Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both, Continued

[Manxome]

Such games exist. Even if everything is initially balanced, one side gets an advantage by virtue of having more players. And no one likes to lose, so this usually creates a mass exodus from the losing team to the winning team, which guarantees it will keep winning.

You could theoretically set up the game so that the side with more players doesn't have any advantage. But whether you do that with scaling handicaps, scaling AI opposition, or taking some kind of average result, you are, by definition, setting things up so that many players actually provide zero or negative net benefit to their side, and that really sucks (either to be that player or to have such a player as your ally). And if it's even possible to provide negative help to your side, you'll have a huge number of deliberate saboteurs (since it's a game and the consequences for pissing off the people you're fighting alongside will never be that severe).

Or you could auto-assign teams, which won't work, because people assigned to the team they don't want to be on will tend to quit or play less effectively.

Or you could set up weird, asymmetrical situations where most players can't reliably tell who's winning, and then end that battle and start a new (and very different) one once a victor becomes apparent. Then people can't flock to the winning side and you might actually get some interesting results. But it requires ongoing creative content generation with minimal testing (since any tests on the scale of the actual game will result in leaked information that changes player behavior), so that'd be really tough (and costly) to pull off.

So most games don't allow you to get any kind of meaningful victory, and organized PvP occurs in special arenas with fixed group sizes.

You can even give fringe benefits to the side that's been winning overall recently--Guild Wars had (maybe still has?) a system where you can get access to a special dungeon if the (small) team that's recently been winning the top PvP ladder matches is from your geographic region (Americas/Europe/Asia), and that seemed to work OK (probably partly because of time zones). But you needed to be in one of the top PvP groups to have any serious chance of influencing that in any way.

[Crissa]

The basis that those 'trends' are coming from is that the sides in the source fiction are always at war.

That sorta pre-existed the MMO format.

Once a side 'wins' there is no reason for the losing side to exist. Which is antithetical to having a persistent world with characters on the losing side.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1196135773[/unixtime]]Such games exist. Even if everything is initially balanced, one side gets an advantage by virtue of having more players. And no one likes to lose, so this usually creates a mass exodus from the losing team to the winning team, which guarantees it will keep winning.

It's pretty easy to stop team switching. Just allow people one character at a time, and have some pain in the ass tutorial, or level up period that prevents you from switching on the fly. So unless you want to pay double for two accounts, you can't switch on the same server. Most people won't pay double just so they can abandon their side when they're losing.

The main problem with war games is that the war generally happens too quickly. Computer games are fast and it's tough to simulate a war that takes awhile. Generally after a days time you can totally take over everything and cities are constantly change hands a few times an hour.

Now for an action game, that's cool, but for trying to make a persistent world, that's not. You'd like a city takeover to be a major event.

The idea would be to have a lot of smaller quests, like "raid caravans in and out of the city". So that you have to gradually deplete the city's soldiers, resources, whatever. The majority of battles take place outside the city, but once you've brought down the resources enough, there are few enough NPCs guards that you can take it down with a full blown assault.

But meanwhile, while you're depleting the city's resources, other PCs are trying to increase the city's reserves. So you've got battles of bandits versus PC protectors, and similar things. PCs could have the option of going into a village and pillaging, stealing gold and such, or razing the village (which takes awhile time and gives defenders time to respond). Pillaging won't shut down the villages operations, but will take what resources they have on hand. Razing destroys the village and its resource creation ability until the village is rebuilt.

Basically instead of being random guys who wander around killing random shit, PCs need to be cogs in the industrial machine of their war nation. Maybe they act as forward looters who pillage enemy villages or strike caravans. Or perhaps they guard their own friendly villages against similar attacks. Maybe they secure gold mines or other resource collection areas. BUt either way, every aspect of the gameplay has to matter to some degree. And everything you do acts to increase your empire's resources, or decrease the enemy's resources.

