Patrol missions, ganking, line-ships and rewards

[jodgi]

Ok, so the loss-induced propensity to bring big ships, friends and pile on the winning side has cast a shadow over the patrol missions. BR limits will help and maybe even fix it? The intention of the patrol missions is that players should feel free to bring an un-modded and cheap ship, do as best they can, sink but get enough rewards to make them not care about their loss. The big groups of big ships piling on makes it hard for smaller ships to do enough damage to farm rewards, at least enough to make the experience equally frustrating to a normal gank anywhere in the OW.

Sandboxers love to gank. They will tell you they love their freedom, role-playing, war-game or “playing it smart”, but they simply love to gank. Even reasonable guys are quickly turned to the dark side when the lizard brain kicks in and tries to avoid loss at all cost, yes, even to the point of having less fun.

There may be something we can do to counteract this, or give the lizard brain something else to knee-jerk to. We’ve talked about this loosely in the past but it’s never been tried: BR based multipliers. We could have variable multipliers applied to xp, cash, marks, damage or all of them but for the purpose of patrol missions I guess most players are grinding the damage thresholds.

The idea is to let the gankee get something from it while at the same time making ganking a truly inefficient way of farming rewards.

Let’s start with an example where one ship is ganked by three ships and two late joiners come in to, um, secure the win.

As it is today all damage is logged for all ships and rewards are based upon said logged damage. In my illustration the B-C-D gankers know they will have to share the damage but one of them is getting the kill rewards and it will be over quickly enough for them to go find a new victim. The victim will struggle to do enough damage to make it feel worth it, he will soon lose the ship, get sent back to port to buy a new ship, guns and repairs.

Let’s say we put a tag on all incoming damage. Ship A would have damage tags from ships B, C and D. The gankers would only have damage tag from ship A. Then we could make damage or reward multipliers based on those tags:

A multiplier: sum(BR-B, BR-C, BR-D)/BR-A = 450/200 = 2.25

B, C and D multiplier: sum(BRtags)/BR-B = 200/150 = 1.33

Notice how the gankers are even being rewarded for ganking in lower BR ships than their victim. It’s even possible to actively pulverize the gankers rewards by using the tags to indentify the gank, but it would get more complicated and I suspect it’s enough to give the victim a consolation price.

The late joiners, though inside the battle instance, don’t factor in as they didn’t get close enough to put a damage tag on the victim. If they did get some damage in they would get precious little for it while bolstering the victim’s multiplier: 1050/200 = 5.25.

If you want to enjoy your freedom and gank the shit out of people like a true sandboxer you can go ahead until blue in the face, but you will let the victim run off with all the rewards.

If you are motivated by rewards you’ll have a strong tendency to join the outnumbered side to get damage done and farm those damage tags.

[SKurj]

Likely won't be popular... but my suggestion is to not allow anyone to join the side with the higher BR...   and If grouped to not allow you to join at all if the BR gets swung too far in the other extreme..  but then that might lead to frustration when players see alot of battles but can't join for these reasons...

[jodgi]

Just now, SKurj said:

Likely won't be popular...

Why not?

1 minute ago, SKurj said:

not allow anyone to join the side with the higher BR... 

We've done things like that in the past and "sandbox freedom" guys defo don't like that.

[SKurj]

1 minute ago, jodgi said:

Why not?

We've done things like that in the past and "sandbox freedom" guys defo don't like that.

I meant my suggestion not popular.

Your suggestion, while it limits the rewards for the gankers, I don't see it being very effective for the simple reason that many gankers aren't in it for the rewards to begin with.

That doesn't mean I don't like your suggestion, I do

[z4ys]

Always wanted to go away from the fix pot size we have for so long now.

Sharing the full pot through all people reduces personal reward yes sure. But reward is although keeping your ship  + having the taste of victory. Considering that makes ganking the way to go.

In the one hand to make people fight outnumbered the profit has to exceed the personal pain threshold. In the other hand to make ganking not desirable the only gain should be personal victories.

Therefore i like your suggestion.

[jodgi]

1 minute ago, Wraith said:

Just bring back duel, small, and large battles with full or no no loss options

Patrol mission are there to get people into the OW, that's an overreaching goal now.

3 minutes ago, Wraith said:

Though, they developed Legends and no one played it.  That might indicate that fair and balanced really isn't worth the time to implement

I'm not suggesting anything fair and balanced, feel free to continue with scumbag sandbox stuff.

