Design and Balance
These are design notes (slightly modified from over a year ago) that we posted for the Alpha community.

I added them to the Beta forum for those that want to understand the design direction better.

* ** Some things may no longer be exactly the same since these are old notes ***

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I'll post some of the design thoughts for your viewing pleasure here.

I know that everyone has lots of ideas and convictions on game play.

The game would be great if you could just do 'X'
The weapon/device needs to do more/less of 'X' since it's 'OP or UP'
The map needs more of 'X' to work well and needs to be 'bigger/wider/shorter/more complex/less complex'
Etc....

When testing Global Agenda please remember the following:

Much of the work for the last couple of years was spent on getting the combat game play where we want it to be with a huge emphasis on having it fun and balanced.

With that in mind, this is what is NOT going to change much, only tweaked:
1. The core combat of the game play including number of player in missions
2. The classes, weapons and devices
3. Map design, size, and complexity will continue to be similar to existing maps
4. The Core visuals, HUD, characters, environments, effects


Re: Design and Balance
Here are some of the key design goals for Global Agenda:

- Combat is fun, interesting and never feels like grinding.

- Combat effectiveness is primarily around weapon/device knowledge, map knowledge, strategy and team play and only a small amount of twitch/pixel hunting.

- Interesting to play classes with many options, while having all class weapons and devices feel unique and powerful.

- Easy to understand combat with good situational awareness.

- Good class complements that make it more effective when playing together with a mix of classes.

- Have agencies and alliances be a meaningful part of the game

- Reward player, teams, agencies, and alliances fairly.

- Provide fun and exciting short and long term game play.

- Have all players interact in a single world (at least by major geography like Americas, Europe, Asia, etc...)

- Allow friends to easily play together



Re: Design and Balance
Some thoughts on Open World vs. Instances

First, everyone needs to realize that there are almost NO true open world MMO games out there (probably with EvE as an exception)

Most MMOs like WoW have large instances in the form of servers, then they have sub instances like Zones, and small instances like battlegrounds. In fact, because the servers have player size limitation, many times it's hard to play with new friends/enemies since they are on different servers.

There are pros and cons to each implementation, and in our case we decided that small instances provide for a better match to our game play.

The Open World (large instances) advantages are best suited for exploration and PvE game play, and typically for a single player or co-op experience. Even WoW and other open world MMOs have 5/10/25/40 person raids when they want a balanced larger group PvE play.

The disadvantage to an open world is typically the lack of balance and performance. For example, PQs in Warhammer are a good concept but tend to be either too hard (if you don't have a team) or too easy (when you do have a team) it's rarely balanced. Same with open world RvR, it's usually either getting wiped out by a larger group or rolling over a smaller group. In addition, the more the combat is real time shooting vs. statistical then more performance issues and lag the players will get.

Our design solution to this is to ensure that any individual mission is fair*, while the larger scale conflict include multiple areas that can be under attack at the same time. This functionality will be introduced soon in the Hex Maps, but requires us to have many more players on-line at the same time to test out.

* fair being relative since a better agency can do a variety of things to improve their chance to win

For me, the most fun are good balanced matches that are close with an appropriate reward based on the difficulty.




Re: Design and Balance
Why are the map sizes small (relatively)

Map sizes are designed to support the number of players that we want in the mission at any one time. Given that, the question becomes, how many players we should have in a mission at once?

We have tried various number of player on each team (we actually had 5v5 for a long time, we tried 20v20, 15v15) and we found that 10v10 allowed for the largest number of players fighting at any one area without creating ugly and confusing zergs and spam fests. It also allowed each player to preform a more specific function in a team without too much overlap (if they team knows how to play well) and have a good balance between pushing objectives and defending them.

What about a large map with multiple objectives and more players?
While that could work in theory, in practice there are several problems:
1. Unless you have very coordinated teams most people tend to run into the battle where everyone else is at and mass zerg/spam ensues with total lack of strategy. (look at AV in wow as an example)
2. If you have a coordinated team and your enemy does not, then one side just rolls over the other. While this may not seem like an issue on the surface (it's their fault for not being organized) in reality you end of with 5% or less of play base being able to play fun matches while the rest are either in the type 1 match (spam fest/no strategy) or type 2 match getting rolled over.

But look as other FPS games like BF and Plantside, they seem to work?
Large map/large number of players FPS games have one thing in common that avoids excessive spam, you kill fast! (at least in my experience) and has a significant amount of pixel hunting and twitch associated with.

The problem with killing fast is that is limits the number of interesting weapons and devices that we can have in the game. (We probably have the most Unique number of weapons/devices in an FPS game at this point and plenty of room for more in the future) It's not hard to create a dozen types of guns with slightly different accuracy/range/damage and call them a different weapon, but those are not unique. We tried that at the start, but to me it became much less interesting to play.

So you can think of the upcoming hex maps as a large territory that you are defending or attacking, but with more built in organization to insure more balanced and fun game play.




