Guild Wars 2

I wanted to put forward an idea for limiting blobbing in WvW:

Double the number of BL maps, but cut in half the size, population and number of objectives on each map. Maybe even make half the BL-type maps desert bl’s and the other half alpine bl’s for a little variety.

To address the odd number of keeps on the BL’s, each BL-type map would have two keeps (either on east and west side or north and south side of map).

EBG would remain the same.

I think this kind of set up would lead to not just more fights in WvW, but more EVEN-NUMBERED fights in WvW. The same number of people would still be able to queue for WvW as now, but the population would just be spread out more.

Idk…thoughts?

I am not sure how this would discourage blobs or encourage even numbered fights. How would you control the sign in/queued population into wvw, and then control what groups they join so as to have anything close to even numbered fights?

Why would this help? If you double the maps you only double the amount of maps that you’re gonna be outnumbered on when the numbers arent even. Players dont just pop up out of thin air to balance the maps.

If you want to have incentives for less blobbing and spreading out, then you should be looking at the commander system instead. Squads should be able to trade max size for boons. On top of that a more flexible marker system would allow us to more visibly change the purpose of a group instead of just a color. Right know it’s even players that set the standards for blobbing as they are censuring themselves, it’s pretty much taboo to have more than one tag (people even get confused at a blue and a red on the same border ffs). It’s pack mentality at it’s best and Anets 50 man squads is fully behind it.

It would discourage blobs by halving the size of population on each map. Instead of having 60-70 people run around as one massive blob on a map, there’d be two maps with 30-35 man groups, which would be better to fight against, especially if you yourself are not running a 60-70 man blob. Now, how you divide those 30-35 people would be up to each server…if they want to run as one big 30-man group or as two 15-man guild groups or have 12-man groups and have some roamers/havoc run around. But even if one server is running 15-man groups and another server is running one big 30-man group, that would be better than going up against a 60-70 man group. Also, smaller maps with less objectives means more frequent run-ins/fights for both roamers/havoc and zergs/guild groups.

As for the whole ‘double the amount of maps you’d be outnumbered on’ thing, that really wouldn’t be an issue that would be any different or worse than how it is now. I mean, whether the BL’s are split up or not, because the total number of objectives and players in WvW would remain more or less the same, the impact it would have on the score wouldn’t really be any different. It would actually even make things easier for the defenders, because if you’re outnumbered on a BL and you have like…IDK…10 ppl on map, then it’d be easier to defend against 30-35 ppl than 60-70 ppl.

Again, with this idea, the TOTAL number of objectives/players in WvW at any given time would remain the same, but by splitting up the BL’s and halving the population size/number of objectives on each BL, those objectives and players would be more spread out as opposed to players running around as massive 60-70 man blobs.

Players will QQ if they cant blob empty stuff…

And if people REALLY want to run around as massive blobs, then they would still be able to do that in EBG. The reason why I didn’t include EBG in this idea is because the EBG map is made unique by the SMC objective; this makes it more difficult I think to figure out how to split up EBG. Whereas the BL’s are pretty easy to split up since the number of camps/towers is even and the maps are pretty symmetrical. As for the keeps, like I said, Anet would probably have to just add two keeps to each BL map, or maybe even have each BL map have one keep but add an extra tower and/or camp.

It wouldn’t help.

Blobbing up is a player mentality and not an Anet design.

Safety in numbers I think is the saying and lets be honest, one of the appeals for WvW is MASSIVE PVP battles.

Seph, so you’re saying it wouldn’t help if players are ACTUALLY LIMITED to only being able to have 30 people per BL map as opposed to 60-70 people? You’re saying this wouldn’t help with the blobbing issue? That fighting against 30 man groups isn’t any better or different from fighting 60-70 man groups (especially if you have around 15-20 people in your own zerg)?

LionChain.7694:

Seph, so you’re saying it wouldn’t help if players are ACTUALLY LIMITED to only being able to have 30 people per BL map as opposed to 60-70 people? You’re saying this wouldn’t help with the blobbing issue? That fighting against 30 man groups isn’t any better or different from fighting 60-70 man groups (especially if you have around 15-20 people in your own zerg)?

Oh yea, am sure it would help the blob issue. But you would really make a lot of players who also paid money for the game really, really angry that they couldn’t play wvw, or couldn’t play wvw with their friends/guildmates.

