Squads and the commander tag: 300 gold for a coloured triangle

The coloured triangle on your map is somebody who paid 300 gold and 250 Badges of Honor for the privilege of being followed around by strangers.

That is the Commander’s Compendium, bought from a Commander Trainer, and it is one of the more interesting purchases in the game because of what it does not buy.

What it costs and what it does

300 gold + 250 Badges of Honor for the compendium. After that the tag can be one of nine colours: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, magenta and white.

There is a Catmander’s Compendium at the same price with cat-themed icons, and once you own either one the other drops to 150 gold + 250 Badges of Honor. A remarkable number of experienced players own both.

The tag broadcasts your position to the whole map: on the world map, on the compass, and floating above your character. That is the entire mechanical effect. It grants no authority, no reward share, no extra loot and no control over anybody.

The squad itself

A squad holds 50 players, which is what a large meta or a WvW group looks like.

There is a separate 10-player raid mode, and raids require it, which is the one place the squad system is a hard gate rather than a convenience.

Inside a squad, players are organised into subgroups, and that is where boon support works: a support build is feeding the people in its subgroup rather than the whole fifty.

What the tag is for

One part is worth understanding before you judge somebody for having one.

The commander gets nothing for tagging up. No share of anybody’s loot, no currency, no achievement worth the gold, no advantage in the fight. Somebody who tags for a meta is spending 300 gold to make it easier for forty-nine strangers to find the event, and then doing the same job they would have done anyway.

Watch what that produces. Hero point trains run by people who already have every hero point. Meta tags at three in the morning so that the handful of people online can still clear it. Somebody who commands the same map every day for two years and knows every spawn on it by heart.

If you have been playing a while, have 300 gold spare and know one meta well, consider it. The purchase is not a status item, whatever the triangle looks like. It is a small permanent commitment to be the person who shows up, and this game runs on those.