Guild Wars 2

Dear devs-
What can you tell us about the future for WvW zergs? Do you approve? This constant karma/exp/reward train goes on in every single borderland and leaves no content what so ever for roamers, smaller groups, or even medium groups. It’s pretty apparent that the mantra of WvW is this- Everyone get to one commander. Follow the blue dot. Pick up supplies when he tells you to. Build when he tells you to. Spam 1 on doors. Repeat.

Whoever has more people, just wins.

Suggestions that I’ve thought of to make WvW more interesting and much much more fun.

Make doors scale with the amount of people that are there. Make doors only take damage to siege. Only one of these options needs to be implemented, as either would single handedly put a stop to “all gather around the door and press 1”

Make ballistas push people back. (much like in the ascalon fractal)

Give more options for commanders. Make commander tags an achievement to unlock that takes knowledge and skill, not just “who can play the game more”. Refund 100g to people with tags and take all tags away.

Take away white swords. (this is just a shot in the air, idk how this would be.)

Make yaks travel 50% faster. (or an upgrade that makes them go 50% faster).

Make upgrading cost you no gold. As it stands right now, nearly no one wants to bother upgrading camps and towers and at times, keeps as well.
Its a real shame all that content has went to waste

Make upgrades complete faster.

Theres more to add, for sure, but in the mean time simply critique my suggestions.

Remeber that my goal is to improve smaller group play and to reduce the blobbing and zerging that goes on, day in and day out.

Most of your suggestions would be nightmare or useless for T1/T2/T3 servers

The only way to reduce blobbing (without revamping the entire combat system or putting in some arbitrary scaling mechanic) would be to reduce the map population caps to about 60 players per map. This won’t happen though, apparently it’s not “epic” if there aren’t enough people to auto-attack down all enemies and structures.

The critical mass for a blob to be effective seems to be about 50+. Anything less and it can actually be beaten by an organized group of 20ish. The map blob only functions well with 10-20 roamers and scouts havocing backlines and delaying sieges by enemies. If it’s a choice between efficient blob size and efficient scouting/defense smart teams will split into 2-3 smaller groups at this size.

There still would be wxp trains, can’t control human greed completely. It would be a lot harder to simultaneously wxp train and hold high PPT though, right now it’s easy for the most populated servers to run wxp trains and hold enough points to “win” as well. Running in a blob of 80 has no drawbacks if you can still leave scouts to man siege and call the blob at each location you take.

Most sieges right now go like this:
1) zerg arrives and is called out by scout who begins firing (OP as hell, but necessary in a way) supply draining cow ammo from a treb. Arrow carts are fired as well if in range.
2) Gate melts in less than 1 minute due to ram mastery + superior siege + golems + timewarps. Alternatively catapults with people maxed in mastery swapping (exploiting) turns to keep bubble shield up permanently blast through walls in comparable time.
3) Defending blob arrives and massive aoe spamfest in lord’s room ensues. Might, blast, bomb, water, blast, repeat till one side wins.

Walls, gates, and most defensive siege are useless for the most part. There are variations, and off-hours are different, but assuming at least one size can queue a map this is the meta currently.

Thrashbarg.9820:

The only way to reduce blobbing (without revamping the entire combat system or putting in some arbitrary scaling mechanic) would be to reduce the map population caps to about 60 players per map.

Then people would run in 60 man zergs. :P

The only way to stop it is to change average human behavior, which won’t happen. The mistake that Anet makes is that they reward this playstyle instead of punishing it.

Reducing population cap does nothing to address the mechanics of the game that have led to zergs becoming de rigueur.

If we want zerging reduced, there needs to be changes to the rewards structure, not just around capping, but around every event type in WvW (defence, upgrading, escorting etc).

You can’t just address the symptoms, you need to address the cause.

Oozo.7856:

Thrashbarg.9820:

The only way to reduce blobbing (without revamping the entire combat system or putting in some arbitrary scaling mechanic) would be to reduce the map population caps to about 60 players per map.

Then people would run in 60 man zergs. :P

The only way to stop it is to change average human behavior, which won’t happen. The mistake that Anet makes is that they reward this playstyle instead of punishing it.

