Guild Wars 2

re: the Desert BL

I understand many people’s frustration over the new BL maps. i’ve talked to a number of players on my server, and i’ve read many of the comments on this thread and others.

as a roamer and small-squad leader, i personally really like many aspects of the new map, I like the keep layouts. I enjoy the more difficult lord/supervisor mechanics. I love how the keeps and towers are themed. I love the upgrade tiers. i love the benefits from the shrines. i love how enemy sentries mark us for a short while when we get close to them. i love how they look. I even like a number of the anti-zerg / blob-slowdown mechanics in place.

the only thing I don’t love — and this one thing would probably bring many of the population back on my server — is the travel time. even with swiftness and 25% movement speed on my characters, it still takes me a hell of a long time to get from spawn to the opposite side of the map. and that’s going N to S and even E to W.

this is clearly a function of scale, geographic mechanics and familiarity with the layout. my familiarity has increased alot, making me feel better about the map. but if either scale of mechanics or both were reduced — i’m not saying eliminate all the obstacles, they are strategically good and fun in some places/cases — I think these maps would see a much higher population then they currently are seeing.

oh…and for the love of all things WvW, please ensure that you gather the opinions and test play experience of small-squad commanders as well as players and commanders from low WvW populations servers. I feel the new map didn’t take into account enough feedback from these demographics before it launched.

thanks!

In regards to PPK, can you implement it so that its in favor of the losing server?

For example:
Winning Server: 1 PPK
Middle Server: 2 PPK
Losing server: 3 PPK

This would make the fights much more interesting and give a chance to the losing servers to catch up.

Changes seem to be a decent step in the right direction – but the most important thing for me is that finally someone from Anet has posted in WvW forum.

Gaile – thanks for letting us know and seeking feedback. I hope this signals a change in policy for WvW and in future there will be more of these “here’s what we want to bring in, what do you think?” posts. In cases like this your player base represent many many hours of play whether casual or hardcore and whilst you’ll never get 100% agreement, that combined experience can help review ideas in a way that would take the development team months to do.

I like the suggestion (somewhere in here) of reviewing any changes after a trial period too. This is no different to doing regular balance reviews.

One point I’d like clarified though – camps upgrading. They don’t need dolyaks to arrive so will they just auto-upgrade on a timer (no change) or will they require human interaction (my favoured choice)? It does make a difference for single roamers, and leaving us to start camp upgrades would not be a bad thing imho.

Changing the auto upgrades: good.

Cata changes: I honestly don’t care. I think guild siege should cost less than other siege, however.

Rally changes: good.

PPK – I have mixed feelings about this. I want PPK. I want it to be a good measure of skill. But what I think it’s going to do is promote blobbing and AJs even more than what we already see now. (And, gamers being what they are, it’s going to promote a more toxic atmosphere in some instances.)

Let’s throw an example out there: today, if I see an enemy group around my size, I’ll hit them. Win or lose, we have the opportunity for a fun fight. When that fight results in a second group hitting us, doubling the enemy presence, yeah, wish that hadn’t happened, but it did. Brush yourself off at spawn, quick review of what went well and where we need to improve, and move out again.

PPK can change that mentality, depending on how it’s implemented and weighted. From “let’s see what we can do” to “don’t be a free bag”.

Of course, it becomes a good reason to actually build and run turtle banners…

So – mixed feelings on the subject. To me, how it impacts fights and the community is going to be the deciding factor.

1. For ppk make sure 1 kill by 10 is the same point as 1 kill by 50.
2. 10 min till a kill counts again from same player so folks don’t farm each other at a wp for points.

etrigan.4213:

tldr:

Start reading the forum, we don’t need interviews two years late with commanders who aren’t that knowledgeable to begin with. I mean these are the same people who I see fail in the game every day.

True – but people wanted new maps on the forums – look what that brought us: I guess it’s rather hard to tell what is and what isn’t what “we” wish.

This is how I felt reading the post though, for real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMK_xpIq2a0

At first blush, these proposed changes look great. Full speed ahead.

Item by item:
Dolyaks: Just about anything that can involve active input is better than automatic upgrades. It is next to impossible to stop someone from killing a dolyak, so in a sense this still favors large-population servers since they are more likely to have dedicated yakslappers, but it’s a good step.

Catapults: Not a tremendous area of concern for me, so I don’t have much to say on the matter. This would seem to be further pushing people toward catapults over rams, which appears to be the intent.

