A case against Caps: How the hackers Still win long after they are banned

i'm not so sure about this, because as far as i know you keep earning ribbons regardless and they remain a 250 xp bonues per ribbon.

you only get the bonus for the first 5 per day. you could call it a cap, but i think it far less of a semantic argument than what Alex/muldoon is making on Redditside. it's obvious that you are going to get 5 bonuses/day, and even after they are gone you just aren't getting awarded bonus xp.

at least i think so. i know i usually earn a boatload of ribbons each play session. way more than 5 to be sure, and i've never failed to get the XP reward when a ribbon is earned, at least for weapon kills that is.

I 100% support the points made in this thread! XP caps are total BS!

I'm pretty sure the implant cap is a temporary thing, while they figure out a system that will make it fair over all. Obviously you don't want two guys rolling up Sundies in an obscure spot and taking turns farming implants. And there is a way to make it so normal players aren't capped and exploiters can't really exploit it easily or in a way that wouldn't be as time consuming as normally playing.

But those of you who are complaining about support exp caps.. how the heck are you hitting those? I've personally hit the caps myself and that requires a ridiculous amount of whatever you're doing (rezes, repairs, hacks, ect) as the only thing you are doing to reach. Sorry to say a medic who only heals isn't pulling their weight. An infil only hacking isn't pulling their weight. A medic only repairing, isn't pulling their weight.

You can hit the same KDR and SPM by killing people as an Engineer, Infil, or Medic as a Light/Heavy Assault. In addition you get all the support exp on top of that. So there's no reason to complain about the caps. If you're hitting the caps. Try left mouse clicking just under enemy color'd doritos once in a while.

If thats not how you wish to play, great. But understand you're not playing optimally and shouldn't be rewarded as much as someone who is. Its just like lonewolfing. Don't expect to make a difference by yourself. Understand you will get a squad to drop on your face and rearrange it.

They removed the cap.

I don't understand the point of this now.

there are far more caps in the game than just the implant cap.
it was just the most flagrant violator, especialy considering exsisting P2W/rich get richer concerns, and Higby's statements of how the system was supposed to be balanced so that someone can run implants for free.

i still hit the hacking cap on a regular basis in small squad fights.

as i pointed out before, the infiltrator cap is laugably low. if you hack about half the assets at a single tower, you will hit it. alternately a single infiltrator can do so on the turret deck of a tech plant

an engineer in a biofarm can also easily cap this out placing a single ammo pack.

killing someone in the meantime does not reset either of the caps by the way. they are on a pure timer based cooldown, though if you have to kill someone during the middle of a turret deck hack, you're doing it wrong/too slow anyway.

this also affects people who pull repair or ammo sunderers in an armor column. i have a pretty weak repair sundy, and i capped it out on a push from reagent rock to scarred mesa... and i don't have the armor or the guns to drive out there and counter the tank resistance we were facing.

You don't even need a biofarm.

If you have a max rank ammo box and actually play/stick with your squad you will literally hit resupply cap every time you place a box. Like you spend the certs, and use the tool in 100% the exact way it's meant to be used for support of actual play, hit cap every time you use it. Max rank ammo lasts for 6 minutes, you will never get 6 minutes worth of XP ticks out of one, I'm fairly certain it is a physical impossibility.

It's a really poor design. If they didn't want that much XP coming from a single box it should last less time, or tick for less. Right now it just behaves like it only works half the time in terms of the feedback the engineer sees.

To put it into perspective for people who don't typically play support roles, imagine if when you killed two enemy players you stopped getting XP from killing any more unless you waited a minute or died, and that certing up your gun just made people die faster to you. It's a little counter intuitive.

Thats false. Thats only 6 turrets and 3 infantry terminals. Hacking all of these never gave me the cap unless I just deployed there from an AMP station where I hacked EVERYTHING there.

If all you are doing is support, you should be capped. Like I said, if thats all you're doing you're not doing enough. You have a rifle, use it. Support exp is something you get as a bonus. Bonuses are capped. Kill caps are much much higher. When you hit both at the same time then you can complain.

Not getting exp for something because of the cap is the game's way of telling you, "go be useful to your team."

I think if you find this as a problem you are without a doubt a play to win gamer.

lst time i was in a tower i stopped getting XP after 3 turrets, so ... not sure where you got that first part.

and secondly, i don't think i was clear on this.

