The state of PS2 and what I feel must change.

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by BuzzCutPsycho, Feb 17, 2013.

  1. LordMondando

    Eh? It's quite obviously modular in several parts. The "Random annoyances" section is the most obvious example.
  2. Miggs

    Well if it's an all or nothing deal with his proposed changes then it's a big "no thanks" from me.

    The resultant game would be nowhere near as fun to play for me (and I'm the only person I can claim real knowledge about preffered playstyle).

    I don't want to be constantly running from opposition zergs trying to defend unimportant bases and then getting penalised even more by having my subsequent spawn locations limited to close locations just so I can remain as a target for a swarm of enemy players.

    Dumbing down the game mechanics and promoting zerg mentality onto everyone is what I read from the OP suggestions.
    • Up x 5
  3. Quovatis

    There are so many things that just worked fantastically in PS1. During development of PS2, they said they would keep all the good parts from PS1 and gid rid of the bad. Well, it hasn't worked out that way. As far as I see it, yes, some bad things from PS1 didn't make a return, but all the good things are also gone. I don't know why the devs are so afraid of using PS1 mechanics that are tried and proven to work well. The hex vs lattice system is a great example. I agree with a lot here (disagree strongly on the no cooldown for instant action, though). PS2 just feels like a giant deathmatch. Tactics aren't required nor rewarded, and it's a big shame.
  4. MrHenderson

    Curious that every single idea would benefit zergfits over smaller outfits. Self serving much?
    • Up x 3
  5. AFoo

    Sounds like an opinion of someone who either didn't read or doesn't understand the game ... he listed 8 pages of "suggestions" to help enhance the gameplay as a whole.
    • Up x 1
  6. Aerolath

    This is your "I told you so" moment
  7. kidRiot

    Highlighted what I'm going to respond to. Once I get more time I'll respond to the rest of your posts but keep in mind, this is from the perspective of a smaller, highly organized outfit that regularly takes on Platoon sized outfits with 2 squads or less. I believe keeping in mind the context of the posters history/outfit size & style is important when reading these posts.

    The overarching ideology behind all your ideas seems to be to limit options to people who know what they're doing. You don't want to make the game completely accessible to Joe Casual because it will ruin the game. Drawing a balance between your average player & your more hardcore players is always tricky. Look at what happened to Diablo 3: it failed because it was too user friendly. Flow of battle isn't dictated by drawing a straight line across a map: that's just like a horse running with blinders on. Flow of battle is dictated by 1) Game mechanics and 2) The players. You don't want #1 to be too limited and you don't want #2 to be limited. Sure what you propose may create more fights and hotspots flowing in a linear fashion but it will make the game static and uninteresting - it will lose it's current dynamic flow. Players will get smarter over time and more interesting fights will evolve. The game isn't always about strategy but what outfits do in the heat of battle that makes it worth telling a story over. The magic behind Planetside 1 wasn't the game mechanics (bad) or even the flow system (decent), it was the things you accomplished that you wanted to tell your friends about and that's what Planetside 2 is missing. It has a solid foundation but changes need to be made (that I won't talk about here, simply addressing your points) to make the game even more dynamic.

    Pain field: This is a terrible idea. I can't tell you the number of times we've landed onto a base and the enemy has the gens down, the point 6/6 capped and is now pushing to the SCU. With a pain field a defense would have less time to be mounted. We've held in the SCU room a number of times until we're simply overwhelmed by enemy attackers. The tunnel system has done a lot to make bases more defensible because it gives the defenders a mobility advantage over the attackers. Having a pain field in the spawn room for a defending base is like telling the defenders, "GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT," not, "We can take this base back with proper planning." Again, you're limiting options and forcing people into picking the nearest hexes to defend which a larger outfit would find much easier to farm. They wouldn't have need to stay to defend a cap when they know where the enemy is spawning. Get your farm on.

    Deployment options: Another bad idea. Why? Because you're limiting options. You have this beautiful huge continent and you're forcing people to spawn near the point where they got kicked out of. This would encourage Joe Casual to run headlong into the enemy instead of pausing to think, "Where can I spawn next that will give me an advantage." You're removing thought from a process that should take some thought. In essence you're dumbing down the game in an effort to encourage fights from one hex to the next. That's why adjacent spawning is bad. You want to give the player options to spawn so that he/she can mount a counter-attack or get ready for the oncoming wave of enemies.

