Making resource acquisition and vehicle spawn timers sane

Timers and resource gain do not make sense...

Generally speaking timers in games for powerful spawns begin AFTER you die, this is the core dynamic that allows them to throttle the entry of more powerful entities like vehicles and air. Compounding this, those with the strongest and most certed vehicles have the SHORTEST acquisition times as well as increased resource gain from membership bonuses.

IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE


The game is built from the ground up to create this terrible perpetual death ball we're currently seeing. The design is fundamentally flawed. It's hell bent on rewarding pay users at the cost of EVERYONE's enjoyment of the game.

I'll offer some solutions here that would go a very long way to solving some core issues in this great game:

• Make the timer start at the time of vehicle death
• Remove the cooldown reduction for all vehicles, make the standard cooldown time reasonable for everyone
• If you die very quickly in a vehicle, the timer will be shorter
• Make resource gain more transparent. Make ALL kills give resources for all types in all areas.
• Remove resource gain while you're in a vehicle to promote diverse play by creating a vital subsection of infantry play to regain resources for vehicles. Infantry play is AWESOME, PROMOTE IT!

Implement this short laundry list of features and the game will be FAR more enjoyable to play for all. I don't normally put my foot down and say, THIS IS WRONG IN A GAME! THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT. But this just seems so obvious, and the current system just makes no sense whatsoever.

If Wookies live on Endor, you must acquit.

at the very least timers should be doubled. I just don't give a damn now if I lose a vehicle, because most of the time I can just get another one.

So you want to keep people that can properly use vehicles from having easier access, while giving those that waste vehicles easier access? Is this by any chance to allow you to get some easier vehicle kills?

Absolutely. This is to promote more back and forth play between infantry and vehicles. By allowing sh*t players to got out there and die again, not only do they get more practice to get better, but infantry get more opportunities to actually kill armor. It's win win.

Allowing the best of the best to spawn spam creates a toxic one sided fight.

Also I don't really drive vehicles, they're too slow for my tastes. I'm busy wracking up 10 kill esf streaks in my underpowered reaver.

I would also absolutely love the idea of regenerating my resources by simply going into the best fight and wrecking **** as infantry. It would feel more interconnected and satisfying, building a direct link between infantry play and getting my next vehicle.

im usually not in favor of ANY resource or timer changes, but dang it OP, this actually kind of makes sense.

the one thing that is absolutely a no to me is the lack of resource gain when in vehicles. some of us just love vehicles. theres no reason to disway us from using them. they should promote infantry play by incentivizing its use, and attracting the inf crowd in their own way, not by forcing people to play a game a cetain way. if that was implemented then the only fair thing to do would to also implement a system where for every x hours spend playing inf, that person would be required to play x amount of time in an aircraft, and in a tank before he could respawn as an inf. its kind of the same thing.

So keep players from playing the way they want in a combined arms game? Yeah, your idea is not only **** but more expensive to implement than the current system in lost vehicle equipment sales. If becoming more proficient at using a vehicle results in diminishing returns, players have less incentive to specialize. Please take you CoD ******** elsewhere. It's cancer for games that aren't corridor shooters.

Hmm, I understand this viewpoint, but it feels incredibly selfish, just being honest here. This is a game that's tuned to have tanks be total wrecking machines, and they should be! So what do you add to the whole of the game as someone who is in a tank ALL the time? Can you understand the viewpoint that having players in the game that are ALWAYS in superior armor or air positions is what's currently suffocating the game?

Perpetual spawning of tanks could work if there were systems in place to ensure that these tanks met on an even playing field against other tanks, but there currently aren't any of these systems.

Hmm, maybe if you guys gave up your defensive slot bonus for resource gain while in a tank? And maybe this had other negative effects like reducing your damage to infantry by 50%? Probably just getting muddy with systems at this point.

Anyway, Glad you were receptive to some parts of my post even though you're a vehicle player through and through! and thanks for the discussion.

Please contribute to the discussion in a logical and open-minded manner while in a professional way. The other people have, so it's not that difficult.

Infantry-only players aren't worth any more time than exclusive pilots and drivers, I'm afraid. It's a **** idea, and discussing it at length won't make it any less of a **** idea.

