"Fight over every inch of the map" - Higby 2011/12. What ever happened to that idea?

Cause yeah, we don't do that.

In fact, I am willing to bet that if they put unlimited tank spawning terminals at Ti Alloys, Cross Roads, Xenotech Labs, and Snake Ravine we still wouldn't see a large battle take place in the huge rolling field between those bases!

Why is that? Why do we only fight in these tiny little bubbles around facilities and almost never fight in the space between these bubbles? Despite the fact that people do drive through them all the time!

Obviously there aren't any capture points out in those areas, so there isn't any capture XP to be had there, but is that it? Sunderers allow us to spawn where-ever we like, so we could fight in the middle of a meaningless field on the way between bases, yet we don't. Heck, we don't even do it with tanks! lol...

It's kind of a downer. I mean, the game seems to play like any other "round-based FPS game", except with travel time between maps instead of loading screens. Granted, occasionally we do magically have a short battle in the space between bases, "Wooh- oh, battle's over."

So Higby and the gang, is this concept even on the table any more? If it is, what about the game is going to change such that will cause the use of these spaces to be a feature of the game, rather than a freak random (and utterly meaningless) occurrence?

We can and do fight over every inch of the map. Its just not 'fight this hex, move to the next, fight this hex', because its not a turn based game. Battles are fluid, moving from one strategic place to another (until they get stuck at the Crown).

Just like armies meet over a strategic place, and the battle for Iraq/Afghanistan wasn't fought over every patch of sand dune.

Its not simply a case of where the EXP is, its where naturally combat would occur. Engagements do happen outside of the bubble though, usually between two moving zergs that happen to cross paths, or when forces hold each other, and push back. Quartz Ridge Camp upto Hvar is a good example of this. If the attacker is moving up the ravine, and the defender rallies at Hvar, you get the bubble in the ravine. This is the flow of battle. Combatants have a purpose.

There is no purpose to pulling up in a Sundy in the middle of the desert and hoping the enemy does likewise 200 yards away.

I had this amazing fight between bases the other day on Miller, TR ran from the north in the middle of a flat desert with some armor along, and we the NC ran from the south and met in the middle, had to have been around a 60 man battle with only a handful of armor units in the mix. Lasted a good 10 min, but was THE most enjoyable battle I've had in PS2, seeing 2 opposing factions, red and blue, clash against each other on an open field like that.

I'd say lack of response time is one thing. Distanced between bases are quite VERY short. When one base is lost, the enemy armor is at the next base before the defenders have had a chance to get their **** together.

Then we get to the next issue, most of the time the main fighting is taking place elsewhere. There's the zerg on the Crown and then there's the fight on facility X. Everywhere else there's a handful of guys defending against a horde of enemies. The forces only ever match when two of the zergs happen to find each other and that's when the battle becomes a tug o war and has some fun in it.

Well, you'd think in a server with hundreds of players on an entire continent that the players would spread out over the continent.

Perhaps that is what he was thinking, you can't blame him for players gravitating to the Crown and surrounding areas.

Just yesterday, on genudine (remember, this is the graveyard server) we had this awesome between bases battle between xenotech, vanu archives and snake ravine. It was glorious watching all three faction colide in the fields, while i sniped from the relative saftey of the archives landing pads.

Of course glorious battles can still happen, it's just they rarely do.

I think it's a combination of underpopulated servers and lack of defensible locations (outside of facilities).
Maybe adding smaller checkpoints along the roads, with infantry respawn and weapons terminals,
would create more 'in-between' battles. (No vehicle terminals).

You kind of answered your own question there. Yea, those battles do occur seldomly but there is nowhere to hide the sundy on an open terrain so as soon as it pops, the battle is over. You can't destroy base spawn

Because infantry get farmed by air, snipers, and tanks in the open, and tanks get farmed by lockons and air in the open. Being in the open is undesirable and quickly gets you killed by the players hanging back at the "bubbles" waiting for easy targets.

I'm not sure that quote meant what you think it means. I think it may be a reference to the hex system vs the lattice system of the original game.

In the original game, you only fought over bases that had a limited Sphere of Influence. A majority of the land on a continent was completely unowned (and couldn't be owned). In PlanetSide 2, with the hex system, you're fighting for control of every bit of land, even if you're not fighting on every bit of land.

Well unless we get server merges or a big new advertising campaign to bring in more people it's pointless. The population we have can just barely sustain some good fights around the main bases on Indar only. If the servers were actually full like at launch you would see fights occurring everywhere again. I do want to know though what happened to that idea of outdoor capture points designed for vehicles to fight over.

