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PvP team balance
Swiftblade13
Member Posts: 638
Others have expressed their concerns about various possible problems with Warhammers RvR system, my concern is much simpler and much more basic.
What will stop one team (probably the Greenskin/chaos/Darkelf team) from constantly gaining victory because of the number/type of players drawn to that team?
On PvP servers in MMO's traditionally the "evil" team does noticeably better in PvP.
Endgame RvR will get old pretty fast if you are on the losing side of an ongoing war for all eternity. I heard it will take months to take a city.. that means that if the "good" team is in a cycle of always losing endgame will be a three month spanking... rarely if ever making any progress, while the enemy slowly pushes them back to their city. At the end their city gets sacked (all three probably in turn), the server resets the front, and they go back to square one again... this time not only they are still at the same disadvantage they were the first time, but they are demoralized as well! On my server in WoW (I'm an old EQ player so dont you dare think I'm a WoW noob or that I'm comparing WoW to WAR.. im not) AV was always won by horde. The alliance became so demoralized they didnt even try.. they just went for the most HK's they could get per round and made no effort to win after a while. It was a three hour grind for HK's as the horde pushed us slowly back.. round after round.
It seems to me something needs to be done to make sure that the same team doesnt constantly win.... its not really fair.. but if the "evil" team constantly wins, the "good" team will lose players to the "evil" team, and become even weaker. The end result is that a handful of underdogs stubbornly play the losing team while most of the rest of the population steamrolls them cycle after cycle.
Is their any kind of mechanic to prevent this? Do you have any ideas that might work?
I know some of you are going to say this wont happen.. that fighting on three fronts will prevent it, but I think not.
I honestly think that one team will be dominant on each server.. probably "evil" on most servers... and it will be that way for the entire life of the game. I sincerely hope it doesnt work out that way.
Grymm
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Comments
http://www.youtube.com/user/Metallica8589/videos?view=0
Just remember that WoW had players that PvPed in their off time. PvPers in WoW had HUGE gear gaps and most of the hardcore PvPers had god awful gear compared to PvE players. You had people with different specs all trying to PvP. Try PvPing with a PvE spec against a gear gapped team and see the result. Reguardless of how good you are you would get destroyed. It made it a bit harder to tell what groups actually had skill and what groups just had gear and pvp specs.
Now look at WAR. Everyone(or as close to everyone as a blanket statement can get) is playing the game to PvP. There are no huge gear gaps(or so it was stated), and everyone will have a PvP spec. Then you will truly see what groups have skill and what groups just have voice chat.
After all, it is a PvP game. Skill, strategy, and cooperation are the name of the game. Why shouldn't teams that accomplish that be steamrolling the other team? Either way it will be tons of fun and if you have ever played another game where a big "population" imbalance occurs you will realize that the winning side soon gets bored and goes for the other side just to have a challenge.
there is nothing you can do to stop the pvp elite payers from seeking each other out and grouping together and making themselves even stronger as a unit than the weak players and taking advantage of them. They couldnt stop it in daoc or in UO so I highly dobut they will be able to stop it in war.
Yes most pvp guilds that I have spoken to are planning on rolling destruction, but most have also said they would roll whatever side had the least amount of players because they wanted to be underdog realm (again) because it provides target rich enviornment once your team gets rolling.
look at it this way, gear wont be a problem and spec wont be a problem so all you have to worry about it ability. if your bad you will get better with time and eventually after a few months of play you will be on par with even the best players!
Identify-Adapt-Overcome-Conquor
just a correction...
The guy who has the first name Paul I think, said that it will take about 30days to sack a city. Not months.
But, about the topic, I think they were saying something about giving the side that needed help with winning sometimes would get a buff. Or maybe they where just talking about to take back the city, I'm not sure.
Zone control is going to work off of points. The points are earned from open and instanced RvR. I doubt 100% of "leet" players will roll on chaos. This means that the order side will stay have players able to earn points. Further, at max level, you could have system that pits "equal skilled" players against each other measured by realm points make sure that only the strongest fight the strongest. If they do that then i do not see a problem.
One way is to make empire classes OP
That's what they did in DAoC to Hibneria, they were the underdogs from the start and then Mythic gave them more powerful classes to balance out the population imbalance.
Another way is to give the underdog-realms extra bonuses.
There are few ways that they have detailed to prevent one side dominating all the time, but nothing concrete & there's a lot of info that is still under wraps. The following list is just a few things that I have heard through interviews or videos that might be in WAR to help with skill imbalance.
(Remember none of these are concrete as far as I know, they have just been mentioned)
1. Once a capital city is sieged the losing side will get some kind of boost that will last until either their city is taken again, or their enemies city is taken. This boost will be some type of combat boost to help the losing side regain their footing.
2. Scenarios (The instanced RvR areas) will be balanced using a point system. This point system will be based not only off of each character's level, but also their ranking in RvR (And possibly other traceable RvR stats). So basically each team will be even, point wise.
For example. One team could have 3 level 40 max rank RvR players & the other team could have 14 level 40 lowest rank RvR players.
3. To help with players switching from their losing side to the winning side WAR is going to have multiple incentives for new players to start on the side that is out numbered. While not exactly balancing skill, it will help with population imbalance.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
I'm pretty sure a scenario like this is exactly what the WAR developers are trying to avoid. They want everyone to be equal from the start & pick a side because you WANT to play that side, not just because it's the most powerful. Or vice versa as in your example.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
Why so sure that the 'evil' faction will have more players?
