Guild Wars 2

I am reposting this from the WvW forum to make sure that the designers gets to read it as well.

First, I’m a long time wargamer/former games designer who plays a lot of WvW. Most of the time I roam alone/in pugs, the rest of the time I play organized guild events. So I’ve seen a lot of different aspects of the game, at least the mid tier one where Far Shiverpeaks usually hovers. And yes, I have run with the zerg many times, but for very different reasons.

What it seems everybody is talking about when they slag zergs is the karmatrain, a massive ball of people circling the map, only interested in Wxp. While I am sure that exists, most of the zergs I have been in have formed for two other reasons:

1: Confusion. This was where I started. No guild, no experience. A nice and shiny commander icon on the map. After having been killed a number of times I learned that if I stuck to the commander there was strength in numbers, I learned how things worked, and it simply felt safer. I don’t think I’m alone there, WvW is a scary place at the start, and we are pack animals.

2: Tactics. This is the zerg I run with on guild nights. It is organized, has a purpose, different teams, different parts, is commanded over teamspeak and in general awesome to be a part of. To bring down a heavily defended T3 keep takes a night, and is a many step process, especially if you need to drain its supplies. Often we break off to run and capture camps, get more supplies, feint-attack other keeps/towers and so on. It might not be the whole zerg that runs off (only those without supply for example) but with enough people, even those amount to a zerg.

If I as a roamer encounters and is killed by a zerg, I have no idea why it was formed and what it is about to do. Karmatrain? Scared noobs? Siergers out to resupply? No idea. At least on guild nights we let roamers and small groups just go since they are uninteresting to us, but since every zerg by its nature attracts followers, others might break off and hack them down.

Increasing the AoE cap would do nothing to stop these things.

I used to play a lot of WAR, where AoE was king both in healing and attack. The only thing a high AoE cap does is give people who play AoE heavy classes a lot of kills, thus making more people roll those classes, thus making more AoE until everything is just a matter off stacking enough fire wizards against each other. A lot of the WvW game is built around choke points, sieges, bridges, doors and so on. Rams melt as it is against a defended keep, can you imagine what would happen if you didn’t even need to build siege?

Siege already has a higher cap than any person, and can be built out in the field as well.

So, what should be done about zergs?

Let’s face it, a zerg (by which I mean a large mass of people) is needed a lot of the times in WvW. And zerg vs zerg can be awesome when it works right. BUT these things needs fixing to make it easier to play:

1: Skill lag (especially with 3 server clashes)

2: Grey out the names of defeated players. A lot of the time I find it hard to AoE in the fury of combat, because it is hard to spot if people are dead or alive, because the mass of red names covers everything. This makes my AoE often hit nothing in moving combat, especially with casting time and skill lag.

3: Shorten server names/no titles. I don’t need a novel for each enemy.

Also, there needs to be incentives to break up the massive zergs that forms for no good reason. I would suggest:

4: Commander colors. Make it possible to choose your commander symbol’s color. That way you can easily say things like ‘follow the red commander to get supply’ in mapchat. Yes, they have names, but especially at the start, it is hard to keep track off, and even now I sometimes end up following the wrong commander if I am focused on other things.

5: More leaders. Either make it possible for commanders to deputize people so they get an icon as well (maybe a slightly bigger dot in the same colors as the commander), or make it possible to buy lower level of commander for cheaper sums. If there is only one or two icons on a map, of course everybody is going to get drawn to them. But if there were lieutenants as well, there are more spots to focus on for people who are not organized, thus they will get spread out more evenly.

6: Make it worth defending: Right now we defend for pride, and to keep the upgrades we have. But, a lot of people are not interested in defense, because that is boring and gives them nothing. It is awesome fighting to take a defended keep and I wish everybody to have that experience of true carnage and war, so make it worth it for the brave ones in there.

7: Make the smaller tasks count. Killing dolyaks gives a lot. Protecting dolyaks gives nothing. We need to have more things smaller teams/roamers can do on the maps.

8: Anti zerg siege: It would be interesting with more varied choices of what to build for your supply, especially for use in the open field and to encourage tactics. Arrowcarts are nice, but why stop there? For example, spiked pits could be dug so people could lure zergs to run after them only to be crippled. Maybe setting a herd of cows on fire to drive them into the zerg, or other weird things used in ancient warfare.