Motivating defenders to fight against the odds (Keep sieges, Forts, Cities)

[Rubius]

This thread is a bit of a mix of feedback from others, all merged into one discussion about ways we can improve the experience for players on the defending end of a tough / heavily outnumbered fight. I've seen a lot of comments about penalizing people who swap sides or ragequit, but I'd like to focus more on ways we can positively motivate players to want to stick around / keep playing.

The current challenges:

- If you're heavily outnumbered, players may not even attempt to go defend a keep.
- If you're heavily outnumbered, players may not even attempt to go defend a fortress. (Or will swap sides for much bigger rewards)
- If you're heavily outmatched, players will often leave City Sieges in stage 1, dooming their team to losses in stages 2/3 that might have been good fights.

This doesn't speak for everyone, and there are strong players on both sides who will gladly fight on no matter what, but it's been clear that many people are driven by shinies and a need for currency.

Of course, we also don't want to just give people who are losing tons of free stuff all the time, but we also don't want them to just quit. "Against All Odds!" helps and is great if you are a DPS / ganker / in a small intercept group, but this motivates very specific players to intercept far away from the big fights. All this leads to:

Idea 1: Add a small amount of Gold or Purple bags, or slightly increase currency payout for Forts for the losing side

This can be done without going overboard on payout but with just enough of a possibility that players will want to show up. "We're outnumbered by more than 80? Well, what if I get lucky and win an invader piece? For two medallions either way, why not try?"

Idea 2: Progressively increase the amount of Purple / Gold bags for losing realms in cities as the Stages progress (Motivate people to stick around)

This second idea would add a small amount of purple and gold bags in for the losers in Stage 2, Stage 3, or both, for cities. Quantity is up to devs, but even just having that "chance" of getting a purple or gold, and the medallions with it, would be a nice motivation. For example, it could be adding a single purple bag for losers in stage 2, and a purple and gold bag for losers in stage 3. It's not a ton, but it's still something - a reason to keep getting contribution.

Idea 3: Don't reduce bag amounts given out in cities if players leave

Idea 3 is one I saw firsthand and it was a bummer. If players quit your instance, you actually get further penalized because even less bags go out. Let's motivate players to stick around even if they didn't win their first stage, and reward those who try to keep playing.

Wrapping up:

One area I haven't touched on here is how we could improve the experience for those defending keeps in zones against a huge zerg, and I'm hoping others in the responses might have some ideas! Oil used to be an (admittedly selfish) motivator for small groups to sneak in to a keep that was extremely outnumbered, but with the changes to that, it's largely a waste of gold now unless you have a force capable of holding the doors.

Anyway, happy to hear thoughts on the ideas above! These are just thought starters, so if others have concepts they feel would also motivate players to fight against numbers twice their size or more, please do share them here. Thanks!

[Amdus]

These ideas defeat the purpose of "trying to win". The problem aren't people wanting shinies, the problem are egomaniacs that can't take dying in pixels. That's why we have the classic desthrows on a daily basis, throwing keeps at third floor with only 20%/40%/60% AAO. It has nothing to do with reward motivation, you get rewards for defending if you contribute too, it has to do with the community and specially with destro.

Same reasoning applies to cities. People joins with wrong builds and get farmed. What do they do? quit. Even though there has been an NPC added to change your spec, people would rather quit the city instead of respeccing and fighting, because they think that if they stay they'll be "feeding" them RR. Like it matters. Destro has thrown so many zones in the past 6 months that I bet there are more than 100 order players below 70RR that already have a few sov items in the bank. Meanwhile destro throws zones and they are 80+ RR with full invader at best. Why def a keep and set up a proper funnel when you can just go third floor and blame "xrealmers" and "order bias"?

The imbalance of classes is only noticeable in small scale, it doesn't change anything in massive RvR battles. Xrealming doesn't change anything in massive RvR battles either. If you're trying to cap Eataine and there's a 300vs300 going on, 24 moving to one side won't change anything at all. So there you go with the classic desthrow excuses.

In short, this system would only make things worse imo.

[mynban]

Real problem is not about not wanting to defend, but rather cumulative effect of;

- it is completely pointless attempting to defend (actually defend not roam)
- it is so much more rewarding to just tag alongside the winning zerg
- if your side is losing it is much more rewarding to roam instead of defend

If devs change above 3, people will not want to tag along winning zerg, instead they will want to fight for a zone that is underpopulated on their side.

In current situation, since it promotes joining zerg, zerg simply gets bigger. If they were to change benefit to other side, people would want to flock to underpop side and things would be evening out before it even comes to reward phase.

