Like much to do with The Tuesday N00b Club, our initial foray into the rather harsh world of Ranked GvG Combat happened sort of by accident. It was to be one of our semi-regular internal guild Scrimmaging Nights, you see; a carefree evening of friendly bashing each other's heads in in the comfort and security of our guildhall. I generally like these; no consequence PvP on a strictly among friends' basis, where we get to try out some of the less useful skills and builds, using a wealth of skills which aren't terribly potent in a PvE environment, and where you can be reasonably sure no-one is going to talk smack or do whatever the GW equivalent of teabagging is, if they kill you. A bit of fun.
Trouble is, we had an odd number of folks online, meaning that one team got the AI healer. I like to think that anyone can do any job in that game - a quick shuffle of the skillbar and away you go, but I'm starting to realise that while this may be true on paper, like much of my GW Theorising, it doesn't quite work out like that in practice. The picking teams thing took a bit longer than I'd have liked, and one team ended up with one of our crack elite monk players, while the other got a somewhat wilful Tahlkora (AI Hero), and frankly, she isn't up to the job when facing a real healer, leading to a quite unsatisfying match for the undermanned team. I think in future, if that happens again, I'll just sit the thing out myself, in the interests of balance.
Anyway, one thing led to another, and the idea of entering a Guild Versus Guild match came up. This is where our merry band of eight end up pitted against a team from another guild entirely. Ak! Strangers! To make matters worse, it seems that for Unrated Matches, you need to have specific other Guild set it up with you, so only the automatic Ranked type of matches were at hand for us. By then an eighth member had arrived, making up a full team. This also meant that we could have Scrimmaged properly again, but we were all setting up for the big match by then, and it doesn't do to keep dithering as a guild leader, I think.
There was some further mucking about with builds, and one of our newer faces, a Warrior sporting a 'Terrifying Gladiator' title, was offering all sorts of personalised advice about what builds would be useful for us all. I'm not a big fan of that kind of thing, personally, and prefer to let people make up their own hotbars, but in this case, I think it was useful for our newer members to get a few pointers for the imminent match. One of our other Rangers, who also has some GvG experience helpfully volunteered to roll a Monk for the exercise, but the Elementalist who actually had the Go! button was a bit keen and managed to launch the thing before he'd finished creating any equipment. All in all, the prep could have gone better, thinking about it, but when I look back, I'm not sure it made a huge amount of difference to the horrors that followed.
At least it was quick. Upon entry the opposition, from the 'Rune of Superior Nerf' guild took one look at us and asked 'First GvG?', which it was. I'm not even sure where you see that information, which gives some inidication of just how ready we were for it all. 'bad luck - we gvg every chance we get :(', and so it began. The basic format of the match mirrors the Scrimaging we'd done before; Guild Lords, Flag Stands, NPCs, and so on, but I'm not sure we even made it to the middle of the map before getting absolutely blindsided, camped and rolled, essentially. I spend much of the match admiring the Cathan Imperial Style terracotta tiles in their guild hall floor.
GvG seems to use the ELO Rating System, (rather than the E.L.O. Rating System), and for some reason, as a virgin guild, we actually started life with far more ranking and points and whatnot, than this eight-strong squad of Ubermenschen, making us the attackers, and making us eat dirt for all of, pfff, eight minutes. It was pitiful, and even they started taking a modicum of pity on us, offering snippets of advice through the slaughter, which I'm almost certain wasn't sarcastically meant!
We pretty much got our arses handed to us, but I'm not sure I expected anything else to be honest. Our guild is full of fine people, some of whom can even hold their own in RA, but this is something else again, and probably not something you causally stroll into, looking for something 'a bit different' one Tuesday night. After the match, we found ourselves now ranked 1600ish and having lost 3 guild points, down to 997, which means we get to do that badly 332 more times, before...well, I don't know what actually...
1600 is still far higher than the guild who had just so extensively schooled us, who were 3000 or so, so my worry is that, given how the ELO works, if we intend to play GvG properly ever, we're going to have to go through a huge amount of pain and suffering like the above, before we gravitate downward to the kind of position on the ladder where we'll find opponents we'll actually stand a chance against. I'm not quite sure that's what *I* signed up for, let alone the other members of the TNC.
Somewhat shellshocked, I did indeed dither about what to do next, somewhat hastily decreeing a split, mostly so I could go hide in PvE-land for a bit. Team A went off to continue the Vabbian Diplomacy, while Team B went off to vent their own frustrations on the much lighter and less brutal Alliance Battles for a while, which apparently went much better. I wouldn't know; I was busy cowering...
It was certainly fascinating, and something of an education, and of course, a look at yet another aspect of the game that I'd never seen before. Just a shame it was so brief really. It also means some serious thought ahead about what kind of guild the TNC ought to be.
There's certainly fun to be had there, I'm sure, but having seen just how seriously PvP Guilds take all this stuff, is that what we want to become?