Population Balance
Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2015 5:54 pm
I've been watching this space for a while now and am super impressed with how the development is going. I believe before long there will be floods of people coming to this server once the last few key features are added, myself included.
I was thinking about that the other night and remembering how faction imbalance used to be one the things that negatively impacted the original game, and I think I have come up with a solution that I wanted to present to you all.
So while it might not seem important now as you can only go up to level 10 and restarting a character isn't much of a big deal, as more content is released and players become more invested in their characters, we need to have a system in place that would help offset future problems of imbalance.
The approach uses classical conditioning (Pavlovs dog) as its basis in that with the system we want to reinforce 'good' behaviour, which we can define as something that makes the game better for everyone, in this instance balanced teams.
The idea is to offer free character transfers to the side that has a lower population, but it must be done with a few conditions in place, to balance such a thing.
Firstly you could only transfer 1 character per week, the transfer would give you the equivalent class on the other faction and maintain all your progression and items. For example lvl 35 Slayer would transfer to a lvl 35 Choppa. At the same time it would let you change your name incase someone on the other faction has it(This could be optional, as I'm not sure how if destro+order can have the same names on a server).
This would assure that the players who are doing a 'good' thing (transferring to the losing side for balance) have no negative consequences. On the flip side you should not be able to transfer to the higher population faction, as if you want to join any friends there you should just have to reroll.
Once we have assured that players have no negative reinforcement for moving we need to give them positive reinforcement to do so. This can be done with some sort of outnumbered buff for the side with a lower population.
A simple version I thought up last night could be that for every 5% one side is outnumbered, they get 10% more experience/renown. So for example if the server balance is 25%/75% the 25% would get a 50% increase in rewards.
This would hopefully be enough to encourage some players to switch sides for a bonus to their progression.
I do not know the inns and outs of the code/server database but the switching could perhaps we done via this website and tap into the database to swap over characters. I remember reading the other day that the website is almost finished so perhaps this could be the next project for you to work on!
If anyone has any other suggestions that might be even better I welcome to feedback, but i think it would be good to have the discussion about the early one before floods of people rejoin the WAHHGH!
I was thinking about that the other night and remembering how faction imbalance used to be one the things that negatively impacted the original game, and I think I have come up with a solution that I wanted to present to you all.
So while it might not seem important now as you can only go up to level 10 and restarting a character isn't much of a big deal, as more content is released and players become more invested in their characters, we need to have a system in place that would help offset future problems of imbalance.
The approach uses classical conditioning (Pavlovs dog) as its basis in that with the system we want to reinforce 'good' behaviour, which we can define as something that makes the game better for everyone, in this instance balanced teams.
The idea is to offer free character transfers to the side that has a lower population, but it must be done with a few conditions in place, to balance such a thing.
Firstly you could only transfer 1 character per week, the transfer would give you the equivalent class on the other faction and maintain all your progression and items. For example lvl 35 Slayer would transfer to a lvl 35 Choppa. At the same time it would let you change your name incase someone on the other faction has it(This could be optional, as I'm not sure how if destro+order can have the same names on a server).
This would assure that the players who are doing a 'good' thing (transferring to the losing side for balance) have no negative consequences. On the flip side you should not be able to transfer to the higher population faction, as if you want to join any friends there you should just have to reroll.
Once we have assured that players have no negative reinforcement for moving we need to give them positive reinforcement to do so. This can be done with some sort of outnumbered buff for the side with a lower population.
A simple version I thought up last night could be that for every 5% one side is outnumbered, they get 10% more experience/renown. So for example if the server balance is 25%/75% the 25% would get a 50% increase in rewards.
This would hopefully be enough to encourage some players to switch sides for a bonus to their progression.
I do not know the inns and outs of the code/server database but the switching could perhaps we done via this website and tap into the database to swap over characters. I remember reading the other day that the website is almost finished so perhaps this could be the next project for you to work on!
If anyone has any other suggestions that might be even better I welcome to feedback, but i think it would be good to have the discussion about the early one before floods of people rejoin the WAHHGH!
