[Suggestion] Change Continent Rotation to 1:30:00

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Scroffel5, Oct 24, 2019.

  1. Scroffel5

    How about we change the rotation to 1 hour, 30 minutes? The alert to lock the continent will always be up, with the other smaller alerts kicking in sometimes. Most people don't play the same game for 3 hours straight, and most people are annoyed when they have to go before the continent locks. They don't get an award. If you won't do this suggestion, how about making sure that on their next login, they get the reward they would have gotten at that time? Same algorithm for your reward payout, but when you log out, it stops and that is the reward you get.

    What do you think? Gimme the pros, the cons, and what I am missing.
    • Up x 3
  2. Demigan

    If an alert is always on it loses a bit of its specialness and people will ignore it more. It also gives relatively little time for battles away from the frontline with the exception of zerging there, so even if you finally saw a fight in an interesting and not often seen place it would never take long before the continent locks.

    A better alternative: all time on an alert is logged, example you played 29 minutes of an alert befofe leaving. If the alert is won that becomes 29 minutes of win time and otherwise lost time.

    This simply adds up. So if you play 1 hour and 20 minutes later on and win the alert (even if you leave 10 minutes before it ends) you get a full award as if you played 1 entire 1:30 alert that your faction won, and 19 minutes already counting to the next.
    The same for lost alerts, these are separately counted from win alerts. If they add up to 1:30 you get a lost reward.

    I do think that there should be a way to somehow force an alert to start. I was just stuck on Hossin for 3 or 4 hours (and even if it was less it felt that long). Surprisingly there were some good fights but I had to give up on pumpkin hunting because I found one halfway up a random tree and another clipped into a vehicle pad and another at the tip of a treebranch hidden in the leaves and realized that most of the pumpkins on Hossin are hidden like that due to the spawnrules they've been given and so pumpkins arent found and respawn somewhere else.
  3. InexoraVC

    Change Continent Rotation to 1:30:00 = strongly agree !
    3 hours per continent is boooooring.....
    • Up x 1
  4. TR5L4Y3R

    continent rotation should be popbased .. 1:30 minimum on minimum pop and up to 3 hours when maxpop ...

    the argumeant of meltdown being special .... ok sure THEY ARE what closes a continent but after you played them a bunch of times that noveltyfactor is simply gone .. it´s also a bit of a problem that certain content just doesn´t have much impact as it used to .. primarily hives and victorypoints were i´m actualy of the opinion that with a fair ammount of tweaking that could have been made fair while keeping it relevant .. now PMBs are all bout OSspamming that don´t add anything to the meltdown at all ..

    the events are a neat idea for diversaty (i don´t get why they removed refine and refuel from the rotatioit had a nice focus on vehiclecombat)

    still the game has issues it had for years that hamper the enjoyment of playing it no matter on what continnetn you play for how long .. and considering the recent layoffs i just doubt it will get any better in that regard ...
    basedefense will still be an issue ..
    g2a play is still not fairly ballanced ..
    maxxes are still not in a good spot ..
    infantry vs vehicles still problematic

    doesn´t realy matter if people leave when either hossin, amerish or esamir are up (i hate amerish)

    however a continent does require enough time for it to develop a propper thug of war between all factions .. and just putting it at 1:30 max for a maxpop could be not enough time ...

    so that´s that on continentrotation ...








    now rewards ...
    derictives and archivements have bothered me with this game for a long while considering how focused it is on a persons ammount of kills .. it´s not just about the alerts ..

    but the rewardingsystem as a whole .. it´s too restricted ...

    something i mentioned many times before is instead of kills to reward bonus xpbatches purely on doing damage, it´s possible for certain AA weapons, it´s possible for tankweapons .... it should be possible in infantry vs infantryfights too .. but isn´t and kill archievemeants are only reached if the player himself got a 1000 kills, killassists are not counted .. and some of the stuff is meant to be done with firesupportweapons that have less killpotential .. meaning you are forced to play suboptimaly or in other words you are forced to play differently than you usaly do in a negative sense ..

    alerts of course have the problem of you needing to be at the start of a alert and have to stay till the end ..
    which often times is just simply not the case ..
    many times people start in the middle of it depending on when they locked on .. sometimes they log on when the alert is about to end .. meaning they get jack from that alert anyway .. heck in some cases you have to leave before the alert ends .. and then you get simply NOTHING!!! ...

    sooo here is my proposal ...
    rewardcaches ... get an ammount of xp (idk 10 or 15k? maybe 50k xp .. by WHATEVER gives you xp) and you get either one or multiple caches like 3 to 5 .. or you get specific caches you are assured to get like a certcache, iso or implantcache or a specific rewardcache ..

