KidRiots Interview With Matt Higby

No... I think that one tank should be able to take on a platoon of infantry because that's what tanks are supposed to be capable of.

Nothing to do with resources really. A tank is balanced if it can do what I reasonably expect a tank to be able to do. And if that means that a tank should be able to hold a platoon of infantry at bay, then a tank in PS2 is balanced if it can hold off a platoon of infantry.

May I refer you to an idea I had? https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/how-to-fix-vehicle-spam.216156/

Thing is though

Game play and fun trump all that in an arcadesque game .... I'm mean we could go the semi-Reality route and have AT weapons rare .. But their would also One or Two shot Tanks .. Wouldn't be exactly fun would it ?

I dunno. Can we agree that fun is a subjective term and that what might be fun for one person might not be fun for another?

I'd leave it at that.

Totally ... And I Guess that brings us back to what Matt said about player demographics and balance .. Try to keep the majority happy , because it's near impossible to keep everyone happy ..

Right... and I think though that his methodology might be suspect.

Because again, I am primarily an infantry player. But I get upset about tank things.

Do we really know what will make how many people happy? I think there's just a potential disconnect between what we might think what people want and what they actually want.

Maybe we just need better tools to figure out player opinion? It could be that for every account that has at least a playtime of... 4 hours a week, those players are automatically asked about their opinion on a certain change when they log on. Players who paid money for anything in the game will have their vote magnified by 1.5 times. In this way the Devs can actually figure out what people find important.

Can't argue with anything you said .. Maybe the Player / Dev disconnection started with the fall of the Road Map .. I'm not even sure anyone from the Dev side has replied to the new one yet ..

No, its really not.

In middle ages there was a religious practice called "Indulgence". Basically, a "forgiveness of sins", which was granted for good deeds. I don't claim to understand the whole concept, but here is how I see it was intended to work:
1. You wronged somebody, e.g. stolen a sheep. Thus you commit a sin against the church (god), and you commit a crime against the man from whom you stolen.
2. You admit to wrongdoing, ask the owner of the sheep to forgive you, and make it up to him somehow.
3. With the forgiveness of that man, you go to church and ask for the indulgence. If it is granted, your sin before god is forgiven.

That's how I see. Even if you do a bad thing, you can still make up for it, and go to heaven, so as long as your sin is forgiven and indulgence is granted. Seems like a good concept, right?

However, later this practice was abused by the corrupt church. You could pay the church, and indulgence - forgiveness for sins - was granted in paper form. Basically, people could pay to clear themselves before society and before god. Do almost any imaginable crime, you're clear, as long as you pay.

That's what I see MAXes as. May be they're a part of PS2 lore and should be in the game. But nothing excuses their corrupt, overpowered form that doesn't fit in the balance.

You could tell that with the way Higby talks, the way he pauses mid sentence, he's jumping through a lot of hoops for ways to word things and to check if he's allowed talking about it with non-disclosure info and also if he could say it and it come true in time so people don't back lash over it.

It's sad to see him go but 4 years is a long time and the timing was right.


also I guess this kind of explains why Indar is just a giant *** square. ut was probably repurposed a bit from 2v2.

Anyways it was a good interview tbh. There were a lot of features that they planned on having that still arn't done because once the game went live it was drastically reducing dev time because of fixing bugs and rebalancing and adding new minor stuff.

Also they were both developing the game engine and the game and take people off of things to work on the engine. it was pushed fairly early out of the gate because it's an engine debut essentially (not saying it isn't a real game). Look at MGS5: Ground Zeroes.

Yeah, basically this. I like them as a concept but they really should have been delayed and redisigned conceptually. They had them in tech test and they could have just not and added them half way through beta.

He got a stippend package, which is where they pay you some value (geenrally what you would have been paid per hour/per usual) for a month or two. He's got enough to coast on for a month or two and to line up a new job but he's also getting used to not living and breathing planetside 2 since it's been 4 years straight.

Superb transcript. Thanks for posting HadesR.

I think this speaks to the heart of a major problem of Higby's period there: the people working on Balance (1) hit a wall (across the game), and (2) they didn't find and bring someone(s) on board to help them get past that wall bottleneck, and (3) instead they largely just left it alone.

