WDS Preseason 2 Changes and Feedback

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Malorn, Feb 10, 2014.

  1. Malorn

    Hello Auraxians!

    We’ve heard your feedback on the new WDS preseason, and we’re going to be making some changes to it, both short and long-term.

    The purpose of this preseason was to address some of the bigger concerns from our first preseason, which was warpgate positioning, reward allocation, event visibility, and player agency in the event. We took some big steps in this preseason to alleviate all of those issues, but we also had an oversight that had an unintended negative impact on player behavior.

    Discovering these issues and gathering data is the purpose of this preseason. We’re listening to your feedback and taking it seriously. We want to get it right and with your help we'll get there.

    Here are the top concerns we have received from you and what we are doing to address them.


    Personal Contribution Effects
    As a result of the adding personal rewards for participation we got some undesired player behavior. We received the feedback, and we can also quantify it. While our capture rate, defend rate, player deaths, and mean playtime are all up from last week, the average number of deaths per player per successful capture decreased by about 11% across all capture events, which indicates a significant reduction in fight intensity. This is consistent with player reports of not having as good of fights and rampant ghost capping for easy WDS points.

    We believe this behavior stems from players avoiding fights in favor of easy and guaranteed WDS points for captures, and that the defense rewards are not lucrative enough to motivate players to defend territory. This was not one of the goals of the system and we apologize for the negative impact it has had on your gameplay experience.

    Long-term, our ideal solution is to scale all objective rewards with effort and risk such that players are greatly rewarded for challenging encounters, and they are rewarded little for effortless ones. We want good fights to be the most rewarding objectives, and not just for WDS points. We will also be better defining what a successful “defense” is so that it is more intuitive and less exploitable. However, these are not changes we can realistically make on short notice. We cannot provide an ETA for those, but we want you to know that we are aware of the bigger issue that extends beyond WDS and that we plan on addressing it when we can.

    In the short term (as in a Hotfix in the next few days) we will be adjusting capture and defense scoring to put more emphasis on defense and make attack less lucrative. We are swapping the values and scaling for captures and defenses, so defenses will be worth a lot more than captures. This will make successful defense significantly more lucrative than captures for accruing WDS points. We know this also means they will be cheesed more, but we believe it is worth it to try to encourage more fight creation. We also know that scoring rule changes mid-season are bad, but we believe this one is not giving one empire an advantage over another and would be welcomed by players.

    Here are the new starting and max values for capture and defense.

    Small Outposts
    • Capture: 2 -> 8
    • Defend: 3 -> 25
    Large Outposts
    • Capture: 4 -> 16
    • Defend: 4-> 16 (unchanged, see below)
    Bio Labs
    • Capture: 8 -> 32
    • Defend: 8 -> 32 (unchanged, see below)
    Tech Plants & Amp Stations
    • Capture: 8 -> 32
    • Defend: 12 -> 50
    Bio labs and large outposts have a smaller defend scaling because they have 3+ points and are easy to cheese and get a lot of extra defense points out of it. We didn't increase the value on these so the entire event is less likely to boil down to cheesing these two facility types.


    Personal Rewards
    For this preseason event we did not go wild with the rewards because we wanted to see the impact of the event and get it tuned before we give out the good stuff. The current rewards are most beneficial to players who have not purchased any camos or boosts, but we also understand the frustration of members and players who have already purchased these items in the marketplace. For our first season of WDS we will have much better rewards, and the rewards will be more applicable to all players.


    The Elusive “4th Faction”
    This is often cited as a problem and is brought up a lot in the context of WDS advantage or disadvantage. We have been investigating this phenomenon to see just how impactful this behavior is. It is ongoing and we have not decided on any action yet, but we wanted to share some of the initial findings.

    We looked the timeline trend of players who change characters on the same account, and found them to be about 1% of the population across all servers on a given day. They don’t all switch to the same faction, though they do tend to sway to one faction or another over the course of several hours. This does not account for multiple-accounts, but we are trying to get at that information too.

    We are continuing to study the 4th faction, particularly how they related to logoff/logon rates, and longer-term switching such as those who follow particular warpgate rotations, and changes that occur around alerts starting and stopping.


    Population Imbalance
    One of the primary goals of this preseason is to closely examine scoring patterns under active season conditions with normalized warpgates to understand the impact of population. We will use this to tune a small handicap the empire scoring for under-populated empires in future seasons. The impact is not obvious and not as big as geographical position, and there is a lot of variability in the scores. Empires that can be classified as over-populated perform very differently compared to one another, and same goes for the empires that are considered under-populated. The goal is a reasonable and fair handicap and to get there we need some quality data from this preseason.
    • Up x 38
  2. Brandmon

    Amerish to live? Infiltrator update? A WDS that works?!

    http://1.bp.************/-vpE6uMJ37dk/UOScrne47aI/AAAAAAAAEL4/Ki-4IWO-SoY/s1600/ron-paul.gif

    Here are some side-thoughts* I left on reddit a few days ago that may serve as food for thought.

