You can only set particles to low in game, but you can set it to zero in your user options file, which is allowed by DBG. As a completely unintentional side effect, this also disables in game smoke and gives you an insane tactical advantage. Users > Public > Daybreak Games Company > Installed Games > Planetside 2 I encourage DBG to lock particles to in-game settings to avoid players using this as an exploit In the meantime, everyone get the word out about this to bring attention to it and get this fixed.
It is around for a long time. But honestly, while it maybe give you some advantage if the very rare smoke spam starts, you are at a major disadvantage in vehicle combat, since smoke can be used efficently to tack damaged vehicles and judge their health. Usually, smoke isnt that usefull anyway, since you can be spoted, muzzelflash/tracer can be seen anyway. The "best thing" it maybe used for is the completly shut down the fps of older systems. Therefore i support the DEVs decission to make smoke optional.
What needs to be fixed first, is the black smoke that occurs if you use anything other than High "Graphics Quality" (Not to be confused with overall graphics quality) with a particle setting of anything other than Low. As such, smoke still appears if you set particles above the low setting even when using low graphics quality. I can confirm however, that there is still a performance increase if you do get rid of the particles via 0.00 particle distance. Thermal vision cannot see through black smoke, so that is a definite disadvantage, and as comes with things like high or ultra particles, lag goes through the wazoo if you're too close to it. Viable settings for no smoke: particle distance of 0 Low "Graphics Quality" Low "Particle Quality" Non-viable settings for no smoke: Medium or higher "Graphics Quality" along with any particle setting higher than low. Aside all the testing that's been done with this by past players and up to now, it's mainly a last-resort for a performance increase, and less-so of an abuse scenario. (Not that people don't abuse it for no smoke, they definitely do) Being unable to see your own tank shots is pretty terrible. If you use ultra particles and low graphics quality you can see the dithering around bullets and tank shots, but that's about it. Plus, you have to deal with black smoke and some extra lag. At the end of it all, I don't think this will ever be fixed, though color me surprised if it ever is. Y' know, since it has been like this since the game was first developed.
My take would be that it can be exploited by players by actively using smokes while not being themselves impaired. To me, it falls in the exact same category as cloak not working on low settings (albeit not as "bad", clearly).
Why would one use smoke? Like said, it is not very effective. Smoke comes from UBGL --> all sup par weapons compared to alternatives Smoke nade --> No offensive ability/Flash nade Crossbow --> No secondary, short smoke time All in all not that good. Also consider that smoke has the same effect on teammates unprepared, and the other guys could also switch it off...
It is though, for about 1/2 your targets. I used to use the engineer to spam smoke darts from the crossbow then use a thermal scope and flash suppressor on my rifle. Most players can't effectively shoot back, but then you run in to a few that apparently see you just fine. I don't want to name names, but I've rolled with guys who've exploited this via settings to smoke choke points before they rush in and steam roll. I'm sure those try hard squads who spam smoke are using this.
I agree, i play smoke dart sometime with my friend , really interesting for holding a point, it work really good, but some guys see you like if nothing happen, with no thermal scope, no thermal implant ( or maybe shoot at you when the little arrow on top of the head who appear when spotted), I think it's not very cool to have the ability to set the smoke to 0, breaking some tactical ways :/
its actually a TERRIBLE idea to disable your smoke in the.ini file, because it disables all particles, even projectiles. i could be standing on a distant balcony spamming lasher at you and you would have no idea where i'm shooting from because you wouldn't see the projectiles. where as usually lasher is like a "look! here i am!" beacon with its huge glowey orbs, you'd be entirely clueless because you disabled the projectiles! plus it goes for your projectiles too, usually you can fire a tank shell at a distant target, see where your shell hits and you can adjust your aim from there, not when you're shooting completely blind with no idea where your projectiles are going! smoke is useless and rare enough that it isn't worth the colossal downside of lacking projectiles. and 90% of your allies! i consider smoke to be a selfish and annoying "me me me!" tool, you're blinding everyone on both teams who doesn't have a NV scope (which is most people) the moment a smoke spammer joins a battle EVERYONE should kill them, because they're f%%king it up for everyone.
Then may as well remove smoke grenades altogether. If they are not that effective to begin with, but ontop of that people can just "disable" them completely without you knowing, that's just ********. Since you mention the flash nade, let's imagine the same kind of thing happened, and fiddling with a value in a config file would totally negate the flash, would that be ok too? I certainly don't think it would.