    all by just simply playing the friggin game instead of having to do supperspecific bullscrap that leads to a suboptimal gameplayexperience ....
  5. TR5L4Y3R


    as an adendum if there was to be a specific alertcache (in bestcase additionaly to the basecases i´m proposing) than that should be focused on gaining xp DURING the alert .. not neccessarily just time spent .. cause otherwise people might be just sitting and running around doing nothing torward the alert itself ..

    same maybe with caches you get by taking part in a event, again xp wise ..

    heck maybe DBG could finaly add getting DBC as a reward in fair ammounts (both for the players AND the company) (like 50 to 100 dbc for a drop ... MAYBE up to 500) .. cause i bet one or another F2P player may apreciate being able to get some cosmetics quite a bit ... (doesn´t have to be all the frigging cosmetics in the world)



    halloweenevent with free horns is superneat ... gonna admit that ... but, even if this game is a sandbox, imho the way of aquiring these derails from playing the game propper ... sooo imo such events should have ways to get rewards that focus on the way of how the game is usaly played ...
  6. Exileant

    :( I like them long, as I like the feel of seeing day and night go by. o_O In fact, I actually wish they would open up multiple Islands on different real world times. :D That way; day and night would be realistic. ;) Also allowing you to fly between them giving you a sun or moon chaser feel as you do. Sure a load feature would take place eventually but having it as an in-game feature would be neat.
  7. Scroffel5

    The alert won't be less special if it is there for the whole time. It'll be less of an alert and more of an agenda. The alerts work towards that agenda, while giving you an incentive, or reward, to continue working towards it.
  8. Exileant

    :confused: Yeah, but common.... :eek: An hour and 30 minutes of Free Aircraft? ;) That would get old really fast.
  9. Who Garou

    I disagree. I think it should be the other way round in regards to large versus small pops.

    I think that the continents should lock every 1 1/2 to 2 hours during prime time hours (general large pop hours each day ... this will most vary on Friday and the weekends.)

    Planetside (2) is about large battle and not small ones.
    For this reason I think when the population is low, then the time to lock continent time should be increased so 2 1/2 to 3 hours.
    Low pop shouldn't mean you get a rewards advantage.
    There are times of the day when a faction can pretty much ghost cap a continent. They should not get the same rewards for someone that win or even participates in a continent capture alert when population is high.

    back to the 1/2 - 2 hours continent change during prime time.
    Let's look at the concentration factor. How long are movies?
    The over-all time being on a continent (open to capture) works best when it would fit within the standard length movie that the participants would usually watch.
    When it takes longer to capture a continent ... well ... people are going to get up and walk out of the movie for one reason or another.

    As to rewards based on time in a continent alert, even if you aren't logged in - as long as that is per account and not per character, then I think that is a good thing. That would even prompt players to stay on for an Alert longer than they normally would even if they can't stay until the end of the alert. This is increases population for at least some of the time during the Alert.
    As to not getting CERTs during the Alert time, I'm assuming that there has always been players milking rewards for the various Alert types without participating in the Alerts. NOTE :: You can still make CERTs during an Alert without doing anything in regards to the Alert. You can mine cortium and dump it into a silo for example which definitely does nothing to help in an air alert and could have little to no impact on the other alert types - including contient capture at this point (I haven't seen bases being the main factor in stopping an enemy advance during a continent alert in a long time).

    I'll even throw DBG this one ::
    If you set-up an e-mail or twitter based alert when a continent-lock Alert was going on, I bet the population would increase during the Continent lock Alerts.
    E-mail. It would be optional, and you could pick set hours when these e-mails would be sent, so that they wouldn't necessarily be sending you e-mails 24 hours a day during times that you know you won't be gaming.
    Twitter. heck who cares? Set it up. It auto send the Twitter post when a Continent Alert starts. Anyone can monitor the Twitter... done.


    Population in general is falling.
    Having HOSSIN being the only continent unlocked during PRIME TIME is only making matters worse.

    And talking about HOSSIN hate.
    I have a feeling that a majority of the population are going to hate the new continent even more than Hossin as it is intentionally meant to impede the use of ground vehicles.
    • Up x 1
  10. Who Garou

    The whole Continent lock process time being reduced so that continents rotate more often
  11. Scroffel5

    You misunderstand. 1:30:00 is the lock time that is always active. That is your full playtime, and the main game. Alerts happen in between, so for instance, maybe 30 minutes of an alert, or 15 minutes, or 45 minutes, ect. There is no "continent lock" alert. It is always running, so technically it isn't an alert; it is an objective.
  12. TR5L4Y3R



    SPLITTING the playerbase IS what makes matters worse ..
    you want BIG fights but you want more continents open at the same time AND you want to make continent playtime shorter ..