Now the hardest thing is what happens if one side gets complete victory. The best way to do it is to try to arrange it so that never happens. Basically the closer you are to your home turf, the more bonuses you get. So while you're fighting with your back against the wall you get some big defensive bonuses which help you to repel the invaders.

[Manxome]

1196147935[/unixtime]]It's pretty easy to stop team switching. Just allow people one character at a time, and have some pain in the ass tutorial, or level up period that prevents you from switching on the fly. So unless you want to pay double for two accounts, you can't switch on the same server. Most people won't pay double just so they can abandon their side when they're losing.

First of all, making it painful to do something is not remotely the same thing as preventing it. You're dealing with a player population that's willing (by and large) to repeat the same simple, effortless fight for hours on end in order to level up. There are games that require you to create a new character to change sides and require you to play for inordinately long periods of time to reach competitive character levels. It's hard to have more of a disincentive than that, and people still switch (many people even create multiple characters for fun). Charging per character slot seems unlikely to make a large-scale difference, especially if there's no charge for creating a new character on a different server (who's victor can be predicted almost as easily as your own server's).

Secondly, telling the player "you can do this, but only if you let me suck away X hours of your life with mindless tedium" is rather poor game design, IMHO.

Even if we suppose that we can snap our fingers and somehow guarantee that no player, once they join a team, will ever leave it for any reason...the economic model of these games requires that new players continue to join for a rather long period after the game's start. You're still going to have way more players going to the side that's winning, even if only brand new players have the option. And the losing team will still lose players--they'll just quit the game if they can't switch sides.

But that's all just a secondary concern anyway, because people switching sides isn't what creates the problem, it just reinforces it. Team are never going to be even in the first place, even if everyone joins at one time and never switches teams. Probably because one side looked more appealing, but players coordinating with friends to be on the same team and simple unequal random distribution are probably more than enough to screw you even if the teams are identical.

1196147935[/unixtime]]Now the hardest thing is what happens if one side gets complete victory. The best way to do it is to try to arrange it so that never happens.

Why the hell do you care about the game allowing one side to win if you specifically don't want it to actually happen!? Maybe you'd prefer it if the developers just told you it was possible to win, but actually set up the mechanics so that it wasn't even theoretically possible?

If the point of the game is to struggle for world domination and defeat the enemy team, the proper way to handle the eventuality of one side actually winning is to start a new game. Give the victors the satisfaction of a true victory and the losers the opportunity to start with a clean slate. Why do you want to drag the game out after once side has demonstrated clear superiority?

The new games still don't solve the problem of one-sided games, because people like to continue to play with their friends (so there's much less random shuffling of teams than you'd like) and if one side wins more (even by luck) people will decide pretty quickly to play on that side.

But the problem is not that someone wins and someone loses, it's that people know in advance which side is going to win or lose, and know that it's not a fair fight (and cause it not to be a fair fight by believing it's not).

[RandomCasualty]

1196151443[/unixtime]]
First of all, making it painful to do something is not remotely the same thing as preventing it. You're dealing with a player population that's willing (by and large) to repeat the same simple, effortless fight for hours on end in order to level up. There are games that require you to create a new character to change sides and require you to play for inordinately long periods of time to reach competitive character levels. It's hard to have more of a disincentive than that, and people still switch (many people even create multiple characters for fun). Charging per character slot seems unlikely to make a large-scale difference, especially if there's no charge for creating a new character on a different server (who's victor can be predicted almost as easily as your own server's).

Well you don't really care if someone makes a new char on a different server, because they're not switching sides. The idea is just that if you want to switch sides because you're losing, you have to delete your old character, which is often difficult for people to do.

But that's all just a secondary concern anyway, because people switching sides isn't what creates the problem, it just reinforces it. Team are never going to be even in the first place, even if everyone joins at one time and never switches teams. Probably because one side looked more appealing, but players coordinating with friends to be on the same team and simple unequal random distribution are probably more than enough to screw you even if the teams are identical.

