[QUOTE=Nail;196768]yes, and I think it’s a good idea, makes you think about your overall role instead of what’s convenient for the moment.
me likey lots[/QUOTE]
I agree, it makes you think about the whole team in general… is the map open out or close together? Will there be heavy firefights or speed runs? Do we need an engie who can zip in and out or one that can take some damage and protect the plant? A heavy engie on one map may be a good choice, but useless on another map where you need someone more nimble, and not being able to swap your body type mid-match adds to the depth of strategy required.
My impression was that Brink tried to do more with the carrot than the stick (that choice of words was in a few interviews). Forcing players to wait after reconnects and other sorts of punishments or enforcements sound wrong to me.
In my opinion class based gameplay has always been about choosing the right class and loadout for the right situation. Being able to change it is essential. How are you to know beforehand what kind of enemies, teammates and gameplay situations you are facing ingame? The body type is basically just another factor in making that choice.
Drastic but simple example: You want to play a certain map and choose to go for the heavy character to play a slow but powerful support role. Once ingame you realise that all your teammates had the same idea and you are basically stuck with a team of slow guys whereas the objective would be a lot more achievable with at least a few fast guys (eg. a document run which I’m sure will be featured in Brink as well). That game might be ruined before it even started and such a thing should not be decided by chance.
I’m against customizing you character ingame (except class and loadout selection) but there should be the possibility to choose a different character (with his own customization and specialisation) as well as the different classes. Maybe that could be even be part of the intel gathered by interrogating enemies (like what types does the enemy team consist of; but that’s slightly going offtopic).
[QUOTE=DarkangelUK;196776]A heavy engie on one map may be a good choice, but useless on another map where you need someone more nimble, and not being able to swap your body type mid-match adds to the depth of strategy required.[/QUOTE]The problem is that these things may change with different objectives as well. So in the first part of the map you may be better off with a heavy guy and in the second part a light one is better suited for the job. What do you select? What will your teammates select? That choice may need more coordination than you have in a public game.
Okay, so this is my current impression of how things work. Please correct anything that’s wrong etc:
You make a new character. You play games online or offline or both or whatever. You earn XP.
You can then assign XP to any of a bunch of unlockable abilities, which may or may not be tiered so you need to buy early ones to get later ones.
You can dump these unlockables if you don’t like them, but pay a penalty in XP for doing so.
There may or may not be a maximum limit on the number of abilities any one character can posses. The above implies to me that there will be.
So if a player wants to make a loadout of unlocks that’s like the first one but slightly different, s/he needs to repeatedly pay the restocking fee to swap between the two.
As a result, players will want to have multiple characters, solely to bypass the restocking and limited ability loadout mechanic. This way instead of continually spending XP on the restocking fee, they can grind out multiple characters to have a bunch of loadouts.
SCENARIO A) And then, need to pick one before a match starts and before they have any of the tactical information required to make a decision about what the situation that’s about to happen most needs.
SCENARIO B) And then, can pick one any time throughout the map, and so is at a disadvantage to all of the other players who have already ground up their selection of characters.
This is what this all says to me:
When you start Brink, you will be at a disadvantage unless you spend X hours grinding up Y characters. Specifically so you don’t need to deal with the restocking thing.
I can see this working out pretty much exactly how Guild Wars did;
People will work out the most efficient way of getting the grinding over, and will copy builds posted on the net just to get it over with. The meta will evolve so that people can most effectively farm XP by farming the people farming XP, and we’ll see waves of gimmick builds.
SCENARIO C) And then, spends 80% of his/her games in a server where his team is largely populated by people grinding their unlocks.
If you don’t believe this will happen in an FPS, look at ETQW’s ranked servers. You have the barest semblance of grindable bling, and still people sit on mountains stroybombing deployables.
A whole bunch of players will spend their maps grinding rather than playing the maps. And finally when the grinding is over, because our species apparently lose brain-function when grinding is involved, they’ll lose all impetus to play because they’ve spent all the time grinding and none of it playing.
The multiple characters thing is (in my experience) pretty antithetical to putting care and time into your characters. In Guild Wars you make a character and pick a class. And then you buy skills (which is much easier if you have them unlocked on your account) and armour, and do missions and quests.
