Triordinant, on 29 April 2016 - 02:30 AM, said:
Maybe now that CW is a "done deal" they just might...
FW is very far from a done deal at this point, it doesn't even have a win condition which means no strategic purpose for taking planets.
What it is is two tactical gamemodes and a reward system, placed into a framework of a map representing an unfinished strategy game.
Unfinished is the key word here, FW will not be an actual game until that macro game has win conditions and strategy towards fulfilling those conditions. A game can not be called a game, and certainly not a competitive one, until it can be played to win.
This the basic conundrum of FW that PGI refuses to address so far:
They have advertised a game mode as "competitive", and then provided no victory to compete for.
I'm not saying that win conditions are sufficient for making a good game, but it IS a neseccary ingredient. It's one of the minimal basic conditions needed for a game to be an actual PvP game rather than a sandbox or roleplaying workshop or something.
Here's the minimal list of ingredients for a PvP game:
1. 2 or more players.
2. A ruleset defining legal and illegal moves in the game.
3. A win condition.
That's it. that's all you need to be a game. For the game to be fun 2 and 3 must be well executed but even if they aren't there is still an actual competition as long as 1, 2 and 3 exist.
PGI is trying to create a game with only 1 and 2 of these basic ingredients, but it's impossible because 3(the wincon) is what defines the emergent meaning of 2 (performing different legal moves). If there is no win condition then there is no way to measure success or failure, all the legal moves in the game therefore become meaningless by definition and there is no way to address that other than adding ingredient 3.
Is it better to have 100 planets that 1 planet in FW? Why? In relation to what? The faction with 1 planet is exactly as successful as the one with 100 planets because there is no advantage to having more planets.
PGI is trying to replace the basic necessity for a win condition with a reward system. That is simply a futile prospect.
Rewards disconnected from gameplay are not a competitive aspect of a game, only scrubs care about them. At best they add nothing to gameplay and at worst they create harmful perverse incentives such as farming mechs before killing omega and so on. Gameplay wise would quite honestly be better off without a reward system, it's just an artifact of the F2P business model that we have to live with.
You could make rewards a part of condition 2, the game rules, if they were part of an economic simulation that actually impacted strategy through resource control and so on. That would be great for FW, but then you'd have to admit that winning moves should be rewarded with escalation of resources rather than be punished for the childish notion of keeping factions from winning ("population balance", lol), and the current pants-on-head line of thinking seems to be that the better a faction does the more they should be punished with reduced rewards.
Now as it stands the reward system is actively harming gameplay. It could be reformed to be harmless or integrated into an economic simulation and become real gameplay. But even if it was it would at best be a part of the legal moves, you'd still need to add a win condition as the 3rd basic ingredient.
Edited by Sjorpha, 29 April 2016 - 04:40 AM.
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