Dear "MUH STRATEGY" guys

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by UberNoob1337101, Aug 17, 2020.

  1. UberNoob1337101

    **** off and don't encourage/force people to play to win alerts. Fin.





    I really used to care for alerts, I've even made plenty, plenty of extremely toxic, salty posts and threads on this forum just because of "fun" experiences I've had while playing for the win. The game became a lot more enjoyable once I stopped playing for certain objectives and played the game 'cause it was fun.


    If you want ppl to care and play for strategic goals :

    1) make playing the locally underpopped faction (the 20% in the 80%/20% fight) actually enjoyable and meaningful to play. I've tried attacking and defending in many hopeless fights, and the experience was soul-crushing. There's literally nothing you can do as an underpopped faction if your enemies aren't stupid. They can recover their losses almost instantly and they mean almost nothing, while you're crippled if you lose any of your assets. Fighting while out-popped shouldn't be a chore, it would be a first step towards actual strategic play.


    2) either bring old alerts back or revamp them. I find them genuinely detrimental to most people's gameplay. They proc too fast and last too short, they make long, grinding fights of old last only 3 hours tops, construction players have no time to build anything significant and have it be used except for free ESF pads or routers, maybe OS if outfit orbitals don't delete it from existence.

    if you want to win alerts be ready to become Quasimodo from all the carries, break your U button from all the redeploys to counter ghostcappers, attack bases only to get seal-clubbed by 30+ redeployside Heavies along with at least 3 A2G ESFs or zerg. Alerts massively discourage good, interesting tactics because they're too short, you need quick, guaranteed results i.e zerg to beat others. Maybe they shouldn't be based around taking territory, rather something else that doesn't encourage neither farming nor zerging. Either way, 90 minutes for an alert is way too little. 3 hours was just right IMO.

    The meltdown alerts encourage ppl who play to win to use some of the scummiest, fight-ruining tactics in the game and the fact is, if you have **** fights, you have **** gameplay. And no amount of caring for alerts will make 99% of people, including myself make want to put up with said ****** gameplay. I'd like to contribute to my faction's win, but fun is more important in game.

    Current alerts make massive, epic fights counter-productive. The strategic layer and gameplay of PS2 are at odds with one another, they should compliment each other instead of invalidating one another.

    At least there are so many alert procs that I never run out of certs.


    3) add actually viable tactics. Can't have strategy if you have no tactics. At the moment, strictly looking at alerts, zerging gives the best, fastest results. Construction could be molded into an anti-zerg tool. Encourage experimentation. IDK. But shoving an entire platoon into a point building shouldn't be a guaranteed i-win tactic, nor should be spamming GSD sundies into an amp station. Everything should have it's place.

    It's why people like biolabs, they break the mold, are almost impossible to kill while providing quick satisfaction. Every inch inside a biolab matters, everything is so condensed that you can be shot from everywhere and flanking is easy, so safeguarding paths to capture points is just as important as capping the points themselves. Control of surrounding bases gives extra spawn locations, ironically making biofarms one of the most strategically demanding bases in the game. Most other bases are repetitive, consisting of shoving everything into capture points, and having the surrounding area barely matter. Most hard-to-take objectives aren't worth it in comparison to small bases that give the same amount of territory%, but don't take even a fraction of effort to take.




    I'm sick and tired of armchair generals and outfitsiders acting like alerts are everything in PS2 when I feel like it's the thing that disrupts gameplay the most in PS2. PS2 is many things to many people, and current alerts by design disrupt gameplay for most play-styles that don't revolve around them. It didn't used to be that way. Days-long battles at the Crown were some of my most memorable moments in PS2, if something similar happened today, Meltdown alerts would inevitably kill it after 3 hours of a continent opening.
    • Up x 1
  2. NotziMad

    lol

    Playing for Alerts is intended gameplay. You can't suggest that players, in a sandbox in which you probably will say so yourself, everyone is free to do as they please, don't play the game as intended? That's just dumb.


    I'm not going to debate (for the millionth time) whether that is good or bad or this or that, point is, it's in the game.


    What I don't get is, if you don't want to play alerts, who's preventing you from NOT playing them? Cause in my experience, that street is a one way street ; anyone who doesn't want to play the alerts doesn't have to.

    But if too many players do not play the alert, then the players who do want to play it can't.
  3. DarkStarAnubis

    So in your mind other players should choose their playstyle to suit your needs :)?
  4. Demigan

    His point is that while Alerts are intended gameplay, their unintended consequences are the promotion of anti-fun gameplay. Avoid the big epic fights that PS2 is supposed to deliver and make fighting your force the worst experience your enemy has so you can cap things as unopposed as possible.

    He's asking for alerts and the strategies&tactics that are needed to win them are aligned with where the game is most fun: hard fought equal battles, and providing stragetic and tactical options to battle overpops so being underpopped can still be fun.

    Basically he's doing the job of improving alerts you want without needing to remove fun content, by actually making the alerts fun.


