WDS is finally not ridiculous

[camycamera]

https://players.planetside2.com/#!/wds

now, who is winning today? VS.

who is winning this week? VS.

and who is winning this season? VS.


looks like these changes worked, because the WDS is finally balanced.

maybe forumside will stop with TR hating season and move on with VS hating season :rofl:

although i think the NC are still going to complain that they are UP on forumside, although this week NC are 10,000 points ahead of TR, and not far behind today.

so rejoice NC and VS! :lol:

[EVILPIG]

https://players.planetside2.com/#!/wds

now, who is winning today? VS.

who is winning this week? VS.

and who is winning this season? VS.


looks like these changes worked, because the WDS is finally balanced.

maybe forumside will stop with TR hating season and move on with VS hating season :rofl:

although i think the NC are still going to complain that they are UP on forumside, although this week NC are 10,000 points ahead of TR, and not far behind today.

so rejoice NC and VS! :lol:

Population and warpgate ownership are the two biggest factors.

[camycamera]

Population and warpgate ownership are the two biggest factors.
yep, that would explain it.

i guess i don't feel cheap now with all of my boosts i got, i felt a bit sorry for the NC and VS....

[ChipMHazard]

I guess it's the VS's time to shine and be hated on:p

[Babyfark McGeez]

On miller i noticed the VS population drastically increased in the past week(s).
Might just be my odd times playing, but if i want the underdog feeling i actually have to switch over to TR now lol (or NC, but...naaah).

[capiqu]

I have always said the VS cry louder and they always get what they want. Anyway seems VS and NC are fighting the TR more than each other lately. At least at Mattherson.

[OmegaPREDATOR]

now, who is winning today? VS.

who is winning this week? VS.

and who is winning this season? VS.


As TR win the 5 weeks, you may wait lots of time to say changes are balanced.

Waiting the real WDS to see what will happen, but it will not be balanced. As SOE finally recognise Indar North WG give an advantage, with 3 factions and 5 weeks, to be fear each faction must be in this WG 11 days and 16h ... will never arrive.

And of course the population is something who will never be fear as they can't do something to population balance.

So everyone will be able to whine about each one for a long time :D

[Emperor Newt]

On miller i noticed the VS population drastically increased in the past week(s).
Might just be my odd times playing, but if i want the underdog feeling i actually have to switch over to TR now lol (or NC, but...naaah).
Maybe 20 to 30 people max. I really wouldn't call this a "drastic increase" in the past few weeks. Also the fourth faction might play into this. And TR pretty much never is the underdog. Unless your are playing around 2 to 4 am. Granted, their numbers took a hit, but I suppose thats the 4th factioners.

http://www.therebelscum.net/world-population/?world_id=10&zoom=4&daterange=1379854969148,1382446969148

If anything I see a rather depressing overall downwards trend. But that applies for all factions.

[Boomzor]

Regarding the title of this thread...

It was glaringly obvious that something was wrong with how WDS played out early on.
Instead of fixing the reasons behind the skewed result when everyone was measured by the same yard stick, they just changed how things are measured.

Having the north gate STILL dominates Indar (and corresponding gates on other continents), having the largest population is STILL dominating the server. You're just rewarded differently in a system detached from what's really playing out on the map.

So, in my oppinion, WDS is still ridiculous, they're just doing a better job hiding it.

[ChipMHazard]

One funny thing about the WDS is that you're now punished for focusing on alerts that do not take place on Indar, in the sense that the new rules reward fighting on a populated continent. So when say the TR on Miller tries to get dominating victories on Esamir or Amerish then they are punishing themselves when it comes to WDS points.
Basicly if you want to win WDS then it seems like it's best to stay on Indar at all times, because that's where most of the players are most of the time.

Or have I misunderstood the situation?

[kubacheski]

Regarding the title of this thread...

It was glaringly obvious that something was wrong with how WDS played out early on.
Instead of fixing the reasons behind the skewed result when everyone was measured by the same yard stick, they just changed how things are measured.

Having the north gate STILL dominates Indar (and corresponding gates on other continents), having the largest population is STILL dominating the server. You're just rewarded differently in a system detached from what's really playing out on the map.

So, in my oppinion, WDS is still ridiculous, they're just doing a better job hiding it.

This is called "perception engineering". Changing the way people look at the problem instead of fixing the problem. Oh, not problem, i mean issue. (See what I did there?)

