OK let's talk about something critical here! "old" post launch Planetside 2 was fun (pre lattice, hex system), every class felt unique and each suited their roles well almost every class needed the other in some form or another. tanks had a purpose pushing battle lines or defending against advancing forces. air was also useful instead of an annoyance helping take out ground targets that were dug in. but besides all of that the fights were awesome weather it was prime time or the early morning warp gate pushes the fights were engaging, exciting and most of all FUN. the battles could shift in any direction allowing tactical freedom, where you and your team had to stay alert to see where the enemy would go to next. i maybe forgot to mention that AIR ,ARMOR and INFANTRY meshed well, as there was a constant combined arms war. the bases were also fun, towers had unique combat to them, same with many bases, and all of the unique bases like the Stronghold or bases adjacent to the warp gate were utilized a lot and often fought at, this was mostly because the continents would never lock, they would only get "conquered", yes the bases had long cap times but this meant that fights could persist several hours instead of 30mins. this also allowed attacking Armor to play defense while the infantry fought over the bases, the one factions Armor had to defend spawns while the other tried to blow them up. same goes for Air they had to clear out the large groups of infantry or the dug in spawn points. (Sorry for wall of text) OK yes this sounds all too good and it might be my nostalgia talking, but now of days nothing really gives me this "Massive Combined Arms War feeling" even when I'm in a tank column or a 96+ fight the only thing that really came close was when pushing a player made base but even then it just feels lack luster as all i see is 100 Heavy's shooting at a wall while 50 ENGs and 50 other classes rep and shoot back where are the tanks or aircraft dead or not here cause the AI turrets and sky shield are keeping them away. after taking with some guys who all have varying opinions, i have come to conclusion that is, **** balance **** flow of the battle improvements and **** your MLG game idea that you have in your head. why can't we just have a game that made for the sake of fun, where there is imbalance between factions and their weapons, where there is some unfair death by splash damage, where we can do the mass grave revive tactic again. (man that was fun and funny as hell all those corpses getting back up to wreck face) a game like the old post launch Planetside 2. but we can't and the root of this is ******* balance or their skewed idea of balance (in a game where every other class is at a disadvantage when fighting a ******* heavy and where current Libs exist) we didn't care about flow of battle or where do i go next, cause once a fight got going it didn't stop till late in the night when people started logging off. OK yes the ghost capping hexes away was bull **** but that didn't happen all the time. and this base flow of battle thing is crap cause hey maybe i want to attack the base that's just over that ridge that this base shares borders with. "no **** you follow the lattice" i have nothing against the lattice provided it actually has an end goal like i don't know a continental lattice or that the map doesn't lock after 2 hours of play (20 VP points woot we won) what do you think? has the idea of balance, fight/base flow and MLG PRO game ruined Planetside 2 or are you calling for them to Nerf something like everyone else and that MAXes are the core problem? should the priority be FUN? or whatever the hell it is they are doing right now?
