Battle Space.

[Dvalon]

will the losing sides of a match gain any bonus, xp, or faction ?

One of the major flaws in wow's battle system was that you didnt neet to win, simply login to a battle and sit on your hands for 10 minutes, let your side lose and you still got honor and tokens.

I hope that battle space in jumpgate does not in any way shape or form reward the two sides that lose.

[-Tikigod-]

I guess it depends how rewards are dealt out.

If there are bounty rewards of credits/xp even for the act of killing a enemy pilot, then of course even if you lose you'll get a reward at some point or another throughout the fight thanks to the soft grouping mechanic Hermann has described will be in place.

Last years builds showcased at conventions, showed that station attacks and similar were broken into 'segments', and early in the year at a convention (Can't recall which one, but it was a video interview), Scorch also mentioned that this might translate over to some of the battlespace situations so they are broken up into 'phases', such as 'Phase 1: Destroy the defense', 'Phase 2: Now destroy the shield core', 'Phase 3: Now go for the power core'.

So if there is also a reward to all who took part in accomplishing the completion of a phase, then it wouldn't matter who ended up completing all their phases first in terms of getting a reward.
The winner would simply get more reward then the other two nations.

What is the real question is: 'What is the nature of the reward? And how much do you get?'.

[Davidkg82]

Losers get an honour mark for WoWC, the greatest mark of shame.

[Malkiras]

Balancing rewards is always going to be difficult. It's not necessarily as simple as "the losers gain nothing" in an MMO. It's certainly true that awarding the losers a la WoW was a big problem as ****ers on either side would just AFK farm the instances to get their honour marks. But giving no rewards whatsoever to the losers can also be problematic. Often you'll be playing one evening and one side appears to be dominating, winning every match. Since there's no reward in losing to these people constantly, the other side simply stops entering the instance matches and no one gets to play. The special thing with JGE though is the three-way setup, where the underdogs at least have a shot at working together to take down the better side if both underdog sides manage some form of teamwork. This can still get problematic as one of the underdog may turn out to be weaker than the other underdog, and then these guys will stop queueing for Battle Space.

And in the end, if it's a 50 vs 50 vs 50 fight, it doesn't really make a huge impact if a couple of people on your side are AFKing. The rest may still be able to win. There's going to be multiple players on every side banking on it, so such a system would only give enough incentive in small-scale fights where going AFK is almost certainly going to mean defeat and thus no rewards.

Another issue with awarding only the winners is the slippery slope of gear progression - these guys are already better players, and now they gain an additional advantage in equipment, making it continually easier for them to win. You can't completely avoid some sort of slippery slope in any game where gear gives even the slightest amount of advantage, but it's possible to make the slope less steep.

What I like better than a "no rewards for the losers" system is a system that gives you rewards for "accomplishing useful things within the instance match". We can see an example of such a system in Warhammer Online. In this game the instanced matches are called "Scenarios". In these scenarios there are two ways to gain XP and Renown (a type of PvP XP). The first and most straightforward way is to win. Winning gives you a nice bonus chunk of these. The second way is to fight. When your team is fighting, you gain XP and Renown proportional to how successful your team is at defeating the enemy in skirmishes. And if your individual party contributes more than another party on your team, that party's members are rewarded more. There is also an "idle" debuff which you get while standing around at the spawn, which prevents you from gaining rewards, and if you are too far away from a battle you also don't receive any rewards from any kills done by your team there. What this does is that it gives everyone on your team an incentive to go out and fight, as it's the only way to be rewarded.

Is this a perfect solution? No. While it practically eliminates AFKing, the issue with this method is that most players are extremely egoistical and that mob mentality kicks in, making the team as a whole, very stupid. The result is often a big zerg of players running about trying to get kills, rather than doing important objectives that are integral to winning the scenario. The classic example of this phenomenon is Arathi Basin in World of WarCraft. This instance is setup with 5 capturable nodes. When your side captures a node, this node generates points for your team. The first team to reach a certain amount of points wins and gain additional rewards (500 if I recall correctly). The typical winning strategy here is to capture at least 3 nodes and post guards there to warn of incoming enemies, so the rest of the team can move in to protect accordingly. However there's no individual reward for guarding these objectives, plus it's extremely boring if no one attacks that particular objective, so frequently everyone ends up moving around in a huge zerg, leaving all objectives except for perhaps the one the big zerg happens to be at, undefended.

And even if some individuals are win-oriented enough to care about the match rather than their own progression or having fun, these individuals are rewarded for their valiant guard duty efforts by receiving the least amount of rewards on their team as they weren't getting Honour from all the kills the zerg was making.

