Update from GMs

[Galacticus]

Originally Posted by Pudge [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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....

This could work but it doesn't fix everything. How can we prevent cross-teaming? Lets say the best guild in Team 1 wants to keep dominance so they ally with the best guild on Team 3. Now Team 2 has to fight the Guild with more people and better gear and the team 3 with better bonuses then them.

This happend all the time on Sullon Zek. The evil team would work with the good team to keep the neutral team in the number two spot and the good team would do it because they wanted to become number two and dont have to worry about getting killed by the evil team. This generally went on by the top guilds of each faction not everyone was cross teaming, but unfortunately all of the team depends on its top guild to do well for everyone.

It was illegal there to cross team there but you cant force people to kill someone they dont want to.

It kind of reminds me of the current 3 guild situation we have now except people can change and move guilds and they cant do that with teams.

If you really think about it, teams are just like forced guilds. Guilds on a team server are like guilds within a guild.

Whats the purpose of forcing people to commit to a team choice that could have negative concequences years down the line with nothing they can do about it but reroll?

[sunmilk]

Originally Posted by Pudge [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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....

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.

[Sirken]

Originally Posted by Pudge [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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....

i like where your heads at sir. incentives to join the #2 and #3 teams is a damned fine idea. keep the ideas floating. we arent always posting, but we are always reading

[Fame]

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[Aenor]

Originally Posted by Colgate [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

uthgaard dug a lil too deep into the mountain and awakened a balrog u no?

[Smedy]

I need to get the uncensored uthgaard story

[thugcruncher]

Originally Posted by marie [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

uthgaard told me and sam that he got booted from the team when he found out what rogean was doing. just gonna stop myself right there tho!

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[Drakaris]

The thing is with sullon zek, they tried to balance things by having pvp tokens to buy expendibles from apvp merchant, such as corpse summon potions.

You don't need to balance the teams with passive buffs alone, but you could balance it by offering more tokens per pvp kill for the underdog team and occasionally putting big ticket items on a random pvp merchant such as cof.

You could get sticks that had 10 charge harmony, or gift of nature, or even group dmf.

Plus you could increase the bard track amount to make sure all 3 teams had proficient trackers.

Just food for thought.

[Drakaris]

Also the problem with having passive stat buffs that make 1 team more op than another is that people would just create pvp rogue alts and use them to instagib players even more easily + plug.

They wouldn't contribute to the alliance they are on and just use them to gank the alliance opposite to their own.

For example, I roll evil. Nuets are equal pop. Goods are a major underdog. I create a good alt rogue, I mq an epic with the help of my evil guild. I get the rogue to a pvp bracket suitable for griefing. I hang around Nuet exp hot spots with a rogue that has +30ish all stats. I disc kill the opponents (if I'm 60).

I become a class A griefer and allow my mains faction to continue gaining new players.



The buffs basically should be more subtle. Allowing them to get more tokens for pvp kills and random big ticket items will give the underdogs a chance to get gear without raiding. Plus they will have more pvp targets making kill tokens easier to get.

[Smedy]

drakaris surely speaks lots about balance while being on the side who brings 70 to fight 20