The Lattice is a false Messiah. Think twice. (illustrated rant)

Giving points for caps is mainly just to make taking a base or holding one have some sort of impact. Or to give players something to show for grinding away all night to capture a continent even if it is ghost capped in the middle of the night. At least you have those 600 faction points showing you did something. Something to reduce the feeling of pointlessness that can feel rather daunting. It was not really intended as a huge gamechanger but as a small incentive for people and to be added on top of other metagame changes.

Eh, and I'm saying rewarding points for caps isn't as long term as points for maintaining territory. People will still be rewarded certs for capping, but there's little sense of urgency to hold a location if there's no incremental point rewards in doing so. I'm just afraid compounding the two rewards (capping in tandem with holding) might result in an absurd lead in points for overnight capping.

Unless they include a groundbreaking "SUPER STRATEGY UPDATE" that will entirely improve the strategic aspect as a whole, what you described is:

"You can kill people at West hills, but you can also kill people at Quartz ridge, allowing your team to kill people at Excavation site !"


The lattice alone won't do anything; it will even break the very little strategic aspect we had left. Hate it as much as you like, but I actually managed to make some nice moves using the Hex system. Whether people used to defend the base or not, this is irrelevant; I had a plan and it worked.

Saying it's a necessary basis for later improvement is a bold statement, but then again I managed to pull out a decent model that relies on the Hex system, which proves you can also improve it.
Some pretend it's a good thing, I say it's a zerg generator, which has not yet proposed a way to fight against endless stalemates ala The Crown.

In order for players to care about the territory, there needs to be some tangible benefit in holding it for a prolonged period of time. Which has very little to do with how hexes are set up. It also needs to be fun to defend it, which is a problem with base layouts and not how hexes are set up. Problems with ghost-capping and ease of capture can be solved with changes to base capture mechanics. Which has very little to do with how hexes are set up.

Exactly why such a huge change is warranted when the most glaring problems can be solved with much smaller changes that don't cut more than they give?

First you say that the ability to hold on to one easily-defended territory with all of a team's population to deny a continent capture is a problem with the current hex system. But then you state that introducing a game mechanic to prevent boredom-inducing stalemates will "end a fight people are having fun in". I suggest you decide what you want first before posting.

Player base needs to grow up. There is making your game more accessible to new players and there is dumbing it down to lowest common denominator. There is nothing wrong with a game that stimulates your mental activivty, that forces you to get better in order to win. Especially when it is still possible to play casually for some run-n-gun action or relaxing fishing for kills with a sniper rifle in case the player feels the need to relax without turning their brain on. It is not either-or, both options are always available.

Exactly why this change is warranted? Why am I as a player should look forwards to being heavy-handedly forced into a established killzone (that will also kill fps for me and ~80% other players because the game is still not ready to support a Ti Alloys fight during prime-time) just because someone arbitrarily painted a line on my map but neglected to do so in four other directions?

I don't see any arguments sans "less options will be better" and "the game should not require thinking because the players do not like thinking with their heads". PROTIP: such arguments won't persuade anyone.

I'm in The Enclave, Friend. What you call a 'zerg', is what I call a good fight. It's big, it's fun, and it's not our fault that you don't have two platoons of your own. A large, well co-ordinated group of players is far more dangerous than the mindless swarm of lonewolves that're out there right now. Giving them direction will make things better.

As far as camping the spawnroom goes; It wouldn't happen if people didn't hide in there, hoping to grab a few kills while a base caps. I've been in so many fights, where right after the initial push, the entire enemy force (Two platoons or greater) just sit in the spawnroom, trying to get a few kills. What they really ought to do is force everyone out of a spawn as soon as an SCU goes down, and put SCUs back at every base. That, plus the lattice will make for a better game.

Let's be fair, they've already spent months trying to improve the current one. It's not happening.

Are you saying people have trouble navigating the map? Yeah the interface could be more helpful, but it's not like you can't open your map and determine the place you need to move to next within 15 seconds.