Some of the best battles happen out in the open, when the zerg is at high speed and doesn't expect enemies until the first 2-3 vehicles blow up to mines.

This requires to leave the base the zerg is at whole minutes before it's captured (thus no fragfest and no XP) to give time to set up a defense and wait (thus it's boring).

The vast majority of people are in the base under siege, until they can't spawn there anymore. As such the zerg gets to the next one just after the defenders arrive and they have no time to get out and confront the zerglings before the next base is surrounded.

A solution to this might be to add outposts, such as those in Amp/Bio/Tech which don't control the region, but allow people to respawn. The zerg would encounter resistance before reaching the next base and defenders would need much less time for moving into defensive positions if there's a good position right near the spawn.

The downside would be that the attackers could then use the outposts and spawn from there if they capture them.

They could also make more capture points that are not bases but rather strategic locations such as bridges .. They don't even need to be capture points in the traditional " flip the point " sense but a simple adding of shields + a Gen room either end would make for some interesting out in the open battles.

Edit: One of the best fight's I have had in this game was over the Bridge cap point at the Impact site .. Images of a Bridge To Far

Weeell, you kinda can. Well, the people that made the game what it is anyway. Don't get me wrong I absolutely love the game, but with "fight over every inch" thing isn't happening for a very simple reason. It is far too common (and far too easy) for entire armies to simply circumvent eachother and start capping empty bases belonging to the enemy. If attack patterns were more directed in some logic pattern the forces would be far more likely to meet, and not only would we get these between bases fights, but also better defenses at facilities that currently nobody bothers to defend! Thats also something, there should be some sort of reasonable reward for defending an area. Currently it involves a lot of waiting around for no points, and when the enemy finally shows they tend to be FAR greater in number than you (known as the zerg...) so defending is pretty much pointless anyway.

A problem may also be that many of the servers are currently underpopulated. Most continents don't have a reasonably large amount of players fighting, Indar seems to be able to get some good fights going but again they center on The Crown, which is a pretty boring place to fight by now. Done that SO many times, and it pains me to drive trough all those empty bases on my way to the same old battlefield I was fighting over yesterday, last week and even 3 months ago. On my servers at least Esamir is simply too empty for a good fight, and Amerish is practically deserted. Me and 2 of my friends held a facilitiy in the middle of enemy territory, and they had 50% population on Amerish. Only 2 aircraft came and tried to kill us until we got out some AA. Then they fled and we stayed for another 10 minutes before getting bored and moving to Indar instead...

1. fighting in the open is suicide
2. distances are so small that trying to fight between outposts is like shooting from one to another
3. the short distances lead to short travel times and noone can set up a defense anywhere in the time a blob moves from one outpost to another

My experience is that we ghost cap over every inch of the map. And that we only actually fight at The Crown and Allatum Bio Lab.

If you removed everything outside of Crown, Ti Alloys, Allatum you really wouldn't notice a difference on Indar.

It really depends on the server population. On Miller the most interesting fights don't happen on or around the crown.

People do fight constantly on the crown, but there is equally high activity on tons of big and small bases around the map. The only problem is that you'll need an organised outfit to guide you towards those bases. Organised outfits don't follow the zerg. They read the battlefield and act, instead of just reacting to threats.

The Crown hogs ALL the action.

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/get-rid-of-the-crown.94068/

Organized Korean gamers kick monkey family in the butt every single time. No saving throw.

The problem is Indar. On the occasions that Esamir or Amerish have a decent pop, there are battles in the open all the time, had a great one a few days back en route to Snowshear against the TR; Sunderers hidden in the wee crevasses, AA-MAXs defending them from enemy air, the infantry brawling between each dip in the terrain to clear space for the Sunderers to move up - it took us a solid 75 minutes to fight our way into the base proper and start capping it. Indar can't support that kind of engagement, first because there are simply too many bases -it's never really that far between them, so the battles take place within bases or on their immediate outskirts- and second because those areas that do exist between bases are too flat and open, not that there are many of them since the terrain over most of Indar is designed to funnel attacking forces into confrontations are specific points, all of which are bases.

Indar is great if you're in a lazy mood and just want some action, because your empire is either A; warpgated, and so all concentrated in one or two bases trying to break out, or B; at Ceres Hydro, TI Alloys, Crossroads, or the Crown, because that's how combat flows across the map.