Hex Lattice: Why it will breathe new life into PS2

1.) Feldspar Canyon Base: the B point would Not flip at all. I started capping the base by myself but could only take 2 points. A few people (Friendlies) showed up. I requested one of them try to flip the point, and the player was unable to. Said player (Who I am ashamed to admit, I have forgotten his/her name, so if you are reading, please message me, so I can credit you with this), found that if they stood under the point, physically directly below it by one floor, the point would flip. I was dubious of this at first, but the point, and the zone to capture the point being detached came up a few times, so it was later confirmed.

2.) Tawrich Tower. The NE outlying base of Tawrich tech. To capture the point, you had to stand inside of the tower (To the east by one room of where the point Used to be, in that same tower), in order to capture the point Outside the tower in a totally different building. Was able to confirm this, by getting the point reflipped by a helpful VS player. Credit: Giltwist

3.) Tawrich Recycling: Was unable to locate the area needed to flip the point

3.) Crossroads Watchtower: The B and C point would not flip. B is located roughly where it used to be, due south of the crossroads tower, behind the small building that currently stands where the large two story used to be. The C point is in the building furthest to the west at X-roads watchtower, nearly at the top of the stairs on the second floor.

4.) Regent Rock Garrison: The C activation point is disconnected, and lies on the first story of the building, on the east side, rather on the second story on the west side, where the point itself is now.

5.) SW outlier of Mao tech, was unable to locate the point activation zone.

6.) The SW outlier of Mao, was unable to locate the point activation zone.

There is an invisible wall blocking the tunnel running E-W behind the Stronghold

The supports on the bridge between Regent Rock garrison and Scarred Mesa are also invisible.

I had also observed some places where the minimap is displaying incorrect information about a week ago, but I have not been able to find those places again. Will start making note of those locations as well.

All but the yellow one I have reported on these forums. And that is only because I didn't notice the yellow one until last night.

Yeah, I heard they moved the point there. If you check the live server, East is where the old C point was located.

SOE, for all the above, the capture zones are still tied to the old point locations found on LIVE SERVERS. Instead of taking the lists from the community, you should just check your own list of which points you moved, and where you moved them to, then check all of those.

As to Tawrich recycling, if you ever find yourself wanting to flip the point, slowly head up the west stairs until the pointcap UI appears.

The capturepoint "A" of the Rashnu Watchtower is in the neutral zone, which means, it can't be captured.

We really appreciate that. I had an opportunity to test this weekend (even in a platoon with Higs himself, *swoon*, so dreamy), but the experience was... difficult.

I think that there are many in the community who are very happy to spend time on the beta server testing mechanics, gameplay, balance, etc. There are far fewer who are happy to go through multiple reboots, crashes to desktop, and spawning freezes while attempting to do so. While crashes will be unavoidable at times, the last weekend's beta release was so unstable as to be nearly untestable.

I believe there will be more players interested in spending time on the test server if there is any way to push a more stable beta for testing. Thanks for all your hard work!

Indar Comm Array (the old spawn area still gives spawn room warnings)
Regent Rock (to cap C you have to run to the old, invisible cap point)

Sent in bug reports on these.

Are these changes being held off for when the new battle flow is implemented or are included in GU7 or coming in GU8?

I think the article's points are sound and just but it saddens me to see the hex system go. It had potential as a system to try and define itself as another workable system aside from the lattice system. During the early days of beta it sounded like the devs were aiming for a different gameplay experience in PS2 rather than following the formula of PS1. I think they have fervently stuck to their words that they do take into consideration the feedback from the player base and this is why we have seen this change.

I still think the hex system had potential to become something with more direction and flow than it currently had. That could have existed through cutting off territories and then flipping the cutoff territories. However they never played with cutoff effects beyond cutting off resources which really meant nothing. Cutting off territories could have offered more strategic benefits such as reduced cap times and switching off turrets and terminals for defenders. Increasing the incentive for cutting off territories would have provided direction and given outfits a better idea on the tactics of opposing sides. Sadly cutting off territories never developed and we were stuck with the shallow system we have now.

I never played PS1 and I'm all for trying out the lattice system and getting those big battles (of which I'm hoping there will be infantry warfare that doesn't have one side shooting through shields at the other side), but I can't help but feel like the hex system is being buried alive with all the untapped potential it had. A sad farewell to it is in order from this player.

Eh I disagree with the article quite abit... It's like he played ps2 for 30mins was confused as to what to do and quit then tryed again with the latice, again for 30 mins....

