Guild Wars 2

I love the way PvE EXP works. Everyone gets the EXP. It virtually eliminates kill stealing, aggressive spawn camping, and actively encourages grouping.

You take that to WvW Experience (Wxp), and it is a blatantly unbalancing force to risk versus rewards.

Take two opposing groups: a 5 man team (Team A) and a 10 man team (Team. The average player is worth 30 points.

Team A encounters Team B.

Best case scenario for Team A is wiping Team B, with a total gain of Wxp of 10 (dead Team B players ) * 30 (Wxp per player) * 5 (players in Team A) = gain of 1500 Wxp.

Best case scenario for Team B is wiping Team A, with a total gain of Wxp of 10 (dead Team A players ) * 30 (Wxp per player) * 10 (players in Team A) = gain of 1500 Wxp.

Now, which team has a better chance of surviving? Why would anyone who is going for the carrot that has been placed in front of us (which, honestly, we all are) in their right mind NOT travel with a huge zerg? You’d be considered witless.

If the Wxp was shared instead of multiplied, your best bet for maximizing Wxp would be a group that was large enough to be mobile, responsive, and agile, but not so large that people can laze around, leaching off of the success of the superior numbers.

Same Teams A & B with this scenario:

Team A Victorious:
10 Dead Team B * 30 per player / 5 Team A players = 60 per player, total of 300 Wxp

Team B Victorious:
5 Dead Team A * 30 per player / 10 Team B players = 15 per player, total of 150 Wxp

This encourages skill, appropriate risk vs reward, and smaller encounters – which are obviously needed, considering how laggy it is with 3 zergs of 50 players have proven to be.

Yet another theme about “Stop liking things that i don’t like!”.
Guys, why you not going into sPvP? It’s all about your lovely “small group skill”. Leave WvW for WvW players.

Uh, the first time I played more than 10 minutes of sPvP was for this monthly laurels thing. Have you been in a fight with the majority of 3 full borderlands at once? You think that’s fun?

This is Orbs all over again – the winning team will gain more and more of an edge.

It’s fun when you can’t barely use auto attack. This game is like bad joke now.

Rednik.3809:

Yet another theme about “Stop liking things that i don’t like!”.
Guys, why you not going into sPvP? It’s all about your lovely “small group skill”. Leave WvW for WvW players.

Have you tried running with a coordinated group of 20-25 rather than 50+? Have you been in a “smaller” 20v20? I guarantee you that it feels every bit as epic as your huge fights, your skills actually work, you don’t die instantly, you can actually see what is going on, and your individual skill as a player actually counts for something.

20v20 is a massive fight really. Your screen is still full of players and there is a ton of damage flying around. The 50+ vs 50+ that is going on right now is just gamebreaking and really isn’t any more fun than a “smaller” fight.

A screen full of red is a screen full of red and your screen is only so big.

To the OP: I fully agree with you. Maybe someday this will be implemented, but unfortunately I doubt it will be anytime soon.

You could split the xp, but you’re still going to get larger groups forming over smaller. Why? Because, as you said, there’s the chance of success factor. Sure being solo or in a smaller group might be more rewarding if you win, but it all comes down to “if you win”. You’ll get your wXP, it’ll come in and build up. But it isnt going to build up if all you do is die to superior numbers (we can assume skill level on havok/roamin groups are the same). People want to win their fights. They want to keep going without having to respawn. Full force zergs just provide more across all areas of reward not to do it.

The entire reward system needs to be restructured if you hope to change zerg culture.

What you are describing is the reward system for every single aspect of WvW, not just World XP. And of course you are right. Its consistent with Anet’s philosophy of never having allied players compete for (or “split”) rewards ever. And its yet another way that Anet enables and rewards the zerg.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/GW2-rewards-the-Zerg-an-incomplete-list

To play in the style you are describing (smaller squad) you must be motivated by style and your own idea of fun because the game will penalize you for doing so, severely.

This makes me sad. Ah well.

Its a no win situation for Anet at the moment. Splitting Wxp will make some happy some mad. They need to add more objectives, larger maps etc to help give reason for splitting up. No one is caring about scores right now, only world XP so they are running in one huge mass zerg. You can easily run ikittenman, take camps, and unapposed towers, rack up fast WxP but the only fights you will see at the moment is 100+v100+. For now it is follow the zerg until Wxp calms down a bit

This would further premote zergs either way. Because if player kill xp was split people would focus even more on capping and avoiding fights. Not that that does not happen now but it would make it wors.

