Population balance in mmos (esp pvp)

[kasey]

Originally Posted by Wilfan

According to the rumors, autobalancing failed in EVE China. Apparently 1-2 big out-of-game guild/corps/clans/whatever took over the game, didn't really fight among each other, then people got bored and left the game. Again, just rumors.

OTOH autobalancing works almost too perfectly in the main EVE.

Why didn't the devs jump into huge GM-powered golden titans and zerged the hell out of any insects who dare to stop fighting among eachother? Or give huge bonuses for certain areas. Man. Starting a war is a problem? I thought we are humans.

[kudos]

EQ did it perfectly when it came to factions. You have good/bad cities but allow all players to group.

[Siddar]

I like the idea of better exp for side that has a lower population. Make the bonus large enough and you will shift population around quiet rapidly.

Also allowing people to change sides would help ballance things out while still keeping the postives of haveing opposing factions in PvP.

[Mippo]

There is no reason to have sides. It only creates problems.

Everquest had the best pvp, and their original system is still the best that's been made in an MMORPG and that's sad considering other games were supposed to LEARN from previous game's mistakes, not introduce new mistakes that didn't exist.

You make the various cities of evil / good, but allow people to group with each other if they so choose. There are more players available to do the content, more players to group with, and people ALWAYS create their own factions.

If you want to create open RvR you can simply do it based around guilds or alliances as opposed to forced factions. Take the zone of Dragonwake, and whichever guild maintains control of the zone, give that guild a reward. For example, put a dungeon in Dragonwake that can ONLY be accessed by the guild that controls Dragonwake.

Put other dungeons in various tier 4 zones with different levels of loot and let people get their own dungeons, and the server will create its own power structure. You could also create different incentives to controlling a zone other then Dungeons. Just grant incentives for players to fight over the areas, and they will do so.

This can easily be accomplished without creating the balance issues of classes on different factions, or any potential population issues.

[DJk_zero]

Originally Posted by Pyros

Or you can design your game without factions. Guilds and alliances are enough, you don't need artificial "sides", that only leads to issues. You just make a FFA world, and it autobalances itself, to a certain extent.

Ding ding ding.

If you let the players create their own sides, they will generally take more ownership of things and become more involved. Teams and factions are doomed to fail in one way or another, and are probably the hardest of all to balance correctly.

[Fammaden]

Originally Posted by kudos

EQ did it perfectly when it came to factions. You have good/bad cities but allow all players to group.

I always thought so too. The cities and NPC's gave you the feel of being "good or bad" and you could even work to adjust factions. Yet you could group with players. If you had a hardcore roleplaying population they could choose on their own to enforce rules, but no one really did that AFAIK, and the discord system was worthless. Maybe the discord book idea could work with some tweaking in a different system but in EQ it was pretty much game over to even try going PK. Doing it like WoW just nullifies the whole issue. No one has a real choice in the matter so the faction sides become totally arbitrary, shallow and worthless.