PPK: I can see merit in the argument that suggests restricting this to stomps, but we can see how it goes at first. For those not aware, there is a site or two that lists kills over the course of a match, and totals per server tend to be in the neighborhood of a few thousand for lower tiers up to around twenty-thousand in T1. This means ppk will have an impact, but not a huge one. Folks are free to theorize all they want about what changes this will cause, but it’s just speculation.

Rally and Rez: I’ve always appreciated GW2’s unique down/death and rally system, and I’ve found in my time that cries of rallybotting tend to be overstated (sure, it’s frustrating when it happens, but we sure don’t hear those same people complaining when they are the beneficiaries). Only one rally may be a bit extreme, and others’ suggestion to tie it in some way to the outnumbered buff may not be far off, but it may be just the right number. I would say it depends on what system is used to determine who rallies — proximity? Damage done? Last down? First down? Random? (Please not random.)

No rezzing fully dead in combat: Yes, yes, yes. Particularly since the death of stability, a smaller group must fight defensively and spend a good deal of time maneuvering — like a reset in pvp — during which time blobs can just fully rez all their dead and never lose. With this change, they can still have people drop ooc and accomplish this if strung out long enough, but it should limit the infinitely-renewing army effect. This is a good change.

First, none of these changes is apt to be monumental, but each represents positive incremental progress toward improved gameplay in WvW.

Second, people, please READ before babbling: It says you can still rez downstate in combat, just not full dead. It says only one person can rally off a kill, not that you can only rally one time. If your driver got sniped and full dead, and then you were able to fully hard rez, I’m not sure what to tell you, man, but I think the other side is just toying with you at that point.

tl;dr I like the changes, go ahead with them, but they could be better

Gaile Gray.6029:

• Objectives upgrades will no longer be automatic based on time. They will upgrade based on dolyaks that reach them. Smaller groups can now prevent an objective from upgrading by preventing dolyaks from reaching that objective.

The main problem right now with upgrades is that yaks or not, they upgrade way too darn quick. I hope this change also makes it take longer for upgrades to complete, because in most servers its pretty easy to find a one or two hour window where there are no attackers and everything gets upgraded quickly. Also, increase the range of the dolyak protection buff. You pretty much have to stand ontop of the yak, which makes it hard to fight players, and dolyaks absolutely need this buff if they want any chance of surviving a fight.

• Supply cost for all catapults are being reduced by ten supply. The layout of the Desert Borderlands map has increased the number of catapults required to take some objectives. We agree with your feedback that also increasing the cost of catapults pushed the balance too far towards defense so we are tuning that more towards offense.

Before HoT, walls upgraded before gates, and gates couldn’t be fortified, providing a reason to attack gates instead of walls. Now, walls and gates upgrade at the same time, so the risk/reward ratio for attacking a gate instead of a wall was pretty poor, and this will make it even worse. While I like the idea of lowering supply needed for catapults, something needs to be done to incentivize attacking gates again, whether it be a supply cost reduction to rams or HP reduction on fortified gates.

• Points per kill will be turned on and kept on. This is to more directly recognize the contribution that fighting other players adds to the success of the world.

PPK helps equalize coverage, and discourages graveyard zerging, which is great. The only downside is that holding towers becomes useless in the grand scheme of things, as they give very low PPT and unlike keeps, can’t have a waypoint. But this can be remedied later.

• The number of players who can rally off a single kill has been reduced from five to one. Both of these changes are designed to help fights resolve and to give smaller, more skilled groups a better chance against larger groups.

Great change, but bad reasoning. Rally is a mechanic that favors snowballing, and mid sized groups need to snowball in order to beat large groups. However, in about equal numbered fights, this is a great change that promotes skill, diversity, and prevents one bad player from rallying 5 enemies. Currently, most zerg fights end with one side completely snowballing off a few rallies, and win with only a couple causalities, even if they were equal numbers/skill, and this should fix that. This isn’t that big of a nerf to skill groups, and they should be able to find a way to play around this.

Players will also no longer be able to revive defeated players while in combat. You still will be able to revive downed players while in combat.

This is good. Skilled players shouldn’t be needing in-combat hard rezzes. If your commander gets pin sniped, you should have a backup commander or be able to function w/o one. Skilled, organized play should be rewarded, and if you run around like headless chickens because your pin got sniped, you aren’t skilled or organized.

