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Advice to Bioware that should revolutionize World PvP
Satarious
Member UncommonPosts: 1,073
I'm sure it's already too late to get something like this into release since the requirements are pretty much baked in at this point (given that the game will release by the end of the year), but they could always put this into an expansion in the future.
An idea that Bioware can take advantage of is to really attack the "herding cats" problem that tends to happen when a leader is trying to control a massive amount of other players. Anybody who has led a sizeable raid in any of the other MMOs out there knows this first hand. It becomes more about hard work and less about fun. Who wants those aggrevations when you're playing the game to unwind and have fun? My idea is a simple one: Build in-game social tools to make managing an army of players a breeze and fun to do. I can guarantee you that it would turn world pvp into a fun, strategic game rather than the current state of just a bunch of people aimlessly throwing themselves into the fight. It would give players pride that they were able to outwit the other side in terms of strategy especially if the other side had greater numbers. Also, the game would pull in the legions of folks out there (including myself) who have a passion for strategy type games on top of the usual rpg folks.
An example of a system Bioware could build is as follows: Divide up responsibilities into roles of Lieutenant, Major, Colonel, General. The Lieutenant would only have to control 5 other players, the Major would only see and organize the Lieutenants. the Colonel would only have to see and organize the Majors, and the General would control the entire army by simply directing the Colonels. Each rank would have its own strategic map: Lieutenant's map, Major's map, Colonel's map, General's map. Each rank would also be able to DRAW on his own map and those of a rank below him will be able to see it. So the General could conduct the entire war effort and know what's going on at a macro level. Also, each player could have a "direction indicator" that indicates which way the player needs to head to get to a strategic point that a higher rank specifies. I think this structure would greatly simplify controlling a large group of people and make world pvp much more strategic and fun. If you build it, they will come.
NOTE: The army structure would be DYNAMIC. In other words, unlike a guild hierarchy, it wouldn't be set in stone. Each and every player would have the ability to start an army. He/she would have to recruit other players in real time. So this avoids the problem of missing leaders when they happen to be offline... the army is built by active players that are online. Over time, all those fragmented armies will merge into 1 or 2 great armies. Think of it as something similar to how Spartacus's army of slaves grew from a ragtag, small group of gladiators into this huge force to be reckoned with over time.
EDIT: My idea allows for flexibility to leave an existing army and start your own. That takes care of the concern that certain people don't like the leadership one or more levels higher than their immediate commander. So they could, of course, encourage their immediate leader (say the Major) to just leave with them and form up a new army. With this system, the cream will eventually rise to the top and people will develop reputations. Those who have been known to run successful campaigns will have no problem attracting followers and building up a massive army pretty quick.
EDIT #2: An elegant solution to handling the "small-to-large" growth path of an army is as follows:
The idea is that every rank level is just a recursive copy of a regular group of 5 players. So a general would have a group of 5 colonels, each of those 5 colonels would have a group of 5 majors, each major would have a group of 5 lieutenants. So essentially, the colonel, major, and lieutenants would be in two groups (the group above that they report to and the group that they control). When the general first starts the army, his title of "general" is essentially the same as "lieutenant" in a large army. His first group of 5 followers would be grunts. Gradually, as the army grows, he would move up to the equivalent of a "major" and then "colonel" after that. His followers would move up the ranks as well. So, essentially, the army would grow and build from the ground up.
When the army is at full capacity, the general's group would only contain colonels, the colonel's group would only contain majors, and so on down the chain of command. All the grunts will be under Lieutenants.
Comments
Maybe for RP clans this would be fun but for most PvP its pointless.
Organising PvP or raids happends by shouting on team speak.
How would it be pointless for PvP? It could greatly increase the efficiency of controlling a large group of people without the aid of vent. And I don't know about you but I'm all for increasing the effectiveness of pugs against people on vent or people who group together all the time. It would make pvp fights more exciting, imho. Also, I'm pretty sure a system like this would make things easier on those who "shout in vent". Nothing wrong with that. The less aggravation there is when it comes to controlling a massive amount of people, the better.
