Teams

[Kakarat]

Good vs Evil = typical game.

Would there be some way that a 3 team game would work?

team 1 vs team 2 vs team 3

[Slamz]

DAOC?

Planetside?

I actually think if you're going to have a team based MMO, it's pretty important to have 3 teams at war with each other. I thought it was a pretty big mistake for WAR to launch with only two teams and I still think that.

[Snowreap]

3 teams wasn't much of an improvement, at least not in PotBS.

player imbalance was the culprit there. too many players rolled as Brits, which made it too hard for them to coordinate a focused effort (too many pugs, and too many pattons). too few players rolled as French, which made it too hard for them to defend their ports.

if you're going to have teams, you need to provide a way to maintain balance. letting players freely move from team to team isn't necessarily the best way to achieve this.

-ken

[Hoofhurr]

The problem with POTBS was how risk prohibitive it was. The bread and butter of POTBS was the port battle and the critical confluence of factors necessary to run a successful one was ridiculous and the punishment for failure was extremely costly.

[Slamz]

The other POTBS problem was that you really didn't have a big in-game reason to care or notice who was winning.

In Planetside, if NC were dominating the map and you were playing TR, it wasn't like you could just ignore the NC. You literally wouldn't be able to fight anyone BUT them.

In POTBS, if the British were dominating the map entirely, there was nothing stopping the Spanish from continuing to attack the French. In fact, as Hoof mentions, there was actual incentive to just avoid the strongest team.


So definitely "3 teams" is not, in itself, a full solution. You have to also design the game so that as one team begins to dominate, the other two teams are somehow coerced into fighting the leader rather than each other.

[Kakarat]

DOAC, Planetside, PoTBS... all games I never did play.

Okay... are their ways of taking their idea and perfecting it?

[Hoofhurr]

On Vallon we had 4 teams if you recall but the shorts, elves and humans made an alliance when it became apparent that the evils had the numbers. I'm not sure how you 'coerce' players into doing what the lighties on VZ saw as obvious. At some point the quality of the player base does a lot to make up for deficiencies in the game or server. There was definitely a sort of pride in guild and team in EQ that I have yet to experience again to the same degree.

Something I haven't seen done that might be interesting is a 5 team design. There's more flexibility for shifting alliances with 5 teams. There were purist elf, human and shorty guilds and if they hadn't split up the available classes by race I bet those guilds would have been more viable.

I'd also like to see a developer not make unique classes for each team. It looks nice in the trailers and on paper but I think it's impossible to balance.

[Diggles]

if you have teams, you need a way that skill/organization can counter blobs/zerg and pure numbers. Planetside does a pretty good job of this with the friendly fire and auto grief system

[Slamz]

I think the key is that multiple teams fail when there are no boundaries between teams. If A can always attack B regardless of how well C is doing then it's a potential problem.

It worked in Planetside and DAOC because you were fighting for map control. If Team C owned enough of the map then Team A and B probably can't even reach each other and attacking C together is simply their only option.

So basically you need a game that works more like Risk. POTBS and EQ and so forth are like Risk where any country can attack any country and boundaries are meaningless, so it becomes possible for the two strongest team to gang up on the weakest and run him off the map without ever interfering with each other.

[OrsunVZ]

I am actually against the notion of making so that you are nearly forced to attack the winning side. I actually much prefer it to be entirely player driven. If one team is beaten out of existence, so be it. Hell the elves on VZ were all but wiped out initially. There were some days where I was 1 of maybe 20 elves even playing. Over time though they came back, and ultimately were well represented.

I would love to see 5 teams. I also would love to see that you would be able to group with other teams ala EQ. Immy healing and all (although I'm sure you can create a mechanic to deal with that little issue). Where EQ didn't fail, was in its ability to create real challenge. And the notion of constantly being on your toes, is something I miss. I still play WAR, but the only time I have even the slightest sense of worry is when Destro holds the land of the dead, and I'm still there ganking away (this is actually the most fun I've had in WAR, and the other day taking down 8 players doing a PQ there before they got wise to me was one of my more memorable pvp experiences in any game).

I still say provide players a way of meaningfully conquering territory, which must have a real impact on their ability to aquire in game items and prestige. Have multiple factions that are governed not by race, but by faction standing. But ensure that there are a ton of open world objectives that can effect conquest, and thus divide up the blob. WAR in its failures actually outlines more accurately what the perfect game would be. There are so many things that they got close on, but the zerg and the mirror image keep designs just kill the game.

[Kakarat]

in the last patch, Warhammer had redesigned the keeps. There are now 2 ramps going up to the hero. One directly into the room, as it has always been and a ramp leading up to the exterior wall of the keep. So far if you actually get inside past the 2 doors its golden to kill the hero.

[Slamz]

in the last patch, Warhammer had redesigned the keeps. There are now 2 ramps going up to the hero. One directly into the room, as it has always been and a ramp leading up to the exterior wall of the keep. So far if you actually get inside past the 2 doors its golden to kill the hero.

I think that's a pretty reasonable improvement.

I still think Planetside had the superior solution though:

Corridors were narrow enough that any entrance would be a chokepoint, but there were multiple entrances. Defenders would spawn in the base (and attackers would spawn directly outside the base, if not in the courtyard) but there were 2 ways to shut down the defender spawn and 1 way to capture the base with or without shutting down the spawn first. So you had chokepoints but everyone was split up trying to defend/attack the 4 main entrances and 3 primary objectives (not to mention the defenders having their own objectives that would basically shut down the attack).


