[Suggestion] Alert Reforms: 3/5 Lock Bonus Reform

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Luicanus, Jun 8, 2018.

  1. Luicanus

    Current Issue: No one cares about the current lock bonuses. Seriously I'm a 2.5-year vet and I struggle to remember them let alone which continent gives each. The only one I can get is Hossin for the Ammo Tower healing and that's only because it's the same as it was before the change.

    Solution Part One: Introduce valuable yet not OP bonuses for locking a continent, examples could be 10-20% discounts on specific vehicles eg MBTs, ESFs or Sunderers.
    Solution Part Two: To prevent Snowballing, have lower tier bonuses too if one faction already controls 2 continents and has 2 desirable bonuses then the third continent lock should come from these less valuable bonuses like the Ammo Tower Repairs. (Or you could just make it that every third lock comes from the lower value bonuses for simplicities sake).

    Thoughts?
  2. Sprant Flere-Imsaho

    10-20% discounts for an entire faction could easily mean those vehicles being pulled 10-20% more often because it takes less time to accrue the needed nanites. How is one whole faction being able to pull vehicles faster not crazy OP?

    'Solution Part Two: Make it better, I'm not exactly sure on the specifics'
  3. Luicanus


    1. Well back in the day (when I started) it was 50% off of all ground vehicles for Esamir, 50% off of all Air for Indar, 50% of All expendable munitions for Amerish.
    These bonuses were very effective motivators. If you didn't want to be crapped upon from a great height you made sure to be the one to win Indar.
    If you didn't want NC pulling Vanguards that were cheaper than your lightnings you fought tooth and nail to beat them on Esamir.
    Seriously 225 Vans vs 350 Lightings SMH.

    Now I concur that those were OP as all hell, especially when one faction had both Indar an Esamir.

    But 20% off of MBTs is actually the same as the ASP perk, except only for MBTs and not lightnings too. You could even make it not stack or partially stack with ASP perks to avoid veterans getting super cheap tanks similar to the old system.

    Say it's a 20% off MBTs bonus but if you have the ASP perk for Tanks it only stacks at 50% value so your normal 20% off becomes 30% off, still a boost that any tanker would desire but not becoming drastically overpowered.

    Not only that but it means that even with a BR75 getting the 20% Lock bonus on MBTs a rival with a 20% ASP perk is still able to compete with them making it less of a gap.

    2. Well I was imagining it as a kind of randomized thing you could rank a bonus' probability with how useful it was. Eg, MBTs, Libs and ESFs would probably be some of the rarer bonuses to show up.
    Lightnings, Harassers, Valks and Sunderers more common.
    Then if you make every third alert picked from the pool of lesser bonuses then you could limit the effect fairly well.

    Ok let's suppose there are 3 tiers of Bonus

    Tier One: 20% off of MBTs, Libs or ESFs
    Tier Two: 20% off of Lightnings, Harrasers, Valks or Sunderers
    Tier Three: Ammo Tower Healing, Auto-repair generators, increased turret heat.

    If you win an alert and have no current locks, you get a random bonus from Tier One or Tier Two.
    If you win an alert and have one current lock, you get a random bonus from Tier Two (no duplicates allowed)
    If you win an alert and have two current locks, you get a random bonus from Tier Three.

    In this way the snowballing is limited by diminishing returns and the worst case scenario is something like MBT + Harasser + Ammo Tower Repairs and not MBT + Lib + ESF.
    • Up x 1
  4. Luicanus

    Having just played an Esamir alert for over 45 minutes where this issue is still a problem I'd like to bring it up again.

    VS held 50%+ of the map for virtually all of that time, meanwhile an NC/TR fight on the far side of the continent had nearly consistently 96-192 players at it.

    I don't want a return to the days of a Vanguard costing less than a lightning, heck no. But people need to care who locks a continent. Presently no one does.
  5. JustGotSuspended

    The bonuses worked well back then because it motivated everyone to win the continent. However asides from the deployable cost reduction, the other benefits were tied to cooldowns. So even if a faction did have -50% MAX or prowlers, they still wouldn't be able to chain-pull them, there would still be a cost attributed to losing the vehicle.
  6. Johannes Kaiser

    Maybe I am too cynical, but I'm afraid even with better bonuses many people would still not care. It may draw some back to the alerts, but not more than 20% of those who do not care at the moment.
    • Up x 1
  7. JustGotSuspended

    True I think it's also partly due to the fact it's really hard to find a good/fun fight nowadays. Once people find a fight they enjoy they usually want to savor it as much as they can and forget about anything else. Not only are they having fun, they're also making more certs and xp then they'd get for even winning the alert! Ironically this usually allows their fight to be cut off and end due to them being often warpgated as everyone was tunneled on that one good fight. At that point many choose to log off or switch to the winning faction.
  8. Liewec123

    I'm thinking this too, the root of the alert issue is noone wants to fight against VS,
    And small bonuses aren't worth the stress and annoyance of dealing with VS
    when you could be having fun against tr or nc.

