Is Planetside 2 balanced for skill?

This game requires very little individual skill. About the only things in this game that I can say actually take skill are killing as infantry and using default weapons on ESF to kill tanks/aircraft/infantry. Everything else is point click and things explode. The most important things in this game is teamwork and having the numbers to do things.

From using them? high recoil weapons will always be very hard to use, burst fire in combat situations itself is hard. It is much easier to pick up a carv and realize "Hey, I can just unload and get kills".

You just explained my own point perfectly. If noobie A needs to learn to burst to do the same damage and be as accurate as Noobie B, Noobie A wins. This can be compensated with things like forward grip on compensator but these are just things that someone wielding a carv doesn't have to invest into. They could go for say the laser sight to improve there hip fire, or what have you. It's a superior gun to use, if I could choose that gun on my faction I would use it because it's drawbacks are far less than that of -insert NC gun here-. This isn't a single player game, the factions shouldn't work like "if you want to have to compensate and are looking for a challenge play this faction", variation does not need to come in the form of making one faction easier to use over the other. There are simply better and more practical ways to balance a game and keep each faction fresh. Especially given the fact that NC guns don't even have the benefit of having a higher skill ceiling when mastered.

I don't worry about it. Then again, I've been gaming for years, and just play the game.

The most fun part of games IS the imbalance, and learning how to take as seemingly weaker or gimped class/weapon and using it to dominate.

"Wah, this is imbalanced! Nerf! Nerf! Nerf!" is the cry of modern, self-entitled gamers who don't like a challenge, but want all the rewards and "God-mode" immediately

If we consider "balanced for skill" to specifically be "two guys coming around the corner and noticing each other at the same instant and the guy with better reflexes and aiming ability winning everytime" then no, its not balanced for skill.

If we consider "balanced for skill" to mean "Being good at a multitude of things such as organization ,small scale strategy, picking the right weapon for the job, and having the ability to use different weapons/vehicles effectively giving you a solid advantage" then yes i think it's doing pretty well.

I think that the lag that is inevitable in a game of this scale, and the randomness introduced buy the sheer volume of players on at any one time is going to make perfect balance exceedingly hard, if not impossible, to achieve.

Considering the amount of fun I have with the game, I can live with this.

I agree mostly, but only when everyone who plays has all those options available. It doesn't really work out so well when you have factions and certain people like certain factions because of style and not balance. It isn't fair for me or anyone to have to choose if I want to play on a side I like but deal with imbalance or play on a side I don't like but have better balance. It's really rather frustrating and is why you see so many people beg for fixes, if everyone did just care about power we'd be looking at very different pops in game.

I really want to say "Yea its all skill" but sadly I won't, few things determine killing someone in PS2 - some of which include

1) Magazine size + Fire rate (hello VS Heavy aka /faceroll)
2) Lag (afterall, when someone pulls a neo and warps all over the place but still manages to kill you thats not exactly skill)
3) Heavy? full health? full charge for your personal shield? have fun murdering 90% of people that have no cover to duck behind

People go off talking about what degree of skill the game takes and what not which has nothing to do with balance. In the end it comes down to whether or not the more skilled player is going win in a one on one fire fight, and yes infantry wise this will happen 95% of the time assuming the player takes advantage of its classes benefits (excluding the infiltrator which plays an entirely different roll from the rest of the infantry). I would say the infantry are quite balanced, even the NC. Many will argue they need some tweeking. I have no trouble with NC weapons maintaining a similar kd but maybe. They are definitely not as under-powered as people make them out to be. Control you fire and get a head shot for complete devastation. I can see them easily geting out of control with a small tweek. But overall there is much more to the meta game then comparing unit to unit. Im sure the game will never be in a state where they can say, hey its perfect were done tweeking, but overall I think the empires are balanced enough where with equal numbers, the most organized or best played faction will win. Still allot of people that over extend with tanks, don't strafe in and out of cover, or simply havent learned the best way to be effective with in this game which is where most of the OMSMAGADS the other team is OP comes from IMO. The basics are easy to pick up but the learning curve is steep, and nothing outshines the importance of teamwork in this game.

No, you simply cannot "unload a Carv and get kills" that's just baseless hyperbole.

The Carv also has recoil. If you don't compensate for it the muzzle quickly rises and causes you to miss.

I'm not saying that the Carv isn't better in that respect, I'm merely saying that it isn't "many times" better.

No more skill than basic hand eye co ordination and a bit of map reading and maybe some pre planning.
Nothing major skill intensive, just like any fps game.
Its a hell of a blast though !!

okay maybe not many times, but when I play TR with the carv I literally just have to unload. Because the recoil is just perfect, if you aim at the chest area it sprays up just enough that you get that headshot, and with the high rate of fire it's not hard to pull this off time and time again. I suppose if you got even better with and could just ping the head every time and control the smaller recoil it would be even more superb.

