We've had Lattice for about three days and the gloss is already wearing off

That wasn't a problem of the hex system per say, but more of an issue of implementation.

There was a definite lack of competing goals that provoked this feeling of avoidance.
it's not so much than player tried to avoid each other, there were just little reasons to go at the same place.
Not fighting is definitely the least effective strategy in the context of the game (no xp/fun)
Adding continent level strategic value to certain bases, and keeping the surrounding ones as a facilitators(influence) would evolve continental level strategy to maintaining those bases safe.
There could even be planetary value on all bases, similar to a permanent global alert system every 30 mins. Passive cert gains could be based on that.

There was also not enough incentives/tools to defend a territory that had already started being taken.
it is fun to gal drop a base and save it at the last second, but it does not provide any "reward". It is still a flaw in the lattice system.
Critical recap xp could fix that, in conjunction with the passive cert gain advantages.

Hard restrictions like the lattice system are by definition anti fun. They bring no new gameplay to the game while removing a complete layer of choices. Even if it is a loss to only a sub part of the player base, it is still potential for in game events lost.

Some argue that the increased density fights are worth it, that there is more tactics.
But large battles aren't new, they existed before. All the tactics people finally notice have always been there too, there are no new tools and as there are less contexts to use them, the tactical realm is indirectly limited.
As I said, there were better ways of obtaining consistent large battles without losing other form of gameplay.

If you think this is whinig wait until it is time for us Vets to lobby for AMSs to have a cloaking bubble, factions to have home bases/santuaries, facility doors, proper infiltrator hacking, continental lattice, defensible bases etc..etc..

This is just the beginning of a larger plot of the PS1 Vets to enslave and exploit the system so it benefits us and only us. Just wait until we lobby for the return of BFRs and immediately blame the newer players for asking for them. We will...nay...we must win forumside at all cost.

It was for some people, also you can't argue with a tactic that worked.

Anyway it's not as if an outfit couldn't notice if somewhere was being ghost capped and mobilize to stop them.

GO GO POWER RANGERS

There needs to be an outfit called the Power Rangers

Was reading entire thread before posting, but had to stop here.

Alerts were terrible in hex. You just go around enemies. Big fights were wastes of time, you just kept going around the enemy. All alerts did for the hex design is further accentuate the flaws that it had.

Lattice is actually far easier to modify than the hex design. Changing up hex's meant having to warp territory in certain ways. It could be done, but in order to change one territory you had to change another as well. So in order to fix one problem, you would likely create another.

Lattice is simple, remove line, add line, move line. No territory modifications have to be made. Only geometry modifications remain.

Lattice benefits the game and the devs in terms of how much they can tweak it.

Lattice is a pretty solid territory mechanic, what they should focus on now is the dreadful tower fights, more concurrent objectives at bases to split forces, and more depth to the core game i.e.- continent locking, resource revamp, etc.

Lattice is better for the majority. It adds structure, still has plenty of variety, and makes finding fights easier. Ultimately it fills the game's intended Niche way better than the hex system did.

The best war gameplays is when it's the craziest and creative, not when it's the most 'balanced' or 'realistic' or 'strategic'.
For me, the issue is purely the lack of situational awareness for enemies, and how they seeminly shoot me and kill me within a second of turning the corner. Not sure if it's lagging (this game is the worst in terms of rubberbanded unsynced players) or people hacking at that point, because I die in almost every single close quarter engagements, even to freaking infiltrators.

Ghost capping wasn't bad, you can only capture territories that is adjacent to yours, meaning they can't cap a territory in the middle of nowhere.

Planetside being a number game is only fun if you organized your own outfit with a huge number of players. But not many players are actually interested in massive 50 man clan sized coordination, they just want to play in squads of 4-8 or smaller.
Planetside is only interesting when guns aren't boring, and when there is a way to de-cloak enemies by damaging them with a bullet so they can't flee and come back to spray you with lasers behind cover. Try aiming at them 50 meters away with a iron sight, whilst they are battle rank 68 and have all the scopes they want..

Not my experience at all. Alerts really bring out the brilliance of the hex system. Playing on Woodman/Miller the alerts under hex are brillant strategic battles with massive battles fought tooth and nail to gain territory. Very close sometimes as well - with one draw recently.

Then you'll forgive me if I have a hard time believing you since my experience involved more of the enemy going around us during alerts. For us, it turned into wild goose chases, cat and mouse gameplay. The game wasn't a game for us, it was a chore.

What server?

Mattherson. And as far as population goes, we're very equal and we hit the pop cap for continents very often.

