Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I am interested to see people’s views on a zerg debuff in WvW. By this I mean something along the lines of “when you are within X proximity of X many people you have -X armor, -X damage . . . etc. etc.”

Importantly:

- It would not trigger until a certain cap had been reached (say 20ish?)
- It would scale as the amount of players in a zerg increases

Results:

- This would make it very unappealing to play in zergs
- It would give smaller groups a much better chance in fights against any who did zerg
- Zergs would still be viable but would lose their completely dominating edge

Drawbacks:

- If you have a group of 20 and another pug doesn’t leave you alone you may be stuck with the debuff. (though as it scales this probably wouldn’t be too much of an issue)
- It may affect Guild play (and thus the numbers needed to trigger the debuff may need to take that into account)

Conclusion:

I think this would be a viable way to limit the zerg power of gw2. It would encourage cooperative play among smaller (although still fun-sized) groups of players. My suggestion would be to add something SIMILAR to this (not necessarily this as it was more of an example). Importantly I would also suggest only adding it to one map. That way, people who don’t like the idea don’t have to play that map, whereas people who do like the idea of playing in smaller, tactical groups rather than zergs can go to a map where that gameplay is encouraged. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a new map. EB seems perfect but may not want to tread on the most popular WvW map just yet. Importantly, to help limit the zerg on said map, the overall player size of the map should be decreased (and possible a new copy of the map created when it is full, much like EOTM).

Anyway thats an idea I have, would love your thoughts.

ANET have stated several times they would be dead against it, because it would cause griefing…

IE groups telling the random pug casuals to “get away you are giving us the debuff”, which goes against the casual non-combative nature of this game.

One thing people like me have suggested is buffing player stats based on how few they had around them, which would encourage playing in smaller groups. So to steal your example, maybe roaming solo you had the full buff, and at 20 people you were just at your base stats (no buff left). But it really just creates another set of problems.

One of my big suggestions is implementing a defensive AoE cap, to promote smaller group play and give them a tool to use against zergs. As it stands now, 30 people can hit 1 person all at once, while the 1 person can only hit 5 (at a time) of the 30. Not very balanced.

that is a valid point. But if the debuff were to scale then i think a lot of this could be avoided. Also if the scaling was not linear (i.e. it only scaled very slightly when you have a few people over the limit and only becomes severe once you have a big mob going on). I think if it is done correctly it can mean that +1 person is always better than the slight increase to the debuff they would bring and that would avoid griefing. Though I do agree it is an issue

Yeah well like I said, they have bluntly stated they were dead against it….But then again they felt the same about WXP being account based or EUvsNA resets being tied together, and ended up changing their minds in those situations…

Something needs to be done, Zergwars 2 is pretty boring, there is no penalty to zerging….Only penalty to run into one.

Don’t you ppl realise that every single www update that changed something was ment to buff zerging? And you are asking to nerf zerging, when its clearly not gonna happen.
Why? Because thats what current mmo “I’m a carebear, I want to feel safe in pvp enviroment” community wants. Gues what, if ppl would want to do small scale stuff they would do it no matter what, but most just join the closest zerg.

King Amadaeus.8619:

IE groups telling the random pug casuals to “get away you are giving us the debuff”, which goes against the casual non-combative nature of this game.

The solution is a small penalty for every additional person over a small number such that no individual person pushes the penalty over a cliff and each additional person only has a minor impact. Given large groups pop orange swords, they have the capability to count how many people are in group.

The main penalty I’d like to see applied to zergs is a movement penalty. My suggestion was to reduce movement by 0.5% for every person over 5 such that kitten person zerg would be moving 25% slower than a 5 man team they came across. The penalty could be higher.

This would have two useful effects.

1) It would make it easier for small groups to get out of the way of a zerg and otherwise operate on it’s edges. It would be harder for a zerg to overrun a careful small group with a movement penalty.

2) It would slow down the ability of a large zerg to move across a map quickly capturing camps, towers, and keeps and provide an incentive to use lighter forces for capturing.

Another option is to have a % chance of missing based on the same formula such that people in kitten person zerg have a 25% chance of any attack missing. Since these penalties start at a half-percent (a 1 in 200 chance) and only increase another half-percent a person (a 1 in 200 chance per person), the addition or subtraction of a single person into a group should not cause so big of a change that there would be complaints.

What both of these suggestions do is add in real world problems caused by large numbers of people clustering tightly together to fight that are avoideused in Guild Wars 2 because there are no collisions, shots blocked by others in the way, or friendly fire and I don’t expect those things to be implemented. Other people getting in the way should make it harder to attack and reduce movement rates. And both of these work without touching the AoE mechanics, which are also part of the problem, because it sounds like ANet is currently unable to lift the AoE restrictions and we are stuck with them.

I highly doubt they would do anything to zergs because of both griefing and fear of pushing people away. If people want to roam around in reasonable sized groups and fight other reasonable size groups, they need to go to lower tier servers.

