So I’ve become a WvW player, against my better judgment.

I love Guild Wars 2. By far the best MMO I’ve played. I’ve played World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons Online (which is really NOT an MMO in the strictest sense as there are no open combat areas; just instanced dungeons and raids. I’ve played Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy as well. A small selection, I’ll grant you, but I don’t see a single reason to return to any of them since I started playing Guild Wars 2.

But I hate WvW with a passion, yet I also seem to be addicted.

Let’s start with the positive: WvW has some great competitive maps. Lots of hidden nooks and crannies, maze-like keeps and towers, and lots of open terrain. If you sit and think about why the maps are organized the way they are, it all makes sense. You need supplies (which you get fro camps) to build siege equipment to either attack an enemy’s land or protect your own. Yaks (short for Dolyak in ArenaNet’s vocabulary) shuttle goods from camps to various towers and keeps. Security checkpoints make sure the yaks can get from point a to point b in relative safety.

So, you cut off an enemy’s supply line by flipping security checkpoints, killing yaks carrying supplies, and then bring your own siege to demolish an enemy’s structures. Then you can flip the land and make it your own.

Players either roam or follow a commander around in a big zerg to accomplish these tasks. There are three teams made up of multiple guilds and the players in them, all battling each other for control of the various maps.

It can be a lot of fun.

Additionally, I maintain that Guild Wars 2 has the best player base I’ve run across. This is true for competitive play as well. There’s some smack talk and some taunting, and a few players get needlessly insulting and nasty when they aren’t winning, but most players are cool and are all about helping noobs such as myself get the grasp of competitive play.

Now for the negative.

First, I’m still a noob comparatively speaking, and I absolutely suck at PvP, so roaming is a bad option for me at this point. I hope to get better at it, but I’m up against players who have been doing this same thing for a decade, rather than a couple of months.

What bothers me is the balance between teams. Every three weeks or so, ArenaNet redistributes guilds and players among various teams, then those teams participate in something of a round-robin, where you play against two teams for a week, and then the teams are rotated.

Big guilds with a large number of players often form alliances with other guilds, which means that it can often be two teams working together to destroy the third. Brilliant if you are on the winning side of things, but a very tedious experience if you’re on the third team.

I always seem to wind up on the third team, which is due to the fact that I can’t deal with noise very well, and strange people’s voices piped into my ears is just not going to happen. That’s not the fault of ArenaNet; it’s just the way it is. Because the commanders want everyone in “comms” (Discord voice chat), they will often hide their tags from people who won’t (or can’t) join Discord.

Guilds generally only want WvW players who can do Discord voice chat, so I’m left in a guild by myself until I find one that will let me tag along and just play.

There are a lot of players who are simply afraid of dying. Dying in WvW means you teleport back to your keep (or spawn point), and then have to run back to the commanding tag (if you’re in a zerg). It can be annoying, but it’s a video game. All you have to do is press “W” a little bit more than normal, and maybe fight off a roaming player or two.

So zerg’s are constantly losing battles they could win because half the players run in the opposite direction as soon as they see a blog of enemies.

It can get tedious just dying and running back to the tag over and over again.

I think the main reason I’m playing so much (aside from the incredible amount of loot you can get over the course of your play session) is that I can’t handle how bad I am at WvW. I get distracted and separated from the tag too easily (I’m getting better). And as I mentioned before my 1:1 skills just aren’t good.

I’m old and autistic. Maybe I can get a lot better at this. Maybe this is where I find out I’ve slowed down enough that I won’t ever be able to play against other gamers any better than I do now.

I feel like I’m improving somewhat, but not fast enough, and it frustrates me.

Additionally, my unique living situation limits the time I can play. Most players aren’t living in a van and relying on solar panels to provide electricity. In the great Pacific Northwest, that means a lot of days where I just don’t have the juice to run my laptop all day. Clouds and rain. Rain and clouds.

It’s almost enough to make me beg my trust for help, but it will be a cold day in HELL before I trust the people who made me homeless (and did so under the guise of providing for my well-being so they could steal my money and literally leave me in the streets to die) for help playing video games.

Learning new things takes me a while, and I’m not always the best at applying that knowledge generally. For instance, I used to play chess with a small group of three or four people back when I was going to community college. At first, I lost every game. By the time I stopped playing with those people, I probably won about 75-80% of the games. But when I tried to play against a new person, I got my ass handed to me repeatedly… until I learned how to play against that person.

WvW is all about battling strangers. There are hundreds of players on all the time. You don’t get to learn how to win against one person, or even against one class.

As I stated, one of the main draws for me in WvW is to figure out why I am so bad at it. So I’m trying out different builds on a multitude of elite specializations, trying to find one that works for me, but also trying to figure out what I’m up against when I play my main (Yahoo Arglebargle, a ranger currently configured as a galeshot.)

And I’m still hoping to find a battle guild that will allow me to tag along without comms to guide me, improving my chances of winding up being the windshield, rather than the bug.

But when I’m short on electricity – like today – I tend to pass my time putting together sets of house (and adjacent) music to fight by. If you ever listen to my sets (you don’t), you’ll hear a lot more menacing bass in the future as I gear my sets toward “music to accompanying a mass slaughter.” Of Pixels. We’re only slaughtering pixels, people.

Or trying.

I think I’ll start broadcasting sets on a regular basis soon. My DJ software doesn’t use nearly as much laptop battery as Guild Wars 2, so I can typically manage a two-hour set even during rainy season.

At any rate, the sun is starting to poke out from behind the clouds, and I might have some usable current here soon.

Back to the mists.