[Suggestion] To: The Developers (Rethink the Main Alert and Make it more Fair to Those who TRy to win it)

The continent victory one.

Today, as many times in the past, TR on EMERALD server not engaging the vanu much and pushing NC when vanu winning and have more people also.

As I suggested in the past make the alert, continent win, be determined by many factors including land control.

i.e. how many times a faction flip the control points anywhere, how many time revives of friendly who died from enemy fire(no friendly fire deaths), how many time supply ammunition, less deaths from a faction at the end of the alert( to show effectiveness of that faction),most kills of a faction(once again effectiveness of a faction), land control(currently in the game), so on, so on.

Also make second place prize, so 150 certs second place, last place get 100 certs/50 certs

All your suggestion ahve one thing in common. They reward zergfests.

So instead of rewarding behavior that leads to a continental lock (for example bonus XP when fighting against faction depending on territory) they'd just reinforce the current behavior of people staying in whatever zerg they spawned by chance.

This happens on every server, its because the Vanu are simply not fun to play against, so the TR and NC inevitably end up focusing on each other to avoid dealing with the Wrel favorite.

You're wasting your breath, last time I made a thread on this subject it got closed.

-edit- actually, I then made another one and it got closed too, although to be honest, the mod didn't close my thread because it was breaking any rules or because of its content, was more of a "personal" thing

(in case your wondering, here's thread with picture and "spoiler wall-of-text" explanation

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps...lert-system-does-not-work-here-is-why.250879/

)

From what I could figure out, there are 2 main reasons for this happening.


1. the structural map bias (Indar North warpgate, Esamir South warpgate, Amerish NW warpgate, and Hossin I don't know and I don't care ) means that it's more or less "easier" to win alerts from that warpgate.

2. A very high (much higher than before ((before = before previous couple of alert changes made by DBG))) percentage of players who simply couldn't care less about the alert.

edit --> sorry, I forgot number 3; that's active squads / platoons / outfits. If one faction has a a couple active platoons or goal oriented squads, it makes a huge difference.

I'm not saying the OP has the right solutions... but FFS.... Connery NEEDS an intervention even more than Emerald...


(a day ago)



(tonight)

...and it's been like this most of the week if not most of the Month... I dunno if that Alert website we used to have is still up, but I'm sure it would also corroborate this pattern.

Something needs to be changed to make NC and TR actually want to at least TRY to "push" the VS as much as they farm eachother



...maybe instead of ONLY giving the winner 3x as many Certs, maybe give the faction that got "Teamed up on" the hardest a good reward too?

Everyone knows the old hive system was superior.. Alas the devs wanted to make their mark on ps2 and scrap a unique system that actually worked. I've tried hard to accept the new alert system but honestly it's just so boring and drawn out on the new timer system with developer mandated alerts. If it's going to take 6 hours to lock a continent then battles better be more player directed with an intensely close finale.

They should integrate shorter versions of aerial anomaly, maximum pressure, refine and refuel into the old VP system. The alerts would feel more rewarding because there were more frequent "main alerts" and it usually took several alerts for one faction to finally win.


For anyone who didn't play pre CAI it really was an ingenious system. The team that reached 20 VPs first triggered the alert. If that team could retain 1/3 of all of the territories then they won and locked the continent. If they didn't, then only their VPs would reset. Sometimes you would even have back to back alerts when a faction failed to lock the continent.

VPs were won/lost through territory control as well as permanently gained through minor objectives such as warpgating a faction, controlling all 3 major facilities (bio/tech/amp). Hives were available for constructed bases which slowly harvested VPs at a rate proportional to the distance from your warpgate (XP/Certs were gained for each harvested VP). Hives also exploded when destroyed which was total area/base wipe out. This type of system encouraged last minute hive stomps/builds and lattice pushes to prevent a faction from triggering the alert and even mitigated/distracted zerging through strategic hive placement.

You mean where a Faction avoided building Hives, horded them to 7, then rapidly gained VPs (their location also matters little as all that does it slow it down slightly)..
All of which are more valuable than even the Largest Facilities on the map, All in reference to hives;
You control a very small area, inside the wall, in your own selected position, most Hives being at map edge or wedged into a crack between rocks, if not clipped into the ground itself.
With the lattice, every point requires an increasing amount of held-territory & an increasing amount of territory to capture per point.
With Hives, You can shut-down endless, lose no progress, can only Gain points, that can't be lost, and only require control of the meters around the Hive: But can produce an infinite amount of HIVE VPs.

