Hi everyone.
Since a lot of people are wondering about the battlegrounds, here are our complete plans for it:
Code:
1. Modify current BG:
* Modify debug messages to go to log file instead of spamming the server
* Change BG starting and ending announcement to go on main instead of broadcast
* Add a Kafra near BG NPCs
* Give points directly to players instead of having them go talk to an NPC after BG is over
* Probably make the map use woe reductions
2. Testing
* Test the changes from step 1
* Try to figure out what broke when we added script to real server last Tuesday (probably something related to so many persons signing up)
* Possibly another round of fixes and testing if we find something wrong during this testing sesion
3. Trial period for BG on the real server for a couple of weeks (hopefully we'll be at this stage by next week, but no guarantees)
* See how fast people accumulate points to balance reward NPC
* See how it works out on this map, or if we want to change it (or maybe have it on a random map)
* See what skills need to be disabled (possibly ones that allows the players to just avoid others and hide for the entire fight, for example)
4. Add in the NPC giving rewards
* Our plan is to give BG gears from all BG types, with official stats on the gears. This is subject to change however.
* Balance how many points it takes to get the gears based on how many fights people have participate in on average to get them, and how fast people seem to accumulate points
* This will need testing before it can be added
5. Do some changes, test them, get them out on real server
* Implement BG keys (what this is will be announced later)
* Implement skill restrictions, map change, etc. based on what we saw during the trial period
6. Look into adding / add the other two BG types (the ones with crystals, etc.)
* This will take some time since since our current SVN does not have BG, so we have to backport them from a newer SVN, which may take quite a bit of coding and setting things up
* Customize them to tie in with the schedule for BG we already have, either make it randomly pick a bg type or have it do certain types at certain hours
* Customize them to assign people to teams randomly like our current BG
* Customize them to tie them into our BG points system / reward npc we already have (points from all bg types will go into one pool of points)
Also I'd like to address some concerns.
First, the reason we can't just add in official bg is because we do not think it would work as-is on our server. It'd be active for a little while, but after a while it'd end up like the pvp rooms. It won't be used often and players would have a hard time getting enough people together to get one going, especially for newer players, except maybe for players in the biggest guilds who would just farm it endlessly for the gears. And one of the points of BG is to help newer players get geared for WoE faster. We feel the scheduled BGs + team randomization solves this problem, and it gives some control over how fast people can get the BG gears.
For players saying that its not worth signing up since its random if you're picked or not, its only random if more than 14 persons sign up. Of course more than 14 are going to sign up the first few times it happens, but we except things to settle down pretty quickly and that it routinely will not be hard to get into fights except maybe during the most active time of the day. If this doesn't happen we will re-evaluate the 14 player limit.
Nothing here is final, feel free to post some constructive criticism, or just discuss the BG in this thread.