/2cents

Quick simple formula to start thinking from;
MB = v * E / A

MB = medals & bags to be distributed after keep/fort (no more flat medals for participation, instead distribution of total amount of calculated medals)
c = victory or loss multiplier
E = how many enemies were on otherside
A = how many were on your side

With this formula fighting against overwhelming numbers is rewarded, and fighting alongside overwhelming numbers against small enemy has little rewards. This would change player behavior towards evening out scales.

[NSKaneda]

Best motivation to defend keeps/forts would be to stop zone throwing in order to get to the city. But that's not gonna happen soon.

[Ekundu01]

Unfortunately this is the design flaw with a 2 faction system that locks end game gear behind something like city. There is zero punishment for zerging and AAO is not enough to motivate most players trying to get kills and even if you get a few kills you still won't defend the zone if you are massively out numbered. You can't even get enough people into the keep to even try to defend when you are massively out numbered. Just this morning before I had to leave for work order was just zerging with Warbands steam rolling zones and destro who didn't even have more than parties showing in the zones. You just can't fight back to possibly defend the zone at that point and all you can do is try to snag a kill or 2 or go do pve or scenarios.

Hell diminishing rations doesn't even work right in some zones it punishes the under populated side giving you even less health.

No matter how they attempt to balance this out it will probably screw over some style of game play. If they can get diminishing rations to work properly you could make it a bit more harsh the for the zerging side. Along with making keep lords scale higher damage/mechanics when one side just flat out numbers the other side. This would how ever screw over small man roam because even if they aren't with the zerg they would be subject to lower hp pools. This could also easily be exploited so I don't think that would work.

Maybe add a special piece of siege equipment called the zerg breaker that drops bombs on the keep if you are out numbered by quite a bit that would need supplies to send in the bombs, turn in would be at the guy that lets you fly to the keep with a box. Bombs would one shot anyone in the area. This would force the zerg to split up and hold bo's in situations where they heavily outnumber the other side or else they could be wiped.

[Aethilmar]

So the entire game reward system is about gear acquisition for power (much like live). You get that gear by flipping zones to city. Easiest way to flip zones is by stacking population. Any counter mechanic that gets in the way of flipping defeats the purpose of the reward system.

In short, if you want to motivate folks to defend in the lakes for reasons other than lols or ego then you need to find a way to reward the top geared folks for their efforts. Otherwise city is inevitable (or Altdorf ).

[Tyrodan]

In short, if you want to motivate folks to defend in the lakes for reasons other than lols or ego then you need to find a way to reward the top geared folks for their efforts. Otherwise city is inevitable (or Altdorf ).

What about a special currency given for defending keeps / fortresses. Each defense, even unsuccessful ones, would grant some of the currency. The fiercer the resistance the more you get as a defender (a metric could be "amount of attackers died"), with successful defenses granting the most.

The currency can then be traded for a buff (like additional crit or dmg reduction) that lasts for a whole week, but eventually runs out. For endgame-content like city and ranked that buff would be mandatory, so even BiS-characters would have to partake in siege defenses. And since the buff runs out eventually, it doesn't hurt to defend some more keeps to stack more of the currency.

[Shogun4138]

When people shout out for help in Zones, there is not incentive to go.. Of you defend it or flip it, you did not contribute enough so you get nothing.

No reason to change zones and help. Except pride I guess.

[emiliorv]

So the entire game reward system is about gear acquisition for power (much like live). You get that gear by flipping zones to city. Easiest way to flip zones is by stacking population. Any counter mechanic that gets in the way of flipping defeats the purpose of the reward system.

In short, if you want to motivate folks to defend in the lakes for reasons other than lols or ego then you need to find a way to reward the top geared folks for their efforts. Otherwise city is inevitable (or Altdorf ).

THIS!!

You need to remake the reward system or remake the campaign desing...some wb leaders (NOT ME) gave some ideas here: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=45512


Some things that could help (IMO):

Remake the actual campaign...change the requirements for a City siege happen, for example (realm requeriments):
-Lock XX pairings
-Win XXX SCs
-Kill XXXX enemies
-gather XXXXXX honour (could be better to use honour points to avoid massive AAO imbalances or lowbie farming)
-Whatever you feel that could be a interesting requeriment

The realm which achive all requeriments first will siege the enemy capital.

Its only a idea....but with something like this you will:
-encourage REAL PvP: ppl need to kill others in order to get kills and honour points
-renew the interest in SC´s
-avoid massive poplation imbalances: without anemies to kill you cant siege
-avoid stalemate: campaign can still progress even with balanced populations

[Kloaner]

What about a special currency given for defending keeps / fortresses.

it will not work. why? because Players tend to abuse any System for their own Benefit, for getting more royals even when they already have 1k in their pockets. We have seen this before, we see this now and we will see this in the future. People cry about low population but do everything to make the game less fun for all, because they don't understand how small the bubble is in which we play and that everthing has an impact.