PS2 needs dynamic XP gain. - Page 4

Electrofreak · 2012-12-19, 05:14 PM

Originally Posted by velleity

Introducing dynamic xp for kills without introducing xp scaling for low pop defenders is flawed and amounts to a nerf to defenders. Playing on a server with huge opposition zergs with an empire that gets as low as 26%, I get a 4% xp bonus and jack for playing outnumbered by 2 + to 1 on most continents other then raw kills.

I don't see how it's a nerf for defenders. Generally attackers are the ones spawn camping so this is a nerf to the XP they could get for that kind of activity. I would agree that a better system for XP when defending is needed, and I would point out that doing this in a way that is dynamic (perhaps providing defense XP bonuses that increase as time goes on and the fight goes on, to a point) is the best way of doing it.

That said, people really like to see that big XP "paycheck" when they capture a facility. Defending a facility for a period of time could have a lump sum reward as well, but if you set any specific timer on when the reward is paid out, you run into problems such as defenders bailing out after they've received their XP.

It's a difficult situation. You need to make the carrot for defense appealing, but if defenders don't feel like they'll ever get the carrot, they'll give up, and if you give them the carrot, they'll probably go back to attacking something.

Defense needs to have a tangible reward (XP bonuses to kills are borderline), but it also needs to keep defenders committed.

SKYeXile · 2012-12-19, 05:29 PM

I also agree with this thread, but until its fixed, THE SPAWNCAMPING SHALL CONTINUE!

Crator · 2012-12-19, 07:33 PM

^ Spawn camping will always occur. What it shouldn't give is a benefit other then stat padding.

velleity · 2012-12-20, 09:26 PM

Originally Posted by Crator

^ Spawn camping will always occur. What it shouldn't give is a benefit other then stat padding.

Spawn camping, done properly, will always have the benefit of operant conditioning.

**Malorn** · 2012-12-20, 10:30 PM

Originally Posted by Wahooo

I don't understand how these changes would be a nerf to XP generation?

See Bob it just comes down to motivation. Spawn camping in it self is kind of a natural progression in the capture mechanic HOWEVER... a well designed base would allow the defenders the possibility to fight back out of their spawns to re-take the base if they are not fully camped. A bio lab for example. Eventually it ends with spawns camped but even then if you CAN fight out it ends up being near inevitable you lose the base. With amp stations and especially with tech-plants now, the spawn camping starts at the START of the fight and the ability to fight back out is near zero.
This is an issue with base design, the dynamic XP part is just so it is less beneficial to the campers.

See the thing is TACTICAL moves need to have the tactical success be the point and not give that much XP. Destroying terminals, Gens, capturing checkpoints and towers these are tactical points to the much larger point of base capture where the fighting and capturing/defending should be the big XP maker. Remember in PS1 who killed the lobby term? The defenders because once you lost the lobby you didn't want the other team to be able to use it right? In ps2? First noob to get to it... why? gives XP and there is no tactical reason to hack them, well there is but it isn't recognized by most of the community and i have my doubts about all the devs as well.

As Bags pointed out, right now it is more beneficial to farm an AMS than kill it. That will always be the case sometimes or to some extent but MOST of the time it should be more beneficial to kill the AMS.

The point is to motivate people to fight over large bases, fight large fights and actually defend territory. Right now the system is too rewarding for giving up and going somewhere else to attack.

This, and the rest of the thread, are all good points. Thanks for the good feedback here.

Mox · 2012-12-21, 11:44 AM

We need dynamic xp gain furthermore we need shared xp in squads and shared xp in vecs.

It is annoying to get xp for capturing empty bases.
It is annoying to get the same amount of xp for a instant kill at the spawns and for killing a player who already shooted 20 people without dying.
It is annoying to get no xp for being passenger in a sundy or tertiary gunner in a lib.
And last but not least it is annoying to get no xp because you are the guy your squadleader has told to cover the rear.

Electrofreak · 2012-12-21, 01:23 PM

Originally Posted by Malorn

This, and the rest of the thread, are all good points. Thanks for the good feedback here.

Good to see you in blue Malorn! It's a comfort to the community knowing you've got a hand in base design. I maintain that arclegger has done an awesome job, but the playerbase has an amazing ability to find the ***** (ch!nk used in the traditional sense here, thanks profanity filter!) in the armor of any aspect of the game mechanics and exploit it to the fullest extent, and it's good to see SOE moving to intercept by continuing to work on base design and capture mechanics.

