Break the blob

[Nikt]

People legitimately don't care about the rewards, as long as they can win. So the only method to break the blob is to make it so that blobs do not contribute to winning. If you do that, though, then your average new player/casual player/guy that came home and cracked open a cold beer and just wants to chill, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the playerbase, will be unable to exist, because one good premade will kill him and all his friends alone - and as we have already established, losing isn't fun.

Here this man , he is a prophet! 100% agree!!
As a guy that came home and cracked open a cold beer and just wants to chill, i support this idea, with all my heart!
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The amount of work required to play RoR at a decent level is depressing. Gather 24 people, preferably in a 2-2-2 formation (communicator recommended), and you'll still lose to a more experienced and cohesive team that's been playing together for months, maybe even years. Or to a 48-person blob. It's probably easier to start a church and become a TV preacher.

[Hazmy]

The reason people blob in this game is because losing in this game is 95% of the time not fun and winning is at least 50% of the time fun. It's the reason destro stacks 2-3 warbands vs order on occasion, sometimes with multiple premade ones, even if the only opposition on order at the time is just pugbands. It's reason why order pugs try to form big blobs. It's the reason why some guilds who claim to balance the sides log onto the already winning side, and only balance if they know they have a chance against whatever premade happens to be online.

People legitimately don't care about the rewards, as long as they can win. So the only method to break the blob is to make it so that blobs do not contribute to winning. If you do that, though, then your average new player/casual player/guy that came home and cracked open a cold beer and just wants to chill, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the playerbase, will be unable to exist, because one good premade will kill him and all his friends alone - and as we have already established, losing isn't fun.

You could enforce a maximum amount of players that can exist within a zone, perhaps, so that after that amount is filled up, overflows will have to go to another zone. You can even make it smart, allowing the side that lost the previous zone a slight increase in player count in the next one. But that has it's own problems. For example, you could end up in a zone without a single tank or healer, and with players that do not care enough to swap, and are happy to mindlessly get warcamp farmed. The fights may become even more uneven, and thus even less fun. You can have guilds colluding to fight each other in specific zones, which, frankly, isn't actually a bad thing; but then it creates a degenerate loop where if one guild is especially strong, everyone is going to just dodge them, or instead stack on their side because losing sucks. Nothing new, already happens.

In short, there is no solution to the blob. It's a purgatory you are all doomed to.

Actually there is one solution. Go que city for a genuinely fair fight of 24v24. No one does, though, because people do not want "fair fights", they just don't want to lose, because losing sucks.

This, a thousand times this.
The pattern of RoR has been visible for many years already, and it's a loop of laziness and pretentiousness.

RoR, by design, and how the community largely is, naturally presents itself very alluring to players who are above average in skill but are not necessarily dedicated, nor hardcore. The skill level on this server is so abysmally low, that players who are just a bit more talented, can absolutely demolish everyone else with close to zero effort and feel like a top hardcore player in any other MMORPG and feed that ego. This server is a breeding-ground for this mentality.

Consequently, this also has the negative side-effect that players get so used to being able to win with close to zero effort - that even the better players forget what competition, learning and improving means - and the moment they stumble into resistance, they can no longer truly enjoy the game or get back on track, accepting a challenge. Which is why any and all hardcore content in the game is pretty much dead - you only hear excuses why people don't queue City or SCs. Best Teams dodging and avoiding each other, stacking on the same sides by "accident".
The reality? Most players no longer enjoy trying on this server, why would they - when they can have fun farming players who are worse than AI in single player games... and you can do all of that with barely trying.

The sad reality is that this server is a farming simulator, and even if through some miracle the devs would climb out of their asses to work on RvR instead of PvE - that won't change the years of conditioning of the playerbase, that complains yet they don't truly want a better system, because that would require effort.

The opportunity has always been there for skilled content, but that's not what most players want.
If one day enemies would be replaced by AI in secret, that players can farm, my guess everyone would be happy with RvR.

[ravezaar]

Remove Crest from Kills, the Rainbow Zergs or Blob as u call it will get alot less frequent again, Iam a veteran I know how RoR or WaR looked before Crest on Kills in RvR.

Its not gonna happen tho and these boring, skilless, meaningless Rainbow Zergs kill-tradin each other and WC-Farming will continue so Iam speaking to deaf ears, just saying what will improve it. Wont solve it entirely but will improve it, but todays playerbase are Blob players, the good Guilds and WB Leaders who could fight on there own is long gone so.

