Too much reward for the winning team

Stop talking about war. This is a game.

When you win in a game, you get a gold medal and applause. You dont get to cut my legs so the next match is even easier.

What is more, as I am clearly inferior, you should give me some advantage to make things interesting for you.

if your Inferior...the train and become better...become a challenge for the other team, Lately people will just roll over dead instead.And probly join the other team lol..its sad to see tbh...ive been NC from PS1 launch ( i was TR in ps1 beta,joined to form a old outfit called Better red then dead) and im NC in ps2.I have tried both VS and TR, to defeat your enemy you must understand them

Alert criteria: capture and maintain 66% of (continent) to lock it for free
Non alert: capture 94% of a continent.

When locked, a continent provides one boost in one random field. The boost can be...

+25% xp
+25% resource gain
-25% general resource cost
+50 certs plus your passive cert gain amount (so members can get up to 98 certs per lock)
Or stuff like that. The alerts should make a lock easier, but consolidate fights to generate a feeling of scale.

With many players flocking in to try Hossin, the percentage of 4th Faction has increased as expected. Most casual players only want to win so they'll join the winning side. Makes sense but it's still just wrong, they need to up the bonuses for low pop. Let me say I'm not exactly too content with the meager 3% bonus Members get and give. This should have been at least 10-20% for Auraxium.

Right, it hurts ONE faction if only ONE faction is doing it. A frame of reference can easily be made for the days of the old Crow or in newer terms, Allatum Biolab on Indar. Sometimes a faction will just dump most of their pop into defending a base and lose everything else.


However, you must have skimmed over the part where I said :

You will see 48+ of faction A pushing a lane against 12-24 of faction B, then about 3 lanes over you will see 48+ of faction B pushing a lane against 25-48 of faction A.

Because the reality is, everyone does it.

If you penalize anyone who does it, the frequency will be decreased. It isn't this magical "only one faction does it" phenomenon, there are groups across all three factions that do it . And there is a huge difference between "No additional rewards" and "penalize" . Right now we have the former, and it has done nothing to stop one sided fights.

People need to realize that if you want to win and not get steamrolled, then you have to earn it. pull more sunderers to cover the field with spawns, pull that tank from a different base to flank the enemy force. Stop expecting others to do the "work" and help, and it will feel more balanced. It's insane that most people will just mindlessly play the game and then cry about it when they lose.

Yea, that would be OK if this was a competition, where you need it to be fair so we can know who is the best. But this is a game where everybody is together and it has to be fun, not fair.

In RL competition you separate people in tiers to keep the matches interesting. In PS2 everybody is together and that doesn't work.

So we need a system, a handicap system, where you reward the low skill players -more damage, more precision. more resources - to be able to compete with the more skilled players. And wonder what, if with that help I win more frequently I climb the ladder and get less help and everything gets balanced.

The reward for the top players is to be at the top of the ladder, even when i am giving advantage to the ones below me. An international chess master doesn’t get any bragging rights for winning against an amateur, so they play against a hundred of them, without looking the chessboard. And yes, in those conditions some of the amateurs are going to win them, and nothing happens.

Yes I've read your full post and to be honest, I'm not sure what context you are coming from but to me you are implying that: "All fights should be 50-50 with only skill alone as the only leverage to win alerts". While as an FPS game it holds true to a certain degree, this is an MMOFPS which focuses more on macro-management of manpower and resources.

I may have started only this year playing PS2 and I respect veteran opinions and the like, however, the reason why a specific faction is "ganked" or "zerged" is because:

1.) They also wanted to win, and the most efficient action would be to gang up on the winning faction to quickly diminish the gap and do a last minute move to secure victory,

2.) In most alerts, a particular faction (particularly the VS) is too aggressive in capturing multiple territories in very early stages of the alert, which as stated in #1, other factions want to win hence gets ganked, without the proper number of manpower & resources to defend multiple points of contention.

3.) Inherent flaw of lattice system and current available territory would give limited number of flashpoints which could also lead to "perceived collusion".

And you are suggesting that SOE penalize factions that exploit the fact that a certain faction made a miscalculation? Then you might want to just remove the persistent world and just make this game have ELO rankings and matchmaking.

*EDIT: Since when did we experienced one sided fights? I firmly believe that one sided fights occur when there is a major continent overpopulation going on.