That being said, I’d like it to be harder to pinsnipe, my suggestion would be to make it harder to find the enemy pin by hiding wvw ranks from enemies, and making tonics (similar to the AC ghost one) buyable with badges.

Basing the upgrades solely on yaks might work out once guilds get yak upgrades running more consistently. It’s really, really annoying when 2-5 people can deny yaks over pretty much the whole map, though. I suppose that’s more of a player issue, though…people don’t like defending camps. Perhaps if the contribution of camps to PPT wasn’t so hidden…

Catapults really didn’t need their supply cost dropped but it isn’t the end of the world either. This change should go on hold until the proxy catapult issue is remedied, though. When the safest place to put a catapult is right up against the wall, it saps all of the fun out of the siege on both ends.

Raw PPK is going to discourage fights and encourage yelling at players who are new or running outside of an organized guild. Also, if one group is better at open field fighting than most, they’re going to see their opponents turning tail to flee over and over. However, since I doubt I can convince anyone of how awful this will be, can we at least move it to points on stake? It won’t solve most of the problems but it at least allows for a bit of recourse.

I’m not sure how the rally changes will go but it seems like a good thing. I’m usually not in the heart of the zerg fights so it’s not really my area of expertise.

At any rate, this is the sort of communication I thought was going to be routine after HoT. It is more than welcome~

Rallying from from kills should be a buff given to outmanned servers as well as increased supply carrying capabilities…..

How to determine who is an outmanned server?

Look at over all PPT scores apply accordingly. A server loosing by a large margin is definitely undermanned and should get this boost to try and even the odds, its funny how the developer has not instilled any population balancing system to create more even matches……

It to me is the main issue with this game and all other things would fall into place if they can get a grip on this issue.

I am not opposed to giving out criticism when I feel it is due, and have done so on many occasions. Honesty though I feel these changes are all for the better, or at very least worth testing.

Not rezzing in combat may seem like a problem, but it makes players more careful where they are standing and possible even make them rethink their gear. I would like to see them readdress the stability issues so as to put the pirate ship meta in check, but for now AT LEAST they are communicating with US.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• Objectives upgrades will no longer be automatic based on time. They will upgrade based on dolyaks that reach them.

Awesome. I had been hoping for exactly this change ever since you announced the automatic upgrades.

• Supply cost for all catapults are being reduced by ten supply.

I like the impact it will have for smaller groups. That said, I think you perhaps need to think about revisiting the balance between gates and walls. Ever since you added fortified gates there hasn’t been all that much reason to attack them instead off walls.

• Points per kill will be turned on and kept on.

I would rather you focused on making sure that fights are an important part of capping and holding objectives rather than resolving WvW matchups artificially. If fights are as important as you say, their effect will be reflected in the team that wins fights holding more objectives and having a higher tick anyway. My worry with this change is that it will discourage groups from taking on fights unless they have the upper hand (i.e. they have the bigger blob).
The one positive of this is the slight shift of importance away from night capping.

• The number of players who can rally off a single kill has been reduced from five to one.

I’ve wanted to see how this would play out for years.

• Players will also no longer be able to revive defeated players while in combat. You still will be able to revive downed players while in combat.

I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand it will allow smaller groups to whittle down larger ones more effectively which is a great thing. On the other hand it will likely make lives even harder for commanders and other melee players who actually try to push and make something happen in a fight.
If you were to make balance changes that reduce the effectiveness of pirate shipping (maybe that’s too much to hope for), this would definitely be a good change.

All in all I look forward to seeing these changes. Thanks for listening to our feedback.

I like pretty much all of the proposed changes, however I don’t think anyone can really know how the no res in combat and only one rally off of a kill will play out. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do an event week with the rally and res changes BEFORE anything else right away. That would be very helpful to evaluate things and allow for a little tweaking of the mechanic as needed. Hell, do a week with all the changes and then collect feedback, that would awesome.

albotelho.2931:

Maybe they will bring back the middle lake and Quaggans… I can just imagine what kind of weird events they plan with Quaggans.

Capture all 5 ruins and a cannon fires quaggans at the gates.

These are all good changes and steps in the right direction. I’d be the first to nitpick something to chew you guys out about, but…. you didn’t leave me any room to do so. Good work, and please keep working in this direction, towards the community. And thank you for the update.

Drew.7192:

Ven Zehn.6573:

kuritsutian.2987:

Besides the whole HP rant I agree on the impact over the community… I also noticed how now people is less likely to res you during meta boss fights specially, now it’s extended to “in general” … there are still some noble souls out there…

Depends, if you’re downed and in a safe spot to rez, people will rez.

