Why Asymetrical Balance doesnt work in Planetside 2

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Xebov, Jan 15, 2014.

  1. starlinvf


    If you haven't played the older Tribes games, it'll wet your appetite for physics based games. If you played the old Tribes games, you'll be disappointed in how badly they crippled the physics. Despite that, its still miles ahead of most modern games in terms of movement. I would recommend giving it a try, but don't spend money on it.... their balancing model is a wreck, and have been known to push changes just to drive sales of new weapons.
  2. TheFamilyGhost

    There is no balance in this game.

    There are no physical laws governing in game performance of weapons or vehicles.

    Changes to weaponry are made on performance.

    Speaking of balance is one of two things: 1) A waste of time 2) Self-serving
  3. Danthaman

    This is just a prowler cry post. I love it when people put out so much words for a simple little whine.

    The prowler is fine. get over it. Sheesh when the TR and VS get such small nerfs the forums get soaked.
  4. Shidhe

    Don't tell Smed that... he's a huge BF fan.
  5. Xebov

    You can look yourself into the categories i mentioned, they are for most cases exact copys. For some cases tehre aare differences but they are realy small.

    Kills are not so important. Situations are important. If Tanks from different Factions are to good against other Tanks in certain situations the kills can be equal overall but there can still be an issue in balance.

    It is done by having "Overdmg". In a perfect Battle both Tanks will not need all of the dmg the last hit will do. This overdmg sucks in the to much dmg done for the balance, so its not relevant for most cases. But the point is that the Devs dont realy touch the weapons. They just build statts and add generic attachments to them, doing some tricks to make it work correctly.

    Im not saying that its impossible in general to get it. But the asymetrical balance ppl talking about is currently simply not there and will not be there in the way they do it. As you said it takes more effort and it may be some effort that directly crosses some points where stuff got generalized for easier developement.

    Creating a core design to work around would force the Devs to give every Faction a unique version of Striker, Lancer and Phoenix. It would make the game more fair, but its very hard to do. The games basics are all generalized across all empires. Launchers will allways be launchers and there is not much room to create for example a unique Lancer for each Faction.
  6. Ned

    I have a simpler version of why it doesn't work.

    1. You will never achieve balance like this unless ES weapons share the same stats.
    2. Its boring.
    3. It kills creativity, uniqueness, faction identity, and limits guns to all having similar stats, none stand out.
  7. FigM

    Asymmetrical balance can definitely work for game like this. But it does require much more thought and intelligent design.
    And even with good asymmetric balance, people will complain much more about the differences between factions, pressuring the dev's to cut down any feature that stands out as unique to a faction.

    People would complain a lot less about faction differences if it was easy to play all factions. But this game is designed to encourage people to stick with 1 faction, because it takes so long to fully cert out a character. Only the most no-life players get to experience multiple faction balance with fully certed chars. Most people would lack proper understanding of the issues

    It is typically "safer" to marginalize differences between factions. And frankly, my experience with SOE devs suggest they should stick with it. They are simply not smart enough to make proper asymmetric feature balance, they'd just make everything worse if they tried
  8. Axehilt


    Overkill damage doesn't really help the reload speed situation. It would help if the slot increased weapon damage by small amounts (since those amounts could be small enough that the TTK doesn't change because the same number of hits are required to kill.) But with reload speed, you just flat-out improve TTK on an item, and as you pointed out it helps faster weapons more than slower ones if it's just a flat value. (Which is why the simple solution is just to have it be a universal percent-based reduction like I suggested, "5% faster reload speed", etc.)

    For the second bit, you're talking about asymmetric balance like a binary thing, being it's either perfectly balanced or not balanced at all. In reality the amount of balance exists along a spectrum, and while we know perfect balance is nearly impossible to achieve in an asymmetric game, you can usually get balance close enough that it doesn't matter. We can already see this in PS2 with infantry weapons, where often they're so similar that it's virtually never a weapon's attributes which decide the fight (usually it's things like the person who gets the first shot off or who aims better.)

    And the third bit? Well for the Phoenix, an indirect-fire AV weapon is distinct from existing weapons other empires have, but not really strongly needed (even by the NC.) For the Striker, it just straight-up duplicates existing lockon AV, so you wouldn't need to bother giving a similar weapon to other empires. So it's only the Lancer you'd need to worry about, and it really wouldn't be that hard to create skill-centric AV sniper rifles for other empires. (The bigger question is actually whether any empire should have infantry AV capable of landing that much damage at that range. Personally I think long-ranged infantry AV is fundamentally a bad thing to have in the mix of PS2 weaponry.)
  9. Xebov

    It was 10% for every Maingun. It got changed to a flat 0.5s value. And the way i described it is the only way it can currently work (if the Devs even care about it). I still dont know why this change was made in the first place anyway. I can only guess that the devs tried to streamline everything for easier developement.

    Balance is a binary thing, you eitehr have it or you dont have it. Even if you are close to it you dont have it, you are just close. Im not saying that being close to is not a good thing, but its only close to.

