This is what I'm talking about : (screenshot)

This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

EXACTLY. This would NEVER happen a few years ago. NEVER.

I'm really serious, I'm super serious, dead ****ign serious. There's NO WAY ANYONE woudl let this happen.

It's not that no one gives a **** about the map anymore and that all the players who do are gone.

It's that the huge majority of a certain faction, at a certain time doesn't give a ****.

It's not that people are just looking for a fight and don't care about anything else. That's simplistic.

Because if NC was just looking for a fight and nothing else. They wouldnt conquer the ******* continent would they? They wouldn't push all the way to teh ******* tech plant AND GHOST CAP IT?


Cause you know what a ghost cap is right? I mean it's got more than one meaning. Originally, it meant someone caps the A point, and leaves like a ghost, leaving behind him nothing, no one. Hence, the term ghost cap.

However it's common to also use that word when someone stays at the base to cap it, ready to defend it if anyone comes. That"s also a ghost cap.

But at the end of the day, a ghost cap is someone or some people who capture a base without fighting. Because there are no enemies there.

You get it now? WITHOUT FIGHTING.

You can't say "people just wana fight." They are GHOST CAPPING and that necessarily means NO FIGHT. So they aren't doing it FOR THE FIGHT are they?

But that's not all.

No one on VS is cares enough to go defend.

It would be a fight.

Get it?

This is the cancer that PS2 has been suffering from for a long time now.

Sorry, I wanted to edit, but I can't anymore.

I just thought of something else.

As a sundy driver, I pay a lot of attention to things like population, in particular, of course, in a specific fight.

One thing I noticed, and it may be because of how the spawn system works, but I think it's mostly because of human nature, people don't want a fight.

They don't.

Not a real one.

You can tell because they FLOCK, and I mean, they ******* spawn every split second to a fight that is already in their favour and also already has a high population for their faction while on the other hand, if it's the other way round, they don't.

In fact, those that are fighting an unfair fight not in their favour, usually leave.

People don't want a fight. That's a ******* myth.


__

ANd that's one of the things, one of the simple things devs of any pvp game should understand and deal with, because they have tools to make a game fun for everyone.

DBG / Rogue Games. I have no idea why, maybe they just don't get it, but at any rate, they don't do this. In fact they do the opposite.

They cater to every vice in human nature they can. They promote bullies. They support esf inantry farmers. They give Liberators tools so they can be absolutely overwhelmingly despicable. I mean their biggest achievement this year, so far, is to give outfits an almost invulnerable flying godlike machine that totally annhiliates everything bellow it.

It seems any chance they can get, the devs provide ways to the players to be dicks. Basically.

Instead of promoting traditional virtues like honour, courage and so on.

Why is that I wonder?

That's kinda the point people have been trying to make. The Ghostcappers (people who "try to win") are capturing stuff without a fight, while everyone else is trying to enjoy a good fight somewhere else. The supposed goal of the game kills fights, it encourages zerging or avoiding fights, it encourages to make the other players leave so players will fight in the dullest, worst method possible to make them leave. "When given the chance players will optimize the fun out of a game", and that's what these people trying to capture a continent are doing.

People have learned. They learned that pursuing the capture of a continent isn't fun. They don't want to try to cap a continent, they want to sit in a never ending biolab fight or around the tri-state area of the Crown because that's where the fights are. If you want people to pursue the capture of a continent again make it god damned fun. Don't blame the players for avoiding the bleak, sad state that the game's "goals" are in. Blame the devs and ask them to align the player goals with those of the game by improving the game design. Remove KD, focus on goals, add secondary objectives, change the flow of battle around bases so fights don't stop after a capture but simply spill out into the field immediately, change how defenses work so spawnrooms aren't death-traps for the defenders and they have an actual chance to retake the point within the few minutes they have. There's a million-and-one things that have to be fixed to make your vision of continental fights work. Don't blame the players in this instance, blame the game.

