While I tend to prefer games with 15 or fewer players per side, Planetside's 200v200 (sometimes 200v200v200) fights were amazing.  I suppose if I could sum up the 3 things which are necessary to make large-scale combat fun, they'd be:

Fun Combat System
Planetside's combat did an excellent job of providing a large variety of weapons, and rewarding player skill.  This allowed the game to remain fun, even in particularly grindy battles where neither side made much progress.  Obviously things like having a variety of avenues of attack (level design)  also factor into combat being fun.

Balanced Population
With uneven teams, battles have predestined outcomes: you win or lose based on whether you're on the team with more players.  With even teams, every single kill you make contributes to your team's winning; your skill and decisions matter.

Skill-rewarding
It's also very important to be rewarded for each thing you do, because even with balanced population one side is going to lose and it would be demoralizing to perform very well and still lose -- so to offset that you need rewards.  Planetside had XP from kills, but it really could've done better achievement/leaderboard-style rewards than it did.  Sort of like "Your faction lost this base, but here were the top 20 players who really tried to hold back the enemy."

I always sort of wondered whether Darkfall was worth trying out.  An early PVP video I watched really turned away my interest because it seemed to have very uneven teams, and very uninteresting combat (AOE abilities spammed at a single choke point.)

 one thing is clear,game company should auto-detect computer connection etc before game start like guild wars if your connection is  too slow or not set-up properlly they should have a site suggestion to help them .

hell often only one player make the whole raid lag if all game pre-tested  it would lessen lot of problem

One of my best MMORPG memories comes from a large-scale battle in DAoC. Not long after launch -- three or four months maybe -- several guild leaders on Albion coordinated an attack on Mid that resulted in every Mid frontier keep falling within a 20 second window. It took 100+ people from many different guilds to make it happen. Several large groups had to travel through the Mid frontier and coordinate the pulling of the guards, destruction of doors and finally the taking of the keeps, all while other coordinated skirmish groups fended off Mid defenders, NPCs and a few wandering Hibs. When those keep messages hit the Mids, they flowed like a river out of their home gate and sent most of us packing back to Albion. Our victory was short-lived, but man, the Mid frontier was on fire that night.

Although they were not perfect (one-shotting archers, lag, horrific stun, and Thane "lag hammers" come to mind), large-scale battles in DAoC were some of the best times I ever had in an MMO and an experience I have not been able to find again.

Sadly, I'm not even sure if such a thing could happen today. If you have 100+ people together now, 15 of them are AFK, 10 are running ahead or messing around fighting mobs, 8 are dueling, 6 are /shouting in public channels, 12 fall behind or get lost, 6 die in the middle of nowhere and spam channels for a rez, and 3 have logged on their cross-faction toons and warned the opposite side.

Originally posted by steamtank

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

Not a big fan of RvR, myself. Even less so when such high numbers are involved.

Nothing to do with the concept; I like the idea of faction vs faction combat .. but the implementation in all of the games that I've seen amount to huge spammy zergfest where everyone just AOEs the crap out of the opposing side. The nearest approximation of tactical thinking amounts to:

"We're winning! CHARGE!" or "We're losing! RUN AWAY!"

Utterly bereft of enjoyment as far as I'm concerned.

 

i've always gotten in with guilds that play tactics over anything else. Usually these guilds are more "hardcore" i think of them as simply being less lienent towards asshattery.

Alot of people are not willing to sacrifice the "i want to do this" to be part of a team exersize, if you get in with a large guild that has fun by functioning as a large unit the beauty of epic battles unfolds.

Thats when you see flanking, ambushing, proper terrain use, proper seige and seige defenses, chokepoints used the right way, ect.

 

pug battles are the ones that result in the senerio you posted, i refuse to fight in those, its guild or nothing.

I totally understand not liking the huge scale battles though, since i have seen the senerio you posted, i just learned to avoid those groups of players, not the size of the fight.

 

 

 

ps to everyone being negative:

read the thread.... its asking why people LIKE massive battles, not why they DONT.

What game are you playing that offers what you like so much? I've been around since 2002, and DAoC was my first MMO. I was raised in MMO's as a RvR player, but I haven't found one game worth my time since WoW came out, and believe me, I've tried them all. They're usually of low quality, high in bugs, and low in population. I'd be delighted to know what game you found to fill that niche.

Because I like massive multiplayer games. The only point of them being massive now is so they can charge a sub fee.

300 vs 300 is not for every game - but it works for some games. 

It has been around for a while and if you like this sort of thing...and one big world (no instancing) ....and PvP ...and RvR... and 'hardcore' (What ever TF that means?) then you can actually play it right now.

http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/roermond-part-1/
http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/roermond-part-2/
 

http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/ruins-of-vianden-video/

http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/its-on/#more-2133
http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/it-fell/
 

Note that this game is now quite old.  Which is why newer games that claim they ahve made a breakthrough and have large battles and a huge world just make me laugh.

Edit: and to answer the OP: why do I like this?  In the context of WWII it works.  Anything less just wouldn't feel right (BF1942 shoeboxes for example).

In our particular game (EvE) huge fleet battles of 300vs300 or more ships involve a lot of coordination among the fleet and squad commanders. As a grunt piloting a particular ship you will be targeting, applying a variety of ECM stuff, shooting at your assigned targets, and maneuvering to get out of range of the most obvious threats like massive bombs or killer drones. As a squad commander you will listen the info of your scouts, listen to your fleet commander and then react to the info and direct the fire of your squad to a particular ship or group of enemy ships.

