Guild Wars 2

I still have to ask, why is zerging so bad it has to be removed for everyone? If it is not your thing then don’t do it. But just because something is not to your liking doesn’t mean it needs to be removed from the game. Clearly Anet wants that mechanic there or they would already have done something about it. And clearly many, many people like that fighting style. Should small groups be nerfed because other people do not like small groups? No.

I know I am going to get flamed for this post because many people on this board do not know how to DISCUSS things rationally (To those can can discuss rationally, thank you!).

But when it comes down to it, this is a battlefield, this is war. Do you think that when the Greek’s first started using the phalanx that the people they were defeating complained to the God of War that it was unfair? No, they worked on figuring out how to counter it because ALL is fair in war. There really are NO rules. If something works, then work it. If something doesn’t work that tactic doesn’t get employed much if at all.

Now, I would like to point out that the AoE-cap is grossly unfair to those that do not zerg. No way around that, I think less people would complain about the zerging if they could hurt everyone in their AoE circle. And in the end, the reason there is an AoE cap is that Anet is not willing to put that much money into more hardware. (At least that is why I think the AoE cap is there, I could be wrong)

actually, there are laws governing how warfare should be conducted. Breaking those will lead to you being deemed a war criminal

Prysin.8542:

actually, there are laws governing how warfare should be conducted. Breaking those will lead to you being deemed a war criminal

Why don’t we discuss the actual question instead of trying to sidetrack this? You know what I meant by the are no rules. And this is not the real world, this is a game and I do not remember there being any rules listed when I press B to get into WvWvW.

Zergs are the heart and soul of WvW and should never be removed. The AoE cap is fine or necroes and eles will be the only things in WvW (and Maguma does AoE zergs very well already). The reason you see so many rage posts/“suggestions” is that Anet has been looking for ways to give smaller groups a better chance against larger ones.

Removing AoE cap won’t work because then the enemy Zerg will also have a lot of AoE cause it’ll be OP and the will just spread out to mitigate total overall damage rather than what they do now which is ball up so that the ticks are spread evenly across all of their zerg. Your attacks can only hit 5 people but they will hit 5 people whereas no AoE cap and 100 people spread out a lot will only hit 2-3 players per AoE

Edit: I forgot to tell you appreciate zergs they give lootbags when you kill them.

Interesting point about the AoE cap. I always thought it was strictly because of the massive amount of additional processing of AoE and DoT.

Perhaps an overall damage reduction based on the number of people in a certain radius? the more people the less overall damage they do? If worked with the right ratios would enable smaller groups to handle larger groups better.

By the way, I am just throwing things out there. I do not think zergs need to be removed or entirely discouraged. But I also get the frustration of small group folks. I run both actually.

I think the issue is the game is very dumbed down for casual players and the game format is structured in a way that allows bad players to walk away feeling like they are good at what they do by blobbing. Considering how terrible the majority of the WvW players are, I guess Anet is doing the right thing to have the game design structured for the casual audience. And lets face it. The game is on its last legs. Its not going to get any better from here.

nirvana.8245:

I think the issue is the game is very dumbed down for casual players and the game format is structured in a way that allows bad players to walk away feeling like they are good at what they do by blobbing. Considering how terrible the majority of the WvW players are, I guess Anet is doing the right thing to have the game design structured for the casual audience. And lets face it. The game is on its last legs. Its not going to get any better from here.

You are playing an mmo. Every part of the game is like this, by design. If you wanted actual competition, you might want to try a different game.

Zerging is a tactic. Sometimes I join them..other times I join a small havoc squad, GW2 offers you free will to choose how and where you play.

I totally agree with the AOE cap…the post about “everyone running Necros and Eles” if it is lifted is too funny as now everyone seems to b running warriors and guardians in WvW.

Remove the cap and the tactics and strategy of WvW will change for the better (IMHO).

Cantur Soulfyre.5409:

…snip

OMG! First message you’ve posted that I am in agreement with.

SleepingDragon.1596:

Cantur Soulfyre.5409:

…snip

OMG! First message you’ve posted that I am in agreement with.

First message today or all time? Cause I think you should agree with almost everything I say… :P but that is just me…

Cantur Soulfyre.5409:

First message today or all time? Cause I think you should agree with almost everything I say… :P but that is just me…

I’m thinking it’s probably of all time… cause I am already disagreeing with you thinking that I should agree to everything you say.

