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Ball groups and other undesirable things
Okeydoke
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Hey guys. I'm an mmo vet. Been playing them for 20+ years. Not sure if its ever been mentioned since I'm new here but just wanted to talk a little about ball groups.
Ball groups have been a pvp tactic in several mmos. In the mmos that they are prevalent in they're the meta really. Short version of what a ball group is is a group of anywhere from 8ish to 24, or even more, players that stay stacked up in a tight knit ball and maneuver around the pvp battlefield in that formation at all times.
The purpose is efficiency and taking advantage of aoe mechanics. The average ball group of say 16 players would be made up of maybe 10 aoe damage dealers, and 6 healers. Give or take a support class or two of some sort, varies based on the game in question.
In pvp the ball group runs around in sync at all times. The dps classes spam their aoe dps. The healers spam their aoe heals. And that's about it. A leader calls the shots and directs where this blob of players moves on the battlefield and what poor enemy player groups it crashes into.
The main experience I've had with it was in in ESO where it was really bad. There were even bot groups doing it. Like one guy multiboxing controlling 12+ different accounts. Not nearly as effective as 12 individual players in a ball group, but still something you had to avoid. I believe ball groups were an issue in Guild Wars 2 also, as well as other games. But its been a long time, I don't recall all the times I've seen it. ESO is just the most fresh on my mind.
So I'm just writing this hoping I really didn't need to write it at all. That maybe the devs already done thought about it and came up with a solution years ago. But if not, just to bring some attention to it.
Yes we want aoe's. They're very useful for taking on enemies when you're outnumbered. Yes we want the better led, the more organized and efficient groups of players (which in principle is what a ball group is, I don't deny that) to do better generally in pvp. But no, I think I speak for many, hopefully most, no we don't want the ball group meta. Where thats just it, thats what ya do. Everyone blob up, get your skills spamming and /follow on the leader.
There are many ways for a dev to make it not the meta. I'm not going to go into all the ways. I just hope the devs take it into consideration when they really start creating/balancing pvp mechanics.
Ball groups have been a pvp tactic in several mmos. In the mmos that they are prevalent in they're the meta really. Short version of what a ball group is is a group of anywhere from 8ish to 24, or even more, players that stay stacked up in a tight knit ball and maneuver around the pvp battlefield in that formation at all times.
The purpose is efficiency and taking advantage of aoe mechanics. The average ball group of say 16 players would be made up of maybe 10 aoe damage dealers, and 6 healers. Give or take a support class or two of some sort, varies based on the game in question.
In pvp the ball group runs around in sync at all times. The dps classes spam their aoe dps. The healers spam their aoe heals. And that's about it. A leader calls the shots and directs where this blob of players moves on the battlefield and what poor enemy player groups it crashes into.
The main experience I've had with it was in in ESO where it was really bad. There were even bot groups doing it. Like one guy multiboxing controlling 12+ different accounts. Not nearly as effective as 12 individual players in a ball group, but still something you had to avoid. I believe ball groups were an issue in Guild Wars 2 also, as well as other games. But its been a long time, I don't recall all the times I've seen it. ESO is just the most fresh on my mind.
So I'm just writing this hoping I really didn't need to write it at all. That maybe the devs already done thought about it and came up with a solution years ago. But if not, just to bring some attention to it.
Yes we want aoe's. They're very useful for taking on enemies when you're outnumbered. Yes we want the better led, the more organized and efficient groups of players (which in principle is what a ball group is, I don't deny that) to do better generally in pvp. But no, I think I speak for many, hopefully most, no we don't want the ball group meta. Where thats just it, thats what ya do. Everyone blob up, get your skills spamming and /follow on the leader.
There are many ways for a dev to make it not the meta. I'm not going to go into all the ways. I just hope the devs take it into consideration when they really start creating/balancing pvp mechanics.
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The main way to deal with them was to cast a barrier in the middle of the ball - it would cut the ball in half, making one half of the ball much easier to pick off and kill.
You would still need almost the same number of players to take on a ball as the ball itself contained, and it relied on the fact that most players in a ball were kind of trash at PvP outside of said ball - but that is perfectly fine when you think about it.
Basically, it means you are able to take on a group of players utilizing a single tactic simply by using a direct counter to that specific tactic - this can be done with fewer players, but only if they are better.
Ashes will have full player collision, which is important to note. This won't prevent balls forming, but it will mean they need to be more spread out than in some games - making the above tactic easier as you are able to get a segment of the ball cornered away without risking getting in to range of the entire ball.
The solution to enjoyable gameplay is to restrict AoE.
AoE with high impact should have high cooldown.
If players can mash buttons, without even looking to see if they hit an enemy, then we will keep having this problem.
A tactic to defeat a ball can only be used as a weapon by a ball if that ball is going up against another ball.
