The problem with nerfing Redeployside

Reposted from my blog: https://aninfiltratorsblog.wordpress.com/2014/07/20/the-problem-with-attacking-redeployside/

Redeployside. A common phrase used to describe the practice of moving large numbers of infantry quickly from one place on the map to another base, which could be nearby, or on the opposite end of the continent. Nowadays, it seems many players are eager to criticize this game design, crying out for more depth and "logistics". A small voice makes the token mention that without the redeploy mechanic, the lone wolf or casual player would be left in the dark, bored and unable to keep up with the good fights.

But I think there is a critical aspect of "Redeployside" that is being overlooked. That is the sheer excitement of stacking up in a point building to fight off the hordes of reinforcements pouring in. Or looking at the map, and seeing that you have 90 seconds to kick an entrenched enemy out of your base. Many times, the mass redeploy strategy fails - yet we often selectively remember the times where it worked, claiming that the meta is broken and the game is shallow. There is a false notion that we should be lugging soldiers across the fields in sundies or dropping them in via galaxy. The truth is, the current meta of redeployment keeps lattice lanes active, and gives us all more opportunity to shoot at bad guys. In other words, it keeps the game FUN. Furthermore, there is strategy that is involved in redeploying, both as a defender and aggressor. And as I mentioned above, it is exhilarating to make a last minute push for the point.

Another rarely mentioned fact is that redeploying is strictly a defensive tactic. You will not capture bases by bouncing around the map to bases you already own. And I find that the most effective way to attack a base with your outfit is via spawn beacons or galaxy drops. Logistics in Planetside remains well and good for this reason. And as the attacker, you need to maintain those logistics to keep your soldiers on the front lines, or else the defenders will break your push and send you back down the lane.

The last thing I want to say is - what will happen if we start to punish or substantially change the redeploy meta? Here is my prediction: You and your outfit set up on a base, lock down the point and start your 3 minute cap. And no one shows up. The enemy is two lanes over, and they are not interested in spawning new galaxies, going back to the warpgate, and then flying over to stop your ghostcap. They will just wait until you leave, and then ghostcap the base back. Because at the end of the day, most of us are LAZY. We will take the quickest and most efficient method that is rewarding. If you punish redeploying too much, people simply won't show up to your fight. All these champions of "Logistics" will be sitting on an empty point on an empty base wondering why their enemy isn't driving a sunderer manually across Amerish to stop their offensive. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of player behavior, especially in this modern age of online gaming.

So that's my criticism of current popular opinion. My suggestion? I do think there needs to be a pop % limit for redeploying into a hex. I would lean towards 55%, because many bases can be spawn camped with vehicles and air - so it seems reasonable that defenders can bring a slightly larger number of players in to a base. Once you break that 55% threshold, the redeploy option is no longer valid for that base - regardless of if your squad leader is in the hex. I also think that rule should only apply on hexes with 24+ in it - if there's 12-24 in the hex, there shouldn't be a redeploy % limit IMO. Once you break 24+ the ratio cap sets in.

I wanted to say something because I have heard very little in the way of "devils advocate" regarding the war on "Redeployside". And quite frankly, some of the changes I've seen proposed, including Malorn's approach of charging nanites - seem dangerous, and threaten the health of our battles. I want enemies charging into my killzone. I want that element of surprise - will GOKU storm this base or let us take it? Should I bring a medic or a lockdown max? Do we have enough harassers in the tech plant??? Logisticside will be a very boring game - sure it will have plenty of depth - but if I wanted to drive across an empty map I could just go play DayZ.

Oh, and I want to add one last thought - when does Mustarde redeploy? When my faction has too much pop in the hex. When I am being spawn camped to hell. When there are no good fights on the map/continent. I do not want to be punished for this, at the solo or platoon level.

I would love to hear your comments!

