Gameplay: Periodic Randomization of the Uncaps

[Malorn]

This is a simple idea based on one I had before about randomizing continental connections.

Essentially one problem in Planetside is staleness - fighting the same enemy from the same direction at the same base every night. After a while we get really sick of seeing the same situation over and over. To provide an example, in PS1 in the early days, the VS always attacked on Cyssor from Orisha, and the NC always attacked from Ekera (TR had Wele). It was always this same attack pattern over and over again. It wans't until they mixed up the continents and introduced broadcast gates that we got to see what it was like to fight on some of the other continents from different perspectives.

Since we have uncap bases on every continent for all 3 empires I can see this same behavior happening if the uncaps are static for each empire. The fronts will always draw the same way, there will be bases we rarely see and we'll always be fighting from the same direction.

This idea is simple - mix it up periodically, such as once every couple weeks or once a month! Just go through each continent and randomly swap two of the empire uncaps, or rotate all 3 empires (should do both since rotating can also ret repetitive. This gives us different perspectives on invading the continent and exposes us to new tactics and gamplay which we would not have seen had we not been attacking from that new different direction.

The benefits are more varied gameplay and keeping things fresh so we don't get the same battles.