WDS Preseason 2 Changes and Feedback

What if all of the XP you earned went into a "pot", and you didn't get to keep any of it without successfully capturing or defending the base in question? You could then simply tie the WDS contribution to the XP award. Two birds, one stone.

Hmmm...I did not think about that, what about if it took into account the allies to enemies ratio over the course of the entire battle? Or would that be to hard to calculate?

Hi PS2 Dev Guys

Regarding 4th factioning, you seem to have queried how often people switch and that's led you to your 1% conclusion. I think you've oversimplified the problem.

When people log in, they look at the population sizes on the server. Let's say I'm a VS player mostly, but I also have TR and NC alts because I like to play 4th faction. If I log in and see VS 25%, TR 45% and NC 30%, I'm going to log into my TR alt and stay there all day as they're currently overpopulated and that's what 4th factioneers like.

You're not looking only for people who change faction during a play session.

You're looking for people who have multiple characters on their account, and you need to be querying how current server population affects the login decisions of those players with multiple characters.

That's the real 4th faction. Character switching is only going to show you a small part of it, possibly even the minority part.

You should also be looking at the '0th faction' too. The people who don't have alts or who's majority playtime is on their main faction character, who 'bounce' in website terms; log in to character select, see their faction is at 25% pop, and either log out there and then or log out within 5 minutes of getting into game.

It's great that this issue is on your radar, both for WDS and non-WDS play, but make sure you have all of the stats!

I played for a couple of hours on Monday and got some personal WDS points. I checked this morning to see how close I am to tier 1 reward and saw I have 0 points. Any idea why? I didn't expect a weekly point reset until Friday.

There are alerts every day, seemingly an average of 3-5 (from my own experience; someone can confirm). People fourth factioning for them will contribute to that 1%. Let's just say for arguments sake that they make up THE ENTIRE 1%, and that there are ONLY 3 alerts in a given day. Alerts are two hours long, so 3 alerts is 1/4 of a day. If no one fourth factions any time but for alerts, and populations are stable (they're not, I know, but this equation would get stupid if we looked at that*), you're still only talking about 4% of the population shuffling about. This highly suggests that the 50%+ populations we see during alerts (up from 33-40%s) are not the result of fourth faction switching, perhaps so much as players simply logging off because they don't like the alert mechanics, or organised outfits pulling players online from other games when the alerts begin because they DO like the alert mechanics.

The numbers I would be very intrigued to see are a compound of population at each, say quarter of an hour, and the number of those players that switch, as a %. This would give us far more insight into player behaviours and habits, and allow us to see if there is much truth to the 4th faction complaints regarding alerts. Until then though, the prelim 1% doesn't suggest this is anywhere near as large as forumside appears to believe.

*As an interesting counter, alerts tend to happen when populations are lower. If NO ONE switches faction the rest of the time, that '4%' suggested may actually be much higher and able to account for the 10% shifts we see, due to the nature of averages. Personally, I imagine that the fact that there's 3* more time spent in alerts than not, and many people simply play multiple characters to try all aspects of the game (myself included), there's not likely to be much truth to this assertion - as above though, need more data.

All the people with limited playtime would hate SOE if they ever released such a system.

Some good base fights can go on for ages which would mean that anyone that can't be online for however long it takes to capture / defend a base would get 0 XP.

Cool. More small battles in small bases. Pick a fight that you have the time for.

If your faction can't muster a defense, that's hardly the attackers fault.

What needs to be changed is how defense is awarded points. It's dumb to tie in points to re-securing the cap points and running the timer back to fully defended. Instead what it should do is reduce the amount of time between ticks for WDS points depending on how many enemy are in the region, so defending a base with 48+ enemies assaulting it would reward points at 3-4 times the rate, with smaller forces decreasing the timer a smaller amount. It could also increase the points awarded per tick depending on the size of the enemy force, and perhaps even have it scale based upon population % in the region.

