Why the ** bother making an "infiltrator" class if it can't infiltrate and it's completely and utterly useless crap? I've had enough already! My main stat is infiltrator (or at least i try to but:...) and I'm sick to death of players seeing me (while cloaked/completely cloaked) from more than 50 meters even during darkest nights possible. And why in the hell would you make it easier to observe infiltrators on higher graphics settings? Where is the equality ?! Where is the "skill makes a one a good player" and not fancier graphics ? On low settings you can't see any enemy infiltrator until it gets <10 meters close and sometimes not even then! And why the sh*** f*** is there more lag than ever, lately ? It worked fine just a few months ago, and now I play with ~15 fps on lowest ****tiest graphics possible? What are you doing with this game?
See SOE, this is what happens when a person picks up infiltrator, with the intent to use cloak as described. When expectations do not match reality people get mad. Variation between the different cloaking settings on high versus low creates a false impression in their minds. People like the OP are shocked that someone could possibly detect their presence any differently then what they themselves have experienced. This creates a feeling of having been cheated when they are detected in situations where they could not detect others. The official description of cloak doesn't help either: The Hunter Cloaking Device is a certification of the Infiltrator class. While active the cloak makes the infiltrator nearly invisible to enemies, but the user cannot use weapons or tools while cloaked. This is the default ability of the infiltrator class. This cloak lasts for ten seconds; adding additional certification levels will not increase it. Here is my description after a years worth of playing 85% time infiltrator: "All cloaking devices work as a means to lower your profile by bending the light around you. There are 3 different states of cloak which can be used in very different ways." #1) Shallow cloak: Occurs when sprinting, and is best used to avoid detection when you are the peripheral vision of enemies during the daytime. Hardcover, and moving distractions in battle well help you blend into the background and become a less noticeable target. #2) Medium cloak: This occurs when you are moving more slowly, crouch moving or walking. However at night time (even in game) when the rod cells in your eyes are most active... motion is detected much easier in the peripheral zone. In fact, pilots in the military are often taught to scan for aircraft using their peripheral vision at night. Because of how the human eye works, you cannot sprint through a field at night and expect to remain undetected as the peripheral vision in humans is designed to be motion sensitive and even shallow cloak will not help unless you are a considerable distance away from the enemy. However approaching the enemy in the center vision area at night actually makes you more likely to be undetected especially if you are moving slowly or crouch cloaked while moving from cover to cover. In short the less mobile you are for prolonged periods at night the better your chance of avoiding detection. 3) Deep Cloak: Refers to the near invisible status described in the official description. To enter into deep cloak make sure you are completely still, and crouching. This is the state that matters the most when going for true invisibility. However certain factors can attribute to its failure. It doesn't completely wipe out all visual indications of your presence. If your enemy is using low settings a shaded geometrical shape of your gun can sometimes be seen as it overlaps other cloaked portions of your body. To compensate, aim down sights so your weapon is held away from your body. On higher settings the patterns on the ground can become distorted. Hiding against a tiled background is a bad idea since the predictable lines will warp, or the pattern on the ground will shift. However picking locations with varied textures like leaves or smooth surfaces will provide no meaningful indications of your presence. Another limitation is breathing animations: Again, getting in the habit of aiming down sights, and holding that position when you become concerned helps reduce the impact these animations can have, especially when using stalker cloak routinely. Its important to note, changes to the cloaking sound (can be heard over 200 meters away), the player crosshairs also turning red over enemies, introduction of darklights, all have had negative impacts on both hunter and nano-armour cloaking as well. With all these counters and downsides to using cloak, it makes the player question if their situation would be best resolved without cloaking at all. If you feel cloaking won't benefit you, I would recommend adopting a hard cover >cloak mindset. Edit: SlowMo you are a textbook example of why SOE should balance the higher cloak settings around the lower cloak settings.Due to complex issues with shaders they cannot make both match 100% but right now one could argue that highest settings could use a tweak to bring it more in line with lower settings. OFC that would mean buffing us... and I really doubt that will happen, everything SOE has done with the infiltrator update came with backhanded bugs and drawbacks. I was secretly hoping with the inclusion of darklight cloak visibility would be tweaked, however this has not happened on higher settings. They just improved the transition from state to state. I do my best to keep a positive outlook on the changes but this class is absolutely nothing like when i first started playing it. The fact the class has changed so much might be a good thing, I don't know, it remains to be seen, and I am STILL holding out hope for the hacking revamp.
You can never really be completely invisible - someone will eventually spot you or light you up with scout radar. Making infiltrators completely undetectable would be overpowered and unfair to other classes, don't you think? As for optimization, yes they did mess up with the recent patches this month. I lost about 10 fps and looking at the forums shows this performance drop seems to have affected everyone. I still can't use the last 2 Nvidia release drivers with this game, either.
