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Balancing Faction Population In Cw


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#1 jeirhart

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 01:47 PM

Summary of the issue:

Due to the nature of faction population, is it currently very possible when attacking certain factions' planets to be dropped into an "auto-win" battle wherein no opponents are available to defend and your team needs only to walk into base (minding the turrets) and destroy the generator at your leisure. This counts as a successful attack on the planet. This is all well and good against those factions completely unavailable (offline) or unwilling to defend the planet for whatever reason.

Instead the issue lies with factions attempting to defend a planet that are being swamped by a high volume of attackers at once. Peak times, like those just before the Cease-Fire, are the most critical as the 6 wins needed to take a planet could all happen simultaneously. This can then easily be compounded by a faction willing to simply stall a defensive force, artificially prolonging their fight to the full 30 minutes by remaining at their spawn point. This forces the defenders to come to them if they want to end the battle anytime before those 30 minutes are up. Meanwhile other groups queued to attack drop into auto-win battles with no defensive team to repel them.

Regardless of the legitimacy of that tactic, such a strategy can only lead to bad gameplay, a planet captured without any actual combat despite willing participants, and the creation of a highly demotivating aspect of Community Warfare to those with lower faction population.

Therefore, any solution to this gameplay mechanic must still allow a larger population faction to use their numbers to their advantage while making the capture of a planet a fierce battle and not a series of delaying tactics while other units swamp the queue to gain auto-wins.



Proposed Solution:

Queue multiple attack groups against a single defensive group who is given no time between defensive actions to repair and rearm (or perhaps do so at a scaleable rate).

The second wave drop is only pulled from the queue once their timer runs out for finding another defensively-queued group not already engaged. While the second group awaits their drop, doing so only after the previous group has been completely destroyed, they are free to spectate their own factions' 'mechs as if they had been previously killed.

If the first wave defeats the defenders, the second wave is immediately placed top of the queue for another attack

However, if the first attacking group is completely destroyed or the timer runs out, the first group is ejected into the main lobby and the second wave group launched. A ready up screen could appear briefly with a few minutes to allow the defenders to select a different 'mech and auto-reset positions and clean the map. The defenders could also choose at this point to decline defending against the second wave, thus granting that second wave an auto-win. A third wave would be pulled to wait in the wings just as the second wave was. This would repeat until the defenders were defeated or the attacks stopped.

On top of this, a short "CW cooldown" could be established to slow time between attacks (those traveling to planets not own by their faction), explained as "Drop ship travel time," and would be somewhere around 10 minutes long on top of the actual max possible queue times for attacking planets. This is not to say that auto-wins would no longer be possible, just that defenders would be given more time to finish any battles and reengage against other attackers and carries a most logical sense in that anyone attacking a planet would obviously have to take some time to travel there while the defenders would already be in position.



Possible Negative Consquences:

-Adds more wait times. Especially true of second (and third/fourth/fifth) waves who may end up spectating a game for up to 30 minutes.

-The number of players included in a single battle (up to 36) may not be something the engine can handle presently.

-Would require significant adjustments to game mechanics by the developers to implement

-Single battles could potentially last 30, 60, or even 90 minutes and beyond depending on the abilities and skill of the defenders



Possible Positive Advantages:

-Gives defensive teams (who by default have an advantage on maps) a chance to defend against multiple groups from factions with larger populations without removing the larger faction's numbers advantage from the board.

-Does not remove the possibility of auto-wins and thus defensive teams are still necessary on all planets being attacked.

-Repair/rearm would be scale-able, allowing developers to tweak the settings depending on how this mechanic performs, or even for certain factions.

-The second wave could potentially communicate with the first wave during their spectating, offering advice or leadership depending on how organized the groups involved in the attack were (Note that the second wave would not be included in game chat during the first wave).

-New tactics created wherein the first wave's goal can either be to wear down the defenders by focusing on damaging them exclusively in hopes that the second wave would then be able to complete the final push or the first wave would just go for broke successfully and have the second wave join a different attack.

-Makes attacks throughout the day just as important as the final attacks in the last hour as removing/adding all those bars can no longer be done by simply swamping the queue in the last minute.



