Say Goodbye to the BFRs

In all seriousness, I'd have no issue w/ mechs of some sort being in the game so long as they actually provided a unique, valuable tactical role on the battlefield that wasn't already covered by other vehicles that are or will be in the game: MBTs, Lightnings, ES buggies, Heavy tanks.

I don't see what they'd add to the gameplay other than being walking tanks.

Unless they change the way BFRs are acquired, I doubt you'll get to use them.

You have to participate in multiple base captures inside the caves. Problem is, those captures have to have defenders, and nobody fights in the caves. Your best shot would be to jump into PS1 right when it goes free to play, and hope people are fighting in the caves.

You'll also have to get to like BR 12 or so to have enough certs for the BFR, and BR gains much more slowly in PS1.

Then you'll be disappointed because the default gunner BFRs aren't that powerful, and they are so slow to drive.

Still, if you can do all that, then get 100 kills in the gunner BFR plus a 15 kill streak, you will unlock the awesome overpowered flight variant, which has jump jets that allow you to jump over a mountain. People will tell you the flight variant is underpowered but they don't know what they are talking about. It's stupidly overpowered and a ton of fun to drive. I pretty much always had a 30/1 K/D while driving one.

BFRs got reactivated and getting ready for glorious comeback, flooding Auraxis with blood, tears and feces of those who raegquit.

You know, it would actually make sense to be able to call in BFR drops in case we get orbital stations. The Vehicle Pads aren't large enough. And they should be tied to many things, not just owning a Terminal in a facility. So yes, tie them to orbital stations and let Commanders call in BFRs. Wait where have I seen similar things? N/M I can't remember. They do often bring up orbital battles on stations, SOE that is. "Often" as in often enough to be a possibility at one point. And I think that the direct counter to BFRs should be the Colossus. If there's a huge Mech, we need a huge MBT to take it down effectively from distance! ;P

Let me guess...





Warhammer 40k?

I suspect we'll see BFRs eventually (the F2P model means they HAVE to keep putting new stuff in to sell).

I don't think they'll be up to much in PS2 though, PS1 didn't have the Air power, the Armour power or the Infantry AV power that is around in PS2.

Scuse me im still here.

They'll never be faster than tanks, whose speed is already a liability, and anyway unless they're running at 350m/s it's not going to help them anyway.

If you make them so tough that they're harder to bring down than a Gal, then they're going to get pulled en masse and be completely unstoppable. In PS1 you couldn't just say, "everybody pull AV turrets/AP tanks!" because the former didn't exist and not everybody was going to be certed into the latter. In PS2 everybody can pull everything all the time and then throw it away

BFRs come in, do you know what my response is going to be? I'm going to pull a Galaxy and ram them

Well, back when I played PS1 forthe short duration before, I had 5 caps on my TR and like 50kills on my NC, but could never seem to get both on one toon.

I VRd all the BFRs before and yeah, I noticed how overall weak the BFR guns were, which led me to be kinda surprised at how people actually thought those BFRs were soooo horribly OP. Its not like it 3 shots tanks and cant die, is immune to EMPs and cant be hacked.

I gunned for 2, althought the game was so laggy I couldnt aim the top gun. We died both times without accomplishing alot.

Yes, I know Certs come slower, but you dont need 1000 for anything, its like 1 or 2 certs to unlock certain stuff.

BFR Cert is 5caps/75kills and a crystal implant thing in the caverns. Plus the certs for heavy armor and BFR I think.

Yup, in PU01 when they optimized indar.

Ya know they never had torso twist...They woulda been a whole lota fun if they did. They have always been Assault Guns, requiring you to traverse the entire robot to fire haha. THey have a very limited frontal arc, except for the top gun. Even that has limited depression angles.

Only thing wiht them in this game would be how much heavy armor to give them before it becomes like a land Liberator......

