[Suggestion] Do the developers even admit/acknowledge vehicle spam is killing PS2?

It'd also allow cheaters/griefers to use explosives to grief in spawns immediately as well. That's a bad tradeoff.

Who would try to take a tank from the front with a RL anyways? Honestly, if you want to try and take out tanks by going through the front armor.. get a tank.

Hey I've encountered a LOT of dumb Vanguard drivers who have only lived because I was 1 rocket short of killing them. Sigh, munitions pouch needs to give more bonus rockets.

Who would take out the tank from the front? Well the HA that only has access to hit it from the front - that's who. I don't sit and wait for it to eventually move from spawn camping a base I've come to assist from another base. I fire and hope to drive it off.

It's staring at a spawn room, you came from another base, and yet you end up facing only the front? Interesting approach you've got there.

Sometimes you don't have the luxury of flanking a tank from where it's parked, spawn camping your base.

I don't want tanks nerfed.... just munitions pouch buffed to 3 rockets per level - which is fair since you're not having flak or nanoweave boosting your life.

But that's simply not true. I'm getting really tired of this line popping up over and over again, that it's a hard-line two-sided issue. That anybody who thinks that there are problems with the vehicle system just wants all vehicles gone and wants this to be an infantry-only game.

That. Is. Not. True.

I want vehicles to be a valid strategic option, rather than a personal powerup. I want tanks that function more like tanks, requiring a dedicated driver and a dedicated gunner working in tandem to crew a powerful vehicle that is a force to be feared in the space between bases and up to the walls, but not the end-all be-all solution to everything when it comes to fighting in this game. I want vehicles that battle it out in the fields and hills, securing their empire's push to the enemy's facility and then making sure that leaving or entering the facility is a harrowing prospect for defenders and reinforcements, not personal XP machines that camp spawn doors with left mouse taped down. I want the occurrences of small, squad-or-less-sized battles at remote outposts (which should NOT be the focus of the game; open field battle and large base sieges are what makes Planetside great, they just need some other flavoring from time to time) to be about who's better at small unit tactics and gunplay, not who happened to bring a vehicle to a small fight.

I want using a vehicle to be a strategic choice, to give up some of your power in one area to gain it in another, to nerf yourself at one role in exchange for dominance in another role.

I do not want what we have right now, which is having the "spawn now" button on the vehicle screen be a button that makes you substantially more powerful at no cost whatsoever.

As much as people around here think "It should be more like Planetside 1" is a dirty phrase, I don't really give a damn. I think that vehicles should be more like Planetside 1: a facet of the game that has its place (dominating field battles) without stifling all of the other gameplay (inability to truly affect battles for bases/towers). They were the way that you pushed to the base, but not the way that you conquered the base. You needed vehicles to win, but you did not need only vehicles to win. It took more.

When you're on foot and you go to the high ground so you can peek over buildings, you deal with what you get. And even with the munitions pouch you don't have enough rockets for an Annihilator to kill 1 Vanguard from the front, or Sunderer that's peaking out beside a building.

Erm... why? If I peek over a building and see a tank, there's no rule that I have to shoot at it there and then. And no, amazingly enough, you do not necessarily have enough ammo without resupplying to kill every vehicle in the game. I'm not sure why that surprises people.

What is out there on that open field? Not like you can take it without taking a base, so what good is it? Vehicles fight around bases because that is the only thing of worth in the system they have. No one fights in the open unless they are trying to move forward to a base. Couple into that the fact that we have sunderers, spawn beacons and spawn rooms.. and why are we fighting in the open again? Are you proposing vehicle only bases where you need to be in a vehicle to take them like the infantry bases?

Which brings up the next aspect. Spawn rooms were designed like that for a reason. They are outside so the defenders cannot just keep respawning and going back to the doorway uncontested. To take a base you have to camp the spawn rooms. Mainly because people keep spawning from them. If we could destroy or shut down a spawn room first thing we would. Then they would never be camped. As it is though spawn rooms are the hardest thing to shut down. Either take the SCU, yet still have a place they can spawn from in places like Biolabs, or wait for the whole base to flip so they stop spawning in.

Honestly having spawn rooms guarded from camping would be horrible. Fighting your way through 400 people that just keep respawning and cloner zerging, so you can get to the spawn tubes to shut it down.. terrible. It would be as bad as PS1 in that regard where some battles lasted as long as players kept logging on and spawning in safety..

Actually if you take the munitions pouch you should be able to kill any vehicle in the game if all your shots hit (short of a galaxy). Thats the point of that cert tree - so you carry extra rockets to get the job done at the cost of no flak armor or nanoweave health bonus.

As for commenting on the hill and shooting the tank. I doubt you've done much infantry work since a good position on a hill is invaluable to someone with a lock on launcher. Not only that, to get to a better position would require a few minutes of running (at least) and thats IF another hill was nearby to fire from on that tank. And when a base is being taken and troops are pinned inside a spawn - time is everything.

So Munitions Pouch - 3 rockets instead of 1 per level. Problem solved and the cert cost becomes more fair.

I assume you got shot/run over by a tank.... I assume you are given access to the logs an know exactly how many players have left the game>.... Strange, I cant see anywhere your numbers posted on the exact number of people playing now.

It's a combined arms game, not COD, you are expected to work with others here an not be Rambo.As infantry I have zero issue with Tanks etc, its part of game an it makes the game fun. Specially when you see 20 tanks in a canyon, an you unload on them from above...

