Balling up in a big laggy group of 60 players, racing to tag as many enemies as possible before they go down, paying extra attention to tab-target through to find the champions before it is too late, this is not fun or the good kind of challenging. For things such as big world boss events, where you don’t even have to worry about getting your tags in on the spawning enemies before they die, this oftentimes results in the fact that you can simply AFK auto attack the boss to death (as long as the auto attack keeps going, sometimes the auto attack doesn’t seem to stick).
For certain events, most notably the current Living Story related Invasion meta events, this type of farming (or lazy) behaviour can actually work against the server’s (or overflow’s) interest progress towards completing said meta event. In these Invasion meta events, a team of 2-10 people can clear events almost as fast as a 60+ man zerg, as the value of the marginal player in a group of 2-10 is orders of magnitude more valuable to the event than the marginal player in a group of 50-70. Doing the events with only 1-10 people is actually a whole lot more fun and and even challenging as well. The impressions that players get from zergging these events, or doing them in small groups is very different, as many of those zergging the events scoff at “just another zerg update”, while those actually working in smaller groups can actually enjoy the combat more. Additionally, if everyone simply zergged, the meta event would be likely to fail from timing out, as that big laggy group of players cannot possible clear enough events to progress the meta event at an adequate rate.
What is the reason for people opting for more of this zergging strategy? The PvE incentives in place of course! Those players zergging the events are opting for the more profitable strategy due to the new champion rewards, as they are getting many more champion kills than those smaller groups, in addition to being able to tag for non-champion kills, for even more loot. “LFM Zerker Staff Guardian”, that is what you’re going to hear because that is what the incentives are encouraging players to do.
With these loot incentives in place, zergging is the Nash Equilibrium of what is basically a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If the player cooperates (spread out in small groups) they will be benefiting their server’s (overflow) by progressing the meta event faster, thus increasing the chances of success; however they will receive less personal loot from kills. If the player defects (ball up in the biggest zerg on the map) they will be hurting their server’s (overflow) progress towards the meta event, however they will be receiving much more personal loot.
This optimal farming strategy of zergging can also be a negative influence in other parts of open world PvE. The Ember farm in Cursed Shore, as well as the champion trains running through zones (Frostgorge, Cursed Shore, even Queensdale) are all notable current examples. Outside of the Ember Farm where simply tagging champs before they die is the best strategy, running in a mad dash from champ to champ to get the tag before they die is the optimal way of farming champions. The only difficulty involved here is getting from champ A to champ B in time, the actual champion fights with that many people is as easy as AFK auto attacking. It is clear that this behaviour was not the intended outcome (Snowcrush can attest to this, I believe his name was); however this is exactly the behaviour that is being incentivized.