Ok, but I think I have some good posts in my upvoted list…

WvW is a PvP mode first and foremost, and yet you don’t go into WvW and join a 70-man zerg to do PvP. You do it so that you will minimize the risk of ever actually having to engage in PvP, while reaping more rewards than anyone else at the same time. In what other PvP setting can you simultaneously minimize risk and maximize reward, by not actually engaging in PvP?

And thus the problem with zerging; it promotes a mindless style of play that is still preferred by most players since it’s by far the most rewarding. In fact, I’d go so far to say that WvW is suffering from many of the problems it does because of how zerging is promoted.

You’re recapping your BL and an enemy zerg twice your size shows up? Don’t even bother, just go karma train another map until they leave.

Your server is struggling in the off hours? Just find an EotM map where you have a large zerg and karma train there instead.

Why bother going out of your way in an effort to learn how to play when you are going to end up being severely less rewarded for it? Zerging is even encouraged by ArenaNet through the AoE cap for example.

And that’s why WvW will never ever be taken seriously, no matter how many leagues or seasons they come up with.

The trouble is, the only real counter to a zerg, is to zerg yourself.

Yes yes, before you even say it, of course a highly skilled group can take on skill-less groups 2, 3, 4 even 5 times their own size. But what if the zerg itself is skilled? Some zergs are more skilled than others, some zergs cannot be taken down by you playing better, because they are also playing better. What are you going to do when RG, VII and BuLL form a 100-man blob? Probably the only thing you could do is form Scnd, GD and VoTF into a counter-blob.

So you see, all other things being equal, the only counter to a zerg is another zerg, and that’s what makes them boring. You say “if you don’t want to zerg, you don’t have to”. Well, I’m afraid you do have to when they are taking all your T3 keeps or camping your spawn. You may not want to fight the zerg, but the zerg wants to fight you.

However, this isn’t the main problem. The real problem is when one side has a zerg and the other side doesn’t even have half the number of people neccesary to fight it, whether that be by forming a counter-zerg, or by splitting up and capping stuff faster than the zerg can respond. If it’s 100 vs 10, it really doesn’t matter what you do, you’re going to lose.

Which brings me to my final point. Again, you said “if you don’t want to zerg, you don’t have to”. Okay, so I want to roam, or I want to fight other guilds. Except the only enemy on the map is a zerg. There are no roamers or guilds to fight. Now what, smarty?

D best.3547:

Zergs are the heart and soul of WvW and should never be removed. The AoE cap is fine or necroes and eles will be the only things in WvW (and Maguma does AoE zergs very well already). The reason you see so many rage posts/“suggestions” is that Anet has been looking for ways to give smaller groups a better chance against larger ones.

Removing AoE cap won’t work because then the enemy Zerg will also have a lot of AoE cause it’ll be OP and the will just spread out to mitigate total overall damage rather than what they do now which is ball up so that the ticks are spread evenly across all of their zerg. Your attacks can only hit 5 people but they will hit 5 people whereas no AoE cap and 100 people spread out a lot will only hit 2-3 players per AoE

Edit: I forgot to tell you appreciate zergs they give lootbags when you kill them.

“will just spread out to mitigate total overall damage rather than what they do now which is ball up so that the ticks are spread evenly across all of their zerg”.
^
This. Because this is the logical step to reduce aoe damage – spread. That way involving much more tactics and planing into fights. And gw2 breaks those logic rules by making mechanics that forces to do exact opposite thing – turtle up. Every single game that has open field fights has zergs in it. Its unavoidable. But gw2 took that to new level by allowing those zergs to stack up into aoe immune balls.

I think my problems with zerging fall into two categories, with the first being a bigger problem for me.

1) Zerging is bad simulation. By that, I mean that what’s effective and what’s ineffective bear little resemblance to what one would expect in the real world. In some cases, it make sense in the context of the magic in the setting (AoE boons have limited range so you need to be near the person using them to get the benefit, which handicaps dispersed groups or ranged combatants). In other cases, it’s a side effect of quirks and limits in the game, most notably (and you’ll find plenty of messages complaining about this, but it’s unlikely to change) the Area of Effect (AoE) attack limits (5 targets), which removes the normal disincentive for clustering tightly together in real combat. Essentially, rather than AoEs being a threat to a tightly clustered zerg, they actually become less effective against tightly clustered zergs because the odds of the same target being hit more than once go down. And in the real world, people clustered together get in each other’s ways, block shots, take friendly fire, and compete for resources, none of which happens in Guild Wars 2.

