The Problem? Its simple, Guilds of players come together and queue for games with large warparties, They then proceed to dominate every game they play removing any fun or feeling of fairness from the game for the other team. The guilds who do it insist it is not fun, Yet they still do it. There excuse? "There isn't a way for us to play vs other guilds" "We still don't find it fun" "But you can find a guild" Thats true but not everyone does, Not everyone can and many people prefer to play with close friends instead of a group of people online they don't know. The game needs to cater to all and not just those willing to form up with 15+player groups. The Damage It Causes Players of smaller groups or even random players are simply leaving due to it. My close friends and myself have a guild to ourselves, 4 out of the 6 of us have stopped playing after getting a match vs an entire guild composition 3 times in one night. There is no fun in it, Nobody learns anything and it is a complete waste of time. The whole thing drives players away, Reduces the ease of access for new players and is ultimately costing the game its lifeline of players willing to remain. You can see some of the damage by viewing the steam graphs, players are joining in masses and very few stay. (obviously more factors then just this cause that) Lower player base means less income and smaller dev teams with slower turnarounds on updates and additions. This in turn results into stagnating game play and eventual death of the game. I am already constantly seeing repeated players who I play against regularly so it cant really afford to get much smaller. The Dev team is also shrinking already. What makes the whole thing worse is the Toxicity at the end of the match, I have seen a number of guilds now that after dominating the game completely begin to type "GG EZ, Rekt" and the other many blatant toxic responses including being just plane offensive. There is absolutely no need for it at all. The game wasnt a good game, you claim you had no fun and the randoms know they had no fun so how at all is that a good game. The Solution The best solution is to implement a war party cap. 5 would be ideal, This allows a squad of players to work together with a variety of classes and have a large impact on the game without completely dominating it. Those who wish to queue up into bigger groups use the already existing choice on the world map labelled "Guild Vs Guild" War parties of 6 or more group up into this game mode and they are matched against other larger groups. A team can be made up of multiple squads of 6 or more and are matched against squads of 6 or more. Until this sort of matchmaking can be set up the war party limit should be put in place. Guilds can still play together and have fun in 5 man squads. Your 5 man squad might not win every match you play but you will have fun games. There is no excuse to pug stomp and ruin the game you love to play so much knowing the damage you cause. "Practice" "No other choice" are all shrouds you hide behind to try and convince yourself you have to do it. Something has to be done before to much damage is done.
I think that expanding on the benefits of GvG would be more effective than reducing the max war party size. You can manually choose your battle on the world map or just hit battle now at the same time to have the same effect as a larger warparty (although the larger warparty at least automatically searches for other groups to fight). If there was a purpose/reason to set up a GvG match, I think it'd be more likely that people would bother doing it. Right now it's a lot of work for no benefit.
The thing is, this would be trivial to bypass. A warparty of 15 splits into three groups, stays in VOIP together, and chooses the map manually.
Then implement a system that warparties can only join games that are 2x their size, cap it at max size/2
I'm with @Sumshine in the belief that and expanded Guild VS Guild battle option needs to be put into place more than simply limiting the Warparty group to 5 players. This game was supposed to be about tactical battles with large affiliated groups fighting it out, not just a handful of players from the same Guild. The main problem is that the current battle system is built around players with no Guild, which is honestly a direct contradiction to what the game was supposed to be. That and the lack of a VOIP make it very difficult for non-Guild players to coordinate effectively enough to win. So you really only have a few options: 1) Join a Guild yourself as a player (essentially not an option for casual players) 2) Create a Guild VS Guild tab so that Guilds can fight exclusively against other Guilds without the need to schedule an event. 3) Activate the VOIP so players can actually coordinate with each other. Honestly, I don't think Guilds should be punished for wanting to play together when it's the devs themselves who never actually seemed to consider how Guilds would affect their game. But then again I also don't understand players who don't want to play as part of a tactical group when that is essentially how this game was always intended to work.
