News: World Domination Series Overhaul

[EVILPIG]

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...hanges.152266/

Originally Posted by Malorn
The WDS Preseason
The goal of the World Domination Series is to create a fair long-term event where outfits and empires can come together to defeat their opposing empires over the course of several weekly challenges. We want to give you a fun empire and server competition to give you something more meaningful and persistent to achieve day-to-day beyond the next capture or cert farm.

As most players should know, we are currently very focused on performance optimizations, and work on other features has been suspended until those optimizations are complete. The WDS is something that we managed to create with very few resources as a means of giving you something fun and engaging to participate in while we complete the performance update. This also the perfect opportunity to beta test the idea of the WDS since the game will not have significant mechanic changes for several weeks.

The WDS preseason is intended to find out what works and what doesn’t and to get your feedback so when we do it for real you will have a fun, fair, and engaging experience.

Player Concerns
Your feedback has been received, and there are several concerns with this event, primarily revolving around fairness. These are the top concerns that we have heard loud and clear from you and briefly what we are doing to address them.

Population Imbalance. We will be changing the scoring to scale with enemy population on a per-continent and per-empire basis. Underdogs will earn more points for their captures and holdings.

Geographical Imbalance. For the preseason we will be rotating warpgates soon in an upcoming hotfix, and may do additional rotations during the event. For future seasons we will have scheduled rotations to ensure geographical fairness.

Empire Hopping. We will be adding a participation requirement in the preseason and are considering scaling rewards with participation in future seasons so empire loyalty is properly rewarded.

Off-Peak/Ghost Capping. We will be changing the scoring such that it scales with total population, so continents with many foes will be worth more, empty continents will be worth much less. This will generally mean that peak time will have a higher point potential than off-peak.

Runaway Empire. We will be adding a bonus when taking territories from the empire with the highest season score on the server. This is expected to keep the competition competitive and give the lower scoring empires an opportunity for a comeback.

Depth/Variety. We will be adding increased capture and hold value the longer a territory is held. This provides for potentially more lucrative captures deep in enemy territory and a reason to defend long-held territory. We also have plans for weekly challenges that will change the rules slightly to mix things up.

In-Game UI Integration. For the preseason we are working on an in-game WDS summary on the TAB screen, and to add WDS capture and hold values to the regional tooltips on the map so you can see exactly how much a given territory is worth. Other UI integration points are being considered for future seasons.

Server vs Global Rewards. We do not have any pre-season plans to address this issue but we are aware of it. For future seasons we are considering more rewards based on your empire’s performance on your server.


Upcoming Scoring Changes
Our goal is to get these in before the preseason is over so we get some time to see how they play out, adjust values, and get your feedback on how well they are working. ETA: Soon!

Base Score Values
The base scoring is focused around capturing and holding territories. These are base scoring values before modifiers are applied. They are of course subject to change.

Small Outpost = 10 points for capture, 20 points per hour held
Large Outpost = 20 points for capture, 30 points per hour held
Major Facility = 50 points for capture, 40 points per hour held

These point values are increasing by a factor of 10 because the difficulty modifier will generally reduce it in the typical case and decimal values are ugly. Overall point earnings should be similar to current. This will result in more point potential but will be offset by the difficulty modifier reduction.


Difficulty Modifier
Each empire has a Difficulty Factor applied to the scoring of each continent. Difficulty is calculated per-empire and is based on enemy percentage of population cap.

Difficulty = MAX(EnemyPop1/PopCap, EnemyPop2/PopCap, MinValue)

This is intended to address the issues of Population Imbalance and Off-peak/Ghost Capping. More enemy population = more challenge = more potential points. If you are outnumbered, then you will be earning more points for captures and holdings than the highest population empire. Peak time will also be worth more potential points due to more enemies on more continents than off-peak time. Ghost capping empty continents will be worth much less than fighting where there is opposition.


Top-Dog Bounty
Territory belonging to the empire on the server with the current highest score for the event will be worth significantly more capture points. This is intended to allow lower-scoring empires to catch up to a leader and to encourage those empires to go after the dominant empire.


Territory Value Increases with Time Held
Each hour a territory is held it will increase slightly in both capture value and hold value (though the rates of each may not be the same). This is essentially an hourly compound interest being applied to the territory capture and hold value. There is a limit of course so it won’t be wildly disproportionate, but the intent is to add some depth and to encourage both capture and defense of long-held territories. Combined with the top-dog bounty this is expected to be one way to catch up to a dominant empire and to deny them the more lucrative territory gains.


Alert Victory Points
World Domination points will be awarded for winning alerts, with more points for dominating victories. These are intended to make Alerts relevant for the WDS instead of alerts being a conflicting goal. Since alerts are more frequent off-peak this will also be one way for off-peak players to contribute more to the event.


