How balanced was PS1 between factions?

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Bill Hicks, Sep 25, 2013.

  1. Bill Hicks

    I hear people talk about the old days, but you never get the feeling one factions was overpowered. Did it has this harrasser nonsense? Did people complain about the old striker? was air and ground balanced?
  2. Locke

    PS1 was a great game but people look on it with rose tinted glasses. It certainly had balance issues all throughout it's history.
    • Up x 11
  3. Lucidius134

    VS is suffering
  4. BigMacDeez

    Harassers were 2-man with a light machine gun turret. Then each empire had a "heavy" buggy. Out of the three, the one I enjoyed the most was the Marauder. It just looked cool, and was a blast to drive. So many good murder memories...
  5. SKYeXile

    Planetside was never really "balanced" it tried to so a more rock paper scissors approach to things...kinda... while there are still essences of that in PS2, its doest really compare to to the sheer differences of PS1.

    Medium assault in PS1 was the same as all the weapons of PS2, so they had the same characteristics, TR high ROF, NC high damage per hit and VS...well VS had this AP mode that was essentially useless...anyway...everything else was verydifferent to eachother. IN PS1 though, heavy weapons, aka: lasher, MCG and jackhammer were the staple weapons.

    As far as empires stood, NC was the best in close quarters, not necessary indoors, but in closer places like towers and stairwells because of the jackerhammer and scatter max they ruled that domain. but they were weak against air, the phoenix left their infantry heavily exposed to any aircraft, skeeter pilots like me could pick of rows of them in a single pass with the 12mm. also their AA max sucked dick. it could kill you 12 minutes after you left its LOS...but for immediate air defence...useless. (i played VS btw, so my opinion on that is from fighting NC not as NC)

    TR was the best outdoors on their field and the most versatile(even though this was meant to be the the VS by design), with every heavy assault having a MCG, a good medium to close range weapon and a striker, a decent deterrent to aircraft and the burster max, very powerful in the hands of a good user, TR were the hardest empire to fight against on the field singe they good infantry-infatry medium range weapons, and simply their sheer amount of AA and AV weapons along with the option AP MCG that could tear strips off maxes and aircraft at med-close range.

    VS had the best air superiority and AV capabilities, not because of the aircraft(all aircraft were common pool) but because of the skillfire(starfire) is was by far the best AA max and it could get to absurd places where it was hard for anything to kill it. The magrider was the clear winner in tank on tank engagements, though it lacked effectiveness against infantry and the lancer dominated vehicles, but it presence wasn't as heavy as the striker because it was harder to use.

    the harnesser was terrible...but VS had auroas, 12 magazine 6 shot salvo of DEATH(2 shot kill, with decent splash)! and the NC had the thunderer, it was brutal against vehicles and could 1 shot infantry with a direct hit and the TR had...nothing... well they had the raider, but that was useless since it requires a crew of like 30 to operate...anyway... yea there was always major problems with balance, this is because the way SOE does balances, they oftendouble or triple nerf things, and they always go to far. and by triple nerf i mean...they go" oh theres a problem with aircraft being overpowered...lets...decrease their armour, increase AA effectiveness and add more AA to the game..." rather than just doing 1 thing at a time in smaller or more reasonable increments.

    Oh yea and the lasher MCG and jackhammer were never in anybody opinion ever balanced, in the early game because of surge and planetside being a close range game, the jackhammer was clearly the best HA in 2003-early 2004, the lasher went through phases of absolutely ******* terrible to "LOL, KILLED YOUR TANK AND YOUR SQUAD AND THEY WERE BEHIND ME!" a dev said it best when he said once: Today: lasher buff, tomorrow: lasher nerf ... and the MCG started off as ok-good and ended up as sub avg when they buffed rexo armour and never changed the MCG to compensate for the new armours absorption, IMO leaving TR at a disadvantage against rexo armour...the armour practically every infantry used.
    • Up x 7
  6. Hibiki54

  7. UberBonisseur


    I think the 3rd person camera played a BIG role in making NC dominate with the Jackhammer.
    • Up x 1
  8. infinite loop

    ^ What SKY said
  9. Kid Gloves

    PS1 balance was way off base for infantry. It was countered to a limited degree by there being a lot of common pool weapons.

    Vehicle balance was also off-base, but one interesting thing on vehicles was practically every vehicle required 2+ people if it was to be used in any offensive manner, with the exception of the lightning, various light aircraft and later the BFR. TR vehicles for some reason needed more crew than others - a point most notable with the Prowler, which required a crew of three to operate (driver, gunner, coax gunner) as opposed to two for the Vanguard (driver, gunner) and the Magrider (driver w/forward-firing PPA, gunner).

    PS1 had some very clever things that PS2 can and should adopt. Vehicle, weapon and faction balance was not one of these. :)
    • Up x 1
  10. Goretzu

    It did - although I'd argue the JH was much more powerful 1 on 1 than in Zerg vs Zerg or organised teamplay.

    It definately had balance problems, as all MMOs do (the most infamous being the Lasher 2.0 - still the most ridculous buff of a previously decent weapon I've ever seen).

    It was a much more ambitous game tham PS2 as well with some serious differences compared to PS2.