Also, got further balance, id remove the top gun but not make it a Flight variant. Just allow it to have 1 set of either of the gun types, AI/AA/AT...but not a mixture of both like the MAX.

PS1 BFRs suffered from poor forethought and not doing basic play testing for balance. The First iteration of BFRs had double the fire power of an MBT, and triple the armor if you included the shields..... but what really screwed everything up was that a BFR's shields actively regenerated at a rate faster then any weapon system other one mounted on a BFR could deal. Conceptually they were meant to be deployed on a ratio of 1 out of every 5 MBTs, but never implemented a system to limit their deployment numbers. Basically once you unlocked them, there was no reason to use an MBT.

Combating them was another issue as well. They are designed around the idea of being Focus fired down by groups of vehicles, with a few weak spots accessible to infantry. But as you would expect, fielding many BFRs made the total DPS requirements to counter impossible to reach without fielding a roughly equal number of BFRs. There was also the firepower increase of the Gunner Variants, making it a super charged MBT.


But what I find really ironic about BFR's design is that it was the complete opposite of what the community had asked for. What they had originally asked for was a 4-5 man Heavy Battle Tank to act as a heavy fire support unit for other vehicles. The intent was the MBTs becoming the mobile armor (and in PS1 you had to use MBTs on the move or get nailed by all kind of AV fire), the Deliverer Variants doing what Harassers in PS2 are built for, and the Heavy Battle Tanks shelling enemy armor to keep the pressure up. The concept is not unlike Battle Carriers providing fire support for aircraft that launch off of it.

Using BF2142 as a baseline is misleading due to the difference in numbers and available assets. Combat effectiveness in PS1 was measured mainly on difficulty in overwhelming an opponent, or being overwhelmed by an opponent, using particular equipment. MAX crashes were devastating, but required significant coordination of several different roles and objectives in order to be successful. You needed the MAX crash, you needed to secure a path as they cross open ground, you needed someone to hack the door at the right moment (or the delay would cause them to lose momentum), and the repair and med support to pick up the ones that died in the initial push. And you had to do all this without the enemy noticing. MAX crashes weren't difficult to stop if you had enough Anti-Vehicle weapons and Boomers to meet them at their entry point.

Anyway, the point was that things can quickly scale out of proportion after reaching certain thresholds. In PS2, those thresholds are a lot smaller, so the multiplying factors stack quicker, executes faster, and reaches absolute lethality with far few units then in PS1. PS2 is also missing the crowd disbursement tools that PS1 had. The Thumper in PS1 wasn't particularly dangerous in a 1v1 fight, but its ability to damage multiple targets at once made it great for killing a tight group of enemies (who would trip over each other in panic), or doing area denial with the splash damage.

Actually, if you watched the Work In Progress streams, you'd know that the reason these were removed was because they serve no game play purpose and so there is no reason to load the assets onto client systems. They were removed to save on game resource budgeting.
And good riddance as far as I'm concerned.

"Prepare for Titan Fall"

The problem was more closely related to the fact that the shields regenerated faster then most vehicles could damage it. If they crouched, that shield regenerated even faster, making 2 crouched BFRs like 2 Tanks attempting to stand off with almost 4 times the effective HP. It was a slow process, intended to countered by a larger number of BFRs, a large number number of MBTs, or infantry getting under the shields (which was almost impossible on foot). BFRs weapons had 2 key advantages, specifically geared toward combating the BFR shield. The AV arms had a small, but significant increase in DPS compared to an MBT. But unlike the MBTs, they could continuously sustain fire, attempting to beat the shields through pure attrition. The breaks in fire from vehicle weapons and infantry as they attempt to avoid return fire is what gave the shield enough breathing room to be near MAX almost all the time.

Oddly enough, Titan Fall managed to find a Holy Grail of sweet spots for balancing mechs and infantry play. In the grand scheme of a battle, Titans didn't signify the end of a match, but instead changed the dynamics... and those dynamics are insanely fluid. And all it took was leveraging the Parkour movement to create the Rodeo mechanic, and then using that as a Titan's Achilles heel. So while Titans pack a ton of fire power, and were fairly mobile, the pilots can utilize the terrain, where Titans are hindered by it.

