My case against armouries

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by RabidIBM, Jan 26, 2023.

  1. RabidIBM

    I was thinking it over the last couple times I was playing, and even as someone who has been in a leadership position in an outfit, as someone had the right click to meme beme fun button, I have to say that armouries are a net negative to the game. Let's go over them 1 by 1.

    ORBITAL STRIKE:
    One of the most griped about armoury assets. So griped about that a scapegoat is needed, and builders are getting blamed for nuke spam. Builders had exclusive use of nukes for years, and for years we didn't see 8 nukes dropped in the space of a minute. Then outfit armours got the right click nuke and suddenly there is a problem. Now, after a couple years of this, Wrel's fans are supporting his vision of a construction overhaul "because it will address nuke spam". Want to address nuke spam? Take away the ability to impulsively right click a "salt nuke" on the map while dead. Restrict nuke access to people who give notice on the map that they have it and have to run a short range dart.

    FACILITY MODULES:
    Discounts are bad. Why? Because they give vets an outright equipment advantage over new players. There are games out there where if a level 1 attempts to PVP a level 60 he's an idiot for trying. I like the fact that in my first life in Planetside2 I got drop podded into a fight, didn't even know that I had a jetpack, but still got 3 kills as a BR1. I LIKE the fact that a newbie is not at a significant equipment disadvantage against a vet (at least compared to many games).
    However, if a newbie wants to pull a MBT, that's 450 nanite. Me, with my right click facility module and ASP only pay 225. Even before you account for nanites from membership I have a 2 to 1 equipment advantage over new players. This is bad, has no redeeming quality, and should just go.
    Another point against discounts, Wrel told us that direct vehicle pull got removed "to slow down the game play". Adding awkward extra steps by removing quality of life features is not an improvement. If you want to slow down vehicle draw, removing discounts would be a more effective way to accomplish that.
    Phalanx related modules are so insignificant and therefore rarely used that you probably forgot they exist, so no loss. Infantry health regen is also completely irrelevant because by the time it would kick in the affected player has either chugged a health kit or been green beamed by a medic, so no loss.

    ANVILS:
    I used to be quite the mountain goat with my Sunderers, I could get them to places that surprised people. I have long since lost this skill for lack of practice because I can just right click an anvil. On top of that, Sunderers are meant to be inherently vulnerable to vehicles because anywhere they can go, so can other vehicles. Anvils can be dropped into places vehicles can't get to, removing a major threat to them. Logistics is meant to be an element of this combined arms game. Protecting logistics is meant to be important, hunting logistics is meant to be viable. Effectively unkillable logistics, such as the sunderer on the cliff south of Echo Valley Substation are bad. Finally, airborne spawn points are now covered by LodeStars, which are balanced by being so bulky.
    There are other anvils that spawn other vehicles, but the only one which has any meaningful impact on game play is heavy anvil sundies. The others really only save player nanite and save time redeploying to draw a new vehicle, and we're back to "slowing down the game play".

    CITADEL SHIELDS:
    These are more broken than most people realize. The issue is that spawn camping is one of the most toxic things that can happen in this game, and citadels are an amazing tool to set up a spawn camp. The one way shields of the spawn room are a very effective tool to help defenders get out of the spawn room in anything close to an even fight (assuming the base is at all well desgined *cough* this is why Interlinks are trash *cough*). By spacing the shield correctly the defenders can be locked in their spawn room. The old citadel shields with the 1 way shields were fun for tank vs tank ops, as they forced a decision out of the opposing tank group. In Connery's golden days of "Tipsy Tanker Toozeday" between HMRD and WTAC it was fun to charge and steal the shield, but one subculture of one server isn't worth keeping a feature in the game for, and Core-daddy is long gone anyways. However, 1 way shields were utterly toxic in infantry fights.
    TLDR? 1 way shields were bad, 2 way shields facilitate spawn camping. Get rid.

    BASTIONS:
    These were great for marketing to talk about when they were new, and have occasionally been fun centerpieces for air battles. However they mostly just annoyed people. I can see them having value for special events, but I don't see them as belonging in the main game play.