    Also isnt it hypocritical that you say "if too few people play the alert the one's who like it can't" while you are proposing to permanently remove all Biolabs and the fun it gives for the lionshare of the playerbase?
    • Up x 2
  5. Johannes Kaiser

    So you want people who care about alerts to **** off and the devs to make them viable at once? Mixed signals...:)
    I do still play for the win with a tiny force, I will not **** off, but I fully agree that alerts need to become more interesting and fun, your points there are generally good.

    I'll quickly go and copy my list of potential changes from a few mintues ago in another thread...second....
    Here we go:
    1) Better and more interesting rewards for alerts and some way for people who log in late to still participate and get something emaningful so they actually bother. Needs especially interesting potential rewards for alert winners (just not too unlikely on the loot tables, otherwise few people will care). Then people care more about the alert, and winning it.
    2) Redesign bases in a way that both attacker and defender have equally long/short ways from their (potential) sawn locations to the control point(s). Also those ways need to be about as safe as one another - length of way is moot if they can be shelled into oblivion menawhile. Especially for defender pathing that's important as the attackers usually have vehicle superiority in ground and air and therefore rarely suffer bombardments on the way to the points. This way defending gets more interesting and might pull some people out of the pure zerg mentality, as well as making the sustained fights many people like more likely to occur.
    3) Allow defenders some prober fortification options, like give them a terminal where they can pull a limited number of PMB buildings and place it inside the and around the base. They need a comparatively quick build time, though. Also makes defending more interesting and makes different fights over the same base a bit more diverse and keeps them interesting.
    4) Make the space between bases meaningful. This can be done by puling PMBs out of their hole, ancouraging defenders to push with their vehicles against the attackers before they arrive (instead of hunkering down and fortifying - to the limited extent that's possible, see above). Makes travel less of a sightseeing tour and more of a fighting advance.

    For your wish for tactical options I'll add one: Secondary objectives in bases that speed up or dely the cap. Speeding up for attackers, delying for defenders, obviously. Could be stuff like "hack the base's mainframe terminal", "plant your faction's flag on the roof of the highest building", "blow up object XY" and so on. And the other side gets counter-objectives when the one side succeeds, in this case "take back control of the mainframe", "destroy the flag and/or repace it with your own" and "replace the destroyed object XY". Hell, the first two are even class-specific, so that can be as interesting and mixed-up as you pelase.
    • Up x 2
  6. NotziMad



    I'll say what I said again, but in different words, maybe that will help.


    Players who don't want to play for the Alert don't have to. But players who don't want to ignore it don't always get that choice.

    While players who do want to play for the Alert can do so without preventing those who don't from enjoying themselves, those who don't want to play the Alert can prevent, do prevent those who do from enjoying themselves.
    • Up x 2
  7. pnkdth

    I think it is a mixed bag. Alerts and such are a lot of fun if you're rolling with an outfit or squad with a common goal. I'd go as far as to say it is the best experience I've ever had in PS2. Random funtimes in bio labs doesn't even compare. However, it isn't because the alerts themselves are fun, it is because I'm working with a group of people. The alerts were just there and sometimes we play them and sometimes we don't.

    Iwish alerts were just replaced entirely with a mission system you activate on an individual basis and/or squad/platoon/outfit scale. You decide when they start, you can choose objectives you want to do, and VOILA the devs will have any ever increasing data base of what people love about PS2 instead of the rather clumsy design of alerts. It would also be super easy to balance rewards and have different kinds of challenge modes. In short, you get to contribute when and where you want to and it all counts towards something (continent conquest, achievements, cosmetics, gear, etc).

    We're in this sandbox together, and no matter how you feel about Bio Labs there's a lot of fun rides and toys strewn about in there.
    • Up x 6
  8. That_One_Kane_Guy

    Agreed. When I'm playing solo if there's a good Biolab fight I'll happily jump in- usually you get to face some good opponents and it's a good place to try out new guns/setups, but when I'm with my friends I deliberately avoid them. They just aren't a really good experience for new players.
    • Up x 1
  9. RabidIBM

    While telling me to **** off was probably not the best way to encourage constructive dialogue, I'll look past it and try to engage with some of the points you made.

    There is absolutely an issue with the game not having enough good fights around the map, and more needs to be done to encourage players and leaders to show up to fights even when they will be at a disadvantage. Nobody enjoys participating in a 90/10 "fight", but I would like to see reasons added to even attempt a 65/35. It is very rewarding to win those when you are the 35%, but that doesn't happen very often.

    There is an issue with not enough being done about zerging, and this only got worse recently. The best counter to over population is splash damage, so I don't know what they were thinking adding a floor deployable that gives everyone blast resistance. More splash damage would encourage better spacing, creating motivation to have one squad hold one location, and another squad hold another location, instead of 48 people in one room. It would also encourage coordination between platoons to have 1 platoon on 1 base, as 96+ population anywhere would be a massive feed.

    I agree with you that redeploy side is a massive issue. Platoons should have to get organized in transports to move to a new base to get rid of the 3:30 of no fight at all followed by overwhelming flash mob in the final 30 seconds BS.

    I agree with you about bringing back old alerts, they refreshingly mixed the game up. I, as a player who plays for strategy, hate only having one type of alert to play. Yes please, bring back the variety.

    So, there we go. Hopefully this added some positivity to what was a negative post.
    • Up x 4