WDS Preseason and Upcoming Changes

Thank you Malorn, this clarifies a lot. Also a big thumbs up for posting it on these forums.

Awwwwwwwwww YEAH!

Oh so this stupid thing finally appears

Your data disproves your first point- that off-peak population is when imbalance is the worst. Populations actually become a lot more even during the night.

And instead of cherry-picking a server, let's look at all worlds.

The point is, populations are pretty even during off-peak alerts. And as the main post mentioned, the difficulty modifier for points will make it worth less to capture territory when it's off-peak, and even more so if you're outnumbering every other faction.

nvmd

This doesn't help under-pop fight over-pop. And by fight i mean fight.

Also this might equalize the score but TR will still have pop advantage and most likely they will secure victory in the end.

Great, so now all us underpopulated factions can rest easily knowing that even though we're getting steamrolled for a week, we might earn more points for it...

I'm losing interest in this game.

Can you add a handicap to TR's score to offset there better weapons and vehicles?

But other than that looks positive.

Thank you! Love the proposed changes, and particularly appreciate the quick reaction to player gripes!

One concern I do have is with:

Off-peak on waterson is when population imbalances are at their worst, usually. What you're proposing with the Alert Victory Points might just throw everything out of whack every day/night during off hours since one faction tends to dominate heavily.
Maybe your other changes balance that out in the long run, but while all those changes were aimed at making a more competitive playing field, this one in particular just tips the scales right back to your faction

Maybe that is by design though since they are supposed to be the domineering, oppressive, tyrannical faction. It might fit right into the lore for NC and VS to constantly be in an uphill fight against them... to some reasonable degree. I can certainly work with that.

Thanks for all the attention in getting this to its ideal and intended state!

That's because in the New Conglomerate, a sense of humor is allowed.

Yeah, because that worked -so- well for alerts. Come on guys, learn from your mistakes. It doesn't go 'Problem->Solution', it goes 'Problem->Solution->Consequences/Problem 2'. The consequences here are that everyone will simply stay TR for a guaranteed win, in the same way as they used to stay on Indar for a guaranteed fight. You need to look at your solutions not as developers, but as sociologists; think about what people will do - not what would you do, but what would an ordinary greedy person in it for a laugh and a few free boosts do.

I don't support the timer solution, but implementing the same change that has made alerts a worthless TRfest is NOT a good idea.

What is this, Mario Kart? I thought this was meant to be a competitive FPS intending to go to the MLG?

Are CoD gonna start increasing the health of the losing team and decreasing the damage of the bullets for the winning team half way through a round? Is DotA going to reduce the losing team's cooldowns and increase their gold rewards?? I assume SC2 will be allowing the losing player a 'Turtle' toggle to surround their struggling base with turrets for a 'build period' to stop all those pesky rushers?

Have enough faith in your solution to the population imbalance issues that this won't be necessary. There should be no reason that a faction that's won a landslide victory with even population should have that cheapened by their losses being worth three times more than their gains. Games are intended to have winners and losers; consolations are not required.

Please stop taking value from the small outposts! Those are providing some of the most fun fights in the game, since the bases themselves may be small but they are often surrounded by interesting, unique terrain and offer good combined warfare fights. You should take value (alerts, points, combat ressource bonus...) from the huge "cloned" major facilities and start promoting the interesting and diversified small and medium outposts.

Most of what has been said are a real improvement on what it used to be. And will make it a lot more fair.
My concerns aren't as much with WDS anymore, but you basically made the alerts worse. Having them discoupled from the WDS gives you options to either go for a long term victory or a short term victory.
Having the alert system coupled with the WDS I think you're again catering to the overpop.
On Miller for example, the population only really gets out of hand during alerts. And doing more alerts server wide in stead of continent wide makes it even less fair. Because if it's just on 1 continent, the underpopulated factions could still manage to get on even foot with the TR. It is actually the case that the NC and VS actually won a few alerts while on even footing against the TR.
While if it's server wide we have a very low chance of winning due to the overpop the TR had during the overwhelming majority of alerts.

If you ask me, I would remove the alerts entirely. It hasn't brought any clear positive point and only distorted the populations.

Also, you said the alerts are more frequent during off hours. But from what I've seen there is just a static timer. And every time it hits 0 it starts an alert. Because I can't remember when we didn't have an alert going during prime time.

I'll be honest, my entire opinion is completely based on my experience on 1 server and the feedback I read on the forums.

Thanks SOE for removing my post without even telling me because you don't like what I was saying. (And no, I wasn't insulting VS or NC players or Mr.Malorn. Actually I play all 3 Factions.)

This post needs more gifs.

Just apply everything to XP as well, that will 100% without a doubt remove the incentive to hop factions, as it is now the incentive is still there, because people want them certs. Just applying this to XP is the best chance anyone has seen to help with the pop inbalance. The only thing that could help otherwise, is rewarding people for factional loyalty with specific bonuses tied to BR, time played on ONE faction subtracted with a non-linear scaling multiplier for time played on OTHER factions, and all of that tied to IP, not account.

This is a comprehensive fix to the problems at hand, but if they are not applied to the root of the problem, the overpopulation and it's source, the focus on certs and XP instead of world objectives, then all it will do is scale scores. The pops will remain the same as long as the underlying reason for people playing on overpopulated factions still exist.


And this one thing I quoted: Alerts should NOT figure into the WDS, and if they just have to figure in there somehow, they should be worth less than a small base cap.

I wonder why they dont actually solve the root of the problem - make the other two factions' weapons competitive with the TR's, and population balance will enable itself.

Noone is going to join VS or NC just to get more points for a couple of kills they can make while being extremezerged.

just give the underpop faction of the way to get better equipment, i mean in the summer vs got all the good toys from winning alert,now this wds,at least give the 3rd position faction of the week 150% bonus so at least the poor wont get poorer and the rich wont become bored of weak enemys

I totally agree with this. With the WDS you devs have introduced a new objective to fight for. This could motivate players to fight for a long run achievement and that's great. Plus, the changes you told us here are simply amazing, there's a lot of potential in them. Someone said WDS is just a distraction but I do not believe it, since the weekly reward is giving more xp than normal. That means every player looking for xp will put attention in this. I really think this WDS thing could easly become the standard way to play PS2.

Alerts, too, are objectives to fight for, but they're in the short run. They essentially give a load of xp in a very short period of time to a single faction that reaches the goal (and sometimes this goal is not fair due to starting territory ripartition). The problem I see here is that alerts are too short in time: they last just a couple of hours. I Think this could be a primary cause of 4th factioning. And they give xp to the winning faction, no matter in what conditions it won. This brings unbalance.

With WDS you're doing a great job: long term objective, xp reward in the end (based on how much you play AFTER the reward, and this is smart strategy to keep your players on the field), AND actually not limiting this reward to the winning faction, as the xp boost is player-wide and could be used on every character, on every faction. There's a lot of player freedom in this system, and balance.

These changes you told us give even more depth to WDS: I simply love the bonus for holding territory and I already imagine new strategies for outfits to capture THAT critical base wich has been to the enemy for TOO LONG and now is just too precious reward to ignore it! This could bring to really challenging long term strategies, putting outfits toghether for epic fights.

IMHO alerts have made their time, for the time being. They were usefull and fun when they came out, but now they just seem a bad copy of WDS. Bring us some basic player driven missions mechanic and you'll see that with this WDS we don't need alerts anymore.


EDIT: one last thing - please make those "territory holding time bonus" visible in the map for every base