DB Design Doc: In-Session Progression System

(Kendle) #61

That’s precisely it.

If over a period of time the team doing best gets better, it breaks the concept of Stopwatch, where the winner is decided by who sets the fastest time over 2 rounds.

In an objective game one team attacks and the other defends. For each attacking wave either the attack succeeds and the game moves on, or it doesn’t. Each attacking wave will then generally see the “winner” of that attack gain more XP than the loser. The longer the game goes on, the more attacks the defending team survives, the more XP advantage the defending team gains over the attacking team, the longer the game goes on.

Result = full-hold. Times that by 2 and you have a double full-hold, making the result of the match a 0 - 0 draw.

When ET was first released I was an admin of one the first ever ET competitions, I refereed a game between 2 top Euro teams on Fueldump, with XP (as we didn’t have ETPro at the time). The match took 3 hours, resulted in 3 double full-holds, and therefore ended a 0 - 0 draw, a complete waste of everyone’s time.

ETPro was soon released, XP was globally disabled, and here we are talking about it today because we sure as **** wouldn’t be if XP had survived in competition.

(Maca) #62

Thank you for the explanation. I can imagine how it works better for MOBA and such because the objective is symmetrical there.

(Kendle) #63

Not saying I’m against all this, certainly for pub play, certainly for straight objective mode, but the determining factor is XP. The better players get better faster because they earn XP faster, and it becomes incremental as the speed at which they earn XP increases the more advantages they acquire.

Make it strictly time limited and comp might consider it, i.e. EVERYONE goes up a tier on 5 minutes, then again on 10, then again on 15 etc. regardless of XP. That’s the only way I can see it working in comp.

(ailmanki) #64

I had say the idea of Experience Points itself is not wrong, but how it got applied in Enemy-Territory.

Naturaly Selection does also have a form of XP, and u can get upgrades through this. Its part of the core game.
While in DB it seems like an addition, e.g. the game can played without it. Basically same is for ET valid.
I had say NS can also be played without any XP, but then it is a complete different game.

So in NS the upgrades have an immense impact on the game. And they are extremely difficult to balance, a little change in one classes speed, and games have a different outcome.

That means DB can have XP and upgrades aswel, but again it will be very difficult to balance for competition. I suppose this had been completely avoided in ET, or maybe the available upgrades had not been suitable anyway.

(tokamak) #65

I’m really really happy with this. It adds a resource-management system to the game which makes everything incredibly addictive.

I once talked about this in the Brink section: For F2P there’s a huge opportunity to monetise this. Paying players should climb towards tiers at the same rate as free-players can of course but you can make paying players allow for growing several tiers at once. This means that they don’t become directly more powerful but they will receive more options as they grow.

So a free player just grows a medic to tier II a paying player now has a medic and a field ops in tier II. Equal power but more choice.

It’s one of the rare ocassions that you can grant an convenience to a player without making it pay to win.

(Maca) #66

I’m glad to hear the xp is the problem, because I personally find this idea of getting these one-use tier 3 items intriguing, so if there is a way to implement it without unbalancing stopwatch it would be awesome.

(Anti) #67

I think XP can be balanced out. We could adjust the costs for each team depending on known average (across the entire population in that mode, not that specific match) XP earn rates for attack and defense, so teams should have equal access. That’d certainly help the balance of them in objective mode.

In Stopwatch both sets of attackers have equal opportunity to earn at the same rate, so in theory between each half of a map both teams have equal potential to earn the rewards, they wouldn’t carry over between halves.

We’d definitely try to avoid it being a system where those that are ahead automatically get further ahead because of these abilities (like in some CoD kill streaks).

(Kendle) #68

Not that I speak for the comp scene of course, for all I know they’ll hate the whole idea and reject it out of hand, and it’s not like it hasn’t been tried before, ET struggled on for several months before ETPro came along and rescued it.

But the thing about competition, like anything calling itself a sport, is that it needs to be fair. It’s not fair if one team becomes progressively stronger over a period of time. Whatever strengths and weaknesses a team has at the start of match is how it should be all the way through ideally, but if ever there comes a time one team gains a new ability the other must gain that same ability, at the same time.

(Kendle) #69

Sorry Anti, you posted as I was posting.

That’s not how Stopwatch works, the fact they change sides is irrelevant. Stopwatch works by comparing times, it therefore requires times to be set, otherwise it’s a 0 - 0 draw. For times to be set, AT ALL, the defending team can’t become stronger the longer the game goes on, NOT EVEN the half round.

