Do you like running around with massive skill lag all the time?
Is it fun to mash one button?
I guess not. The reason for blobbing is the same as the reason for Ursan Way in GW1:
People like to win, even when winning means doing something repetitive and boring.
The game seems to favor blobbing as the best (or at least the easiest) way to get tally-points, drops, karma, wxp, xp at the moment. Otherwise, why would you suffer through hours of skill lag?
Here are some suggestions how to change this:
1. Reduce damage done by players to gates to zero and increase the damage done by rams slightly to compensate for this.
If a gate doesn’t go any quicker whether you are 20 or 80 people, naturally the way to win will be to have 4 20-man groups instead.
This leaves the defenders with a choice: Go with one massive blob to 4 towers or go with 4 small groups to every tower. (The speed at which rams can take down a gate needs to be tweaked in way that ensures that a 80 man zerg does not have the time to wipe 3 groups all over the map and travel to the 4th tower before you can cap.)
In this way attackers and defenders would be encouraged to split up into mid-sized groups to win. Et voila, you have yourself 4 mid-sized fights instead of one boring skill-laggy Blob vs. Blob.
2. Make rewards in WvW scale down with the number of players participating.
One could – for example – introduce the following system:
If 10 people take a supply camp, everyone 100% of the reward (wxp,xp,karma,drop rate). If it’s 20 people all rewards are scaled to 50%. At 40 people everyone gets 25% of the reward and so on. That way, the PUGs and Karma-Train riders will be discouraged from blobbing up.
Off the top of my head I would just suggest to make the 100%-Reward marks as follows:
- 1 player for player kill (meaning if you kill somebody 2v1 you only get 50% of the rewards). That way wiping an equally sized group gives you full rewards. Winning despite smaller numbers gives you more rewards and ganking one lonely guy with 80 people doesn’t give you much.
- 5 people for sentry or dolyak
- 10 for supply camp
- 15 for tower
- 30 for keep
- 50 for SM
The scaling could also work in the opposite direction but there it should probably scale slower and be capped somewhere (for example soloing the sentry could give 200%, solo-ing a supply-camp could give 300% of the reward a 10-man group gets, soloing a tower could get 500% the reward or something like that)
3. In order to help spread the players across all four maps (yes, there are maps besides EB), one could make the outmanned bonus reduce damage taken and increase damage dealt. In my experience many people only start coming to maps once some things have flipped to their color. The people who actually fight against the odds should get some actual boni and not just incentives for the Karma-Train riders.
On a side note, for all of you blobbers who might wanna rage about this. Think about it: You could still get the same amount of rewards without having to blob if you ran in mid-sized groups. And do you SERIOUSLY like blobbing??
I do understand that it’s hard to get the PUGs to stop following the nearest Commander Tag and divide up into mid-sized groups. However, if the way to win disfavors blobbing, I figure all commanders will discourage their PUGs from blobbing and encourage them to form mid-sized teams and send them to objectives while perhaps assigning an experienced player to call the shots during fights.
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