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The Whole Faction System is Stupid! Hence My Suggestions


Alter

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The inherent flaw in the design is pretty clear from the evidence that in every server (or almost every) it's always one faction that dominates the other in faction pvp, specifically SSP. I've read some comments which said that it's the community's problem and in Asia, they share blah blah blah. That is stupid. The whole point is to create a competitive experience that has both pvp and pve (farming) elements. But as it stands now, one faction always fills SSP and engages in mindless farming (like robots) while  the other is left disgruntled and many have gone offline indefinitely since server merge. These people are not just newbies; I'm in a clan where tens of them with 600+ AP have vanished since.

 

Here are my suggestions. 

 

0. Make 7 or more SSPs. So no group could occupy every single one of them.

1. Limit the number of players on each side in SSP. The problem is then that they could just keep on fighting and never settle, so no one could farm anything. 

2. So have some kind of competition/battle to decide who get to farm each SSP for the next 1-2 hrs uninterrupted by the losing side. But one side would then send spies to other side to mess this up. On top of that; what would decide which people in the winning faction get to farm?

3. The 2-faction system is thus stupid. Let clans freely form their own factions/alliances which fight each other. Each faction is then managed by players so spies won't be able to wreak havoc in a fair battle.

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The 2 faction system has its flaws in just about any game that uses it, this game comes closest to doing it right through use of a balance system that only semi-backfires due to the presence of bots and gold farmers that just inflate numbers allowing faction balance to get out of hand. This allows more of the "serious" players to all join the same faction and overrun SSP.

 

It is basically the community's fault when you see things in chat such as "SSP griefing ch1". These people don't even truly fight for it anymore, they just choose to mess up the other faction's mining. If they weren't such cowards they'd just come during the capturing phase instead. They say all's fair in war but is it too much to ask for respectful opponents?

 

More channels is problematic in the sense that the bots can just cycle through all of them provided that no capture/mining phases overlap and every player would be able to simply farm instead of fighting. Being able to fight anywhere is what killed massive open-world PvP for this game despite also making it less monotonous.

 

Faction based capping is probably the best idea from above but it's the most troublesome to implement. Note that you never actually need the faction outfit on to just enter SSP since you can run in without any sort of portal. Faction Dragon Pulse is quicker but strictly optional.

You only need it if you intend on fighting, this would mess up accuracy in the numbers a little since even though your character page indicates you faction you can choose not to wear your uniform until you start doing any quests there.

Your other problem with this is accounting for players that are counting in the influence but go AFK (a lot of help those players are :P). A player that's in a PvP zone but not helping out is as good as one that's not even there in the first place.

 

There technically is a battle to determine who gets control of an SSP channel: the capturing phase. The point of the phase is this: whoever kills Konta/Suljun quicker gets control over the 30 minute or so mining phase in the sense that you can buy soulstones with prestige and have to protect the drillers. As I mentioned before, you just don't see that much of a fight over capturing anymore depending on your server.

 

Clan based SSP would be a nightmare. It would turn SSP into the place where small clans go to die since they absolutely need help from the bigger ones in order to get anything.

We're already getting a small-clan graveyard in Q4 with the 24-man Legendary instance Midnight Skypetal Plains, things are gonna be chaotic enough when that comes out.

The large clans don't even need to seek alliances with smaller ones, it would basically turn into a monopoly through all the large clans working together possibly mixed with oppressing the small through breaking alliances just to get the rewards for themselves.

 

If you ask me, the best plan is to make SSP work more like a 24-man instance adding in a faction based cap and regulated entry as well as removing any way of getting to a new channel without hard-capping the lowest numbered ones first (even taxi methods will need to be put in check to make it work).

 

I like the intent of SSP, but I can see why it just doesn't work in the West purely due to greed. One faction dominates simply because it's the most effortless (laziest probably a better term) way of getting soulstones from it. The losing faction can just harass the winners with the rationale "if we can't have SSP, nobody can".

 

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Would you rather have few small clans die or would you rather have an entire freaking faction, which is about half of the population, die? Weak clans losing is EXACTLY WHAT COMPETITIVENESS MEANS? Do you propose a gameplay where everyone gets what they want and no competition is involved? For crying out loud, this is a pvp content. And if you suggest another pve content where people could farm; I'm not debating it.

 

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If you ask me, the best plan is to make SSP work more like a 24-man instance adding in a faction based cap and regulated entry as well as removing any way of getting to a new channel without hard-capping the lowest numbered ones first (even taxi methods will need to be put in check to make it work).

So I assume it's 24 vs 24? What about one faction sending dummies to the other side so that they could win?

 

And when you blame the faction imbalance on players' community, then how does "design" play one of its roles? A good system MAKES players gravitate toward an intended outcome and not leaves every stuff to chances.

 

The reason the losing faction (e.g. mine) doesn't put up much of a fight BECAUSE even when they have gathered enough forces to successfully drive the other faction away, they still cannot farm anything as the second would just gather all their forces from other channels for a comeback. It's ridiculous.  When you have 2 factions, it's inevitable what one will be stronger than the other. What are the odds that THEY ARE BALANCED? Pick 2 numbers at random, what is the probability that they're equal. IT's zero in continuous distribution and almost zero in a large discrete space. I don't see any SMART mechanism for ensuring 2 factions are balanced either.

 

Even if 2 factions were exactly balanced, they would either fight all day long and no one could farm anything, or one faction would hog 1 channel while the other a 2nd channel. It's still ridiculous. Where would the pvp part be in this?

