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[dave_sullivan]

I've been working on a multiplayer team-based third person shooter for a while and am tweaking game mechanics after some user testing.

According to user tests (and me, haha) the most unique thing the game has going for it is basically "quake 3 with 0 gravity and jetpacks". That is, your environment is a sphere with 6 degrees of freedom, it is a 0-gravity environment, and you have a jetpack you can use to go pretty much anywhere. Otherwise, you pick up items and shoot other players.

A twist I added is that instead of 2 fixed teams (eg counterstrike), any player can start a team, and other players can join it. I'm calling the teams "corporations", and the player that starts the corporation becomes "CEO". You can almost think of this like clans being built right into the game interface. But these corporations aren't supposed to last forever; they really are teams in the sense that a team exists to win a round, and new teams can form any time.

So this brings me to where I'm stuck: Doing it this way requires win conditions to be basically asynchronous. We have a team-based third person shooter where teams are constantly changing. You can collect mineral resources, you can collect items (like a powerup to shoot faster, a medkit, or a deployable mineral mining rig), and you can shoot other players. But what are the win conditions? And if there's base building, why would you want to build one?

One idea I had was each CEO would start with an "AI Core" item, which they would then deploy somewhere in the level. The AI Core would then need to be "fed" with minerals, at which point it will build a base around itself in various stages. The aim of the game is to get your base to level 3, which requires a certain amount of minerals to be added to the core. You have to prevent other teams from getting their AI Core to level 3, and there are different ways you can do this, mostly involving going to the enemy base and shooting their AI Core.

An alternative is to throw away the whole "constantly shifting teams and allegiances" and just have it be capture the flag with jetpacks in space, which could itself be pretty cool and is more tried and true.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[JWK5]

Why stick with a losing team rather than just switching to whoever is winning? What motivation is there to not just wait till the end and then have everyone pile on to the winning team?

I think in a game where you have shifting allegiances you need to have a good balance between personal gain and collective gain. A conflict between the two could create some interesting gameplay.

Maybe upgrades (access to guns, tools, powerups, etc.) could be determined by personal gain but the win condition could be determined by team gain (the AI cores or whatever).

Maybe players get more personal gain points for scoring for a losing team (thus prompting them to want to switch to underdog teams to power up faster) but each team could have a set number of roster slots that become vacant when a member of that team dies and can only be filled by opportunistic living players who quickly switch to that team.

I'd imagine this would help the problem of piling on to the winning team is at the end of the game the winning team would know everyone else is coming to gun them down and clear their roster slots and you'd have a lot of team switching early on as everyone wants to rank up fast by scoring for a losing team. It'd create a situation where in the early game everyone hunts down the underdogs and in the late game everyone hunts down the winners.

[dave_sullivan]

> Why stick with a losing team rather than just switching to whoever is winning? What motivation is there to not just wait till the end and then have everyone pile on to the winning team?

Yeah, agreed. My thinking initially was teams could be set to "open recruitment" or not. IE, some teams anyone can join, but some teams are invite only. So later game, the best teams are "closed" while the teams that need bodies are open. But even that doesn't quite solve the issue.

> Maybe players get more personal gain points for scoring for a losing team (thus prompting them to want to switch to underdog teams to power up faster) but each team could have a set number of roster slots that become vacant when a member of that team dies and can only be filled by opportunistic living players who quickly switch to that team.

That's a really good idea. The theme of "playing for the team vs playing for yourself" is a really interesting one that I'd like to explore with the game. Like sometimes there's better gains by working together, sometimes better working for yourself.

Alternatively, maybe I could have it so a team is automatically locked once the AI core reaches level 1 or something? So you can be open in the beginning, but once you really get in the game, you have to commit to your current team?

And/or maybe there's a team leaderboard and an individual leaderboard?

Maybe your ranking by kills determines a grade for your character, so the top killers earn more points for whatever team they're on? Maybe AI Core upgrades are effectively cheaper for higher grade players? I think this is closest to what you're suggesting.

I still feel like it doesn't quite fit though. I like this idea of other teams adapting or merging to counter a stronger threat/opponent, kind of this self evolving eco-system. But at the same time, I could do 2 teams in a space station on opposite sides of eachother, steal their AI Core and bring it back to your base to win (CTF). While part of me wants to do something out of the ordinary, another part of me wants people to play it, haha.

[JWK5]

You could create roles/classes (a la games like Overwatch), but each with their own personal reward/goal systems. Players would choose their role at the start of the match and stick with it until its end.

