First off I want to thank the staff at HWS for all the hard work you put in. HWS 8.0 looks to be amazing. I want to talk about a couple things from HWS 7.0 that has me concerned going into HWS 8.0.
Epic’s Not Being Crafted and POI Regeneration Rate and #
So epic’s won’t be crafted anymore. I am completely ok with this. The issue I have though is that the changes made to the POIs from HWS 6.0 to HWS 7.0 made a lot of us in my circle not want to run the POIs in HWS 7.0. It took like 3 days if not longer it seemed for the POIs to regenerate. So if we did get to them first it would be 3 days before we could check them out again. A lot of the time they were on cooldown.
Solution:
Make it so that the POIs regenerate much quicker. There a lot of people out there looking to do them and play on the server because of them. I know we had 4-5 guys who all they liked doing in HWS 6.0 was POIs and because of the changes quit playing in HWS 7.0 after about a month.
With the larger planet sizes we should be able to put more POIs on the larger planets. #MakePOIsGreatAgain
The major issue and the one I am most concerned about is the limitation on small factions versus large factions. The OLP being factored on Alliance online instead of Faction online will go along way toward fixing this however there is one other major issue when it comes to balancing large factions versus small factions.
3 factions of 40, 25, 25 can only have 9 towers on GG total while 10 factions of 3 can have a total of 30 towers. You can see how this is very unbalanced. As you can see a Alliance of 90 people have 9 towers and a Alliance of 30 people can have 30 towers. I understand the reasoning behind it so larger groups can’t easily overwhelm smaller groups but the current way its being done is being taken to the extreme by some.
Solution:
Instead of doing the numbers by Faction do the numbers by Alliance. That way a Alliance of 90 isn’t penalized for having a larger playerbase and the smaller groups aren’t penalized for having smaller numbers.
For every 5 members in your Alliance you are allowed 1 tower on a PvP world. This number is capped at 12 towers. So the 3 faction 90 man alliance will have at most 12 towers. The 10 faction(5 members on average each) 50 man alliance will have at most 10 towers.
I think even smaller groups can hit the required 60 members to get the maximum 12 tower cap.
I also forgot to mention these are active members. If you have 60 people but only 30 are on the previous 7 days you only get 6 towers for the next week cause you had 6*5 active players. So that stops large groups from getting a bunch of inactives to inflate their numbers.
I like the direction this is going. Caps are good for everyone and it allows people to play the way the want to without pressure of joining a large faction. I like large and small factions so not being biased here but this would allow a more balanced gameplay.
Just so people are aware what I am talking about. An Alliance that was half maybe one third the size put down 25+ towers while a Alliance twice if not three times the size were able to put down 9-12.
We need BA caps based on Alliance numbers and those numbers to be based on active players!
One thing you will still run into is that even though your alliance of 90 players, there is still the limit on the amount of SVs/HVs you can use on GG. We were an alliance of smaller factions, and mind you I am not against a limit of alliances. The prior season it was the same scenario but the opposing alliance had control of GG, and nothing happened to change that meta.
And I’m all for POI increasing regeneration between looting.
I think your biggest issue here is defining your term “alliance” in a code-able format. You cant just say any cluster of allied players, because each alliance is a seperate decision between each pair of factions. So faction A can be allied to B and C, but B and C can be enemies. What would that do to the limits for factions a, b, and c? Also, what is to prevent one faction from placing more than their share of this hypothetical maximum number?
Finally, you try to compare small factions to large. While it is a valid concern, you then say
I personally built a trade empire from a group of almost always less than a dozen individuals. If you are saying that a sixty man faction is achievable, or even a good idea in most cases, you are sorely mistaken. If you mean that number in an “alliance” group, then we wind up back at the start, where we cannot define what that means. Closest thing you can say is using an entire origin.
Personally, I absolutely hated the developing meta of splitting factions into smaller ones that are allied, in order to circumvent server limits. In fact it was one of the reasons that I took a break from Empyrion this past season. I prefer the idea of a group of people just outright acting like a team, and working as a group. This is obviously specific to the idea of splitting large groups into smaller, not allying up with other groups with similar goals, as I myself have done in the past.
I dunno. Its a bit of a sticky topic though, to be sure.
That comment you quoted was in reference to smaller groups saying we cant ever hit the cap. Not that it would be easily feasible or all people would want to do it. Just that it is not out of reach for a group of smaller factions to hit cap.
