T.I. Alloys is not the problem

I mean, yeah, armour is useless. I'd be nice if they had a use but so long as defenders have invincible, endless spawns that can only be removed by taking the base completely they'll remain that way. Since you seem to think that defenders are at a disadvantage somehow, despite it being so stacked in their favour, everything else you've said is completely pointless.

Ask yourself this: Why would you ever form an armour colomn if your enemy never has to worry about their primary logistics being killed by your colomn?

Oh yeah, armor isn't useful at all! You don't need it to get your Sunderer to the next base. You can't use it to suppress the defenders and prevent them from attacking your sunderer spawns. You can't use them to spawncamp or shut down lanes inside a base if they are in your firing line. Useless I tell you!

The fact that you think that an invincible endless spawn automatically means the defenders have all the advantages is ludicrous.

If I ask myself if i would build an armor column I would say "yes!". Because armor columns have a lot of uses in securing area's, suppressing your opposition and protecting against the defenders from wrecking your Sunderer spawns and then using their own vehicle column to get their Sunderer to your base and attack it.

Really good post, makes sense, it's constructive, insightful, true!

I totally agree!

>While I agree with the intention, and have myself been frustrated with players who won't leave mid map on many occasions
L-look, thousands of people are enjoying the hex and are having fun, what can we do to stop it? Wait I have an idea, how about we remove the most popular hex in the game to satisfy a loud minority of forum crawlers, heh, that should show em..

Well , the problem is a small minority and a dev team thinking and telling other players how they should play the game and where to play is a giant problem to begin with, its our time we do with it as we wish, removing bases, and parts of continents just to push players to play where they want turns off people and that ends up with canceled subscriptions , Im sorry I dont want to play a arena shooter which is what their turning this game into their failed Planetside Arena which I dont want no part of if this continues , removing TI I think puts me on the last leg with this game. About 1 more stupid decison from hanging it up and going back to PS1 or start a emulator project for PS2 and restore the game to its former glory.

There is nothing stopping you from driving a sunderer to T.I. alloys and starting a fight. The difference is that those who use "Join fight" will be sent to different areas of the map. These people did not necessarily enjoy running up the same gully hour upon hour just to be farmed. It was the lack of alternatives that sent them there, T.I. presenting as the lowest common denominator in the game. Especially during off hours when all other bases are disabled, where is the pity for those players?

There is something stopping you: A goal to work towards. Holding an empty point doesn't have the same feeling.

But it cuts both ways: There's nothing stopping the capture-the-continent people from doing their thing even if most of the rest of the playerbase is fighting in bases like TI Alloys. The problem is that these same people have convinced the Dev's that their gameplay needs to be forced upon the rest, rather than made so appealing that the rest will join themselves.

This has been a trend for a long time now. The changes to Outfits for example were supposed to be the great return of PS2! Yet in reality it just increased the divide between those who just want to join and do some pew pew and those who want the feeling of a deep stragetical gameplay. Those who want that deep stragetical gameplay are encouraged to avoid combat, overhelm their enemies at any point in time and never get caught in an extended engagement. Attack is the most important course of action, defense is to be avoided.

We need a gamplay where the pew pew players can just join and find a good fight somewhere alongside the capture-the-continent players, and both can be satisfied. This means we need to change how our goals are reached, so relatively balanced fights will be the fastest way to capture the continent rather than avoiding the mass multiplayer mayhem the game is supposed to deliver. We also need an organic teamwork structure as basis for our existing tight squad system. Any player looking at another player should be able to evaluate their class, their capabilities and how they could work together at any point in time without the need to be in an arbitrary squad or platoon. Players should also have the natural option to evaluate how a battle is progressing each time they are dead, and then automatically be able to pick the class or vehicle to help their team. Ideally the pew pew players can just form shocktroops that go for the main objective over and over until it's reached while the other players will use this spearhead to form their battleplan and try to help it advance by fighting on the fringes of the frontline.

The people driving the sunderers from Ceres to T.I. Alloys does so for a reason, it is the easiest way to farm AMS ticks. The gully, the stone-cave makeshift garage, and the surrounding terrain is rarely visited by hostile armor as it is simply inhospitable. If anything it needs to be made equally or more appealing to attack the Crown from Ceres as it is to attack T.I. Alloys. The solution is simple: add more rocks/trees to the hillside making it completely undrivable to vehicles. On Amerish for example, even though there is a lattice link from Rockslide Outlook to Lithcorp Central, those who hold Rockslide are more likely to attack the Ascent. This because the sunderer drivers path-of-least-resistance points thereto.