This is a common mis-conception, that just because you switch sides it evens out. It doesn’t, that’s not how Stopwatch works.

(Bangtastic) #70

I really welcome this idea because “feeding” will become a common term in this game :smiley: A reason more not to ran stupid into enemy fire imo.

EDIT: it like the buy system in cs, its in a way similar as it is planned in DB when it comes to this extra factor of resources. What should now prevent you from stopping the time in stopwatch?^^

(Anti) #71

[QUOTE=Kendle;437539]Sorry Anti, you posted as I was posting.

That’s not how Stopwatch works, the fact they change sides is irrelevant. Stopwatch works by comparing times, it therefore requires times to be set, otherwise it’s a 0 - 0 draw. For times to be set, AT ALL, the defending team can’t become stronger the longer the game goes on, NOT EVEN the half round.

This is a common mis-conception, that just because you switch sides it evens out. It doesn’t, that’s not how Stopwatch works.[/QUOTE]

What I meant was more like this:

[ol]
[li]We allow the attackers to earn the upgrades faster (we can do this many ways)[/li][li]The attackers set their time[/li][li]In the second half that ensures the new attackers will definitely get the same time to earn the upgrades that the first attacker did[/li][/ol]

That would balance out the potential between halves. Obviously we want to avoid full holds.

I don’t agree with the point in your other post though, that both teams have to have them at the exact same time. Use of buying, keeping dropped enemy weapons and running eco-rounds in CS is always variable between the two teams and is based on their match performance. That doesn’t unbalance the game, it actually adds an extra layer of team play and tactical depth.

It was a similar case for staying alive during a losing round in CoD1 S&D when you’d grabbed an enemy SMG as a secondary to go with your K98 :slight_smile:

(Kendle) #72

That might work, but you’re dabbling with map balance there. If the map is balanced so that it works when both teams have the same opportunity to earn upgrades (as in objective mode) does it become unbalanced if one team earns upgrades faster than the other? But it might actually help SW if the attacking team gets stronger as the round goes on, so it’s certainly an interesting idea.

True, but CS / COD S&D is not Stopwatch. Switching sides half-way through isn’t what makes it SW, it’s how the match is scored that makes it SW.

(tokamak) #73

What kendle means is that when an attacker is winning then great, the match will be short, but when a defender is winning then that advantage will only increase in their favour leading to full-holds.

He has a point, I just don’t think it’s big enough to invalidate the thing as a whole.

(Kendle) #74

Without being rude tokamak, you think too much, for once in your life be told by someone who knows. I’d bet my house the ET comp scene won’t touch DB if XP can’t be disabled or made to work in some way differently to how it’s been described in this thread.

The idea of the attacking team levelling up faster is actually a good one, though I suspect even that would meet with resistance. I’d still rather see it being linked to time, namely “we’re 5 mins in, you haven’t broken defence, here’s an upgrade, oh it’s 10 mins in and you still haven’t set a time, here’s some more stuff to help you along”.

The problem with being linked to XP is attacking teams will devise strategies to get the XP as quickly as possible, possibly at the expense of attempting the objectives until they have, so we have a couple of minutes of grind before the real game starts. That might even be acceptable come to think of it, but it’s still not particularly “sporting”. In real world team sports neither gets (increasingly) punished for losing some time into the game, or rewarded for winning (before the match is over).

(Samurai.) #75

In terms of comp, i can just say as a defender psychologically i don’t like the idea of knowing that the attackers should always gain an advantage because of an XP system (an external variable outside of the defenders control) even if i know i will also be attacking at one point as well… This can be pretty demoralizing letting a bad team finish a map because of an XP system granting them benefits over the defending team, when really they should suffer for being a lower skilled team.

i want to see it as a level playing field whereby neither team gains an advantage from an external source… If a team is being dominated they shouldn’t gain a reward for reviving each other 7000 times in 5 minutes, they should suffer because they are a lower skill level. It’s a harsh lesson to learn for a team, but it should soon make them focus on where they went wrong and improve strategically (as well as individually to prevent it occurring again).