"This allowed outfits to predict the flow of battle in such a way that interesting and hectic fights could be produced at the drop of a hat"

This Already HAPPENS. The flow of battle is not some magic thing that can't be predicted.. It's really quite simple and after playing the game for awhile you pickup on it easily esp during the alerts. Don't get me wrong I liked the latice system in ps1 and was abit bummed to find that ps2 wasn't going to use it, that is until I played the game during the alpha/beta and realized with the limited space it made sense to not use it. There just isn't enough to the game yet for it to work out right the way it did in ps1.

I would love to see it here but simply don't think it's time yet as we don't have enough continents to fight over currently. The only reason it worked in ps1 was the fact there were so many continents, and for it to work out we'd need like 6-8+ min, yet we still don't have a fourth...

Also there were serious problems with the system in ps1 like not being able to push out of the warpgate if a faction had control of the cont, you'd need double their numbers to zerg out. The one way around that in ps1 was the multiple connections to different continents to get a foothold on the other side of the map while their zerg was distracted at the warpgate. Hence why I think it isn't a good idea here till we have more continents and more possibilities so it doesn't feel like a zerg only straightjacket has been placed on the game.

The prob here is that they havn't found anyway to solve these sorts of problems with the limited continents we currently have and will simply repeat the mistakes which is not better than what we currently have w/o the latice system.

The lattice system is probably the worst change I've seen the devs make. It's wrong on just about every level. It makes the game great for people who play for 10 minutes and log off again, but it screws over anyone who plays the game alot. There is exactly one successful strategy: Have more people than the enemy does. That's the only thing you can do. You can't flank around them, you can't disperse large enemy forces, you basically can't use your brain at all. If SOE actually does this I'm probably done with the game, because I can't ******* see any reason why this is fun. A game is supposed to be easy to learn and difficult to master, and instead SOE is lowering the bar. There's a reason no sport in the world consists of headbutting each other until one person passes out, its really really boring. So its great for casual players, they can find a fight really easily, but it also means there's absolutely no reason for me to spend money on it. There's no innovation, there's no creativity, there's no tactics other than set up respawn. This system might, MIGHT be tolerable if planetside was a two faction game, because then its possible for you to win when your faction has more people. But its impossible for one faction to outnumber both the others, which means the only way to cont lock anything is to ghost cap it. Any prime time turns into a never ending fight going on and on and on and on and on. Honestly on test I hate the base I'm fighting over a lot more than the enemy I'm fighting there because I can't stand the sight of it any longer. Fundamentally, this update kills any variety in the game. All fights at a given base will follow the same progression. All fights other than ghost capping is going to be a giant battle. Anti air batteries are going to deny air at these huge battles, and anti-armor batteries are going to deny tanks. The game is now actively attempting to stop me from using my brain, taking away the ability of any small unit to actually accomplish anything. I'm never gonna have to adapt to a smaller fight with fewer people and then rethink it for bigger fights. I'm never gonna have to really think about anything at all.

Except this isn't true at all.

People who complain about the Lattice system's lack of strategy are fooling themselves. Planetside 2, as of this moment, has almost no strategy whatsoever. There are no supply lines, energy reserves, resource mining operations, anything like that. This game has very, very minor strategic elements, but right now most strategy comes down to simply locating and fighting enemy forces. We aren't talking about something like a Paradox Interactive grand strategy game, an entry in the Total War series, or Starcraft. The strategy in Planetside 2 isn't even remotely bordering that, and likely won't for quite a while.

All the Lattice will do is limit the amount of potential bases a faction can attack at any given time. This has nothing to do with with lanes, routes, or whatever people like calling them now. It's almost exactly the same system we currently have, except much, much more focused and directed. I don't see how this is a bad thing. People like to talk up how the current Hex system encourages strategy, but it really doesn't. It has next to no depth. An advancing faction can have any number of targets to choose from at any given moment.



This image shows my problem with the current system. A TR force at Crimson Bluff would be able to choose from five different targets to attack, making it incredibly difficult for VS to mount any kind of proactive defense, like intercepting a potential TR armor push at a base about to be defended. This limits strategy to an insane amount, and Planetside 2 ends up playing more like a session of whack a mole rather than anything else, with attacking forces appearing from any variety of different bases with little if any warning for the defenders. The ability for entire outfits to skip around via redeployment with incredible ease only exacerbates this problem, as it encourages defending forces to more or less teleport between bases, rather than fighting or traveling outside of them. So you end up with rare cases of interbase combat, and the locations of battles that are determined almost exclusively by the attackers.