[Malorn]

One funny thing about the WDS is that you're now punished for focusing on alerts that do not take place on Indar, in the sense that the new rules reward fighting on a populated continent.
If enough players leave indar to fight for the alert then it is the alert continent that gains the point value, not Indar.

This is why we added the ability to award points for winning alerts. We haven't enabled it yet due to negative stigma and culture that has developed around Alerts, and because we need to see the scoring results so we can come up with a good value for them.

To correct this problem we want to make sure Alerts are worth enough that if you avoid them you are handing a lot of points to another empire, and if you attend and lose you are at least earning a lot of points due to enemy population shift to the Alert continent.

[EVILPIG]

How about we turn Alerts off for a week and see how things play out?

[Selerox]

It's the North Indar Warpgate. Every time it's the same. Whoever has that has the advantage, it's always been that way and it'll stay that way until something changes.

I'm all in favour of shifting the Indar WG positions, but I genuinely don't know how you could accomplish that without a fairly dramatic redesign. The only thing I can think of is maybe rotating the position of the WGs slightly:

SW Warpgate -> Hvar
North Warpgate -> Mao
SE Warpgate -> Tawrich

That's a pretty crude example, but that's the general idea. Whatever it takes to stop whichever faction has the North WG having a free reign across the North of the continent.

[kubacheski]

If enough players leave indar to fight for the alert then it is the alert continent that gains the point value, not Indar.

This is why we added the ability to award points for winning alerts. We haven't enabled it yet due to negative stigma and culture that has developed around Alerts, and because we need to see the scoring results so we can come up with a good value for them.

To correct this problem we want to make sure Alerts are worth enough that if you avoid them you are handing a lot of points to another empire, and if you attend and lose you are at least earning a lot of points due to enemy population shift to the Alert continent.

So I'm a little confused. You're wanting to leverage the Alert system into WDS scoring to get populations to move from continent to continent? Is this to even out populations across continents or to get people to fight in more places?

If its to even populations, why not put more worth on lower population continents and the pops will balance themselves out across continents as squads go to the lower pop continent that gives more benefit?

If you're running it to get people to fight on other conts, why not explicitly rotate the continent where scores are calculated? Say, i don't know...when warpgates are rotated. Simply rotate the cont. or better yet, why not explicitly have 9 rounds i mean there are 3 different conts and 3 WG locations so there are 9 permutations.

yes I'm being a bit sarcastic there, (not so much about the first one tho) but if you're going to have to orchestrate such a contrived construct to promote some arbitrary "goal" or "engineer" an engagement, just give up on persistent nature of things and go round based.

Or you could duplicate the continents, flip them and put a "II" or "III" on their names, and put WGs between them so there's some global flow to battles. Then you can replace the dupes with new ones as they're created.

[MaxDamage]

I guess it's the VS's time to shine and be hated on:p

Did we stop hating the VS at some point?

[kubacheski]

Did we stop hating the VS at some point?

Hah! dirty Vanu.

[MaxDamage]

What contributes to winning these WDS things?
Is there a video that explains it all somewhere?

[kubacheski]

What contributes to winning these WDS things?
Is there a video that explains it all somewhere?

dunno bout vid, but: Official PS2 Forum post (https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/server-downtime-for-hotfix-october-16-2013-6am-pdt-3pm-cest.154341/)

[MaxDamage]

dunno bout vid, but: Official PS2 Forum post (https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/server-downtime-for-hotfix-october-16-2013-6am-pdt-3pm-cest.154341/)

Yeah thanks, did glance at this. Seems like such wide reaching impersonal goals to me. I've noticed some DWG miller outfit holding large outposts, farming all day on Indar. Seemed unusually keen to keep it, so I guessed they were just trying to boost VS score for WDS. TR randoms were running in there feeding the meat machine most of the day, largely at Crimson Bluff tower. But can organised effort really make a difference next to the natural ebb and flow of the war?

[kubacheski]

But can organised effort really make a difference next to the natural ebb and flow of the war?

Well I think thats the problem, there was no ebb and flow. There was just flow. Too much focus on exp grind which led to steamrolling around continents flipping bases and noone defended, cause holding a base did nothing for you but give a spawn point. It is an orchestrated effort to get people to defend the bases that they have.