Well true. You can't get it perfectly equal, but you don't even have to. There are going to be all kinds of fluctuations that occur at various time periods. Like any MMO, there's no point where everyone is logged on at the same time, so even if Team A has 1000 people and B has 1200, there could be a time when A has more people logged on at one time than B does.

1196147935[/unixtime]]
Why the hell do you care about the game allowing one side to win if you specifically don't want it to actually happen!? Maybe you'd prefer it if the developers just told you it was possible to win, but actually set up the mechanics so that it wasn't even theoretically possible?

Yeah pretty much. It's cool to believe that something might be possible. Even if it's set up so it probably never happens.

If the point of the game is to struggle for world domination and defeat the enemy team, the proper way to handle the eventuality of one side actually winning is to start a new game. Give the victors the satisfaction of a true victory and the losers the opportunity to start with a clean slate. Why do you want to drag the game out after once side has demonstrated clear superiority?

Well, because in RPGs that's not the way it happens generally. The game doesn't end when the empire takes control of the galaxy. It basically then becomes rebellion versus empire or whatever. Yeah, one side is monolithic and large, while the other one is small, but you can still run a cool game out of that.

Just wiping everything clean kind of sucks because it means everyone loses their characters.

[technomancer]

Planetside does that on a daily basis. It is possible (but not bloodly likely) for one of the three factions to completely take over all of the battlefields. In fact, you side gets various bonuses for taking over battlefields. Of course, it'll reset back to default levels the next day, but you get get to keep some of those bonuses for 'winning' the previous day.

[Draco_Argentum]

1196157445[/unixtime]]Well you don't really care if someone makes a new char on a different server, because they're not switching sides.

Yes you do. They will create a character on the team that is winning and stop playing the one on the other server that is losing. So now four teams are involved in the loss of balance.

Part of the reason allowing players to actually change the game doesn't work is that there is a select group of people who actually change the game. The hardcore players who play eight hours a day. These guys will do stuff at a rate far beyond the people who play on weekends.

The disparity in time played is the heart of the problem. Anything that takes a month at ten hours per week but only takes a day at ten hours per day will simply ruin the game. Bad game design simply makes it take a month at ten hours per day. Casual players don't want to take two years to get anywhere so they will leave.

This is normally countered with artificial lockout timers. Now the ten hour a day crew can't advance as fast. The problem is these artifical timers don't suit open ended content like capturing enemy cities.

In short, players who aren't on all the time need to feel like they are making a difference to the way the game progresses.

[Crissa]

It doesn't take a hardcore player to change the game.

Even a casual player, showing up at the right time, or focusing where the enemy isn't, will break the balance.

I did that constantly on WoW - targeting people who were choking the economy by bringing in the specific goods which would deplete their ability. Or doing PvP where the 'hard core' (aka 'gank and squat') people were not. If no one is at that particular flag, someone who knows the terrain can just wait and get the flag when the least amount of resistance is. A persistant game means even the hard core guys go to bed eventually - or fight the 'big battle' elsewhere.

I hate to say it, but RC is right here. There's nothing you can do about the teams winning or losing, and ultimately, you have to make the game not care.

But there's no reason you can't make an event take days or weeks to pull off. Mr Hardcore will focus his efforts, but you can totally make turn-ins that are faster actually count for less, or limit how many a player or account can turn in during a timer period - or similarly, limit how many can be completed. Re-spawn times are a bitch.

-Crissa

[Username17]

If you want the battles to mean something, you have to make the factions small enough that the big guys don't trample everyone else. If you played factions belonging to individual lords or some shit and had shifting alliances between groups of humans and orcs and whatever then you could just have people taking territory from each other.

If there's just two sides, one side wins and the other side loses and that's the end of it.

-Username17

[Manxome]

1196157445[/unixtime]]Yeah pretty much. It's cool to believe that something might be possible. Even if it's set up so it probably never happens.