    you spread the pop thin that way, big fights IF AT ALL will be super rare and you don´t even give enough time for large army movemeants so said big engagemeants can happen in the first place ...

    who gives a scrap about how long movies are? movies are merely for watching, you do not engage in them, you have no actions you can manipulate them with, thus the factor of which one may need conzentration on it is a different one than the person himself being actively engaged in a contesting enviromeant ... a movie ends at a specific time always .. a engagemeant however can last as long as a player choses .. he can decide to join a battle and leave it at his own choice, he chose to start a large engagemeant himself .. there MAY be an end to a basebattle eventualy but compared to your average movielength such basebattles have drastically different length ..

    a movie is entirely linear it has a fixed story ... during a alert the players write their own stories for the time of their chosing and even after an alert they can chose to have an aftermath ...
    alerts are not what planetside is about, it´s about the battles that are fought in it .. the alert is merely A phase within the conquest for a continent even if it closes the conquest ..

    continental conquest does not need to be just a meltdown alert all the time ..

    regarding rewards .. whatever people may exploit alerts through whatever ways (wouldn´t mining is doing nothing) has no meaning to the people who just genuinily want to play but may log in the middle of an alert or by the end of it .. it all means jack in that regard if they get jack of a reward..

    sending an email out to when an alert starts? having a webside with alertstartcountdowns like a guildwarswebsite with countdowns for bossevents? .. while that MAY be helpfull it still means scrap if you can´t participate in time ... it surely is no guarantee to get enough players particpating in it ..

    have players simply gather XP during when they are active during an alert or event (air anomalies, powerstruggle etc.), no matter when it starts or ends .. but that XP goes into a pool of which when a player reaches a set ammount he gets a reward instead of being continualy forced to sit through every alert start to finish when RL reasons may not allow it ..


    players are more motivated when they get SOMETHING every once in a while ...
    punishing them with lesser rewards cause of low pop for any reason (work, different timezones) is not gonna motivate to keep playing as in:" oh you play in the hours were everyone is at school cause you work at night, well you may aswell not play at all cause we give you garbagerewards for that .. ... also for low pop the game already HAS the measure of decreasing the captureable territory ..
    this game needs ways and flexibility to be able to reward players in a motivating way
    AND it needs to provide meaningfull goals beside the obvious for players to continue playing ..
  13. TR5L4Y3R


    actualy the objective has been always there unless they changed it with the inclusion of inbetween events - to get enough territory to start the meltdown and then to have to hold the most territory by the end of the meltdown alert ... now you make continents being about meltdownalerts all the time, are players always supposed to get the alert xpboost now? shall it rather be put into the events? or shall it be taken out?
    also if the meltdown is running all the time it means more players will log into into the middle of one which may affect of how they would get their rewards ..

    events happening within the alert is not a good idea it either distracts from doing the alert or they are entirely useless because winning them gives only a bit of an advandage in the worst case for half an hour .. what would be the point in that? .. and you can´t just change the factionreward a event gives to be too strong that it snowballs with the alert ...
  14. Demigan

    This heavily encourages farming of any type to get XP, and would push people away from capturing bases and into Biolabs and the like to get as much XP as possible while the timer runs.

    A better solution would be to make supportive actions more important. Right now an assist is barely worth anything which is telling everyone "kill, don't assist". A simple idea is that if you get rewarded for 50% of an assist, then you get 50% to your directive reward as well. You can also reward people more based on what the group does rather than the individual. Let's say you are keeping a MAX's back clean but that MAX gets all the kills from your hard work while you get a pittance, you should get more and it's not as if that MAX would earn half as much if his teammates weren't there to revive him, repair him and protect him! So what if every XP tick logged nearby your current position and your last death position (for a short time) is combined, and every minute you get a certain % of the XP?
    Say you are fighting in a group with some MAX's, engi's, HA's etc and you get 5% of their total XP earnings (and they get 5% of the total XP earnings of everyone around them)? It encourages players to stick together, to find places where XP is really earned and work together to earn more?



    Perhaps here is an idea: Instead of making a timer for the continent, make a timer for each faction. When the timer runs out the warpgate loses it's shield and can be captured. The faction that captures a warpgate wins the continent. If all 3 warpgates lose their shield and no warpgates are captured in half an hour then the faction with the most territory wins.
    Warpgates do not require a lattice-link to be captured when the shield is down (to prevent North-west Esamir from always being the easiest to fall). Controlling territory makes it easier to spawn near the warpgate ofcourse and to place (relatively) safe PMB's nearby.

