Anet tricked me with 12 v 12

Sooo wait.... Are you telling me you didn't ever bother getting into a group with friends before because... (excuse me I am confused....)

You could make teams before - it wasn't always groups entering at random but if we were down a guildie and couldn't get a PUG we entered as 3 and we were always organized... I think you all miss the fact that it was full of new people who didn't know what they were doing - chaos was expected originally; just like anything where you throw random or teams of people into something they don't understand.

That sort of chaos was to be expected - go find the 12v12 is ruined thread and you will see that as a bystander I have seen just as much chaos (and by bystander I have watched my husband play it) - its as bad now as it was the first day of the FPE - the difference is, by the 2nd day of the FPE most everyone had it figured out and organised... It's been over a week and I still see mass leavers and people running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Don't believe it, you watch a couple of matches over someones shoulder.

And there was a few idiots during the FPE shouting: don't bother getting a group just hit enter - usually they were set straight and by the third day I rarely saw anyone saying that at all.

Math is totally irrelevant. You arn't healing a single person for hundreds of HP, you are healing a group, which is the point. Let's not forget that there is a nondescript range for party skills. The result is not different than in 8v8 because the effect isn't different, just more wide raning. Heal party won't save a person getting their ass handed to them, but it will heal more people at once - in range.

I WANT MY 12 Party screen back up. I don't want 8 other allies who, when I play a monk I can't really tell how they are doing... AND WE CAN'T COMMUNICATE w/ them...Fix ANet!

Or this could just be, you know, corporate paranoia -- they're so afraid of not getting your money that they'll do *anything* to avoid even the *possibility* of a scenario that involves you not buying.

eudas

Im starting to get into PVP.

The 12V12 is just wrecked.

You cant speak to your allies (and anyone saying use local, well yea lets use local chat to talk tactics where the other team can hear you DUH).

Playing as a monk is completly pointless alot of the time as its normally not my team-members that need healing, but you try speed clicking on varios people to heal, its a nightmare.

But most importantly, it feels like 4v4 not 12v12.

I agree completely...12v12 should be changed...think about it this way

E\Mo Renewal party spam
+59 hp every...4 seconds (2 recharge, 2 cast)
not much IMO...if you can't put out at least 100 damage in two seconds against a soft target...go back to presear

Its not just E/Mo heal party but any party skill was overpowered in a 12 on 12 fight. Its not that you cant put out enough damage to deal with the heal parties but your enemy could kill you because he technically had an extra 200 health you dont have.

It was a BETA EVENT beta is not release beta is a testing period. Obviously Anet thought things like Aegis/Heal Party/orders were overpowered in 12 on 12 and it did not go with the original idea of an alliance battle, 3 teams of 4 duking it out. So they fixed it. yes they could have fixed it in a different way yes it could be better, but there is no point in ranting about it saying anet tricked you. They didnt, part of it being beta is that things are expected to change.

I hope they update the alliance system so that allied parties would show up under the Allies tab in the party window (so party wide skills do not effect them and you can keep tabs on their health and even communicate through team chat).

Let's see. They one one system during the one beta event, which everyone has access to. People like it, so they decide to buy Factions. They buy Factions and what do they find? Arena Net has changed the entire style and manner of the battle. Tricked. The new system was not tested, and it shows. Arena Net needs to learn that changing things at release is stupid and could start hurting their bottom line. If ranting is the only way they can learn this, we need more ranting.

Also from now on, if there is a system in beta you like, don't buy the game until some poor schmuck who has bought it confirms they changed it at release to screw everyone over.

Agreed, too bad I didn't do that before I wasted $50 on this crap.

So they are supposed to release buggy content then because if they change it, it will make people mad? They saw a design flaw in the 12 on 12, they fixed it. While you can ask for things like "Put allies under allies in party window" and "make team chat go to all 12 people", leaving alliance battles in the state where 1 e/mo heal party spammer (or even worse an orders/hp spammer with OOB) can easily keep the tide favored to his side through the massive amount of total health being healed. No single person should be that powerful in the fight.

Yes it can be better, and yes it can be improved while keeping HP/orders from being too powerful. Besides, you had that elongated early access event to decide to buy it.

BY the way, the amount of complaints about factions is currently far less than the release of prophecies. If you remember the hundreds of wtf where is UAS threads.

THANK YOU! Why is everyone assuming that 12v12 was changed because ANet thought that party wide spells were too strong? I dont' recall that being stated by ANet anywhere, and if it was, a link would be most required as evidence.

