rebalance infiltrators

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by VeryCoolMiller, May 6, 2019.

  1. Scroffel5

    The other thing is that, it only says "Most Used Weapons" and then says the kills. Is it comparing by kills or weapons that are used the most? It looks like it is comparing by kills. Lets start of with small numbers, using the top 10 most used weapons. Say that 10 people use the 1st most used weapons, 9 people the 2nd most used, 8 people the 3rd, and so on. Say that the 10 have 100 kills, the 9 have 90, the 8 have 80, and so on. That means that each person using the 10th most used have 10 kills, and the player using the 10th most used weapon also has 10 kills. They are same ratio, 1:10. If it doesn't give a number of how many people are using it, you can't really determine how effective it is. That is if it is judging by how many people are using it. If the Ghost is number 5, that just means a lot of people are using it, but then the VA39 Spectre should be higher than it statistically, because it is a starter weapon. That means starter weapons should count. The NS weapons thing, I am not understanding.
  2. Skraggz


    He is saying that NS don't count because all factions can use it rather then ES weapons because ES is x1 (its faction) and NS is x3 (all factions can use) bringing into question is own means to judge whether a weapon is strong or not. On top of that.... This doesn't justify "Infils are over performing" by any means as it is just a kill list.
  3. Scroffel5

    Yeah.
  4. Somentine

    Aight bro. You're an idiot (no offense).

    The reason no one complains about them is because LMGs aren't some broken weapon for a 2nd slot on either heavy or eng. SMGs as far as I remember can only be picked on a secondary for LA, which allows them to run either a shotgun/smg or a carbine/smg for short-mid or short-long... or meme and use 2 cylcones on NC. BR is only available to medics, and no one thinks BRs are broken on any class, primary or secondary. While people don't directly complain about shotgun secondary (for NC the HA gets jacky) on eng, there are people who complain about shotguns in general.

    tl;dr - no.
  5. TobiMK

    What you fail to consider is that the Ghost (and its equivalents) are the meta snipers of choice for any CQC sniper (a group that overlaps quite a bit with good players in general). At the same time good players are far less likely to choose long-range snipers like the Longshot, since those are not any better than a Ghost/SAS-R/TSAR-42. This explains why the accuracy stats are skewed towards presenting worse ratings despite higher accuracy on CQC snipers and vice versa.

    Add to that the aforementioned factor of risk. It's pretty self-evident that close-range sniping is vastly more difficult than long-range sniping. The (arguably skewed) accuracy statistics don't do much to disprove this. Simply considering the fact that a close-range sniper is under constant potential threat and has to rely on quick aiming, where a long-range sniper is safe and has multiple times longer to line up shots and track targets should be enough to realize what playstyle is more difficult.

    My Reaper on "1CarapacePlease" disproves this rather easily, still at 44.6% accuracy after over 10k kills. Despite that, my accuracy has been consistently high on all my CarapacePlease characters. They have a combined playtime of over 900 hours, and my accuracy has not gone down. So no, my accuracy won't become uniform any time soon.
  6. TobiMK

    Ignorance doesn't make arguments any less valid.
  7. TobiMK

    Well, you claimed that you were a good infiltrator player, but there is nothing backing that up. If you make such a claim, be ready for people to check it out and also be ready for an appropriate response if it turns out you were incorrect.
  8. TobiMK

    I asked another player (mainly plays HA, occasionally sniper) to record 1 hour of himself playing as a bolter spontaneously. The result were 243 kills (7.3 KD) in 1:08h with minor effort. Many times in the video you can see how he does not hit his initial shots, but simply repositions without pressure and gets the kill on the second attempt. Furthermore he uses Nano Armor Cloak (for obvious reasons) and already within the first 30 seconds of the video it saves his life. And that is just the first of many times.

    Here is the video if you want to watch:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prgDeCGtIjw&feature=youtu.be
  9. pnkdth


    First he claimed it was a popular and over-performing weapon with top players, I checked those and MIND BLOWN every last one of them had on average 3-4 LMGs with more use and better performance. Suddenly, that point was no longer important. Then the next was the amount of kills which also stopped being important once those weapons dropped off the board. Funny how that works, eh?

