A Less CHEESY tactic?

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Goodkat, Nov 21, 2013.

  1. Goodkat

    Hello! I am back to Planetside 2 after a break and like many others I am greatly enjoying the OMFG release and the aniversary 2x experience. It is good to be back, and I mark my return with a humble request as an avid tanker and engineer.

    Like all tankers, I thoroughly enjoy a good tank battle and am the veteran of countless armored confrontations. On occasion, however, I employ a different, and far more clever (if not nearly as effective) tactic versus my fellow tank drivers. If you have never done this, prepare yourself, because I am about to reveal a great secret! The tactic goes something like this...

    I take your standard IED (Improvised Explosive Device) cobbled together from whatever somewhat explosive materials I have on hand (a coffee can full of match heads and fart is my favorite). I then put this said explosive together with a proximity trigger and hide it in one of those huge single-slice pizza boxes! Genius right!? I figure that all that tanking works up an appetite! Wait... it gets better. Pizza is great, but there is actually no microwave in these future tanks (crazy, I know). To make the "pizza" even more tempting, I warm it up first! That's right, this "cheesy" treat is warm enough to show up in the thermal optics that many tankers use! The theory is that a starving taker will see a giant glowing pizza box in their thermal and drive right up to it.

    This idea actually caught on and now many crafty engineers are using the same tactic. I kid you not, one time I actually ALMOST damaged my tank on one! Now, believe it or not, as tempting as those devious deceptions look, the vast majority of tankers are never outsmarted by them. They have even taken to calling these devices "tank mines" as a jest. They are, of course referencing the highly effective and largely hidden weapons specifically designed to take out armored vehicles that were developed some 500 years ago.

    Their mocking of this clever but useless contraption actually got me thinking. What if these things were to be approached from a different direction? What if they we meant to be harder to see instead of like tempting beacons? They just may have more success? Keep in mind I am in no way asking for actual "tank mines." That would be totally crazy! All I ask is that we try to make our IEDs a little smaller, lower profile, and we should probably even stop heating them up. What say you guys?
    • Up x 9
  2. Ice

    Taking mines off of thermal has been mentioned for a future balance pass.
    • Up x 1
  3. Silver Fox

    Random, but I wonder where the term "cheese" comes from? Is it because it complements all the whining?

    I agree with you, but your title got me thinking.
    • Up x 1
  4. Goodkat


    What? You don't like cheese on your pizza?
  5. Silver Fox

    Maybe they should make futuristic EFPs so we can add mustard stains to all that cheesy goodness.
  6. Trebb

    It took me a few paragraphs to realize where you were going with this.

    You can still get a vehicle kill now and again:

    1) Hide it in bushes along well traveled areas, or where a tank might go
    2) Study where harassers speed around a base to, well, harass people. They go too fast to slow down in time*
    3) On Esamir, people don't want to go over the huge base walls, check for mines, THEN get a vehicle. They just spawn a vehicle, so oblige them by putting tank mines on the down-slope of the spawn platform, you can't see it from the terminal ;) (HINT: you can actually access the vehicle terminal from outside the base wall if there's a window there)
    4) Drive a solo-harasser, taunt a tank into following you, then quickly swap seats and drop a few mines. Make sure the gap is large enough to allow the mines to arm :p

    * I actually had a full harasser chase my 1/3 harasser, I put mines in the only bottleneck in the road using tip 4 above, sure enough they hit it and died. I then got a hate tell saying it 'wasn't a valid kill' as they stopped in time. WTF? Valid enough for me, I got certs from it :p But it made me think: Thanks to latency we do get a lot of draws where we kill each other, or die behind cover. What if you did stop before the mines, but then blew up anyway because on the other guys client it showed your vehicle drive over them? HMM!
    • Up x 2
  7. UberBonisseur

    Some guy somewhere suggested that landmines should be indestructible.
    Now hear me out before you say "BS"


    To deal with mines, you'd either have to:
    -Defuse them with engineers in the open, which slows down the armor column
    -Run a mineguard to clear the path and detonate the mines


    In both cases, MINES ARE SUDDENLY RELEVANT.
    As opposed to tiny triangles instagibbing vehicles as they run them over, or useless giant pizza slices that are used as glorified C4, mines do what they're supposed to do: slow down enemy vehicle advance.


