SOE, do not listen to INFANTRY telling you how to balance the game

Currently when I play this game this is what normally happens; I'm in a vehicle doing great but not really have any fun (most of the time I just feel OP), I'm in a Biolab actually shooting my guns and having a freaking blast, or I'm playing Rocketside 2 while I'm trying to defend the other bases and rarely pulling out my rifles.

I think Biolabs did it right. Vehicles play a huge role in grabbing the outer bases but the real fight comes down to a man-to-man... not man-to-tank/lib.

Base design is the issue not vehicles being over powered. They should be dangerous... people should have to think twice before deciding to engage any vehicle. BUT ALL bases should be a 2 part fight with infantry being the determining factor in the end because these bases are suppose to be built with defense in mind correct? Until that happens people will keep complaining because they are being spawned outdoors away from the objectives they have to defend while there are 2 tanks outside and a bomber in the air... If they are expected to defend these objectives that are placed outdoors in the vehicles play ground OF COURSE they are going to want something good to fight the vehicles.

did you even read my post? lol

It's good that right now that infantry has its own situational advantages over vehicles and disadvantages that vehicles can exploit. The only thing, really, is that bases for a while have favored attackers, and because of that, infantry was relegated to a "last line" and "no more resources" role, which is unfortunate when people suggest that the game should punish players for being infantry.

You guys mentioning real life are extremely selective when it comes to scenarios. As far as I know, there are infantry weapons that deal not only considerable weapons to various vehicles, including ground and air, but are also rather devastating, based on the weapon itself. Not to the extent where it wouldn't be absurd to question having vehicles for anything other than transportation, but it's not like infantry have to bend over and wait for a paddling every time they encounter a tank or helicopter.

Your second paragraph actually intrigues me. What hand-held weapon exists that is capable of dealing considerable damage to both ground and air vehicles while being light weight and cheap enough to be carried by every soldier in every squad, and is also capable of carrying dozens of ammunition? Because as far as I'm aware, infantry get jack all for anti-vehicle weapons.

No... If we go by RL... Infantry is not. Cause unless Infantry is going face to face, above the ground with tanks, of course they are dead. Except... Like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target.

Infantry is NOT going to be stupid and stand out in the open for the tank. Infantry are also used to scout ahead of armor because of the fact there are tank traps, Anti-tank mines and ambushes. Despite what you might think, there are infantry methods to deal with armor that don't involve using rockets. Same with air.

At the same time, infantry do have other things that go towards that advantage, but they have to have the ability to do so. In Planetside 2, there is no ability to do this, one of them is building entrenchments and ambush means to take advantage of that situation.

Lastly, Infantry is not usurping the place of vehicles. You are foolishly believing that. Infantry has to be literally roving between bases by themselves like mindless hordes with impunity. But that isn't the case. They have to take vehicles to get to some of these places, but at the same time, the transport vehicles cost, timer wise as much as tanks and twice as much as tanks. They are high priority targets. Flashes being the cheapest, but also the weakest and also on a long timer as well, with weapons if people bother with them on it. You do realize that today's infantry, if it isn't an APC, it's a chopper that is bringing men in and taking them out of the area. We only have the Sunderer and Galaxy for mass transport and those get rarely used because again, no credit to the driver for doing it unless it is an organized outfit.... Which leads to people floating towards using ESF, Lightnings and MBTs to get to a fight or using the deploy. That is the reason there is a lot of vehicles out there is simply to get from one point to another on foot is dangerous and driving as a transpo is boring unless you are part of an outfit actually doing the organized fighting.

This is also the reason why you have these damn vehicle zergs is the simple fact that everyone wants to fight, but not do the other stuff that only organized groups will do. The same was true with Planetside 1.

If we're going with IRL, your assertion is wrong. Tanks are easy to kill because they lack situational awareness, and have you ever pointed a Jav at a heli?

Don't make assumptions. Read the links in my sig for more info...even though they were targeted at lolpodders, it still pays to know what you're talking about. Take it from someone who does this stuff for a living...I'd rather be a lone dude on the ground. Vehicles are scary big targets unless backed by an army. Infantry LITERALLY counters everything.

Tanks and aircav are for mid range recon and infantry support. If you're going to quote real life, make sure it's accurate.

The ONLY way to know if the game is balanced:

NO ONE IS HAPPY.

