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.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Sirisian

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.

You are misreading my post. I haven't proposed any silver bullet "fix" - just ideas on how the problem might be alleviated, but I have yet to find a set of ideas together that I think creates a good system and meets their stated goals, yours included. I created the thread to have a good discussion and get other thoughts from folks because outside perspectives are always good.

I also disagree with your assessment.

Lots of great contributions in this thread. There are some recurring themes that are solid, like having resource-related structures/objectives in territories that can indirectly impact other territories. You yourself mentioned this theme. Guild Wars 2 has a model like this and their motivation as to provide meaningful things to do for different sized guilds, so there could be the massive battles, but also smaller fights and confrontations that are fun and meaningful in the grand scheme of things.

Interesting tweet from Higby:

Apparently we're missing some details from their system.

Of course we are. Compared to other things they haven't talked much about the resource system, and most of the information we do have about it is nearly a year old. It would not surprise me that some of the information has changed, but all we have to go on is what they've told us. This is a macro-economic aspect of the game and the problems discussed here are not problems that are readily observable on a small scale.

They've focused on creating a first-rate shooter experience and that is of course vital to the success of the game. It makes sense not to talk about the macro aspects all that much at this point, but this is an MMO - the macro aspects are what makes it different. That's the most interest part to me. A COD/BF like shooter clone in sci-fi isn't particularly interesting. MMO with a huge persistent world and strategic objectives creates grand achievement not possible in a session shooter - that's interesting to me. So naturally I study it. And my resulting conclusions are part of the subject of this thread.

Knowing which suppositions are allegedly incorrect would be helpful. I could cite the things we know but it is possible the design has changed since the information was given to us. If previous information is no longer valid then that would change things. I also wouldn't objecto to them telling us how it actually works.

[Higby]

Good thoughts in this thread. A lot of valid concerns for sure, and a lot of stuff that we've sort of found solutions or possible solutions (we'll see when beta starts and people actually actively metagame) to some of these issues. I'm not going to go piece by piece through all the ideas and respond, but a couple things I wanted to clarify:

1 - it's not just kills that grant resources in moment-to-moment gameplay, any score generating event (healing, spotting, repairing, capturing, vehicle destruction, etc) will all generate resources. This moment-to-moment gain is also there for empires that are super pushed back, if you don't own any (or very little) territory that is generating resources for you, it's designed to give you enough to sustain fights while you recapture areas.

2 - re: Malorn's initial idea of removing resources when territory gets captured... I think this would be pretty difficult to pull off fairly. People would either log out when their territory was about to get capped so they didn't get the punishment, or we'd have to punish people who weren't even online which seems odd, especially if you log in in the middle of or right after a big territory losing streak.

3 - our influence system is going to have more effects than just territory capture bonus, things like longer respawn times, vehicle timers, resource costs, sphere of influence for deploying galaxies so you have to be further out from a base to set up a mobile spawn point, are all things we're planning on being associated with the influence system - which effects and their degree will be tuned a lot during beta

4 - the current maps are showing temporary resource values, we will have a more varied landscape at launch. The idea of making frontier territory more valuable is interesting Malorn, I'll have to chew on that a bit.

5 - we've talked quite a bit about having continental resource pools per empire vs per player, so if your empire owns 100 units of Alloys you can spawn a tank, but if they own 80 you cant. We've sort of gone away from this for a variety of reasons, most notably is it really discourages people to begin campaigns on continents where they don't already have strong resource yeilds, makes an empire that has dominance over a continent extremely hard to break, whereas if you can earn resource elsewhere and use them to go to war on other conts it fixes that.

6 - it's possible for us to do bonuses based on connectivity, i.e. if my empire owns two separate chunks of territory on a continent i may get a lessened yield until they're "connected" to my warpgate - again, that's something we've discussed and we're open to doing if it helps add strategic depth, but we sort of want to see how things work "as is" first.

