Guild Wars 2

A problem most people have with WvW is that forming a single blob is too effective.

A really simple starter solution would be to make the In-Combat Speed the standard speed and get rid of the out-of-combat speed, so the only way to move faster is through swiftness and movement skills.

This will make the maps feel bigger.

This will make it so a small man has better chance of taking towers, a zerg can’t just ignore a small group and be on the other side of the map then run all the way back when the wall is at 5% because the few people in the tower reporting are just waiting instead of going out to fight.

This will make it so the second half of the zerg that is Out-of-Combat can’t catch up to a small roaming group just because they are stuck In-Combat, which will easily encourage more small group play.

This will keep people from respawning immediately and being able to get back into a nearby camp before you cap it, just to run in circles once again.

This will make tower attacking/defending more intense because if you die it will take you more time to get back to the fight.

This will make positioning of all the players in the map much more important since everyone will be moving across the map much slower.
IE, multiple smaller groups can hit different towers and the one enemy zerg wouldn’t have time to swing through and stop them all.
IE, it will be much riskier to take your full zerg on an offensive push, especially if a small group decides to tag your waypoint.

This will make death feel like death an not a, oh jeez, what an inconvenience, well just give me 30 seconds and I will be back where I was at.

This will make the maps feel bigger.

no, this would just make me feel reaaally slow
Would rather have bigger maps to make the maps feel bigger…

I don’t disagree with your points but sadly I think slowing down everyone would be considered a game breaking nerf. Most everyone is probably so used to it current state that changing it could have a very negative effect on the population.

Personally the best part of this game is the fast paced movement and mobility in and out of combat. Removed that and I doubt this would be my go to game as it is now.

RashanDale.3609:

This will make the maps feel bigger.

no, this would just make me feel reaaally slow
Would rather have bigger maps to make the maps feel bigger…

Theoretically bigger maps vs. removing the Out-of-Combat speed will result in the same thing. With bigger scaled maps it would take you 30% longer to get to the same tower (if scaled that way), while removing the out-of-combat speed will also take you 30% longer to get to the same tower with the current maps.

The feeling of being “slower” is just based off what you know now about how in/out-of combat speed works. This is something that will go away in time, just as if they released new scaled maps you would feel slower at first.

I am not saying having bigger maps is something that we shouldn’t hope for, not being able to siege from tower to tower would be a good thing, but the likely hood of getting bigger maps anytime soon is slim vs. being able to just remove the out-of-combat speed which will have the same net result. Unless, of course the coding makes that impossible.

Either way, there shouldn’t be two split combat speeds, since it generically gives an advantage to the bigger group for no good reason I can think of.

Will not accomplish what you suggest, and belongs in the trash bin with all other suggestions that the game should make things more frustrating for it’s own players. I mean, come on.

Punishing risk taking just means people take less risks, FYI, and in the current state of the game that means even more people sitting at structures firing siege over and over and only leaving when there IS a zerg to back them up and rez them. Don’t understand why this is such a complicated concept…the less you punish risk the more people are willing to have fun and run around solo or in small groups or hit keeps they might not be able to take….

if u want to make the maps feel bigger remove the JP and the PVE areas in wvw and spread stuff out more that way

Forming a single blob isn’t effective because of movement speed. It’s effective because this whole game is balanced around little circles we stand in for buffs and heals. It’s balanced around sieging and protecting siege. It’s balanced around singular structures. It’s balanced around AE instead of DD.

No, movement speed isn’t something we should be putting on the list to try and get WvW to be less zergy.

Zosk.5609:

Punishing risk taking just means people take less risks, FYI, and in the current state of the game that means even more people sitting at structures firing siege over and over and only leaving when there IS a zerg to back them up and rez them. Don’t understand why this is such a complicated concept…the less you punish risk the more people are willing to have fun and run around solo or in small groups or hit keeps they might not be able to take….

I am confused. “Even more people sitting at structures firing siege over and over and only leaving when there IS a zerg to back them up and rez them” is exactly what already happens, except now there is time for them to wait for the zerg to get there. Removing the speed will force the people in the tower to come out to fight to save it since there is more likely of a chance a single zerg wouldn’t be able to get there in time if you remove the out-of-combat speed.

This doesn’t create risk for the small group, it adds a lot less risk for them as mentioned in my statements above, but instead adds risk for a server to form a single blob as opposed to multiple groups.

If you would like to share your thoughts on why this would create risk for a small group I would be happy to hear them, but right now it just seems your immediate unwarranted hostility to the thread lead you to create an ill-thought out response lacking any concerns to back up why this would create risk for the small group.

There’s 2 separate issues here, let’s not mistake one for the other.

1) Blobbing is too effective. This may be due to the fact that most support skills are AoE, or “Target the 4 closest Allies”, and the game is so heavy on AoE there is the benefit of negating AoE damage by stacking up so only 5 get hit.

