Guild Wars 2

Gothir.3604:

Buffing some NPCs is not the right way to discourage zerging. There are enough NPCs in wvw as it is without adding more. They need a way to split up the huge groups by having multiple objectives that need to be held at the same time.

I like this suggestion and it would definitely encourage zergs to split up.
This would only work for sentry points or camps, since people would just place 30 superior AC’s in every tower and they would be impossible to siege.

However, the best possible solution would simply be to split the rewards depending on how many people who were participating in an event.
As well as split wxp for kills depending on how many people have tagged a person.
There should be a minimum and maximum amount of points you could get, so a group of 100 people wouldn’t only receive 5-10 karma.
The main reason for people to run with the zerg (based on my experiences) are definitely the rewards. Most people do not really care for the overall score, at least not the casual player.
Sometimes i’ve asked in map-chat if anyone wanted to help me set up a distraction at a keep or tower, but i’ve never been able to establish a party.
I believe this is because people want the rewards for the tower/keep that is already under siege. The typical human mentality applies for WvW as well: “Why should i be the one to be denied rewards? Someone else can set the distraction so i’ll get the karma and wxp”
It’s really important when designing games to know that you’re working with people, and they behave IG as they do IRL.

Aztex.4895:

Everyone knows WvW is only about zergs. And yes, this is one more thread about how it could be fixed. I didn’t find any post regarding the same suggestion, so here it goes.

Anet can still hide it a bit with some updates (like this last one in Arrow Carts), but servers still zerg and they will continue to do it.

Why do people zerg? Because they get points faster and with no challenge and because they have more supply with them to build any siege weapon.

What if all the points – Keeps, Towers and Camps – would scale in difficulty with the number of attackers, like we see in PVE?
The more people there are attacking a Tower, the harder it gets – NPC’s get stronger with more skills, there are more NPC’s spawning, the Gate and Walls get more Life.
I don’t know if they are already doing this, but I guess they aren’t because it would be the best way to counter zergs with balancing a bit.

I think with this idea well balanced, a Keep or a Tower would be so hard to take down when there’s a zerg of 40+ people in front of it that it wouldn’t be fast enough. Players would think about the time wasted in only one point and would try to separate in teams to take/defend other objectives in the map at the same time.

Just, no. Let me explain why.

If you scale the “difficulty” of the structure, then you’re automatically slanting the balance in favor of defenders. By doing this, you require fewer people to defeat a much larger force. This would promote ninja’ing structures, and far fewer fights over the point.

Zerg tactics work in the mindset of amassing your entire force into one unit; normally this would have the downside of a slower response time due to having all of your units in one place and it requiring more time to move 50 people as one than it does to move 5.

If you wanted to reduce zerging, you need to make it harder to track the enemy. As-is currently, you can have a 5-10 man team trying to take a tower and the enemy zerg can respond within a matter of minutes – far before you have the chance to take it down.

My changes:
Swords only appear on your map within a set radius of your location.
Swords don’t appear when engaging an NPC, they will display when a threat to the location is displayed. (Say, 75% health on the wall or door).
This would REQUIRE the use of scouts at each location to report back when the enemy has started knocking on your door. If a group has gotten your wall to 75% and you haven’t responded, there’s a good chance you’re going to lose it. Furthermore, it encourages the use of smaller raiding parties. If you’re small, you can move around relatively undetected. It would allow for more ‘strategic’ capping of places.

You make the maps bigger with more objectives to capture. If the maps are bigger than you need more smaller groups (less than 15) to cover more ground. You could still have your massive blob armies attack major objectives but the way the maps are now. People know how to navigate terrain way to quickly. And with the arrow cart buff it makes it really tough to ninja anything nowadays.

Well if this were to happen then you would just have to introduce new maps. IMO Anet should also take into consideration the wvw population of tiers 1-3 vs 4-8. Maybe make maps that accommodate to the size of those tiers. On the GvG suggestion I think they should beta a wvw a map with cap on it. Say 40 people.

IDEA: Outmanned buff means that that server’s normal camps/towers/keeps are worth 1/2 the points when taken. Doesn’t matter if they leave or not. You take Anz and speld? Great! 0 points. You have to take Anz and Mend for 1 tower point. speld and pangloss for 1 camp point etc. If they take them and then port away (removing the buff) the points stay as they were when they were given (at half value rounding down).

I kind of feel that zergs are a natural part of massive pvp. Unorganized zergs get crushed with seige or well organized zergs. Its natural. I think the situation that a lot of ppl are complaining about is trying to fend off a zerg without comparable numbers or enough supply to build the seige up (because you can’t hold anything long enough to build up the supply). This situation is rough because as time goes on only a more organized zerg can beat a zerg and nothing can beat an organized zerg. So my idea is remove the incentive for a zerg to run roughshod over an outmanned group.

Think about it, its natural. If a server, or a region of the world, can only muster 10-15 warriors for every 30-40 of your own then it would seem that those parts of the world are somewhat less rewarding to take. The boons of sacking Paris should not be as beneficial as taking London. If it were, no one would go for London, they would just zerg Paris over and over again.

Gothir.3604:

Buffing some NPCs is not the right way to discourage zerging. There are enough NPCs in wvw as it is without adding more. They need a way to split up the huge groups by having multiple objectives that need to be held at the same time.

I agree with that. I feel WvW would be better in general when you have people spread out everywhere, you could expect combat anywhere. Right now it’s just a battle of zergs for the most part. We need better UI tools to group and coordinate forces and stop being forced to either zerg or 5 man it.

Aztex.4895:

Why do people zerg? .

There are strength in numbers. Higher Tiers also have greater number of active players in wvw, 24/7. Don’t like zergs or your computer can’t handle it, drop to a lower tier with less populace.

scootshoot.6583:

Aztex.4895:

Why do people zerg? .

There are strength in numbers. Higher Tiers also have greater number of active players in wvw, 24/7. Don’t like zergs or your computer can’t handle it, drop to a lower tier with less populace.

That’s certainly an option, but you also have guilds that like to have private guild nights. Having to switch servers to form a guild only event seems a poor solution when there are simple ways to fix it.

Add a number of magical sources of power (3 is not good cause every server wuold capture one and get done with it and 1 will only bring lagfest) that spawn every 2 hours on the map and last for 20 minutes (or the time needed to capture, at least 10 minutes). Every captured source gives a number of points or other advantages. The reward must scale based on enemy presence. This is to force field fights and split forces.