Boss Blitz goes against a pillar of the game

Boss Blitz is an event that brings out a behavior that was specifically cited as one the devs wanted to avoid: My Spawn, Go Away. The scaling on the bosses is so severe that the only way to get full rewards is to have around 10 on each. The scaling is mistuned to an extreme level, more than a squared difficulty increase for people greater than ~10. This leads to people getting very pissed at other people if they zerg up or just for coming after the event starts. We are actively mad at people for coming and "ruining" our run, exactly the feeling the game was supposed to be specifically designed to not evoke.

I don't understand. The original problem was that you don't want people here so you don't compete for the loot. Boss blitz doesn't have a problem with that. Your loot is the same, in fact your own loot will be worse if you run around and zerg. It doesn't go against anything since you are not competing for rewards. You are all working together towards the same thing.

@"Warscythes.9307" said:I don't understand. The original problem was that you don't want people here so you don't compete for the loot. Boss blitz doesn't have a problem with that. Your loot is the same, in fact your own loot will be worse if you run around and zerg. It doesn't go against anything since you are not competing for rewards. You are all working together towards the same thing.

But it's not. More people SEVERELY scale the bosses, to the point where you can't get gold and full rewards. You actively want people to leave in order to not scale the bosses up. It might not be direct competition, but it's the same issue: you want to claim the event for your team and actively hate and yell at people who come and "ruin" your run for full loot.

Look at it this way: Blitz is similar to Octovine, in that you want to split up about evenly and kill at the same time. But it's octovine if you were actively trying to harass players not in your group to leave because it couldn't be completed in time if more than 60 people (out of 250 who could be on the map) were doing it.

I have yet to run across this issue. So I guess we're both anecdotal. o.o

@Boogiepop Void.6473 said:

@"Warscythes.9307" said:I don't understand. The original problem was that you don't want people here so you don't compete for the loot. Boss blitz doesn't have a problem with that. Your loot is the same, in fact your own loot will be worse if you run around and zerg. It doesn't go against anything since you are not competing for rewards. You are all working together towards the same thing.

Right, so you split the people up. They are yelling at you for essentially not doing the mechanic correctly, not that they don't want you to participate. Is basically the same to how people yell at you for not CCing when the breakbar is up or keep standing in AoE because you are failing the mechanic. Just go to any other place that needs people.

No, they are yelling at you because they already have 10 people and you are ruining it. You have the 60 people in the organized group screaming obscenities at everyone else in map chat because they are "ruining" the event. Even on disorganized maps, people are all caps in map chat telling people to mot come because then they won't get gold if the boss scales. The event makes people actively feel bad if everyone on the map participates.

Yeah, the scaling on the bosses is insane. a whole zerg could take 10 minutes while 10 people could take 3.And in map chat I had people yelling that I was wrong and "10 people are sure to fail, you need much more" because that's what people have grown accustomed to when it comes to legendary PvE bosses.

@"Boogiepop Void.6473" said:No, they are yelling at you because they already have 10 people and you are ruining it. You have the 60 people in the organized group screaming obscenities at everyone else in map chat because they are "ruining" the event. Even on disorganized maps, people are all caps in map chat telling people to mot come because then they won't get gold if the boss scales. The event makes people actively feel bad if everyone on the map participates.

Please, you are telling me that the map has 60 people with 10 on each spot and nobody is willing to take one more person? Nobody cares having more than 10 unless there's like 15 people per group and I am not even sure the map can hold 90 people. That is not a thing unless one boss is severely outmanned while another group has too many people. In which case just start moving.

No, the event does NOT make people feel bad if the map participates. It just rewards smart play over brainless zerg play. It's not asking for much that people stay where they are and understand, the reward in the end will make up for the lack of champion loot from not tagging. Sadly people are sheep, they stay at one place and after the boss died they awkwardly stand around a bit. Eventually one of them moves, causing another one to follow. The rest feels stupid for staying now that two other guys started moving so they join them as well. Soon they all went to the next boss, potentially ruining the event for the others. That IS annoying and literally preventable by not being an idiot and doing what people normally want to do all the time: Get rewarded for doing absolutely nothing.