For a well coordinated fleet with competent fleet commanders a massive battle is NOT a random affair. Of course, you can be baited into a trap and may have to fight against odds too high to win, but if the commander and the fleet does not panic, a small fleet can inflict heavy damage before being anihilated. The fleet actions prior to the battle (scouting, positioning, assigning particular roles to each squad and pilot...) are crucial and specially while roaming or hunting down an enemy fleet, it can be nerve breaking too.

What you don't see during the battle is 600 ships fully rendered with their hulls glitering, the shields glowing and explosions everywhere. What you see is a zoom out look of the battlefield where each ship is color coded into a small square and a list of ships on your right that you use to target, get close to, avoid, shoot, or whatever it is that you have to do.

There may be guys with übercomputers able to fight these massive battles and see the actual battle close up with all effects on. I sadly cannot.

Huge battles require a lot of skill, concentration, discipline and coordination. The give you a huge adrenaline rush, and above all, they are fun. Sadly I usually end up with my costly ships reduced to unsightly wrecks...

Originally posted by steamtank

ps to everyone being negative:

read the thread.... its asking why people LIKE massive battles, not why they DONT.

Actually, the way I read the OP, it's asking how in the world can anyone like these things? 

If you want huge battles, go play the Total War games. Like the OP said, 300+ vs 300+ or some other ridiculous number is not needed. I enjoy the feeling of large, epic battles (which is one reason why I love RvR and I love DAoC), but something like 100 vs 100 is fine for me. I don't want it to the point where things start to lag and you get killed by what seems to be an orbital cannon of death but in reality is just hundreds of people spamming AoEs.

Edit: EVE is an exception because EVE is kickass.

Originally posted by Airphel

ahh, the zerg vs zerg war... always a thrill.

 

Lag... sometimes, but not really.

 

A real battle is always thrilling, win or loose, if your guild actually knows how to manuver as a whole. Flank left, get those catapults up, mind the wizards/archers on the walls, move your stealth team in from the south and take them off the walls... ect ect... its like living a war out of the history books, or one for the history books...

QFT!!! The first two years in Shadowbane had epic banes, beautiful to be a part of. When the onslaught of kiddies that refuse to follow a leader hit MMO's that is when great large scale battles died.
 

The more, the merrier.

Originally posted by Fkinglinux

Maybe on the history channel. I've never seen a large scale battle in any MMO that had any semblance of organization, if it did, not much more than a glorified zergfest.

Beyond that, as someone said, they're really like RTS games and the only one who has any fun in an RTS is the guy in charge.  Otherwise, you're just cannon fodder and you have to trust that the people running the show aren't stupid enough to get you killed.

However, I don't play MMOs to be a pawn, I play them to have a good time and running around on a leash doing the will of someone else that I may or may not trust isn't my idea of a good time.

Originally posted by Cephus404

Originally posted by Fkinglinux

Maybe on the history channel. I've never seen a large scale battle in any MMO that had any semblance of organization, if it did, not much more than a glorified zergfest.

 

Beyond that, as someone said, they're really like RTS games and the only one who has any fun in an RTS is the guy in charge.  Otherwise, you're just cannon fodder and you have to trust that the people running the show aren't stupid enough to get you killed.

However, I don't play MMOs to be a pawn, I play them to have a good time and running around on a leash doing the will of someone else that I may or may not trust isn't my idea of a good time.

You're a pawn whether you like it or not.

Any MMO that advertises massive battles is one to avoid like the plague.  The more players in the area, the greater the confusion.  None of these MMO have anything close to the tools needed in a mass battle like that.  Lag has little to do with it.  The only one I have played with marginal tools is Eve and even that is not something I enjoy.

they like it because they're lack skills to compete in smaller #s, also it feels epic.. though its a bunch of mindless button mashing noob ish

Eh sometimes it's just something different about massive battles, it can be fun, just it can get tiring like anything else if overdone.  Some of the fun massive battles I've been in were back in DAOC days, when we had organized raids where we actually did flanking attacks, and used baits and strategy to counter another zerg.  Unfortunately I rarely see that these days, and a lot has to do with the game design of newer MMO's.

Gameplay> Graphics, and I love pvp and huge battles, thus I would love it.

I dont get why people dont like something, and then comes to the forums to say it stupid where I know many people like 300vs300 battles.

Whoever said the guy in charge are the only one having fun are clueless of massive battles.

In darkfall, I am usually the guy who scouts/flank/ bait, I like mount combat.

I get told where to scout, but I usually kill 3-4 ppl during the time we get sieged and the time we get attacked.

Darkfall is the only game that I have had fun in massive battling, Eve is stupid to me.

Originally posted by Palebane

You're a pawn whether you like it or not.

I'm not a pawn at all, I play games to do what *I* want, not what anyone else wants me to do.  When I stop being able to do what *I* want, I stop playing the game because it's no longer what I want to be doing.  Granted, that means I don't play a lot of games but that's my choice and I make it.

Massive battles are the target of any MMO. You feel like a part of something bigger than just yourself, and suddenly winning depends on working together with your friends (or having the most of them :P). It's one of the things an MMO can do best of any game, after all, it's Massive Multiplayer Online, not Mono Masochistic Offline. You don't pay $15 a month to fly solo.

The biggest battle i've been in was in EVE Online, which had around 1100 participants - And despite some heavy lag, it was one of the most exciting things i've ever done in a game. It's about your clan, your guild, your alliance, not just about you, and you feel like you're making an impact on the entire world, rather than just hand in a quest for purely personal rewards. It's very very rewarding.

I would hardly call 50-75 players "large scale", in any case. The appeal in those huge battles lies exactly in the fact that individual skill doesn't matter as much as in smaller battles. You have to work with your entire group to get victory, rather than just try and fly solo, and that's where the challenge, aswell as the gratification comes from.