Containment Site Playtest Feedback - Apr. 18

Simple and short:

- Remove the no construction zone.
- Not having a map/minimap was quite confusing.
- Make the arrows for B and C in different colors so people know where they are running towards.

I've played this base for a few hours now and my confusion about the layout isn't going away. OK, that's partly because the layout changed mid way through but it's persisting despite taking an hour yesterday to just explore it. Planetside 1's bases were a little convoluted sure but I felt like the layout was relatively straightforward. The containment facility is on a whole other level of complexity and I'm not enjoying that. This may in part be due to the absence of a minimap view that I can lean on when lost, the absence of map views I can rely on was doing real damage to my play session.

I want to re-iterate the view that the vents should always benefit the attackers, but also the vents themselves aren't very interesting visually and should instead be cable ducts, which make more sense for a crawlspace that players are expected to move through.

Also feel the need to re-iterate that a play space for vehicles should be one in which using the guns is rewarded. The way it is currently designed, it primarily rewards roadkills instead of weapon kills. There should be something in that ring shaped play space that slows vehicles down.
That said, outside the base, the lack of exterior walls meant it was a little two easy for vehicles to shell the attackers sunderers at long ranges. Consider moving the sunderer towers close to the vehicle bays in such a way as to block long range fire so enemy armour has to come in close to do anti-sunderer work.

Cheers.

How about adding softspawns for the Faction which controlls the point. If you capture a point you gets a spawn like a router or elysium-spawn, which can get destroyed by weapons or repaired. It is locates somewhere in the room with alittle cover or even add multiple of them.

Also it would be nice if you could add a new alert with these bases for example collect the most storm energie (with these bases and some other possibles)

With the base not completed there are few places you can get behind the walls. Here are the places that I have currently found. Also got it a short video for the ones interested.

I hope this will help with making the base bullet tight.
P.S. Also contains a picture of the peaking hole in Stillwater Watch where you can shoot enemies through the floor/wall

As of now, it is very hard for me to understand where I need to run to help my team. Even if I hear a gunfight nearby, it can take minutes to find it. Maybe with time I'll learn the base layout.
On surface it is worse - tons of gunfight sounds but nothing happening around actually, everything is underground. And can miss important sounds of some sundy tower fight happening.

Btw, noticed that someone was able to glitch and deploy a sundy into the building textures, no idea how. Screenshot: https://photos.app.goo.gl/AVLFSoHhnGsGPu4f9

Really love this facility and this playtest was really nice, way better than the previous one.

I'm happy that you're taking sound into consideration in your form, I somehow feel that the sound are not muffled enough when not at the same level as you, it gets a bit confusing. Apart from that, I love the sound ambiance of this new facility. Also, I found that the siphon alert sound was not loud enough; I'd like to hear it from the whole facility.

The layout is still confusing and most of this is probably caused by minimap problems. Even the spawn points seem in the middle of nowhere and that's really annoying.

The flow was sometimes a bit messy but I think most of it is due to people not knowing the base well.

It seems to favor defenders, but again maybe it will get better when people know the base better. Also it's not always bad to have bases that favor defenders, we have a lot of them already and it's not unplayable by any means. Maybe the timer should be a bit shorter when one of the point is not owned (because the A point is hard to take by design).

There is this problem where, when you've just unlocked a new spawn room as an attacker (because you capped B or C), the spawn system will still select the previous sunderer, and maybe also because of minimap confusion, a lot of people didn't seem aware that you could spawn at a way more favorable spawn.

The attacker spawn rooms are not owned by the defenders when they possess B or C. Don't know if feature or bug.

There is this thing, where you can blockade some tunnels with engy barrier. I don't know if this a a good feature.

Well, here is all I had in mind right now. Keep up the good work!

A couple of things I noted during the Play Test:
After the end of the Play Test, our outfit captured and tagged the Containment Facility. No resources were awarded. I am guessing that the resource reward level has not yet been decided on or set up on the Test Server?

Since the play test flipped the base mid-test to verify that neither the attackers nor the defenders had a skill disparity, I think it shows the base is still a bit too easy to defend. Once the fight moves below ground, The attacker vehicle spawns get wiped by defenders (if they know what they are doing) and the attackers end up getting sandwiched allowing the defenders to reset the shields and retake at least 2 points. This will tend to make this a stalemate base with a pop sink.

Interior is still wildly confusing to me. The new floor lettering when the path splits helps, but a depth or level-dependent mini-map is a must-have, otherwise I will be forever running wildly around this place trying to figure out where to go.

