WDS: New Rules. New Scoring. New Rewards.

By: Margaret "Luperza" Krohn

After the first World Domination Preseason, we took all of your feedback and made some major changes to the rules, scoring and rewards. Today, we're happy to announce the start of PlanetSide 2 World Domination Preseason 2 on Friday, February 7th, 2014 at 12:00 AM PT!! Check out the changes below and prepare for war, Auraxians!

Scoring & Rule Adjustments

- Disabled Difficulty and Top Dog multipliers. This means scores will be far more consistent and predictable throughout the day, and contributions have equal value regardless of time of day or continent population.

- The time between hold points being awarded to the empire has been reduced to 30 minutes (from 60).

- Point values for capture, defense and hold now increase the longer a region is held and resets when the region is captured.

     * The value increases occur every 30 minutes the facility is held.

     * Max value is attained after the facility has been held for 6 hours. After 6 hours, hold scores will still be awarded every thirty minutes, but the values will not increase any further.

     * There’s now a “time held’ field in the region info panel which records how long your empire has held a particular facility.

     * Point values still differ based on outpost type. It is configured such that overall value of a Large Outpost is twice that of a Small Outpost, and a Major Facility is twice that of a large outpost. Major facilities are worth significantly more points to capture, hold and actively defend.

- Defending a region now awards WDS points.

     * The defend value is shown instead of the capture value on the region info panel if your empire owns the region.

     * Defend value is lower than capture value due to frequency of captures compared to defenses. Overall these values are calibrated to be roughly equal in total contribution to empire score, with captures being slightly higher.

- Hold value remains as an empire-only scoring mechanism and comprises roughly two thirds of an empire’s total score.

The purpose of these adjustments is to provide more value to holding and defending territory and more value to taking territory that has been held for a long time. This also opens up a lot more strategic options for players wishing to maximize their personal contribution, the point earning of their empire, or those trying to set back another empire.

Outpost Scoring Values

Values listed are Starting Value / MaxValue after 6 hours.

Small Outpost

- Capture 3/25

- Defend / Hold 2/8

Large Outpost

- Capture 6/50

- Defend / Hold 4/16

Major Facility

- Capture 12/100

- Defend / Hold 8/32

Warpgate Balance

By removing difficulty, we have also removed population adjustment, and we want to explain why we have not replaced it as population was a big concern for players. We have been collecting scoring data over the last several weeks using these updated scoring rules so as to create a baseline and calibrate the scoring values. It was also used to calibrate any population adjustments if required. Across all servers and factions, the data showed no significant skew as a result of population. However, it did show a very significant skew based on warpgate position across empires and servers. So at this time, we do not have a population adjustment and we're instead focused on balancing out the only significant source of scoring bias supported by our data.

We have used this calibration data to create three sets of warpgate positions such that each set of warpgates has close to the same point earning power per day. There are six permutations of these positions between the three empires, and over the course of the season each of those permutations will be active for a week.

- Each position is set such that the sum of all point earnings across all continents for the empire with that position through normal non-WDS play is roughly equal to the other positions.

- The positions will rotate through each permutation automatically at the start of each week. (Weeks start Friday at 12AM.)

- This rotation does not require downtime and players will receive several warnings prior to a rotation. Players in the warpgate during the rotation will be taken to the respawn screen.

- Only the warpgates are being rotated; territories owned at the time of the rotation will be unaffected.

Server-Specific Rewards

- Weekly and Season reward distribution will now be dependent on the individual server’s WDS scores

     * Ex: If TR had the highest score on Connery, but VS had the highest score worldwide, TR on Connery would still receive the weekly reward.  

- Worldwide scores will still be tracked and displayed on the website, but will no longer have rewards tied to them.

- Each player of the winning empire for the week will receive a 3 Day Experience Boost

- Each player of the winning empire for the season will receive an exclusive decal and the temporary title of “Dominator” (which lasts until a new season winner is crowned)

- Both the Weekly and Season Scores and Rewards will be displayed on the [Tab] Screen.

Weekly Personal Rewards and Contribution

- Players now earn contribution points by participating in the defense or capture of a base

- The amount of contribution points a player receives is equal to the amounts of WDS points their empire receives (i.e. the points that are displayed on the map region panel).

- The total amount of contribution points a player earns during a week will qualify the player for weekly personal rewards

- There are 3 tiers of weekly personal rewards

     *  Tier 1 is awarded at 200 contribution points 

     *  Tier 2 is awarded at 800 contribution points

     *  Tier 3 is awarded at 2000 contribution points

- Each contribution tier rewards the player with a Supply Cache, which contains one of many items (ex: camos, boosts, weapons, etc)

- Higher tier Supply Caches will both contain more valuable items and have a higher chance of having a more valuable item in them

- Each personal reward will be distributed immediately after meeting the qualification

- Players can earn multiple weekly personal rewards provided they meet the qualifications of each one

- Player contribution progress will be displayed on the [Tab] Screen.