Some would suggest that this is working, people are defending bases, but now noone is really moving around much. most just camping the highest populated continent cause that's where the "points" are earned and that's where the bodies are to shoot at.

From Malorn's post, they're going to put some points into Alerts so that people will continent hop on occasion and then the Alert cont will be the highest populated cont til the next alert.

An organized effort can make the flips on the bases where opposition has a foothold. But if you happen to be the faction with the preferred warpgate and have a big population, then you're getting more points, just defend and hold out against the seige as long as you can. Everyone complaining about WDS says the faction with North Indar WG wins. Everyone stays on Indar cause its the high population as the North Indar WG has easiest defense of most of the northern territores so the faction owning it has most of their people there defending. Simply put, its a numbers game.

[Natir]

If enough players leave indar to fight for the alert then it is the alert continent that gains the point value, not Indar.

This is why we added the ability to award points for winning alerts. We haven't enabled it yet due to negative stigma and culture that has developed around Alerts, and because we need to see the scoring results so we can come up with a good value for them.

To correct this problem we want to make sure Alerts are worth enough that if you avoid them you are handing a lot of points to another empire, and if you attend and lose you are at least earning a lot of points due to enemy population shift to the Alert continent.

Alerts are still a joke and just go to whoever has the highest population. People can look at a map where the alert is on and tell who is going to win just by the population numbers and who controls the map. While I was playing a NC character on Mattherson, it was just painful. Not only are the NC inept from organizing, they are on the bottom of the barrel when it comes to population. The times when they are above, there might be maybe one or two fights to even play at while the rest of the continents are completely empty. Alerts and the WDS are not solutions to any of the population imbalances/extremely low populations and the lack of wanting to do anything other than kill people.

Played a little bit on Connery since they are the highest pop server and omg the lag. So much lag I just said fuck this. Those optimizations better be good enough to merge waterson and mattherson or I guarantee people will continue to leave. No one wants to invest money in a game where they can barely find a fight or when they get to a good one, everything just lags and their fps goes to shit. I might add that at least on Connery, you weren't getting killed by random players who are in the top 1% of all players... Funny how all those MLG PRO top players flock to Mattherson..

When I did play and there was an alert, the territory control went to the highest population and the biolab alert went again, to the highest population. We had one biolab and there just were not enough NC on to even hold 1 base... The easiest to defend I might add. There was no "tacticool tactics" involved in taking that base, just numbers and that is what overwhelmed us.

[ChipMHazard]

If enough players leave indar to fight for the alert then it is the alert continent that gains the point value, not Indar.

This is why we added the ability to award points for winning alerts. We haven't enabled it yet due to negative stigma and culture that has developed around Alerts, and because we need to see the scoring results so we can come up with a good value for them.

To correct this problem we want to make sure Alerts are worth enough that if you avoid them you are handing a lot of points to another empire, and if you attend and lose you are at least earning a lot of points due to enemy population shift to the Alert continent.

Good to see that you've already planned for it.

[kubacheski]

Good to see that you've already planned for it.

One would hope. It definitley appears that the Alerts were the first pass at trying to calcualte a "score" in PS2 and WDS is the second. Alerts only exposed too much offense, and WDS exposed too much defense. Combining the two may hit the sweet spot for scoring and rating all 3 factions against one another.

This will then most likely extend an MLG match to the 3rd dimension of 48v48v48 instead of just 48v48. Not only will PS2 have the largest teams, but the addition of a 3rd team to a single match. Anyone know of another game where more than 2 teams compete in the same match? I don't follow eSports and can't seem to place one.

[Malorn]

Alerts are for variety and a change-up from the usual Indar fight. It works when players respond to them.

[Calista]

Alerts are for variety and a change-up from the usual Indar fight. It works when players respond to them.

Might be time to throw away the carrot and use a big stick instead.

[Rolfski]

Instead of the usual counter-clock wise Warpgate rotation, I would love to see a real Warpgate hussle every now and then. So next Warpgate rotation, only switch VS an TR positions please. So VS can fight TR downwards towards Howling Pass for a change.

[EVILPIG]

Alerts are for variety and a change-up from the usual Indar fight. It works when players respond to them.

One of the biggest issues with Alerts is that they are not a change up, they are the norm. Alerts are far too frequent. A couple of patches ago, there was a couple of days without Alerts and it was awesome. The players had their fights and pursued what they wanted, not what the system told them to. If we could get some no Alert days that would be great. Alerts can be turned off on the fly, announce that you're going to try some no alert days and shut them off for a few days. Hell, muster up a Double XP weekend and turn off Alerts.

