Company and Faction Modifications

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#1

@Kay
@Developer

Hello Dev Team and Kay. I want to address some things going on with the faction and the companies while you are in design phases.

@kay, I saw you post about the team looking into creating temp lockout periods after joining a company, and i can tell you you are wasting time and development resources on this feature. This feature has been done by eve online and it caused a great amount of drama and impacted retention rates in a negative way. my advise is strongly stated “do not do it”

One of the major issues that new worlds team suffers from is that you make changes to the game that is often not practical. Its the area of design the system designers can improve the most in.

As a fellow colleague and systems designer, I’d like to speak with you on these topic, in an effort to provide some other alternative argumentation and inspiration to correct the problems we are undergoing with new world.

Shell Companies

Lets start the chat about shell companies at the reasons why people are doing them

  • Banking accounts
  • Timer related issues
  • Abusive conduct (like sniping the war claim)

If your intent is to correct shell companies there are some fairly easy changes that can be made for these issues.

Wars

Lets talk about wars for a moment and some issues we are seeing in them and potential changes.

The first issue we see with wars is that purple, the attacker, is slotting yellow a neutral party in that war. These mechanics are being used to help support abusive gameplay. The simple solution to this issue is to not allow other factions to be slotted for a war. We may ask “what happens on low population servers?”. The issue is that the population rates are the result of a sort of “sickness” the game has at the moment. This “cold” the team needs to cure by making vital health changes to the game. After this the body, or game will heal in time. The medicine for this situation is simply to merge servers that are below a population rate.

Our second issue with wars at the moment is how to deal with high success rates on defending entities. The current concept the design team is looking for is alterations to the respawn locations. Its a start but going forward in your design of all pvp content you may want to have two options for each type of activity. I will give you examples of this.

In wars, you should allow siege weapon to destroy walls or doors. For example, if each capture point some how removed a bonus to doors to “reduce damage taken by siege”. players could fight for the doors to attack them and destroy them from normal attacks, or you could look at allowing a second option of siege pelting them after the first or during the first node capture. A second optoin allows more complex strategies which allow potential for war victories. plus, siege is epic.

In Arena we have two options for victory, or should. In wow’s case we have defeat them (kill them) or timers. Timers can be a straight close the arena and assign a win value based on score, or you can apply “dampening” timers to help push people to victory.

These are just a few examples but they should help you understand where war really is suffering, namely that there is no alternative way of dealing with the situation.

Lets talk about player distribution on factions

I would like to start off by saying i think you are making a big mistake with the 60 day limitation on transfering factions, in fact, this may be very damaging to the game in ways you may of not of thought.

You have to look at the game like scientists look at how we’d live on mars. When you start to see the game in this way, you will start to get an idea of what area’s of the game are the most vital. In this case we learn that the most vital is air. In mmo’s, the air of a game is companies or guilds. They are the most dangerous part of life support to take away. Orbs, LFG, LFR, and multi-community / multiguild join options effectively mean death by carbon dioxide poisoning (lack of air). These must be avoided at all costs.

Months ago i warned you and some of the senior analyts at ags about the orb system as well as the other above systems. They should never be touched, however you are doing that in a micro way that is damaging the game. This faction transfer cap in ways prevents people from finding a home. It does not invalidate it, but it does invalidate access to that form of the game and so in an indirect way you invalidate it.

Lets take a look at the situation where player a on faction a wants to find a company but cannot do so. They have other potential offers and maybe an invite or two have been extended by other companies, but because of the timer they are not able to join that other company on another faction. The player gets bored and leaves the game.

would you be suprised to know that i have experienced this situation a few times over? i strongly recommend you reduce this faction transfer cap to 2-3 days. People should be fairly easily allow to transfer from one faction to another so that rentention rates are not impacted. Ultimately factions only serve a role in pvp, more specifically in wars, so there is no real sense of danger that can come from this change.

Lets talk about encouraging people to use 3 day transfers to balance the population rates.
A good bonus for distribution of players on a faction would be faster faction rep generation. Its useful to people who first transfer factions. Actually, its vital to them since they have to “grind” the rank for the new faction over again (at least the first time around).

Another good bonus is bonus token generation. This bonus should be based on the number of zones controlled by your faction. Eg; X bonus per each missing zone controlled as the underdog faction. for example, if green has 1 zone, and 9 zones can be taken, and 8 are in the control of the other faction, green should obtain a bonus * 8. Eg. “2% bonus tokens per a missing zone”.

You may also want to look at adding some population distribution bonus’s to this system. For example, a reduction in housing costs and taxes based on population sizes. i want to mention here that i am strongly of the opinion housing should only be allowed for zones your guild directly controls and that no players should have multiple houses, but this is putting aside that position in hopes of a better, healthy player distribution.

Additionally, you should give the lower population companies a 200% bonus to pushing a zone as well as a 50% reduction to costs to declare war. A massive bonus to a chance at a zone would significantly impact players desire to distribute themselves and with a reduced timer its possible.

I also want to add that the option to transfer an entire company to another faction or even server would significantly help the game . You can also make it a paid item for server transfers (but leave it free for faction).

Its problematic for a guild to transfer players from one faction to another much less another server, having features in the game itself would improve these issues and help keep people together while giving companies better oppertunities without breaking any economic values (at face value).

As always i am here to help, and wish you success

1 Like
#2

@Community-Team
Can you guys get kay, or one of the devs to read this?

#3

Anything that lock players down eventually make them quit. You cant control players migration to find the right company or friends to play with… open up server transfer and faction change… let the game be dynamic… less ppl will quit. If the player cant find enviroment that fit for them and if they are being restricted… then… they stop playing.

