WDS awareness?

bpostal · 2013-10-18, 11:06 PM

Originally Posted by kubacheski

...

WHY THE F*CK DO YOU NEED A SPECIAL EVENT TO PROMOTE THE ONLY OBJECTIVE IN PLANETSIDE?!?!?!

...

This comment is very apt and succinctly expresses my growing unease with PS2.

Mordelicius · 2013-10-18, 11:42 PM

Glad someone posted a WDS thread. I really want to post this but I didn't want to start another complaint thread

The Top Dog Mechanic must be discontinued and replaced with a different mechanic. It punishes winning and rewards losing. If the factions are ever to get balanced, this will sting really hard.

Suppose the factions are balanced and suppose this is basketball (5 v 5 balanced population).

Team A make 5 straight shots.
Team B misses 5 straight shots.

Team A leads by 10 points. Now everytime Team B scores, there's an added +1 because they missed 5 straight shots? So the team that made 5 straight shots gets punished and the team that missed gets the reward. One can see how awful this system is.

Alternative:
Make the bonus scores based on current continental population. Now if the basketball game was 5 vs 2. Now, it would be fair if the team with just 2 players get more points if they make a shot because it's 2 vs 5 and the odds are against them.

But the current program punishes a leading faction. It's a very poor way of rigging the scoreboard to make the match close.

I've seen this type of mechanic before in my favorite RvR MMO. And that was far more insidious form than this. It was so bad that losing meant winning. And winning meant you got cheated. What was the result? Everyone wanted to lose because there was a massive reward tied losing.

The reward was so big that winning was moot and pointless and everyone was fixing the situation so they can lose. It was horrible

.

Natir · 2013-10-19, 12:00 AM

Originally Posted by bpostal

This comment is very apt and succinctly expresses my growing unease with PS2.

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Mordelicius

Glad someone posted a WDS thread. I really want to post this but I didn't want to start another complaint thread

The Top Dog Mechanic must be discontinued and replaced with a different mechanic. It punishes winning and rewards losing. If the factions are ever to get balanced, this will sting really hard.

Completely agree. Its basically throwing welfare points at them. Obamacare faction FTW! But seriously though, seeing as how the VS were the underdogs and now they are winning with a huge lead just screams something is wrong.

Mastachief · 2013-10-19, 03:15 AM

To be fair Malorn is asking for input on how to make it viable, but so far i think we have come up short with solutions. I'm not sure there is one.

Natir · 2013-10-19, 05:11 AM

Originally Posted by Mastachief

To be fair Malorn is asking for input on how to make it viable, but so far i think we have come up short with solutions. I'm not sure there is one.

There isn't a solution. Malorn really should just abandon the WDS at this point. Clearly it has not worked at all and just provided literally everyone with free boosts who logged on once to the winning faction. The population imbalances are way too great and there still is no incentive to take and hold territory. Until you fix those two problems, doing anything else will not actually address the issues.

WDS is a shame and should have never gone through. When it first started, it was obviously clearly biased towards the overpopped faction. Now it just favors the underdog with the new point system to the point that they are getting way too much help. At this point, it really seems like the dev team (primarily Malorn since this seems to be his pet project) has no clue how to fix population imbalances and make people want to take territory.

At the end of the day though, if all you do is reward people for killing vehicles and killing people (tons of exp goes into getting kills, kill streaks, bonuses with using weapons, etc) over taking territory or using any of the support mechanics. That is what needs to change for people to start caring about territory. Plain and simple. If you can earn the most certs by taking territory, people will do it. If you can earn the most certs by farming kills, that is what people will continue to do. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out easier solutions to the problems this game has.

I will even break down some ideas for the dev team.

Territory cap streak: You get bonus exp for taking more territory during your play session.

Territory defense bonus: You get little bits of exp here and there for defending a base. Maybe it is just passive for how long you have been in the area of a base defending or have it based off of what you do while defending. You repair something while defending a base? Maybe give you defense bonus exp.

For taking a point at a base, taking down a generator, guarding a point at a base while it flips, should grant you more experience than it currently does.

Actually capping a base should give you way more experience than it currently does.

But what do you sacrifice for this? Who knows. What I will tell you is that if you want people to care about taking territory, the resource system will not cut it and is a joke. At the end of the day though, due to the free to play model, you cannot greatly reward players. The free to play model right now is really what is holding the game back. Unfortunately, these problems will doom Planetside 2 forever.