Sadly this isn't useful for Planetside 2, as the movement systems are vastly different.

BFR will return, probably around the time the next set of Star Wars movies start pumping out.

If the BFR are stylized properly, they could be used to attract the Star Wars crowd:



Plus PS2 already has Tatooine, Hoth and Endor.

My bet is BFR in PS2 by 2015.

Ok, so knowing that, simply vastly reduce the amount of time it takes for the shield to regen. I dont see why that woulda been so hard to fix and why it would make everyone hate BFRs so dang much.

Ofc, I think it might be the same reason I loathe Air so much, even if they nerfed it and buffed AA, id prolly still hate it, but still. If I saw some nice balance changes happen which made them not so absurd, im sure id loose my hatred overtime.

I know the BFR I gunned for it died pretty quickly. Took a steaming heap of rounds to kill it, but it died without doing a whole lot.

Ofc I think it was mostly infantry firing LMGs at it lol. Which I think it kinda ******** feature of PS1.....AP bullets haha.

Well, if BFRs do come to PS2, they'll be just as horribly broken in either the exact same ways or in some completely new and "innovative" ways. Because the one group in the entire world that seems to have the least awareness of what was epic win and fail in PS1 is, hilariously, the PS2 team. The only plausible reason to bring them in would be because "OH NOES TITANFALL," which guarantees they will be rushed, buggy, untested, and stunningly ill thought out and poorly designed.

And we'll have all new problems as well, like giant walking robots that flip upside down when they trip over a 1" lip on a bridge transition, or are unable to traverse 80% of the slopes in the game, forcing them to move exclusively on roads "for balance reasons."

Ah, I thought somebody mentioned torso twisting earlier. Well, that's how Starsiege did it, without the torso twisting. It feels weird like that, unnatural and impractical, but, it's still fun. I would like to see a variety of BFR's like there were in Starsiege and Mechwarrior. And some could have torso twist and others not.

As for the flight option, it sounds like they way over did it. What would be valuable, unique, but not OP is just limited jump jets, to allow a 5-10m jump. Basically, enough to jump on top of the shortest buildings in the game. That would be very valuable, fun, and fun to watch, as BFR's chase down infantry. Also, being able to sit on top of buildings gives an advantage when searching for infantry targets, so long as the guns have good depression.

Probably the best way to balance is to follow the Starsiege/Mechwarrior method, either having multiple styles of BFR's, or a wide variety of cert chains to achieve the same effect.

For example, in Starsiege, there were 'scout' Hercs that were very high speed and agile, and could run circles around the bigger ones, but their guns were weak and they had little armor. As you moved towards the middle of the pack, you got a mixture of features, and then you had the behemoths with heavy armor, big guns, but were slow and vulnerable.

It could be done similar to the Tribes armor model, i.e., have 3 basic frames, light/scout, medium and heavy. Then use cert chains to allow the player to select the features they want, with emphasis on one feature requiring sacrifice on the others (Armor, Guns, Speed).

For example, a scout could sacrifice guns and armor for maximum speed, combined with wide radar detection and anti-lockon feature, allowing it to blaze through territory and only be prone to direct fire.

A heavy could sacrifice armor and speed for maximum AA guns, or do the usual and balance armor with guns

IIRC, in Starsiege, and also WoT, weight was a limiting factor in loadouts, so for example, if you wanted the heaviest armor, it prevented you from using the fastest engine because of weight, or incompatability. Anyway, there are many ways this can all be balanced.

I don't get why people cried soo much about BFR's after the nerfs they was pretty much useless and had huge SHOOT ME weakspots on them....

BFRs are the balance needed against Liberators (which are breaking the game far worse than BFRs broke PS1).