Uncapturable Foothold / Sactuary Hexes - Pro's and Cons - Page 6

megamold · 2012-03-14, 04:47 PM

maybe they could get out of the whole stalemate thing by playing with the resources mechanic.
if you set in up in a way that would make it a good tactical move to lose 1 cont to go after a better resource haul somewhere else then there might be less stalemates.

but i'm geussing most of this will get figured out and finetuned during beta
after all, building a big map full of capture points and then having the people fight on just 20% of it would be stupid

Elthbert · 2012-03-14, 04:50 PM

Originally Posted by megamold

but there will be many more then 3, tray and higby have said several times that they want to add all the original continents
they just seem to be focussing on 3 for release.
my geuss is they want to keep some content for after launch (to draw more players, keep the current ones happy)
and at the sime time lighten the workload ( cause making these continent is difficult im sure )

and usually spreading out your dev team over to much "stuff" makes for a mediocre game, i'd rather have them spend more time on the game mechanics now, and add more content later.

I understand. I still wish there were 4 at launch

StumpyTheOzzie · 2012-03-14, 04:59 PM

So, it seems like the prevailing thought is that uncapturable sancs on each continent is a bad thing. There should be a HART mechanism to drop anywhere on cont if you have no captured hexes.

This is just going to be super irritating to the winning team. They've fought so hard for many days and now there's going to be HART drops all over the continent. It's going to be like bushfire season with a million little hotspots that you have to go and "extinguish."

If the winning team has managed to totally capture the whole continent, that's a big deal. I think they deserve more than just all the resources they can farm. Even something like "Indar was last conquered by the [faction] on [date]" in an evening news-style ribbon on the bottom of the map screen.

**Malorn** · 2012-03-14, 05:03 PM

Originally Posted by Figment

@Malorn: How many people and how many continents do you see per server? Because what you described sounded like you didn't expect the servers to get full enough for all three continents to actually... be pop-locked.

In every MMO I've ever played server populations fluxuate significantly depending on time of day.

For any given server...

Lets suppose at peak we do have a pop lock for all 3 empires on all 3 continents. For one that's kind of crappy because it means some people are sitting in a queue and can't log into the game. But in spite of that at this moment there is "perfect" balance and the fighting is as extreme as its going to get.

As the night wanes on people will log off, go to bed, and the population will diminish and the relative distribution of the three empires will change. It will not be even across the empires and so we'll see surges in empire pops, but gradually over time the population will wane, and it will be a fraction of the population at peak.

So if we had 3 continents locked at peak, at off-peak like 4-5 am when most of the world is sleeping, we'd be lucky to see even 1 locked, and most likely it's less than that. Its not uncommon to see 1/5 the population off-peak as peak.

If that much smaller population still has the same 3 continents to spread out on you could see some really lopsided behavior.

World-lock happened a few times in PS1, and the two times I saw (and participated in it), it was very off-peak, at like 4-5 AM, certainly not prime time. That's what I mean by strange and lopsided behavior. The idea to consolidate the available continents as population changes keeps the battle raging all night long and it keeps the continents relatively consistent and stable and not prone to huge changes like that in the off-peak times.

**Malorn** · 2012-03-14, 05:12 PM

Right any territory can be captured, but the amount of friendly territory next to it determines how quickly it can be captured. If ou capture something in the middle of NC territory it'll take a long time to cap and it will take NC very little time to retake it.

The idea behind this mechanic means battles will tend to have fronts, but aren't required to. Doing behind-the-lines work will take longer and be riskier and easier for an empire to respond to. That will tend to keep poeple focuse don the front or the main battle. But the door is still open to do those sorts of things.

If you do manage to capture a territory and can manage to capture another one adjacent to it then you managed to create a foothold and holding that territory and capturing more becomes progressively easier. At that point you'v eeffectively opened another front.

Elthbert · 2012-03-14, 06:25 PM

Originally Posted by StumpyTheOzzie

So, it seems like the prevailing thought is that uncapturable sancs on each continent is a bad thing. There should be a HART mechanism to drop anywhere on cont if you have no captured hexes.

This is just going to be super irritating to the winning team. They've fought so hard for many days and now there's going to be HART drops all over the continent. It's going to be like bushfire season with a million little hotspots that you have to go and "extinguish."

If the winning team has managed to totally capture the whole continent, that's a big deal. I think they deserve more than just all the resources they can farm. Even something like "Indar was last conquered by the [faction] on [date]" in an evening news-style ribbon on the bottom of the map screen.