M

I have to agree.
I'm a Galaxy pilot, i should be outraged by the very thought that redeployside could be healthy, but i'm not.
cause in reality, i'm Light Assault/Galaxypilot/Harrasserdriver. and while one may think "hey thats some nice differentiation you have there, must be nice to always change up your playstyle and keep it fresh" it's not. all of these 3 function exactly the same the way i play alone and with my Outfit. in the end, it all comes down to one thing:
-Flanking
The Light Assault can easily reach places that other classes have no access to
The Harrasser has such a manouverbility combined with speed and small size, that it can reach places only Infantry are supposed to go.
and last, the ultimate flanking tool, the Galaxy
allows a whole squad to circumvent any restrictions by Spawnrooms, because even without squadspawns it's 12man spawnroom on it's own.
even the biggest Infantrypush can not pass trough a wall of Zepher, PPA, Bulldog, Prowler or Rawkitpod explosions.
Infantry who just reach the Objective simply by "spawning" (aka dropping) there circumvent all this with relative ease.
don't missunderstand me, 5guys in a Galaxy can not beat a full zerg on their own, as that is still a battle of 5v48+ but if you have the numbers tp fight a smaller force can already win. you don't need 48 players to beat 48 players, if 24 of those are not a direct threat because they are camping the spawnroom, 24players on your side who then also have the advantage of surprise on their side can win.
i guess it all comes down to the point, that Galaxies, Sunderers and other vehicles are not logistics, they are tactics. and if you don't use them then thats not the fault of the game, but of the person whos taking leadership.
TL;DR
If you don't use "Logistics" you obviously don't need them because you have the numbers to ignore tactics.

It it keeps game fun, why is game so boring? Why ppl run to next base by foot? Why does ghostcapping still work? Its nice to have easy access to next fight, but there is a line, where access is too easy, to the point where we have not a single reason to bother thinking about what base is important enough to defend. Ppl still can ignore ghostcappers because hey, we can redeploy at that lattice lane later and quickly get it back.Or just leave it as is, since this dot on map means nothing, we just grab techplant and some territory at another lane and we have MBT and resource income again.

Removing supereasy redeploying wont make logistics meaningful by itself, but its vital part of that. If devs will even bother to add some depth, they will be forced to limit redeploying.

There are tons of other fun games, if PS2 gonna use strategic depth to compete, it needs to get some first.

The problem being that players won't just sit on some undefended cap 5 mins -- at least not in large numbers -- once they know that only actual travel can reinforce a base beyond 50%.

If they're smart, they'll fly/drive elsewhere. And because redeployside is limited, they'll have a better idea of where the enemy is, and thus can either reinforce the front that needs help or probe the weak point at a base that's weakly defended.

Game depth triumphs if players aren't able to magically redeploy to reinforce a fight.

I would say that a lack of a strategic element can leave this game unfun.

Imagine a game of chess, where through strategic feints and decoys you have made the enemy think that you're going to make a hard drive down the right side of the board. So naturally he puts the bulk of his forces there. And that's when you strike with your hidden flank on the left side. The road to his King is clear, and there is no help in sight... checkmate is only a turn away.

Suddenly your opponent picks all his pieces and plops them down around his King. Your trickery, cunning, and planning were all for naught. In one fell swoop your opponent managed to completely halt your advance and blow your plans out of the water.

Now your opponent might think that he was having a blast, but you and most neutral observers would probably be thinking that it was a pretty cheap win. The side that had advanced strategic planning was not rewarded for it; in fact the opposite occurred.

In short, taking away that strategic element makes a game like chess unfun. And the same is true for Planetside.

Now nothing stops people from making last minute pushes to defend a base... all that means is that you're going to have to plan out your last minute pushes in advance. Which again, is a certain command skill that should be rewarded and not ignored.

On my part I don't want to get rid of redeploying completely... but there should be a cost to it. What I would change is:
1) Redeploying should count as a suicide in terms of KDR. This would stop the MLG Pro crew from abusing it unless they thought it was worth it (say redeploying to an alert critical base).
2) Redeploying should cost resources, based on how far the redeploy is. In that way you could make an emergency redeploy across the map, but you couldn't keep doing it as a continuous tactic. It would also mean that if you could trick your enemy into redeploying across a long distance, they would take some time to get back.
3) Redeploying should take more time, based on how far the redeploy is. 10 seconds to one base over is fine, but redeploying across the map should take about a minute.
4) Redeploying should alert the enemy that reinforcements are incoming. This allows them to call in their own allies or bunker down if it's predicted that a massive counter-attack is coming. The enemy should get a rough idea of how many players are in the process of redeploying into that hex. This combined with extended redeploy timers would help preserve that strategic element to it all.

These changes would keep redeploy, but tweak it so that it is costly to use as well as counterable. In that way it still allows for redeploys, but restricts them to be only something you might use in an emergency instead of as a regular tactic. It also allows the opposing side a chance to call in their own reinforcements or respond in some other way.

If they can't figure out how to pull a flash or spawn to a deployed sunderer, then there's more wrong with that player than redeploying alone can fix. Have you considered that with entire platoons rapidly deploying between bases and squad galaxies that the current system means casuals and lone wolfs can't keep up? At least before redeployside, there was a chance to get into a landed galaxy or into a sunderer before it left. Now the galaxies never land and the sunderers never stop once they've been spawned. What do you say to the lone wolfs and casuals now?