I don't mind -50% recourses bonus, but +25% xp for Hossin might change my mind and I might try other faction's weapons lets say..

Didn't SOE already measure the 4th faction and found that very few players actually hop factions? Stop arguing about a myth.

Oh I did. Due to rather rare chance to have that bonus.

The player base is so small now that when currently measured; it's like 10-20 people are left 4th factioning by themselves, but relatively it's a sizeable portion of the population

/Kidding

OT: Some interesting idea's in the thread, as usual I can't help but take my usual boring stance on this. The game will need some rather clever and complicated rules/reward systems added to try and add pressure & control to the faction populations to keep them balanced. Simply because the players can't do it for themselves.
It's these social aspects of MMO's that I've seen come up a lot which are the end-all of driving people away. Like MO or UO in it's early days, there were "realistic" rules on PK's (Player Killers), and they could reap a lot of reward from tormenting newbies and the Good Guys, and trampling them with there PvP specific gear and skills. Where as all the good guys were usually engineered for PvM assuming they even got the Dungeon they wanted to fight Mobs in, they were killed by PKers, thus eventually driving them away from the game.

Related to my assertion, here's a great Ancedote by Richard Garriot that I really like (Probably an experience from the late 90's, so an issue dating back to the dawn of the MMO):


The Thief

One day, early in the life of UO, I was participating as a GM and going to the aid of people who requested it. A note flashed across my screen from a woman, who said something like “Today is my first day trying to play UO, and every time I try to leave town a thief steals all my stuff, so I have to restart, and he does the same. If this continues I will quit and never come back to this game.”

So I arrived in her presence as Lord British, not that she cared, she did not know or care who I was, and only wanted her problem fixed. I felt I was up to the seemingly simple task. I told her to come with me, and I would escort her out of town. As we left town, suddenly *ZIP* a thief flew across the screen at speeds I could hardly understand, and stole her gear and disappeared! I told her to wait here, as I teleported to try and get in advance of the speedy ruffian.
When I finally froze him with a GM command, I revealed myself as Lord British, and told him to leave this poor woman alone, that this would drive away potential new players which we could not allow. Stop or else I would ban him from the game! He begged for forgiveness, and pledged to never do it to her again.

Satisfied, I returned the stolen items to the woman and told her, she should be safe now for at least a while, when *ZIP* the same thief came by again and stole all her items and disappeared. So, I chased him down a second time, and told him, hey, you had been warned, now I am going to ban you. He pleaded and pleaded and exclaimed how exuberance had overtaken him, and that he swore this time he would never do it again! Reluctantly, I believed him, and took the belongings back to the woman, again.

But then, for a third time, the same thief *ZIPPED* by… I froze him to the ground and told him, I was about to ban him! Then for the first time… he broke character, and refered to me out of character as well… “Look Richard Garriott”, he said, “You guys made the rules to this game, the rules include the role of thief, I am playing just as the role would be intended to be played. If the King tells a thief not to steal, of course he will beg for mercy and swear he won’t again. But what do you expect of me… I am a thief!”

After some thought… I agreed with him. So instead of banning him, I teleported him to the far side of the world. Then I gave the items back to the woman who could finally go about her business. After that, I began to think more carefully about the rules we ourselves put in the game, and the inevitable play styles that would come of it.

This game does come down to managing manpower, I agree 100%. However, very few outfits actually do this and do it well. What I'm suggesting is to nudge them in the right direction. To find ways to win fights that are closer to 50 / 50 without constantly relying on just sending wave after wave of soldiers at it until the enemy doesn't have enough ammo per mag to drop them all. And I'm not saying every fight should be 50 / 50 exactly on the nose, I just want there to be more of them that fall between 1 : 1 and 2:1 odds and less that are decided by bringing 2+ to 1. I'd actually be fine with little to no reward/penalty up around 2 to 1 odds.

What you described with territory isn't "ganking" if you have more territory, you have more fronts to defend and are more susceptible to attacks on multiple fronts. That is the way it should and does work.

And let me be clear on this, if you think bringing 4x the hex population to a fight is exploiting a miscalculation, your idea of managing manpower effectively is severely flawed.

