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Chaos, Dragons, and Zergs ... Oh my!
Lawtoween
Member UncommonPosts: 103
So CSE has said the world was created by an break in the "veil" that unleased magic and dragons on the world causing a cataclysmic event (or something like that). All of that created some level of chaos, but what if the break in the veil was not an accident? What if it was caused by a higher power that prefers chaos over order and control in the physical world? I ask these questions because in that case, wouldn't that power try to prevent any one group from gaining too much control and establishing their own order on the world?
I realize CSE is working diligently to make it technologically possible to have zerg on zerg combat, and if it can be smooth (frame rate and cpu-wise) then maybe it will be a great thing. But when one realm runs a zerg that is just too big for the other realms to deal with, the game will suffer (account) losses. Sure, some people like being the underdog (I would count myself among them), but no one likes losing 100% of the time. Eventually, even they will quit or reroll on another server (or worse, on the other side of the same server).
So, instead of tolerating that, what if the powers that be (in game) made it hard on a realm that became too powerful? It might make things a little more chaotic for that realm, or (as I raised in another thread) send dragons to put them in their proper place.
How this might work is if a realm gathers more than a certain number of characters together and that group moves through areas not currently controlled by any realm (after all, why would the powers of chaos care if one side wanted to destroy another bastion of order?) then they might attract the attention of a dragon. Now in this case, CU dragons would be unbelieveably powerful, zerg busting monsters. But if MJ already had a role for dragons, then perhaps there might be a tornado, a ground splitting earthquake, a meteor strike, or a torrential downpour that resulted in hundreds of lightning strikes and a flash flood of biblical proportions (or maybe the rain is acid). Any of these elements of chaos could be used to coax a realm into not running in a single zerg.
The point? First, it would be hilarious to watch from afar if you were on the other side, but more importantly, if the side with the numbers advantage was forced to split up its forces to move them from friendly territory to enemy territory (and I would not have these things happen around keeps or other control points where large battles are bound to happen and could build up over time) then the underdog side(s) might stand a chance at defeating one of the half-zergs and at least slow down the advance. The trigger number itself would have to be somewhat random, otherwise the true power gamers will figure it out and make every zerg exactly one character short of it, but as importantly, what is an overpowering zerg on one server may be a small group action on another. It should have some sort of relationship to the number of combat characters available to the weakest realm on a server, and should apply to all realms.
What do you think? Is this sort of thing necessary? Would it make the game more or less fun for the high population side? Would it ruin the fun for the underdogs? If you like it, do you have any more suggestions for chaotic effects that could be used to break up zergs?
Lawt
Comments
I genuinley hope this game wont be a boring zergfest. It isnt fun at all.
Ex-DAOC, Excalibur
I think your idea would be a great new twist on breaking the zergfest. However, I hope Dragons and Divine Intervention won't be necessary in order to balance the opposing relms. MJ talks alittle on the subject in the following interview at Dualshockers.
http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/04/11/interview-mark-jacobs-shares-the-vision-behind-camelot-unchained/
Any Artificial handicap system needs to be very subtle otherwise it looks like the game punishes and persecuted the better faction.
Artificial balancing is the death of pvp games, the game must be balanced by the players or you'll get nothing but realm hoppers and then you wind up with another Warhammer.
Expresso gave me a Hearthstone beta key.....I'm so happy
So CSE has said the world was created by an break in the "veil" that unleased magic and dragons on the world causing a cataclysmic event (or something like that). All of that created some level of chaos, but what if the break in the veil was not an accident? What if it was caused by a higher power that prefers chaos over order and control in the physical world? I ask these questions because in that case, wouldn't that power try to prevent any one group from gaining too much control and establishing their own order on the world?
I realize CSE is working diligently to make it technologically possible to have zerg on zerg combat, and if it can be smooth (frame rate and cpu-wise) then maybe it will be a great thing. But when one realm runs a zerg that is just too big for the other realms to deal with, the game will suffer (account) losses.
I see what you're getting at but I think an artificial NPC injection from a 4th party ('chaos') isn't necessarily the right way to go about it. Imagine this instead:
1. Controlling a larger amount of area results in stretched supply lines. Consider it similar to GW2 without the "you can take over a lot more supply camps if you own more keeps". In other words, you have to truck supply from your home base (your realm home) to repair keeps, upgrade keeps. This means that a megazerg will have softer outlying keeps. If the megazerg is skilled, coordinated, and outnumber you 10:1, you're still screwed. However, it would give you an opportunity if the 'zerg' side is scrubby and only outnumbers you 3:1.
2. Respawning and getting back to the fight can be tuned to take significantly longer if you are the winning side and "your keep" is in the enemy's frontier. This gives the defenders a faster "resupply rate" of players.