If they institute such a thing there will be griefing, there is no question about it. You’ll run into situations like Amadeus said “get away from us, your giving us the debuff” which will consequently probably cause that player or players to get reported. We’ll probably have a constant state of bickering going on in chat.

They are better off giving some sort of incentive to roam in groups of say 20 or less rather than penalizing. Give them double the rewards across the board and extra damage vs gates and walls.

Let’s face it, no matter what measure is taken, the larger group is almost always going to take out the smaller group. The 2 biggest things that would combat zergs is removing the AoE cap (yes they can do it, piles of siege have no problem hitting 50 targets lag free, our AoE can do the same if calculated that way). The other is removing the ability to rez downed people in combat. Also remove the ability to rez dead people all together.

I disagree entirely that people join a zerg because they want to. people join zergs because its easy loot bags and keep farming. Why would you sit there with a small team of people hacking away at a door while there is a zerg knocking one down next to you every few minutes. People won’t spite themselves because they want to be in a small group, the loot of zergs is too tempting. However if zergs were not viable, I genuinely believe people would much rather play in groups of 15-20 rather than 50+

zergs are inevitable, why fight the inevitable? Besides, micromanaging how players end up playing would just add un-needed convolution to complexity.

Dante.8456:

I disagree entirely that people join a zerg because they want to. people join zergs because its easy loot bags and keep farming. Why would you sit there with a small team of people hacking away at a door while there is a zerg knocking one down next to you every few minutes. People won’t spite themselves because they want to be in a small group, the loot of zergs is too tempting. However if zergs were not viable, I genuinely believe people would much rather play in groups of 15-20 rather than 50+

Have you every capped a way pointed keep with defenders and siege with just 15-20? No? Thought so. Parts of WvW require a zerg. There is also a very important difference between an unorganized zerg (which is how you have described them – loot/keep farmers) and an organized one. Anet has stated multiple times they have nothing against organized zergs. People are allowed to play how they want. If you don’t like zergs, just avoid them and don’t get yourself in a situation where you get killed by one. And you forget, you only get loot if you don’t die and an unorganized zerg dies in seconds against an organized one.

King Amadaeus.8619:

ANET have stated several times they would be dead against it, because it would cause griefing…

IE groups telling the random pug casuals to “get away you are giving us the debuff”, which goes against the casual non-combative nature of this game.

Rally system already creates this effect and ANET doesn’t seem inclined to fix that.

Maybe they could just make players actually a physical thing, like you cant walk through other players in wvw. This would get rid of stacking which would make less players in a single place and also create tactics around body blocking.

The only debuff I could picture them using to entice not zerging would be a penalty to MF and WXP gained…but I’d rather them not do that, it’s nice to spend the Friday before reset just karma training to relax before the hectic reset.

“I want to feel cool and take on 10 people by myself.”

No. This is not how PvP works. The only thing I would say MIGHT work without breaking the game too badly is giving a SMALL stat buff to Outnumbered servers.

+10% Increase on all stats when outnumbered.
+2% Damage Dealt
-2% Damage Taken

^ That is even a lot.

I’d take a different approach.
Personally I don’t mind zergs per se, as others have pointed out, they’re pretty much a necessary evil.

I much prefer roaming in smaller groups, so what I’d really like is rather some kind of warning that a zerg is nearby and approaching, so our group can anticipate/react accordingly.

To that end, I’d suggest implementing some akin to “marching sounds”, amplified character footsteps, directly proportional to the size of the group.
As more people run together in one given direction, the sound can be heard from further away, with approximate source location through positional sound.
The volume can be set up on its own slider in the sound options.

King Amadaeus.8619:

Something needs to be done, Zergwars 2 is pretty boring, there is no penalty to zerging….Only penalty to run into one.

/agree

But seriously…

If you nerf aoe, you punish small scale (small scale won’t have any way to wipe out multiple enemies the same time).

If you buff aoe, you punish small scale (buffs would go for everyone, like 40 people stacking buffs… not a good idea).

The problem lies in auto-targetting and AoE, but it also lies in rewards and a billion other elements of the game. It’s too late to change it now, because it would require ArenaNet to re-invent maybe 10% of the whole game.

since all 3 servers will be running zergs at the same time on all of the maps isnt that called balance? If you see enemy zerg just report it in TS or Map Chat so your Zerg can handle it.

Jaxs.5830:

King Amadaeus.8619:

ANET have stated several times they would be dead against it, because it would cause griefing…

IE groups telling the random pug casuals to “get away you are giving us the debuff”, which goes against the casual non-combative nature of this game.

Rally system already creates this effect and ANET doesn’t seem inclined to fix that.

Because they feel like the rally system is “an innovative” and key aspect of the game.

Simple solution to promote smaller group instead of blobing

- Give commander buff (similar to siege razer) when you are in the commander squad and close to him.

Don’t do anything else. Commander usually can’t stick close to each other more than 30 seconds. So players will split in multiple groups to follow their respective commander and get their buff.

Problem solved and we just improved the commander tag…