WDS awareness? - Page 3

GeoGnome · 2013-10-18, 10:55 AM

There has been something rolling around in my head since last night that I wanted to put up here. This isn't meant to bash the efforts of the SOE team, but quite frankly it's just something I feel I need to say.

Malorn: You say that you want the WDS to drive strategic thinking and whatnot. The problem here is that there is no planning or strategy or anything in the WDS that can be used. You log on and play. The battles are largely shifted up and down the lane by taking points, which Can be accomplished by some tactical movement... but because the bases change hands so easily, each base capture is just Meaningless. To keep assigning arbitrary values to the bases will not make people start caring about capturing Quartz Ridge camp or someplace else. What will make people start to really consider how, where, when, and why about base captures is for each base to have some kind of use... something that helps them in a realistic way. Strategically the Lattice is limiting (Tactically it has improved things though), and that is alright as the chaotic mess that was the hex did need some limiting factors, but it needs some kind of way people can actually make those big strategic decisions in an unforgiving environment in order for things to improve.

An example, but not necessarily a great one, would be a system by which you need to knock out power stations in order to take another facility. Or maybe you need to take out a communications array in order to move undetected through a valley. The only bases currently that embrace this, are the bases surrounding facilities, where you have to Take the base in order to get into the larger facility. Those kinds of things are actually exciting and make people think about how they want to approach. The current system stiffles that somewhat, because you are pretty much restricted to one approach because of the lattice, but an easy fix would be to bring back those outlying bases like there were, before the lattice... maybe don't make them full bases with a spawn, but a mini tower or underground facility, so that you have to take and hold a 30 second cap point, in order to move up through teleporters. People have to take out those strategic targets, it requires though, in order to advance. You can't take the base without a lattice link, but interaction within the base requires something different.

That covers attackers having some need to think to get in, for defenders holding a base should impart something to the owner. Again: Comm arrays could mean a sensor sweep of an area. Or you could do some kind of thing linked to implants where people need to hold a base to make and implant implants. This imparts a tangible value to the base and makes people want to take or hold these bases. These also need to be things that can't be done from the warpgate... everything can be gotten from that magical impenetrable dome. I understand that is so that people can get everything from go... but what reason then, do people have to advance down lane? They get nothing for their accomplishments. Giving people things In the world that they need to fight to achieve will be Much more of a driving force than XP or WDS or Alerts or cert points or BR EVER will be.

I Like the WDS. I get that it can help with a few things. But it will never captivate people until the world itself has some kind of reason to exist. It's all so empty and meaningless; and no amount of XP or WDS score is going to fix that underlying problem. When those kinds of things exist, so that people are actually challenged to do something... Then having those rewards in place, will mean that people will be that much Happier to get something: "Hey I worked really hard to take this, now I get a ton of XP and a ton of WDS score, yay me" but right now, it's like those consolation trophies you get for participating. You tried nothing and accomplished nothing but your still getting all this fluff. It carries No weight what-so-ever.

kubacheski · 2013-10-18, 11:35 AM

Am I missing the point of this? Am I crazy to think that the entire motivation for playing Planetside 2 is to take over the world? It's an eternal struggle against the other 2 factions to dominate the world of Auraxis, right?

WHY THE F*CK DO YOU NEED A SPECIAL EVENT TO PROMOTE THE ONLY OBJECTIVE IN PLANETSIDE?!?!?!

What this points to is that SOE has strayed so far from the core Planetside elements that they've nothing left to do but insert "match" based combat into longer timeframes that usual. This is no MMOFPS, it's just instanced continents with very long matches that don't reset landmass control when said event is over. This is not war, it's battles and skirmishes in different places on a big map.

I still cannot believe that you have to run events to promote competition and in the end all it has done is imbalance the populations with encouraging the 4th faction after a year into the game. Pick a side already. Go back and learn from the mistakes of PS1 and lessen the effects of population imbalance with dynamic xp and/or damage bonuses for low pop factions. People will switch to the low pop to get the bonuses. Events like this promote faction hopping.

