Global Conflict

Jokerle wrote:

Necromancer wrote: i don't understand how you can fly a jet without reps. no regen means you are doomed from the start and you can't do anything about it. seems pretty frustrating to me.

land and repair yourself? Airforce is no place for princesses

at least in BF3 there were runways and the jets could take a punch.
good luck landing a jet in BF4. you can crash it into a tree to land, but the smallest bump during take off and all those repairs were for nothing.
not that there were many jet land & repair in BF3 in GC anyway.

Necromancer wrote:

Jokerle wrote:

Necromancer wrote: i don't understand how you can fly a jet without reps. no regen means you are doomed from the start and you can't do anything about it. seems pretty frustrating to me.

land and repair yourself? Airforce is no place for princesses

at least in BF3 there were runways and the jets could take a punch.
good luck landing a jet in BF4. you can crash it into a tree to land, but the smallest bump during take off and all those repairs were for nothing.
not that there were many jet land & repair in BF3 in GC anyway.

land and repairing jets actually happened like 10 times a game in bf3
At some point Expandas came with the philosophy that its not worth your time, and that bailing over a backflag when your jet is almost dead is more efficient use of personell.

However not everyone agreed with that strategy, I know ID's strat usually is more conservative and just revolves around keeping air controll the entire game, in which case repairs happened a lot.


In bf4 im not entirely sure how the jet repairing fits in, because Ive hardly flown at all

as much as I like the jet-topic....let us keep the focus on the campaign proposal.

I had a thought about the draft process late last night. Most imbalances seem to be from attendance so why not draft with that in mind? Set up a draft of all attendance of 5, attendance of 4 ect per division. You would end up with 15 mini drafts (Inf 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Arm 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Air 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) instead of 3 (Inf, Arm, Air) but it wouldn't take longer.

I also think that the draft signups should be more specific with the attendance section. Instead of
"On a scale of 1-5, how do you rate your attendance"
use
"In the next X weeks, how many do you expect to be able to attend. On average, how many hours do you expect to attend for each battle day you attend 1-6"
Then filter those results into a 1-5 scale based on hours expected attendance. eg If X=8 and the responses are 6 weeks and 4 hours, that signup would have attendance of 2.5. ({[6*4] / [8*6]}*5). We can set up a spreadsheet to do all the maths for us.

I am aware that it can be hard to know availability in advance.

I also think that group drafts should be gone unless it's your first campaign. It is a right pain dealing with them. Mid campaign group signups of new members should also be a thing we do our best to do but do not guarantee and a no go for everyone else.

That's an interesting approach Sloth.

I hadn't completely formulated an idea I had: turn 'attendance' into a multiplier when preparing for the draft. If someone's really good but their attendance is poor then they have a lower 'modifier' when compared to someone that's OK but their attendance is consistent.

But I think I like your idea better. I also agree the 'attendance' question needs to be more granular. However, it's tough to gauge anything longer than 8 weeks; I think I would make that the max.

Again attendance is the wildly speculative variable here. Heck, it's tough just getting people to sign-up in ABC

At the beginning of BF4C1 I really had no idea who was showing up versus not. ... but I digress.

Banning jets was a joke guys. I just hate jets because they kill me (I also hated the attack heli, but that thing is so bad in bf4). Realistically, I leave it to the air guys to figure out how to fix and balance these things.

Player rating is rather complex and probably impossible to accurately quantify. Player self-reported attendance projections are helpful, but most people can't project their attendance more than a week or two in advance, especially players in school (probably the majority). The most important thing is to get the officer balance right. There are some individuals who are better at judging the skill of known community members, inferring ability from stats, the ability to place appropriate weight to attendance and leadership ability when drafting... If one side doesn't have people like this, the draft will be pretty imbalanced.

I think the best way to do the draft would probably be to just do a back and forth picking procedure, playground football style. Either that or let one side formulate the two armies, with no input from the TAs or the other army's officers, and then let the other side pick which army they'd like. Cooperative drafting efforts are prone to gamesmanship, imperfect sharing of information and have much more potential to lead to hurt feelings.

Bock wrote:The most important thing is to get the officer balance right. There are some individuals who are better at judging the skill of known community members, inferring ability from stats, the ability to place appropriate weight to attendance and leadership ability when drafting... If one side doesn't have people like this, the draft will be pretty imbalanced.

That's the problem I faced in BF4C1. I tried to provide input, but I typically deferred because: 1) first time officer, 2) first time drafting players, and 3) only my 3rd campaign. I lacked the experience to be really effective, in my opinion.

I don't think a cooperative drafting would lead to gamesmanship, if both HCs don't know which army they would get in the end. Sounds counter-productive to withhold information and produce a possible weaker army that may very well be assigned to that HC in the end.

Still, I think all those things were already implemented in the past, we had more than capable HCs and we still ended up with unbalanced campaigns. I think we need something new, Sloth's attendance measurements are a step in the right direction in my opinion, but people don't always know exactly how their attendance is going to be, as Bock said. It's complicated.

POLL ABOUT MINES

this thread has more votes than mine discussion. voice your opinion!

