I find I have less and less actual game time, and more and more downtime/time spent trying to find a fight. This is due to a number of factors, all within DBG's direct control: - Restrictive spawn rules. You often have to go through six or seven loading screens to get to a fight. The idea that it makes things more 'strategic' is ridiculous - you can still get anywhere you want to, just with the added boredom of load screens. 'Fly there' is also no solution - many bases lack air terminals, and getting through the loading screen, running to a terminal, pulling an aircraft and flying there still subjects you to a lot of needless tedium. Frankly it's more like a commute than something you'd expect in a video game. - Regular crashes. Since the patch this week the game is crashing every 45 minutes or so. Usually seems to happen at the end of a long loading screen slog across the continent, which is just the icing on the cake. I guess it will be hotfixed but it's still not acceptable that the game is broken for days or possibly weeks every time there's a patch. If DBG can't playtest they need to restrict the number of patches to one every six months so the game is not too damaged by them. - Continent queues. I don't mind these in principle but the implementation is atrocious. 90% of the time it doesn't load the continent when it gets to 0 secs, it just sits there until you open the map and queue again - that is, if it hasn't crashed entirely requiring you to exit the game. I'd especially warn people on PS4 against getting a membership - when I renewed mine the queue crashing got much worse. I do not understand what DBG think they are doing. It is fundamental to a shooter to have shooting, not constant waiting around. It doesn't matter what amazing possibilities for combined arms combat there are if you spend more time in loading screens and queues.
Quite hopefully, the boredom of redeploy hopping should coerce you into not doing redeploy hopping. But all of them do have terminals for Harassers and Flashes. What do you mean? there are whole genres that ask you to commute from here to there after you accept a mission to officially start the said mission.
Pretty sure the best respawn feature right now is when you are defending a base and it's going to the wire and you die. While hovering over that very same base you press respawn and end up on the other side of the map only to lose the fight because you are miles away.
I think all bases should have the ability to spawn a new vehicle that is little more than a rocket with a seat in, aimed at a particular location before you spawn it. The rocket is very fast and has minor steering capability. It comes with built in parachute and has no option for weapons or other certs. Pure super fast single person transportation.
Dont you find it fun when youre at your mission objective and you love the fight you're in. then you die and are spawned 3,000 meters from the fight in an empty base, while the system tells you to get back to the mission.
Great, so this videogame (which to recap, is something you do for fun) is coercing me with the threat of boredom? ... which is going to take you even longer than six loading screens. Maybe the first time but not hundreds of times. Fast travel is basic functionality for a modern game with maps this size.
Got a similar, if maybe minor, gripe on PC due to max population locks and faction balance locks. I often now start in VR Training then have to apply to go to a continent and then when I get there either redploy to choose my battle or go instant action and take pot luck..........it's only a couple of extra steps to getting into a fight but when (like me) you are a member and have six characters it can get quite repetitive. Don't have the respawn problem though as I just choose "change spawn" then select where I was before, rather than the auto spawn button, which can take me somewhere else.
I have this same opinion. I don't understand how people have so many spawning problems. Bar AMSes exploding, I've not had trouble spawning on the offered point that I selected on the deployment screen map since late 2014 and back then it was because of the "change map, mess up spawn list" glitch. Nor do I ever have any trouble getting to an appropriate mode of transport within any given respawn. (I suppose I am not being particular about whether I want to fly or drive but, as this is just transport, the only reason it should matter is due to terrain considerations.) With the spawn opportunities available from squads and platoons and reinforcements on top of that, it's just vexing. No, that's the video game saying: you're doing it to yourself. You don't have to undertake this arduous process of transporting yourself through such a laborious method. I guess you don't consider yourself a decent navigator? Multiplayer games? I'll grant you that MMOs that still use dungeon paradigms may give you "go back to entrance" spawns halfway or all the way through, and the hub towns will certainly offer some form of quick connection between them, but otherwise ... ?
On my phone, and it's a nightmare trying to do multi-part replies with it... But in short: 1. So I'm supposed to go on a boring drive through empty fields or stay on the empty map I'm on, or one of the adjacent empty ones? Explain to me why. What possible benefit is there to trying to keep players away from each other in a multiplayer-only game? 2. It takes a couple of minutes to go through six load screens. So yes, that will almost always be quicker than finding a terminal, pulling a sundy and driving to the other side of the map, and often quicker than a flash (esp on hossin). 3. What games have you played with these map sizes and no fast travel from one discovered area to another? Rpgs in the 90s and early 2000s used to be like that but I can't think of anything more recent... until ps2 decided to uninvent the wheel and go back to the sled.