Well, if your ideal is for the game designer to do something arbitrary and then lie to you about how the game works, I don't think there's much point in debating with you about what will or won't work.

1196157445[/unixtime]]Well, because in RPGs that's not the way it happens generally. The game doesn't end when the empire takes control of the galaxy. It basically then becomes rebellion versus empire or whatever. Yeah, one side is monolithic and large, while the other one is small, but you can still run a cool game out of that.

Just wiping everything clean kind of sucks because it means everyone loses their characters.

You're making unwarranted assumptions. If you're building a game where you expect there to be large-scale wars, and then have them end, and then have new large-scale wars start, you design the game with that in mind. You can easily set up a world in which that makes sense, and you can let people keep their personal characters, items, etc. between iterations if you think that's a good idea. At minimum, you just need to switch out the battleground.

And rebellion vs. empire is arguably a new battle. Even a new kind of battle, requiring entirely new gameplay mechanics.

1196167331[/unixtime]]If no one is at that particular flag, someone who knows the terrain can just wait and get the flag when the least amount of resistance is. A persistant game means even the hard core guys go to bed eventually - or fight the 'big battle' elsewhere.

Sorry, if your strategy is to camp out, spy on the hardcore players, and wait for them to drop their guard or go away so that you can strike, you are NOT a casual player. You are explicitly trying to outwait the "hardcore" players. That's about as hardcore as it gets.

You may play irregularly and log fewer total hours, but you still have to be incredibly hardcore to use that sort of tactic. Casual players play for short periods of time when it's convenient for them. They don't try to synchronize their play time with some magical in-game window of opportunity. And they don't wait around, they go and do something immediately interesting even if it's strategically suboptimal.

You seem to be saying that you can (to some degree) compensate for less play time by being smarter and more dedicated. That's probably true, but at best that allows the hardcore players with busy schedules to compete with the mindless players with nothing but time. And frankly, it's insulting that I should need to be better than my opponent just to counter the fact that he has more free time. Especially since the person who plays more definitionally has more practice.

However, this problem could probably be addressed by setting reasonable standards for the amount of time each player has to benefit their side, and allowing the players who want to spend more time playing to play in multiple (independent) games concurrently.

1196189453[/unixtime]]If you want the battles to mean something, you have to make the factions small enough that the big guys don't trample everyone else. If you played factions belonging to individual lords or some shit and had shifting alliances between groups of humans and orcs and whatever then you could just have people taking territory from each other.

If there's just two sides, one side wins and the other side loses and that's the end of it.

Shadowbane allowed players to create their own factions, with no practical limit to the number of factions that can exist at one time, and most servers still quickly collapsed into one superpower.

Say you've got however many factions you think is optimal. Our premise is that they can take territory from each other and get advantages from that, and maybe even that one faction can (at least theoretically) "win." Why are people less likely to join the current top faction in this set-up than in a 2-faction arrangement? Even if people don't care about winning, they'll presumably want whatever advantages you get from having more territory and not having enemy players take your current territory away from you.

Maybe you figure that in a free-for-all, you're always outnumbered, and people will gang up on whoever's winning instead of switching sides. But the results of Shadowbane seem to indicate otherwise. And even if they do, that's dangerously close to forming another superpower (by alliance) to fight the first.

But even if players don't all join one faction, what stops one relatively-powerful faction from gaining total victory over one relatively-weak faction and eliminating it from the game? Even if you have some sort of "last stronghold" mechanic that prevents a faction from being totally eliminated, does something stop them from being marginalized to the point that no one wants to play as that faction? The effective number of factions can drop pretty quickly unless you have some extremely invasive game mechanic designed to guarantee otherwise.



I think the chief problem is that people in a huge, plodding war machine don't strongly identify with one particular team. They see that the machine will not only go on without them, but probably won't notice their absence, and that they could get more personal satisfaction by doing something other than serving the best interests of their current team. That's pretty much a non-starter for any serious war.

