Guild Wars 2

If you have an open mind and serious about wanting to tackle the problem I would check this out:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Discussion-How-to-level-the-playing-field/first#post3085269

For the love of god please no trolling.

Madora.9340:

I came up with an exponential function that would even the odds, but there isn’t any answer for such a large man zerg. If they are all grouped up like that, go steal their territories. When they only capture a tower while you snag two camps, two towers and a keep, well, I guess they’ll have to learn.

So your idea of making the other team pay by running a giant blob… is that in the time it takes for the enemy blob to take a tower… your small group will take two camps, two towers, and a keep?
Lol
Or are you running your own giant blob? And how is it 400% more efficient?

azizul.8469:

if only they can implement a debuff that make you take more damage if there are more than 5 people within your melee range……

no need to do that, just remove the AOE cap, and see the WWW meta game turn to lots of small organic groups that use CC and thought instead of single mindless auto-attacking Blob.

Relentliss.2170:

Or they could redesign the maps so they are bigger. Push all the major objectives to the corners. Remove waypoint building in side keeps.

Actually this is probably the single most important thing they could do to dramatically shift the gameplay from zerging to small group roaming.

Making maps very large, placing extremely valuable points on the map at corners of the map far away from each other, and sprinkling in less-valuable objectives around the middle of the map would have a huge impact on breaking up large zergs, as each side would have to balance response. For example, attacking a valuable objective at the corner of the map with many troops would lead you vulnerable to small groups taking smaller objectives elsewhere on the map and, even if you capture the valuable, single point objective, the loss of smaller objectives might not be worth it.

And yes, no waypoints. It’s absolutely stupid how a zerg of 80 people has the same mobility and response time as a small group when you can just abuse the WP mechanic while a keep/castle is under attack and ninja-teleport a full zerg into the Lord’s room when the reward timer is up. One of the most game-breaking thing in WvW at the moment in my opinion, along with the 5-person AOE cap. I don’t mind making upgraded keeps take longer to breach if you just remove the ability for an entire army to magically spawn inside of it and completely overwhelm everyone attacking. It should be an epic siege where people on walls and behind the gate are fighting over the course of an hour to take or hold the objective, not one where you PvD for 20 minutes only to get steamrolled by 80 people who suddenly appeared out of nowhere from the middle of their keep from another BL. Again, zero risk, full reward behavior that encourages this type of play.

There has to be some sort of TRADEOFF to blobbing. I’m not against it ever happening, I think that’s unrealistic and it would be nice periodically to have an “epic” fight to protect a key objective, especially if the lag can eventually be sorted out. It also gives more of a safety net to newer/less-skilled players who aren’t yet confident in their ability to pull their weight in a small-group setting. But there has to be a REASON for it to happen, and it has to have some sort of risk to it.

Right now blobbing is all reward and no risk in terms of PPT management, and that’s just not a fun way to play this game. It’s not fun for the zergers who can’t activate any skills in an 80man blobfest, and it’s certainly not fun for roamers who generally feel useless in the PTT game.

The way I imagine this game is sorta like this:

There’s a large force of maybe 30-40 people that act as a relatively less-mobile force that concentrates on protecting and objectives and advancing the “front” of fighting.

Smaller groups act as raiding and/or special ops groups that focus on dealing with the other raiding groups, destroying the logistics of the main “army” force, doing combined ops (flanking 40 man zerg, hitting their backline, harrassing, spearhead etc) with the friendly “army” force when directly engaging an “enemy” army, etc.

Then, there would be a role for everyone to still enjoy the game, the overall zerg size would be dramatically reduced, and the relative importance of roaming would be increased.

I hate to say this, but I’m beginning to accept that gw2 is simply not a good platform for serious competition. While it has potential, and is fun, there are simply some fundamental flaws that turned a game of chess (Gw1 ) into a mix of dodgeball and checkers.

I predicted that it would be a number 1 game, but I am now also predicting with confidence that these blob / zergs won’t be a long term problem as eventually there will not be enough serious pvp’rs in the servers to form big blobs, and wvw will eventually be owned by small gvg groups – and even then it won’t be serious competition because matchups are not player controlled. I give it a year.

Ricky.4706:

I hate to say this, but I’m beginning to accept that gw2 is simply not a good platform for serious competition. While it has potential, and is fun, there are simply some fundamental flaws that turned a game of chess (Gw1 ) into a mix of dodgeball and checkers.

I predicted that it would be a number 1 game, but I am now also predicting with confidence that these blob / zergs won’t be a long term problem as eventually there will not be enough serious pvp’rs in the servers to form big blobs, and wvw will eventually be owned by small gvg groups – and even then it won’t be serious competition because matchups are not player controlled. I give it a year.

My biggest fear is that Anet is not convinced blobbing/zerging and complete lack of useful things for roamers to do it an actual problem.

If that’s the case we’re just wasting our time trying to come up with solutions since they won’t be motivated in the slightest to change the status quo of WvW.

Honestly, with some of the basic no no’s the game has vs pvp’rs…. I just don’t think Anet understands the pvp format. I think they are amazing programmers / game designers – but they just don’t understand the pvp culture. I honestly believe they would fix it, if they knew how.

if you really want to understand the heart of pvp – play a game of chess. wvw is a chess board with chess pieces – the problem is one team has 10 rooks 15 knights, 23 bishops and 2 kings, while the opposing team has a zerg of 150 pawns and 1 queen.

Shonie.5297:

Madora.9340:

I came up with an exponential function that would even the odds, but there isn’t any answer for such a large man zerg. If they are all grouped up like that, go steal their territories. When they only capture a tower while you snag two camps, two towers and a keep, well, I guess they’ll have to learn.