AN ENGINEER CAN KILL ALL DAY LONG AND THE AMMO CAP WILL STILL HAPPEN


ok, perhaps that will be clearer. killing an enemy DOES NOT reset the support caps. period.


and finally, your attitude is exactly the problem with most players nowadays. you feel that the only worthwhile contribution to the team is made by killing the other guy.

the reality is that with out support roles keeping mass repaired, allies armed, and squad mates alive, it doesn't matter how good you are at killing, you will lose.

as an infiltrator, i know this because it's how i help my team - by sabotaging enemy support troops.

not everyone feels the game needs to be played with overwhelming force, especially when precisely applied force does just as much, with less effort.

I don't care if the engie gets capped on Ammo. I don't care if kills don't reset caps, I know they don't. You claim that all I care about is kills yet it is OBVIOUS that you only care about points. See.. I'd heal someone, give them ammo, and revive them to help them. You do it for the points. I don't care about certs or points. I care about winning. Take away the points from support actions and I would still do them. You however wouldn't.

You know what you and people like you would do? Play Heavy assault only and say, "Its SOE's fault that I am not playing an Engineer or Medic. They didn't make it worth our while."

So who's the problem? All I ask is for support to hold their own weight. It means firing a weapon. In the Army IRL, we were Rifleman First, our Job Second. I expect the same thing here. And it works. I don't care about points or certs, I want that base, that alert, and that continent. How many of you even try to take continents anymore?

Cert famers like you ruin this game. Not people with a winning attitude like me.

Personally I do think the support caps are kinda dumb. Im a primarily heavy / infiltrator player but i've played engy and I find those support caps kinda stupid.

Im a PS1 vet though and really love the old system >.>. Instead of immediately awarding you exp for support activity (flying a gal and dropping players off was considered support activity. Any kills they made added to the exp pool you got) they deposite the exp in 5 minute incriments. So you aren't immediately awarede +3 exp flashing on your screen. Instead you get it in chunks of 2k+.Depending on how much support you actually did.

I think they should just go back to this and give the 5 minute proc timer a nice large cap so it looks rewarding.

let's work backwards here shall we?
where's your proof i'm a cert farmer? did you even look at my stats page? i mean, it's not like you needed to go far. most of the info you need to see i'm NOT a cert farmer is right in my sig...

that was a half decent attempt at a straw man though.

this isn't the army, and not everyone is one of those people who enjoy rushing headlong into combat. some people prefer to play support, and they should have just as much XP opportunity as any other playstyle. they have every right to their fun. if they wanted a hard cor army sim, they would go play arma. and by the way, i hardly ever play on indar. primarily esamir and amerish , and i've taken a few continets just this weekend actually.

most played class: infiltrator. by a mile fully 55% of my time is spent as an infiltrator doing recon and cloaking. if i really was a cert farmer as you claim i'd be an engineer in a tank or playing as a skygod. my K/D would also be much higher than a measly 1.2

and if you really want to know, my magrider kills + liberator kills only account for about 600 of my 9k kills... yep CLEARLY i spend lots of time farming

you say you care about winning, and then immediately claim that the only thing that matters is shooting the other guy. players are going to take the easiest path to power, but you're failing to realize that in order to win, you need a support network. i can't play all classes at once, and this isn't the military where you are assigned a job and you do it. that means that in order to get people to play support classes they need to get XP for it and not have it capped off so they go do something else like shoot HE at a sunderer.

but hey, you apparently know me even better than i know myself. you managed to figure out that apparently i'm the problem here, and that what i really want is more certs, and not a system that is not beholden to cheaters and exploiters, and robs legimate players of XP that they would have otherwise earned.

Bravo Sherlock. my hat is off to you and my Ruse undone... Bravo.

Or, you're trying to paint what you see in the mirror, because like you i play to win.
unlike you, i realize i cannot do it alone.

in case you're interested, you can look here to see exactly how wrong you are about me.
and in the meantime, would you kindly reread my OP and make an effort understand exactly what i'm asking for before making such off base assumptions again?

You made a generalization so I made one right back.

When you're ready to knock off the assumptions about my attitude, I'll knock off mine about your playstyle. Show me respect and you'll get it in turn. If you're not willing to do that, or think I'm wrong. Feel free to open my profile up and hit ignore. That might do us both a favor.

