The Vicious Cycle of Farming

About all the balance changes that are happening, they all occur because the game rewards farming too much. Tank Drivers complain about being farmed by Libs and ESFs when they could just pull a couple of Skyguards or team up with a pro air outfit. Why don't they do this, you ask? They're too busy farming infantry and tanks to care. The infantry don't care about that because they're too busy farming behind spawn shield walls. The funniest thing about this is, many gripe about how annoying it is to get killed by a Lib when they are trying to "solo" tank drive. Infantry complain about Libs because they try to lock on to a lib solo and simply are spotted and destroyed. I'm not saying Libs should get a buff, and I like the current update for them (Less Libs one-shotting each other w/ Tank Buster), but this game is fundamentally flawed.
The Solution is simple:
1) Reduce the amount of xp gained while inside a spawn room.
2) Reduce xp gained by taking down infantry in vehicles or aircraft. (They should still get more xp per hour/minute, but since they kill so many compared to playing infantry, reducing xp gain will not hurt the advantages of pulling a vehicle)
3) Add more ways to gain teamplay xp (combining efforts to take down a sunderer, tank, etc.)

However, this probably won't happen as everyone is having a great old time out on the farm, so any change would be met by outrage.

Farming: (verb) The killing of a character by means of a weapon or tactic not approved of by the killed characters player.

Farmer: (noun) A Planetside 2 player who is effective at role divergent from that of anyone he kills.

Planetside 2: (game) Apparently an agricultural simulation.

How about we add fun content so we can do stuff other than farming?

I lol'd. While learning to fly an ESF might actually provide some reward, using a Skyguard is completely thankless. Dual Burster MAX currently has more DPS and better accuracy than a Skyguard. The reward just isn't there for Skyguard, like it is for ESF.

Skyguard is completely specialized against ESFs only, while the ESF is good at other things.

Imagine Playing ESF and not being able to engage anything except liberators and other ESFs. Shooting at infantry only made the run into buildings without ever getting a kill. Shooting at tanks only made them target and kill you. That's what playing a skyguard is at the moment. Unless a ESF is being shot by multiple (3 or more) AA sources, they can simply AB away. Liberators are even worse.

Flak in all forms needs a bonus. The explosive damage has been completely taken away in it's current form because it was deemed too powerful and I agree with that point. What needs to happen is for Flak explosions to create a flinch mechanic on Air. Give it some turbulence with the visual flashes to reduce air effectiveness when AA is around. This maintains the deterrence factor the devs want for AA while reducing the Farm Factor that currently exists because of the lack of risk involved for standing in AA for 10+ seconds.

Agree with 1 and 3

Killing infantry with a vehicle weapons should only give half xp and should not be recorded on k/d for either player. This seems pretty reasonable to me but whatever.

imo this is the real issue the game is having.

The content is there, it's currently just less rewarding to engage that other content.

On top of that, the XP incentive blows.

No one logs into PlanetSide 2 and says, "I can't wait to play AA today!". Why? Because there's no XP incentive that makes people want to. When you go Skyguard, you sacrifice your ability as a Lightning to do anything else other than AA. Sure you can kill infantry here and there, but you have almost little-to-no defense mechanism against anything else.

Once you pull a Skyguard to a fight w/ a ton of aircraft, the following happens:

- You might get a few kills, granted if the pilots knows to get the **** out, they get out.
- You sit in the base and wait for a long time, waiting for any potential air to come by (and hope they're bad enough so you can get the kill) or continue waiting because aircraft knows to avoid that base.
- You drive forward to a few bases, to realize that your presence makes air not want to go there.
- And you wait to die as a Skyguard with a **** score/hr because you managed to deny air for a few minutes.

I think a decent fix that would get people pulling out anti-air more often would be to multiply the AA experience you get for shooting aircraft (not killing) by 5 times. So instead of that terribad 20xp per hit, you get 100xp per hit. Maybe even 200xp per hit.

Also, for ammo towers.

Make it so you can change your vehicle's load out there for no cost. Skyguards can change out to an AP Lightning, HE, HEAT, etc. Sunderers can change out their guns, etc.

Reducing XP is not going to help stop farming because many farm for KD at this point, or just for the sake of getting lots of kill regardless of rewards or stats.

Currently there's just no valid place in the game for easy infantry killing explosives attached to vehicles. They add very little to the cap-point focused gameplay, and usually just prevent infantry from bothering to attempt to defend a base because the floor between the spawn rooms and that point might as well be lava if there's a few libs, bulldog galaxies, etc. above and/or multiple tanks aimed at the spawn exits.

Sunderers and galaxies are transport and mobile spawns, but beyond that the value of vehicles as an integral part of strategic gameplay is pretty nil right now.

If a single Skyguard could run around killing Libs, it would be a bit OP. I would simply add more xp for surface to air damage. 1 or 2 Skyguards/Burster Maxs can keep air out of an area, which is essentially killing them.