In Planetside 2, "Invisiblity" is a joke. At ultrra settings you're just as easy to see while sprinting within ~30 meters as a normal soldier. I always treat myself as visible from that range unless I am sitting crouched in deep cloak. They REALLY need to enforce cloak visibility across graphics settings.
It's not utterly useless. Infils kill things, hack terminals, and place mines in places. It used to be the other way around. Lower settings would give a "shade" where the infil is. It's just how the game projects the sprite/infil now. The infiltrator class is not based around equality. It has its advantages and disadvantages. (Ex. Lower Health or Motion Spotter) The skill is found when a player a midst a 100+ player battle with explosions, bullets, lasers, smoke, grenades can have enough situational awareness to spot or hear a cloaked infiltrator. However, if the infiltrator knows what he's doing, he should know how to maneuver to create his own advantages a midst the same chaos. Don't Worry, Take your time, learn from your mistakes and you will find that playing infiltrator has big rewards.
Infiltrators exist because if they gave light assaults sniper riffles the forums would drown in tears. That is my theory anyways...
I agree about the settings problems, it is really an issue, but not about the lag. Then, I'd say I really started playing infiltrator since the update, because of the vandal, whcich lead me to play basr too, and without knowing what could be the infiltrator before (i had like 2 hours of play with it) i really like it, it's becoming my class of choice over LA sometimes. I think people who are the most hurt are the ones who play infiltrator since the beginning, as their playstyle has changed a lot since, but for me, cloak remains awesome!
are you sure about the medium cloak while moving?,i can swear that the visibility of sprinting and crouchwalking is exactly the same
~~~ I'm writing this after having wrote everything below, a rant somehow got introduced in what I was saying, so I'd warn out those who are completely disinterested. I'm personally sick of it in general. I know it's overly said, especially how the "sick of it" part goes, but it fits it. I don't particularly care in general, I just find ways to adapt, but infiltrators have gotten so much hate recently, starting up by giving everybody recon dart bolts and yada yada. I love this game, and I'll definitely keep playing it from time to time, but now I'm not in the mood of tryharding on this game, and I only play it at all when I've got nothing else better to do. I feel SOE will act too late already. Especially considering the infiltrator community is one if not the strongest on the forum (just go look at the amount of posts on the other classes....), and I see more negative posts than anything positive. As already said my our previous community manager Luperza, peoples go on the forum to complain more than to say positive things, and that's true, but it somehow looks like nobody's listening either. And as someone who'm I don't remember said, if a problem comes up, but a few weeks later is replaced by another one, then you know that it was not that bad, and doesn't actually need fixing, it was probably just the flavour of the moment. But it does feel like the infiltrators have been requesting a few issues repeatedly over and over that never got fixed. Notably the cloak depending on your graphical settings. As for keeping a positive outlook on everything, I've had that attitude for so long, but the infiltrator patch and the meaningless nerf to NAC just finished up my resolve. It looks like a gravedigger who's already digging his own grave. In a common way, we'd say: isn't that putting Descartes before the horse. Which is completely true, before fixing the current issues, there's this overflowing amount of updates coming. So here's what my overall observation is: This game isn't meant to be played on the computer. Once it gets out on consoles, everybody will have the same graphics, which will help considerably in that aspect. SOE (this is pure speculation obviously) tries to get out as much material for the release on console, regardless of the impact on gameplay. To me, it feels like this is missing the point, and this game is about to hit a crash point in the few next years. Simply because instead of fixing the game and making it enjoyable, they are simply trying to overflow it with new content. Which, although it can be good, can also simply make it annoying and meaningless in excess. Games that have perdured and have actually a strong community are usually games that balanced themselves well, no matter how it ended up happening. One of my favorite quotes for the subject would me from the Two John's (from ID Software) which is: Easy to learn, hard to master. Which is the key to making a successfull game. This game currently is well placed, getting into the game has even been helped on with the added feature of the starting questions. Hard to master can go to ESF fights, or ground combat as well. Though unbalances are starting to ruin it, because no matter how well the overall game is balanced, if there's one thing out of balance, it can mess everything else up. And the over-abundance of possibilities isn't good if they aren't all balanced together. Giving someone twenty choices whilst having two of them clearly better than the other ones will negate the impact of having a variety at all. /R Well, I was on going on a tiny rant there, and I will stop it abruptly over here for a simple reason, I do not think me writing it will change anything at all, and I'd need at least 25000 words to express myself, which is not something I feel like I should be doing in this thread. I will not erase what I wrote beforehand though, because I still have the vague hope that somehow those words might just reach the good eyes and, without necessary changing anything, would bud in an idea for a better game. I guess Cute summed it up pretty well there, everything just felt like it came with disproportioned drawbacks or backhanded's. CuteBeaver has it.
They have sniping rifles. They just don't have bolt action rifles Regarding crouch-walking: It's the main thing that needs a serious reduction in visibility. As Quoted and re-requoted, there's no difference in Shimmer with it as opposed to full standing movement shimmer.