I am going to also post this on the HPG Manifold reddit, gain more feedback and opinions that why and will update this post with anything I find relevant.

Edited by jeirhart, 18 December 2014 - 02:09 PM.


#2 jay35

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 02:32 PM

Simple solution: Auto-win drops do not count towards the planet's overall attacker wins unless the planet has not been defended within [XX] minutes or [X] hours or whatever length of time makes the most sense for balance purposes.

That way a defender can't game the system by simply not defending a planet, and attackers can't game the system how they currently do swarming to generate a number of auto-wins while the legitimate defenders are actually busy defending the planet.

Worst feeling in the world is being defenders who win every defense of their planet and yet watch the planet essentially be stolen due to the auto-win empty drops happening simultaneous to their successful defense. That's absurd. It's both unrealistic to those who clamor for realism and it's piss-poor gameplay for those who clamor for gameplay over realism. Regardless of which you feel is most important, the current situation is neither, and this is a simple way to fix it. Just discard auto-wins from counting toward a planet's attacker wins if there have been active defenders on it in the past [period of time].

So much simpler and probably easy enough to implement.

Edited by jay35, 18 December 2014 - 02:39 PM.


#3 BigTaeng

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 02:39 PM

We will have to see how PGI plans to address the "last-minute" issue for planet defense which essentially renders matches by European time zone players meaningless.

I do not think that any faction should get an advantage simply because they have more players. I think that would compound the population issue as contracts expire and some units jump ship to get those auto-wins. What should probably be done is a tweak to the queue system where instead of dropping on an empty planet, attacking teams would fail to find a match as long as there is at least one defending team currently engaged.

Of course the downside of that is punishing those players who picked a popular faction simply because they enjoy that faction's lore, and not for any metagame reasoning. But hopefully this would encourage merc units who are on the fence about which House to represent, or Homeworld Clan units unsure about which invasion corridor to join to choose an area where they would be more likely to face action.

[Edit: While I was typing my response, jay35 suggested something pretty similar. I prefer his idea, as it introduces a grace period where a defending team might be done with a match and preparing to drop again while attackers are still continuing to queue.]

Edited by BigTaeng, 18 December 2014 - 02:45 PM.


#4 StillRadioactive

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 03:28 PM

There's already a 10-minute waiting period after an autowin before matchmaker will kick off another attack by the same faction on that planet.

This means that it takes three skilled groups to lock out a planet perpetually, regardless of how many attackers are thrown at it (1 win, 1 autoloss, wait, 1 win, 1 autoloss, wait, etc.)

Add this to the fact that the factions with the smallest playerbases also have the fewest contested planets, and you have a recipe for populous factions to just play queuewarrior online.

#5 OneBildoNation

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 03:38 PM

@jay35

> Simple solution: Auto-win drops do not count towards the planet's overall attacker wins unless the planet has not been defended within [XX] minutes or [X] hours or whatever length of time makes the most sense for balance purposes.

You can easily game that by just having one group defend the planet against as many attackers as you wish. Doesn't really work, and effectively punishes players for attacking.

Edited by OneBildoNation, 18 December 2014 - 03:39 PM.


#6 Bront

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 03:48 PM

View PostStillRadioactive, on 18 December 2014 - 03:28 PM, said:

There's already a 10-minute waiting period after an autowin before matchmaker will kick off another attack by the same faction on that planet.

This means that it takes three skilled groups to lock out a planet perpetually, regardless of how many attackers are thrown at it (1 win, 1 autoloss, wait, 1 win, 1 autoloss, wait, etc.)

Add this to the fact that the factions with the smallest playerbases also have the fewest contested planets, and you have a recipe for populous factions to just play queuewarrior online.

Actually, it's a 10 minute wait when you get a 12 man (or will be after the patch), not 10 minutes between autowins.

#7 StillRadioactive

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 04:23 PM

View PostBront, on 18 December 2014 - 03:48 PM, said:

Actually, it's a 10 minute wait when you get a 12 man (or will be after the patch), not 10 minutes between autowins.


My understanding of it comes from this tweet:
https://twitter.com/...708844643811328
plus first-hand experience of who we have in queue when we hit long wait times.