I am no glorified Net Commander of FPSdom... But I see a lot of potential for the Lattice in conjunction with several other coming changes. So called Leaders and Tacticians attempt to use Hex system strategies with it. Bad call. When that doesn't work, Plan B is to Zerg. And the Lattice is not for that, it is as many have noticed too predictable in its current form and Zergs will eventually wall each other.

Some Hrs ago there was an Alert on Indar on Woodsman, the TR were brutalized. All we did was follow a lane, to use DOTA's terms. More than once it was apparent that blind aggression and attempts to steam roll the opposition with no plan, both stalled us too much and dried us out.

Haters Gonna Hate but I like the Lattice. *EDIT* Rather, I like what I see so far, what it does with Defense/Offense and lanes, I don't see how it is limited at all. I like where it's going, I don't like how people are using it. Sue me.

I'm more than just a little disappointed with this lattice system. It was touted by the PS1 vets as being the thing that'll make PS2 awesome... All it's done is made it zerg-y and dull.

Rather than encouraging defense, it's encouraged people to join the nearest group of platoons and steamroll their way over the poor sods who actually try and defend anything.

Every "fight" has a population of 75% to one side, and 25% to the other. Regardless of whether you're one of the 75% or the 25%, this is not what constitutes a good brawl.

There were more and better defensive actions and counterattacks prior to lattice restricting the options presented to a zerg. The more options a zerg had, the more it broke up of its own accord, meaning defenders could push back against groups which were managable in size. Because defensive actions could be more successful more frequently, people actually bothered.

Well you got that backwards. Manuever and base capping under the Hex system was completely up to unit leaders depending on the terrain and type of transportation and combat situation.

The lattice required major relandscaping -- some parts of Indar aren't hardly recognizeable anymore (e.g. road from SE warp gate half way to sky mesa, Ceres to Galaxy) and they added and removed roads in an attempt to make it just a bit more logical--yet problems still remain such as between NS Secure and Vanu Archives, where there's really no logical reason for not being able to cap between the two. Combat flow decisions under hex was made by leaders, combat flow under lattice is dictated by a contrived system that discourages small unit captures, sometime doesn't make sense based on the terrain and if changed at some point needs a revamp of roads, bridges and emplacement of NO GO terrain. Most of Esamir will either be completely changed, along with it's wonderful openness, or the existing lattice system will even make less sense than it does on parts of Indar now.
--
I'd like to see a hybrid of the two system, where capture is hex based as before, but the lattice drives resources.

Right now on Connery Endar, the NC holds the Crown and Ceres cut off far behind enemy lines. The NC folks fighting at the crown are still drawing full resources from the warp gate, minus the two connected territories they cut off in--they can stay there indefinitely drawing warp gate supplies. This situation also existed under the hex system and was to a large degree at the root of the hellter skelter map fluctuations that scattered people all over the map.

How it should be, is being cut off means exactly that--if you want to fight at the cut off crown...go for it! But only expect to draw from the few meager resources actually coming from the crown; under those conditions the emphasis of unit commanders would have usually been to try to reconnect, rather than trying to carve out a bigger unconnected hole behind enemy lines with his dwindling number of tanks, aircraft, c4 etc. In truth the back caps could probably be harder--but they shouldn't be impossible. The lattice system would still be an excellent means to define supply connection to the warp gate in this way--even without the gimmicky forces "what can we actually capture" next part of it. Fronts would better defined by the resources, unit leaders could still do daring raids to adjacent hexes with strong maneuver based benefits but also accept the risk of trying to feed its force if it got cut off.

Most of the geographical changes that happened to Indar either were going to happen anyway, or needed to happen regardless of hex/lattice. Even now, much of indar is still just existing in the shadow of Amerish in terms of geographical design. You could chalk up a few of those said changes to lattice, but those changes started happening long before lattice came. I will say that with or without lattice, speaking only in regards to the geographical changes, they were good changes.

The hybrid suggestion is pretty cool, but I cannot endorse a revert to the hex design. I absolutely despised the gameplay that went on, and the "Strategy" that went on during hex seemed a heck of a lot more basic than what goes on during lattice.

Lattice has encouraged our alliance on Mattherson to coordinate at a much higher efficiency now. Some people say that lattice takes away the strategy but I have been experiencing much more tactical gameplay with lattice now than with hex.

The hex design didn't really incorporate strategical thinking. Attacking forces had so many options, getting around your enemy or flanking them was trivial at best. It's hardly a difficult matter to diffuse an enemy zerg in the hex design, while in lattice it proves much more difficult and I love that challenge.

People say lattice dumbs down the game but from my perspective it just looks like it takes a lot more coordination now to achieve the same results compared to the hex design.