    So i think this change would just be "20% more magriders" which would make VS even more OP and unfun to fight,
    So perhaps they'd end up winning even more alerts! (If that is even possible.)

    If we want to fix alerts then we need to fix the root cause, VS!
  9. Johannes Kaiser



    For all In know you are both right. Fighting against VS is less fun.
    But this "fun fight tunnelvision" is likely the bigger culprit. Only recently I played in an Esamit alert, and NC overpopped BL-4 with 80%, 2 platoons at minimum. Guess for two minutes it was a good fight, so everyone piled on, TR thought "f*ck it" and left - smart move -, meanwhile NC just popdumped the thing. Cue 2 min later when half our territory was cut off, including the just taken BL-4, because the links were undefended thanks to this massively stupid move.
    As soon as one faction has fewer people who just pile into whatever the fun fight of the day is to them, that faction will most likely win, as they will have the most players to field.
  10. RabidIBM

    The trouble with this concept is that the people who lock the continent and the people who benefit from the continent lock won't be the same people most of the time. Winning an alert needs to benefit the people who won the alert.

    We also just need to shake up the alert meta. People ignore it because they're bored of it. At this point almost any change would be a good change. I personally would be in favor of bringing back the micro alerts and the 20 continent lock points. Other than HIVEs, 20 VP was a good system. It allowed factions to internally cooperate towards key objectives with a clear benefit. Micro alerts were good because they shook up the meta. Particularly the kill score alert punished sustained double teaming. The victim of double teaming got the most kills and won the alert. I personally would like to see a return of 20 VPs to lock a continent, with a constant stream of micro alerts which award VPs for winning the micro alert. This way if 2 factions conspire to make 1 faction unable to win a particular micro alert, they can just set themselves up for points in other ways.
    • Up x 1
  11. Luicanus


    While I don't disagree with his I would point out that it's not a fault unique to my proposal, we have the exact same situation currently only no one knows or cares what the locks are.
    People have and always will benefit from what those before them achieved.

    Mate, I think you read my mind. The current system pulls an alert out of thin air and just foists it upon us. The 20 VP system was far superior for generating a feeling of needing to achieve objectives. The only reason the VP system was canned was because Hives were breaking the system but now Hives are gone too. Time to revive VPs.
    Also continents remained open longer so it wasn't a constant merry-go-round of locks and unlocks.

    You know, you may be right. But even if it's only 20% who are incentivized to rejoin the fight that's more people who'd press home against the leading faction. It's still better than we have it now.
    Heck, if you don't like fighting Vanu and magriders then maybe you'd want to fight harder to prevent Vanu from getting 20% cheaper magriders next time?

    People always fought tooth and nail for Indar and Esamir, not only to earn the bonus for themselves but to deny it to an enemy. There was an extra level of play, if NC already had Indar and Esamir was a coin toss between NC and VS, it benefits TR to nudge it to VS to prevent NC steamrolling.
  12. Demigan

    I don't think that continent reward will ever be successful, especially right now. Only 1 in 3 factions can ever earn one from a specific continent, the victories are currently "earned" by zerging, redeploy and hitting the weakest enemy again and again and any time you come online you will either benefit from work someone else does or you get punished because your faction lost a few alerts.

    Locking the continent itself should be the reward. You should not look forwards to what you can do or gain from locking it, you should want to lock it because that offers you the best gameplay. Even better is to reward not for a win or loss, but for how hard you fought to get it. If you gave it your all you should not feel cheated because your team lost anyway.

    In short, when it comes to alerts and capturing the continent:

    MAKE IT FUN.
  13. Luicanus


    While I see your point, I disagree that it's an entirely bad thing for the dynamic between the different factions to be different each time you log in. Sure, you didn't personally earn the X% off of your ESF and the enemy didn't personally earn the Y% Off of MBTs but the variation it brings was healthy and kept things from growing totally stale.

    I agree that my suggestion here isn't going to magically resolve every issue, there are some other great ideas out there too. Alone none of them make things great but the objective with these suggestions is to tend towards a better experience.

    RabidIBM brought up returning to the Victory Point model of continent locking as it made players more invested in participating in alerts. Specific battles meant something because you could tell that losing here would lose the continent. No individual battle has that clutch feel to it anymore.


    I've argued this point myself before on other threads, alert reward bonuses should be tied to how well you participated in the alert not simply how long you were present. Currently a guy could AFK in the warpgate watching Netflix and still get the complete bonus.