I'm really not sure what the rage against biolabs is for, they are/were one of the most fun and iconic bases in the game. Removing satellite spawns from biolabs....why? It makes the experience much more frustrating, since when combined with the funky spawn system you've got a 15s cooldown or simply no option to spawn at that base at all. I get that this is supposed to get everyone to hate bios and completely kill them off so they can be replaced with more containment sites in future updates. But why??!??! There's really no need to make the experience so horrible and now make biolabs even more uncapturable without significant overpop. Please revert this change, it's really silly and puts a lot more emphasis on punishing people for dying than it should. As for the smart supporters of this change, who I no doubt will point out the fact that satellite spawns never existed before. Yes, you are right. However back then defensive sunderers were allowed to spawn anywhere on the base, including right next to the teleporters - they weren't affected by the massive no deploy circles. So basically there was no need to hike for 30 minutes from the spawn room to the teleporter. On top of that the spawn system didn't punish people with 15+ seconds of respawn time because their hex was overpopped. So yeah please revert this it's not very fun and doesn't do anything other than make the experience even worse, and I'll also throw in the obligatory please revert containment sites and ikanam to proper biolabs. Cheers.
Imagine, that'd be so good "sorry I ruined Esamir guys, I admit that I have no game dev experience or experience as a map designer, I was way out of my depth, so I'll be fixing my mistake and reverting Esamir back to before the shattered warpgate. Lead Youtuber - Wrel"
My only real gripe with it is the Sundy no deploy zone at the Satellite bases overlaps the Biolab teleporter building in many cases. If they sorted that I'd be cool with the change.
This is another example of a quick and cheap change when something more thorough was needed. I recently drove past a sunderer someone was setting up at the base of the grav tubes to get to the bio lab's air pad and laughed a little. "I remember when those mattered!" Then I thought that wait a minute, that's really terrible that those don't matter. There's a lot of potential for factions to muscle force multipliers against the biolab. There are teleporters, grav tubes and jump pads to get into these things. Setting up all the sunderers should result in an overwhelming force multiplier for the attackers because they get all the angles on the defenders. Attacking a bio lab with only one way in should be a joke because the defenders will so easily contain it. Instead, strategically, bio labs are very lack luster. There's no thought in how to capture them at the platoon/command net level, other than do it quickly before they become a black hole for your faction population. Now, I get that dependence on these attacker spawns which have so much run time to get back to the fight is effectively a long respawn, so defensive spawns would need to be longer in the bio lab to compensate. End result would be that medic lives matter, I'm ok with that. It would also be nice to get one new bio lab layout. I think Wrel made a smart choice with tech plants when he only overhauled one of them, leaving the other 9 unchanged in case the new tech plant layout was a disaster. On Esamir I'd say that Eisa Tech Plant has been a rare glimmer of success in a storm of failure, and would like to see this successful element repeated with bio labs. Take ONE bio lab, and try out a completely new floor plan. If it works, spread it, if it doesn't, revert. Even get the community involved, make the tools available for download to create in game terrain, let the player base have a "design a bio lab" contest, and put the winner into the game.
I think this is an attempt to rollback a dumb change. The results from the roleback though are less than stellar because it's not also rolling back yet another dumb change at the same time. What I mean. This all originally worked. But then... 1. They put a sundy no-deploy zone on bases for defenders as well as attackers (used to just be nodeploy for attackers). This was in general probably a good move but it had a side effect related uniquely to biolabs. For biolabs it means the satellite base teleporter is often in a no deploy zone. You can't park a sundy next to all of them so the time-to-point is not reduced over the main spawn, or jump pads, air the airpad lifts. This frankly made biolabs easy to crush for organized outfits. They could zone up the biolab innards and spawn suppress. So as a fix.. 2. They switched biolab teleporters to spawn tubes. This fixed the problems from #1 for defenders but had all sorts of flow side effects. Biolabs became just raw spawn faucets and left these nasty spawn-suppression quagmires for noobies to get caught in. They've now reverted #1, but not #2. The teleporter based satellite spawn setup is supposed to be a really quick ingress option. But it's also supposed to require a faction to actually hold that satellite and maintain a spawn at it. Unfortunate because there are a lot of strategies to that base. It's got key "beachhead" locations, and zone control locations all over it. careful... That's how we got Ikanam Biolab. I'd like for once see a biolab the way it was *meant* to be fought. The designer of the biolab made the whole thing around a mechanic that never made it out of beta: There are supposed to be enemy GALAXIES on either airpad dumping out troops from their AMS.
Ikanam is bad, I'll agree. The problem is we have a dev team (or possibly just a lead?) who will never admit a mistake. Because (t)he(y) will never admit a mistake, no mistake will ever be rolled back. I like some of the concepts at Ikanam, but the package deal is a failure. I like the idea of medium cover terrain so that there is actual conflict between infantry and vehicles, with both able to enter, but neither being comfortable. I like multiple vehicle capture points outdoors with 1 capture point indoors so that the attackers can win with a slow siege, but need to get inside to wrap things up in a timely manner. I like integration of the construction game into the rest of the game. What I don't like is the underground terrain. It makes for a confusing mini map, players have trouble finding their way around, and because there was nothing constraining how much footprint they could take up the facility bloated harder than J. K. Rowlings writing. Then our YouTuber-in-chief looked at this and said "Yes Daddy! I love it, give me more! Let's triple down and create facilities with all 3 points underground with even longer run times to get to control points and even more players getting lost! Let's not stop at 1 of these monstrosities, lets make 3 of them!" Ikanam should be renamed to something other than Bio Lab so people know not to expect the dome, the underground should be scrubbed and the top plateau should get one of the donut buildings from outfit wars. Put the spawn room under the donut building with a couple stair ways to come up, and some rabbit tunnels to the other points of the base so the tunnel entrances are still important to watch. A lot of this could be fixed by the folks in charge letting go of their pride. If they were willing say "Oops, we implemented a mistake, sorry about that, we'll take it out now" then we could be much more adventurous about experiments. In that world, any bad game play would be in the game for 3 months tops because that's the time scale of the large patches.
