WDS - You serious SOE?

Babyfark McGeez · 2014-02-26, 03:04 AM

Ok, so here i go, wanting to see how amerish turned out (some of the bases i liked, some were atrocious as usual), and guess what, amerish had a queue.
So allright, i stay on indar then for a while.

I noticed that TR Miller (which i was playing then) pretty much only held Allatum on indar (while having the south eastern WG no less). Curious as to why every single TR would hang out in that remote facility and ignoring everything else i went and checked it out.

That's when i realized that the "WDS" was responsible for indar being unplayable as TR, and here is why:
You get 32 WDS points for "defending" Allatum, which will happen as soon as someone flips a point and you flip it back. So all TR did was hang around Allatum, wait for a point to flip and then get it back for 32 points. And that's pretty much all TR did on indar everytime i logged on (which was several days and quite some hours mind you).
So i decided what the hell, went to allatum, went afk, watched a few movies and series while wiggling the mouse every now and then and ended up with 900+ WDS points while not moving a fucking finger or even watching the damn screen.

And while i think the rewards are something nice for F2P players and a good idea, is that really the result SOE desired with this WDS crap? Each time i tried to actually play the game on indar, i eventually gave up because 90%+ of the TR population was hanging around at Allatum. Not only did this completely destroy the actual game for everyone not wanting to AFK-Farm WDS points, but it also made the WDS itself even more stupid.

So to summarize: People ask for some meaningful, overarching objectives. The devs come up with a scoreboard and additional xp bar, probably the most lazy and least "planetside" way of adding "depth" to the game.
Then they say they thought long and hard about this WDS stuff, and the result is people getting WDS points for ignoring the game and idling in some remote biolab to exploit a loophole that should have been fucking obvious.
And the people wanting to play the actual damn game are being screwed over.

So yeah, you serious SOE? That's really the best you can come up with after thinking long and hard?

At this point i'm not sure if even intercontinental warfare or resources/ants can redeem this crap, because chances are they will manage to fuck that up too (or just make it completely braindead because they assume their console players are imbeciles).

Heavygain · 2014-02-26, 03:45 AM

I have not witnessed this Allatum behavior at any point at all, although I admit I have only been back for a little under a week.

Babyfark McGeez · 2014-02-26, 04:30 AM

Well, i played for three or four consecutive days for quite some hours each in the last week, and (atleast on miller) this was happening every single damn day.

Maybe i just had bad luck with the server/faction/continent/time of the day, but the underlying problem was pretty obvious: WDS is ridiculously easy to exploit, and doing so completely undermines what the gameplay is supposed to be, thus screwing over people who do not want to farm WDS points.
Aside from the "let's all hug the 32 points multi cap point facility" exploit, i also often saw people yelling "Let NC/VS/TR cap a point for WDS" in many different base defenses, and i even found myself hesitant to quickly respond to a point flip in progress, because "free stuff".

From my observation they simply didn't think this shit through. And it was allready an incredibly lazy idea to begin with.

Baptist · 2014-02-26, 04:58 AM

It's any Bio Lab on Indar, TR will sit and Farm a few of my guys raged about it being the reason TR is winning the WDS Bio Labs should be removed from the point system.

Fara · 2014-02-26, 05:02 AM

WDS has been a pretty bad experience for myself. Vet player from day1, i've got 12 months of boost left on my main character and all WDS does is give me more 1 hour boosts (up to 20 so far). No weapons, no camo.

And to top it all off, its changed the mindset of the 3 factions ' zerg army' so its very hard to play normally or get a decent fight. Stuck with 2 options, fight while heavily outnumbering enemy or suicide attack vastly superior numbers (even with 1~2 squads).

I'll be glad when this is over and SOE rethink it.

Gimpylung · 2014-02-26, 07:52 AM

This absolutely has been happening on Miller all week. All empires are guilty of doing it but some are worse than others as the utterly pointless WDS scoreboard will indicate. TR are by far the worst offenders and I pity the genuine TR players who have denied Tawrich practically all week due to most of their pop being in an isolated bio dome on the opposite side of the cont.

