02-01-2026, 11:40 PM
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".)
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".)