[Suggestion] Improving the reward system in PS2

IMHO one of the biggest problems the game has is that most people play the game "wrong". WAIT DON'T LEAVE JUST YET lemme explain.

Of course there is no bad way of playing a game. What is important is that you're having fun and bla bla bla...
HOWEVER there is always a way the game was MEANT to be played; that the designers choose as the main way to play the game. Like sure, you can "play chess" by dancing on the chestboard if you wanted to (I highly recommend trying this btw, great fun) but then you're not really playing the game "properly"

So, what's the "proper" way to play ps2? Well, since ps2 is a sandbox game there is no way of winning the game. You can however, win a battle. Or an alert. Or you can help your faction gain total domination. I bet all my money these are the kinds of "win" the developers wanted the players to pursue.

But they failed horribly at encouraging the players to do that. If I asked you what is your goal while playing ps2 (just be honest with yourself. And no, "having fun" doesn't count as an answer) probably about 5% of you would mention territory conquest. The rest would answer it's farming certs, K/D or directives or just getting long killstreaks.

There's a lot of things which could be adressed here, but in this post I'm gonnah focus on the cert system. If it gets popular I might make a part2 or 3 about other things. So, without further ado, I present to you: a partial solution to the problem! With math! RUN!!
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Your cert income is no longer personal. You do not get certs simply for gaining EXP. Instead, when you enter a battle, you get bound to the facility you fight at. All your EXP goes towards building Battle Effort in the base you are bound to. BE represents the total ammount of EXP your faction contributed to that base, and every base tracks it's BE sepparately. Every facility also tracks every player's share in building the BE for later use. When the battle ends, one way or another, you are granted certs based on the simple formula:

certs_gained= (Your_BE_share/Total_BE)*Facility_cert_value*Win_modifier

where Facility_cert_value is a varaible which changes based on the ammount of players in your faction on the server. The more players, the higher the value. Bigger facilities are also worth much more certs

so:
a) Taking or defending your territory is now the only way to get certs. And winning will grant you 50% more certs than loosing so you had better try to win. Conquest encouragement for the win

b) Winning a battle can only grant a certain ammount of certs. There is no point in farming and making the battle longer. Farm discouragement for the win.

c) Certs are distributed among all the players who participated in the battle, according to their contribution to the total BE. The more EXP you got the higher your share of certs will be. Taking the base with a zerg of 100 players will cause everyone to get about 1/100 of the value of the facility, while taking it with a tacticool squad of 12 will net everyone about 1/12. Zerg discouragement for the win

d) Successfully defending the facility will grant you the same ammount of certs as taking it. Loosing a battle will still give you 50% of what you would get if you won. If you were the only one defending, you will get a lot of certs even if you failed. Defending encouragement for the win.

e) Stat padding is not an option because killing your alts is no longer enough. You would actually have to do this in a battle to get any certs from it. But then you're much more exposed to other players who may kill you or report for statt padding. Statt Padding discouragement for the win

Why is having fun not an answer?

Keep in mind im not the type that believes fun is the main goal of a game and certainly hate when people pivot their reasoning on this alone but it is an extremely important factor in gameplay

"having fun" is not an answer because it's fundamentally the goal of playing most games in the first place. You could apply that vague answer to 99% of games and it wouldn't tell anyone anything about your play style or what you value in the game.

I think there are ideas in here that have some merit but realistically, you can't solely tie exp to base capture.

I would weight experience tied to a hex that is contested. However, what if the battle has spilled out into the field, and now I'm just outside of the hex when doing a lot of fighting? Time spent - no reward.

This will also *possibly* discourage between base fighting and there's an entire world out there waiting to have new battles fought on unfamiliar terrain. This is possibly the entire point of the ANT and player base system, so we are running contrary to what the devs are planning.

I *do* like the idea of changing how exp is doled out in contested bases, but again, I would only change the weighting of it and then you've really gotta figure out how to delineate who gets what and not screw people over via an arbitrary boundary.