Gotcha. That makes sense. Im just having a hard time thinking of a way where you could enforce any limits outside of factions, or origins, atleast with the alliance system as it is.
Mentioned it elsewhere, may be worth repeating here.
I think the loot quantities should be revisited (loot was reduced) and possibly increased.
Taking the risks, time, and incurring the costs to conquer and loot a POI, in some cases seems like it’s no longer worth the effort for the loot gained.
I like to run POIs from time to time as well, daily regeneration would be fine i guess…
About factions… those small faction bases no matter how numerous can be overrun with bunch of HV/SVs from bigger faction. Limits does not matter much in this case since bigger faction will have ppl recycling and preparing new equipment on fly. They were made mostly because of performance issues.
Regarding POIs:
It’s again little bit bigger than just rage quitting about long cooldowns.
The thing is that our own, modified HWS POIs have insane loot here and there and once you know the pattern how to capture them (each of them has) it’s “easy”.
I know some players personally that know these patterns and looting these POIs as doing daily breakfasts.
They even have set a timer when the POIs refresh again to be able to loot them fast.
It’s tricky because people who focus on POI raids they always win, so to speak. But for more or less occasional raiders it is either on cooldown or way too difficult.
That is why I have implemented the Mission room in EGS HQ, which some don’t even know still…
The cooldowns there will be adjusted for sure but that way everyone has fairer chances.
I mean in general I am totally lost to be honest. On the one side I couldn’t care less if some guys farming his pockets / OCD to death but on the other side I somehow fear this and think these players are bored then. Isn’t it human nature that greed and abundance is the root of boredom?
My goal is that you always can have fun on HWS, always have something to do. A late game we worked so hard for.
But maybe I really should just don’t care… set regen timer low everywhere and so be it.
What do you think?
Regarding the limits:
We learned a lot from the past and try to improve it for HWS 8.
I think the common general disclaimer should just be that a Solo guy faction can never compete with the big factions.
Alliances however are the challenge for us for sure.
What will help logically would be at least minimizing the area of effect of Alliances with the already available setting:
# False will not allow any alliances with or join to factions from other Origins
OriginAccessOthers: true
HWS is the only server where Origins really matters in a large scale. We have set this to true since the whole system got implemented in Alpha 5.
It has pros but also cons. Maybe subject of change in the future.
Personally across all the people in TAW, ABN, ACP and other friends I haven’t heard anyone say the POIs are hard. As a matter of fact their mostly very easy to run. Just that compared to season 6 they seem way less worth doing. Its not about rage quitting. Its about being bored or going around and finding them all completed. If you waste your time or get bad loot from a bunch in a row you’ll stop doing them because its not fun not because you rage quit.
I think it would be awesome if the regen timer was higher but the POIs were like insanely hard to run.
As for the POIs I realize you have a lot of stuff on your plate for 8.0 launch but its just something to consider looking into in the future. Maybe even have a contest like you did with the Bunkers and let people create insanely hard POIs that have better loot and shorter regens to implementation in 9.0.
(but common, the loot in HWS 6, 42 Auto Miner Cores in the HWS Lava Bunker POI, that had to be nerfed :P)
Regarding the Alliance Limit… too early yet to announce it in bigger scale, still testing but Jascha did some magic again…
So actually we have a THIRD limit layer on top of the local pf and global limit now.
The “Alliance Base limits”! (for now only for Bases)
So quite exciting… if we say 10 Alliance bases in the tool for Golden Globe for example it means 10 Bases for your faction and your alliance factions are allowed. Pretty easy.
No matter splitting 30 member into 3 x 10 or having a 40 member faction. If the 3 x 10 guys are allied they also can only have 10 Bases.
Hmm this reminds me of the whole issue i had in the OLP discussion.
’Too many solutions’ being proposed at once.
In my honest opinion we should wait patiently for 8.0 instead of trying to do anything too radical or extreme and if this becomes a problem it can then be adressed then.
Think of it like a science experiemtn: You change too many variables (things) and the experiment becomes meaningless or impossible to reach a conclusion. It’s the same with PVP; it’s multi-layered.
That is nice… Any plans to add stricter limits on hv/sv to reduce lag. Currently GG is broken and impossible to contest because of massive lag problems.