I think a lot of people are expecting drastic changes to base design based upon the demands of the communty, but anyone who has worked in game design before knows that's absolutely a terrible idea. Keep making small changes and observing the way the playerbase reacts and you're sure to find the best solutions.

Obviously a lot of base design centers around XP rewards and how it motivates the attacker or defender during a battle, guiding them towards certain objectives and entertaining gameplay. The mission system is a great start to this system, but as usual, we must expect the playerbase to find a way to exploit it as best they can. A combination of good base design and XP reward mechanics is absolutely necessary to prevent the playerbase from moving in mass towards a certain style of gameplay (spawn camping, vehicle spamming, infantry zerging, or aircraft whoring) and just making other elements just no longer fun.

I'm sure a lot of this is stuff that you guys already realize, but the community often gets tunnel vision when discussing topics like this (myself included).

NapalmEnima · 2012-12-21, 05:27 PM

One thing that might help to bolster defense is to make the turrets tougher. Their damage output "feels" right, but it seems that they got considerably more fragile at or shortly before launch.

I think a good rule of thumb is that if an MBT and a cannon turret get in a slugging match, the turret should win by small margin. Throw in an anti-armor main or any ol' secondary on the tank and it wins instead.

If you could recess the cannons a bit to make them harder (but not impossible) to hit from the air that'd be good too. A wider platform (with an upturned lip) for AA turrets to give some protection from ground attack would likewise be good.

That could result in a pretty significant redesign of the current turret-tower-thingies.

As several others have stated, making defensive XP visible as a lump sum would go a long way to help folks feel they got something out of Holding the Line. "You defended FOO for BAR earning a total of BAZ defense bonus XP."

You could throw a detailed report in as a GAQ so it wouldn't interrupt someone still fighting, but could be pulled up easily. Kills, deaths, accuracy, leaderboardy stuff...

Lonehunter · 2012-12-21, 05:46 PM

There's minor tweaks and things that won't be great to start with but I'd love to see this implemented. It would be far better then what we have now. This is one of those things that PS1 vets don't understand why it isn't part of the game, like being able to have more then 1 waypoint per squad lol

kamikazety · 2012-12-22, 06:35 AM

A curious idea, but why cant we make an AMS' xp value based on how many people it has spawned? So if you assist/kill an AMS that has spawned say 55 people it should be worth a hell of a lot more xp then an AMS that has spawned 2 people.

That'd certainly make them more valuable to kill over farming. Sure overall can still get more xp farming it for awhile but individuals tend to be selfish. If you dangle the possibility of a lot of xp for destroying it, They are more likely to destroy it than to farm it.

Crator · 2012-12-22, 08:09 AM

^ Intentionally create a farm? No thanks.

**Malorn** · 2012-12-22, 09:22 AM

PS1 also had indirect XP rewards. If you healed/revived/repaired/hacked a terminal, and then someone went on to get a kill or score other points shortly afterwards you would get bonus XP rewards for that. I still remember the lodestar drivers that would create little repair/rearm stations for aircraft and tanks that would make crazy XP from the repair, rearm, and indirect XP rewards from all the vehicles they helped. But as above, this is harder to teach new players.

Just to play a little devil's advocate on this subject...

The downside to dynamic xp is that xp gain becomes harder to understand for new players and becomes yet another barrier to learning the game. It is also difficult to balance. Getting a constant set of points for each action is simple to teach, and simple to balance.

Another challenge is helping make all classes roughly equally profitable in terms of XP gain. For example, Engineers and Medics have opportunities to earn XP which Light Assault, Infiltrators, MAX, and Heavies do not. Weights could be applied to certain actions but that creates inconsistency which becomes more confusion to new players.

It's simple to understand that kill is worth X, revive is worth Y, capture is Z, etc. When those numbers start varying it becomes harder to figure out how to best earn XP. Some kills will be worth more than others for no obvious reason. Of course that's true today also - sometimes you randomly get headshot bonuses, streak bonuses, streak stop, and vengeance bonuses. Passively though those reinforce certain behaviors like it is good to go on a kill streak, and good to stop enemy players who go on kill streaks. And things like headshot bonuses and kills in general are (in theory) something Infiltrators should have an easier time getting so it is a way to help counter the lack of support options for that class.

Though the basic rules of a dynamic system are fairly simple....