Warhammer keeps are STILL kind of stupid in that you still end up with only 1 objective and I'm sure it will still be a huge clusterfuck finale in that room but at least they took away the overt defender advantage in that one final chokepoint.



Basically if you could take the Warhammer game engine and overall objectives and plop it down on the Planetside maps you would have a magnificent game.

[Hoofhurr]

Hah yeah.

From WAR: Engine, Lore, Tactics, Scale, General PvP
From Planetside: Building Blue Prints, Friendly Fire, Lattice Structure, Strategy.

That would be a fun game. I was always hoping the WAR BOs would be more like the PS objectives in the back forth and varied nature of them. The BOs should have been much closer to the keeps and should have been more interesting.

[OrsunVZ]

If WAR put a lattice system into play, the game would overnight stop sucking. There would still be issues, but the game as a whole would be in a totally different league.

[Slamz]

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Planetside and WW2O both realized the folly of letting people just attack any base they want anywhere on the map. A mechanism that directs the flow of battle will concentrate people more and make the whole thing more fun. None of this round-robin BS of people basically claiming empty bases from each other rather than fighting along fronts. If you want to take the NEXT base you have to hold the PREVIOUS base.

[OrsunVZ]

You chose an interesting way to phrase that. Because both extremes exist in WAR. Either there aren't any people in your sand box, or there are too many. To be really successful, mythic has to find a way to break up the zerg a little bit. As it stands right now, when the zergs meet, WAR is like 2 gigantic sharks battling it out, where each person is a tooth in a mouth filled with thousands of teeth, nobody cares one bit if a tooth falls out, so the individual contribution is totally marginalized, and as a player you stop feeling at all significant. This is a huge mistake for a western audience, and frankly I'm surprised they didn't see the issue coming - nobody wants to be simply another cog - that's communist speak!!!

On the flip side, they created a mechanic which often promotes the zergs avoid eachother. This has been vastly improved on since the start of the game, but it still exists, and can be a problem. Most of the time though, its the shark scenario - which frankly, for me, is worse.

What winds up happening, is people turn to scenarios where their individual contribution is absolutely VITAL. It is here that one can make a name for one's-self. It happened in WoW too. It isn't that the scenario forum is a better game format, but it absolutely provides a platform to achieve a noticeable improvement to one's character (even if it isn't through gear itself - notoriety is most often far more satisfying).

Of course this is all ego talking, but what competitive *anything* doesn't pertain to that?

[Slamz]

I think Planetside had a lot of accidental genius in that area.


I think maybe one thing that limits the "zerg" feeling you might get in Planetside (also WW2O) is that anything you want to do, you basically can do with 1 person. Technically.

You only need 1 person to blow up a generator or destroy the spawn tubes or cap the base or cap a tower or deploy a spawn spot.

So if you could somehow slip around the zerg vs zerg warfare, you could accomplish something big. I think that was a real driving factor in the psychology of the Planetside player. "If I can just sneak in here and..." / "If I can just hide while that tank goes by, then I can..." / "If I can run up here and cap this tower before anyone notices..."

You'd die trying these things like 49 times out of 50 but the point was the potential was always there for you to do something heroic.


Even on the battlefield, not all targets were the same. So yeah, you'd go tit-for-tat for a while killing zerglings but once in a while you could blow up a tank or a flying transport or something and get a rush of "Oh yeah, I'm awesome".


WAR doesn't really have any of that. There's nothing you can do solo, so you'll never be the hero. Trying to be sneaky/solo mostly just results in your worthless death. And there's rarely that moment of "Oh yeah, I'm awesome" because the only thing there is to kill is more nameless, faceless zerglings.


So maybe the necessary elements are:
* Objectives which can be accomplished by an individual
* Objectives take some time to be accomplished, such that an individual can also interrupt it

This way the drive of zerg vs zerg is to get that individual in there to do or to interrupt the objective. Current WAR implementation means that the drive of zerg vs zerg is to simply overwhelm the enemy zerg by pure brute force, which takes away from individual creativity and accomplishment.

[Vllad]

You could make the argument that games that are not zerged based are broken as well. Arena in WoW was not fun when you lose your healer. Most Arena 6x6 battles were either won 6-0 or you lost 0-6. Their were very few fights that were won or lost 6-5 or 5-6.

Once you lost your key player the battle was over. You spent most of the time just waiting to die.

With Zerg fights strategy plays a much bigger role depending on the game. The reason Zerg fights don't work in WAR is because that game sucks and is very poorly designed. I know you like it O but WAR is totally broken.

Planetside is perfect for Zerg fighting. You had to have mass strategies to break stalemates. Occasionally one person could make the difference and turn the tide but it had to have good follow up by the Zerg.

Planetside was well designed. WAR was not.

You can't make definative statements about playing styles with out taking into conideration of the designes that employ paticular styles.

Zerg fighting can be great if the game is well designed for it. Smaller tactical fights can be fun as long as the games are well designed for it. You can employ both to work well if the game is well designed for it.

The problem is we keep playing games that suck at it.


Vllad

[Vanraw]

I agree zerg aspects should play into a game, but the issue, and usally the reason game makers compromise, is the technical aspects of servers and networks, as well as PC's to handle it well.

[Thudz]

Three team lattice system is pretty much the pinnical as far as I'm concerned. I suggested early on the WAR would be much better with a lattice.