Whew! Okay, carry on TheorySiding.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by DviddLeff

Great post Malorn - as always!

This is a serious problem that you have hit dead on - the territory system is great to get fights away from bases but resources appear too abundant behind the lines for it to be a major strategic factor.

Some great ideas here - I particularly like weighted resource nodes and the strategic option to knock out resource flow by destroying/disabling some kind of in game structure like an extractor. I especially like this option if players could add extractors to regions themselves, boosting the resource flow but making it more of a target.

As you say the "shield" of a personal resource pool makes the immediate effect a problem - and without a system that will feel artificial I do not see how this can be avoided unless ALL equipment different to default kit costs resources.

I too like the idea having resource disruption without capturing the territory. I like the idea of the weighted nodes, though I'm fairly certain they already have this.

The player-constructed resource enhancements is interesting. When I read that I thought of the eventual plan for outfit-owned structures, and how Smed likes sandboxy EVE-like stuff. Having outfits plop down a structure that improves resource harvesting that might become a strategic objective feels right up that alley. The general idea of developing the land is interesting, though it might take away from the pacing and the action.

I would expect the resource pools we see now aren't the final resource pools. The pool size and values we've seen so far don't seem to jive well with the idea of never feeling like you have enough resources. If I have a resource pool big enough to pull a dozen vehicles that could last me all night.

Then there's resource boosts....eugh, I won't go there this time.

[Synapse]

Originally Posted by Higby

Good thoughts in this thread. A lot of valid concerns for sure, and a lot of stuff that we've sort of found solutions or possible solutions (we'll see when beta starts and people actually actively metagame) to some of these issues. I'm not going to go piece by piece through all the ideas and respond, but a couple things I wanted to clarify:

1 - it's not just kills that grant resources in moment-to-moment gameplay, any score generating event (healing, spotting, repairing, capturing, vehicle destruction, etc) will all generate resources. This moment-to-moment gain is also there for empires that are super pushed back, if you don't own any (or very little) territory that is generating resources for you, it's designed to give you enough to sustain fights while you recapture areas.

2 - re: Malorn's initial idea of removing resources when territory gets captured... I think this would be pretty difficult to pull off fairly. People would either log out when their territory was about to get capped so they didn't get the punishment, or we'd have to punish people who weren't even online which seems odd, especially if you log in in the middle of or right after a big territory losing streak.

3 - our influence system is going to have more effects than just territory capture bonus, things like longer respawn times, vehicle timers, resource costs, sphere of influence for deploying galaxies so you have to be further out from a base to set up a mobile spawn point, are all things we're planning on being associated with the influence system - which effects and their degree will be tuned a lot during beta

4 - the current maps are showing temporary resource values, we will have a more varied landscape at launch. The idea of making frontier territory more valuable is interesting Malorn, I'll have to chew on that a bit.

5 - we've talked quite a bit about having continental resource pools per empire vs per player, so if your empire owns 100 units of Alloys you can spawn a tank, but if they own 80 you cant. We've sort of gone away from this for a variety of reasons, most notably is it really discourages people to begin campaigns on continents where they don't already have strong resource yeilds, makes an empire that has dominance over a continent extremely hard to break, whereas if you can earn resource elsewhere and use them to go to war on other conts it fixes that.

6 - it's possible for us to do bonuses based on connectivity, i.e. if my empire owns two separate chunks of territory on a continent i may get a lessened yield until they're "connected" to my warpgate - again, that's something we've discussed and we're open to doing if it helps add strategic depth, but we sort of want to see how things work "as is" first.

Whew! Okay, carry on TheorySiding.

Zomg higbywall!


Interesting thoughts higby. I'm not sure I quite agree that a personal resource for each player is a good idea. As people pointed out, it makes the taking of a base quite weak in terms of weakening the other empires.