Weekly Challenges
These are weekly tweaks in scoring rules. The goal is that they will help mix up the event and give empires and outfits opportunities to pull out ahead or play to their strengths. We may try out a few of these in the preseason. Here are some of the ideas for challenges we are currently considering:

Esamir/Amerish Madness – Scoring on a specific continent will be worth significantly more points. Example: Amerish is worth double points. Alert frequency also adjusted so the only alerts you get are on this continent. (Don’t worry, we probably won’t ever do an Indar one)
Size Always Matters – Major Facility point values increased (bio labs, tech plants, amp stations). Facility Alerts increased in frequency and continent domination alerts reduced.
Red Alert – Alert victory point values are increased to have more significant contribution.
Molon Labe – Territory Hold value increase over time and max value is increased. Defense is more rewarding.
Pillage – Capture value increase over time and top dog bounty increased. Attack is more rewarding.
Sudden Death – Base Capture and Hold values increased, so more points overall earned this week. This might make an interesting challenge for the last week of the season.

Please let us know what you think of these changes and the event in general. Constructive feedback always welcome! Help us make it better!

[KesTro]

It's a far cry from what we have now and there's some good changes in there although I can't see it helping in the long run on certain servers with a wild pop-imbalance. On servers that are relatively close to one another I can only see this as being a good thing though. Reading through the comments though it's as the Dev's say. If they can do this with minimal time taken away from focusing on optimization I'll take it.

It also seems like the first step towards that mythical dynamic xp you all want and love.

[Hamma]

Holy paste fail! :P

Posting as news, somehow missed this last night.

[Hamma]

Updated OP

[capiqu]

Wow, whats the point in being in the lead?

[EVILPIG]

Originally Posted by Hamma

Updated OP

Posted from phone. I thought your update was my post fail, I just edited.

[EVILPIG]

Originally Posted by Hamma

Holy paste fail! :P

Posting as news, somehow missed this last night.

I was trying to fix when you updated and screwed up your update if you could fix again.

[Dodgy Commando]

Originally Posted by capiqu

Wow, whats the point in being in the lead?

To win the WDS when it ends?

I'm glad they are doing this. It certainly felt a bit limp at first, but they are really looking into improving the WDS and making it worth something. Very glad with what they are promising, it should give the game some very much needed long term goals.

[Babyfark McGeez]

Who the hell cares about this artifical, disconnected event? I know i sure don't and the majority of people i met in the game didn't even know it is there.

There are a crapton more important things which need attention, this is certainly not one of it.

Edit: Now i do realize this is nothing that really takes away from the (so goddamn much needed) development, but i just feel it's like the alerts, just on an even more remote level where the player has a hard time feeling "connected" to the event.

Edit²: Ok this sounded more hostile than intended lol.
So i'm giving them credit for doing something with the game to try to enhance our experience.

[Crator]

Well, it seems like they are trying to develop a meta-game which is good. My problem with it is how does the general populous know about how it works? Not everyone will read what was posted above. For this reason I don't see how this will help empire hopping, because people who don't know about the WDS won't care and hop anyways.

Another concern is that they are developing the WDS around induvidual/disconnected continents. Does that mean if they get all this stuff for WDS working that we are less likely to see the inter-continent lattice with continent locking in the future? Or will they redesign the WDS when the devs get to implementing that?

[Boomzor]

For some reason I find it rather hard to relate to all this.

It's like the house is on fire and I've just been given a blanket to keep warm. Am I suppose to be grateful for it?
Then again, someone did care enough to atleast consider doing anything at all about my original predicament.

Now I'm standing here, on fire, blanket in hand, going

WTF?!

[DirtyBird]

There were population balance issues before the WDS, this doesn't address those issues.

If you are still seeing those imbalances do you really care that the WDS is being adjusted to show an even split of points?
The only thing this changes is the WDS scoreboard and while its lopsided it looks bad for PS2.

I cant see how this will change the declining askew population on Briggs.
The imbalance existed before the WDS, the WDS didnt not create the imbalance.

[Calista]

Originally Posted by Boomzor

For some reason I find it rather hard to relate to all this.

It's like the house is on fire and I've just been given a blanket to keep warm. Am I suppose to be grateful for it?
Then again, someone did care enough to atleast consider doing anything at all about my original predicament.

Now I'm standing here, on fire, blanket in hand, going

Kinda like the Titanic is going down and they are busy re-arranging the deck chairs

[GreyFrog]

Hmm I don't feel like its as useless as some people are making out. For me its wonderful that we finally have some acknowledgement that pop imbalance is a problem. Its great that someone with half a brain is finally looking at these things.

They really need in game news though, any one who doesnt pay attention to the launcher and doesnt read the website knows about this event how?

[Crator]

Well, it seems like they are trying to develop a meta-game which is good.

My problem with it is how does the general populous know about how it works? Not everyone will read what was posted above. For this reason I don't see how this will help empire hopping, because people who don't know about the WDS won't care and hop anyways. Ah, never mind, I missed the In-Game UI Integration part. Guess we'll see how it goes.

Another concern is that they are developing the WDS around induvidual/disconnected continents. Does that mean if they get all this stuff for WDS working that we are less likely to see the inter-continent lattice with continent locking in the future? Or will they redesign the WDS when the devs get to implementing that?