Game Mechanics?

Mickle

#1          900 players are in the game.  700 want to be in Realm 1, 100 want to be in Realm 2 and the rest are in realm 3.

Question : How do you ballance gameplay?

 

 

#2          900 players are in the game.  300 want to be in Realm 1, 300 want to be in Realm 2 and the rest are in Realm 3.

Realm 1 is made up of hardcore players

Realm 2 is made up of casual players and carebears.

Realm 3 is made up of part time players and role players.

Question : How do you ballance gameplay?

 

#3          Winning:

 

300 hardcore players beat all the others.  They win what ever prize.

Question: How do you keep the strong from getting stronger and the weak from getting weaker and still offer a prize?

 

#4          Replayability:

 

After winning the pirze, why would I want to win it a second, tenth, 100th time?

 

 

 

meddyck

Even the least balanced DAOC servers weren't anywhere as bad as having one realm have 77% of the population like in your scenario.

But yes keeping realm populations reasonably close will be very important. My thought is that there should be hard caps at character creation somewhere around 36% of the population. Let's say a server can support 2000 players online at a time. That means at release you wouldn't allow any one realm to have more than 720 players. Once that number was reached, no more accounts would be allowed to create characters on that realm/server until the other realms on that server had gained enough population that the populated realm dropped below 36%. Then you would also allow free server transfers from overpopulated realms to underpopulated realms of the same faction, but you would never allow transfers to overpopulated realms.

As for incentives for achieving victory, relics in DAOC worked very well for that. Gaining a 20% damage bonus was a powerful motivator to keep trying to get all the relics or at least all the relics of the same type (power or melee). What you don't want to do is what WAR and GW 2 do which is have artificial resets after one side achieves victory. The 2 realms that in effect lose should be forced to topple over the winning realm either working alone or temporarily working together. If they don't do that, the winner should remain in a dominant position indefinitely.

dynamicipftw

You create a fun and competitive group vs group scene. That way the underpopulated/losing realms are lucrative destinations for hardcore GvGers who want to see more enemies than allies in the battlefield. That's how it worked in DAoC.

 

You could help it even further by making it possible to change (reroll without deleting the old chars, no transfers) to the underpopulated realm within the server (it should have a long cooldown though, to discourage spying).

 

I will never understand why they didn't do this in WoW: My server has 70% horde 30% alliance. If they made horde to alliance transfers free until it reaches 50-50 there would never be any faction imbalances.

Ellya

What they did in original DAoC, where the Hibernian realm was underpopulated, was to make Hibernian characters stronger in general.  It mean that a smaller number of players from Hibernia could beat a larger number of players from the other realms.

In turn, this led to a number of people moving to Hibernia in order to play those extra powerful characters, which led to them being brought back into line once the player balance had been reached once more.

Balance was a nightmare in DAoC, due to the unmirrored classes, population differences and demographics of the realms. It led to much gnashing of teeth and endless forum discussion. (By the way, DAoC DID have official forums, but they were taken down in the first few months due to the "negative" publicity they attracted.).

I'm sure that MJ will be putting on his flameproof suit for much of the same in CU, as he has already stated he won't be using mirrored classes.

Tuktz

For there to be winners there has to be losers. That's part of what's wrong with current mmos. Companies are Too scared to have the risk of losing in the game, so there's not real challenge or risk of loss.

winning isn't fun unless there's the very real possibility of losing.

in fact some of the most fun I had in daoc was when we organized our realm against the winning realm, and took back our relics. It was a huge sense of victory/achievement winning as the underdog .

its just a matter of design so that strategy trumps zergy nunumbers 

 

why would there be carebears in a rvr only game tho? Even the housing and crafting are part of the rvr in this game.

and you'd be surprised how much the challenge of toppling the winning realm turns casual players into hardcore hehe

fanglo

Originally posted by Ellya

What they did in original DAoC, where the Hibernian realm was underpopulated, was to make Hibernian characters stronger in general.  It mean that a smaller number of players from Hibernia could beat a larger number of players from the other realms.

In turn, this led to a number of people moving to Hibernia in order to play those extra powerful characters, which led to them being brought back into line once the player balance had been reached once more.

Balance was a nightmare in DAoC, due to the unmirrored classes, population differences and demographics of the realms. It led to much gnashing of teeth and endless forum discussion. (By the way, DAoC DID have official forums, but they were taken down in the first few months due to the "negative" publicity they attracted.).

