What are your thoughts about IWAY, MF and trap groups?

I have all six chars. I Have beaten the game with 4 of them - the other two are at ember and my main has FoW armor. Aside from that i know to myself i am a good player pvp and pve.

Despite this I have 7 fame. I wanted to get my rank up a while ago but sadly realised the BS of it all quickly. Its unfair imo because you go to topk and its either trap groups, iway war groups or mf groups. This is a generalisation, of course you get mixed groups - but these three listed make up the majority of parties. I realise alot of people are going to disagree here because many of you may use these tactics since they are so popular.

I refuse to go rated pvp now and i just say to my guildies when they want to go 'sorry i cant be bothered with the lameness'. I think this is a fair comment, calling it lame that is. Cheep, easy, fairly effective tactic - high, quick reward. Little to do with skill yet they get the rewards.

Understand please, its frustrating because no one wants a mesmer and my fame is low to start. Ive stood spamming in topk and i get in about one party an hr - thats not an exageration, thats how bad it is (im talking about mixed groups, i refuse the shame of having to be downgraded to rezmer).

I dont realistically see anything that will matter being done to this. They can nerf and effectiveness will drop but it wont stop it. Another extreme way might be for arenanet not to allow more than 2 of one profession in the same group but of course this would be unfair in other ways and: what if an axe, sword, hammer war want to be in the same group? etc etc.. Personally i think they should consider making 4v4 give fame as well.

Please give your views.

Thats because they are better than balanced usually. Granted they all die vs a guild with a build, but they usually always destroy PUGs.

I think Lampshade has really hit on it there. Builds like IWAY, Trapper, etc. are common because they work, on average, better than a balance group. Granted, a smart balanced group or rainbow spike type group will be able to mop the floor with any of them, but the amount of preparation, teamwork, and communication required is significantly higher with those types of groups: generally, you can only find such with a guild group. Builds like IWAY require little skill or preparation to play, and to win (although their losses can be equally catastrophic), so a lot of people use them to build up cheap fame. In this day and age, until you get to rank 3, or more likely rank 6, you will have a hard time finding a decent balanced group in tombs.

Unless you go with your guild, which is probably your best bet.

Rico

First off, PvE and PvP are extremely unrelated when it comes to skill. You may have played that much PvE, but as far as PvP is concerned, you are right there with the rest of the players who bought the game yesterday. No offense, I know many rank 9s that don't know shit about PvE. I'm just saying, they are completely different worlds where skill in one, in no way means skill in the other. While you might say that the current PvP system requires no skill, many of the PvP players would say the same about all PvE. Also, 4v4 arenas hardly count as PvP.

However, I do agree with you. IWAY is not even flavor of the month anymore, its like flavor of 3 months, so its getting a little out of hand. Notice what builds you see being run in American districts, and also notice how little America has had favor recently....these people aren't going into tombs with the goal of winning HoH anymore, they are just trying to get quick fame. It is detrimental to the system, and there are many things that could be done about it, and I expect something will be done fairly soon.

Personally, I think bringing back the 6 way burial would kill off lots of the iways. As would requiring 3-4 wins before you start to gain fame.

anyway, gl in PvP. dont be too discouraged. we all started somewhere.
.02

The only problem with IWAY is how wide pread it is. An average run to the Hall of Heores looks like:

You vs IWAY
You vs IWAY
You vs 2 different builds, plus IWAY
You vs IWAY/Different build
You vs different build
You vs IWAY, IWAY
You vs Different build
You vs different build, IWAY, IWAY, different build