    However I'd say generally the game was fairly balanced (probably helped by the much longer TTK), but that's not to say the factions were the same.


    The main reason I'd say this was that on the US servers NC dominated generally (with most pop), on EU servers it was much closer to even between the 3 factions (with more even pops - generally whoever has the most pop at the moment was ahead), and on the Asian servers VS dominated (with most pops) all with the same build.

    Was it perfect balance? No.

    Would a PS1 WDS have come closer to a 33-33-33 points split than PS2 is doing? Yes.
  11. Bill Hicks

    Perhaps back in those days players were more dedicated and ignored imbalances.
  12. huller

    Jackhammer.

    Imagine a game with a TTK that is 5 times as long as in PS2 but then you hand a PS 2 TTK shotgun to the NC in bases with extremely confined spaces.
    • Up x 2
  13. Larington

    Well, it's funny, in PS1 the sentiment in our (VS) outfit was that the NC were slightly overpowered (AKA "the devs play NC") but generally things felt more or less balanced between empires. There were dominant strategies for sure though, everyone had reavers & those came with rocket pods by default, and later in the games life mosquito's got a super accurate machine gun that turned it into something that could make mincemeat of ground troops in a nasty way. Meanwhile the majority of the ground troops would run rexo for extra armour and damage resistance and heavy assault for maximum killing power. The Striker was an effective weapon but the missiles would cancel out if lock on was lost, though comically you could sometimes scare the enemy off with an empty striker by pointing it at them and hoping the beep beep beep would send them away.

    Fun aside, my outfit leader is looking forward to Planetside 3 because he reckons VS will be the slightly OP faction... I reckon that's like hoping a 3 sided coin-thing will flip tails, then heads, then tri when it could easily just go tails, head, head or something.
  14. Irathi

    PS1 certainly had balancing issues, but one big advantage it did have over PS2 was that loadouts where completely customizable. So if you ever felt at a disadvantage you could try something else without altering your playstyle entirely. If you wanted to bring a deci or striker when using light assault (agile suit in ps1) you could!

    Ps1 had different suits and not classes, every suit had a given amount of space (inventor) and slots to equip weapons. The suits where infiltration, agile, re enforced exo (rexo) and Max. With the exception of infiltrator and Max you could pretty much do as you wanted, infiltration suits where limited to pistol sized weapons and maxes well they where maxes like in PS2.

    This at least gave you the option to customize your playstyle in a greater way when it came to what type of guns to bring to the fight, mind you we had nothing like underslung barrels, extended magazines, red dot sights, supressors etc. The only option you had was what type of ammo you wanted to shoot, normal bullets, armor piercing and for some rockets/flak/grenade launcer/plasma etc etc.

    Personally I think that PS1 players accepted the differences more, people in PS2 are too used to playing generic fps's like BF3 and Call of Duty where both sides have pretty much the exact same weapons and balance is then easy. In ps1 we accepted that NC rules up close (JH), VS rules corners (lasher that actually LASH), TR rules middle range.

    So it was more of a which empire has which pro and con at which situation, not which empire is OP and UP in general. We accepted that the empires where different and choose empire based much on playstyle. I could personally never get used to NC weapons like the jackhammer, but MCG and Lasher where my two lovechilds.

    The MBT's where also much more different than today, NC had slow fire, low arch and hard hit - resembles today's version, TR had fast fire and a large magazine (was it 12?) but a very high arch and was an easy target to hit as well, VS had light armor, but could hover and had a straight - no bullet drop fire like the Lancer has in PS2. All three very different, all three had their situation where they would shine, imbalanced? - YES HELL YES ! - But we called it variation of playstyle.

    Imbalance is often a stupid word people throw around when it really makes up the variation in a game.
    • Up x 1
  15. SKYeXile

    Oh yea,
    Oh yea NC HA was nice, but they were all situational most players on VS anyway kept a locker full of MCG's and jackerhammers since you could loot the other factions weapons and in a TOD(tower of doom![tower of terror if you were an east coast ***]) you would bring out the other factions weapons, the MCG and JH did alot more damage per clip making it a better weapon for those who could take on multiple people at once, with the lasher it would always be, kill 1, kill 2 ...ki.*reload*and you were dead. MCG and JH you would kill 4 easily in CQC.
  16. Pella


    Nah you need the Mealstrom for tower spammage.
  17. NC_Edacyn

    PS2 is becoming what PS1 was, which is great.

    PS2 is great mind you, but it's evolving into elements of PS1 that some in the SOE team overlooked when designing PS2.

    And they are bringing some of the best elements back into PS2 from PS1... hopefully soon after Operation: Make Game Faster is complete.
    • Up x 4
  18. Thovargh

    I really can't tell if that's sarcasm or just extreme optimism
  19. SKYeXile

    Cant use them i was normally riding the grief lock from tking people i hate and also the thumper. oh how i loved to thump.
  20. Goretzu


    You needed corners to exploit (and I mean exploit) the JH fully (if they'd removed 3rd person it would have nerfed its kill rate significantly).

    Most bases had very long corridors, and if you knew what you were doing a thumper would easily clear any corners.

    You are right though, outside it was rather like playing PS2 with just PA with the JH.