#8 Geck0

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 04:27 PM

I think in addition to anything added that doesn't completely remove the possibility of auto wins we institute a partial or lower value win option. ie: Fights that happen are worth more towards capturing a planet than fights that don't. In the current system a fight could be worth a whole point where a auto-win drop be worth 1/3 of that point representing the time of the game vs the time in queue.

#9 Bront

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Posted 18 December 2014 - 05:40 PM

View PostStillRadioactive, on 18 December 2014 - 04:23 PM, said:


My understanding of it comes from this tweet:
https://twitter.com/...708844643811328
plus first-hand experience of who we have in queue when we hit long wait times.


Mine comes from the patch notes and how he explained it on the Town Hall meeting. It used to be a 5 minute wait till you found an enemy 12 man, or else you just launched, once your side queued up a 12 man. Now it will be 10.

#10 Galaxy Crusader Puppeteer

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Posted 19 December 2014 - 04:27 AM

There are teams willing to sit in queue for 10 mins just to hussle up auto-wins , so team X can get a name of their unit on a planet on a X part of map, thats prolly gonna end up being reset???

What are you really playing this game for ?

Ask yourself?

Or even worse are ppl who stall the attack on good teams they face so auto-winers could get more points.

I wish that over time this game becomes much more.
Game that has no meta , where skill alone is meta.

Where you have true role warfare. And not just min/maxing builds. So every game goes the same, like defend with Vomit TBR, then on a push/rush switch to strkcrow.

Over and over same,gameplay, same outcome.

PGI is really back in control over this project , they are fixing a lot of stuff 2-3 days after community notices a problem.
Really greatfull for that. So i have hopes that CW has a great future.Something like Planetside 2 kinda warfare,mixed in with a commander mode from BF4 for tactical ppl to direct online Cw games.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh drooool. :D

#11 Firewuff

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Posted 19 December 2014 - 05:00 AM

So a defence team will get walked over the second time 100% of the time. Its a bad idea.

Ive suggested have an increasing waitime that scales out after each autowin. I.e. 10 mins on the first 20 mins on the second 30mins on th e third. Its a lot of time to waste and gives defenders more time to mount a defence.

Not counting auto wins are bad as it is a way to game the system. Win x battles then tell no one to queue so they can win it back.

#12 Karl Streiger

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Posted 19 December 2014 - 05:26 AM

I'm glad that the past days brought many good ideas - this is one of them.

The best unit MWO have - should more as capable of beating every foe but other high competive units - all night long.
So a planet or a border defended by them will never change the owner.
Pretty sure they can fend 4 waves off - before there mechs are broken and without ammunition.
So you may need 48-60 attackers to be sure to take a planet from a defender.

In any case it is not satisfactory for the defender nor the attacker.
Still think that asymmetric groups sizes would work best, maybe with a fast spawn and increased tonnage for the defender?

The figures are the same - 12 vs 4 = 48 vs 12 but - the defenders have some real numeral disadvantage.

#13 GI Journalist

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Posted 24 January 2016 - 09:36 AM

As a consequence of the current queue system, Community Warfare has become a strategy game in which factions capture planets by attacking them with 3-to-1 ratio of players in an 8-hour time period. With a 3-to-1 ratio of attackers to defenders, even if the defenders win every battle, the planet is captured. This may be sound military strategy, but it is extremely dull for the 2-out-of-3 attackers who aren't getting matches, and frustrating for the defenders, whose victories are empty and meaningless.

Unless the queue system is changed, the most important part of community warfare will continue to be to recruit large numbers of players who are willing to go through the tedious process of attacking planets by overwhelming the number of defenders and forcing empty matches. Rewarding players for creating empty matches is a bad idea. Players in units will stack the population of certain factions to guarantee victory so they can reap the benefits of planetary conquest in Phase 3.

Attempts to reign in "large units" or provide PvE matches for attackers will fail to change the essential problem: the population of factions determines victory in CW.

My question is this: how should CW change in order to ensure that players have live opponents and that victories in matches with live opponents are meaningful?

Some ideas are being discussed here: http://mwomercs.com/...-cw-dropsgo-go/





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