DUST Search - Conquest design flaws

Zeylon Rho wrote:

Kristoff Atruin wrote:

On top of all that when I'm defending a district my corporation owns, I don't actually feel like I own it. Sure it looks the same every time, but the defender isn't defending it. The "defender" is attacking it at the same time the attacker is. I'm not standing on the wall of my fortress repelling the heathens, I'm assaulting what is ostensibly my "home". To make this more absurd, in every defensive battle we've had we've started out the fight trying to break into the very structure we're "defending". Conquest 1.0 was fun despite its balance issues because you felt like an attacker or defender. What we have now is about as far as you can get from that.

This is the part that seems most silly to me. I get that they want "battles" to be fair. But if a corp owns a district, and has 400 clones or whatever already there - why would the defending corp need to play the "sprint to the capture point" game? Wouldn't they be the defender's Null cannons by default, firing full-on at the attackers until they manage to capture objectives? It's a bizarre system as-is.

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Kristoff Atruin Subdreddit Test Alliance Please Ignore 610	Posted - 2013.05.20 06:23:00 - [1] - Quote I think there are some major problems with the concept of planetary conquest as it exists, and in the general balance of the game overall. My role as a director in Subdreddit is mostly in managing districts and making plans for conquest. I'll keep queuing up battles as long as my members are interested in them, but I've personally lost interest in the game mode and I think our members are mostly feeling the same. There is no strategy involved at the high level, and ownership straight up lacks value. In my role as director of conquest / district management I feel like a human instant battle server. I press buttons so that other people can play a game, not play a game myself. First a side note - I think you really need to investigate the statistics about what weapons and suits people are using in conquest, and what kinds of equipment are used compared to FW / instant battles. It seems as though if you want to win you need as many people as possible on your team using assault rifle gank fits. Raising the stakes seems to drag the the balance problems right out into the open. As an anecdote, I run logistics. In other game modes I spend a lot of time healing people and giving them ammo. In conquest that has yet to happen, because nobody lives long enough to need me. I have also yet to notice a logistics suit on the opposing team. I'll leave this at that though, because the balance of various weapons and suits really isn't my concern at the moment. My main concern is with the design of the conquest system itself, and it's been one I've been voicing ever since the designs started to be revealed to us. The current design lacks any kind of higher level strategy, or incentive other than bragging rights to own districts. Some super elite fps clans who have been playing shooters together for many years were really concerned that their low numbers would mean they couldn't hold territory and wanted "raiding" to be a viable strategy. So attackers were given big advantages in terms of clones stolen, production halted etc. The result is a system where owning territory is simply a bad investment unless you have a truly massive number of very skilled players. Consider that it costs 80m to take an unclaimed district, and 160m to 240m to take one that is occupied. Those districts can produce up to 8 or 10 million worth of clones per day. That means you need at the bare minimum to go 8 days without being attacked to simply recover your investment...but does a day ever go by without a district getting hit? At what point does it ever make sense to enter into the conquest system? The only thing to gain is bragging rights, but we didn't need conquest for that. On top of all that when I'm defending a district my corporation owns, I don't actually feel like I own it. Sure it looks the same every time, but the defender isn't defending it. The "defender" is attacking it at the same time the attacker is. I'm not standing on the wall of my fortress repelling the heathens, I'm assaulting what is ostensibly my "home". To make this more absurd, in every defensive battle we've had we've started out the fight trying to break into the very structure we're "defending". Conquest 1.0 was fun despite its balance issues because you felt like an attacker or defender. What we have now is about as far as you can get from that. Now compare this system to Eve, where sovereignty comes with increased income. Higher risk, higher reward. Furthermore there are strategic reasons to hold control of specific systems in Eve. None of this is reflected in PC. It's a massive isk sink with few benefits and it doesn't convey the feeling of owning