[Suggestion] Countering zerging and encouraging even fights

Hell no to artificial "anti zerg" spawnrules.
Hell no to Hex. Ghostcapping is not fun in any damn way .

You just have to understand that numbers is one form of strenght in this game. More guns is better, more tanks is better, more planes is better, more bodies to throw in the fight is better !

There we go. SOE needed to build the fence that is the Lattice to keep the players together, otherwise we'll wonder around capping bases, maybe we'll see an enemy, maybe we won't.
We wouldn't have a lot of these problems if people would step up to leadership positions, if people would understand certain weapons are unfair, if people would understand they don't need 200 people to capture a base with only 10 enemies, if people would use some common sense, if people weren't so ready to take the easy way out.
Maybe one day we will have a system that allows freedom, but it is not today.

Exactly. They catered to and wanted the BF/CoD crowd and that's what they got. Players who will take the easiest and simplest farm fest but now instead of Crownside, it's now Spawncampside...... sigh

I like the zergs, It's whole point of planetside.

If I want 64 people in a battle I will go play BF3 or bf4. I play ps2 for massive 100+ people battles. If you are outnumbered you just dig in and kill as many people as possible and the rush foward to maximze your population exp bonus

I'm glad you understand this. I take a lot of heat on these forums for my position on this; when all I want is to have my choice of batlefield back, and not be forced into the same scenario over and over.

I dont care if people where ghostcapping; I was stopping ghostcappers and defending back bases when I was in the mood, and helping maintain the front line.

The players make the game; many want 'metagame' but are unable or unwilling to provide it for themselves, therefore regulation and rails have to be put into the game to hold there hand and tell them what to do and where to go.

I dont understand this 'PS2 is all about massive battles", yeah well that should mean 'continent wide' or 'multi continent wide', where several battles are happening EVERYWHERE.

This no longer happens and now its "Massive battles AT THE SAME PLACE"

Yawn. MAybe it is time for an uninstall, and let the new gamers have their deathmatch game they want so badely.

I made suggestions along these lines a few weeks/months ago.

My idea was that a base has a certain amount of XP for its capture - that XP should be shared amongst the attacking force. That would mean a small force taking a biolab or tech plant is far more rewarding than a zerg taking a small outpost.

We used to have freedom with Hex, actually, but it didn't work. The problem here, like someone else said, is not "the system", it is the playerbase. What I sggest is to analyze players mind and with that try to find a solution. Most players want to win, they just want that, the esiest win the better. When we had Hex people went around empty bases ghostcapping for the win. Now devs have forced players to be toghether, so they're are toghether but still want an easy win, so they go zerg and mostly avoid other zergs.

This behaviuor is also encouraged by the total lack of value of territory: who cares if an enemy zerg is conquering a base of us after another? I'll go with my own zerg in another lane and conquer without resistance the same amonut of territory we're losing in the other lane.

I think this could be the real problem: losing territory does not give any noticeable disadvantage and in the other hand keeping territory does not give any noticeable bonus.

I'll be honest, I really can't think about something that really solves this issue. All I can say is that we need some game mechanic that makes a territory more valueable to the faction that owns it, the more time passes in that faction hands the more value it should gain. We need something that motivates people to fight to keep their territories and the more a territory is kept, the more advantages it should give to players.

Maybe we could think of introducing some structure building in bases that take some effort to be done and grant substantial advantage, like the possibility to spawn vehicles from there, for example, or defence measures (what about descrutable walls buildable by engineers just like turrets?), resource bonuses, XP bonuses for actions done in the base or maybe even in near bases.

TL;DR
The problem is there's no value in conquered/lost territory. XP is the only goal here, and the easiest way to get XP is conquering half-empty bases with huge force. This is what zergs do, actually. Something has to be done in order to give territory an increasing value, the more time it remains in a faction hands. This could motivate players to keep what they've taken and fight for it.


-EDIT-
What about introducing factories in continents? Only if a faction owns the MBT factory, it can spawn them. There could be just 1 or 2 factories in a continent quite for every type of vehicle/equipment available. I bet players would not be so willing to lose an MBT factory and not being able to spawn MBTs anymore.

This could also bring to a certain variability in faction armies: VS could own the MBT factory and the Galaxy one, TR could own the Harasser factory and the MAX, and so on. Every faction could have its war machines but it also could steal technologies from other factions.

Why not provide a passive boost to defenders when outnumbered by a significant margin. Could be % damage resistance buff based on how outnumbered you are.