If you’re full dead, people risk getting dead themselves by rezzing.

If you’re downed, and in the middle of a fire field or similar, only people with the right utilities can do anything for you without dying.

This is a two way street: I consider you a jerk if you’re full dead and just sitting waiting for a rez, while everyone else WP’s to run back. (not you in particular, just any “you” who does this lol)

+1 Totally agree, if your in a “downed” state in the middle of a fight I will do my best to try and get you back up, even to the point of going down myself. But if your dead while the fight is still on, then you really need to wp and run back or wait till the fight is over. Rez’in someone who is dead in the middle of a fight takes way too long plus it takes two people out of the fight, one, you being dead, and two, the person trying to rez you.

Absolutely this. I will absolutely go out of my way to get someone up and back into a fight. However, there are caveats, if you’re lying dead somewhere, up you go, if you’re inexplicably lying dead two inches from a waypoint, up you go. If you’re dead at a meta boss or similar, I will walk all over your corpse while I fight and wait for you to waypoint out.

Why? Because most HoT bosses, especially the Chak Gerent, are just giant DPS races. Your corpse is scaling the boss, me stopping to rez you lowers the overall group damage and leads to a higher chance of failure and having stand in one spot rezzing a person who won’t waypoint while the AoE happy bosses are doing their thing is a real good way to get killed yourself. If you’re downed, I’ll help you up. If you die, it’s on you to waypoint out and get back into the fight.

Lord of Rings.5371:

Should Guild Wars be called Grind Wards, too?

Guild Wars 2: Grind of Thorns

Well, here’s my two cents :
toxic players usually don’t even realize they are.

It generally comes from an inability to think outside one’s own box.

Playing with friends and guilds is a good way to avoid dealing with them.

Hot is not the scapegoat for toxic mapchat. Ever kill a champ out of turn in old Queensdale? You would think you were drowning kittens.

No, I must disagree. Toxic is whenever and where ever bad mannered players reside that think your negatively impeding their progress. It’s not new in GW2 and it’s not simply a result of more challenging HoT content; it was also a result of absolutely mind-numbing scrub content in core GW2 too. It’s not even indicative of the population in general in the game. It just takes one or two.

Bottomline is that if toxic mapchat is a problem for you, GL finding ANY online game where you play with others you will not have this problem.

Kerin.9125:

That’s one way very toxic way to look at it and to refer to that section of players, how very appropriate is a thread with ‘toxic’ in the title.
Another way to look at it is that the game that those people enjoyed for over two years and which they could play at whatever skill level they had was taken away from them and replaced by something aimed at the hardcore, highly-skilled players who were whining GW2 was too easy.

Here’s the deal – my way of looking at it is objective. That’s what is going on in the game right now. Regardless of how you feel about it that which I have described is what’s happening in the game with the new content.

Also – nothing was taken away form anyone – the game that these people enjoyed for over 2 years is still there – none of it has been touched, changed or made harder. The entire core GW2 experience is still there for people to enjoy at their “casual” pace and skill level.

What you wrongly believe here is that you and other “casual” players are entitled to the game’s development future – which you are not.
I would have understood your point if Anet had taken away the old content and changed it to make it harder – that would have been valid.

That however did not happen – simply more, new content that is also harder was added to the game. Does that take away the old content? No. Are you suddenly unable to enjoy what you enjoyed in the game up until this point? No.

What they did is simply added in more things – for years now hardcore players have asked for harder content and a lot of replies on the forums have been similar to “this is not what you should get – go somewhere else or quit -Anet doesn’t want to do this”.

Well now Anet has decided they did want to do it and thus hardcore content is in the game. Does this entitle me and other hardcore players to go “this is how it is now if you don’t like it go ahead and quit”-no.

Having more variety in the game is certainly not going to hurt it especially since they didn’t take anything away from you by giving something to us.

Fact is, had GW2 been like HOT then it’s likely it wouldn’t have survived because what games like GW2 pre-HOT and many others show is that the majority of players of MMOs these days don’t want to ‘work at it’ and many, like me, frankly aren’t skillful enough to do the kind of content the minority now spewing “git gud” manage.

And it’s a good thing that GW2 has remained at its core casual-friendly – with now the option for hardcore players to do hardcore things if they wish. The vast majority of GW2 remains incredibly easy.
The core game is not dead – and with time more hardcore and casual content will be added – thus giving all types of players more things to do in the long run.

