101

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Again, this is just 'hypothectical'. AC has not implemented thier proposed changes yet, so the impact of those have not effected the current situation.

If you have a softball league of 10 teams, but 3 teams are so much better then the others, that they always beat them with the 15 run rule in the 3rd inning, the league would be imbalanced.

The 7 'ok' teams can't win when faced with any of the 3 good teams, but they have fun when playing against the other 7. The 3 good teams only have fun when playing each other, but also don't mind having batting practice against 7.

So after the first season, the 7 teams realize they have no chance of finishing in the top 3, that 30% of their games are basically wasted, so some of them choose to go play in a different league. The top 3 are bored with 70% of thier games, they aren't going anywhere because there's still a little challenge in the game.

Leagues will disband the top team and require them to join other teams, or to find a new league. Because getting rid of 10% to try and make it fun for the 90% is what's needed to save the league.

Of course this analogy has lots of holes when applied to an MMO, but the general point is if the company has changed the rules around and made many attempts to fix the game so that it is fun for a majority of the players, but it hasn't worked. Then they have to either accept the game has failed or take drastic measures to try to save it.

There are still so many things for AC to do that that, again, this isn't even on the horizon as an option yet. Adding in 100 new Islands with no direct travel between groups, and starting players in different corners of the world would be one direct way to avoid the new vs vetern issue.

Re: A simple recipe for victory

I heard Battlestar Galactica online had this issue on launch: everyeone joined same faction, so DEVs had to implement incentives to join the other side, which had obviously a hard time to go against the overwhelming force of the the favourite faction.
Same in Black Prophecy.

i wonder what it was and if it worked out wink

*Disclaimer: This post can contain strong sarcasm or cynical remarks. keep that in mind!
Whining - It's amazing how fast your trivial concerns will disappear

103

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Creating another set of 6 islands, that had a one-way teleport, could be an interesting twist. And didn't open up for return until all the outposts where captured and held for a certain time period.

Would vetern players make the one-way trip? You could only bring a limited amount of supplies/bots, so advantages would be limited, and each character that made the trip would make the existing Islands that much more exposed.

Re: A simple recipe for victory

some heavy handed solutions suggested :-)

the incentive to PvE is to gain something (NIC, modules, materials etc.). The incentive to PvP seems to be to destroy in the vast majority of MMOs I played. You are gaining from PvP (mainly territory) but the usual primary focus is to go and blow stuff up.


There is no conquest of territory going on in PO right now so there should be no PvP except "pirating" in the normal situation. However since PvE is lacking and people generaly thing blowing other players up is fun, we have roaming squads that PvP for no gain.

This in my view is wrong. War as the first course of action never worked anywhere except FPS/RTS games that are however designed for that one sole purpose. There should be more things to do on the PvE side (NPC intrusions anyone ?) to keep people from going PvP happy just of boredom.

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Arga wrote:

Creating another set of 6 islands, that had a one-way teleport, could be an interesting twist. And didn't open up for return until all the outposts where captured and held for a certain time period.

Would vetern players make the one-way trip? You could only bring a limited amount of supplies/bots, so advantages would be limited, and each character that made the trip would make the existing Islands that much more exposed.

I would modify this:

Let's have NPC island conquests. Basicaly from time to time a new island or 2 are discovered. You can deploy a limited number of teleports during a few windows of opportunity. You go to the island and have to conquer it basicaly. Then there's some research and resource gathering involved to build more permanent teleports back to "known islands". This requires work on bot part and would need participation from both sides of the pond. Now you build the teleport and you get to controll it for a while (a limited monopoly). However intrusion teleports are still possible by other corps.

How would the NPC intrusion work I have no clue. Some sort of long and big epic mission to conquer outpost and teleports already on the island and prevent NPCs to return.

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Arga wrote:

Again, this is just 'hypothectical'. AC has not implemented thier proposed changes yet, so the impact of those have not effected the current situation.

If you have a softball league of 10 teams, but 3 teams are so much better then the others, that they always beat them with the 15 run rule in the 3rd inning, the league would be imbalanced.

The 7 'ok' teams can't win when faced with any of the 3 good teams, but they have fun when playing against the other 7. The 3 good teams only have fun when playing each other, but also don't mind having batting practice against 7.

So after the first season, the 7 teams realize they have no chance of finishing in the top 3, that 30% of their games are basically wasted, so some of them choose to go play in a different league. The top 3 are bored with 70% of thier games, they aren't going anywhere because there's still a little challenge in the game.

Leagues will disband the top team and require them to join other teams, or to find a new league. Because getting rid of 10% to try and make it fun for the 90% is what's needed to save the league.

Of course this analogy has lots of holes when applied to an MMO, but the general point is if the company has changed the rules around and made many attempts to fix the game so that it is fun for a majority of the players, but it hasn't worked. Then they have to either accept the game has failed or take drastic measures to try to save it.

There are still so many things for AC to do that that, again, this isn't even on the horizon as an option yet. Adding in 100 new Islands with no direct travel between groups, and starting players in different corners of the world would be one direct way to avoid the new vs vetern issue.

Leagues are usually tiered.

