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Click here to go to the next VIP post in this thread.   Old 2011-07-21, 07:43 PM   [Ignore Me] #5
Malorn
Contributor
PlanetSide 2
Game Designer
 
Re: Grief Forgiveness


The grief system from PS1 already had forgiveness built-in.

It had two components - rate of accrual and rate of decay.

Rate of Accrual

Grief in PS1 accumulated at different rates. If you went on a TK spree you racked it up real fast. However, if you had the same number of kills spread out over a 10 hour period, you would get far less grief.

Grief gain was a function of two variables:
1) current grief score
2) recent grief activity

So if you had a low grief score you would get the minimum amount of grief when you did inflict it. If you infrequently got grief you would also get the minimum. If your grief score was higher, it indicated that you have issues with grief and therefore the system was less forgiving and would give you higher grief amounts. Recent grief activity resulted in being on a killing spree or doing a lot of damage to friendlies would quickly rack up grief and the accrual rate would accelerate.

These two functions can interact, meaning if you have a high grief score and go on a short killing spree you can quickly find yourself in weapons lock.

Rate of Decay

In addition to the accrual rate, Grief Decay worked in a similar fashion and was a function of two factors:

1) Time
2) Current level of grief

Grief decayed over time. The rate at which it decayed increased with lower amounts of grief.

So basically if you hovered around 0-100 grief the grief you gained would be minimal and the rate of decay would be very rapid, usually gone within an hour or two.

I usually had my grief < 100 pretty much my entire time playing Planetside, and that included capping random asshats from time to time. The key was never letting your grief get too high. Once your grief got into the 300+ range then the decay rate was slower and the accrual rate was faster. Even then, 300 grief decayed in a day or two as long as you didn't significantly add to it.


Anomalies due to weapon design

That said, this system as neatly designed as it was, had some anomalies that could cause someone to rack up a lot of grief in a short time. The first was "plasma grenades". Because of the burn-effect of plasmas every tick of the plasma counted as "grief activity", which means it accelerated the accrual rate far faster than other weapons. If you had fragmentation grenades your accrual rate was much slower, even with the same amount of friendly fire. If someone using plasma wasn't careful they could rack up tons of grief and make it hard to work it off for days, especially if they kept using plasma grenades.

Avoiding using plasma was a good way to keep grief rates low.

Lag and warping and weapons with projectile speed also tended to cause grief issues, because at the time you fire them nobody is in the way, but after they leave the gun someone can move in front of them. Weapons like MCGs which had a high rate of fire could quickly rack up 3-4 instances of grief, and then a few more times it would rack up more. This accelerated teh accrual rate, so any further grief would be much worse.

Shotguns tended to be the best weapons to use in terms of minimizing grief. First, they were instant-hit, which limited the warping/projectile delay issue, and second each blast was considered 1 hit, which means that if you had one stray shot your accrual rate did not pick up significantly. So using a shotgun and aiming well with it was a good way to avoid grief or handle a grief cool-down period.

These are characteristics of the weapons interacting with the grief system. I hope that the tweaking they are doing to the grief system is fixing those issues by adding a little more tolerance for weapons that are grief-prone and maybe being a little less tolerant for weapons that aren't grief-prone.

One thing to point out that I loved about the grief system is that if you ran over someone both of you got grief points, because the blame for the incident was equally shared. The driver got grief for not moving out of the way of the victim, and the victim got grief because he was standing in front of the tank. This prevented behaviors where pedestrians were intentionally standing in driving lanes and also encouraged them to get out of the way of vehicles. That's a good behavior to teach so I'm glad they awarded grief for both the driver and the pedestrian.
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