As a constructive suggestion, I think it would be useful to provide some penalties to clustering to offset the benefits that are often simply a side-effect of quirks of the game implementation and correspond to some of the problems such a strategy would cause in the real world. The most obvious would be a movement penalty, so that a 50 man zerg will have trouble catching a small group of defenders that turn to run. In the real world, large groups generally do move more slowly than small ones for reasons abstracted away by the Guild Wars 2 implementation (e.g., collisions, friendly fire, and avoiding them).

Other options might include increased cool-down times on skills (to simulate the larger draw on the ambient magic a large group would cause), damage reduction or a percentage chance to miss (to simulate the interference a tight cluster would cause in lieu of implementing collisions or friendly fire), or reduced effectiveness on boons and heals (to simulate the diffusion of magic across a much larger group) to offset the reduced effectiveness of AoE attacks. Phase them in slowly in small increments (perhaps with every new person) as the size of the zerg builds (to prevent a penalty cliff that cause the group to blame someone for tipping them over the edge).

For example, maybe each person over 5 reduces movement by a half percent so that a fivty-five person zerg would be moving 25% slower, or even a full percent so they move at half-speed.

2) The predictability of it all. When a zerg attacks an undefended target or a much smaller group of opponents, the result is predictable. To me, it’s boring being on the zerg side and just as boring from the target side. The outcome is inevitable. On the winning side, it’s like riding the champion train in Queensdale — run up, attack for a few seconds, get a reward, rinse, repeat. On the losing side, well, it’s not much fun being a piñata, which is why low population servers have trouble holding on to WvW players and guilds. Even when you have a more even match, there are certain optimal ways to do things that make it all very repetitive. Beyond the zerg-limiting suggestions in the first part, I think ANet needs to work harder to create more diversity in viable styles of play in WvW. They need to figure out a way to make ranged play more viable so that Rangers and Engineers don’t wind up at the top of everyone’s “Worst Class for WvW” list.

In many ways, WvW is a game of rock-scissors. Rock bests scissors. Rock beats scissors. Rock beats scissors. So eventually most players play rocks because rocks always win and scissors always lose. ANet needs to figure out how to turn WvW into something more like paper-rock-scissors, where there is no one optimal choice for every situation but where paper defeats rock, rock defeats scissors, and scissors defeats paper so that if everyone starts playing rock, you can play paper and beat them.

A major part of what makes tactics interesting in the real world is the concept of Combined Arms, which is coordinating a mix of dissimilar assets into a fighting force so that they cover for each other’s weaknesses. An effective fighting force in a well-balanced WvW should require unique abilities of all classes rather than the abilities of simply 5 classes. An as much as that’s about making what some classes do more effective in large scale battles (e.g., ranged attacks despite the AoE limits, which aren’t going away anytime soon), it’s also about limiting classes so they are not one man armies that can move quickly AND heal quickly AND do lots of damage AND apply lots of CC AND have no weaknesses. While any weaknesses are a problem in one-on-one PvP, giving every rock it’s paper as a weakness is key if you want to have real tactics in WvW that give every class something to do and require players to do more than push a few buttons to win. Every class should have something that they can’t do [well] to give them incentive to travel with someone else of a different class and build.

Please note that this doesn’t mean replicating the WoW “trinity” here. Looking further back to games like Dungeons & Dragons or wargames such as Warhammer are a better source of inspiration here. See this article writing in the context of encouraging tactics in tabletop role-playing games:

http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/elements01nov02.html

Prysin.8542:

actually, there are laws governing how warfare should be conducted. Breaking those will lead to you being deemed a war criminal

1. Video games are not war

2. The laws of war do not limit how many soldiers each side is allowed to have in a particular location

Crazy combat mechanics aside, zerging is only really a problem when there is NO counter zerg. Then it’s just a typical PvE champ train, it’s even worse because it doesn’t just auto reset in a short bit of time so it becomes a ghost town until it’s back capped. GW2’s problem is that this happens at a pretty steady rate so eventually all the WvWvW action is going to be on a handful of servers.

Cantur Soulfyre.5409:

I still have to ask, why is zerging so bad it has to be removed for everyone? If it is not your thing then don’t do it. But just because something is not to your liking doesn’t mean it needs to be removed from the game. Clearly Anet wants that mechanic there or they would already have done something about it. And clearly many, many people like that fighting style. Should small groups be nerfed because other people do not like small groups? No.

I know I am going to get flamed for this post because many people on this board do not know how to DISCUSS things rationally (To those can can discuss rationally, thank you!).

