Allies, enemies & NPCs in WvW logs

A WvW log’s agent table mixes four very different kinds of agents: your squad, enemy players, siege engines, and assorted NPCs (guards, lords, yaks…). Getting stats right means classifying them correctly first. The EVTC format page documents the raw classification rules; this page applies them to WvW specifically, quoting values from a real revision-1 WvW .zevtc log (arcdps build 20260114, Alpine Borderlands) inspected while writing this page. That log’s 133 agents broke down as: 13 squad players, 31 enemy players, 28 gadgets, and 61 NPCs.

The base classification

From the official EVTC docs (see the agent table section for the verbatim rules):

• is_elite == 0xFFFFFFFF and upper half of prof == 0xFFFF → gadget (volatile pseudo-id in the lower half of prof)
• is_elite == 0xFFFFFFFF and upper half of prof != 0xFFFF → NPC (species id in the lower half of prof)
• is_elite != 0xFFFFFFFF → player (prof is profession, is_elite the elite spec)

That splits players from everything else — but in WvW the interesting split is within the player group.

Squad players vs. enemy players

Both sides are “players” by the rule above. The difference is in the 64-byte name field, which for players holds three null-terminated strings: character name, account name, subgroup (see agent table).

Squad/subgroup players have all three populated. Observed:

prof=6, is_elite=67, name = "Wag Toof\0:Wag Z.8294\03\0"

— character name, account name with the leading : as seen in game, and subgroup 3 as a string.

Enemy players have an empty account name (and no subgroup). Observed:

prof=1, is_elite=27, name = "Dragonhunter\0\0"

The character-name slot doesn’t contain their real character name — in the test log every enemy player’s name was the name of their spec (“Dragonhunter”, “Willbender”, …), while prof/is_elite stayed machine-readable. Enemy players are anonymous in logs: no account, no real name.

So the practical rule community parsers use: a player-typed agent with an empty account-name field is an enemy player. Cross-checking with team ids tells you which enemy side they’re on.

Two caveats:

• This page’s test logs only contained squad members on the allied side, so whether same-team players outside your squad appear with account names is unverified here — don’t assume the empty-account rule maps exactly onto “same team vs. other team” without checking team ids too.
• Player stat fields (toughness/concentration/healing/condition) are coarsened to 0-or-10 on write — see the anonymization note — so you can’t distinguish builds from those.

Siege and other gadgets

Siege engines are gadgets. Observed in the test log:

prof=0xFFFFB58E, is_elite=0xFFFFFFFF, name = "Flame Ram Build Site\0"

Gadget ids are volatile pseudo-ids (“generated through a combination of gadget parameters — they will collide with npcs and should be treated separately”, per the official docs), so don’t key siege identity on the id across logs — the name string is the human-useful part. One related official changelog note (jul.01.2026): WvW siege was detached from its owner, which “differs from operator” — so damage attribution for siege depends on the arcdps build that wrote the log.

NPCs

Structure NPCs (guards, veterans, lords) and ambient creatures are NPC agents with a real species id. In the test log, WvW NPCs carried generated names of the form ch<species>-<n>:

prof=27031, is_elite=0xFFFFFFFF, name = "ch27031-2429\0"

The species id (here 27031, the lower half of prof) is the reliable identifier; the ch… name string is a placeholder, not an in-game name. The meaning of specific WvW species ids is not documented in the official notes — correlating them to guard types is left to community tooling.

Summary decision table

Check (in order)	Classification
is_elite == 0xFFFFFFFF, prof >> 16 == 0xFFFF	Gadget (siege, build sites, tablets…)
is_elite == 0xFFFFFFFF, otherwise	NPC — species id in prof & 0xFFFF
Player with non-empty account name	Squad/subgroup player (your side)
Player with empty account name	Enemy player — resolve side via team ids

For reading the agent table itself, see Parsing EVTC logs.