[Suggestion] Lattice System

Is just nanites - especially on Esamir. It makes for awful choke points where even when a faction controls 25% or more territory it's still happens quite frequently that it can only attack 1 of the opposing factions at a single base despite having 4-5 bases that touch that particular faction.

Is it really that hard to rework this system? It's awful and makes for very little tactical play.

I hope everyone is aware of this video:


I believe a great deal of players would agree with this style of play talked about: the hybrid lattice hex system. Maybe the devs will do it but I think they are aware of the issue.

Yes, I've seen it before. I like it and hope they use it.

It was available on PTS for player testing for some time. Most people gave it negative reviews.
As someone who played in the Pure Hex System, the major issue with Hybrid was that it essentially involved everything that made the Pure Hex System a pain. Before you can even say, "[if the problem is legitimate] maybe we can fix that part," keep in mind the developers already did a sweeping dump of the PHS for Lattice after attempting some smaller fixes and tweaks and realized the depth of chasm before them.

The main problems of Hex System are: it promotes abusive non-gameplay tactics (chained wack-a-mole ghost captures), victory is all about population and the ability to spread that population, and that territory and defense are meaningless (not in the sense that any given base couldn't be defended but in the sense that the enemy could just casually sidestep any defense attempt indefinitely and, in turn, just keep avoiding each other and still "succeed"). In the hybrid system, the lattice was something of a strategic afterthought - trying to follow it was a surefire way to lose, especially against an opponent who played by the Hex.

According to the video is was not tested - only a similar system was tested. The system in the video forced base capture eventually, but greatly increased the role of vehicles and that's the biggest problem with it. PS2 has become infantryside, with vehicles as an after thought because the vast majority of players dislike vehicles.

A big plus would be the reduction in mass 96v96 fights that the servers simply cannot handle well. The lag and performance dramatically suffer in such fights.

Lolwut? Infantryside? Clearly you have not been on the receiving end of ESF and Valkyrie spam, or the absurd amount of space vehicles have to operate with. The fact of the matter is that vehicles are still way stronger than infantry, who have few weapons to effectively counter vehicles. You're full of **** and you know it.

TBH I still don't know why hex was removed... There was a lot of talk at the time about people not being able to find a fight but there's instant action for that now.

As zergs roll around any & all defended bases, anything that resisted was ignored?
If you defended, the zerg went around, cutting you off, as nothing could stop it from doing so, all the way to the warpgate.
And the zergs on all three sides avoided each other, as they could.

Instant Action wouldn't actually let you have a fight, with that system, by nature.

Just cut the enemy zerg off as it over extends? Like they still do with lattice if the pop is low enough.

Back then it meant they didn't get resources for any territory and so they couldn't maintain a push.

The way I see it is that none of my friends quit the game before lattice was implemented.

Over-extend?
You're trying to cut off something 3x the size of your group, with hexes that is dynamically captured.
They cover more ground, and have absolutely no reason to fight, so they'll keep weaving.

So, any actual fight is absent.
And you're just ghost capping around, even if it worked.

If your friends quit because You couldn't "go around" every single possible path, and a zerg couldn't be blocked, nor a choke-point function..
I have to question if they wanted to actually have combat.
As, higher pop, can capture more hexes, and it has no way to ever force a fight, so it's in circles.

It's more that no one wanted a 200+ player or even 100+ player fights as the only options. There were a lot more players back then and they were all funneled into narrow channels. Back then fewer people had the hardware to handle that kind of thing.

A lot of people flocked to the game for it's sandbox like options, teamwork/strategy and game persistence. Massive fights were cool to experience but few people I know enjoyed them outside of the novelty factor.

Well, if you held the line, you didn't get a fight, as the entire enemy force evaded you entirely.
If you tried to engage them, they'd scatter around, and make the defense pointless.
The Zergs also dodged each other.

I prefer we actually had defenses make a damn, as with Hex.
You could defend a position, and unless that position is as mobile as the enemy conga line, it's worthless.
Which kinda makes it entirely useless, when population dominates the sheer amount of land control you can influence at once..
And any defense, where you could possibly do anything to a larger enemy if they engaged, is useless, As they don't have, and will not engage.

Making Defense useless.

Do you see what I'm getting at? If you defended a base, you were useless.
If you engaged the enemy, you could've likely done more by not being static, or taking time to land shots.
As that's time spent not moving influence around.
So sandbox indeed, teamwork indeed... if you're goal is combat however, Nope.

You obviously didn't play pre-CAI and obviously can't count. The number of infantry fights is at least 2000% greater than vehicle fights, unless you count the odd 5v5 or so vehicle fights that currently happen.

You seem to think the zerg cared. That was the ultimate knife in the back for the hex system; it was generating a mood amongst players who burned out quickly - apathy.

Zergs would form up at warp gates and then sally forth to crush small encounter after small encounter, base after base buried under the strain of pure numbers. All of the factions exhibited this behavior. The opposing zergs would dance around each other's captures on the map, crushing poorly populated bases in front of them and leaving a trail of bridges that slowly burned to another faction's capture, prompting, at some future whim, the zerg to roll back around and crush any chance of a small base fight once more. People capturing bases on the periphery of the larger fights to try and dilute them lost people trying to defend them as time went on. And players gradually stopped doing that as well, as any moment a zerg might descend upon their position and crush them, wiping out any semblance of progress. Defense and offense was useless in turn. And those zergs tried hard to avoid each other. Should these ever-circling zergs have met, by accident, a sudden but brutal fight might emerge, mostly by accident, and then the whole would dissolve into a mass of incoherent players until, ultimately, the next zerg formed at the warp gate, ready to head out and perform the whole pointless dance once again.

