Alright, so most of people have encountered massive zergs of players farming through content, some of them are annoyed by it, some aren’t – but I think it’s safe to say that zerging takes away most of games’ challenge and complexity, because almost everything can be solved by zerging up and charging while pressing 1 every now and again.
Also, in dungeons, most people don’t bother to think how to beat the content and do it as intended, preferring to stack up in a corner and glitch the fight.
Here is a possible solution to the problem/giving the game some more depth in zerg content: DISEASE CONDITION.
The idea is simple and straight from GW1 (I think someone even mentioned it before the Tower of Nightmares released) – a condition that spreads when a player touches another player! One stack not being much of a hindrance… but 10? 20? The idea is to make players be aware of their surroundings and at the very least pay attention during combat
I see two possible implementations at the idea’s core –
1. coming spread: Every time a diseased player touches somebody, he spreads disease, which stacks intensity. Every a player is touched by a diseased player that player receives stack of disease.
Now that solution would cause people to pay attention so that somebody won’t run into them. That of course causes obvious issues of trolling, or suffering due to other players not paying attention. So here’s the second possibility:
2. incoming disease: Every time you touch someone who is diseased, you catch a disease, which lasts long, but only stacks intensity when a diseased player touches someone else! That way ideally players would be motivated to pay attention to mutual positioning and avoid scoring more disease by rubbing on others.
Of course, bot methods have issues, such as possible trolling, or visibility in a big zerg. While nothing can be done with trolls, the visibility issue would pretty much solve itself as people would spread a bit, this adding to fix the problem of clustered special effects making it impossible to effectively control you environment in huge zergs.
Now, the possible story I had in my head for implementing it: RETURN OF THE SCARAB PLAGUE!
It can start in many ways… a survivor coming from Elona carrying the plague… An artficat brought from Elona 250 years ago by a Sunspear, in which the eggs are hidden…
What’s important is this: Scarabs are back, and they are spreading rapidly through populated regions, with soldiers, traders, adventurers and asura gates providing vast and fast connectivity between peoples the plague has spread with lightning speed, hitting major cities (events possibly including quarantining infected citizens , preventing food stores from being infected etc, all non combat, except instanced outbreaks).
Then it hit rural regions, with seemingly random attacks on major food suply areas, and ones of military importance the plague threatens to leave us vulnerable to any attack by a dragon or other force!
What stands behind this Plague? Is it just an unfortunate mishap? Or is there some more malignant intelligence behind it? Perhaps Palawa Joko? Or some other, yet unseen enemy?
I’d imagine the Plague condition to be not much of a hindrance in this instance, just some minor health drain. But when stacks builded by either of above mentioned methods result in player dying/being downed then he or she explodes in a geyser of little scarabs that infect as many player with disease as they can latch onto to, possibly annihilating a zerg in moments, if payers aren’t quick to react! Of course the bugs would move slowly, and be easy to kill, but hard to sot in a crowd.
Well, here’s the ideas. Sorry for some possible chaos etc, I’m very tired when writing that up!