reboot Planetwars?

Can I as a complete n00b get a quick rundown on what is PlanetWars and why should I care about it?

Planetwars hasn't been run in a while because the last couple of times it was run exposed some significant failings in its gameplay design. Altering how Planetwars works, even if the target is a relatively simple design, is a complex programming task that

(a) requires significant infrastructure development work, which nobody seems to have the required combination of time and expertise to do at present - I have tried in the past and may try again in the future but C# is just not something I am particularly experienced in
(b) has to coordinate between the infrastructure, the lobby, and ZK itself

You may rest assured that the reason Planetwars has not run in a long time has nothing to do with somebody or anybody not wanting Planetwars to occur. It's just not an easy task.

Path of Exile makes a big Steam announcement every 3 month when they start a new league and draws in many new players. Im was wondering if we can do the same with Planetwars seasons. Does anybody know if they pay Steam for this or they just present it as a new "release"?

Of course, this would require solid and tested mechanics to be implemented where multiple battles can happen at the same time and where it's not so bad for the faction if some noob joins a random battle and looses it. But maybe this raises the priority for PW development.

A quick explanation on how planetwars works and what the problems are more or less:


At the moment, with the current map there are 3 factions that player can join. It doesn't matter what the factions stand for, it are just teams basically. (And yes there are other maps with other factions)




The goal:
All the factions have the same goal, which is to capture another factions main planet.
(On the map these planets are highlighted)

The way to reach the goal:
Capture planets from the other team until you are in reach to capture the main-planet

How to do this:
Every 15 minutes one of the factions can send out 1 attack team. So you form a team of 3 players at max, and descide which planet you want to attack. The faction that holds the planet then has a certain amount of time to fill out the at max 3 defender spots. (Yes 2v3 or so is possible) When a faction attacks their time ends and the next factions time starts. If a faction does not send out a team their clock just runs down and then the next factions time starts. ASO.


Each faction has a certain "influence" on each planet. This means to own a planet you need to get your value to be the highest. And that value changes if your attack team wins.


Now there are some other fancy mechanics like the whole infrastructure & diplomacy stuff. But since there are always only very few players doing this stuff (1 for each faction to be exact) i wont go into details with that.



Now the problems that exist with the current system:

1st: The balance
Duo to the faction descriptions and some big clans, the factions are at this point not balanced at all.
You just need to go to the individual faction pages and will immeadiatly notice:

Empire has barely any members, because of its description, and also to some degree because of the people that were back in the day part of the faction. However, in the last planetwars round, PRO was fighting for, which was a very hard team to beat.

Then Dynasty, the basically 1 clan faction. TheGBC basically owns this faction and therefor calls all the shots within it. GBC always had a good amount of activ&strong players so that was always somewhat fine until last planetwars where they just couldnt rly field any teams. Therefor the last planetwars was more of a 1v1 and later rush to an undefended capital.

And last but not least Federation. Federation is the every guy faction. Its description is very welcoming, which led to Federation having way more players then the other factions. Of course this also led to some big clans joining Federation, atm this is mostly Mumble Clan, but back in the day it was namely Mean. But as I wrote, a great number of individual strong players also joined.

As you can see, to balance this out would need some effort.


2nd: The "random" factor.
Now, during a planetwars round, when a faction is having their attack time. Every faction member is shown a big button on their screen calling for them to join the attack team. And what does every curious newbie does?....
This means, you are currently discussing with your teammates what you are supposed to do. And suddenly 3 newbies jump into that game and waste you attack move. This was always a big problem within Federation for example.


3rd: The kinda overpowered influence of planetary infrastructure.
The main-planet in particular has a lot of infrastructure already build on it before the game starts. But of course it only assists the defending team. The infrastructure mainly gives e-income. But if your team starts with +60e and you don't well then it just doesnt matter. Not last, but the previous planetwars Federation had fought its way all towards the capital of Empire. And I think we played like 6 or even more games, and just could even win once.
(You need to win way more then once to capture a planet) And we litteraly fielded the strongest set of players we had available. So when you are at your capital, and you can field a strong team. You will win.

4th: The low number of players.
A big problem for Empire and Dynasty is always the time-periodes where no-one is online to defend your planets, because planetwars never stops until someone won. Eg. If you can just outlast the other team till the defenders go offline. You will autowin all the following games. And since often Empire or Dynasty relied on very few people to do the job... the result are obvious.

There are some other issues, but this should cover the main problems.
I am sorry if anything I have written down is wrong, it has been some time...

It sounds like that can be reduced to a capture the flag mode where the flag can be the 3rd thing you place at the start of a game.

Why do you need have to account for other surrounding planets in a self contained game mode? ZeroWars doesn't have to do that.

quote: Why do you need have to account for other surrounding planets in a self contained game mode?

Planet Wars matches are not self contained, that's the whole point.

The core principle when it comes to ingame matches is that there is an overarching metagame which impacts each match's setup and in turn is influenced by actions of that match.

Just thinking about it, we could have another round, announced when etc. Just for fun tho, even if the functionning isnt ideal I always had great fun playing it.

quote: Lawesome9: isn't there a vote that asks if planetwars should only run on weekends? ▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼

I just mean that the (new) players do not know it yet and before there is somehow extremely much time vested, it would be enough for me with the old factions (maybe unbalaned) and you can then see how popular it is (still)?
You could start with just weekends or even just one day on the weekend.