Alliance Battle Weekend

I gave up playing AB level of play this is aweful now.. and frankly with this weekend the lag has been horrible wish they would do another double JQ/Aspenwood weekend soon less time and get just as much points if you win compared to winning on your own map in AB

They'll do that whether or not it's double faction weekend. It's default, like the inevitable 'suxons mob!' 'no, tardzicks started mobbing first!'

Also, am I the only one who actually likes playing on Kaanai as a Kurzick? The faction is terrific, especially if you have a good team who knows what it's doing. Kaanai winstreaks are awesome <3.

Good luxons go AB, good kurzicks go JQ.

Who cares about AB anyway now JQ gives you triple the amount of faction.

What's AB now? JQ and VQ give more faction even when it's doubled.

I've played about 20 games, won 15~ of them as Kurzick, it's a lot of fun

Very often I find Luxons mobbing, it depends on your luck and teammates..

Uhh, has anyone else been experiencing terribad lag this weekend? I've been having bad lag since the CNY event and I'm wondering if its a problem with my ISP. It seems to be worse when I get in a game...i've gotten pings up to 37K in etnaran. Even though we were winning I eventually quit because it was getting unplayable.

Thats great in theory but the best team in the world wont help you in anyway if the other 8 players run around the map like headless chickens.

It generally works because the enemy is typically 12 players like that. Then again, I'm luxon.

Yes. I haven't been in a game without complaints of lag. Even if I'm not lagging, someone else is going 'laglaglag' or 'stuck!' - assuming they can say so in the first place. My ping is jumping up and down like a grasshopper on crack, and it didn't do this during CNY weekend. My pings are not 37k, but 400 to 3k+ and back is not fun when you're the monk. But the faction was good enough that I didn't mind, heh.

Had one of these this weekend. We were Kurzick playing at Luxon defense and my guild team of 4 held off two whole groups... what's more we were killing a large number of them and before we got swamped had it to 5v4 (or less) at one point. What did the other 2/3 of the Kurzick side do? Apparently fornicated with themselves, because they capped nothing and obviously killed nothing.

It's fun to go with an organized, coordinated group, but sometimes it's just not enough.

'twas a good weekend.

We had quite a few wins on Etnaran and Canyon on Saturday, playing as Kurzick. I wasn't counting, but on Etnaran I would say we won more than we lost.
And it continued Sunday with the winning ways, won 4/5 matches on Salt Spray and when we moved to Grentz, it was a slaughter house. I lost a total of 2 matches on that map and I played close to 30 matches.
Moving to Ancestral we lost one out of the 10 I played there. We would have lost 2 but won the one match by 10 or so when we came from behind.
Overall very good weekend AB-wise and Balthazar / Kurzick Faction. I donated about 250k faction over this weekend.

EDIT: On the lag - I found EU to be less laggy than AM, very much so. I got spikes of 24k pings at times on AM.

This is one of the large problems with Double Faction weekend, as it brings out all the really bad players that will effectively leech faction off of the players that are actually trying. If you are lucky, you'll enter a "cycle" where teammates are trying and you win through a combination of good teamwork and builds. But the other half of the time, it feels like a total waste of time, where you'll see a huge mob running around. Even worse, the mob strategy seems to occasionally work, because sometimes the opposing side is so idiotic that they will just continually rush in and fight them--thus racking up kills. As a result, nobody ever learns and bad players never get any better, and they continue to treat AB as a Deathmatch scenario.

Right now, you can pretty much spam the Enter Battle button and contribute nothing, because the punishment for playing stupidly is whatever the time you waste to find other players to fill up your PUG (as probably half or more or your team will rage-quit). And during double AB weekend, you will have zero problems finding plenty of incompetant people that don't care about what party they join, and you can just keep going.

If ArenaNet wants to really teach people how to play, then they need to have a different kind of Faction Weekend where only the NPCs on AB are worth double (or heck, triple) Balthazar and Allegiance Faction and making only winning double the Faction reward. At least this way people will be slightly motivated to play with AB fundamentals like capping the shrines, avoiding pointless (or unwinnable) fights, and trying to win.

That would just swing the problem the other way. Nobody would fight to actually hold a shrine - you'd just see the same large mob of people running around, except the shrines are changing colour a lot faster.

You all make it sound as if winning/losing is somehow important. Did any of you stop to think for just one second that all those bad players running around might actually be having fun?

Heck, if it bothers you that much, just do something else that weekend, and play AB with the rest of the leet players the other 51 weeks! Its not as if AB is any good for faction, even if you win all your battles on double faction weekend.

QFT

Nubz, meet [earthen shackles] and [ray of judgment]!

If you just randomly add people to your groups, you're going to get shit people.

If you look at who you invite, there's usually enough good players to form a good team.

One good team that actually wipes/splits groups and defends shrines instead of mindlessly capping will carry.

This has got to be the first thread that I've ever seen on Guild Wars Guru where people are actually defending the PUG. Every time I see a thread about some bad experience in PvP or PvE--regardless of what it is--then the knee-jerk reaction is: You should have gone with some guildmates because PUGs suck.

Now this thread is suggesting that somehow the average PUG is just a huge pool of undiscovered talent. Like professional gamers habitually lurk in District 1 when they are bored and wait to be picked by a random group.

The most hilarious thing is when people claim that "Luxons always mob" or "Lux are more organized"... Huh? Kurz and lux are essentially random people sampled from the GW general population. Both groups are identical. Sometimes they mob, sometimes they cap, sometimes they're kinda organized... But most of the time members from both groups run around making poor choices regarding when to fight and when to cap.

I think the reason that people are defending the pug in this thread is due to the fact that it was a Double Faction AB weekend. This is when many of the older players and more experienced players decide, maybe I should max out that title. They often do come out and play during these special weekends, when normally they may not. This would lead to a increase in the ability of pugs and possibly making them better. By a general rule, yes, pugs are normally bad.

I think this is due to the fact that people are more focused on the red dots then the blue dots. Therefore they don't notice if they are mobbing or not.

All your base are belong to us. <33