You have the Premier League, where the best players play. You have the 2nd League where the average players play. You have the 3rd League where the sh*t-for-brains play.

When a team gets good, it reflects on their points and they go up the tiers into stronger competitions. When a team gets bad, again it reflects and they go down the tiers.

In Perpetuum there is no such thing. 7/10ths of the teams consciously decided to stay in the 3rd League in order to avoid playing against the top teams. Nothing wrong with that in itself, it's just another way of boring someone out of the game when you're aware you have no hope of beating them. smile

But Devs disbanding player-corps because they're too good at what they're doing... No-no Arga, that's a line no Dev company stepped over and survived the fallout.

[18:20:30] <GLiMPSE> Chairman Of My Heart o/
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Re: A simple recipe for victory

Syndic wrote:
Arga wrote:

Again, this is just 'hypothectical'. AC has not implemented thier proposed changes yet, so the impact of those have not effected the current situation.

If you have a softball league of 10 teams, but 3 teams are so much better then the others, that they always beat them with the 15 run rule in the 3rd inning, the league would be imbalanced.

The 7 'ok' teams can't win when faced with any of the 3 good teams, but they have fun when playing against the other 7. The 3 good teams only have fun when playing each other, but also don't mind having batting practice against 7.

So after the first season, the 7 teams realize they have no chance of finishing in the top 3, that 30% of their games are basically wasted, so some of them choose to go play in a different league. The top 3 are bored with 70% of thier games, they aren't going anywhere because there's still a little challenge in the game.

Leagues will disband the top team and require them to join other teams, or to find a new league. Because getting rid of 10% to try and make it fun for the 90% is what's needed to save the league.

Of course this analogy has lots of holes when applied to an MMO, but the general point is if the company has changed the rules around and made many attempts to fix the game so that it is fun for a majority of the players, but it hasn't worked. Then they have to either accept the game has failed or take drastic measures to try to save it.

There are still so many things for AC to do that that, again, this isn't even on the horizon as an option yet. Adding in 100 new Islands with no direct travel between groups, and starting players in different corners of the world would be one direct way to avoid the new vs vetern issue.

Leagues are usually tiered.

You have the Premier League, where the best players play. You have the 2nd League where the average players play. You have the 3rd League where the sh*t-for-brains play.

When a team gets good, it reflects on their points and they go up the tiers into stronger competitions. When a team gets bad, again it reflects and they go down the tiers.

In Perpetuum there is no such thing. 7/10ths of the teams consciously decided to stay in the 3rd League in order to avoid playing against the top teams. Nothing wrong with that in itself, it's just another way of boring someone out of the game when you're aware you have no hope of beating them. smile

But Devs disbanding player-corps because they're too good at what they're doing... No-no Arga, that's a line no Dev company stepped over and survived the fallout.

tiering requires tiers and rule descriptions. without them there can be no tiering. also a league runs in cycles. it starts anew each season.

Re: A simple recipe for victory

EVE has a similar tiering. You have nullsec, lowsec and highsec. Corresponding to the best being in nullsec because they're strong enough to grab & hold territory, average being in lowsec because they're not strong enough and pirating is their only option of epeen-feeding, and carebears in highsec who just want to grind NPC's & Ore and watch their ISK counter tick away.

Perpetuum has... None of that. Because Alpha > Beta. smile

[18:20:30] <GLiMPSE> Chairman Of My Heart o/
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Re: A simple recipe for victory

and because you can play on beta, but fall back on to alpha at any given time....

*Disclaimer: This post can contain strong sarcasm or cynical remarks. keep that in mind!
Whining - It's amazing how fast your trivial concerns will disappear

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Syndic wrote:

EVE has a similar tiering. You have nullsec, lowsec and highsec. Corresponding to the best being in nullsec because they're strong enough to grab & hold territory, average being in lowsec because they're not strong enough and pirating is their only option of epeen-feeding, and carebears in highsec who just want to grind NPC's & Ore and watch their ISK counter tick away.

Perpetuum has... None of that. Because Alpha > Beta. smile

you sound like you never played EVE, just read about it :-)

highsec > everything else ....

Re: A simple recipe for victory

I'm speaking about team vs team, not where its best to carebear it up. smile

[18:20:30] <GLiMPSE> Chairman Of My Heart o/
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The Imperial Grand Wizard of Justice

Re: A simple recipe for victory

"NPC island conquests" sounds interesting.

*starts scribbling into concept document*

Re: A simple recipe for victory

I told you about NPC island conquest when was OBT =\

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Syndic wrote:

But Devs disbanding player-corps because they're too good at what they're doing... No-no Arga, that's a line no Dev company stepped over and survived the fallout.

Sure they did.  Back during EQ1's glory days(and more importantly:pre instancing) the GM's had to forcefully break up guilds because they were too strong and began to monopolize entire zones in the gameworld--and locking everyone else out.  That game has been fine since it launched, and apparently has yet another expansion coming out, so it appears to continue to do fine.  If anything that dev team(the one that took over for 989) has grown substantially over the years.

