"Arathi Basin" clone?

So, SHMUP: Orbital Combat is finally grinding to a halt - May 8th approaches sooner every day. I'm working on pre-planning my next indie hit-in-the-making.

I've noticed that a few "clone" genres have sprung up recently. Where there's been more than a few DotA, Tower Defense, and WoW clones springing up, I haven't really wanted to re-clone those already cloned games. Thus I set my sights on the parts of WoW I most enjoyed, back when I played: the battlegrounds.

The Arathi Basin gameplay design is more of a strategy game, for those who are not familiar. Each side has a home base that serves as a default spawn point. Between the two bases are a number of nodes:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.            ___ O ___
3.           /         \
4. [P1] --- O --- O --- O --- [P2]
5.           \___ O ___/

The goal of the game is to hold the majority of nodes for as long as possible. Both sides have a "counter" that increases periodically - and that period is shorter if more nodes are controlled. The first side to a given threshold wins.

With the FaceBook support the dimeRocker platform gives, this could open up a nice multiplayer system so that groups of players can play simultaneously. Some minor RPG mechanics - player levels, random drops determined on a killed player's level, etc. - can liven up the experience and provide impetus to attack enemy-held nodes beyond the simple notion of "just" winning the game.

Ideas thus far? Criticisms? Things I've missed? Things that would make this popular? Things that would make this not so popular? This is merely a design pre-brief; I haven't even filled out the beginnings of the whole idea - this even is merely a restatement of the basic mechanics underlying the Arathi Basin battleground.

 

This sounds quite similar to the "Onslaught" game-mode from the Unreal Tournament series if I am not mistaken.




You may want to play that to see what you should NOT do for this type of game, as unreals variant is frequently a stalemate fest.

I would be careful with this. On a team based game you need to know that you and your teammates have a common goal. If half the players are in it to win, and the other half is going around simply to collect items for themselves, you will get a lot of frustration and stalemates.



I would probably be more help if I had played WoW before, but anyways, good luck.

 

Hmmm. Those are very good points. WoW's "Onslaught" mode worked about the same way, except both sides had a point counter: 0/2000 v 0/2000. The first team to 2000 points won, as the counters increased more quickly if you held more nodes. The counters never fell. Thus, the game could not be a permanent stalemate unless nodes were permanently in flux - which would mean it was a battle of two pretty equal teams, both intellectually and in actual force.

I think an "Onslaught"-type game I make - if I do - needs to have a different scoring system, for starters. The goal needs to be clearer even than "Get 2000 points before the other team" - kills should matter, because there are players who are purely in the game to kill other players.

I have played UT2004 before, and I remember the mode. It might be worth me pulling the game out once more, just to get myself critically thinking about this play style.

 

I think I'm understanding where UT2004 and such have gone wrong.

First - in Unreal Tournament, there's no limiting factor on the match. The match is won when all nodes are taken. While the WoW setup alleviates the problem slightly, the main hangup still occured when there was lots of node activity.

A good way, assuming the WoW points-to-victory model is kept, is to make each side have a "base point gain" per unit time, which increases more quickly if additional nodes are in the team's possession.

Second - Adding items and character levels are a tricky mechanic, absolutely. In DotA there's a term for those who will just hide out and collect items and levels: "Jungler" (named for hanging out in the "jungle" then appearing seemingly out of nowhere and causing total mayhem, and their team's victory.) This is a phenomenon I wish to avoid.

I can prevent this by items being awarded upon the taking of a node. Nodes become the way to improve oneself - and if you look at my original diagram, you will see that each side has a goal right outside their own gate, and thus a free item for each present team member. Additional nodes must be fought for to gain items.

If I go with this ideal, though, it would make character levels immaterial - players would become powerful for achieving the game's goals, which would seem to reinforce good game design.

Ideas? Criticism? Reminders of how noobish I am? Applause for cleverness (I hope)?

 

I think the best implementation of your ideas that I've seen is the gameplay in Planetside.

However what I feel is missing from all the examples, from wow to bf2 or planetside is a sense of investment. The game world resets and other than your character you're back to square one. There are no real consequences to winning or losing as in certain mmo's such as Eve.

As a result it becomes quite rote and the fun vanishes. I remember sitting in a wow battleground a few years ago discussing this with a friend in ventrilo. We had just killed 80 people in arathi, and neither of us felt any sort of value in it.

If you can figure that part of the equation out, I think you would have a hit.

 

That's also the hardest part, and conventional logic does little to help it. If you have someone on a winning streak, and they get more powerful each time they win, it will take some random yahoo who's himself been on a winning streak to stand a chance against him - I call it, "The Hercules Complex." Conversely, if you buff those who lose you face the same thing - as I nickname it, "The Anomaly of the Noob Of Death"

Something I've been juggling around from my WoW days also is a Rank system, kind of like in Vanilla WoW, but a bit more useful.

As you win battles or capture more nodes, your rank improves. But it's far from cosmetic - you have power to "reprimand" or "commend" fellow players of lower ranks, with the result that capturing nodes grants players generally items that correspond to their "merits", and the social implication that players respect higher-rank, higher-merited players more. It gives players a way to say either, "that player wins battles and helps allies", or "that player is not a team player who rarely contributes."

Also, because in any multiplayer setting tempers run high, the Merit system works as a disciplinary tool. Three "reprimands" in a match, and you're booted with a moderate-intelligence AI taking your place. I liked League of Legends, but because of the instanced nature of the game, they did not add any form of "report misconduct" feature to the game. I felt this was a mistake - if you don't give people a good reason to act civil, sadly human nature is that they will not.

Besides, points in a virtual setting are not an entitlement. They are a luxury. Further, when you're facing a social and gameplay system that lets people know how you act, it does give a little impetus to play nice - the rewards, after all, are better gear, better rank, and fame, that main goal of any member of a community.

This is still in hoary theorycraft, as you can see. These are just ideas. How are my thoughts on the matter coming?