    So... I'd say since the basis of his argument was so easy to turn against his claim, yes, in this case it definitely make his point less valid. Objectively false, in fact.
  10. Campagne

    Except that's not really true, is it? Either way it does not even attempt to contest my point. [Citation needed] on player choices.

    Short range rifles largely just have to point and shoot, while longer ranged fighting requires leading and accounting for gravity against smaller targets. The cloak allows for the same amount of time to aim at any range, Mr. "I dictate the engagement."

    This demonstrated my point exactly. It's not the magical S, it's much closer to what I would have expected.

    Wow, these replies sure are getting shorter and shorter...

    Firstly, you're literally proving the point.

    Secondly, an example: Bill Nye the Science Guy, a famous and popular educational "science communicator" has been the star in a great my educational videos and has his own show on Netflix. He is a mechanical engineer, with his only academic degree being a BS in mechanical engineering.

    However, Bill has done many many talks on subjects not at all related to mechanical engineering, such as basic chemistry and genetics. Even if he didn't have any understanding of these things on a personal account through a direct education, the information he provided over the years is no more or less accurate. I am more qualified to talk about genetics than he is. This does not make much of what he has said in the past wrong.

    In case this all just flew over your head, the gist of it is this: Even if I wasn't a good player, my arguments filled with logic and reasoning and everything else would not be automatically discredited. Bill Nye doesn't need a degree in biology to talk about genetics. (But in regards to that one infamous episode of his Netflix show it wouldn't hurt. :p)
  11. Scroffel5

    I have watched only the first few minutes, and he is playing like a Heavy. He was about to die so many times, and he just spammed a few medkits and retreated behind cover. And you say he repositions without pressure, but his shield is broken a ton of times and he has 1 or 2 hits left on him. Again, he just uses a medkit. You also mention he is using NAC. If he was using the Hunter Cloak, he most likely would have died more often, so that also factors into the weapon. Combinations affect a weapon. And quite a few of these people are standing still or moving slowly. At 2:15, he dies on the retreat. To say there is no pressure to get away is false. After he respawns, he goes to the other side, where there are way more people standing still. Whats worse is that they are behind a bit of cover, so you won't accidentally shoot the body, because it is an even smaller target than the head. He also didn't even notice that he got sniped in the back. All he did was medkit and go back to what he was doing, and he didn't notice the Light Assault shooting his team. Don't you think his recon would have been helpful there? Then he dies to his team before he can run and medkit. This guy plays like an HA. And now I have pretty much just stopped watching, because he goes back to shooting still targets who keep peaking out. In the right situation, yeah, you can get 243 kills, but the circumstances should also be recognized when you look at it. When he ran out of medkits, he had to play back. He even charged and almost got killed, but NAC helped him out a bit. I am not sure what is in his suit slot, but I know it isn't advanced shield capacitor. That is what I run anyways. Also, look at 7:05. He gets up, tries to quickscope the HA, misses, and then he gets killed. He got too close. You also make an argument that you can just retreat so easily, but not if you get too close.
  12. Scroffel5

    TobiMK, please restate your all of your main points so we don't branch off into some other argument. The first argument you made was that Infiltrators are unbalanced, but now we branched off into CQC BASRs. Lets go back to your main points so we can talk about those, and give the facts or opinions you find that make the Infiltrator unbalanced.
  13. TobiMK

    Being able to dictate the engagement does not mean you are able to evade any returned fire ever. To get that, you'd have to remove yourself from the fight, for example by sitting on a hill somewhere. Now you can shoot in peace, take all the time you need since you don't get punished for being slow. The supposed difficulty of tracking a moving target is vastly inferior to having to accurately land shots in an actual combat scenario, whether that is in close range or not.

    The length of our posts is not connected to their quality. Otherwise you might well be correct about this issue. Why should I type five paragraphs, when one gets the message across.

    Well, it would seem that the majority of threads in PS2 with misinformed arguments and common misconceptions are made by bad players. Whether that is because large parts of the community are in fact very bad at the game (and many suffer under the famous Dunning-Kruger-Syndrome) is another discussion.