 

I don't see a point in this game being an MMORPG anymore. Everyone either farms SSP or grind dailies/dungeons to death. I may as well switch to a game on steam where I could do 1 vs 1 battle just like arena, with heavenly fps, graphics, and awesome combat mechanics; and no leveling is even needed.

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Next time you make a counterargument against me, make sure to read my post multiple times to let it sink in.

 

If you did that, you'd notice that my quote meant more as an instanced area (it just so happens all the open world instanced areas are 24-man "dungeons" but I think the hard cap is actually around 30 people).

 

"A few small clans" can kinda add up. With what I'm seeing on my server that can be worse than an entire faction quitting. It's ok to be competitive but when clans with power have a chance to stay permanently in control of it even if they have to stomp on the small, I'm sure they will. Players from small clans would either be forced to kiss up to larger clans to let them in or quit, and no one wants to be subject to that kind of decision. There's a difference between having a chance and never getting one at all, that's why allowing niche clans to die out due to "competition" is a bad idea.

 

Define what you mean by an intended outcome, if you're whining about RNG then don't play this game since it's probability heavy.
 

1 hour ago, Alter said:

E The reason the losing faction (e.g. mine) doesn't put up much of a fight BECAUSE even when they have gathered enough forces to successfully drive the other faction away, they still cannot farm anything as the second would just gather all their forces from other channels for a comeback. It's ridiculous.  When you have 2 factions, it's inevitable what one will be stronger than the other. What are the odds that THEY ARE BALANCED? Pick 2 numbers at random, what is the probability that they're equal. IT's zero in continuous distribution and almost zero in a large discrete space. I don't see any SMART mechanism for ensuring 2 factions are balanced either.

ven if 2 factions were exactly balanced, they would either fight all day long and no one could farm anything, or one faction would hog 1 channel while the other a 2nd channel. It's still ridiculous. Where would the pvp part be in this?

Of course numbers won't exactly be even, but I'd rather have to fight off 5 extra people than 20. That's the rationale of the faction balance system, anyway.

If you don't like open world PvP, go do arena instead and I'll see you back on here when you can't even hold your own in 1v1.

All you have to worry about in arena is pairing up against a class you hate but if you're good it won't matter how annoying your opponent is especially when stats are normalized to an AP of 390.

What's wrong with 2 factions locked in battle all day and not farming? Sounds a hell of a lot better than SSP griefing.

If you just wanted loot all along, dungeons are better by a long shot since a full run of all the Heroic dungeons can net you at least enough gold for 100 soulstones or a handful of moonstones each day (not much at first but it adds up over a couple weeks or so). Not to mention the right drop if you do a 4-man instance. A single offal paid for all the Moonstones I needed for True Breeze and a Sealed Taikhan Skin could almost net me Scorpio.

 

If you're gonna quit, then quit without saying a word. You probably don't have a lot of people to play with anymore if so many of your clan went missing.

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So what's your suggestion for balancing the factions? making it 24 vs 24? What would you do about 1 faction sending dummies to fill up the other side?

 

There's no thing wrong with 2 factions fighting all day long and I didn't oppose it; it's just a remote possibility that I had to mention. But this will most likely never happen. One faction would hog one channel and the other another channel if you managed to approximately balance the factions. It then becomes just purely farming again.

 

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If you just wanted loot all along, dungeons are better by a long shot since a full run of all the Heroic dungeons can net you at least enough gold for 100 soulstones or a handful of moonstones each day (not much at first but it adds up over a couple weeks or so). Not to mention the right drop if you do a 4-man instance. A single offal paid for all the Moonstones I needed for True Breeze and a Sealed Taikhan Skin could almost net me Scorpio.

What part of my post led you to even suggest that loot is all I want when I was opposed to farming a pvp content without any actual pvp?

And why do you think I whine about RNG? What the ... Did I mention RNG anywhere?

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If you don't like open world PvP, go do arena instead and I'll see you back on here when you can't even hold your own in 1v1.

Another WTH, and I'm lost as to which part of my post helped create this assumption. My complaint is that there's very little to none open world pvp at all.

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The main thing is, any attempt to fix SSP has to not only fix the issue, but needs to also be easily implemented (since NCSOFT West probably doesn't care enough to totally revamp SSP). Therefore solutions I have considered viable hinge mainly on changing loot. 


I don't think factions are an issue, I think laziness (aka switching to the dominant faction) is the real issue. To that end, I think an approach that provides incentives for loyalty and punishes treachery would help stop further imbalance. Something like having the CD for switching sides to be a longer period of time, like a month. Maybe having a week long debuff called "Traitor" where the person receives a 50% decrease to faction points they earn. 


As for the current imbalance, I think providing greater rewards for contesting SSP would help bring people back/balance the situation out. If you're not the dominant faction, unless you can farm the miners,  there's no point in going to SSP since you'll make much more money running dungeons.  To that end, perhaps NCSOFT could buff the chests the miners drop (guarantee one moonstone or something) and make the drops from the drills global. At the same time, to make capturing/defending not feel like a total waste of time, make the Unbound terrors drop 1-4 key fragments (use 10 to make an ssp key). This would also discourage people from channel hopping to farm Grindtooth as there would be incentive to something other than afk wait for him.

 

Implementing these changes would go something like this:

1.) A week or so before they would be shipped, NCSOFT would announce the changes to SSP. This gives people time to figure out what faction they want to stay in.

2.) People switch to the faction they want to be in

3.) SSP happens and hopefully it's not completely one-sided


but lets be honest here. NCSOFT hasn't even bothered optimizing SSP for us. SSP probably isn't going to change a bit. 

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