Uncapturable Foothold / Sactuary Hexes - Pro's and Cons

[Figment]

PS1 of course had its peak "marketing" effort in 2003. The majority of people had bad connections and social networks on the internet were in their infancy. According to facebook, at least 30K people, pre-media hype, are interested. And that is just people on Facebook. I still come across people who played PS1 and are not aware of PS2. Then there is the increase in player potential, with eastern Europe joining the online community and youths joining the older PS1 veterans.

I would say, 50-80K should be doable with good marketing. If it receives good reviews and replayability and if people get tired of 'grind' MMOs... Who knows. Not saying it cannot be done, just saying SOE and ProSiebenSat should be ready for it. Really do hope the system they come up with can cope. Players should know in advance which servers would merge with which IMO and preferably when, so it is not seen as decline.

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by Skitrel

Explain how invincible unassailable bases fit in the ethos of a world where they're supposed to be fighting for complete control of the world.

I dunno. Why did sancs exist in PS1?


Ooooh.. You see what I did there?


Uncap = sanc + warpate - loading screen.

It adds no additional functionality or capability. It streamlines gameplay.

[Malorn]

I don't think it really matters how many poeple are on the server. The facts remain that the population will expand & contract. The battles will shift accordingly with populations going to maximum and tapering off. Even if we have 10 continents, at some point the population will drop substantially and some of those continents will become ghost towns, or the player density will be cut back severely.

Since PS2 is a game where the players are the content, keeping up the density is important to preserving the gameplay.

How is this going to be done? We can't simply instance more Indars and then destroy them when they aren't need as the world is supposed to be persistent.

The only thing that really comes to mind to preserve density while also preserving persistence is to have a large number of continents, but expand / contract the number of available continents to fight on, sort of like how with Core Combat only 2 caves were open at any given time and it rotated, the Planetside Server could lock or open continents as the population increases/decreases. The set of continents that are available should rotate to keep things fresh of course.

For release when we only have 3 continents they could create duplicate continents and then replace them later with new unique continents, assuming the server could handle it. Along those lines....

Idea - Continents are actually servers
1) Each continent is a server, with duplicates at launch.
2) Duplicate servers get replaced with new continents over time.
3) Set of available servers (i.e. continents) adjusts with global planetside 2 population
4) All players and outfits are globally unique.

I think it would be rather cool for each continent to be a server, but the players & outfits are globally unique. So for each geographical location, you have a set of servers equal to the number of continents. As the player population dwindles access to servers could be reduced, and as the population increases, servers could open up. The servers that are available could be random or rotated to keep things fresh.

But then you run into a problem where there are 3 starting continents but the would-be population of Planetside could be much bigger.

It's kind of cheesy but extra servers could simply be duplicate continents. As new continents get added they can replace the duplicates. As the game goes on and on, they could have dozens of unique continents to fight on with the set of continents people have access to shifting as global PS2 population changes. It would scale really well and long-term Planetside 2 could have a lot of individual persistent worlds that sort of lock & unlock like the old caves did depending on population and rotate so we have a lot of unique places to fight.

They could also be region specific, like Europe has their own set of continents/servers, so does North America, and East Asia, etc.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Uncap = sanc + warpate - loading screen.

It adds no additional functionality or capability. It streamlines gameplay.

Good summary. This is how I have come to view the footholds as well.

[Malorn]

Sorry for the multiple posts, but it just occurred to me as I was reading that other thread about space combat that my idea above about each continent being a server may be close to what they are planning.

http://www.fpsguru.com/game/284/feat...t-SyndCon.html

“We will start with a single planet and continent,” said Smed, “then add more continents, and eventually planets.”

If they're trying to build a large network of "planets" then they're going to want to have a lot of different continents to travel to, which means I might not be too far off the mark with my idea above about having each planet a unique server with globally unique players.

All they need are "placeholder continents" to account for a larger player base than they have continents to individually sustain. Over time they can replace the placeholder (duplicate) continents with new unique ones.

