Cuddlypuff wrote: »

There's an important point that many people are missing here - ball group play locks you into a very niche playstyle and you have to sacrifice some freedom and fun to do well.
1. Most ball group members (8-9) are almost full support on set rotations. Only the leader and DD really have active decision making and rotations.
2. If truly optimizing group comp, you need to farm so many buff sets, many of which are dungeon/trial exclusive. On the other hand, standard PVP builds pretty much stick to the typical ROTW and craftable sets.
3. You are locked into doing what the group does (typically farming stale AP) rather than having the freedom to go around the map looking for fresh kills. You also have to wait for the entire group to catch up, put up camps for pointless fights, empathize with team members making bad mistakes, follow calls that you know are wrong etc etc.

Points 1 & 2 are not really a problem. Some people love to play support and farming sets is not difficult. Point 3 is why all but the most elite ball groups are just straight up bad, because good players need to have faith that all 11 other members of the ball group are on the same level.

This is certainly a good description of why "Just imitate the ball groups" is not a workable strategy for most players. It takes serious dedication from the whole team to make it work. Most players simply don't find the ball playstyle fun, and even less of those who do want to commit to the effort.

For those of us who played in organized guilds, we know the sort of collaborative, group effort it took to play at that level raid night after raid night. It's one of the reasons that cutting guilds down to 12 members hurt so much. Imagine having 18-24 core members and then being forced to decide who made the cut.

kadar wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Optimized team play is not the problem. Nobody is complaining that organized groups exist or that they are more powerful than disorganized randoms. The complaints are about the stale meta dominated by a single powerful "ball" strat, which often lends itself to dragging out and stalemating fights well after objectives have been decided.

I think this is the confusion most people have about "ball" groups. Group optimization is a continuum. Once optimized to a high degree, groups get labelled "balls". A lesser optimized group running redundant armors, damage buffs, personal burst heals etc. gets labelled a "smallman." At the lowest end we have duos who are essentially in 1vx builds.

I can't even think of a balance change that would destroy the "ball" playstyle. Completely de-couple buff/healing effects from a range check (so that there's no advantage to being close together)? Remove the ability to buff allies altogether? Nerfing cross healing would do nothing more than force a build tweaks.

I've thought about this a bit over the years. People these days saying that dark convergence or synergies carry ballgroups weren't around for the days of destro trains or whatever else there was. I dont think any balance changes will stop the ballgroup playstyle. Really the only thing I can think of that would force a serious change is player collision, but that'll never happen.

Attilla7814 wrote: »

NotTaylorSwift wrote: »

Youyouz06 wrote: »

Einstein_ wrote: »

Summary:

Optimized Groups:
- mostly experienced players
- years of playing together
- highly optimized group builds
- every important buff there is in the game
- setup with well defined roles
- voice comunication / lead
- hundrets of hours of training just in this group composition
- analysis of logs and videos after every raid

VS

A bunch of players on some random builds with mostly not alot experiance (experienced players dont tryhard ballgroups).
- nothing of what i mentioned above.


guess who wins.....

you can try to nerf whatevery you want the optimized group will always win and it should be like that.

'A highly optimized group that has played for years, forged in the heart of battle...'

But they use harmony+grave robbers+vicious death+every available buff that they require and they play/contribute in/to 'Lag'. Sounds fun!

I agree with OP, those days are over (tried/done/next). Most of the time on EU, there is so little action that these groups just join the general zergs and if they are to take a homekeep for farming, people just stop going and ignore them.

So you run naked in pvp? Do you avoid buffs? Skilled players dont use buffs? Literally every good pvp build ever uses the most buffs it can get access to...

You also contribute to lag. If you play cyro you contribute to lag there.

There is action on EU.

None of what you said makes sense. Sorry.

the only action i see from you guys is taking fare or bb and farming the same 15-20 randoms over and over again. Have you ever messed up with other ballgroups on greyhost in the last months?

yes.

I'm yet to see any ball groups in cyrodiil... unless by ball group you mean organized group? When I hear the term ball group I'm thinking of a group of people that stay within 1 healing spring radius at all times .

TheEndBringer wrote: »

An organized group can be, and often is, running just as tight as a ball group. Their weakness is they don't want to be boxed in to these cookie cutter rolls. Most people actually want to play the classes they like and don't find running ball groups a rewarding experience, anymore than I find speed running a trial a rewarding experience.

This makes no sense to me.

It is like saying that you want to do trials trifecta run with a random group of players all using unoptimized builds. You are fighting against the game itself if you aren't applying even basic optimization techniques.

The game literally wants you to do this, that is why we are given skills like, for example, Molten Armaments - so that the group does not have to waste 10% of their precious bar slots (or pots... or even Oakensoul for that matter...) obtaining something that can be provided by one slot on one player. Selecting sets is the same process - factoring out group buffs so that roles are free to specialize in what they do best individually. There is nothing sinister about this.

On the other hand, if you want to argue that certain sets are cheesy or toxic in the PvP environment (and not in PvE where mobs can't post to the forums) then you won't get much of an argument from me - it's one of the reasons why I play in Ravenwatch.

But trying to argue that an unoptimized group should beat an optimized group - assuming, for the sake of the argument, the same level of base player skill - is just an odd argument to make and one that fights against the base mechanics of the game itself.

BazOfWar wrote: »

Zos really needs to do something about ball grouping because it is ruining the casual play and fun in Cyrodiil.

If they want to flex their pecks give them an Arena where they can fight other like minded ball groups and leave the rest of us to our casual game.

This is so self entitled. It's not all about your fun and what you like or don't like. In our group we like fighting the zergs and we like fighting other ballgroups in gvg. And we like fighting other groups whilst dealing with other elements of Cyrodiil. We don't want to just gvg all day so saying put us in an arena is just ignorant. There are also things WE don't like but we don't spam it all over the forums asking for it to be removed, we optimize our group and our play in order to deal with it...

Also... Cyrodiil is not specifically for 'casual' players. It is for anyone who wants to play it. 'Leave us to our casual game' ? Like what? It's pvp. NO ONE is going to leave you to your casual game.