The nature of games like eso and gw2 led to zerg and PvDoor. You can design maps that the optimal nature of things is amoeba warfare.
Crowfall
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Vitality
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Zerg and PVDoor in ESO was largely a waste of time. Most of the lucrative pvp (in terms of rewards) was found in the small 10-20 man skirmishes that mainly took place at bridges.
Cyrodiils map design was fantastic for the smaller groups.
Tuco
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I like the art style of the female templar too. So tired of exaggeratedly feminine characters and armor.
Forcing the general playerbase to operate into small groups in an open-world environment is challenging. It's effective to just have a 10v10 instanced arena to shove everyone into, but I get bored of that very quickly because it's a similar experience each time.
The best way to do is in a FFA situation is to provide territory on the map that can be controlled and give rewards to the owner. But the territory doesn't fundamentally need more than a few people to operate it. So if you get 30 people guarding it, it's a waste of time for everyone involved. If each area is owned by a specific person who set rewards for the people helping him, you'll see a lot of weight forcing people to split up, form small groups and compete with each other.
In a faction vs faction vs faction scenario it's much harder. The playerbase will tend to group up and go after the closest enemy. This promotes a zerg vs zerg vs zerg mindset. Organized groups can engage asymmetrically and take land away from the enemy, but this is considered PvDoor. The best way to combat this is to not reward the player for how much territory his faction owns, but reward the player for how much territory he or his group owns.
I also think having only three factions isn't a good number. 5 or more would be better because it would add more chaos and make it easier for people to gang up on #1.
Even as the person at the top directing strategy I agree. If this game is to be successful the majority of pvp needs to happen in the 3 - 15 player range. However, the most important battles will always be the ones that put hundreds of people on screen, and when the most epic battle of a given campaign is sending half the raid to sb.exe, lags out the server, makes the engine stop rendering your enemies or gives you shit FPS it's a bit anti-climactic.
Forcing the general playerbase to operate into small groups in an open-world environment is challenging. It's effective to just have a 10v10 instanced arena to shove everyone into, but I get bored of that very quickly because it's a similar experience each time.
The best way to do is in a FFA situation is to provide territory on the map that can be controlled and give rewards to the owner. But the territory doesn't fundamentally need more than a few people to operate it. So if you get 30 people guarding it, it's a waste of time for everyone involved. If each area is owned by a specific person who set rewards for the people helping him, you'll see a lot of weight forcing people to split up, form small groups and compete with each other.
In a faction vs faction vs faction scenario it's much harder. The playerbase will tend to group up and go after the closest enemy. This promotes a zerg vs zerg vs zerg mindset. Organized groups can engage asymmetrically and take land away from the enemy, but this is considered PvDoor. The best way to combat this is to not reward the player for how much territory his faction owns, but reward the player for how much territory he or his group owns.
I also think having only three factions isn't a good number. 5 or more would be better because it would add more chaos and make it easier for people to gang up on #1.
Tuco
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Oh and just to reiterate what I said before, I played in Cyrodiil pretty hardcore in ESO for the first two months, so my experiences were contained within that time period and I don't know how it evolved afterward.
Like Vitality said the best pvp was in 10-20 man skirmishes where people would farm players, usually disorganized players trying to get back to their zerg, or splits off the zerg. This is sort of an example of what I've been saying of players grouping together, staking a claim and farming the resource of that claim though it's a little perverse because the squad is doing little to help their faction.
A key debate is how much you reward players for map control and taking a territory vs how much do you reward players for holding territory and making it successful (ex: holding a mine and ensuring the product of that mine gets sold/used at a nearby city). I think the point-scoring based on holding territory paradigm of GW2/ESO worked well for games that went on for a static period of time, but for Crowfall players need to be rewarded for killing players and for exploiting resources and the campaigns need to end when one side gives up.
An example: if a guild has ownership of a keep that is controlling the only mana-fountain on the map, but everytime they try to export the mana to a crafting station to make mana pots and enchantments an enemy guild captures their cargo and gets the reward instead. In the land-ownership scoring system the keep-owning players are winning. In a more open system, the land-owners get frustrated because they're wasting their time and losing their cargo/guards. This is important because these games are all about wars of attrition.
Byr
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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There are more people playing mmos than any game can handle in a condensed area. At some point it becomes the players responsibilities to bring a reasonable amount of players to any engagement. If guilds kept the numbers down we wouldnt have a lot of the problems that existed with past games.
Abefroman
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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It's the responsibility of the developer to discourage it, not the players. Players aren't suddenly going to decrease their chances of winning by bringing less people cause it's the right thing to do. There are tons of mechanics that you can put in place to make guilds split up into smaller forces and not zerg ball. The question is will they do it.
Agraza
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There is no way to make that happen. There is no gentlemen's agreement that's feasible between all parties. One group zerging an agreed number of fighters forces everyone to escalate. It has to be done through game mechanics.
EVE's doing something about making you take multiple objectives to acquire territory from another guild so you'll have to balance forces and likely have both occupation teams that commit to an objective and strike forces that move from point to point. That could help reduce the size of a given fight and still allow you to escalate the size of your human wave. I think the logistics required is going to be a burden for noobs, but it's not an unrealistic expectation at this point in EVE's lifecycle that noob corps swear fealty to a guild with the capacity to get shit done and learn from the inside.