Forcing players out of the shielded area will achieve nothing more than feeding certs to the attackers if the base layout doesn't change.

I'm saying they have no direction. They don't go where they're needed, they go anywhere they feel like going. 90% of the time, these people like to cap empty territory. Is that fun? Not really. Does it help your empire? No, it'll be back capped 5 minutes after they're gone.

It will force them to attempt to retake the base. Right now, why should they? They can sit in their little invulnerable room, and shoot out. Free certs. They'd rather lose the base, and then cap it back when it's empty. That makes for boring gameplay.

Well it's the communication problem that has very little to do with how hexes are set up.

When it comes to inter-platoon communication, we have ORDERS chat (which is spammed by outfit adverts and "To the Crown! Now while we still have the chance!" more often then not), REGION chat (which only recently started working with any kind of reliability; from what I've seen in-game, about 90% people don't even now it exists), flashing attack/defend icons on the map (which have no tags/annotations and don't send any kind of signal to your in-game HUD). And no ability to sent valuable recon on enemy movements to other players on your team if you happen to witness it whatsoever.

THAT is the problem (besides ghostcapping and the lack of capture lock timers). The introduction of rush lanes ain't gonna do squat to fix it.

If the best way to defend the base is to attack it from the outside and force your enemy to try to defend that crap, then it's another base layout problem.

If there are people that really regard spawn shield counter-camping as a reliable source of free certs - strongly enough to make them forgo anything else, there is nothing we can do for them.

I didn't say anything about communication. I said people have options, and they often opt to do something useless. They need direction in the form of a line that they need to follow.

Directing clueless players to where they are needed is great. Unfortunately, the system will, far more often than not, only direct the handful of players who weren't enough at the previous base.. Chain reaction of 'not enough defenders' for the entire lane?

If you are outnumbered 50 to 25, directing those 25 defenders into the next base down the line will do very little. They'll be overrun there just as much, as there are no reserves down the line to eventually increase the defender numbers (nor need for any, with how easy it is to move around the battlefield).Likewise, attackers don't need to dilute their force to hold on to territory.

The Rush Lanes system does not promote defending on a different lane any more than the current hex system promotes defending territories under attack. What it does is focus attackers and disperse defenders (you can argue that current system disperses both), unless the battle is a very close one (the kind that can already happen with the hex system anyway, albeit rarely).

And fixing communication inside your own team can work wonders on that front. Without pushing through perfomance-killing changes that are (if the rumors are to be believed) are the reason Hossin and some other yummy features are pushed further back from release.

It doesn't promote dispersing of a defending force at all. Infact, it forces them to rally at the next defensible position. What this does is give the defenders time to pull themselves together and call in reinforcements. The Lattice is what would allow some real strategy to shine through. You can expect large stalemates. Big fights, that aren't going anywhere. This is where outfits come in, and make a real difference. This is where good communication and cohesion make a difference. These things don't matter what so ever while capping empty territory.

Pray tell, what do you think "bottled up" enemies are going to do?

Yes, it's being made for the lowest common denominator, because there are WAY more of them than there are of you. And no, my argument won't persuade anyone, but that's mostly because anyone that still needs to be persuaded has their head shoved so far up their *** they couldn't be persuaded to begin with.

If Planetside 1 is any indication, fall back to another continent. If Planetside 2 is any indication, continue to fight to push out of their warp gate until they actually manage to break out. Some of PS2's most intense combat happens right outside a warp gate. You know... the $#!% most people downloaded the game for to begin with?

No, it really doesn't. They won't deploy there, because deploying there means they'll get farmed by the same zerg that farmed them the first time. If the game literally does force them to deploy there, they'll either take the fastest available transportation to some other lane or their warpgate, or they'll just reach for the logout button.