So yea, it would certainly help decrease the blobbing, as it would also massively decrease the playerbase.

LionChain.7694:

Seph, so you’re saying it wouldn’t help if players are ACTUALLY LIMITED to only being able to have 30 people per BL map as opposed to 60-70 people? You’re saying this wouldn’t help with the blobbing issue? That fighting against 30 man groups isn’t any better or different from fighting 60-70 man groups (especially if you have around 15-20 people in your own zerg)?

Well if you limit people to 30 to a map, you’re gonna have a few roamers, few duelers, few scouts, few guild parties running around and some afks at spanw which means your blob is about 5-10 people.

5-10 people running around a map decreases fights due to the fact of less people on field. That doesn’t sound like WvW, that sounds like sPvP or a small GvG of pugs.

But for arguments sake, lets say everyone on map rallies on tag, what would you do with your 30 people? I bet you would do what the blob does already, go from one empty tower to the next in a vague attempt to level Elites.

sephiroth.4217:

LionChain.7694:

Seph, so you’re saying it wouldn’t help if players are ACTUALLY LIMITED to only being able to have 30 people per BL map as opposed to 60-70 people? You’re saying this wouldn’t help with the blobbing issue? That fighting against 30 man groups isn’t any better or different from fighting 60-70 man groups (especially if you have around 15-20 people in your own zerg)?

Well if you limit people to 30 to a map, you’re gonna have a few roamers, few duelers, few scouts, few guild parties running around and some afks at spanw which means your blob is about 5-10 people.

5-10 people running around a map decreases fights due to the fact of less people on field. That doesn’t sound like WvW, that sounds like sPvP or a small GvG of pugs.

But for arguments sake, lets say everyone on map rallies on tag, what would you do with your 30 people? I bet you would do what the blob does already, go from one empty tower to the next in a vague attempt to level Elites.

I already have all my Elites unlocked. Like I said, it’s up to each server what they would do with their 30 people. Run as one big 30-man group or run as two separate groups, or have some scouts/havoc, etc and one main zerg, etc….there are lots of options what you can do. Even if one server decides to run as a big 30-man group, and the other servers run as say 15-man groups, the 15-man groups would have a much better chance of fighting against 30-man groups than a 60-70 man groups. And I don’t really think you can ‘bet’ anything; each server has players that like to run as 15-20 man groups, and players that like to run in blobs.

But let’s say you’re right and that one or more servers run as one big 30-man groups on the divided BL’s. It would still be better than dealing with 60-70 man groups on one single BL map where that’s the only fight on the BL and everyone is lagging out/DCing like crazy.

By splitting the BL’s, maybe there’d be a 30v30 fight on one BL, and because map pops are capped at 30-35 ppl, maybe there’d be another 30v30 fight going on in a diff’t BL, as opposed to just one single 60v60.

And because each map would have half the amount of objectives and be half the size, the chances for both roamers/havoc parties and zergs to run into each other and end up fighting would be higher, as opposed to the way BL’s are now; most of the time when I run havoc, like 85% of the camps I take are just free caps without any resistance.

I get your idea, but I don’t think it works on the basic premise that you’re forcing limitations on players who don’t want it. There are other ways to incentivize people to play in different ways that doesn’t choke already imbalanced map populations. Any game you have with large-scale PvP (Planetside 2, EvE Online) is going to see zergs no matter what you do. I’m not a game designer and don’t have a solution, but I don’t see this kind of change as having the desired effect.

LionChain.7694:

I wanted to put forward an idea for limiting blobbing in WvW:

Double the number of BL maps, but cut in half the size, population and number of objectives on each map. Maybe even make half the BL-type maps desert bl’s and the other half alpine bl’s for a little variety.

To address the odd number of keeps on the BL’s, each BL-type map would have two keeps (either on east and west side or north and south side of map).

EBG would remain the same.

I think this kind of set up would lead to not just more fights in WvW, but more EVEN-NUMBERED fights in WvW. The same number of people would still be able to queue for WvW as now, but the population would just be spread out more.

Idk…thoughts?

