One problem I noticed with the Tug of War

[Marinealver]

Now I am going to add some constructive criticisim about the current tug of war capture system. Now just to let you know it is better than the wack a mole ticket system that was up earlier but I can see it being a fight killer as much as a Gen Drop in the first game.

Here is the scenario. Defenders in a biolab loose all but 1 node however because they understand the mechanics better they stack up on that node 6/6 and still begian to pull the base in their favor while the atackers vainly atempt to capture all nodes because they don't quite get the meta game changes.

Now if the atackers realize that it is not the number of nodes but the number of players guarding a node with a maximum of 6 per node then they will break off the attack and instead camp their own node with 6 a piece pulling the base to their side.

So there you go the non fight stalemate in which players will stop to camp the nodes they got instead of pushing to attack the nodes they don't have. Say you got a (reduced numbers here) but 24 against 24 defenders you will have the atackers taking and camping 2 nodes and the defenders staying on their two node to try and slow the capture process down and thus no one willing to go to the middle ground and take the enemy nodes.

[Xyntech]

The thing is that one player camping one node is still going to win against a bunch of enemy nodes who have nobody sitting on them.

Obviously both sides could decide to camp what nodes they control, but one side will generally have an advantage, either through having more nodes, more campers, or more territory influence. In theory (and from what I've seen, in practice) this should encourage one side or the other (or both) to leave a few people on the capture points while the rest go clear out the enemy. You don't even necessarily have to flip all of their capture points, just kill or disperse them so that they can't compete in the tug of war.

The biggest problem I see right now is that camping a point while nobody is actively trying to attack it is just as boring and unrewarding as ever.

I think that a simple solution would be to give a small trickle of XP for influencing a capture point. Start it off at 5xp every 5 seconds, then increase it by 2xp for every enemy influencing any point and reduce it by 1xp for every friendly influencing any point (down to a minimum of 1xp every 5 seconds). Extra people beyond a points cap limit could still earn XP and would still contribute to lowering the total XP rate by 1xp, but wouldn't provide any additional tug of war influence.

It would just be a nice (but very small) XP reward for doing your job defending a point, while not being more lucrative than clearing out any enemies who you know are waiting to be killed at an enemy cap point.

Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, it would make it clear to new players that they should be defending points. That's one of the bigger problems I see with the current system. New players capping a point and then abandoning it, not having any obvious indication that they are supposed to influence the point after capturing it. New players will generally already understand the concept of going and killing the enemy at the other control points, so I think it would be better to accidentally end up with too many newbies camping friendly points than having them constantly abandoning them. Besides, more experienced players will have somewhat higher odds of actually dislodging enemies from the other control points, so having new players provide a valuable service while gaining a trickle of free XP would be a win win.

[Gonefshn]

The attempt to make influencing points a larger part of the strategy only put more players out of the action than they already had to worry about. If they want to fix this issue they need to change how you get the XP for a capture not the capture mechanics. Having to stay inside the SOI during the flip for XP is slowing the game down.

[Bocheezu]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

The biggest problem I see right now is that camping a point while nobody is actively trying to attack it is just as boring and unrewarding as ever.

I was in one of the Amerish biolabs the last day of beta and people would still rather get camped by that one guy in the spawn room than stand on a capture point. Even after I mentioned in /re that we need two people at every point to cap faster, nobody did anything. The capture points were 0/2, 0/2, and 1/2 (me).