We are doing that, remember Moorland Trenches has 10 active bases while Keepsake Bay has 5 active bases. These two maps should provide very different experiences and should give some idea how long each takes to complete, and a clear assumption is that they will take different times which correlate with number of active bases.

If Moorland Trenches completes in less than 30 minutes, then that's actually a good thing, and it's pretty clear we can activate the remaining 5 bases that are positioned around the edges of the map to increase duration. Right now it's hard to assume it's going to happen this way.

If Keepsake Bay completes in less than 30 minutes, we don't have more than 2 bases to activate to make it longer, and that might not be enough. The map does have some unused area which could be used to allocate new bases, but at that point we should have a better understanding if such an action is worthwhile. The first tests should tell.

In any case, it's not going to be easy to make a PvP mode great fun to play alone as you're primarily there to play with others. A gimmick such as player-commander functionality which you don't see anywhere else in RWR could be a fine attraction, much like the bribes, but I do have doubts for how long is it going to be attractive, the same doubt I have for bribes.

I'm not against the player-commander idea, it's perfectly doable even - you can make a base target request for the commander to attack to with a scripted command. It's just another layer of complexity which we certainly shouldn't do until the mode has been playtested for a longer while first.

With current implementation, you'd have hard time inputting the base target for the commander. The map view hasn't been prepared at all to work with e.g. hotkeys to hook up a block or base id to be sent to the server in a command, and you can't use calls with map view either. The two feasible ways to input the base where to attack to would be a custom command e.g. /attack "base text" or by travelling to the site and pressing a hotkey or making a call to attack "here".

Another alternative to steer the troops the commander is in possession of would be through some kind of dummy vehicles, could be perhaps looking much like a flare. The vehicle would have protectors value set high, so the commander would prioritize allocating troops to the location where the vehicle is. This way you could run around the map throwing flares, and wait for the troops to arrive there as issued by the commander. Maybe the vehicle would have a time to live so that the flare would automatically disappear at some point, allowing the soldiers to be redistributed.

Despite the apparent usability issues, I'm not entirely convinced it would be fun to play alone, having the commander capability, against an enemy AI commander who isn't aware of subtleties of the new mode like Neutral base capture importance for increasing soldier capacity. I also don't see big efforts to be made in the commander side at this point anymore just to make it fit the mode better. If this is going to be a problem, it might come to that that if a faction starts without players, the bases get distributed from the start rather than having Neutral own them.

{SAS}Beerdrinkers today.
New gamemode DOMINANCE

19:00 UTC http://itsalmo.st/#rwrtime right?

Yes

Based on tonight's event (Bootleg Islands, Keepsake Bay) with 15-30 players and the after-show with 4-10 players (Old Fort Creek, Moorland Trenches), my take on Dominance would be:

* 45 min match timer is too long; if a match doesn't come to an end otherwise, 45 minutes in one map feels rather draggy
-> 30 min should be better

* Bootleg Islands and Keepsake Bay both went all the way to full time, why?
*** Keepsake Bay with the formation of bases it has makes up a very linear map, which doesn't really bring out the point of Dominance where you'd have options where to attack to
*** Bootleg Islands had the other faction hold Old port for ages as their final base, they could hardly get out, and the other faction could hardly get in
-> Keepsake Bay should either a) be removed or b) have bases laid out in some other way, e.g. in north there's plenty of constructed unused space (a more grid-like / diamond formation could be nice)
-> Bootleg Islands could possibly have Old port removed as an active base, maybe bringing Aqualand back, or maybe not; just the 30min timer could be enough to keep the final base battle reasonable

* Old Fort Creek wasn't bad at all, actually could've been great if players would've already had bigger squads for capturing bases on their own
-> maybe add North town base as capturable
-> could be partly due to lower amount of players as well, 5vs5 feels much more controlled than the hectic 15vs15, but surely the map formation affects as well

* Moorland Trenches was actually quite nice, although it was max 3vs3 at that point, had plenty of attack options. On negative side the map is rather open and without cover, but it could fit lots of players ok due to roles for cover creators, shield guys, etc. The base captures worked nicely, we started to do a little bit of base rotation, but it was cut short luckily. Ways to avoid that could've been shorter max time or the HQ concept.

* In general, M79 and snipers feel somewhat overpowered when there's lots of other players on friendly side who keep you protected and take all the bullets from enemy side. I personally started to feel bad about using PSG myself in the Old port siege, aw man, I was scoring way more than I deserved
-> I guess this is the stuff that can make people leave quite fast
-> some Dominance specific tweaks to be made? M79 reload time nerf, sniper projectile speed nerf, maybe? Probably needs more testing first to make a judgment.

* XP / RP income seems about ok. I almost always had grenades to spawn with so I didn't hit 0 RP more than once after foolish spamming of calls.
-> squadmate XP "cost" could be lowered to unlock squadmates earlier.

* Plenty of the combat vehicle spawnpoints are in the inactive Neutral area, leaving them out, which isn't the intention.
-> Dominance specific combat vehicle spawnpoints to be placed?

* Stats score sorting has been fixed for the next version already, it's still doing kills - deaths in the background.

* Total / match stats shows initially with wrong text if the scoreboard is closed with match stats shown.

PVP was good fun. I'll see you guys next Sunday.

I'll save my real thoughts on balancing and what not until I have one or two more matches under my belt.

Wald

Some intitial thoughts...

I liked the proximal base mechanics in action.

I felt the pace of the game was better at the periods when there was more than one base for each team to attack.

The game got congested and slowed down when there was only one base to attack and so all players where fighting over one target/pair of targets.

I presume it's set up that this only happens when the final base is under attack.

This issue was one of the grumbles about the single-base capture format used previously.

Right now, I'm seeing two possible ways of avoiding this happening:

i) The first is by having bases under a team's control generate income for the team. So by the time one team has reduced the other team to a single base they'll have an RP advantage to artillery the hell out of the final enemy base. This might not work so well with persistent RP.

ii) A second possibility, probably better, is to change the victory and capture rules slightly. Basically, it would work by victory being achieved not by capturing the final enemy base, but by capturing the penultimate (second to last) enemy base. So instead of a team having to defend one final base, they will be defending two. Losing either of them results in defeat.

Imagine this in practice with Keepsake Bay. Today, the final base was East End, I think, and the battle to capture that one base was long. Instead, the final two bases could have been East End and Ranch and the loss of either would result in defeat.

Similarly, with Bootleg Islands today: it felt as though most of the time in the battle was spent trying to capture the single final base at Old Port.

Perhaps the easiest way to frame this would be that a team achieves victory when they've captured a certain number of bases, which would be the total number of bases minus one.

I think this second option could work well. Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that a key to this format should be that there is never, ever a case where a team has only one base to attack. Multiple bases to captures create imbalances which keeps the game more dynamic and fluid.

m79 was only useful when pushing the beach street. After we reach end of the street, it was uselss. Enemy was out of range and they just sniped me when trying to get closer. Then tried to go closer with shield but as they were on the roof they could shoot me behind the shield and that was the point where the progress jammed until time run out.

How about making all the bases capturable?

That would increase the time it takes to capture all bases for victory, and already 2/2 games in the session ended by 45min time, and that time was too long.

Another point is related to fighting morale of the faction that is about to lose. It's easier to keep fighting and stay playing if the total base count is low. Consider the following situation:
* a map has been configured to have either 5 or 10 bases to capture
* one faction is losing, having only 1 base left to defend
* in order for that faction to comeback and win the map before time runs out, they need to capture at least 2 or 5 more bases
* capturing 2 might just be possible assuming there's time left, but 5 feels like a lifetime away in any case