Resource Denial: PS1 vs PS2

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Sirisian, I re-read your post. I have a difficult time understanding many of your posts because I don't see a clear Problem -> Solution mapping, or an enumeration of the goals of the design.

Problem: Allow strategic moves beyond the front lines to affect player purchasing power (resource denial).
Players need a way to attack bases not on the front lines which have an effect on the front lines. However, you don't want a system where someone has to babysit a base more than 2 tiles back from the front line and defend it all the time. The generator concept allows weighting of the tiles by percentages to directly effect how a player spends resources. If a tank costs say 100 Nanites to pull and someone downs a connected generator then power is diverted from the base to power the other base so you get hit with a cost and it's now 120 Nanites to pull the same vehicle. Losing a tower or outpost also cuts into benefits so players will immediately see a problem. (Pulling a base deeper in controlled territory can be done with no penalty). So the solution evolves into a system that focuses on players fighting on the front lines for the most part.

That and as other mentioned you don't want to cut off player's ability to purchase certain vehicles. Ideally you just want to cut into their spending power, not their earning power. Subtle difference, for attacking someone's earning potential, which would be based on their own gameplay, not the factions.

Problem: Allow strategic moves in deep territory still.
Territory should have the ability to be taken strategically behind front lines as mentioned. The solution was then taking down generators and holding them for adjacent cells affects hack times. This allows both the taking of front lines bases while also large scale strategy if multiple generators are taken down. This also allows battles all across the front line, not focused on one base.

Problem: Current resource system is complex.
I also simplified all the proposed solutions down to two resources removing the complexity of balancing a four resource system that the developers proposed. Auraxium for cert purchasing, and Nanites for every play style. The proposed gameplay elements support this.

Problem: Players won't feel the immediacy of objectives being lost.
The proposed system for creating resource drains by requiring resources for all non-stock weapons, certs, and ammo requires that there be a continuous drain on the resources. Pulling from a base with one adjacent generator connected that's down costs 20% more Nanites. Some bases have multiple connections to bases. Dropping 3 adjacent base generators completely wipes the pulling power of a base allowing resource denial in a fair way. Players will be forced to retreat and defend bases on a strategic scale so they can wage war on the front lines efficiently. However player's themselves aren't getting hit with their resources being taken away. They are merely having their options from where to spend them removed. They will invariably view this as fair compared to the developer's and your proposed solution.

Problem: Casual players that play only 2 hours should not have their play style limited.
The loyalty system places each player in full control of how many resources they earn by actively completing missions and helping their faction. Their purchasing power is the only thing limited which is based locally meaning if they want to pull a tank they can, but they might need to pull it from a tower for the same cost since a base is currently experiencing efficiency problems due to generator or the lack of tower bonuses.

Originally Posted by Malorn

Back to denial - lets try to keep it simple as possible and as close to the current design as we can manage. That makes it not only more realistic for them to actually adopt but also least likely to cause problems with other related game systems. Complete overhauls of systems will probably happen in PS2 but they'll happen well after release as part of significant content releases (like EVE online has done).

I'm indifferent to when it gets implemented. I'm just stating your "fix" is flawed and simply makes the problem worse by perpetuating a territory gain resource model instead of denying resource indirectly while still allowing players to accrue resources. If they implement your method or any other one instead of the one I proposed it will just take much longer until a balanced and fun system is implemented, but if that's how it has to be then okay.

Interesting tweet from Higby:

Originally Posted by mhigby

I've been following that thread, lots of supposition there is wrong, there is more complexity in our system than you guys think

Apparently we're missing some details from their system.