Summary: It is well known that Ilum fails massively to be an effective open PvP world environment. On the busiest servers you have two daily "zerg" periods where everyone basically tries to get as many people as they can in ops groups, these ops groups then face off for the Central Assault area, pretty much making all the work that went into designing the rest of the Ilum OPvP area moot, you could have just built a 4096x4096m box for people to fight in and you'd have gotten the same results.

The problem with Ilum was the idea of the "objective" areas being areas people would actually attempt to control and hold, the issue there is that pre-release and for a little bit after release this simple objective was so exploitable some controlling factor had to be introduced, thus the change from actually taking objectives, to killing other players and if that fails to be achievable, collect "enemy armaments".

This generally works but is onerously boring if there is no one to fight, and, during the two time a day Ilum zergs, the zerg behavior makes Ilum PvP seem even stupider because its completely ignoring everything else about that area of the planet to focus a gigantic fight in one spot.

Proposed Fix:

Proposed Changes to Ilum Objective Structure <:That is a map based visual representation of what I feel will "fix" Ilum and make its Open World PvP more meaningful, challenging and fun for everyone involved.

Short Synopsis:

Using development resources already on hand that require very little additional functionality, you effectively seed the North and South assault points with more armaments than there are at the Central Assault, the issue at hand being, you have to hold those points for the armaments to be collectable by your faction.

This promotes a level of competitive attempts to stop the enemy from gaining the extra bonus by taking your closest assault point and defending it, denying the enemy faction access to their potential bonus.

It promotes defensive behavior where factions will effectively attempt to stop attacking groups from capturing their bonus spawns.

It also places the Empire bonus spawns closest to the Republic base and the Republic bonus spawns closest to the Empire base. (Because...duh, where would both factions be storing their armaments? Definitely not out in the middle of an undefended area, they'd be stockpiled at the "front" as such, and on Ilum the front for each side is in front of the other side's base imho.).

Overall Gain:

• Fights on Ilum spread out more and do not center on one specific area of the map. As any one instance of Ilum can only have so many players on it. The potential of "zerg behavior" is reduced as it is not entirely possible to succeed in total on a map with multiple points of offense/defense by rolling as a single group "zerg".
  
• Removal of the static walkers, and animated sequences for destruction/removal/addition of new troop carriers will reduce overall lag at each Assault point.
  
• Replacement of Troop Carrier "objectives" with Shield Generator models lowers the polyface count of each area, making frame rate more consistent in fights, shield generators simply have a destroyed/undestroyed state and are easier on peoples CPU's when swapped from one state to another.
  
• Shield Generators at each Faction Assault Point give a greater incentive to defend assault points due to minor defensive buff for doing so. Also gives slightly outnumbered defending groups a better chance against slightly larger attacking groups.
  
• Multiple areas of spawn for "armaments" splits up the generalized combat population in their pursuit of their "daily" requirements and causes more "ranging behavior" around the map to attempt to complete dailies more efficiently which leads to smaller PvP encounters as "rangers" run into enemy "rangers" that aren't in large zerg groups.
  

In Final:Overall, Ilum has a lot of space and a lot of potential for a lot more fun, but the current state of Ilum makes it not very much fun at all and completely dissuades even the most ardent PvPers from becoming involved in it because theres no reason to go there other than the dailies. Kills on Ilum need to be giving Mercenary Commendations, perhaps 5x Mercenary Commendations per kill on Ilum, as was intended in its design. Theres no other incentive right now to be there, but the PvP dailies, and the PvP dailies create two predictable zerg traffic jams, then a whole lot of wandering around not engaging in PvP at all, for the rest of the day, because theres no reward incentive for staying on Ilum any longer than you have to.

My apologies if a write up on this has already been submitted, I know there have been many posts on Ilum but I've given this a lot of thought and I am of the fair belief that Ilum, as it is, is salvageable with very little extra development resources needed in regards to creating a functional open world PvP environment.

http://www.downfallguild.org/node/8602

Fixed.