[Elthbert]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

I dunno. Why did sancs exist in PS1?


Ooooh.. You see what I did there?


Uncap = sanc + warpate - loading screen.

It adds no additional functionality or capability. It streamlines gameplay.

except that every warpgate was not open to be warped to from the sanc, not even every continent is necessarily open to be warped to from the sanc.

In this case there is no way to even make it difficult for someone to move into the continent, which one was able to do in ps 1

[Fenrys]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Good summary. This is how I have come to view the footholds as well.

That's actually a good point.

Since we don't need lattice links to capture territory, you can't block access to a continent by taking the base by the warpgate anyway.

[kadrin]

Originally Posted by kaffis

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.

It's not the amount of people per continent and the amount of servers that concerns me, it's the sheer lack of continents they'll be forced onto. As was pointed out earlier in this thread, those 3 continents are just going to turn into endless zerg balls contracting and expanding with no one making actual progress.

Lack of progress generally leads to the death of games, I just fear this game will burn out sooner with fewer continents to fight for and no sense of actual progression since it's going to be extremely unlikely any empire will get remotely close to locking a single continent.

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.

This ties back into what I said above about the lack of progress. If all the valuable parts of the continent are taken, and everyone knows there is no way they can possibly lock a continent down, there is no reason to fight for the other parts, therefore the fights will focus on just a few areas of the map continually. All the efforts to spread the fighting and make the whole continent a warzone will be wasted as only a few people will bother with the low value places and everyone will focus on the high value places.

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by Elthbert

except that every warpgate was not open to be warped to from the sanc, not even every continent is necessarily open to be warped to from the sanc.

In this case there is no way to even make it difficult for someone to move into the continent, which one was able to do in ps 1

A fair point, but they are obviously wanting to go to a less... strict.. order of battle, with the removal of lattice links. functionally making each empire have a broadcast warpgate on each continent will amount to the same thing.


Ooh! Idea! I'd just been thinking about how it will kinda suck that each empire is permanently stuck with the same uncap. So. Cap a continent, and the empire gets a pop up window asking which uncap they should claim, and suddenly that one is theirs, and the other two are assigned randomly to the other two factions.

[Hoodlum]

Originally Posted by Figment

Just going to post this again...



I really hope the other continents will provide some more clever continent shapes that prevent this standard T-split from reoccuring every day for 10 times, the split was actually already seen in the demo. But those sanctuaries are really just in the way of any coordinated plan to capture the continent. Capturing this continent CANNOT be done. It simply cannot be done... It will just feel like you are constantly being double teamed. I don't think the continent is large enough to make you feel like you shouldn't be able to control everything.

Thank you very much for the picture! and I agree something needs to be changed be it floating or sky bases that move slowly around the edge of the map

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Ooh! Idea! I'd just been thinking about how it will kinda suck that each empire is permanently stuck with the same uncap.

Probably sound like a broken record but I think rotating them once per month to one of the 6 possible configurations would resolve this.

[Hoodlum]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Probably sound like a broken record but I think rotating them once per month to one of the 6 possible configurations would resolve this.

I think we would need them to rotate a lot sooner then that say every day to a few days to a week at the most

[Malorn]

Nah it takes a while for it to get stale, especially when you have multiple continents to fight on. And rotating will affect the positioning of the empires so it is a little disruptive. I can see maybe once every two weeks but even that seems a bit extreme.

[Hoodlum]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Nah it takes a while for it to get stale, especially when you have multiple continents to fight on. And rotating will affect the positioning of the empires so it is a little disruptive. I can see maybe once every two weeks but even that seems a bit extreme.

How often do you think the the cycle of hex changing will go like the picture's that were linked I'm thinking it might be a daily thing that's why I said to have it change so often

[Malorn]

We're talking about different things. I'm talking about rotating which empire owns each foothold, not talking about anything about hexes.