CCP FoxFour
C C P
C C P Alliance
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Posted - 2013.10.18 17:27:00 -
[1] - Quote
If you have not done so, please read the introduction post here.
Friendly Fire
Note: Friendly fire relies a fair bit on standings, so if you have not read about that read about it here.
This is probably one of the biggest changes we will be making that differentiates factional contract matches from public contract matches. There is not much to discuss about the exact design of friendly fire, just that it will be on. The bigger question though is how do we prevent people from going into one of these matches and just teamkilling all day long. We don't want to remove griefing entirely, a little bit here and there can be a healthy thing, but there does need to be a penalty. So what will happen when you team kill someone is that you will lose standings to the corporation that you are fighting for. If your standings hit 0 you will be unable to join factional contract matches for at least 24 hours after which time your standings will reset to 0. There is the possibility we will kick players after a set number of team kills in a single match, but we have not decided on whether this will be implemented, or what the threshold will be.
So just how many times can someone team kill before they can no longer join factional contracts? Well that depends on your actual standing with the corporation you are fighting for. If you are fighting for the Gallente you will be gaining and losing standings to the Federal Marines. Here is a graph that shows depending on your level just how many times you can team kill before being unable to join Factional Warfare.
The graph above shows that if a player was at a standings level of 1 with the Federal Marines they could TK 4 times before not being able to join factional contract matches. The same player has a standings level of 10 they could TK about 16 times before getting removed. The idea being that corporations such as the Federal Marines gain faith in the mercenaries who spend time working for them and will be more lenient in punishing those that worked hard. From a design perspective we are offering more rewards for having higher standings and so are going with players who have worked hard to get there really probably want to stay there and if they TK is truly is probably on accident. That being said we don't want to give them free rain to go rambo on their teammates. :)
One more thing we are looking at doing is giving the ability for players to forgive team kills. This probably won't make it in with all the other factional contract changes but it is something we are looking at doing.
I am going to be entirely honest, while we are confident about the lower levels only giving you 4 or 5 team kills before restricting you from the match, we don't play enough matches with friendly fire to know if this is to punishing. With these stats being level 10, team killing 4 times (without said team kill being forgiven), you would then have to grind about 800+ matches to get back. We are very open to adjusting this and scaling it. See again the point at in the introduction thread about requesting feedback. :)
Removing ISK Payouts
No, not because we hate you. Remember one of our goals with factional contracts is to make it something you guys want to play alongside public contracts. Removing ISK payouts accomplishes this goal and makes factional contracts an ISK sink. It also helps make them different, again another goal. We cannot just remove ISK rewards though and expect you guys to play this. See the next point!
Adding Loyalty Point Payouts
If you have not done so already I highly suggest reading the loyalty points post before reading this. You can find it here.
Now that you know what loyalty points are and what they do for you this post is very simple. At the end of a factional contract match you will receive loyalty points for that corporation based on if you won or lost. The corporations will reward those that won handsomely while still rewarding those who stayed to the bitter end. We are not set on the exact amount yet, but at this stage you should expect the losing side to get about 1/5th of what the winners get.
If you have read the thread about loyalty points and the loyalty point store you will know what items in the loyalty store will cost both ISK and loyalty points. However, factional contracts only payout LP. The general idea is that if you are a hard core factional warfare player you grind up LP, buy things from the LP store, and then sell them to other players for ISK on the market. DUST doesn't have a secondary market for this implemented yet. This left us with a difficult choice to make. We could delay this feature until the secondary market is in; that would suck because we want to play this, and we're sure you guys want to as well. The second option was put this feature in but somehow balance it for there being no secondary market and then rebalance it again when the secondary market comes out. This would be bad as it means a lot of wasted development time. The third option was to balance it for the secondary market and just let you guys do your thing in the meantime. In the end, we settled on the third option. This does mean that people participating in factional contracts will make less ISK right now, but if they are hoarding loyalty points then they will have the potential to make lots of money when the secondary market comes along and they can sell FW gear to other players.
Faction Boosters Boosting LP Payout
Faction boosters are explained in more detail in the post on Standings. Be sure to read that before reading this section here.
So yes, we will be adding faction specific boosters and on top of what they do for your standings they will also provide a boost to loyalty point payout for that faction. So if you have a Gallente faction booster plugged in you will get a bonus to your Federal Marine loyalty points. The bonus is currently set at 30%.
We know that some people are going to look at this and cry pay to win but we disagree. These boosters will not g...
Game Designer // Team True Grit
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