The cap is in place so people who play the game alot spend money on them......The end

no, you made a straw man, not a generalization.
you've stated multiple times that you don't care for caps, and you have ignored my point that those points you have a stated you don't care about are incentive for other players to play support classes.

instead of addressing how that logic was wrong, you called me a cert farmer and said i'm the reason your faction loses fights.

i'm not sure how any of that is my fault.

did you even read the very first, colored, bolded line in my post?

also you do know that that cap was removed, right?

this thread has only tangential relevance to implants, and is at it's core about XP caps that were implemented and tuned aver a year ago when everyone was doing everything they could to get to BR 100 first.

Then do like I suggested, and put me on ignore. Or you can just agree to disagree. I'm not going to give you any options other than those. You care about caps because you lose certs over them. I don't care about gaining certs for support or kills (in fact if you really must know I'd rather if certs were rewarded for continent captures only-- but thats a different subject for another day). I don't know how much more basic you can get than that.

and here is where you basic assumption continues to fail.

i don't really care about certs, i care about taking the base.

i do however recognize that other players DO.
if there isn't a carrot to pull them into support roles, my faction is going to crumple like an aluminum can every time without those support roles.

this is basic player behaviorism right here. players are going to do what they are rewarded for.
if they don't feel rewarded for something they stop doing it.
caps effectively stop rewards after a given time.
ergo, the caps are driving people into playing heavy assault, and other classes that are more effective at direct combat, at the cost ov vital support structures.


for the last time. this isn't about certs.
it's about winning AS A TEAM

Then worry about what you do and what those people under your leadership do. Whenever someone in my squad says, "Why isn't anyone coming out of the spawn room?" I tell them, "That's because they are just bots, don't worry about what they do. -We- have to do our job and win this."

If players aren't willing to do whats needed because they don't get individually rewarded for it, then I just write them off. They are bodies that hopefully will attract rounds that would otherwise go to me. I'll do what I can and what is needed to make sure people are able to do the right thing. But those guys in the spawn room, I can't do anything for them. You can't either. Don't even think you can help them.

And to be honest, I'd rather the zerglings played offensive roles. Half the time when they play medics, they rez me with a quarter health because they didn't bother to cert into the tool. When they play engineers they set up a turret in a bad spot and shoot people in the back, but never lay ammo. When they play infil they run around 500 meters away taking shots at a spawn room. They're worthless. At least if they play HA or LA, then they are getting in and being meatshields for the real players.

When I run my static squad, if I pull a MAX, I know one of my guys is going to pull an engie. An engie with a certed repair tool and a certed ammo pack. And he will do his job properly. They also can rely on me to protect them. I'd rather if a PUG or Zergling didn't bother in most cases unless they are fully certed. And you know what? My buddies didn't cert into what they did to get rewarded. They do it because it helps the team win. Those are the people I want playing support roles. Not cert farmers.

So in a way I'd be against making support more rewarding. Simply because I want quality people in those roles. Already its pretty damn rewarding to play support. As a medic or engineer, I can pull a 24,000-34,000 score per hour (400-560 SPM) on a good day. And 15,000-18,000 on a normal to bad day. Thats ALOT more than it was a year ago. The only class that comes close to that is MAX with dual ravens blowing up an entire enemy tank zerg. HA and LA don't even come close to that. Infils I'm not too sure about. I haven't tried going exclusively infil with recon darting and the like. Its probably not too bad, maybe a little better than a LA.

But its safe to say that the scoring on Medic and Engineer actions are rewarding enough. Its because of that, that we have many who don't even pull their rifles out and actually help. They just repair/heal/revive. While helpful, isn't the only thing they should be doing. That was the point I was making. For example, many medics probably don't realize they can carry C4. The only slot it takes is healing kits (which medics don't need if they have AOE heals). You can carry two. It only takes one to kill a MAX. Can also be used to take out sundies if you're ballsy enough. Works really good if a LA is jumping on it. They freak out and fire on the LA, ignore the medic and medic blows the sundy and rezes the LA (did this yesterday actually).

i think i see the issue here:

you're thinking on a squad level, and i'm thinking on a macro game level.

the problem with your approach is that you need to break people of habits that the caps give them so they can be good player (ever question WHY they drop turrets and not ammo? because they realize their ammo XP caps out. they've never seen kill XP cap out...)

i'm trying to address the issues in the game so those bad habits don't form in the first pace, and those random players actually see a use to certing out the medic and engy tools.

outfit/squad players are almost always going to be better than a random public player, simply because they are more invested.

but that's no reason t write off all the pubbies as worthless, or not make efforts to teach them what they should be doing anyways.