Why not make it Capture the flag instead?

Capture The Flag, whoever is holding the flag will be forced to rp walk through the map to the other base in order to get valor for everyone on the map.

http://www.downfallguild.org/node/8602

 

 

Fixed.

Funny but not really relevant.

Why not make it Capture the flag instead?

Too much area, too easy to runners to completely lose pursuers with RPG based powers.

Control point/w benefits is a better way to go, it promotes more predictable play which in the area of an MMORPG, you sort of need.

Why not make it Capture the flag instead?

 

Capture The Flag, whoever is holding the flag will be forced to rp walk through the map to the other base in order to get valor for everyone on the map.

What about that? Seems like a challenge.

open world pvp zones are never a good idea. theyre always unbalanced and theyre always exploited. they just need to make it a regular warzone and leave it at that.

not like we have a lot of warzones. im tired of hut ball anyway.

open world pvp zones are never a good idea. theyre always unbalanced and theyre always exploited. they just need to make it a regular warzone and leave it at that.

 

not like we have a lot of warzones. im tired of hut ball anyway.

Open World PvP has worked in a lot of games. Its not so good here and WoW's experiments with it weren't exactly stellar examples of OPvP.

DAoC and Shadowbane got it about as right as you could get it. Warhammer's OPvP model wasn't too shabby either, which makes it a damn shame that the rest of the game was sort of crap.

What about that? Seems like a challenge.

Until someone finds a corner and you cant find them again as they tape a penny to their move forward key.

Until someone finds a corner and you cant find them again as they tape a penny to their move forward key.

Yeah the area is just too large for capture the flag style game play.

Control Point w/benefits does work though, and is pretty easily implemented with what they already have available.

You need a system to balance out uneven population numbers or every open world system without 3 factions will fail. 3 factions worked well in DAOC.

I like the concept but every open world concept will fail when one side is outnumbered 2:1 3:1 or even 4:1 on some servers.

You need a system to balance out uneven population numbers or every open world system without 3 factions will fail. 3 factions worked well in DAOC.

 

I like the concept but every open world concept will fail when one side is outnumbered 2:1 3:1 or even 4:1 on some servers.

Well this addresses that in some fashion by promoting ranging group behavior.

Zerging multiple points isn't possible. So the chances of smaller/winnable engagements even on servers with severe population imbalances are highly increased.

What would happen here unless a diminishing return was put in place was each faction would sit alone and farm the pickups. Which is what happens now.

The problem really boils down to faction imbalance, people having jobs/school, and did I mention faction imbalance?

The idea in OWPvP is to have huge epic battles; which does happen as you point out just only at certain times when people are able to actually sit down and play

Forcing the battle over the middle to get the pickups actually does force OWPvP to happen, it just isn't what a lot of us want I guess.

What would happen here unless a diminishing return was put in place was each faction would sit alone and farm the pickups. Which is what happens now.

 

The problem really boils down to faction imbalance, people having jobs/school, and did I mention faction imbalance?

 

The idea in OWPvP is to have huge epic battles; which does happen as you point out just only at certain times when people are able to actually sit down and play

 

 

Forcing the battle over the middle to get the pickups actually does force OWPvP to happen, it just isn't what a lot of us want I guess.

We want OPvP we'd just like it with a lot less zerg and lag.

Now you're right effectively Empire players could just ignore Republic players holding the Northern Assault, and go to the South Assault and hold that and farm, but the idea of placing them closest to the enemy base is to attempt to provoke more reliable attempts to remove hostile forces from those points.