    I dont completely agree here. The Phoenix is very very usefull. If you have enought Heavys around that can handle it you can easily destroy enemy vehicles from your spawn without the need of direct sight. You can also kill vehicles that move back into cover while heavily dmged. NC is the only faction to achieve this. The point that most NC dont gather together to do this is more luck to other empires then uselessnes of the weapon. The Striker is a plane copy, but it is a copy that deals more dmg then other lockons (25% more), wich means you need less Heavys with strikers to kill something then with other lockons, it also means you can deal more dmg per lockon and often you have only one lockon. The Lancer is very special, rarely used by anyone, but very powerfull if players bring the skill as you can shoot down air with it and can fire on long distances. All of these guns have a very strong point that other empires miss. The lack of teamwork, and sometimes skill, lets players use them less effective while they would shift some situations realy hard if players would use them (and i allready seen striker firelines and Lancer firelines).
  10. Axehilt


    Balance definitely isn't binary. There's a huge difference between a game with slight imbalances, and one where the imbalances are huge and blatant. Even within PS2 you can see this, where before being balanced there was a slight imbalance between the Marauder (very good) and PPA (balanced with Fury), while the C85 Modified was just absolutely terrible. In one cases (Marauder vs. PPA) the imbalance was very slight, while in the other (Marader vs. C85) the difference in capability was extreme.

    So balance as it matters to players definitely isn't binary.

    The Striker's advantage is balanced by the need to maintain lock to keep landing shots. I think this patch someone found the Striker's TTK against a tank is only like 2 seconds better out of a TTK of ~28 secs? So that's less than a 10% TTK advantage, at the cost of having to maintain a lock and be in front of enemy line of sight much longer than normal. Most players (myself included) feel that's too strong a disadvantage to be worth it. And rarer is the opinion (like my own) that most of the time lock-on weapons are trash anyway since they represent a player choosing to be fodder (infantry) when they could be a predator (vehicle) instead.
  11. axiom537

    I think asymmetrical balance can be used to give each empire a different flavor from the other empires, not by restricting certain weapons to certain empires, but making these empire specific weapon available to everyone, but require these variants (knock offs) to require an additional 2000-3000 worth of cert points to match the original empires base model.

    For instance, the Phoenix is a unique weapon system, but it is restricted to the NC only and it costs 1000 certs or 750 sc to unlock. Why not allow the techs from the other empires to design, their own variant of the Phoenix. However, since their variants are knock offs, they are not as effective as the phoenix and require additional cert upgrades to make them the same.

    Therefore, if the TR or VS wanted a weapon system similar to the Phoenix, they would have the same up front cost, except their Phoenix version would not have the same range, speed, so they would need to invest another 2000 cert points upgrading their Phoenix variant, to match the NC's Phoenix.

    * This idea is not foreign to the planetside franchise, in PS1 we could loot the other empires weapons and if we had the equivalent qualification, then we could use that weapon. We could also hack enemy vehicles and use them as well, so seeing a magrider in NC blue or TR red was not uncommon. Now I am not so sure we should be making of enemy vehicles or hack enemy vehicles directly, it would be cool if when an infiltrator hacked an enemy terminal we could pull that empires vehicles.*
  12. lothbrook

    It doesn't work cause this game isn't asymmetrical, MBTs are the only thing that is asymmetrically balanced, everything else is so identical to what the other faction has only the weapon equipped and skill matters in these fights. I suppose i could say the NC max is also asymmetrically balanced as well because of how drastically different shotguns work and its the only CQC max, lol, but the other 2 maxes are almost identical IMO, and all 3 faction specific utilities for maxes are super situational and rarely do much.
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  13. Goretzu


    Balance exists and happens, whether you like it or not. :)
  14. JokeForgrim

    That's just good marketing, ITS THE BEST! GET YOURS TODAY! (While stocks last...)
  15. TheFamilyGhost

    On what criteria does balance happen?
  16. Goretzu

    Yeah it is a possiblity. :)

    To balance things. :eek:
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  17. TheFamilyGhost

    "To balance things" is not a criterium. It is an action.

    On what criteria should balancing lie?
  18. Kitakami

    I'd say asymmetric balance is almost impossible because there isn't an asymmetric battlefield.

    In the real world, frex, a guerilla force takes the hills, or the woods, or inner cities, mingles with the populace, etc.

    In PS2, all objectives are in bases, and all bases are essentially the same. Whatever is optimal for that scenario, is optimal for the game. Hence, high ROF, hipfire accuracy and large mag capacity being "the be-all and end-all" of infantry weapons, regardless of faction.

    No-one cares about the dead ground between bases. You catch a taxi across those, or just teleport.
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  19. Goretzu

    On them not being balanced. :D
  20. TheFamilyGhost

    "On them not being balanced"

    See how hard it is to define the criteria used? This is why speaking of balance is nonsense.