And it’s all fine, until you hit your second character, and you realise that if you want PvE skill X to function like it does on your previous character, you need to headshot another billion swamprats because that’s by far the quickest way of doing it.
You want to play with your Ritualist, but you don’t have a max Great Dwarf Weapon? Well then your Rit sucks, and you know it. Better fire up hard mode and start doing the Secret Lair of the Snowmen dungeon x 15000.
So here’s what you do: Stop playing. Because it’s either that, or do the grind again.
It doesn’t work. People don’t put care into multiple characters, because the grind is the same grind, and well… just, no. The people who are willing to put the grind in don’t see those characters as characters any more, but as a class/skill combination. The grind has stopped being about development, and is now a chore that needs to be done before you’ve catch 'em all’d.
Arenanet are finally getting this through their heads, and have started toning down the grind and making what’s left account-wide. (Though their main team aren’t working on the game any more, so we’ll see what happens with GW2).
I should probably put a disclaimer here. None of the above is to say ‘change things or I’m not buying your game’. But if you see me wince whenever anyone says the word ‘persistent’, this is why.
I can see where you are coming from Shirosae, but I do think we may collectively be getting a little ahead of ourselves in terms of talking about a system which we actually know very little about.
Locki said specifically in an interview here that a) the rewards are geared towards specialisation, rather than being better/unbalanced and b) there will be a limited number of upgrades allowed in each match, a point I had missed previously. Depending on what that limit is, I don’t think SD is going to allow hyper-niche players (which was my original concern) or super-imbalanced players to come to pass. In fact, I imagine that the limit on abilities selected before a match will put more of an onus on selecting a really balanced build that is best able to cope all the possible roles you might have to play in that game.
Whether this limit presents more of an issue with the idea of guild-wars like “builds” and wanting to swap character midgame is another matter. Whats important for me is that it looks like they have put some safeguards in to make advancement less game-changing. In any case, hopefully any rougher edges on this stuff will get noticed in beta and smoothed off. Ahemhem.
Well sure, but given that Richard just specifically asked for opinions and we have no other info to go on, I felt it appropriate to have a rant
Besides which, at least SD can get a feel for the sorts of prejudice that they might need to deal with.
Yes, but if the only effective way to play is for everyone to have a really balanced build that is best able to cope with all the possible roles you might have to play… why bother with customisation at all?
Aren’t we immediately back to the +5 Armour of General Purpose? Wouldn’t everyone just use one of a few general purpose builds that were essentially irrelevant because they all did as well as each other?
If general purpose builds are encouraged by having specialised builds be penalised by lacking key skills, what’s to stop me grinding a bunch of other characters and syncing with some friends like GW’s RA?
What happens when group syncing becomes the norm in pub play, and you aren’t in a guild?
If I can’t use multiple specialised characters, what’s the point of having multiple characters at all? Should I have multiple characters who all have general purpose builds, removing the need to ever swap between them?
Well see, this is my issue: If you’re going to depreciate your customisation system to the extent that it doesn’t matter, why have it?
If you’re going to have it so that it does matter, then you need a way of balancing the excesses.
But if the way you achieve the excesses is by grinding, and the way you grind is by playing in a particular way, and you can play in a particular way better by exploiting those excesses…
I genuinely don’t see a way out of this maze of catch-22’s, though that’s not to say there can’t be one.
Rainbow 6 is a good example. This game is usually 10 short consecutive matches of 3 mins each. In between the rounds you can change your gear, which affects the game ALLOT, and trough this, a mini-meta game develops. You constantly need to reconsider your set up each match or you’ll become outdated. It’s like playing rock-paper-scissors ten times in a row.
If someone starts using tear gas in one round, you can chose to put on a gas mask to counter it in the next, unless that person anticipated that and only used the tear gas to lure you in using a gas mask so you wasted one slot you can’t use on frag grenades or a heart beat sensor. And this goes on and on.
So in that way it’s fun, as long as you your choices are permanent it’s all good.
Like Blizzard did with the heirloom items that can be used on all characters within your account? It would be cool to wear a hat or lucky charm that gave 10% extra xp points or something.
