Baptist
2014-02-11, 02:23 AM
Posted by Malorn
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/wds-preseason-2-changes-and-feedback.172500/
Hello Auraxians!
We’ve heard your feedback on the new WDS preseason, and we’re going to be making some changes to it, both short and long-term.
The purpose of this preseason was to address some of the bigger concerns from our first preseason, which was warpgate positioning, reward allocation, event visibility, and player agency in the event. We took some big steps in this preseason to alleviate all of those issues, but we also had an oversight that had an unintended negative impact on player behavior.
Discovering these issues and gathering data is the purpose of this preseason. We’re listening to your feedback and taking it seriously. We want to get it right and with your help we'll get there.
Here are the top concerns we have received from you and what we are doing to address them.
Personal Contribution Effects
As a result of the adding personal rewards for participation we got some undesired player behavior. We received the feedback, and we can also quantify it. While our capture rate, defend rate, player deaths, and mean playtime are all up from last week, the average number of deaths per player per successful capture decreased by about 11% across all capture events, which indicates a significant reduction in fight intensity. This is consistent with player reports of not having as good of fights and rampant ghost capping for easy WDS points.
We believe this behavior stems from players avoiding fights in favor of easy and guaranteed WDS points for captures, and that the defense rewards are not lucrative enough to motivate players to defend territory. This was not one of the goals of the system and we apologize for the negative impact it has had on your gameplay experience.
Long-term, our ideal solution is to scale all objective rewards with effort and risk such that players are greatly rewarded for challenging encounters, and they are rewarded little for effortless ones. We want good fights to be the most rewarding objectives, and not just for WDS points. We will also be better defining what a successful “defense” is so that it is more intuitive and less exploitable. However, these are not changes we can realistically make on short notice. We cannot provide an ETA for those, but we want you to know that we are aware of the bigger issue that extends beyond WDS and that we plan on addressing it when we can.
In the short term (as in a Hotfix in the next few days) we will be adjusting capture and defense scoring to put more emphasis on defense and make attack less lucrative. We are swapping the values and scaling for captures and defenses, so defenses will be worth a lot more than captures. This will make successful defense significantly more lucrative than captures for accruing WDS points. We know this also means they will be cheesed more, but we believe it is worth it to try to encourage more fight creation. We also know that scoring rule changes mid-season are bad, but we believe this one is not giving one empire an advantage over another and would be welcomed by players.
Here are the new starting and max values for capture and defense.
Small Outposts
Capture: 2 -> 8
Defend: 3 -> 25
Large Outposts
Capture: 4 -> 16
Defend: 4-> 16 (unchanged, see below)
Bio Labs
Capture: 8 -> 32
Defend: 8 -> 32 (unchanged, see below)
Tech Plants & Amp Stations
Capture: 8 -> 32
Defend: 12 -> 100
Bio labs and large outposts have a smaller defend scaling because they have 3+ points and are easy to cheese and get a lot of extra defense points out of it. We didn't increase the value on these so the entire event is less likely to boil down to cheesing these two facility types.
Personal Rewards
For this preseason event we did not go wild with the rewards because we wanted to see the impact of the event and get it tuned before we give out the good stuff. The current rewards are most beneficial to free-players, but we also understand the frustration of paying players who don’t need boosts or limited-use camos. For our first season of WDS we will have much better rewards, and the rewards will be more applicable to all players.
The Elusive “4th Faction”
This is often cited as a problem and is brought up a lot in the context of WDS advantage or disadvantage. We have been investigating this phenomenon to see just how impactful this behavior is. It is ongoing and we have not decided on any action yet, but we wanted to share some of the initial findings.
We looked the timeline trend of players who change characters on the same account, and found them to be about 1% of the population across all servers on a given day. They don’t all switch to the same faction, though they do tend to sway to one faction or another over the course of several hours. This does not account for multiple-accounts, but we are trying to get at that information too.
We are continuing to study the 4th faction, particularly how they related to logoff/logon rates, and longer-term switching such as those who follow particular warpgate rotations, and changes that occur around alerts starting and stopping.
Population Imbalance
One of the primary goals of this preseason is to closely examine scoring patterns under active season conditions with normalized warpgates to understand the impact of population. We will use this to tune a small handicap the empire scoring for under-populated empires in future seasons. The impact is not obvious and not as big as geographical position, and there is a lot of variability in the scores. Empires that can be classified as over-populated perform very differently compared to one another, and same goes for the empires that are considered under-populated. The goal is a reasonable and fair handicap and to get there we need some quality data from this preseason.