    Capturing more territory slows down the timer for your faction. Since whenever it slows down for one faction it also speeds up for the others it means that the continent can also be captured sooner if one team holds more territory.
    You can now also add alerts that take a chunk of the losing faction's timers so that winning the continent is about speeding up the timer of your opponents.
    You can also add mechanics that allow players to directly take down chunks of the enemy timers. For example by allowing PMB's to construct a special disruptor vehicle that needs to be driven towards the enemy warpgate where it'll explode and take a chunk off the enemy timer, giving a good amount of XP for players who supported the vehicle during a portion of it's trip and the person who drove it there. It adds a nice VIP section where one team tries to defend their warpgate and one team tries to protect their VIP vehicle until it reaches it's destination (naturally it's general whereabouts would be visible on the map, but not it's exact location until spotted). This makes PMB's more important again but punishes murder-hole PMB's with the VIP vehicle needing to exit the murder-hole first and reaching an accessible road.
  15. Scroffel5

    A ti
    A timer for each faction based on territory encourages doubleteam. Think about it. Say NC is always teamed up on by VS and TR. They will always end their time first, and then either TR or VS will get the win. Good idea, though. Also what is a PMB?
  16. Demigan

    Territory control always encourages double-team, even with the current system. Attacking a stronger enemy means you grab less territory, so you attack the weaker one. The one that is attacked most becomes the weaker one as they are outnumbered, and as such they will lose the most territory as more enemies will come to double-team them. So I don't see much difference in the current system.

    You could change it some. Anywhere between 1% and 33% territory control the timer is the exact same. Only if you rise above 33% does your timer slow down. This divides the reasons to attack:
    • The team with the most territory has reasons to attack the weakest to gain more territory.
    • The team with the second-most territory has reasons to both attack the weakest and the strongest. The weakest to gain more territory and the strongest to make sure his timer speeds up again (and as a bonus also slow down his own timer).
    • The weakest has reasons to attack the strongest to slow down his timer but will still benefit from capturing territory from anyone to try and reach the 33% territory point.
    Since contesting the same warpgate is likely going to be a nightmarish combat scenario to capture it all 3 teams will want to get the timer of the opposition down ASAP. Having 2 warpgates to capture is far more useful as it spreads the forces more and gives you a better chance of capturing one, giving more incentive than the current system to not just double-team. Yes there will still be double-teaming but at worst it'll be the same as now at best it'll be less.
  17. TR5L4Y3R



    see i´m currently not thinking about any big mechanical changes considering the recent circumstances with DBG
    i´m looking for easier solutions at the moment ..
    there will always be ways to exploit alerts and and xpgain, you won´t fully get rid of all of it ..
    and yes i totally agree that supportive actions should be fairly rewarded, as mentioned the simple action of dealing damage should be rewarded, repairing, healing, scouting with radar and motionspotters should all be rewarded etc. being actively capturing, defending or fighting and supporting around a capturepoint should be rewarded the most ...
  18. Demigan

    Allright, small changes?

    Start with the way statistics are displayed. Removing KD from the TAB screen would be golden to start with. Then making other statistics far more prominent would be the way to go.

    Example: Vehicle kills per minute/life
    MAX kills per minute/life
    Aircraft kills per minute/life
    Vehicle+MAX+aircraft kills per minute/life.

    This would already shift focus away from farming infantry and encourage players to try to farm things that are tough and riskful to attack rather than trying to farm weak infantry with as little risk as possible. By making the vehicle+MAX+aircraft kills the most prominent it makes players want to achieve any tough kill, and they get a more individualized stats view as well if they want to see if it was the vehicle or MAX kills that got them the most this session etc.

    DBG keeps track of heat maps displaying all kinds of stats, such as deaths by players. The map screen also keeps track of (what I think is) the amount of shots fired in a region. These create these "hot combat" blips on the map screen that stay a while before being updated.
    These heat maps can also be used differently. If the game tracks a certain amount of players (say 20% of the total faction players in the base area) in a particular hex for a certain amount of time the game can mark this automatically as a hardpoint. It could represent a Sunderer, a chokepoint or just a tough fight where one team holds his ground (any painfields disqualify this type of defense to exclude spawnbunkers). The players who are involved through killing, spotting and supporting friendlies who kill or destroy in the hardpoint area (so also if you shoot into the hardpoint area from outside) will get another statpoint (siegebreaker?) if the area is cleaned of enemy resistance and occupied by allies.

    Both these solutions shouldn't be too hard to implement as they are for the most part already in place and would already have a very large impact on how players act. It would also be nice if sites like Dasanfall and Fisu would refocus their stat pages to display information like vehicles destroyed more prominently and steer the playerbase away from the KD farm rethoric that has been going on since they introduced KD in beta.
    • Up x 1