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Thread: WDS awareness?
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Old 2013-10-19, 12:25 PM   [Ignore Me] #43
bpostal
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Re: WDS awareness?


Originally Posted by Natir View Post
It is the free to play model that does this. You cannot reward people with so much EXP or certs that they do not buy boosts/subs or weapons.

The resource model does not work at all and is no incentive for people to take territory. They just don't care about it. What is the only thing people know to do in this game? Destroy stuff as that is what gives you the most reward. If you flip that and make it so territory capture and point control gives you the most EXP/Certs then people will be forced to play the objective. Yes, you must force people to play the objective. (Emphasis added)

At the end of the day though, this has been talked about since tech test and it is falling deaf ears over at SOE. These same issues have been all over the place (PSU, Reddit, SOE Forums, etc) and SOE has not once tried to fix it. Instead, they implement terrible ideas like the WDS. No one cares about it. Especially since all you gotta do is log onto the winning faction once to get your ACCOUNT wide exp boost...
If we have to use a stick instead of a carrot then fine. Grab a stick and beat that ass. Try to modify XP variables so that players who are near their squad's center of mass and waypoints are rewarded more; those who are off mucking about in the middle of nowhere get less. The mission system might help if/when it's implemented but as it stands there's no real functionality that explicitly tells players 'hey dummy, maybe you should stack up with your squad'. The result being players acting like it's one giant TDM (Loosely using the letter 'T') and one either very frustrated or apathetic SL.

How do we apply that to WDS? WDS missions via the (recently updated) UI. We can see where the most 'points' can come from, it's almost thrown in our faces. Again the problem is forcing players to go after those facilities with nothing but arbitrary points in a system that not all players (especially the 'drop in, drop out' ones) care about.
An analogy being the tech plant bennie. Even if your empire is about to lose tech, players typically won't leave a good fight elsewhere to shift to a defensive battle to save their Prowlers. IDK if that's because tech has been devalued because of prevailing PS2 playstyles or the fact that no matter what you can always fall back to your WG and pull whatever you need.

There is no tool, beyond the use of the occasional /order, that aids in zergherding. This problem is exacerbated in WDS not only because there may be as many different strategies as there are players but also because there's no real way to tell a 'good' order from a 'bad' one other than seeing if that order aligns with a given players goals. Of course, there's no benefit or disadvantage of following or ignoring an order either. The end result being typically no response from anyone or at most less than a squad of random people who may arrive in a heavily contested area with little to no idea of what's going on or what needs to happen. This is further exacerbated by the simply fact that the functionality of /re has been reduced to the probability of a coin toss. The discussion of tactics in /re is again hampered by the fact that, to most, there are either no tactics, bad tactics or pure trolling occurring in the chat. This all assumes your chat windows isn't 'stuck' on Platoon, resulting in most players ignoring/not seeing any text communication outside of platoon chat whatsoever.

The unfortunate part of my post is that I have fewer suggestions to fix these problems than I have complaints. I will admit that a player mentality of 'me first, squad second, faction whenever' in a game such as PS2 boggles my mind and causes me to refer to those 'greenies' outside my direct communications bubble with disdain almost equal to that of the VS or NC.

TLDR: Mission system would be nice to help incentivize and ease the act of moving and coordinating with those who are not in my mumble/teamspeak/ventrillo/whatever communication network. A small, preliminary of this system (even if generated automatically by a bit of programming and the use of metrics) for use primarily as it pertains to WDS would be even better.
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