It should be pretty clear what we want is a way to attack the empire, not just the players in front of us, and we expect to do that by warring on their resources. I dont see that happening with individual resource stores though because the effect seems like it would be way too weak and diffuse. I think you should take another look at #5, perhaps give players a free vehicle at the start of the day so it won't matter to them where they start.

#3 I like the idea of more variables to influence, good stuff, but please give us a way to have an impact beyond the front lines as well.

#1 if you can sustain a fight based on your kill bonuses alone...why have the passive income bonus from territory at all? It just pushes the winners to have slightly more vehicles but isnt directly more fun for anyone, and it makes resourcing an unstable equilibrium. The guys camped in the warpgate will always get fewer vehicles, and have no tactical options for quickly reducing the supply their enemies have.

[SgtMAD]

Originally Posted by Higby

6 - it's possible for us to do bonuses based on connectivity, i.e. if my empire owns two separate chunks of territory on a continent i may get a lessened yield until they're "connected" to my warpgate - again, that's something we've discussed and we're open to doing if it helps add strategic depth, but we sort of want to see how things work "as is" first.

Whew! Okay, carry on TheorySiding.

if anything the group that caps a backhex should get a benefit/boost due to having to defend for a lengthy hack timer and degree of difficulty,

make it the reward for pulling off the hard missions,it sure shouldn't result in a penalty for the capture team.

I think an empire that is cut in half like you are thinking would already be in a bit of trouble,adding to it might break them.

[Toppopia]

The almighty Higby has spoken, it seems they have lots of ideas about this topic, and we seem to be helping alot. So i am confident that they will with our help think all a really good system. Because this is the second most important part of the game, after the massive 2000 people fights.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Higby

Good thoughts in this thread. A lot of valid concerns for sure, and a lot of stuff that we've sort of found solutions or possible solutions (we'll see when beta starts and people actually actively metagame) to some of these issues. I'm not going to go piece by piece through all the ideas and respond, but a couple things I wanted to clarify:

1 - it's not just kills that grant resources in moment-to-moment gameplay, any score generating event (healing, spotting, repairing, capturing, vehicle destruction, etc) will all generate resources. This moment-to-moment gain is also there for empires that are super pushed back, if you don't own any (or very little) territory that is generating resources for you, it's designed to give you enough to sustain fights while you recapture areas.

2 - re: Malorn's initial idea of removing resources when territory gets captured... I think this would be pretty difficult to pull off fairly. People would either log out when their territory was about to get capped so they didn't get the punishment, or we'd have to punish people who weren't even online which seems odd, especially if you log in in the middle of or right after a big territory losing streak.

3 - our influence system is going to have more effects than just territory capture bonus, things like longer respawn times, vehicle timers, resource costs, sphere of influence for deploying galaxies so you have to be further out from a base to set up a mobile spawn point, are all things we're planning on being associated with the influence system - which effects and their degree will be tuned a lot during beta

4 - the current maps are showing temporary resource values, we will have a more varied landscape at launch. The idea of making frontier territory more valuable is interesting Malorn, I'll have to chew on that a bit.

5 - we've talked quite a bit about having continental resource pools per empire vs per player, so if your empire owns 100 units of Alloys you can spawn a tank, but if they own 80 you cant. We've sort of gone away from this for a variety of reasons, most notably is it really discourages people to begin campaigns on continents where they don't already have strong resource yeilds, makes an empire that has dominance over a continent extremely hard to break, whereas if you can earn resource elsewhere and use them to go to war on other conts it fixes that.

6 - it's possible for us to do bonuses based on connectivity, i.e. if my empire owns two separate chunks of territory on a continent i may get a lessened yield until they're "connected" to my warpgate - again, that's something we've discussed and we're open to doing if it helps add strategic depth, but we sort of want to see how things work "as is" first.

Whew! Okay, carry on TheorySiding.

Wow, that's a lot Higformation!

The connectivity-based bonuses are cool. I like the potential there, as disrupting connectivity becomes a strategy in much the same way as disrupting the lattice in PS1. Going to give this one a lot more thought.


