Personally, I LOVE large battle “Zerg” fights because of the focus of team coordination and team effort. However that isn’t to say I don’t like small group combat.
One of the weirdest things I have found in this game is that people tend to look down on Zerg fighting and saying that zerg fighters don’t have any skill. I see many threads where people go “Oh hey guys lets introduce X to the game to discourage zergs” which is not the correct approach to improve the game.
First off, let’s take a look at “Zergs” and what that means. A zerg fight is just a large group of people fighting another large group of players. There is nothing inherently less skillful about fighting MORE players. However, individual skill is less necessary in Zerg fights compared to a let’s say 5v5 fight. Instead group coordination and group positioning is far more important. Let’s say you have a 50 man zerg against another 50 man zerg. There may be some players who have effectively “mastered” their class and are very efficient with it in combat but they can quite easily lose the fight because the opposing zerg out maneuvered their zerg and worked better as a team.
Next, let’s take a look at what people don’t like about zergs. One of the main issues people have with zergs is that the whole notion of “Simply have more players and you win the fight” which can be a valid frustration for many WvW players like myself who have servers that are quite capable of being top tier due to great coordination but simply do not have the numbers to keep up with say T1 servers. However, larger numbers do have their downfalls. In an objective based game mode like WvW having a large mass of people on one position means that every other position potentially has fewer numbers making them susceptible to attacks. Here, where I believe the problem is, is that people don’t really have all that much of a reason to say take a tower for better PPT because they aren’t really rewarded anything through having superior PPT and what really should be encouraged is server decision making and deciding whether or not they should really all go to the same place to make a ball of players who will have the upper hand in fights due to sheer numbers or should they split their players to better capture an array of objectives. Here, things such as server rewards that we will be seeing in Season 1 would fix this problem.
Next, let’s look at another common complaint. Due to lag most zerg fights just dissolve into players spamming their auto-attack button and not pulling off well coordinated combos. However, the appropriate response shouldn’t be to simply say “let’s discourage zerg fights” and instead should be more along the lines of “let’s fix our server performance”
I don’t think you understand. There is literally NOTHING about adding more people to a fight that decreases skill required. Instead it shifts individual skill over to group skill. A group of 50 mashing the 1 button will not beat a group of 50 who positions carefully, and uses CC healing and buffs carefully. However, I do agree that there are less tools in open field combat to let smaller groups out play larger groups.
