There needs to be a solution to 40 mans/Swarm Mentality in WPvP

PVP War Mode and World PvP
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No one likes them on either side, and the only way that seems to work is to just outnumber a 40 man/angry mob and weather the storm of lag.

I can understand minor 5-10 v 5-10 skirmishes out in the world or even like 20 v 20s during the incursions, but when one side calls in a 40 man (usually the Alliance in a per capita sort of sense) that’s when things get annoying.

As of now, I can think of two solutions off the top of my head.

Solution 1: Put a population cap/equalizer on shards so no one side can outnumber the other by more than X players. If players try to mass join into one shard in one raid group scatter the incoming players across 20 shards. It prevents massive outnumbering for both factions because most shards will have relatively equal populations of Horde and Alliance. If a fight breaks out or one side forms a massive raid group, there will be enough people on the other faction in the shard to pull together a defensive with relatively equal numbers.

I.E. If there are 50 Horde on a shard, there won’t be less than 40-45 Alliance. Likewise, if there are 40 horde on a shard, there won’t be more than 45-50 Alliance. And there suddenly won’t be 20+ more people of one faction in one shard unless there are suddenly 20+ more people of the other faction suddenly appearing in the shard.

This solution just prevents people from summoning a massive raid group out of nowhere and is the less annoying of the two solutions i can think of. It doesn’t solve FP or WQ camping. However, it curbs the outright dominance of one faction on one shard just due to sheer numbers.

Solution 2: Give an underrepresented spec/class a PvP talent or hard gated Azerite Trait designed to hard counter/shut down big raid groups or introduce a useable item in the game like that. Something along the lines of an ability or item that scales exponentially higher per player target hit. So if it hits 10-15 people maybe it’ll chunk them to 80%, but if it hits 25+ they’re all gonna die.

Arguably the worse of the two solutions I can think of because a nuclear deterrent is hardly the best thing to have, but there is upside of potentially growing the population of an underrepresented spec and shutting down 40+ man trains of people running around and giving a hard counter to swarm mentality.

Solution 3: A mix of solutions 1 and 2. Put the nuclear deterrent in as a short term “fix” to the issue while dev teams work out the phasing/sharding for solution 1. After the phasing/sharding system is complete put it into the game, but keep the nuclear deterrent in until you can see that the phasing/sharding system works. Once there is substantial evidence that the new phasing/sharding system works, remove the nuclear deterrent.

Would love to hear people’s opinions on the matter and see what they can think of to solve the riddle of 40 mans/swarm mentality.

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You have not stated a problem that needs to be solved.

It was great fun to raid the horde capital city the other night. The horde alarm went off and there were eventually enough to drive us off, just as there would eventually be enough alliance to drive off the horde if/when they attack Boralus. It would be just like it has always been in cities such as Ironforge.

It was also fun to do solo warmode as an alliance player when horde raids assaulted Drustvar yesterday afternoon. It was my decision to turn warmode on, and I could have turned it off. There were a few times when a dozen horde attacked me and killed me a couple of times. Isn’t that to be expected when you turn warmode on?

If your problem is that you were killed while you had warmode on, you were looking for pvp action and pvp found you. If you don’t want warmode on, you can turn it off.

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Yeah lag is fun amirite.

Enjoyed a whole Drustvar alliance raid causing the zone to spaz the ffff out.

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Agreed, sometimes lag becomes a problem. It was fine for a while in Drustvar, but then lag started after most alliance left and more horde came in, in much stronger numbers. When it became a problem in Drustvar, I left the area. Lag also becomes a problem in other places, even where there is no assault or raid.

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They’re addressing it to an extent to try to discourage it, but so far it’s not enough. As you pointed out, there should most definitely be a cap on the amount of players that can shard in at once.

Some hotfixes from today:

  • The PvP quest [Against Overwhelming Odds]
    can no longer be completed while in a raid.
    Developers’ Note: The intent of this quest is to incite aggression amongst players on the under represented faction throughout war mode. Allowing it to be completed in a raid focused too much of that aggression in one place in one large group. This change spreads the fight out into more parts of the world.

  • The weekly PvP Call to Arms quests can no longer be completed while in a raid, and do not count kills on players below level 120 or with the [Honorless Target] debuff active.

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Depends on who you ask.