You gotta know your limits (team, budget, self, etc.). You gotta be able to see and identify Walls and Bottlenecks. And you have to know when and how to get and use the help you need to get past those Walls and Bottlenecks.

"Hard" is relative, and while Higby and the Devs in their assigned roles did many things that others would find "hard" or a Wall or Bottleneck, they tackled them without getting stuck in a Wall or Bottleneck. But Balance was not something they were able to get past the Wall/Bottleneck on. They struggled with it, they got stuck in it, they concluded that they needed more Tools to get past it, and they concluded that with the Tools they had it was "almost impossible to make headway" and should largely be left alone. They either did not conclude that they needed help to assess their subjective Wall, or they knew it but were too ego or politics or otherwise non-project goal focused enough to take the proper step of seeking and getting outside help/solutions.

They failed in that they didn't recognize they had hit a Wall and were in a subjective Bottleneck. They failed to make the move to appropriate people who could resolve that Wall/Bottleneck, or who could have advised them and thereby enabled themselves to do it. They didn't assess the problem correctly and they didn't develop the people to delegate it to.

If you can see a Wall but can't get past, you need help to get past it. If you can't see the Walls, then your management/oversight needs help to see them. And if you can't assess how to deal with Walls, then your management needs help to assess it.

If I were to create an MMOFPS I would hire Higby in a nanosecond to lead the Dev Team. To *NOT* hire him as such a talented and available Asset for this exact task would be a Colossal mistake: he can expert nail 95% of the Dev process at a AAA level. But I would install him in a system where his subjective Walls could be identified, and then their solutions troubleshot by a broader reaching/thinking process to help him (or others) to see, assess, and deal with them. Or to adjust the system itself to hunt out the processes and resources needed to resolve the Walls/Bottlenecks.

As there is no new blood on the current PS2 Dev Team, I assume that they still have this Wall/Bottleneck issue. Though perhaps there are new custodians of Balance now, who perhaps won't hit the same Walls/Bottlenecks. However, if they new Team is in the same Wall/Bottleneck on Balance, and they don't change to find help to resolve it, then we will see the same continuation of terrible and dead end balance.

Seems compelling. Would like to test and see how it felt.

I don't know enough about C4.

I agree the Medic Revive needs adjustment. Perhaps explore the suggestion that each Revive depeletes a unit of Power in the Revive Gun, and the Gun needs to be Recharged at a Base/Sunderer Terminal. Or that each Player can only has a minimum set Downtime after they die, perhaps the Downtime increases if they are Revived multiple times in Short periods. Or do the 40K:EC thing where a killed player can be Revived by Allies or Perma-Killed by Enemies, whichever gets to them first and administers it.

I am not in agreeance with this. I don't like how it affects the Balance of Vehicles.

I am not a fan of this. We can already see in Server Smash that the optimum game when played for Objetcives of Base Capture already invalidates both most Ground Vehicles AND the vast majority of area outside Bases.

*IF* the game were changed such that either (1) other non-base Main Game Objectives were added (Vehicle Objectives?) were added, or (2) Infantry transport and Faction Battlefront relied on Ground Vehicles (nerf Gal, Valkyrie, Revive, Beacon, ESF, Terminal Hack, etc.), if you did those, then I could see more expansive nerfs of Vehicles at bases.

For what ever reason I can't quote you selectively. This forum sucks.

uhlan said: ↑

“Considering the above, mass soldier conflict has zero moral considerations of any kind. So why not throw troops at a target and have that MBT kill 20-30 in a row without consequence?

Because it's a game... and a game needs balance even when that balance isn't rooted in reality.

This is why tanks shouldn't be able to kill 20-30 soldiers at one go, for instance.”

ColonelChingles said:
I would argue that because it is a valid military tactic in PS2 to send 20-30 infantry against a tank, you need to make tanks more powerful than they are in real life.

IRL you don't get that many riflemen running at a tank with C4 in hand, because 1) C4 doesn't work against tanks and 2) people like not dying. This means that the threat that tanks face in PS2 will be much higher than IRL and therefore tank defensive and offensive power needs to be increased commensurately.