I think I’m completely sick of this complaint. Seriously, it’s an MMO and we’re playing a game mode for LARGE SCALE COMBAT! That means a large group of players fighting each other. As in 40v40v40 or 60v60v60 is the normal and what should be occurring. This complaint, as you wrote it, is what drove the dev’s to create that horrid desert map.

Grayclay, I think what you’re talking about in terms of imbalanced map populations is more about imbalanced server populations, which is a separate but related issue that still needs to be addressed. But my post is mostly concerned with addressing people running in 60-70 man blobs. I don’t know if players would inevitably love or hate this change were it to happen; no one can say whether or not it would ultimately work.

Again, this thread isn’t about server population issues or people running around in one big group or a couple smaller zergs…it’s literally about limiting people from running in 60-70 person blobs, and this idea would do that because the pop. cap of each map would be about 30-35 people.

Right now, blobs are an issue because you get a 60-70 man blob together and you can basically steamroll entire maps pretty fast unless the defending server also runs a giant blob, which basically means less number of fights because everyone on the map is focused on just one big, nonsensical blobby fight.

And players are able to run in 60-70 man blobs because there’s nothing stopping them from doing it; if players are given the ability to do something in the game, then they will do it….it’s human nature. That’s why in order to specifically limit/discourage playes from running in these massive blobs, they have to actually be limited with dividing maps and halving map pops.

Blobbing has been an issue in WvW for a while now, and I know I’m not the only one to have issue with it for one reason or another. I really think that, even if people don’t ‘like’ the idea, forcing a map population limit and thereby removing players’ ability to build up to 60-70 man numbers is the only way to actually and effectively address these absurdly-sized blobs.

And yeah, with a 30-35 man group on a smaller BL map, maybe you’d be able to steamroll the map if the defending server has few to no people on map. But if they even have one guild group of 15-20 people running on that map, they will have a much better chance defending the bl against a max-size group of 30-35 people as opposed to 60-70 people.

LionChain.7694:

Blobbing has been an issue in WvW for a while now, and I know I’m not the only one to have issue with it for one reason or another. I really think that, even if people don’t ‘like’ the idea, forcing a map population limit and thereby removing players’ ability to build up to 60-70 man numbers is the only way to actually and effectively address these absurdly-sized blobs.

Yeah, but what about the people that pay for and enjoy the game BECAUSE of giant blobs? Your idea effectively discounts that entire sector of the playerbase, which is clearly a large one given the size of said blobs people play in.

My point is that your solution doesn’t actually fix the inherent problem, which is incentive distribution, it just splits up your problem into microcosms of the original problem because it only addresses the symptom of the larger issue, which is the lack of any reason to NOT blob.

This is WorldvsWorldvsWorld, not partyvsparty or raidvsraid. Some people like to run solo, roam, duel, havoc, whatever. They contribute in their own ways. But I enjoy running face-first at an earth-shatteringly large army at the front of another earth-shatteringly large army to find out what gives first. I’d be willing to bet a good chunk of people who play this mode get a thrill out of the occasional grand-scale warlike combat. Smaller groups can stop massive zergs on objectives if they’re prepared and bunkered-down, but of course they’ll struggle if they’re terribly outnumbered and unprepared. If I wanted a game mode so controlled I’d just play structured PvP.

I’m not really against zerging, as a game mode it’s fine, but it rapidly gets boring in this game because of the sheer volume of spell effects going off. Combat in a zerg is seriously hard to read, and while it can feel satisfying to watch an enemy zerg melt under the firepower of your own blob, I can’t really point at any moment that felt epic to me because I can’t read the combat very easily and tell who I’ve killed or how I’ve contributed, unless, of course, I contribute by building up some siege in the back and racking up kills with the ballista while we’re defending a point.

Truth be told for zerg on zerg warfare to feel epic you need to spread out the blob to a level where you get that epic feel but instead it’s in an awesome battle raging across an entire castle rather than just in the corner under the stairs, and you need to make one-on-one fights within that zerg feel more memorable, either in terms of rewards or in simple recognition of killing the enemy that was on the ballista, or who was keeping their group buffed or healed.

To do that, you need to introduce mechanics that are aimed at spreading the zerg out, be it during a siege to force them to attack multiple locations at once rather than just ramming a single gate down, or be it during open world engagements with other zergs.