Doesn't seem right. "old" PS2 had the least class viability of all. It was HA all the way, and screw any other class. Medics were basically only capable of healing and reviving, Infils weren't really useful at all as sniping wasn't exactly great to influence a battle and there were no SMG's yet so all you needed was a single Infil to spam recon darts. Oh that's right! No Motion spotter available, and a max recon dart would scan a walking player once if he walked through the center of the dart because those things were completely useless at launch. LA? The Jumpjets were buggy and could barely get you anywhere. In fact, in the early days the fuel capacity was bugged so a level 1 and max level jumpjet had the same amount of fuel, only the regeneration was affected. Engineer was it's usual vehicle-driving self and MAX's were 200 resources each and had things like old ZOE to make everyone uncomfortable. Then vehicles! Oh yes vehicles. The Saron was a vehicle sniper that could also snipe infantry. HE in general could be used to lock down and entire base with only one or two MBT's/lightnings. Anchored Prowlers could wipe out entire vehicle columns. What about aircraft? Oh goodie, noseguns that could set a vehicle aflame with a single magazine to the back, rocketpods that could set a vehicle aflame with a single volley to the top. Rocketpods that could kill everything around a Sunderer with 3 rockets against it. Daltons that were basically a slightly weaker C4 bomb from the sky against vehicles and infantry. Zephers that were better at AV than current Daltons and could wipe out entire Zergs in a single run. And what about balance? for the first year of my PS2 experience, I saw Zurvan AMP station three times, and Crossroads four times. Because the NC was so laughably weak they could rarely get passed Tawrich and the way the maps were build the NC's position on Indar was simply impossible to hold. And the Hex system, oh that wonderful screwed up system. If attackers experienced resistance, they just went to another base, and another, until the defenders were too late or too spread out to defend one, then the attackers would converge and take it. There was no strategy involved, and the defenders would basically be completely powerless the moment a faction got enough terrain to get out of their box (which the NC rarely ever did). Ghost cappers would undo the work of others or force several players to hunt them down, and considering that there were no stealth-revealing lights and friendly cloakers were just as visible as enemy cloakers it was tough to find them and even tougher to know if you were about to shoot an ally or enemy. What I think happened is that you have some giant rose-tinted glasses of the passed. The "combined arms" fights you refer to must be the early days ineptitude, where for at least half a year people pulled vehicles and aircraft randomly to see how good they were, resulting in massive completely randomized battles with tanks facetanking instead of using cover, aircraft crashing as much into players as dominating them and infantry doing kamikaze runs because half of them still expected small-arms fire to work against vehicles, or that they could beat vehicles by using sheer dead body weight to crush them. The reason we can't have "a game made for fun" is because the developers realized that they had to make it fun for the most people. Considering that 1 or 2 MBTs would be having a blast blowing up two entire platoons worth of people, but that at the same time two entire platoons worth of people were having a crap day because they could do virtually nothing but throw their dead bodies against tanks and hope some players would make it to the point (assuming the point wasn't out in the open and bombarded with shells as well). So they started changing tanks to give infantry more of a chance, meaning the game got more fun for two entire platoons of people while the 1 or 2 people in a tank were having somewhat less of a blast blowing everything in sight to smithereens. Although I would have gone for the other route here: Rather than segregating tanks and infantry and simultaneously nerfing tank power (which still completely dominates infantry BTW), I would have upgraded the killing power of both tanks and infantry. If infantry has enough of a chance to beat back tanks it becomes a more balanced fight. Especially since tanks are widely available, rather cheap, have no limits to the amount that can be pulled by multiple players to balance them out and take less skill to operate. Overall, many of the things done to PS2 over time were better for the game. They provided better game flow, better stragetic options for both attackers and defenders, better balance between vehicles, infantry and aircraft and better ways for spawns to work (less spawncamping crapshoots, like the infamous hallway of death that tower-bases used to have). I'm not saying it was perfect, I'm not saying that every choice actually solved the issue's they tried to abolish, but in the long run it did improve the game compared to what it was.