Also if anyone's subjected to developer force it is the capture-the-continent camp. They are the ones that need to hurdle across the revamped spawn system resulting in squads that cannot all go to the same location without using a spawn beacon. And when they finally arrive at a base, combat may be stalled for minutes by a single backcapping fight-avoiding cloaker. To be fair I think it's wrong to indiscriminately divide the playerbase into "pew-pew" and "capture-the-continent" players. Personally I try to get the "pew-pew" at fights that have strategic value, while at the same time working towards a directive. If one of those things are missing I'm less motivated.

It's not just about AMS ticks. Also people coming from both the biolab and the Crown will actively find places where their Sunderer is protected by terrain and friendly armor, that's nothing new. Those coming from ceres have no other option to place their Sunderer: Their alternatives would be to place it down in the gully where people from both the Crown and the Biolab have a much easier time to kill it with vehicles or place it behind the Arch where the Biolab people place their Sunderer, which obviously can't happen as they have to quite literally muscle inbetween the vehicles coming from either the Biolab or the Crown as well as the TI Alloys vehicle department.
In other words: The design prohibits the people from Ceres in attacking in any other way. Complaining that people place a Sunderer there is like complaining someone is placing their Sunderer in a Sunderer Garage. That little hollow was specifically designed as a Sunderer placement area. Although it was poorly designed at that.

The solution you bring up is to simply prohibit the people from Ceres to place a Sunderer there, which makes capturing TI Alloys from Ceres even more of an impossible task than it already is. This is because your solution is solely designed to prevent large-scale 3-way fights.

The reason people from Ceres don't attack the Crown is because it's even worse designed for them to attack. In fact your solution would basically make TI Alloys as unreachable as the Crown. To attack the Crown from Ceres means you need to either go up the long winding road with 1 Sunderer "garage" beneath a rock outcropping that is easily assaulted by LA's. Then the infantry still has a ways to go while getting shot at from above fighting an uphill battle that makes the murder-gully towards TI Alloys look like a walk in the park. When you reach the top you have to pass the Tower itself which pours even more plunging fire on them and cannot actually be permanently shut down unless you use a massive Zerg.
The alternative attack route is to drive around and come up near the bridge going to the Palisade. That means you are now going to have to content with vehicles coming from the Palisade, Zurvan AMP, the Crown, Crossroads and even TI Alloys that will drive around there if you place your Sunderer there. Going further would just expose you even more. It's basically impossible to capture the Crown from Ceres unless you assume some extremely unlikely situation or large-scale Zerging.


As for developer force: The revamped spawn system was designed to prevent easy zerging and you are complaining that you can't as easily outpop a base by simply redeploying everyone and have to employ squad beacons. That's about the worst that squads have had to endure. On the other hand the pew pew people have had to endure entire bases being revamped and removed just to satisfy the people who like the capture-the-continent gameplay. There's now about half a dozen bases that have disappeared and dozens that have had extensive remodeling just to prevent players from having a good time there. The Crown was about the first base to fall to this, having it's points put farther outwards one by one and making it increasingly impossible to defend as some points are now literally placed at Sunderer placements. And while the squaddies have been getting handed tons of toys and encouragements to do their thing the pew pew people have been getting hammered with the bases they like to fight at slowly being deteriorated and removed.


Your point about "try to find pew pew at fights with stragetic value" is exactly the problem here: "stragetic value" is almost absent in this game. The best stragetic value is "can it be captured quickly right now?". The game's goals encourage strategy that avoids pew pew. That needs to change.
It shouldn't be hard to find a place where you can be stragetic and get pew pew, in fact it should be organic. A player should be able to die, check the map during his respawn timer, then pick a place to fight at because the information handed to him on a platter (gathered by his allies for increased teamwork!) gives them a good idea where they might be needed and their experience can tell them what class they should be fighting at there.

HAHA Yes there is!

We did this day one minute one. When Indar unlocked sunderers and routers appeared in the deactivated Ti Alloys hex within minutes. **People wanted to play there**. But all spawns are deactivated in that hex. Even if you die next to your own spawn you can't spawn at it.

Wrel just gave a big middle finger to the players. It's not cool. He needs to go mess with some of the ****** bases instead of messing with the good ones. There are NINE construction bases on Hossin he could screw with instead.

Can we please just have our T.I. Alloys back? One of the main problem I see now in the game was the addition of the Bastion. I'm in a very small outfit, and we've had members leave to join an oversized outfit just to be able to get into a Bastion. Small outfits, with players that have jobs and families, will only see a Bastion once every 3 or so months. If they're lucky. Then you have the problem with the outfit leader having access to all the benefits from all those in the outfit, without sharing any. This needs to be changed to something that benefits the players that put the most resources into the outfit. But my main reason for coming here was to beat the snot out of the idiot that removed T.I. Alloys from the fight. RETURN T.I. ALLOYS TO US AT ONCE!!! Removing it was a bad decision. Removing rock bridge between T.I. Alloys and The Crown was also a dumb move. FIX IT AND RETURN IT TO US!

