Faction Problems and Possible Solutions.

[Completes]

I tried to email NCSoft and offer some ideas to fix the unfair zergs of a single faction completely dominating the other faction. Personally I don't want to switch factions to make it "easier," but when almost every channel in misty woods has one faction camping and griefing players to kill them it's gone a little bit too far. I know a fair majority of the players have switched factions due to Blackwyrm, which brings me to my first idea

 

(1) Make Blackwyrm chest and Terror chests only obtainable 3 times a day, 5 times for the weekend reward chest; doing this will disallow one faction to farm it all day everyday and grief the runs of the other factions. This would also help to cut down on the bots who are farming the terrors the majority of the day. It seems that a lot of players have been caught in the factions and are holding space that should not be, which brings me to the second idea.

 

(2) Remove players who are not guild leaders from their factions when they have not played in more than 30 days; this would clear space, especially of the players who started the game at launch and have since quit the game entirely. I feel as though these two simple and easy fixes would make the game ALOT better in the term of faction quests in misty woods, and especially for the new areas coming out that allow soul stone farming within factions. Another idea that could come into play that could stop the constant spamming of bots would be.

 

(3) Players who are under level 20 can only send 3 messages every 10 minutes, with the exception of premium members; this would stop the constant and non-stop spam and make it a lot more manageable and allow players who are still under level 20 to get the help that they need. Another huge problem pertaining to Blackwyrm is for people who do not have outfits to taunt with their cat or their thrall. 

 

(4) Disallow Blackwyrm to become aggro'd to a player or familiar who is not wearing a faction uniform. Yes this will ruin the idea of taking off a faction outfit to avoid griefing, but the boss is a faction boss so if the other faction is messing with the run, let it become a zerg, they'd use their familiars to steal aggro and ruin the run anyways. Another huge problem with the current system is the quests that literally require the killing of other players.

 

(5) Don't include quests in the higher level 50 content that reward players for killing one another, or at the very least reduce the number from 10 to like 2. Most of their problems stem from Blackwyrm and the inability of one faction to do it, making everyone switch to the other faction to get the kills and rewards. Please help this post for a possibility of a fix to the current faction systems. It's late here and I cannot fully remember all that I wanted to say. If I remember any more of it I will be sure to post it here. The main points have been made to stand out for people who don't care about reading the explanations.

[AlphaPizza]

The only point I agree with is to prevent a Faction World Boss to be aggro'd by a player/familiar that doesn't wear its faction outfit, because it is impossible for the opposing faction to do anything to fight back, beside reporting the player and hoping that he gets banned.

 

For the rest, particularly 5), you may as well ask NCSoft to remove Open World PvP at  this point...

The point of having opposing factions is to encourage PvP, I you want the rewards of the faction dailies, you must accept the risk and having to fight for your rewards.

 

I do understand that on many servers the factions distribution are unbalanced and it is difficult for the dominated faction to do the dailies. But instead of removing the PvP incentive in a PvP oriented-game to fix that, they should just give the outnumbered faction better chance or better incentive for still trying to fight back.

Some game gives a buff to the outnumbered faction, in Guildwars 2 WvWvW, that was just a XP+Magic Find boost and no damage on your gear when you died (so you don't need to repair). But other games also gives stats (atk, def) boost depending on how outnumbered you are.

 

In BnS, that could be implemented that way :

• In a faction zone, the game count the factions players distribution in all active channels. If there is a global faction imbalance for a certain amount of time, the server gives the outnumbered faction (in all channels) a few bonuses :
  • A stats buff that scale on how bad the distribution is. The more a faction is outnumbered, the higher the stats boost get (up to a certain cap).
  • This buff could also apply on the NPCs of the outnumbered faction camp, thus making it harder for the opposing faction to siege the camp.
  • A bonus on the dailies rewards (more xp, more money, higher chance to get a good roll on Soulstones pouches)
• The buff is revoked if the global count become even and stay stable for a certain amount of time, but anyone that completed a daily (but did not claimed the rewards yet) while the buff was active can still get the bonus on their rewards.

Then there's the problem of bots filling up a faction available spots and messing up the numbers, but that should be addressed differently.

 

[DarkSkyBunny]

players would still grief the other faction by killing the people who are killing bw if they change the aggro/taunt feature.

[AlphaPizza]

That's not griefing if the opposing faction can kill the guys interfering. Again, this is a PvP zone, people are meant to fight for the bosses & dailies, that's only a problem when you're not wearing your faction outfit and that the opposing faction can do NOTHING to stop you from interfering.

[Zeream]

Why not just have a certain limit to the number of players of a given faction can be on a single channel?  For example, say max channel population is 30, so 15 cerus on one channel and 15 crims on another.  To prevent AFK griefing if players aren't inside the PvP zone or appear as afk, they're moved to an "afk" channel with their faction uniforms removed, or just removed from the Misty Woods zone altogether.

 

Of course, you still need the buffs you mentioned when the players are imbalanced.  Can I ask why you count global distribution, instead of applying the buffs by distribution per channel?  Wouldn't that be more balanced?

 

And yeah, I'd like to point out that part of the problem of doing "playercount" based actions is that there can be AFK griefers.

 

Maybe also a list of the number of people wearing their faction uniform per faction would be a good guide so you can avoid "bad" channels.

[Ringring]

The salt is real

[AlphaPizza]

12 hours ago, Zeream said:

Of course, you still need the buffs you mentioned when the players are imbalanced.  Can I ask why you count global distribution, instead of applying the buffs by distribution per channel?  Wouldn't that be more balanced?

If there isn't a global imbalance, I feel that just changing channel is enough of a workaround if your current one is dominated by the other faction.

 

I would also want to avoid the case where one faction control 80% of Misty Woods channels, and that in the 20% remaining channels where the other faction grouped up have to deal with a few empowered opponents (since in these channels, they would be outnumbered) who can mess up insignia farm/world bosses just by themselves (we know how efficient can be a few Destro jumping in when the Insignia bosses appear, red spinning the people farming to death in the confusion).

I mean, this scenario already happen with the current system, but just imagine the frustration of the already gobally-outnumbered faction that grouped up in a channel so that they can do there dailies/bosses, but they now have to fight buffed opponents even in that channel, this would just make things worst for them.

 

12 hours ago, Zeream said:

Why not just have a certain limit to the number of players of a given faction can be on a single channel?  For example, say max channel population is 30, so 15 cerus on one channel and 15 crims on another.

This would only work on servers where the factions distribution is already balanced. On unbalanced servers, this will give the dominant faction even more advantages : more channels (since they can't fill up all the spots available in the channel, the server will have to create more channels to compensate) which means more world bosses to kill and more resources to gather.

For the outnumbered faction, that doesn't change the fact that they will still be outnumbered in most channels, and now they can't group up in one channel to control it, since at best they will just have the same number of people than the dominant faction.

[piinkstrawberii]

the ratio of ceru to crim is ridonk when crim gets all the alts and bots! it pisses me off when i cant even finish my factions when ppl just camping... i went to tomen range to help a friend and there were level 45 camping out there... tis a sad sad pathetic site to see...