3. The forces of 'chaos' can be the ones that own "darkness falls" and the upper tier / unique resource nodes. The longer a realm "owns DF", the more the chaos NPCs leak into DF and oversaturate it. When another realm severs your connection to DF and replaces it with their own, the chaos forces die off and have to infiltrate the new realm's access to DF.
So, normally your realm just gets stretched thin if you're winning "too much". The notion of injecting an NPC 4th party is ok, but I wouldn't use them as a hammer to smash down a realm that's winning just because they're winning. I think it's important that any self-regulating aspect of the RvR be "intuitive", or natural -- e.g. the stretched / limited supply to repair and upgrade the keeps with, or the naturally long travel time between home base and outlying keeps if you own all the damn keeps. The self-regulating DF control will also create a dynamic 4th party interference that is slightly skewed against a "heavily winning" realm.
Etc.
Edit: The point would be that an 'underdog' side would be able to ninja a keep quickly, and then defend it with 1:5 odds and still take out huge chunks of enemies before they lose it. Rinse, repeat, take screenshots of the killspam, etc. High-five themselves even if they lose the fight because they just racked up ridiculous RPs, etc.
Please do not confuse my use of underdog to mean a side with less skill. I mean it solely in the context of one side has a MASSIVE advantage in numbers of players. I would never advocate punishing a side for being successful. Skill and strategy should determine victory. That's why I suggest this. I hope that CC, corpse burning, and other combat mechanics will make it possible for a smaller group to slowly reduce the numbers of a zerg until it can be defeated head on. I fully encourage implementation of such measures, but I seriously doubt every server will be balanced enough for those things alone to be a long term solution. I agree that attempting to force balance, for instance by only allowing a certain number of players to enter a particular zone or to log in at one time, would spell death for a game.
Keep in mind also that I would not advocate implementing my system right from launch. The game would need some time to settle out. Also, it would not happen every time the zerg crossed an open area. It is meant to add randomness after all, and it should not be a crutch the underdogs can rely on every time.
Maybe it could be more subtle than the death of half of the zerg. Perhaps it could be manifested as an increase in the (negative) random events Mark talks about in his Chaos principle, based on population density at a given location. But players must know this is why it is happening, or else they will not change their behavior and avoid forming zergs.
Lawt
+1 very well said. There are a lot of good ideas in your post.
It will promote realm hopping, sorry but pvp players are notoriously competitive. If a valid strategy to beat your enemy is to have your entire guild log in alt and boost the enemy Zerg so they get pounded by a dragon, players will do this.
again, artificial balancing in pvp games is a terribly difficult thing to get right and this suggestion would be abused because it is too powerful and too easily adapted as a valid strategy.
Expresso gave me a Hearthstone beta key.....I'm so happy
I hadn't thought about players with multiple accounts creating alts for the sole purpose of invoking this effect. I agree there would be some of it due to, as you say, competitiveness.
Perhaps instead of being a killing instrument, instead it could just be a flock of vultures following the zerg around (and visible from much farther away than objects on the ground) to give away its position to the enemy. That would allow hit and run tactics a much greater advantage (than without), and would be just like a player with an alt simply following the zerg himself.
I'd still like to see some random destruction going on from time to time though.
Lawt
This is the right idea, though I am not sure entirely on your mechanic of choice. A large enemy has to be vulnerable to small attacks. This must be true both strategic and tactical scale.
Strategically player structures are critical. Another thread mentioned the desire to build farms. Farms, mines, quarries, lumber mills, religious temples, shrines, any building that can be built, destroyed, and gives a strong benefit to doing so can a great way to break up the zerg. If these are plentiful and valuable, it is impossible for a single zerg to defend them all. This will cause a successful realm to have more, but smaller, fighting forces. Sure a zerg should be necessary to go after the big targets such as a keep, but if it is possible for a smaller force to hold their own in a keep, at least for a little while, it allows a small force to slow down an attacking zerg enough for raiding parties to pillage the land behind.
As Easymode said, "if the megazerg is skilled, coordinated, and outnumbers you 10:1, you're still screwed." This is absolutely true. But when we talk of server imbalance it is generally more in the size of 3:2, or 5:4. This is a large enough imbalance to turn the flow of almost every fight in a straight up zerg v zerg fight, but not nearly enough to prevent what I mentioned in the first paragraph. Add in a third realm, and a zerging realm is really put in an uncomfortable position. Allowing a smaller realm to have victories will help keep the imbalance from growing even greater.
Tactically the megazerg must be vulnerable to attack from well-organized smaller forces. This means strong CC and strong AoE spells and the ability to kite a zerg. Zergs should pay a price for being clumped up. While that provides a lot of fire power to a single point, it should come with the risk of suffering severe casualties. A smart zerg spreads out in the open field. However this makes it vulnerable at its edges.
These to concepts are critical to help balance both overpopulation and zerging. These problems are bound together. A properly designed game limits their effects not by artificial 4th party mechanics, but by having a sound and well thought out system of strategic and tactical objectives.