In fact, the worst thing about that scenario is the route cause - the feel that you need to swap around to be as competitive as possible because your characters are so niche to each class, or
Okay, that one nailed it for me as it is one of the most frustrating aspects of both ET games. The feeling of being ‘forced’ into changing your class because everyone else is behaving like sheep. Once you get familiar with a classed based shooter you rise to a new level of tactical awareness where you can anticipate the commonly used tactics by the other side. For example, I can’t be any other class than a soldier with a rocket launcher on the Quarry map, because nobody else will ever shoot that hog with fast planters that will ALWAYS come down the same route and clear the objective in the first minute of the game.
I’m sure I’m missing allot of things in these games that other people do see. But the point is that it always feels like you’re the one who has to sort out the mess created by others. A more common example is always having to switch to infiltrator because nobody can be bothered putting up a radar while still crying about in voice chat.
It’s mainly a problem that is the result of human behaviour, but I sure hope it gets smoothed out in Brink. Perhaps rewards that keep adding up every minute that someone does not work on a certain mission, so that when a job really gets neglected it will pay allot.
It’s just like the law of supply and demand: Quake Wars works with a fixed price for all objectives and actions. You didn’t get anything for deploying that radar except for the usual and the cease of complaints. It sure can be handled in a much more elegant fashion. Now I think about it, at the risk of becoming too complex, this can be worked out in great detail. Even points gained from kills or heals could accumulate the longer nobody has killed or healed someone, in fact, everything that has a reward can by dynamic.
[QUOTE=tokamak;196804]
It’s just like the law of supply and demand: Quake Wars works with a fixed price for all objectives and actions. You didn’t get anything for deploying that radar except for the usual and the cease of complaints. It sure can be handled in a much more elegant fashion. Now I think about it, at the risk of becoming too complex, this can be worked out in great detail. Even points gained from kills or heals could accumulate the longer nobody has killed or healed someone, in fact, everything that has a reward can by dynamic.[/QUOTE]
The only thing worse than something not getting done because everyone is too stupid/slow/lazy/inert is when it doesn’t get done because everyone is playing the system to get better payoffs. That bastard that sits in cover watching everyone die, just to get a few more xp. This obviously needs to be balanced quite well. There are lots of XP griefers. You do remember the team killers to get the objectives themselves, right? Those same people will have even less problems to sit back and watch.
Maybe best way to solve this is to give a % bonus to every mission you complete, which will accumulate. And those bonuses are higher for class specific missions. And they all will be gone, if you change class.
Some made up example
my first action as a medic is to revive someone, which gives me 20 XP, and 0.4 % XP bonus for all subsequent XP
now I kill someone, which also 10XP (0.4 % don’t really have an effect yet) and 0.1 % are added to my bonus, which mean now I have a 0.5% bonus.
after killing 5 more I have 1% bonus
now I do super awesome medic mission objective which gives me 500XP + 5XP from the 1% bonus
-need to change to soldier, now my bonus is reset 0% (and it probably costs me some money too, as far as I understand)
What will this do? It makes it more lucrative to do you class specific tasks, not only for that task itself, but for everything you do afterwards, and in contrast to you supply demand model, it doesn’t reward waiting. And it also doesn’t make it as lucrative to steal XP from other classes, than if you did what you are supposed to do. This may even be extended. Got an achievement? Short XP % bonus …
Don’t know if there is an upper XP cap, but once you reach it, all those incentives don’t work anymore. So there also must be things that cost you XP. Things like respeccing for example. Or teamkilling. Maybe even being voted off a server …
Wow guys. This is a fantastic amount of input you’re all producing. Keep it up. I don’t have time to contribute now, I’ll really want to sit down and let everything you’re saying and suggesting sink in.
[QUOTE=organon;196826]The only thing worse than something not getting done because everyone is too stupid/slow/lazy/inert is when it doesn’t get done because everyone is playing the system to get better payoffs. That bastard that sits in cover watching everyone die, just to get a few more xp. This obviously needs to be balanced quite well. There are lots of XP griefers. You do remember the team killers to get the objectives themselves, right? Those same people will have even less problems to sit back and watch.
