WDS Preseason 2 Changes and Feedback

I'm thinking people will still zerg like crazy, after all it takes effort to redeploy to a base and defend it, much easier to stay with a roller zerg and keep capping even though the points scored will be less. Either that or huge stalemates will be the order of the day as opposing zergs sit in bases and wait for the other to attack.

IMO the personal rewards should be scrapped and replaced with something that the entire empire works towards. E.g some sort of weekly or daily faction rewards. I can't see the majority of people ever playing the WDS properly when there are essentially two scores to get, your personal one (that gives rewards) and the empires (which doesn't).

Yesterday I logged in to Miller, got spawned on Esamir, saw that there was an Indar Alert ongoing, tried to warp to Indar, saw that there was a 50+ Warping queue, logged off. Good thing that I have characters on other servers.

Another anti-zerg idea:

How about if instead of awarding points to al individuals for the taking or defending of a base, that the base itself has a bunch of points associated with it and they are divided amongst the attackers/defenders at the point of capture/defense.

That would mean that you wouldn't get a lot if you were in an enormous zerg where the points are divided across hundreds of people, but if you're in a small tight outfit that takes a big base you'd get plenty of points. This might naturally spread the battles across all disputed territory areas more evenly. This could apply to both WDS and/or XP points potentially.

(I admit I haven't fully thought this through, just putting it out there)

The log-in/log-out numbers also will capture people gathering passive certs, since the system requires them to log into the character or forego those. That requirement makes one-hour faction locks and other things that could address the issue impractical.

^This. I have to logon all of my characters once per day. Locking me to one faction would just not work. I don't even have more than 1 character per server so it would really just punish me for absolutely no reason.

As for all of the people saying to just divide the points amongst attackers and defenders, what would actually happen in that case would just be people yelling at everyone to get out of "their" base capture, and it would really ruin the entire game.

Massive defense point only encourage highly organized outfits to set up farming choke points... going from one extreme to the other in an instant now, are we?
Here is a radical idea: how about trying a balanced approach first?

Long term "events" are boring, useless, stupid, and promote snowball zerging

There needs to be metagame fuel that brings you a potential win during 1 session, every day. Long term virtual points bring you nothing.

I like when a dev uses the term 'cheesing.' It shows a good understanding of the way the game is actually played, especially by more experienced players and outfits. Trying to get maximum benefit with the lowest possible expenditure of effort.

Increasing small outpost defense points is a good change. Many small bases rarely have significant fights at them, which is a shame since some of the most interesting base architecture is to be found there.

You (SOE) need to start playing more and study numbers less . Population imbalance will always have a huge impact on how fun the game is to play regardless of alert/wds/event x AND how appealing it is to new players - which in turn affect the longevity of the game, no new players = dying game.

As long as you (SOE) think that it's hunkydory that one empire CAN have 58% world population (as VS did last night on Miller and most late nights as of late) people will quit.
I actually saw players being proud of zerging the crap out of the low pop empire and saying that "the problem is NC/TR leaving, not VS stacking".
Idiot players will be idiots, don't let it spread to the devs.

Balance population or die trying!

Just for completion:

Can you put some GM's to monitor the... em... not so "legit" players on the servers.

That would make it much easier to capture or hold small outposts in 1-12 player 50/50% fights.

Can someone explain to me how is it fair that i get same reward on tier 1 (200WDS) and tier 2(800WDS) .... i got both times 3x 1 hour EXP boost!!! So i can only hope to get 6x 1 hour EXP boost on 2000WDS?!?! Please fix this, its not nice playing for scrap, its a rip off... Was hoping for a cammo or something and i get nothing :S Please people regulate this **** so it doesnt happen to anyone else or again.... It's sad....

In my experience, listing out the possible rewards from a random goody box is a good way to earn player goodwill. That way people know what they're getting in to.


Also, I believe a 10 minute timer on switching empire on the same server would solve most of your 4th faction woes. People who earnestly want to play a different faction won't mind an extra-long bathroom break, and those who just want to troll are deterred. People who follow warpgates will be barely if at all impacted, and I don't think anyone really minds them.

The Elusive “4th Faction”

I Don't want to come off as rude here but. This is why you don't let people have different faction characters on the same server.
It was a bad decision form way back in the game sense Planetside 2's Release, and has slowly broken the game ever sense.
I Hope that in the future of this game this game everyone is given a server move token or complete refund on the other characters that are not there main. If you wanna fix the issues “4th Faction” THAT IS THE ONLY SURE FIRE WAY!!

lmfao are you really complaining about Miller VS? we overpop MAYBE 2 hours per day, at thats at midnight GMT. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WEEK.

Let's look on the TR then, or, god forbid, the NC, with all their zerglings capping a small outpost with 48+ and 21 vanguards.

I'm willing to see what happens with this scoring change, but not too optimistic that it will be better. The only thing less fun than defending when vastly outnumbered is attacking into it. Expect lots of people yelling at faction-mates not to kill the opponents until after the point flips. Lots of it. Bad feelings shall ensue.

Malorn had an interview last night on reach cast, where he kind of answered this. If I am wrong I would like someone to correct me btw, because this is from my memory, which is a weird and undependable thing.

Basically, they knew that there would be a level of cheese involved, that the system could be exploited with multi-point bases, but the scale to which people went into screwing over the system was above and beyond what they expected, and they realized it had happened within a day (Which was even more surprising).

This is just a bad idea all around.. Who's going to be attacking who if everyone is just focusing on defense? I thought WDS stood for "World Domination Series" meaning whoever captures more territory wins?. I wasn't aware that WDS now stands for "World Defensive Series" meaning whoever stops more people from capturing territory wins.

Break out your engineer turrets, Lock-on rockets and AA maxes ladies and gents cause its now time to bunker down.

Small list off decent bases to do this:

The Crown
Crossroads Watchtower
Scarred Mesa Skydock
Vanu Archives
Idar Excavation site
Howling pass Checkpoint

have fun

It will fix only 1% of population. I doubt it will change anything significantly. The only thing it will promote is multiple account creation.

If this is indeed so, then is the only answer I can give. It's like there are no people that acutally play the game on live servers in this company or something.

Yeah but what Malorn was saying, and said last night during a reach cast interview, is it's not as easy to pin down as: People swapping to another faction from the faction they are already fighting on, mid fight.

The next thing they were going to do, was check on people who possess multiple accounts, seeing if people were swapping accounts before swapping factions.