So your idea of making the other team pay by running a giant blob… is that in the time it takes for the enemy blob to take a tower… your small group will take two camps, two towers, and a keep?
Lol
Or are you running your own giant blob? And how is it 400% more efficient?

I wouldn’t be running a large blob of people, no. It takes two or three people to snag a camp, about ten to take a tower quickly with superior rams, and twenty to take a keep. I know, the chances of something like this happening are pretty small, but it can be done. And if anything, you would force the enemy to WP whether you tap their keep, or when they notice everything on their end of the map has white swords.

In real life, smaller groups are always more mobile. How bout giving a speed debuff to anyone surrounded by a massive amount of allies? Smaller zergs would recieve a small debuff while giantic ones would recieve a pretty severe penalty to speed.

Ricky.4706:

I hate to say this, but I’m beginning to accept that gw2 is simply not a good platform for serious competition. While it has potential, and is fun, there are simply some fundamental flaws that turned a game of chess (Gw1 ) into a mix of dodgeball and checkers.

I predicted that it would be a number 1 game, but I am now also predicting with confidence that these blob / zergs won’t be a long term problem as eventually there will not be enough serious pvp’rs in the servers to form big blobs, and wvw will eventually be owned by small gvg groups – and even then it won’t be serious competition because matchups are not player controlled. I give it a year.

Accept it. Has been for almost a year. You just had more fun expecting/hoping change would come soon. Hasn’t even come close to changing giant flaws.

All the real head hunter guilds left the game. Unfortunately all that is left are blobs of people who really dont know how to pvp….or even what it looks like for that matter.

Simple GIANT game-changing mechanic change would be just to only allow rezzing from out of combat players. Solves so many issues. Enough of the crutches for new players.

MAKE YOUR GAME HARD SO WE STICK AROUND TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO WIN!!!

Stop with the hello kitty island skill level requirements.

Npac.3476:

Ricky.4706:

I hate to say this, but I’m beginning to accept that gw2 is simply not a good platform for serious competition. While it has potential, and is fun, there are simply some fundamental flaws that turned a game of chess (Gw1 ) into a mix of dodgeball and checkers.

I predicted that it would be a number 1 game, but I am now also predicting with confidence that these blob / zergs won’t be a long term problem as eventually there will not be enough serious pvp’rs in the servers to form big blobs, and wvw will eventually be owned by small gvg groups – and even then it won’t be serious competition because matchups are not player controlled. I give it a year.

Accept it. Has been for almost a year. You just had more fun expecting/hoping change would come soon. Hasn’t even come close to changing giant flaws.

All the real head hunter guilds left the game. Unfortunately all that is left are blobs of people who really dont know how to pvp….or even what it looks like for that matter.

Simple GIANT game-changing mechanic change would be just to only allow rezzing from out of combat players. Solves so many issues. Enough of the crutches for new players.

MAKE YOUR GAME HARD SO WE STICK AROUND TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO WIN!!!

Stop with the hello kitty island skill level requirements.

…Says a thief…

In all seriousness, there should be something much bigger than ourselves that we should be working towards, whether something is in motion or not, I’m not sure.

The game mechanics don’t just reward large numbers. Large numbers ensure victory. There’s no reliable way for a smaller force to win against a much larger one because everything can be overcome by the swarm.

The answer? It’s one that nobody has mentioned because nobody will like it. Limit the size of each team to be equal to the number of the smallest team, rebalanced every 15 minutes — not by kicking active players but by preventing new ones from logging in. Teams will not be exactly equal but it will hugely better -- Yes, that means queues will get worse, but that’s a separate issue.

Unless the game is fixed in this way, or something similar, it will always be fundamentally broken.

Aytrix.4059:

What are your guys feelings on removing caps of stun, fear, knockback, etc abilities rather than all aoe? While I think removing all aoe caps would be best, this might be a nice middle ground depending on the strain this puts on the server.

So basically leave the cap on damage spells and remove damage and player cap from all Crowd Control abilities.

You want to buff what is already the strongest, most abundant mechanic in this game?

The last thing this game needs is a debuff for zerging. Any and all tactics should be viable for WvW and just punishing people for zerging does not fix the underlying problem which is a lack of defensive tools. Its war remember and not everything is meant to be fair. Right now there is a severe lack of tools for defensive players and that is something that needs to be addressed to level the playing field between Zergs and small groups. If you give players the tools we will use them and find the solution ourselves

Right now in the short term Anet can do 3 things to fix zergs
- Remove golems off the trading post: It was silly to put them on as it encouraged rush style gameplay and made defense almost impossible. Just remove them and compensate players. While open-field fights would still be zergy at-least we can fight them off at towers and keeps now
- Remove rally (Keep downed state) or restrict rallying to 1 player per kill (Person who got final hit): This would stop entire zergs coming back from the dead and reward skill play and actually make it possible to defend even against golem spam. Groups even with an AOE cap can dmg a zerg now.
- Remove the AOE cap after toning down there graphics and flashyness: Necromancers and Eles are supposed to be walking artillery and anyone dumb enough to blob should pay the price with a mouthful of Marks and meteors. With the AOE cap removed while it would not stop zergs entirely it would reduce stacking and blobing and encourage people to move in smaller groups or formations to deal with the AOE classes thus instead improving skilled play

Long Term
- Introduce defensive Siege like say an EMP or siege razor siege Shield
- Scale up Keep lords and stone-mist legendary (Say 5% more HP per player when theres more then 7)

Its all a matter of introducing the right tools. Zerging should be a viable tactic but we should also have the means to fend it off. Anet Really needs to give us the Tools and the Short Term fixes could be implemented withing a few weeks if they wanted and AOE cap/Rally should be prioty fixes. Anyway that’s my 2 cents