Malorn, this crap of handing a faction or participtaing players a boost, or medal, or special snowflake in a crystal box is just crap. Most people want to hack an enemy vehicle, to jump a warpgate to continue on a lattice line for continent locks, to actually have to worry about defense of a base, to have control of a significant landmass mean something. To push the opposing force back to their respective home continent so that thereare 666 opposition soldiers sitting in their warpgate to push back onto Auraxis and release your jackboot from their neck. I want a goddamn bridgefight or a tower battle like in PS1. Footholds and chokepoints to drag out the death and destruction. I want concrete trees, dude. I want perm cloak and darklight. I want snipers and infils separated. I want finite certs and remove class switching. Remove classes. I want your chosen cert trees to define the playstyle you choose. I want CE deployables and doors.

Man, we want a game that is fun to play, not a fun event every now and then inside of the game. The big picture man! Make the game fun and interesting and playable. The game, not some damn event.

Mastachief · 2013-10-18, 12:54 PM

Originally Posted by kubacheski

Am I missing the point of this? Am I crazy to think that the entire motivation for playing Planetside 2 is to take over the world? It's an eternal struggle against the other 2 factions to dominate the world of Auraxis, right?

WHY THE F*CK DO YOU NEED A SPECIAL EVENT TO PROMOTE THE ONLY OBJECTIVE IN PLANETSIDE?!?!?!

What this points to is that SOE has strayed so far from the core Planetside elements that they've nothing left to do but insert "match" based combat into longer timeframes that usual. This is no MMOFPS, it's just instanced continents with very long matches that don't reset landmass control when said event is over. This is not war, it's battles and skirmishes in different places on a big map.

I still cannot believe that you have to run events to promote competition and in the end all it has done is imbalance the populations with encouraging the 4th faction after a year into the game. Pick a side already. Go back and learn from the mistakes of PS1 and lessen the effects of population imbalance with dynamic xp and/or damage bonuses for low pop factions. People will switch to the low pop to get the bonuses. Events like this promote faction hopping.

Malorn, this crap of handing a faction or participtaing players a boost, or medal, or special snowflake in a crystal box is just crap. Most people want to hack an enemy vehicle, to jump a warpgate to continue on a lattice line for continent locks, to actually have to worry about defense of a base, to have control of a significant landmass mean something. To push the opposing force back to their respective home continent so that thereare 666 opposition soldiers sitting in their warpgate to push back onto Auraxis and release your jackboot from their neck. I want a goddamn bridgefight or a tower battle like in PS1. Footholds and chokepoints to drag out the death and destruction. I want concrete trees, dude. I want perm cloak and darklight. I want snipers and infils separated. I want finite certs and remove class switching. Remove classes. I want your chosen cert trees to define the playstyle you choose. I want CE deployables and doors.

Man, we want a game that is fun to play, not a fun event every now and then inside of the game. The big picture man! Make the game fun and interesting and playable. The game, not some damn event.

Sniff sniff.. marry me.

Sirisian · 2013-10-18, 02:28 PM

Originally Posted by ringring

Pretty much as evilpig said. Motivations should be player driven.

I can't see what can be done to WDS, I'm not even sure what it's intended to achieve.

The standard Events have their good points in as much as to do impact on player, outfit and empire behaviour, but because the end result is more XP (sometimes a lot more) and because more XP mean more certs and more certs equal more power then they have tended to destabilise populations.

An ideal ps2 would have neither Events nor WDS but rather something else and we know what that 'something else' is.

Well said. I think the WDS event was possibly a wasted effort as it lacked a goal or focus.

My main worry is that it's distracted from real development and design of the game. WDS wouldn't have been in my top 100 issues to work on at least given all the other issues. Especially taking time to implement it into the UI rather than focusing that UI effort on cleaning up the menus and the interface more. (Especially with the PS4 launch looming).

Babyfark McGeez · 2013-10-18, 03:41 PM

True. I would rather see them fix the floating turret at west highland checkpoint that's sitting in the air for over four months now lol.

Edfishy · 2013-10-18, 08:27 PM

In the culmination of the event, allow us to capture the enemy sanc and "win" planetside for the day (resetting the servers and disabling sanc capture).

That's where a leaderboard would mean something.

