Which way of altering siege from its current fixed state be best at discouraging faction stacking?

darkblue5

Not to say that you must necessarily believe that faction stacking should be discouraged to answer this poll. But rather to encourage us to think about what types of siege changes would have the least damaging spill over effect while making the literally close stacking of semi-organized players less advantageous. At the same time limiting complexity, calculations, and most important of all limiting server load also has to play a part.

TheBonesXXX

I'd like siege to do equivalent damage to launch to smite the mindlessness.

Siege has and always will be the best anti turd herd remedy in the game.

Only mooks and mindless oafs will die to it. Which is the point.

If people wanna act like free AP they'll get treated like it.

WoppaBoem

Increase the damage of siege some fraction of the recent bugged increase with no other change.

TheBonesXXX wrote: »

I'd like siege to do equivalent damage to launch to smite the mindlessness.

Siege has and always will be the best anti turd herd remedy in the game.

Only mooks and mindless oafs will die to it. Which is the point.

If people wanna act like free AP they'll get treated like it.

Lol we managed to defend Arrius from 2 breaches multiple times by keep siege always on the breach while mutiple zergs wanted to get it. Nothing to do with bad players it was good defence. Your very offensive acctually, I am happy I am not you

redspecter23

An actual Proximity Detonation style siege, or siege mechanic.

Proxy det siege would be hilarious!

TheBonesXXX

WoppaBoem wrote: »

TheBonesXXX wrote: »

I'd like siege to do equivalent damage to launch to smite the mindlessness.

Siege has and always will be the best anti turd herd remedy in the game.

Only mooks and mindless oafs will die to it. Which is the point.

If people wanna act like free AP they'll get treated like it.

Lol we managed to defend Arrius from 2 breaches multiple times by keep siege always on the breach while mutiple zergs wanted to get it. Nothing to do with bad players it was good defence. Your very offensive acctually, I am happy I am not you

I'm not sure if you're not a native speaker and you think I'm against siege being powerful or not.

Nothing I was said malicious, so I'm not sure why you're offended.

frostz417

An actual Proximity Detonation style siege, or siege mechanic.

Looks guys. Someone’s gotta say it... stamVD

TheBonesXXX

frostz417 wrote: »

Looks guys. Someone’s gotta say it... stamVD

Grenades. Im all about it.

DocFrost72

Siege should deal more damage when striking more than 6/12/20 players. Each interval should deal increased damage. Basically, a reverse aoe cap.

Deploying siege to fight a small man group would be pointless, and defending keeps means the attackers may actually have to (*gasp*) spread out a bit.

Minno

Other

Problem is, we tried all those! We had prox det, huge debuffs, objectives added, etc. And still players zerged front doors of keeps causing lag issues. The only fix was killing them quickly. With that in mind I think it needs to be a 4 change idea:
- siege should cause crazy damage but remove some of the debuffs (or drop the dmg but keep the debuffs).
- PBAOE skills should be nerfed hard, but compensate for strong debuffs.
- All ground targeted based skills are rebalanced to deal ALOT of damage. Things like volcanic rune, DK's 70% snare thing, etc (but not things like elemental blockade, nightblade's path, etc. Only abilities that require you to select a place on the ground for the ability to attach to!).
- add more siege! We need ways to scale keeps, cause huge damage to walls, protect walls, etc.

That is my opinion! If you want to just PVP, I hear there are BGs and IC that do just that without siege

TheBonesXXX

Minno wrote: »

Problem is, we tried all those! We had prox det, huge debuffs, objectives added, etc. And still players zerged front doors of keeps causing lag issues. The only fix was killing them quickly. With that in mind I think it needs to be a 4 change idea:
- siege should cause crazy damage but remove some of the debuffs (or drop the dmg but keep the debuffs).
- PBAOE skills should be nerfed hard, but compensate for strong debuffs.
- All ground targeted based skills are rebalanced to deal ALOT of damage. Things like volcanic rune, DK's 70% snare thing, etc (but not things like elemental blockade, nightblade's path, etc. Only abilities that require you to select a place on the ground for the ability to attach to!).
- add more siege! We need ways to scale keeps, cause huge damage to walls, protect walls, etc.

That is my opinion! If you want to just PVP, I hear there are BGs and IC that do just that without siege

I think Siege > Ulti > Player is how damage should rank. With single target being stronger than AoE, ground based AoEs being next, AoEs that follow the players should all increment like prox det; so it retains the AoE burst effect.