To do that, you need to look at something Desert Borderlands did very well, despite it’s flaws: passive buffs, effects, and key areas within a fortress. The keeps need to do something other than just sit there on the map waiting to be ram raided. They need to send out raiding parties of their own, trigger dust storms or rain down artillery barrages against nearby strong points and detected zergs (thus making the sentry points a much higher priority objective to defend) in order to force those zergers to spread out.

They also need to have key points within the keep that you need to capture as well. Think SM’s hard now? Imagine if you had invincible auto turrets that were controlled by an Asuran monitoring station that you needed to cap, a guard post that constantly spawned NPC reinforcements that you needed to cap to disable, a generator that creates freak lightning storms in the courtyards… Just having a single objective, the keep lord, makes the fight rather uneventful and leads to the same old cycle of ram, kill zerg, kill keep lord, repeat. Having some secondaries would at least make the zerg spread out more and fight over a wider area for that more epic feeling.

If you want to roam, then roam. Don’t come in here demanding everyone plays the game to your way of playing. Obviously the 60-70 players in that large group far outnumber you and your opinion.

Pahawe.4865:

snip

This is a problem Planetside 2 suffers from, where base design encourages spawn camping from the numerically superior force. An issue that can be solved through better base-design and incentivization. Not an easy or simple thing to fix, but relatively straightforward to diagnose.

I like blobs, they do not need addressing.

the problem is if you halve the population per map but leave maps the same size, each map will be alot more empty and it will be harder for the groups to find eachother to get fights. lower population density might also encourage k-training

part of what sets wvw apart from other pvp is the large scale fights. that’s the entire reason some people play it. imo that’s part of the reason why ppl didn’t like the DBL’s and other HoT wvw content (like banners), because those things were designed to split up blobs (not to mention that the banners could also be abused by larger groups fighting smaller ones).

To discourage blobs you have to penalize them for being lazy scabs.

Make the outnumbered buff meaningful.

I know ANET says they are AFRAID (typical for them) of the outnumbered buff being exploited. But STACKING HAS BEEN EXPLOITED ever since the game launched. Why are they blind to that obvious fact? WvW lost thousands upon thousands of players after launch because of the stacking exploit and they have never once tried to fix it.

Imo, they don’t have the skill to fix the stacking issue and are afraid to even try. Mike O’Brien’s love of metrics probably has something to do with that.

Cluster Bomb: trick/trap, deals small damage to large aoe +1% per enemy player caught in the same aoe. cost 10 supply to use etc. It won’t solve things, but it would be hilarious to see it added for a day or two a week.

Bit more serious: Conflict of player interest. "I like this and hate that." I like that and hate this.".

The general idea is to build something for both, and honestly if you want to win the match, then I think you’d have more success running multiple 5-10 man groups and take, back-cap, and lead the enemy 60-70 zerg on a merry chase. You certainly would win on points.

But most people would find that boring or hard (do notice the "or", just want to point that out before someone starts picking on that). A lot of players enjoys the large scale, or find it easy etc. Will you remove their fun just because you don’t like it ?

I do like the idea of adding maps with lower caps, but probably from a different perspective. I’d like to see ANet drop the 3-4 identical styled maps, and rather make specific maps to different play styles. So making one map with few big objectives, lots of terrain, chokes, etc and make it a low pop roaming map. And another (themed after old Kaineng town) where you’re basically in a huge urban area with multiple walls for a full time siege on siege warfare etc.

Let players go after what interest them, instead of trying to force them to play with all the others that want to play something else.

Raolin Soulherder.3195:

the problem is if you halve the population per map but leave maps the same size, each map will be alot more empty and it will be harder for the groups to find eachother to get fights. lower population density might also encourage k-training

part of what sets wvw apart from other pvp is the large scale fights. that’s the entire reason some people play it. imo that’s part of the reason why ppl didn’t like the DBL’s and other HoT wvw content (like banners), because those things were designed to split up blobs (not to mention that the banners could also be abused by larger groups fighting smaller ones).

Not really a problem, we had the deserted map for like 6 months, right lol.