In a small sense this exists in objective hold bonuses. If you stay on point while it's capping, you get a kill's worth of exp every few seconds.

The main issue I take with capping the exp value is that this game *was* meant to have epic zerg battles. People just like to ***** about getting outpopped because they can't control it, but it's a valid tactic in real warfare just as it is in game.

Discouraging big fights will run exactly contrary to one of PS2's other selling points. We should be encouraging them, but making sure the bases can handle them.

Again, I think there is some merit in changing the focus of the game from KD to objective - but you also have to remember that people come into this game with a set of expectations, and lobby shooters have conditioned everyone to focus solely on KD because it's the only statistic you carry with you. That isn't a fault of Planetside, but they could certainly try and find ways to help people realize that there's a very important philosophical distinction between this game and other shooters.

Then your BE is contributed towards the closest battle.Sorry I didn't answer this in my post but it was getting long already

Look up.

Imagine there's a small base worth 500 certs and a large base worth 2500 certs. Zerging the small base with 50 people will give everyone about 10 certs. That's pathetic. But zerging that large base will still give everyone ~50 certs, which is decent I believe. So it's not like you can't zerg, it's just that zerging small facilities(which are not designed for it) is simply not worth it.

Now look, when you zerg that large facility and there are no defenders, the potential reward for simply comming there to defend it and loosing is initially as high as 1250 certs. You can bet your a$$ people will swarm in to defend it. Once they do the reward per player starts to drop. Let's say there's 25 of them. Even if they loose, they still get as much certs as you do! But then lets say there's 40 of them or a tacticool squad joins in and they may have a chance of winning, if they do the potential reward suddenly doubles! More people swarm in and before you know it it's 50v50, a LARGE BATTLE and not a zerg. Which one do you prefer?

It would still be correct though

I think playing on that is an important key to bringing more lively gameplay in

Realistically, I prefer the one that remembers there is much more to this game than only playing infantry

???
...did I say anything about infantry? Or vehicles for that matter? As long as you're contributing to the closest fight, you are rewarded. Doesn't matter if you drive,walk or pilot.
Also, I am not infantryside if that's what you mean.

+1'd mostly for the sense of humour used throughout. Makes the whole thing much more light-hearted.

It's an interesting concept for sure.

The first issue is finding vehicles a home and to decide how they contribute and what the reward is.

The second issue is defining contribution. eg:

1) I deploy in and hold point, die a lot, make a few kills, but not many. I contribute as a support for the team.

2) I deploy in and take up a ranged farming position, scoring many kills, but disregard the objective.

3) I deploy in and literally just sit in a safe place to wait while the battle goes on and collect certs, win or lose. I enter combat at least once before going afk so that I've checked the contribution box.

Again, I like the ideas, if not exactly in your initial form. I'm just here to pose questions that will undoubtedly arise during actual gameplay.

You get EXP as usual, it's just that the way it works is altered. Basicaly Your_BE_Share is the total ammount of EXP you accumulated during the fight and the Total_BE is all the EXP your faction accumulated during the fight. If you do better than the average player on your side you will get proportionally more certs. If you do worse it's the opposite so:
1) you get EXP for people spawning in, taking the control point and defending it. Just like usual. The more players spawned and the longer you hold the point the higher your share will be
2) you get EXP for killing enemies, just like usual. The more enemies you kill the higher your share will be
3) if you do nothing you get no EXP and no share. If you do very little and go AFK you also get very little EXP and so your share will be very low. I placed (Your_BE_Share/Total_BE) in the formula especially for that reason. If you had like 0 BE share your reward is 0. If you had very low share your reward is low. Try it, math is not that hard . Kidding. Don't get mad at me. Please. I have no friends for that very reason

So this exact formula is endlessly concerning from a new player's perspective. Experienced players would effortlessly make 10,000+ exp, significantly raising the total BE, and get large rewards all the time even though most don't even need certs anymore. Simply by playing the game, they will screw over an inexperienced player who may, for example, struggle to get 1,000 exp per battle. Players who would need certs the most will have the most difficulty finding them, because players who don't need the certs are getting all the "battle certs" instead.

