Make an Alert where the Empire with the most Deploy Bonus XP at the end wins. The goal of this is to see transport vehicles used more often to get around instead of redeployment/instant action/beacons. This would also help see Galaxies used a lot more by more than just air outfits.
Some way of triggering alerts when populations are balanced better is always a good thing. To this end the only thing I can think of is that having alerts trigger only during medium/high server periods is a good way of ensuring that we have at least prime hours balance in place. Alerts without sufficient server population often leads to one faction just sweeping the alert because the populations are imbalanced, and just give free XP/certs which becomes too much of an advantage to that faction. So alerts during higher server activity, but with greater trigger frequency might be the best approach.
Enforcing more restrictions is one of our last options. We first want to try disincentivizing the faction-hopping behavior. If we make the short-term rewards less lucrative that means there's less appeal to quickly switch to an alt faction. We've also talked about giving more benefits to underpopulated empires (more than just XP) to make players feel adequately compensated for being underdogs.
Once we get in more alerts, I can totally imagine supporting a public alert "calendar". However, it gets a little tricky. If we provide too much information about upcoming alerts it effectively starts the alert (i.e. if we reveal the next alert is to capture all the biolabs on amerish, people will immediately start capturing the biolabs on amerish before the alert starts). Of course we could lock the continent or reset the territory control prior to the start of an alert, but those are far from ideal options.
Global Alerts should be possible as well. I.E. a lot of people suggested "without tanks, without air" type alerts. These could affect all 3 contients and then whoevers captured the most of (SUM of % all three) would be the winner. Thus forcing people to spread out if they wanted to win such an alert.
The one big issue I see is basically what happened to me today. I played for ~1.5 hours of an alert. And crashed to desktop about 5 times during that time. Now if that reset my contribution it would effectively make alerts pointless to play for me (as it happened today I also crashed when the alert timer was on 2 seconds left - dunno if I got the alert reward or not).
Don't want to sound like a smart ***, but the root cause is that big green carrot dangling in front of their eye, that green carrot represents the large amount of experience for winning equals certifications. Those faction-hopping players are driven to farm experience points as quick as possible, with the least amount of effort, the alert is just that quick and easy, switch faction to the winning side. Removing that fat green carrot isn't much of an option because it is what makes the majority of the players respond the the Alert in the first place. Making the requirements for victory more dynamic, things might get interesting. For instance, having the continent population dictate the victory condition requirements, the amount of terrain that needs to be controlled in order to win. For instance, TR has 41% pop on Indar, NC has 35% and VS only 24%, this will allow the underdogs, VS in this case, to have a change to actually win an Alert if the keep hold of at least 24% of terrain. Even when fighting an over whelming force, keeping hold of terrain around the warp gate is easier and gives them a decent fighting changes, with out having to fools around with modifying increased XP and more health like was done in the original Planetside to counter empire imbalance . I've seen 2 faction working as a team to push back another faction in to their warp gate and fail. If every 15~30 minutes the population balance on the continent is checked and the victory requirements are adjusted at steps of max 5% per check, it will also make faction hopping less desirable because leaving one faction will lower their requirements and switching to the winning team will increase there victory condition requirements. What ever will be cooked up to counter faction-hopping, I still put the blame on that fat green carrot...
Then I would suggest reworking Alerts because they do go against the continent cap metagame. Perhaps reduce the timer to half an hour so that the alert becomes more of a scramble?
Yeah, the calendar idea doesn't seem fitting. The sudden surprise is what makes alerts great, as you quickly have to adapt to the new situation, rather than zerg rush and hold it...
How about alerts that have the goal of having the most resource production on a continent? You could make it for the most infantry resource, or vehicle, or aerospace, or the sum of all 3.
I think a 'Rebellion' type of Alert would be great. If one faction owns more than 60% of the map, a Rebellion alert will apply to the two smaller factions and q 'End Rebellion' alert will go to the faction who has most of the map... so the biggest faction has to stop the smaller two from gaining more land, and the other two factions get extra rewards for taking territory from the larger faction, but not as much from each other.
