Mesmer (GW) and a game mechanic insight

Visiting the beautiful lands outside Kryta, with my Mesmer. Gorgeous... =p (I mean the scenery, not the chick hehe) Goodness me, playing an interruption Mesmer is really fun once you've gotten good at the game. It's equivalent of playing a blue deck in MTG - it's all about permission and control. The enemy only does what you allow him to when you're around, given you haven't run out of spell and skill interrupts. Watching an opponent get to 80% spell completion before interrupting him, and interrupting his next 3 spells as well gives me a kick all the time...especially when doing it to a human player ^_^

Well for the game mechanic insight I got - Guild Wars tombs has perhaps the best functional gameplay for a 3 team FFA situation.

See the reason why "free for all" combats don't work is that, when there are 3 teams, the most passive team has the advantage. If team A attacks team B, both of them will take casualties and be weakened while team C continues to grow stronger, and eventually enough to wipe out either team A or B (whichever one won). Stronger not just by accumulating resources : also by information, since it can often observe the combat between team A and B. The whole game then becomes a stalemate where everyone is paralyzed and unwilling to commit to combat.

Guild Wars Altar matches are mostly played in a 3 team FFA style and it works very well - it's a 10 minute countdown to the end of the game and the team holding the Altar at the end wins. Holding the Altar grants the holding team morale boosts and ressurections every 2 minutes, which is a large advantage. What happens is that both remaining teams will eventually have to gang up on the holding team, since neither one can kill the holder alone (due to the Altar advantage). And both remaining teams WILL win, since it's 2v1, but the question is how long the holding team can last (hopefully until the end of the countdown?) and even when the holding team is defeated the two teams that were allied will now suddenly become enemies and fight each other for the right to capture the Altar. Being first to capture will give you a difficult fight against 2 teams later on - but being late to capture might have you losing by not being able to kill the holding team fast enough, or not being able to backstab your previous ally effectively enough to prevent their Altar capture attempt.