endorse it.
Guess what? There are people, like me, who do not want to be landed in a guild with an ugly cape, an apathetic leader, a bunch of corrupt officers, and sixty other members who constantly beg for free stuff, in an alliance of similar guilds. Some of us prefer a quiet, small guild or even guilds with two or three people in them. Here is another way I can tell you are a pvp elitist - 1) the telltale "lol" "rofl" "lmao" at the start or end of a sentence, 2) dismissively telling your target to do something, 3) and telling your target to play RA.
Sorry to scare you, but there are some people that *gasp* actually want to enjoy a computer game! I am sure there are many people like me who do not want some snotty thirteen year old boy who thinks he's hot stuff shouting orders at me over Vent . There are some people who do not want to spend an hour to find a group just for a quick loss or to be kicked a few minutes later. If I want to be abused by the thirteen year old kid, I'll go to HA thank you.

Aspenwood, if you had such elitism put in, would be incredibly unfair. You would have 8-monk teams on the Kurzick side making an "invinci-Gunther" and the Luxons would get hosed. Assuming the GW base is 65% Kurz and 35% Luxon, that's a good amount of players getting ripped off. This idea puts too much power in the hands of PvP-elitists with tons of time to waste. They could give massive amounts of power to whichever faction they wanted.

Please no! Alliance battles are the one place where i can do large scale pvp without having to worry about cheap team builds!

IMO, the only thing that could make alliance battles better is more maps.

The thing that makes an area like Aspenwood fun is you can play any build you feeling like playing. Far more fun and challenging trying to fight a battle where you don't have perfect communication, you have to make do with the professions and builds your team has, and your skill at recognizing and reacting to a wide variety of situations really comes into play. Plus it doesn't hurt that it usually only takes less than 5 minutes to get into each battle.

Organized teams would just turn it into another build wars format. The best builds for each side would soon be arrived at and that would be all anyone would bring in there.

Keep these casual PvP formats as they are for us Pvp "lite" players. Its the only fun we have with PvP. However, if they want to add a seperate district or area for organized teams that would play other organized teams and leave us random group people alone then I have no problem with that.

I would like to see a new kind of this semi-pvp in GW:EN. Something like AB or FA/JQ but maybe a bit more team-based, as you describe.

The problem would be Spike builds ofcourse. But maybe they could make the maps with 2 teams of players, each vs eachother ofcourse. But since they have to capture certain points, it would not be advisable to make Spike-builds, since you can not defend all points at the same tim with big teams (similar to AB). But at the same time, traveling between these point is made harder, because there will be NPC enemies (to all), spawning at different points from time to time. These NPC's should be very tough and require a good balanced team to take down. And they should spawn at random points, so that camping at their spawn point will be useless.

I would like to try out organized Alliance Battle for a week or so. Just to see how things end up.

If you actually gather people to do Jade Quarry, it is already essentially organised as you'll never see anyone else there.

i agree w/ the op. it shouldn't be made permanent, but it should be tested out. alternatively, u could simply make it like ra/ta. have a random setup for one and a non-random setup for the other.

WHY the hell NO ONE play FA/JQ ??? is fun, BUT no one is there = you NEVER start!!!

Please, ArenaNet, do something for increase popularity in that places, I know you can make something smart, please!

I know many players like the ability to just jump into the action with no hassle - that's part of the reason RA is so popular. It's important to keep gameplay as open and accessable to players as possible but I don't think elitism would be much of a problem.

Mainly because there's no fame in AB/FA/JQ. Teams in HA want ranked players because the only goal is to get as much fame as possible in the run and you're more likely to do that with a group experienced with HA. Similar to pve groups not wanting to take other players because they aren't level 20 yet and may reduce the chance of completing the mission/quest.

Also, AB/FA/JQ are just casual modes where the only goal is quick entertainment, faction or jade and amber. Only a complete tool would try to go through the same headaches to create a group for these as they would for HA or GVG. IMO there would be far more guild/alliance/friend groups than elitist shithead groups simply because everyone wants to have the most fun in the shortest time possible and spending X hours creating a team would defeat that purpose. The amount of guild/alliance/friend groups could only be rivaled by the number of PUGS. Don't underestimate the amount of people who don't have active guilds to play with or page-long friend lists.

And why would anyone take an issue with funky builds? If someone wants to try an all MM build why is that a problem? An 8-monk kurzick team in FA you say? How about an 8-mesmer lux team? Hello 5-BoA sin team. Hey look, four IWAY groups forming over there in the corner. So what? Others will join these groups if they fancy and they have every right to enjoy the game. They probably won't have much success but if they have fun then that's all that really matters. Spike teams are a PITA no matter where you go but that's a part of GW that we have to live with. Thankfully they are no way near as effective in open, splittable maps kinda like FA or maps with several objectives/control points like AB and JQ. Yes, a good guild/experienced team will roll a less experienced and coordinated group but that happens anyway when these players join FA/JQ/AB for fun.

