5 replies to this topic

[Jman5]

How often has your unit experienced this. You guys all get on in the evening and play your hearts out attacking or defending a planet. You get your tags on a planet and go to bed. Next day you look at your planet count and it's already gone.

Apparently QQ has captured 4 planets, but I've never seen our tags on the map. We always immediately lose the planet the next attack wave when everyone goes to bed. I don't mean the enemy faction retakes the planet. Just someone else shows up at 5 am to successfully defend the same planet.

Instead of having the same planets be up for grabs every time, the algorithm should alternate between available worlds on the border. Even better would be to allow loyalists to select a specific bordering planet they want to attack for whatever faction they vote for. That way you could actually direct your invasion as your loyalists see fit instead of relying on some algorithm to worm your way through the inner sphere.

The current system is strongly biased toward large, global units that can have teams playing at all hours. How are smaller units supposed to carve out their own space on the map if the only way to hold onto territory is to play every attack wave. If you do manage to hold onto a planet for a while it's usually because you defended a planet just as the front got pushed forward that attack wave.

It's also making Mercenary units less willing to stick around after a week. The large units don't care about the MC earnings, and the small units usually can't hold onto a planet for more than 1 attack phase.

PGI, you've got a funny way of encouraging smaller units.

Edited by Jman5, 16 May 2016 - 12:29 PM.

[AlphaToaster]

The back and forth makes the fighting over it part seem really pointless, I agree. If its impossible to hold the planet then there's little incentive to try to take it and we're back to FP having little to no meaning if you're not in a really large unit.

There should be some kind of cool-down period after a planet has been fought over, maybe 12 hours or something, where a planet cannot be attacked again. In lore, after losing a planet, say the defending forces in the area are depleted and it will take 12 hours to reinforce the sector in order to remount an offensive to take it back.

Units get their MC ticks until they have to defend the world again. Large units can still use their size to overwhelm smaller ones because that's the whole point, but at least the small units can be there to meet them when that time comes.

There should also be treaties and alliances between units of a faction. If I'm NA prime time, my unit should be able to hire another unit for EU prime time, to defend our world. While under contract that merc unit will gain a bonus for each victory, and for planet conquest purposes, their unit victories count towards the unit paying their contract. This way smaller units can hire other units to protect their worlds and still keep the tag.

[justcallme A S H]

Yep, the 54MR has had this happen on numerous occasions. We are not a big unit and predominately US - NA.

US people battle it out, tag a planet.
Oceanic team (usually 5-6 of us) defend it with all we have, keep the tag. OR attack another to push borders... Sometimes while attacking there might be a single drop to defend the planet and then another unit gets to "tag" it because they defended it? One tile? DAFUQ....

Only to then have the Euro timezone guys either;
1) Defend it with maybe 1-2 games and FLIP the tag, I watch the queues at work sometimes, and it's 1-2 defends and that's all you need to flip a tag.
2) Opposing Faction attack it (and Euro, lot of the time it's ghost dropping on said planet).


Euro timezone is the easiest to tag planets in, because a lot of the time it's ghosting or defending a handful of times because of the low volume of games at that time.
If you have a look at a lot of Euro units, they have the most planet tags of all (vs games played) and that's not because they necessarily win a lot, it's because you can ghost drop a planet to death or defend 1-2 attacks and flip a tag from a unit who might have spent 5 hours with 12-mans and earning 100+ points to take it yet they only earn maybe 10-15 points.

So yeah, I agree, once a planet is taken there should be at least an entire cycle where it is NOT attackable and the borders move the fight somewhere else.

OR if you are defending a planet, you need to earn MORE points than those who won it.

So say attacking you earn "100 points". To flip the tag while defending, you need to earn "101 points". Given you get 1 point per person in a win scenario.


PGI have made FP so you need to be a part of a unit, no worries at all. But to tag and stand a good chance of keeping it, you need to be in a massive unit that covers all timezones or just get lucky and not have the faction counter-attack at all the next cycle.

Edited by R31Nismoid, 16 May 2016 - 02:03 PM.

[Davers]

Everyone should realize that the best way to get benefits in CW (whether MC or tags or whatever) is to make super units. But PGI has made that very difficult now, so no one wants to spend the billions of Cbills to be the next MS. In trying to 'punish' the big units, PGI actually gave them a monopoly over CW.

[Deathlike]

I don't think this solves the problem.

Yes, you could try to alternate the planet after winning it outright, but that doesn't really solve the small-unit problem.

What you really want is some sort of "C-bill pool of rewards", relative to the # of players dropping, and ideally winning. PGI already calculates how many "wins" a particular player or unit drops, so this is easy enough.

For losing drops, you can reduce the value of that loss by 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4 (a loss is not worth talking about, but you'll get credit for your share in attempting to be useful).

The pool of money for winning the planet should be like 100m C-bills. So, if there were 100 players playing FW for that planet for the night, chances are, you'll win 1m C-bills, assuming you are contributing equally to the planet's capture. Of course reality says that not everyone will get 1m, but of course the "pool" can be adjusted higher as more people play (you still have to have a minimum, 100m sounds reasonable for lower pops). This is ideally how you reward people for playing FW...

[UberStuka]

They shouldn't let a planet that was just taken be immediately contested for 2-3 cease fire periods. Just saying