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/wds-preseason-2-changes-and-feedback.172500/
Hello Auraxians!
We’ve heard your feedback on the new WDS preseason, and we’re going to be making some changes to it, both short and long-term.
The purpose of this preseason was to address some of the bigger concerns from our first preseason, which was warpgate positioning, reward allocation, event visibility, and player agency in the event. We took some big steps in this preseason to alleviate all of those issues, but we also had an oversight that had an unintended negative impact on player behavior.
Discovering these issues and gathering data is the purpose of this preseason. We’re listening to your feedback and taking it seriously. We want to get it right and with your help we'll get there.
Here are the top concerns we have received from you and what we are doing to address them.
Personal Contribution Effects
As a result of the adding personal rewards for participation we got some undesired player behavior. We received the feedback, and we can also quantify it. While our capture rate, defend rate, player deaths, and mean playtime are all up from last week, the average number of deaths per player per successful capture decreased by about 11% across all capture events, which indicates a significant reduction in fight intensity. This is consistent with player reports of not having as good of fights and rampant ghost capping for easy WDS points.
We believe this behavior stems from players avoiding fights in favor of easy and guaranteed WDS points for captures, and that the defense rewards are not lucrative enough to motivate players to defend territory. This was not one of the goals of the system and we apologize for the negative impact it has had on your gameplay experience.
Long-term, our ideal solution is to scale all objective rewards with effort and risk such that players are greatly rewarded for challenging encounters, and they are rewarded little for effortless ones. We want good fights to be the most rewarding objectives, and not just for WDS points. We will also be better defining what a successful “defense” is so that it is more intuitive and less exploitable. However, these are not changes we can realistically make on short notice. We cannot provide an ETA for those, but we want you to know that we are aware of the bigger issue that extends beyond WDS and that we plan on addressing it when we can.
In the short term (as in a Hotfix in the next few days) we will be adjusting capture and defense scoring to put more emphasis on defense and make attack less lucrative. We are swapping the values and scaling for captures and defenses, so defenses will be worth a lot more than captures. This will make successful defense significantly more lucrative than captures for accruing WDS points. We know this also means they will be cheesed more, but we believe it is worth it to try to encourage more fight creation. We also know that scoring rule changes mid-season are bad, but we believe this one is not giving one empire an advantage over another and would be welcomed by players.
Here are the new starting and max values for capture and defense.
Small Outposts
Capture: 2 -> 8
Defend: 3 -> 25
Large Outposts
Capture: 4 -> 16
Defend: 4-> 16 (unchanged, see below)
Bio Labs
Capture: 8 -> 32
Defend: 8 -> 32 (unchanged, see below)
Tech Plants & Amp Stations
Capture: 8 -> 32
Defend: 12 -> 100
Bio labs and large outposts have a smaller defend scaling because they have 3+ points and are easy to cheese and get a lot of extra defense points out of it. We didn't increase the value on these so the entire event is less likely to boil down to cheesing these two facility types.
Personal Rewards
For this preseason event we did not go wild with the rewards because we wanted to see the impact of the event and get it tuned before we give out the good stuff. The current rewards are most beneficial to free-players, but we also understand the frustration of paying players who don’t need boosts or limited-use camos. For our first season of WDS we will have much better rewards, and the rewards will be more applicable to all players.
The Elusive “4th Faction”
This is often cited as a problem and is brought up a lot in the context of WDS advantage or disadvantage. We have been investigating this phenomenon to see just how impactful this behavior is. It is ongoing and we have not decided on any action yet, but we wanted to share some of the initial findings.
We looked the timeline trend of players who change characters on the same account, and found them to be about 1% of the population across all servers on a given day. They don’t all switch to the same faction, though they do tend to sway to one faction or another over the course of several hours. This does not account for multiple-accounts, but we are trying to get at that information too.
We are continuing to study the 4th faction, particularly how they related to logoff/logon rates, and longer-term switching such as those who follow particular warpgate rotations, and changes that occur around alerts starting and stopping.
Population Imbalance
One of the primary goals of this preseason is to closely examine scoring patterns under active season conditions with normalized warpgates to understand the impact of population. We will use this to tune a small handicap the empire scoring for under-populated empires in future seasons. The impact is not obvious and not as big as geographical position, and there is a lot of variability in the scores. Empires that can be classified as over-populated perform very differently compared to one another, and same goes for the empires that are considered under-populated. The goal is a reasonable and fair handicap and to get there we need some quality data from this preseason.