Putting people in smaller groups (so that they have a more visible effect on their faction's efforts) does seem like it ought to help (though it may create other problems), but I don't see any way to make such an arrangement stable. If you do, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts.

[Crissa]

1196197258[/unixtime]]Sorry, if your strategy is to camp out, spy on the hardcore players, and wait for them to drop their guard or go away so that you can strike, you are NOT a casual player. You are explicitly trying to outwait the "hardcore" players. That's about as hardcore as it gets.

What?

Look. It doesn't take a genius to say, "Hey, those guys went here. I think I'll just... go the other way."

It just takes paying a teensy bit of attention. Start up the game, visit the auction house, look at the things you can produce, see if one if being hoarded today. If so, do something about it.

Want to PvP? Fly to the PvP zone. Fighting at your level? No? Go the other fucking way.

Someone camping a spawn? Find another spawn point. Try another quest. There are others.

It doesn't take someone 'hardcore' to sit and watch for a moment and learn where the 'big guys' are going. They're as predictable as mobs because they're doing everything optimally.

Why do you think the number of 'casual' players is so high in Warcraft? Or did all the hardcore raiding scare you away from noticing that for every one 'casual' player in other MMOs, there are ten more in WoW?

Because you can totally go right at the pass when the hardcore guys go right. It doesn't take eight hours to do that. To pay attention to the landscape. To go the other way. Heck, ask the hardcore guys on your side where they're going and go the other way.

-Crissa

[technomancer]

Planetside has got some pretty good mechanics to encourage that stability.

There is a hard cap on the number of people from any given faction that can be in any given region.

The greater the imbalance, the tougher the weaker side is to kill. You get minor (but noticable) damage resistance, so it takes longer to kill you.

With those two factors, people will generally hop into a region where their side is slightly outnumbered. If there is a huge imbalance, it still sucks to be on the smaller side.

Each region has a large number of bases and towers. You can respawn at towers, and anyone can hack any tower anywhere, this is in addition to mobile respawn points anyone can drive up in and deploy, which makes the respawn point invisible, with a radius of invisibility. Each base can be hacked by anyone who's faction controls a 'linked' base, which can either be linked from off-region (neighbors) or from another base in a region. You rarely run into a situation where you have to hack a specific base to proceed, unless there is just one base left to be hacked. If you're taking a region, you need alot of people to not only attack the bases you're trying to take, but to also prevent people from taking towers, deploying spawn points, and to defend vulnerable bases. If you're losing, you can generally take any of 3-6 bases, and if you're wining, you can generally take any of 2-3 bases. This gives even an outnumbered enemy a pretty good chance at defending the region successfully.

This gives a pretty good balance point between offense and defense. The defenders are generally fewer, and so have a slight edge in individual combat (assuming equal skill levels), and have to defend fewer targets while having more targets to attack, so their fewer absolute numbers usually translates into a parity, or even advantage, in individual combats zones within the region.

A brand new, created 10-minutes ago character played by even a semi-skilled player can easily kill at battle rank 25 (the highest level) character. Granted, the BR25 character is probably being played by a pretty skilled player, and they can pull out a larger bag of tricks than the brand new player, so they can better respond to changes in the battlefield dynamic and take advantage of more advanced vehicles. Combine that with respawn timers that increase in length based on how frequently you die, and you end up with a situation where pretty much anyone can make a real impact in the short term battle, which can lead to a swing in the long term momentum of the war. There are also timers on how frequently you can pull out vehicles, so that helps keep the side with more higher-ranked people from totally dominating a side with less higher-ranked people, because the weapons needed to take out a tank require less points than the weapons needed to get a tank in the first place.

Combining that, with the fact that a small 'commando' team of just a few people (2 minimum) can take over a lightly guarded base fairly easily, and so the other side has to send more people in to take it back, and it gets messy.

So planetside is usually pretty stable, but if one side gets lucky (alot of people on their side on when there arn't alot of other people on or whatever), you can dominate that day.