    In this case though, your arguments are simply discredited by common sense. I'm not sure if it's the lack of perspective that's causing this extreme disconnect between opinions that have been widely accepted for years, or something else. Good players have realized that infiltrator is imbalanced long ago, maybe though just after having played it themselves. But even if we say that infiltrator only becomes unbalanced once an above-average player uses it, that's still leave us with a significant portion of the playersbase that can equip a broken class with broken abilities.
  14. TR5L4Y3R


    calling someone an idiot IS an offense
  15. TobiMK

    I thought we had been over this enough times by now, but okay. Problems with the infiltrator are simple: You have access to an unreasonable ratio of risk to reward. Simply by deciding to equip the infiltrator class you gain combat advantages for free that cannot reasonably be countered by other classes. At no effort or risk whatsoever you now have the ability to be aware of your enemy's position and movement. Provided the enemy does not have their own kinds of motion detection, something that happens frequently, you now have an incredibly unfair advantage over any enemy in your vicinity. You can decide when, how and where to engage. As a consequence of this, you now have an immediate advantage before you fight and as you decide to take your first shot. Despite having easier to use weapons (the main skill snipers require is mostly tracking, where as any automatic gun requires that + recoil compensation, and both of those over the duration of however long your engagement takes, not just for one bullet), you may still miss your shot. But that doesn't mean you die. Your superior positioning (which you did not achieve through any application of skill) will now let you escape and reposition. You don't have to worry about potentially being spotted, your cloak will take care of that. You can now start the entire process of setting up your engagement from the start again. At no point in this did the opponent ever have a fair chance, in fact the opponent most likely hasn't even gotten any opportunity to shoot back yet. So far the only bit of skill the infiltrator had to bring up was to track an enemy that likely wasn't even aware of the existence of the infiltrator yet. Said enemy does now have the knowledge if you missed, but still has no idea where the infiltrator will be next. The engagement continues to be skewed in favor of the infiltrator. If the infiltrator fails to convert his advantages more times afterwards, there really is no good excuse. You'd actively have to ignore the crutches you are given to fail in such a 1v1 scenario.

    All of this is just about CQC sniping. In the interest of keeping the comment somewhat short, I haven't even looked at SMG infiltrators (though admittedly, they are not as broken as CQC snipers) or long range snipers, which dominate every outdoors fight at virtually 0 risk ever, and deliver incredibly annoying chip damage to anyone leaving the safety of a building occasionally.

    It is obvious how the game suffers when infiltrators are at play. Yes, the effects infiltrators have own fights become less the bigger the fight is (the infiltrator has more other targets to shoot, the chances of allied motion detection go up, etc.), but for any small fight an infiltrator instantly grants an imbalance in power to whoever has it on their side.
  16. Scroffel5

    Infiltrators have the potential of making a lot of kills if played right. I can't deny that, but they don't impact a decent sized battle as much as the other classes. Think for instance in a push for the point, say in one of those rooms. You spray some recon on so you and your allies can see. That is good, but you already knew they were in that room. You can see them. Now you know the people who are in the room and a few meters outside the room, who could ambush you. You go to push the room with you CQC sniper. You take down one guy and you gotta retreat. Maybe you can take down another guy. Why? Because you can only focus on one target at a time, and you can't take multiple targets firing at you. You aren't a Heavy Assault. You don't help out in a push as much as the Heavy Assault. In the meantime, you could stay back and support the other classes in pushing by headshotting the people who are slow-moving or standing still.

    In Planetside, personal kills don't matter as much as keeping that point. If you can contribute to your team capturing/defending that point, you are being useful. If you can contribute to keeping the other team off the point, you are being useful as well. Infiltrators keep people off the point when they go long range sniping, and they try to help their team capture the point and defend it in CQC, but you contribute less to getting on that point than defending it. If there is a room full of enemies, you have to rely on your team more, because you won't take them all out or absorb enough damage for your team to get in.