2) Roaming the map as a single, large zerg instead of separated groups is too effective and discourages the latter. This is due to the maps being too small.

The OP is referring to #2.

I doubt that Anet will put the effort to change the map geometry, and removing the out-of-combat speed is a lazy, quick fix to achieve similar effects.

In-combat speed is bad enough. Please don’t make us move like we’re in molasses 100% of the time. Besides, people will still blob anyway.

aathomas.4638:

Zosk.5609:

Punishing risk taking just means people take less risks, FYI, and in the current state of the game that means even more people sitting at structures firing siege over and over and only leaving when there IS a zerg to back them up and rez them. Don’t understand why this is such a complicated concept…the less you punish risk the more people are willing to have fun and run around solo or in small groups or hit keeps they might not be able to take….

I am confused. “Even more people sitting at structures firing siege over and over and only leaving when there IS a zerg to back them up and rez them” is exactly what already happens, except now there is time for them to wait for the zerg to get there. Removing the speed will force the people in the tower to come out to fight to save it since there is more likely of a chance a single zerg wouldn’t be able to get there in time if you remove the out-of-combat speed.

This doesn’t create risk for the small group, it adds a lot less risk for them as mentioned in my statements above, but instead adds risk for a server to form a single blob as opposed to multiple groups.

If you would like to share your thoughts on why this would create risk for a small group I would be happy to hear them, but right now it just seems your immediate unwarranted hostility to the thread lead you to create an ill-thought out response lacking any concerns to back up why this would create risk for the small group.

because everyone will move slower including the roamers/havoc groups…because it is possible for a zerg to stack swiftness more then a roaming group due to static fields and blast finishers…guard/ele combo…because cause if i cant catch the zerg im more likey to bunker in a tower with ac and wait for zerg to come by then try and run across the map dodging theifs and roamers…because when im in the tower with the acs and a havoc/small group comes along 1 ac will normally take care of them….let alone 2-3 firing because other people are there waiting for the zerg too…..

last but not least please read the description of wvw…it says massive scale combat or zerg vs zerg..what part of massive scale combat makes you think 5v5 or 1v1…5v5 and 1v1 sounds like really small scale combat to me….

It would feel awful but this does seem like a reasonable work around to the problem of one max queue zerg being able to cover an entire BL in 2-3 mins.

Bushido.2184:

There’s 2 separate issues here, let’s not mistake one for the other.

1) Blobbing is too effective. This may be due to the fact that most support skills are AoE, or “Target the 4 closest Allies”, and the game is so heavy on AoE there is the benefit of negating AoE damage by stacking up so only 5 get hit.

2) Roaming the map as a single, large zerg instead of separated groups is too effective and discourages the latter. This is due to the maps being too small.

The OP is referring to #2.

I doubt that Anet will put the effort to change the map geometry, and removing the out-of-combat speed is a lazy, quick fix to achieve similar effects.

I don’t really agree at all… I am always curious what people are comparing it to. After dying, I’d say the time to get back in the action in WvW is higher than average compared to other similar games. There’s also not much porting options. Also, because of the high population of roaming/ganking and the fact that there is so much escaping in this game that people rarely die as a group….it can actually be difficult to get back.

In fact, I say one of many reasons people like to stick together in large clumps is the fact that it becomes much less likely you’ll die and have to run back. You’ll get rezzed if your side wins and the downed state slows down pushes so that many people if they choose can get to a structure and safety when they are losing.

(This is just one reason, others being that people actually think big fights are fun… the current state of structures and siege makes it more rewarding WXP wise as well. However, I think map size has next to nothing to do with it, and the zergs would be just as big if you doubled the size of all 4 maps).

If you reduce out-of-combat movement speed the defence response times become longer. Combine that with the 30 second swords delay we got in a recent patch. You would see towers captured before anyone has a chance to defend.

It would also make teams more reliant on abusing the keep waypoint uncontested bug. Even today whenever a keep is contested the first question in map chat is “timer?”.

I would prefer larger maps – 15-20% in each dimension. This would give attackers more time to break in a structure. It would encourage servers to split up the massive blob in order to protect important objects. In addition Arenanet could introduce “anti-speed trap”, that removes all speed buffs from all sources for a certain time.

But this is only one aspect. A revamp for reward system is also planned. I hope it will be more important an rewarding (for servers and players) to hold and upgrade (in a more active way) structures. If you don’t have to run in a blob to obtain the same amount of WXP/gold/karma, the size of the blobs will shrink.

The maps are as big as the engine will allow without a significant overhaul. All they could do is to reduce the amount of unused space to spread things out, but you’re still going to be able to run an 80 man zerg in a circle around the map in 5-6 minutes.

All this would do is slow WvW down to crawl. There’s a reason perma-swiftness is pretty much a requirement for WvW. Even normal out-of-combat speed can feel excruciatingly slow