[Aeon of Strife] 4v4v4v1 (3 teams and neutral hostile) competitive Objective & PvE-esque Aos/Moba

[Death Adder]

I've liked the idea of a 3 team AoS for quite some time, since ideally any weaker team still have a shot at winning by teaming up against the strongest when necessary.

Like so you'd think that this would continue in an indefinite cycle of trickery and backstabbing to take the lead and eventually win 1v2, but no. Instead what happen more often than not is that you have the two strong teams wipe out the weak and then proceed to play your now bad Dota or LoL clone while the eliminated team sit and watch or leave the game...

That's why I thought of the idea that the win condition shouldn't be directly related to destroying your opponents based, it should be based around Capture the Point (CtP), Capture the Flag (CtF), and PvE objectives.

I'm almost certain that the 3 team AoS style will work so much better if you're fighting over objectives instead of fighting to eliminate each other. (All of my non-existent data suggest that this is the case.)

Now what I've got is basically just a couple of concepts of variations or directions to go with this general idea and would like get some general thoughts on this idea of concept.

p.s. like I said I've got basically nothing set in stone besides the point of using all 12 player slots split in 3 teams together with 1 neutral AI each (Neutral victim, extra, and passive), competing against each other and Neutral Hostile AI player.

 

[Chaosy]

My dad and I played a game called "The Dark Age of Camelot" back in the day.
It's a PvP game with three factions and the system worked fine there. The strongest faction stood alone and proud while the other two teamed up.

The goal was, as you said to fight over control points. In DaoC it was forts which factions controlled.

However it happened that guilds would class even among the two weaker factions, it depended on the group. I think for two factions/teams to work together they need to be very serious to realize that if they just kill the weaker foe they will be crushed by the strongest opponent afterwards.

As such I don't think 3 teams will ever work in wc3 unless you manage to make a map which gets DotA-like fame.

 

[Death Adder]

My dad and I played a game called "The Dark Age of Camelot" back in the day.
It's a PvP game with three factions and the system worked fine there. The strongest faction stood alone and proud while the other two teamed up.

The goal was, as you said to fight over control points. In DaoC it was forts which factions controlled.

However it happened that guilds would class even among the two weaker factions, it depended on the group. I think for two factions/teams to work together they need to be very serious to realize that if they just kill the weaker foe they will be crushed by the strongest opponent afterwards.

As such I don't think 3 teams will ever work in wc3 unless you manage to make a map which gets DotA-like fame.

Yeah Dark age of Camelot has a pretty great reputation so even though I haven't played it myself I've heard about it. Games like DaoC and planet side 2 are kind of assuring in this way because I know that it's at least worked in other types of games.

And yeah you're right about that teams (outside of pros) are unlikely to team up on their own, which is pretty much the reason behind this entire object focused concept.

I guess I'm looking for ways to sort of "forcefully" or maybe more like "naturally" make it happen through conflict of interests.

If the pointing arrow or exclamation mark is huge enough the players will go for it, right? Maybe/hopefully?

 

[Chaosy]

You could actually do it forcefully.

If you can somehow detected the team that has the lead you can make the other players forcefully ally each other automatically.

 

[Softmints]

Thoughts to consider:

• I can agree with not letting teams be eliminated in this format. However, if the main base effectively can't die, then this game is more of an arena than an AoS. That means you should consider whether lanes are worth keeping, or what alternative advantage pushing lanes might give.
• Try to limit PvE objectives to those which are contestable or centrally located. It's 3v3v3; you want player interaction.
• If you introduce a capture point, it needs to be plausible for team A to hold it against teams B and C. That's hard to get right when team A is outnumbered 2:1.
• One solution is having many capture points, but that can introduce a lot of cat and mouse when teams want to avoid engagements.
• An alternative: if team A has the capture point, they passively generate x orbs per minute until they lose control. For the other teams, orbs will spawn in the area (some for team B, some for team C). Here, team A is rewarded with guaranteed orbs, while teams B and C aren't forced to team up immediately: they can try to zone each other off the orbs if they're okay with team A getting the guaranteed ones. This keeps the politics interesting.
• You can have the objective spawn closest to the weakest team to give them a chance to catch up.
• Capture the Flag is hard to get right in an AoS. I would avoid this unless you have a clear image of how it's going to work, and it isn't trivialised by certain heroes/compositions.

I've done some write-ups of successful 3v3v3 AoS maps before, they should be useful background reading: Terpentin, Rival Nations.

You should also investigate Dead Island: Epidemic which was a commercial 3v3v3 arena game based on capture points.

 

[Death Adder]

Thoughts to consider:

• I can agree with not letting teams be eliminated in this format. However, if the main base effectively can't die, then this game is more of an arena than an AoS. That means you should consider whether lanes are worth keeping, or what alternative advantage pushing lanes might give.
• Try to limit PvE objectives to those which are contestable or centrally located. It's 3v3v3; you want player interaction.
• If you introduce a capture point, it needs to be plausible for team A to hold it against teams B and C. That's hard to get right when team A is outnumbered 2:1.
• One solution is having many capture points, but that can introduce a lot of cat and mouse when teams want to avoid engagements.
• An alternative: if team A has the capture point, they passively generate x orbs per minute until they lose control. For the other teams, orbs will spawn in the area (some for team B, some for team C). Here, team A is rewarded with guaranteed orbs, while teams B and C aren't forced to team up immediately: they can try to zone each other off the orbs if they're okay with team A getting the guaranteed ones. This keeps the politics interesting.
• You can have the objective spawn closest to the weakest team to give them a chance to catch up.
• Capture the Flag is hard to get right in an AoS. I would avoid this unless you have a clear image of how it's going to work, and it isn't trivialised by certain heroes/compositions.