I also disagree that lattice discourages small group play. I will openly agree that it limits small squads more than the hex did, but the hex discouraged big fights which is counter-intuitive to PS2's niche. Still in the lattice, you have a good selection of small fights to choose from. Someone claimed earlier that all lanes were zergfests, and as a reference I looked at my map last night during primetime and globally there was 3 big fights and 7 small fights going on on Indar. Every faction had access to them, and each faction had access to more small fights than big fights on an individual level. So it just doesn't make sense to me when someone tells me that small fights are out now, because that's far from the truth unless you're warpgated or have a severe population imbalance on your server.



I will say I like your idea about cutting off the enemy though, and I hope that happens. I think lattice should still stay though. I also think it would be pretty neat to disable you from gaining territory while you're cut off, unless it's the territory that is cutting you off. That way you hold out and coordinate for your empire to re-link you to the gate. Could make for some engaging gameplay I think.


Finally, Planetside 2 is about big fights. Hex adjacency discouraged that, and made them a rarer occasion than it should have been. And that's bad, because Planetside 2's defining principle is big massive fights, if you can log in at any time and not have access to that, something is fundamentally wrong. I love the big fight, it's why I play Planetside 2 in the first place. With the hex adjacency, getting into a big fight isn't always a possibility. If a big fight isn't happening, then why am I even playing Planetside 2?

People keep saying, "I spawn into a base, look outside and see 50 tanks camping our spawn." How was this different than before? Do you guys seriously expect that because they changed the mechanics of the order in which battles take place that all of a sudden you will be able to go to an outpost out manned and our gunned and defend it easily? Hell no. What's awesome about the lattice is when that moment happens you can set up a defense like a bottleneck at the next outpost because they have to take that next outpost unless they change lanes. The lattice gives defenders the advantage of knowing where the enemy will have to strike next to move on, thus allowing them to set up a better defense.Instead of saying there is a zerg at this out post hit that redeploy button and get your *** to the next outpost to set up a defense because there is a high likelihood of the zerg hitting that base next aka the lattice. The lattice has given us improved more predictable macro hex combat while still maintaining the micro (field or base) combat diverse to those willing to adapt and develops new tactics.

I also disagree. We had some great battles. Hell we were happy to get an objective to fight for - a purpose.

However we spent more time hopping around abusing squad deploy and shuffling people in and out of squads to get to the fight - which lasted 2 minutes - than actually fighting.

I got fed up when time and time again there was no way to defend Xelas or Onatha without numbers because a single squad can not be in all of the many places it needed to be at the same time : 3x satellites, 1x generator, 3x capture point, Nx enemy sunderer, 3x teleporters, 2x jumppad
We should have been able to hold the southern satellite .. and the enemy has to fight through us.

We had to use some strategy - we did not have strategic battles.
We had strategic gambits or maneuvres.

The actual battles were a bit dull, and with few exceptions over before they started. Enemy brings sunderer. Sunderer go boom. Battle over. Or base being hacked. Squad Deploy. Resecure.

I think the biggest problem is that peopel compare the finished lattice system to the unfisnished hex system.

There is no question that the current implementation of the hex system had defects.
But an improved version would not have all the defects you are mentionning without being as flawed as the lattice system.

Absolutely. The comparison is inherently unfair.

The Lattice has had 9 years of development time and, considering the sacrifices it makes, is much simpler than the Hex in ambition and scope.

... What?

Are you sure you're on Mattherson? Because Indar Alerts tended to form stable lines and most Esamir alerts end with massive battles at Glacier Station, Jaeger's Fist, and fighting between Apex and Aurora. I haven't done any Amerish alerts lately, but I recall a lot of fighting near Spring Valley or Silver Valley or something.

If you're having alert problems I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 problems but finding a fight during a Mattherson alert when the populations are locked and there are huge battles going on for large territory chunks all the time ain't one.

Popular misconception actually. PS2 is about lots of large fights that interact with each other over distance. Look at how horribly designed the bases are for Lattice - They were never intended to support the number of people fighting over them that Lattice has. They're designed for fights of about 30-100 people, with 100 being the top end. The game was never intended to cram 300 people into one fight. The terrain, base design, game mechanics, and hardware aren't able to handle that and weren't designed to handle that.

Hex exemplifies strategic gameplay while lattice exemplifies tactical gameplay. I was originally against lattice, but after playing on it basically since it came out I don't think its that bad, in fact my gaming experience on mattherson hasn't changed at all. I think the best compromise is to leave lattice on Indar and keep hex on Amerish and lets see how lattice plays out on easimer since its already on the test.

Both systems have there strengths and weaknesses so why not have both map styles in the game for diversities sake?