1. Immersion. Maybe you don't care but that is why you don't get to go anywhere at anytime within 1 loading screen. This isn't a round based shooter. It's an MMO and that means a somewhat open world where you have to walk, drive, or fly to where you want to go in one way or another. If you think this part is boring maybe the game just isn't for you. If they made everything instant then why even have a 5k x 5k map? Just make it a lobby based shooter where you sit in a lobby looking for games and click on the one you want. /sarcasm off 2. I have no idea what this means. I never load 6 times unless it's some sort of sync bug where it has to load the game world twice. Maybe it's more of a problem with PS4. Why are you reducing yourself to ground vehicles? Do you fear the air that much? It doesn't take that long to fly from one side of the map to another and if you are careful you can avoid any conflict until you reach where ever you are going. You can get a air vehicle by returning to the warp gate your faction owns. This also = Immersion. 3. So if this is so true why exactly did Blizzard shut down the most popular Vanilla WoW server in May 2016? It had 11k concurrent players and over 1 million unique accounts. There was no group finder, no fast travel, all the "modern" qualities that you seem to think are popular are seemingly less so when players that played Vanilla WoW refuse to play "modern" wow. 240,000 people want a Classic WoW server. Planetside 2 would kill to get 11k concurrent players, btw. My suggestion is find a group of players to have fun with and try to immerse yourself in the game. If you approach PS2 like CoD or Battlefield you might be disappointed with what you find. You can always grab an ESF from the warp gate so flying to where ever you want to go shouldn't take longer than 6 loading screen.
Well. Ceres population is pretty small... so...instant action button works doesn't it? Pretty sure that's why it's there.. so those who want isntant gratification can get in on a fight. Crashes suck. They need to be fixed. I can agree here. And for queue... try an underpop faction? I play VS strictly and have never had a queue whatsoever. When you play an easily abused overpop faction that almost doubles the underpop faction (fisu says Vanu barely broke 100 while TR are nearly 190 at peak)... then I have trouble finding any sympathy.
I have to admit I haven't tried instant action since this time last year. I assumed it just put you on the most 'active' of available spawns so wouldn't address the issue. Does it definitely let you spawn at unavailable spawns? As for abandoning my BR98 TR, that's only happening when I quit the game.
Modern MMOs have fast travel after you've discovered an area. No one thinks it breaks immersion. What breaks immersion is repetitive travel through the same empty maps between fights; it's a chore. If you don't like fast travel maybe you should stick to lobby shooters; no fast travel there. As I said above, the six loading screens is redeploying multiple times to get to the other side of the map. It's very frustrating but still usually quicker than using vehicles. As I also said above, many bases do not have air terminals, so you will still be going through at least one extra loading screen. I have never heard of a game that deliberately forces it's players through extra loading screens. On most games there is a significant development effort to keep loading screens to a minimum. DBG seems to put development effort into increasing the number of loading screens, a 'de-optimization'. And they wonder why the playerbase keeps declining. Yet the WoW with modern qualities still trounces classic WoW. Are millions of people willing to play a subscription for classic WoW? In 2016, if you want more players you have modern features.
Assuming that you're not talking about bugs and other minor design flaws... It is critically important that players cannot respawn across the continent in seconds. This is because there should be a certain amount of strategy in the game, that if an enemy platoon is fighting on the west side of the map they should be slow to respond to combat on the east side of the map. So the enemy platoon needs to make a tactical decision... to break off a defence early and gamble that the blueberries can finish it off or see the defence through but risk missing out on the second base defence. If it was that easy for players to instantly respawn at any base of their choosing, there would essentially be no strategy at all for which base to attack. Additionally, it is important for combined arms to force players to travel from base to base. Infantry are the ones favoured by redeployside, but vehicles have no such luck. If infantry could just easily teleport from place to place, that means that they get to skip all the mid-field fighting where vehicles are dominant. And if that's the case, there's really no point to mid-field fights because you can't stop infantry from hopping from base to base anyways. At least if they take a Sunderer or Galaxy there is a chance to intercept it... but you cannot intercept or prevent a redeploy (except for blowing up the SCU if present). Really infantry should not be able to spawn in any base that is under attack (yes, even if you were fighting there already). They should only be allowed to spawn at uncontested bases or Sunderers. To get to battle, infantry would have to travel from at least one base over or find a Sunderer. This gives more value to strategic deployments of infantry and adds depth to the game. It would also solve spawncamping. And it would place a higher importance on having an attentive Medic nearby.
WoW has lost millions of subs due to your features you claim as "modern". They are no where near as popular as they were back in classic or even WOTLK. The "modern" features as you call them are striped down versions of what a real MMO was. 240,000 people signed a petition to get blizzard to open a classic wow server. They would have to pay monthly sub for it. I'm sure it would generate at least 2 million users for an official server. As I said, you don't have to load six times to get to the other side of the map. Grab a ESF from the warp gate if you are in a place that doesn't have a VTerm. If you ignore the advice given by others and continue to think the game is flawed because you find playing the game a chore or boring, it sounds like a personal problem and PS2 isn't your type of game.
I think flash, harasser and sunderers should be able to trade their weapons for jet engines and lower spawn cost. Super fast speed and acceleration. I mean it. I would love it. The good stuff starts at 2:58. Turn down the volume a lot. Starts at 1:48.
I anticipated 'grab a ESF' right there in the OP, and have already explained several times why it's a bad idea. Frankly, the only 'advice' in the thread that is potentially useful is the guy suggesting instant action. If it does let you bypass the normal spawn rules it may be somewhat useful, though I've not tested it yet.