Natir · 2013-10-18, 10:08 PM

I've watched the WDS stuff from when it got started. Clearly there was a population problem. I think the first round of changes were good but what happened now? VS are the underdogs and they are now winning 37% to 31/32.... It really seems like the higher popped factions now have to work twice as hard to achieve those points and I don't think they really care. They just want to play the game.

You want people to take territory? There needs to be an incentive. Resources right now do not cut it. There is still no other point in this game other than to cert farm. That might be a bit harsh but it is true. When people play the game, they look at the best ways to earn certifications and advance their character and taking a base is definitely not one of them. What do you get the most reward for? Killing players and vehicles. Not capping points or territory, which it should be. Killing players and vehicles, etc, should be the secondary objective but if you look at how you are rewarded, that would be number 1.

You need to be rewarded for taking a base, not by getting more points towards your empire, no one cares about that. The people that do are just roleplaying like it matters when 90% of the population just wants to farm like in any other FPS game.

So, what would I suggest?

You get great rewards for capping a point and holding that capped point. You get great rewards for flipping a base. The longer you defend the base (IE: Stay at the base and defend), you get rewarded for that. Now, how much experience should a player be rewarded? I dunno, and I don't think it can really be done. Due to the free to play model, you cannot over reward players as there needs to be incentives to buy boosts and a sub. If people feel like they earn a lot of EXP (like Firefall), then there is no point to sink any money into the game.

Now, what they should do is lower the amount you are rewarded for killing vehicles, players, blowing stuff up, etc and grant you more rewards for territory control. Clearly the resource system doesn't work. Again, it is all about the farm.

But Natir, I already have what I want and I do not want anything else in terms of certs. Yeah, Okay... Lets humor that for a second. That person is the minority in that case and most players are always lacking things here and there to really complete their character. You finished your HA? Well, there are more classes and vehicles that players use so it will be a while before they finish the cert grind.

bpostal · 2013-10-18, 11:06 PM

Originally Posted by kubacheski

...

WHY THE F*CK DO YOU NEED A SPECIAL EVENT TO PROMOTE THE ONLY OBJECTIVE IN PLANETSIDE?!?!?!

...

This comment is very apt and succinctly expresses my growing unease with PS2.

Mordelicius · 2013-10-18, 11:42 PM

Glad someone posted a WDS thread. I really want to post this but I didn't want to start another complaint thread

The Top Dog Mechanic must be discontinued and replaced with a different mechanic. It punishes winning and rewards losing. If the factions are ever to get balanced, this will sting really hard.

Suppose the factions are balanced and suppose this is basketball (5 v 5 balanced population).

Team A make 5 straight shots.
Team B misses 5 straight shots.

Team A leads by 10 points. Now everytime Team B scores, there's an added +1 because they missed 5 straight shots? So the team that made 5 straight shots gets punished and the team that missed gets the reward. One can see how awful this system is.

Alternative:
Make the bonus scores based on current continental population. Now if the basketball game was 5 vs 2. Now, it would be fair if the team with just 2 players get more points if they make a shot because it's 2 vs 5 and the odds are against them.

But the current program punishes a leading faction. It's a very poor way of rigging the scoreboard to make the match close.

I've seen this type of mechanic before in my favorite RvR MMO. And that was far more insidious form than this. It was so bad that losing meant winning. And winning meant you got cheated. What was the result? Everyone wanted to lose because there was a massive reward tied losing.

The reward was so big that winning was moot and pointless and everyone was fixing the situation so they can lose. It was horrible

.

Natir · 2013-10-19, 12:00 AM

Originally Posted by bpostal

This comment is very apt and succinctly expresses my growing unease with PS2.

It is the free to play model that does this. You cannot reward people with so much EXP or certs that they do not buy boosts/subs or weapons.

The resource model does not work at all and is no incentive for people to take territory. They just don't care about it. What is the only thing people know to do in this game? Destroy stuff as that is what gives you the most reward. If you flip that and make it so territory capture and point control gives you the most EXP/Certs then people will be forced to play the objective. Yes, you must force people to play the objective.