So, ideally we'd want to reward people who aren't necessarily fighting, but are doing something that's useful for the team. Let's take the familiar BattleSpace instance with the 3 capital ships as an example. Some players will be nuking the enemy capital ship rather than fighting the enemy players. Nuking the enemy capital ship is GOOD for your team, and people doing that could therefore be rewarded proportionally to the amount of damage they've done to enemy capital ships. This means that players who actively aid their team rather than AFKing get rewarded somewhat, although not as much as the winners, plus they forego any special bonus reward for winning. This also notably reduces the slippery slope issue as well as the issue with players not queueing when they know they'll most likely lose.

Is such a system perfect? No, it's still not perfect - but I'd be satisfied with such a system, if rewards are properly balanced. If not properly balanced it will give problems as players will gravitate to what they feel give them the best rewards personally, ie. if fighting other players gives more rewards than nuking the capital ship, it can be an issue to find enough players willing to do the "inferior" job of nuking the capital ship.

One issue that's still remaining is that two groups of players might engage in fight over an area that's strategically unimportant, but these are still rewarded for the simple fact that they're "fighting". One way to prevent this would be to give reduced or no rewards for fighting enemies outside areas that are considered "important" by the game. An "important" area could be defined by a capital ship and its surrounding area. This presents a new problem, however - sometimes it can actually be a strategically good idea to fight outside the "important" area, but people who do so will receive less rewards. This will give people an incentive to take the tactically poor decision because of greed. I'm not sure this sort of system is really worth it.

One way to promote guarding objectives (a la Arathi Basin) would be to give rewards for "standing near a captured node", as this would reward people guarding the node.

Bottom line is that it's very difficult to get PvP instance rewards just right, which is why MMO developers struggle with them.

[-Tikigod-]

Originally Posted by Malkiras

Balancing rewards is always going to be difficult. It's not necessarily as simple as "the losers gain nothing" in an MMO. It's certainly true that awarding the losers a la WoW was a big problem as ****ers on either side would just AFK farm the instances to get their honour marks. But giving no rewards whatsoever to the losers can also be problematic. Often you'll be playing one evening and one side appears to be dominating, winning every match. Since there's no reward in losing to these people constantly, the other side simply stops entering the instance matches and no one gets to play. The special thing with JGE though is the three-way setup, where the underdogs at least have a shot at working together to take down the better side if both underdog sides manage some form of teamwork. This can still get problematic as one of the underdog may turn out to be weaker than the other underdog, and then these guys will stop queueing for Battle Space.

And in the end, if it's a 50 vs 50 vs 50 fight, it doesn't really make a huge impact if a couple of people on your side are AFKing. The rest may still be able to win. There's going to be multiple players on every side banking on it, so such a system would only give enough incentive in small-scale fights where going AFK is almost certainly going to mean defeat and thus no rewards.

Another issue with awarding only the winners is the slippery slope of gear progression - these guys are already better players, and now they gain an additional advantage in equipment, making it continually easier for them to win. You can't completely avoid some sort of slippery slope in any game where gear gives even the slightest amount of advantage, but it's possible to make the slope less steep.

What I like better than a "no rewards for the losers" system is a system that gives you rewards for "accomplishing useful things within the instance match". We can see an example of such a system in Warhammer Online. In this game the instanced matches are called "Scenarios". In these scenarios there are two ways to gain XP and Renown (a type of PvP XP). The first and most straightforward way is to win. Winning gives you a nice bonus chunk of these. The second way is to fight. When your team is fighting, you gain XP and Renown proportional to how successful your team is at defeating the enemy in skirmishes. And if your individual party contributes more than another party on your team, that party's members are rewarded more. There is also an "idle" debuff which you get while standing around at the spawn, which prevents you from gaining rewards, and if you are too far away from a battle you also don't receive any rewards from any kills done by your team there. What this does is that it gives everyone on your team an incentive to go out and fight, as it's the only way to be rewarded.

Is this a perfect solution? No. While it practically eliminates AFKing, the issue with this method is that most players are extremely egoistical and that mob mentality kicks in, making the team as a whole, very stupid. The result is often a big zerg of players running about trying to get kills, rather than doing important objectives that are integral to winning the scenario. The classic example of this phenomenon is Arathi Basin in World of WarCraft. This instance is setup with 5 capturable nodes. When your side captures a node, this node generates points for your team. The first team to reach a certain amount of points wins and gain additional rewards (500 if I recall correctly). The typical winning strategy here is to capture at least 3 nodes and post guards there to warn of incoming enemies, so the rest of the team can move in to protect accordingly. However there's no individual reward for guarding these objectives, plus it's extremely boring if no one attacks that particular objective, so frequently everyone ends up moving around in a huge zerg, leaving all objectives except for perhaps the one the big zerg happens to be at, undefended.