As for your edit, I'm speaking as a player who looks for nothing but one sided fights against the favor of whatever faction I'm playing on at the moment. VS was the overpop faction on Mattherson for more than a few months, yet I was still able to find plenty of bases where 25-48 TR or NC would be camped at a base with no more than half a dozen defenders. Or trying to attack a base with a squad or 2 only to have a full platoon show up and pull more MAXes than there were attackers.


I know this will sound a bit ******-y and elitist but, if we are talking about me personally, I don't want 50/50 fights with the current playerbase, because they usually solve themselves. Easily defended bases are defended. Easily attacked bases are captured. Anything in between usually results in attackers eventually losing their spawns. What I want is a system that incentives players to get better at dealing with equal opposition to the point where 50 / 50 fights become interesting and dynamic.

Very well.

If it's a strategic location that leads to multiple latices like The Crown, Waterson's Redemption (The Octagon),or The Bastion, It seems logical to bring 2 or more platoons if the faction in question would decide to split push from that direction, then again time and time again has proven that wasting manpower and resources on those aforementioned hexes more often than not cost the said faction the alert by allowing the opposing factions to focus on other lesser populated hexes.

I started playing PS2 on 3rd week of feb during 9-1pm and 10-1am EST on weekdays and if Matty ever overpops it is because TR/NC are always at Indar, actually in the middle of March things started to change that NC and TR are able to win alerts.

For people getting better and striving, I think it will all come in time. I started this game with like 0.3 K/D just repairing stuff, reviving people and training myself to be a scythe pilot, now I'm at 1.3 K/D, still average compared to a lot and this is just a game anyways, although at least I can be an impact to wherever I am whenever I am playing, however small it may be.

As for my reply may seem a little bit personal, my apologies. Just wanting to clarify the context on where you are coming from. But yea, can't really do much except do stuff till everyone else do what has to be done during an alert.

Rewards need to be in place for the victor, and only the victor, to make people give a damn in the first place. Nobody is going to bother trying to cap a continent if it gives no benefit, or if the losing side gains even comparable benefits, let alone greater ones, than it does the victor. The cap rewards are not something that should be used to balance the playing field.

Furthermore, the rewards gained from a continent cap should be big; big faction-wide rewards add to the sense of accomplishment felt when completing a task in-game, and to this end those rewards work well. I don't believe it would be healthy to detract from that.

Applying your logic, no base should ever fall because that's not fun to lose a base. No team should ever have pop advantage and no one should die because that's not fair for me to die and you to live.

Applying your logic anything that is deemed not fun should be banned everyone must die equally and regardless of playtime, level and expertise everything must be equal.

Do you see how damaging your thought process is? You cannot reward poor play regardless of how pathetic it is. You must push for excellence and integrity or you have nothing.

I don't mind over-population.

As a defender, it's a lot of fun punching a zerg in the nose.

Easy as well since so many of the zerging force are horribads...

Still, I wish there was more to do. The resource system could have been designed to promote more "partisan" activity with troops moving behind enemy lines disrupting things (armor convoys, harassers harassing, setting up ambushes to steal resource transport, anyone?)

Ghost capping was bad before the lattice and too simple to boot because it could be accomplished by one person. The lattice although designed to keep the fights decent sized has had unintended consequences like making the game very flow-charted and well, boring.

I know the development resources are probably not what they need to be, but you HAVE to make the game's resource system more dynamic and you HAVE to decrease the amount of bases on the map.

You also need to remove the instant deployment mechanic. People should have to make their way across the "void" between bases (more vehicle fights), OR make a "drop" which should be attached to infantry resource availability.

Too many bases with instant redeployment at-will turns the game fom "epic" warfare on an "epic" sized map to just another lobby-based arena game.

Pipe dreams, i know, but one can always hope.

I wanted to make similar topic.
I really like the bonuses for locking but when you play the underpop faction you are always screwed.
The bonus needs to be 30% MAX not 50%. Also each 1% of over 33% Pop should give 3% more expensive vehicles and consumables. So the factions would balance by itself.

I won't lie I haven't finished reading the thread, but how has nobody brought up the obvious glaring issue with an hex based rewards. A lot of battles happen inbetween hexes so its not uncommon for one hex to have a lot of friendlies in it (and look like the are crushing the enemy) but in reality the enemy is in the next hex (where there are few friendlies). So basically even though it might be an even fight both sides would be getting penalized for no reason.