Would you say Auric Basin meta is bad too because it splits people up? Serpent's Ire meta that also requires them to not bring garbage builds but builds that have at least some utility/CC?

It's mostly just people needing to learn what is going on, showing that they have a base understanding of how the game works. Many people seem to lack that understanding or choose to forget about it though and that is very annoying.

Bah... I've never encountered any of the sort.If anything what i've encountered was me and a friend basically 4 manning half the bosses with some randoms because 90% of the people on that map still follow the herd mentality and stack on a single boss. We killed the centaur which is a long ass fight because he keeps running when you have low cc (only 4 people), i went AFK for several minutes, came back, got the pirate to 80% and only then did another boss die. Me and those randoms, and a couple more eventually, ended up killing 4/6 bosses, granted the 4th was when everyone collapsed on the last one, but still. A single group of less then 10 guys had to do all the work, because the rest couldn't use their brain mass and scatter.So yeah, i was using map chat to tell people to scatter, not from my group, i could use a few more people, but from the zerg. Basically just telling people how i was killing bosses faster with 4 then them with god knows how many!

@Blocki.4931 said:Would you say Auric Basin meta is bad too because it splits people up? Serpent's Ire meta that also requires them to not bring garbage builds but builds that have at least some utility/CC?

Actually I would call Auric Basin a great meta. It requires coordination and splitting and planning properly. But what it dosen't do it punish you for having the whole map participate. Serpent's Ire is bad because it's overtuned to the point that it has an 80%ish failure rate even with coordination, though.

@"Boogiepop Void.6473" said:Boss Blitz is an event that brings out a behavior that was specifically cited as one the devs wanted to avoid: My Spawn, Go Away. The scaling on the bosses is so severe that the only way to get full rewards is to have around 10 on each. The scaling is mistuned to an extreme level, more than a squared difficulty increase for people greater than ~10. This leads to people getting very pissed at other people if they zerg up or just for coming after the event starts. We are actively mad at people for coming and "ruining" our run, exactly the feeling the game was supposed to be specifically designed to not evoke.

Give people some time to realize how it works. This "division of labor" is also true for other events, including the VB meta, which is even more dependent on people splitting up. If you were present for the the last incarnation of the Blitz (which used the same mechanic), you might recall that it took the better part of a week before people identified the efficient strategy, the tools that worked best against each boss, and for those concepts to be widely known enough that enough people could follow them.

Eventually, people will realize, "oh, wait, this is a farmer's dream: someone else can do most of the work, because those people might actually prefer if I do nothing until the boss is down to 10% health, at which point, I can get in a few hits and get credit."

As it turns out, the folks cranky about "ermagahd, the scaling!" calmed down, once they were reminded of how long the transition period was lo these many years ago.

tl;dr patience, young Palawadan, patience

@Boogiepop Void.6473 said:

@"Warscythes.9307" said:I don't understand. The original problem was that you don't want people here so you don't compete for the loot. Boss blitz doesn't have a problem with that. Your loot is the same, in fact your own loot will be worse if you run around and zerg. It doesn't go against anything since you are not competing for rewards. You are all working together towards the same thing.

Yeah not getting those 20 tokens, the 10 or so Queen’s gauntlet tickets you probably have more than you need, and a few more champ bags is just such a drag.

Nothing to do with the event, it's working fine :smile:. I think the OP is referring to the scaling instead. Question is, once the problem is identified why not just solve it by spreading out?

Roughly 7 minutes to kill all bosses simultaneously by splitting into 6 sub groups to tackle each bosses. 7 minutes plus(with the scaling and players afk AA) for killing each bosses; zerging 1 at a time. 7mins to complete the event for better rewards by spreading out or 42mins+ in total to clear for lesser rewards by blobing? Productivity in an hour.

Weird, I have yet to see all of this yelling.

Everything shouldn't be about zerging, especially with plenty of people trying to organize things. Sure some people come late, but I've seen people who will join a squad and then proceed to go to an entirely different boss from where they started and not follow what others are doing at all. I've seen a commander just give up when half the squad went to three different bosses when there was several minutes of time to explain while waiting for it to start overlooking the place the boss was going to spawn. It's not even worth trying with zerg mentality, and I don't believe mentality should be rewarded.