    STEEL RAIN:
    Now that it finally works right, and hasn't left the MAXes in the sky for a while, I do sort of like it. It does need to give less notice to be good, as 30 seconds is enough time to prepare and turn it into a slaughter for 12 unfortunate souls even if they did bring MAXes. Regardless, we don't need an entire outfit armoury for this. A "deep strike" console could be added to warp gates and the SL has to pay a couple hundred nanite to activate it.

    COLOSSUS:
    The other thing I do like. The Colly is a good and underrated tank, I think we don't see them because most outfit leaders would rather right click a salt nuke then give their people a good tank. However, they are not worth having the entire armoury for. I don't know how hard it would be to code, but there must be a way to get multiple players to pay nanite for a single asset. If they cost a total of 2000 nanite and could only be pulled from warp gates that would be fine.

    CONCLUSION:
    I know it can be tough to separate what is good content and what is bloat in a game which is meant to be multi-faceted, meant to be combined arms and is meant to have many ways to play it. I don't fault the decision to add armouries to the game, we have to come up with ways to keep things fresh. However, a willingness to experiment needs to be backed up with a willingness to be critical of the results and remove unhelpful features. I know that Wrel said he saw the impact outfits had on player retention, and intended armouries to be something of a love letter to outfits, but I really don't like the effect they have on game play. We don't need resources to reward us for taking bases, just seeing our name on the base as a way to flex on the server was reward enough. That, and playing with an outfit doesn't really need to be rewarded with game play assets, as sharing a gaming experience with people we like is reward enough.
  2. ganthercage

    Nice interpretation I agree totally
  3. Snow Sheltie

    I will once in a blue moon look here to see what is going on and see if there's been anything that would remotely convince me to ever return to the game. Over four years later, nothing put into the game's done anything to convince me that my decision to quit was a bad one.

    The likes of Wrel and his cronies shot themselves multiple times in the feet over years of mis-handling the game. They were appealing hard to the COD crowd and the hyper-competitive MLG crowd when I quit because everything they were doing at the time was making it increasingly difficult to maintain an outfit.
    • There were so many issues with leading squads and platoons that were never issued or took years to address. Months before I quit they finally added the ability to squad leaders to create fireteams within their squads.
    • There was a "map drawing" feature added but it was done so badly and never displayed on a minimap that nobody ever used it (How the **** do you mess that up so badly and never fix it?).
    • Booting more than one inactive player from the outfit at a time was never a thing (try removing 200+ inactive players in one sitting and you'll realize how much of a chore that is).
    • Five. Why the **** was five the magic number for how many ranks you could create in an outfit? And what page in the Codex Astartes dicated that nobody was capable of allowing for the creation of more than five ranks in an outfit?
    I could go on with the number of ways the more psychotic members of the playerbase would go out of their way to actively sabatoge anything that would improve outfits and how the devs seem to listen to them over the actual players who were using their game time to lead outfits, squads and platoons for that large-scale cooperate gameplay the game should've pushed for this whole time.

    The final nail in that coffin for me was when Daybreak decided to arbitrarily declare that all three factions MUST have even population across the board at all times so if either the VS or TR didn't feeling like playing that night, I couldn't play with my outfit. I absolutely hate trying to solo in this game and attempting to be part of multiple outfits was a far bigger hassle for me than I want to deal with. No play with outfit, no play game. I was one of the few players who were interested in platoon and squad leading and I enjoyed it. Daybreak managed to kill the fun of the game in a way that all the trolls and griefers who went after me over the years could only dream of.

    But what do I know? I'm not in charge of PS2 and it's been obvious to me that 99% of devs in the industry, particularly the Free2Play portion, pay absolutely no attention to what their playerbase is doing or needs to maintain whatever unique aspect lured them to the game to begin with, and then wonder why said playerbase leaves for other games in a heavily saturated market.

    For all intents and purposes, it looks like me quitting before all these things you talk about were implemented was an excellent choice for my own mental health.
  4. ganthercage

    looks like a logic decision