Obviously SOE acknowledges the issue to some degree, because in the January patch they are finally giving us some better base defenses against vehicles. Although it's not enough in my opinion, base walls and towers actually need to provide some cover from attacking tanks and air.

That being said, Planetside 2 was obviously designed for massive amounts of vehicles. Bases were designed to have vehicles fighting inside them. As it stands right now, you can be killed by tanks or air almost anywhere.

The changes SOE is making in the next patch won't help resolve the root cause of the problem though - the sheer number of vehicles in play in any battle. I think that all SOE needs to do to fix this is bring back the 2 man requirement for MBT. But they are adamant against doing that.

Which is why I said, in my first post in this thread, that the root issues that cause PS2's problems with unthinking vehicle spam are deeply ingrained into its design, which is problematic. There is never any reason NOT to spawn a vehicle if one is available. That's a problem. There is never any reason NOT to just roll vehicles right up into the middle of the next outpost/base. That's a problem. There is never any guiding setup (I.E. lattice, but not necessarily just like it) to give players a sense of direction that forms natural battle lines conforming to the geography of the continent between two linked locations (Remember Cyssor bridge battles? Remember Hossin swamp battles in the low-lying swamp-forests around elevated bases? Remember pitched armor battles in the canyons and mountains of Ishundar? Remember rumbles in the bowl of Searhus, with the Triforce bases of Interlink, Tech Plant, and Amp Station?). That's a problem.

SOME battles lasted that long -- namely battles where the attackers were being silly about how they go about assaulting the base. There's a reason that each base had spawn tubes and a generator, and the generator was in almost all cases WELL away from the spawn room (and in the case of Bio Labs, even required a short trip outside on the roof [note that these features, combined with implants like Surge, made getting to the generator of a sieged Bio Lab as a defender risky, but not impossible]). There were options other than brute-forcing your way down to the spawn tubes to blow them up. All you really needed to do was get one infiltrator into the basement with a router pad.

I seriously miss when there was more to Planetside than spawning a tank and rolling to the nearest enemy spawn room to hold down left mouse.

That is a pretty broad generality and a case I never see happen on my server. There is never a time when I look out across the field and ever see more tanks than there are infantry. There has never been a time when I swapped from infantry to a MBT or a lightning to camp a spawn room specifically. So it is rather hard for me to wrap my head around what it must look like on your server. I am really trying to imagine it though.. hundreds and hundreds of tanks, everywhere. It almost seems like the stuff fairy tales are made of..

The galaxy isn't a vehicle?

I don't use lock-on launchers. And really, if a base is spawn-camped, realistically those guys have already been pushed inside there, and it's unlikely their numbers have increased or the enemy decreased by enough that them + me on foot would change the situation. I'd rather wait until the enemy move along to the next base, and fight the stragglers instead to recap behind them. Only the more organized ones tend to come back and secure the areas behind them, and if they were organized that well I'd be setting up where they looked to be going next, not trying to sneak up on a tank in a failing base.

I've said it before and I'll say it again and again:

The "vehicles" aren't a problem in this game.

Aside from the Liberator and the Magrider, all vehicles are probably where they should be right now.

An ESF isn't a problem.
One HE Vanguard isn't a problem.

The problem is 50 ESFs in the air, continually, constantly.
The problem is one tech plant belching out MBTs in a steady stream, and no matter how many they throw at you and you destroy, more keep coming.


The real problem is resources being meaningless and lack of a need for logistics.
Vehicle spam is just a symptom of that illness.

-Certain vehicles need to cost more to throttle their use so it doesn't become overuse and then finally abuse.
-Territory, or lack of it, doesn't impact vehicles enough. Nearly-warpgated enemies can too easily keep throwing vehicles like they're disposable because they pretty much are.
-The places where you can pull certain vehicles need to be cut down on. MBTs should only be accessable from the warpgate and tech plants only. You should only be able to pull an ESF from a common tower base that has a connection to your warpgate.


Again, I have to stress that vehicles themselves are probably pretty balanced already, with a couple exceptions. It's the continual mass spamming of them that ruins the game.

The issue is Base designs, not vehicles. But why play a game with huge maps, combined arms & advertised as a big *** war MMO if you don't like vehicles? Plenty of other FPS games out there.

I feel that for the most part vehicles are pretty decent. The problem of spawn room camping should be fixed or at least mitigated when they introduce tunnel systems.

As to main base combat, I would suggest putting the generators that drop the vehicle shields INSIDE of the actual main structure and make the spawn points for the controlling factions vehicles outside of the structure as well. That means that tanks will battle for the outside of the base on the open ground like they should, and infantry will battle for the inside like they should until they can bring down the final generator and at that point the battle is essentially over anyways. On the flip side, bringing down that last generator would allow an enemy counter-offensive just as easily as it allows your armor to roll in and mop up the base.

This would also add a whole level of strategy to walled off bases. Do you actually want to bring down the vehicle shield generator and risk and enemy counter attack while you're still weak or is it more tactically sound to simply leave the shields up, allow the infantry to mop up the defenders and make sure that any counter-attack has to deal with your armor outside the base and still have to have an infantry fight to get inside.

Just an idea I had that could address some of the vehicle zerg issues. Obviously this would only work in bases that have walls and shields but it could be a start.

Annihilator spam is far superior vehicle spam.