09-22-2009, 03:16 PM
Hoofhurr Wrote:Playing devil's advocate. Ok so let's say you create a highly valuable object to fight over. What makes the object highly valuable? It seems like the most valuable objects would be those objects which improve your chances of beating your opponents to the next valuable object. But we don't want those in a game because that leads to the advancement model.
You don't want the objectives to be individual advancements. Not if you want balance anyway. Team advancements are where you want your goals set.
In Planetside you gained team bonuses in exp, damage etc based upon who got the most base caps from the day before for example.
In Shattered Galaxies you locked in certain resourse area's based on the previous days military successes.
As long as you make team advancement the key to individual advancement you are good to go.
Shattered Galaxies was a much larger strategic game in scale so if you wanted to take over regional area's in order to use those area's it required dedicated efforts to do so. Once taken over individual accomplisments could be achieved. The battlefront was so large however that the front pushed over months not days and since their were multiple teams you could make progress in some fronts but not others.
The problem with Planetside is while it was fun and mayhem the goals were still tactical and not strategic. Their was no benefit to taking over the map. Planetside was a tactical game with no strategic goals. That is why it couldn't keep players around long term. Even then long term is realative. I played it for a year total.