Redeploying can be used offensively. Drop a platoon on the point, fly away to another enemy base. People start swarming to the base to defend. Re-deploy the bulk of your infantry back into the galaxies and flip another base. Usually you'll get one base a minute away from the capture. Then the defenders have to choose between redeploying to another base to defend or staying at this one till it fully recaps.

Unless they have a continent pop advantage, they'll start losing bases as attackers use redeployside and a few liberators mixed in to spawn camp.

Most of the time, when you attack a base and the enemy zerg shows up, pubs and open squads and platoons will start trickling in from the nearest friendly base with sunderers. The defenders get stuck defending the base against those reinforcements while the redeployside force redeploys back into their galaxies and hits the next base.

If you only play with 1 squad, then yes. If you have 2 squads and the second one brings liberators and hacks the vehicle terminal to pull HE lightnings, then redeployside becomes an extremely boring spawn camp. This is pretty much the only way to win when fighting whole OUTFITS that do nothing but defensive redeploying.

That's generally what SHOULD happen if your side leaves a lattice lane undefended. Then you re-deploy and you're stuck in a spawn camp.

With the current game, a lot of smaller outfits and casuals are unwilling to attack bases without a huge zerg behind them because they know that at least an entire platoon is going to show up to fight them for about 30 seconds and then redeploy back to whatever fight they came from. Reality is you have lots of contested bases that are actually empty.

They should have to decide to continue zerging or to split their force up to defend their base, risking the loss of progress on attacking the other base. Smaller outfits of really good players or even small units of casuals and lone wolfs could actually do something now other than serving as a temporary distraction for the zerg. This would encourage people to spread out between all their lattice lanes if they want to hold territory so you actually have some small fights instead of just a few big ones.

This is why there's lattice. They can't ghostcap the base back if you have people flipping point at the next base.

This is the only honest reason for keeping redeploying as is. Entire outfits do this to redeploy their whole platoon onto a base being attacking by 8 guys and then after they win, they call themselves awesome and strategic(Like GOKU). That is until they meet a group that anticipated that and had the spawn room camped. Then those outfits go to the forums to cry about spawn camping...because they're too lazy to re-deploy a base back to get vehicles or a sundy to spawn outside the base.

And as the defender, your current punishment for redeploying directly into a base is you get spawn camped. It's even more painful for casuals.

Putting pop caps in hexes goes against what Planetside 2 is about. There are still many way that non-casuals can get around it and even exploit this to ensure they can win in ways that can't be countered by casuals. First, you forgot again the squad vehicle spawning. Then there's spawn beacons. Lastly, you take away the only method for defenders who redeployed into the base to get out of a spawn camp....through vastly superior numbers cuz they're too lazy to try anything else.

If re-deployside gets fixed, you also get rid of a lot of the spawn room camping and you get rid some of the advantages of being overpopped.

Casuals won't keep throwing themselves into that situation and an overpopped faction can no longer just redeploy to a base to kill all the attackers and then redeploy back to another front to continue zerging their way between bases. You also get rid of the issue of every base fight turning into a laggy, all infantry bio lab style fight AND more time spent fighting in the field using combined arms to do something other than spawn camp and hurting everyone's framerates with tons of HE being fired on one area.

Agree with OP. Someone who actually thinks about the game mechanics before posting on forumside. Very rare these days.
Afaik there is already a system that prevents players from spawning in a base where their faction has more than 50% population. Of couse there is the possibility when the squad leader is there or they are nearby the hex.

You summed up exactly my feelings in this part here. I always see these "logistics" and "strategy" people talking about this kind of stuff. What I want to know is how is making me drive my flash or fly my ESF to the next base fun? That's not strategy. The only strategy you get from that is a gal drop. Other than that, it's just a stretch of time I have to spend doing nothing while I could be at the next fight enjoying myself.

Now sure, some of the organized outfits might enjoy this. But what about the hundreds of new players and people who aren't in outfits? You're exactly right when you say these people are misunderstanding player behavior. Think about a new player. They don't know the map layouts. Their vehicle timers aren't certed into. And they also likely will have no outfit or anyone else to give them direction. This will also be difficult for people who aren't in an outfit.

A big portion of the PS2 player base is made up of lone wolves, new players, and "cod kiddies". You can say you hate some of these types of players all you want, but it won't change the fact that they make up a large portion of the player base, and they always will. New players will get lost, and the casual gamer or your "cod kiddie" players will be frustrated they have to drive/fly to every fight and log off.