There are many things I like about Factions, there are some things I do not. It just so happens that the change to 12v12 is something I personally don't care for. It was a link between PvP and PvE in the FPE: both sides could enjoy it. More importantly, it served as an actual spanning platform between the two communities in that PvE players actually liked it. They don't want another HA, RA, TA, or GvG. They want something that's more PvE-ish, and the FPE version if Alliances Battles was more PvE-ish than the other versions of PvP. And if I'm not mistaken, the PvE community was large. Another reason to change it back is that a number of people apparently bought Factions (or were planning on buying Factions) almost entirely because of the FPE version of Alliance Battles. The change HAS cut sales, which is not a desired effect for any company. Hardcare PvPers of course want more of the same, but there are a lot of others out there that want...CASUAL PvP. Besides, the Alliance line affects both PvE and PvP. Why should it be so unappealing to the PvE group when it appears that a large number of them enjoyed it during the FPE?

Doesn't stop Smurf Guilds. I've personally experienced a group of four quitting before the match started and have heard people talk about having it happen to them before.

People that are intent on ruining one side's chances of winning isn't going to be stopped by Guild alliances.

When I see irrelevant things like this, I prepare myself for the opponent hurdling a strawman at me from a catapult.

And there it is, I ducked, good thing.
A bug is not a "design flaw" in the manner you are using the term.


Bs, bs, bs, bs, bs. Party effects have a non-descript range, and not only that but heal party isn't that powerful - the max an el/mo can do is heal for 67 hp, oh no! 67 hp! Warrior skills can do that much damage in a single blow, not to mention a 2 second cast time and recharge. If a single el/mo with heal party can turn the tide of battle in a 12 man match with heal party, you deserve to lose. Maybe if a 4 man team of el'mo stood around perfectly spaced spamming heal party simultaneously, possibly. But they would required guards not to get their asses handed to them.

Only because of screw ups with the CE, if that ever happens again Arena Net/NCSoft can expect their game to be going down the hole anyway.

Heal party has a shorter range than maintained enchantments (IIRC). I was E/Mo being a ward maiden in the FPE (as well as other builds) and i can assure you, HP was NOT overpowered. Considering how much damage the AOE fire spells and traps were doing (with some help from the army of minions body blocking), it didnt really even out.

I think the most important issue Anet needs to address is LACK OF COMMUNICATION WITHIN THE SO CALLED TEAM OF 12.

During the FPE, before the battle started, we would assign people tasks. Sometimes we would change splits depending on the map (If the map was to our disadvantage, I usually asked more people in the middle to capture the middle points in a 8, 2, 2 split)

You cant even do this anymore. You cant call for help. You cant tell people to retreat. Quite frankly...i cant even tell when people from my side just quit!

-.o

another problem is we're all grouped into 4's but theres absolutely no way to use the mini-map to see ur 4 all u see is red dots, so if i die and in the 20 seconds it takes for me to rez my team has moved on I cant instantly see them on the map i have to click names to see where they are and where they're goin.

*sigh* its still fun but nowhere near as good as the original..
no way to tell who left on ur side
cant effectively link up with other members if u get seperated or people drop
still get the same behavior in that people wont listen and will go off and do whatever they want instead of sticking with the 4 man group we've been constrained to but now i cant communicate with those closest to me

personally i dont think that it was because of the party skills that it was changed there are many different approaches they could have taken without it being so drastic such as changin the effect slightly in a 12vs12 match so it only affected the nearest 7 allies.

ill still play but i hate it compared to the FPE!

Sad as that may be, it does restrict it somewhat. Not everyone is that determined, thankfully.

I am a hardcore PVPer and I definitely do not want "12vs12" turned into a series of 4vs4. If I wanted 4vs4, I'd do RA and TA in Chapter 1. As such, I see no compelling reason to buy Chapter 2 because in my view it does not offer anything worthwhile enough to justify the $59.99 CAD pricetag. If they made 12vs12 actually be 12vs12 again instead of a series of 4vs4, that would offer a lot more incentive to buy it.

Besides, waiting for good players to assemble and forming parties is a very tedious and incredibly wearing process. Hence even for hardcore PVP players, there is much value in casually having a party assembled randomly for you and not having the headache of making one or waiting around til someone else makes one.

Here's one vote from a hardcore PVP player to put 12vs12 back to the FPE style.

