I should actually know … 
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There’s also Peke
I’m sure they can be sneaky at times…
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It could even be a sneaky Peke peeking on the peak
Sneaky Peke Pete peeks sneaky peaks?
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Piqued Peke Pete’s sneaky peek peaks
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Describe the user above in 6 words?
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You know what I’m curious about… is if I-novae is considering abstracting the teams away and letting the number of teams be arbitrary, to a certain degree.
Say there are 5 alliances on the server, there might be 5 different teams fighting eachother. Now lets say that the smallest of the teams shrank in numbers, they then call a vote to join a different one so fun can continue to be had. Or something.
An alliance, or group of clans/corperations I suppose would be a good start to define how many teams would be on the field. Some sort of hard upper limit would probably be a good idea, as having 75 different teams fighting eachother might be confusing, depending on implementation. And of course a minimum of 2 teams.
While I’m not saying this is a feature I really desire, if implemented decently, would make the game that much more engaging
It’s certainly a possibility, we’ll see how things pan out through playtesting.
I had imagined that, as with other arena games, which side a player joined for any given match would be kinda irrelevant, and the sides would be symmetrical.
On a public server, you’d just join the team with fewest players or get auto balanced. (With provision for groups of friends to stay on the same team). If you left the match for a bit and came back, you wouldn’t be too bothered about joining the same team that you were in before.
In the event of uneven teams, Hawken sends a general message to the overpopulated team, asking them if they want to be sent over to the other team. Press f5 or something. If they do that, they are rewarded with some money/xp for the choice.
Perhaps each team gets the same amount of starting funds to share between them? Then the team with less players can buy better equipment.
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Or the game simply says that balanced teams have balanced stats on their gear. Numerical imbalance dynamically produces gear imbalance. Facing a 2:1 numerical disadvantage? You team now has a 2:1 gear advantage. Your shots do twice as much damage. And/or your sensors are twice as sensitive. And/or you have twice as much ammo. And so on. The actual numbers would be based on a perceptual 2:1 gear advantage. Even having a 10% greater damage per hit might be considered twice as good as the defined standard damage.
Because everything is rebalancing continuously as folks arrive and depart, when that guild of 20 guys decides to leave your team, you start to accumulate effectiveness over the next couple minutes. The time delay would be intended to reduce the effectiveness of exploits.
Folks will switch sides in a heartbeat, until some balance point is reached, perhaps only a few percent. However, I can easily imagine teams seeing a 10 or 20 percent advantage for the other team and refusing to switch sides, considering it a greater challenge for their team.
That numerical advantage can be based on player ratings as well. If the sum of player ratings on one team are 10% lower than the other, then they get a 10% gear advantage.
The gear advantage system could also be used for handicapping individuals based on player ratings. If a server is defined to be level 8, then folks rated below 8 would acquire a gear advantage while those above 8 would see a gear disadvantage. The numerical imbalance stuff would be applied on top of that. So a full team of 10s against a single 1 on an 8 server would be… interesting.
you cant really trade off funds for player count without throwing off the funding balance curve vital to any match based games with funds. They’re set up by necessity that more funds increases your power at decreasing rate, to allow comebacks and to prevent one team from getting too far ahead in a power curve, once that happens the match is already lost and it gets boring for everyone involved. Also i could see problems where people get bonus funds, then an extra person joins leaving the team with both the full team and the extra funds. A better solution might just be a bot, if they exist in battlescape.
NS2 made it so that if you have more than 1 extra player on your team, the extra player was presented with the option to switch teams but would not be allowed to spawn until one of his team mates died. Frustrating when up against a team that is hemorrhaging players but honestly at that point you’ve probably won.
I don’t like the idea of changing gear attributes dynamically to maintain balance. It feels to me that a model 1 gun should behave like a model 1 gun no matter what.
Another idea is that the imbalance between team numbers is redressed by adding one “virtual miner” for each player the smaller team is short. The virtual miners will then increase the resource extraction rate for that team.
if there’s enough players in one game, the imbalance caused by even a few players might not make enough difference to be worth addressing past the standard auto balance methods.
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weapon balancing is something that happens a week before the game is officially released, and a week after. It is silly to talk about it right now.
