09-22-2009, 01:49 PM
Quote:How do you deal with fluctuations in server population relative to map size and number of objectives?If it's pure PvP, this seems to take care of itself. What was 200 vs 200 primetime is 20 vs 20 at 4am.
WW2O took things a step further with the way they do logistics and supplies. Maybe you have 5 players defending a city and the enemy is attacking it with 15, but supply-side, you have "400 rifleman" spawns and so do they. So it's basically 400 spawns vs 400 spawns, regardless of how many active players there are. Having more active players is still a nice advantage (it's hard to flank and avoid being flanked when the enemy has more eyeballs than you) but it's not as cut-and-dry as you might otherwise expect 5 vs 15 to be.
Other games (EVE, SWG...er...AOC? SB?) did things to simply make it impossible to attack at certain times. To destroy someone's station in EVE you really have to attack it twice: once to put it into "protection mode", which is basically like a signal of a challenge, and once when the protection mode ends and you can kill it for real.
That's not really my ideal solution, but it does show that game designers can contemplate these situations and come up with reasonable solutions.
Quote:I feel like this is really one of the central, unresolved issues of pvp online gaming. I think psychologically people want conflict in their gaming but more so than fighting they want to win. People will avoid conflict in order to feel like they are winning. This is key and a problem imo.I wouldn't say people will avoid conflict to feel like they're winning.
I'd say people will always take the easiest path to "winning", whatever that constitutes. If it means fighting, they'll fight. If it means not fighting, they'll avoid fights.
When Planetside launched, the best way to gain XP (especially command XP) was to capture bases. The best way to do that was to find undefended ones to take over. Fighting someone over a base would, in the end, give you less XP than just taking an empty base.
The Planetside dev team did some smart stuff, though. They made it so that you got no XP for taking an undefended base and they added the lattice to help channel players into conflicts with each other. That really ramped up the head-to-head fighting. They fixed the problem by making it so that avoiding conflict did NOT make you feel like you were winning.
This also speaks to your fort swapping comment in WAR. WAR launched with exactly the same mistake that WW2O and Planetside launched with, and I expect WAR will eventually arrive at the same solution:
If you make it more rewarding to AVOID conflict than the ENGAGE in conflict, then people will tend to avoid conflict. In effect, the game has created an objective to avoid conflict and players are simply responding to that objective. The solution is to do a re-design of the objectives so that the most rewarding thing to do is to engage in conflict.
In retrospect, Planetside really was an amazing game that has a lot of design elements that really worked and were either amazingly well thought out or just really, really lucky.
Kind of a shame that it sucked as an FPS, though. And that the bases were all the same. And that the global map was so small. And that game design prevented them from ever updating the maps and base layouts...
But it got some fundamental elements exactly right, I think:
* Multiple teams to prevent any 1 team from ever easily dominating
* Battles sized so big that no single "pre-made" could ever dominate.
* Tactical objectives arranged so that no single small space ever turned into a complete clusterfuck (spawn room battles could sometimes turn cluster-fuckish but even there when you saw the hallway was jammed, you just went around and blew up the generator. There was never a need to squash your entire fighting force into one room with the entire enemy fighting force.)
* Objectives designed (eventually) to create conflict rather than support avoiding it