And even if some individuals are win-oriented enough to care about the match rather than their own progression or having fun, these individuals are rewarded for their valiant guard duty efforts by receiving the least amount of rewards on their team as they weren't getting Honour from all the kills the zerg was making.

So, ideally we'd want to reward people who aren't necessarily fighting, but are doing something that's useful for the team. Let's take the familiar BattleSpace instance with the 3 capital ships as an example. Some players will be nuking the enemy capital ship rather than fighting the enemy players. Nuking the enemy capital ship is GOOD for your team, and people doing that could therefore be rewarded proportionally to the amount of damage they've done to enemy capital ships. This means that players who actively aid their team rather than AFKing get rewarded somewhat, although not as much as the winners, plus they forego any special bonus reward for winning. This also notably reduces the slippery slope issue as well as the issue with players not queueing when they know they'll most likely lose.

Is such a system perfect? No, it's still not perfect - but I'd be satisfied with such a system, if rewards are properly balanced. If not properly balanced it will give problems as players will gravitate to what they feel give them the best rewards personally, ie. if fighting other players gives more rewards than nuking the capital ship, it can be an issue to find enough players willing to do the "inferior" job of nuking the capital ship.

One issue that's still remaining is that two groups of players might engage in fight over an area that's strategically unimportant, but these are still rewarded for the simple fact that they're "fighting". One way to prevent this would be to give reduced or no rewards for fighting enemies outside areas that are considered "important" by the game. An "important" area could be defined by a capital ship and its surrounding area. This presents a new problem, however - sometimes it can actually be a strategically good idea to fight outside the "important" area, but people who do so will receive less rewards. This will give people an incentive to take the tactically poor decision because of greed. I'm not sure this sort of system is really worth it.

One way to promote guarding objectives (a la Arathi Basin) would be to give rewards for "standing near a captured node", as this would reward people guarding the node.

Bottom line is that it's very difficult to get PvP instance rewards just right, which is why MMO developers struggle with them.

Shortened version: "What Tikigod said."



Seriously though, good post there Malkiras.

[Zombie #4]

*head falls off from all the reading*

Seconded, nice posts in this thread.

[Sygarth]

Actually, bottom line is that if you aren't PvPing for the fun of it you're playing the wrong type of game. Game assigned PvP rewards? You've got to be kidding me.

I would go on with the whole "reward for having fun" being nonsense but meh.

[Classicoke]

if it plays like an twitch-fps-action-skill-game, you should be rewarded for your skill and effort, meaning your team might have lost but you may still be top dog in points xp and epic loo.. i mean lasers. no fun going all out only to find the rest of your team are lolling into asteriods, ruining any chance of progression for you.

i played WAR alot (i mean ALOT) and while scenarios are coolio i dont like how they add, what seems to be, a flat bonus if you win. it should be like 25% bonus on what you already gained in the instance. that way you cant suck (or slack) but then still get a monster 6 + 6k pve and pvp points upon victory. no slacking!

[Allattar]

Hmm you could look at this as a sort of inverse tax problem.

With tax you tax items that people have to, or will pay more for. An example of which are cigarettes, alcohol, and petrol. Put more tax on those and everyone will just cough up more. There is no alternative to Petrol thats widespread and available, yet, but as soon as there is one, that'll be taxed to high heaven also.
Cigarettes are addictive, so if you smoke the choices are limited .
But if you taxed lets say chips, ok chips are nice but I could live without them. There would come a point where too much tax on chips just means the cost of the chips aren't worth it now.

Now when it comes to gameplay, you play the fun games for fun. Reward or not. Everyone will play those. Rewards are an incentive to do something. Now if something is really fun, with rewards everyone will get all the awards fairly quick. Now if you reward players for sometimes the not as fun parts of a game then you add an aincentive to do something that is either pretty difficult or lengthy (grindy, but grind = bad), or something that is monotonous. You build a reward to draw someone in as an incentive to something they are not going to enjoy as much.

So where did I get to.
If a game is fun, surely that is a reward in itself.

[F.T.Winston]

Nice to have everyone in agreement for a change

Some very good points here, I'd hate balancing this kind of thing to be my job. Excellent post Mykarth, and a very good point by Sygarth - this is a game, rather than a job, so playing should be fun. We should be able to play for the enjoyment of playing, and not just for rewards. Battlegrounds should not be a chore. So I guess the devs should design the scenarios in such a way as to do what they can to stop the most useful 'winning' tactics (guard duty on AB) being the most boring ones. Not that guard duty need be boring.