News: WDS Preseason 2 Changes and Feedback

[Baptist]

Posted by Malorn

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...edback.172500/


Hello Auraxians!

We’ve heard your feedback on the new WDS preseason, and we’re going to be making some changes to it, both short and long-term.

The purpose of this preseason was to address some of the bigger concerns from our first preseason, which was warpgate positioning, reward allocation, event visibility, and player agency in the event. We took some big steps in this preseason to alleviate all of those issues, but we also had an oversight that had an unintended negative impact on player behavior.

Discovering these issues and gathering data is the purpose of this preseason. We’re listening to your feedback and taking it seriously. We want to get it right and with your help we'll get there.

Here are the top concerns we have received from you and what we are doing to address them.


Personal Contribution Effects
As a result of the adding personal rewards for participation we got some undesired player behavior. We received the feedback, and we can also quantify it. While our capture rate, defend rate, player deaths, and mean playtime are all up from last week, the average number of deaths per player per successful capture decreased by about 11% across all capture events, which indicates a significant reduction in fight intensity. This is consistent with player reports of not having as good of fights and rampant ghost capping for easy WDS points.

We believe this behavior stems from players avoiding fights in favor of easy and guaranteed WDS points for captures, and that the defense rewards are not lucrative enough to motivate players to defend territory. This was not one of the goals of the system and we apologize for the negative impact it has had on your gameplay experience.

Long-term, our ideal solution is to scale all objective rewards with effort and risk such that players are greatly rewarded for challenging encounters, and they are rewarded little for effortless ones. We want good fights to be the most rewarding objectives, and not just for WDS points. We will also be better defining what a successful “defense” is so that it is more intuitive and less exploitable. However, these are not changes we can realistically make on short notice. We cannot provide an ETA for those, but we want you to know that we are aware of the bigger issue that extends beyond WDS and that we plan on addressing it when we can.

In the short term (as in a Hotfix in the next few days) we will be adjusting capture and defense scoring to put more emphasis on defense and make attack less lucrative. We are swapping the values and scaling for captures and defenses, so defenses will be worth a lot more than captures. This will make successful defense significantly more lucrative than captures for accruing WDS points. We know this also means they will be cheesed more, but we believe it is worth it to try to encourage more fight creation. We also know that scoring rule changes mid-season are bad, but we believe this one is not giving one empire an advantage over another and would be welcomed by players.

Here are the new starting and max values for capture and defense.

Small Outposts
Capture: 2 -> 8
Defend: 3 -> 25
Large Outposts
Capture: 4 -> 16
Defend: 4-> 16 (unchanged, see below)
Bio Labs
Capture: 8 -> 32
Defend: 8 -> 32 (unchanged, see below)
Tech Plants & Amp Stations
Capture: 8 -> 32
Defend: 12 -> 100

Bio labs and large outposts have a smaller defend scaling because they have 3+ points and are easy to cheese and get a lot of extra defense points out of it. We didn't increase the value on these so the entire event is less likely to boil down to cheesing these two facility types.


Personal Rewards
For this preseason event we did not go wild with the rewards because we wanted to see the impact of the event and get it tuned before we give out the good stuff. The current rewards are most beneficial to free-players, but we also understand the frustration of paying players who don’t need boosts or limited-use camos. For our first season of WDS we will have much better rewards, and the rewards will be more applicable to all players.


The Elusive “4th Faction”
This is often cited as a problem and is brought up a lot in the context of WDS advantage or disadvantage. We have been investigating this phenomenon to see just how impactful this behavior is. It is ongoing and we have not decided on any action yet, but we wanted to share some of the initial findings.

We looked the timeline trend of players who change characters on the same account, and found them to be about 1% of the population across all servers on a given day. They don’t all switch to the same faction, though they do tend to sway to one faction or another over the course of several hours. This does not account for multiple-accounts, but we are trying to get at that information too.

We are continuing to study the 4th faction, particularly how they related to logoff/logon rates, and longer-term switching such as those who follow particular warpgate rotations, and changes that occur around alerts starting and stopping.


Population Imbalance
One of the primary goals of this preseason is to closely examine scoring patterns under active season conditions with normalized warpgates to understand the impact of population. We will use this to tune a small handicap the empire scoring for under-populated empires in future seasons. The impact is not obvious and not as big as geographical position, and there is a lot of variability in the scores. Empires that can be classified as over-populated perform very differently compared to one another, and same goes for the empires that are considered under-populated. The goal is a reasonable and fair handicap and to get there we need some quality data from this preseason.

[KesTro]

I like it so far, interesting to see the Defense ratios get changed even higher as that was already the easiest way to score points, at least for me at any rate. Point gets flipped neutral, you flip it back. BAM free points.

[typhaon]

Serious question: how is any of this making PS2 more fun?

[Ruffdog]

So fight avoidance is still an issue with 3 empires and 3 continents and rewards for taking empty land. Wow who knew?

[ringring]

Sigh.

[synkrotron]

I am assuming that the word "cheese" here is being used as a verb, to explain the action of perhaps taking advantage of a situation.

It is the first time I have heard this term, probably because of my age...