    Battle flow: Like I said earlier having a true battle flow doesn't mean knowing where your enemy is going to be it's picking the right moment and place to carry on your attack or defense. My outfit constantly has people in the air so that we do know where the enemy is spawning. All you need is people in the air scouting. You've played this game enough where you should also know where the enemy is going to head. Each server and faction has their own personality. With all the fighting we've done on Indar (I'm on NC Connery) we can tell with a pretty good % where the TR or Vanu are going to go next. What about Joe Casual? The new hotspot system and enemy density alerts have come a long way to showing people where to go. If anything, PS2 needs a more compehensive tutorial for new players or act as an option for existing players to use. You want to give the players knowledge not take away their options because if you do that, then the game isn't being played to its full potential.

    Flow of battle is an interesting thing, because like you said the game is the players. We can do whatever we want within the limits of the game and it's those limits that act as a plateau between creativity and zerging. Zerging to me isn't only about numbers and big fights, it's about people thinking less than other players who can accomplish similar goals with smaller numbers. Encourage the playerbase to think on their own feet, don't encourage them to have that instant gratification that comes from COD-like battles where less thought is put into objectives and more thought into killing.
    • Up x 2
  8. strove

    As much as what you say is, for the most part right. You don't even try to effect these things yourself, there is a permanent fight on indar on your server because you have commanded your 600 man outfit to zerg the place to shreds. Personally i think that outfit numbers need to be capped, no one wants to defend the small places because when there's 200 infantry and 50 tanks outside the spawn there is no point. Essentially the improvements you have suggested are right, they work out (plus or minus some small details) but what needs to happen it a large increase in tank re spawn times to stop the armor masses, there also needs to be a more effective way to take tanks and some aircraft out, if you get a lock on a tank, the tank kills you and take 1/6 damage then pulls out and gets repaired, with planes they fly in, get a lock on, pop flares while firing rocket pods, then wait till their flares are ready again, if a burster turns up to support the rockets 9/10 times the plane will get away with enough health to go and heal... not to mention Libs...

    to summarize we need:
    tank timers increased
    player masses and zergs to be much harder to pull off or a way to break up the zerg...
    and the actual possibility of taking out armor before they get 20 kills

    i don't want to have to give up on the continent when BCP here runs a zerg there, but at the moment the options are get killed repeatedly from 'cheesy' kills, or back out.
  9. Rusky

    I heard Call of Duty is a nice game too, you should try it.
  10. Cl1mh4224rd

    I always liked the cloaking bubble around the AMS in the original game. It would be cool to see it as a certification for the Sunderer in PS2. I disagree, though, that it shouldn't prevent use of other certifications. A cloaking bubble is a natural fit for the Defensive Slot.
  11. EmanModnar

    A lot of people are mentioning - when they get tired of a certain fight to just go elsewhere. However elsewhere doesn't usually get you a decent fight. When you have 100-200 people playing an organized style of gameplay, or even just a squad, and you want to try 'something else' that usually means going to another continent and then locking it capping mostly empty bases in 45 minutes - not fun, most of the time people don't come to try and stop you, because they enjoy the fight where they are - they have no reason to leave.

    People are on indar because that is where the fight is --- address the bigger problem and merge servers -- giving more population -- that would solve some of that. The same thing held true in PS 1 - when there were continent locks, another good fight would eventually break out elsewhere.

    For those thinking that Buzz just wants a giant zergfest to unleash a constant TE swarm through are wrong - what he wants is a good fight that keeps moving - in one direction or the other. TE has just as much fun with organized defense in a three way as it does assaulting a base.

    As for something else Buzz is a champion of - multiple objectives - and that is something the smaller outfits, or even a random squad can do at any point in the current game or the one he is suggesting instead of it. How many outfits, when in a big zerg, actually say 'lets all work on getting a particular gen down' or 'lets do a max crash to the scu' instead of leading by saying 'all head to that capture point over there and lets take it' There are outfits that want to play and try to coordinate, and there are outfits that are more of just a community who don't care as long as they're having fun - if you see Buzz on during the day or on weekends - he's solo - he wants the game to work as a whole - not just for zergs.