#4

The way i look at it is that the servers realistically should have higher caps. The game needs to have population rates which allow the guilds to sustian themselves, and it does allow for enough players to exist on a server to do that. the same people are around and to few people and opinions develop. People tend to not have a large pool to pull people from for new guilds, and the result of that is just factions and a lot of political drama.

Eventually that breeds toxicity and that in return leaves people into positions they cannot find a home in, or the homes they can find are not at the right levels of progression or atmosphere composition (ie the guild members attitudes and personalities).

These things contribute to the downfall of the game pretty significantly, although they tend to be very subtle in their nature.

Reducing the faction transfer timer allows for the game to be more efficient in regards to allowing transiting, more people transiting means less toxicity and faction building, and the result of that is a healthier, more balanced server.

#5

That does the exact opposite.

The servers would degenerate even quicker into single faction/company controlled toxic hell. What’s missing is that removes any form of faction loyalty, and fosters a feeling of betrayal in players. That would give players enough power to organize mass faction swaps resulting in complete server health degeneration on a grand fatal scale. To clarify it would make what is happening even easier to accomplish.

As for boredom. Faction isn’t the cause of boredom. The lack of compelling game loops, and time restrictions preventing people from playing large portions of the game, other than during predetermined times, is a core design that leaves you with nothing to do often.

Designs that allow for open ended emergent gameplay are so rare. It’s been done before, There is plenty of room for improvement. It feels like people want to add an RTS element, but do not understand how to eliminate the bulk of the timers when designing the territory control.

Most the above reminds me of another game, that degenerated into less than 5k players, and one server in under 3 months, and now has no presence on twitch at all.

#6

Please, yes.
It was such a dumb idea to allow other factions to join on either side for wars. All we see are same 50 cucks on each side for each war… I almost want to add there should be a round robin or something so others have a chance to participate.
Beyond the above, where is the hate that is needed for a multi faction system to work. In WoW I hated Alliance because they could kill me in the the open world (and did at times lol). Right now, I could turn on PVP and farm and no one would touch me since other are doing the same thing, trying to kill or killing either person would slow down the farm which is why people don’t PVP open world.

They NEED reasons to PVP in the open world. Objectives, goals. Capturable PoI? Split zones into areas, company controlled, like cities in a state.

#7

That is 100 percent accurate. The luck bonuses for flagging actually incentivizes people to flag, not to fight. Fighting becomes counterproductive. It’s why the fights between flagged people declined, but trying to explain what was going to happen was futile, all people could muster was parroting a poorly thought out risk vs rewards mantra.

#8

It would be paired with motivators. People would take advantage of easy pushing, because it means easier attempts at getting gold. You underestimate greed and player driven efficiency.

Which game?

This idea that open world is somehow the best thing to happen to pvp is a myth. It has no real bases in truth. No real quality comes from this, nor does any meaningful form of cooperative or competitive content. It is a waste of time to try to get people to world pvp.

Large scale pvp does not have the technology to support it in a way that could be achieved to be stable and enjoyable. Eve has tried this for two decades. We just dont have the tech yet for it, and it wont be a thing until we have better cpu tech and a new way to handle the rendering systems in games (ie no polygons). Such techs are undevelopment now, but they are m inimum 5-10 years off before we see them in gaming.

I really wish you guys would stop with this nonsense about open world, especially in a game that the designers have clearly stated will never be forced pvp (and for extremely good reason).

You need to come to terms that this is not that game. Play eve if you want it, its probably the only one you will get like that for a while.

#9

I just want to touch on this and say i am thankful that the design team took this concept from eve. It was a good move and such limitations are healthy for the game.

#10

Well, sort of… the main issue of being flagged for more luck and other bonuses (no yield, there should be) is the fact to farm efficiently you MUST be wearing appropriate gear that is obviously NOT pvp centric.
On top of that since we have Aptitude now (it is a good addition dont get me wrong), getting those rare materials is pretty easy now, I know I have a surplus. Therefore no need to fight over rarer nodes.
Could add more yield when flagged which is meaningful, since I stated getting those leggo mats is trivial now.

A reason to kill the other person is what is need though. As much as I love sitting here giving AGS free ideas, they will have to figure that out.

I’m not sure what your take away was from my suggestion but it seems to be wrong. I’m not wanting a design that has this huge world pvp like Dark Age of Camelot, I want small skirmishes where even smaller companies can assist. Where if a faction decides; we are going to zerg X thing, then small bands of players can take Y or Z thing to even it out. Multiple objectives within a zone.
The massive open world battles a la “Hillsbrad Foothills” is not what I’m suggesting.

1 Like
#11

No I don’t. That has already been tried, and failed miserably.

It’s the quest for power that will cause a subset of the players to ignore the motivators, and use the tools you are giving them to seize control, even though doing so kills the game in the long run.

Crowfall

Well all the above is complete nonsense. Planetside proves that false it did all those things well in a compelling manner until Daybreak took over and ran it into the dirt. The only thing different is the genre, the lack of a well designed territory control system, and not making game performance a major focus from the very start.

#12

It’s lazy design that is outdated, and has no place in future games. I would rather see something more creative.

#13

Yes totally agree… it takes time for some to find a home that they feel comfortable with and to try to fit in… some may never find it… its important that the game is flexible enough to allow players to move around in order to find a place that they feel comfortable to stay and play. I believe server transfer ticket should be made available to purchase for a certain period before any future server merge. Let the population migration be dynamic and balance itself and any remaining small servers after can be merged.

#14

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