Hives: Ruining Planetside 2

*cough*

Notice any trends there?

Your spamming the forums OP.

This really explains it all. VS has a monopoly on teamwork on Connery. I picked this game up and started flying 4 months ago. Right away I learned I'll die to half the people out there, who I'd never catch up with, and I needed wingmen. Soon after that I found out that anyone who feels like grouping up on Connery plays VS. I failed at getting any Skyknights to group up and noobs quickly gave up flying. Worse than that, is more vet pilots than not fly under the cover of VS gank squads and ***** about them instead of doing something about it. I flew VS for a while but gank-squadding is lame as hell and no more fun than getting ganked, so I just quit the game and now play Arma 3. The whole server is just pathetic, it's not just the air, and I feel like Connery ruined this game for me. Short story long, VS attracts teamwork oriented players, and they wreck enemy hives and build up their own to win matches. There's not much you can do about it, TR and NC just don't have players who work together. Any mechanic that emphasizes teamwork will cause Connery power to shift VS. At least until the Chinese zerg logs on and TR has 50% pop. The root of this whole problem is that Planetside has catered to CoD kids, and now teamwork and strategy is out the window because people who want to work as a team, like myself, have found much better games. Daybreak dug this hole, and now they're stuck in it.

Take out the hives

Im glad im not the only one who hates continent locking hives, who's idea was it anyway? It seems the obvious thing was to have hives add a link in the lattice, slow the advance of a zerg or somthing. I thought that was the idea of including base building the first place? I was playing on cobalt most of the day today and the pop has remained pretty small, just as decent fights started everything locked without warning.

I think that whenever 20 VP are reached, the warpgate shields go down, and then you have to cap them. I think the warpgates could be really cool battlegrounds.

As a VS Connery player, I'd like to point out that our HIVES are really the *only* way we can win.

NC has the NCProKorean guys, and they're both good players and have a LOT of players.

And the TR seems to have the entire Chinese PS2 playerbase hop on all at once, making it virtually impossible to take territory, especially when the NC and TR decide to not kill each other, and gank the VS.

I work nights as well, and there have been quite a few times lately where I've hopped on and VS only has single-digit percentages of the server population. If we don't build obnoxious, cheesy, terrible HIVES, most of the time we wouldn't win anything, and probably could never leave our Warpgates.

Or, I'm just saying, we could make it so huge ****off Korean outfits using bots could maybe not be on the US West server? Please?

But that'd be too easy, and we can't have simple fixes, y'know...

I know. Maybe I'll just go sleep until they let me move my main to a less cancer server like they said they would do years ago.

I agree continents are locking annoyingly fast. At the same time I'm an avid construction user. I honestly get more fun out of building in the path of oncoming zergs than hiding a HIVE off in a hard to reach place.

I want more room to build between facilities on the latice by them reducing the no-deploy-zones slightly, but at the same time I want the HIVE itself to be more disrupt-able so those bases crammed in really hard to breach places can't basically decide the winner. Maybe the Glaive can work to hurt the efficiency your HIVe is running at. Ontop of that the Glaive should be buffed further IMO by removing the damn map marker for the enemies to locate the damn darts.

The simplest solution is to simply cap the maximum number of VPs that can be earned by Hives. Everything else provides a specific number of points, why shouldn't Hives? I would suggest 6-8 VPs as the cap. Probably 6. Also I'd suggest that they accumulate points slower. That way it's still meaningful to build or destroy Hives, but they're not going to lock the continent themselves. You're still going to have to win an alert or, at least, control a significant amount of the territory.

Hives should be limited to being in a hex on the lattice that your faction owns. Problem solved.

Hives? I've never even cared about building or destroying one of those bases.

What I wanted was to be able to build things to improve existing bases or to help my team. But no build zones are everywhere.

That sad thing is while you are building HIVES in a way that is much more fun for most players, it's actually far less effective in terms of "winning" and capturing the continent than just building one on top of a mountain bottleneck that attackers can't get to. There is basically an inverse relationship between how fun a HIVE is to attack/defend and how effective it is at "winning" the continent. It is just completely backwards and broken game design IMO.

Every good fight since returning to this game has ended with the mining faction shutting down conts for the night because popping Hives is the most boring thing you can do besides make the hives.

I disagree that HIVEs shut down conts too fast. Conts get shut down too fast in general, but HIVEs generate VPs fairly slowly.

However, I find building them pretty boring. Everywhere are no-deploy zones. When you try to build one near a frontline, then you just get killed while trying to do it and your base also gets destroyed. The only safe way to build them is away from a frontline, which is just boring. You build your base, and then you sit there and have nothing to do anymore.

When I build a base then I do it for being able to use its turrets against the enemy, not for the VPs. But this is not really doable with this base building system, mainly due to no-deploy zones everywhere.

Build items from Cortium (ANT deploys) should change focus to:

(just ideas with no time given to balance/exploit/impact on classes)

1. Fixed emplacements (small sandbag like firing spots, pillbox, trench)
2. Supply tents (AOE ammo, heals shields)
3. Medical tents (AOE heal)
4. Radar Station (AOE spot like dildar, darts)
5. Manned gun emplacements (AT arty, AI arty, Mortars, Pew Pew Laser beams)
6. Force Fields
7. Stun Fields
8. Flash Traps
9. Concussion Traps

Just some ideas....to balance maybe require a specific within range (inside the tents for example)

In general, I love the idea of mining resources for use in battle.

So maybe ANT ability to issue an AOE shield to all nearby infantry or vehicles (damage mitigation) that uses up Cortium stores)

In short, integrate ANT and Cortium into the existing fights at map based bases or in field fights.

derp bad sentences above...just meant to say to balance some items, maybe require a specific class to man or occupy the build item.

The basic idea is to create front lines and forward/supporting bases...to encourage team work, strategy and such.

Don't design and develop with DBG cash and certification use as PRIMARY considerations. Good game design leads to those things being desired/used.

I do think continents lock too fast now. Alert win + doing pretty well + hives = very fast map flip. Actually annoying as a base builder too because it can take a long time to build up a good base and then BZZT CONTINENT LOCK, base blows up, game over.

Maybe they just need to make continent locks require 25 points rather than 20. That would offset a fair amount of hive activity.

But OP's points about base attacks are wrong, I'd say. Or rather, his complaint of shooting at walls and shields with tanks shows he's not doing it right. I have solo killed bases as a single infantry. I duo them with a guildmate frequently enough. All you really need to do is kill any structural shield generator around the hive (that's the module with the three dashes over it), then overload the hive (same as a generator) then kill the VP module inside (by shooting it directly). If nobody is home this is usually easy. You need to avoid any AI-controlled anti-infantry turrets but that's usually easy enough (worst case, kill those modules first).

Well-defended bases can be very hard to take down but if there are 4 active HIVEs then 3 of them probably have 0-2 defenders.

I've also seen people from all 3 teams doing "base buster" platoons. Usually roll in with a couple of galaxies or 2-3 sunderers and drop off a platoon worth of infantry and MAXes and just waste everything. That's very hard for defenders to stop unless there's just a lot of defenders, which is rare. At any rate, blundering over there with a tank is usually the worst plan.


tl;dr
Increase map VP requirement from 20 to 25.
Killing bases can be fun if you know what you're doing.