If you are worried about full holds then alter the way objectives work:

[ul]
[li]speed up the mobility of the EV (90% of a game revolves around waiting for this to move while no enemies are around as it is so slow - same with the lifts (do they actually speed it up at all?),[/li][li] carryable objectives need to be instant pickup/return, have the ability to shoot while holding and have a short transmit time to a location that is accessible via both teams.[/li][li]Flicking the switches on camden need more cover (so players have an incentive to go near it - basically suicide going for it (especially with no defensive spawn waves - so no clear time period to do it) and a longer reset timer so progress doesn’t disappear after 3’s of no one touching it. [/li][/ul]

(iwound) #76

ive already mentioned this earlier in the thread. but that way everyone would get these perks at exactly the same time. result 5 mins of insane spam.
the way sd are doing it here it spreads out the upgrades and prevents spam.

the xp farming you mentioned would become afk for 5 -10 mins then use the upgrade. at least the suggested way can control the amount of any individual weapon. tweaked and balanced as more gets added to the game.

the maps can easily be balanced to accommodate these perks.

i suggest reading all the thread. there’s at least 1 surprise in there that will make a few here flame.:slight_smile:

(OwNLY) #77

Lets see how it works in CS:
You lose the first round, which means you cannot get good weapons in the 2nd round.
Maybe in the 3rd round you can buy and maybe win a round.
If you don´t you again have to save for another chance.

What buy- and killstreak-systems do, is giving a team which is already dominating a power-up.
Not every round you have the same chance to win.

While the better team gets to play with perfect equipment all the time,
the team which has lost a few rounds now have to play with even weaker equipment,
and is more likely to lose the next rounds.
Or they just give up everyhing up (eco round) just to get another shot the round after that.

If you think about it, these systems dont really add depth, they just fake it.
In my opinion CoD ProMod did this better than CS.

(tokamak) #78

[QUOTE=Kendle;437575]Without being rude tokamak, you think too much, for once in your life be told by someone who knows. I’d bet my house the ET comp scene won’t touch DB if XP can’t be disabled or made to work in some way differently to how it’s been described in this thread.
[/QUOTE]

Alright. I’ll take that. However, I’m sure that using a different game mode for competition is to be avoided though. I will start cooking on something that will appease both.

(ImageOmega) #79

[QUOTE=Samurai.;437576]In terms of comp, i can just say as a defender psychologically i don’t like the idea of knowing that the attackers should always gain an advantage because of an XP system (an external variable outside of the defenders control) even if i know i will also be attacking at one point as well… This can be pretty demoralizing letting a bad team finish a map because of an XP system granting them benefits over the defending team, when really they should suffer for being a lower skilled team.

i want to see it as a level playing field whereby neither team gains an advantage from an external source… If a team is being dominated they shouldn’t gain a reward for reviving each other 7000 times in 5 minutes, they should suffer because they are a lower skill level. It’s a harsh lesson to learn for a team, but it should soon make them focus on where they went wrong and improve strategically (as well as individually to prevent it occurring again).

If you are worried about full holds then alter the way objectives work:

[ul]
[li]speed up the mobility of the EV (90% of a game revolves around waiting for this to move while no enemies are around as it is so slow - same with the lifts (do they actually speed it up at all?),
[/li][li] carryable objectives need to be instant pickup/return, have the ability to shoot while holding and have a short transmit time to a location that is accessible via both teams.
[/li][li]Flicking the switches on camden need more cover (so players have an incentive to go near it - basically suicide going for it (especially with no defensive spawn waves - so no clear time period to do it) and a longer reset timer so progress doesn’t disappear after 3’s of no one touching it.
[/li][/ul][/QUOTE]

I am with this post. I really like the ideas presented on how to change the objectives. I am all for faster completion of objectives. Makes things way more exciting!

Also, I think my biggest fear of these perks is it becoming akin to Call of Duty’s kill streaks. Rewards that aren’t really balanced and just allow the good players to rack up more XP/kills. In fact CoD’s system is designed so that the lower tiered kill streaks unlock the higher level ones. Silliness.

Edit: Oh, and it’s worth noting that in the competitive CoD scene these kill streaks, some perks, and many weapon attachments were banned from computer play.

(INF3RN0) #80

All of the concern here is shared by me as well, BUT does everyone here actually find the “ultimates/tier3” or the number of times they are actually available to really be an advantage??? Think about it. If all these end up being is something that is either an incredibly undependable one-time use item/skill, then will it really skew the outcome of a match, pub and comp? Maybe they will be effective 50% of the time by players who practice their use, and then perhaps they will be able to add or subtract 12 seconds on their team’s time. I’m more concerned that not all of these unlocks are of equal value to even want to unlock some of them.

The passives are a different story of course. If those offer a base amount of measurable advantage, then all of the arguments and concerns apply. It’s a cool idea to get rewarded for playing well, however being able to become stronger because of it continuously reduces any chance for an opponent to retaliate. We need to know what is being considered as passive abilities first though, before we can make any judgement calls or give any real feedback there.