PlanetSide Universe - View Single Post - Balancing Factor: Resource Storage Limit
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Old 2012-04-18, 10:53 AM   [Ignore Me] #15
Xyntech
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Re: Balancing Factor: Resource Storage Limit


Originally Posted by Malorn View Post
I don't agree with that assessment. Soft cap is still un-capped and carries with it all of the badness of an uncapped resource system.
Not really.

With a soft cap, you can make it a curved falloff of return, so that when you have 10,000 resources you are earning them at the same rate as when you have 0, but when you have 20,000 you are earning them 1/2 as quickly and when you have 25,000 you are earning them 1/4 as quickly.

By the time you reach 30,000, you could be earning them 1/20 as quickly.

With no resource cap, you could just stockpile 2,000,000+ resources with no consequences of any kind.

With a hard cap, you could stockpile 20,000 resources and after that you get no value from anything related to resource acquisition at all.

With a soft cap, you could (realistically) stockpile let's say no more than 40,000 resources, because after that you are only earning them 1/10,000 as fast as normal. You can still build up a bigger reserve than if it were a hard cap, but you still will never have more resources than you know what to do with.

Soft cap doesn't mean no cap, it means that you don't just hit a wall.

It's like flight ceilings in games. In Planetside 1, there was a hard ceiling. You would be flying upwards gaining altitude, and then suddenly you would hit an invisible barrier and just stop ascending, like hitting a physical roof but with no damage. It sucks and is undynamic and uninteresting.

Flight simulators on the other hand (along with many other games with flying) have soft flight ceilings. As you climb higher and higher, the air becomes thinner and your aircraft is unable to gain as much lift as before, until eventually it becomes impossible to go any higher. There still is a flight ceiling, but it isn't just this wall that you smack into.

And just for the sake of comparison, no cap (no flight ceiling) would be allowing a propeller aircraft to fly into space and eventually leave the milky way galaxy and beyond, with never a decrease in speed.

Soft caps are just more dynamic and interesting and allow you to cater to a wider variety of people.

Unless you would care to explain to me how being able to earn 2,000,000 resources at the same rate as you always earn them is exactly the same problem as earning up to 40,000 at a significantly diminished rate of return.

Last edited by Xyntech; 2012-04-18 at 10:56 AM.
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