It's interesting to see people asking what the aim of this change was when it's been explained already.
Purpose
The purpose of this was twofold:
- To make a start on punishing lack of diffusion (aka blobbing) with an aim to spreading out engagements over a larger area, in a way that didn't require new mechanics
- To ensure that the AoE system serves smaller groups against larger ones, instead of larger groups against smaller ones, in an effort to lower the optimal formation size.
Definition of zerg
Zerg and blob are the same thing. You can quote whatever definition of zerg you want, but if your formation is comparable to
this, and your tactical and strategic choices boil down to roughly the same as one of those units has (damage out, heal out, etc) then you're a zerg. This holds true whether you're 24 or whether you're 96. Zerg / blob is the point at which most of the game's strategy, tactics and abilities become useless. I've already stated that I believe that point begins at about the 18v18 mark and is fully realized at about 36v36. You will undoubtedly disagree.
The OP's videos
You demonstrate two situations:
- Keep defense. Yes, that is a problem. It's a problem caused by the original shitty design forcing chokepoints, which you've acknowledged.
- Zerg on Sanctuary of Dreams a few days ago, at the event. If you were involved in that battle and you didn't think that was a zerg, you need your eyes checked.
Where my opinion differs from yours is that I see people apparently unable to avoid this forced check for diffusion and instead of railing upon AoEs for making me play differently, I put it down to 1 of 3 things:
- Refusal to adapt
- RvR system failure (it needs to FORCE splitting all over the map)
- Map failure (keeps/BO design)
That simply tells me that I need to work on more measures for diffusion. However, with one thing or another, it's actually very hard for me to want to do
anything here any more. Noticed the lack of patchnotes? It's related to not being able to solve this zerg problem. If I can't solve it, the game has no interest for me, and I've been on the verge of quitting a number of times in the past few months. This is why I will not back down.
More detailed reasoning on RvR
Unfortunately, something a lot of you don't seem to understand is that this game presents incredible challenges to anyone trying to fix its RvR systems. Let's look at what we've got:
- Reward-driven game, not fun-driven game - players will play to maximise rewards rather than fun, and it is close to impossible to implement a good reward system that can't be abused without using a human judge or an AI from two hundred years in the future
- Two-realm system - not self balancing
- Crossrealming capability - no ability to reward a realm as a whole because of no permanent lock without incentivising crossrealm
- No ability to change maps (will always have chokepoints / bad map design / bad keep design)
- No ability to change fundamentals of RvR system (will always have BOs and keeps)
- No ability to balance individual engagements or factions, so game can be ruined by ambient population factors (this was part of what I was attempting to do in making small groups able to destroy large blobs)
- Lack of adaptations to large scale combat in the combat system (MMO design focusing on small scale, many abilities and even entire classes become weak to useless at warband scale as aoe/bomb setups and increased mass become king)
- Lack of adaptations to large scale combat in the gameplay. Example: other games use vehicles and varied unit types to create tactical and strategic depth - Warhammer by contrast has very low to no strategic depth in large scale and low tactical depth there too. The closest Warhammer gets to implementing different unit types is siege and people hate it
- Poor flow due to travel times across the lake, low action-to-travel ratio compared to almost every other game
- Anthropic principle - the players remaining in Warhammer are the ones who could tolerate and thrive with the flaws. Attempts to break up zerg and bombing fail partly because so many of the players left want to zerg and bomb
Then you wonder why I attempt measures like this. The above represent a horrific set of constraints on any attempt to fix the RvR system. While I
do have something planned, it's still subject to all of the merciless constraints above and so I don't have much faith in my own solutions any more.
The key problems
Now, you want a definition of the key problems as I see them, I'll give you one.
- The game's combat goes to **** in large scale, defined as warband versus warband and above. Because the game resolves to a state where blobbing and mass are king, this kills any kind of tactics based around splitting and maneuvering beyond the most basic flank attack. This was what the AoE change attempted to resolve.
- There is nothing in the game which puts a soft cap on your maximum effective force size. The more players you have, the better off you are. Any measure designed to threaten this idea (artillery, cannons, melee cleaving) is complained about and the players continue to play in the exact same fashion until enough pressure is applied to remove the change. This leads to zerg.
- It's almost impossible to make people split up, even when using brute force macro mechanics, because they naturally gravitate to large fights in a single location.
The various suggestions proposed
You've made numerous suggestions:
Might stop morale cheese. Won't make large scale combat any more deep or interesting, because the problem is one of scale. There comes a certain point at which there are so many elements in play in a battle that it becomes impossible to consider them all at once, and this is a state that I would define as "chaotic". It goes without saying that as the number of players increases, the number of events increases as well, and this quickly crosses the chaos threshold. When this threshold is hit, usually the tactical focus shifts, such that we consider a unit as a group, or a warband, rather than a single player.
Increase in scale also places more emphasis on pure damage/heal and affecting many targets at once, and less emphasis on more subtle effects, resolving each individual down into something as basic as the average RTS soldier. You've noticed that even when splitting is forced to weaken AoE, mass ST is the result, and the effectiveness of mass ST naturally increases with the number of attackers.
Thus, the problem with WAR is that its interplay between groups and warbands in large scale is far weaker than its interplay between the individual units of a group and the group as a whole in small scale. Changing morale won't change this.
This has potential in terms of reduction of large combats to multiple smaller ones... but it also has pitfalls. The classic example for CC breaking up large scale combat is high duration AoE stagger, and it was something that I confess I'd considered as a tactic for KotBS and Chosen for use against zergs (extend stagger range, lower duration, duration increases with more targets hit). However, I don't think you mean this. You spoke about AoE punts, which trigger immunity. I could lift the cap and increase the radius of all the AoE punts and I don't think it would suddenly make large scale more interesting.
I don't have a problem with nerfing AoE snaring. A large scale system should work to reward use of tactics. This is very difficult with restricted unit types already, because synergy between different types of highly distinct unit in large scale, as in strategy games, is a HUGE part of what enables this to work, and Warhammer does not have that at all. Throwing around AoE snares everywhere to limit mobility doesn't help that **** at all, especially when increases in density cause ranged units to become increasingly more effective compared to melee ones.
The problem is this: How do you do it? AoE snares, in particular Slice Through and Big Brawlin', are staples in small scale as well as large scale. Even if you made every AoE snare have a 30 second cooldown, you face the problem of density - there will be enough classes capable of AoE snaring in the average composition to ensure that AoE snaring is still a constant. How do you handle this?
A final note
It's quite annoying to see it repeatedly stated that Flurry or any of the other limit-breaking, scaling attacks has become king, as if the base damage is 3k. These attacks reach very high numbers only if enough targets are hit, which is either your fault or the fault of the map design. I feel that that should actually be acknowledged. If you are not forced to blob, then don't. If you are forced to blob, then we need to look at what is forcing blobbing and how that should be resolved. This change was only ever intended to act as a check - a kind of singing canary in a cage - which would draw attention to situations where zerging is forced.
@Tesq
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