Battlestar Galactica Online - Dev Blog 33 - "Tournaments"
19 October 2016
Hey pilots,
Today we’ll focus on the upcoming tournament system and give the first insights into this years’ winter event which will take place in a special event sector.
Tournaments[]
In the last blog we presented the four elements that are necessary to relaunch the tournaments and gave more details about the system behind it.
The first part – leaderboards – was released with Game Update 57. They are almost complete but will be extended by the new tournament rankings with the next release. They will track the current tournament results as well as the results from the two previous tournaments of the same kind.
In addition, we plan to resize them in one of the upcoming releases to support smaller desktop resolutions.
The other three parts still need to be released in order to have tournaments again. But alongside finishing the client release, the team also worked on these and the good news coming up – Game Update 59 will be the relaunch of tournaments!
The three missing elements; zones, redesigned sectors and the tournaments itself including the first stage of anti-grouping measures have been finished and internally tested so far. The first beta tests started yesterday.
As mentioned last time, the new “zone” system will host all kinds of tournaments, the battlespace and some of the upcoming events in future. In game we’ve unified all zones within the “Battlegrounds”-UI, accessible via the star icon (formerly known as event shop icon) within your menu bar.
This new layer will display tournaments ahead of their starting time, show you the requirements you need to enter and also allow you to enter or leave a “battleground”.
To start with, battlespace (for players up to level 10) and three kinds of tournaments will be available:
- Strike Top Gun Battle
- Escort Top Gun Battle
- Line Top Gun Battle.
Strike and escorts share nearly the same rule set at the start whilst line tournaments have a little addition in order to compensate the slow maneuver and moving speed and create more pressure in each individual fight. This addition comes in the form of a power-up system, starting with 4 different buffs that will, for example, temporarily boost damage or speed.
Furthermore, we’ve redesigned the sectors the tournaments take place in. First of all each tournament will have its own sector. Strikes will compete in Echthros, escorts will fight in Hades and line ships in Ephialtes.
Ephialtes
All three differentiate in style and color scheme, but first time share the same size. With the old tournaments the escort sector was much bigger than the strike sector in order to match ship scale and space needed. We’ve reversed this decision as we really wanted to bring players together in a few hotspots, not allowing grouping up in the distance and fighting together.
That’s also the reason for removing central objects in the Hades sector and deactivating the map in all three sectors.
Moreover, the highly anticipated anti-grouping system has been added. So to begin with we’re doing soft attempts in order to stop grouping in tournaments. The contribution system allows us to track down every collective action across the entire tournament session and therefore automatically apply penalties to follow-up kills with the same people.
So for example: Player A and B fight together and kill player C five times in a tournament session together. At the start they will get the full 100 points for the kill, for the 3rd shared kill they might just get 50 points and for the 5th kill 0 points. Please note: these are only example values. The system can detect any kind of group constellations and will be able to penalize abuse. As mentioned, the penalties are quite soft for now. We plan to optimize them within the testing period and also once tournaments are live. Also, harder penalties like reduction in total points or disqualifications are possible in future. We aim for fair conditions across the board.
Other than that we’ve also added a small admission fee in merits to participate, updated the loot tables for each individual level range and also limited the rewards per level range to the top 30. Of course these will also be observed and can be adjusted based on the needs and test results.
We’ve already made some adjustments and fixes based on the internal and moderator playtests. Further alterations might follow during the current beta tests. We currently plan to release Game Update 59 at the beginning of November.
Winter Event[]
Unlike the last two years, you won’t see “Typhon” return in December.
This year’s winter event will take place in a special event sector, making use of the new battleground system.
Both fleets will approach each other in a new territory which is a dangerous place to be in! Sightings of a new ship and some mysterious larger object have been reported, but the secrets are hidden in nebula! I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog update! Stay tuned for more information as we keep you up-to-date on the tests for the tournaments.
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