You guys keep acting as if every fight's going to be a steamroll. Some of them might be, yes. Does this mean all of them, or infact most of them will be? No. As I said before; a zerg is just a large group of players to most people here. No one seems to care if they're a co-ordinated outfit, or not. Quite honestly, lonewolves will almost always get stomped by a co-ordinated team. That's how it is in almost any game. The lattice is going to throw those un-coordinated lonewolves against eachother, and outfits are going to be what makes a difference. With the way the lattice works, an outfit will definitely take notice if they lose a large base, and will move in to defend the next base in line, while the defenders rally.

If someone's so frustrated by losing that they'd quit, they probably shouldn't be playing FPS, let alone PlanetSide.

I should have been clearer on the system not dispersing players, but that the players will disperse on their own. Atm players may disperse randomly in part, but I'd wager the dispersion is intentional for the majority as very few people want to fight a losing fight (there is no 'delay the enemy advance' incentive in game). The predictability of the Lanes will make it very clear when you're losing. If you lost the previous base, you will lose in the one you were forced to as well.

The only way this won't happen is if the defenders use communication and teamwork to gather reinforcements. This is already possible yet it doesn't happen. I don't think it will start happening as if by magic. Even if we assume that some communication happens, the system is still inherently advantageous to the attacker who don't need communication for the main push (but can still have all the same benefits of organized play).

As for time given to defenders? If they remained at the last base until the very last moment, as many have observed with the 'staying in spawn room shields looking for kills' comments, they won't have any more time than before. Distances between the bases haven't grown and I dare say some of the longer distances have been eliminated as possibilities.
But perhaps more importantly: What would defenders actually use their extra time on? There's very little digging in one can accomplish at the moment, apart from engineer mines

The upcoming micro-hex system is not only a step in the right direction; it's a needed one. You can go on talking about changing base designs and whatnot, but the two biggest problem that exists today is that there are three, unpredictable zergs each raging in different corners of the map, and that ghost-capping is something that any rookie can do. The micro-hex system fixes these two issues to a great extent.

The micro-hex system will force the zergs to go head to head, and will prevent the ghost-capping almost entirely. It will make the game more predictable, which is exactly what it needs right now. Planetside needs these big zergs to clash, nullifying their respective capacity to just roll over territories unchallenged. And the micro-hex system does this better than any lattice system could do, because it drives the swarm of lone-wolves to stay within a certain area, simply because they want the points for when the territories are captured.

There are some that have complained, using the argument that the game will no longer allow outfits the flexibility to think and play tactically, which I think is completely misunderstood. Sure, you could go around capturing poorly defended hexes, giving your faction a slight increase in their resource-per-minute timer, but how meaningful does that feel? Organized groups and outfits want to feel that they have an impact on the game, and though capturing resources does have some impact on the opposing factions, it's hardly a game-changer and they know it. So they come up with ideas on how to change the resource system to allow for more influential resource denying.

The biggest satisfaction, however, would come in the form of direct, visual feedback that they have had a profound impact on a battle. And the micro-hex system allows just that. As zergs clash, the outfits on both sides will have the opportunity to change the course of the battle through organized gameplay, and if their tactics are successful, they will see their zerg gaining momentum in real time, as it over-runs a base as a result of the outfit's actions. And I don't know about you guys, but I think that is the perfect measure of success for organized players.

You can call in more people, for one. The assumption that simply because you lost one base, you're going to lose every single one after it is absolutely ludicrous. Everyone acts as if every last fight is always going to be a one-sided steamroll. I don't know where you guys get that from. Right now, every fight isn't a one-sided steamroll, so why on earth would that be the case when you've got more people on both sides? It wouldn't be. All of this is baseless conjecture.

I'm getting rather tired of even talking about it, because nothing anyone says or does will convince people in this thread that the lattice is anything but garbage. What experience do you guys talk from? I have no idea. What I do know, is half the 'horrible problems' you guys have with the lattice weren't present in PlanetSide 1 (The game the lattice is taken from, and what this game should strive to be).