And I may have missed it, but how would the system handle "orphaned" bases? Consider: Defenders of a base push the attackers out and fight in the field. Defenders are within their base's region/SOI, so their exp goes to the base they're defending. Meanwhile, the attackers are closer to the next base's region/SOI, so their exp goes to the base the attackers spawned from. Let's say the defenders eventually push through, attack, and capture the next base in line. What happens with the exp in the base the defenders were originally defending? It wasn't attacked or defended, so is its exp just sitting there? Would the original base's exp trigger too? Would players get reduced exp because everyone left that fight to join the next one in line?

And if the original base does give exp, what happens when one base is being attacked from two different directions? Say NC has a base with TR to the west and VS to the east. NC pushes out and captures the VS base, leaving most of their exp behind in the NC base, but the base capture causes the NC base to give exp too. Would the TR in the NC base also get rewarded because the NC won a completely separate fight?

This could end up being a really great idea, but doesn't currently seem to address the fact that players of various skill can contribute to multiple different fights at the same time.

lol it's no worries. Coding and I don't mix, been there done that, and anything that isn't physics related in math and I don't mix, not your fault

If you've addressed that already and I missed it, that's on me.

This is where I was catching the idea of a communist cert delivery, rather than merited.

I'm waiting to see what other think, I'm sure you'll have plenty of responses soon enough. I'd certainly like to see objectives be given weight.

The one thing we haven't addressed is the pending changes slated to come soon. With the Indar revamp and removal of smaller bases, addition of garages and player-made facilities, how would you address those battles with your system? It's going to happen, the only question is when.

Well, the cert ratio remains the same.
With the old system if the pro made 10 000 exp and the noob only 1000 exp then the noob would get 10 times less.
In this system if the pro made 10 000 exp and the noob only 1000 exp then the noob would still get 10 times less.
If there were 10 pros who made 10 000 exp and one noob who only made 1000 exp then the noob still gets 10 times less than a pro.
If there were 9856353356 pros.... you get the idea.
Yes, the better you are the more you get and the less everyone else gets... But it works both ways so the ratio remains the same. Actually I think it's gonnah work the exact opposite, with pros complaining about newbs destroying their cert income and going somewhere where the reward is higher or where they are needed most. It is an intentional mechanism to spread the fights a little and prevent people from zerging.

If you fight outside of a contested base's region, your EXP is transfered to the closest contested base in a 1000m radious.
I'd also change the definition of what is considered "contested". A base is "contested" when there's at least one deployed enemy sunderrer in it's region or if the enemy has partially captured the base. A battle ends when the base is no longer contested. This way, even if the attackers don't actually own any controll points, the battle will keep going until they loose their last sunderrer (at which point they probably lost anyway)
So in your case both the attackers and the defenders would get certs for the first base once the last enemy sundy got destroyed, and then they would start contributing BE towards the second facility.

I do not quite understand what you mean. A base does not "give EXP".

Anyway I'm going to bed now, so you may have to wait for the answer until tomorrow. Good night

@OP, rewards should be one of the last things to worry about in a videogame. We aren't hamsters.
Then again... fun is subjective. So I guess I can't really "discuss" about it. Rather than some logical facts, but...meh.

This is fine, but what about those of us who play during off-pop hours due to odd employment times? Ghost capping really late at night and really early in the morning just got lucrative, if we can get a chunk of certs from solo capping a major base. I've been able to solo cap a tech plant, and an amp station before, at about 5 in the morning, where I was one of about 3 people on hossin, 2 of which were allies. The reward needs to be indirectly linked to an actual enemy opposition, otherwise ghostcapping will become the norm again.

Its a topic for zerg control via reward manipulation.

How about a this,
An infiltrator would get a tactical nuke enabled which he would aim and deploy if the area would be severely overpopulated,..