At the end of the day though, this has been talked about since tech test and it is falling deaf ears over at SOE. These same issues have been all over the place (PSU, Reddit, SOE Forums, etc) and SOE has not once tried to fix it. Instead, they implement terrible ideas like the WDS. No one cares about it. Especially since all you gotta do is log onto the winning faction once to get your ACCOUNT wide exp boost.

Originally Posted by Mordelicius

Glad someone posted a WDS thread. I really want to post this but I didn't want to start another complaint thread

The Top Dog Mechanic must be discontinued and replaced with a different mechanic. It punishes winning and rewards losing. If the factions are ever to get balanced, this will sting really hard.

Completely agree. Its basically throwing welfare points at them. Obamacare faction FTW! But seriously though, seeing as how the VS were the underdogs and now they are winning with a huge lead just screams something is wrong.

Mastachief · 2013-10-19, 03:15 AM

To be fair Malorn is asking for input on how to make it viable, but so far i think we have come up short with solutions. I'm not sure there is one.

Natir · 2013-10-19, 05:11 AM

Originally Posted by Mastachief

To be fair Malorn is asking for input on how to make it viable, but so far i think we have come up short with solutions. I'm not sure there is one.

There isn't a solution. Malorn really should just abandon the WDS at this point. Clearly it has not worked at all and just provided literally everyone with free boosts who logged on once to the winning faction. The population imbalances are way too great and there still is no incentive to take and hold territory. Until you fix those two problems, doing anything else will not actually address the issues.

WDS is a shame and should have never gone through. When it first started, it was obviously clearly biased towards the overpopped faction. Now it just favors the underdog with the new point system to the point that they are getting way too much help. At this point, it really seems like the dev team (primarily Malorn since this seems to be his pet project) has no clue how to fix population imbalances and make people want to take territory.

At the end of the day though, if all you do is reward people for killing vehicles and killing people (tons of exp goes into getting kills, kill streaks, bonuses with using weapons, etc) over taking territory or using any of the support mechanics. That is what needs to change for people to start caring about territory. Plain and simple. If you can earn the most certs by taking territory, people will do it. If you can earn the most certs by farming kills, that is what people will continue to do. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out easier solutions to the problems this game has.

I will even break down some ideas for the dev team.

Territory cap streak: You get bonus exp for taking more territory during your play session.

Territory defense bonus: You get little bits of exp here and there for defending a base. Maybe it is just passive for how long you have been in the area of a base defending or have it based off of what you do while defending. You repair something while defending a base? Maybe give you defense bonus exp.

For taking a point at a base, taking down a generator, guarding a point at a base while it flips, should grant you more experience than it currently does.

Actually capping a base should give you way more experience than it currently does.

But what do you sacrifice for this? Who knows. What I will tell you is that if you want people to care about taking territory, the resource system will not cut it and is a joke. At the end of the day though, due to the free to play model, you cannot greatly reward players. The free to play model right now is really what is holding the game back. Unfortunately, these problems will doom Planetside 2 forever.

How do you fix the population imbalances? Merge more servers into each other. Mattherson, at it's peak, has no more than 1700 players on. Briggs has less than 1,000 players during their prime time. Waterson is similar to Mattherson. Connery has about 2500 players total during their prime time but they also got 2 mergers as well. These numbers are also based off of people logging on during that given hour (and who are currently logged in) so the population actually playing will be much lower as people could just be logging in for their certs or checking to see who is online.

You should also note that a lot of the servers are not even at that supposed 2k continent cap when a continent has a queue. Clearly SOE has also lowered the population cap without telling anyone. Stats don't lie.

At the end of the day though, all these little fixes here and there are just band aid solutions to the problems. Band aids are only meant to work for a very small period of time until the real problem is addressed. SOE has tried to reuse the same dirty band aid and it clearly keeps falling off.

Hate to be harsh but these are all issues players have addressed and given answers to and SOE brushes them off. It is time to start listening more to the player base and implementing these tough ideas or their game really will be going no where fast. This MLG shit will also go no where fast as people will continue to ask, what is the point of taking territory. Do you know? When you take a continent, does it get locked, kick a faction off, rotate the warpgate? Nope. Nothing. You get absolutely nothing. Boom problem addressed and solved.

bpostal · 2013-10-19, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by Natir

It is the free to play model that does this. You cannot reward people with so much EXP or certs that they do not buy boosts/subs or weapons.