In this way, the best thing for defenders is a loooong protracted fight with large forces, and even if they lose the base the first time the cap point gets taken (as is often the case) they still got points for defending it as long as they did.

Interesting idea! Lot of good ideas in this thread. We're reading and considering it all!

Unless you can see into the future to predict how a battle will play out there's no telling how long any ''fight'' will last. You could be outnumbering your enemy 5 to 1 and assume that you'll win in 3 minutes when suddenly a mass gal drop happens dropping dozens of players that put up a strong fight for over an hour.

Also in my opinion things like ''Pick a fight that you have the time for'' give off the wrong type of mindset to the players. If I want to help my faction at X base then I should be able to do so without having to risk getting 0 XP from it just because it takes longer then I anticipated.

The players should not get punished for trying to help out their faction during big battles because it'll completely ruin the idea of simply doing whatever little you can do to help.

Here's a more refined version of the proposed system:

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...ign-farming-with-winning.172784/#post-2491467

That's a great point.

For those with multiple-empire characters per account, the devs can compare the faction chosen by the newly-logged-in player with the highest populated empire on the server ultimately selected. If the person chooses an empire that is the most highly populated on that server, check to see if this empire is not what the player most commonly picks. If all is true, probability of the person being in the 4th empire is higher.

THANKS!


I'm not sure if it's enough incentive for personal points... perhaps personal contribution points should be awarded to defenders based upon intensity of fight modifier (I leave this precise value to your database number crunchers) * XP gain.

Then the only issue I can see remaining is actually conveying how this works to players so that they understand that defending a large territory for 30-60 minutes against a massive enemy force would be a lucrative means of earning faction WDS points.

#1: Capture XP is relatively low compared to XP earned from actually fighting. A 30 minute fight that awards 1000xp is insignificant compared to the couple dozen kills minimum I'll achieve during that time.

#2: PS2 is not a great game if you only have 10-30 minutes to play (30min is like a minimum) and is much better when you have an hour or more. If a fight stalemates and I Iogout before it's finished, I rarely am concerned much.

In fact, if the defenders retreat and abandon a base with more than 2-3 minutes on the clock, I will never sit and wait on the cap timer... I chase them to the next base where I can keep earning XP. Most of my Outfit and friends do. We only leave a force big enough to hold the cap point and spawn rooms on lock at least long enough for us to reinforce them if needed... and given many random players propensity to sit and camp the enemy spawn room, that usually means only a couple guys sitting on the point... if any.

I do NOT understand people who LIKE playing on the top pop faction....

Frankly I find it boring as all getout to be on the overpop faction.

I want ENEMIES to fight... not be in some overpowering zerg getting 10 kills an hour racing for kill-steals. SPM tanks when you over zerg.

This is exactly how the WDS should be working.
No resistance, no WDS points awarded
Little resistance, little WDS points awarded
Lots of resistance, lots of WDS points awarded

The current huge blob steamrolling from base to base its hurting the overall game play and sadly people are too blindly focused on getting those shiny WDS points because they unlock goodies or what ever that they will come up with these game breaking tactics. sadly all factions are doing it and only those who are not interested in those WDS points end up left facing that huge enemy blob that will steamroll over them with relative ease.

For defense, yes...

for attack? no.

Otherwise all you need to do as "Defender" when an attacker swarm comes in to take high point value regions is IGNORE THEM and they get NOTHING making the problem EVEN WORSE.

If your faction can't muster a defense to stop attackers, or more importantly simply refuses to because doing so would negate the point gain for the attackers, then we'd have EVEN LESS DEFENSE.

Instead what we need to change is to make defending against a large force more valuable for the defenders, even if they eventually lose the base after defending it for an hour and the first time the attackers take the cap point they take the base (which currently results with no points for defenders, despite having held it for an hour).

You need to think about what behavior it would encourage. Allowing defenders to deny points by not defending is an absolutely atrocious idea as it would compound the problem even further... only then noone would get points.

WDS capture reward for an area should not be the exact same as another faction.

