Modes The Solo vs Open vs Groups Thread - Part the Second [Now With Added Platforms].
- Thread starter Robert Maynard
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I do not want anyone to be forced to play where they do not normally play (or feel that they are being forced). If this was an issue where Open was more effective, to the level we saw in Lugh, I would be just as supportive of those in Private.
Personally, I just want equivalence between the modes...just work it out so that those in Open do not feel compelled to play in private modes to win goals like we saw in Lugh. This, as far as I'm concerned, is a very defined issue that is a subset of the overall Open/Private mode discussion.
The ideas I like are in no particular order are:
1. Making a small buff and debuff to contribution, give Open a little extra contribution, take a little from private mode. This does not change any of the rewards for those participating...it just changes how much the contribution each mode makes to the overall goal, with the overall way the system works like a black box...no one would be the wiser.
2. Another way to handle this, albeit more heavy handed, would be to remove friendly fire from CZ's in Competing, race type Community Goals. This would remove the inherent problem, but would also move the game closer to a PvE game....otherwise the devs need to look at valuing the PC kill as a higher contribution value to the overall goal. These should not change the reward levels for people...just how hard they can push the goals from the various modes.
3. Avoid Competing/Race type community goals.
I am not a designer and these suggestions are pretty ham fisted. There were some other, more elegant ideas in Part 1. I am sure the devs are considering even better ways to deal with this.
I do agree that in any other situation, the Private modes have very little effect on Open, as due to random players playing randomly, they should cancel each others activities out.
However, in the case of large groups, working in concert in Private, against an Open group is worrisome. Currently, the player groups I am aware of that have carved out places for themselves, are making nice. There are no turf wars...everyone is, generally, leaving each other alone. I am uncertain as to how long this will last. In Lugh, we have, historically, had people working against us in Private mode. We accept this as part of the game, and plan accordingly. However, as groups get more organized, and larger, there will be issues ensuing from this...this emergent gameplay is coming...it just hasn't caught on yet.
This last point is something that people need to come to terms with. Just because a person plays in Private modes, does not mean they are playing by themselves. They are playing along side everyone in Open...they just do not see them. In many cases they are actually embroiled in PvP. The Private players do not believe they are, however, in this game PvP is not just about killing other players. It is about being able to undo someones work, for some of us, months of work, and never have to worry about being blamed, caught, or fought with. A large enough group can undo months of play in just a few days now...a week on the outside. Whether you feel this is fair or unfair doesn't matter, as this IS the design that the Devs have created. These outcomes, although expected, will still be painful for Open players to deal with.
So, there's your answers! I just want this game to succeed. So does everyone else on these forums. Unfortunately, this game is different on so many levels, that people (myself included) have problems getting their heads around what the game is supposed to be and where it is going.
The problem with the CG isn't the guys who play solo as well they play solo so you would have to assume they are not coordinating with any one. It will be those in open who coordinating that decide en mass to move to solo to ensure victory.
With 1.3 it could be a huge deal..
What is there to coordinate? You only have one option. You participate in the task or you don't. If everyone in Open actually took part in the task instead of worrying about stopping others taking part in the task then there wouldn't be any problem. It wouldn't matter where it was done, only how many do it.
Blockading is not supported. It has several failings and mode swapping is only one of them.
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what DB say about that do u know?.... solo...oppose solo ...what ever that means
Points taken and well made. + Rep for a respectful, intelligent, and thoughtful response.
But, yeah, the ideas I presented I don’t think will completely balance the modes and make them as fair as possible. I do think some of those ideas would lead to a fairer, more balanced system, but they’re not facts- they’re just ideas supported with some evidence and a lot of personal experience and observations of Elite Dangerous. The Frontier forums is one reason I am convinced there are quite a few folks who bought the game to play online, but quit or go to Solo because of their bad Open experiences. I see such posts every day in the Frontier Forums, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe there are people who would play Open if it were improved.
Concerning your comments on Open getting higher payouts and such- you make really good points. With bonuses, I think fairest way to do it is to give the bonus upon turning in vouchers, bounties, bonds, and selling commodities. I believe a bonus for playing in Open is fair no matter the amount of players an Open player encounters. The bonus is because of the general idea that playing in Open yields a risk in itself. When I go to play Open I don’t know if I’m going to see no commanders or several dozen throughout my adventures. But when I click on Open, I have to accept the fact that it is riskier because that potential to deal with human players is real. I might sail on through as if it was Solo, or I could end up getting attacked by Elite pirates.