All I want is something done about the state of RvR and its campaign but we havent seen that is years, for RvR all we got past 3-4y is a Champion Spawn Event wich still hasnt worked and we got Crest on Kills wich imho ruined RvR totally.

PvE gets new skins, Dungeons, Weapons, Gear every year and RvR still gets nothing, kinda wierd considering what type of game this is dont u think

[nebelwerfer]

The right medication is to make CC give diminishing returns so that an outnumbered group can manouver and outplay by clever use of CC in RVR.

Also there needs to be changes to morale, coordinating morslebombs is punished by giving diminishing returns (what the heck?) instead of elevating speccable m4s to the blobcrushers they're meant to be. ("Muh funnel"-just put terror debuff in fort with x minute respawn timer and forced release in keep and fixed)

Also the tank morale bellow to reduce damage by 50% and you can cast that from like 100ft? Should obviusly be radius from the tank himself, he cant force the bellow from his targets mouth like it appears by current design.

Add vendors in keep that come with aao who sell potions that give effects like cleansing winds, resolute defence, stuff like that.

Good thing is it's alpha, testing phase, go nuts and experiment. Less wallowing like itt plz tho i understand the frustrationat this point, im guilty of it aswell

Sry for this, its phonetyped

[Shogun4138]

What i find strange is the devs that do play the game seem totally satisfied with blob play. Doing the same thing every day for the last few years.

There have been other threads on adding to rvr but they fall on deaf ears or maybe the ideas are just not able to be done.

The blob won't go away as long as players can hit 3 buttons and aoe 24 people and as long as there are no real objectives in the lakes.

If they stop the balancing chase and committed time for actual content in rvr to spread the blob.

[Ramihrdus]

I feel like the way to go would be to force the war bands to be actually useful. Right now they'll happily park themselves outside of (any) WC and fight there for hours while expecting solo box runners to do all the work leveling up the zone.
It's even more insulting when after a zone lock people thank the WB leaders, when nothing they did was actually useful for capturing it.

Get rid of box running and make resources tied to holding objectives. The realm that holds x amount of objectives for y amount of time gets the resources. Make it something that forces the war bands to take a more active part in capturing the zone, and preferably something that forces them to deal with multiple objectives at the same time.

This way you could still stack three war bands together, but you'd only be able to handle one objective, and the realm that splits up their forces would still be able to hold a majority and get the resources.

Just brainstorming, but maybe you could have two fighting heroes (like dwarf/ork) spawn at multiple objectives at once, and the side that wins get extra resources. The idea isn't exactly to fight the hero, but to create multiple hot spots that the war bands have to deal with and ignoring them would cause the other realm to get resources.

[Slowbro]

Make solo great again. This is the best solution

[DevanShell]

I am not quite sure if we can realistically break the blob meta without hurting RvR for the casual playerbase. At this point, there is not much casual-friendly RvR content left besides blobbing.

Roaming in groups from duo up to 6-man feels really rough these days. Proper fights against equal-sized groups are rare, and more often than not you end up getting chased through the lakes by larger parties.

Especially in duos and trios, stealth squads are nearly impossible to deal with.

On top of that, forming a proper 6-man outside of guild groups takes forever. And if RvR is not working out, even SC queues for a full 6-man can take a long time.

So in the end, I often feel like I’m just playing a “fill the group” simulator and wandering through the lakes killing smaller groups — which is usually boring — until we eventually run into a warband.

Even I started joining the blob on my low RR alts because everything else feels so punishing right now. Blobbing requires little effort, no proper party composition, and most importantly: it guarantees gameplay. It may be fairly boring gameplay, but at least you actually get to fight someone.

As an Order player who occasionally leads pug groups, I also feel that Marauder stuns combined with Choppa pulls completely destroy pugs with relatively low effort (mostly pugs, not a real problem in organised warbands).
Good positioning is probably the best counterplay, but that’s not really a skill you can teach or coordinate consistently in pug groups.

Overall, I feel like we ended up in some kind of stalemate somewhere between the currency unification and the latest balance patches.

So honestly, blobbing feels like the lesser of two evils right now.

[rorswar]

I am not quite sure if we can realistically break the blob meta without hurting RvR for the casual playerbase. At this point, there is not much casual-friendly RvR content left besides blobbing.

Roaming in groups from duo up to 6-man feels really rough these days. Proper fights against equal-sized groups are rare, and more often than not you end up getting chased through the lakes by larger parties.

Especially in duos and trios, stealth squads are nearly impossible to deal with.