For example: Both VS and TR WDS reward points are the same for 60WDS hvar controled by nc.

Its the same with every territoy not controled by X faction is the same by the opposing faction who does not have it as well.

Right now, because its shared a low pop overall faction is at a extreme disavantage because they have less players to capture territories. As well as working towards a specific hard territory is not only hard, but the points can be wiped back down to default by the other enemy faction who does not own it. And whats worse, a low pop faction will get farm by one or both at the same time for the wds points every few hours or so. This makes the faction feel not only useless but gets no chance to really contribute to the season.

The WDS points value for capturing an enemy base should be based on the time the specific faction itself took the base, not shared. This allows the faction to actually get a chance to capture a base and get rewarded while not getting undercut by the other enemy faction who does not own that territory as well. It also stops the situation of 2 factions ganging up on the smallest pop for wds points at the same time. And the WDS points gain would become more balanced with this purposed change as well.

The WDS Capture points should not be view-able by the defenders.

The defending faction will keep an eye on the high WDS point areas and instantly react to the threat of it being captured. They use the defense spawn camping to rake up the WDS points.

By removing the capture points by the enemy being viewable by the defenders, it makes it less obvious where the enemy will go. However, the defender wds reward points being high will still tell players where the enemy will likely to go to. But not definate.

WDS exposes the weakness of the instant action system at its current state and how its being exploited by the Zerg forces.

Basically, when a faction sees the enemy going for either a facility or a high WDS point area, they send 1/2 platoon to multi-platoons to farm them instantly by respawning. Now if the facility/are is in the nearby territory within 3 territories away, that fine. But the isntant action causes an instant inbalance by allowing those platoons to pop even on a group less than a squad worth.

SOE did put in systems to curve the abuse of the instant action zerg swarm. It takes the instant action option when the pop is about equal. But it failes when its suppose to work because the combination of server latency, lag, and platoon+ worth of players going to one instant action area all at once!


The solution is simple: make respawning on a specific instant action spot cost infantry resources

By making it cost IFR (infantry resources), it slows down and stops the instant spawn zerg from abusing the instant action system. This allows small squads/platoons to make progress of capturing and fighting at base VS geting curb-stomped by a zerg. The enemy whos capturing can still get overrun by zerg, but its more likely to happen by vehiclular means that can be countered which the respawn can not atm.
This is how it could work for specific instant action:
Cost per IFR resources (IFR)
-Default-
Facilities: 100 IFR
Large Base: 150 IFR
Small Base: 200 IFR

-when territory is cut off-
Facilities: 400 IFR
Large Base: 300 IFR
Small Base: 350 IFR


Specific Instant action cooldown should be 7 mins with passive cert tree fro players to cert into to reduce it to 3 mins. Still tied to the random instant action cooldown.
o. Default
Facilities get the least by default to spawn to because they have a spawn gen to offset the cost to respawn from far away. Small and large facilities do not have the spawn gen nor do they have the same support fuctions. So the base size dictates the IFR costs, from largest being the cheapest while the smallest being the most.

o. Territory cut off
In this case the facilities get the most because they are the biggest and need the most support form the lane. As well as pop balance so that a squad/platoon/facion does not instantly squashed after taking the time to cut a facility off takes a lot of time and effort to do. So they should be rewarded with the less likely to get curbed stomped by the zerg and feel worthless effort. Small would be still higher cost than the large base.

o. Cooldown increase
This is to help curve against those players who have a sube and or a boost that rewards them with varying resource gains. But still allows players to decrease it to be the same cooldown as the random cooldown through the passive cert line.

Random Instant action should remain free since it randomly chooses a instant action spot in the world to send the player to.

(con' from the instant action post)

Of course, those who have low pop faction on the continent/world would not have to pay as much as the balanced or higher pop. The higher pop one though would have its IFR cost go up to keep the game not only in balance but it makes sense that this cost would be connected to the upkeep cost of a faction via pop.