I feel a lot of players come from a mill sim/tactical backround like the arma series or war thunder ect I was wondering if a "hardcore" server would be possible with half or no shields reduces vehicle armor or bolstered hit values, im not dumb I understand with zerg style gameplay on such a large scale it might be odd but it would make things interesting. idk just a thought
Games are balanced around their damage and the TTK. PS2 would need a longer TTK because of the Latency system. If you only need like 3 or 4 bullets to kill someone you get more and more places where you can kill someone before you even showed up on their screen. It also means that spray-and-pray becomes better, which is the opposite of what you seem to be advocating. If players can just drop behind a large group of players and spray their Carbine randomly got get 4 kills without trying, there's either something wrong with the game or it went COD (which would be bad either way). Why use a sniper if you can get kills at range by simply spraying bullets at them? Or worse, let's assume snipers are also buffed by this, why use something else than a sniper and simply OHK people with chest-shots? The game isn't build for this, the balance isn't build for this. You are basically doubling people's kill potential per magazine and making it easier to achieve. Think about a MAX, sure he's a lot easier to kill now, but a Mercy-MAX would only have to enter a room and look around him while holding the trigger to kill off 90% in the room, and since your enemy now has less time to react and return fire he can do that. Also, if you are a shotgun hater, you do not want this change.
I don't think sniper rifles are problematic. If bolt action can OHK with chestshot then nanoweave should protect against that. If bolt action can't OHK with chest shot then semi-auto sniper should be able to OHK with headshot. In that case bolt snipers would be used for long range harassment ie leaving the enemy with just tiny bit of health left after you hit him. I'm not sure MAXes would become larger threat than they are now. Sure they would kill faster but they would also get killed faster. What I consider potentially problematic is SMG infiltrator replacing Heavy Assault as main combat unit. Heavy assaults would only be used for combat in buildings and infiltrators for everything else. Personally I don't mind that but I imagine lot of other players would hate getting killed from behind by invisible people.
The unfortunately reality with hardcore or perma-death servers in MMOs (and often in non-MMOs) is that not enough people play on them to make them worth the $$$s. And that's before you consider the aimbotters going there and the endless balancing required to remotely make it workable.
this just wouldnt work for planetside you would have to rework everything in the game to the point of basically making a new game that just had some of this games models. Bases would have to be redesigned classes would have to be reworked to make them usefull as infiltrator will be king as semi auto sniper rifles would 1 shot headshot 2 shot chest shot and BASR would 1 shot chest shot and if you put something in specifically to counter that then it wouldnt exactly be hardcore anymore would it because in hardcore games/modes something like a battlerifle 1 shot headshots and 2 shot chest shots hell almost anything 1 shot headshots. Infiltrators would also be the only used class because of the cloaking ability is the only way your not simply going to get picked off on your way to the base and with vehicles being easier to kill theres not likely to be any spawns sticking around to attack bases making defenders highly favorable and thees are just some of the more obvious issues to deal with. Basically theres too many issues with trying to translate this game into something like what you describe the idea might work in some sort of battle island thats designed specifically for it but that would still require alot of time and resources.