    Now, recon has very little risk, but so does reviving players and repairing vehicles. The only disadvantage for the latter two is that when you switch to your tool, you switched off of your weapon and now you can't cause damage. However, that is how you support your allies. They do the damage for you when you repair and revive/heal them. With recon, its the same deal, but you don't have to hold your recon on an object like you do with your repair and heal tools. The other disadvantage with melee depends on the type. If you have recon darts equipped, and you know enemies are near your sundy, and you shoot a recon dart there, chances are the enemy will know something is in that area, and they will probably find your sundy. True, they could have found it anyways, but its even more likely they will find it if there are recon over in that area. Also, if you shoot a recon dart at your feet, enemies can see if from far away, and I know for me that when an Infiltrator shoots recon, I look in that direction to see if I see them. With the Motion Spotter, it does have its advantages over the Recon Darts, but you can only place them at your feet. While enemies can't see it from looking at the minimap, when they are close enough, they can see it. If an enemy is close to you while you place it down, they are gonna hear that little blip sound and see it on their minimap. At least I do. Those are the downsides I have seen in using them, but there are downsides to every tool. However, you can't forget the positives. Yet, make no mistake. There are no unfair advantages. You still have to act on what your recon intelligence tells you, and if you can't execute, then you are dead. You also can't say it is an unfair advantage because that can be applied to the other classes. The HA has an unfair advantage; it can blow you up with a rocket launcher in one hit, and it also does good damage to vehicles. They also have an overshield. The Medic has an unfair advantage; they can heal their health, and if they have Carapace, that is even worse. The Light Assault has an unfair advantage; they can fly right over you. You see, you can't say it is an unfair advantage without comparing it to the advantages another class has. Everything has advantages and disadvantages, but I wouldn't call the recon devices an unfair advantage.

    Another side point I want to mention is that you can't always choose your engagements. If someone is within your recon darts, for instance, and you are also within your darts, they may not know where you are, but you can't deter them from coming towards you if they already are. You can change your path, but that doesn't guarantee that you don't get spotted. You can shoot them as they come towards you, but you already had to because they had decided to walk in that direction, not expecting to be jumped by an Infiltrator (or were they?).

    Are snipers easier than an automatic weapon? I would disagree. I have played both. With an auto, I just point and aim, whereas with a sniper, I have to lead, account for bullet drop, then point and aim. I also have to wait for that rechamber. I do recognize that with an automatic, you have to deal with recoil, but you could just burst your weapons and then your recoil will reset. And yes, it may only take 1 good shot to end the fight if you have a sniper, but if you miss, you are probably dead. Can you run thanks to the recon? Sure you can, but when you run, that is the time you get shot in the back. NAC helps with that, but when you drop the NAC, you are back to taking regular damage, and at this point you are turning around for another shot. You have a 1.1 second rechamber time before you could fire again if you missed, so you already have been in combat for at least that long. That is long enough for them to have already killed you. If you have cover on your side, you can go ahead and run behind it, but there is nothing to stop an enemy from doing the same. We can't suppose an enemy is stupid because they don't have recon, can we? They can reset the battle in their favor by running behind cover, crouch walking back and forth, and waiting for you to go look for them. You can't see them on the radar anymore, so you go back to shoot them, supposing they are behind cover, and they are waiting. Whatever their ability is has probably recharged by now anyways or at least a little bit.

    You may have an advantage and take use of that and still lose because of the other persons advantages. An Infiltrator may be able to decide when they want to fight an enemy thanks to recon, but they still have to do the work. That isn't an argument against Infiltrators, however. It is an argument against the weapons they have and the tools they have. It is easier to argue for the balance of an item in the game instead of the thing that encompasses that item. You can ask for the balance of CQC weapons, maybe limiting their effective range or raising the rechamber time, and that could be doable. That is easier to do. We could, instead, just give all snipers 1x-4x sights and keep their rechambers where they are. That is doable. We can give a disadvantage to recon, though I still don't see a need to. That is also doable. To argue that Infiltrators should be removed, made to cost nanites, "rebalanced", or some other thing doesn't fix the situation without giving ways of how to.

    When you go onto long range snipers and SMGs, I will mention those.
  17. Campagne

    That's funny, given you said pretty much exactly that already.

    [IMG]

    And again, if accuracy at long range was easier one would expect to see a significantly higher average accuracy on long range weapons, but this is simply not the case.

    Actually, it's because when I say something like this:

    It just gets cut out. :rolleyes:

    Actually, these are what are commonly known as "opinions."

    The irony here is so thick it's getting hard to breathe.

    If this were true you would have no difficulty demonstrating this. And yet, as per usual this has yet to be demonstrated.