Maybe best way to solve this is to give a % bonus to every mission you complete, which will accumulate. And those bonuses are higher for class specific missions. And they all will be gone, if you change class.
Some made up example
my first action as a medic is to revive someone, which gives me 20 XP, and 0.4 % XP bonus for all subsequent XP
now I kill someone, which also 10XP (0.4 % don’t really have an effect yet) and 0.1 % are added to my bonus, which mean now I have a 0.5% bonus.
after killing 5 more I have 1% bonus
now I do super awesome medic mission objective which gives me 500XP + 5XP from the 1% bonus
-need to change to soldier, now my bonus is reset 0% (and it probably costs me some money too, as far as I understand)
What will this do? It makes it more lucrative to do you class specific tasks, not only for that task itself, but for everything you do afterwards, and in contrast to you supply demand model, it doesn’t reward waiting. And it also doesn’t make it as lucrative to steal XP from other classes, than if you did what you are supposed to do. This may even be extended. Got an achievement? Short XP % bonus …
Don’t know if there is an upper XP cap, but once you reach it, all those incentives don’t work anymore. So there also must be things that cost you XP. Things like respeccing for example. Or teamkilling. Maybe even being voted off a server …[/QUOTE]
Ok, I’m not up to speed on Brink or what conventions from ET that might carry over, but mightn’t there be times when switching over is a sacrifice you make for the team because no one wants to spec that one spec you need? I remember times in ET where I’d much prefer to have stayed whatever it is I was having fun at, but I swapped out to the necessary class to get the obj done. In that case, does it make sense to penalize people for changing mid match?
Ok…I like that…reminds me of the “do you want to switch teams” feature in quake et…never worked because it was too little and xp really didn’t amount to much in that game…but I like the idea.
I guess in ETQW this was more of a problem, because often you had small teams, where not every role was present. In Brink, as I understand it, teams will always be size 8, the rest filled out by bots. So every class should always be there. And if of 8 people, no one has the right class for a map objective, they deserve to lose. And if it’s not 8 people, the bots will be what is missing. As long as the bots are good, this should be ok.
[QUOTE=organon;196826]Maybe best way to solve this is to give a % bonus to every mission you complete, which will accumulate. And those bonuses are higher for class specific missions. And they all will be gone, if you change class.
[/QUOTE]
Oh yes, I really like that. There are indeed hooks to the S&D idea, we indeed don’t want perverse consequences like people ‘playing the system’ to get more points instead of playing the game.
I was also thinking about how complex you could make these things. But if this sort of stuff is handled well and all tucked in at the background, then it won’t have ever have to bother regular players. Huge algorithms running on the background can be reduced to a ‘you receive more xp if you stick with your class’ tip at the loading screen.
So in that way the possibilities are endless and you really need to be careful not to let your solutions create bigger loopholes than the ones you’re trying to smooth out (like I did :p)
[QUOTE=tokamak;196894]An xp bar that is starting to fill, but only pays off if it’s completely full, and completely collapses again if you change. [/QUOTE]organon’s and your idea seems completely counterproductive.
You do want people to switch classes when it’s necessary! The problem with ET / ETQW was that people didn’t switch in the right situations. Forcing people to play the class longer will only work against that. “We need an engineer. Meh, but I want my xp and if I switch I loose them. Screw it, somebody else can do it!”
I misread his post and you caught me before I could edit it
You do want people to switch classes when it’s necessary! The problem with ET / ETQW was that people didn’t switch in the right situations. Forcing people to play the class longer will only work against that. “We need an engineer. Meh, but I want my xp and if I switch I loose them. Screw it, somebody else can do it!”
I absolutely agree with that, but organon’s idea for rewarding to stay with your class can still work .
What we’re trying to smooth out here is people arbitrarily switching classes. They should be free to do so, but if you stick with your class then you’re at least offering the rest of your team some certitude that benefits them and should thus be rewarded.
A system that rewards people to change classes should only jump in when there’s a severe need of that class. And when it does, the rewards can be more powerful then the ‘staying bonus’.
Example (the xp values are obviously made up, but meant to show how they compare to each other)
The objective is to blow something up and the team needs a soldier.
Switching classes will make you lose that 5 xp bonus you had going on.