The only comparison to VPs not from HIVEs, are from warpgating or controlling all of an Major facility type..
Actions that require massive amounts of territory & work from the faction whole.
HIVE VPs required only 1 sodding person or a single squad to sit in a mountain far away from everything.


If that's superior:
Lets go to the old Connery tactics.

To win the game: Be the warp-gated faction, send Air to farm HIVEs.
Once at 7, Place all at once across the map, only defend them, nothing else (as you're warpgated, you can lose nothing.)
If enemy manages to take a HIVE or all of them, Return to start, farm HIVEs with air.
If they do manage the above, and they lose HIVEs, they have the points still.
Once you're at 15 Points, something can't be stopped or only slowed.. You zerg out from the warpgate.
As the territories surrounding the warpgate, will each essentially give VPs as you have no Territory.
Win at 20 VPs with a Map control-Victory, with less than 5% of the map; And having had to defend no territory at all.
If the enemy stops the push quickly, return to warpgate, and get HIVEs again or wait to try again;
As you are now, until the Map locks, constantly at 5 points from victory.


Superior system?
Whomever HIVE'd First has an untouchable lead, whomever HIVE'd longest will always be in the lead.
Territory value is less & less, as you gain VPs, splitting up your forces as well to defend it all.
HIVEs never decrease in value, can't lose progress, can only Gain points that also can't be lost.
HIVEs are literally a "If I have this enough times, even at 1 second intervals, I will win"
Mean while, all other aspects of the VP system required actual map control, that got harder as you progressed, and risked losing all progress at any time, With Achievements granting a limited amount of VP.
These achievements were not done by a single squad typically.. Unlike an HIVE which gives a permanent VP for simply sitting a PMB into a rockside; The longer that HIVE exists, the larger the Value, which can't be lowered.

IE, HIVEs made territory control less valuable.
HIVEs did not require faction-wide actions or coordination.
5 VPs from the Lattice could take entire platoons, requiring them to engage the other sides directly, and to hold more & more land.
10 VPs from HIVEs, is just a matter of time, a single solo player can do, on a mountain away from all other players.

You can literally AFK Hive Points, for no negative consequence for losing that HIVE even.
Oh, you aren't progressing any further? You kept all progress & points.
You just have to kill their HIVE, and you're right back in the lead, the only way to lose that lead, is the opponent HIVing for even longer than you did.
Or the factions managing to take the entire map.. which your faction can stop, by not defending their own territory..
But just attacking their opponents in their own fights, disrupting them... While their passive HIVE VPs score them a victory.
Not from tactics, just from an Building ticking a clock, while they stall all combat into a loop.

Ingenious! All Land mass is worthless compared to throwing a HIVE into a rock.
And Being warp-gated, Means nothing if you have a HIVE in a rock.
Which if they're not constantly smashing, you are winning.
If you HIVE first, you are in the lead with less effort, less effort needed across the map, and less people.

Akin to going "You need to control an increasing amount of land to win. Unless you sit in the corner, which also wins"
HIVEs defeated the purpose of territory control, as they dominated it.
Made every Continent a waiting-to-lock, as No one can stop HIVEs, they can only delay HIVEs.
And to delay HIVEs, you have to grind against automated-self-repairing-Walls-&-Turrets.
It did not encourage fun in the slightest for the opponents..
Let alone on Connery, where they ******* Glitched the HIVEs into damn ******* rocks constantly.
And then zerged the lanes from the warpgate, since they could focus their entire population into the 3 bases around it, or into HIVEs, where You are not effectively keeping those down, nor stopping Air balls around PMBs.

I'll be honest here, that sounds WAY more involved and skill based than what the VS currently have to do to win every alert on Connery. (basically nothing outside of just not disturbing the lattice-line that currently allows the TR and NC to have some protracted pointless FARM in the most Biolab-like base they can both be herded into by the stupid goddamned Instant Action button).


OH OH!! Also I just thought of the best reward ever! --- the Faction that got teamed up on the hardest during the Alert, should automatically have their Directives Progress and K/D ratio for that past hour and a half Doubled or Tripled b/c in a lot of cases that's the entire reason the 2nd runner up was focusing them in the first place. Not for easier Certs like most ppl think they are, but rather to bolster their own K/D and Directives kills.... That'd be the perfect ironic outcome if every time your enemy thought they'd be taking the path of least resistance in stat padding, only to reward you with all the extra Statistical D**k waving achievement points they thought they were going to get.

It's as skill based, as sitting at a doorway till someone pops in.
You leave all Lattice bases, and retreat to the waygate, so You need to do literally nothing as a faction, while a squad is capable of handling the Hives.
Wait till VPs hit 15 or similar, then just zerg the nearby bases, if the enemy resists, you respawn at warpgate.