In real life, infantry have virtually no way to fight against vehicles directly. Period. Yes handheld weapon systems exist but they are either not issued to standard squads or are rather ineffective, and still not issued to more than one soldier per squad. Yes there exist other ways like mines, and those exist in PS2. But if a squad comes up against a tank, face to face, they can't all just pull out rocket launchers and spam the thing to death. In that situation they run and hide and call for air support, or let their own tanks deal with it.

And infantry really are usurping vehicles. Five HA's on Flashes can do everything a tank can do, more effectively at that. Throw an engi and medic into the mix and you have an immortal blob of unlimited rockets. Infantry in PS2 do not need vehicles in any capacity. You could literally remove every vehicle from the game and nothing would really change. Infantry do not require transportation from galaxies or sundies, they can just spawn there or grab a flash. They do not require support from tanks because they get spammable rockets. They do not require support from air because they get spammable rockets. Flashes are literally the only vehicle infantry need.

You can't tell me infantry aren't usurping vehicles when a squad of HA's on a hill can keep an entire army of vehicles at bay with their unlimited lock-on rocket spam.

If we're going off real life my assertion is 100% correct. Infantry squads have no real means of dealing with enemy armor. They don't arm every squad with a javelin or something. Infantry squads get single shot AT rocket launchers. They carry literally no AA whatsoever and their ability to engage armor is so limited that they never even try. Infantry do not engage vehicles unless under special circumstances.
If they made rocket launchers cost resources like vehicles that'd be acceptable. Dumbfire costs 150 resources to equip, 25 per rocket. Lock-on costs 250 to equip and 50 per rocket. Make it limited. Because that's the balancing factor in real life. Infantry simply aren't given a ton of AV weapons, they're expensive.

One thing is for sure, playing around with vehicles has proven to slay this game.

It is a friday almost approaching prime time and populations are just low or medium.

Apparently we are taking the right route in balance, I only hope after this fiasco is over some heads on high places will roll.

Disclaimer: Not a military nerd, I hate this ****. But realism arguments are dumb and easily debunked so here goes.

And a real tank costs about 4.3 million dollars just to build over a few months. Then you start accruing maintenance costs, now pay to train a crew, build&buy ammunition, fuel, storage and transport infrastructure. It's deployment time is too long to even be present for a majority of modern engagements and the current army finds they have a surplus of MBTs at about 9000* tanks to ~1 million members (half active, half reserves). Or if all those tanks were mobilized, 0.9-1.8% of the US Army would be armor. All other branches of the military will have significantly less.

The modern tank is archaic and underused. It hasn't done well for itself since Desert Storm. They are prone to all kinds of failures, far from unassailable and don't have near the flexibility that infantry does. Today's warfare, much like in most times through history, is mostly craploads of hiking, boredom and a tiny bit of murder. None of which probably make a good basis for a videogame.

The tanks of Auraxis fair well because they're first and foremost logistically easy: No weather, small distances to travel, instant nanite-assembly from cheap resources, reproducable every few minutes. They are just a replacement for the default playerclass, nothing else. The unfortunate thing is that armor and vehicles in general tend to be much less nuanced and interesting of a class than infantry - they're big, slow boxes with one button to push and encourage very dull, defensive and objective-ignoring play. They are the cause of most stalemates, have the lowest skillceiling (effectively lower than some RPG-MMOs, holy ****!) and aren't even rewarding to kill right now.


* Other sources put the figure at about 2200-3000.

Specific parts of real life can play parts in arguments without all aspects working. The part where infantry are limited against vehicles and thus serve other purposes is one of them. Infantry should not be the "do everything" class. It should not be able to counter everything in the game. Nothing in the game should be good against everything. Tanks, aircraft, and infantry all need their counters. Infantry are weak against vehicles but are required to capture territory. Tanks/sundies are good at supporting infantry but are weak to air. Air is good at taking out the ground but is weak against other air or dedicated AA. Infantry currently do not abide by this, HA's with Annihilators literally counter everything in this game. That's not right.


P.S. I agree that vehicles themselves have problems and are pretty braindead. I'd love it if MBTs required a crew to use, a driver and gunner. I'd love it if ESF's weren't good at everything and had to spec into either A2G or A2A, not both.

Lol, actually infantry is happy, the rest aren't.

That's right, the solution isn't a biodome everywhere, or buffing AV like the devs making the same mistake they made in PS1. The solution is the cloaked AMS, PS1 mines, PS1 spitifres, and PS1 motion detectors WITHOUT THE CUD CHEATS (no Orbital Strike, No Reveal Enemies, No EMP blast)

If infantry were as dangerous to vehicles ingame as IRL everyone who only uses vehicles would quit the game outright.