Originally Posted by typhaon

Serious question: how is any of this making PS2 more fun?

I suppose this is different for each of us. I've found WDS funny to start with, but boring in the end. I got the second tier award, at 800 points, and decided that it was highly unlikely that I would get time to reach the third tier prize (I'm assuming there is a time limit on it), so I went back to making my own fun (hunting enemy and shooting them in the head).

[ringring]

Originally Posted by synkrotron

I am assuming that the word "cheese" here is being used as a verb, to explain the action of perhaps taking advantage of a situation.

It is the first time I have heard this term, probably because of my age...
.

I've only heard it said recently and only in the PS2 context.

I take it to mean 'playing in a way that other people doesn't approve' [cynical] or 'playing and using the easier weapons to get kills'.

I suppose an obvious example would be using a lib to camp a spawnroom (low risk, low skill and potentially high reward), but overall to me it seems as fairly arbitrary concept.

Personally I'd like to know what 'player agency' is. Perhaps you get a badge to flash at people once you've joined it! 'Halt PA, don't move!'

[CheeZeX]

Originally Posted by synkrotron

I am assuming that the word "cheese" here is being used as a verb, to explain the action of perhaps taking advantage of a situation.

It is the first time I have heard this term, probably because of my age...



I suppose this is different for each of us. I've found WDS funny to start with, but boring in the end. I got the second tier award, at 800 points, and decided that it was highly unlikely that I would get time to reach the third tier prize (I'm assuming there is a time limit on it), so I went back to making my own fun (hunting enemy and shooting them in the head).

'Cheesing' has been a term that's been around for as long as I've been gaming. Something like 20 years now. It's just a term for doing something that's one of the following:

-Quick & Dirty (In Planetside 1 that would be Orbital Striking an enemy AMS even though you would be able to destroy it with other means pretty easily).

-Cheap and rage worthy (like only fighting a battle if you're in a tank and never fighting without one).

-In Starcraft 1/2, something like a Cannon Rush (Placing defensive structures inside an enemy base very early in the game) would be considered Cheese

[camycamera]

Originally Posted by typhaon

Serious question: how is any of this making PS2 more fun?

i like getting free rewards.

although in its current incarnation, the WDS is just a Ghost capping zergfest atm, which has put me off from playing it until it gets fixed with this.

[exile]

Originally Posted by CheeZeX

'Cheesing' has been a term that's been around for as long as I've been gaming. Something like 20 years now.

The simplest definition for the term is something that requires low skill but usually delivers a high reward.

[synkrotron]

Thank you for explaining the definition of cheesing.

I've been playing computer games for forty plus years but that is the first time I have ever heard the word cheesing.

Sorry.

If you google the term cheesing you get a somewhat different result (South Park). I had to add gaming to the search to pull up the required results, of which there were many opinions on what cheesing was.

[Mordelicius]

I assume most players already got their rewards so I tested the waters again (I'm pretty sure I had at least 100 WDS points and now it's gone and I'm back to 0 ).

The defenses and fights were actually great especially with the WDS defense bonus that's popping here and there. NC Waterson held most of Western Indar lanes. There were great fights and defenses, back and forth on Dahaka, Saurva, and Indar Escavation lanes. There was even a fight with NC saving Hvar from TR during the Tech plant alert.

Then the WDS monster reared its head again after the alert. NC with 48+ was capping Allatum from TR (1-12 resistance). NC has another 48+ capping Tawrich from the VS (1-12 resistance). While 48+ TR is knocking on Hvar gates with NC having (1-12 resistance, myself among them). We lost Hvar with practically no defense. And NC capped Tawrich and Allatum 4 minutes before TR can take Hvar. It just didn't matter because capping empty bases is more important. Indar has become a ghostcap Musical Chairs routine once again . The patch can't come any faster.

Lastly, one thing to see with this incoming hotfix is the effects on Alerts. I don't think they addressed the alerts. There are two separate objectives/rewards. And one is more pursued and coveted. NC Waterson won that Tech Plant alert 5-1-1 with as if TR and VS with little to no interest at all. The only TR attempt was when they ninja dropped at least 5 galaxies at Quartz Ridge while we were clearing out back cappers.

The alert rewards are quite miniscule in comparison to the WDS ones, hence they need to integrate it within the WDS format or else it's just a distraction and a source of confusion especially to the new players. I posted an alert tweak suggestion on this thread:

http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=57849

[ringring]

I'm sure I heard Malorn saying that they were looking to scale WDS points with the amount of fighting going on, and not just on alerts but also for normal XP too to make it more PS1-like. (I heard this on the Reachcast podcast)

[Mastachief]

Originally Posted by ringring

Sigh.

^^^^

[typhaon]

Originally Posted by ringring

I'm sure I heard Malorn saying that they were looking to scale WDS points with the amount of fighting going on, and not just on alerts but also for normal XP too to make it more PS1-like. (I heard this on the Reachcast podcast)

Because clearly that's what everyone has been asking for...

I mean you've barely been able to get a word in edgewise on the various forums because they are so clogged with posts from people asking for more scaling scoring systems.