The edge on this rusty sword is the Beta Crown, a base where there was always a fight. What happened there was a "fight" in the sense a single near-perpetual string of moments encapsulating the philosophy that nowhere on the map really mattered. The whole of the continent could be a sea of red or blue or purple and there would just be this one off-color hex that people were still fighting in with little more reason than there was (always) a fight there.

The hex system caused a large numbers of players to just stop caring about what was going on and whether anything in the game mattered. There's no single event more closely associated with our current problem of the game being one where people play for stats rather than objectives than this. Satisfaction with the paltry sum of experience one received by "being there" when the base was captured, or by being in some off-site location repairing or hacking turrets, is apalling.

In the same way you feel this observation of mine may be silly or sensational, I believe you laying blame on the door of the lattice for your issue is just as unfounded.

While the video is a year old, I am not much more impressed by its proposal now than I was that year ago. The question of who will go stop the edges of the map from burning and how long it will take them to tire of doing the same thing over and over again will remain.

Why wouldn't the lattice system be left unchanged as it is with the introduction of the hex system underneath it? You can capture the next territory if you own the base just as usual but until you own the base then you can't take a single hex of the next territory. The more hex you own in the region grants lower capture time to that base, so capturing the hex can lead to a faster capture of the base. I thought that this would be the obvious solution to the problem and the correct undertaking of Cyrious' proposal.

If this solution has not been tested then it needs to be.

There was a time when the game play was wide open.

The forums let lose oceans of tears...and lattice was instituted.

Simply make the rewards greater and people will go fight a contested area. They have done a good job in the rewards department with the smaller alerts now and I trust them to devise appropriate rewards.

Short of literally having no reward for ghost capping and indeed no reward for entire locks on the continent as well, there's no way to keep from re-experiencing the same old combat that many folks claim to hate. Ghost capping.

I remember those days, and they sucked. Lotta zerging but the zergs would more or less move around one another endlessly without trying to fall into direct contact. The amount of work required for doing nothing versus doing a lot (IE: fighting those big numbers) will always look more enticing as long as it has "some" reward. There are always those that don't enjoy the combat (Which still amuses me considering the game they're in.) that'll happily move behind the entire frontline quietly to continue ghost capping. No real reason, just their kink I guess.

That said, no to the hex having experienced it against this lattice system. Yes to chokepoints... which don't really exist if you think about it. Nothing's stopping you from going around that armor column and hitting them from the rear. There's enough lines open pretty much whenever to go elsewhere if you really don't wanna try fighting your way through in a game about major conflict between three factions.

Big problem with planetside 2 atm is that there is no real reason to do any objectives, if they could add incentive more then the chance to earn a decal that you wont use (salty knight is the only good decal ) such as if you get all the bio labs on the map everyone in your faction gets an hp boost then it would work better.

i haven´t played for a while now but one thing i´m sure of is that PS2 needs to either over or rework its directives and general xp generation .. specifically for those who play a suportive role ...MW:O does that fairly well actualy .. assisting in combat, scouting, flaking repeatedly, the simple act of taking dmg for another teammember gets you bigger rewards than merely finishing off a opponent unless you combated him alone (which hapence rarely and still nets you less than the afforementioned stuff).. you get even rewarded for the act of doing damage be the target killed or NOT ...
and these things need to be added to PS 2 ... rather than rewarding the kill the task of engaging the enemy in any way needs to be rewarded ...

biggest flaw are weapondirectives that are meant for support or deterance to be awarded for kills instead of just damage which leads to bad play with that particular weapon ..
engaging enemys around a objective needs to be more rewarded then simply waiting around it and taking those couple ticks of xp ..

the way of how the progressionsystem is implemented imo is often what drives a player to play a specific way .. that needs to be adapted ...

as for hybridhex ... outside of ghostcapping i don´t see a big drive for the majority of people to engage in these ..
i too experienced the hex system during beta were a infil mostly spawns, takes a a flash captures the point and just leaves before any engagement can happen .. it was just redeploy: the game ...

a inteligent laticesystem that offers options is the way to go ... bases that have absolute value to fight over or outposts that offer a quick alternative route to the targetarea but offer no reinforcement spawns, as well as outpost that do offer these reinforcementspawns/terminals ..

the problem with hex also was that it was too prone to cut of resourceroutes from a large territory under the old resourcesystem which led to a even bigger snowball on overpop ...

what exactly would happen on a facility that got hexsurounded under the new system? does it cut off the ability to redeploy to that facility or spawn vehicles from it?
if you would make hexxes capable to cut off a facility that way than i think this would be even harder for a defending faction to hold that facility because you force them out of it to engage you or fall back for reinforcements there would be less need to engage the facility directly but instead you just starve it out ... would a propper battle happen? i think not ..

how would you be able handle a overpop or a zerg ?