The difference is the 60 man zerg (being the entire map population) would lose the match (PPT game, I know, no one cares about it, yeah, sure, whatever, if no one cared about it all the structures would go undefended 24/7). The current meta is 60-80 man zerg and the rest scouts/sentries/havoc. Without those 10-20 support crew the blob can’t keep anything or upgrade anything, if the blob can’t exceed 40-50 players without abandoning all other objectives, it makes small(er) scale fights more viable.

TheLawndart.7658:

Reducing population cap does nothing to address the mechanics of the game that have led to zergs becoming de rigueur.

If we want zerging reduced, there needs to be changes to the rewards structure, not just around capping, but around every event type in WvW (defence, upgrading, escorting etc).

You can’t just address the symptoms, you need to address the cause.

I believe it does (at least partially) address the cause. The math simply favors bigger blobs beyond a certain point. There is a critical mass of players which makes a metagame including blobbing much more profitable, and I believe that critical mass to be around 60 players per map.

It takes longer for a smaller blob to melt gates. Smaller blobs carry less supply, making it harder to spam siege for everything.

I don’t think they will lower map caps though, it’s unlikely they would risk making that many customers angry.

Rewarding defense is much more problematic, as it can easily be exploited (dolyak walking bots at release are an example, hence the removal or gold/karma from the escort event).

Rewards for upgrades? Players line up to queue useless upgrades.
Rewards for building siege? All kinds of siege placed in dumb spots and wasted supply.
Rewards for scouting? How would you even….?
Dolyak escorts? Welcome back queue hogging bot legions.

Active defense is already rewarded. Kill someone or repair something every 3 minutes for karma, wxp and gold.

Reducing rewards based on number of players might work, but it’s likely to lead to harassment of non-guild players if they bump the rewards down by being there (hello unfriendly game atmosphere). I feel reducing map caps would be overall more player friendly, especially if they added duplicate/overflow maps (perhaps EotM could serve this function).

To OP: If you don’t like that play style, move up to T3 or higher. Either that, or join a more WvW focused guild that actively looks for both fights and PPT.

Otherwise, stop complaining. What you’re seeing is the result of a lack of manpower in your server to actively defend a structure, making it easier to flip structures back after they’ve been taken in order to preserve PPT. It’s actually quite a good strategy all things considered.

In T3 servers and up, roaming is necessary to contest bloodlust, cap camps and cut off reinforcements to enemy zergs. Medium sized groups are required to keep enemy zergs busy. Large size zergs brute force their way into structures. If that sounds like it’s for you, well, time to start saving gems to transfer.

Why ask this question? If an Anet Dev came and said “Yes, Bloobing is the intended gameplay option” would everyone finally shut up? Or will the whining continue until the majority of the people, people who enjoy this type of game play are forced to play the game the minority likes?

Keiel.7489:

Why ask this question? If an Anet Dev came and said “Yes, Bloobing is the intended gameplay option” would everyone finally shut up? Or will the whining continue until the majority of the people, people who enjoy this type of game play are forced to play the game the minority likes?

Really, it was a rhetorical question. But, I’m not gonna lie, if a dev said “yes this is how we envisioned wvw” then i would not say another word and just play the game. If it’s not going to happen, then its not going to happen. Why waste my time here asking the impossible.

Nothing wrong with blobbing if it gets the job done. If you can’t counter or work around it then that’s a problem within your server that you need to sort out.

What else do you expect 500 players to do on such tiny maps?

Battlefield has bigger maps than the WvW maps and is limited to 64 players.

I was like, wouldn’t the solution be to make bigger maps and adding more objectives? Then you can add a “scouting” feature that players can use in order to alert others of enemy movement. The main thing is the space between objectives. The more time a large blob travels together, the less they get done. If they split up, they can flank enemies, search for weakly defended objectives, force the enemy to split up, etc.

A scouting feature would be an extra “skill” that you can only use on enemy players. It should have a poison cow radius of effect, and if you hit enough people with it (some number), the group of players is flagged on your servers map for a short period of time (2 seconds). The skill would have a 3-4 second cool down, requiring a scout to actively and safely follow the group lest he lose them because he was attacked or just didn’t feel like scouting anymore. There could be some reward for tracking an enemy group for some period of time as well.