I think unconquerable places on EVERY continent are a bad thing. I do not think one should be able to HART into any particular hex you so choose should you loose everything else, I don't think you should be able to HART into a fully conquered continent at all.

Elthbert · 2012-03-14, 06:27 PM

Originally Posted by Malorn

Right any territory can be captured, but the amount of friendly territory next to it determines how quickly it can be captured. If ou capture something in the middle of NC territory it'll take a long time to cap and it will take NC very little time to retake it.

The idea behind this mechanic means battles will tend to have fronts, but aren't required to. Doing behind-the-lines work will take longer and be riskier and easier for an empire to respond to. That will tend to keep poeple focuse don the front or the main battle. But the door is still open to do those sorts of things.

If you do manage to capture a territory and can manage to capture another one adjacent to it then you managed to create a foothold and holding that territory and capturing more becomes progressively easier. At that point you'v eeffectively opened another front.

very well put

NCLynx · 2012-03-14, 06:31 PM

I'm posting this while not having read through the entire thread so it's likely something like this has been said already.

I didn't like not having sanctuaries at first but I'm fine with it now. Getting rid of the uncappable plots of land we have in addition to that? Nah. Keep it.

The only way the uncapturable land will annoy me is if it's on literally every continent. The way I would like to see it done is once there are a decent amount of continents each empire gets two continents that have uncapturable land on them (similar to the home continents in the original). Any additional continents don't have ANY uncapturable land on them, and since there are more continents in total the 3 empires don't have to share a continent with upcapturable land.

Hope that made sense. It did in my head.

Kipper · 2012-03-14, 06:41 PM

Originally Posted by StumpyTheOzzie

This is just going to be super irritating to the winning team. They've fought so hard for many days and now there's going to be HART drops all over the continent. It's going to be like bushfire season with a million little hotspots that you have to go and "extinguish."

Let the 'winning' team have its message immortalised in the logs, give them a resource boost for doing so well, but it doesn't mean they can rest.

The HART drop to anywhere on the continent for the losing team (only until they get their first hex back) is supposed to be something thats very difficult to defend or contain, due to not knowing where its gonna happen - because otherwise how does the empire re-establish itself?

I just want to see empire territory be fluid, not always connected to a fixed point. As I said waaaay back in the thread, today, I might log in and be contesting the south of the continent, over the next week, we might lose that but gain in the north, because there's no special attachment to any uncapturable area - that would be fine, we just own shit in the north now instead.

The uncapturable hex for each team means each teams territory is going to always be in the same place.

Figment · 2012-03-14, 07:28 PM

@Malorn, I think you misunderstood the question. I don't mean pop spread on a day, I mean total server population. With a limit of 666x3 (1998) per continent, we got a limit of 5994 people per server at launch.

World of Tanks even as I speak now (at 1:30 AM), on the Euro server has approximately 17.000 players online. There are around 450 instances active.

When there's a server you can play on, it may well be going to be full instantly when there are just three continents. I would imagine you'd need several European and several American servers. PlanetSide 1 started with four American servers and two European Servers. With the amount of continents available then, it was easier to spread the populations. With just three continents at launch, we may need a lot more servers.

In that respect, I also wonder if we'll be able to freely login to any of them with the same character, or if we're going to have to level a number of them on different servers to play at some times of the day.

But yeah, basically I'm worried about not just getting pop locked out of a cont, but also pop locked onto a continent.

ThGlump · 2012-03-14, 07:44 PM

Freely change servers with your character would be nice and remove that first month rush and then needing to merge servers. But ppl would be picking servers where they winnint at that time (making it even worse for losing side), and you would not have that attachment to your empire/land you conquer as it wouldnt be yours.

Without free server change there will be another problem. Not at start, but there will be population for 3 continents. What happen when they add more? Game area will increase but populations stays same as ppl wont leave their servers. So if they add like 5 more continents it will be quite empty unles there will be merges.

Lonehunter · 2012-03-14, 08:03 PM

Yeah "Permanent" footholds are totally going back a step. In original PS each warpgate went to a designated warpgate on another continent. So you could basically make a road map, and travelling by vehicle you would sometimes have to jump across a few continents.

The traveling wasn't the problem. This system turned the continent into a progressive capture system. The same front lines where always created around the same bases. Every now and then there was a back hack, but most of the time the factions always came from the same directions.

Then they changed them to broadcast warpgates so we could go anywhere, and it got real

Figment · 2012-03-14, 08:05 PM

It could affect outfits though, being forced to split over servers or even continents due to pop lock for the entire day and all.