Good to see score makes an impact so support isn't discouraged. Its a good way to have a base income amount, but only giving that out if the player is doing something (so we don't have bots sitting around gaining resources). Although I'm still a bit concerned about this being too big of an income source and having it devalue territorial resource income. But if it's meant to be a small source so players have something to work with, and the fighting part is to discourage AFK-shenanigans then it seems good to me.

The logoff/leave bit for taking resources from players is a good point I hadn't considered, though I didn't particularly like taking things from players anyway, seems shitty. I guess the only real solution to having a personal resource pool and having denial work reliably is to keep the resource pool fairly small and to have steady sinks for all gameplay styles so any player can't go too long without caring about resources. If we're always hungry, we're always going to be looking for food, and we'll care when someone tries to take it away.

Regarding frontier territory being worth more - you could make influence inversely proportional to resource value. So if you manage to take a big risk and go after a territory that you have a small amount of influence over, the resource gain could be big. This is a bit of a risk vs reward tradeoff, as the more influence the easier it is to capture something, so perhaps reward efforts which go after hard to capture territories. Capture a high-risk territory which you may not hold for long and you get a big yield. As they secure other territories nearby and strengthen influence (risk goes down) the value goes down. It's tricky because it could also discourage taking of territories, but that's probably more of a balancing thing.

This could turn into a sort of diminishing return mechanic so dominant empires don't get massive resources for all their rear holdings. They should get some, but it shouldn't be an overwhelming advantage. This could be one way to tone it down and also reward risky attacks. And conversely, it could also help backed-up empires. They won't have much influence so the territories they have would generate more resources.

I like influence having a bigger impact than just capture times. I've been trying to figure out a way to tie in resources to influence and the above idea was as far as I got. The GW2 mechanics are also worth a study. Having read them I like where they're going with that. Might have to try that game until playing PS2 becomes a full-time occupation.

[goneglockin]

I know PS players wanna be armchair generals, but part of the reason the game died out so quickly last time was because of the meta game. Allowing one person to bring the play time of others to a screeching halt is basically an epic troll.

Most people who want to play these games want to play the shooty end of the business, and what will bring MMOFPS into the forefront as a genre will not be the metagame, but the massiveness and the shootyness.

It has less to do with "casuals." In fact, i'd say armchair generals playing a watered down FPS game for the metagame ARE the casuals. I'm all in favor of more traditional shooter mechanics, and I even like the metagame- but I dont believe for a minute that such a combination will ever be successful.

That's what I'd really like to see this time around more than anything else; for the game's # of players not to drop off a cliff in the first year and end up on life support indefinitely past the second year.

By 2006, I was looking to move on from PlanetSide because the massive battles just weren't there anymore- not like they were in the beginning. I tried FEAR and discovered the most underrated MP experience of the decade, and soon thereafter found my way over to BF2142.

P.S.

Maybe, PS2 will be big enough, long enough, that others will make games like it too. I would like that much better than getting a good two years or so from one PS game each decade. With competition, there's also the chance that the other games will play differently from whatever SOE serves up. Maybe more to your liking. At this point, I really don't care how the game plays. Been playing these things long enough to just adapt and deal with it, and if not, I find something else to play.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Higby

2 - re: Malorn's initial idea of removing resources when territory gets captured... I think this would be pretty difficult to pull off fairly. People would either log out when their territory was about to get capped so they didn't get the punishment, or we'd have to punish people who weren't even online which seems odd, especially if you log in in the middle of or right after a big territory losing streak.

Well. Instead of removing resources when territory gets captured, why not do it in the opposite way - increase the resource cost of items a bit as you lose territory/decrease as you gain territory? This would only affect people who are actually online.

In other words, when the server is reset and each empire holds 33% of a continent, all resource costs for vehicles, etc, are at their standard pricing. And as you gain territory, resource costs can go as low as 75% of standard cost or as high as 125% of standard cost as you lose territory. 75% and 125% were just thrown in as examples. Maybe it's between 80 and 120, or 50 and 150, whatever.

