Three PvP Factions?

[Zeddash]

I was wondering if this was ever really possible to balance this in an MMO? DAoC population balances started to show fast on the server I was on. ESO had the same issue. It always felt like the underdog would naturally begin to be focused by the two others.

I've had the same feeling playing threes in board games. Even without the verbal creation of alliances, there is sometimes a tenancy to pick on the weakest to get them out of there, which is a very viable strategy and possibly part of the fun (doesn't just need to be 3 players here.)

There is enough balance issues with two factions.

What games do you think did this best, video game or board game?

[Arsilon]

Human nature will always force the issue and I would think its too hard to overcome that with just two factions.

The other way is to have diverging 'victory' conditions or perhaps with scaling anti-gang up penalties and/or underdog bonuses that are weighted based on how imbalanced things are?

[Slamz]

I do think that three (or more) factions are the way to go, but careful design is required because it's vitally important that the 2 strongest not be able to pick on the weakest past a certain point.

Like imagine a map design that is basically 3 tracks into a central control point. Whoever controls the middle is going to be ganged up on. Once Team A controls enough, Team B can't even reach Team C. Team A could strategically hold back so that B and C stay in contact (assuming they can herd cats well enough to hold such a strategy) but the game design itself makes it impossible for A and B to continue to pound C back to the newbie zone. Somewhere there's a chokepoint and only one team can hold that and progress past it.

Planetside (1 moreso than 2) had a good thing going with their "lattice system" -- something I very much think MMORPG PvP games should consider. I think it could be massaged into something even better but the basic idea was: each location connects to particular other locations. In order to attack some base, you must own one of the connections to it. In a 3-way map battle, the losing team would keep losing connections, putting the other two teams into more and more contention. You could still gang up but game design didn't encourage it, and made it harder to hold that "truce".

I think this would be a good basis for a design, if combined with some kind of "map rotation". Possibly the map literally rotates. Because you also don't want Team C to be stuck in a corner fighting the same front forever because even though they are now only facing a part of Team A, they still can't win. Player numbers ended up like 60-30-10, and now Team C is getting bored and losing their morale checks. But occasional "mana quakes" or insert-nonsense-here, randomizes or rotates the map in some way and now, well, maybe they're still stuck but at least the map is different and they have new things to try and explore.

(Planetside did that too. Someone would "win" a map and that would just lock it for a while. I always thought the Planetside problem was they just made this all happen too fast. There has to be a place in between "I am tired of fighting this same fight over this same piece of land" and "things move so fast that I went away for lunch and we lost the continent".)

[Slamz]

The other way is to have diverging 'victory' conditions

This makes me think of DAOC and that central dungeon thing (which was implemented after I'd quit, but still).

Victory condition: get to the middle.
Once you have the middle, new victory condition: sack the dungeon.

Team A, having obtained the middle, no longer cares about beating Team C back to the newbie zone. They want the dungeon.

I do like the idea of simply changing the rules as you progress in such a way that it doesn't make sense to pound one team into oblivion.

[strife]

Didn't New World have 3 factions?

[Slamz]

Yeah, though New World's PvP setup was pretty FUBAR outside of the fact that it had 3 factions. Actually New World does raise one good point, though, which is the need to resolve the player tendency to congregate into a single location (until the server crashes) and "what do you do about that". New World's answer was fixed sized battles that you had to sign up for (and may or may not get into). We had a thread about that here: https://thepurge.net/showthread.php?tid=7498