Hello PSU, let me introduce myself briefly,
CmdAtino, Woodman NC
Playing since November 2012 (beta) and have played for over 600 hours of PS2 (impressive number considering I've been playing this whole time on a laptop on an Intel HD4000 (dat low settings with render at minimum gives me a star wars battlefront 2 vibe ^^)
What Planetside 2 needs to do with the capture AND defense mechanic is to award xp for both, but have this amount of xp received be based on the nubmers involved in the fight.
The system I have thought up is pretty simple and, I am no game developer but, seems relatively easy to implement. The game already features a relatively decent population counter for each base on every continent. All that needs to be done is to assign a "Tier" to each of these stages, 1-12 pop is "tier 1", 12-24 is "tier 2", etc... you catch the drift till "tier 4" being the 48+
The game already also calculates the pop percentage so it obviously has a level of coding designed to know whether someone is involved in the fight or not, and regardless they are still present in the area and a possible threat unless AFK.
The tier system works with a ratio system, 1:1 means both tiers are equal and this should give the amount of xp that is already in game, however, if the attackers take the base with a tier higher than the defenders, the xp is divided by the amount of the ratio.
e.g. The attackers roll into a small outpost with 24-48, take the point and camp the spawn room of 1-12 guys then the xp received for this capture is (normal xp divided by 3 because the tier ratio was 3:1 in favor of attackers
The advantages of this system are:- Rewards heroic fights against the odds the most and encourages even fights over population spam.
- Split a large zerg up as they will realise they are getting far less xp (up to 4 times less is quite a lot)
- Gives rewards according to the effort put in.
- Forces people to split up more evenly in different lanes to get xp rather than stick to the lane that is winning due to ridiculous nubmers.
The tier system can also be adjusted to severely decrease ghost capping to reward very little xp, rendering ghost capping completely redundant and only to be practiced to flank or for an alert. (You fight no one, you get no reward from the game)
The tier system can be adjusted for defense and would give defenders a much bigger incentive.
Two types of defense:
Basic defense
Either the flag (or flags) have been captured and the timer started but is still in your empire colour. If you resecure the flags and the timer comes back to zero, you receive the base amount of xp for a defense (this value can be 75% of a standard capture xp) now weigh in the tier system, a recapture against the odds is more beneficiary and hence the defenders will become more aggressive for that xp.
Heroic Defense
A heroic defense consists of recapturing the flags and bringing the timer back to zero when the timer had already turned the enemy colour (meaning more than half the capture time was already over). This type of defense awards 125% of the xp of a capture as it would mean that you have broken the spawn room camping. This along with the tier system could make defenders that are outnumbered or at even numbers especially aggressive to the attackers.
So let me know what you think of this system, if it has been discussed before, I apologize to the OP.
I think this could work, made an account to share this with you because I felt like it could really benefit the game without being something that seems overly difficult for the devs to implement as it doesn't involve base redesigns and very complex systems, the "tiers" are basically already in the game, they just need to add this ratio system and I feel the fights would be a lot more fair, the toxic xp hungry zergs would split up a lot more, the mission system could even be redesigned with a filter to only join "heroic defense/attack" or "standard attack/defense" depending on how you feel about your personal skills and filtering out the overpopped fights in your favour. It would help to give a label to the types of fights happening on Auraxis.
My first post so I hope it wasn't too messy, just needed to share this with you and see what you guys though of it.
tl;dr Apply an xp multiplier or divider to both base captures and defenses according to a tier system based on the numbers involved in the fight, reward fighting against the odds and punish outnumbering zergs.
CmdAtino, out.