WDS: The Battle Begins

Uhm, WWII german vet?

Apparently we're OP. nerfnerfnerf.

It's been mentioned a hundred times, but WDS scoring shouldn't be utterly, wholly, absolutely, completely, and entirely contingent on whichever faction is overpopulating a server. It's extremely demoralizing to the losing side, and it's probably extremely boring for the overpopulated zerg -- which, in this case, is almost always the NC.

It can't be that difficult to severely handicap the overpopulated faction, either through experience penalties or the COMPLETE AND UTTER REMOVAL OF WDS POINTS FOR GHOST CAPPING, PERIOD, END OF STORY. Population in a given area should play a much more direct role to the amount of WDS points that any given territory is worth, and population disadvantages should more heavily reward defenders. It'd at least give the rest of us some semblance of competition. As it stands, I'm sick and tired of waiting in my faction's spawn room while several dozen NC tanks / aircraft sit nearby. It's becoming difficult to even find a fair battle on any of the three continents at any given time on Waterson. Last night's fights at the Crown / Rashnu were the only truly enjoyable experiences I've had thus far with the event.

Seriously, this event has been an abject catastrophe.

It's nothing to do with pop though. Even the under pop faction is zerging. They way it's been designed has caused people to zerg across uncontested territory. Pop is a different discussion. The broken mechanics of WDS are the fact it promotes capturing territory above everything else, primarily because of the personal rewards. People have decided to grind their way to these rewards via the path of least resistance, i.e. massive zergs that ghost cap entire continents.

End this terrible idea asap before there are no players left.

WDS may be the end for ps2, no one fights, they just form the largest zergs ever seen and ghostcap empty bases.

There needs to be a fix to make ghost capping less profitable.

Wrel's idea on this whole fiasco is right:

Reverse the rewards for attackers and defenders.

The zerg problem will disappear overnight. Right now the cracks are already starting to show and SOE has an entire weekend of nothing but negative comments from the playerbase. They should take the hint and make changes as soon as possible because the game cannot cope with this for another 3 weeks.

Oh, btw, lets not forget Waterson, where 90% of the playerbase all jumped ship to NC, leaving the TR to sit in the warpgate with no hope of getting anywhere.

It has plenty to do with population, the faction with the larger population can afford more zergs, and more zergs can conquer more territory, and is harder to avoid thus the occasional big fights that still happen, and are generally far more costly for the lower pop side, as the higher pop can hold them and go around them with another group at the same time.
Also the term ghost capping is not equal to capping with a huge army uncontested. ghost capping is when the control points are flipped in a zone by a few attackers and then even they leave the zone (thus the zone marker on the map shows 0 pop, yet the zone is being capped, hence the term "ghost capping").
But still the larger issue is that the Personal contribution carrot on the stick is too prevalent, and getting that reward is far simpler via attacking (as the "hold zone" point is not awarded to the personal contrib at the 30 min marks when it ticks over, and most of the time sieges don't even last 30 minutes, and the defend score is only awarded when the base cap bar is fully restored to the owners side, and that doesn't happen too often either, especially with the fact that the act of attacking is overly rewarded so most of the time there's no chance to gain any defender score, and that's why generally noone stands up to stop the opposing zerg, there's not enough incentive).

I like those ideas. +1 from me. But with a better description on the faction flavor
Also :

Seriously, how couldn't they see the behavior of the players coming???
You get an idea? Ask for "competitive" people how they would break it/abuse it/cheat it. Make it foolproof and fair.

We're looking into some solutions for the issue where players are all going to one location ("zerging" as you call it ) to get the maximum WDS Points.

If any of you have suggestions, please send them our way. We'd love to know what you feel would resolve the issue. As I receive more information from the Development Team, I'll be sure to share it. I know Malorn (the Designer in charge of the system) has been very active on the Forums, Reddit, etc answering questions and letting players know this is a Preseason and we want your feedback.

Quite a few others have suggested this and we're looking into how we can resolve it.