MAXes (especially when grouped) seem wildly overpowered in the hallway fights. These bases are going to be where everyone goes to Aurax their MAX or launchers.

With the darker lighting inside, IRNV scopes are the way to go. Those with ASP who have a primary in the secondary slot can run one IRNV and one normal sight and be the masters of both the tight hallways and the upstairs circle areas by switching guns. Putting Infravision implant on a MAX as a defender made it "easy mode" for hallway sweeps.

Just a slight troll comment here: Whenever the Tempest Siphon is turned off, for some reason I just want to switch my TV station to NBC... (Since the Feedback form had a lot of audio questions, I felt this needed to be stated... )

• The new attacker spawns could benefit significantly from having indicator paths added (as the rest of the facility has): This will help taking the correct paths into the facility.
• Survivability of upper attacker spawns is a concern: the gate sundies can be quite easily targeted by vehicles: wonder if it is worth considering changing the gates to be more like garages?, possibly even with consoles that control the shield instead of generators. This would basically create more lasting spawn options once attackers breach the upper area.
• In general walking paths are very long in the facility. Essentially only groups supported by medic are even able to last long enough, but it also makes it frustrating for solo players, or when facing MAX units. In some stretches adding beams like in the tech plant tunnel could be an interesting element. Maybe something that can depend on an destructible objective in the future?
• The siphon control console is rather deep in the facility. A thought here is whether there is merit to moving it further out, i.e. somewhere between B+C, thus allowing attackers to get to it and flip it earlier. E.g. at the staircases in the central area (pretty much opposite of where is was before) This could e.g. be used to access (and maintain) spawns that are brought in the central shaft (beacons, squad spawns since this is no-deploy area now). Also: adding either jumppads or elevator beams that lead only down the shaft (if accessible) could offer added ways in e.g. using the remaining upper spawns, and clearer paths onto the roof from the upper area could be useful, too in that case.
• An added thought would be whether the syphon control could be used as a rail switch of sorts: i.e. when active it would cut off defender's routes to B/C (by energizing passageways leading to B/C), and thus force them to go through A and secure that before being able to go via B/C directly again.: This would make attacking a bit easier once the syphon is controlled, because otherwise attackers need to distribute forces to control the various routes, whereas defenders could punch through with collective force on one of them, or iniciate backcaps of B/C points if attackers leave them behind.
• Not having the minimap layout (yet) adds to the confusion: it is also difficult because PS2's minimap doesn't support multi-level minimaps and thus isn't ideal for vertical base designs.

Many of the remarks regarding gameplay have been mentioned already in this or the previous playtest. The base is massive so it's at quite a risk of being a massive pop sink (especially the first couple of weeks) and then either stay that way or become a place fights try to move around instead. But it looks nice and it's a lot of new stuff so let's hope it's also balanced in normal play where there aren't always as many people fighting over it as in the playtests. Off-pop is probably going to see an imbalance, as only two of the Containment Sites are active in a 3-lane Esamir.

Walking into the CS from the outside is absolutely terrible. The ramps are annoying to jump on from the side so especially newer players will struggle with this, but for most players it also screws up movement. Since sundies can't be deployed inside anymore, everyone will have to take this path on foot and it's almost trivial to have three engies with mana AI turrets guard the three entrances. The other ways into the base are much harder to reach for infantry.

It seems ANVILs can be glitched into the CS rather easily. I've actually been stuck in one of the tubes from the upper outside level down into the base because the bottom (inside) was blocked by a dropped ANVIL, and it's not possible to move back out at that point. I'm not sure if it's possible to shoot the ANVIL from the elevator tube because I wasn't sure what was going on until someone pulled a vehicle from it. I guess in much the same way I've seen Vanguards driving in the lower levels, too. There have also been sunderers deployed "outside" but glitched into the building. I've even glitched in myself waay too many times (all inadvertently) because I couldn't see where on the map I was dropping mine. Of course players can be banned for abusing this but the ease at which I accidentally managed this is concerning. I have reported some instances of this using the in-game bug report but repeating it here for good measure.