anything or living somewhere. Furthermore, the various SIs don't seem to convey any serious advantage. It doesn't actually matter what kind of SIs you hold, from the Dust perspective. The research lab itself is really puzzling, because it gives a reduction in attrition penalties...but how many people attack by moving clones from a currently occupied district? Doing so leaves the attacking district very vulnerable with the minimum 150 clone loss, and odds are youGÇÖre being attacked by a clone pack and canGÇÖt move the clones anyway. This attrition bonus also seems to imply a strategic level to district ownership, by using depth of terrain held to keep some central districts safe(r) and productive while battles rage on the front lines. Yet to accomplish this requires holding a bare minimum of ~25 districts (3 jumps in any direction from a single planet), which in turn would require a number of very high SP players rivaling the size of many alliances within Eve. Dust as a whole doesn't even have that many players...so what is the purpose of the lab? The basic idea is sound - turning Dust at a high level into a giant game of Slay, but the execution fails to pull it off. Maybe these things will be less of a problem when more space opens to us, or when null is opened. Until then I won't be bothered at all if people in Subdreddit don't want to join conquest battles anymore. Conquest simply isn't that interesting in its current form. I wish I had some good suggestions for how to fix these issues. The only things I can think of are the ability to deploy onto the district to walk around and become familiar with it, and run pratices with your corp. The other is the defenders starting out with control of at least the control points inside the SI itself. If I'm defending it, I should start inside it. That doesn't address the strategic level that is sorely lacking though, only the tactical level.
Zeylon Rho Subdreddit Test Alliance Please Ignore 290	Posted - 2013.05.20 08:04:00 - [2] - Quote Kristoff Atruin wrote: On top of all that when I'm defending a district my corporation owns, I don't actually feel like I own it. Sure it looks the same every time, but the defender isn't defending it. The "defender" is attacking it at the same time the attacker is. I'm not standing on the wall of my fortress repelling the heathens, I'm assaulting what is ostensibly my "home". To make this more absurd, in every defensive battle we've had we've started out the fight trying to break into the very structure we're "defending". Conquest 1.0 was fun despite its balance issues because you felt like an attacker or defender. What we have now is about as far as you can get from that. This is the part that seems most silly to me. I get that they want "battles" to be fair. But if a corp owns a district, and has 400 clones or whatever already there - why would the defending corp need to play the "sprint to the capture point" game? Wouldn't they be the defender's Null cannons by default, firing full-on at the attackers until they manage to capture objectives? It's a bizarre system as-is.
Baal Roo Subdreddit Test Alliance Please Ignore 1357	Posted - 2013.05.20 10:22:00 - [3] - Quote It really is a futile, non-immersive endeavor.
Arramakaian Eka Tronhadar Free Guard Minmatar Republic 538	Posted - 2013.05.20 11:06:00 - [4] - Quote Valid criticisms and I agree. But this is just the first iteration of PC. That's why there's only one very small area in the universe we can conquer. The depth will come as EVE economy gets more linked with that of Dust, and we'll get more benefit from owning districts. Zeylon Rho wrote: Kristoff Atruin wrote: On top of all that when I'm defending a district my corporation owns, I don't actually feel like I own it. Sure it looks the same every time, but the defender isn't defending it. The "defender" is attacking it at the same time the attacker is. I'm not standing on the wall of my fortress repelling the heathens, I'm assaulting what is ostensibly my "home". To make this more absurd, in every defensive battle we've had we've started out the fight trying to break into the very structure we're "defending". Conquest 1.0 was fun despite its balance issues because you felt like an attacker or defender. What we have now is about as far as you can get from that. This is the part that seems most silly to me. I get that they want "battles" to be fair. But if a corp owns a district, and has 400 clones or whatever already there - why would the defending corp need to play the "sprint to the capture point" game? Wouldn't they be the defender's Null cannons by default, firing full-on at the attackers until they manage to capture objectives? It's a bizarre system as-is. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever that we have a 24-hour warning of an attack, and only get to deploy at exactly the same time as the attacker. I believe this is due to the general shortage of game modes - something we've been asking for almost a year now. For the defender to start by holding onto letters would require re-balancing of those maps. Given the two game modes (OMS and whatever that "new" one is don't count as separate game modes) we currently have, I'm not holding my breath...