Actually, I can see how this would be effective for PvP. I play WoW on a pvp server and I'm in a PvP guild, so we're usually pretty organized through TS. A little communication and feedback goes a long way in pvp situations. We also usually have a 'focus' on our team, or someone who picks out targets for us to burn down, to make our fighting more effective. People with CCs/interrupts also do their duties and communicate what their doing. What this ends up doing is making us more effective, and it's easy to see the advantages when we're fighting pug teams through the battleground feature. We pretty much win every game we play that way.
I don't know if this rank system would work, though. I suppose there'd have to be prequisites for each rank, but I highly doubt people will listen to someone who's been randomly put into a position of authority over them. The thing about pvp is that in one way or another we get that thrill from taking down an enemy player, and for the average pvper, it's hard to see past that tunnel-vision need to hammer down an opponent when the reality of it is that chasing kills is likely causing your team to lose sight of it's objective.
There would have to be more insentive to listen to someone barking orders at you, perhaps a bonus in damage or something for sticking to a squad element, or a bonus in rewards or something when you follow said order? I don't know, but it could definately be fun if devs thought of some interesting tools to make PVP more strategic and calculated rather then leaving it to some killfest where the best gear wins.
Aside from the maps and drawings, sounds a lot like EVE Online's Fleet setup.
I agree that there's a few out there who just want to "bash heads in" and not follow orders. That would be another advantage of this system, imho, since you can more efficiently control people at all levels. The General can fire and replace colonels, the colonels can fire and replace his majors, and so on down the chain of command. The lietenant would be able to just boot people out of his group which is easiest to do since he has control of such a small group. This structure would make it highly efficient to keep a massive group in line, imho. The jury is out how well a pug general would do, but it's definitely an effective tool if used right.
I'd swear that I've read this post before somewhere ...
Nice idea. The problems though are obvious:
People don't get along so well in open pvp raids (open to more than one guild), giving certain players authority over others without their consent is a can of worms. Even if you would have an honest voting mechanism, the biggest guilds would always call the shots, which is a recipe for hate.
Only thing that can solve this is making joining and leaving said stucture voluntary and instantly and allow multiple army structures like that to be formed on each side; if you don't like Darth Legol4s shouting orders at you, form your own raid.
The other "problem" would be in regards to the unit strategic maps: 6 out of 10 assault plans will be distinctly penis-shaped
(Which isn't such a big deal though, but people would also write stuff like "Darth Legol4s is a ************* " which would make them an extra workload for mods).
Solution: work with controllable icons / arrows / circles on those maps instead. (People drawing penises with said icons is unavoidable however as it a given fact that with ANY kind of player controlable visual medium, penises WILL be created).
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I agree that people tend not to get along in open world pvp. I've been in enough of them in WAR. But I've found that the biggest cause of people getting upset and rage quitting is when they're stuck in an ineffective group (or warband) and end up LOSING over and over again. People don't like to lose. It's human nature. When you're on the winning side, whether you're in a pug or premade, people are happy and talking about how "this is the greatest game ever!!!"
My idea allows for flexibility to leave an existing army and start your own. That takes care of your concern that certain people don't like the leadership one or more levels higher than their immediate commander. So they could, of course, encourage their immediate leader (say the Major) to just leave with them and form up a new army. With this system, the cream will eventually rise to the top and people will develop reputations. Those who have been known to run successful campaigns will have no problem attracting followers and building up a massive army pretty quick.
I agree. It's pretty similar to how pvp raiding works in EVE, in fact. At least in militia warfare, which had open raids for all militia members to join, I experienced this very clearly: some people build a reputation as great and creative commanders and players would flock to their raids. As long as others are able to form their own, it's all fine and dandy.
My brand new bloggity blog.
