[Suggestion] The Ultimate Thread Dedicated to Refurbishment of Infantry

What you're suggesting is a major overhaul to the game. This takes to much time and resource to do it. A 1000 person team couldn't do what you want therefore its improbable that any of that will happen. I am sure that the team that has been working on this game for several years now has proposed and considered every thing you stated and reconsidered again sometime after the initial suggestion. There are many things we would like to see in this game however resources keep it from happening.

TL DR. Will read tomorrow. And damn it, I was talking about bullets and vehicle ammo costing resources back in early 2013...

And this big of a thread, when I wanted to go and try to breakdown current infantry weapon balance, since we finally got probably all the info needed to do this with horizontal drift being known...

The only reasonable way to 'refurbish' infantry game play is for the game to have Better Base Design that does everything in its power to:

1) Eliminate Spawn Camping as a base capture end state by putting in SCU beside the spawn room camping last line of defense has been over run positions at every Infantry Centric Base, with the Spawn Room either indoors and/or underground AND...

2) Have at least one capture point have a path(s) from the Spawn Room that is underground and/or indoors AND...

3) Walls that can be walked upon by defenders by way of stairs that start out whole but by the efforts of the Attackers can be breached by combined arms (see: shields aka doors because they are not opaque but can be passed through by defenders while up) aka the tanks have an easier time blowing holes in the walls for the infantry to enter the base but C4 will do in a pinch.

That should be a bare minimum for every base where Infantry are expected to be the power houses of urban combat.

Vehicle combat should be about getting between the bases and breaching the defenses for the infantry to go in and shine. To that end, there are a whole lot of small bases out there that should be "ghost towned", have their infantry spawn rooms removed, infantry capture points (especially outdoors points) removed to be replaced with a must be in any vehicle capture point.

Then throw ANTs into the mix as being what ressupplies a no longer infinite source of ammo landing pads, ammo towers, repair/resupply sunderers, and turrets.

Poor Base and Terrain Design has hampered both the Infantry and Vehicle game play of Planetside 2 by giving Vehicles and Infantry spawn camping and farming as the goal to push the enemy back and gain resources. Sure, we have come a long way from the Shacks of Doom the game launched with but the game has still not learned and improved upon how ******* Planetside 1 already got basic Base Design better and the impacts that has on Infantry players.

Well, this thread is supposed to be a consolidation of ideas. If SOE wants suggestions to improve infantry gameplay, they just have to come here.

I say this with respect. Consolidation of ideas from someone outside the dev team is just shouting into a storm. We can all come up with excellent ideas that could make the game better for the veterans that play but not so much toward the new blood. Much of what you said I would like to see implemented into this game, truly I would. However I assure you that from watching interviews, command center, twitch channels, reading reddit AMA threads, and more that they have considered the vast majority of everything you stated and more likely the most common ideas more than once. However time and resources are limited. The time and effort you put into are outstanding and should be merited but unless you want your voice truly heard you need to become a developer on the PS2 team. And then they can tell you face to face exactly how they considered all that you posted at one time and how its either unable to become a reality or that its just not a priority right now.

Many people post ideas and suggestions not understanding the amount of coding and time it takes to turn something into a reality.

First of all, congrats to writing what propably is the longest post in the history of this forum. Have a cookie.

Now i like these ideas:

Immersion
Engie bunker
Camo
MOAR ES STUFF
More difficult MAX revives
Infi ideas

I am skeptical on:

Melee weapons: I am a large fan of medieval combat, but the ideas seem very unfitting in this game. I mean there is a reason why you dont see modern soldiers running around with Claymores. Also the new melee combat system you propose would probably not work out well with the games latency.
Movement: I like the ideas, but once again modern technology just does not support it.
Inventory/ weight system: I like the idea, but it would be difficult to implement and you must be careful not to kill the class balance

I dislike/ hate those ideas:

Engy nerf: seems absolutely pointless and engies are already a subpar option when vehicles are not involved.
Medic nerf: seems pointless once again
An even heavier MAX: no, just no
Resource costs for EVERYTHING: the problem is that this game is already very complex and difficult for newer players to get into. This would make things A LOT worse. Also I and I presume many other people play this game more casually, and it would be just super annoying to manage my resources for like 20 minutes just so that I can play a bit. Basically this is a gps and not some hard-core super complex rpg.

You'd be better off calling this "Proposed Changes to infantry for the future game Planetside 3" There is no way SOE would ever consider putting the amount of resources required to do this into Planetside 2.

SOE, I hope you're paying attention?

HIRE THIS GUY!

