It's very sad how this game doesn't reward you for trying to win

In most MMORPGs there's no 'defined' win conditions.
Take DAoC; perpetual warfare. Keeps, towers n' relics changes hands over and over and people fight it out.
Warhammer Online: Keeps, Fortress and the city instance in RvR or never ending PvP scenarios.
Guild Wars 2: Keeps in WvW and PvP scenarios.
WoW: PvP scenarios, Arena.
EVE: Never ending battle over space.
and I could continue down the line.....

You never 'win' in a MMO. The world is static and never ending. You need a score ladder to 'win'. And then it's Counter Strike and the likes for you.

The "point" in MMOs when it comes to PvP is to fight and kill. You cannot 'win'.

True but when I won a battleground in world of warcraft, I really felt like I won it, even if the battleground meant nothing in itself and that the horde and the alliance were still at war for this battleground I won two minutes ago.

In PS2 winning a battleground mean taking over a base, the thing is, its virtualy impossible not to take one, unless we're talking about the crown, there is no two sides looking forward to win the battle, there is just a bunch of people shooting each others until the base is eventualy capped. There is no sense of accomplishement doing anything in the game.

Having a win condition doesnt necessary mean that you'll have a "you won!" pop on your screen and the game will shutdown, but may means that you achived something noticable, and currently, capping a base is not noticable at all.

That's the price you pay for sending 20+ people to cap a base from 1-5 people. If you're as organized as you say, you'll understand concepts like force allocation and recon to deploy your troops as they are needed, rather than in a giant blob of vehicles that rolls around capping empty bases.

This is where you come up with something groundbreaking you've thought about since the very creation of the game.


Like a Permanent tournament based on Weekly Outfit Highlights backed up by a full-time caster and a Replay system, putting forward the community and the depth of the game, bringing exciting battles and cunning tactics every week aswell as creating a whole new genre, the MMOesports, that could be accessible to everyone, enjoyed by players and external spectators alike, bringing in more and more people into the game.



It must be in the plans.


Right ?

I think the title of this thread says it all.

"It's very sad how this game doesn't reward you for trying to win "

Well done. Succinct.

Maybe its just you man.
When my squad takes a base after a hard fight, it really feels like we have won.
When we defending against the oncoming hordes, it really feels like we have won.

The difference is that in for instance EVE you want to take territory because it gives your alliance great benefits. The aim of the biggest fights is to capture systems. In PS2 the biggest fights are just certfarms, and people get pissed off if you actually try to capture the territory or kill sunderers.

Besides those 15% more exp? Well if that is good or bad depends on the attack. Against ninjacappers it is useless indeed. I would at least give some exp if you can recap the base after your own bar was already lost. Maybe more if you win it back after the anouncer already told you to get your *** moving or loose it.
The killexp should not go away but it should be WAY lower. maybe half it or something and start rewarding the actual game. Aka not realy the capturing as itself. Thats ok but the act of capturing. The "standing around the controlnode and defending it" because that nets me wooping 25exp...I stand there for 10-15min doing nothing and waiting for the event that a enemy comes by to stop my group? 15 exp. IF a point is contested and there are many enemys around the node you get attackbonus and defenderbonus so thats ok. But the boring work of capturing itself while 99% of the own side run around outside shooting stuff...Why are they rewarded for that and I`m getting absolutly nothing for wasting my time for my team?

Thats what I meant to say. In MMORPGs you don't have clear victory conditions. Instead there is character progression or sometimes even entire guild progression ( in Eve Online, guild=corporation ) in accumulating resources and manpower. Players have to unlock things with time and that is what makes them stick with the game for so long. There is actual scientific study which shows that progression of that sorts creates some drug-like effects which explains in part why are people willing to grind in other to unlock stuff.

Only MMO I played was Eve Online and I didn't like it's PvP mechanics because after you figure out best tactics it kinda becomes just boring repetition and waiting for enemy to come and fight. Fights don't have deeper reason like fighting for resources ( except in big 0.0 alliances where you as a regular grunt don't really care about Technetium moons ). Only exception to that rule is wormholes I guess but still, if you PvP you have to spend lots of time waiting. Thats why I prefer FPS because you can get into action instantly.

Shooters offer victory conditions on the other hand and I don't think that character progression ( unlocking new things like in BF ) is the crucial aspect of why people stick with playing those games.

Planetside tries to offer both ( capturing base and character progression in form of weapon certing ) but isn't good at either of those as other games are. So my point is either make game more MMORPG like or somehow rework the base capture mechanics so that the gameplay doesn't feel like endless TDM most of the time in which neither sides win.

Double post

Two words: Continent locks

Suddenly you HAVE to win.

I agree with the defense of a facility not gaining EXP to be a downfall.

I spent a complete two hours in the game last night running with a large, random platoon. We capped a base, then headed south to finish off the continent. My squad ended up getting placed on a defense post at Jaeger's Landing. Not only was I getting frustrated because I was sitting still with no action and nothing to do, but when the TR finally did show up (pansies!) and try to steal it, I didn't receive any sort of compensation.. in fact, I earned a couple of unwarranted deaths due to bored, careless teammates and suicidal aircraft.

I will admit that this discouraged me from wanting to ever defend a base or take any sort of defensive orders. Given the option again, I'll switch squads and head towards the action.

Doing the whole engineer turret thing gets tiring after a while and just rolling with a zerg is a more preferred change of pace.

I used to do a lot of repairing when I was wanting to level up things.
Now not so much.

PS2 = Grind > Game Mechanics.

Precisely. Bases have no value whatsoever, they are only arenas for large battles to happen. Might as well remove tons of unnecessary bases and leave say three main facilities. I bet the gameplay would be much more fun because then you would have tons of players in one massive battle which is the main thing that makes Planetside distinct from other games.

Yes, of course! The lowest common denominator.

WHO KNEW?

Yeah, tons of invisible players popping in and out of existence, fun.

Right, and that is fair is it ?

Empire 1 spends 4 hours trying to break into a Biolab owned by Empire 2, only to back hacked by Empire 3 forcing them to make a tactical retreat from that Biolab to stop Empire 3's advance.
Everyone who spent 4 hours there get absolutely NOTHING, yet the defending sides makes hundreds of certs .... yes, and that would be balanced wouldn't it ...............*rolls eyes*

( Times used are to give an example and not factual in case anyone tries ot pick it apart via that aspect ).

This can't change without the complete overhaul of the game.

You'd have to erase the K/D mechanic. Stop tracking kills, make vehicles somehow limited and only give points for doing things that help your empire (with the appropriate cert costs changes). But that's not gonna happen.

That is where you are entirely wrong, especially in your Warhammer Online and WoW examples.

For WoW there were clear victory conditions that awarded you for Victory/Loss. Ironically, at the start, WoWs rewards were mostly for kills, like this game and that made the PvP battlegrounds quite pointless.

Blizzard remedied this by making the Victory/Loss condition the most relevant. If you view the continents as giant battlegrounds, then you'd expect there to be some kind of awesome bonus of character progression for the entire faction, but that's not the case. Just like in the early days of WoW battlegrounds, victory/loss is trivialized by "honor" (or the set of rewards not necessarily implying territory acquisition)



They could attach stronger diminishing marginal returns, like Blizzard did for WoW, but I'm sure there would be too much of an uproar in the "community", because it seems like they are content with the non-tactical game play.

The meat of WH were in its battlegrounds as well, as well as the best PvP rewards etc.

WoW arena doesn't even make sense in the context of a respawn/TDM system, but if people actually had meaningful resources that determined a larger outcome to manage, I'm sure it (PS2) might have as much depth (as WoW) in the distant future.