The Lattice system will greatly improve on this. Instead of being able to choose five attack routes like the above screenshot, under most circumstances it seems that the attackers would have two bases to choose from, sometimes not even that many. This would allow defensive forces to much, much more easily intercept attackers and defend their territory. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping an outfit from simply leaving one base, traveling to one at a different location on the Hex, and attacking from there. That's more or less the same system that exists now, but simply gives the defenders more ability to actually predict movements.

For people who are complaining about how awful this will be for small outfits, here's some food for thought: the other day my relatively small outfit was doing what we normally do, which is redeploying around the map to find fights where we can make a contribution for our team. Most of the time these end up being defensive fights, and a lot of the time we end up pretty outnumbered as well. This wasn't any different the other day when we headed over to defend Rust Mesa against a BWC spearheaded attack. They probably outnumbered the VS defending force around two to one, give our take, and we pretty quickly realized that by sitting on the front lines we weren't going to be able to make a difference.

So, what we did instead, was figure out where there Sunderers were, redeployed to a different base, drove our way to a vantage point, and then volley fired AT rounds as HAs to alpha strike their Sundies faster than the TR could repair them. And, you know what, we ended up winning the fight thanks to our very decisive attack. Without any Sunderers TR was gradually bled out of the point, and we were able to establish a serious enough foothold in the base to prevent them from deploying any other Sunderers.

This is also what the Lattice system should encourage more of. Because we could, possibly, have more evenly matched, or large scale fights, and fights like these in between major bases, it gives smaller outfits more opportunities to be useful and coordinated. By being able to predict routes of advance, and knowing where enemies are likely pulling vehicles or aircraft from, it allows smaller outfits to wreak havoc behind enemy lines, or blow up vehicle terminals in friendly bases to deny hackers. It opens up a much larger variety of tactical options beyond just "redeploy to base X, swarm out of cap room and work from there". I know for a fact that, by being able to predict where multiple Platoons of NC were at, our two squads were able to completely shut down their offensive simply by coordinating and using terrain to our advantage. I would like to be able to do that more often.

Basically if you don't like the Lattice I don't know what's wrong with you.

The whole debate boils down to:
Does the LATTICE improve the game ?


So far, I find any argument for the (current iteration of) Lattice unconvincing, because:
-The Hex system has proven at times that it has potential which unfortunately was swept away with successive updates
-If you're not a part of the zerg, you can only poke the zerg thus being only 300m away from it

The example you provided:

I can already do it in the Hex.
Hell, I've written walls of text about how the only significant thing you can achieve, ever, is to kill Sunderers.
Did you do it only because the lattice inspired you to ?


So, back to the point; is there ANY mechanic based on the lattice ?
We have a dynamic; large fights, which I could already experience.
We have no mechanic (yet)

The lattice will only be justified if further improvements to the game REVOLVE on the Lattice and if they are BETTER than what they could be with a Hex-based system.


Conclusion:
Wait (again...) and see. Till then, live servers are stagnating

The Lattice system is literally the hex system with different looking base connections. There are no other real differences.

This on its own is the best reason to move to this system.

It gives attackers exactly the same ability.

That is indeed all the lattice is, fewer connections.

If bases have fewer connections, it would allow for this system, which would seemingly add depth to the game.
If it's combined with a few detriments for not having a connection to owned territory, things may get interesting~~

Wow, a game which two opposing sides have the ability to predict and the others' movements instead of randomly guessing? Why, that almost sounds... strategic.

Well not if the possible moves are relatively limited.

I made a point of mentioning this, as its been cited over and over that one of the great benefits of the new system. Is that it gives defenders time to prepare as they can predict the attackers movements.

As I've said elsewhere, its already been seen, that the attacks ability to do the same and 'leapfrog' over to bases they can't cap yet and spawn camp them, nullifies this supposed gain.

A totally agree that this game needs a lattice system but the one they are testing now, at least in its current form, does not work as well as other types or systems would and would serve to ruin the game for a lot of people.

Here's my take on this issue with an alternate "Hex-lattice hybrid" system if anyone is interested. In theory it would provide the best of both worlds with much fewer down sides if tweaked properly. http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...aditional-lattice-hex-hybrid-proposal.119413/

Woah, you mean the attackers might be able to more easily predict where the defenders would be rallying from and preemptively stop counter attacks by destroying terminals and reinforcements before they reach the battle?

The Lattice system sounds better each day. Next you'll be telling me that singe infiltrators won't be able to solo cap bases anymore.

no I'm saying the two negate each other. either the defender has more men and a smaller attacking force slowly walks into a kerbstoping. Or the attacking force has enough men to camp 2-3 of the spawns of the bases along that given lane.

Demonstrable. the whole 'predictability is good' advertised benefit of the lattice, doesn't wash.