Like it or not, this game needs Orbital Strike.

I hate indirect fire in any FPS.

I really don't want to see major battles end because one platoon saved up 40 orbital strikes. It adds nothing to the game because it can also be used to nuke people trying to push out of the spawn.

Well, the OS isn't indirect fire, much, as you have to be in the locality. A bit like lobbing a USGL.

However, I don't particularly care any way. In PS1 I couldn't understand the hate against flails, they were fairly easy to dodge.

This isn't a game about dying for your empire.

It's a game about making the other bastard die for his empire.

So yeah, I use appropriate weaponry and dominate the battlefield. I don't play stupidly.

I expect mechanics to be there to stop spamming like that... Its been said.... Over and over in this thread that there needs to be severe restrictions on who uses it, and how often.

Not only that, "nuking" the push is simply not how it is described in any of these posts...

1. It is visible. I mean, you would have to be literally blind, deaf, or incapable not to notice and run the hell out of there.
2. Some people have suggested non lethal alternatives.
3. The idea behind it is to force you to move, on pain of death.

For one thing... Saving them up is one thing, but many suggestions have offered simple solutions known as "cooldowns", and more extensive systems that include consumables to further limit usage.

There are some good posts here, but people are not spending any more time than it takes to read the first post. Take some time and read the thread.

I think death rays from space would kill this game. Really how much fun will it be to get repeatedly blown up with absolutely no recourse. How frustrating will it be for your squad/platoon to be wiped out by a single individual and you cant even fight back. Orbital strikes for me will be the end of my relationship with planetside 2.

Let's not make your farming something noble as you call it. It's farming. All kinds of farming is stupid by fact.

I'd rather die a lot trying to do something that matters.

In PS1 Orbital Strike was a command ability EARNED by commanding, that gave no kills and required DEDICATION TO COMMANDING. Because when you were in command of a squad you got only COMMAND XP, not BATTLE XP.

OS were sort of a hook to get people to command and reward those successful at it.

The whole rewarding successful commanders thing, while not perfect in PS1, made the game alot better as it gave pubbies a bit more structure. Pointed the way for alot of the old guard leadership, to learn to "command".

was guuuud.

Given the games current mechanics... OS needs to be bound to outfits in some way, and should be a rare reward, for outstanding gameplay, and it should be an OVERWHELMING advantage... but... that's just my 2 cents.

Of course bringing back REAL command mechanics would be mOar GuuDER.

I'm against OS that said it can be implemented in a non-spam way and still allow all players access to use it without these stupid ideas like 10,000 certs and BR 100.

Anyway:
Add a 4th resource (infantry/armor/air/command)
You gain command points only by commanding a squad.
The bigger your squad the faster you get points. Bonus points when your squad does useful things (capturing and defending bases)
Earn X points get a single use orbital strike
Using an orbital strike in a section of the map prevents further strikes from your faction in that section for x minutes.

Good:
Everyone can earn orbitals
doesn't interfere with cert progress by "wasting" certs on a single use item
prevents large organized outfits with many unlocked OS from just obliterating a single base
earning orbitals will be hard enough that you won't want to waste them

Bad:
No matter how well an orbital strike is implemented getting killed by it will always feel cheap and unfair.

At this game no one cares how you feel about the ways you get killed. Unless you drop raeg /tell. People might laugh a bit.

You mean like getting sniped by someone in the distance at 400m that you never saw?
How about getting spawn camped by tanks on a tower base?
Slaughtered by MAXs, blown up by proxy mines, your tank destroyed by tank mines? Sunderer destroyed because engineers chucked said mines off a cliff down onto you?

Look, there are MANY ways for this game to feel cheap and unfair. That's part of its draw. It can feel unfair TO you, or it feel unfair FOR you, and we both know which is preferable. So, does that mean we should remove snipers, Tanks, MAXs, and mines from gameplay and let everyone just have at it with guns and knives to make things "fair"?

@ pondra - If you can't tell the difference between the items you listed and opening your map and selecting a location to use OS then I really see no point in having any form of discussion with you.

My vote is for absolutely, 100% NO.

I felt this was one of the most overused, fun-breaking aspect of the first PS. It always seemed to ruin a good fight, and it seemed like they came down every 2 seconds.

If it is implemented, make it so difficult and restricted that people don't use them as easily as reloading a weapon, or even waiting a few minutes to use it again. I think level and cert restrictions aren't enough because eventually nearly everyone will reach those limits, and it will be OS spam all over again. Need to come up with something that makes is insanely hard to do one, or like I said, better to not implement it at all.

if they introduce OS, it better have some long warning before it strikes (20 seconds at least, an alarm should be blaring thru the attacked facility waring of the incoming OS, and a large visual indication should form in the sky

not sure at all who should be able to trigger them, maybe it should require a set of facilities and an infiltrators have to set up multiple beacons etc

At this point, if you really are planning on telling the Dev Team 'They want Orbital Strikes'... Note my concerns I pointed out.