I spent a lot of time dealing with them in Archeage.
Since most balls are directed by one player, treat them as one player. Send people in on two or three sides to throw in some barriers in the middle of the ball that they can't get past and you win.
AoE or not, you win.
I've never seen a ball group overcome that as a tactic.
Says you. You are a time waster and a know-it-all.
Even for the most simple, logical things you have to counter argue and provide your elaborate insight.
Barrier this barrier that. And my experience from ESO was that zergbuster features were used by zergs.
The solution to enjoyable gameplay is simple. Restrict AoE. AoE was no meant to be the main choice of actions that it has become in all games now.
If you dont get that I dont thing that, I think it's high time people stopped wasting their time responding to your "barrier experience" arguements.
And its true, a lot of the things you think of to counter ball groups, actually makes them more powerful when they use it. But yeah long cooldowns on spam aoe would pretty much make ball groups a non issue. But theres other solutions too I think.
Aoe that increases in damage based on how many people it hits. Or even just damage being generally stronger than healing. ESO ball groups could heal through anything because damage definitely took a back seat to healing in that game. You couldn't surprise a ball group with spike damage and pick anyone off, healing was too powerful and they were in a constant state of healing, just spamming heals even when they're not being hit by anything.
I dunno, I'm open to any kind of solution. Ball group meta is just so boring. Static, flat. I want dynamic combat, actual tactics that a leader has to call out. "Group(ball) up were about to hit the breach hard." "Spread out were taking too much aoe and focus fire." Call outs that change based on the situation and whats happening. Fluid. As opposed to robots just staying in ball formation because they're just going to heal through everything, or rotate damage shields and outlast everything anyway.
I wish you had played Tera Online.
Beautiful AoE abilities that were never an issue in being used by pvp zergs.
In that game a player was requires to set sight on an enemy to win.
There were a lot of cone attacks on medium duration cool down but nothing like the ESO mess.
The guild leaders on fights of 40 vs40 100v100 etc would actually say focus this guy focus that guy, and you would see players moving up to the named person and fight. That persons allies would run up to them and join the fight.
Today it's all "stack on leader. Spam spam. 3 2 1 move in. Move left. Move right" all while spamming aoe without targeting enemy people.
I get that this makes sense in a purely or mostly PvP game.
It doesn't make sense if that game is designed to be 50% or more PvE focused though. All it does is remove options. The best idea in a PvX game is to ensure those options remain, but are either not able to be abused, or are able to be countered.
Rather than removing AoE, a much better idea would be to ensure every ability has at least a 10 second recast timer, so the game doesn't have a single spamable ability. If classes are designed around this notion, then a lot of cheap tactics in both PvP and PvE are eliminated, without any actual detriment in terms of available options. That said, I am not advocating for that here, as it isn't needed.
And just because someone that is not 100% keen on PvP has been using a PvP tactic successfully for years that you didn't think of, doesn't mean it isn't a valid tactic.
The simple fact that ESO doesn't have player collision means it wouldn't work nearly as well there - perhaps not even at all. You can't put a barrier between a group of people if those people are all standing in the same spot.
As soon as those people have to spread out though, it becomes a perfectly viable, valid and effective tactic. If you manage to get several barriers in place at about the same time and break them off in to several small groups, your work is basically already done.
The only real counter to this tactic is for the ball to prevent the barriers being put up in the first place, so the key to it's success is to have several people go in from several different directs.
Since we know one of the barriers in Ashes will be a tank ability, that adds to this being a viable solution. If all barriers were cast by mages, it would obviously be much harder.
The funny thing to me is that a ball is basically the PvP equivalent of a mid range PvE encounter.
If it is well disciplined, a PvP ball will do what it want's to do, not what you want it to do. Since most PvP'ers thrive on chaotic combat more than anything, as soon as they come up against an enemy that won't descend in to that chaos, they can't deal nearly as well as they can in more chaotic situations.
This is the true reason balls are successful.
Force that chaos on them by breaking the ball up, and you win.
But yeah, in most games that works, because they dont have player collision.
They can just stack multiple small scale aoe effects in one place and hit most enemies/concentrate fire on specific targets.
That could change if Intrepid gives specific classes the ability to block projectiles (like the wall of the tank class).
AoC will have player collision, so i would imagine them splitting up in multiple smaller groups:
1. A line of melee classes, that then use their charge/movement skills to close the distance to the enemy (clumping up would hinder then in their movement because of the collision
2. A blob of hardcast ranged classes, that dont depend on movement, but just need to cast for their big spells
3. A mobile ranged flanking force to negate summoned walls/projectile blockers
Sounds to me like an organized raid. Aka, the bane of PvP players.