My personal guess is this is during low-pop time and some small outfit is trying to get their resource ducks in a row. I know we'd do it, because it is just about the only f*cking way to get them in a reasonable time.
Like, on Wednesday we capped Crossroads, Regent Rock and Peris Amp during off-pop Indar, shortly after that an alert started and we held the two green ones for the entirety. All our resources were restocked thanks to that, and we most definiely could not have done that had we had to compete with zergfits in gigantic fights that go nowhere (as we all know that's an Indar thing to do).

I mean look at this.

Seriously, ******* look at this.









OK

So for those of you who can't read a map (and trust me, there's like a million of you out there who can't read a ******* map).


My cursor is on Amerish Apex Reserve . The base immediatly next to the VS warpgate to the northof the map but in the middle lane..

Found it?

ok, so check the population stats to the right.

This is where one of hte biggest fights on the continent is happening. Proof of this is the orange explosion looking balls you can tell on that region but that you do not see anywhere else on the map. There's an even 12-24 TR and VS fighting for that base.

WHICH IS CUT OFF.

I cut it off.

So "normally", what would happen is most of these VS would then push the top lane to secure the top warpgating base (Jagged Lance Mine) and push down that lane. Leaving the dumb 12-24 TR in that other base that they can't cap and that is cut off.

Logic right?

That's not all.

"Normally", a couple experienced players would go for NC Arsenal, but never mind that. No one is doing that, obviously, but never mind.


You might say "but you just cut it off, they need time to realise". TO which I reply, no, I cut thsi ******* base off like 20 minutes ago. That may not seem like a long time, but in PlanetSide 2 time, that's a lot. That's ******* huge even.

_______________________________________________



All right so that exhibit number 1.

Exhibit number two, you can find again on the VS front, to the south at the Biolab.

As you can see, it's been cut off by NC.

But not only that, the next 2 bases in that lane have been taken as well. And in the other lane, SplitPeak Pass is cutting them off too, one base away.

You might say, "oh it's only been a couple minutes, they are so busy fighting, they didnt notice."

Let me tell you how long THAT one has been cut off. There's an Alert, as you can tell from the op of the map. If you look at the timer, you'll see there's 57 minutes left.

So let me put it this way.

THE ******* BIOLAB WAS CUT OFF BY NC BEFORE THE ALERT EVEN FUICKING STARTED.
______


So to sum it up.

We've got most of the VS population fighting in a cut off biolab against most of the NC population.

We've got a very big chunk of the current VS population fighting in another base that is cut off as well.

If I were new to the game, I'd be thinking, "they haven't realised". Or maybe I would be thinking actually you know what? I really don't know what the **** I'd be thinking tbh.

But right now, I literally don't understand, I think as much as I can, but I just don't get it, seriously, I'm at a ******* loss.


___

Lastly.

Some may say "oh people just wana fight." (I addressed that one in this very thread, at the beginning).

Some may say "oh it's always been like that. To whcih I reply, ******* NO IT WASNT ALWAYS LIKE THAT FFS. 2 years ago, maybe 3 even, who cares, this would NEVER have happened. Never!

That's the reason I'm so ******* shocked about this. Seriously, we are reaching ******* levels of ******* random ********, my own ******* PC feels like it's gona explode.

PS. it's hard estimating the pop without having access to pop websites (it's possible, but I didn't use them at teh time).

That said, in that last screenshot, the fact that the Alert is not one of those "reduced lanes" one with a smaller timer, pretty much garantees a certain level of population.

(I actually don't know what that figure is)

Here's a bonus thing to consider: navigating the continent (aka finding a fight) is usually miserable.

It doesn't take long for a player to learn that, in smaller squads/solo, physically moving from one base to another just makes you a free kill - ESPECIALLY if you're trying to move to a base where a fight is already taking place but the game won't let you go there (more on that later.)

The most reliable ways to create a fight with >24 players are: you create a large outfit which might make a large fight when they go somewhere or might just ghost cap, or you follow another large outfit/zerg which might make a large fight when they go somewhere or might just ghost cap.