This used to work only in a very few conditions: 1) You needed at least 6 soldiers on point to cap quickly otherwise it was very slow. 2) Players had to stay on point, not rush for the spawn room, otherwise the capture timer would stop. 3) Capture timer depended on how much adjacency the territory had with the ones your faction already owned. At a certain point this has been changed. Do you remember why? Because some idiots cried because they said it was boring to stay on point. They wanted to get more kills, not sitting while waiting for the enemy to retaliate. And they also cried because they didn't want to need a full squad to capture a base. Those stupid kids (I assume MLG people) pretended to cap bases all alone. And SOE listened to them, and that was where problems began. What happened? 1) One soldier needed to flip a point. 2) You can flip a point then leave the control console. 3) Capture timer is fixed, and it's usually rather fast compared to what we used to have. At this point lattice was no longer an option: it turned into a necessity because players suddenly became unable to protect the bases they captured. Because on single lone wolf was suddenly able to capture a Tech Plant. We ended in a situation where you capped a base, left for the next, and you had to get back because you had 3-4 ghost cap going on all the time. Even the bases you capped 2 minutes earlier were suddenly contested once again. That was not fun, that was tedious. After that 3 big mistakes were done. 1) They never finished the resources system. Max and vehicles are huge force multipliers, allowing people to get massive kills and change the tide of a battle. Considered the huge opportunity cost of nanites, players should spawn a vehicle or a Max any time it's possible, otherwise they are just limiting their potential. Once again: do you remember why we ended up in this situation? Because other stupid crybabies said it was boring to wait for their Vanguard / Prowler / Liberator / Magrider to be available again. They wanted to sit in their vehicles all day without downtime. And again, SOE listened to these idiots. Instead of being a game of combined vehicles and infantry PS turned into a game where you get the better results only with vehicles, and you should get to infantry only when you have to cap points. Just look what happened to Sunderers: no one fills a Sundy with 12 soldiers because it's suboptimal. Considered vehicles cost is ZERO, you better get 4 Sundies with 3 player each one. You have 4x firepower (8 turrets instead of 2!!) and benefit from proximity repair and ammo. Again, in this situation the game became imbalanced and vehicles had to be toned down. 2) Devs added multiple ways to teleport to battle, making the frontline extremely unstable and destroying the sense of battle flow. Still, the fault is of some players who didn't want downtime: they didn't want to wait for gunners, they didn't want to regroup at the Warpgate, they didn't want to travel across the map (how many times did we do that in PS1???). Still redeploy and instant action are the main reason why I believe the Combined Arms Initiative will fail. Because in a game where vehicles are available everywhere and teleport is possible at will, no one needs a fast transport solution. In this scenario the Valkyrie will never serve the purpose of troops transport and the Sunderer will always be like a Battle Tank. 3) Too much focus on KDR instead of the whole game experience. We've been telling this since beta, but SOE wanted to appeal the KDR iditos coming from Call of Duty. Assist mean nothing, support activities are secondary, no one cares about capture and defend while kills remain the primary occupation. While there is nothing wrong with this kind of behaviour, the game does absolutely nothing to encourage players to play per objectives. Just look at the whole directives system, where you must achieve thousands of kills instead of being rewarded for the xp you get with a certain weapon, and where Max kills and infantry kills are the same, while vehicles destruction, scouting, healing, saving friends etc has no purpose. Get used to it: PS2 turned into a huge brainless meatgrinder. It's a good game still, but it will never have more depth than this. Because depth doesn't pay. Imitating top-selling games for casual players does. At least that's what DBG seems to think. But they are not selling me this Combined Arms ********, I don't think the game will change. And that's why after years I've quit spending money in the game. It will never be real MMO where battles are on a large scale. It's just a FPS where you fight somewhere, redeploy, get a new battle, then redeploy again. And in the end no cares about the winner, as long as KDR is high enough.
Granted, there is an argument to be made that even full squads suffered from that prior arrangement. A good portion of the squad would be disallowed from ever leaving a very small radius of the capture point (the second story of a building or the tiny box of a building) for the duration of the capture, pigeon-holing them into a barrel where they could easily be isolated and shot. Even compared to PlanetSide Classic where you hack the console and then get the privilege of positioning yourself wherever else in the base you think would be most suitable to defend that hack, not having that privilege is a huge deal.
I have to admit the first couple of weeks playing PS2 was probably the best gaming experience for me. Huge battles with vehicles and infantry, being part of a gaming community, running ops every day... It was fun but the game itself was much worse than PS2 today. Render distance was 50m for infantry and still the game ran like ****. Liberators and rocket pods from ESFs killed everything and everybody. Weapon / class balance was horrible. I think that MLG ******** they wanted to have was the worst thing that happened to the game. They spent so much money and time on something that was hopeless instead of improving the game. What I miss from "the old days" is population. Even after several merges we do not have enough players (and I think players / continent limit is lower than it was, isn't is?).