Can't say I have either it's aways been zerg for me unless its Warhammer then its a tide :d
Personally I don't have a problem with zerging as a tactic, but if you did want to get rid of it, the way you do it is by having multiple objectives that all need to be taken at the same time. Let's say you have a 20 vs 20 map, and there are 4 objectives on the map. In order to win a team must hold all 4 objectives at the same time. A zerg group would be useless in this kind of battle because they wouldn't be able to hold all the objectives at once.
Of course, by doing that you make it harder for random players to participate as they won't have the teamwork and communication required for it, which means less players participating overall and therefore fewer matches and eventually the system dies due to a lack of players.
The more players you introduce into the mix, the less teamwork and coordination required to succeed. If you want highly tactical and organised PvP you need to reduce the numbers involved.
But in general, to me a zerg is a large grouping of mix matched players. Bunch of solos, some duos, some guild groups, bunch of randoms really, that all just congregated together because it makes sense at the time. The only cohesion is the zerg itself, you stay in and around the zerg, the mass of players. There might be some guy calling shots in zone chat. Or there might not.
A ball group is a tactical unit of players. Tends to be guild groups but not exclusively. It can be as little as 6-8 players or as many as 24 or more. And what it does is what I described in my previous post. Far more organization and cohesion than the typical zerg.
And in the games where ball groups are the meta, it is what many of the top pvp groups do. Because you have to to compete in many situations. The only thing worse than fighting a ball group is BEING in a ball group. It is utterly boring. You have your role in the ball group and you press the same abilities over and over, in sync with every other member of the ball group doing the same with their assigned abilities, as your ball group crashes into everything from solos, zergs, and other ball groups.
Anyway, I didn't know before that there was going to be player collision in this game. That COULD really stop ball groups from becoming the meta. Just hope the devs are aware of the ball group phenomenon and designing the game so it doesn't become the one and only meta.
To me, a zerg is a mass of any combination of classes with no over all strategy.
A ball is a mass of specific classes running a single strategy.
An organised raid is a mass of balanced classes capable of delivering multiple different strategies.
A zerg will always be killed by a ball, but a ball will always be killed by an organized raid.
In order for a ball to be able to adapt it's tactics, it would also need to adapt it's class composition. If it does these things successfully, it is now an organized raid.
If people think that spamming 1-2 AoE abilities:
1)without targeting enemies or friends, based on the function allocated (dd, tank, healer, support)
2)Picking an optimal race that they may not like, just for the few hours in a week that they have to play as an organized group
3)Picking gear set to maximize the benefit of only those 2 aoe abilities, without worrying AT ALL about strengthening other character features since, you know, they are part of a group
4)Staying away from a red circle indicator of enemy dmg and gathering to a green circle of healing
5)Following the leader icon
...is skilled gameplay, they are deluded. Effective tactic? Yes. Skilled gameplay? 100% no.
That is why I hope that AoC will restrict AoE, in a manner that a high impact abilities should have high cooldowns.
Any person who defends mindless AoE gameplay wants an easy way to win.
Using this, you can take a number of players that are absolutely not skilled and turn them in to something that is worth more than the sum of it's parts.
What shows a lack of skill is when actual PvP players that are able to match a ball in numbers can't manage to defeat it.
I think balling up is a valid tactic. I'm not vouching for it to be completely obsolete. Balling up to hit a specific point, the force multiplier that that creates on that point is a valid tactic in my opinion. But at the same time it should be absolutely devastating for every single player in that ball to get hit with aoe at the same time. Like it shouldn't just be something the ball group barely feels and shrugs off. It should very quickly encourage them to spread out. And the risk of it happening should be enough where they dont generally just stay in ball form in the first place. Dynamic combat, changing formations and callouts based on the situation, risk vs reward (the advantage of ball form vs the risks of it), so on and so forth.
There is no risk in balls. Every group member has an easy task. Spam 1-2 AoE
Any strategy to harm the ball can be used by the ball to harm the equal number of enemy players who did not build to spam for example 1-2 AoE dmg abilities while their ball healers spam 1-2 AoE heal.
The ball strength is simple minded AoE function.
That is why the easiest way to address it is to have high CD for high impact AoE.
Nobody gets harmed except for the players and their leaders who want 1-2 button AoE PvP.
It may well be that you can't break up a ball in that game, I can't speak to it. All I can speak to is that the game in question has essentially childproof combat with very few valid options of character build, and even fewer options of what to do in combat.
The fewer options players have, the more likely it is that a single tactic will be unbeatable. Agreed, balls are a valid tactic. They are a cheap tactic, but they are valid.
Giving one class in the game an AoE that multiplies damage to each target based on how many targets it hits should be enough to end balls in any game that doesn't have player collision. This is a much more workable solution to the earlier suggestion of removing AoE from the game - as this suggestion could add to the PvE game as well as the PvP game, rather than taking away from both.