During the Attack on LA. They had several bosses that couldn't be attacked by new people after a certain amount engaged them. This might be a suggestion.

I have a different view of the situation. We are talking here about a Festival, that is not even a yearly thing. It will last a few days only - including a weekend. It then happens the - very logic - expected usual: It drains all players out of which a vast majority are casual players who just want fun, rewards, points and don't care about builds, how it works and learning mechanics.

I believe that the root cause of the problem is not that players are zerging, but much more that to put an event requiring split up, strategy with scaling and impact on reward is not the most appropriate type of event for such a Festival. To my eyes, there is a contradiction between what is a Festival, open to All for some easy fun, and what is an event of the type Boss Blitz, that requires organized map. The two things just don't match together.

It is not fair to yell at people who just come taking taking part to an opened timely limited Festival. They are allowed to come. They are allowed to join. It is not their fault if the event is set up the way it is. There is no sign at the entrance telling: It needs only a limited amount of people and please learn the mechanics before to enter.

Personally, myself tagging for PvE meta events and being a WvW/raid player, I also regret the way it goes during this BB event. However, it needs to show some understanding toward what we are talking about: BB is not the meta of a regular activity. This is a sporadic "fun" in middle of an open to all Festival. It is a bit illusory to expect else than zerging. At least that's how I see it.

This event was originally only available from August 6th to August 20th, 2013. Somehow, in those 2 weeks, players were able to figure out the mechanics.

So, give it a few days and see what happens.

@Eramonster.2718 said:Nothing to do with the event, it's working fine :smile:. I think the OP is referring to the scaling instead. Question is, once the problem is identified why not just solve it by spreading out?

Roughly 7 minutes to kill all bosses simultaneously by splitting into 6 sub groups to tackle each bosses. 7 minutes plus(with the scaling and players afk AA) for killing each bosses; zerging 1 at a time. 7mins to complete the event for better rewards by spreading out or 42mins+ in total to clear for lesser rewards by blobing? Productivity in an hour.

because people suck ...

trying get gold on unorganized maps is futile anyway but I still hate needlessly long fights so I've been running off to different bosses when too many people show up but they end up blobing over after the previous one dies anyway instead of going to work on a different boss -_-

There seems to be a difference in scaling (or caps that are different from boss to boss) because when I participated the BB yesterday noon, the zerg did the bosses one by one and the first one, who teleports around in the lava, took the most of time, while all the others were defeated much faster. And the zerg even growed during the event, as more and more people joined.

@Lanhelin.3480 said:There seems to be a difference in scaling (or caps that are different from boss to boss) because when I participated the BB yesterday noon, the zerg did the bosses one by one and the first one, who teleports around in the lava, took the most of time, while all the others were defeated much faster. And the zerg even growed during the event, as more and more people joined.

If one boss died... another bosses get stronger... so if you kill them in one time... you avoid that... mostly by killing bosses till 10% of hp... wait for others than finish them. gold or silver.. doesnt matter... but its fast.... one by one takes a lot of longer coz bosses grow stronger. Also scaling it for 60 ppl...

There are already maps with multiple gold successes in a row. I think it's interesting to have some group events that require every participant to give a little thought into the mechanics, whether it's bringing anti-break-bar tools or reflects, or spreading out, rather than mindless zerging. If you want that simple, the Labyrinthine effigy is perfect; you just have to equip a water balloon and aim.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:There are already maps with multiple gold successes in a row. I think it's interesting to have some group events that require every participant to give a little thought into the mechanics, whether it's bringing anti-break-bar tools or reflects, or spreading out, rather than mindless zerging. If you want that simple, the Labyrinthine effigy is perfect; you just have to equip a water balloon and aim.

I would guess you are in the US where there's a much higher chance that every participant speaks the same language?

@OP has a point though. Sure, a lot of us like the challenge and coordination required to finish certain events or at certain reward levels. But, when the best way to get the best loot is to coordinate, and then yell at everyone else on the map to kitten off so you can get your max reward, that really is the opposite of what was promised at launch.