You realize that one of the only reasons Alliance can pull that off is because there is a massive inequality between guard quality in the Horde and Alliance cities right? Boralus guards are stronger, are in higher numbers and spawn more guards the more horde players there are. Your hub is also concentrated in one general area whereas the Horde has Dazar’alor which has sparse guards and our docks which basically have no guards the two of which are separated enough to need a flightpath between them.

Again this would happen easy for the alliance because your hub is so centralized. If an Alliance raid hit Horde docks, the pushback time is slow because we essentially have 2 poorly defended hubs.

The operative here being a dozen not a 40man.

My problem is massive 40man raid fights with one side massively outnumbering the other. I’ve no issue with dying with WM on against reasonably equal numbers.

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Lol what?

We kept Boralus for close to an hour tonight before they got organized and wiped us. Sounds like you’re just grouping up with the wrong people.

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Wait what? Call to Arms was never completable in a raid. As far as I know, nobody was complaining about it; why change it?

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It’s harder to keep Boralus though … Zuldazar is more open . But that seems to a be a common thing with Horde cities , Orgi is much more open and easier to raid than SW, which is so tight that if you turn the wrong way , you run into danger.

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I was wondering about that too unless of course that they changed it last week for the alliance with release of 8.1.
The Horde Call to Arms could never be done in a raid for the horde .

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I did Against Overwhelming Odds in a raid last week, and got no credit toward Call to Arms, which I ended up doing later in a 5 man.

I can sort of understand requiring kills of 120s given the reverse level scaling. Removing credit for honorless targets will actually just get more honorless targets killed, since people will just camp for longer.

Blizzard is just clueless about how their game works.

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Yea, and how big a group did you bring? Granted, we probably hit Boralus for different reasons. I usually hit Boralus/Tiragarde Sound with around 4-5 friends for the lols. Sometimes we RP as bandits and just gank people on the roads. Other times we go through the canals and harass the docks and grip people off their boat.

That still doesn’t excuse the glaring inequality in guards. The only upside we have in guards are that a few random guards up at the Great Seal/Dazar’Alor have 650k health for some reason while others of the same name only have 325k health.

However, all this is an enjoyable tangent. The matter of a solution to 40 mans/swarm mentality still needs to be addressed.

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The difference in guards is likely due to alliance being underrepresented, to try and keep Boralus raids from being a poop parade. Then again, given how compact Boralus is, some of the feel of it could well be just having the same number of guards concentrate d in a smaller space, too.

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So if lag is the actual problem, why isn’t the topic about demanding Blizzard to address the lag itself?

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Because they can’t … I heard somewhere it a question of the basic server architecture and not just server capacity. That requires a huge time consuming redesign of the game this big and old. Not gonna happen.

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Partially true, but the issue is that the lag has gotten worse as a result of a huge redesign they’ve already done. So a big redesign is not out of the question in the first place, and in particular refactoring that design to be more efficient is not out of the question.

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Don’t know if it has got worse … it was always really bad . Whenever the cryptids came to Orgimaar , the game was unplayable . You come out of the Cleft of shadows , fly over Valley of Strenght where the raid typically would be and your game basically freezes .

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I’m kinda saying it’s been noticeably happening at smaller thresholds (smaller raids) than what I’m personally used to from previous expansions. So before I would see this type of lag with 40v40, or maybe only when we started getting to greater than 40v40, and typically anytime close to peak hours. Now we can see it closer to 30v30 and maybe even lower in some cases at peak hours.

Raids on a capital city on a high pop server has always been bad of course, but it seems myself and others are seeing it happen more often than we did in the past in the open world.

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I think I might have been the first one to post that. However, I was talking about 40v40 - actually, alleged 80v120 - battles. It’s the combination of large numbers of people fighting each other in a single geographically small battle with AOE attacks that causes problems with Blizzard’s server architecture.

40v1 battles should not have this problem. Even 40v40 battles, which have long happened in epic battlegrounds, should be able to be handled with minimal lag, as long as you’re okay with add ons missing a few attacks that don’t involve your character.

That said, the lag I’ve been seeing is still quite playable, especially if you’re willing to watch your GCD, and I’ve seen it only when I’m part of the fight, not just because there’s some battle going on somewhere else in the zone.

Edit: like Balanor, I have been seeing this in smaller battles than before.

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The problem is that the servers can’t handle it. It’s not annoying because you’re out numbered, it’s annoying because you can’t move, can’t see what’s going on, and can’t fight back. Even 40 on 40, it’s incredibly annoying.

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