Ball groups and other undesirable things

Ball groups were an issue in Archeage as well.

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.

Ball groups are inevitable and all the tactics suggested to fight them become better weapons when used by the ball groups.

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.

Micromegas

Making combat single targeted with few AOE skills with long cooldowns could fix this problem.

George Black wrote: »

Ball groups are inevitable and all the tactics suggested to fight them become better weapons when used by the ball groups.

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.

noaani wrote: »

George Black wrote: »

Ball groups are inevitable and all the tactics suggested to fight them become better weapons when used by the ball groups.

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.

You all make some good points. Player collision will change the ball meta. Mostly reduce it. Might increase it in some ways too though. Would have to see how it plays out. But yeah, just stuff like that noaani. Counters to it, like a barrier. It's been years since I played ESO but we had nothing like that at the time. On top of that, you couldn't even CC ball groups. Because of group synergies and proper builds and classes in these ball groups, they always have someone just spamming purge or whatever mass cc break. It's just a blob. Only thing that stops it is another better blob.

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.

@Okeydoke
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.

George Black wrote: »

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.

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.

Damokles

I never heard anybody call zergs a ball group xD
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

Damokles wrote: »

I never heard anybody call zergs a ball group xD
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.

Nagash

Damokles wrote: »

I never heard anybody call zergs a ball group xD
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

Can't say I have either it's aways been zerg for me unless its Warhammer then its a tide :d

Wandering Mist

Zerg groups (or ball groups as you call them) will happen in large scale PvP even if there are no aoe abilities at all. The simple fact that is that when it comes to dealing with a bunch of randoms using limited communication, the best way to succeed is to group them all together and focus them on a single target.

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.

I'm not exactly talking about zergs. I understand how you're relating the two though. Because in some contexts they're kind of the same thing.

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.

Okeydoke wrote: »

I'm not exactly talking about zergs. I understand how you're relating the two though. Because in some contexts they're kind of the same thing.

This is a distinction I make as well.

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.

Can you form organized groups without 1-2 AoE spam gameplay? May you win at every castle siege.

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.

George Black wrote: »

Can you form organized groups without 1-2 AoE spam gameplay? May you win at every castle siege.

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.

It isn't skilled gameplay, but it is smart gameplay.

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.

Well it depends on the game, whether or not an equal number of players not in ball form should be able to kill the players in ball form. Assuming relatively equal skill level of the 2 groups. ESO, generally no way. Other games it very well could be possible. The ball is stronger in some games than others.

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.

Okeydoke wrote: »

Well it depends on the game, whether or not an equal number of players not in ball form should be able to kill the players in ball form. Assuming relatively equal skill level of the 2 groups. ESO, generally no way. Other games it very well could be possible. The ball is stronger in some games than others.

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.

Okeydoke wrote: »

Well it depends on the game, whether or not an equal number of players not in ball form should be able to kill the players in ball form. Assuming relatively equal skill level of the 2 groups. ESO, generally no way. Other games it very well could be possible. The ball is stronger in some games than others.

I never got in to PvP in ESO, the game never looked interesting enough. I only really played it for the lore (have been a fan of Elder Scrolls games since Daggerfall) but that soon proved to be as uninteresting as the game itself, so I stopped playing.

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.

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.

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.