Rednik.3809:

Yet another theme about “Stop liking things that i don’t like!”.
Guys, why you not going into sPvP? It’s all about your lovely “small group skill”. Leave WvW for WvW players.

Spvp isnt good. Team gets spilt up. Rewards are bound to spvp only so skins I earn there mean nothing. Lots of reasons.

Large scale battles can be epic, but honestly most of the time it’s zergs avoiding each other to claim easy points and only engaging in open field battles when they have a much greater advantage.

The main problem with this idea is that having teammates negatively impact your experience gain is just wrong. People would start blaming allies for leeching exp off of them, which is kind of opposite of what the whole game is about. If you started soloing a supply camp, and a random player passes by and decides to help, would you tell him to leave because he’s cutting your exp gain in half?

This… Really doesn’t seem good. It’s an unnatural, counterintuitive way of disincentivising zerging. It doesn’t flow well with the rest of the game at all.

Want to disincentivise zerging? Get rid of the other things that don’t fit well, like the AOE cap, and turn siege weapons from minor nuisances into killing machines like they should be.

It would go against ANet’s philosophy of not hating to see allied players. I think at most they should make it so that every player over 10 or something you start getting less, at most. I agree with trying to reduce incentive for zerg another way. Realistically the larger your force the slower you must travel to keep it in check, in game this is the opposite, you move faster! Especially due to things like Temporal Curtain which have infinite target limit.

What would’ve helped reduce the zergs as well is orange swords.. which I never thought was a good change to begin with, yet I swear I saw it on some podcast that a huge guild were saying “Oh that’s a great idea to break up zerging” and suddenly the forums were full of people requesting it, it’s dumb as hell change. (Funny to see that guild now complaining about zergs).

What such a change will accomplish is that no one earns any WXP. People will still clump up because of the same reasons theyve always clumped up. Only now, they will earn much less WXP.

And those that do go smaller groups? Well, outside the odd highly organized WvW guilds, they will not get any WXP because they still get rolled over by much bigger zergs.

As long as there is no real tactical disadvantage to massive blobs (and no: skill-lag doesn’t count as a tactical disadvantage :p ) you won’t get rid of them. The risk vs. reward is just too much in favor of zergs for most people.
The irony is that the culling fix we were all waiting for and many thought would help smaller groups actually promotes zerging even more.

The maps aren’t really that big, travel times are quite low and anyone has the ability to rez anyone at any time.
These things would need to be looked at to seriously impact the potential of a zerg, but since that would take a huge rework I think a straight debuff when X amount of allies are near, however cheesy it sounds, is the only feasible way to impact zerging significantly.
Buffing/reworking siege (especially defensive siege) might help a bit as well.

Neandramathal.9536:

It would go against ANet’s philosophy of not hating to see allied players.

I keep seeing this comment on ANET’s philosophy used as an excuse and frankly it is invalid. The rally system and how it works in WvW means I have no interest in fighting by other allied players, aka walking rally points. The lack of group priority for buffing/heals/clense means I have no interest in fighting by other allied players. Just two small examples of how that philosophy is not even valid in the current game.

As i have stated in other posts about Wxp, i will state here. The biggest problem with the new system is it rewards in the wrong way. For one splitting Wxp is not the way to split up zergs. A better way and a way that would lead to IMO a better, more well rounded approach would be as follows. First, i am not sure if its worth any Wxp or not but defending needs to be worth alot more Wxp then attacking structures, camps, and dolyaks. It would be simple if you are on the defending side of an attack you get maybe 1.5x the wxp that the attackers would get if they capped + Wxp based on the number of people attacking the structure + the obvious Wxp from any kills you get.

so lets say an attacker would get 150 WXP for a structure, then a defender gets a base of 225 WXP for defending if they keep the structure then they get a bonus of maybe 10 wxp per attacking enemy( 10 may be high not sure of a good number but this is just for explanation sake). so in this scenerio lets say the defenders are succesful against 20 attackers then they would get 425 Wxp plus what ever they get from kills. Another bonus can be added whenever you get Wxp from taking or defending a structure based on how many structures your server currently holds.

This would help because it would give incentive to stay and defend your points. It would put a stop to the current mind set of, get a zerg cycle through a map and dont defend anything so that the enemy can reclaim and we can cycle again for more Wxp. Due to this behavior i have found it useless and a waste of money to even try to upgrade anything.

By giving incentive to defend structures it will naturally cause zergs to decrease in size due to the fact that they will not want to lose structures. It would be even more effective to have the last boost i mentioned.