The ‘casuals’ as you refer to them are angry because the game they had no longer exists and they paid a premium price to have it taken away.

I’m sorry did HoT also uninstall Core Gw2 from your system?
You’re basically making things up at this point. It was heavily marketed that HoT would be harder and more hardcore focused.
Raids were announced ages ago. The content was advertised as harder, the beta weekend events gave people a taste of how different the content was – we had youtubers cover it, there was plenty of indication that HoT content would be “harder” for the “casual player”.

If you got blindsided you got blindsided because you’re not an informed consumer and didn’t research the product you were planning to buy before buying it. That’s nobody’s fault but your own.

Harper.4173:

This toxicity you mention is mostly because the game requires you to succeed now and many players are still very bad at the game – which leads to bad experiences, frustration and conflict.

If you think about it, this trend was foreshadowed in events like the Marionette, with people complaining in map chat about the event failing. Whether this is due to inexperienced or less-skilled players or not is not what matters.

In order for content to be harder, there has to be a possibility to fail. However, no one likes to fail. Add in the human tendency to blame anyone and everyone other than oneself for failure, and that’s a recipe for bad feelings. The absolute skill of the people present is not a factor. They may all be below average. However, since people tend also to have an inflated opinion of their own capabilities, and since they failed, someone else must be at fault.

Throw in internet anonymity and you’ll see those thoughts expressed.

DoctorDing.5890:

Core game is still casual-friendly but HoT is definitely not.
The mistake they made is to launch an expansion that is so dramatically different to the core game.

They told us exactly what the expansion was going to be about before it was even launched. There were many us making a huge stink on the forums, before launch, specifically because they were being excessively vague about what the expansion would contain. They eventually gave up the goods and made posts detailing what it would be like. They told us it would be more challenging. Why would you buy something that you know in advance, that you don’t want to play? That isn’t ANET’s mistake…its the customer’s mistake. Its on the customer to be intelligent enough to pay attention to what they spend their money on.

That being the case, there is still plenty of casual content in HoT. HoT is even more about open world content than core Tyria. There are zero dungeons and zero fractals in HoT. The only instanced content in HoT are raids. There is currently only one raid. That means 90+% of HoT is open world zerging. Nobody checks your gear, food, build, etc for open world zerging. You can participate or not participate in open world events at your casual leisure. You can group or stay solo for any open world content just like you did pre-HoT. There will be mobs you are going to get steam rolled by if you try to solo them…just like pre-HoT. Yes, the maguuma mobs do have better AI and hit harder than central Tyria mobs, but guess what…if you don’t like fighting them…you don’t have to spend any time in maguuma areas if you don’t want to. Central Tyria is still there. If you want the rewards for the content, you will do what every mmo that has ever existed requires….toughen up, adapt, and possibly group up to get what you want from the new content. Less whining and more playing IMO.

I would consider myself a casual in the sense that my play time is very limited and restricted to unusual hours, but I have no problems with anything in HoT except stupid mini games. That part isn’t a difficulty thing exactly…its more of an aversion to platform gaming. I have taken 5 characters through this expansion and completed their elite specs with no issues. I find the HoT areas infinitely more engaging than central Tyria. The multi layered map design, the new map navigation methods (gliding, mushrooms, wallows) are amazing. Step out of your safety routine for a minute and learn something new. The only things really different are these new ways to get around the map (which you had an intro to in dry top and silver wastes), mobs being tougher with new mechanics (which you had an intro to in dry top and silver wastes), multi layered maps (which you had an intro to in dry top and silver wastes), and raids (which are just advanced dungeons/fractals…that have been present in the game for years now). There is literally nothing in HoT that should be such a shock to anyone that has been playing the game for years now. Its just an issue of players refusing to adapt/improve and choosing to whine on the forums instead.

Daddicus.6128:

Ayrilana.1396:

Exactly where are you forced by the game to need ascended to do content other than high level fractals? Player created requirements do not count. I could require all players to fight with pink armor but that doesn’t mean it’s actually required for that content.

You can complete all content, other than raids, in whatever build that you want. Everything on the HoT maps can now be done in whatever build you want. Every class can complete any of the HoT content. I’ve done map completion, ran the story, and done metas with all of them. You can do PvP and WvW in any build that you want. Yes, some builds will be more effective than others.

