The flops of Defense and base design so far, with solutions

Op, you and I are on the same wave length. I made a huge post in beta pointing out all the same flaws, pointless clutter and just downright bad designs. It really doesn't matter how cool or aesthetic these bases look, if the game play suffers because of it then it will lose people and there is no game without the people. I was this game's biggest fan and supporter for the last 6 months, but now I am to the point that I wonder if I can be bothered to log on anymore.

Doors would help but there is a problem. Doors in an mmo seem to be a very tricky thing to pull off. You saw them in Planetside but what happens when there were 100 people all standing behind the door you just hacked? Sometimes it wouldn't open right away and if there were tons of objects constantly hitting the door it lagged worse or didn't open and you died.. Why? because the server had to push the door opening to 100+ people at the same time rendering\registering everything either hitting the door, the explosions around the door, or going through the door. If there were 100+ players outside shooting in then you had double the work load. This is why a camped back door was such easy EXP. Half the time, the door wouldn't open for the attackers but it would open for the defenders.

I use to have video of my outfit crashing the test server after a play test on Extinction. We put as many boomers as we could around the back door and all 6 of us tried to fit inside the doorway. BOOM! It literally crashed the server because of the way the explosions were rendering inside (Zone A) and outside(Zone B) and that was just the 6 of us. There might have been 30 or 40 players still around when we did it. We were not the first to do this. Its much more complicated than it seems to do something like doors in an MMO like this.

+1 to this.

I approve of this post! Plus, the current SCU icon is ugly. I like yours better with the stick figure and the circle.

This game would b really fun with winding staircase combat

Wut

What happens in PS1 when you are defending, and the attackers outnumber you 3:1, and you have no cloaked AMS, no spitfires, no PS1 mines, no motion detectors, no boomers? The attackers are camping your spawn tubes within a minute. Same thing here, base design has little to do with it.

Free bump for awesum thread

A smart a brilliant post. Smart base defense is not even close to what the Dev have made. The best base to defend was the Tech plant and they Nerfed it because they can't handle the infantry render distance because they want this game to run on peoples old, POS, outdated, awful rigs, to get the console scrubs in the game.

I really like these ideas, they are constructive and well thought out. I too have been working on redesigning the bases myself, and it does take tons of time. We need the ability to defend bases from the inside, which we cant currently do because the spawn is disconnected from the main structure of the base. I could go on but I agree with the OP and we need changes.

It has to do with it; in PS1 the spawns were usually the very last place to take, while in PS2 securing the spawn is more important than securing the control point.

Camping spawns is not the issue, it will always happen, it's a logical step in assaulting a base.
But only under those conditions:
-Spawn exits can only be shot by infantry
-They are placed within the base

You can't argue that a shack with 2 doors on open field is a good spawn.
As long as you can be instagibbed by a Tank or Liberator when you take your first step outside, we'll have a
problem

This guy says it better than I do anyway:

';,,;'

___,,,_";,,;"_,,,___

(\/) 'i:::i' (\/)

_[¨¨]_
(°V°)
{ ":" }-c\_/
_!J !J____

Most good ideas are gradually being added.

Remember, PS2 isn't even out yet. It's only in open beta

The OP is a great post.

May I offer my own suggestion for how to improve defense ... well, anywhere in the game?

Give Engineers the building blocks of a Bunker in place of the Turret emplacement to cert into:

1) A crouch height wall, door way wide at the very least, in a semi circle or corner configuration.

2) A "mushroom" / "umbrella" cover, a sloped roof, at the height of a door way.

Toss in some camouflage for individual flavor. Make it a tiny destructible portable shield gen Give the engineer a tiny bit of exp for damage it absorbs when fellow faction members stand around it. Have more cert levels in it for better hp, types of damage, variable sizes, whatever. Have it cost infantry resources to replenish its supply.

I am pretty sure us players would actively by trial and error improve the defense of bases and much more creative uses as well with such tools at our disposal and it would make the Engineer more fun to play as well.

For instance, you see that image from Figment that was just shared by UberBonisseur? Now imagine at the very least the green part with these building blocks of a Engineer or two covering the defenders leaving the spawn room - suddenly their chances go way up.

Good stuff. I hate jump pads too, but if the devs are married to them for whatever reason, they should at least make them locked to a faction like the teleporters.

No, the spawns were chosen by the players as the last place to attack because they could get more command experience (So they could get their I-win buttons) dings at the end of a cap when there are more defenders.

If it weren't for CE+CR in PS1, the spawn tubes would have gone done within the first minute of any unbalanced attack, which is almost all of them.

So who were those types of players that liked playing defense and never got CR? Players who didn't want their I-win CUD buttons, and saw the I-win CUD buttons ruining defensive gameplay and gimping infantry.

Biolab: spawns & CC in the basement, exposed gen on roof
Techplant: spawns & gen in the basement, CC top floor
Interlink: spawns & CC & gen in the basement
Amp Station: spawns & gen in the basement, exposed CC on roof
DSC: spawns & CC & gen in the basement

So spawns being the last place to attack had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that's where all the defenders are pouring out from and tied with either the gen or CC as hardest places to get to in any base, whilst gen/cc alternate between most exposed/easiest to reach in several base types.

Also, I've never seen anyone else whine so much about the little CUD as much as you do. CE was a crowd control tool, the fact it could net you easy kills/xp was besides the point, you used it to slow the enemy down so you could react and redeploy people to counter. It was a component of a defensive plan, not the lynchpin, that was the players.

Ahh, the science of being camped. Wonderful.

True base defense happens long before the bad guy gets to the base.