Since the beginning the game shouldn't have exp for kill, but only for objectives. Now you ended the farm. The game should have only certs for cap and def a base, by any means.

With that you won't see players camping or "defending" a spawn room. ESF players hunting with a large group inside on the enemy territory without a purpose. Libs doing **** for the faction except for themselves. Tanks complaining about "nothing" to do. Infantry doing **** for the faction except stop in a spot and pew-pew for no reason. [Insert another stupid thing which shouldn't happen in a war game here]

I like Planetside 2 a lot, but I wish everyday a real MMO War Game, not a huge FPS.

While being deterred might be just as good as dead to the attacking LIb, I can assure you that being deterred is not the same guy that had to pull his skyguard to do it. When the LIb flies away the infantry guys go back to working the point, the armor goes back to fighting but the guy in the skyguard, he drives around for a while then usually gets blown up or just abandons the vehicle. It is not the same thing as killing the Lib to this guy.

Another point I saw made is anger over people farming for K/D score as opposed to taking points. Let me assure you that even for the most staunch faction supporter, 2 years of running roughshod over points making the great plays that win alerts for the team will not stop derpy at the warpgate from tking you/your galaxies and letting you know how much everyone hates you. After 2 years you have a k/d of 1.2 as opposed to the tank driver who has a 7.4 and daily lets you know how you are bad for having that 1.2. Go ahead, argue that you are the one capturing points for the empire, see if that will get respect...no, of course not.

Leave the game because you are a COD kiddie and like to play infantry? Continue to play but farm everyone you can in a biolab no longer concerned with who wins the battles because of previously stated reasoning. Take away all stats for K/D and watch 80% of the population leave the game. I dunno, maybe you are right, maybe the game needs to be cleansed of all it's current players so a new meta can arise. Personally, I think it would end the game.

I should probably change the last sentence of my original post to not in a million years.

Fun fact: -Lib player complain that too much people are farming while the highest SPM players ares living in libs.
-Lib players speaking of teamwork while libs doesn't needs combined arms to attack any target of the game.

Planetside 2 started off all wrong with vehicles and now it's too late to change the way people use them. It was never a good idea to have vehicles so accessible to everyone. Too many people got into the mindset that they can only play in vehicles and still do it to this day. Those vehicle only players (unless waiting for resources or timer) complain about infantry players wanting better quality fights due to all the spam yet what would they do with out infantry to shoot?

We get too many resources regardless of if we play as a team or leave to camp a warp gate solo and we are awarded too much XP for killing infantry in vehicles. I would have preferred to have vehicles as an unlock and require lots more specialization, skill to use and physics to make them actually enjoyable. 1v1, vehicle on vehicle combat should be much more lucrative than farming 20 infantry guys. XP should be scaled on difficulty so that HE rounds net less XP for killing an infantry player than an AP round, but still less than an infantry player killing another infantry player.

If you scale XP on the effectiveness of the weapon/vehicle then I think more people will use them for actual combined arms combat. People will do what needs to be done instead of what they always want to do, since what they want to do won't net them exponentially more XP unless it's vehicle on vehicle combat, which is fine.

Base captures should also give less XP because I think it's one of the primary reasons uncontested zergs even happen. Support roles should net a bit more XP to offset getting less for base captures and those who are good at killing won't be affected much. Good balanced fights should be the only real way to earn XP and would promote those grand battles that people want instead of those large steam rollers.

At this point there isn't much SOE can do that won't drive away a lot of players. Hopefully they don't want to make everything so easy for everyone in the next MMOFPS game they make.

1.)1 pro ESF pilot can take out a lib. For 2, its a walk in the park.
2.) I'm not a lib pilot, I just put my certs into it because most infantry weapons are sidegrades and armor zergs are the meta (which realistically, they should be, mind you.)

I would argue that this isn't the real issue.
The real issue is that vehicles don't have their own objectives.

Everything focuses on Infantry taking a capture point which forces vehicles to focus on infantry. Give vehicles objectives that cannot be obtained by infantry and vehicles will have incentives (carrots) to leave infantry to do their thing.

For clarification, a very simple example using current vehicle capabilities.
Communications - If vehicles could destroy communications facilities, which cut off any calls for reinforcements or prevent teleportation to a nearby base (hex) filled with infantry and only allowed a repair sunderer to fix it. Vehicles would be fighting vehicles, focused on a facility that didn't require infantry. - not that I suggest this be implemented, it's meant to be an example of vehicle objectives effecting the game.

There are plenty of suggestions related to vehicles having objectives. Flyers could have their air base that only flyers can effect, harassers are the speed buggy they could have objectives to get something someone picked up from point a to point b in a period of time to complete and objective, et.

Right now the game is designed around infantry. Until that changes, the only change we can count on are "balance" changes to give infantry more breathing room.

I would stop farming in my Liberator if I coudl get a legitimate award/Auraxium Medal that I could show off for all the roadkills I get in my Reaver.

Exactly. There's Spotter, Piloting, and Point Cap Ribbons, why not Roadkill?