As far as a tank needing to be stronger in PS2 to defend itself against 20-30 infantry, it simply shouldn't be possible.

The game doesn't scale well.

In this game, as opposed to reality, you can field as many tanks as you have people to drive them. In PS2, you can have tanks outnumber infantry by a fairly large margin.

Having those same tanks be able to handle 20-30 inf a piece would be ridiculous in a game like this.

Ranges are far too short, there are terminals every few meters, a base every 100 meters or so... and within those parameters you have, very nearly, an unlimited amount of resources to pull anything you want.

The game was designed to be infantry-centric and then they threw Maxes and Vehicles on top of it without very much thought.

PS: To anyone saying "but vehicles do X to me when i'm in the respawn room!". Maybe, just MAYBE, you should go to one base back in the lattice system and restart the battle from there. When the vehicles already got your respawn room in view is the time to regroup in other place and come with a plan. Throwing bodies at the enemy isn't the best tactic. In fact it shouldn't even be a tactic, but apparently the lone wolf can't think, so he NEED to be able to break a siege by just rushing outside of the room/base

Definitely some interesting stuff in the video. Thanks for sharing!

Can't say I agree with some of the things Mr. Higby said there (stuff like 'UBGL nerfs' and 'subtle', 'nudge', 'not drastic' don't belong in the same sentence, IMHO), but since I wasn't actually there with the dev team, talking it out, I have no place to say anything. XP

Some of things PS2 got 'just because it was in PS1' spawned some trouble that we could've lived without, yes (NC MAX packing those crazy shotguns in the winter season of 2012-2013, for example), but the decision of including the third side of the conflict was undoubtably a correct one, in my opinion. For all the trouble it has caused, having three teams instead of two is one of those things that make PS2 a unique experience.

(Personally, I think that 'just because it was in PS1' argument should've been applied to some other things as well. UI, alternate weapon modes and vehicle weapon layouts being all being strong contenders.)

i was meaning to keep the same amount of soup XD but it seems my analogy has confused things further lol

like i said though, infantry are the base, the default, the starting point, you don't nerf the starting point, it won't accomplish anything, you balance things against the starting point.

This thread is about Matt Higby's interview, not about tanks versus infantry balance. I found the video to be a confirmation of exactly what I expected. He clearly didn't want to leave the company but has been coached to say otherwise. The look in his eyes says that he would have preferred to stay, but his disheveled and tired look also says he was tired of fighting for his way.

There were a lot of aspects that were addressed that I hadn't considered before. Matt hadn't signed up to be this celebrity figurehead when he began his position with SOE. Can you imagine what kind of stress that was causing him - being blamed for any and every shortfall that the game had while simultaneously having to make decisions on its future based on player feedback. It's actually amazing that he isn't spiteful of the player base at this point.

I may not have agreed with some of the design decisions made for this game but I don't blame Higby for everything that's happened.

Actually I think this game would not even work without the VS.

As aggravating as it is to get teamed up upon by VS and NC, without a third faction most alerts would simply not really work the way they do.
I mean, instead of pushing as much as you can until you get stopped because you have too many territorry adjacent to both empires forcing them to fight you, the superior empire would simply warpgate the inferior one eventually.
Don't want to deal with LPPA Lasher and Lancer? Go fight NC!
Tired of Ravens annihilating you from a hill a kilometre away? Don't want to fight the shotgun fetishists in a biolab? Go fight VS!

Having three factions is one of the most important aspects of the game imo!
....
Even though that is not the reasons he had for doing it.

I guess we have different "starting points" then.

My starting point would be an approximation of 21st century vehicle-infantry balance. In my view, a tank in PS2 should perform roughly the same versus infantry as a 21st century tank does today.

It's hard to pick just infantry as a starting point... just as it's hard to make a recipe while only focusing on one ingredient. Because the point of recipes is the relative balance among ingredients, not just one. You can make that recipe bigger or smaller, but chances are that what you want to preserve is the balance among ingredients, not the amount of one single ingredient.