    It improves teamplay among both sides. It fixes the idle sundy-busting. It makes chokepoints more relevant.
    • Up x 10
  8. Silver Fox

    Not a bad idea. Route clearance was always a very big thing in Iraq; convoys would be delayed or rerouted if we couldn't get the engineers out there to keep the roads clear.

    In order for this to really work, though, roads need to be more relevant. In PS2 roads are just suggestions, just arrows pointing in the direction you need to go. What's the use of mining a road when most vehicles will just take a direct line from base to base? And mining an entire field isn't practical.

    Neat idea though.
    • Up x 3
  9. gigastar

    Upon reading the thread title, i went over every tactic i knew was worth employing and i noted that every one of them is cheesing in some way.

    And on that note, i dont think i have seen anything not called out as OP in the last couple of months.

    As far as i can work out, the term "cheese" originated within the tabletop gaming community during the primal era of the internet. Possibly earlier.

    Its always been synomynous with "overpowered".
    • Up x 2
  10. Silver Fox

    Interesting, thank you.
  11. gigastar

    That was probably me. And to be exact i suggested that tank mines be invulnerable to small arms fire.

    You got everything else spot on though.
  12. HannibalBarca

    Call me crazy, but sometimes I think mines should actually be more visible (and also truly deadly).

    The purpose of mines should be "area denial" rather than vehicle kills. In RL (I know...) the mines would likely be used to funnel vehicles into a "killing zone" where they can be destroyed by artillery, other tanks, whatever.

    I reckon mines should almost OHK tanks, but be clearly marked similar to a spawn beacon. Engineers should also be given a lot more mines. Engineers would then be able to actually prevent vehicles from going into certain areas. So rather than mines being a sort of short range rocket launcher or grenade alternative, they would open up whole new gameplay options and teamwork opportunities.

    A classic use of mines from history is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mafeking, where the Brits fooled their enemies by elaborately *pretending* to lay minefields and barbed wire. The mines were not real, and no vehicles were destroyed. Nevertheless the "minefields" functioned perfectly, exactly as if they had been real. The point is: mines are mainly useful for their threat value rather than the actual kills.

    So here's another crazy thought. Mines could OHK tanks, but only one mine in ten actually explodes. As a tanker, would you drive over one knowing you have a full 90% chance of not dying? Engineers would need ten times as many mines, and they would be clearly marked so tankers can avoid them easily enough (but at that point the engineers have dictated the flow of the battle somewhat).

    I would be really interested to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

    Edit: Yeah the mines would have to be invulnerable to weapons fire. And maybe engineers could clear them if they got out of their vehicles (or from the back of a harasser?)
  13. HJK148

    Yeah, they might want to fix the Flash as well, it has Mineguard, but half the time the Flash is the wrong way up for Mineguard to provide any protection. Except against aircraft, of course, but it's not really big enough for anyone to hide behind.
    • Up x 1
  14. RHINO_Mk.II

    This actually makes a lot of sense gameplay wise.
    • Up x 1
  15. UberBonisseur

    I'd go as far as making them entirely indestructible, or make them destructible by small arms.
    It's too easy to sweep a road clear by shooting at a pack of mines with a tank.


    Force the pilot to go out, or force him to get friends that'll do the job for him.
  16. Owleyes

    The whole point of having different slots to fill, Like the defense slot, Is to force choices, Making mines invisible would take those choices away.

    The days of being Forced to run MineGuard really sucked, You can't just throw them anywhere nowadays and expect free kills.

    The upside is that when someone does hit your mines they die, Unlike before when EVERYONE ran with MineGuard.
  17. IamDH

    The medieval days where everyone who used a bow and arrow was called cheesy


    I just made that up
  18. Yuukikun


    That's impossible, on your client you always see the image of where he was in the past. There is no way he can go over the mines in your client and not in his.
  19. UberBonisseur

    Who said invisible ?


    Owleyes is it ?
    • Up x 1
  20. Izriul

    Cheese has been around for a long long time. Cheesy music in the 80's for example. Hell, when I was a kid we used the term at school in a similar fashion to now, and there wasn't any public internet then.