/points at Zorro

- Z

1. Slot-based inventory. Slightly negative on this mostly because it fails to establish a clear reason for existing, apart from a vague notion that it would be more tactical. (Clarification: I played 3.5 years of PS1 so I know exactly how tactical that inventory system was. It worked fine for that, but really didn't offer substantially more tactically-rich choices than
2. Netcode. Naturally I'd love to see this optimized more. Realistically it's unlikely to change much. Still they could diminish the value of corner-peaking (relative to other skills) by increasing the infantry TTK so that the time advantage lag compensation provides isn't such a significant portion of the TTK.
3. Prone. Slows down pace too much to be worth it.
4. Sprint. Fine as-is due to the game involving much more travel than typical shooters. The only reasonable way they could add a sprint bar is if they also added a travel mode where you stowed your weapon and could go back to running forever. It's fine for players to be wrong that the game is too infantry-centric, because eventually (despite infinite sprint) they'll be crushed enough times as the infantry peasants that they are, and they'll wise up and start playing more vehicles.
5. Cover-peaking. Not against this, but it'll have limited value due to the game's fast-paced nature.
6. Bunny-hopping. I'm definitely in favor of things which increase the movement skill depth of the game, and bunny-hopping is one method of doing that.
7. Vaulting. But this would break Planetside's long tradition of making me feel like a 80-year-old soldier who has difficulty jumping over a waist-high railing! (Just kidding, this should obviously happen.)
8. Marching. Sort of unclear on what this is supposed to provide. We're not gunpowder age soldiers, so we don't march in some suicide line towards the enemy.
9. Armor. Taking the existing (relatively-balanced) classes and adding more health to Heavies than Infiltrators by adding an armor system would simply shatter the existing balance. So unless you also provided new benefits to lighter classes, this would shatter the existing balance (which is already rocky since MAXes are already too strong.)
10. No location-based hit detection until shields are pierced. While certainly more realistic, this is a step backwards in skill depth for the game. It's better to let headshots be valuable at all times, even though it makes less sense.

I was about to write TL;DR, than I found it was one of those very few actually constructive and interesting post.

There's some good stuff in there. A small gold mine for Devs.

I'm seeing some fantastic ideas but, to parrot a couple of others, the majority of issues that are starkly obvious with PS2 could be solved with better base/map design, to allow players to find their particular niches. Hossin feels like it's a start in places: more difficult for vehicle mobility, encouraging infantry for the right reasons. Allowing players to place themselves where they want to be in terms of playstyle, goes a long way to alleviating many concerns.

Currently, more than anything else, it feels like a dreary trudge over similar territory, or moments of fantastically compacted "Cool!" moments interspersed with a lot of yawn that you don't want to deal with. RE- a description I give to my other gaming comrades, PS2 feels like BF3 in terms of brute combat, except instead of loading screens, you gotta foot-it to the next part you actually want to knock heads over.

Again, fantastic ideas on most counts, but these are SOE devs we're talking about here. Whatever kind of structure this company has, it's not one friendly to actually doing **** that we need. For example, see PS1. Or pretty much *every other game* under their wing. I know they try in some instances, but we're hamstrung under what they can't do, a lot more than propelled by what they can.

A few walls here & there, along with some altered spawn mechanics, would be far easier to code and implement whilst at the same time altering the "battlescape" enough to stamp out a lot of this headless-chicken gameplay that is bewildering to noobs, and overpowering to those stat-****** that know the exact equations.

It's why the BF series is always going to be more successful, as the game field itself is rapidly mutable. There is no perfect spot, because someone's going to blow it up and goodbye to your cover. Whoever created these maps, needs a whack round the chops for giving none where it's needed, too much where it's not. If you can't give the players flexibility, it's always going to stagnate. And if so, you'd better have an incredibly well-thought design for them to not get bored around for as long as possible. Which we lack.

Some good, good wishes.
However I think most of these (if not all) is never gonnah happen.
Also, I think that you should rather do it step-by-step, one thing at a time. Instead of making one huuuge thread try making one thread per suggestion, for example "introduce stamina" thread or "Light Assault revamp" thread

I was considering that, but since I try to place a link to all my important threads in my signature, it would become bloated beyond belief. Thus, I decided to simply place everything infantry-centric into one thread.

This isn't PS2. There are more new mechanics in this thread than in the game itself. For better or for worse, even suggesting this as anything less than Planetside 3 is pretty crazy. I'm not saying that these aren't good suggestions, just that they're not even remotely practical, any more than those flying aircraft carriers they showed us back in beta are.

