WDS Preseason 2 Changes and Feedback

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 -> 100

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 free-players, but we also understand the frustration of paying players who don’t need boosts or limited-use camos. 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.

Originally posted here: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/wds-preseason-2-changes-and-feedback.172500/

Glad to see there is being done something about it, because in its current state its breaking your game.

Also pleased to see there is actually a point in defending now. Tho I don't see it being enough to stop the massive zergs.

This certainly has been....
Interesting.

You know what you do with pop imbalances? You make a continent specific pop lock during ALL TIMES except during 3 continent alerts (bio, amps, tech). This lock will make it so the highest pop cannot have more than 10% more pop on X continent than the lowest faction. This way no one is getting **** on constantly. It will also make players go on other continents, which you want (since it took you guys so long to redesign them) since the player base has gone up. So the overpopulated faction would have a queue once the lowest had enough people. This will also help with the 4th faction, which isn't just people switching faction characters. It's more of the underpopulated players logging off which just means less fights. Boom did your job, for free. You're welcome. Also reset the WDS, **** is over after 4 days anyways. VS on mattherson have a 40k lead? yup done.

How impactful it is? Any time an alert happens, and event like this happens, on Connery for example, you see TR and NC players drop and the VS players spike. TR takes the largest hit causing them to lose so much ground. It's partially the reason why their score is 30K points below the VS leaders last I checked. (The other reason is because all those VS during the 12am-10am range)

It has to be more than 1% unless they're all calling up their buddies every time an alert happens. I've seen the VS spike in population from 30% to 38% when such things happen. That can't be just a measly 1% of the overall population.

Them switching to another side because the Warpgate is a better place, I'm fine with that, it's when it visibly occurs during alerts outside the WDS event just so their loyal faction can win.

Tying it in with population imbalance, you can easily solve both problems if you just have a lock on accounts that makes it so you can only play the faction you just logged off with for the next 2 hours.

Something has to change - at the moment it's just a blob of tanks and sundies going from base to base, waiting out caps.

I have to make little commentaries to myself for amusement.

[David Attenborough] ...the herd will migrate like this for the whole winter, oh what's this? A skyguard has wandered away from the pack, and here comes a prowler! He charges...but a nearby battle sundy's nurturing instinct kicks-in, and she dashes to put herself in front of the young skyguard. This prowler will stay hungry for now...[/David Attenborough]

The rewards should be lucrative otherwise i see no reason to participate in the WDS.

At first the idea appealed and kept my interest, for about 2000 WDS points, then i felt duped and insulted when i saw the reward for my effort.

In my experience with similar games e.g. Warhammer Online, a lot of players will simply flow downhill to the easy pickings. They don't want stand up toe-to-toe fights - they want easy ghost caps or to roll over any opposition with massive numerical advantage.

They don't seem interested in the actual game - large scale battles - they simply want the shiny toys.

I am at a loss as to what the Devs can do about that because if they make these kinds of people actually work for a reward they will throw a hissy fit it they can't find a way to work around the system.

Yes, very good. Now fix the MCG and jackhammer.

Not much you can do about it but I dont think the WDS does a smaller server like Briggs any favours.
We're lucky to fill one continent and when you water down our game into one of ghost caps on empty continents or cheesing Bio Lab defenses its rubbish to play.

One of you devs should jump on during our prime time and see what its like.

It's not like you have to go out of your way to get WDS points. You go out of your way to rush to get 2k. When you will easily have them by the end of the week. Personally I don't think there should be any individual awards. This game is supposed to be the game that doesn't cater to all the achievement cry baby *******. You log on, play for your faction and then you log off. It's an MMO, there shouldn't be an end game besides personal enjoyment. Go back to COD, thanks. <3

They can only give us the data.

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.

THIS PLEASE, this is the best short term fix for so many population related problems, oh and amerish update asap!

The WDS has been awful and not fun so far, zergs ghost capping everywhere, no good fights and population unbalances. And now there will be zergs defending and no one attacking since it is no longer worth it.

I love the game but not what it has become with this WDS pre-season, I only forced myself to play for this promise "Higher tier Supply Caches will both contain more valuable items and have a higher chance of having a more valuable item in them". I was really curious about what will be the rewards for testing this mess, my guess was the oldest and less sold cammos, it was the cheapest thing I could thought at the moment. I was really surprised when I got 3 useless 1 Hour 50% Boosts for Tier 1 and 3, and 5 Single use cammo for Tier 2. I think it is better to wait for the next "Sorry we messed it up" double exp weekend than grind for Exp boosters.

And from what has been wrote in the first post the rewards will stay the same for the pre-season. I really recommend removing the personal rewards since those are the ones that give false hope and push players to grind points forming the ghost capping zergs.

TL;DR: Give better rewards so it would be easier to stand the state of the game with this Pre-Season or remove them completely so the game goes back to how it was before.

Maybe there are more than 1%, but then they use separate accounts for this faction-hopping. So they are immune for any account-wide locks. And intra-account (or HW-id) locks are a shady ground.

I like the new changes to come, but any idea why TR has just dropped out of the WDS as it seems?

Any thoughts on doing a daily reward for earning a set amount of WDS per day? Could be lesser rewards. 1xboost instead of 3x for example.

Beyond that I think the WDS is a good thing. I'd love to see some of the log on stats as it seems, to me, that there are more people on even at later hours.

this is good news.

i just feel a little sad though that players decide not to actually play the game and make playing the game for people who want to actually play the game harder for them to enjoy

Unl

unlikely,