Say you're a squad of 12 and a platoon of 48 rolls into your base to cap it. Your squad would all get a passive 60% damage resistance buff and potentially a 30% damage resistance buff to your ground vehicles within the zone. Clearly the resistance could be tuned to make it fair as I have no figures to base this on, but the advantages would be:

• Defenders get the fun of being a 'super soldier' and feel as though they can actually have an impact on the attacking force.
• The zerg gets targets to shoot (and they would have to shoot them a lot!).
• Defenders can get some decent XP as they'll actually be able to kill enemies without being instantly killed.
• Attackers can get bonus XP for taking out stronger soldiers.

As the numbers balanced out, the resistance buff would decrease to 0.

Planetside 1's solution was very elegant:

• Have a smaller population limit per continent
• Have more continents

Benefits of a Planetside 2 Dynamic Continent System:

• Dramatic increase in the number of population-balanced fights
• You're far more likely to walk away from a session with the sense that you did something important ("I captured Amerish today") instead of that being quite rare

Here's how it would work:

1. Pop Limits Reduced. This creates far more fair (even-team) fights.
   • Instead of the highest population leader being able to stack on a continent, they're forced to spread out.
   • Also, this introduces situations where it's genuinely desireable (for fun reasons) to join a smaller population empire (because they can fit into that 250 vs 250 vs 300 fight on Indar 2; The overflow of that high pop empire are stuck with ghost capping.)
2. Continent instances spawned as needed. When the high pop empire needs another continent to fight over (because nearly all active continents are filled by them) a new continent spawns. Obviously since there are only 3 continents defined so far, it's nearly always going to be a duplicate of existing continents.
3. Domination closes a continent.
   • Dominating a continent provides a slight reduced benefit (because multiple dominations will now stack.)
   • Domination now feels like a momentous victory (and happens more often.) When an empire dominates a continent, capping is disabled. 10 minutes later, respawning is disabled.
   • Upon Domination, a score screen is accessible to see some stats about the win, and to transport (from anywhere in the continent) to the next continent to fight on.

Because continents are opening based on player count, and eventually closing down, there are constantly many even-team continents being fought over (as many as the lowest-pop empire can field players for, basically.) This dramatically increases the odds you'll end up on one of those fights.
Some disclaimers:

• PS2 is currently about casual low-skill-depth PVP.
• So rocking the boat probably isn't a good idea, because the players who've stuck around are the ones who are fine with population advantages (zerging) and progression advantages (vertical progression)
  • SWG failed not because the gameplay they switched to was bad, but primarily because the players who were still playing SWG at the time were fine with the game's current state.

World of warcraft did try this at the wintergrasp and it ended up in much asshattery.

Not to mention the whole idea is terrible.

I have nothing against massive battles. But the whole point of these suggestions is to make less one-sided battles, where you're fighting 40 vs 150.
Encourage people to not pile into one big blob but instead spread out where they are needed.

Granted, winning by overwhelming force is a valid strategy and that is not something I'm arguing about, but when you have three times the numbers just sitting in a base waiting for cap timer to tick down while camping the spawn it's no fun for neither the attackers nor the defenders.

I truly believe the vast majority of the player base does not enjoy camping spawn-rooms while waiting for a timer to tick down.
As you said, ideally players would take the incentive themselves and go where they are needed. Unfortunately this is not the case, and so it is up to the game to actively encourage people into making fights fair.

Why so terrible? It would certainly encourage me to try and stick at an outnumbered base rather than just redeploying somewhere else.

Ah, you mean you want to go ghost capping.....

Artificial performance boosts like that basicly make the underpop people into demigods and normal pop guys into helpless prey. It feels stupid in a gamebreaking way. You need to have equal chances or game just wont work.

You can have a 50/50 battle between zerging units and the battle will always favor the defender or more aggressive side. Then it boils down to AMS placement or AMS destruction, number of MAX units attacking/defending the points and the skill level of the overall masses or a small group of elite coordinated squads.

Give XP bonuses, for fighting outnumbered in a region... and significant ones for fighting vastly outnumbered.

EDIT: Stack with both global and continental pop imbalances.

Carrot, not the stick.

I think MBT's would like it... more obstacles to block lock-on and use for cover in battles

The "Player Generated Missions" item on the roadmap seems to focus around this.

If it works even a little bit, I'll be very happy.

why not both?

penalties make people not want to play

just promote the behavior you want.

XP in such a grind heavy game is an easy and endless supply of motivation