On the other hand, you made another good point about commanders being worth more than NPCs in combat and bounty hunting. We would have to find a way to minimize exploits, though. Perhaps when a player kills another wanted/enemy player, they won’t be placed in the same instance again for some time. Or Frontier could look for players who kill only each other, back and forth, just to get endless bounties with bonuses. It wouldn’t be such a difficult thing- they already keep up with what we do to find combat loggers. Just set it up to where it alerts the appropriate folks at Frontier that two players are exploiting the system by killing each other again and again. And Frontier decides what actions to take.
Thanks for the critique, though. Great ideas are rarely great right out the gate- great ideas can only be forged through criticism and debate. Who knows, maybe we’ll end up coming up with a really great idea through these debates
Anyways, I’m pooped out after responding to all these comments. Thanks to those of you who criticized in a respectful, intelligent, professional manner. I really appreciate having an actual debate.
And now, I have a fresh, new episode of Game of Thrones to watch.All bow before Lord Tyrion!
Ok.. Let's talk about balance.
FD already seem to spend quite a bit of time balancing (nerfing / buffing) this game. To what end? It's really not a competition. OK, CG's could be seen as a competition, so balance them, make them Open only, whatever. The fact that they don't / haven't suggests that either they don't believe it's a problem, or perhaps they are already 'balancing' the outcomes by taking all modes into account. The Open players who have complained of Solo / Group players opposing them unseen never acknowledge that there are very likely plenty of unseen Solo / Group players working with them, unseen to their Open enemies.
Your assertion that just playing in Open should warrant a bonus is (in my opinion) not really reasonable. You might meet another CMDR, you might not, you might meet an NPC, you might not. A player in Solo might meet an Elite Anaconda. Might not. Might get interdicted three times as they approach a station. Might not. No matter how often it's stated that there is no risk in Solo, it's not true. Some CMDRs will be hard to fight, so will some NPC's. Not every CMDR in Open is a skilled combateer, and this assertion that Open is so much harder is just a sweeping generalization. No offense to those awesome, unbeatable combat pilots, but even if I played in Open I might never meet them anyway.
There's really no point in buffing Open, if you then have to buff Solo so as not to offend Solo players. It seems like a lot of work for very little forward momentum.
Your point that Open needs to be made fairer is absolutely valid. Sadly, I suspect it will be an ongoing effort because human nature is... Human nature. Some people will always cheat. How FD choose to deal with players who do that is entirely up to them and their legal teams. In terms of placing players who destroy other players in different instances, I don't see the point, as that's valid gameplay. And therein lies the whole Open versus Solo thread. Some people like to destroy other CMDRs, some people don't like to be destroyed. That risk will always be there in Open so long as non consensual PvP is considered valid gameplay, and if people bought this game to play online, but don't want non consensual PvP, nothing will get them back into Open mode while it is still allowed.
That was about Power Play but what he meant was that for every player in Solo completing a task there will be another player in Solo completing a counter task and they will cancel each other out. Open players should not worry about Solo players opposing them because there will also be Solo players supporting them. In Open, players compete directly, in Solo they compete indirectly. Ultimately is it the Power/task with the most supporters/participants that should win, regardless of mode.
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Let's try an example.
Decrease Solo by 10%
In Open you earn 10,000Cr. In Solo you earn 9000Cr. 1000Cr less in Solo.
Increase Open by 10%
In Solo you earn 10,000Cr. In Open you earn 11,000Cr. 1000Cr less in Solo.
Effectively the same. Solo gets less, Open gets more.
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This is my point. If a group of players in system A want to undo what a group of players in system B are doing, they just have to go into Private modes and do whatever they want to. Now, with the changes coming in 1.3 this could all be water under the bridge and the BGS will no longer work as it has in the past. We have to wait and see!
The thing about PowerPlay is that there will be 'repercussions' for changing sides. The types of CG's that will be used are what I am also waiting to see, and I am also interested in seeing is what an unaffiliated player can do within Powerplay.
The fact that Sandro put up the Vox Populi thread to discuss this problem specifically, gives me pause that these Competing/Race goals will be more common. If they are, it will be interesting to see what the outcome to these discussions will be. I am hoping for some 'OMG, why didn't we think of that', type change.
Well then you redo it in Open or redo it in Solo. If you are in System A why does it even matter what mode players in System B are using? They are in a different system anyway.