I also found some other bugs, some of which I've reported in-game as well.
Containment sites:
* The banners/direction signs are flipped in half of the base, so they say things like "1-A dloH ograC". I get that the base was just mirrored after building half of it but yeah. For example at Andvari the south-facing side of the base has most of them reversed. This also applies to the NS logos in some walkways and an attacker spawn, the 012004 writing, and A-1 columns near the attacker spawns. I think the most blatant one was back-to-back "Cargo Elevator A1 - Bay access" signs, one normal and one mirrored in the same view. No clue if that sign was pointing anywhere though. In the same fashion, the container one level down from ground level has the NS logo mirrored on one side but correct on its other side.
* There's some strange black box-thing on the ground in the upper defender spawn, and this piece also extends into the stairs leading to one of the defender spawns. Running up those stairs, it actually blocks you so you have to jump over it.
* The defender spawns are both marked "A1" on the columns near them and the signs in the base. It'd make sense to me to give them unique names.
* Going downstairs from ground level to one or two levels down (don't remember exactly where) or back up seriously screws with my brightness. It'll go bright and dark a couple of times in rapid succession, like flashes, feels very uncomfortable.

Missions:
* Inconspicuous Crate got stuck at 6/16 "Obtain all three encryption keys 0/3". That was the only listed objective. I pinned the mission and there was no marker anywhere. Obviously I got the first key for free, the second at a terminal and for the third I had to kill 25 people in an unspecified timeframe. I remember not finishing the latter objective before logging off or warping, I also remember (but I could be wrong) seeing a message that I killed enough people at some point later, probably during the first playtest. I wasn't actively paying attention to missions then, so I went offline afterwards before trying them later. This was the state I found it in. Doing it again on another character worked fine and I think I even tried warping to sanctuary and back while doing the kills part, which did not seem to affect it.
* Containment was stuck at "Investigate the garage 0/1", pinning the misison did not show any marker anywhere. At least I thought it was stuck until I did it again on a new character and remembered the rest of the mission objectives. When I tried doing it on the "stuck" character, there were no friendly Containment Sites, and the objective doesn't have a tooltip stating that you need to do this at a friendly one, rather than any one. If you leave the game before finishing the mission and forget the objective, you'll probably be frustrated with this like I was. Some extra explanation in the mission objectives wouldn't hurt.
* Missing In Action makes the "Scan the area" right-click action available to you immediately after accepting the mission and before speaking with Campner. Probably yet another artifact from me accepting the first five missions simultaneously and only starting them days later, but one could be on a continent, accept it and not want to warp to Sanctuary yet because of continent queues. Before speaking to Campner, the player probably has no idea that this option is related to this mission. Using the action shows the message that the player isn't in the "designated area" and there are no mission markers yet. After speaking to Campner, the mission works normally and the option makes sense.

Bases:
* The new teleporter at The Traverse doesn't work from either direction. The one in the satellite building isn't shown on the map, while the weapons terminal and vehicle terminal are present.

Other:
* The improved ability indicator is nice. It's subtle, maybe slightly too subtle, but much better than before. For HA, the overshield look more visible too, that's nice. But this also made it more obvious that the overshield isn't shown over the sights in ADS, while in a normal (hipfire) stance, it does have the shield glow over it. Since quite a few sights obscure most if not all of the weapon, there's little visual indication, besides the bar color, that the overshield is on. It's the same as on live right now, but I think it could be a good addition.
* I don't think the Phylactery change is necessarily good. Even with the most recent changes, it's become very niche, if useful at all, and probably not worthy of being exceptional anymore. I can understand player frustration if they spent actual money on rolling for it or even crafting it, only to see it being completely repurposed for something else that has very little value in actual scenarios. The way it currently is on live is already pretty okay, what were the problems with it exactly? If you managed to get enough ticks you can self-revive, but that's accompanied by a laughing sound, some very specific animations and it takes a long time, I think even enough time to reload a Gauss SAW or a Decimator. Sure, MAXes are probably the most effective class to use it on, but more often than not, a MAX dies while emptying both arms. Upon reviving, a bunch of enemies might and probably will have formed around him and he'll find himself having to reload immediately or at least very soon, so that's a massive disadvantage already. I think the new changes make it viable on medics only and they'll probably be out of revive grenades by the time it actually triggers so it's not super great either way, and you basically lose an implant slot. I'd demote it all the way to the most basic of implants in the current (PTS) state. And that leaves the problem of how to compensate players for that. Is there going to be some kind of refund, and if so, what? The normal 500 for duplicate exceptional implants? The 45000 someone might have actually spent on crafting it? Nothing? I'm personally saving up ISO to craft an exceptional, for months already, so I'd welcome a big refund in that case, if the changes do go through.

Because of limited time I haven't checked a lot of things in the changelog yet so I'll give that a go over the next few days.

There is a problem with the lighting effect inside the containment site.
The underground light that enters the darkness has a gradually dimming effect.
But if you exit from the underground passage, there will be light flickering.
After exiting the underground passage, it should also gradually become brighter, with a transition effect.