Those few who cannot defeat Heal Party and Aegis in 12vs12 do not have to like it; they can go practice improving their enchantment removing skills, energy denial skills and killing the target fast skills in RA and TA while everyone else enjoys 12vs12 in the FPE style.

to people saying they paid blah blah for factions n 12vs12 was the deciding factor etc. when u buy a game like this, u run the risk of changes to the game in the future as part of the terms. Anet could make all the mobs big fluffy pink rabbits n theres nothing you can do.

Obv. there must have been a very good reason for them to change such a big thing in factions at the last minute else they wouldnt have ran the risk.

I can't believe people are complaining about party-wide effects.. just let it be since it's a NEW PvP format. Every PvP type shouldn't be oh-so-same and boring.

But yeah. I had the same complaints as a "hardcore" PvPer.. everything took way too long to setup, arenas is a joke, but 12v12 offered a nice break from things.

I was also pretty close to buying Factions (only because of the FPE 12v12) but now I'm just going to wait until improvements are made.

Obviously it wasn't good enough and definately was not well recieved.

Oh and Loch, if your name is based on that of the philosopher, you shame it by association.

If it's larger than radar, it isn't much. I did PLENTY of E/mo heal party spamming on Friday. After a few hours of doing it and usually hitting roughly half the group, I gave up on it and went back to regular monking. Four people could probably cover all of the shrines; 2, not even close.

I didn't say warriors were weak. I said "Having a bunch of IWAYers running around is NOT going to help you cap objective points unless they split up, at which point they would become useless and die in a very undignified manner." Warriors are not going to be capping shrines by themselves. They die. If someone faces a war on the open field, then yeah, they should run. If they run to a rez shrine, they should laugh while the war dies. I was not speaking about warriors killing other people 1v1 on the open field, I'm talking about warriors capping shrines. They don't, at least not by themselves.

This setup isn't even remotely super, nor was the FPE any more full of "typical builds" than ABs are now. In fact, you just said warriors are all over AB now. I doubt we'd see a huge increase in warriors if the format was changed back, and in fact, things you have said suggest we would actually see fewer warriors. At least if the FPE setup was brought back, we might see some eles, some necs, whatever else. Being a monk right now is absolutely pointless. No one should EVER bring a monk into AB. Do you really want that? You want ABs to be restricted to basically 2 or 3 professions?

I also find it interesting that you complain about lack of organization right below, but your teams in FPE were organized enough to stay in range of your orders, your E/mo heal party spammer, your martyr monk, and so on. Everyone was just running around in a group of 12? Because I found that running around in a big group was not usually the most effective method. Of course, that's alleviated now, I suppose...

Well, your experience with parties was much different from mine during the FPE. I was frequently near a shrine and able to get some support from a war or ranger to help me take the NPCs down and cap it. Perhaps I was simply stuck with good groups or something, but I would say at least half of the groups I played with during FPE were quite good about communicating with one another.

So, we can keep it now and have useless monks and virtually overpowered warriors (your words), or we can switch it back and have eles, monks, warriors, rangers, necros, and so on that are all useful in ABs.

Loch, I don't suppose I need to mention that you don't always rez in the same spot as the rest of your 4, don't always die the same time as the other 4, or even need to be in a group of 4. 2 people can easily cap one shrine; you don't need 4 to do it. Frequently, a friend and I joined up together and capped shrines while the rest of our party faced off with the opposing team in the middle of the map or at some shrine. The point is, you do not always need to be running around in a group of 4. Sometimes it is much better to break off with just one or two other people and have everyone else doing something else. With the FPE system, it was easy to "organize on the fly" like that. Now, impossible.

I just got a crazy idea: make the party size 6. The other 6 would be allies, the trade would be replaced with a "alliance team" channel, and the 1 minute timer would still exist. If you entered without a full party, a team would randomly get assembled, and an in-game system would prevent any party deemed "crappy", i.e. 6 warriors and ensure things that are balanced, like at least 2 monks on the alliance team, and at least 1 warrior. The 6 member praty would enhance whole team enchantments to make them have a point. What do you think of this system?

Actually if anyone bothered to notice the last day of the FPE there was very minimal leavers. I still in the current ABs see as many leavers as the first day of the FPE.

I think it boils down to this

First day or two of the FPE: people were curious and confused or freaked out when they saw it was a 12man list.

Now with current ones: They either don't like the play style, they don't like that they are losing, so on and so forth. (Unfortunately these leavers won't change.)



I think that makes for too much chance for guilds to meet up and tests builds and utterly block out the random people.... Takes long enough to get a 4man group together - a six man would just be craziness

No matter how much conversation or anger.
Lol. . . Anet's not gonna change anything.

I'm not talking about covering all shrines, I'm talking about covering the majority of your team, which tends to be centralized and not off to the farthest extremes. If you by yourself can cover half the team with heal party, add another heal party e/mo and voila, you've got the whole team covered most of the time. I don't care if an NPC in the far corner of the map isn't getting covered.

Huh? Explain, please. You can easily cap a shrine with two warriors. You can do it with one warrior, but as with any other character, it takes too much time to be worth it. If you have heal party spam, you'd have a pretty hard time trying to die to the NPCs. Small groups of warriors + heal party will own small groups of something else. In large groups, warriors + heal party + orders will still destroy groups of something else, and if they don't they can just split up and destroy them that way. With the relative disorganization of AB's, you can't do much about that. Hell, organized parties in HA get rolled by IWAY if they let a few critical mistakes slip, imagine random groups of 4.

What the hell? Warriors are common in AB because they are good. If you could use skills that augment their strengths (e.g OoP) and minimize their weaknesses (e.g heal party, extinguish), guess what, you end up with an even better team, one which everyone will tend to favour. The more organized you make something, the more people will tend to go for the build that gives the best chances of winning. There's a reason why in random arenas you see all kinds of weird builds, while in GvG you see mostly the same old stuff over and over again. You make a lot of statements with nothing to back them up. How do you come to the conclusion that more organization = more diversity?

Orders and heal party require the holding down of ALT, finding the place where you can cover the most allies, and repeatedly slamming the heal party / orders key. You don't need a masters degree in communication to do that.

Good for you. For me, between the target call spam of 11 other people and the chat of teammates, I couldn't get a single thing across in typing. I did and still do get the help of allies, but that doesn't require teamchat, just common sense and decent skill to realize that two people can take an enemy point easier than one. Like I already said, I'd rather have some sort of balanced gameplay.

in those 4v4 and 6v6 matches that it usually boils down to at a shrine, u are generally in pretty close quarters with the rest of your party, and theres a few very nice divine favor skills ppl often overlook

Yep best trick ever from Anet show something in a preview to attract buyers then "Fix" it to make players feel frustrated after the purchase.

What the #$@%^ i am gonna cancel my subcri.... wait a minute they already got every cent they will ever earn from you. Look whos laughing their way to the bank now.

Lucky for me i never like 12v12 anyways. Long live PvE YAY!

*starts playing Factions and encounter more locked gates and Fed Ex quest*

%$@%$&*^&$%

I've played 12v12 in the fpe and I've been playing it now for a couple of weeks. These are my observations: as has been suggested in this thread, the 4 player teams do make things more manageable tactically, but the lack of communication and full party visibility is a real handicap. I've stopped playing 12v12 with my monk character because of the impracticality of healing anyone other than my immediate team. The solution for that problem (allies, full party chat) has already been suggested in this thread. I hope arenanet will listen and change it.

However, I also wish that Arenanet brought back the "instant action PUG" option as in the original FPE. Here's is my reasoning: the original 12v12 was chaotic and spontaneous. You could enter instantly, but you never knew what you got once you were in it. It was utterly rubbish tactically, but it was enthusiastically fun. For serious players it must have been a rather poor experience. But it was ideal for noobs like myself to have a quick shot of chaotic fun.

GW is actually many different games all under one roof. The original 12v12 was yet another type of game, different than the current 12v12. Not really one for the serious PVPers but still tremendous fun, even with the leavers. So here is my suggestion:

Keep the 4 man teams and improve communication, that will satisfy the needs of the tactical players. But also bring back a separate arena for random 12v12. It will not be everyone's cup of tea, and if not enough people enjoy the frenzy of it, it can always be eliminated. But I would bet that the great majority of players (who admittedly are not all that good) would find it the best and more accessible PVP experience.

Noobo

out of curiosity has anet responded in anyway about the Alliance Battles, reason for change, anything they're doin to alleviate our concerns, if they will ever change it back etc??

i agree with the OP and wish that these issues were "corrected"

I don't think the "there were too many leavers" argument is valid. Towards the end of the FPE there weren't many leavers because the ones who were playing understood the format and knew they'd get rewarded even for a loss.

I read most of this thread and also others in the same line, I do agree with many of the complaints brought up towards the 12 vs 12 battles, I do however see things differently on several aspects and have to say am surprised this seems to have gone either unnoticed or simply it’s something people don’t see as important enough.

Fist off, the *Alliance battles* themselves, like many I enjoyed the fpe version better, not what I expected or hoped for but better than it is now. Still having a random 12 man team is not an alliance battle to me if I can’t go into battle with my alliance. The best chance we had was trying to time hitting that enter battle button which is simply ridiculous.

Of course I understand the difficulty some players could have fielding a 12 man team or even 3 x 4, so of course a possibility to go in without a full 12 man group would have been needed. I’m thinking something like RA and TA would have worked, two areas for the needs of both groups, so alliances that are big or organised enough to field 12 players for *AB* would be able to play as they wish. Now they simply can’t which I find unacceptable and I don’t care how you put this, those are not Alliance battles but just larger RA areas.

Before anyone jumps on the reply button and starts telling me I haven’t read the thread, yes I have. I just don’t agree with the reasons for changing the format or the solutions to the problems they had.

In the case of skills like Aegis and Heal party, would they be overpowered? Would they make the battle that much longer? Probably, but yet do we take what can arguably be called the most important new aspect of Factions and change it to the point that they did because of a few skills that were originally balanced for 8 vs 8. Personally I would rather have them re-balance those skills if it as to come down to that, than what we are seeing now.

Quitters, well again do you punish all other players because you have a problem with quitters, add a penalty of some sort, like some have mentioned in this thread already and the problem would already be a lot less significant.

As it stands now, I see Factions as bringing two new things to the table and sadly I see those as very minor and even unneeded or wanted changes. The new alliance functions of GW have for one made it easier to get guests for GvG from within your alliance because of the chat. Yes it’s a nice little addition, but it isn’t the thing everyone was waiting for, especially considering that we have been waiting for over a year for those things.

On a more negative side, the only real alliance activity we can do is farm, farm and farm some more one dumb 8 minute quest that you run to obtain faction. Well ok this isn’t really an alliance thing since the quest can be run under 8 minutes with henches! What is the big goal behind this…controlling towns for elite content, again I can’t help but think this falls short of what people were expecting from the Factions release and pretty much guarantees that most of the GW players will have some level of trouble getting in to that content if not in a huge alliance.
I can’t help to think that if major changes aren’t done to several of the new Factions functionalities, we can expect a downward spiral in the player base. Maybe those changes are more complicated than we think of figure to be, in that case I think Anet as to step up to the plate and give us the exact time of day. Not something like we are use to getting, *we are working on it and it is coming soon*…famous last words, but an honest answer that actually does enlighten us on the present situation.

This should help take away some of the frustration, for now at least.

The only problem with having two arenas is this - the current ABs moves the lines.... So is one arena just going to be faction farming? (personally I would think the old AB/FPE system would be great for this since the more elitest type like the new way cause it supposedly calls for stratedgy >_> It only seems fair that what they like actually be important and I say this with both sarcasm and truth... >_<).

The reason for the bit of sarcasm is that several times I read in here by those "elitests" that manning the headless chicken team was impossible.... So does that make me and so many others that could are uber elitests who cut our own path and don't do the cookie cutter o_O? I just find it amusing is all.

But that is the problem if you make two AB arenas and probably why Anet has done so. And if they choose one system/arena to control the line over the other then you have more mad people... (personally I don't care... I have 10k faction to raise and I refuse to do it in the current AB system... however if they aren't punishing the faction farmers >_> ... of course that would be "unfair".)

I also want some sort of answer. Last I heard they were "working" on a means of communication but thats the last we heard. I won't be happy with just a line of communication, I want the roster back even if it is split between party and allies. I want to see what is left of my team dangit. ;_;

I'd say it's naive to think that you'll get good results by barking orders at a random group of 12. You'll have no idea who in fact will follow and who will stay. The current 4+4+4 setup makes team coordination manageable, since each team of four isn't cluttering up the same team channel and pinging/drawing on the same radar.

You could do this with a four player team as well - just tell them to stick together and help complete the next objective. In fact, I believe that it's even easier to get predictable results by ordering around a team of four.

And if your team of four doesn't listen? It happens in pugs that I join sometimes, so the best I can do is suck it up and try harder in getting a better group.

Oh, and Ken, lay off the flat-out personal attacks; those don't add anything to your position at all.

Yeah, I love how you see someone disconnect and you just have to wonder who has a disadvantage....niiiiiiice idea

Bring back the old system. That new rule ending match when +100points works good enough.

...bastards