First I have to say, thanks for the input, quite a few bits here were very insightful and definitely food for thought.

Some things I think I can help point out or clarify:

One of the few things I'm basically dead set on is to have 12 human players, the three teams' creeps would be controlled by AI player Neutral Victim, Extra, and Passive, for an effective 5 players per team if you include them.

So it's 4v4v4 + Neutral Hostile, I think this should help to always have something going on and teams not feeling too limited even if there's a lot of different objectives.

• I can agree with not letting teams be eliminated in this format. However, if the main base effectively can't die, then this game is more of an arena than an AoS. That means you should consider whether lanes are worth keeping, or what alternative advantage pushing lanes might give.

As for the lanes (assuming I go with standard AoS creepwave-esque), they wouldn't move directly towards the enemy bases, but rather toward the (in my mind probably somewhat fortified) "outposts" (tentative name for capture points) and flags that are more towards the center in between all three teams.

• If you introduce a capture point, it needs to be plausible for team A to hold it against teams B and C. That's hard to get right when team A is outnumbered 2:1.
• One solution is having many capture points, but that can introduce a lot of cat and mouse when teams want to avoid engagements.

This is a very real concern, at the moment I think that first of all I can't have too many "outposts", like you said, and secondly I'm thinking along the lines of retrieved flags being brought to the team's "outposts" and being half of the benefit of these "outposts" but also having a loss of efficiency the more flags you keep in the same outpost.

Basically I think that ideally there would always be a trade-off and it would almost never be beneficial for your opponents to completely shut you down as their objective isn't directly related to your elimination, they should just want to kick you down enough to give you a speed bump and take take the lead. They're still competing against each other as well so they wouldn't want the other team to be the 3rd dog and get the bone. Or they could change their priority and give up on one objective in favor of another indefinitely.

• Capture the Flag is hard to get right in an AoS. I would avoid this unless you have a clear image of how it's going to work, and it isn't trivialised by certain heroes/compositions.

I'm not completely certain of how key this will actually be of course, but I'm thinking along the lines of besides them giving some benefits that they're mostly for increasing the secondary resource income generation of the team's base or outposts (depending on where they're brought).
So I'm thinking that while I probably won't get it right the first time it should still be something that can be tweaked as long as I'm not completely off-mark.

As for compositions trivializing the CtF aspect, I'm all for having a strategy in mind and making a team setup to match it. Ideally it should be a valid strategy to adopt a primary focus on CtF.
However, I'm not thinking along the lines of a literal flag which you pick up and then teleport/jump/get hooked/increase movement speed get in & get out type of thing.

My idea of CtF here is more along the lines of the Blood Elf campaign map where you have to rescue the captured Illidan from Maiev*. So it's more of taking control of a Flag and then escorting it to one of your outposts or all the way to your base, where it's still not entirely safe as you could lose your outpost to another team and they could either leave the "Flag" there or try to bring it closer to home.

I've got a pretty much blank terrain map as an early outline**, which is at least looking along the lines I've been thinking. But since I'm not even entirely sure about what I really want the map to be myself I'm having a tough time making a new version of the outline...

In this version the 3 large circles are basically the rough estimates of the bases, the medium circles represent capture points, and the small ones are locations for the Flags to spawn.

And the center of the map is basically supposed to either be where the 3 teams duke it out to control the center OR the win condition would be something along a Race to first get to and through your part of the inner section and kill your relevant Neutral Hostile Guardian boss as the win condition.

(While I had this outline made I was weighing more towards an enormous fortress in the middle as a capture point but I'm thinking more along the lines of some kind of PvE race focused win condition.)

**Outline: http://puu.sh/nGRDJ/416764d286.jpg

*Some Russian video of the captured Illidan Campaign Mission https://youtu.be/uHuK6kBndtw?t=256

 

[Softmints]

The terrain design looks pretty!

• There are a lot of 'small circles' on this map. How many are flag spawn points? In what pattern do they appear / why do there need to be so many?
• For any objective that all three teams are invested in (like flags), it is important to reward participation. One team will eventually get the flag, but it must be worthwhile for other teams to show up and make it difficult, otherwise they won't bother and you don't get good gameplay. The participation reward should be gold/exp or similar; something everyone wants more of.
• Having a 'flag-bearer' unit is a good approach, it avoids having heroes make tedious trips.

My advice for arriving at a design that does what you want, is to picture in your head the most exciting possible thing that could happen in a 4v4v4. Then write it down, maybe show it to people for feedback, and then pick whatever mechanics will make the exciting thing happen as reliably as possible.

If the excitement is all in a climactic struggle over who gets the final points, maybe the game should be round-based so more climactic struggles can occur. If the excitement is team-fights over this flag, then how do lanes or control points contribute? Should it be a capture-the-flag game?

You should have the answers to these broader questions before moving into specifics. It will help you to focus on what's most relevant and useful.