Posted by Korn 3 years ago (Source)

Hey there,

when we send out surveys - or run forum polls - we are fully aware that politics come into play and that different groups will try to influence the outcome one way or another.
That is also why we always make it clear that these surveys or polls are never a "vote" on an issue. Rather, they are a tool for us to gather as much information as possible, being fully aware that different sources of information carry different types and magnitudes of bias.

When looking at survey data, we can also see when responses come in, and if and how the ratio of responses develops over time. In this particular case, we can indeed see a small impact from the "coordination" that has been going on behind the scenes. Interestingly, by the way, is that we did not see anyone advocating for a return to the "one shot meta" that as claimed in the recording.
The reason why we sent out the disarray survey in addition to all the information and feedback that we had already gathered on the subject beforehand was mostly to see if it is consistent - after taking politics and manipulation into account - which the impressions and our own thoughts on the state of Disarray that we had prior to the survey.

So what is our view on the state of Disarray, and has this been impacted by the survey results?

In our forums, we have stated regularly that since Disarray can be dodged by splitting into multiple alliances, the natural balancing limit for Disarray is ultimately given by how annoying it is to fight with friendly fire enabled and how challenging it is to organize an implicit alliances of multiple groups that are not allied in-game.

If Disarray is too strong, fighting large battles as a split group becomes too powerful of a strategy. If Disarray, on the other hand, is too weak, then it can't function as a gap closer for large scale fights.
When Disarray was initially introduced, it was very weak without any noticeable impact on fights. Later on it was changed to also increase damage taken by players, which lead to a very "one-shot" heavy meta that we did not like as it made large scale fights less enjoyable.

We then changed Disarray in a way that it would not affect damage taken, but have a much stronger effect on damage dealt and healing instead, which is the current situation what we are in.
While we feel that this has been a step in the right direction, our current view is that it's right now a bit too strong, making "splitting up" too powerful in some situations. This, in turn, can have the effect that a larger group and well organized group gets a disproportional advantage by being larger & being better at splitting up.

The fact that Disarray can be worked around like that is always going to be a downside of the feature. Hence, we can't realistically expect to eliminate this strategy completely as that would mean that we'd have to make Disarray so weak that it won't have any meaningful impact.

Hence, our stance is that we intend somewhat flatten the Disarray curve - not by so much that pure N+1 strategies become dominant again and not by so much that splitting as a strategy will be eliminated entirely, but in such a way that it will feel less mandatory.

In addition to that, we are considered to change the smart cluster queue in such a way that people queuing for a zone count towards Disarray in the zone that they are queuing for. The intention here is to discourage "queue stuffing" which we hope will reduce the number of times that the cluster queue will become active and in turn might contribute to large fights happening more evenly, across multiple zones.