5 minutes ago, Wraith said:

doesn't require any new, convoluted RoE?

No new ROE here. The announced BR limits are, tho.

[Slim McSauce]

14 minutes ago, Wraith said:

But do patrol missions really accomplish that?  It takes what, a teleport to a port, buy trash shop ship, put some mediums on it, sail 5 minutes into zone and jump into the winning side of an open battle or tag some AI.  So we're chalking 5 minutes of OW sailing time up as a win for getting people into the OW?

My overarching point was that BR limits are essentially an attempt to make things "fair and balanced" on top of some silly new RoE that requires you to stay in a fight unrealistically as kill or be killed, when a large percentage of naval engagements ended up in sailing away or surrender and capture.

It's done more than anything else to promote PVP. People want objectives and missions and gripping fights. They don't want to search for an hour to find 1 guy who runs for an hour. That gameplay turns people away from the game. In DayZ you can dispatch people quickly who try to run away, in NA you get caught up shooting chain at sails through your bow guns, wasting an entire play session over one unresolved battle.

I bring up Dayz because that's the type of game OW hunters play.

Edited March 19, 2018 by Slim Jimmerson

[Trino]

23 minutes ago, Slim Jimmerson said:

It's done more than anything else to promote PVP. People want objectives and missions and gripping fights. They don't want to search for an hour to find 1 guy who runs for 30 minutes. That gameplay turns people away from the game.

No, that gameplay turns SOME people away from the game ... and i think these people are gone months if not years ago. The people that are playing the game in the last months mostly LIKE searching and hunting (proof: they are still playing). Of course most wished more life, more other players in the OW. So now we get the patrol zone which turn the game in some hybrid between OW and arena game ... 

Now we have an open world much more deserted than before and an arena where you have to do some sailing and logistics to find a fight ... what seems like a compromise is just a scare off of both player groups. And beside this: change of RoE in patrol zone caused balance problems that have to be solved, so we are just at the beginning of many new balancing rounds (=patches), much more complicated due you have to balance ships, mods, cannons and woods to two different RoE. 

Edited March 19, 2018 by Trino

[Slim McSauce]

25 minutes ago, Wraith said:

But dragging players into PvP'ing the way you want them to by making the rewards indispensable is a recipe for an empty game. We saw it in the past, we're seeing it now.

Nononono, don't go telling ME that I want to drag people into PVP missions. I'm arguing FOR pvp missions and not AGAINST ow hunting. I'm acknowledging that those are two  different styles of play, missions being akin to an MMO and hunting to DayZ.

"Indispensable rewards" That you can get doing either, so don't try to pigeon hold my side of the game on the guise I'm against yours, kay? If OW hunting was good on it's own we wouldn't NEED to promote PVP, it would just happen. Go to a PVP zone, PVP just happens there...and it's not just the meagre 10 pvp marks you get for damage. Players like direction, without it you get people wasting hours sitting outside safezones for their gank to come.

Edited March 19, 2018 by Slim Jimmerson

[Landsman]

4 minutes ago, Slim Jimmerson said:

If OW hunting was good on it's own we wouldn't NEED to promote PVP, it would just happen. Go to a PVP zone, PVP just happens there.

Pretty much all that needs to be said... all the clowns arguing about how this arena mode doesn't belong into NA and takes away from the OW "hunting" PvP really seem to play in their own parallel universe where NA has 2k players online around the clock and OW hunting / searching for good fights isn't just a waste of time. And people claiming that PvP zone is more about ganking than OW is just a steaming pile of BS, if I ever saw one... the reality is that the patrol zone just shows how people play in the OW but on a grander scale, so that really every idiot can clearly see it.

[Corona Lisa]

2 hours ago, jodgi said:

Sandboxers love to gank. They will tell you they love their freedom, role-playing, war-game or “playing it smart”, but they simply love to gank.

I love u.

 

On topic:

I also think we definitely need a system with a BR multiplier, but I dont think this one will work. The flaw is that it only counts which players I shot and which players shot at me. So I would go in, get shot from everyone and then focus one target only. If I kill it, I go to the next target, but not before the first one is dead.

So I can get an insane multiplier by focussing single targets while getting shot from everyone else in an equal battle.

 

Also Im the opinion that rewards for being outnumbered should stay the same and not get multiplied to prevent killing noobs infront of capitals. Its too easy to get crazy high rewards otherwise.

Main goal should be to make ganking as unattractive as possible.

