IDEAS FOR RYZOM

Two ideas to make the op battles a bit more balanced.

Idea 1:
Make sure the difference in attackers / defenders is maximum x amount of people. If there are more than x on one side, new people that attempt to join will be queued until the other side also get people to join.

Idea 2:
Same as above but it is only attackers that are limited.


Edit:
Snippets from other ideas that people have posted below:

… keep it like it is but ban launchers …
… have an "invisible fence" around OPs during the battle that wouldn't allow agro within …
… kami and kara would be better off joining forces …
… get rid of op's …
… make those guilds that own OP's pay a tax wherever they own an OP to the local government …

keep it like it is but ban launchers.... meagon launchered my head so many times last night, I've got a permanent bald spot.

seriously though, I've no idea how to make it more balanced... but if all this bravado from syndicate is anything to go by, I'd say the kami and kara would be better off joining forces.
would be kinda funny don't you think? the pokemon lovers teamed with the trollop worshippers to fight the folk whose heads have their own interplanetary weather systems.

well, I'd break out the popcorn anyways.

Idea #1 is a nice theory, but there are enough min/maxers out there that I see it being abused.

Idea #2 is flawed in that whichever faction is largest would NEVER lose a defense stage.

One thing that I think would balance things is to have homins fight their own fights; have an "invisible fence" around OPs during the battle that wouldn't allow agro within, say, 100m of the OP. In my opinion, agro-dragging is a larger issue with OP battles than unbalanced headcount.

I dont think there is any change that the devs can make to improve ops at the moment. I actually do agree with Marceline, launchers make it much less fun. However both factions have the ability to train and bring launchers, so unless there's enough firepower to convince both sides to sit down and agree to arms reduction, we will eventually all show up at ops with launchers and blow each other up from 60m away for a couple hours... sounds fun right?

Good. She can have your banana scones too :P

i was talking about the bravado that frequents region and uni channels..i forget actual quotes now but something along the line of "we shall take over the world" "we have occupied void and dyron, where next" "if you're not with us then, by virtue, you are against us" - sort of suggests undertones of world domination/annihilation.

so yeah, they may need to join forces if they wanna combat that.
but let's be honest, you guys would revel in it.

but hey, i'm a fraud, ibest not to listen to me :P


balance game, get rid of op's. no need to worry about balance then.

Got to aim high marc :)

ah, virg. you know me... i aim incredibly low. usually with my face towards the dirt ;)

IMHO, Ryzom is the sort of game that allows for the players to balance the game out themselves but that is down to hard graft, planning and developing new tactics and trying out new things.

As for the player base and numbers in factions - thats not the be-all-and-end-all of who wins the OP battle. But since the topic, imo, seems to point towards an inbalance in players as a cause then I will say this:

For both ideas, I think it would push aside a lot of people, naemly F2P players who might get overlooked for masters or those who think themselves a "VIP" compared to others who may not possess PvP skills despite being masters. If you were to set a max amount of players to attend, who would decide who goes? And if F2P did get involved on a first-come-first-serve basis, would those who are on the "waiting list" resent them or ask those "not doing much" to leave? I don't think such a situation would be good for the game.

I think there are internal issues that need to be resolved within the factions themselves since a lot of players in the Karavan left due to the inability to work with the players from the other servers since the merge. Clearly the Kami were able to work better in cohesion than the Karavan having retained their French and German players and since the merge there have been a lot of shift in guilds and in factions of numerous players resulting in a decline of Karavan players. At the end of the day, your paying money to play something which gives you enjoyment. If that enjoyment is not there of course you have every right to rectify that in any way you see fit. Clearly in the early days of the merger, the Karavan struggled to unify and address their concerns with eachother. Thus, here we are continuing to lose members to other factions. That is probably, one of the main, if not the main reason for the inbalance in my opinion.

As Placio mentioned... the dreaded aggro dragging... well, it IS a tactic and I would also say a skill. I guess to create a barrier to stop aggro coming in is a great way to allow the OP battles to be what they should be: PvP not PvE. This for sure would get my vote.

yeah i'll agree with that ^^ on the aggro dragging. i do think that should be stopped or controlled.. at least at OP battles. it's just plain annoying. a tactic it maybe but a really cheap one.
not sure about it being a skill though :P

the max amount of players idea would create a school playground style team-pick. naturally the highest skilled/strongest pvp'ers/players would be picked first and any others would either be left by the wayside or resigned to the fact that they are a bit crap. there's always someone who's gonna be picked last after all.
you could argue that it would be incentive for people to up their skills in order to be one of the first picked, however i doubt that will be the case. more likely they'll just say "f*ck it" and not bother at all then just continue to play their game as they were. unless, of course, they are 100% pvp minded and/or devoted to their chosen faction.

Ummm ... we kill npcs at OPs, that's the gist. In fact The Outsiders have brilliantly shown in the past few days that you can ignore the defending players (to some extent) and focus on killing the npcs with great results; if you have good jewels and the opponents can't manage to stun/root you, a bomb enchant will wreak havoc in the npc "guards".

I don't see how aggro dragging is an issue, just an extra PvE inconvenience along with the PvE against guards. Pure PvP would be arenas only; even supernodes see the accidental vorax drag.

Back to the topic at hand: forced GvG would just see the creation of two superguilds along the lines of faction. Forced caps on numbers would create 2-3 superguilds dedicated to pvp. As long as there's an economic incentive to be in the ever-growing winning "pool", there will be imbalances. What you need is a system that's self-limiting as its numbers grow.

A dozen Kinchers is more than just "inconvenient" unless the defending team is at least fifty masters. And while the occasional accidental Vorax drag happens at SNs, it's not an "every 2 minutes" occurence. At least the guards are a designated part of OP battles. I don't consider them PvE as they are not a natural part of Atys; they exist only for OP battles.

About the only way I see agro-dragging as balanced is if defenders outnumber attackers by 3-to-1 or more, forcing the attackers to exploit the environment... or if the attackers are just too incompetent to fight themselves and too poor to hire NPC guards to fight for them.

But that's just the opinion of a Tryker who prefers to do her own killing or die honorably trying.

I guess the phenomenon is not unknown to all the old servers. But probably it was most extreme on Leanon. The exodus of the Karavaneer already began there during the Temple Wars, when there were much more Kamists than Karavaneer (you got the religion with your choice of race and could not change it back then), and the less the Karavaneer got even a chance to get their pick into the soil, the more they stayed away from the event or left the game, which in the end had the Karavaneer finishing hardly one temple, while the Kamists having build three shrines.

Over the years it got more balanced, although when it was allowed to choose your faction (only the religion then), you could see whole guilds meandering from one side to another, depending on which was stronger - because it's more fun to be on the winner's side, I guess.

Balance in power was reached at one time when Karavan PvP players and Karavan RP players decided to stick their heads together and fought side to side, although at length the Karavaneer were still bleeding out. Before the merge, the Karavaneer could still hold an outpost or take one, but at a ratio of fighters 1:3 (and worse), mainly because the Alliance of Honour was still aligned to Jena, and Hell, they could fight!

After the merge, there were so few German Karavaneer returning that it did hardly matter - partly because of the language barrier, of course. So the German shrinkage really is not that important regarding today's situation.

The language barrier, I can imagine, is also a great hindance to coordinated fights today. Not every French or German player speaks English, and very few of the English language players speak French or German. So how can you fight properly if you have to discuss or translate everything said before you are able to take action?