Its not going to 100% guarantee that "win trading/kill trading" or just outright combat avoidance won't continue to occur. But having a bunch of Reps right on the door of the Imperial base might provoke Imperials to attack them, or Reps to attack Imperials for the Valor/Merc Comms, thus escalating situations of combat due to the proximity and incentive.

first thing ,nice post ,well structured .refreshing from all the qq post on here.

that said,im 100% sure that when they designed ilum,they had a nicely put together powerpoint like yours detailing why such and such would promote good pvp.Unfortunately ,on paper and in reality rarely are the same.Players will find ways to exploit/bug/cheat that you never expected.A good example is adding kills to the daily/weekly quests.I m sure they tought ,well that will promote pvp they need kills now,player chose kill trading.faster and easier.

first thing ,nice post ,well structured .refreshing from all the qq post on here.

that said,im 100% sure that when they designed ilum,they had a nicely put together powerpoint like yours detailing why such and such would promote good pvp.Unfortunately ,on paper and in reality rarely are the same.Players will find ways to exploit/bug/cheat that you never expected.A good example is adding kills to the daily/weekly quests.I m sure they tought ,well that will promote pvp they need kills now,player chose kill trading.faster and easier.

As a designer myself I am well aware that players will find a way to exploit anything they can exploit.

The idea here is to try to present more situations of engagement, thus to promote higher levels of non-exploitative play, and higher levels of "quality" play.

I don't think anyone can consider the lag ridden zergfests that occur twice a day at Central "quality" play, even on my monster rig thats 10 FPS slideshow at best. Its simply too many people focused on one objective and one objective only.

Add multiple objective points with different terms of engagement in regards to them, and you have one op group on one side of the map another on the other and thus less people per major encounter. And of course the ranging between points creates clear points of ambush opportunity for even smaller PvP encounters.

There is nothing tactical about Ilum at the moment, its zerg to win and the largest zerg of course, wins.

So we need things added to the Ilum environment which force those large groups to split up and engage in smaller encounters in multiple areas. Creating better PvP experiences for everyone involved.

I suspect this could work if you made it a requirement to hold BOTH the North and South bases in order to collect the armaments and put some sort of 'tenacity' system in place based on number of players who entered the Western Shelf or "answered the call".

With tenacity a few players might defend one of their bases long enough for a battle to gain momentum and for reinforcements to make the long journey from Fleet. It might also help to offset faction imbalance on some servers.

I suspect this could work if you made it a requirement to hold BOTH the North and South bases in order to collect the armaments and put some sort of 'tenacity' system in place based on number of players who entered the Western Shelf or "answered the call".

 

With tenacity a few players might defend one of their bases long enough for a battle to gain momentum and for reinforcements to make the long journey from Fleet. It might also help to offset faction imbalance on some servers.

Tenacity or Bolster with the intentions of trying to offset numerical advantages might be somewhat effective but I would actually counter this with increasing the total defensive bonus staying within a shield generator defended assault point gives that diminishes in efficacy as your population numbers start to balance out and equal the opposing force.

This will at least give a helpful boost to people that are hopelessly out numbered, but only where it counts, at the objective points, and make them feel less like they're being farmed, and make them feel as if their defense of a certain area has a distinct meaning and advantage, i.e., surviving long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

So a natural base tenacity or bolster system I wouldn't agree with, but defensive emplacements scaling their defensive bonuses based on population numbers addresses this in the same fashion, but with more tactical meaning and does not benefit players that are not engaged in the defensive action and are off stealing boxes at Central while a few desperate defenders are trying to hold their bonus spawns.

I like this and want to see something like this implemented.

Id add a daily quest to collect your faction-specific armaments to gain valor, giving another form of valor gains.

I like this and want to see something like this implemented.

 

Id add a daily quest to collect your faction-specific armaments to gain valor, giving another form of valor gains.

I'd definitely say that evolved/added/adjusted Dailies could definitely fit around a more complex Ilum PvP model.

Of course increasing the potential gains might mean increasing the required gain amounts, but thats all sliding scale stuff and if its "fun" then going from say, 30 boxes/kills to say, 60...isn't as big a deal as 30 is now, when 30 is patently not fun most of the time and sometimes getting 150 in a day can be done if you can stand fighting in the zerg without your computer catching on fire.