Guild Wars 2

This just occurred to me, as I was pursued along with 4 others by a 40 player zerg…unable to use any skills, despite the fact that they would have saved me…all because of skill lag.

It seems that the bigger zerg has the advantage when it comes to skill lag. I may be unable to use skills, but others somehow are, so why is this the case? I imagine there must be some sort of buffer of skills that can be handled at once, and the each person has a shot of getting a skill off, depending on which type of skill it is, and pure luck. The thing with luck is, the more players, the more they benefit from the luck. So if this is how it actually works, large zergs get to create skill lag, and then they get to disproportionately benefit from it, because they have more players in this game of chance.

Just throwing this out there, but might it be possible to preferentially queue up skills from the outnumbered group, so as to subtly discourage massive zergs? So for example, if a 40 player zerg took on a 30 player zerg, each player in the 30 player group would have a 1/4 improved chance of getting a skill off as compared to the 40 player group. This means that they would have roughly even numbers of skills going off between the groups, despite the fact that one is outnumbering the other. This makes smaller groups able to take on larger groups, even in the face of horrible lag. In fact, the smaller groups may benefit from it.

It’s not that I have something against massive zergs per-se, but with the presence of skill-lag, they do tend to make the game unplayable or at least un-fun. If they didn’t also guarantee success, I imagine people would strategically try to run slightly smaller groups, which would make the game more fun for everyone.

I know, ideally, skill lag should not occur at all. And if this issue is ever fixed, or at least improved substantially, I think this sort of soft buff would naturally disappear – less lag = buffer matters less. But that’s fine, I only recommend it so as to encourage reasonable player strategies that don’t hamper enjoyment of the game for everyone.. And to provide a simple consequence – run with a lag-producing zerg, and suffer diminishing returns.