The sudden surprise makes basing your nightly operations around it a nightmare to organize, and getting a badly timed alert during an operation will lead to bad gameplay as in the end as either everyone goes to play the alert or nobody goes to play the alert. Right now with the lattice if an alert happens on esamir we just leave it for whoever cared enough to go for it to go do it. I think faction wide alerts would be better: Basically having it be more about having the most territory overall across all continents rather than a single one. It would make it easier to setup and because the factions would then be spreading thin across 3 continents rather than zerging a single one with the entire server population. It would help the people who get stuck in a queue unable to attend or influence the alert directly, and it would make it a bit easier to gather people coming late as they wouldn't be stuck in a queue for 30 mins just to get into the proper continent so they can play with their outfit.
A reset sounds like a good idea. But make sure it's also a base behind or in the lattice case the satellite that connect to it and the base next to it have to reset they need to give each side some time to make their way, maybe even send some forces to the forward base to stall the other forces from getting closer.
Core alerts with "capture biolobs/techlabs" etc are fine. As are some random selection of territories of that particular map. However do not do what you tested on the big showdown night of one of the alerts being "capture x(singular) territory". So many players swarm there that the servers simply can not handle it at current and far to many people would find it unplayable and thus not fun. Perosnally I would look into alert modifications/mutations. People have been throwing many about. for instance you have the core alert of simply capture indar but then modify it with "no tanks" or "all resource costs are doubled for vehicles and aircraft and tripled for infantry" Things like these can be easily changed, relatively quickly implemented and can vastly effect the way the game plays and thus throw in some incredible variation to what people expect.
I crashed right before the end of an Indar alert on Briggs, and couldn't log back in. I didn't get the reward, and I am seriously pissed off, because the FOURTH ******* FACTION always wins the alerts on Amerish and Esamir on Briggs. The alert system has just incentivized people to switch factions to XP farm. It sucks.
worse than exp. farmers are the people who spy on one faction for awhile, change characters, and give intelligence to their "true" faction. or log into alts to team kill the other faction and disrupt their operations (blowing up sunderers, terminals, etc. etc.) there really should be some restrictions on alts and alternate accounts just for common sense purposes...
This **** happens to me all the time on Briggs. They C4'ed the spawn right as we were at a critical base defense, and TK'ed me, then tried to get my sunderer. This is a load of BS, and I'm sick of it. It ruins the game.
I like it, answering what the unintended consequences of adding a feature would be. I'm glad to hear you folks practice that deliberately. In the case of a public calendar, information could be limited to time it starts, possibly duration, maybe continent. Duration and continent might give it all away though. Tricky indeed. Query: Would capture all biolabs on Esamir/Auraxis include grabbing Terran BL-4? Odd alert types (shotgun list): Capture all edges of continent. Capture furthest corner of map (Esamir, ymir/BL-4. bullwark, and that pear-shaped place to the north) Race to the furthest corner from your factions warpgate. Sit in a hole (impact site, the pit, lithcorp secure mine) Capture all [A,B,C] tower bases. Capture all bases that give a specific resource type. capture all [A] bases. Capture all bases that only spawn sunderers, harassers and flashes. Capture all little bases that can spawn tanks. Capture all little bases with air resupply points. capture all bases that have bridges as a major feature of their layout. Control most territory that isn't touching the edge of the map. Touch enemy warpgates, most controlled territory adjacent to enemy warpgate wins! control most territory on auraxis. Shields up, capture all secondary bases that have vehicle shields. SCU Destroyed, only spawn points are sunderers and beacons Stealth fighter, team with most damage inflicted by aircraft wins, This value is subtracted by surface to air damage against their faction. No mans land, cumulative value for territory controlled that has absolutely no one in it. No contest, least contested territory wins.
I'd like to see a variance in the length of alerts. Oftentimes I will log out at the beginning of an alert because the beginning seems to not matter or is drawn out. The last 30 min to hour of the alert is usually the most exciting.