How do you fix the population imbalances? Merge more servers into each other. Mattherson, at it's peak, has no more than 1700 players on. Briggs has less than 1,000 players during their prime time. Waterson is similar to Mattherson. Connery has about 2500 players total during their prime time but they also got 2 mergers as well. These numbers are also based off of people logging on during that given hour (and who are currently logged in) so the population actually playing will be much lower as people could just be logging in for their certs or checking to see who is online.

You should also note that a lot of the servers are not even at that supposed 2k continent cap when a continent has a queue. Clearly SOE has also lowered the population cap without telling anyone. Stats don't lie.

At the end of the day though, all these little fixes here and there are just band aid solutions to the problems. Band aids are only meant to work for a very small period of time until the real problem is addressed. SOE has tried to reuse the same dirty band aid and it clearly keeps falling off.

Hate to be harsh but these are all issues players have addressed and given answers to and SOE brushes them off. It is time to start listening more to the player base and implementing these tough ideas or their game really will be going no where fast. This MLG shit will also go no where fast as people will continue to ask, what is the point of taking territory. Do you know? When you take a continent, does it get locked, kick a faction off, rotate the warpgate? Nope. Nothing. You get absolutely nothing. Boom problem addressed and solved.

bpostal · 2013-10-19, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by Natir

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.

Ghoest9 · 2013-10-19, 12:50 PM

The lattice(as implemented) removed all strategy except thee most basic and boring concepts.
WDS does nothing to change this.

Original Planetside with its ability to back hack if you killed drained the energy the ability to capture small spawn points(towers) regardless of the lattice had much more stratgy potential.

EVILPIG · 2013-10-19, 01:09 PM

Originally Posted by Ghoest9

The lattice(as implemented) removed all strategy except thee most basic and boring concepts.
WDS does nothing to change this.

Original Planetside with its ability to back hack if you killed drained the energy the ability to capture small spawn points(towers) regardless of the lattice had much more stratgy potential.

Lattice is the worst. Since Lattice has been developed, I'd like to see the Lattice disappear at times. Perhaps a condition that players could affect can turn Lattice off.

Babyfark McGeez · 2013-10-19, 10:52 PM

Originally Posted by EVILPIG

Lattice is the worst. Since Lattice has been developed, I'd like to see the Lattice disappear at times. Perhaps a condition that players could affect can turn Lattice off.

The problem with the lattice in planetside 2 is that, to stay in Ps1 terms, they basically linked all towers together with the major bases which naturally results in way too linear and predictable network.
When i first saw that it was one of those "D'oh!" moments.

/sorryforofftopic

Natir · 2013-10-20, 09:11 AM

Originally Posted by EVILPIG

Lattice is the worst. Since Lattice has been developed, I'd like to see the Lattice disappear at times. Perhaps a condition that players could affect can turn Lattice off.

Lattice is a great idea for this kind of a game and it needs it. However, the maps, bases, etc, are far from even being ready to accept that lattice system. The lattice system on the Nexus island crap is how it should be, not like how it is right now. They needed to make the continents with lattice in mind. Until they completely redo the continents to flow with the lattice, it will never work.

kubacheski · 2013-10-21, 12:57 AM

Originally Posted by Natir

Lattice is a great idea for this kind of a game and it needs it. However, the maps, bases, etc, are far from even being ready to accept that lattice system. The lattice system on the Nexus island crap is how it should be, not like how it is right now. They needed to make the continents with lattice in mind. Until they completely redo the continents to flow with the lattice, it will never work.

The lattice introduction into PS2 was the only way to make the fight go places. The hex system is far superior and more flexible. Think about the "influence" factor in having surrounding territories "assisting" with the defense of a base. The supply lines that would logically be there, not forced by a lattice line. The hex system allows for a much more dynamic land control system so you can actually cut supply lines by taking all the hexes surrounding a base or hex with a high value resource. But without more continents and intercontinental connectivity it simply doesn't work.

Consider this on a single continent you simply had 3 "frontlines" (TR/NC, TR/VS, NC/VS) and a couple spots in the center that were a free for all. The bases close to the warpgates were not fought at. The only contested land was in the center. The lattice forced you to go from one place and they tried to structure it so that you could fight more places before you worked yourself in a circle, but it's boring on a single continent. PS1 has what 12 conts with 3 connections each? And cont locking and base bonuses, etc. The PS2 lattice system reduces complexity and strategy as it's still limited to a single continent.

To be on topic, the problems with the game aren't addressed or repaired by the WDS, they're actually exposed more. Why would you want to advertize your shortcomings?