Most of the players at the time didn't get all insane about it because most of the players were getting shut out of content, and we're talking PVE servers.  And the players that did get split up would just find a way to reform, or rebuild elsewhere.  It wasn't some constant well publicized cycle but it definitely happened, and more than once.

That being said, EQ1 was no sandbox.  Yet, dev teams did take action, and were not burned at the stake.  I guess don't believe everything you think.

Annnnnnnd that's my fun fact for the day.

115

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Your assuming the league is big enough to have tiers, the analogy I used was specificly a league with only a few teams, which is how they start out. Only after they are active for a few years and/or merge with other leagues, do they have the roster to divide teams into tiers. In those cases, the #1 team is automatically moved up to the next tier, and the worst team is moved down.

The only thing in Perp that can create tiers, is the same thing you point out about eve, allowing players of differing skills to put 'distance' between them. Much like miners have to deal with now, once your 'spotted' your dead, if your under geared, out manned, and out skilled the only defense you have is avoidence.

The problem with adding more space is simply that it won't encourage PVP, it will make roaming almost impossible - which is the result of spreading people out, and make planned intrusions so easy to defend it wouldn't be worth the agressor's time to go there, nor would they need to.

Terrirory can't expand faster than the rate of new players. Putting an artificial barrier would really have the same effect as distance. It would reduce the roaming pvp targets in both areas and make intrusions logistacally difficult. Making this change would be 'hoping' that it would encourage more players to join the game to fill the space, build it and they will come. But if they don't, your screwed.

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Arga wrote:

Your assuming the league is big enough to have tiers, the analogy I used was specificly a league with only a few teams, which is how they start out. Only after they are active for a few years and/or merge with other leagues, do they have the roster to divide teams into tiers. In those cases, the #1 team is automatically moved up to the next tier, and the worst team is moved down.

The only thing in Perp that can create tiers, is the same thing you point out about eve, allowing players of differing skills to put 'distance' between them. Much like miners have to deal with now, once your 'spotted' your dead, if your under geared, out manned, and out skilled the only defense you have is avoidence.

The problem with adding more space is simply that it won't encourage PVP, it will make roaming almost impossible - which is the result of spreading people out, and make planned intrusions so easy to defend it wouldn't be worth the agressor's time to go there, nor would they need to.

Terrirory can't expand faster than the rate of new players. Putting an artificial barrier would really have the same effect as distance. It would reduce the roaming pvp targets in both areas and make intrusions logistacally difficult. Making this change would be 'hoping' that it would encourage more players to join the game to fill the space, build it and they will come. But if they don't, your screwed.

I'm assuming the Devs want a game that has more then 50 people in it, yeah. At this point there's no chance of encouraging PVP, the population has been virtually moving from one server war from another, nevermind the civil wars on certain islands. Resources are obviously strained for most corps since they can't cope with more then 1-2 lost fights before the red alarm starts sounding off.

If territory can't expand faster then the rate of new players, does that mean territory should be reduced and increased according to population size? I mean, right now having 6 Beta islands is pretty much pointless. Only 1-2 are actually used, the rest is just empty space that discourages PVP and reduces roaming targets.

But all that aside, I honestly believe the step forward for Perpetuum is to open up huge empty spaces with POS & terraforming and let the players move out and build up. In 6 months or a years time when the population has grown and the community evolved beyond the same 10 guys and 2 r-tard trolls, PVP will come by itself when interests collide on a bit more advanced, more mature level then "HERP DERP I R PIRATES LOLOLOLO"

[18:20:30] <GLiMPSE> Chairman Of My Heart o/
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The Imperial Grand Wizard of Justice

117

Re: A simple recipe for victory

If territory can't expand faster then the rate of new players, does that mean territory should be reduced and increased according to population size? I mean, right now having 6 Beta islands is pretty much pointless. Only 1-2 are actually used, the rest is just empty space that discourages PVP and reduces roaming targets.

Travel distance and territory seem to be too closely banded in the game. Having 100's of islands would completely eliminate any resource pressure while not neccesarily even creating a suffcient travel deterent. Even with 100 islands it wouldn't take very long to 'find' another corps POS. Not to mention the suck-ass issue of hauling mats out there to build it.

What creates 'space' for new corps is them being too insignificant to waste time on. If your only target is 99 islands away your going to go there regardless of the time it takes. But if your too busy defending and counter attacking your neighbor, then your not going to go 2 islands away and open yourself up for a counter attack just to say hi to some low power non threatening corp.

The less pressure the further a corp is likely to roam.

On the other hand, if it was just 'empty' space, no resources just hours and hours of traveling, then maybe that would be enough deterrent, but if there's no threat to your outpost in the middle of BFE then where's the game in that? We may as well all request private instances. hmm

We could use a little less Herp though Derp may be balanced, but I'm no expert smile

Re: A simple recipe for victory

Syndic wrote:

I'm speaking about team vs team, not where its best to carebear it up. smile

in that case highsec was still better ... wardec and nobody else interferes ...

Re: A simple recipe for victory

DEV Zoom wrote:

"NPC island conquests" sounds interesting.

*starts scribbling into concept document*

I can code it for you if you like :-))