I think that your reward system wouldn't be good.

You give too much reward for the victory, and with a cap on the amount of certs per battle you would see terrible things in battle:
For instance: A player joins a battle where he's hopelessly outpopped. The battle isn't going well and there's no real reason to fight there. His best options are leaving or griefing his team so that the base is captured faster, then making sure he moves to another fight so he doesn't get sucked into a fight he doesn't want to be by accident.
Then there's stalemates: If two zergs end up fighting each other you end up with a huge loss in certs as the battle rages on. This means that people, and zergs, will avoid this stalemate. This means that Zergs will not be stopped for the fear of getting stuck in a long stalemate.

Just this already paints a very scary picture: People will avoid fights they think they'll lose, they will band together to form Zerg and guarantee victory and certs, they will not redeploy to stop those zergs in case they might end up in a stalemate.

Then there's the "smaller" stuff.
Do not "bind" people to a facility this harshly. Switching from a fight that's no longer fun should be an option or people will rather leave the game than continue playing without any chance to win or in a fight they don't score their BE at.
It would be completely detrimental for aircraft, who wouldn't be able to fly around and attack things outside of the first base they fight at. It also begs the question what happens to fights inside bases beyond the frontline. For instance: I defend myself against a tank in a frontline base, then move in a Skyguard to the closest ESF resupply base my enemy has available. Do I get XP and certs for downing those ESF?
How about those people (me for instance) that drive around in vehicles for extended periods of time to backstab a large tankzerg? Would I get rewarded even if I had to fight several other enemies in different bases to get there?

ghostcapping during off-hours will be possible, yes, but it won't be nearly as lucrative. The variable Facility_cert_value increases with the number of players in your faction on the server - when I think about this now I actually think you're right and it should increase with the number of your enemies population. Well, it's just a general idea anyway, needs some polishing -so when there are no enemies on the server then the prices for capturing a facility are rather low. How much lower is up to debate, but you certainly won't be getting 2500 certs for ghostcapping a tech plant.

Good point. So I guess that the cert reward has to scale with time in some way or another, otherwise bad things may happen. And this is kind of problematic, because making the reward scale with time will enable players to farm by making the battle longer. However, since we bound this to the facility they fight at, they can still loose and get 50% less cert income. So I guess that you could farm, but you're risking loosing and getting only 50% of what you farmed. Here's an improved version of the formula:

certs_gained= (Your_BE_share/Total_BE)*Facility_cert_value*Win_modifier*(Battle_time/Facility_capture_time)
where Battle_time is the duration of the battle and Facility_capture_time is the lowest possible capture time for the facility (if you kept all the control points).

So the potential reward increases with time for both sides and the stakes are getting higher and higher. At some point the reward for winning will be so high that everyone will want their share and more and more people will spawn in on both sides. By farming and making the battle longer, the risk of loosing also increases. If you had a population advantage and you captured a base as fast as possible, you have a large chance of winning and then you could proceed to the next base. But if you intentionally made the battle longer then the odds will start to even out and you may find yourself loosing.

Banding together decreases your reward/player so no, I don't think people will zerg. Fighting against overwhelming odds will usually net you more certs than the enemy, even in case you lost, because there's so many of them. So I think people will keep fighting even if they are sure they will loose.

Like if there's a base worth X certs, sieged by 50 players and defended only by 25. Even if the defenders loose, they are still getting as many certs as the attackers. Above that they start earning less than the attackers, but they are starting to have a chance of winning and if they do, they will earn twice as much. The chance increases the more players spawn so it's a motivation for them to spawn in and take their chances.

Switching fights always remains an option. Your BE is not lost when you leave a facility, so when the fight ends you will be rewarded for how much BE you contributed before you left. In the meantime you can start contributing to another facility and get rewarded for that too. You loose nothing if you switch battles.

If you aren't currently in the SOI of any contested base, your BE will be transfered to the closest one. After the battle ends there, you will be rewarded with certs as normal.