Kristoff Atruin Subdreddit Test Alliance Please Ignore 614	Posted - 2013.05.20 13:40:00 - [5] - Quote I'm fairly hopeful that conquest will improve. The other thing is that with the minimum 150 clone loss on defeat, and the daily attacks, makes PC feel like grinding structures in Eve. Every. Single. Night. On the 14th we took 3 districts and people in our corp were concerned that meant there wouldn't be enough conquest battles for everyone to get involved. Now we have trouble finding enough people who even care to fill up a team on time. The honeymoon phase wore off pretty quickly.
Chinduko KILL-EM-QUICK RISE of LEGION 85	Posted - 2013.05.20 16:29:00 - [6] - Quote I agree with this. PC just doesn't offer much. I feel the same for Faction Warfare. I just don't feel like I'm an actual defender or attacker which is awkward when you're suppose to be either an attacker of defender. You get the same feeling from current instant skirmish battles as you do in PC and FW. I feel that FW should serve as practice matches for PC. This is why I include it and would want it to be the same game mode used in PC which should be skirmish 1.0 as the OP mentioned. That was my favorite game mode of Dust. I hope CCP implements these ideas. +1
Narcil Dropfire Subdreddit Test Alliance Please Ignore 26	Posted - 2013.05.20 23:26:00 - [7] - Quote The worst part from my perspective, is how bad the lag has been at every PC battle I've been a part of. It's difficult to take seriously when we're expecting half of our team to be playing through a slide show.
Rachoi HavoK Core RISE of LEGION 54	Posted - 2013.05.20 23:51:00 - [8] - Quote i agree with what you say in the main ost, but i have a feeling as things are ironed out, we'll see more. we DO need a real mode that feels like its a true Seige, mode, or RUSH, like in the Battlefield series, with dynamic, mobile combat maps, where the defenders have waves of NULLs set up, where we can actually either hold onto those and wipe them out, or disable [and i say disable because if your're trying to take the area, you'll want those cannons back with minimal rebuild times] the score of cannons, so you're MCC can move in for a bunker busting neutron blast. these current modes that to me are ntohing more than an 'oh ****, enemy, jump out and shoot things' sort of modes, i can understand Faction warfare doing that... not PC. on the note of the weapons, they need to downgrade those ARs still, and bring back the diversity, i truly do miss when i would actually see effective piles of different weapons, not all those GEK, GLU and Duvolle
Superluminal Replicant Planetary Response Organization 50	Posted - 2013.05.21 00:40:00 - [9] - Quote This was a good post and I agree with the non-existent feeling of attacking and defending roles. What they need to do is bring back that skirmish mode in the old closed beta build where the Attacking MCC was moving to dock with the Defending Outpost. This mode would be perfect for PC battles. You would have the attackers deploying at one end of the map and their MCC slowly moving towards docking with the SI of that district. The attackers would advance capturing a possible 2 Null cannons outside the SI as well as Turrets and CRU's, the Null cannons hacked by attacking forces are just disabled and wont fire at all. The defenders would spawn inside the SI where there would be able to hack 3 Null cannons., the defenders can either fortify themselves in the SI and defend it or send troops out to push back the attacking forces. Holding 3 Null cannons for the entire match is enough for the defending side to stop the MCC docking with the SI. This would give a sense of attacking and defending. I'm sure this is what CCP plans to do.
slypie11 Planetary Response Organisation 293	Posted - 2013.05.21 00:54:00 - [10] - Quote Really, PC is essentially just random matches on the same maps every time with lots of lag and a fancy title

low genius The Sound Of Freedom Renegade Alliance 99	Posted - 2013.05.21 01:47:00 - [11] - Quote tl;dr it's day 6.
Kristoff Atruin Subdreddit Test Alliance Please Ignore 632	Posted - 2013.05.21 03:28:00 - [12] - Quote It may only be day 6, but the problems with the strategic level of conquest have been quite evident for over a month. The balance issues with the suits and weapons themselves have been outrageously evident ever since Uprising deployed. Put the two together and you've got a system that fails to deliver on the sense of location, value, ownership and really everything that was supposed to make Dust different. This is a bad thing. It is not fun. Not even remotely.


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