    *Warning: Contains frustrated minor SOE bashing
    • Up x 3
  3. Westy543

    Hopefully this discourages 6 platoons dropping on base after base.

    Hopefully.
  4. sladuog

    Only to re-secure a tech plant or amp station. Note to self: make sure we have some zepher libs in reserve.
    • Up x 2
  5. o.Solei.o

    Thank you guys for all the long hours you are putting in, and for synthesizing player feedback with data mining to produce positive changes! It's greatly appreciated.
    • Up x 2
  6. bPostal

    I'll have to listen to the reachcast show again to fully digest everything you've said on the matter but thanks for looking into this.
    • Up x 1
  7. Ketadine

    4th faction-ing is a problem because you can have multiple characters on the same server. Limit it to only one and most of the issues will be fixed. It's not that impactful in the WDS, but it is during alerts.
    • Up x 2
  8. FreelancePanic

    It's nice to hear the current rewards aren't going to be as... anemic as the ones given out in the actual seasons.

    Also, would it be possible to gain WDS points actively instead of waiting for a timer to tick down? Surely being at a battle to repair/heal/fight should be rewarded, instead of being -that- guy sitting in spawn and waiting. Tie it to ribbons or something.
    • Up x 1
  9. Iridar51

    Nice to see you guys actually listen to the feedback.
  10. ironeddie

    It's nice to know it's being worked on. I like the wds concept and I think some of us forget it's pre season still. It's not supposed to be perfect or finished yet.
  11. Brandmon


    4th Factioning =/= Multi-factioning
    • Up x 2
  12. Copasetic

    WDS points should be tied to total XP (from all participating players) earned at the base over the course of a fight, like how capture rewards worked in Planetside 1. That way intense fights reward more points regardless of whether you're attacking or defending. The same mechanic could be used to award capture/defense XP since it encourages the kind of gameplay we all like while discouraging ghost capping and steamrolling.
    • Up x 1
  13. Phaze

    Continuing with this silly point system... no matter how you jiggle it... is going to kill your game.

    Please stop. It's dumb.

    We want more cool stuff/features in this game. We don't want continued efforts on this goofy scoring season nonsense.
  14. zappy

    The rewards earned for paying customers should be different to free players.

    e.g Paying players has a higher % of obtaining a good reward, or instead of getting 3 boost they get 4.
  15. Kunavi

    I'm of the opinion that we need a better basis before we venture into WDS style contests. Basically what Phaze said. WDS should be tied to many things, not just capturing or losing territory. PS2 right now is either K/D or capturing. If SOE wants to push out events in this environment then they need to be completely separate, like hunting Snow-Men.
  16. Strikejk

    They should change that you only get defense points for defending a 50% (half-flipped) base.
    It's so EZ and abusive to get the 2k WDS points, just logon deep in the night with a friend playing the enemy faction and flipping a single point back and forth.
    Atleast the abusing is pretty worthless due to the fact that you can get 2k points in 1 day without any problems and you have a whole week time for that ;)
  17. NinjaTurtle

    Hi Malorn thanks for the feedback and it's good to see some action being taken because as you mentioned this has had a horrible impact on player behavior. You've got to always consider players will take the path of least resistance to get the carrot at the end of the stick especially when there are rewards. I can confirm on Waterson at least this is exactly what was happening

    If I may suggest 2 possible solution that could be used in part or whole to contribute to making a good WDS season

    Idea 1:

    Instead it should be based upon activities during the fight such as killing, reviving, repair etc etc etc. Once the base is flipped you get a reward based upon the total accumulation of points you earned in experience during that fight meaning you actually have to do something.

    This will in turn stop people overly zerging because if the zerg is too high the base will

    a) be taken to fast meaning there will to little chance for experience to be earned so they will go and look for a fairer fight

    b) or because your pop is OP there will be less people for you to kill and again your experience accumulation will be low

    The capture will apply a WDS multiplier to you score and assign you points as you earned

    Example:
    Bases are divided into small (x2), medium (x3) and large (x4)
    5,000 experience earned during fight
    The threshold for WDS points is made in this example 5,000 per 1 WDS point

    Large base Experience Total = WDS points
    4 x 10,000 = 40,000 = 8 WDS

    This is an example and your math boffins will have to work out values that will be fair and work across the board for all classes and skill levels.

