Too often the battles in Planetside 2 boil down to which side has the population advantage, the more difficult to reach sunderer, or a greater number of organized outfits to win the day. A well-deployed sunderer becomes a clown car of continually respawning infantry that charge out and get mowed down only to come back ten seconds later to do the same thing, should they opt to do so. Spawn fights turn into giant meat grinders where either enough reinforcements spawn in and brute force push out of the safe zone to retake the point or suffer from a constant barrage of suppressing fire for 5 minutes or more while the capture timers tick down. Public assortments of players have no incentive to do anything but spawn and die from the same position over and over again, even if it ultimately just results in a futile, frustrating experience. So here's my suggested solution: spawn batteries. I've heard that something similar was instituted in Planetside 1 --- I don't know, since I never played the original game. However, the way that I see it, were contested bases, sunderers, valkyries, and galaxies all subject to having a certain amount of times that infantry could spawn inside each of them, it would result in a situation where teamplay and incidental coordination would be inherent to the core play experience. Let's say that, for instance, a small base has a base charge that can spawn 30 people and recovering 10 charge every five minutes or so. A cluster of thirty defenders could pop forth from the spawn room to attack the enemy and advance towards the objective, and if they're gunned down too soon they won't have that ability to pop back into the spawn room as quickly. They'd have to look at the options of either being more willing to wait for a medic to revive them or spawn back into uncontested territory. Spawning into uncontested territory would mean they'd be a fair bit away from the fight, of course. At that point they could either spawn a vehicle or look for other friendlies with spaces in their transport vehicles to get back up to the front lines. Sunderers could have batteries in a similar way -- and smaller than the installation batteries in order to encourage more sunderers to be taken to fight in a given theater. Furthermore, it would put more emphasis on the way that galaxy and valkyries would have the incentive to go back and forth between areas where infantry are spawning and waiting for a ride to the place they're currently embattled, rather than simply hug the ceiling directly at a point and scratch their noses as everyone in their squad just respawns and drops ad nauseum. I know that it's probably far too late in the game's cycle to consider things of such a measure, but I believe that were the spawn system in this vein, it would result in a better experience that would emphasize coordination and establishing supply convoys of fresh troops into big battles rather than simply make the game largely boil down to which side has more people willing to jam the respawn button faster.
Why are many people on the forums, such as OP, trying to change the way this game is? How can you people not like the insanely huge cluster battles, where players are spawning every second and you see these big *** hoards of soldiers fighting each other. Zerg vs Zerg. What the hell is so bad about that? Once again PEOPLE PLAY PLANETSIDE BECAUSE OF THAT, no one is trying to make this a squad vs squad game or an outfit vs outfit game. It's a mesh of hundreds of players being thrown into the fight at once. A spam battle of epicness. It's not meant to be small. Please move to one of the other thousand FPS's out there that are small and fire-team based. Planetside is a Novelty, it's something people play sometimes when they wake up and have a day off and are like "damn, I wanna shoot hundreds of people at once". There is literally no other reason for planetside than that. Call it respawnside, zergiside, redeployside, whatever. But that's the game.
So you want to be completely unable to spawn at a base because a bunch of randoms used up the batteries.
It would force people to be smarter about respawning. The way that outfits and platoons in general heavily influence the outcome of battles comes from a way that they're willing to forgo spawning into as infantry and begin backspawning to pull armor and transports so they can break the siege. In essences, making people unable to spawn continuously from a contested base would mean that even random people would have to start behaving like a platoon, spawning transports and looking for rides so they can drop into battle. Something similar, yes, but one that would only simulate a supply chain. Player bases might only become more valuable under such a system, since there'd be a pressing interest to build bases that would be used as forward operating bases to fuel an ongoing battle, if need be. I'm all for big pitched battles that have hundreds of people fighting at once, certainly -- but whenever it becomes a question of waves of infantry repeatedly respawning every ten seconds, it quickly becomes a matter of not whether one side can outmaneuver the other, but which side is outnumbered gravely. This is why people complain about population imbalances -- make it so that a side that simply has more players doesn't instantly win because they can just bottle up the spawn and carelessly take casualties.
With your system, you can't pull back reliably. Why? As if any of your side did, they just limited the number of available spawns back there. Which if the fight is anything more than 30 allies, will be unable to spawn even once back there. If they can, you'll have a grand 30 people, regardless if you were 100+ , while the enemy being the attacker... Has sunderers, many sunderers, enough to actually have their numbers. So when your ability to spawn is removed by people re-deploying, or your opponent logging on alts to suicide, don't complain. After all, if you have 3 bases, you have a limit of 90 people at once across 3 hexes. In a fight, you can lose that many from a fight of what, 12-24, pretty quick. Since in a single hex, if your team spawns, you have only 6 deaths to spare for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, you can have a glorious 10 more spawns. 2 short of the smallest grouping of players: 1-12 IE your supply chain reaching across 3 entire bases, can only handle 90 people. That's 3 entire hexes to travel. And only 90, unless someone spawned earlier, which reduces it further. To actually handle an equal force as a defender, let alone a zerg, you have the glory of needing sunderers that must survive the enemy's tanks, with a grand cap of 30 people, and only replenishing 10 people per 5 minutes. Aka a 90+ fight, needs 3 entire hexes' worth a people, which means for the next 2 hexes, No one can spawn. Heaven forbid those bases are attacked, or guarded by the opponent keeping them drained. Or alts killing themselves at random bases, ensuring Your side can't even spawn at a base. Or that glorious battle hopper draining spawns from each base. The side with more players, can easily handle the losses. Why? As unlike the defenders, or unpopped side, they only have to worry about how many kills they've made. After all, they likely have more sunderers. Which means they can have more people. So yes, Numbers win even harder; As the smaller force now can't even spawn if the mob kills them enough. Attrition works both ways.
