Gameplay: Endgame Options

[Mechzz]

Not sure if the Devs come here, but this idea came out of the endgame thread over on the forums. Strikes me as something that could help peeps to carry on playing the game.

Background
I totally love planetside. I've played it more than I've played any other computer game. About 6 months of my life went to it. And I don't think I'm unusual, lots of peeps played for a year or less.

Good as it was, it got samey and there was no real sense of over-arching story or achievement. So you move on once it gets stale. SOE obviously want to avoid that, so here's an idea to help me keep giving them my money.

Idea
Incentivise the empires by spawning special empire mission choices when a certain condition is met. The condition can be good (we got Indar, yay!) or bad (we got pushed off Indar, boo!).

So when somebody gets continent lock on Indar the CR5's get to choose from 3 options:
1. Hold at least 60% of all resources for next 24 hours
2. Hold at least 3 out of the 6 main bases continuously for the next 48 hours
3. Stop any other empire from taking 1 main base for the next 72 hours.

Or when you get pushed off Indar completely:
1. Retake 1 main base within 12 hours
2. Take 50% of resources within 24 hours
3. Achieve continent lock in 48 hours.

2 riskier than 1 and 3 riskier than 2, so a bigger bonus would apply if achieved.

Bonus = greater resource generation, bonus to empire health or armour for a short period. Mission medals could be handed out to the "vets".

These would be missions you could choose to take part in, and would spawn all the sub-missions you could want.

And the zerg could still zerg. This would allow peeps to find their niche within achieving the overall mission.

I also don't think it would get stale too quickly because it is a natural extension of the basically exciting gameplay.

You could track which empire wins the most missions each months, adding another level of metagame.

Downsides
I'm not too good at foreseeing these, but empire hopping is obvious. Would we need to lock players to an empire in the bonus mission period?

Oh, and to avoid ghost hacking problems, set a minimum number of kills to be suffered and/or deaths to be inflicted to meet the mission success criteria.

Summary
This idea fits well with the natural flow of the game. It rewards an empire for doing well in a concrete way and doesn't require the top level players to disappear into their own "end game world". In fact, it encourages them to stay and lead us zerglings to greater victory.

I'd love to hear the Devs thoughts on this, but I know they have other things on their minds right now.

Thanks for reading this far.

[SgtMookie]

I like your idea but more on a larger scale. To push for world domination like in PS1 have those bonus only happen when all continets are controlled by one empire with a larger bonus for this.

Once all continents capture
(All players in that empire)
Immedinate 100% HP bonus - first 24 hours
Immedinate 100% XP bonus - first 72 hours
All resource purchase 75% off - first 72 hours
Resource bonus 50% Extra collected - first 48 hours
3 free skill upgrades - each empire player

Above is just some ideas that I could think of. This would make it more of a challenge to obtain continent locks and also it would make other empires work there butts off to stop you.

[Mechzz]

Thanks for the comments Mookie, these would be great additions to the extra levels of follow-on mission choices that could be spawned once a certain "victory condition" had been met.

I also like the idea of getting my "Auraxian VS War Hero" medal after I'm part of the team that achieves that particular feat first in PS2

[Warborn]

I like the idea of having end game states where the map resets and one side gets a perk for having won that "campaign", to borrow WW2OL's term.

One thing I worry about with something like this, however, is that victory could be too easy to achieve. I'm not sure I like the idea of having win conditions which take place over a weekend. That doesn't feel very epic to me. I think weekend-long events which are similar to your idea in some ways (do X and get Y bonus for a while) would be really cool, but having a victory scenario should be something that takes weeks or months to achieve, I feel. Otherwise it trivializes the thing.

Furthermore, "CR5s". CR5s in Planetside were just shitheels who grinded squads for longer than other people. Idiots like those people should not have the authority to dictate stuff like empire-wide benefits. Were there to be any player decisions to be made, I would say the entire empire, maybe the entire empire excluding people who aren't paid members with characters over X cert points, should be able to vote for it.

[Malorn]

I prefer a DAOC-like End Game for a continent - capture and hold 3 artifacts.

Mechanics:
- Artifacts default spawn in a little ancient Vanu shrine, one near each warpgate.
- Artifacts have a unique benefit per-continent, and he benefit increases non-linearly the more artifacts an empire controls.
- Artifact benefits affect the entire empire on all continents.
- Artifacts are "captured" by bringing them to a facility your empire controls, sort of like an LLU from PS1.
- Only 1 artifact is allowed per facility, so controlling more than 1 means the empire must own more than 1 facility.
- Artifacts held too long in the same facility de-spawn (thinking days, not hours)
- Once placed, the artifacts cannot be removed from a facility unless they despawn or another empire captures the facility, at which time it must be moved to a different facility.
- If the artifact is not placed into a facility after a certain period of time it will despawn.
- Artifact benefit scaling is something along the lines of 2% (1), 4%(2), 10%(all 3).

Example artifact benefits:
- Vehicle health bonus
- Infantry health bonus
- Ground Vehicle damage bonus
- Air vehicle damage bonus
- Infantry damage bonus
- Resource requirement reduction (might be too OP and mess with balance)
- Bonus resource awards


I think this is a good replacement for continent locks or "win" conditions. They could make it a big global achievement when an empire controls all 3 artifacts from a continent.

[Warborn]

Originally Posted by Malorn

I think this is a good replacement for continent locks or "win" conditions. They could make it a big global achievement when an empire controls all 3 artifacts from a continent.

I don't think it even approaches a replacement. A gameplay mechanic which simply rewards you for holding modules like in Core Combat doesn't relate to the desire for some people to allow for the war to temporarily end with one side being victorious.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Warborn

I don't think it even approaches a replacement. A gameplay mechanic which simply rewards you for holding modules like in Core Combat doesn't relate to the desire for some people to allow for the war to temporarily end with one side being victorious.

The war "temporarily ending" was always a bad thing. Lull, boring, nothing going on, dead time, etc. Then you had a further lull as empires had to start a fight somewhere else.

It almost always came down to maneuvering to double team one empire or the other, and avoiding getting double-teamed yourself.

The only way you really took a continent in PS1 was by double-teaming some other empire and gobbling up much of the continent before they could adequately respond. It nearly always came down to numbers. In the early days it was getting a pop lock on a continent before the other empire, because on those days you could get over 55-66% of the pop for a single empire on the continent and then steamroll it.

That whole mess was rather horrible gameplay, led to some really lame tactics, lots of dead time, and rarely was it a situation where both sides are evenly matched and one clearly pushes out the other. More commonly you had a stalemate and the 3rd empire would push in on one of the two sides, but they wouldn't commit enough to create a stalemate themselves, the'd just cause one side to lose.

The artifact idea is not the same as modules. They can't be held at the same base, which requires you to hold at least 1/3 of the continent, and with such a clear bonus both of the other empires will be gunning for you trying ot get one of those artifacts back to lessen the global bonus that empire is receiving. It also gives you a reason to attack deep into an enemy territory and not just fight at the center in a big stalemate.

It gives you a clear reason to fight on one continent vs another, unique benefits to each continent, and a victory condition without actually clearing out the continent and creating all the poor gameplay experiences that PS1 had as a result.