What is wrong with WDS?

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by The Jiggler, Feb 22, 2014.

  1. The Jiggler

    It surprises me that the wds faction score is not modified by population at all. There's no benefit to adjusting the weight of wds points based on a prime time slot and it would be more beneficial for SOE and the playerbase to weight the wds scores based on population.

    From SOE's point of view they wouldn't want to encourage people to only play at prime time. They want players online as much as possible to keep the game alive.

    From a players perspective changing the weighting based on population would avoid any advantage earnt through prime time population advantage AND dirty back-handed night time ghost capping at the same time.

    The only other area of imbalance is that i honestly don't agree with defence points. The benefit of defending a base should be entirely based on the point income from holding the territory for a period of time and not simply exploiting the income when a control point is flipped and then defended. At the very least the defence point reward should be a fraction of the capture reward; This would simpy encourage more fights and less exploitation of the system.
  2. Phyr

    They did internal testing and determined that population based scoring didn't change the outcome.
  3. Typhoeus

    For the first two weeks you'd get twice as many points for capturing then you did defending. It led to massive zergs completely avoiding each other and just ghost capping easy territory all day. After two weeks of this, they switched the values around. We now get as many points for defending as we did for capturing, and half as many for taking territory and guess what? People are fighting each other again. Much better as is. Most players could care less about WDS. They just want to log on and have a good fight.

    As for population.. it seems it'll never fix itself and because of conflicting data, SOE has no idea what to do. On some servers the over populated side get's its butt kicked regularly by the underpopped, while on other servers the underpop side gets steam rolled by the overpopped. Common sense would be to give "buffs" to the underpopped but because of this data they can't do that. So which ever server has the overpopped getting rocked by the underpopped, it's their fault for being so terrible and why we can't have nice things ^^
    • Up x 2
  4. AnnPerkins

    I think SOE is aware that the defense point system is sub-optimal but I haven't really heard of a better system other than basing it off the xp you earn in the region.

    I do wish that there was a short period of time after a region is take that your faction could take it back for the same WDS points it was taken for. Right now if you lose a 8 even 16 point WDS region then immediately fight to take it back you get... 2 WDS points. It kind of discourages defense.
  5. The Jiggler

    The current WDS meta is ghost cap entire continets at night, uncontested, and begin each day with a large amount of terrtory to defend. Did the internal testing reflect how likely this is to happen if the players are not scoring as much personal WDS points at night?

    This meta also includes the ability to gain lots of additional points at any base where an effective defence is worthwhile.

    The idea would be to take an average population for the server and award full contribution or even a higher percentage relative to the current population against the average when alot of players are online. And naturally rewarding a fraction of the points at night relative to the average number online.

    What are the details of this internal testing? How can anyone assess how accurate their results were without more information than a simple conclusion without any reasoning.
  6. Accuser

    Of course, this testing occurred before the game began, which means that it didn't take into account player behavior in any way. Assuming everyone continued to play as though WDS weren't happening, the current rules would not favor the high-pop faction.

    But since player behavior changed (dramatically) when WDS started, the overpop faction is consistently winning.

    My hypothesis is that, before WDS began, there was extremely little ghost capping by anyone. So it was a non-issue with their internal testing. But now that WDS has begun, the highest pop faction (particularly at off-peak times) racks in the WDS with ghost capping.
  7. IamDH

    Boom. Nail on the head

    Whilst im interested in getting rewards (NS-PDW specifically), without any battles i will have little to no incentive to log in. I am genuinely surprised as to how 48 players can just wait for 20-30 mins doing nothing (and getting minimal XP) just for WDS points
    • Up x 2
  8. Phyr

    You guys act like capping entire continents during off hours didn't happen prior to WDS. In WDS 1 they weighted points based on population, and the overpop faction still won. In a contest about capturing land, the side with the most people is going to win.
  9. Vaphell

    probably, but the amount of rtardation WDS 2 introduced is off the charts. There are either massive zergs rolling through the map to harvest bases that accumulated points or everybody sitting in a fed biolab. The fact that you need to let the point switch to get any defense points doesn't help either.
    If you care about WDS points you are not going to try to recapture lost bases. Attacking zerg got a lot of points, you will get 2 because the base reset. You are also wasting time trying to stop zerg, you will lose most of the time and won't get a single point for the effort.

    To show how ridiculous the WDS is set up, all factions should cut a deal. Every side sets up a farm, eg a maxed out biolab where you can go to farm 2k points via rapid point flipping in 3 minutes. Everything else on the map is fair game.
    • Up x 1
  10. Phyr

    The personal WDS points is the main reason for mass multi faction zerging. Once people learned how pointless it was it died down.
    • Up x 2
  11. BITES

    Real life testing says no.
  12. Amrok1

  13. AnnPerkins

  14. Phyr

    And you know this because of all your extensive research and testing :rolleyes:
  15. BITES

    Yes thanks for noticing.