No, the real problem is that even when full, it will be empty. Why? Because this would literally kill all major WvW guilds running with 20+. They would be bored out of their minds fighting a pug zoneblobs they will totally steamroll or they would only fight a single other guild per side because no one else fit (heaven forbid pugs play on the same map). What would OP do, tell them to go to EB with the inevitable 200 man queue instead? Because thats what would happen, no pug will want to zerg/roam these maps at the prospect of meeting a single guild that’s impossible to beat because even now they can go 25vs50 and win. GG when that become 25vs25. No chance. Gaem ded.

LionChain.7694:

I wanted to put forward an idea for limiting blobbing in WvW:

Double the number of BL maps, but cut in half the size, population and number of objectives on each map. Maybe even make half the BL-type maps desert bl’s and the other half alpine bl’s for a little variety.

To address the odd number of keeps on the BL’s, each BL-type map would have two keeps (either on east and west side or north and south side of map).

EBG would remain the same.

I think this kind of set up would lead to not just more fights in WvW, but more EVEN-NUMBERED fights in WvW. The same number of people would still be able to queue for WvW as now, but the population would just be spread out more.

Idk…thoughts?

Nah

Far simpler and better idea would be to provide bonus rewards both in terms of score and personal rewards for every won combat engagement in which you are outnumbered.

Local outnumbered buff would need to be implimented for this, but it would be a positive bonus, not a nerf to anyone and it would be optional and nice goal to strive for and get better at the game.

Right now too many servers, even after the server merge, have too many empty maps. At times, extremely empty, adding more maps would multiply this bad situation, it would be worse then desert BL. So I very strongly disagree with more maps.

The first issue about blobbing is lots of people actually enjoy that, because it’s easy : you can do whatever you want by the sheer effect of numbers, so you can braindead in the blob spamming 1, kill any roamer, solo guy reaching his friends, take towers, camps, and sometimes even keeps, without thinking too much about what you’re doing, and still get the loot. It surely is a nice rest after a hard day of work.

I’m sorry, but no, people can’t do roaming or work in small teams when 3 blobs are chasing each other in the map, because when the blob is near, you’re lag-CC’d and wake up dead. Because you can’t fight a blob 5 vs 50, and won’t try, even if you’re promised a full legendary set, because it’s more or less no use.

As for the epicness of fights, it walks on a sharp edge. I totally agree with the fact that a 10-15 pack with a good synchronization can epicly wipe a huge unorganized blob, and that feels really rewarding. I’ve also seen many fights be an epic mess with 2/3 sprites online, AoE impossible to read, tremendous lags, and uncertain issue. I won’t call that epic. Just huge mess.

The main issue is blobbing is a result of WvW fundamental mechanics allowing ppl being lazy. Despite all ANet’s attempts, many servers don’t feel like it’s useful or rewarding to hold points and level them up. So they need to work on rewards so that blobs chasing each others and flipping points won’t give anything at all. Why not having a fixed small amount of loot per objective, and split it between the blob ? “nothing much divided by 50” won’t leave many things left.

On the same idea, there’s a cap on how many ppl can rez an ally at the same time. There should be a cap on how many foes you can engage in a fight at the same time, and you’d get like 10% damage from every other in the area.

I’m positive about the noise telling “WvW is big PvP big fights blah blah blah”. Check WvW maps. Does it look like the courtyard in any way ? No. Then the purpose of WvW isn’t blobs fighting blobs.

The OP seems to think there are enough people willing to tag up at all times of day to make the multiple maps, 30 cap viable. Players will go to where the action is, ie where the comms are.

There is also the small problem of other servers leaving players logged in deliberately in your spawn- not so bad when there’s 5 of them on a 60 map cap but when it’s 5 of 30, that’s a big problem.

Guild raids would be next to impossible to get all on the map you want to run on, and if you do there will be the usual complaints either from the guild ‘leave the map we have guildies trying to get in’ or pugs complaining about the guild group not capping with no pugs to fill that gap.

Can’t see how restricting numbers will be anything but bad.

There is nothing that needs fixing on blobs. Several players enjoy the concept and it is actually something that GW2 does better than it’s competitors.

What could help is limit the siege number….
Max 3 siege at the same spot… (there is some radius who already exist).
But including build site… To be sure that you can’t build more that 3 siege on the same place…
Then no need to blob to open those T3 wall with 10 cata at the same time…
Finish the time when you build 5 ram and 2 shield gen….

With that you need to spread to take stuff…. There will be the same blob for fight, but maybe it will be easier for defenser (but defenser will have the same limit).

