WDS: The Battle Begins

I just want give proposition for reward:
- ONE single use camo, that we can chose. People will complaint about three single use camo that you chose for them.
- Codes instead of actually boost. So people can give them if they will not want them.

Second actually split the rewards in 3 groups. So people will not get 3 x boost for their tier 3 reward. This is so disappointing, especially when others get golden SMG.

Edit: And consider giving Contribution points for Ribbons you earn in the game. Especially for defenders.

I'm not to crazy about the rewards but hey it's only the first week of a new system. They are nice yes but they seem to fewer then what was talked about. Maybe if you get for example a 1 hour boost for tier 1 you can't get it again for tier 2 or three until the next week starts. Same for the camo. personally I got 1 hour boosts on both tier 1 and 2. At first I was like hey this is cool and on the second one I was kinda bummed about it. I feel that by either getting a 1 hour boost for all 3 tiers or for the 3rd tier is to little of a reward considering the work you have to put into getting to tier 3. I think also think if you threw in a loadout slot of character slot into the mix that would be pretty cool.

i'm sure you've heard this 1000 times already but what the current system is doing right now is rewarding ghost capping. on Briggs it is HORRIBLE, first most of TR at the start of WDS2 went and ghost cap Amerish and Esamir while the rest of us TR players who actually wanted to play the game were left fighting huge *** zergs of NC and TR fighting control of Indar with TR having next to no hexes left.

the system does not address player behaviour.

i wrote this comment quickly on Wrel's weekly update video where he talks about how bad the WDS is right now and how to fix it:

now i got this from suggestions on the forums, most notably from here and here.

those threads i linked are fantastic and have great ideas that i tried to explain as best as possible in my comment, as well as adding a little bit of my own stuff.

I agree completely. I even stated my concerns with the idea and I know it's merely a bandaid on a much bigger issue but it might be a small step in the right direction. I wish I had some brilliant idea to fix the issue but alas, I don't. I do think that this would be a quick to implement patch that would again be a step in the right direction at least until they come up with a metric or formula for glaring pop imbalances in a given territory.

You do bring up a big problem with this suggestion though in that people would just camp biolabs. As most people can attest those are the most frustrating places to defend under normal circumstances. Maybe make their point value drastically less than amp or tech stations? Like maybe on par with small outposts to keep people moving.

Again I realize these are just temporary fixes that might "fix" the game in the interim until they figure something out that's better.

Just want to say thank you all! Much better feedback! Loving the suggestions and concerns y'all have been adding to the thread.

Also, Higby just Tweeted this, so I want to share it on our forums!

Ya personaly I'm trying to look for long term solutions. Really feel that the one I'm talking about right now is one of the Larger Core mechanics of the game that needs to be fixed since Launch, along side the current resource revamp.

I'm not really sure if there is much we can really do to Band-aid the current problems, so far with the last WDS it seemed that each fix helped one aspect but ended up making another worse in the process (such as the Scoring changes that dractly changed the results).

I just hope that this issue gets addressed instead of being forgotten as they go for more Bandaids to fix the imediate problem without treating the cause.

I'm just giving feedback from what I saw in-game. The TR on Waterson spent the entire weekend trying to deal with the NC super-zerg, but when people starting to hear that the reward for that headache was most likely 1 hour boosts or single use camos, most of us just gave up and logged out.

I may have the solution to the zerg and maybe ghost capping! What if you had something like capture/defend this building with at least this many people and up to this amount of people? For example say you had 3 people but it requires at least 5 people to capture it. Sure you can cap it but the reward would be cut back, same as if you had to many people in that area. Say you set the biolab to a max cap of 120 people but there was 140 people in the area. Your capture points would decrease instead of staying as what's listed. I think it could be a start to prevent everybody from going to this place with a force that's impossible to defend from.

The personal scores are either to high or to low.

If lucky, you can effortlessly zerg your way to 2000 points.
If unlucky, your are stuck on a continent full of 3-7 points worth of basses to cap.

I'm now stuck at 1700 points and I just cant make more with the peanuts.
Indar was full, everyone was going for the juicy basses. So, after I got on what was left for me? Nothing.

After they took everything, every one then instantly left and went god knows where so the population % on Indar dropped. Not only that I then had nothing to take but I was also underpopulated and both of the factions were recapping the TR.

Doing what your talking about sounds more like an artifical cap of participants to a fight. When you add in the fact that we don't know the exact numbers of people at a fight for any side it would cause more issues then help.

The problem is less that Ghost caps happen, and more that there is no insentive to prevent them. The Current WDS personal points reward system heavily rewards ether a successful Capture, or A defence that lets the attackers flip a point without much risk of loss (AKA multi point bases compaired to Single point bases).

As you say it's Preseason .. You can afford to make drastic changes and see how they pan out ..

IE:

Removing Capture XP totally from the WDS score for a week and changing personal contribution to actual mean you have to contribute ( personal XP based point allocation ).

Having points dynamic and based on World pop .. TR 25% / VS 45% / NC 30% .. TR get's 20% more points if they fight VS and 5% more if they fight NC .. NC gets normal points if they fight TR and 15% more if they fight VS .. VS get's normal whoever they fight .. A bit like the Top Dog bounty but based not off score but World pop ..
Might help alleviate the impact of off peak pop issue's which needs to be addressed.

Just examples of course

So yeah, last night I got 24 WDS points in the course of about 1 minute because I was at a biolab about to move out after its capture and one enemy recon idiot kept running point to point and capping the biolab points while there was still 10 people inside who recapped them. The gaps between his caps and ours gave me defense points with each cap and recap...