Because the team has 0 soldiers, the first person to jump in will receive 20 xp bonus
The first guy who breaks the impasse receives a big reward
The team now has 1 soldier, if the second person joins in he will receive 10 xp bonus
At least it no longer has it’s hands tied to it’s back, so a second person to jump into the soldier class will receive a smaller reward than the hero who took the initiative
Two soldiers are handy, but a third soldier can still be useful
The third person who switches to soldier will receive a 5 xp bonus.
And here it’s where it gets interesting. Note that the 5 xp bonus equals the bonus for staying with your class. So switching to the third soldier won’t let you win or lose any xp, the transit is completely neutral
In this way the first two people to switch classes will receive a reward, the third will get a ‘free’ class change to soldier, while the underlying ‘staying bonus’ ensures the rest of team can keep fulfilling their roles and keeping the team stable.
Now this was an example where the team was lacking an objective class, so that’s double bad. But I can imagine you want all spots filled at every situation.
So the same reward system can apply to simply taking a class that isn’t played at the moment, but obviously the reward will be less (10xp, like the 2nd soldier) then filling a class that isn’t played but required to take the first objective.
I also wouldn’t worry too much about people not filling the main objective class when it’s needed, everyone wants to be the hero to make the touch down. The reward system is only there as an insurance to kick in when things go terribly wrong.
Which leads me to another big contributor to class imbalances and frustrating gameplay:
lemmings.
The most common tactic in QW is too simply take as many objective classes as possible, ignore all the enemies, and charge on the objective head on, keep touching it respawn after respawn untill the objective is done.
The bad thing about this easy tactic is that it usually can have two outcomes. Either it works and the lemmings gnaw trough the objectives bit by bit, turning the game into an elaborate version of Space Invaders. Or, because of the lack of supporting classes, the lemmings are too weak to get trough the first objective, the defenders overwhelm them and the attackers are pushed into defending. The attackers start to build turrets, deploy snipers all over the place and before you know it, no one is taking the defence class any more.
In Quake Wars pubs it’s usually the start of Valley that turns out like this. Either the mob of engineers throw themselves on the objective, complete it for 1% extra before getting blown up or shot in the head by a snipe, and still succeed. Or this rather senseless tactic fails and the frustrated engineers pick up a sniper rifle to get back at that bastard on the mountain who has ruined his moment of fame and sit out a sniper contest for the rest of the match.
I may have lost track in all those walls of text (haven’t read most of it tbh, seems to be a lot of repetition), but wasn’t the discussion to do with changing body type mid game, and NOT changing class? Since well, you can change class mid game any way…
[QUOTE=darthmob;196896]organon’s and your idea seems completely counterproductive.
You do want people to switch classes when it’s necessary! The problem with ET / ETQW was that people didn’t switch in the right situations. Forcing people to play the class longer will only work against that. “We need an engineer. Meh, but I want my xp and if I switch I loose them. Screw it, somebody else can do it!”[/QUOTE]
I undertsand that, and I have seen and experienced the problem. And it sucks to lose because of that.
Thing is, there are on 4 classes now, and it seems always 8 players, which will be computers, if filling up is needed, that always take the classes that are most in demand. So, if there is the proper class for a job missing in your lineup, despite you knowing the map, and knowing beforehand what you will need, or people simply refusing to do their job, then you deserve to lose. Use the classes that are needed on the map (and actually, there should always be every class on the map, this is not quakewars, where artillery becomes useless once the action moves inside). And encourage/lead/make your teammates do their job. Both of this should be encouraged far more than frequent class changing. Shure, it should be possible, as a last resort. But focus should definitely be on having the right team balance in the first place, and encouraging everyone to do their job. This is a team game, and team play it should be. Not guys sitting around camping, and one guy doing all the objectives.
Maybe one way to encourage to have balanced teams in the first place is, to have your XP devided by the number of people in your class.
I have seen it too often in cod4 , and in quake wars: if you are too stupid to go to those big colored triangles, with the big marquee letters telling you what to do, you deserve to lose. And if you are in a team that does that, and can’t make your team to do the right thing, you deserve to lose too, and may it only be some experience/money when changing class.