We did this during our first Preseason, but perhaps we didn't get enough feedback or something got lost in the mix of things. People seemed happy about the event when we announced it on Monday, but now that they've played through it, it seems people still want some changes made, so let us know what those are. I can't go back to the Development Team with "they don't like it," I need to go back with "they don't like it because x, y, z and v." I've gathered quite a bit of great constructive feedback, let's keep that coming my way.

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To everyone in this thread,

Keep sending us your feedback, but do try to do it in a constructive manner. We're listening. This is a Preseason for a reason. We want your feedback, so we can make the event more fun going forward and allow you to win really cool rewards in the process, especially for our players who want some Marketplace Depot items, but can't afford them.

Well for starters don't give us single use camos as rewards, and 1 hours boosts as T3 rewards . That only makes people even angrier

Where's the "dislike" button?

This is the dumbest event in any game I've ever played.

But these are free. You can keep that one use camo on for as long as you want. Boosts are great rewards and time savers, but I do agree, if you are already BR100, we should be giving you something else.

I've already got this on my feedback list under rewards. Quite a few people have expressed concern about the Tiers and the rewards granted.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Your comment is honestly breaking our Forum Guidelines. We are listening. Saying, "This is the dumbest event in any game I've ever played" is not only rude, but not helpful. That gives me no feedback on what you think is "dumb" and how you think that "dumbness" can be resolved.

Please think about what you're posting and how that represents you and how that helps or doesn't help us resolve the issues you are experiencing.

Right off the top I can say that the way the Defence mechanics are in game is one thing that despretly needs to be redone/fixed.

There need to be something in the system to reward people for defending without making it so that they only get counted if there is a point flip. As it stands now it give no real reward for say defending an AMP station well, compaired to say a Biolab with multiple points.

Defence needs to be setup to give rewards for holding a base in your control while under attack. A simple Idea to do this is that It looks at the populations of the attackers and defenders.

Say every 10-15 minutes, so long as there is still an enemy presence the Defenders will get a XP/ WDS points reward. The amount would be based on 2 factors:

- Overall value of the base in the WDS ( as it is setup now)
-Overall pop balance between attackers and defenders

How the Pop balance would affect the points would act in the way that if the attackers are close to equal or greater to the defenders in number, they will get the full WDS points bonus, while if the defenders greatly outnumber the attackers, the reward is reduced.

Doing it in this manor would mean that the best reward would be from balanced to Last stand fights for the defenders, while the reward would be less and less for an overwhelming defence. This System could also be reversed for Attacking the base to help reduce zerging/ghost caps.

Really until the All or Nothing reward system that is in place for defence and captures (IE, only get Cap xp if your there for the last seconds of the cap, not for actualy participating) We will continue to have problems with Zerging and battle flow (Sitting at a base doing nothing for 5 minutes so they get the cap reward instead of continuing the fight).

They're free you can't ask for anything more for a game that let's you play it for free!?

I'm sure you guys are familiar with Wrel's Youtube channel and on his latest channel update he mentioned switching the point values for attacking and defending bases making it more valuable to defend versus attack. I highly recommend someone checks it out. I'd post the vid myself but I've never been able to do so (maybe my browser idk).

I'm not sure if this would fix the event as it seems like then you'd have people reluctant to be aggressive resulting in long stalemates but it might be a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately an event like this while looking good on paper, doesn't take into account the psychology of the playerbase meaning if they can exploit something then they will whether it's by switching factions, zerging, etc.

I honestly can see the problem doing that right from the start:

- If it's more valuble to defend then attack, why would anyone attack past a certain point?
- With how defence mecanics and WDS points setup, it would turn most fights into Farms at Biolabs/ Multi point bases, because you only get the Personal points if a point is flipped.


I'll refer to my prevous post above, One of the Core issues is how the Defence/Attack reward mecanics are currently setup, and until that is addressed these other Issues in the WDS will continue to happen. You can keep making your House look better and better, but if the foundation it is on is Crooked, it will still be off.

I'm enjoying it so far, but I haven't looked into it deeply enough to determine if it does reinforce zerging, ghost capping, other-bad-thing-3, etc. I just know I've enjoyed the big battles.