One of the biggest flaws with PS2 at the moment is that (generally speaking) all the fighting happens on Indar, which gets pretty repetitive. Decent fights on Esamir or Amerish seem rare, and are often very unbalanced (one faction decides to cap, nobody bothers to defend, and a mini-zerg just steamrollers the whole place).
So I've been wondering how we could encourage more fighting on the other continents, and my concept for this is to add an overall score for each of the three empires, and then announce a winner at the end of every week (or maybe month?) - along with a prize in the form of XP for everyone in that empire.
Empire Points
Awarded for:
- Capturing a territory (with a multiplier for winning a Challenge)
- Defending a territory (with a multiplier for winning a Challenge)
- Holding a territory for an hour (score multiplier increases every hour, up to a certain cap)
- Capturing a continent
- Holding a continent for an hour (score multiplier increases every hour, up to a certain cap)
Ideally the scaling bonus for holding land means that constantly swapping territory and always attacking is less valuable than carving out a defensible 'state' on each continent and then consistently holding it - with border zones that change hands often, while only a well-organised attack will take the more secure 'homeland' areas. Of course this would need to go hand-in-hand with changes to make defending more viable in the first place...
Challenges
Finally empire commanders would gain the ability to periodically issue a challenge to a rival empire over one of the territories they control. This would function as a kind of bet - with the attacking empire scoring a large bonus if they successfully take the challenged territory, and the defender scoring a large bonus if they defend it.
These bonus points would be subtracted from the other empire's score - so a trailing empire can challenge the leader, and risk their own points in an attempt to close in on their lead. The stakes of a challenge would be based on the current 'holding' bonus for that area - i.e. the longer the defender has held it, the more points it's worth in a challenge.
Once a challenge is issued, the territory would be locked for a while (ten minutes?) becoming uncapturable to give the defenders time to organise (generators/turrets/terminals would likewise become invincible/unhackable).
Weekly Winner
At the end of the week, players of each empire would earn an XP bonus based on their empire's score - with a bonus award if their empire was the winner. This XP would be awarded whether or not the player is online at the time, but only if they participated in at least one successful capture or defence that week.
Ideally this would make people feel that every capture or defence actually matters, that holding territory is important and that they cannot afford to ignore Amerish and Esamir - in case their rivals earn an unbeatable lead by holding them unchallenged.
tl;dr: award empire-wide score for capping and holding territory, and give an XP prize to players every week based on that score. This should encourage people to care about the meta-game, rather than just grinding kills.
What do people think?
2013-01-14, 05:07 AM
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