Maybe one is a saboteur who is tied to one specific team but whose goal is to switch into the roster of other teams and in doing so secretly sabotage the advancement of that team's AI core (for example, the saboteur has a bomb that can only be planted by the saboteur but takes time to plant and while doing so has friendly fire switched on making him vulnerable to being killed by allies who have witnessed the act and exposed the player as a saboteur).

Maybe another is a bounty hunter whose goal is a constantly changing hit list of enemies from the various teams that must be killed for big score and the bounty hunter has tracking abilities and utilizes sniping and kills from the shadows. In this manner he is an excellent tool for opening up team rosters.

You could have loyalists who are given a specific team they are loyal to and their goal is to attempt to stay in that roster at all cost and further its progress towards victory. If they are killed and removed from the roster their goal is to take out a member of that team so they can claim a spot in the roster.

Another could be a guerrilla fighter who gains perks (faster movement, better resistance, more personal scoring) scaled by how far behind the team they've currently joined is. Their goal is to constantly bring up the underdogs.

Each step in the AI core's progression could create a sort of major threat for other teams. Perhaps once a core is given X amount of material and is ready for upgrade there is a time period where all cores shut down and can not be progressed until this core has completed its upgrade and during this time the core is vulnerable to damage and can have its progress reverted. In this manner, suddenly all other teams have a strong intensive to gang up on the currently upgrading team. While the upgrading happens the upgrading team is able to build cover (short walls, turrets, etc.) to give them extended defense options. Also, during this time the upgrading team's roster is locked, meaning its members will spawn back into the roster upon their deaths. In this manner should the core be upgrading to its last needed point for victory there is no team-switching possible for currently opposing players until the core is destroyed (further reinforcing the need for opposing teams to come together to take down the upgrading team's threat).

You could split each game session up into 3 segments (a best out of 3 scenario) and between each segment is a weapon/gear buying session. The currency is gained during play via personal rewards. So by playing your class well you earn currency to start the next segment of the session with better gear.

Just some quick ideas off the top of my head.

[valrus]

To disincentivize everyone rushing to the winning team, maybe have the player's rewards for the round be summed with or multiplied by a value that's higher for players who joined their corporation earlier.  So the first person -- the CEO, makes more than the next two players (the upper managers), who make more than the middle managers, etc.  So everyone can pile onto the winning corporation, but beyond a certain point they'll be "making minimum wage".  But meanwhile as a losing corporation loses players, the remaining players will be moving up the ladder to fill the spots vacated by those abandoning ship.

You might be able to shift ranks a bit -- like if I collect a lot of resources for the AI core I can work my way up the corporate ladder -- but it's still going to be hard to catch up with players who have been there since the beginning.

This shifts the incentive scheme strongly towards starting your own corporation, though, so it'd be good to think of ways to avoid having every player trying to be their own CEO.  Like maybe there are only so many AI cores, and you have to both find them and also achieve a few tasks to start them up (deliver 15 resources to them, defend them for 1 minute, etc.) before a corporation starts at all.  The corporation forms around the newly-started AI core, and initial ranks in the corporation are assigned according to how much you contributed to the initial effort (like 5 points for being the first player to find it, 1 point for each resource, etc.).  This also helps to form "natural teams" -- like when a bunch of unaligned players are in an area and someone finds an AI core there, then it's in each player's interest to hurry to the AI core to invest your resources and get a good starting rank.

[valrus]

Oh, and another way to prevent clumping is avoiding a single path to victory (such that it's obvious when one team is far enough ahead that others can't catch up).  So if there's a path of exactly five core upgrades and you win, it's obvious who's winning, the one who's upgraded the most.  But if there's different paths with different numbers of upgrades, and you don't know which the other teams have chosen, it's a more of a risk to say "Oh, they're so far ahead I better jump ship".  Or if the cores are asymmetrical by nature, and just have different paths to winning such that it's hard to judge which one is closer.

Taking the economic theme further, one thing about economic simulations is that a player that appears to be behind might actually be taking another strategy, like stockpiling a resource, withholding it from the market and creating scarcity, and then selling it all at once, then buying up the other resources with the profits.  Maybe your AI core is a teleporter, where you can feed resources in to upgrade it, *or* sell them on the common market for cash.  You might see the other team trying to safeguard a copper source, but you don't know what they're doing with it. Are they selling it, stockpiling it, or using it for upgrades?