EVE's doing something about making you take multiple objectives to acquire territory from another guild so you'll have to balance forces and likely have both occupation teams that commit to an objective and strike forces that move from point to point. That could help reduce the size of a given fight and still allow you to escalate the size of your human wave. I think the logistics required is going to be a burden for noobs, but it's not an unrealistic expectation at this point in EVE's lifecycle that noob corps swear fealty to a guild with the capacity to get shit done and learn from the inside.
Vitality
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There's always going to be big fights at primary objectives, medium fights at secondary objectives, and smaller fights at tertiary and outlier objectives.
That's just how it goes, when games put hardcaps on the number of people at a certain fight, the game gets uneccesarily limited (ala Archeage seige population caps)
Now macro level pop caps have been shown to work in larger games like planetside and guildwars 2.
If you want a small fight you have to go look for it, if you don't want to look for it then log into a different game and hop into a Battleground. Because that's the only guaranteed fairly low population capped pvp model in MMO's today.
The whole point of the thrill of the skirmish group (10-20 people) is that you disrupt the zerg and dodge the zerg and sometimes AoE bust the zerg. ESO was a real thrill when this type of method wasn't nerfed into complete retardation.
TL;DR the thrill is overcoming the odds with a smaller band of trusty friends. Making the game force the opponent into a fair fight is boring as hell.
That's just how it goes, when games put hardcaps on the number of people at a certain fight, the game gets uneccesarily limited (ala Archeage seige population caps)
Now macro level pop caps have been shown to work in larger games like planetside and guildwars 2.
If you want a small fight you have to go look for it, if you don't want to look for it then log into a different game and hop into a Battleground. Because that's the only guaranteed fairly low population capped pvp model in MMO's today.
The whole point of the thrill of the skirmish group (10-20 people) is that you disrupt the zerg and dodge the zerg and sometimes AoE bust the zerg. ESO was a real thrill when this type of method wasn't nerfed into complete retardation.
TL;DR the thrill is overcoming the odds with a smaller band of trusty friends. Making the game force the opponent into a fair fight is boring as hell.
Tuco
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The other aspect that exacerbates this issue is that people are notoriously bad at counting enemy players. Sometimes we'll get a stream of enemy communication where they rate our numbers at 2x what they are. I come down on this pretty hard when I'm leading and a scout says, "50 reds at this location" and I show up and there's 20 people there.
What this means is that two groups of 20 people fight each other and rate the enemy at 30 players and each look to escalate by calling backup.
Byr
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Id argue its a shared responsibility. If a guild is recruiting 300 people and expecting their large battles to run well, its an unreasonable expectation to start with.
Vitality
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From my experience there's a bit of skill-variance with your scouts Tuco. LOL. Skirmish 1 & 2 ran into some issues with them in the past as well.
Agraza
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One of the biggest issues with big fights is focus fire target calling. It's ludicrous. Generally the fight is actually a dozen iterations of 100 v 1 over and over and over. Being brought from full health to dead within a second isn't good gameplay, but large fights have a LOT of that. Add lag to the encounter and one side may win due to a disproportionate share of access to the server while it's overwhelmed.
Collision and free targeting could help mitigate alpha strikes in future games, but lag is the enemy of everyone and shouldn't determine the outcome of an encounter. It's just not realistic to expect any host to be able to support 1000 v 1000 fights fluidly with modern tech, so they have to find a way to separate the zergs of all parties so that organization, leadership, skill, etc. remain the dominant factors in determining success.
Collision and free targeting could help mitigate alpha strikes in future games, but lag is the enemy of everyone and shouldn't determine the outcome of an encounter. It's just not realistic to expect any host to be able to support 1000 v 1000 fights fluidly with modern tech, so they have to find a way to separate the zergs of all parties so that organization, leadership, skill, etc. remain the dominant factors in determining success.
Vitality
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One thing to consider Agraza that most of us in this thread aren't currently: Base Building
Base building really hasn't been done on a large scale pvp front in some time, I think the last real game that incorporated this was Anarchy Online to some degree? Maybe EvE online null sec?
Archeage doesn't really count all that much due to property protection and population capped castle seiges.
What I'm getting at is that once you incorporate player owned and unprotected land consumption you start creating a relatively dynamic amount of goals for your playerbase.
Instead of 1000 players being at Irondick mine or a bridge or something farming noobs for honor points, you're instead concerned with whoever might be attacking your base or who's base you want to fuck up.
The real discussion here is what kind of property protection if any are they going to implement? Too much? Everyone spawn camps everyone. Too little? Australians cap your keep at 3am in the morning. **something only the likes of Tuco's group and alliance can deal with**
Base building really hasn't been done on a large scale pvp front in some time, I think the last real game that incorporated this was Anarchy Online to some degree? Maybe EvE online null sec?
Archeage doesn't really count all that much due to property protection and population capped castle seiges.
What I'm getting at is that once you incorporate player owned and unprotected land consumption you start creating a relatively dynamic amount of goals for your playerbase.
Instead of 1000 players being at Irondick mine or a bridge or something farming noobs for honor points, you're instead concerned with whoever might be attacking your base or who's base you want to fuck up.
The real discussion here is what kind of property protection if any are they going to implement? Too much? Everyone spawn camps everyone. Too little? Australians cap your keep at 3am in the morning. **something only the likes of Tuco's group and alliance can deal with**
Abefroman
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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Those are two different points. I agree that expecting an engine to handle a metric fuck ton of people is unreasonable. No caps on Ae's except healing ones, collision detection, multiple objectives in different places, strategic choke points to kill zergs, these are all things they can put into place to make sure people don't just stack up and win by brute force. Players will use any advantage they can get to win. If it's numbers they sure as hell will do it.