Probably should address this before it's exploited in to kingdom come...

And since my thread was locked because I didn't know of this thread since it's in a forum I usually don't visit, I'll paste this here as well:

yep, this needs to be fixed. i already did a bit of exploiting with that, leaving one enemy at the base on purpose and letting him cap points to recap them. he actually got into it nicely, i just wounded him now and then to keep him engaged in this activity. by then end of it he thought he was totally outplaying me and boasting in /yell that i should leave while i farmed the WDS points for our faction.

i didn't take it much far but it could be purposefully exploited using alts and such. really needs to be looked into.

Since SOE is trying to consolidate opinions here, I am going to repost my recommendation:

In the WDS, USUALLY, the reward is points. Thing is, currently because the rewards are tied to daily action, the goal of the WDS is to grind out as many WDS personal points as humanly possible. The easiest way to do this is by avoiding combat... because you get certs (Albeit at a reduced rate) but most importantly, you can earn real, tangible goods by ghost capping. So the goal of the WDS right now, is Camos and 1 day boosts.

This is a good thing in a way, because it shows a few things:

People will be motivated by something other than certs if they are sufficiently rewarded, and cosmetics like camo and 1 hour boosts do that nicely. That gives those rather cheap and frankly throw-away items enough of a value that they can be used to incentivize stuff in the future, without fear of totally shattering game balance. This bear special significance for the testing community, because this is pretty much a precedent for people to say: "See SOE? If you offer a reward, albeit a really cheap and meaningless one, people will not only bug test for you, they will do so with such remarkable gusto that they will break the system for you inside of an hour, guaranteed."

Next, it shows that if you incentivize aggression and attacking too much, the entire system breaks down; Unless, you have a high enough population cap that combat avoidance is impossible. Connery and a few other places that have high enough pops are currently working as they should, because there are just enough people that you quite literally CANNOT avoid fighting. Waterson on the other hand, people have spread out over the whole planet and are doing what they can to ghost cap themselves silly. What this says to me, is that they should try something different with the WDS, rewarding defense over attacking... or maybe make successful defenses make territories more valuable to attackers, to push MORE people on those successful defenders.

Also, while it was removed, I think a regional modifier of points, based on the number of people who are present to defend would be a good way to balance things out immediately. So, taking a totally undefended area would give you like 1 WDS point, but taking an area that is defended by a group that has a greater number of people than you by Percent, that gives you all the WDS points, maybe even More than the base value.

So to summarize in a few points, These are the changes I would make to the WDS scoring:

• The base score of how much a territory costs remains the same. Every once in a while a base becomes more valuable, depending on how long the base is held, and the size of the base.
• The reward of defense should be modified one of 2 ways: 1.) you make defense the most rewarding between territory acquisition and defense. Or 2.) Successfully defending a base should modify the WDS value of that base, to make it more rewarding for attackers and defenders. In this case you can get a well defended facility that focuses fights in because it is too valuable Not to try and take, and too expensive to loose.
• The base value should be modified by the number of people you threw into the fight. If you threw 100 people into a fight where there were 15 defenders in the prior we'll say, 15 minutes, then you should get next to no XP. But, if you can take the base from 100 people, and you have 90, you should get rewarded More than the base value for your accomplishment. This will Indirectly effect overpopulated factions, as they are much more likely to show up in mass to fights, or take territory with more than is necessary numbers. Making it regional means that even if an overpopped faction is fighting with fewer numbers against an underpopped faction who is in that area overpopped, everyone gets what they deserve for their fights.
• Rewards absolutely, need to stay in. Infact, I would expand rewards like this to more things done in the future to help the community break whatever it is the devs are trying to test.

I little disagree. People where ad first motivate by REWARD. They did not know what reward is. They just want them. Now people are motivated by a CHANCE of winning golden SMG.

My opinion is that WDS should promoted holding the largest territory possible. That attacking is also rewarded, but the first priority is to deffend what you already have.

lol a NC is talking about VS being overpop.. Yeah maybe 2 hours between 3 - 5 am US western time lol. And let's completely ignore the NC 45% pop during the remaining 22 hours of the day.

Well yeah, there is a psychology term for that... basically you are rewarding people on an inconsistent basis for something very valuable. It makes people play that much more, because they are convinced THEY are the ones who will win a golden SMG. It's the same psychology that makes casinos and the Lottery work. That doesn't negate the fact that they are breaking the system to do it. But it -does- show that you can incentivize player behavior by something other than certs.

And yeah, that is why I said in my stuff that either defense should make a territory more valuable to defend or attack OR just make defenses cost as much as attacks do now, while making attacks cost what defenses do now.

Maybe points shouldn't be immediately awarded after capturing but only after a respectable (but not too long) amount of time that the territory is held and kept secure ?

You can still attack juicy targets but have to stay there and defend it to get the reward for a time, instead of jumping away right after

More like 8 hours from Midnight to 8am .. And NC don't have 45% for the remaining 16 hours

Current World pop on logging in:



World pop taken at 1am (PST) Yesterday ( Hovered around the same for the 3 hrs I was on )



5% difference between the top two factions is a lot different than 21%

But you see population needs addressing regardless of who has it .. It's stupid to say " You have pop advantage at X hour so it's fine we have it at Y hour " .. It needs fixing across the board .. It needs to be balanced for all 3 factions including *spits* TR