I am not usually into the risk side but ill try

Black ops will mostly work like they did in bf3c4
wiki/index.php?title=BF3_Campaign_4_Sys ... Battledays

some rule changes:
1. only Transport vehicles allowed. Tell me if some maps are unplayable without armour
2. The defending faction side must make fair attempt to win and must not delay the map on purpose.
3. rush/oblit Round will end as soon as the Defending faction has equalised the number of captured mcoms.
---
one new item:
forward recon: show map, number of enemy divisions and buildings on an area.
---
changed item:
sabotage:
Remove any one random(chosen by die roll) enemy building (except HQ's) from the territory.

Territory battles:
mostly like in bf3cXXX
wiki/index.php?title=BF3_Campaign_6_Sys ... _Placement
difference

Main bases or whatever: Defensive bonus +1 divison. Only maps with defender side preference.
All other territories :Teams SWITCH SIDES
Each loss removes a division on the losing side. Attacker must remove all defensive divisions.
fog of war: You only see the map of the territory you are adjacent to.
You can only see the number of divisions on a territory by using forward-recon

Recruitment system:

HC's form two armies working together. and get assigned one randomly.
No buddy system except for first timers. If more than 2 newcomers join on a person they may be split between teams based on TA vision.
Army lists will be open for review to public at least 3 weeks before FIRST ATTACK (does not need to happen before BFI) for comments and changes (can be done anonymously via google doc comments.)

idea:
both sides start with 2 continents each and will fight each-other over the 3 unassigned ones. With 1 map (both sides played) win needed to capture the territory

1) i would say yes for using transport chopper on infantry only.
the stinger/igla range is further then the height ceiling, so unlike BF3, its always possible to shoot down the air vehicles from the ground.

2) the problem with sabotage was simple - it cost the same to destroy or build your own.
destroying enemy forward base (or any building) MUST cost more then building your own.
the idea is to encourage armies to build,evolve and change the dynamic of the map. the stronger army will always try to keep the situation as it is, as its benefits them.

3) no switch sides.
if you play the map from both sides, it destroys any defensive bias.
more chances for the stronger army to win and continue steamrolling.

4) i don't think the buddy system was ever an issue. was there a group signup that was approved and caused imbalance? everyone saying the same about the group signups, we're in agreement on that.

5) i don't believe you can predict attendance. people with 100% attendance that also put 100% on the signup form didn't show up once. game becomes boring or personal life it doesn't matter. attendance history can not predict anything about future attendance. i also think that quantifying player skill by others (or the players themselves) is not going to work.

Crazy Idea of the day: With the exception of HC/Officers(/and probably Squad Leaders), what about randomly assigning folks to an Army; make the list reviewable/voteable; rinse and repeat until a final assignment list is generated.

We still can't mitigate attendance, so why try. And trying to devise some kind of criteria for player selection seems to a lost cause (at best).

So we randomly build the Armies! After HC and Officers are selected, who ever is left is randomly assigned an Army.

The two Armies are presented for review and put to a vote. Unanimous approval required. We time box it and/or define a max number of Randomizations.

insanityrocks wrote:...randomly build the Armies!...

I like the idea of randomizing the armies, since it seems that the other procedures tried so far have failed, (except maybe for a big influx of new players), but the randomizing might need some refinement cause there are some obvious problems with it. For instance, wouldn't you have to do the randomizing within divisions, i.e. air - armour - infantry so that you avoid having 90% air-people in one army etc... This raises another question - if choosing division prior to campaign - should one be able to switch division mid-campaign?
Still... regardless of what we do, the balance variables will probably come into play once the campaign has run for a few battledays, attendance issues and so on...
Whatever drafting procedure used, mrBLUE's idea of the 4 week timer seems like a a good option.

random armies sounds like a terrible idea, reasons should be obvious.

I think it would be fair to the army leadership that they get to pick their armies and not have them picked for them.

IMO it best worked out when we did it the old way, each HC prepares alone who to draft, on the day of the draft 3 separate drafts are done - inf, armor, air. First pick determined by coin flip, each side pick one guy per turn untill draft list is empty.

Just to expand on the "4-weeks" rule suggestion:

From the data I have from BF3's C4, C5, C6 and BF4's C1, it seems we can have a pretty good idea of how the campaign will be, ie. unbalanced or balanced, after 4 weeks are completed.

For example, in BF3's C4 we had Gladius having a winning round pct. of 50% (21/42) after 4 weeks, in which everyone deemed was a balanced campaign in the end. In BF3's C5 we had 32% (14/43) for KART, in BF3's C6 we had 29% (12/41) for UN and finally, in BF4's C1 we had 15% (5/34) for the Allies. All that after 4 weeks completed.

My suggestion is to implement a rule that if any army has a winning round pct. lower than 35%* (we can do 40% if you guys want), after 4 weeks played, the campaign ends then and there, otherwise it is allowed to continue happening. We can even add some more territories or extra tickets in that case, so we can extend the life of a balanced campaign.

With that rule, BF3's C5 and C6 would have ended sooner, I think everyone agrees those were pretty unbalanced campaigns. BF4's C1 actually ended up after 4 weeks, which was also a pretty unbalanced campaign.

This isn't perfect, but at least we would minimize the extreme cases of unbalanced campaigns, like the last 3 ones.

And if possible HCs/TAs don't find this rule very comfortable, we can change it to having a mandatory poll after those 4 weeks instead. So the army can choose if it wants to continue playing or not.

*We can always refine this percentage once we gather more data from future campaigns.