News Post

Beta Weekend #1

[ Sat 5th May, 2012 @ 1:28pm ] by Darkademic

What a weekend it was. As we all gathered on Mumble in the hours before the beta was scheduled to start, a voice suddenly said "I'm in". At first we thought it was a joke, but our initial scepticism turned into hysteria when another person said they were in, and then another, causing the rest of us to scramble to log into the game. Lo and behold, the beta had started well before it was supposed to and [DkR]'s epic journey into Tyria had begun.

The excitement was short lived, as server issues started cropping up and people were kicked out of the game, often unable to log back in again for hours at a time. Frustrating for sure, but once we finally got in, it was so worth the wait.

The starting zones were crammed full (as expected) so it wasn't long before large numbers of us hopped into WvW. Initially we were up against Vabbi and Sharp's Corner, and while we did dominate on Friday night, the lag and server stability issues meant that it wasn't until the following day that we really got stuck in.

On Saturday morning, the servers were rotated and we found ourselves facing Far Shiverpeaks and Kourna. We began fighting in the Eternal Battlegrounds as the share of the objectives there was quite even and there seemed to be plenty of fighting going on, however we soon realised that both of our enemies had left half of their own borderlands unclaimed. We gathered together and headed into the green world (Far Shiverpeaks being the green team). We took the objectives with ease, meeting very little resistance, and eventually we had control of the entire green world. We then turned our attention to the blue world, and did the same there. By mid-afternoon we had control of all three borderlands, save for the odd supply camp, and so we returned to the Eternal Battlegrounds where most of the fighting was still to be found. The other two servers seemed unaware that their homes had been completely taken over.

Eventually, the fighting did spread and both of our opponents began taking back their home territory. This allowed us to make some significant gains in the Eternal Battlegrounds, which we ended up controlling almost entirely. We fought both of the other teams off for the rest of the day until around 9pm on Saturday when many of us decided to take a break from WvW. This is when our enemies made a huge come-back. By around 2am Far Shiverpeaks had control of 90% of the map, and we were finding it very difficult to repel them due to our low numbers. However, in the end it was too late - we had already accumulated too much of a lead in points and ended up winning the second matchup.

The third rotation on Sunday morning put us up against Fissure of Woe and Abbadon's Mouth. On Sunday afternoon the Eternal Battlegrounds were full to bursting and some of the most intense fighting yet occurred there. Again, Desolation ended up dominating and winning by a huge margin.

1st Matchup
2nd Matchup
3rd Matchup

On the PvE side of things, the Ascalon Catacombs were completed by Roadblock, ZeCool, Bibidiboo, Abhorsen and Consaii, so gratz to them. Overall we took a much more flexible approach to PvE and didn't really organise anything specifically as a guild, everyone just organised themselves based on the areas they were levelling in.

We did try to organise some SPvP, however we weren't able to queue as a team, and the premade servers weren't working very well, so we didn't have much success on that front. Still, the SPvP was a lot of fun.

That pretty much summarises the weekend - can't wait until the next one!