I'm sure that MJ will be putting on his flameproof suit for much of the same in CU, as he has already stated he won't be using mirrored classes.

lol, Hibernia was never stronger than Alb. 

The only time we got close to being able to compete was with the limitless shrooms (because of FOP) and even then that was not a design decision but rather an oversight on how powerful FoP could be in RvR.

Seitr

In DAoC they made it easier to level for the underpopulated realms by giving free levels after a certain amount of days up until level 46 I believe it was.

Mickle

Most of you are missing the point.  The point of my post is to tell the Dev that he needs to think "what if this happens".  What tools can the Dev put in place during ALPHA that could counter these problems.

 

I ask these questions because I have seen problems like this in DAOC and other games.  It may not of been 90% for one Realm but it was bad enough that players said "why bother.".

Jimmac

edited out

Tumblebutz

Originally posted by Ellya

What they did in original DAoC, where the Hibernian realm was underpopulated, was to make Hibernian characters stronger in general.  It mean that a smaller number of players from Hibernia could beat a larger number of players from the other realms.

In turn, this led to a number of people moving to Hibernia in order to play those extra powerful characters, which led to them being brought back into line once the player balance had been reached once more.

Balance was a nightmare in DAoC, due to the unmirrored classes, population differences and demographics of the realms. It led to much gnashing of teeth and endless forum discussion. (By the way, DAoC DID have official forums, but they were taken down in the first few months due to the "negative" publicity they attracted.).

I'm sure that MJ will be putting on his flameproof suit for much of the same in CU, as he has already stated he won't be using mirrored classes.

HAHAHAHAHA!

falcuk

Realm Pride comes into this also, theres always people who will play on teh underdog realm in a bid to succeed as its bragging rights in its own form.

I played Hib Excal and we were underpop compared to Alb and Mid, Alb was always the zerg realm, but we had Dem Hibbies on our realm and well anyone that knows of them knew they alone made us more powerful than sheer numbers hahaha

Teh_Axi

You can't balance this element, its just an inevitable part of the game.

What you could do though is have mechcanics that limit the growth of a faction, more infrastructure could require some form of maintanence or upkeep cost. So having a more players wouldn't be as large of an advantage if you can't coordinate them enough to maintain what you take.

Secondly another good option would be to simply limit the spoils, realm pride etc is all good but if everyone can benefit equally and be top dog(s) then it just makes joining the zerg more enticing. Limit the number of top spots and you'll no doubt see guilds deciding they'll be better off elsewhere, even if it means being on an overall weaker faction.

Mickle

Originally posted by Teh_Axi

You can't balance this element, its just an inevitable part of the game.

What you could do though is have mechcanics that limit the growth of a faction, more infrastructure could require some form of maintanence or upkeep cost. So having a more players wouldn't be as large of an advantage if you can't coordinate them enough to maintain what you take.

Secondly another good option would be to simply limit the spoils, realm pride etc is all good but if everyone can benefit equally and be top dog(s) then it just makes joining the zerg more enticing. Limit the number of top spots and you'll no doubt see guilds deciding they'll be better off elsewhere, even if it means being on an overall weaker faction.

I was thinking something like this.

 

Take a look a the numbers from the week before.  Look at the total number of hours played per Realm, total number of players per Realm.  That would take into effect the hardcore players and the zerg.  Do some sort of math and then use that magic number on the realms skills. 

That way a non zerg, non harcore realm would use 100% of thier skills.  Zerg would end up with 90% of thier skills and hardcore would be 80%.  That could allow the Devs to have built in tools that work without thier direct input.

Nervz

I'm frankly not too worried about this, it has a way of balancing itself as some have already hinted. There will obviously be some default balancing mechanism so that we never have the first situation you describe in your post.

 

With regards to the other situations, the real hardcore "pro" guilds or groups generally love to roll on underdog realms and try to be the catalyst for positive change. (myself included). It adds a different dimension of challenge in a meta-game sorta way. These type of groups don't usually enjoy being on an over-powered side. In DAoC there were so many times top guilds would delete and re-roll another realm. 2-3 weeks later you'd see them rolling hard in the frontiers or organizing and leading raids. Even though this may not be 'realistic' it is part of the essence of  war and will cause realms to go from underdog to over-powered and back over periods of time, which is the way it is meant to be really.

 

 

Hestia

Will this game have the common tab targeting system?