Of course, the battlefield resets every day at the server reboot, so it's not quite what you're talking about. It would be difficult, but not overly so, to modify the overall scheme to allow for persistance, but still not allow one side to be permanatly dominated and forced back to their origin stronghold without any outside bases at all. The trick would be balancing the bonuses you get for being on the losing side (more concentrated forces, more targets to attack, ect) with the bonuses you get for being on the winning side (enhanced resources from holding bases).

[Manxome]

But that isn't what you said, Crissa.

someone who knows the terrain can just wait and get the flag when the least amount of resistance is

even the hard core guys go to bed eventually

Going where the hardcore players are not and playing when they're not are rather different.


But even if you're choosing your battles and not playing at 3 AM, it's not likely to work in a serious competitive setting.

If you've got gratuitious, unorganized PvP fighting of various levels, and you can easily observe it, go ahead and participate in a level-appropriate encounter. But when you're actually concerned about some objective that you want to attack or defend, you don't choose your opponent's level. If your opponents are trying to win the war, rather than gank a few unsuspecting players, the hardcore players aren't going to voluntarily leave you an opening if doing so allows you to beat them at the overall objective.

If there's a bunch of points you can attack and some of them aren't defended, go ahead and fight an asymetrical battle. But if your opponents are more numerous or more hardcore than you, they can attack more locations and defend more, which means either they're defending everywhere or they're attacking your undefended locations faster than you're attacking theirs (or both). Either way, you're going to lose.

Your exploits in WoW aren't a zero-sum game, and the people you're "beating" aren't playing against you. They're playing against the computer, and they're crushing it mercilessly. If they were choosing their tactics to defeat an enemy player faction, they'd be chosen to be effective against enemy players instead.

I'm sure there's tons of casual players in WoW. But I'm not pretending that they have the same ability to influence a faction-wide conflict that the hardcore players do. And in WoW, that's fine, because the game is not about faction-wide conflict. But if you're going to make a game that is about it, that solution is off the table.

[Manxome]

1196202720[/unixtime]]The trick would be balancing the bonuses you get for being on the losing side (more concentrated forces, more targets to attack, ect) with the bonuses you get for being on the winning side (enhanced resources from holding bases).

But the teams' power is (presumably) based in large part on an independent variable (number of players). And doing any serious scaling based on number of players quickly causes things to become stupid and frustrating.

If the smaller team gets bonuses for being smaller, then a bunch of new or unskilled players, by joining my team and sincerely doing their best to ensure our victory, can actually cause me to lose. That may be stable (everyone, in joining the winning team, causes it to start losing), but it's awfully unsatisfying when the best way to make team A win is to join team B and twiddle your thumbs.

And if the bonuses you get for being on the smaller team aren't large enough to counter the numbers--even when the large team is not clogged with incompetents--then you still get runaway desertion the first time one side gets a decisive advantage, causing that advantage to become permanent.

You could try to measure players' performance and provide the losing team an advantage based directly on how much more effective their opponents are, but then you're really saying that nothing the players do can change the outcome, because playing better just makes your opponents strong enough to beat you anyway.

And putting limits on teammates per region only prevents performance issues or runaway concentration, it doesn't help even the teams unless the limits are so strict that people on the larger team can't play at all because every region is full.

[Crissa]

Yeah, the mechanic that allows the winning side a battle advantage is terrible. It needs to be a different advantage that they gain - basically swapping one advantage for another.

...And yeah, I suppose some casual players don't have much control over when they play. But they should. Playing any time you can instead of a time that you can and is advantageous to you is more key to getting around hard core players (who already play any time they can, and oft times when they shouldn't).

My argument was sounding a bit strained, somewhat like the 'but math isn't hard!' argument from the prior page about Power Attack.

But currently in the PvP for WoW, playing the game and winning can take longer than merely losing, so there is a decided camp that has decided that the tough games that might reward more aren't worth the effort, so they sit in defense and allow the game to progress without them.