If you want to see this system like in action, you should give Battleground Europe:World War 2 Online a go. It works really, really well.
Wow. That game is still around? I haven't played that game for AGES. They didn't have that system back when I was playing it. But yeah, it would only make sense for a game like that to have such a system. I think it would make sense for any massive online game. I'd love to see it in action for a game that gets a massive amount of players like World of Warcraft.
I don't think an order given by a general would spread smooth and nice through the colonels, to the majors, etc to the "soldiers". There would be too much confusion with clarifications and counter-orders. I mean there is enough confusion now with one guy giving orders, imagine with 10.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I have to agree. I like the idea, but I doubt the implementation would work out.
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
That's why each rank would only have to worry about the rank immediately below them. The General, for instance, would easily be able to see on his own map whether any of his colonels are headed in the wrong direction. He could then focus on keeping those colonels that somehow go off track in line. The same applies recursively on down the chain of command. If there's just one leader trying to micromanage the entire army, that would be an order of magnitude harder to pull off since there would be 100s of people he would have to keep track of. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather only have to focus on 5 people at a time than 600.
I think you might be misunderstanding how this system would work. The orders being given by the "10" different people aren't being simultaneously broadcast to the entire army. That would just be a mess. It's SEGMENTED. In other words, a given rank only sees the orders given by the rank above: Grunt only sees the Lieutenant's orders, Lieutenant only sees the Major's orders, Majors only see the Colonel's orders, and Colonels only see the General's orders. So if you are a grunt, for instance, all you ever have to worry about when it comes to orders is your superior officer (the Lieutenant). There's not much room for confusion in this idea. If there is confusion, it's much easier to deal with in this structure since it's essentially borrowing a concept from Computer Science called "recursion": Taking a bigger problem and continually breaking it down into smaller problems through the ranks.
Oh damn... didn't read the whole actual post before i knee-jerked here. Anyways, this is not going to you OP, it's a fine idea you got there. I'll leave the post anyway cause it does pertain to the discussion.
So this is to all the guys who would make "officer abilities" earnable in some fashion (an I know you're out there):
My experience with open world PvP games is that a formalized system wouldn't benefit the game in any meaningful way while it would be quite open to abuse and griefing by the players.
The point of all this is battlefield communication, so what's wrong with plain chat channels?
WAR's world PvP suffered immensely due to initial lack of global channels that could be accessed by all. Then Mythic fixed this by putting up regional and global war channels... Open to ALL. And then they dropped the ball again by introducing an exclusive channel that was open only to guild leaders and alliance officers - this made the whole WAR thing seem distant and "exclusive" again to common grunts (or just anybody who is not into guild politics).
Imo, they should just give the players a plethora of communication tools and let them sort out the ways to use them. Some kind of a battlecom kit where you could directly give markings and call out targets to others in your team would be nice, for example. But making this capability dependent on some arbitrary game requirement is... wrong.
For example, how would you determine who gets "officer skills?" The best mmorpg PvP strategists are piss-poor at direct combat. They don't have the time to go jumping around and hitting people. They're too busy sitting hidden behind some rock, following the situation, coordinating with other strategists and calling out orders.
In my experience, a good leader is a good leader. A good battlefield general does not have the "herding cats" problem. I know guys in WAR whose very presence in chat channels inspires the troops and gives them direction. Actually, it is the people who would like to be generals but are unable to make a contact with their soldiers or actually consistently devise winning plans who usually lobby for such formalized system where the choice of leadership is actually taken away from players.
These kinds of systems require active player participation - something that is never assumed.
You can put in hours and hours of work on something and have players completely ignore it or the clever ones find a way around it or a "soft exploit" kind of thing and all that effort you took is for naught.
In real life, there are penalties for disobeying orders and unless you put in a discipline system etc. it just won't work.