On top of that, forming a proper 6-man outside of guild groups takes forever. And if RvR is not working out, even SC queues for a full 6-man can take a long time.

So in the end, I often feel like I’m just playing a “fill the group” simulator and wandering through the lakes killing smaller groups — which is usually boring — until we eventually run into a warband.

Even I started joining the blob on my low RR alts because everything else feels so punishing right now. Blobbing requires little effort, no proper party composition, and most importantly: it guarantees gameplay. It may be fairly boring gameplay, but at least you actually get to fight someone.

As an Order player who occasionally leads pug groups, I also feel that Marauder stuns combined with Choppa pulls completely destroy pugs with relatively low effort (mostly pugs, not a real problem in organised warbands).
Good positioning is probably the best counterplay, but that’s not really a skill you can teach or coordinate consistently in pug groups.

Overall, I feel like we ended up in some kind of stalemate somewhere between the currency unification and the latest balance patches.

So honestly, blobbing feels like the lesser of two evils right now.

I would agree.

This is a Realm vs Realm game that heavily incentivises group-based play with the right composition and, ideally, voice comms. However, most of the player base these days are too casual for this, or do not have the time for it, and are basically limited to a bit of off-time when they just want to hop in for an hour and play a bit.

So for those more casual players, the options are:

1) Go into the lake solo and get rekt by stealth and rDPS healers, or run over by blobs
2) Roll a class that is heavily geared towards 1v1 (see the first point) and don't rely on others
3) Play a class that does less well in 1v1, and join the blob for safety

Unfortunately, the devs, in their wisdom, made it even easier to blob (e.g., WB crowns, etc.) and incentivised blobbing even more, whilst killing off the small-scale and the solo scene by repeatedly failing to tone down a handful of classes that dominate 1v1, thus pushing people even more into blobbing.

[nocturnalguest]

I am not quite sure if we can realistically break the blob meta without hurting RvR for the casual playerbase. At this point, there is not much casual-friendly RvR content left besides blobbing.

Roaming in groups from duo up to 6-man feels really rough these days. Proper fights against equal-sized groups are rare, and more often than not you end up getting chased through the lakes by larger parties.

Especially in duos and trios, stealth squads are nearly impossible to deal with.

On top of that, forming a proper 6-man outside of guild groups takes forever. And if RvR is not working out, even SC queues for a full 6-man can take a long time.

So in the end, I often feel like I’m just playing a “fill the group” simulator and wandering through the lakes killing smaller groups — which is usually boring — until we eventually run into a warband.

Even I started joining the blob on my low RR alts because everything else feels so punishing right now. Blobbing requires little effort, no proper party composition, and most importantly: it guarantees gameplay. It may be fairly boring gameplay, but at least you actually get to fight someone.

As an Order player who occasionally leads pug groups, I also feel that Marauder stuns combined with Choppa pulls completely destroy pugs with relatively low effort (mostly pugs, not a real problem in organised warbands).
Good positioning is probably the best counterplay, but that’s not really a skill you can teach or coordinate consistently in pug groups.

Overall, I feel like we ended up in some kind of stalemate somewhere between the currency unification and the latest balance patches.

So honestly, blobbing feels like the lesser of two evils right now.

Very well said!

Since few last years i often restrain from logging on unless ive got at least some friend available or can join some decent organised group. I definitely used to pug along way more often back in a day.

Its not hard to get a group going, but quality matters alot so by the time you get somewhat working party together its already ~1+ hour of your playtime more or less in case you do it in game without pre-coordination on discord. Sure you can coordinate with friends on discord, but i cant fully relay on just that as ive got kinda unpredictable playtime myself.

As for the alts, i also recently leveled up few destro chars in odd hours and i was blobbing hard, even more of that i was making open warbands (quite hard to join /5 pugs as sub40) to get as much doomed sub 40 folks as possible so we being completely unable to fight on our own had to just zerg surf with what it was.

Worst part of this all is that you cant que SCs anymore if you got 6men, you will just dont get a pop most of the time. Very bad ninja change... Previously you could at least farm some pugs if there is absolutely nothing to do and nobody to fight but now you have to go zergsurf. Efficient zergsurfing requires you to play kite/ranged group that are suboptimal in SCs so now its much harder to combine SC q and oRvR zergsurfing. Previously you could stay in the lakes as melee group, do something and constantly get pops and mostly play SCs atm you will be stuck with your melee SC comp in oRvR without pops and suboptimal composition for kill farm in blobs... Meh