[jodgi]

2 minutes ago, Jon Snow lets go said:

So I can get an insane multiplier by focussing single targets while getting shot from everyone else in an equal battle.

Maybe... On paper you could do that. How to get a lot of damage to be multiplied while running around getting shot by everyone, though?

[jodgi]

32 minutes ago, Wraith said:

so your perspective may be skewed

But yours isn't?

[Thonys]

it think The  new reward system in the new UI will tell us more

until  then we have to see what they come up with..

we are indeed in need of a good reward system that's for sure ,but also logfiles and a good integrated map,bounty system , better trees ecc..

all things we have to wait for first,i hope they have done a great job allready

until then i can't say anything about it..

i just wondered ,what was the last time we had a new ship ?and what can we expect of the new UI  

Edited March 19, 2018 by Thonys

[Corona Lisa]

43 minutes ago, jodgi said:

Maybe... On paper you could do that. How to get a lot of damage to be multiplied while running around getting shot by everyone, though?

If I feel confident that we win the fight I would intentionally not shoot for a higher multiplier and only focus specific targets. This kinda happens already in some fights, because you get much more for 1 kill than for 3 assists, so I focus the ship where I have done a lot of damage already if possible.

Why not just count the BR of both sides at the end of the match and multiply the rewards based on that?

[z4ys]

12 minutes ago, Jon Snow lets go said:

If I feel confident that we win the fight I would intentionally not shoot for a higher multiplier and only focus specific targets. This kinda happens already in some fights, because you get much more for 1 kill than for 3 assists, so I focus the ship where I have done a lot of damage already if possible.

Why not just count the BR of both sides at the end of the match and multiply the rewards based on that?

BR alone is a lie

[Corona Lisa]

Just now, z4ys said:

BR alone is a lie

Why?

[z4ys]

do you would consider 6 * (100BR) vs 1 (600BR) fair?

[Thonys]

3 minutes ago, Jon Snow lets go said:

Why?

i think we all better can talk about rewards for doing damage for both players

as a attacker and a defender , (at this moment the attacker who wins a battle has some joy ,but the loser get no damage reward at all ,and  that's not in balance..)

we need well balanced rewards  in a good reward system.

but we have no reference yet the new ui has still not arrived..

[Corona Lisa]

27 minutes ago, z4ys said:

do you would consider 6 * (100BR) vs 1 (600BR) fair?

Well yeah BR is not perfect but its a pretty good indicator and should work in 90% of the time imo.

20 minutes ago, Thonys said:

but we have no reference yet the new ui has still not arrived..

No offense bro, but this is a suggestion and if you have nothing to add why post?

[Thonys]

2 minutes ago, Jon Snow lets go said:

 

No offense bro, but this is a suggestion and if you have nothing to add why post?

oke, so now we have a reward for both player s allready ?

in the same post i sad .

"i think we all better can talk about rewards for doing damage for both players"

that's a new addition and suggestion  to the topic i think..

but i leaf you to it ..than, go ahead and make it a private conversation..

i dont care

[King of Crowns]

I think people just need to accept that they have a 50/50 chance of not making it back when they go into the pvp circle. ships being sunk is good for the game. the player base just has to realize that they are going to sink in these events. Ganks are not fun for anyone. but with the battle staying open for 30 mins there is no telling what is going to happen. there is no way to ensure that your going to have enough to get the job done before another fleet of players comes along and jumps in. 

[RaimundoJoe]

Why not limit the ship types, sailing in the Patrol Zone? Or maybe, provide the ship from the Admirality. @admin said "u need three runs to get to 10000 damage points". Well lets prove that theory, give every player that takes a Patrol Mission three ships to do with them as much damage as possible.
There has to be some type of mission control so players will only take the provided ships to the patrol zone.  With this layout ganking will still be possible but they will present more targets for u to shoot at...and in the end making as much damage as possible is the goal

[Lovec1990]

What should be done to fix this is:

Limit mismatch between BRs so one team will not have to big advantage.

On the other hand it would be more intrested if it would be dearh match and every joiner will join weaker side so ganking groups will ending fighting eachother

[HamBlower]

Maybe a easy and quick way for the devs could be to change evry day the allowed ship class. Nassau Patrol is limited because of shallow water, the three deep water regions could randomly change the allowed ship classes.

Most of the guys commenting wants a quick change. If the logic structure has a lot of dimensions, the coding is more complicate and the possible side effects has to be proved properly. I hope that allowed ship classes for players should be an easy way to read from the database and the coding for one restriction shouldn't be complicate.