And even then, there can be a lot of down time to organize players into making a fight! You figure, most players who are willing to have THAT much downtime in a shooter are probably playing Arma or something.

So everyone's encouraged to play redeployside. And of course, the devs tried a bandaid solution to that: sometimes now the game just won't let you deploy in some places randomly, instead of fixing why everyone redeploys in the first place.

And you know what the latest iteration of this redeploy system does? It prevents you from finding fights! Do you want to go to a fight where your team has 2% population? Go ahead! Do you want to go to a fight where the enemy literally cannot capture the base no matter what? Go ahead! Do you want to go for a critical base your team is currently losing that will determine the outcome of an alert but your team has 60 players there and the enemy has 59? **** you.

(The thing I love the most is the join combat button, more often than not, lets you spawn at the base the redeploy system won't let you go to. Whatever the "join combat" button uses to determine where combat is, USUALLY results in the same answer the redeploy system gets when it tries to figure out where you shouldn't go... The "fix" to redeployside was to literally not let you go where the combat is - by the game's very own definition of "combat"!)

This is a game people typically play because they want lots of people to shoot at and want to have lots of people shoot back at them. Then the game does everything in its power to prevent them from doing exactly that. So if there's a fight in Amerish Apex Reserve when nobody can capture it? Sign me up! Who knows where or when I'll be able to get into another fight?

(And Tawrich can burn for all I care. I'm not going to try and get in there all by myself and save it. <12 enemies? Place is like a ghost town anyway.)

You've made a few points, and I agree, I think you're right on a lot of them.

However, and I know I may sound like a broken record, and I also know I may sound like the only ******* madman in the streets holding up a sign saying DOOM IS UPON US, but that's because all the people like me, who think like me, who play like me, and that is, all the people for who a fight is not an end in itself have left the ******* game.

With the exception of prime time.

I mean, you must play at prime time right? If not every day at least sometimes. This **** would NEVER happen. NEVER

I've been in a few outfits over the years. You know what they ALL had in common? (and I played in outfits in all factions).

ALL OF THEM (and there's more than a few) were objective oriented.

You never got a ******* Friday Night Ops with 2 ******* platoons and organised team speak comms (though these days its Discord isn't it?) that just looked for a fight? Some random place to shoot at the enemy for no reason?

NEVER. ******* NEVER.

Each and everyone one of the outfits I spent some time in, at least for squad play, ops, but even ******* public platoons, would ALL be objective oriented. NO EXCEPTIONS. EVERYONE would be working very hard to win alerts, to save bases, to conquer the continent.

And that's still true today. At prime time.

So if the game was intended to provide fights for players to fight it, at the end of the day, this game doesn't have ****ign Alerts just so everyone can ignore them. That gameplay always was the main gameplay of this game.

It cohabitated with others, it's a sandobx, but if anyone asked you what PS2 was about, you would say it's open world PvP combined arms, tactical game in which FACTIONS fight for TERRITORY.

People who "just wana fightr" aren't fighting for anyone but themselves.

I could go on and on but I'll stop here, but I swear to god, I just don't get why people who "just wana fight" for no other reason than to fight don't go play some ******* MOBA or something.

I mean just ******* delete all the bases in al the continents.

Just get rid of them, entirely. Leave only the biolab. Then you could call it Biolab Online 2.

Is that REALLY what the devs had in mind when they made this game? HELL ******* NO.

Yeah I get ya. I mean: when an outfit does something for the sake of capturing territory or for success in an alert, there's no guarantee anyone's going to respond to them and they end up essentially ghost capping (even without meaning to) and even that happens in prime time!

Here's what I remember happening the second to last time I played on prime time in Emerald:
Indar was unlocked for a real long time. We were in the southeast warpgate. I was getting tired and ready to go for the night but kind of wanted to do an Indar alert before logging off. I saw NC start to gobble up all our territory on the east side of Indar, and deliberately ignored that fight! Believe it or not, it's because I still TRY to enjoy the territory control aspect of PS2 even though every update DBG makes regarding it seems to punish that, so I really wanted to start the alert - where my goals and idea of how the game should be played shine! (Besides, starting in last place generally seems to be beneficial, like how starting in first place almost guarantees you lose.)

