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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Anti-Zerg Mechanics (Theorizing)
ArchivedUser
Guest
So what kind of mechanics do you guys thing they will have in place to prevent Zerging?
We have already heard things like:
No fast travel, which will make it much harder for people to meet up easily to Zerg.
"No Zerging bosses without knowing their mechanics"
What kind of systems do you guys think will be in place besides these?
I hope there will be boss mechanics like: (Note, talking about world bosses, event bosses etc)
Boss healing skills like, whenever a player dies boss heals a certain amount, or a healing skill that scales based on players within a certain radius, like a mass energy drain skill used on all players in vicinity that heals the boss.
Bosses with Damage Aura's, say for example a Fire Golem boss has a Fiery aura that burns everyone within a certain range for xxx dmg per second, making healers be unable to keep up with it in a Zerg.
Dominance skills that targets a % of players in the vicinity, making it more dangerous the more players there are.
But I'd like to hear your theories
We have already heard things like:
No fast travel, which will make it much harder for people to meet up easily to Zerg.
"No Zerging bosses without knowing their mechanics"
What kind of systems do you guys think will be in place besides these?
I hope there will be boss mechanics like: (Note, talking about world bosses, event bosses etc)
Boss healing skills like, whenever a player dies boss heals a certain amount, or a healing skill that scales based on players within a certain radius, like a mass energy drain skill used on all players in vicinity that heals the boss.
Bosses with Damage Aura's, say for example a Fire Golem boss has a Fiery aura that burns everyone within a certain range for xxx dmg per second, making healers be unable to keep up with it in a Zerg.
Dominance skills that targets a % of players in the vicinity, making it more dangerous the more players there are.
But I'd like to hear your theories
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Comments
And why anti-zerg when it comes to world bosses?
It's not exactly a challenge if all you need to do is throw numbers at something as epic as a world/event/lore boss is there?
Imagine you're going against this Epic Dragon and all you would need to do is throw thousand players at it, it kinda ruins the epicness.
2. Yeah that's basically everything I've heard that is a statement from Intrepid, that's why I was wonder what sort of mechanics they could have in place.
3. Hmm, never considered that battle platform could be an option, nice.
Intrepid will need to implement participation metrics for this to work properly. I hope they do this, because it gives them a powerful tool to eliminate toxicity in different areas of gameplay. For example, it could be used in a scaled individual looting system to eliminate loot toxicity.
Just to be clear, by toxicity, I'm talking about behavior that has an unbalanced risk vs reward. The kind of behavior that allows small group of people to dominate a game system with little or no effort or risk. This is the kind of behavior that can destroy a community and cause people to quit the game.
Zerging, loot toxicity, PK griefing and Bots/gold selling are all forms of toxic behavior that needs to be addressed by game systems design, rather than assuming that the player community or game masters can deal with this on large server populations. Intrepid have announced a great flagging system to help equalize the risk/reward for PK griefing and an automated detection system to guard against bots and gold sellers. I'm waiting in hope to see how or if they intend to address these other two important areas in the game systems design
And while I do agree it is a good way to do it, personally I feel like it is a bit.. "cheap", I mean I can accept it if it is explained by skills and abilities. I like things to make sense lore wise, and bosses randomly scaling according to number of players would not be the best way, in my opinion. But it is a good way to do it
And yeah I know, thankfully they are well aware of these things so we will hopefully see some good systems for them
You shouldn't be limited in how many people you bring (this is MMO) but there should be some drawbacks and increased risks the more people you bring.
- players dieing around boss boosting bosses damage and healing him.
- every X incoming attacks boss does some AoE (the more players, more AoEs happen)
- boss mind controlling certain percent of players periodically and let em attack their friends (the more players, more threat when this happens)
- players not being able to walk through each other (body physics) making it very hard to avoid punishing boss AoEs in crowded space (other players preventing you to dodge out)
- boss puts poison on random players, that affects not only said players but players close to them as well (if you are in crowd of too many people, gonna be hard)
- etc.
Oh that's a nice idea, poison aura on players, auras stack.
Or even, boss puts DoT on a player that, when they die, they explode for a lot of damage or spread a poison cloud to others.
so if 20 people would participate, the boss should adapt towards that number of people, and become more resistant, stronger, and more unpredictable, to make the fight way harder that it gives zergs as big of a challenge's as if you would try 4 man it
theres probably better additions to make it even more interesting, but i think this could be one of the solutions to prevent hack & slashing of big HP bosses
However, many will not work on an organised zerg - a number of fully formed and organised 40 man raids that descend in an organised way on an unsuspecting world boss.
The idea of cheesing the mechanics of world bosses is an incredibly difficult one to combat.
What happens if three full raids are organised by an alliance and it is agreed upon that only one raid will attack for the majority of the fight and then the other two raids will chime in at 20% to just smash it down? Or wait until a particular phase that hurts large numbers is past? Even if the boss dynamically scales up it might be too late from the influx of that extra sudden damage.
One mechanic I would like to see implemented is that the boss is healed for a percentage of his health for each new player that attacks after say the first 5% of his health is removed. This would then punish the influx of players who just rush in on an almost downed boss.
I think the idea of limiting the fighting area is a good one, especially when coupled with punishing mechanics that, with collision detection, could kill half the attacking force in one go if there are too many sandwiched in.
Another excellent mechanic is disease (boss specific of course). If one player is struck by disease but will infect any other players within 10 yards, this can quickly get out of hand in a zerg. There is even an incidence of this occurring in WoW that epidemiologists studied as the disease was brought back from an instance and spread throughout the capital city populace, killing hundreds of players - until Blizzard hotfixed it.
Too large zerg = very hard to move around
very hard to move around = very hard to avoid boss AoE
boss throws AoE + zerg of people around you = RIP
more players = adaptive and harder boss