[Fenrys]

why not explicitly have 9 rounds i mean there are 3 different conts and 3 WG locations so there are 9 permutations.

I think it's 3!^3=216 permutations?

[kubacheski]

I think it's 3!^3=216 permutations?

yea, after Rolfski said rotate just 2 empires in a switch, I knew that made my numbers would be a little off. It's actually 3!*3 cause the rounds would be only on one continent at a time. Not globally scored, i guess, is how to say it, so you don't need global permutations.


But either way, I'm getting dragged into the details, noone needs round based competition in a persistent game. Isn't that kinda what the difference is between persistent worlds and instanced combat? Why bother with the larger framework if you're going to simply slice it up into arbitrary timeframes for an arbitrary scoring system? I mean that's the issue here. Planetside (1 and 2) claim to fame is the persistent world in an FPS. Maps don't reset, the fight never ends, so why try to put in a system that does all the things SOE designed Planetside to extend beyond?

My other problem with it is that balance is difficult to achieve in combat alone. Can you imagine how much unnecessary time it will take to balance the scoring system? Introduce a new way to earn exp, or a new OP weapon, or some people leverage an existing mechanism differently. Doesn't the general flow of who owns the most land and who gets wacked the most determine the "win" condition? Or at least "win feel" for any individual player and/or faction. If a player can't determine from feel alone who's winning and need a few numbers to tell you, your name in lights and a ribbon to say "you were there", there's issues. Why not just give participation awards so everyone has a warm and fuzzy?

Seriously what happens after Round 1 in the WDS? all bases magically go neutral and there's a mass land-rush? What exactly will separate the rounds other than some arbitrary decision of "go" and "stop"?

Get real. The truth of the matter is that PS2 isn't as large and expansive (3 vs dozen conts and no direct intercontinental linkages) as PS1 was in 2003. graphics it wins hands down, big whoop. What's good graphics do for ya when FPS goes to hell in a mid size fight? How long has it taken to introduce a new continent because they have to hand craft every square km? and they're spending their time splitting up the game into weekly rounds of who held land the most. How about make more land so that not every base is contested every 10 minutes? Make intercontinental lattice so there's movement across the universe instead of interior to each of the continents. There's no progress being made... you don't move from one to the other like ants marching across a park from picnic blanket to picnic blanket gobbling up all the sandwiches and cookies. We just sit, swinging from the right battle line to the left battle line. Get bored, jump a cont, oh wait, we're being "urged" to now that alerts will count towards our "score". (Which I'm convinced is just to have a pop lock somewhere other than Indar.)

Bleh....I'm tired of bitchin....WDS is a waste, and PS2 is quickly becoming one too, maybe I should have just said that first.

[Masterr]

How about we turn Alerts off for a week and see how things play out?

bc indar, all day, forever....

sigh.

[BlaxicanX]

Turn alerts off for a week and the game will revert back to what it was pre-alerts.

Indar-side. All day, erry day.

I think people have forgotten why alerts were integrated into the game in the first place. We were given the chance to have community-driven goals/objectives. The community failed.

[Fluke]

Alerts are for variety and a change-up from the usual Indar fight. It works when players respond to them.

If people aren't responding to them sufficiently then increase the reward. Double XP.

But make them far less frequent as Evilpig said.

[Babyfark McGeez]

...

We were given the chance to have community-driven goals/objectives. The community failed.

What? When? We don't have any tools whatsoever to do that. Like...a mission system originally planned to be in at "release" for example.

As for alerts, so long as we don't have an intercontinental lattice and proper home continents, i have to admit i kinda like them. While i still see them as disconnected and artifical and think they should be removed the minute we do have intercontinental warfare, they manage to create a more tangible short term objective.
Unlike this "WDS" nonsense which is simply a disconnected and artifical scoreboard slapped onto a game where having no scoreboard or winner is one of the major driving points.

But understanding planetside is definetely not one of the strong points of the devs, so my fear is when we finally get to have our intercontinental warfare in place they will still rotate home continents, keep the alerts and introduce a new "WDS". Ahwell, i will wait for that crucial time period after the optimization to make my final verdict on this game. True MMOFPS or dull cash of duty turd, we'll see.