So... How many adversarial problems have we found?

Losing team Desertion;
Winning team Dilution;
Imbalanced Rewards;
Time vs Rewards;

What else?

And maybe we should break this conversation off somewhere else...

-Crissa

[Manxome]

1196215007[/unixtime]]Yeah, the mechanic that allows the winning side a battle advantage is terrible. It needs to be a different advantage that they gain - basically swapping one advantage for another.

Indeed. It sucks to keep playing when you already reasonably know who's going to win (even if you're the winner, but especially if you're the loser); you want a substantial risk of upset for almost the entire game, and when that substantial chance is gone, you want the game to end very quickly.

I'm of the opinion that you want a two-tier system where you distinguish between the concept of controlling the game and the concept of winning the game.

Completing local objectives allows your side to get control of the game--this means capturing territory, or controlling resources, or having won the last few battles, etc.

Having more control of the game than your enemy causes you to make progress towards winning the game. Important distinction: gaining control of the game doesn't help you win, having control of the game helps you win. Defending your control of the game is important. While you have control, you're steadily accumulating points, or resources, or something that will eventually cause you to win.

But the more control of the game you have, the greater your tactical disadvantage. The less control you currently have, the easier it is to seize more, and the more you have, the harder it is to get or to keep.

So when team A scores a series of important victories and gets control, they start accumulating points in the bank that will eventually cause them to win (if all goes well), but team B gets a bunch of resources right now that can be used to launch a counter-attack and take control back from team A.

The winning team, ironically, is on the defensive; they want to preserve the status quo, because the status quo is in their favor and will eventually result in their victory. The losing team wants to go on the offensive and change the current situation, and they are in the best position to do so. This usually also helps provide the requisite advantage to the losing team, because if there's multiple possible points of attack, the attacker has an advantage over the defender.

You also want to throw in some destabilizing element that makes it impossible (or at least improbable) for both teams to have exactly equal amounts of control for any prolonged period of time; the closest thing to a stalemate we ever want is oscillation.

So with evenly-matched teams, team A gets control and accumulates points for a bit, but then team B gets their act together and uses their new tactical advantage to kick A's butt back to their home turf and seize control themselves. Team B then accumulates points until A's successful counter-attack. Whichever team manages to maintain control more on average eventually wins (if you really want a close game to continue forever, you can require winning by a substantial margin, and then closely-matched teams can plausibly go at it indefinitely without either side having control for long enough to win).

With (extreme) unmatched teams, the better team gets control and doesn't lose it; the worse team gets a tactical advantage, but it isn't enough to overcome the superior team, and the better team wins on time (directly or indirectly) after a straightforward fight. But if the losing team never makes a successful counter-attack, we want the game to end quickly, and possibly for the losing team's tactical advantage to continue to grow with time, even if their control doesn't decrease.


I also think it's important that the tactical advantage given to the team without control ends immediately upon that team acquiring precisely equal control. You don't want players to deliberately lose objectives in order to handicap their opponents; winning an objective should always help you win the game. This system means that winning an objective can only increase your odds of winning the game, while still providing a solid opportunity for the losing team to make a comeback.

1196215007[/unixtime]]And maybe we should break this conversation off somewhere else...

That might be wise at this point.

[Crissa]

Any time you let people lose n {n>1} games instead of winning 1 game is also a poor mechanic, as it doesn't particularly encourage them to win or play past a certain point in time.

-Crissa

[cthulhu]

Pirates of a burning sea has a clever mechanic for it. When you're side conquerors territory, you get points, when the points reaches a certain threshold you win and the map resets, but everyone on the winning team gets a goodie.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

In an effort to get back on topic, I found a post that particularly annoyed me. Remember the guy that made the "Wizard Handbook" where Warforged was the recommended race choice?