That is the ENTIRE point of the XP system - Instructing players how to play the game and rewarding them for doing better at it.
and the cap system is an unnecessary hobble to that learning process.

Again I disagree. Those players have those bad habits long before they come into the game. Its a cultural issue that would need to be solved on a scale that is well beyond a simple video game. The issue is, we just have to deal with it. Hence why I say to write them off. One way to fix it is to make it unfun for those players by instituting a way that they have to play for normal victories (such as rewarding certs/exp upon continent captures). But SOE won't do that and shouldn't do it simply because a loss of revenue. They know that, and I know that.

If you remove the caps. Like say just outright removed them. The little farmers are going to go from sitting in a spawn room shooting random things to sitting there with a buddy or an alt account and farming certs off a ammo pack instead of actually fighting. Sure.. we can ban them when we see them. But are we going to see them in a random amp station that won't be visited by the enemy for another 2 hours because its deep in friendly territory?

Believe me, the number of farmers is more than the number of non-farmers. Welcome to MMOs if this concept of farmers being here in large numbers is new to you. So SOE has to make the game somewhat fun for them, or at least at the end of the day give them the illusion that they are having fun. All the while they do honestly wish to make a good game, I can't see a developer putting heart, mind, and soul into a project that has nothing to it. And I see the devs playing this game so they do want to have it be fun for those playing it properly even if we are the minority. So with that being said, they will take measures to curb the farmers into playing the game somewhat normally. Sort of like what you were saying.

Except here with the caps, they are discouraging the farming a bit, and pushing them towards something that is productive somewhat to team players. Going out and getting kills. Good players will go out and play support roles, regardless of the rewards for it. For them helping the team and winning is their reward. I do it for that reason, you say you do as well (so I will assume you do).

A player has a choice when they first load up a game. And that choice is made before he even sees how the game will play out. That choice is whether to be a team player or not. If they choose not to be. They won't be. No amount of incentive will make them do the right thing. Yeah you can increase the rewards for support. You can take the caps off. That player might even heal, revive, or repair. But only because it is convenient for him to do so. He'll watch a teammate get killed, kill the killer and then revive the teammate. He could have helped his teammate kill the guy and not have to revive. But it was worth more points to let him die, kill the attacker, and then revive. And you know what? Its already like that. This actually happens more often then you think.

I mean that strategy on the surface doesn't sound too bad right? He's still helping his teammate get back up. Sure.. but how much time does that take? How effective is the revived teammate with his shields down. Ammo expended (more so because he solo fought the attacker), and so on? Yeah on this one instance its not so bad. But when you have dozens of players doing this. Fighting against dozens of players who don't. Who's going to win the fight?

You say I'm not thinking on the macro scale.. On the contrary. Every little thing that people do wrong. Every thing they exploit, hurts their team a little bit. When you have hundreds of players doing this. It cases alot of harm over a 4 hour period (assuming a normal play time of most people, staying on to play through an alert) over three continents.

And this is why I write them off. This is why I tell my squad we have to do whats right because we're the only ones who will. We're too small to cover the normal PUG certfarmers, or zerglings. We just can't do it. If they comprised 20% of the population, we could account for them. But we can't. They cover more than probably 60%. We cover for people who do play the right way (and maybe just don't have a squad, or are just ignorant, but want to learn). Because thats what we can do. And thats what we should do. We set an example and thats all we can do.

I don't expect SOE to fix the problem. I don't think they can. I think only the players can. So I do what I can do. I set an example, I explain my views and hopefully inspire others to do the right thing. Maybe someone will make an outfit and run organized ops. If one person does that and gets 24 people on board. Then I succeeded. I multiplied myself by 24 in that case. Thats a start. And I do think I get the right word out there. I get tons of likes here or there for these sorts of discussions. I don't care about the popularity. I really don't. But it at least lets me know people do listen and do care. So I do what I do until no one gives a damn. And then I just do it on a personal level.