Siege has proven to be the number one zergkiller, as it should be, it's deployed, slow, stationary and needs to reload.

Too many people tunnel vision and crack under constant pressure (as evident by the calls to make pressure builds abysmal)

Truly I'm for ladders, but then update the keeps so they aren't just waypoints with a wall anymore.

FleetwoodSmack

Other

Minno wrote: »

Problem is, we tried all those! We had prox det, huge debuffs, objectives added, etc. And still players zerged front doors of keeps causing lag issues. The only fix was killing them quickly. With that in mind I think it needs to be a 4 change idea:
- siege should cause crazy damage but remove some of the debuffs (or drop the dmg but keep the debuffs).
- PBAOE skills should be nerfed hard, but compensate for strong debuffs.
- All ground targeted based skills are rebalanced to deal ALOT of damage. Things like volcanic rune, DK's 70% snare thing, etc (but not things like elemental blockade, nightblade's path, etc. Only abilities that require you to select a place on the ground for the ability to attach to!).
- add more siege! We need ways to scale keeps, cause huge damage to walls, protect walls, etc.

That is my opinion! If you want to just PVP, I hear there are BGs and IC that do just that without siege

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!






If it happens...

VaranisArano

So, I'm not actually a fan of this idea, because my prefered solution is for ZOS to fix the darned servers so we can all enjoy large scale army vs army combat in Cyrodiil.

But to entertain the notion, I think most suggestions here are going about it a little backward.

Start with why do players group up into faction stacks.

1. Because a certain, objective is obviously important - last emp keep, a ring keep, or a scroll keep.

2. Because they can't accomplish their goal without a large number of players.

These require different solutions.

1. ZOS keeps trying to spread out fights by adding more objectives, amd it keeps not working, because certain objectives are more important. If you make certain objectives less important -say, by dropping the scroll worth back to only 1 point - there's less times when everyone will stack up to grab a scroll than when its worth 10 points. If you lower the importance of objectives, you lower the incentives to faction stack! However, you also lower the incentives to come out and fight - and the objectives of Cyrodiil are designed to generate fights. They manage this splendidly - except that the servers can't handle them.

2. The harder you make it for players to accomplish their goal, the more players are going to stack up in Cyrodiil. This is particularly true of the players who zerg or play in PUG raids. They can't accomplish objectives on their own, unlike most organized raids or organized small groups, so they faction stack.

So if you introduce killer siege, as ZOS did with the catapult buffs of Summerset, you actually encourage players to faction stack even more. They died, en masse, but they still massed up because that was the only way to for those types of players to capture keeps. So short of oblivion damage type siege like we had with this bug, players will still faction stack just to be able to accomplish their objective - as long as that objective is worth stacking and dying for.

Moreover, buffing siege on its own hits everyone, and in particular, hits everyone harder who does not have dedicated support roles who can use Siege Shield and Purge for their group. So when you see things like siege use against small groups or in open field fights, these players suffer because they do not have certain specialized mitigation options readily available tI the same extent large organized raids do. If you buff siege to deal with large organized raids, everyone else gets slaughtered - we saw that with Sumemrset and the siege buff was reverted.


So if you really want to have "good fights" and less faction stacking, I'd suggest a 2-part solution.

Part 1: Drop all objective point values to their previous value, or to 1. Yes, this has significant impact on the scoring, but it reduces some of the incentives to faction stack to capture important objectives.

Part 2: Buff siege at the same time you buff the ability of individual players to cope with siege damage. As it currently is, organized raids have the ability to handle siege better than anyone because they can run specialized healers with expensive skills like Siege Shield and Purge. Obviously, the speed nerfs also hurt the ability of individual players to get out of or through siege quickly. So if you buff siege, and you really want this to be about the skill of individual players, you need to increase the ability of individual players to use skilled play to both capture objectives (which requires sieging the wall down usually while standing in defenders' siege attacks), defend objectives (often requires standing in the attackers' siege), and to mitigate siege damage without using the expensive skills like Purge and Siege Shield that are largely the purview of larger, organized raids.

The buff to players has to be something that individuals can use - solo, small group, zerg surfer, PUG raid, or organized raid. That way players are less dependent on forming large groups to accomplish objective in the face of buffed siege. Survival becomes dependent on actual player skill - much like small groups liked to brag about their ability to move on the battlefield without the "crutch" of rapid manuvers prior to all the speed nerfs.



Now as I said, I'm not a fan of this idea. I prefer Cyrodiil as a AvAvA zone with large scale combat.