There was a time, in the open beta and for a short while after launch, where PS2 was very fun. But this wasn't due to any of the game's mechanics or balance. As Demigan pointed out, there were many horrible flaws with the balance at the time. No, the fun was because no one knew what the crap they were doing. You didn't have MLG heavies around every corner, no vehicle farmers camping infantry battles, no skyknights camping the enemy warpgate by themselves. All you had were some thousand dummies running around not knowing what they were doing and not caring. It was enjoyable because there was no stress, no competitiveness, no one there to remind you that you're not at the top of the food chain.
good points from everyone. and im glad that no one is outright attacking one another on the points made. i did say it may have been my nostalgia speaking but i get your point at times it was ***. if not my nostalgia maybe im burnt out of the current Planetside 2 i just feel that the older planetside had some imbalance that made it more fun. and some quirks that also buffed it. i still to think that the game has been balenced far to heavily in one way or another to put redeploy side 1st. true but this could have been fixed or changed so that transports are actually a thing insdead of hey look battle gal or sundys are just a spawn point. yes sundy balls were OP but they were fun as hell especially if you could infiltrate the enemies and go suppressor weapon here and knife happy. i think that something does need to be done about redeploy side and how fast the maps lock and rotate, as i never see battle lines ever get to some bases anymore hell the norther biolab on Indar rarely gets fought at same with J908 impact site. the fights are the same cause they are always at the same 3 bases that push back and forth on a lattice and once your faction finally pushes back another getting some momentum to push all the way to the warp gate fighting the whole way there not just capping 1-12 with 96+ but 48-96 to 48-96 or 96+ with about at 60-40% pop balance the map locks and every single time i think "**** just when this was getting good". its like an arcade game that says insert 5 tokens when you have 3 so now you have to go play Hossen. the VP system and the old alert capping is just some false BS some times you win and you fell that you really didint earn that win cause you were getting your *** handed to you on a platter. or your are kicking *** and the other team wins cause VPgens. maybe something should be done to all of it make VP gens something like a resource mine or every time you would earn a VP your faction gets an implant and those in the base get 2 or something. any ideas? flaws in my ideas? nerf something BS? your ideas?
The fight always occur in the same bases because some take longer than others to capture, as they are more defensible. For instance Biolabs are in general quite hard to take. The problem is Redeploy gives players such a fast reaction that there is no possibility to take the enemy by surprise, and terrain means nothing. It basically allows players to ignore rules of time and space, making the whole idea of a big open map completely meaningless.
If you're really looking for ideas. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?threads/planetside-vs-planetside-2-lattice.223102/ An idea I had a long time ago that I think could be expanded upon now that cortium and PMBs are in. You could use Cortium mining in a major base hex as a "fule" source or something. Just spit balling a bit. There were more ideas from back then also. Hybird Hex/Lattice with the major bases having lattice and the smaller bases used in a HEX config to encourage more freedom but I would contest that we would just get the same circle zergs that we had when HEX was in.
My idea: Limit the amount of redeploys you get based on a timer, similar to resources. For example, whenever you log in or switch continents you start with 5 redeploys. Every two minutes you receive 1 new redeploy. For normal combat this is enough to get around. You spawn on a continent, you have enough redeploys to get to another area where combat is. If you are in-combat, you are likely to never run out of redeploys to get back to your base if you are in the middle of nowhere. But if you are in a redeployside platoon, you can only redeploy so many times before you run out, and suddenly players will get left behind, or the squadleaders can't redeploy to the area they want. Slowing down the amount of times they can do this and breaking the never-ending cycle of redeploy, forcing a platoon to continue where they are. This is just a bare-bones idea, but you get the drift.
+1. This would also make the use of transport vehicles (and therefore the use of other vehicles to stop them) a much more valuable part of the game!
My vision is different: getting to other side of the map takes only a few seconds. You want to respond quickly to an attack? Keep a fast response vehicle ready (Valkyrie) and make a good use of Spawn Beacons. Spawn Beacons could be buffed to work for an entire platoon and have a shared cooldown.