In a very short space of time they ruined the most popular two of the four maps, Indar and Esamir. The game now has 3 blind zergs full of bored people, socializing and chatting, plus a bunch of others like me constantly redeploying looking for a good fight that when found, it ends too soon. People are spending more time in queues, looking at the map or moving thru terrain like lemmings than actually playing and having fun. Are you guys entertained?

Basically TI is not the problem. its the the other bases that are.

The solution is to make people want to play at the other bases instead of trying to force them. Instead of removing TI try to look at why people want to spend so much time there.
Long term consistent/predictable fights are fun. In Planetside 1 there were fights on Cyssor that literally went on for weeks because it was just a fun place to fight.
Fights ending is not fun. One of the things that kills the entire server during off-peak hours is fights ending or an alert locking the continent.

Nothing good long term can come from making people unhappy. Nobody plays videogames to be unhappy. People who dont have fun are going to log off and eventually stop logging on.
I started playing in 2012 and now i only log on for a few weeks whenever there is a big patch, quickly realizing that the core issues with the game are still there and that content patches are just bandaids to boost short term player numbers.

TLDR: People play TI for a reason. Dont take their fun away and make more bases like TI.

I just wanted to say that I am kinda missing TI Alloys too. I have never been a character that hogs the centre of the map, but there are times when it used to be great fun hunting, or being hunted between TI Alloys and Ceres Hydroponics.

I have since found that I am having to do the same but between The Crown and Crossroads. Still fun, I suppose, but not as good as the terrain between TIA and CH.

I dont miss Ti Alloys at all. In fact I forgot about it very quickly. There is no "another ti alloys", no mid farms-fests.

Everything is better without that stupid base.

Wow, gonna bump a months old thread for this huh? Real mature.

I will say this as many times as I have to - removing stuff is never the best answer unless there are no other options. Removing Ti has buggered over the Indar central lattice, pushed the focused fights to the surrounding hexes. I concur with what other people have said on this thread, this is not the answer.

There are several places that act like Ti Alloys - a population sink that people like for the large numbers gunplay. Like Biolabs, Nasons, and others. Removing Ti hasn't magically fixed the issue of players congregating at certain areas to just shoot at each other and have fun, and its just a glaring missing hex on Indar that smacks of developer laziness. They couldn't think of how to fix it, and they didn't want to leave it, so they removed it, and don't have plans to fix it.

You are allowed to dislike Ti Alloys, but everyone who liked it shouldn't have to suffer because of that.

That was the point of removing That base. To spread battles all over the continent. I never wanted for people to Not congregate.
Im happy that we still have big battles.

And I doubt there were that many people who enjoyed clusters at Ti Alloys. Maybe those few who knew how to take advantage of its poor design.

My post from 6 months ago got necrod? Also, has TI been closed for 6 months now? Wow.

Mithril, if you end up seeing this: I know you already recently answered some questions about this base for the community, but could you please pass up the line that the giant ugly scar in the middle of the most popular continent should be embarrassing to them and the players want a fix? This is coming from a guy who was routinely frustrated by players not leaving TI when other more important bases were going down. I think I might be who this was meant to please, and this is not better.

Agreed. Like I said, just leaving it disabled and not fixing it makes the devs look lazy, and though the fights may be spread out its hardly a fix when you still get massed fights. The changes to Biolabs this patch force you to spawn at an outside base and teleport in, but it just pads on some time and allows attackers to that satellite to interrupt the stream of reinforcements, but it hasn't done much to deter Biolab fans at all. Ti should be fixed whenever they get around to doing an Esamir style rework (IF they end up doing one) and not just left as a big distracting empty space only good for hiding ESFs and the occasional Pilgrimage by the Church of Ti Alloys.

If Ti Alloys was not enjoyed as a fight, then people wouldn't have congregated there, whether they were farming or getting farmed. The fact people massed there and kept doing so, even if all they did was get farmed, was indication people were deriving SOME enjoyment out of it. And now they go elsewhere for their fix, and Ti just sticks out like a sore thumb.

I miss TI Alloys actually. It was 10 times more enjoyable than current unending ranged tank fight between Crossroads and Crown towers in my opinion.
There was a reason why many people chose to fight at Indar/TI Alloys, it was fun. It became annoying just after the introduction of spammable orbital strikes.