No, it shows that Community Goals are going to continue as a separate thing and they want to consider all the fuss being made by Open CG players to possibly balance them in the future. Power Play is designed for this from the ground up - it's a very different thing to CGs.
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Try this:
Open 2 PC's count as 5 NPC's. The reward would still be for two kills, but the contribution to the overall goal would be 5 NPC's rather than 2.
If there is a discrepancy in the number of NPC's that Open can kill due to PC intervention, then a debuff can occur in Private mode..
You kill 50 NPC's in Private you get rewarded for all of them, your contribution to the goal is 45.
In either case, everyone is still paid for their proper number of kills, but the inequalities toward contribution to tiers is overcome.
and u pay the refunds wave?
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What goal/contribution are you talking about? No Community Goal or mission has ever counted PC kills towards the contribution as far as I know.
Player interaction is the *reason* that you play Open why do you also want compensating for it? The extra fun, for you, is already the compensation for the "extra risk".
And how would you even *measure* these things? Who decides how many NPCs I'm worth or you're worth? How do you measure "PC intervention"?
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Ok...let's look at two player groups from the game.
Emperor's Grace and EIC.
Neither are in direct opposition, nor are they having any strife between them. This is an example! <come on internet work with me here!>
What they are is two large groups that have worked the BGS for months.
EG has expanded into a number of systems. EIC, creates 2 groups of 10 people, and has them start to mess with EG's systems in Private mode. Currently, they could, in concert start flipping stations and systems. Depending on the current queues in these systems, they could remove CG from these systems in a week to 2 weeks. Worse, they could just work a bunch of missions and queue up a bunch of unnecessary states to stop EG for months in all their systems. This is what I am talking about.
You are correct, it doesn't matter what happens within the systems if people keep to themselves...however, if the BGS doesn't drastically change, the above will happen to someone at sometime....and the receiving player group will not know who did it...or worse just write it off to the buggy BGS and struggle on.
As powerplay is being advertised as an overhaul to the mission system, which is directly tied to the BGS, I am not as certain as you are that this will be a sequestered and controlled system of changes. If you have some dev info, give it up!
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
When the XBox One version is released there will be a whole load of new players affecting the single shared BGS - players that will (presumably) never be encountered by PC/Mac players.
Power Play isn't an overhaul to the mission system. The overhaul to the mission system comes in the same update as Power Play.
But in your hypothetical situation what happens if some of the players are in different timezones or just different parts of the world and the matchmaking does not put them together? Even if they are all in Open there is no guarantee that they will all see each other. The whole foundation of the game does not support the sort of direct competition that you seem to be trying to achieve. It wasn't designed for that. No changes to this or that will make any real difference without a fundamental redesign of the basic foundation of the game. And that isn't what either of us paid for.
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I simplified the example...do whatever you want with the math and the credits.
How's this
Open player kills 2 NPC for 200 credits but the goal is credited with 500 credits. The player still only get 200 credits...but the goal advances by 500.
A Private player kill 50 NPC's for 5000 credits..they get paid the 5000 credits, but the goal is only pushed up by 4500.
Whatever.
Player interaction is a reason to play in Open. When you add a layer of reward to that, then equivalency comes into play. If everything is equal then it is about the player interaction. When there is a win state related ONLY to the number of NPC's killed, then there is a discrepency between modes, you might not agree with it but there is....
and the merry go round starts back up.
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You are completely missing the point. You are focusing on the wrong thing in this. It's not about people playing with each other....it's playing against each other. They do not have to work together in the same instance...they just have to work together..pulling in the same direction.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
I agree with the first and last. Player interaction is the reward for playing in open - it's by choice that each player makes, individually.
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u want to play at open its YOUR CHOISE noone made you play at open ....
Why do you disagree with the center.
If you play chess, the interaction is between the two players. If one of the players is put on a timer and the other isn't, the game becomes unfair. It's a similar state. In a Race/Competing Goal, the timer is ticking. One player can choose to play in Open or contribute more (and subsequently make more) by going to Private. Most players are going to go where the contribution to the outcome (or their pocket) regardless of their desires to interact. Most of us, making this choice, feel that this is a design to force us into private mode. Again, this is ONLY IN THE COMPETING/RACE type goals.
Again, the merry go round is starting.
Yes I'm afraid I am missing the point. If it doesn't matter about them being instanced together why does it matter about them being in different modes? In your example they were all part of larger player groups, by definition they are working together. If players aren't working together then they are just doing their own thing and one or two individuals should not have any noticeable effect.
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