Bottom line is, I want to log on and jump into the fight. The reason PS2 is called a game is because it is supposed to be fun. There is absolutely nothing fun or exciting about driving or flying to a base for a fight. Nothing. If I want to drive around I'll hop in my car and go for a nice afternoon drive. Call me lazy, call me a casual, but there is no way I will drive to a base every time I want a fight. The only time I ever do this is when I am doing a gal drop during outfit play, and even then it's still something I hate and put up with only because I'm following my platoon lead, not to mention it is the only shred of strategy that will ever come from flying/driving to a base. I would get frustrated if I kept being so limited with my redeploy options.

It doesn't benefit only defenders. When rolling with a zerg I almost never travel to the next base anymore. After we cap it I just hit redeploy and wait for a sundy to deploy at the next base and instantly teleport there.

Who says it has to be a "redeploy all the way back at the warpgate and pull a vehicle there"? It could be as simple as "redeploy into a non-contested territory and to deploy at an AMS you need to be in the same area as it." The bases are really close in this game so it wouldn't be that much travel but still enough to give whoever is at that base some warning that a large force is approaching.

I don't know why it is so hard to understand that stuff changes. People who want this game to become planetside 1 will never have that dream happening without killing this game entirely. The gamer mindset and resource is very different than it was 10 years ago. Before the economy was in decent shape despite the war but now we have a very troubled economy with unemployment rates increasing. Back then the gamers barely cared about the resource of time as people were more content and humble with how things were. But now gamers are a bit more selfish and have the resource of time as one second of fun is very important to them. This is your majority now folks and SOE wouldn't have a good time catering to the small group of old veterans from planetside 1. They would lose sales and they would most likely have to sell this game and what not. We are already losing people from a small community compared to other games so nerfing redeploying would cause that. Current gamers want redeploy options on the double and don't want to walk across the entire continent. There are other games for that and planetside 2 doesn't appear to be that one. If the developers were people who were making the game out of interest and not thinking about money then they would do what you guys want but thats not our situation right now and will never be the situation.

Yay! Someone who doesn't want me to be left out in the dark, bored, and unable to keep up with the good fights! I tip my fedora to you, good sir. Now then, on to more important issues: LET THE TRYHARDS' ARGUMENTS BEGIN!

If anyone wants this game to become a Planetside 1.5, the game (2003 crap) became free THIS APRIL. YOU DO REALIZE THAT, right?

I still say the fix is to institute a spawn queue. Would fix Sunderer clown cars too.

My personal opinion on this matter is that if you want to play a team deathmatch game with some mechanism for rotating maps - the nature of the game that redeploying as freely as we do now pays lipservice - there are far better games out there that are also far more well-catered to that audience. Either that or you can stay to play this game but there will have to be consequences for that style of gameplay. There must be consequence along with benefit otherwise there is no choice.

I think any real discussion on how to 'fix' Redeployside needs to start with a "What am I trying to accomplish?" discussion. Most of the hate I read focuses on how a large platoon can hopscotch around the continent participating in fights as much without giving any warning to the opposing force.

Which isn't in and of itself bad. Planetside is about having fights. Even if all the meta were to be stripped out: no more lattice, no more locking, no more resources... all of it gone. The game is still great; it's just called Battlefield now. Any problem which can be boiled down to 'and then they came and fighted me', isn't being expressed correctly.

So if I don't want to stop big platoons from participating in fights, what do I want?

1. Every contested lattice link should have an active fight.
2. Fights should be of varying sizes. (if we get 1, the continent pop caps give us 2 automatically, but it's worth mentioning explicitly)
3. Platoons need to be able to organize and participate in fights.
4. Lone Wolves need to be able to participate in fight.

"Redeployside" is bad because it hurts 1. At the platoon level, there isn't much point to dispatching a group unless you have the single largest force on the continent (and possibly the server). Anything less, and you could be prevented from ever winning a fight by some larger platoon+ that chased you around the map. Left to rational actors, the populations will slowly congregate in an effort to prevent being pop-stomped, until eventually you get a 3-day Crown fight.

So how do you stop this? You can't simply block functionality from platoons, for the same reason you can't stop people from 4th factioning: They will simply disband, redeploy and form up. Especially if they realize their opponents are unwilling to match the strategy out of sheer laziness. If you want to stop a platoon from teleporting across the map, you need to remove any and all ability to teleport across the map. No redeploy, no spawn beacon, no squad spawn. Nothing.