I wasn't the only one.

Someone in the command chat got mad nobody was defending and just letting NC gobble up all those bases. Multiple people responded: let NC ghost cap half our territory so they can trigger the alert.

When the alert started, the NC outfits involved left to go fight elsewhere and we quickly gobbled all our territory back with very little resistance.

All those bases flipping back and forth must've taken place over 45-60 minutes, and at least one faction was conspiring to not fight at those bases at all!

It seems the game is designed (probably unintentionally, but designed nonetheless) so objective-oriented players will deliberately kill fights for the sake of objectives, but fight-oriented players will just as easily surrender objectives for the sake of being in a fight.

Welcome to the fallout from the Lattice. This is all part of the long term plan to funnel PS2 into a strictly tactical shooter. Hamburger hill, 'spawn, run, shoot, kill die, rinse, repeat'. It makes 'balance' easier to code (although you'd never know it), and eschewing strategic game play means you don't have to spend development resources and brain cycles on supporting all of the implied metas and real-world impact that holding territory might actually have in a large-scale battle.

Very few deal with ghost-caps anymore because very few even open the map anymore. They click 'instant action', or they spawn near their squad, and start firing. It's a tragedy, too - pre-lattice, squads will circle behind the front and cut off territory, infiltrators could 'pre-create' problems ahead of the advancing forces, etc. That's all gone now.

In my experience, on Cobalt, all that isn't really gone. What I mean is, it's not like this all the time and every day. For example, this would never happen on a populated continent at prime time. That's possibly also because of active outfits (who generally are mostly active at that time); the huge majority of outfits play the objectives, you rarely see an outfit organising Friday Night Special Ops that will simply go to a biolab and ignore the continent.

But left without outfit / squad play, players don't bother anymore.

Still, symbolically, I think it's important, but particularly, it is a trend that has been growing for maybe a couple years now, it's (what I fee is) a problem that has been becoming worse in recent times.

I don't think that's really new. I've always been under the impression that people don't really look for a good fight.
Most look for a win. Or rather the impression of winning. So instead of building a defense and gather their forces to stop an attacker, which requires EFFORT, they will gather in ANOTHER LANE and push where there's nobody.

Result: everybody is under the impression they're doing good since they capture base after base.

How often do you see the SW faction on Indar push all the way up to Dahaka while the SE faction is threatening Peris ?
Happens all the time !!!

The faction that wins is generally the side that is double-teamed the least.


The greatest strength of PS2 is that people can do what they want to do. The greatest weakness is that they usually do what you would prefer they didn't.

I still can't believe anyone would think the Hex system was any better.

Let's put it like this: The Hex system offered more tactical options to the attacker, but reduced the tactical options of the defender to almost zero. Attackers only had to spread out to the surrounding bases, any base where enough defenders accumulated would simply be abandoned, and the other bases would be taken over before the defenders had any chance of a good counter-assault. On top of that the act of Ghost Capping was a rampant unstoppable cancer. As a defender showing up at a single base you didn't know what you would find. A player that just goes down the line of bases starting the cap and moving on? An infiltrator hiding out in the base and capping the point over and over again until you leave? Or maybe you'll find it's a small squad that simply murders the little resistance that you can offer because there was little way for your allies to know that it wasn't just a ghost cap. With little way to determine what was happening and this system sapping much more time from the defenders than the attackers it was a tactical void where no option was really worth exploring.

The hex system was a cancerous piece of crap slated 100% in the favor of the attackers, taking away any choice for defenders to enjoy it or make any tactical decision. The only defence was offence by ghost-capping yourself to cut off territory or using your own zerg. F all that.