Combined arms games have an ecosystem, not unlike the one you see outside. You've got grass, you've got herbivores that eat the grass, and then you've got carnivores that eat the herbivores. It's a pyramid, there has to be a ****ton of grass to support the herbivores, you need a lot of herbivores to support the carnivores. If anything but grass grows disproportional in population things start to die... and planestide 2 is dying right now.

Infantry, armor and Air share this dynamic to a degree.

If you just give the player a choice between grass, herbivore, and carnivore... who the hell is going to choose to play as f*cking grass?

Do you understand the concept now? These games are more than just getting more kills than everyone else in a giant fully certed tank, it's also about sustaining the PvP ecosystem as a whole.

This game isn't world of tanks, it lacks the balance and depth in armor implementation to make a battlefield full of only tanks and air enjoyable to play at a AAA title level. If infantry play isn't the core of this game, it's only living up to a fraction of its potential.

And you don't make infantry focus better by pegging down vehicles. You know what that is? Making the game worse.Through **** balance decisions like the one proposed in OP. All it does is force players to play in ways they don't want to instead of encouraging them to do other things. Want more infantry? Give them better experience balance. Remove KDR if it's too much for their little heads to handle when they see vehicles dying less. Two out of three factions start with the better available small arms in this game for the majority of classes. Almost no one starts with the best vehicle loadouts. Guess where money will disappear from if you force people who don't want to play infantry out of their vehicles? And that is why this is a **** idea not focused on actual class balancing, because as far as balance goes, KDR means abso-*******-lutely nothing and the only thing anyone should be looking at is score per hour. Is infantry lacking? then balance its means of gaining experience. Otherwise the game turns in to a BF3 *********** of ineffective armor while everyone who entered the game expecting role-based fighting is driven off by pronounced grind2win in an arena where you aren't rewarded for sticking it out. Get this through your thick skull, slughead.

"Make cooldown same for everyone, oh wait, don't"

And you want to punish players for being good. Seriously?

Let's go further! Remove Infantry Resource gain while you are not in the vehicle to promote diverse play by creating a vital subsection of vehicle play to regain resources for infantry. Vehicle play is AWESOME, PROMOTE IT!

That was sarcasm. No. If you like infantry play, go play infantry. Don't force other people to play as you want them to play. Playing how I want is one of the main reasons I play Planetside2. It's selfish position, yes, but I think people will agree with it, even the ones in organized outfits.

You guys are speaking as if you represent a small fraction of the community. "Don't stomp on how I like to play!"

Damn near EVERYONE wants to be the bad *** wracking up kills in a sweet as vehicle and this is the core issue right now in the game, because there are no restrictions on being that guy 24/7. Now we have a battlefield full of clunky slow tanks creating boring front lines that no one can penetrate and air forces cruising over entire continents going from point to point destroying any decent fight that may be going on.

I'm the cancer here proposing solutions? You guys are literally the ones gestating over the battleground, proliferating the battles with rampant vehicle growth. Nod on that one for a while.

And here we are, right back to the issue not being KDR, but SPM/H. If vehicles are equal to infantry in cert gain, the only thing keeping people from choosing one or the other is preference and the need for countering enemy units, which is a far cry better than your proposed "nerf X by forcing people to play as Y so that X is less appealing" solution. Compared to your fix, I would gladly accept a experience decrease for vehicles that gain certs faster than average, something that would have the ForumSide warriors screaming bloody murder. Cry somewhere else that people can see how flat out punishing someone for specializing their character how they want is a terrible way to foster a focus on another aspect of the game. This idea was bad and you should feel bad.

It's not a preference of infantry over armor, it's a preference of being superior to everyone else on the field that i was alluding to. Exp is negligible most the time, people will play what's most fun.

As the saying goes: "When everyone is special, no one is". This is why vehicles need some culling in their availability and numbers.

Pick your poison: Make acquisition a bit less instantaneous, or nerf them so they do not destroy the game as they are currently doing. I can almost guarantee one is going to happen as players leave this game in droves.

As a roughly 75% inf player, let me reveal something that all ragey pilots and drivers seem to neglect...

We want tough tanks. We want deadly air.

What we don't want is tanks or air to be a straight upgrade to being a grunt. What's the point of being Infantry if I can just spawn a tank and go to town? I get a metal shell, beastmode weapons, increased speed and increased cert gain as a nice side benefit. Why would I ever slog it out on foot?

