f13.net forums - Mythic concludes that /level 30 won't fix population balance

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April 23, 2024, 12:08:20 PM

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Announcement on the herald says they are giving up on /level 30 for underpopulated realms.

It seems /level 30 attracted tourists from other servers, but almost no permanent switchers.

New accounts (of which one has to assume a siginificant proportion are sodding buff bots) will have a specific low population server/realm suggested to them as they join the game from the next patch on.

This sounds to me a great deal like pissing into the wind. But at least they are trying.

How does PS try to balance realm population these days (or anything else with an RVR style concept)? Does it work?

Quote from: eldaec

This sounds to me a great deal like pissing into the wind. But at least they are trying.

/agree

I placed my raving about a possible solution at QT3.

This is like mythic waking up and noticing the world is round.

We all knew it was a stupid idea the day they announced it.

I have about 6 /level 30 characters on 4 servers, the highest of which got to about level 35.

If they had bothered to talk to any of their subscriber base they might realize that the treadmill just grates on people to the point that grinding it out again to get to 50 on a different server isn't going to solve the population balance issues.

Offering players an incentive to move to another server (a nice option for those level 50's seeing their old friends leave in droves) may have been a better idea.

Also the fact that most do the /level stuff so they can mess around in the battle grounds which is arguably the most fun part of the pvp experiance. If you are doing this to play in the battle grounds there is no reason nor incentive to really level up very high.

Kaid

After Planetside downsized from four North American servers to two, players gained the ability to play on two empires/teams/sides on the same server. There are three sides. Before, the rule was one empire per server, to prevent cheating and spying. Changing between empires is restricted to one switch per day. The ability to play two different teams on the same server has led to significant movement between empires. Players that do this regularly are sometimes called the "fourth empire."

Reducing the number of servers was a great change that led to a better game. The ability to change empires, unfortunately, has had regressive effects for the general community and negative results on individual outfits.

Players join the team that is winning at the moment, or has recieved the most interesting feature lately. This leads to unbalances in the power and numbers of each empire. My current outfit is having a fracas about a player that went and played with the enemy while being on our voice communications server.

Right now the game design includes a feature to penalize overpowering empires and reward underperforming ones. It gives and takes away experience-earned and starting-health bonuses, I belive. However this feature is based on the empire's power over longer frames of time (weeks.) It is unequiped to effect short-term changes in who-plays-where.

As you can see above, the developers are designing a system to balance over the short term. Whether it will work and what undesired behavior it will bring out remains to be seen.

I would not reccomend this for DAOC. The best way to balance the servers is to simply get new people to play the game! There needs to be real incentive to play on a underpowered server, too.

Mythic has announced the future use of instancing in the RvR. As I was proposing from a bit of time...

this is why pvp teams games are inherently flawed IMO.

You miss out on one of the most fun parts of GvG, the politics, alliances and backstabbing and you get stuck with people on your team you dont like and cant change.