Nevertheless, looking at why most players form faction stacks, the above is how I would address the issue.

DreadDaedroth

Other

Simple:
Let the siege damage procs sets like it was for years before WolfHunter patch.

InvictusApollo

Other

We should make the sieges as powerfull as they were with the bug but make it impossible to do point blank shots by introducing minimal range or sth like that.
As for Oils we could make them prevent stacking of hots.

All other siege engines were ok as they were almost unable to hit and one shot players unless they were standing still and inviting death.

darkblue5

Make an automated siege that 1HKOs randomly half of the population of Cyrodiil every 30 minutes.

VaranisArano wrote: »

So, I'm not actually a fan of this idea, because my prefered solution is for ZOS to fix the darned servers so we can all enjoy large scale army vs army combat in Cyrodiil.

But to entertain the notion, I think most suggestions here are going about it a little backward.

Start with why do players group up into faction stacks.

1. Because a certain, objective is obviously important - last emp keep, a ring keep, or a scroll keep.

2. Because they can't accomplish their goal without a large number of players.

These require different solutions.

1. ZOS keeps trying to spread out fights by adding more objectives, amd it keeps not working, because certain objectives are more important. If you make certain objectives less important -say, by dropping the scroll worth back to only 1 point - there's less times when everyone will stack up to grab a scroll than when its worth 10 points. If you lower the importance of objectives, you lower the incentives to faction stack! However, you also lower the incentives to come out and fight - and the objectives of Cyrodiil are designed to generate fights. They manage this splendidly - except that the servers can't handle them.

2. The harder you make it for players to accomplish their goal, the more players are going to stack up in Cyrodiil. This is particularly true of the players who zerg or play in PUG raids. They can't accomplish objectives on their own, unlike most organized raids or organized small groups, so they faction stack.

So if you introduce killer siege, as ZOS did with the catapult buffs of Summerset, you actually encourage players to faction stack even more. They died, en masse, but they still massed up because that was the only way to for those types of players to capture keeps. So short of oblivion damage type siege like we had with this bug, players will still faction stack just to be able to accomplish their objective - as long as that objective is worth stacking and dying for.

Moreover, buffing siege on its own hits everyone, and in particular, hits everyone harder who does not have dedicated support roles who can use Siege Shield and Purge for their group. So when you see things like siege use against small groups or in open field fights, these players suffer because they do not have certain specialized mitigation options readily available tI the same extent large organized raids do. If you buff siege to deal with large organized raids, everyone else gets slaughtered - we saw that with Sumemrset and the siege buff was reverted.


So if you really want to have "good fights" and less faction stacking, I'd suggest a 2-part solution.

Part 1: Drop all objective point values to their previous value, or to 1. Yes, this has significant impact on the scoring, but it reduces some of the incentives to faction stack to capture important objectives.

Part 2: Buff siege at the same time you buff the ability of individual players to cope with siege damage. As it currently is, organized raids have the ability to handle siege better than anyone because they can run specialized healers with expensive skills like Siege Shield and Purge. Obviously, the speed nerfs also hurt the ability of individual players to get out of or through siege quickly. So if you buff siege, and you really want this to be about the skill of individual players, you need to increase the ability of individual players to use skilled play to both capture objectives (which requires sieging the wall down usually while standing in defenders' siege attacks), defend objectives (often requires standing in the attackers' siege), and to mitigate siege damage without using the expensive skills like Purge and Siege Shield that are largely the purview of larger, organized raids.

The buff to players has to be something that individuals can use - solo, small group, zerg surfer, PUG raid, or organized raid. That way players are less dependent on forming large groups to accomplish objective in the face of buffed siege. Survival becomes dependent on actual player skill - much like small groups liked to brag about their ability to move on the battlefield without the "crutch" of rapid manuvers prior to all the speed nerfs.



Now as I said, I'm not a fan of this idea. I prefer Cyrodiil as a AvAvA zone with large scale combat.

Nevertheless, looking at why most players form faction stacks, the above is how I would address the issue.

I believe that the majority of the suggestions I made that weren't tongue in cheek approached the idea of individual player survival against siege being based on siege as it is now. (Thanos-ing Cyrodiil every thirty minutes would certainly improve performance at the cost of killing Cyrodiil PvP, it would also destroy groups more than solos) Siege won't kill a solo player crossing breaches a good portion of the time as is. The players on the other side of the breach are much more often the actual cause of death, and would be regardless of siege. That said I'd be willing to see siege be even less effective and even more survivable for solo players than it already is if it simply did have a mechanic to prevent stacking. (Siege Week weakening the tank meta was a real bonus IMO, but again it is quite controversial if hurting the tank meta is worth the cheesy deaths.)