And what happens if we do that? Let's assume that we have a game where your only deployment option is the Warpgate, and any other movement has to be done manually. For a platoon, this means 4 Gals and ~5 minutes gathering & flight time to get to any point in the server (ok, your outfit might take longer to organize. ). Long enough that very few caps could be stopped by surprise reinforcements (most of the time the base would be outright lost, and you'd be setting up to defend the next), and any convoy could be spotted beforehand. I'm sure there are people reading this getting stiff about the idea already. We haven't exactly enshrined #1, but it's much harder for platoons/Outfits to simply shut down all fighting on the continent by warping around constantly.

How does that affect the Lone Wolves though? Well, as Mustarde says: it screws them. Pulling vehicles isn't trivial for your average pubbie. A Harasser or ESF can represent 15-20 minutes waiting for resources. If your fight happens to get steamrolled before you have a new one available? I dunno... log off maybe?

But I think there is a solution, and it's twofold.

Instant Action/Login Spawn needs to be much more intelligent. I'm sure that most of you just ignore the initial spawn option when you log in, and probably haven't touched the instant action button in months. If you're in a platoon that's expected. If you're a Lone Wolf that's a failure state. Ideally it could learn the types of fights you want, but I know it keeps telling me to join 48+ Zerg-grinders and that's not helping #1. I'm not sure what it's trying to do now, but Instant Action should be trying to seed fights. I'm not surprised it won't/can't right now though, because it's largely impossible. Which brings me to point two...

Sunderers need to be cheaper than you are comfortable with. If I'm going to put a bunch of lone wolves in a Lattice lane, I need to make sure they have the ability to push the lane without having a squad handy to pull an Sunderer. In the last 6 months I think I've pulled a grand total of 3 Sundys. It's just not worth it for me to try pushing a lane because all it takes is a single enterprising defender (like myself, or most of the people here I bet) to Tank Mine it, and I'm out 30-45 minutes worth of resources. End result is that I have no Mech left, the lane remains un-pushed, and now I need to find another fight to redeploy to because the enemy sure isn't dumb enough to pull a counter-Sundy for me to mine.

And I think the resource revamp is going to help with that. Probably not enough, but it's a start. Yamiks made a video complaining that the Flash might see its position as personal transport be supplanted by the Sundy because of how cheap it's becoming. Good! If I have 5 pubbies fresh off a defensive win, our first instinct should be to grab 3-5 Sundys and push the lane. No worries about losing it and not being able to pull another for half an hour. If it dies, that's fine: you have three more, and in a few minutes you'll be able to replace it anyway. We want it to be very, very easy for even a disorganized force to push to the next base. They still have to go and actually capture it, but the lane should never empty out because nobody can spawn.

So between the much more common Sundy, and Instant Action sprinkling people around the map seeding fights I think you stand a good chance of getting rid of the quantum-warrior teleportation, and make it so fights can flow up and down the lanes.

And if I'm very, very lucky it could result in more of the combined arms that people are so fond of. If the fields are full of Sundys, nobody can footzerg anywhere. And they can't teleport either, so they need to pull their own tanks to push through the enemy Sundy line. And then you want to pull Libs to counter the tanks, and ESFs to counter the Libs...

It could be very good.

TL : DR - an oddly colored Bambi.

Nerf redeployside and lose even more players, it's as simple as that.

SOE is not that stupid, they are actually going to buff redeployside by lowering the cost of Sundies and giving them some sort of shield.

Fixed, any change that makes my KPM go down makes me more bored, my fun in this game is directly correlated to how many kills I'm getting (which is the point of any FPS game), if I have to spend more time getting into fights I'm going to get less kills, thus I'll get bored, thus I'll end up burning out and quitting the game earlier.

The only change they have to make is prevent people from redeploying AND zerging, that's it. Remove the base as an option for redeploying if the pop imbalance is over a certain number and that's it.

Shallower, higher-KPM options exist. If you don't care about game depth you can play CoD, which I imagine still spawns players <8 secs away from each other nonstop.

Planetside 2 is the deep option. The shooter worth playing.

If we had realistically simulated logistics we wouldn't even need developer placed "bases".

Although I might disagree on his stance about rocket primaries, he's right on about this redeploy thing. The population % cutoff is a great idea too. I want stuff to shoot at constantly to keep pushing my spm and experience gained, but would enjoy more consistent fair fights as well.

Remember the pre lattice days? Boring ghost capping everywhere, all the time! Let's not bring that back again please. Or maybe there really are a bunch of people who enjoy sitting on a hex for minutes on end, waiting for it to flip with minimal push back?