PvP Night this week in the Tuesday N00b Club, and rather than the usual two teams of our own guild beating on each other in the guild hall, I thought it might be fun to try Alliance Battles instead, which was probably ill-advised, thinking about it. That's the one with the three teams of four, versus their three teams of four and while your own team of four can be hand-picked and carefully balanced, you have no idea who the other eight are going to be, making overall coordination quite difficult.

That still doesn't stop the occasional Pocket Rommel giving it a go mind you, and throughout what turned out to be the only match of the night, some Master tactician spent a lot of the proceedings shouting cryptic orders at everyone and going wild with the mini-map drawing tools (A feature I'd love to see other MMOs steal) and pinging like a crazy person, helpfully enough.

Its a rather anarchic place, all in all and somewhat reminiscent of Warcraft's Battlegrounds. The map has a number of shrines, which when captured, will start contributing points to your overall side total. At the start, everyone fervently and emphatically insists that each of the three teams goes to a different teleporter out of the start area, taking each to a different side of the map. Presumably this is so that the three teams conduct simultaneous advances up the map, capturing shrines with the maximum efficiency, although I've no idea why, as pretty much within the first two minutes of the match, both sides seem to degenerate into rampaging twelve-man mobs and start zerging about at each other.

We did our best at maintaining our squad cohesion and sticking to our allocated map side and this works well if the other team does the same, leading to a series of 4v4 fights. Alas, instead we were mostly being beaten about the place by ten or more of the enemy on our side of the map. In theory, this leaves the remaining eight of our lot to capture enemy shrines unopposed, but it didn't seem to pan out like that and all in all, we got quite comprehensively owned, losing the match something like 400 points to 500. I blame force of numbers, and of course, the other eight people on our side. I expect they were silently blaming us and it all reeks a bit of recrimination.

Interesting techniques here and there though. I was especially taken by the lone Elementalist Kamikaze builds which seemed to be on the enemy team in abundance. Using a horrific combination of run speed buffs and massive point-blank area-of-effect Fire Magic spells, it seems quite easy and common for one single player to simply run in to the shrine and literally explode, totally wiping out the defending NPCs and instantly capturing the thing in the blink of an eye. They're nearly impossible to stop until after the event, at which point, you're suddenly overwhelmed by newly spawned hostile NPCs, and they don't especially care about survival anyway - job done! Very unsporting, although there's nothing stopping our lot from doing the same back, I guess.

Also a lot of trouble from Warriors with huge Armour and two or more Monks in tow, healing the bejesus out of them and coating them with buffs. Try to take out the Monks and the Warrior gives you a good mashing. Well played, but damned annoying.

We certainly got our fair share of kills, but as pointed out by one of our guild, Alliance Battles are very much about avoiding fights with players if you can, and taking out the shrines as quickly and often as possible. If that can effectively be done by one single person, that frees up three others to mash up the opposition, or assault three more shrines. Clearly the Kurzicks had a far greater understanding of the metagame specifics than we did. All soured the experience a bit for us, to be honest, and the ensuing PvE unwinding rampage was a far more enjoyable thing.

A sad truth of Guild Wars PvP is that the more organisation you are allowed, the more likely and more brutally you are to be stomped on. Not as much fun as I'd like, and I much prefer the more random antics of Fort Aspenwood and the Jade Quarry really.