• Stupid Griefing Potential - In the original Planetside, Orbital Strikes were great in situations of clearing out swarms around small areas like Towers and some bases. Where pushing out to take out AMS as infantry was almost Neigh impossible without armor support (Lack of anyone but people certed as Adv Engineers to drop ACE Mines). However, many people who used it, often did it for griefing or stupid things like "Hey, I got OS... Everyone stand here so I can fire it off."
• Spamming potential - The obvious issue will be that when more and more people accumulate it, the spamming potential of it becomes one extreme of the spectrum.
• Deniability of OS support - The other end of the spectrum is that it also has the high potential of people firing it off for no reason to deny the faction use of it. With the current issues where people will flip or intentionally grief other factions... This can be abused as a means of denying the other side being able to use it in general.
• Unnecessary - For the most part, with how easily some vehicles are destroyed except in the camping situation, the necessity of the OS is not as necessary as it was in Planetside, where infantry could do very little to take down an AMS, but in Planetside 2, Sunderers are not 100% difficult to take down as a single or multiple infantry types.

At this time, the bigger issue is still how defense is suppose to defend a base when the answer is 'LOS is fair game' with regards to vehicles and the ability to spam HE/HEAT rounds and the defender's inability to fight 'on the same level' with attacker once the outer defenses go down.

The Amp station revamps are almost to the right direction, but still needs a little tweaking, especially allowing defense to get to the outer walls, but also allowing the attacking infantry to 'push them back' so that defense is not super strong, but also not lopsided for the attacker to have the 'main advantage'. You also still have to address this with the smaller locations, the Tech Station and also the Towers. These should be addressed first before considering Orbital Strikes.

20 seconds with sound alarm? That's be too much.

Yet, some little dots of laser guidance systems running on the ground would be nice. Not visible for farmers focused spaming the doors, noticeable for players with better situational awareness.

You make a very good point, and like i said earlier, i really don't think the game needs them. But I think (warning personal opinion incoming) that requiring line of sight would help. Especially if like other people have suggested, it took a few seconds to deploy and gave ample warning that it was incoming.
I see this mainly being a way to clear the areas immediately around spawn. If someone wants to just sit in a tank pounding the spawn with no regard to their safety, then they deserve to die to something that gives a warning that it's inbound.

That said, if they REALLY want to do it, let's get some iterations on test to see how well this works with various damage values.

One last thing: Without introducing something like Command resources, there is no good way to balance this without making it so weak that a full platoon has to fire them all off at once, because no matter what they will be spammed if they are available to everyone regardless of cert/resource cost.
Just my 2 certs.

I don't think there should be a question of "who" uses the OS. No one should get the OS. The OS should fire off periodically by the base itself in outnumbered circumstances - like say every 2 minutes in a 7 minute countdown base. OS capability would be determined by ownership of some major facility such as the Interlink. The game would detect if the defenders were spawn camped (something that should be eliminated instead of thinking a band-aid OS is the solution.)

The power of the OS and what it does is all up for discussion still.

That certainly solves the issue of "people". How would you detect that they're spawn camped though? And how would you counter such a mechanic?

I play to win the overall battle.

Most bad players think that "farming" infantry is the best way to earn XP. None of those players have over 600 SPM, I assure you.

Playing to win the overall battle means a lot of vehicle kills since you have to control the outdoor fight, kill enemy sunderers, and protect your own. That's what I do. And I make a ridiculous amount of XP by doing it. I could play more cautiously to optimize for K/D, but I'm playing to win and that means optimizing more for SPM (destruction/capture of important objectives) than K/D. So my K/D is a bit lower than it could be, but that's fine because I win more battles as a result.

The only sad part is that unlike Planetside 1 I don't get capture/defense credit for my contributions because I'm often disabling enemy vehicles at the next base when the cap finally goes through (since the battle is more or less won by the time you get a strranglehold on the enemy spawns, and whether it's an infantry camp or a vehicle camp, it's not good SPM.)

So while I wouldn't describe it as "noble" (that's a bit silly,) I'm definitely not farming and definitely a huge factor in my team winning a base battle.

No, to orbital strikes. Bad idea. Only fun for a few. Or you have too many of them occurring and then nobody is having fun.

Development resources can be much better spent on things that will bring fun to many.