New Devlog: Off-Peak Port Battles

[KittyMac]

Originally Posted by Rusty If you play (like most others) during the populated times, then you'll have more of a chance for port battles, just not a specific one.

That exacerbates the problem where there's not much point in attending a pick-up-port-battle. This further skews things in favor of low population nations, since the time "me and me boys" spent grinding a specific port becomes worthless with the time change.

Find some other way to get people into port battles other than contention points, and then maybe this system has a snow-balls chance in hell of improving things.

[Sir Trafalgar]

Once the system is in place can you guys post the peek times on the charactor creation screen so that people know what they are signing up for.

[Groovytunes]

Originally Posted by Rusty There seems to be some disconnect. We're pushing port battles away from 1am-6am. Assuming that I'm correct about that (and the graphs should verify this) do you still think that we're not understanding your point of view? As for the talking to you, this is why we're posting this. This change hasn't been implemented.

If the result is that battles on Roberts can happen at random hours between say 2pm and midnight "Euro" time... Then you have a deal sir.

I assume that in some way you would expect (and possibly seek) a natural migration to then occur, reducing the number of players playing on a server not of their timezone?

[Siege]

Originally Posted by isildur No, because I haven't created them yet. But I will share them with you before the system goes live, and solicit feedback.

The question no one has asked time to implement?

[Balcom]

I won't read through all the other feedback - I'll leave that for FLS to decide.

Since the attackers have the advantage, can we give them a voting choice on the preferred time slot during peak hours? I could see that being very difficult to implement.

One more advantage of a vote is that it would indicate your intention to come to the PB at this time. For people who just want to attend PBs, this might be helpful. Just some other thoughts to chew on.

I'm not crazy about the random time - I know of PB leaders who really only have time to hop on during specified times and so PBs are scheduled according to their availability. It makes it a little more difficult for these instances.

If I were to grade this idea - maybe a B+?

[Schneemann]

Originally Posted by isildur No, because I haven't created them yet. But I will share them with you before the system goes live, and solicit feedback.

Ah yeah when you mention it: When should this system go live? Days, months?

If you want to stop the "exodus" from Roberts you will need to provide exact times and the timeframe for implementation, otherwise this devlog causes at least more than less confusion at all.

[kazamx]

Rusty and Isildur. thanks for the replies.

I tend to write slow, and so I was referring to posts you made much earlier in this thread. My post was a little out of context by the time I hit submit taking into account the posts you made while I was writing.

[beltpouch]

So if I threaten to migrate to some other server will you guys post the new PvP devlog :-)

Just kidding, carry on :-)

[Gunhead]

Originally Posted by Rusty Oh, and someone mentioned poluation as well. We've mentioned this a couple of times, but it's always been in the future. I have a dev log about this coming out, but we've been waiting on 1.7 to start up all the marketing. We're going to do the following things: 1) Advertising - Gasp! Yes, you heard right, we're going to start doing constant advertising for the game. By "constant" I mean that we're not going to do one blitz for a few weeks, we're going to be advertising each and every month forever. 2) Free Trials - As part of the advertising, you'll be able to click on ads and get into a free 14 day trial. 3) New web site - the web site has been under redesign for quite some time, and is being split into a marketing site and a player site. We're going to do a much better job for both sides than in the past. 3) Buddy keys, which worked pretty well for us in the past. We've been waiting on 1.7 because of a lot of things, but primarily for the new tutorials because all of this has been focused on new users. So, when does all this start? 3.5 weeks.

This sounds very good, hope you'll attract a good crowd.

Though directly linked to the prospect of new players you guys at FLS do need to address the population imbalance as well and rather sooner than later. I don't need a crystal ball to be able to tell you that the distibution of new players will go close to as follows: large portion of new players will make a British toon, close runner-up will be Pirates and the new players making a Spanish or French character will be something like half and half of any number of new Pirates.

Thus the imbalances will only deepen which i assure you not a good thing for the health of the game on any server.

What would help prevent that would be to work a way to do a one-time-offer faction change for all present characters and introduce population caps to factions (something like if most populated nation has over twice more players than the least populated nation no new toons could be created for that nation).

Another way would be to do something along the lines Planetside did: put in a system where lower percentage factions gain bonuses related to the differences. In this game it could be sort of second, dynamic set of "underdog" rules such as increased doubloon, MoV and contention gains adjusted by the difference in population compared to the most populated faction.

Something like that but before there's a potential new wave of players.


Sorry to stray off topic but population imbalances and off-peak flips go pretty much hand in hand.

[Rose Temple]

You know I understand what you are trying to fix, but I think you're going about fixing it all wrong. Not that I plan on you listening to us, after 11 or so pages of writing you seemed pretty fixed that this is how its going to "fix" it, and other suggestions are comments are being ignored.

Simply put you say that you're trying to avoid a 1am to 6am port flip. Okay I can see that, but then why add the randomness to it where even if I flip a port aftera long long fight until 11pm I may now not be able to get into the port battle, or my whole society, because it now gets put on hold until 6am?

Why not just say, from 1am to 6am no ports can be flipped, and be done with it. If contention hits 9999 then the port goes into "hold" until the next open slot then its put out.

Why the randomness of + or - 3 hours? What does that solve? And why can't the Spanish and Rats fight a battle at the same time that the Brits and French fight a battle? Why should I as a Brit be penalized because the Spanish and Rats are going at it?

As mentioned before the issue isn't the times, but server population imbalance at certain times of day. Limit the participants of a Port Battle, insist that both sides need to have 15 eligable players online to have a PB, limit the opposing players to the exact same invites as eligable players on the defenders side, and then have at it.