Guild Wars 2

I think we can all agree, this is getting out of hand and becoming far less enjoyable.

The 60 man zergs. (or rather, the blobs as a zerg would imply they’re being lead by a single mind with coordination, but they’re usually not. It’ll be a small core group on ts and 30+ pugs looking to karma train)

WvW has become even worse than the queensdale champ train in that, everyone on the map gathers up, spams 1 a bunch and either rolls over the enemy because they have far superior numbers or scatters like roaches because they’re getting creamed.

Now granted, there are good “zerg busting” guilds out there that try to fight these (I’m in one and 20vs60 is just a bit more than we can handle) but a regular commander, without his entire force on ts and running synergized builds, has no chance at all.

This is not a cry thread about “fairness” though, but a question of “who’s having fun” in these fights? The members of the 60 man blob who spam 1 and hope they can tag a few of the enemy? The 20 man squad trying desperately to defend their fully fortified keep against this mindless monster? And what could/should be done about this?

So an idea was given, not by me, but I like it and want to propose it as something to be considered and discussed, about implementing a “proximity debuff” to balance fights somewhat and maybe even discourage “blobing” a bit. It could go along the lines of: every 5 players over 30 in “x” proximity results in a 50 stat point debuff. (just a rough idea folks, don’t get hung up on these numbers) Something like this could really take the wind out of the sails of the karma train and return a player vs player element to wvw, making it feasible to fight these groups and more rewarding to have coordinated teams rather than massive numbers. And even with a “300” stat point debuff at 60 people, c’mon you still have 60 people.

A couple of questions pop into my mind with this though. If I’m commanding and don’t want the massive debuff, how do I keep people from blobbing up on my tag? Possible solutions: give commander ability to hide their tag from all but their squad just like joining a squad allows you to hide other tags. (I personally like this idea for guild raids too. We use the target to follow our driver but if he could hide his tag from all but us, it would allow individual parties to target specific enemies and not lose our “tag”) Also, and this has been brought up many times before and still remains a good idea in my opinion, allow commanders to select a tag color. Zerg getting too big? “blue squad full, need people on red tag”

So I’ve become bit long-winded but would appreciate a quality think tank here and who knows, maybe Anet might even listen if we come up with something good =)

If you want forced small group combat, SPvP is thataway →

This will never happen.
GW2 is centered around the idea where another player near playing with you is always something good, not a bad thing. And the idea of play how do you want, and don’t be punished by it. The reward system, event system, party system, xp system, everything in this game is made around it. It’s a great idea and one of the best things in the game. What you’re suggesting is to punish players who want to play together, even if it is in great numbers.

As a hardcore WvW player, I totally agree with you that the blobiness takes away some of the fun of the game. And is actually a shame that they will not create something to punish players in blobs. But what they can do is instead of punishing the blob, is to reward with more power the smaller numbers, with new siege, new WvW skills who works while outnumbered and such. I still think that is something that will be hard to see someday (the outnumbered buff is worthless, for example), but at least is a more natural approach to the core of the game.