Whats wrong with the good side ,In my opinon thus far the witch hunter is the most intriguing class so i think i will be on the empire side, that is unless we get some DE assasins
I think that having some instancing will help against one side (chaos as you put it) from dominating the server. I think this because from my experience in DAoC. The "underdog realm" usually got their arse handed to them not becuase they were less skillful but becuase they couldnt muster enough troops. With a good portion of the campaign points being won in even number combat, you will see less of one side dominating over the other as a whole on the server.
Skill will play a huge roll in WAR I would imagine but, I dont think a vast majority of skillful players will play on chaos versus a smaller number playing Order. Skillful players are past that. They go for what they want and in fact, even find more enjoyment playing what they think is the underdog just to make it tougher on themselves.
I wouldnt worry so much about it. I think Paul and the gang have a good idea as to what they are doing.
Oh and by the way, this game should not be WAR but PWN !!!
In DAoC the "good guys" Albions had the most numbers...
A good way to balance things is if there are 100 Greenskins Vs. 70 Dwarves, the Dwarves would get 30% more points for doing exactly the same as what the Greenskins did.
I dont know if I've explained this well enough, but if you do get it, please feel free to expand on it or comment if its even plausable.
There is a way in the pvp/rvr scenarios, but I doubt anyone would like it (including me) if Mythic actually instigated it.... Random match-ups.
Paul has stated that before a scenario starts, players are pulled out of the world where they fight the opposition in an instance that looks identical to the outside world (identical to lessen the disruption) and any balance issues will be made up for with npcs. Well, all Mythic need do is break the groups players start with and randomise the players
It won't stop players grouping and organising out in the open world of the game though.
______________
Mark E. Cooper
AKA Tohrment
Proud member of Damned Souls since 2007.
http://www.damnedsouls.eu
as far as I knew the game was going to auto-produce NPC fighters to help whatever side needed them the most at the moment. this applies to capital sdieges as well. It is supposed to be a lot easier to take BACK a city of your than it is to take an opposing city.
waagh!
Itchie
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Way to kill the idea of guild pvp runs.. Bad idea that will annoy plenty of players :] Unless it was a sideshow instance that didn't change anything related to the game world.
You Daoc players are quite familiar with guild runs in pvp heh. And besides, playing with a well coordinated group is always more fun than playing with random players. Has been since day one of online gaming, for instance in games like quake 1 ctf/tf.. which was a blast to play at the time
Even if I wasn't in a guild (and with some of my alts I don't join guilds) I wouldn't want to play Instanced Scenarios if I couldn't play with my group of friends. It kind of defeats the purpose of logging on with your friends and takes away a large part of the fun. And as it's been said, the game could kiss most big guilds good-bye as well if they did that.
WAR is trying a unique approach and designing a game where both guilds (large and small), small groups of players and solo players can all contribute to the RvR conflict. Forcing randomized grouping in Scenarios would certainly hurt the guilds.
There are easier solutions, like using a formula to calculate the overal PvP ranking of a team trying to enter a Scenario and match them against a team with a simiiar ranking. If one team is always the top ranked on a server then they're going to be facing the other top ranked players on the other side.
On a side note - I believe the Dogs of War NPCs that will be generated to balance Instanced Scenarios are only meant as a last resort. Mythic has said they would prefer players fight each other. I also don't think they'll be used for capital sieges, there was talk about providing buffs to the defenders to help them push out invaders eventually - but that doesn't mean there won't be extra NPCs as well, we just haven't heard anything about that yet I think.
Having done raids against Boss's in wow and really thinking wow this was all for nothing, Knowing I can take a city is making War look even better.
My solution would be to provide small player instances. like up to a max of 5.. and have them be one for random and a seperate for pre-arranged teams. They would be small so that they would que quickly, and even if you didn't have that many friends online, you could still join with a few friends or if not.. then you could still organize 5 people pretty easily. These types of instances would be worth less then big instances, but the big instances would be spaced out a bit more ex: like 3 a day, so that they are not farmed and the smaller instances ignored..aka AV.
I would also use the npc method if one side was clearly outnumbered, but I would be certain to make sure that killing no brain npc's would yield a very small to insignificant reward. I would also award the side with the npcs for how well their npcs do... as to encourage them not to just see them as no brain/easily replacable npcs. And most importantly if this method was used.. i would give some level of control to the players near the npcs so that they could give suggestions to them, such as ... "fall back", or "stick with me" so they don't get trained into the enemy team time and time again. Oh and a half way decent AI wouldn't hurt.
In the end you can't really stop the big guild uber gear steamroll. It will happen, but you can take steps to reward skillful single players as well.
Don't forget that each race has it's own warfronts Empire VS Chaos, Dwarf VS Greenskin, and High Elf VS dark Elf. I just find it unlikely that one faction will dominate all three at one time. Although I could possibly see one side dominating 2 of the warfronts majority of the time, but three would be difficult unless the opposing faction was that severely underpopulated.
They said they will count instances more than anything else for pvp points. This tends to make it more balanced because instances are the most balanced way to fight: no ganking, even sides, etc.
Of course, nothings perfect and one side will start winning most of the time. Oh well. I tend to like underdog sides and would join that one. Others like the big side and will join that one. It doesn't really matter in the end.
I think the most harmful thing the WAR devs could do would be to take a heavy-handed approach and try forcefully to balance things. Just let it go for a year or so and see how it turns out...