Perhaps I was unclear in my distinction of why I had said 'contested' bases specifically. In contrast to the limited supply of the contested bases, those that are safely behind the front lines with no possibility of capture would have an infinite spawn capacity, thereby making for a means to pull an indefinite number of reinforcements, so long as they can make the trip and have the resources to acquire the materiel necessary for such a trip. The idea isn't so much to limit the number of people who can participate in a battle so much as making it so that the side with the greater numbers can't simply continue to pour forth from extremely limited spawn areas and take advantage of natural advantages regarding sunderer deployment or the natural defensiveness of the location for the defense. Instead it would start to become a battle of trying to cut off one another's supply of sunderers and galaxies swooping in to drop off more troops, resulting in a more pressing need for a vehicle battle surrounding the facility.
No. This is a bad idea that is poorly though out in terms of implementation. As noted above, Planetside is all about the large battles. Sure, there's nothing preventing smaller battles taking place, and I even enjoy those often more than the zerg.v.zerg battles. But it's undeniably epic to take part in a zerg.v.zerg, and I'd hate to see that gone. If you don't like it, go play some other game. Pretty much anything else will have you covered.
Once again, this wouldn't do anything to influence the size of battles, merely the frequency at which people can spawn at a given point. If anything, it would create battles that are just as large but much less dense, since players attempting to reinforce a heated battle would be pulling lightnings and MBTs, drawing up air vehicles and anti-air vehicles, and generally spreading out rather than being encouraged to spawn en masse from one or two points and clustering into one or two key strategic buildings. The beauty of Planetside 2 is the number of players that lets us have strategic battles. I'm not sure if I would consider 'blindfire into and out of a choke point' to really be the pinnacle of strategic first person shooting.
A good balance for this would be pretty difficult to reach. If the respawn battery didn't scale with the people involved, you would probably tend to have either a massively hard time defending or attacking. Obviously Fennel saying 30 spawns per 5 minutes is just a figure thrown out there, it seems a little low imo. I imagine that larger bases would be needed as well. Small bases usually only have 1-2 "good" sundy spots. I do really hate it when a single sundy spawns literally hundreds of people out of it in a single battle, which is what I think is the root problem that Fennel has. Zerg vs Zerg is really only interesting in large field battles with vehicles. A 96v96 biolab fight is just a ****show. When you get a lot of people, I personally find the best fights are NEVER the ones at actual bases. They're the fights between Indar Excavation and Quartz Ridge where you're pushing against each other to simply reach the other base. Once you actually get to the base though, its just a boring 10fps slog where you might get one kill then die from some dude you never had a chance of seeing. also People can plop down hives for free on their alts then claim them for their faction. People go on their alts and friendly fire sunderers all the time. These are worse problems in my opinion, and theres no way you'd be able to address them without pissing off a lot of people.
Those were the days. Every major facility had an NTU. Can't tell you how many Gal drop ANT runs I participated in to save a base that was under siege. Good times...... Wish they'd re-implement NTUs and the ability to T/P small vehicles in a Gal.
I like the idea, but... We need to keep in mind the future of the game,new players. A newbie HAS to have a good experience their first game, I.E. Be able to find a good balanced fight on this HUGE map we have. By itself this will have newbies spawning away from the front line, looking for the fight... That's not good. _or_ A newbie will be one of the fortunate few who spawn into the front line, have a great battle. Die, then spawn way back at a second line base with no direction on how to get back into the fight. If only there was a way to combine this system and get players into fun balanced fights with clear objectives and goals.... Oh yeah Leaders and missions
Honestly what keeps new players around is the Instant Action (I) button on your keyboards. No one wants a majority of their game to be running to a combat zone, or pressing U over and over trying to find the fight. All new players have to do to get in the action and see what planetside is about (massive hundreds vs hundreds battles) is do the tutorial and press I, or the Join Combat button. DBG was genius to add that, and I don't remember it being there when I first played. So new players right now are probably fine.
Upon consideration from the responses and my own watching of the periodic Wrel video from years past, what about making it so that instead of a battery upon the base or sunderer itself, it's something each individual player has? Wrel had a video about 'infantry logistics' where he was talking about having drop pods as a personal resource whenever considering the ability to hit 'I' to just jump into a fight. What if that drop pod currency were also used for spawning on sunderers or contested bases? That way, it could be a renewable resource that would regenerate quickly enough to make prolonged fights something that's not too punishing and at the same time prove both a source of attrition for careless forces and provide a personal incentive to hold onto one's respawn until a medic can come by for a revive. That way, spawning in a 'safe' base could be one that's either optional for those who wish to ration their personal spawn resources or the last option when one is simply conga-lining into combat with perhaps a bit too much gusto.