Re: Design and Balance



We definitely understand the appeal of an epic conflict that involves cooperation and coordination of many players (~100+) against a rival faction!

We believe GA will foster even greater epic conflicts and rivalries between player-created Alliances; however, unlike PS, our approach is NOT to use large playable maps.

Instead, our "large scale battle" will be implemented and visualized via a hex-map where each hex corresponds to a playable mission level designed for 10v10.

So, you could think of our hex-map as an ultra-large "meta-map"; Each hex corresponding to a different facility/objective type. The overall hex-map conflict/campaign will persist for 45-60 days so there will be MANY strategic choices to be made by your Alliance about which type of objective hex to attack, and when, and with what specific team/etc.

There will often be coordinated attacks by multiple strike-forces across different hexes simultaneously. It is simply that each strike-force is designed to be a maximum of 10 players (due to the many reasons Erez described above).

More details coming as we introduce the hex-map functionality. The point being there is a layer of strategy, coordination, and team-work coming at the hex-map level that is intended to provide meaning for what is being done within your 10v10 instance conflict.





Re: Design and Balance
One of the key reasons for having virtual territories instead of a single world map is that we wanted everyone in the world to play together.

In Global Agenda there are NO servers (except major world regions where the ping would be too high otherwise like Americas, Asia, etc...), in that respect it's more similar to EvE then WoW. Every player is in the same world competing, and given that we seem to have some rivalries you can all take it out on each other when the game starts

Also, we are not using a tile set (like hellgate). We have certain elements in a map randomized (like they would be in real life) crates for cover are a good example, each time the map starts crates will be in different positions, and some doors may be open or closed. This will keep the basic map flow recognizable but have some variation for cover, flow, and position.



Re: Design and Balance
Since many people are asking, I'll post a bit about the concept behind the hex/raid game play.
Please remember that this is subject to change, and that most input (until it's implemented and tested) will not be too useful.

With a few exceptions such as EvE, most MMOs (WoW, WAR, EQ, CoH, GW, etc..) don't have much of a persistent world.
Having an on-going persistent world presents several problems, the largest issue being that players/clans/alliances that have been playing longer or that have become very powerful tend to stay that way. This creates a very 'new player' unfriendly world, and can also get stale after a while.
My belief is that our longer term game play should be more like a sport then real life, and a sport with no seasons, just on-going matches, no playoff or championships would be much less interesting. On the other hand, we do want to have something deeper then just a ladder type system seen in sports.

There is much more to this, but the following should give you an idea of the longer term game play.

First. the alliance/agency game play is separate from the normal leveling and weapon upgrade system. To level up and upgrade your devices a player must still play some of the normal PvP missions.

What we plan to implement are seasons associated with an objective. (the full storyline and fiction you will get later)

- Each alliance has the same overall goal of reaching the winning objective first.
- An alliance will have agencies that cooperate to reach the winning objective faster.
- Agencies contribute towards the winning objectives by building up and protecting their territories (hex grid)
- The territories the agencies develop (individual hex maps) can be of several types and different levels (like an RTS game). Some may generate output directly towards the winning objective while others can be setup for support functions.
- An agency can acquire and develop as much territory as they want, but a larger territory will be harder to protect.
- Agencies can attack other agencies territories (hex map) to steal resources, or to cause damage to enemy groups
- It will probably take about 45-60 days to reach the winning objective.

- Agencies can invest in defenses (turrets, robots, etc...) to help protect their territories. As well as support like faster respawn buff, damage buffs, etc...)

- Agencies can also coordinate attack and defense with other members of their alliance. Agencies can hire mercenaries to help attack and defend territories.

- An agency will probably have a player cap of about 100.

As the agency develops more territory, there is more to protect at any one time. If you have 15 Hexes then you may need 150 players to protect them all at once if there is a large scale attack against your agency. An agency with 50 hexes will need as many as 500 players on defense (since it's 10 per hex) and will most likely need to bring in Alliance help and mercenaries in case of a war. On the other hand, if you are in good diplomatic relations with everyone else you may never have a large scale attack against you. Also, not all hexes are the same, and you may need more specialized groups to defend or attack particular hexes.

So while there are no single 100v100 player battles, you could have a war with 1000v1000 players fighting in a set of hexes (100 hexes in this case) all at the same time, while all hexes being won and lost are affecting other hexes in the grid.

So the design concept is the following:
- Short time frame for matches: 15-20 minutes with win/lose
- Medium time frame for hex grid wars: 1-4 hours long
- Long time frame for an overall win: 45-60 days

Once a zone is won by an alliance a new zone will be added.
- All of a player's personal achievements and possessions will remain (when you acquired a new weapon or skill you keep it).
- All alliance/agency achievements will also remain, although nothing to give an advantage in the new season.
- All new hexes will need to be developed (the 60 day RTS game starts from scratch)