Only if a Pilot, and a clear sky ; Unless you are a good pilot. 0_0 when was a Valk considered fast, same speed as a galaxy apparently. Spawn beacons, you first must have already been there. Demigan's idea, at least allows you to not be stranded in the middle of no where when the enemy vanishes after driving, flying or walking just to get there; IE longer than you fought the enemy. Also means you don't need a squad just to travel between bases without spending a ton of nanites with prayer of no enemy air. - And also means, a single EMP, aircraft or bright opponent doesn't just break the beacon that screams into the sky preventing you from using a beacon for the next half hour was it? Or have to be a good enough pilot to fly a Valk, and not be blasted to bits by skyknights, for every fight that isn't next-door. And obviously, have access to a bloody air-pad inbetween fights, let alone when the enemy likely got there ahead of time since they are attacking. Heaven forbid the login spawn, isn't near an air-pad, and isn't literally in a random dead zone.
Although I like it, I think that we need to be careful how to implement this. Individual players should be able to relocate and find new fights quickly and not have to travel constantly. What needs to be toned down is the amount of squads/platoons dumping all their members on a single base, instantly out-zerging the opposition. But how to properly achieve this? Maybe we can just take your vision and force it on squads/platoons, but not individual players?
defendable bases like Crown, you could deploy to any base your faction owned, Instant Action that actually instantly put you in the action.. very little churned out NS cashgrabs, no commissioner. things stacked as you'd expect (have resist shield and nanoweave? ofcourse they'll stack), NO CONTINENT LOCKING, nuff said. "Command Center" regular updates from the devs about what they were working on, devs held parties and events for players to join in (old devs like Higby who mained NC and Luperza who mained VS), GRAPHICS, the game looked so much better 4 years ago on my potato PC than it does today, R.I.P PhysX thats just the stuff that came to mind, i'm sure if i think there is way more.
Why can't lone players get an ESF? After all if one is not in squad the he/she cannot pretend to be everywhere and respond like Rambo. I often play alone and if I don't like where I'm fighting or I want help somewhere else I just get a flying vehicle or a Flash. It's very fast. If things worked this way then organization would make a difference. Today we have so many "spawn to" options that organization goes to the background (like innate Squad Logistic Support on Sunderers, Galaxies and Valkyries).
Not everyone is a Pilot, let alone capable of surviving skyknights across the entire continents and stalking hostile warp gates. And wanting to actually play the game, rather than "How can I get there, and how many nanites can I spare to do it". It ain't "rambo" or "Trying to be everywhere" to not want half the game to traveling while avoiding ESFs. As well, only specific bases & the warp-gate even have Air terminals. Add in a single one-man liberator, any ESF, a galaxy or any aircraft really, can easily kill any inexperienced Pilot... IE did you forget that ESFs literally stalk across the map destroying tanks, and rival air craft across all territory lines? Aka we aren't all bloody pilots that can avoid, dog-fight or manage an ESF from the warp gate to the target without a hitch. As well, if one side of the continent is outright being zerged 96+ to 12, you're going to what, Drive a flash all the way from the warp gate or that battle zone? You have better luck than I, I find Liberators & ESFs on my *** within 5-15 minutes of travel. Well, unless you have at least 3-12 people, a Sundy without any AMS system is a useless transport - let alone for allied support. Given you'll need another one just to get there, and it'll explode quick without deploying, or you're in a Sundy ball from hell. Galaxies, flying air transports that generally air drop troopers down: That's all squad only for reinforcements. Valks, same thing, squad only. Only a Sundy allows allies not from your squad, in the local region to respawn there. At a hostile base, you'll want that. Otherwise, you have only your squads spawning at vehicles requiring operators and limited to each squad. Having to pray each Sundy that someone bothers to bring is an AMS, isn't all that grand of a concept for logistics. As whom in hell would bother with a Sundy without an AMS? Right, Sundy-Ball, One-time transport before a beacon is set. Practicality vs Assumed 'Logistics' fun. I rather not need to be a pilot just to reach a battle without a grand half-hour of driving per fight. Not to mention, that unless you spawned at a place with an air-terminal, you have to go to the warp gate before starting the trip.