Take more challenging objectives, get more xp.
Kill more challenging opponents, get more xp.
Help your teammates/Empire succeed, get more xp.

Conceptually I think these are easy to teach, but learning the cutoffs and how to min/max your productivity becomes much harder to learn. The exact behaviors you did to earn more XP become masked behind the XP number while in the current system you can see the exact actions that resulted in your rewards. Ideally we would want you playing the game and doing the right thing to be the optimal XP gain so it happens naturally but that's very hard to balance.

Not saying I disagree, just channeling potential opposition and putting out some reasons why it is the way it is. It wasn't haphazardly thrown in or put in just because other games did it as might be commonly speculated by the tinfoil hat crew. There are sound reasons for the current system.

Crator · 2012-12-22, 11:51 AM

^ Those things Marlorn listed were there to promote team oriented game play, prevent exploitation of XP gain, and also the easy to teach hard to master element produces a sort of progression or achievement for the player.

Mox · 2012-12-22, 01:10 PM

I dont think dynamic xp gain or shared xp concepts are an issue regarding the new player experience. noobs have a lot of other problems than thinking about the exact amount of xp they earn for a certain action. Learning by doing is the way it works in this case.

Far more important is that dynamic xp and shared xp offer incentives for relevant participation in the game.

raw · 2012-12-22, 07:53 PM

Originally Posted by Malorn

Though the basic rules of a dynamic system are fairly simple....

Take more challenging objectives, get more xp.
Kill more challenging opponents, get more xp.
Help your teammates/Empire succeed, get more xp.

This is all fine and dandy in theory but in praxis challenging opponents do not reward enough XP vs. simple objectives.

For example, killing Infantry is a rather simple objective. It's at what? 100 XP now? Killing Tanks is not a simple objective (unless you're a rocket pod spamming ESF obviously), yet you get 150 XP I think for a tank kill. That in itself is not enough, but you obviously add the 1-2 infantry kills on top of that. Except, the driver will almost always bail before his tank blows up, so 150 XP it is.

In the same time an infantry can kill one tank, it can dispatch 5-10, maybe even 20 other infantry. And that doesn't even account for the fact that a tank is much bigger risk target than another infantry.

Conversly, it is so easy to farm infantry with HE weapons/Rocket Pods, why would you *ever* want to waste a shot on armor? You can rack up enormeous amounts of kills (good for the e-peen) and XP by blasting Infantry. Shooting at rmor/air is high risk low reward in comparision.

So to summarize:

For infantry its more rewarding to go after other infantry than after armor/air.
For armor/air it is much much much much more rewarding to go after infantry than after other armor/air.

At the end of the day your XP scheme doesn't add up. Rewards for "challenging" targets needs to go up considerably.

Also, you have to draw a line between catering towards new players and catering towards the mentally retarded. Emergent gameplay means that you add a number of simple tools for the players to wield and combine to enormeous complexity and depth. It does not mean that the game must be simple, in fact it must allow for complexity and depth. The long term survival of an MMO hinges on the complexity and depth, I'd even go as far and say a proper MMO cannot even be realized without faciliating complexity.

Long time Eve Online players will tell you that their game is a game of knowledge. That means that on the one side the new player experience is horrible, because they know fuck all what they are doing and get ganked and griefed to oblivion because of that but on the other side of the medal it also means there's a lot to learn, a lot of stuff to *do* (as in having both a lot of content (width) and a lot to learn about each smaller subset of content (depth)). This is the ideal model for emergent gameplay. This is why Eve Online is doing well. Obviously Eve Online isn't "easy to balance", easy on the side of the developers. That's what making an MMO means too: Commitment.

Planetside 2 clearly lacks in the complexity department, it's like cats-n-mouse on 64 sqm. And that isn't just some edgy critique about the merry-go-round of the zergs, but it's quite literally a game that is as simple as watching an episode of Tom & Jerry. Actually, considering Tom's elaborate and complex plans to catch Jerry, PS2 requires even less brainpower than following T&J.

The MMO aspect of the game cannot be made simple. It needs complexity and depth, and there needs to be knowledge attached to it. You already made the basic shooter gameplay simple and easy to get into - by following BF3 and other modern shooters. This is excellent for new players coming over from other shooters - but remember, those shooters aren't an MMO, they aren't Planetside. As you say yourself, Planetside is more, both in width and in depth. PS isn't just BF3 on bigger maps.