I'm not against large scale Cyrodiil fights, there certainly were many during the Siege Week despite the siege. In fact there may have been a higher median number of people at individual keep fights even if there was a lower average number of people at keep fights. Those fights also seemed less intensely laggy due to them being spread out miniature fights around the objective. But they were not the large scale ball versus zerg/PuG fights that some people enjoy. The proposed siege changes largely function on the access of preventing the stacking part of large group play from being the best strategic decision in all situations.


Despite being beyond the more limited purpose of my poll the objective part comes up here. Honestly your suggestions are a good starting point for thinking about how objectives could be changed to better direct where different types of PVP happen. Rather than having objectives merely be less useful period what might be more interesting is if the type of objectives could better attract the types of combat people enjoy.

Right now towers largely attract tower farmers period. Keeps attract zergs and ball groups. Bridges and Milegates offer the most disorganized and useless albeit consistent medium sized PvP encounters. Solos, small mans and PuGs are then left with the option of getting wrecked at campaign objectives or meat-grindering at gates and bridges. Meat-grindering is also still pretty boring and often end relatively fast in Xv1s, but it is a much less frustration experience than getting farmed by a ball group at a back keep or getting smushed or disconnected by a faction stack guild. Encouraging gate/bridge fights or faction stacking are things that ball groups unintentionally do. Things that favor large scale fights where either numbers or legitimate and skillful organization vastly outweigh what a small group can do means a lot of players will be having worse play experiences.

If there was any way to better encourage the best PvP guild groups to go after map objectives that offered something useful while not being highly tempting to solos and small mans, while still mostly discouraging the faction stacked zergs, and offering better objectives than resources and tower humping for small groups and solo players. Perhaps a lower AP gain but higher campaign point location that had some sort of inverse Proximity Detonation mechanic would be worthwhile. The buffed siege could perhaps not work there or...

Reasonable small group or solo play objectives are very hard unless you like tower humping, especially if you prefer the sides of larger spread out combats as I do. The siege is really the main mechanism for providing this.

Regardless actually giving organized groups a more interesting place to fight and a greater likelihood of running into worthy opponents would make me more likely to enjoy group PvP with the PVP guilds I am in. I would like to make it so that there's less of a reason campaign-wise to take a back keep and slaughter solos, PuGs, and small groups until you pull enough people away from more interesting siege fights because regardless of how skill intensive it is. IMo it makes PvP less enjoyable for far more people than end up enjoying the result. Honestly I'd rather get reliably bow ganked with total health desyncs every ten minutes than try to play the map when a ball group decides to essentially do some griefing at an objective. At least less of my lifetime would be wasted then. The strategy is simply tower humping writ large, except that it involves an objective vastly more important than a resource.

highkingnm

Make an automated siege that 1HKOs randomly half of the population of Cyrodiil every 30 minutes.

I picked the joke answer but I think keep damage the same but use an unblockable knockback could work. It will be a way of pushing apart stacked teams whilst still damaging people who have no clue what they are doing. You mention SO and replicating the popcorn there to some extent could be interesting.

Galarthor

Easy fix:

1) The more people you hit the higher the damage -> this will be particularly painful for the lag-causing zergs / ball groups.

2) Let the DoTs apply an unpurgable (AoE) debuff when they are being purged. If too many of them are purged - i.e. 10 stacks of the debuff - then the player will explode / die. -> again, this will hurt he lag-causing zergs / ball groups the most.

Feanor

Make an automated siege that 1HKOs randomly half of the population of Cyrodiil every 30 minutes.

Solves lag, and that’s what people apparently like over gameplay.

Iskiab

Keep them as is where only totally disorganized solos or extremely outnumbered small mans will actually die to siege.

I don’t understand the whole ‘let’s buff small group and 1vx playstyle’. Why should ZOS or anyone else care about how things effect this group?

If they’re getting rolled by larger groups it sounds reasonable to me. Anything less than 12 people should be nothing more than a speed bump for a larger group, I don’t understand why people talk like they should be more than that.

biggda76

An actual Proximity Detonation style siege, or siege mechanic.

Iskiab wrote: »

I don’t understand the whole ‘let’s buff small group and 1vx playstyle’. Why should ZOS or anyone else care about how things effect this group?