Hardware differences are always going to be an issue in PC gaming. I don't think that using the term 'nearly invisible' helps. To me a person is either invisible or not. It would be better to describe it as 'very difficult to see' or 'chameleonic'. Of course, evolution has bred us to spot lurking predators so the slightest 'discrepancy' can be picked up. And speculative shooting quickly highlights a cloaked INF because your target reticle flashes red. It isn't just your cloak that can fail you. On several occasions I have been crouched out of the way when an enemy has run into a room and immediately targetted me. I don't know if that is down to Scout radar or hacks but those players have known exactly where I am without being able to draw LOS to me. I fnd cloak pretty effective but many INFS I see in game think they can run around in the open. I find INF to be a fun class in a support/ combat role.
Or as a "Hi Friendly enemy soldier! Please follow me on your path to revenge because of the new killcam and don't bother about the war going on"
I play on the lowest setting and I cant see cloakers.Minimum requirements suggest that at that setup I should be able to play the game without downsides or handycaps to the gameplay it self only to have less detailed graphics (like shadows,reflections etc..) but that however is not true I have to play with the handycap of not seeing cloaker even when they are sprinting right next to me. Im not asking to be less visible or completely invisble but visibility to be adjusted equally for all settings. This is serious issue that affects the "experience" SOE talks about all the time.I think this issue should be addressed accordingly.
Incorrect.... minimum requirements have ALWAYS been based on what it takes to avoid resource starvation. Recommended requirements usually based on moderate performance using an often undisclosed series of settings (although most can safely assume med settings). The Recommended requirements are then lowered by a small amount as a marketing move, and optimal hardware tends to be around double that. Simply put, consumers are stupid...... they often make estimates (more like barely educated guesses) based on scale of numbers, but not the translated meaning of a particular value. And this phenomena is never more apparent then when people try to use WoW or CoD as a base line for performance comparisons with other games. The refraction method used to make the cloaking effect is one of the more calculation intensive operations available in the developer's tool box. The reason they use it over alpha blending (which is somewhat cheaper computational wise), is because contrasting colors between the infil and backdrop are still noticeable until you reach 90-95% transparency, after which they are practically invisible. But with refraction, the effectiveness scales better with distance, as it plays off pattern recognition using the same color set as the back drop. With TR infils in particular, all the black areas not covered by camo would stand out against any non-dark background if they had used blending instead.
I have no idea what that other guy's saying (sounds like he just wants to bash someone for no reason).... but in most cases the graphics "level" shouldn't be your main bottleneck, it's usually the CPU itself having to juggle so many resources (Eye candy) at once through its cache levels that causes the redundant FPS slow-downs... atleast that's what I got from some of the tentative admissions from their own programmers on the topic last year. This is something that players with 4.2ghz and faster Quads noticed immediately off the bat when the game first came out and was so slow for everyone else b/c it was literally only running on 2 cores at the time. There's generally a magic threshold on CPU speeds where the level of your graphics aren't important. Infact overclocking often did the trick for a number of people. For me, 3.7ghz initially and then eventually only 3.4 after ther optimizing pass (on Medium) seems to be my magic setting to stay above 50fps. If you've got an Intel instead of an AMD, then you should see no difference on the specific quality Settings .... ...between "High" and low that controls Cloak Alpha Shader Transparency itself.
There is a very distinct difference between invisibility and cloaked. There is no invisibility in PS2, but there is cloak/camoflage/stealth. Once you learn to use cloak for what it is, it's amazing. So many people have this mindset that they can hit F and nobody will see them. That's not how it works and that's not how it's supposed to work.
Cloak makes me laugh. I pretty much only run stalker these days. Sometimes enemy players will stroll right passed or even through me. Same situation and I get spotted easily and die. Which is what irritates me the most about cloak is the lack of consistency i've described. It's hard to have a firm set of rules for playing the class because what works once may not always. There's to much luck involved.
Weird. I have been playing the infil class since the game came out and I have zero problems infiltrating enemy bases, hacking terminals and causing mayhem (like the all-state guy). What I gather from the OP is that: A) they are new to the game B) they want all of the skill of an experienced infil NOW. They don't want to learn how to play the class, how to effectively cloak/uncloak and stay undetected. They just want to be invisible everywhere and instantly be the best infil ever. So when I read the title of this thread "Why bother?", I see it as the OP basically saying "why bother?" to learn something that takes many hours of learning to be really good at. Entitled generation, sheesh.
Playing INF requires patience. Many players either don't possess this trait or don't see why they need to use it. Others, based on my couple of hours play last night, clearly think that cloaking not only makes them invisible but magically scrubs any memory of them from the minds of enemy players. In one case a guy was running straight at me from less than ten metres way and thought cloaking was his best option rather than ducking back round the corner or shoot/knifing me.
If you use the cloak like that, You can just run rings around the guy. He can't see you as well, so its easier to slip into the building to your left and reengage via smg, sr, sasr, basr.