However, the simple fact that collision exists in Ashes means quite a few things for balls.
First, it means they will need to be more spread out. That in turn means that the whole ball won't ever be able to target the same area, which means it is easier for would-be attackers to pick off the fringes of the ball without getting killed. This then becomes their main weakness.
The other thing it means - and this one could end up being comical if the ball is truly disorganized - is that with collision, turning a ball is much harder. Not impossible, and not something good players will have an issue with. But when you have a ball that has 4 or 5 players in the middle not really paying attention, there will be a real delay in effectively turning a mass of players like this.
Agreed with pretty much all of that too nooani. The solution may already be in the bag for us with the player collision. These games are complicated though and almost every game that comes out ends up with an unforeseen meta and consequences that the devs didn't see coming. So READ THIS POST DEVS. Good discussion in here, better than I expected on an mmo forum heh
If they were a roaming band of flagged players that'd be one thing, but I doubt you'd need to even use a ball tactic if you're just running into a few players here and there out in the wild.
And if the tactic was being used in castle sieges wouldn't a small group of clumped up people be the perfect target for all of the castle siege weapons to knock them over/out?
Unless I'm missing a portion of PvP (which is most likely the case) I don't really get when people would want to use it? If it truly is boring, it doesn't sound like it'd be the most effective strategy in this game.
The strength of the ball group is that it's members use only 1-2 AoE abilities without aiming.
The group members build (race, gear, class) only for the purpose of their 2 AoE. For example a DD will go full atk without any concern about survivabilty.
A tank will go full CC without concern about survivability.
A healer will go full healing without concern about survivability.
The ball group does not prioritize enemy targets to harm the enemy numbers. They just spam AoE, no matter if there are DD that take more dmg, tanks that take less dmg, healers that need to be killed first. They just keep healing, and keep dealing AoE dmg and CC.
The ball group just follows the leader from the breach, to the throne room, spamming AoE. They will reach the objective and you cant ignore them or avoid them.
Anything that you can use against a ball group, they can use against you (except for siege weapons).
If high Impact AoE abilities receive high cooldown, the ball group will be affected in two ways:
1) Since they cant spam 1-2 AoE, they will need to build for:
DDs will split resources to dmg, CC, survivability, mobility.
Tanks will split resources for defence, CC.
Healers will split resources to mana regen (no more "wholesale" healing), healing amount, survivability.
No more mindless actions, counting on some1 else to cover your exposed weaknesses since you put everything your character had into dealing dmg.
2)Ball groups will have to aim enemies and prioritize targets as opposed to following the leader, forming a ball.
Nobody else will be affected by high cooldowns on AoE.
If ball group leaders and other players think that they are so skilled I am sure that they can keep winning without AoE.
But just on the surface, you can imagine ball groups being effective in siege situations. And the caravan system, you can imagine both the defending group and the attacking group being forced to use ball grouping IF its the meta.
The difference between this game and the game I reference most, ESO, is that in ESO it was a persistent, ongoing 24/7 battlefield. So that's just ripe for ball groups. Many ball group players wouldn't even go out and pvp until their full group was there and they could move out in ball form. But once out there it was just ballin around until they were done pvping for the night. It was target rich.
Ashes won't have that same kind of 24/7 pre determined battlefield. Nevertheless, if ball groups are the most effective, efficient way to pvp, it will become the meta.
And to answer your question about the siege equipment busting up clustered players. Yeah that's how it should work. But some games it just doesn't, the ball is too powerful. Ball groups in ESO could eat a lot of siege fire before you'd even see their health bars start to move. They're all on top of each other, multiple people casting aoe heals and damage shields and whatever else mitigation abilities they have. The siege weapons in that game didn't have a high enough rate of fire and/or didn't do enough damage per hit. The operator also has to aim and hit the player or players and often misses. People in the sights of siege get a ground graphic cue that the little patch of land they're on is about to get hit by a ballista or what have you. And they have time to avoid it.
That said, there were of course instances where concentrated siege fire could drive off a ball group. Rarely did it ever kill or stop one though. They'd usually just back off and come in from a different angle.
You won't see them just roaming around the countryside, killing all in their way. You probably won't see them in dungeons, either.
Assuming they even work in Ashes, we may see them in instanced PvP and maybe sieges - though I doubt they would last long in sieges due both to the need for timing and tactics, and siege weapons. They may also show up in a guild vs guild situation, but likely only as a third party taking advantage of all the flagged players.
The issue with balls is mostly to do with lack of mechanics in other games. It is only natural that some people would think the issues of one game would move to another, but sometimes people think this without thinking what mechanics need to be in place (or need to be absent, in this case) in order for that issue to remain an issue in another game.
All up, even if balls are possible, and if they are as effective as they are in other games (which is unlikely), it will only really affect a small portion of the game.