If they’re getting rolled by larger groups it sounds reasonable to me. Anything less than 12 people should be nothing more than a speed bump for a larger group, I don’t understand why people talk like they should be more than that.

I don't understand the whole 'let's buff zergs playstyle'. Why should ZoS or anyone else care how they affect solo or group players?

Honestly imagine being such an ape to think you are supposed to be nothing than a small hidrance for zerg as small group. Sure if it's players that are equally skilled but why group of better players shouldn't be able to take on larger group formed of bad players? Because numbers? Doesn't make sense. Fantasy wise you're able to win when odds are against you and even in actual history it happened. So why aren't small/solo players supposed to win? If you can't win while u outnumber people than l2p cause in that scenario you lose only if you're bad

VaranisArano

Iskiab wrote: »

I don’t understand the whole ‘let’s buff small group and 1vx playstyle’. Why should ZOS or anyone else care about how things effect this group?

If they’re getting rolled by larger groups it sounds reasonable to me. Anything less than 12 people should be nothing more than a speed bump for a larger group, I don’t understand why people talk like they should be more than that.

An organized small group ought to be able to fight effectively against a larger disorganized group.

But an organized small group ought to be defeated by a larger organized group (and usually is.)

So some of this is coming from the small organized groups rejoicing that buffed siege let them take on the big PUG raids on some campaigns.

But the idea that buffed siege ought to allow organized small groups to take out larger organized raids easily...that's more of a stretch, where siege buffs start to overcome the ability of players to organize effectively to withstand it.

In short, I figure the sweet spot is where siege is meant to be a force multiplier, but its not supposed to be an "I win" button against larger, more organized forces than your own.

Mojmir

Make an automated siege that 1HKOs randomly half of the population of Cyrodiil every 30 minutes.

Or N bombs from perfect dark lol

vamp_emily

I think Siege damage should be different for CP and NO CP campaigns.

Increase the damage, as it was before the last update, for all CP campaigns but then reduce the damage for Non-CP campaigns.

darkblue5

Make an automated siege that 1HKOs randomly half of the population of Cyrodiil every 30 minutes.

VaranisArano wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

I don’t understand the whole ‘let’s buff small group and 1vx playstyle’. Why should ZOS or anyone else care about how things effect this group?

If they’re getting rolled by larger groups it sounds reasonable to me. Anything less than 12 people should be nothing more than a speed bump for a larger group, I don’t understand why people talk like they should be more than that.

An organized small group ought to be able to fight effectively against a larger disorganized group.

But an organized small group ought to be defeated by a larger organized group (and usually is.)

So some of this is coming from the small organized groups rejoicing that buffed siege let them take on the big PUG raids on some campaigns.

But the idea that buffed siege ought to allow organized small groups to take out larger organized raids easily...that's more of a stretch, where siege buffs start to overcome the ability of players to organize effectively to withstand it.

In short, I figure the sweet spot is where siege is meant to be a force multiplier, but its not supposed to be an "I win" button against larger, more organized forces than your own.

Honestly during Siege Week I never saw a smaller group of disorganized players defeat an organized group. Organized groups still defeated significantly larger numbers of less organized players in no CP campaigns and in CP campaigns. And siege didn't even universally prevent good organized groups from stacking and taking advantage of the bonuses from stacking. I did see that skillful ball groups when egregiously outnumbered in keeps would be forced to retreat or unstack much faster than previously but I think that that ultimately is good for the fluidity of combat during campaigns.

I don't think skillful organized large group play went away during siege week other than those larger guilds not playing due to not wanting to (possibly expensively) adapt when they knew that the bug would be fixed. I have faith that skillful large group play would still be beat equally skillful small group play, but I don't think that should mean that a small groups should be NO threat to larger groups. I don't think the siege changes would be enough to make small groups consistently defeat larger groups unless the larger groups simply are bad.

I guess I just have faith that groups who claim that they are composed of some of the most skillful players in the game and backed by some of the best theory crafters would still be able to adapt to in some cases not having balling up be the best strategy.

Hurting faction stacked zergs also didn't even mean that the side that outnumbered the other would lose more, but rather that the stacks of 92 randos who had to split up were less damaging to the servers. The benefits of a 61rst person at a keep started to be less than the benefits of having 1 person at another keep and I think that was a good thing. Honestly the change like all changes would be better implemented by larger organized groups, and give them better options against disconnection level zergs as well. Zerg guilds would probably still be the top dogs as far as actually winning campaigns but maybe with siege changes they'd be in server breaking stack much more rarely.