[RageMasterUK]

Ill make this a quickreader so it might get read

Make it so territories
1. ...are worth more resources on capture by the longer they have been held.
2. ...give soldiers directly defending the hex a higher resource gain rate the longer the base has been held.
3. ...give the empire holding them a slightly higher continent-wide gain rate the longer they are held.
4... stockpile is reset if the hold on a territory is broken. It pays no extra cap or defend reward untill the territory stockpile fills back up over time.

Territory Stockpile effect. Pays out more over time to defenders, and more on cap for attackers.

In my Planetside 2 hallucinations this would...

1 .Incentivises defending long-held terriories potentially, forever. You want it to be your Outfit who holds the foothold hex's forever? Now its actually worth it.
2. Would bring the battle to every single hex, when the cap reward becomes high enough.
3. Would move the frontline around in a organic manner. As the longest held territories are captured and new territories become the biggest payout, troops would push elsewhere.
4. Gives those behind enemy lines nice incentive for their actions. Just breaking long-held territory holds briefly would affect enemy continent wide income.
5. Has many handles. Can have individual stockpile gain profiles for each territory. Can set cap on gain rate or gain or profile it so it flattens out at somewhere reasonable. Or screw it have it exponential gain (j/k)
6. Makes capping worthwile even if it may be impractical to hold the territory. Attacks can be mounted just to break the enemy's hold for a moment to reset their stockpile.
6. GMs can just throw ontop or subtract from stockpile amounts as a control if they need to balance resources/combat areas manually for any reason, or they're having a special event.
7. Balance effect on resource. Empires defending like demons will eventually loose a base worth ALOT OF RESOURCES to their attackers, and suddenly the empire on the back-foot, sad for lack of resource can start ripping tanks out the terminals again.
8. Would encourage many many more 3 way conflicts as the onus to attack/defend longheld bases is equally high for all empires.
9. Allows an empire to survive and earn massive potential resource on holding just a handful of hexs really really well.

Just my blerb. Maybe it has value =D

-RageMasterUK

[Figment]

May I suggest we look at the global influence of resources?

Currently it is very... Uni-continental.

[Xazbot]

The player-constructed resource enhancements is interesting. When I read that I thought of the eventual plan for outfit-owned structures, and how Smed likes sandboxy EVE-like stuff. Having outfits plop down a structure that improves resource harvesting that might become a strategic objective feels right up that alley. The general idea of developing the land is interesting, though it might take away from the pacing and the action.


____________
That's a good point indeed, plus with this system I can predict a trend where outfits from diferent faction will try to disrupt the resourse income
of their harder competition. Making that outfit rivalry way more personal.
I think that the devs, if they don't have something on the line of this should probably look in to this as a possibility.

[SKYeXile]

Originally Posted by HtSgtMAD

if anything the group that caps a backhex should get a benefit/boost due to having to defend for a lengthy hack timer and degree of difficulty,

make it the reward for pulling off the hard missions,it sure shouldn't result in a penalty for the capture team.

I think an empire that is cut in half like you are thinking would already be in a bit of trouble,adding to it might break them.

Yea, it makes sense that a hex cutoff from your warpgate is worth less resources, but good gameplay doesn't need to make sense.

[OutlawDr]

Originally Posted by Higby

3 - our influence system is going to have more effects than just territory capture bonus, things like longer respawn times, vehicle timers, resource costs, sphere of influence for deploying galaxies so you have to be further out from a base to set up a mobile spawn point, are all things we're planning on being associated with the influence system - which effects and their degree will be tuned a lot during beta

Thanks for the info! The part I quoted has me most interested. Could you tell us more on what determines influence percentage and at what rate influence is acquired as of now. Is it something that will shift drastically day to day, or is something that changes more slowly over a matter of days?