StumpyTheOzzie · 2012-03-14, 08:48 PM

Originally Posted by Malorn

So if we had 3 continents locked at peak, at off-peak like 4-5 am when most of the world is sleeping...

That brought a chuckle.

Anyway, as a "night shift" player I can tell you that with PS1 anyway, there were huge differences in empires chosen based on cultural ideals.

I won't go into it because someone will call me racist or something and then the amateur psych students will yell buzzwords or whatever but my experience tells me that there are biases.

If the devs want to balance this, I think they're going to have to do better than +30%xp for a 8:1 disadvantage in numbers. If it's balanced correctly, market forces will force the 4th empire to balance out any rewards so no matter what time of day there's an even fight.

Back on topic - I don't like the idea of uncapturable footholds but I can't come up with anything satisfying to resolve the situation.

kaffis · 2012-03-14, 09:08 PM

Originally Posted by kadrin

Whoa whoa, wait... There's only three continents at launch? That doesn't bode well.

On the subject of the footholds, I don't like the idea at all. What's the point of fighting for a continent if we cannot kick the other empires off them and reap all the benefits of owning it? There's going to be less incentive to actually take a continent and hold it and more to just take the most beneficial parts and screw the rest.

Okay, first off -- PS1 had a 400 player per continent cap, with 10 continents. That's 2000 concurrent players per server in PS1.

PS2 we're estimating (based off the PCG article), 2000 players *per continent*, with 3 continents. That's 6000 players per server.

As figment points out below (thanks, Figment, I'd have been off by 1), we had 6 servers at launch for PS1. That's a cap of 12,000 concurrent players at Planetside's peak.

To achieve the same population, PS2 will only need 2 servers! I don't see 3 continents at launch as a problem.

Secondly, let me just repeat what you said at the end there, because I've typed too much between it and here. "There's going to be less incentive to actually take a continent and hold it and more to just take the most beneficial parts and screw the rest."

What's wrong with that!? The reason d'etre for fighting in PS2 is to accumulate resources to fuel the war effort. Fighting to take unvaluable land just to say you own it is wasted effort, especially when the other two empires will be fighting to take that valuable land BACK from you. The other land will only be worth holding if it supports taking or defending the valuable resource-rich hexes. Your time would be better spent, in other words, defending the worthwhile stuff and saying "screw the rest of it" than doing otherwise. And that seems like an absolutely fine state of affairs, to me.

Originally Posted by Figment

@Malorn, I think you misunderstood the question. I don't mean pop spread on a day, I mean total server population. With a limit of 666x3 (1998) per continent, we got a limit of 5994 people per server at launch.

World of Tanks even as I speak now (at 1:30 AM), on the Euro server has approximately 17.000 players online. There are around 450 instances active.

When there's a server you can play on, it may well be going to be full instantly when there are just three continents. I would imagine you'd need several European and several American servers. PlanetSide 1 started with four American servers and two European Servers. With the amount of continents available then, it was easier to spread the populations. With just three continents at launch, we may need a lot more servers.

Again, see above. World of Tanks has 17k players online on the Euro server. I'll take your word for that. Planetside, with 3 continents per server, can match that with 3 servers. That's not unreasonable to have 3 Euro-located servers. As you pointed out, PS1 launched with 2.

Will PS2 be more popular than World of Tanks? Quite possibly, but that just means more servers.

People seem to consistently overestimate how many players are actually contained on a traditional model (that is, one with multiple character-specific servers rather than a matchmaking service to set up private instances like World of Tanks) MMO server. Fortunately, SOE is a company with experience in this department. They've got half a dozen MMO ventures or more from which to mine concurrent vs. subscribers stats from, as well as playtime habits, etc, including a previous MMOFPS Planetside venture.

6000 is a pretty darn big server, and, as I pointed out above, will require only 3 servers to match Planetside 1's market penetration. Obviously we'll want to shoot higher than that, but I think expecting playercounts -- particularly *concurrent* playercounts -- in the hundreds of thousands or millions is wildly optimistic.

Team Fortress 2, which I think we'll all agree is still quite popular an FPS, hit just shy of 45k concurrent players today.

By our estimates, that's 7.5 servers worth. In other words, barely more servers than PS1 launched with. And it's a AAA F2P multiplayer-only FPS game that does very well. Call of Duty: MW3 hit 49k today. CounterStrike Source hit 56k. CounterStrike hit 73k.

So I think it should be clear that running around 8-10 servers would be quite successful by all expectations and metrics for SOE here, and would handily avoid being locked out of servers. Similarly, running 10-12 servers would probably provide enough leeway to prevent being locked *onto* a continent becoming a common danger.