Quote:
Originally Posted by Pudge
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easy solution, just give benefits to the lower-populated teams. i suggest +2 to each stat across the board for every 1% that a team is behind. ways to calculate this can get a little more complex with 3 teams, but it's easiest to just measure against the most populated team. (this means that the 2 lower-pop teams will have slightly more trouble fighting between each other, which promotes fighting against the zerg a bit more often)
Ex:
Team 1: 40% pop - 0 bonus
Team 2: 35% pop - +10 to all stats and resists bonus
Team 3: 25% pop - +30 to all stats and resists bonus
Now, wouldn't you choose team 3 if you held no allegiances? in reality, teams would never get this far apart, because any new players will simply roll on the less populated teams in order to reap the benefit of + stats.
Creative solutions. there is always a way....
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Brand new to project1999, but used to play on Sullon Zek (good) during Velious and Luclin. Anyway, interesting thread... for a team-based server setup I think it is very important (potentially even crucial) to have some means of balancing the lower populated faction. I think that balancing around stat points is an interesting idea--giving the underpopulated faction(s) basically some sort of stat compensation to make up for the gear they are probably unable to get. In that way, I think it offers a sort of partial solution to the problem, but not a solution to the overall problem which is population imbalance. Giving a faction better stats doesn't really explicitly encourage an increase in population for an underpopulated faction.
I think a more direct solution would be to reward the underpopulated faction with some sort of exp incentive. Exp rate *obviously* correlates with population, to a certain degree... but especially within a context of a given server. If one faction is getting rewarded more exp because they are incredibly underpopulated, I think it is safe to bet that newcomers will be at a CERTAIN ADVANTAGE to roll on the underpopulated force. This also would give incentives for people of the dominant faction to reroll, since leveling would be easier. Also, in Velious (or whenever AAs come out), exp boost starts directly correlating with stat increase as well, since those can be achieved with AAs. This sort of solution would help a server reach a population equilibrium more naturally than most others that I could think of.
Also, I will say that there was no counter-balance in place for population imbalance when I was playing on Sullon Zek. And I played on basically ... the extremely underpopulated/gimp faction, the goods
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] I still had more fun that I knew what to do with, and that's a large part of the reason why I just downloaded project1999.
Sorry for wall of text, but..
TL;DR: Exp incentive for underpopulated factions.