Why are you excluding player-created requirements? Raids are out of the question unless you have maxed your gear, because there are no teams that will allow you to come with them. You are excluding the main source of angst over this.

…Because as a player you can make your own rules for doing the raid? You are blaming the wrong people here if you are instigating that Arenanet should be accountable for Player Requirements, this is happening way too much. Even Arenanet said that these raids aren’t meant to be done with any pick-up group, rather guilds will have much more success. Why? It might be because guilds have players that have worked together for some time on various other activities, and know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They can meet the challenge easily, and know very well what their gear requirement for their friends and guildmates will be to complete the raid.

Pick-up groups don’t. And thus we are seeing people scrambling over themselves making these one-time deal groups and fail, and blame the gear rather than themselves. Players will blame literally EVERYTHING else but themselves, that is precisely the biggest problem underlying everything with HoT, people are just too stubborn to learn. Even though, EVEN though the majority of the content in game isn’t even remotely close to the level of challenge of raiding.

I sincerely hope the Gerent Nerf is the last PvE nerf we will see for HoT.

Things that people claimed weren’t casual friendly pre-HoT:

Fractals (3 mini dungeons plus a boss?! I don’t have time for that I play 20min a day, I’m casual!)
Dungeons (I can’t get into a group because I don’t have zerk gear and I don’t speedrun! I’m casual!)
World completion (why do we have to do WvW for world completion, I’m casual, I don’t like PvP!)
Story-mode finale (I need a group to finish the story?! what the heck Anet! I’m too casual for that!)
Living Story S1 (these LS events are timed?! You’re saying I can’t do all of the achievements within the 2 weeks if I only play 10min a day?! I’m casual, wtf ANET!
Living Story S2 (wtf Anet, I didn’t log in when these were released because I’m super casual, and now you want me to grind gold so I can trade for gems? I’m casual! I don’t have the time nor money to do this!)
Dailies (Whoa, Anet, look at how long it’s taking to do these dailies! And I have to do it to get laurels?! I’m only on for 2min a day! I can’t possibly get all of this AP that you are forcing me to get! Make it casual friendly!)

I think a lot of people think that casual friendly means everything needs to be able to be completed quickly or easily. A casual player does not imply a bad player, it implies someone that plays at their own, typically slow, pace. Being able to do things at your own pace: that’s the definition of being casual friendly.

In GW2 you can do literally everything at your own pace (minus holiday events, as those are time limited). That is casual friendly. Raids is the only area that I would say has the biggest obstacle to casual players, and that’s getting a 10man group together.

I’d love to hear what exactly in GW2 you couldn’t do at your own, casual, pace.

If something takes a long time, it doesn’t mean it isn’t casual friendly, it just means it will take longer to complete, but it can still be 100% casual.

People claimed crafting legendaries wasn’t casual, but I can assure you I crafted two from scratch, casually, over the course of 2 years. Some days I felt like working towards a requirement, some days I didn’t. I dictated the pace I completed things. THAT IS CASUAL.

Yes, yes there is.

It was called the New Game Enhancement.

Poukinator.7059:

I think some people are missing the point so I’ll clarify why OP bring that idea in the first place.

First of all, let’s say 2 years ago, WvW was contantly active in every tiers (with the exception of T8-T7). And there was this thing called “Zergbusting” for those who still remember the term. Zergbusting was when you had a group of, lets say 20, and you could kill a group of twice your numbers (in this case, 40). BUT, since the stability nerf (For those who don’t know, stability was stacked as duration before, not intensity) Groups like these have hard time to “ZergBusting” anymore since the only way to survive now is “Blobbing”, But not everyone likes to do that and those people get punished for being overwhelmed, and you can’t really make “good plays” anymore since stability is so easy to lose without getting corrupt boon’d.

How about partly or completely reverting the stability change?
I mean you already realized what the problem is, yet still listed megaservers and better rewards as the solution – they’re not – people will leave because there’s always a time where you’re outnumbered and not standing a chance is frustrating.

When more then 25 players from the same server are within range of each other then one of them gains the ticking bomb debuff. The debuff makes the person explode in 3 seconds. When one person explodes this way the buff is passed to another player on the server until the number of players in range is under 25.

Ta da! and Boom!

All the talk about creating Factions and Guilds reminded me of a clip from Babylon 5. Here’s a link as it might come in handy. Enjoy….

https://youtu.be/AcBTOU7RvbU