    I also don't agree with a bunch of what Buzz has to say here - especially since once 1 thing is implemented it changes the entire dynamic - and he knows that too - which is why you toss out a bunch of ideas and see what happens.
  12. EmanModnar

    You would think - but right now an AMS without mineguard isn't much of an AMS that is at the point of the battle anyhow. Great you get a bubble around it, and eventually everyone is running from your ams and can be easily found by the enemy. A spawn beacon is then put within 100 m of it which is easy enough defending or attacking. Then a drop pod hits your ams, drops a single mine on it, and book. Your entire offense of perhaps a platoon is gone in a second by a 2 person squad in an undefended area.

    Buff up the rest of an AMS's nornal defense, against gunfire, av, air, mines, and c4 - then sure, give it a bubble option, until then, substituting one for the other isn't a good option.
  13. EmanModnar

    No not entirely true - the zerg will not move forward to capture a 250 exp small bit of land that means nothing, they will stay and keep their 1500 exp base thank you - However Air would move forward and can quickly return to get the exp. And a zerg would still need to spend time holding the SCU down until it blows. I'm sure many of you have been in battles in a bio lab where by they time you got to the shield gen of the SCU, it was going to cap soon after anyhow. By pushing defenders out - you're only saving minutes - time for a proper defense somewhere else to be put up.
  14. drNovikov

    So, some people are tired and they want to force all other people to go elsewhere so those tired ones could have a fight.
  15. drNovikov

    No, it doesn't. 8 pages? So what? It is still all about zerging.
    • Up x 1
  16. Riftmaker

    I'm not even sure where to begin,pretty sure you're trolling. I mean you can't really be serious with that statement. Anyway good sugestions,logged in just to thumbs up everything and to bump this thread(we all know how much of a pain logging in is on this forum but it was worth it !)
  17. drNovikov

    No, I am not trolling and yes, I am serious. I hear that some people are saying how tired of the Crown they are. I see that lots of other people are fighting at the Crown and loving it. I hear that those 'tired of the Crown' guys want to 'nerf the Crown' because 'they cannot find a decent fight somewhere else'.

    So, basically, they want those people who love the Crown get out of the Crown to pleasure them. They want to 'nerf the Crown' and take away the fun from lots of people just because they are 'tired'.
    • Up x 1
  18. EmanModnar

    No, you're putting two different issues into one answer. The idea is to find a decent fight faster, if you don't want to be in the 'main fight' As it stands there are plenty enough people that stay away from the main zerg: either they want a chance to learn the game, or they're practicing flying over a less contested area, or whatever - but as it stand if you don't want to be in the main fight, it is extremely difficult to find another one because of numerous reasons:

    1. Low Pop
    2. No reason to defend unless you're a defending and getting a farm
    3. No motivation to leave the 'main' fight for secondary objectives (PS 1 - someone tried to drop your only tech plant, someone would come and try to stop you - but this required back-hacking capabilities). Now people prefer to sit inside a farm zone and who cares if they lose tanks.
    4. You can't tell how much time you have, or just how much you lost an area until you get there.

    He's trying to address those issues.

    He isn't saying you must go from base A: directly to base B. The old lattice work of PS1 still provided options and alternate bases - it wasn't a straight line - but gave direction still. (I prefer and improved hex system myself honestly)

    Part of what makes this all difficult is yes, on the map you can get a warning, by seeing a blinking zone, that multiple squads are there, and if a hack started. However: you can't tell if the gens/scu are down, you can't tell if the satellites have been taken, and you don't really know how much time you have since you can't tell if there are people on the capture points.
  19. HadesR

    But there is no reason why it shouldn't ... I'm sure outfit leaders have at least minimal communication skills right ? So why doesn't outfit X contact outfit Y and Z and organise an Amerish day ? or an Esamir evening ? rather than expect SOE to hold their hand all the time.
    The only thing stopping people doing that is their own willingness or lack of to do so
  20. drNovikov

    Then we should address the low pop problem, not take away the fun from people who are okay with the Crown and love it.

    When I am tired of the Crown - I go somewhere else. I guess I am not egoistic enough to propose taking away other gamer's fun in favor of my own.
    • Up x 1