Shortening Alerts

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Glenndal, Apr 25, 2020.

  1. Glenndal

    What would happen if alerts were reduced from 1.5 hours to 45 minutes and bases capped 1/4 faster ( so if a base currently took 4 minutes to cap it would now take 3)? Thoughts?

    I personally feel like alerts are too long right now. It often seems like a faction manages to win for the first hour, and then half an hour later another alert finishes on a different continent and that faction floods in to the current alert and wipes the floor with the team that held most of the map for an hour. Could just be my perception though.
  2. Johannes Kaiser

    Not to mention the constant threat of disconnects, forfeiting all rewards in the end.
    • Up x 1
  3. strove

    Most of the time capping a base is working into and holding the point, not actually running the timer down. You shorten the alert you limit the amount of bases that can cap with resistance so the likelihood of the faction that triggered the alert (usually starting around 40%) will just win.


    You can literally leave the game and come back, it retains your time participated so long as you are there for the end of the alert. I do wish they would grant rewards if youre not online for the end but did participate during the alert though
  4. Johannes Kaiser

    Maybe that's a very recent change, together with reducing the amount of disconnects in general. But a while ago i was disconnected every 2 hours or so, and I can tell you I never got decent alert rewards because it usually gave me the boot about 10 min before the end, and getting in again it counted me in for 7 min.
    • Up x 1
  5. Caesar_REDMIST

    Alerts time are fine. But they should fix disconnects. If I play 1 hour 20 minutes and then disconnect by mistake and come back online I will have only the points for 5-10 minutes. Is not fair.
    • Up x 2
  6. The Shady Engineer

    +1 on fixing disconnects. Emerald prime time has been crazy unstable ever since Escalation and it sucks to get disconnected 10 minutes before an alert ends and get fk all rewards even though you fought hard for most of its duration.

    That said, shortening alerts is not the answer. If a faction starts an alert with 50% territory and the alert only goes for an hour or 45 minutes there can only be 2 outcomes:

    1) Faction auto wins the alert because there is not enough time for the other factions to overtake.
    2) Faction gets hyper double-teamed into the dirt.

    Both result in less than enjoyable gameplay. I think 1.5 hrs as it is currently is actually very fair and enjoyable.
  7. Glenndal

    I somewhat disagree with the first point. The timer determines how long you need to hold onto the point. By reducing the cap time you make all bases slightly harder to defend, even if the base is under contention. If people are dead set on fighting over that particular facility, it won't have much impact, but flipping who has the spawn room and lattice definitely does something.

    In my mind, this also makes it easier to attack around an enemy zerg of overwhelming size by going to different locations. Basically if the enemy is a big dumb ball of people taking one base at a time, this could make it easier for much smaller coordinated groups to win by outmaneuvering them on the map in many locations. Lattice greatly limits how effective that is though, so maybe it wouldn't actually matter.

    For the second point, you're sort of right about it favoring the triggering faction, but that's another reason for reducing the cap timer. In theory, the more territory you have, the more points along the lattice you need to defend, the harder it gets. A shortened cap timer means the other factions will need less time to catch up.

    I like the idea of getting rewards for the end of the alert while offline, and honestly that MIGHT be a good chunk of the reason I want shorter alerts. Alerts are longer than the amount of time I usually like to play in one sitting (not always, sometimes I'll just play 3-5 hours at a go, but definitely not every day). If that's true for a lot of players, maybe they would be better from a quality of life perspective if they were shorter.

    I'm definitely not SURE about any of this, but its just how I've been thinking about it. Like maybe the times I'm imagining are bad, but it feels like Alerts would be improved by being slightly shorter in some way.
  8. Glenndal


    Those are definitely the worst case scenarios, and it COULD be that bad. I don't think it definitely would be though.

    The reason I suspect that the current timings aren't optimal is because I don't know if they've ever been changed. Cap timers I suspect have probably been tweaked at various stages, but have alerts ever NOT been 1.5 hours? It seems unlikely that the perfect value was found on the first try. Even if it turns out that its the perfect value, I'd feel better about it if we tried 45 minutes and tried 2 hours for a few months each. (Also maybe they have been different at some point, but I haven't found anything that says they were)

    And cap timer is very important for this working well. An obvious absurd scenario is if it took an hour to cap a point (no resistance), and alerts were an hour long, this would basically guarantee the triggering team a win. Not definitely, but for sure not many facilities would see action in that alert. Similarly, if alerts were still an hour long and capping was basically instantaneous, the game would turn into a wierd version of arcade catapillar, where everyone races across the lattice to warpgate the other two teams the fastest. Combat would happen at all, but most of the alert would be this dumb race.

    Like, this ISN'T a suggestion thread. I actually do find the current alert times enjoyable when they fit into my schedule, and they're not bad for sure. I'm trying to get a feel for the ways they could be better.
  9. The Shady Engineer

    Original alerts were 2 hours long. First 30 minutes were probing attacks, maybe a single point base that no one cares about flips. Next hour was major territory plays with the last 30 minutes, and last 10 minutes in particular being clutch plays with massive population dumps and MAX crashes. The grenade spam and screen shake sure were something as 96 people tried to force their way into a single story point room. Desperate charges and last stand holds on one base to buy the boys time to cap another... I miss 2014.

    We also had 45 minute (or was it 1 hour?) alerts during the Victory Points era of Planetside. Played out like I mentioned, either the triggering factions won by a landslide or got double teamed into oblivion. There was the occasional nail biter alert but those were few and far between.
  10. LodeTria

    As a faction that wants to win, you take & hold the bases that are easily defended like triple pointers and hold them during the start & don't over extend. Normally these bases have are connected to smaller easier to cap bases that you can flip easily for score later in the alert.

    If you faction goes over-board and takes too much territory then you usually get double teamed.
  11. Glenndal

    Excellent. That's the info I was looking for. As I mentioned, fiddling with the cap timer is a potential way of making shorter alerts more dynamic and I personally would like them to be shorter, but this makes me much more comfortable with the current time.