We have been working hard on making some major updates to the Factions system, and we are now commencing public testing of these changes. They represent some significant changes to the Factions system. As such, we feel it is important to do extensive public testing and gather as much feedback as we can.
First and foremost, please be assured that we will make very sure these changes are as well tested and debugged as possible before publish. Even though these Factions system updates are now in testing, this does not by any means signal our intent to publish them with the next live update. In Publish 65, we added a new feature that allows us to patch out alternative maps for testing while leaving the Live versions untouched. This gives us the ability to keep the Factions changes in parallel development and hold off on publishing them to the live game for as long as needed.
You are invited to join the public playtest of the Factions system changes. You will find a test shard named "Factions" on the server list. This server is dedicated to testing the Factions changes, but it has all the normal test center features enabled. Please, create a character, join a faction, and come join the fight!
Please utilize this forum to offer feedback, report bugs, and discuss your experiences. I will be here frequently to take in the feedback and answer questions in depth.
Here is a quick rundown of the things you can expect to see:
1> There are now three factions. Their names (Crusaders of Virtue, Guardian’s Legion, and Free Tradesmen) are temporary placeholders, and deciding on the final names is one point we would very much like feedback on. The three factions’ philosophies are all opposed to each other ? each faction can find evil in the purpose and deeds of the other two. They have updated blurbs on their recruitment stones.
2> Each of the three factions has a new stronghold. Two of the strongholds have been placed in newly-renovated mountainous areas. The former Minax stronghold is now the home of the Guardian’s Legion, but the base has been completely rebuilt. All of the bases are completely unique, including their layouts, architectural style, and furnishings. They are designed to present interesting choices for assault and defense.
3> The score system has been completely reworked. The new system scores players in combat based on the following actions: damaging enemies, healing allies, stealthing, revealing stealth, and fighting in the presence of of town sigils. These scores are designed not to accumulate continuously but instead to act as ongoing ratings that compare players against each other. This means that scores will fluctuate up and down over time based on ever-changing conditions. It is the intent that the new score system measure actual real-world player performance in combat, instead of being a value that accumulates over time. Score is now awarded for overall performance in battle rather than simply for scoring kills or corrupting sigils. As such, it is no longer possible to transfer points between players.
4> The ranking system has been altered. There are now only 8 ranks. Each rank has a unique name. The names of the lower four ranks are the same for all factions, and each faction has unique names for its higher four ranks. There is also a new Rank 0, named “Deserter”, which is reserved for those who join factions but never fight in a battle. Ranks have some minimum participation requirements in terms of time spent in Faction combat. Ranks are otherwise distributed based on overall player score, with only a very small percentage of players able to attain the highest rank. Assignment of ranks depends on active (i.e. non-Deserter) players in each Faction. A player may only be promoted or demoted one rank per day. The "punkte" speech command now opens a UI window that shows you your score breakdown and gives you a sense of how your performance relative to your faction mates may or may not merit you a promotion in rank.
5> Faction artifacts now have lower rank requirements, because it will be difficult to attain maximum rank. The highest tier of Faction artifacts will require Rank 5, which is sufficiently difficult to attain but not so difficult that only a handful of players will be able to use them.
6> There are now in-game leaderboards that update hourly. Each stronghold will have one set of leaderboards for its own faction, and a set of all-factions leaderboards. These will list players in order of overall score, the five sub-scores, and also by total kill count and kill ratio.
At this point I do not want to go into too much detail about the updates to the score system. In the near future I will begin offering more details about how it actually works. But for now, I just want you to play the system, form opinions about whether the new score system seems fair and accurate, and tell us what you think!
Happy playtesting! I’ll be joining in, anonymously of course, so I’ll probably see you there...
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Mike Moore UO Systems Designer
The following are known issues with the Factions system updates currently in testing as of 14 April 2010. Please see this post on this forum for details of Factions playtesting.
Some faction items have no rank requirements. All faction items should at least require Rank 1, so they cannot be used by Deserters (Rank 0). There is some minor monster spawn in the Free Tradesmen stronghold. Logging out on the elevators in the Guardian's Legion stronghold will insta-log the player, assuming the player is not in combat. Faction Guards' names display the wrong faction. Suicide by trapped box can be used to avoid giving Faction kill credit. Duplicate faction vendor chests may appear in strongholds. Faction warhorses do not work.
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04-14-2010, 01:27 PM Mike Moore Systems Designer
The intent of the design is for score to rate players on the same scale regardless of whether they play a lot or a little. In other words, someone who plays eight hours a day but sucks would have a lower score than someone who plays 1 hour a week but owns. The low-score guy wouldn't be able to attain high rank because of low score, but the high-score guy wouldn't be able to attain high rank because of low participation.
The levels of participation required for each rank are actually not that high. Meeting the time requirements should be the easy part. Fighting well enough to raise your score should be the difficult part.
I'd also like to note that at this time I will speak a lot about the intended results of the design, without speaking much about the details of the design. The details will come later.
I'm not being coy for its own sake. This playtest needs to tell us whether the system is functioning as intended. For now, I'd like everyone to play the system and make discoveries about it, to be able to offer feedback based on actual experience instead of theorycraft and speculation.
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04-16-2010, 11:41 AM Mike Moore Systems Designer
Deserters don't count. That is one of the key reasons to lable them deserters. You are only compared to active players. Deserters also can't wear faction artifacts which keeps people from joining just to get artifacts and then not supporting the faction. Of course, if you actually help your faction for a minimum amount of time per week you are not a derter and it takes about 15 minutes of pvping to remove your deserter status.
One thing you might not know is that you can't get points unless you are near members of enemy factions. Also, you gain points in direct proportion to how many enemies are around, so if you are good it always pays to be the underdog. Finally, your ability to gain rank is directly relative to how you are doing relative to all the other active players. So, if all players in factions tried to create a conspiracy to just stand around each other and then jump off a wall and heal themselves... they would have a decent healing score but they would all be rank 2 because none were actually getting ahead. If you all have 10000 points, you are all a low rank... rank comes by doing better than other players not from just a raw pile of points.
This also means that as the game matures the ranks will normalize. If everyone gets better at the same rate, then the ranks don't change. If we raise dps for everyone, then the ranks don't really change.
The scoring system is comparative. The only thing that the statistics tell you is where you are weak and strong compared to the other players. So, "my healing is a little low" is a helpful observation but "I got my healing up to 11000 today" doesn't inherantly mean anything. That also means that it doesn't break things if we reward healing yourself. Healing yourself by potions or spells is part of being a good player. Everyone who is good does it. Thus, it is part of what makes you good and is measured.
So, in the new system we have a measure of your ability as a soldier (rank) and then a measure of service to the faction (silver). We are looking at adding a third element that is a measure of your Loyalty to the faction but that system isn't very far along.
