Gameplay: Metagame vision

[Chotchbeard]

I posted this to reddit last night, but figured I'd post here too. Reddit link is...
http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/c...me_brainstorm/


Proposal
When a faction fully captures a continent, lock access to that continent for x hours or until a different faction locks another continent (for example... TR locks Indar; An hour later VS locks Esamir; Indar now becomes unlocked). All active players (defined by who earned xp reasonably recently) in the locking faction get a cert reward, and an experience boost for x hours (the actual reward is debatable, but I'm going with this for my example). We'll say that the locking faction is currently "dominating".

When a continent is unlocked, all territory on that continent becomes neutral and warp gate ownership is rotated/randomized. This allows people to see continents from different perspectives.

Once a faction controls all but one of the continents (so 2 right now, 3 after Searhus is added), they "win the war" and get an even nicer cert reward and xp boost for x hours. Everything is unlocked again, and all territory is set to neutral (lore-wise, I suppose you could some time has passed and there was a period of relative peace/cold war).

This makes it a lot harder for a single faction to cap multiple continents, since the resistance gets higher (and battles get more epic) the more continents they lock. It also forces them to keep their eye on more than one continent at a time, since they will lose their locks (and dominating status) and have to start over if someone else takes a continent. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it moves the action around to different continents, and not just Indar.

Making it so a faction must control all but one continent makes it so there's always a choice of at least two continents to play on, which is good if someone has a certain continent they really hate, or if there are too many players online for one continent to support.


Example
Let's say Searhus has already been added to the game for the sake of this example...

TR locks Indar, they are now "dominating". Anyone in the faction who has been active (gotten some sort of xp) in the past 10 minutes gets 25 certs, and a +25% xp boost for 3 hours (just throwing out numbers for the sake of argument, they probably aren't the best numbers to actually use).

They now have 3 hours to lock two of Esamir, Amerish and Searhus.
An hour later, TR locks down Searhus. Active players in the dominating faction get the same cert bonus (25) and an extra +25% onto their boost. Now all the TR players who have been active have a +50% xp boost total, and they have bought another 3 hours for their lock (see additional thoughts below).

It's down to Esamir and Amerish. TR has to take one more to "win". One of three things happen...

1) The main TR force is focusing on Esamir (because everybody hates Amerish), but they're being dumb and don't notice that the NC is dominating Amerish. A short time later, NC locks Amerish up. Both Indar and Searhus unlock, their territory becomes neutral, and their warp gate ownership is randomized. NC players get their rewards (25 certs, +25% boost). Amerish is locked, and NC players now have 3 hours to lock up another continent. NC is now dominating.

2) The main TR force is focusing on Esamir, but a few outfits are being vigilant enough to keep an eye on Amerish. Epic battles ensue due to population being compressed to two continents. It's close, but in the end, TR wins Esamir before the NC or VS can take Amerish. Every active TR player gets their bonus for "winning the war". 100 Certs, and an extra +50% xp boost for 3 hours (bringing the total to +100% xp). At this point, all continents unlock, and their territory becomes neutral. Warp gate ownership is randomized on all continents, and thus war breaks out anew.

3) Epic battles are had, everyone has fun (hopefully), but nobody is able to lock one of the last two continents because everybody on the server is now compressed into them. After 3 hours, it appears we have a stalemate. Indar and Searhus are now unlocked, their territory becomes neutral, and their warp gate ownership is randomized.


Additional Thoughts
- Faction rewards for continent locking (certs+boost) should probably be server-wide instead of continent specific. That way people defending a different continent from being locked (and thus preventing a faction from losing it's dominating status) don't get screwed over. In addition, perhaps only the one-time cert reward should go to the players who have been active, and the boost just goes to everybody on the dominating faction. Probably easier to keep track of that way from a programming standpoint.

- Maybe instead of taking over all but one continent, have that number based on online population. If a continent can hold 2000 players, and you have 4 continents, that means the server can hold 8000 players. Say there are 5000 players online (if servers are merged someday maybe). That means there are too many people to hold on 2 continents, so we need 3 continents open for everyone to play. In this case, you would have to take over all but two continents to "win". That way, there are always at least 3 continents open and enough room for all online players. Since there are enough online, capturing that last continent is still going to be a challenge for the dominating faction. My opinion is that there should always be two continents available to choose from though, so the most a faction should ever need to capture is one less than the total number of continents.

- Maybe the dominating faction only has 3 hours from the initial lock and the timer doesn't reset to 3 on a new lock. I like the idea of it resetting to 3 though, because it's been proven that it's not a stalemate yet. (Again, 3 is just a hypothetical number here)
Maybe a faction should lose their bonus xp boost once they are no longer dominating... Maybe they should keep it for the full 3 hours regardless. It's debatable.


tldr - Lock access to continents for x hours once fully captured. Conquer y continents to "win" and reset the game.