The resource model does not work at all and is no incentive for people to take territory. They just don't care about it. What is the only thing people know to do in this game? Destroy stuff as that is what gives you the most reward. If you flip that and make it so territory capture and point control gives you the most EXP/Certs then people will be forced to play the objective. Yes, you must force people to play the objective. (Emphasis added)

At the end of the day though, this has been talked about since tech test and it is falling deaf ears over at SOE. These same issues have been all over the place (PSU, Reddit, SOE Forums, etc) and SOE has not once tried to fix it. Instead, they implement terrible ideas like the WDS. No one cares about it. Especially since all you gotta do is log onto the winning faction once to get your ACCOUNT wide exp boost...

If we have to use a stick instead of a carrot then fine. Grab a stick and beat that ass. Try to modify XP variables so that players who are near their squad's center of mass and waypoints are rewarded more; those who are off mucking about in the middle of nowhere get less. The mission system might help if/when it's implemented but as it stands there's no real functionality that explicitly tells players 'hey dummy, maybe you should stack up with your squad'. The result being players acting like it's one giant TDM (Loosely using the letter 'T') and one either very frustrated or apathetic SL.

How do we apply that to WDS? WDS missions via the (recently updated) UI. We can see where the most 'points' can come from, it's almost thrown in our faces. Again the problem is forcing players to go after those facilities with nothing but arbitrary points in a system that not all players (especially the 'drop in, drop out' ones) care about.
An analogy being the tech plant bennie. Even if your empire is about to lose tech, players typically won't leave a good fight elsewhere to shift to a defensive battle to save their Prowlers. IDK if that's because tech has been devalued because of prevailing PS2 playstyles or the fact that no matter what you can always fall back to your WG and pull whatever you need.

There is no tool, beyond the use of the occasional /order, that aids in zergherding. This problem is exacerbated in WDS not only because there may be as many different strategies as there are players but also because there's no real way to tell a 'good' order from a 'bad' one other than seeing if that order aligns with a given players goals. Of course, there's no benefit or disadvantage of following or ignoring an order either. The end result being typically no response from anyone or at most less than a squad of random people who may arrive in a heavily contested area with little to no idea of what's going on or what needs to happen. This is further exacerbated by the simply fact that the functionality of /re has been reduced to the probability of a coin toss. The discussion of tactics in /re is again hampered by the fact that, to most, there are either no tactics, bad tactics or pure trolling occurring in the chat. This all assumes your chat windows isn't 'stuck' on Platoon, resulting in most players ignoring/not seeing any text communication outside of platoon chat whatsoever.

The unfortunate part of my post is that I have fewer suggestions to fix these problems than I have complaints. I will admit that a player mentality of 'me first, squad second, faction whenever' in a game such as PS2 boggles my mind and causes me to refer to those 'greenies' outside my direct communications bubble with disdain almost equal to that of the VS or NC.

TLDR: Mission system would be nice to help incentivize and ease the act of moving and coordinating with those who are not in my mumble/teamspeak/ventrillo/whatever communication network. A small, preliminary of this system (even if generated automatically by a bit of programming and the use of metrics) for use primarily as it pertains to WDS would be even better.

Ghoest9 · 2013-10-19, 12:50 PM

The lattice(as implemented) removed all strategy except thee most basic and boring concepts.
WDS does nothing to change this.

Original Planetside with its ability to back hack if you killed drained the energy the ability to capture small spawn points(towers) regardless of the lattice had much more stratgy potential.

EVILPIG · 2013-10-19, 01:09 PM

Originally Posted by Ghoest9

The lattice(as implemented) removed all strategy except thee most basic and boring concepts.
WDS does nothing to change this.

Original Planetside with its ability to back hack if you killed drained the energy the ability to capture small spawn points(towers) regardless of the lattice had much more stratgy potential.

Lattice is the worst. Since Lattice has been developed, I'd like to see the Lattice disappear at times. Perhaps a condition that players could affect can turn Lattice off.