But when it comes down to it, this is a battlefield, this is war. Do you think that when the Greek’s first started using the phalanx that the people they were defeating complained to the God of War that it was unfair? No, they worked on figuring out how to counter it because ALL is fair in war. There really are NO rules. If something works, then work it. If something doesn’t work that tactic doesn’t get employed much if at all.

Now, I would like to point out that the AoE-cap is grossly unfair to those that do not zerg. No way around that, I think less people would complain about the zerging if they could hurt everyone in their AoE circle. And in the end, the reason there is an AoE cap is that Anet is not willing to put that much money into more hardware. (At least that is why I think the AoE cap is there, I could be wrong)

here’s the thing. it isn’t a matter of the playstyle, really. it’s the fact that zerging has been buffed numerous times, and has been made more and more profitable as well. it’s hands down the best method to do ANYTHING in this game, and the counters to it have gone from laughable to non-existent. so you either zerg or get zerged. those are your two options. you can do other things, but it’s not as efficient, and if you run into a zerg, you’re screwed. if you’re lucky, you can run while your slow friends get killed. and all they need to do is just spam 1 and F to collect all the lootbags.

it’s a matter of balance, and the balance is completely out of whack. so in order to achieve some measure of balance, they either have to nerf zerging of buff pretty much every other aspect of the game. everything from the skills, to all of the NPC mobs would need rewritten. that includes all of their PvE encounters as well, because zerging dominates that as well. it would insane for them to rewrite their entire game, so the only hope for some balance in this regard is for them to nerf zerging. simply because it’s gotten so many buffs and added incentives that other areas of the game are practically obsolete at this point.

I don’t think they need to be removed… however, I do feel that some of the incentives for grouping up need to be lessened (ressing/rallying).

ok, i will leave the “remove AOE cap” in a different thread. and will try another solution.

soft cap the borderlands population. not by static amount (* i.e. cap at 50 people.. as some other threads say)

but by the amount of the defenders in their own border map.
soft cap is 5 to 10 above the defender population.
i.e. if the defender have 34 people in the border, the invaders will not be able to gather 85 man blob, but will be capped at 39-44 people. so they will not be able to annihilate the map and the defenders will have a chance.

the cap will be soft cap and little higher (5-10 people above), so there will be no situation that the defenders go for WWW embargo with zero participants, and no invader can get to the map.

this implementation will make the borderlands population more or less equal so zerging is still viable but not so productive, by the time you zerg some objective, your opponent who have similar numbers split to three and conquer three of your objectives etc.
also, it will reduce the off time/ night capping .

the central map will remain the blobbing map. i have no problems with this.

Aoe cap at 5 is due to engine limitations

Lalangamena.3694:

ok, i will leave the “remove AOE cap” in a different thread. and will try another solution.

soft cap the borderlands population. not by static amount (* i.e. cap at 50 people.. as some other threads say)

but by the amount of the defenders in their own border map.
soft cap is 5 to 10 above the defender population.
i.e. if the defender have 34 people in the border, the invaders will not be able to gather 85 man blob, but will be capped at 39-44 people. so they will not be able to annihilate the map and the defenders will have a chance.

the cap will be soft cap and little higher (5-10 people above), so there will be no situation that the defenders go for WWW embargo with zero participants, and no invader can get to the map.

this implementation will make the borderlands population more or less equal so zerging is still viable but not so productive, by the time you zerg some objective, your opponent who have similar numbers split to three and conquer three of your objectives etc.
also, it will reduce the off time/ night capping .

the central map will remain the blobbing map. i have no problems with this.

Nice idea

I wouldn’t say its the Zerg’s, the Zerg’s themselves would be fine the issue is the maps are to small to avoid them most of the time. Some of us enjoy running headfirst into 80 people and killing them with 1/2 their numbers but for the small mans/solo’s and unorganized mini zergs, as I said, the maps are just to small to avoid them most of the time.

Nuzt.7894:

I wouldn’t say its the Zerg’s, the Zerg’s themselves would be fine the issue is the maps are to small to avoid them most of the time. Some of us enjoy running headfirst into 80 people and killing them with 1/2 their numbers but for the small mans/solo’s and unorganized mini zergs, as I said, the maps are just to small to avoid them most of the time.

it isn’t necessarily the size of the maps, it’s the layout. they were laid out for convenience, not for anything even remotely resembling strategy. the areas are put in the worst possible positions while giant chunks of the maps go largely wasted. it’s just another major problem area that they’ll never fix.