I only mentioned a variable number of teams because as far as I know, it would be a unique feature of such a game, and would probably make it easier for friends to play with eachother. Such a thing would have to be kept in mind while developing the actual game if it is going to work well.
Two teams is fine too, as it really does not matter. Regardless of how teams are set, I suspect most people would want to be able to play with their friends
In the end it would depend on the vision i-novae has for the whole thing. The vibe I’m getting is that its not quite ironed out yet.
Equipment stats changing dynamically doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
My point was that, contrary to what tiwake suggested, players wouldn’t have any affinity to one team or the other.
It’s not that stats are changing dynamically. You see, there’s a central power transmitter at the spawn point, and it distributes power to all ship systems in the arena. So if there are fewer ships and ship systems drawing on the power source, they’re more powerful.
That could even be carried to the point of saying that a team would turn off unused systems so that their important systems are more effective. And likely lots of other team-wide power management schemes as well.
Is that a blanket statement or something specific about @tiwake’s post? There are myriad reasons for players to gravitate to one team versus the other. One team has obviously better players and they’re very probably going to win. I want to win, so I hop on their side. One team has a bunch of people that I enjoy playing with. I want to play with friends, so I hop on their side. One team is going to value my skills because they don’t have anyone doing what I do well, so I hop on their side.
I only don’t care about which team I’m on when I don’t know anyone and I really don’t care to know anyone. I’m just there to pad my personal stats and I’m not going to rely on anyone else to do that.
If you’re talking about the formation of many teams, I could well imagine that people might want to gravitate to small teams with folks that they know, but they’re probably going to get stomped by large pickup groups. Well, unless the gameplay is so clever that teamwork is even more important than sheer weight of numbers.
This is the exact reason I’m advocating against public stats. That’s such a terrible reason for gameplay. If you’re only concentrating on padding stats you aren’t concentrating on winning which is the soul purpose of every match - not padding stats. Stats(hopefully few) should be a biproduct of whatever actions you take to achieve victory, not necessarily an ingredient. I should still be able to win a game with terrible stats, because although my methods weren’t beneficial to myself, they very clearly were beneficial to the over arching goal of defeating the enemy.
Planetside 2 and even battlefield comes to mind. In battlefield I have had many games where my stats are terrible for the match, yet we win decisively…why is this? Because I concentrate on being aggresive by holding the points while dying, instead of being careful passive and padding my stats. I can’t count how many games I’ve lost because the whole team is snipers and won’t capture a point. That is not fun at all in my opinion.
I’ll be honest and blunt: I would never play a game with this sort of mechanic. Why? Because any 1v1 dogfight I may happen to have instantly becomes a crapshoot that isn’t based on skill, but who has more(or less) players on their team. That is straight BS and after losing a completely even fight for this reason I would probably stop playing.
We can take the previous example of a majority sniper team to the next level as well. To the attacking team that only makes it more frustrating. What used to be a 1shot kill only if you got a headshot, the snipers now only have to hit your body to kill instantly. They can’t cap your capture points because they’re all sniping but if you leave cover for an instant you die. You’ll still win but will be frustrated that you even had to play that game. It’s just griefing of another kind. That is the worst kind of gameplay I can imagine.
I’m not trying to attack you directly so I hope it didn’t come out that way. It’s really unfair and unfun to have a completely unbalanced game like that. I have been on teams where you have less people and still won. It’s absolutely possible - I don’t want a bonus powerup where I can easily kill the other team as long as I break them off into 1v1s due to powerups. It’s insulting to what skill I may or may not have. I’d want to defeat them on an even battlefield. I’d be insulting and have less fun if I have a TTK(time to kill) that’s half the time of the other ship that I’m fighting if I had the advantage, and it would be even worse on the other side of that engagement.
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Total agreement.
Well you unbalanced it, not me. Your fights are going to be crapshoots anyway, depending on the gameplay - which we have no information on. Will you run into a superior ship in your 1v1 engagement (on the server with perhaps 200 players on it…)? Will you run into pairs of opponents? Opponents with support? Opponents with special weaponry? Each fight should be a crapshoot and you should be on your toes the whole time. Sometimes you run. Sometimes you call for support. Sometimes you slug it out.