Here is part of a post of his from:http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=958801
"A good idea is retraining to an alternative class feature (combat wizard), losing scribe scroll to a fighter feat"

It made me cry, it really did.

[Voss]

Lose scribe scroll to pick up a general feat that you can get at any time? What the hell? Improved Init isn't bad, but... since you can give yourself any fighter feat with that stupid Spell Compendium spell, actually taking one is always going to be subpar.

[Manxome]

1196252389[/unixtime]]Any time you let people lose n {n>1} games instead of winning 1 game is also a poor mechanic, as it doesn't particularly encourage them to win or play past a certain point in time.

I don't think that's quite accurate. What you don't want is for the expected reward of deliberately losing to be higher than the expected reward of trying to win; that happens because you can quickly lose and start another game that you are more likely to win, not just because you can quickly lose. The fact that you aren't somehow penalized for a quick loss or forfeit (compared to a slow loss where you put up a good fight) is also a requirement to get this result.

If you reward the player either for their personal performance or for securing final victory for their team--rather than being on the winning team in a local engagement--I suspect this problem goes away (at least mostly).

It's somewhat impractical to cause losing to take a long time, though, given that players can always just quit. You could prevent them from joining a new game for a certain period of time, but that's potentially unfair if there's any legitimate way for the battle to end quickly.

Though you could limit players to participating in a fixed number of major battles per server per week, which you may want to do anyway to prevent players with lots of free time from massacring everyone else.

[Leress]

Fighter Revisited

The class in the thread sucks, but the really fun stuff is below when the "pro fighter" people come in and hijack the thread.

Enough of the Fighter remake threads version 2.X

[Captain_Bleach]

1196295647[/unixtime]] Fighter Revisited

The class in the thread sucks, but the really fun stuff is below when the "pro fighter" people come in and hijack the thread.

I hate thread hijackers and "pro-Fighter" people.
But you shoudn't be casually tossing around words like "this class sucks;" the Internet is open to all forms of players, and not all of them are rules-savvy. If your criticism is not more constructive, you'll just alienate yourself from people who need it the most: those people who need to look at the glaring rules problems and Frank's fixes the most.

And yes, I am being preachy on purpose.

[Leress]

1196296368[/unixtime]]

1196295647[/unixtime]] Fighter Revisited

The class in the thread sucks, but the really fun stuff is below when the "pro fighter" people come in and hijack the thread.

I hate thread hijackers and "pro-Fighter" people.
But you shoudn't be casually tossing around words like "this class sucks;" the Internet is open to all forms of players, and not all of them are rules-savvy. If your criticism is not more constructive, you'll just alienate yourself from people who need it the most: those people who need to look at the glaring rules problems and Frank's fixes the most.

And yes, I am being preachy on purpose.

Well since it is nothing more than just a sprinkle of an improvement than anything else yes I would say it sucks, now if you look at what I do on the threads on WOTC you will see that I give more than just saying that a class sucks and I show why the class isn't good.

I have the same handle on WOTC.

[Captain_Bleach]

1196296856[/unixtime]]

1196296368[/unixtime]]

1196295647[/unixtime]] Fighter Revisited

The class in the thread sucks, but the really fun stuff is below when the "pro fighter" people come in and hijack the thread.

I hate thread hijackers and "pro-Fighter" people.
But you shoudn't be casually tossing around words like "this class sucks;" the Internet is open to all forms of players, and not all of them are rules-savvy. If your criticism is not more constructive, you'll just alienate yourself from people who need it the most: those people who need to look at the glaring rules problems and Frank's fixes the most.

And yes, I am being preachy on purpose.

Well since it is nothing more than just a sprinkle of an improvement than anything else yes I would say it sucks, now if you look at what I do on the threads on WOTC you will see that I give more than just saying that a class sucks and I show why the class isn't good.

I have the same handle on WOTC.

Good point.
But what do you, then, if someone gets pissed off, and says "If you think that you have such a superior understanding of the rules, then why don't YOU make a class?!"