Late at night I've even seen people log in alts to intentionally flip flop points to generate WDS.

I suppose SOE will tell us they are using pre-season to tweak the mechanics but in reality the whole concept needs to be abandoned because its absolute crap, makes no sense regarding the limited lore of the game and is a pathetic and tacky placeholder for a more meaningful and authentic meta-game.

WDS is idiotic and breaks the game, simply changing the amount of points awarded isn't going to fix it, it needs to be abandoned.

ringring · 2014-02-26, 08:04 AM

Originally Posted by Gimpylung

This absolutely has been happening on Miller all week. All empires are guilty of doing it but some are worse than others as the utterly pointless WDS scoreboard will indicate. TR are by far the worst offenders and I pity the genuine TR players who have denied Tawrich practically all week due to most of their pop being in an isolated bio dome on the opposite side of the cont.

Late at night I've even seen people log in alts to intentionally flip flop points to generate WDS.

I suppose SOE will tell us they are using pre-season to tweak the mechanics but in reality the whole concept needs to be abandoned because its absolute crap, makes no sense regarding the limited lore of the game and is a pathetic and tacky placeholder for a more meaningful and authentic meta-game.

WDS is idiotic and breaks the game, simply changing the amount of points awarded isn't going to fix it, it needs to be abandoned.

I agree with this and I've never been in favour of WDS at a conceptual level regardless of how they tweak the scoring system.

But I have to say apart from this thread I've hardly seen any complaints of it since the point for capture and defence were swapped around (other than folk moaning about the value of the rewards they are given).

In fact because of the lack of complaints I'd assumed it was all going swimmingly, or nearly so.

almalino · 2014-02-26, 08:09 AM

Why people even fight for WDS when rewards is so small like 3 hours of Resource boosts???

Gimpylung · 2014-02-26, 08:21 AM

Originally Posted by ringring

In fact because of the lack of complaints I'd assumed it was all going swimmingly, or nearly so.

Thats the most tragic thing really. Nearly a year and a half of deathmatchy mechanics has lowered the expectations of an unlock driven playerbase I fear.

Snoopy · 2014-02-26, 10:38 AM

Same problem on Briggs. Not as bad as it used to be, but often see over orders/region people telling them to 'let the enemy cap x point so we get de pointZzz!11!/'. smh

We suffer from a lack of fights as is, due to our tiny population (and the fact that Australia doesn't have the population to grow, no less sustain its own server tbh) and WDS has done absolutely nothing but make things even worse.

The rewards are absolute shite anyway.

Crator · 2014-02-26, 10:43 AM

This was initially discussed in another thread not long after they first implemented the new WDS mechanics. Not many posted in the thread though. I described how to gain WDS points this way in that thread.

New WDS broken; Needs serious, immediate refinement

Babyfark McGeez · 2014-02-26, 11:16 AM

Yeah, i noticed i posted a general rant in that thread, but i haven't been playing untill i decided to check out new amerish a few days ago.
If i would have played, i surely would have added my impressions in your thread.

This seems to be another general problem though, the interest in PS2 just isn't there anymore (not only me personally). I mean just look at this board and the dates of threads and last posts.
Maybe everyone moved on. Or maybe everyone accepted the corporate bullshit that is Planetside 2 and became totally jaded.
Sadly the population (and population imbalances) i noticed when playing last week seemed to imply the former, people simply went away.

Emperor Newt · 2014-02-26, 11:22 AM

WDS actually made me play less and from looking at our Mumble server activity it seems like I am not the only one in our outfit. I am really starting to despise WDS. Attaching more numbers to gameplay mechanics doesn't make them better.

KesTro · 2014-02-26, 02:11 PM

Originally Posted by almalino

Why people even fight for WDS when rewards is so small like 3 hours of Resource boosts???

Because working 12 hours some of us can only play a few hours at a time. :P

Crator · 2014-02-26, 02:17 PM

It's been stated by Luperza in a thread on the official forums that the rewards are insignifcant because this is still pre-season. She said the rewards would be much better when it's the real deal.

The last few times I've received the 1st tier reward I got a 3-day XP booster though.