    This is just a rough outline of what I suggest, with all your stats I'm sure you can come up with a better formula and obviously rewards will have to be scaled accordingly

    Idea 2:

    WDS point reward is simply rewarded per 15 minutes. WDS points are not rewarded for anything other than territory held after each 15 minute period.You would have to scale your reward system to match obviously so it isn't either to easy or to hard to reach based upon how fast point would accumulate

    1 point for every small base
    2 points for every medium base
    3 points for every large base

    This would promote the need to defend and capture because each base is every 15 minute interval going to reward points to you if you own them so you will want to defend everywhere you can
    • Up x 1
  18. Clapeyron

    we're an ungrateful bunch, but then again we are paying customers of a service... So while we DO complain (rightfully at times) about unfinished and (sometimes) broken features, it is at least nice to know that you (the devs) are active and are trying to sift through all feedback that exists.
  19. Daikar


    Did you even read the post? 1% of the population on a given day changes to another faction on one account, hardly a major problem.
  20. Bullborn

    Hello, and thank you for listening to player feedback.

    In regards to the new WDS scoring, I believe the changes may be too strong in the other direction. I fear that the result now will be that any cap started will be met by a massive zerg of defenders looking for easy points.

    These are the current issues as I see them:
    * WDS score is most easily farmed by ghostcapping as the risk of failure is small.
    * WDS score is fastest gained through capturing, not defending (the new scoring will change this).
    * Players will want the full 2000 WDS score reward. Which is time consuming and time-limited. Reinforcing the need to do the above easy farms.
    * Players will naturally choose the path of least resistance to reach their goal, regardless of whether or not this is fun. This often means that actually giving player rewards can be a negative influence on their fun. Players are stupid that way, but that's how it is. If there was no personal rewards, I am sure we would have seen a different player behaviour.
    * To ensure WDS score being fulfilled, overwhelming numbers are brought to the fight, ensuring victory (zergs).
    * Players are required to stay in the base until the capture timer ends to get the reward.
    * Players can arrive at the last second and get the full reward (thus large ESF swarms are formed).
    * Most servers have some form of population imbalance.
    * Population imbalance snowballs as new players wish to join the winning faction.
    * 4th faction is a perceived problem. The assumption that there is a big 4th faction problem amplifies the problem. I would be inclined to thinking that 4th faction is more a problem of the losing faction(s) not enjoying losing and thus actually log off. Shouts of 4th faction problems will in turn cause this to happen more often.
    * Rewards are uninteresting and reinforce a negative look on WDS.


    Suggested Short term fix:
    * Potentially lower the score needed to get rewards so that you get less reward-focused player behaviour.
    * Give some WDS score be based off XP (or 1 point per cert gained). This allows you to utilize existing mechanics that are in place to encourage more diverse player behaviour.
    * Continue using the WDS score "increase over time" mechanic to make targets deeper in enemy territory be more worth. This does encourage fights to happen outside of the normal chokepoint bases.
    * Keep working on balancing the capture vs defense numbers. I think the current change is too drastic and would suggest something closer to a middle road.
    * Make the rewards more interesting, but do not make the requirements to get them be so excessive that you enforce bad player behaviour. Ideally they should be feeling like a bonus for playing during WDS, not a grind that you can speed up by changing your behaviour.
    * Percentage increase to WDS score for underpopulated factions.


    Suggested Long term fix:
    * In planetside 1, the capture score was determined by what happened in the sphere of influence (comparable to hex) in the last 15 minutes. You also had to be there for the last 15 minutes to get the full reward. WDS score could be based off a similiar system where your actions inside the hex in the last 15 minutes provide you with a % number that determines your final score if the capture goes through. Any action that gives XP should give WDS-% within that hex/area (not just within the capture zone). So if you have been fighting for a bit within a tech plant hex, you may gained 50% WDS contribution, and thus if the capture goes through, you get 50% of the capture score. This reduces ghost capping and ESF last-second swarms. No point cap-jumping as you wouldn't have built up any percentage in the hex when the cap goes through.
    * You gain the score regardless of your current location. This allows you to move on and stops you from having to camp spawn.
    * 5-10 minutes after you have left the hex, the score starts to decay. Again, stops you from having to sit around waiting. Move on to the next objective.
    * Defenders gain WDS score for any action that gives XP within the hex.
    * Resecures give less WDS score than captures (defenders already get WDS from actively defending).
    * Keep the increase-over-time mechanic to encourage fighting for bases that haven't been capped in a while.
    * In addition, the short term fixes for rewards, pop-imbalances and score-requriements still apply.


    Long term population imbalance helpers:
    * Non-combat advantages to lower population factions (xp gain, wds score, etc)
    * Use the recommended server and pre-selected faction to encourage joining the lower pop factions.
    * Allow permanent faction change to lower pop factions (but not other way). Retain BR and weaponry (or equivalent faction specific weapon)
    * Less servers (a pop locked continent is balanced).
    * Fix login servers so people can log in ;)
    * Lock joining an overpopulated faction unless you have a friend-code.

    --
    Anyhoo, this post is getting way too long, so keep iterating and keep listening to the community. If nothing else, at least it gives you a friendlier community to help promote the game. :)