    No one is saying the infiltrator isn't or at least doesn't have the capacity to be imbalanced, just that its not magically overpowered. In my opinion they're largely only overpowered with SMGs. Pistols and rifles are fine and need good aim and stealth to get the most out of them. But even so they aren't demi-gods wielded only by the elite on a holy quest only they could ever undertake. Honestly, just pull your head out of your *** so we can all just have a nice discussion for once. :p
  18. That_One_Kane_Guy

    Oh look, ammunition.
    Whether or not you can attempt to use motion detection to position yourself to chain engagements doesn't make the Infiltrator any less dependent on them. Either prove the a CQC bolt infiltrator is not dependent on chaining engagements against peer opponents to succeed or concede the point but stop moving the bloody goalposts.
    I invite you to prove that the Jaeger experience correlates to the Live servers in any way, shape or form. Specifically how they can be used as a reference point for balance, player experience, etc.
    "Someone called me out for contradicting my own arguments again, Ha!, it was actually hyperbole all along! Now to get that ad hominem ready, because that plan never fails!"
    Thank you. For future reference will you be adding notations for the posts of yours that are meant to be interpreted literally and the ones that are merely 'literary devices' or will that be dependent on whether you're losing the argument?
    Fixing what, random deaths from sources beyond your control? That is literally the nature of Planetside. Large, chaotic battles where your life is meaningless on it's own and you can be snuffed out in an instant, and respawn in the next. One of the most glowing reviews ever made of this game goes over this in detail pointing out exactly how this sets this title apart from its peers. If I wanted smaller, controlled battles there are other games that do it far better.
    If you want your distinctions to be A. clear, and B. taken seriously, it would behoove you to keep them consistent. A major point of yours earlier was how the skilled players don't use Infiltrator instead of Heavy Assault because of how easy it is, so you clearly are not exclusively referring to the peasants when talking about 'un-competitiveness'.
    At least you acknowledge it's purely theoretical. If you want me to draw that Nirvana Fallacy you're on out to its logical conclusions though things are going to start looking really silly.
    Citations Needed.
    Citations Needed.
    No the thread you are posting in on the forums you have blatantly discounted as immaterial by the people you demonstrably consider irrelevant does not count.
  19. TobiMK

    Whether you kill 5 enemies on the point by clicking on their head with 1 bullet each, or by shooting them with an automatic gun with 5-10 bullets each doesn't make too much of a difference in the end. The HA isn't a MAX. The overshield lets it tank 3-4 bullets generally. If you're pushing a point, you'll get much more coming to you. An infiltrator playing angles a bit more cautiously will be able to kill easier than a HA that actually has to enter the enemy's line of fire.

    Placing motion detection in such a way that it doesn't give you away isn't a particularly difficult task. Sure, it will happen that you place a motion spotter and someone happens to be right outside the door and can instantly engage you. But this really isn't much of an issue if you read the battle correctly.

    The inability to act on an unfair advantage doesn't suddenly make it fair.

    Total knowledge of an enemy's position is easily a bigger advantage than an overshield/self-healing/being able to fly.

    That is literally what CQC sniping is.

    This all goes away when sniping in close ranges and becomes irrelevant when sniping at long ranges.

    This means you positioned yourself badly.

    That is all me and others are asking for. I don't want them removed entirely or even fundamentally changed. There are small things that would already be nice. Making it so that snipers cannot scope while cloaked, making it so that Sensor Shield removes any and all detection from recon devices, removing Nano Armor Cloak, making all snipers more like the Daimyo and making the Daimyo no longer be semi-automatic, etc. All this would already help with some of the frustrations that infiltrators cause daily.
  20. TobiMK

    As explained previously, the accuracy is skewed because good players use the CQC snipers disproportionately more.

    I cut that out because I debated that point in the paragraph above it.

    Actually, these are what are commonly known as "opinions."

    The irony here is so thick it's getting hard to breathe.

    I'm not saying that either. I am saying that infiltrator currently has tools that make it imbalanced, not gamebreakingly overpowered. These are things that should be looked at, but as I said elsewhere in this thread, they don't require any immediate hotfixing. It's been 7 years, people have adapted. But at the same time that does not mean that imbalances must remain in the game for longer. I listed a few small potential fixes already in my post responding to Scrofffel, right above this one.


    SMGs require them to actually be in combat. They are surely not as imbalanced as snipers.

    I usually wouldn't come to this Forum if I wanted a nice discussion.