NC & TR on Connery, are used to being zerged by VS there.
Fighting VS there specifically is: If you get enough kills, the entire VS population at the fight vanishes inside a minute.
Otherwise, it's as many vehicles & infantry dropping out of every meter of land from VS, with dedication to camping the spawn-rooms.
This means, typically there isn't a fun engagement against VS there, you either barely get kills or have nothing to shoot.

TR however, same with NC, actually stay & fight.
So if you want some decent entertainment, or a stable fight... yeah you aren't after VS.
And Biolabs.. they are the sole place that NC reliably can keep a fight alive, and where every single gun they have works.
Shotgun-Maxes for example, are optimal there, Shotgun Heavy Weapons work there as well.
And there isn't prowlers or magriders (Typically) inside that interior, so they aren't being mauled.

I left Connery ages ago, but the situation seems to be identical; VS is not fun to fight.
And HIVEs have no actual skill involved, they have no actual counter past blowing Nanites every 5 minutes to random corners of the map, inside seconds of the Hive placement: and then even still, the Hive gains progress.

Like, do you like fighting an enemy that can literally haul their entire frontline into the mists?
As that is what VS pulls there, If enemy resists, Respawn at Warpgate.
If enemy can't resist, Swarm & spawn-camp.
TR & NC lack the volume of AOE spam, and NC is not a hard-target to kill, their new users are wielding Gauss-Saws.
So.. yeah fighting VS, where AOE spam, infinite-ammo weapons, dodging-tanks, and hitscan Beams are commonplace.
Or fight an Enemy that lacks all of these things, have normal bullets, large targets... People usually pick the one that is enjoyable.

I'm confused about the part how any faction could simply win by having 7 hives. That may help start an alert but sitting at the warpgate and zerging out doesn't guarantee you're going to get the % of territory required to win the actual alert. And there was also a significant VP rate difference between having 7x 100% hives and 7x 1% hives. You're looking at a VP every 6 minutes or so which is impractical to maintain versus a VP every 10 hours. And those 1% hives can only reach 31% over time so you're still looking at something like one VP every 3 hours with all 7 at 31%.. On Emerald at least there were a lot of hive stompers that would max crash from galaxies. This system actually encouraged alternative play than the mindless lattice battles and was usually pretty exciting for the new players that manage to tag along from the warpgate.

Even if rep mods made construction invincible again, much as changed with the addition of the OS and glaive/flail combo. It's significantly more risky to have higher % hives near enemy warpgates as there are now tools to quickly kill isolated bases. Other objectives such as warpgating or controlling 3 major facilities also provided multiple permanent VPs so I don't really see the difference. Not to mention all this reset if you failed to lock the continent after the alert.

Regardless, if hive hoarding was seriously such a gamebreaking issue there are many easy fixes to your complaints such as:

• Slowing VP generation
• Making the 7 HIVE objective a temporary VP bonus
• Add aerial anomaly, maximum pressure, refine and refuel as ~15minute VP events.
• Adding or shifting anchors on the hive so they can't be glitched into the ground.
• Using the OS or flail to take out glitched hives.
• Scale the HIVE reservation timer 1-5minutes depending on the final operating % of the hive

To me this has become just another game like a "3 way" battlefield but not really since one faction is usually getting getting double teamed. Random events trigger that really have no impact on the overall game. When you're the faction getting double teamed, especially when you didn't provoke it, the pop basically drops off as you lose territories and everyone shifts to a biolab grind (if available) where the pop is at least somewhat even. At least with the old VP alert system one faction wasn't usually mindlessly beaten back into their warpate through the continent lock. Warpgating usually only happened mid game to get VPs or to prevent a faction from locking/winning.

Not that the devs will make any of these changes... but even if you hated the old system you're not providing any hypothetical solution to an otherwise canned experience. If you really think the current alert is interactive, fun and rewarding to most players you're probably in the wrong thread.

Old Hives were as I just said.
The Alert version was;
Avoid Hives, reach past Territory %, place Hive, trigger alert.
IE, it was used to avoid triggering the alert until they had so much extra territory that losing was incredibly hard.

While the Original Hives:
Unavoidable VPs, that are a constant value, devalues any territory.
As the VPs are incapable of being lost, and required less manpower in addition to less land needed to be secured.

Slowing their VP Generation; achieves nothing.
As it wasn't their raw speed (let alone at 7), it was how easy & powerful their Infinite supply of Permanent VPS were.