Just remove Arrow carts, banners, and shield generators and the game will be fine. Right now it is ludicrous to try to cap anything so sieges up – so things are left alone and blobs hide behind siege.

Give me a narrow bridge where I can activate a gust of wind or a giant sandworm that can be summoned once within a 2 hours period of time. Jack the Zerg killer.

(Ironically if you split most big groups they run around screaming while moving their hands in random ways.)

I’m not a fan of blobbing so I don’t frequently take part. However, I see no reason to force my preferences on others. If they want to blob, then blob!

If they made the game less aoeish spam, less cleaves, less aoe, but having 1 or 2 stongers aoe and cleaves on a single target game would be much better.

Atm all u need is 1 big blob and few ppl to watch keeps and blob can jump from map to map. Put in 15 mins timer to prevent players from jumping from map to map should help spread ppl out more.

Best counter to a huge blob is multiple smaller “blobs” that work together, but at the same time separately, that I’ve seen.
Wolf pack mentality as opposed to swarm mentality. Does it always work? no, but I’ve seen much larger groups get taken down buy smaller groups (with overall fewer numbers than the large group)
And it’s tough to get that coordination most of the time, unless the commanders are in comms together.
Each smaller group still needs to be relatively disciplined though.

Think of it like 2 players against a hard bunker, alone you probably cant take a good bunker down (at least in a timely fashion), but together, you can break through their defenses.

As far as countering a huge blob that keeps capping/defending everything, start hitting too many things for them to respond to.

When anet introduced the squad UI they should have restricted it to say 25 players in WvW. That maybe would have helped. This idea was given as feedback way back when they had the CDi on this as well so its not as though its hindsight.

stop lowering the aoe cap and RAISE it.
i used to scoff.
now i rue.
such sads.

blobs are fine if you have blob too. blobs arent fine when a server pulls all people on all maps into one group to outman the other servers who dont have as many people on and karma trains all 4 maps through sheer numbers. that’s the real pain in the kitten of WvW. that’s why there should be a dynamic map cap depending on how many people are on the map. say you can bring 10 more, but not 40 more. dynamic map cap on all maps except EB and no dynamic map cap for the defenders of home border, that’s how i think it should be.

Blobs are inevitable .Most people who either don’t want to command or just haven’t got it in them to command will converged on the the only tag or leader on any map.The real problem is server stacking that started with the easy transfers.The earlier game had smaller blobs and seemed better matched before transfers were aloud .Personally I think transferring from one server to the next should have had a longer waiting period between transfers.Instead of a week go with at least a month. Or an exponential waiting time between transfers. first 1 week , second 2weeks, third 4 weeks and so on then maybe reset every year. That would at least deter the fair weather groups .But unfortunately the damage is already done.

There’s a fix for this blobbing in question. Make an option where a commander can challenge the opposing commander in a duel. The losing side of the duel “accept or decline and auto defeat” which most likely is the blob server commander. They will have a morale impact of 50%, meaning all their attributes are decreased by 50% for the next 10 minutes while the winning side squad can go on a rampage with an additional 50% to wipe that blob. It’ll be fun. It’s like pac man just ate the “dragon ball” and decided to kill them blobbing ghosts. C’mon, you know them blobs gonna hate my suggestions… Oops. That’s the majority on this forum?

While not likely ever to be implemented, I would love “Champion vs Champion”, with morale effects lol. Set up so they cant get attacked by other players, maybe a ring in the center area.
Granted, some crap player or spy might enter the ring, causing one side to lose morale.

50% boon/debuff would be way too op though, 10% would be noticeable enough.

dragon.8071:

There’s a fix for this blobbing in question. Make an option where a commander can challenge the opposing commander in a duel. The losing side of the duel “accept or decline and auto defeat” which most likely is the blob server commander. They will have a morale impact of 50%, meaning all their attributes are decreased by 50% for the next 10 minutes while the winning side squad can go on a rampage with an additional 50% to wipe that blob. It’ll be fun. It’s like pac man just ate the “dragon ball” and decided to kill them blobbing ghosts. C’mon, you know them blobs gonna hate my suggestions… Oops. That’s the majority on this forum?

Hate, yes.
Ridiculous, yes.
Boring AF, yes.
Not worth the time to reply, yes.