However, the maps need to be bigger or there isn’t much point to truly scouting, nor smaller but spread out squads. Since everything is so condensed, it’s easier, and more efficient, to have one main blob and a bunch of havok players running around in teeny tiny groups.

Oozo.7856:

Thrashbarg.9820:

The only way to reduce blobbing (without revamping the entire combat system or putting in some arbitrary scaling mechanic) would be to reduce the map population caps to about 60 players per map.

Then people would run in 60 man zergs. :P

The only way to stop it is to change average human behavior, which won’t happen. The mistake that Anet makes is that they reward this playstyle instead of punishing it.

This. Change reward structure, problem solved. Serious players all hoped that the WXP system would be introduced properly and with this in mind, it wasnt and here we are months later, same problem. ANET runs in those blobs, they do not see it as a problem.

I agree with the OP and l also like his suggestions.
Anything that can reduce the effectiveness of huge zergs and enable lower pop servers to actually hold on to a keep or a tower should be encouraged – we rarely, if ever, manage to successfully upgrade a keep. Been weeks and weeks since I last saw a waypoint.
For clarity’s sake, I should point out that any zerg over 20 would be considered big on my server (Underworld) as that’s often our total population on our home borderlands.
Suggesting people transfer off such servers is very unhelpful as that only makes it worse, locking us into a downward spiral until the server is completely empty.
Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing – a completely deserted realm with no points at all might bring it home that something needs to change.
At least it’s Christmas this week, means I can spend my time doing something else besides getting steamrollered by Fort Ranik

I only agree with the PVD bit, gates shouldnt take damage from players, i dont like blobs/zergs myself but hey thats what you get in large scale battles

I think blobs are fine. It is world vs. world vs world after all. Much like Alliance Battles in GW1, a casual mode of PVP. People rarely complain much about AB being disorganized and chaotic (exploits and cheating is a different can of worms). In fact, for every person here complaining about blobing, there are probably 9 others that are happy with it being like it is.

When I see threads like these, I think people want equal organized team PVP mode like GVG. Why those aren’t in from the first day still baffles me.

sollution: body block as in gw1.60-80 men zergs just cant move because they block each other. a 30 men blob can easyli counter anything. 10 heavy melee block, 10 midline and 10 nukers. little like in Sparta more viable builds and tactics. and because the smaller fights medium classes come in sight.

Collision boxes are very, very very cycle intensive. I don’t think it is a viable solution. Even if it did, it can open up a lot of ways “spies”, or your generic kittens, can hurt the game.

nikitnq.7143:

I think blobs are fine. It is world vs. world vs world after all. Much like Alliance Battles in GW1, a casual mode of PVP. People rarely complain much about AB being disorganized and chaotic (exploits and cheating is a different can of worms). In fact, for every person here complaining about blobing, there are probably 9 others that are happy with it being like it is.

When I see threads like these, I think people want equal organized team PVP mode like GVG. Why those aren’t in from the first day still baffles me.

Man, I loved AB in GW1. The only difference there was a single SF ele was able to take out an entire mob solo. Unless there were rangers. kitten rangers.

good ol’ ‘rupt rangers… :’)
collision not makes any problem. if you played gw1 you know friends can go closer as enemys. you need 3 times more friend to block you as enemy. 1-2 are nothing. 10-15 is annoying but only because you have a dozen of traitor in your team. body blocking only make problem if you are in a 60 men blob.

Also, being in a 60 man team on teamspeak is pretty awesome. Just as much fun outside of the game as inside of it.

It doesn’t matter if it was intended or not. In PvP, you can count on two things guaranteed.

1. People will settle into things that seem to work best.
2. Other people will complain about it.

I can definitely see why some would consider wanting to change the mechanics to limit blobbing. However, if they did that, we’d be right back to “1”, shortly followed by “2” again.

Game encourages large team play. It wont happen, and I hope it doesn’t.

Killing karma trains is very fun and I know a lot of guilds that enjoy the zerg busting

Natronix.9827:

Game encourages large team play. It wont happen, and I hope it doesn’t.

Killing karma trains is very fun and I know a lot of guilds that enjoy the zerg busting

Blobbing is not team play, it is follow the leader at best.