Even if you do make consequence for disobeying orders, people will avoid the entire system like a plague because what you will get is a boat-load of "arm-chair Generals" gaming the system to maximize their own points etc. and lots of people with frankly no clue what so ever somehow put into "leadership" roles.
Talented, motivational, and exceptional leaders will emerge naturally in a server community.
The only thing type of system would do is limit and restrain the natural processes.
Not worth the trouble.
Again with the "taking choice away from the players" nonsense. The players in my idea are free to quit the army and start their own armies at every level. There's no "stuck with a badly run army" dilemma that critics seem to be imagining.
Let me try to condense this down a bit for certain critics to be able to digest easier: This idea is a simple tool to make managing a massive amount of people easier to do. Nobody is forced to do anything. Everybody is free to leave. Everybody is free to not use this tool if they so wish. These things are a given, but need to be spelled out for some it seems. As I've spelled out in my original post, the leaders are chosen by the simple fact that those below them were willing to join their army. I don't know if you can get any more simpler and fairer than that.
In my experience, the fact that a "good leader is a good leader" is obvious. A good leader is a more EFFECTIVE leader when he delegates and doesn't have to micromanage a massive amount of players: Focusing on 5 vs. 600.
First of all, the game ITSELF requires active player participation which should never be assumed. You can put in hours and hours of work into the game and have players decide to quit and play some other game. *shrug* It's called RISK and the willingness to take it from time to time, my friend.
The penalty for not following orders is a simple one performed by PLAYERS and doesn't require artificial constraints from the system: If you don't follow orders, you get the boot. Every rank is free to fire (or boot) the rank below. It works just like a typical party system in an mmo only at a grander scale.
My idea doesn't preclude the idea that "the cream will rise to the top" when it comes to leadership, it encourages it. Again, it's a simple tool to make organizing armies easier to do. It doesn't choose leaders and it doesn't force people to play in a way that they don't want to play.
Worth the trouble, imho. Anything that helps turn world pvp into something strategic rather than the chaotic mess (in your typical mmo these days) of people just mindlessly throwing themselves into the fray is very beneficial.
Nothing can beat organized guilds and guild alliances.
As long as players have the tools for coordination and communication, these things will happen naturally.
You can't force it, and it's a waste of time to try. Players will do what they want to do, they'll find a way to use/abuse any system to their benefit.
As long as you don't actively hinder battlefield organization and coordination through limiting communication avenues, the problems take care of themselves.
It is, however, hard to say though in "modern" MMORPGs because the general audience is a lot bigger now, a lot more independant now, and (in general) a lot less social.
I give you credit for thinking outside the box mate, but...this is way too far for me.
Wanna coordinate? Hop in Vent.
Wanna command? Start a guild and recruit followers.
I like the drawing on the map idea...but it should be visible by everyone and available to everyone - ignorable on an individual basis.
Aside from that, this is just far too much to add and well beyond "fun" imo. PvP moves too fast to play 'telephone' and voice channels have proven time and again to be the best solution.
Nice ideas but this just sounds like a full time job and IMHO thats not what games are about. Have fun working in game.
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Sorcery must persist, the future is the Citadel
Running a RAID is a full time job. This greatly simplifies the process. You sound like you're not into strategy games. This will be fun for people into strategy, trust me on this. What this idea does is abstract away the organizational aspect of the job so that you can concentrate on the FUN core: STRATEGY.
Anyone who has grouped in guild wars knows about the drawing of penises on the sketchable minimap.
Oh and the odd placed "Bewb" thrown in for good measure.
The following statement is false
The previous statement is true
I agree that there's going to be the immature kids who like to draw penises and boobs on the map, but they wont last too long in a position of power since people will just choose not to follow them. Simple.
OP's suggestion sounds similar to MAG's system. Normal soldiers, squad leaders, platoon leaders and the OIC (Officer In Charge). Except MAG can only have one set of those per side per match.
Really, that's so weird, I could swear I've already answered it somewhere else.
What a mystery ...