I see your point. But they're going to eliminate the risk with zerging as soon as they're able to anyway. Oh well, luckily, I don't get paid to come up with solutions, because I don't seem to be able to!
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the zerg scenario is always a difficult animal to solve.
the best way to deal with it is to let the players manage it. This happens in a couple ways.
- tribes need to be conscious of the repurcussions of allowing a server to become a 2 sided contest. This sometimes means letting a neutral / friendly fight their own fight, '...uh dude, you got yourself into this mess, you're evenly matched with those folks...if they up the anty and bring in some more people we'll come in to even it up, but we're not going to help you zerg them...'
- the server needs to police itself...if a tribe starts becoming 'too big' well, steps need to be taken (by the server) to convince them to unbig.
we've played server police before, and while it generally isn't horribly enjoyable (you end up being kinda hated by all), our efforts, combined with others of like mind, kept a server vibrant for very long time...but this is there ar edifferent types of pks...and if the world is 'good enough' for folks to want to preserve their gaming environment, players will fight to do whats necessary to keep it alive and vibrant. Most of in the pvp community know exactly how to kill a server. we all know that killing the server is counter to anything other than short term enjoyment. It then stands to reason, that the majority of the pvp community is exactly in line with the pve community when it comes to maintaining a level of balance and fairness between pvp freedom to act and carebear freedom to be protected (how that occurs is of course up for debate). Because this promotes a long term healthy gaming environment.
We want the same things.
If zerging is going to be the solution, why not get rid of any pk penalties and make some serious defenses that require more than just a zerg...
Perhaps some defenses should require a very skilled crafter and terraformer to destroy.
Perhaps the term "release the hounds" should be a common term to avoiding a zerg attack.
Theres got to be a way around it without stupid stat nerfs and pk sickness.
if you want to have war features or play parts of a game that is war focused then pretty much nearly by definition zergs are required. Not only do RTS games weigh heavly on maintaining and managing both population zerg and resource zergs its also most of human history related to war.
i think the game/combat dynamics will do a lot to keep zergs at bay...once ranged weaponry comes in, a well built, well located fortress will be very very difficult to take if defended by a competent group. current combat mechanics dont allow us to use terrain to much advantage, but with the advent of ranged systems...we'll get ourselves out of the stone age.
I'm all for communities policing themselves, I've just never seen it work. The solution is always, "Join a guild!" "Oh, your little noob guild got destroyed? Okay, ally with a big guild!" As I said before, very static, very restrictive, and very boring. But a loose coalition of small tribes and solo players with enough time to prepare and with the right tools (such as the one fflhktsn mentioned) might be able to preserve a more diverse playstyle, I've just never seen it before.