Is elitism the only major concern then?


EDIT: I really like Guildmaster Cain's idea as well. Would be fun to see in GW2.

What about, like in TA, where you can enter with any amount of people?

Like, everyone has an option to form a party, but when they have however many people they want, they get grouped with however many left hey need.

Ex. (For Fort Aspenwood)

Team A has 4 people.

Team B has 3 people.

Team C has 1 person.

Team D has 8 people.

Teams A, B, and C get grouped together and team D enters their own game.

FA/JQ are far too centered around extremely exploitable AIs to ever make it as an organized play mode. With such fast rezes, luxons would have a heck of a time pushing through to victory if the teams were even close to matched in skill and coordination.

Alliance Battles require a more nuanced explanation. Yes, you can't control what the other 8 are doing, but brining an organized capping team of 4 is already a huge advantage that turns most battles to your favor, and earns you faction faster whether you win or lose. Randomway is still popular nonetheless.

Any one person can take mines, break gates, etc. by themselves.

I think it'd be rather fun.

Our posts really have nothing to do with each other. I was responding to the op, and I don't see how quoting my post makes any sense.

You said how easy exploitable AI along with co-ordinated teams makes it impossible to play coordinated.

If you can already exploit the AI by yourself, it doesn't really matter if you have 7 people backing you up or not.

Sorry for confusion.

Kurzicks can hide the gate NPCs safely behind the gates they are guarding by coordinating gate repairs and openings when an enemy is behind the lines. You then can't really kill them efficiently without an ele at that point, though that won't be enough since they will have monks on them.

A lot of my point has more to do with organized teams just playing better. Teams playing well would completely break the flimsy FA NPC mechanics.

An organized FA would be interesting, fun for a weekend maybe, but I seriously doubt it would make it more popular in the long run. I go to FA to goof around like in RA. I dont take it too seriously. I try to win usually. Sometimes I just go in to test/practice builds. I think a lot of others go for the same reasons.

FA doesnt really have any rewards worth organizing a team for. In HA you get fame for winning and get to open a chest winning halls. In gvg you get guild rank maybe champ points. In TA you get glad points. In FA you get....luxon/kurz points if you donate and takes forever to get to the next level, or amber/jade which is kinda worthless. Making a team for it isnt going to be worth the reward for most people I believe. At least not in the long run. Like I said before, for a weekend thing once in a long while it could be interesting but I dont see it becoming a permanent thing ever.

Have you seen npc archers at VoD in GvG? A.I. doesn't get any more expoited than that . Not even the girls on Girls Gone Wild can compare.

Exactly. There is no reason or reward to organize a team for these modes other than pure enjoyment. Anyone that does must want to have fun. I like the thought of filling incomplete teams with other players too.

Again, it wouldn't make sense to make a permanent change to these modes because they're the only casual pvp we have outside of RA (and to some extent TA). But as an event I still think it would be a refreshing change.

Waiting for hours with my mesmer or ritualist to enter UW/FoW/Tombs is a serious pain, and if they ruined the random access to Fort Aspenwood, that would be a very sad day.

Instead allow please random team access also to other end game areas!! It would be nice if you could enter for example UW in a random team, too.

Fort Aspenwood would be terrible, if you could choose the team members. Kurzicks could just stay behind the gates and keep the NPC's alive with monks. That would give them a victory every time.

I would be perfectly happy if FA/JQ required you to take a group of 4 (like AB does).

Why waste time at Aspenwood, when Jade Quarry is better suited to both rits and mesmers?

And you don't think the Luxons would catch on with a suicide BM/Well of the Profane or Order of Apostasy team?

It has always been possible to get into the same game as their friends, but few people take the effort to synch their timers. Durring the FA/JQ event weekend, when there were 3 districts of JQ, a group of about 6 of us were able to get at least 3 of us into the same game.

Incredibly lame. /unsigned.

You guys keep saying people will go "GLF MORE ALLY OR ABOVE" or "R9 GLF MORE" but do they do this in AB? No. And do you really think people of that high status (rank 9, things among that line) would really come to FA/JQ? I don't think so.

Thats because in AB, you only need three more people. And there are groups that are like: "LF 1 Healer, 1 Nuker, and 1 Tank SI!".

Its just not as common any more since ABs are not as active as they used to be.

i used to like playing at FA quite a bit (quit due to the leechers) and i don't think an organized team of 8 would be a good thing for it. however, it would perhaps be cool if you could form a party of up to 4 to play. i've taken guildies there and told em how fun it was only to see them get stuck on a team other than mine, leaving them rather lost and frustrated. i'd like the option of teaming up with a buddy or two, for sure.

but overall, FA/JQ could be greatly improved and made more attractive by:

- PUTTING A STOP TO THE *&^%* LEECHERS (*ahem*)
- creating a tutorial/explorable mode for those who are new to it
- increase amount of faction you earn there
- allow small teams to make up the whole of the team (it is a team effort, after all)

my 2 cents anyway.