And again for all the people shouting "but mah tactics!". All the "extra" tactical value the hex system had to offer it took away from the defenders, and then some more. Lattice is by no means great, but compared to the Hex system it's a godsend. PS2 wouldn't have survived for 4 years if it had kept the Hex system.

Welcome to Re-deployZone 2

I've thought for a long time that when a hex is cut off, the point should go neutral and start a cap timer for the whole base to go neutral as well. If the base isn't reconnected in time, defenders lose their spawns and taking the base becomes trivial.

Getting cut off should be an emergency.

the game is basically a half done early access scam since 2013.

the dev team clearly has no real level artists so all the bases are ugly and lame and i dont care about fighting for them.

infantry combat is spawn die spawn die spawn die spawn die and that got old years ago.

a 300 man fight is just boring for me since its an unorganized repetitive meat grinder and the outfits that made big fights fun left a long time ago for good reason.

the devs that knew what was wrong and wanted to fix it had no power or say to change anything and the dumpster fire burned on as usual.

there is allot of stuff wrong and it really just got worse with all the nerfs but hey heres a new gun for 10$ now piss off


btw didnt read any of it. lololloloololololloololololol

ANY type of linking is bad. Why is there a linking system in the first place ? What's the justification for this limitation ? Just make every facility on the map worth a certain amount of victory points. Faction that has most when alert ends, wins. Any facility can be captured at any time. TERRAIN and SUPPLIES (by means of sunderers) should be the only things that influence where you can or cannot go. Not some cheesy 'magical' lattice network...

Their faction can be warpgated in the south, if a platoon can travel all the way to the north, why arbitrarily prevent them from taking Dahaka or Mao if they can/want ?

This would also limit the power of the zerg, since the zerg, no matter how big it gets, only controls ONE hex/facility...

Let's just start with the "limits the power of the Zerg".

In the past we already had the Hex system and it is closer to your idea than the Lattice system. But Zergs were even more rampant during that time than when Lattice was introduced. Zergs would even actively avoid each other when they met, taking bases next to each other rather than attacking directly.

Ignoring the lessons of the past and assuming your magical idea of "less zergs" becomes a reality, you ignore that it wouldn't stop at zergs. If your idea worked like you say it would then the biggest fight would be 12-24 anywhere on the map at best, with most fights being 1-12. This would have been true with the old population numbers, but even more with current population numbers.

Then there's your claim about terrain and supplies. Unfortunately people would simply use the cheapest methods to get around: Stealth Flashes, Valkyrie drops and other such tactics. Why bother with supplies and terrain when you can simply drive stealthed around your opponent, steal a vehicle pad behind enemy lines for a Sunderer and deploy that somewhat hidden? Even if you curb redeployside it would still be the most effective method to get territory. The amount of tactical acumen needed: Practically nothing. The amount of tactical skill required to defend against this: Impossible. You need too many people to stop a single incursion like this, ignoring the fact that Valkyries for example would have an easy time dropping a few infiltrators behind enemy lines without anyone really being able to stop many of them.

So the best method to defend against this? Zerging with redeployside ofcourse! Creating a platoon and redeploying to any base in distress to overpop it and clear it out, then moving to the next one would be the most effective defense. And if you reduce the effectiveness of redeployside you would discourage anyone from defending anything but large facilities. Why fight over small facilities if it's a futile action?


In conclusion: Your idea is crap. You haven't through it through, you haven't looked at how history already shows the problems of the system you are proposing which you would basically push into over-drive. You would boost the exact problem you are trying to prevent.

I didn't mean that removing the Lattice NOW would solve the problem. The Lattice is only one factor in what has resulted in the current gaming experience. I just don't understand why they implemented a linking system TO START WITH. My point is that a real open world, with no lattice/hex/whatever layer upon it, would have been better to start with.
From this base, I think the game would have evolved in a better direction in every aspects.

This and more expensive vehicles. It should never be a good choice to spawn an ESF/valk just to taxi you somewhere. It should be a TERRIBLE choice... yet it happens all the time in this game... you should be pissed when your vehicle is destroyed