Most of the changes were never requested by the player base, and players never have control on what is altered. This game is balanced with spreadsheets and data mining.

No, not really. That's exactly what cherrypicking is.

There is no logical connection between the way anything works in real life and the way internet space wars work. The very nature of a multiplayer game is that it has to work within itself, stand on it's own merit. That vain fantasies of intended design or realism do not at all make a game fun is the most salient point anyone could make in this discussion: Players won't come back just because some dorks think "things should work this way". If an FPS has an embarrassingly low skill-ceiling and borrows more MMO-design ethics than it does core FPS ones, you're just going to be out of players. Simple as that.

The very core concept of a shooter is that all players, especially the default class for everyone, can interact with and be a threat to almost anything based solely on their ability and skill. Stratifying players into groups that are very binarily either correct for a task or not, where encounters are decided emphatically not by the players actions, is not conducive to such a game. It is it's very own kind of market niche that appeals to players who do not enjoy direct competition and enjoy the much lower pressure this approach offers, and that's great for those folks, but it is most certainly not a shooter of any flavor.

Since PlanetSide 2 has the base mechanics of an okay FPS, I'm going to assume SoE's intention is not to completely alienate the FPS playerbase in favor of the MMO crowd and that therefore the current situation is still much, much too lenient on vehicles.

I play a lot of vehicle play, MBT, lightnings, even my souped up flash runs. Sometimes I like to grab a sunderer and have fun with that too.

Sometimes, rarely...but sometimes! I'll grab an ESF and burn around, then I'll 1 man a lib with my tank buster and go destroy all the turrets to bases and try to pick off lone tanks.

Yet, there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with having biodomes. Heavens forbid some people might just enjoy a different play style to you, or don't want to be cheaply killed by pod spamming / HE's all over the place.

And you know what? they have as much right as anyone else. In fact MORE, because no one has asked to make everything under cover, they've just asked for better lay outs, or places to get a break.

It's not THEM who's whining.

And they damn well deserve to get some peace from vehicles. Hell, even friendly tanks running them over or firing 50m away and giving them screen shakes can be a royal PITA.

So yeah, SoE, Do listen to your PLAYERS when they are asking for some sort of compromise rather than an ALL OR NOTHING scenario where they get to play cheap.

Unfortunately, if you go that route you end up with a watered down game with little replayability and patronizing gameplay. A tank shouldn't be on par with a HA because "lol they have 2 b fair!". Vehicles beat infantry, period, that's how it should be. If you don't like getting farmed by tanks, get some air support or use your own tanks. Don't like getting farmed by air, get some air support or AA. Infantry should not be able to reliably counter these threats.

Team work is suppose to be the main feature of PS2. You can't have team work if everyone can do everything. Team work can only be used if everyone has a specific role and they come together. Infantry capture bases. Tanks defend and support infantry against enemy infantry and enemy vehicles. Sundies transport and spawn infantry. ESFs/Libs hunt tanks and sundies. Skyguards and burster maxes kill air. They all have their roles. But infantry ruin that balance by being able to do everything themselves.

I'm sorry, but you need to understand that a game like planetside is built on combined arms warfare. It's balanced for the team, not the individual. An individual will never be balanced because he can be countered by too many things. However a team can be balanced. A group of infantry should NOT be able to engage vehicles easily. They should be forced to use their team. By allowing everyone to do everything you remove the necessity for team play, and thus remove the very essence of this game.

So basically you want it so that people will only have to get out of their vehicles to cap the point? That doesn't sound like fun.
Infantry is very much able to engage and destroy vehicles. Infantry are the jack of all trades. they can do everything but they don't do it well.
This game is not vehicleside 2. Many of us don't want to pull a vehicle everytime we encounter one. Thankfully it is so many that this will never happen.

The idea that "if I do x, you are supposed to do y" or "you should be forced to z" go against one of the most basic principles of multiplayer gaming: counter-play.

Introducing a given mechanic should not constrain those it is used against into a 1-solution or you may as well quit dichotomy.

But then again, a central concept of counter-play is that you should think about the people the mechanic is being used against rather than the person using it, which would of course require some sense of basic consideration for other people.

Not likely with the typical FPS community...

Just look at how often, in justifying themselves, players disparage those whom their actions have frustrated with callous, dismissive and condescending vitriol like "L2P noob", "sheep", "lemmings", "if they can't deal with it, they deserve to be farmed", etc.

Anyways, here's a good bit on counter-play for those unfamiliar with the concept: