My primary concern with planetside 2 (in pictures)

The way things like annihilator spam scale in PS2 is another problem. Probably due to the TTK being so much faster.

In large numbers your options are another massive tank army or annihilator spam wherever terrain permits you to not get obliterated by the tank army you're attempting to engage. In this scenario annihilator spam needs to be as strong as it is.

But what happens when a lone vehicle wanders into an area with a bunch of infantry that happen to have annihilators? He gets obliterated instantly, most likely. No warning, no option to make anything happen unless he can flare and hes dead. Lets say for a second the resource system was actually functioning in a way that limited vehicles. This is a situation where you would lose your vehicle, and there's potentially nothing you could do about it.

Vehicles need to actually be durable and meaningful. Losing them should matter. The screenshots I posted should happen, but they shouldn't be how every single fight looks. At the same time you also shouldn't lose one instantly to a mass of not-rendered infantry with annihilators.

That's kinda hard to believe, when 90% of your post mentions tanks.

For starters the timer should start AFTER you die. Secondly they should have added a cert investment to getting a vehicle.

Another thread to point out a problem that doesn't exist.
With solutions on how to fix something that isn't broken.

Agree with the timer starting after you die. But not with the having to spend certs to get a vehicle.

Read it again?

Cert requirements would be pointless considering the cert system in PS1 and the cert system in PS2 are two entirely different things.

In PS1 you had a maximum of 26 points to play around with, in PS2 everyone will eventually have everything like they do now. PS1 forced specialization. You couldn't have every vehicle, piece of equipment, max unit, and weapon. Those 26 points had to be spread out between those 4 categories.

I'd like to just say I love those screen shots. For every person that said "this is why I don't play" or "this is the problem with PS2" there's another just like me saying "Seeing a bazillion tanks, planes, infantry, maxes, etc etc all running around is freak'n EPIC!"

I grew up on crappy old 4bit and 8bit side scrollers. Eventually there were computer games with awesome CUT SCENES ... I remember saying "maaaan... someday the GAME itself will be as cool as that cut scene!" and then I log into PS2 and my dreams are realized! Get this... I CAN PLAY IT FOR FREE?! Wow... didn't see that one coming!

Vehicles are what made BF1942 and its sequels so much fun and set them apart from Call of Duty where you had like ... what... 2 or 3 specific missions you got to drive one vehicle. Vehicles being cheap and easy to use is what makes PS2 awesome.

I love seeing a column of armor rolling out to it's next objective! Hoo-rah!

Multi-crew MBTs, perhaps?

Tanks will be tougher, meaner, but at the same time there won't be as many of them.

Just my opinion

Look at the screenshots. Most of what you see is vehicles, not infantry. To be specific, mostly tanks.

Seeing tons of **** on screen is indeed awesome, I don't disagree. But the distribution of those things swings far to heavily towards tanks being the majority.

Vehicles being cheap is a large part of the issue but not all of it. When we look at the resource system it's fairly obvious what the system is intended to do ; it's there to make more expensive things harder to obtain, and as a result have them obtained by players less frequently. However that's obviously not what happens. You can play the game for just a few minutes and observe this as truth. 250 resources for a tank or 200 resources for an ESF is frequently a meaningless expense, as you will have probably generated far more than 250 or 200 in the lifespan of your vehicle essentially making the vehicle free. If the vehicle was intended to be free, we wouldn't have a resource system in the first place.

There seems to be a misconception in this thread that I'm saying things like massive armor battles must never happen ; when in fact I'm advocating for vehicles to be restricted to a similar infantry:vehicle ratio as we saw in PS1. In case you didn't play PS1, there were still very, very large tank battles in PS1. The difference was you didn't see approximately 1 vehicle per 1 infantry in fights.

Sorry, but no. You can't connect those two premises and produce that TL;DR/Conclusion.

I hate to say it, but Planetside 2 just sounds so much more fun than PS1. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed PS1. I think the problem is they titled the game Planetside 2, instead of something different.

PS2's a brilliant game, but it's not a 'version 2' of Planetside 1. It's much better. It's more modern, more fun, has broader appeal, and much more scope. It hasn't realised this yet, but what game realises its potential on release? PS1 didn't, even slightly!

It's much like the mistake Scrubs made with Med School. Med School's a fantastic sitcom in itself; exceptionally high production values and very easy to watch and enjoy. The problem is they tacked it on to the end of a franchise that had finished. If it was 'launched' they would have got a good few series out of it. Instead, they billed it as a continuation of something that was now falling behind the times, then released a modern sitcom instead. This meant no one who would have watched it if they dropped the Scrubs tie-in (because some people don't like Scrubs?!) did, and the people who watched it because they were heartbroken at the 'end' of the Scrubs franchise were completely disappointed.



So yeah. Your whole thread is 'QQ I wish the game were different to how it is, so I'm going to say that the way it is is a -problem- rather than something not to my tastes.'

It's like me being like 'The problem with Terraria is that it's 2D.' 'The problem with Minecraft is that it isn't 2D.' 'The problem with Call of Duty is that there aren't any capture points.' 'The problem with Skyrim is that it's too open-ended.' 'The problem with Borderlands 2 is that it's a gear grind.' 'The problem with Max Payne is that it's 95% cinematic, yet costs 10 times what it would sell for as a DVD.' Okay, bored of this now. Do you get it? You just don't like something about the game. It's not 'killing the game' or anything else though. The game is great. I love it. 300 people in my outfit love it. The 600+600+600 we see on Indar and Esamir each day love it. And that's with all the bugs and imbalance, and lack of a metagame. Imagine when we've got a polished product with real motivating factors to it (restriction =/= motivation, just FYI).

It's gonna be awesome. Sit back, enjoy the ride. If you're not enjoying the ride, Planetside 1's still up isn't it? If not, try a few other games and check back in a couple months. It's going to be twice the game PS1 was.

...now I wanna go play SimCity instead for some reason...

Agree 100% with the OP's point about AV-infantry options. Yeah Engineers have Mines, but what do INF's get? Why are LA's also a total crap shoot when it comes to putting the hurt on Vehicles? ..... It's really simple ... the Hitregistry favors vehicles by a massive Margin. Shells have massive collision hulls and AOE's that leak through the Geometry. Those stupid covers they put on Windows actually made it easier to kill the players inside them.

How is the resource system being broken not a problem? Everything I talk about in this thread stems from that issue. SOE even admits themselves that the resource system is broken and for that reason it's on the roadmap to be revamped entirely.

This will change when the orbital strike comes in, those traffic jams will be junk piles.

I roll in my tank, I kill and get killed in it. I roll with a softy, and if I can manage it, sneak up on a tank with mines and blow it up, or get blown up by a tanker who is smart enough to see me. Rolling armor is great, but it is also problematic as anyone who was in an armor zerg and tell you, trying to move and get through is a nightmare because you get locked in place by the other tanks, or ran over if you are a trooper and people can't watch out for you and you them. Yes, PS1 certing and vehicles was much different, but that didn't mean people didn't zerg armor there too. there was just less pop to do so, and also, you need troopers to go inside the bases to capture them.

The resources system is not yet where it needs to be but that is in the making.

A PS1 system wouldn't work for the BF3 audience this game is targeted at. It would only frustrate them not being able to fly/drive and shoot whenever they want. I know I would, coming from BF3.

My chutpah is fine thank you. I prefer not to name names because 1. You don't have to, as you've proven and 2. Anytime ANYONE on the forum says anything that's not 110% complimentary about a certain in-game outfit even if it's perfectly true (again, as you've proven) they get all huffy about it and then report-bomb your posts until a mod removes them, proven time and time again. Had a bad experience with a certain in-game outfit? Good luck telling anyone about it on the forum.

As for telling lies about how a certain outfit operates go watch the videos they posted themselves doing the very same thing I described.

Here, see if you can Annihilator your way out of this. Go ahead...stand outside for 5 seconds. You're lucky if you don't die inside the spawn shields since explosions go through shields and walls in this game too. Also, go ahead and look at who posted this video.

The real point is, anything is OP if you have enough zerglings, whether it's a rocket launcher or a Liberator. And whoever brings the zerg horde pretty much cancels out whatever counter there is to that specific weapon or vehicle.

I agree with the OP, but i reckon most people agree also. However, i'm not sure that certing for vehicle access is the way forward - everyone should be able to pull the vehicles regardless of previous experience in the game.

In the interim, i suggested just before christmas that we double the acquisition timers for all offensive vehicles, and reduce by 50% the rate of resource gain, while reducing the maximum number of resources held to 500 (down from 750).

Now i know (from my previous posts) that some will vehemently disagree with this, and i'm ready to face all the names and abuse under the sun. But the fact remains that you never need to leave a tank, ESF or Liberator if you don't want to.

Please don't get me wrong; i love rolling around in tanks and i'm quite a dab hand now at the Scythe. And there are few things as inspiring (or scary!) as being involved with/on the receiving end of 40-odd tanks rolling across the battlefield. But it does get old whenever you can pull a tank, spend 5 mins getting to the destination, a couple of mins fighting until the tank is destroyed, then simply hopping into a new tank from the closest vehicle spawn.

I certainly do not see the issue as "game-breaking" (like others have wildly exaggerated in the past), but something needs to be done to gently encourage/force people away from the vehicle spam.

I vehemently disagree with this, since that will fix nothing.
Any fix concerning the resource gains needs to avoid ONE HUGE ISSUE called resource snowballing.

Most territory = Most resources.
Factions stuck at warpgate get constantly **** on by the camper which can pull out 3x the ammount of vehicles. Whether you cut down the resource pool or increase the resource costs, it will only increase the imbalance.


Now, to put things back in context:
-Tank zergs only happen post base capture. The mass of footmen stuck in the base rush to the vehicle terminal, and pulls out its own personal disposable transport aka MBT.
-There are just too many tank spawns. Satellites around facilities provide them, and it's a terrible thing because the stock can be renewed just too easily. See below

The biggest improvement would be to make the MBT a investment; either by targeting resource starvation for zergs or promoting pulling MBTs from warpgate which acts as a filter.
In the first case you want MBTs to cost more on the frontlines, on the second you want MBTs to cost less at warpgate. Dynamic resource costs can be a solution.

Its a combined arms warfare games.

yes, there will be tanks.

I personally think the traffic jams are a hillarous emergent phenomenon, however given these also happen IRL in warfare. You know.. meh?

My solution to the problem here, if indeed there is one. Is to make planes a little bit more effective against vehicles again. thus making situations like these massive honeypots for strafing runs.