Understanding the need for speed disparity

Hello

I'm going to talk about something that was well done in the past, but it seemed like it wasn't done on purpose

I think for a PvP game that doesn't focus on a precise scale of fight, which is what Ashes of Creation seems to be going for, it is important to understand the need for speed disparity in relation to the size of the group. The larger you are, the harder it should be to move fast.

The point is to give smaller group the possibility to decide to not engage in a fight where the opponents are overwhelmingly larger than them.
Note that, on the other hand, it shouldn't help them disengage. Once your group gets caught, or once you engaged and realize that you tried to bite more than you could chew, it should be hard to disengage. Or else you end up like New World (for example) with people chasing others for miles...

So, let's get to the point :
In Dark Age of Camelot, they implemented that idea pretty well, although when looking at Warhammer Online, it seems like they did it by mistakes or that the people that understood this concept weren't there any longer.
There were two important era in DAoC regarding this (in my opinion), Before the Trials of Atlantis (ToA) extension and after.

Pre-ToA : each realm had access to 2 'mage' classes that had the possibility to give 'mage speed' to their group, giving about 150% out of combat movement speed. And each realm had access to one 'singer' class that was able to give 'speed 5' to their group at about 200% out of combat movement speed.
For any group, it was rather easy to find at least one mage (being a caster class, lot of people played it, damage, pew pew, magic, people like it), so it was rather easy to go out in the wild with at least mage speed. Finding a singer support, could be a bit harder (depending on the realm and the fact that they are support class, so usually less people play them). So if you wanted to go out with a 8 man group, finding a speed 5 class was nearly mandatory.
But for large scale group, about 40+ people, sometimes 100 or more, it was getting pretty damn hard to find a speed 5 for each of your group, so a lot of the large zerg were often moving around with mage speed...

This meant that smaller group (duo with their support, 4-5 people roaming around or 8 men group), could often see the zerg before getting caught and decide to not engage them, to not get steam rolled. They could also decide to actually engage if they felt the zerg was focused on something else, already in a fight or just in a bad position.

The main point is that this speed disparity made it possible to not get zerged anytime you encoutered a larger group. You would not always escape, mistakes can happend obviously and sometimes you are just unlucky, but you could play with a smaller group, trying to find other smaller group, without having to play a style you didn't want to play. And it was the case for any group size

Post-ToA : they decided to add special items with this expansion called artefact, and one of them which wasn't hard to get, gave the bearer the ability to have his group pulsating enchantments (which speed buff were) affect 40 people around him instead of just the group.
It became super easy for zergs to move around with speed 5. When with 100 players you would need at least 13 speed 5 classes before, now you would need just 3...
So, was it now impossible to play around the massives zerg ?
Not at all, they also added a key ability for some mage class, the ability to land a pod that would prevent any ennemy speed bonus in the area, it was a damn huge area (if the max range spell was 2300 unit in this game, I think the anti speed pod had a radius of 5000 units, clipping distance was about 10k units), it was super fast to cast and didn't put the mage in combat, but had a CD. So it still allowed people to avoid getting engaged if they encountered an important mass of players.

I think understanding this concept is key. Of course you don't have to copy / paste the idea, especially pre-ToA era since today, most guilds would optimize their roaster to have enough speed class anyway.

But giving people the ability to possibly avoid getting engaged is key to help people avoid getting always thrown to the ground every time they encounter a group more important than them, be it 8 people trying to avoid a zerg or soloer trying to avoid a group.
It's also important that the avoidance is clear, you either get caught or you don't, to avoid people chasing for miles and miles to "maybe" catch their prey
And it's important that it's not unbeatable, because we don't want people to never engage any fight

Thoughts ? =D

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Comments

Unkempt Foliage

I haven't played any game where this is a thing, so I have no idea how it works in practice, but my initial gut reaction to it is that I would not like it. I don't mind temporary movement speed buffs or debuffs as spells, but I wouldn't want a permanent one based on party size.

Movement speed is one of those things that once I get used to a certain speed. I hate being any slower and even a couple of percentage points is noticeable and feels like I'm crawling. If I get slower in large groups it would honestly frustrate me.

It does discourage zergs but it also discourages lots of legitimate scenarios where you need large groups. Just grouping up to move to a dungeon or to a city siege would feel like a chore for large groups.

I would rather have a community solution for zergs. Use node, city, or guild chat for warnings. If zerging is still a problem. I still think diminished returns for pvp large groups or tweaking the corruption levels for large group would be something I would look at first.

Dygz

Steven has something in mind for preventing zergs.
An artificial snare due to group size is odd.
Seems easy enough to just wait until we reach the destination to formally join the group in order to bypass the proposed restriction.

George_Black

High CD for strong AoE
Or high MP cost for strong AoE
Or low dmg for AoE

Zerg problem solved.
Dont expect to win 20 vs 100 if both sides are good players.

Sathrago

Make it so that groups larger than the base party size multiply the aggro range of it's party members. Basically just slow them down with the enemies in the area they are passing through. If damage dismounts you or there is some sort of daze mechanic this will slow those larger groups down without requiring specific classes and such.

bloodprophet

Making larger groups slower will only mean good players will stay in smaller groups to avoid the debuff. Players will find away around such things.

CROW3

I really don't like this idea. It punishes players for participating in the large group combat situations that is a core AoC tenet. Players would either split into smaller groups or most likely refrain from these encounters until the debuff was removed.

Sathrago

bloodprophet wrote: »

Making larger groups slower will only mean good players will stay in smaller groups to avoid the debuff. Players will find away around such things.

I think that's the point of such a suggestion. Honestly, my suggestion would be targeted at open world zergs as you wouldnt find mobs inside of sieges, battlegrounds, or caravan fights (as far as I know). Caravans might be affected a bit traveling to them, but not during the caravan fights.

Tritri

Sathrago wrote: »

Make it so that groups larger than the base party size multiply the aggro range of it's party members. Basically just slow them down with the enemies in the area they are passing through. If damage dismounts you or there is some sort of daze mechanic this will slow those larger groups down without requiring specific classes and such.

That would be horrendous

If there is one thing that's straight up horrible, is to have mobs running around during a PvP fight, such a nuisance for everyone...

Especially myself, being a main healer, it's always a plea-sure to have a mob perma aggro on you that just a nuisance because even if I place myself well, mobs will always find me since I will generate aggro and my tanks has other stuff to do than to run around trying to get the aggro back

George Black wrote: »

High CD for strong AoE
Or high MP cost for strong AoE
Or low dmg for AoE

Zerg problem solved.
Dont expect to win 20 vs 100 if both sides are good players.

I really don't understand your reasonning behind this ? Can you elaborate ?

I don't think it should be seen as a nerf for zergs.
If you take the pre-ToA situation, it could be seen as a nerf for the zerg yes, but as I said, it's not the best implementation.
The post-ToA idea was better, the "no out of combat speed zone" was quite interesting and it was used by groups but also by zergs.
And it's not a masse snare, since in combat speed or movement would still work.
It was used in zerg vs zerg, group vs group, small vs small, so it really doesn't directly target the zerg.

The point is obviously not to discourage a playstyle in particular, on the other hand, it's to promote the ability to play whatever playstyle you want in a open world setting... and not clutter player in instances wiht predetermined map and predetermined number of players

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