Sure, let’s just tell several hundred players to sit on their hands because an idiot popped a tag and went /threaten at someone else. <sigh> smh

Ven Zehn.6573:

Best counter to a huge blob is multiple smaller “blobs” that work together, but at the same time separately, that I’ve seen.
Wolf pack mentality as opposed to swarm mentality. Does it always work? no, but I’ve seen much larger groups get taken down buy smaller groups (with overall fewer numbers than the large group)
And it’s tough to get that coordination most of the time, unless the commanders are in comms together.
Each smaller group still needs to be relatively disciplined though.

Think of it like 2 players against a hard bunker, alone you probably cant take a good bunker down (at least in a timely fashion), but together, you can break through their defenses.

As far as countering a huge blob that keeps capping/defending everything, start hitting too many things for them to respond to.

I agree. Been there done that and its awesome, wish more people could understand this.

I don’t think blobbing is necessarily a bad thing. It’s a good server community building method and, even if it promotes lazy and bad play out of players, it can be quite fun fighting against another blob.

transfer to t8 … oh wait……

Dawdler.8521:

If you want to have incentives for less blobbing and spreading out, then you should be looking at the commander system instead. On top of that a more flexible marker system would allow us to more visibly change the purpose of a group instead of just a color.

Bump thread! I couldn’t agree more in terms of the blobbing issue, Dwadler brings a good point where the commander system should be focused upon in order to have a variant towards blobbing. One idea could be to encourage “sub-groups” with lieutenants using “numbered” tags for his/her team to see, it would allow strategic planning by commanders that are not into blobbing around (screenshots attached), a toggle option can be in place depending on the commanders’ style of play. It’s how “Alliance battles” in GW1 thrived and this would also enable focus towards player builds/class/combos, the very lives of the sub-group and lieutenant would now be dependent upon it to capture/survive. I’m unsure as to whether these ideas are feasible or not, comments welcomed and this post is a great start! Please keep thread alive! Thanks!

~Woop S

It’s easy to have sub groups now, just run more tags, use ts, and you can have different teams doing different things. It’s just more fun to run as a large group facing off against another large group than it is to mindlessly karma train- if you like that, go to EoTM.

This is an MMOPRG, a massively multiplayer role playing game. WvW is a large scale PvP game mode that is supposed to have massive combat. The blob is a great thing, and many enjoy fighting blob vs blob. You can still play however you wish to in WvW, just as the blob can, but consider that something that comes with the territory. There is already a small scale PvP zone in the game, for those that do not want to see the bob, this is one is the large scale one. There is no need to " stop the blob" at all.

For those who just think of the blob like an additional obstacle in the game mode, it is like the ghosts on pacman , dont let them touch you! The biggest issue I see with this is not the blob at all, it is the groups that do not communicate with the other groups, that do not get in TS and coordinate with everyone else on their server in a server vs server game mode. That is lack of organization and coordination on their part, and if they choose to do that instead of know what is going on the battlefield, they should get wiped, as they are choosing to be wiped at that point instead of working with others on their team, just as any football team would get their teeth kicked in if they all just " did their own thing" instead of pay attention.

There are plenty of roamers and havoc groups on servers that are listening to what is happening in the server’s TS and not ignoring everything else going on that do quite well. You choose your targets and such depending on where your blob and the enemy blob is, not just run around uninformed noobing it up being roadkill because you don’t know what is happening on your own server or maps.

I’d argue that TS is good, but not everyone uses it, and spying has been rampant again since server merge, till this day there has been no solution put toward to fix it. This might put some TS users off, but the core issue is not TS or communication, it’s the current blobbing behavior in WvW. As long as the enemy can hear/spy on you (TS or in your squad), they’d gain a major advantage. If the WvW mechanics + scoring discouraged zergs, there’d be more subgroups running around capturing camps at 3x the speed, and each build/person in that group would pay more attention to what they or the commanders are doing since their lives depends on it. In-game commander commands to subgroups can not be “spied” upon as they can’t be seen or heard. How does an enemy zerg attack 3 subgroups in 3 different locations with 3x the capture/scoring ticks? The mechanics of commanding/scoring in WvW should drive player behavior, not TS, and definitely not Zerg Wars.