The only things I don't like here are the melee weapons. That doesn't make any sense to me. You've got stuff designed to improve combat at range, and make it feel more like an actual war in the future, and where do energy rapiers fit into that? No-one except Jack Churchill has intentionally carried a sword into battle in the last hundred years; why should we think that in the far future we'll have seen the revival of the bayonet charge? Somebody running at you with a katana's gonna get his nanites reconstituted pretty bloody fast. The marching in formation idea is the same way; that's something else that armies don't really do anymore. Automatic weapons make that a really bad idea.

Get outta hear with your fencing swords, Zorro.

This is one aspect of the game that consistently blows my mind. When the gods of lag compensation favour me - and I manage to hit my target before they kill my in a single hit - I am appaled at how slow my bullets travel - how difficult it is to use an Assault RIFLE at anything beyond 100m. Whether because of muzzle velocity or the atrocious first shot recoil multiplyer.

• CME - Assault Rifle - Vanu Sovereignty - 670m/s
• Gauss Rifle Burst - Assault Rifle - New Conglomerate - 650m/s
• Torq-9 - Assault Rifle - Terran Republic - 620m/s\

• Ak-74 - Assault Rifle - Russian Federation - 900m/s
• M16/AR15/A2/A1/A4 - Assault Rifle - U.S.A - 948m/s

Now while I appreciate - that this is a video game about space soldiers (sometimes in spandex) - can anyone explain to me why - logically - future guns would shoot 300m/s on average, more slowly - than their conterporary counterparts?

The only reason I can see - is because it was decided that there should be a soft-cap on the effective ranges infantry could engage out to. Either that - or they wanted to make bullet drop more of an issue at closer ranges. A goal I also don't understand the purpose of.
H-V45

Because developers are scared of change, they do that in other arcade FPS games too. They have no idea how much more fun accurate ballistics can be.

One of the many reasons realistic games (such as Arma 3 and Insurgency) have such a fresh, fun gameplay is because the rounds are fast. Like really fast, but in a realistic way. And in these games suppressors make rounds go very slightly faster too, just like it happens in real life (http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/20...a-silencer-effect-the-velocity-of-the-bullet/)

Only old kinds of suppression methods (that are not used anymore) made the rounds go slower, and PS2 is set into the future.

Equip a suppressor in Planetside 2 and the rounds go even slower (because all arcade games follow the same old myth, suppressor = slowed down bullets). Now add that to the already ridicolously low speeds and exaggerated drop and it looks like you're throwing bricks with tracers at the enemy, which is not fun, not realistic, and breaks any kind of believability/immersion.

To balance a realistic suppressor in a game like this, you could simply decrease the accuracy of the weapon, which would kinda make sense, especially on smaller weapons, because the added weight of the suppressor could make them heavier.

They seem to discourage longer ranged gun fights with all these limitations (including damage drop off) in addition to the fact that it's harder to get the kill because an enemy can slip away to cover easier at range.

Thats the feeling I came away with as well. Which...as a long time lover of battle rifles, and general marksmanship in FPS's is a constant frustration for me.

I enjoy being able to sit back in Insurgency and pick people off across the map with my FAL. Don't get me wrong that game has its issues too (weapon sway and cones of fire that are ridiculously large for 'realistic' weapons) - but I was hoping to enjoy a similar expeirence in PS2. Nope.avi apparently.

Speaking of firearms 'realism' gripes, is anyone else annoyed that PS2's smg's are godlike at CQC/B ranges, but assault rifles somehow are not? I mean, how does a bullet that's lethal out at 100m, suddenly become less effective over a shorter distance?

first off, its a great thread, lots of effort went into this


but there are alot of things that...really shouldnt be done


grenade launcher for medic....howaboutno
the medic class needs the least work done to it, if anything the grenade launcher should go to the heavy to be used instead of a RL

i agree with the thoughts about the light assualt, but i think that something the LA should have is akimbo pistols

the MAX unit ideas are horrible, the engineer's ammo pack shouldnt be that limited

the infiltrator i dont think really needs that much work, i kinda like the crossbow idea, making a primary crossbow weapon might be interesting

(mainly because i want my vanhelsing crossbow)

the asthetics, the TR should be red and black, like our flag, not this red black and grey we have now, our default armor should be much darker

the NC colors should be Blue and yellow, and their default blue should be a darker navy blue, beige is ok....but i think making them full blue berries would be better. the VS are fine, and in most cases have the best designed armor.


i want the MCG model to be redone, and then i want to have MCGs on my MAX unit