What most people want to see is a system where everyone works together. Where tanks are protected by footsoldiers. Where the arrival of a tank means the day is goddamn saved. Where the presence of an ESF wing means the difference between a lib stomping (even with AA) to a glorious counterattack. We want to see a tank/jet come over the horizon and feel fear and awe in equal measures. As it is, it's like "oh look. Here comes the tank zerg. Lucky us".

I'm all for making tanks tough. Like, require-a-squad-busting-its-posterior-to-take-one-down tough. But that platform a) had better require 4 people to utilise and b) once it's dead it better stay dead for a long time. As it is, a minute later another one pops up. Same guy. He didn't even bother trying to keep his tank alive.

So pilots/drivers, hear what I'm saying. You get better toys under my rule. You just have to learn to look after them

All those ideas are terrible and seem designed to prevent people from specialising in any role besides infantry. Which is probably what the OP wants, I'm sure, but it's a viewpoint that should be hunted down and crushed wherever it appears until it has been eradicated from the face of the earth.

Don't counter one bad situation with another one.

Then he must have had it alive for some time prior to that. This is a benefit of the current system, because if you go out and do your thing and you survive it, eventually you get what amounts to a second chance. Everyone dies sooner or later, and this means you can keep playing your chosen role if you keep each vehicle's lifespan over x amount of time. Throw away your second chance or waste your first vehicle in a kamikaze run, and you find yourself waiting on cooldown.

The main flaw in the system right now is that while is uses both timers and resources, the resource side is highly screwed up. The only time it even matters right now is when you're losing, and only on that continent. It basically tells people that if they're losing ground, it's only going to get worse, and they should just cut their losses and go to another continent where they're better off.

I agree with you in part...the flaws in the system are absolutely bang on. But for the power that a current tank provides, a 20 minute stock c/d is absolutely nothing. Basically, rolling engineer there's no reason you can't keep your tank alive until your next one is off c/d, definitely after certing. My objection is the only true limit to the amount of vehicles in-play is the number of players in your faction. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to keep players out of tanks. But there needs to be some kind of penalty for pulling one, some kind of drawback. I think players should be rewarded for specialising into anything, however:

This is kind of a cop out. I respect you Fox, because you're generally insightful. But don't see this as an attack on your right to destroy your foes from your armored chariot. This is more about limiting the endless tank zerging. Rolling tank should be a conscious decision where you acknowledge some form of weakness. For instance; I roll Light Assault...I know if I engage anything, at any range other than knifefight, I die. Like that *snaps fingers*. If you're a good tankie who doesn't waste his vehicle, I think you should (theoretically) be able to pull another vehicle near instantly. But the endless waves of tanks need to go, for the good of balance.

My idea is to increase the number of people required to operate tanks. You make it so that one person drives, the other guns, a third mans the turret, you've INSTANTLY crippled the mindless zerg. I don't limit the ability to pull tanks, I limit the ability to operate them as a one-man army. (Let's just assume I'm talking Prowlers for the sake of simplicity, Magriders and Lightnings are different.) It requires more people to operate, but from here we make them tougher and give them a general damage buff. Tanks kick more butt than they did, infantry finally get a place and an advantage. This is how I'd do it, but it won't be implemented. Smed 'n' co. have already stated this. This is why guys are looking to the timer or certs in order to curb it, because the obvious, logical solution has been ignored. Guys who want to be the best tank crew on the server are now facing restrictions because SOE think having the old PS1 style of vehicle or certification is nonsense.

(I'd also limit tank spawning to techplants and warpgates, but this is more to prevent unstoppable deathballs of mega-tanks than an attempt to restrict tank use. Means that infantry, by killing a tank, get a bit of time to work without being harried by tanks.)

What would you do in order to curb the zerg? If you were tasked with making infantry combat relevant to the game? I'm not trying to get you to see the game from a footsoldier's point of view, but more to try and find a creative solution I would have missed due to my internal bias.

As much as I agree that vehicle timers and resource cost are meaningless right now (even as a FTP player with few ranks in acquisition timer I have no problems spamming them) I'd wait for adjustments to vehicles until the patch that changes XP gain against infantry and reward XP for damaging vehicles.

Right now the most efficient way to farm XP is to kill infantry with HE shells, and damaging vehicles give experience to the owner from repairs. If this changes, at least some people will shift to AP rounds, GtG missiles or AA weapons (depending on how severe are the changes). The net result can't be other than a reduction of vehicle numbers in the field.