7 Hive VP Bonus: There was an extra permanent VP bonus for just having them btw.
And as a temp bonus; you'd pop it to finish off a map, making the HIVEs just used "Secured by HIVE hording"

Hives have no relation to those events..
And having those bring VPs as bonuses, with HIVEs up, basically rewards overpop let alone if they used HIVEs.

Did you ever assault HIVEs?
The volume of positions is absurd, and even when they aren't glitched into the ground..
Construction itself, Is designed to make it an Absolute grind-to-make-progress against Automated self-repairing systems for the attacker.
So it'd the same problems, just they wouldn't be straight Invulnerable HIVEs, but dozens of the things still locking.


OSC...
Any HIVE that was intended to stay alive, had their own OSC'.
And about 30-40 minutes to kill the OSC, during which the HIVE has had 30-40 minutes of uninterrupted VP Generation.
That puts the HIVE 30-40 minutes ahead per OSC attempt, in making a VP, per HIVE.

That reserve timer... doesn't help at all, past who can hoard the HIVEs into Limbo for the longest.


With the Old VP system, when HIVEs were there.
The Faction who left all their Territory, was the best off man-power wise, if they liked construction.
As all they had to do, was Build HIVEs repeatedly, which only need a squad.
While their majority of the faction did not have to do anything past attack Bases that they couldn't capture.

Solution to HIVEs: Do not make them at all Related to Victory-Conditions.
Make them a Boon to their allies, a Priority target for enemies.
IE make them Buff-Providers, Suddenly those bases have Value, and isn't since they are dictating the entire map.
This makes Allies want to Defend Hives (solving Builder complaints of "no one defends me"), and makes Players actually want to attack it, without Slamming a Hammer into their Skulls if they Don't.
IE Natural encouragement, that isn't Punishing the enemy for avoiding putting their face into a blender.

The current Alerts, are better than "I better go hot-drop into a cliff-side to suicide to a HIVE, or we lose the map in 10 minutes instead of 45, thanks to Faction that has 1% territory doing nothing but harassing Bases they can't cap, and screwing around in Mountains"
Aka "The Faction with No land mass, winning Territory Victory Condition" via "Static base hidden in mountain, near No tactically valuable object", and avoiding & discouraging any & all contact with other players.

Right now, those Alerts reward & work based on the faction as a whole acting..
Rather than "Squad 7, built a Hive. So, if they camp it long enough, That will do 3 Platoons worth of people, capturing & holding 9 entire bases"
IE less than 1% of a faction doing an Action in an zone of 30 meters, was more effective than 98% of a faction coordinating Efforts across a massive surface area of Kilometers..

simple ... remove bio farms in general and ti alloys on indar.. also bring back how planetside 1 worked with all bases having meaning on map and home conts plus the old way the lattice worked on powering up bases down the chain but being able to hack anywhere on map ... oh and LLU capture the flag runs.. done and done...
So much was lost...

Removing these stalemates would be a huge help. But think of why people are there in the first place. They're some of the only fights that don't disappear as soon as you get there. What's needed is a constant fight along each lattice line. Not fights that start, stop, start, stop, over here, over there... Open territory between and around bases needs to count. Not only would this keep players engaged, it should help balance fights among all factions and all lanes.

Edit: Big hands, small phone, not enough coffee, so many mistakes.

Props to them for being able to take irreversible amounts of territory while simultaneously preventing their own faction from warpgating, harvesting or somehow otherwise obtaining too many points too quickly..

Yes I've assaulted many hives and had all kinds of fun doing it. Pre CAI if I wasn't building bases I was often assaulting them. Successfully in most cases too even though my outfit mains NC which was basically handicapped due to low vehicle DPS (unlike TR in the past). There were plenty of tactics that could be used for base stomping in addition to numerous cheesy counters. None of us care about K/D though so maybe that's the difference here. Exploding a base that took someone hours to build was rewarding to me and most of my outfit. Defending a base through a lengthy outpopped fight was also rewarding. But you don't sound like you built much which was probably why you had such a hard time exploiting their weaknesses. It's even easier now that there are so many new changes aside from slow rep rates (fast beacon spawns, routers, flail/glaive, fast OS charge, nightshade, weak spawn tubes, weaker turrets ect.)

I would be onboard with bases being buff-providers if only just to bring attention to them. Personally I prefer base action and the OS is so weak now that it's usually ignored. The only way to get a base fight worthy of the time it takes to build is to plop it down on a strategic area that blocks an active zerg lane and hope the other team takes the bait. That said, none of this makes the new timer system and 1.5 hour alert less stale. The cycle and fight time is more or less fixed with no real room for player intervention.