It's hard to draw a direct comparison with the video because the guy spends a majority of the video complaining about something that doesn't apply very well to a game where your opponents are all human. As far as something that takes "double skill" not doing "double damage", I think that we have that for the most part, with the exception of OHK sniper rifles. It's an extremely overpowered mechanic buried behind a bunch of arbitrary skill checks and accuracy bottlenecks.

Is PS2 balanced around skill? I would say no, not how most people define "skill" when talking about FPS games. The mechanics of shooting add random factors such as CoF to aiming, semi-random alternating direction horizontal recoil to force lowered accuracy at longer ranges, low TTKs all around, and so on. This puts a low softcap on how far FPS "skill" can affect the outcome of any given fight. Games that work primarily off this kind of skill usually have long TTK's, very quick movement speeds, slower bullet speeds, unpenalized omnidirectional movement, etc. Best example of a game I can think of released recently that emphasizes this type of skill is Tribes: Ascend.

PS2 uses an entirely different type of "skill". It's a skill used in just about every video game ever made, but it only really shines in a game where the differences between what team a has access to and what team b has access to is so minute it's beyond measurement with simple human hardware. Basically, you just put yourself at the greatest advantage possible while putting your enemies at the greatest disadvantage possible. Get behind tanks to do drastically more damage, flank unaware groups of enemies, set up at bottlenecks to defend against much larger opposing forces, specialize your weaponry rather than using general purpose ones, fire down on enemies from above, the list goes on. PS2 emphasizes whatever you call that far more than any game I've ever played.

Been bursting on NC since the first day I started playing b/c the first thing I noticed was the crazy Spread ... I didn't even know at the time when I rolled as this Faction that there were differences between the factions on weapon use, I assumed it just pure Aesthetics.

But y'know what?

It's not that simple. Yeah you can burst as fast as possible, even abuse a Macro or bind fire to the Mouse-Wheel which is a cheap way to get around ROF limits in some games. But you still won't out-DPS a TR or land as many shots as a VS of equal skill level. It's impossible, the damage just doesn't offset the reduced rate of fire when bursting. And ya won't hit anything at all on NC if you're being pelted first (And bascially stunlocked from having your shots hit anything which is just beyond punishment). It's just not rewarding and this is where they've failed to incentiivize an awful lot of people into playing something more challenging.

I disagree,game is balanced great.

Yeah, the stunlock when getting hit is very annoying. You can simulate suppression fire, but crippling someones aim with a high rpm and especially when one faction has to use precise shots in form of bursts, then this feature is really questionable. Why should someone suffer with his aim when he gets hit first, especially with the overall too high precise weapons. I mean sorry, full auto fire from range and you can kill stuff.....even with sub machine guns, lol ?

Imho, any feature crippling aim in a FPS is a stupid idea

PS2 being balanced for skill: It's getting there but lacks variety atm as this is still a numbers game: more people = win

Besides balancing issues, it could use more tools to deal with the zerg, like more detailed scouting and heat mapping.
Adding more tactical elements to the game (the upcoming anti-hacking drone looks promising) will also help adding more variety in skills to the game.

So it sounds like Rocket Pods are a Foo strategy.

This game isn't balanced for Skill > Power, why? because each factions guns have different TTK's.
The game could easily give each faction distinct playstyles, while still balancing the TTK on all guns of the similar type to be the same.
TR CQC AR 1 = X TTK, should be the same as NC CQC AR 1 TTK, the only difference is the TR should have less damage, but higher ROF, and NC has slower ROF, but higher damage. VS of course would have roughly a little slower fire rate then TR, but more then NC, but have no bullet drop, but still have the same TTK as TR and NC CQC AR 1.

Why they decided, from a competitive stand point, to give one faction an edge in TTK over the other factions, especially considering this is a skill based first person shooter, is beyond me. The only reason games like BF3, and Counter Strike are played by many professional gamers, is because all of the guns are balanced, one side doesn't have a gun that has a lower TTK then the other side. This isn't to say that one gun isn't over powered sometimes, but all players have access to this gun, and it will eventually get fixed.

I personally hope SOE will see the problem with this sooner rather then later, as in the long run when more players realise that factions like the NC have a much lower TTK on nearly all of their guns, that inorder to be competitive in PS2, your going to have to play VS and TR, and NC will be left as that third wheel empire that only diehard fans play.

Yeah Rocket Pods finally got my attention as being a little imbalanced yesterday when I spent 2 minutes sneaking into a Base to try and hack several AA turrets in a Row to hopefully shoot down this Lib that was keeping our infantry from keeping Gens down. The instant I started doing some damage to the Lib... his buddy in a Scythe oneshots the AA turret with Podding. ...okay, I still had 2 more hacked... so I get in the second one and burstfire the Lib down to about 3/4 HP until that same scythe instantly wheels around and 1 shots that turret too and instakills me with the huge AOE as I'm jumping out.

...Okay... I just learned something. I'll kill the Scythe first next right? He's just aiming at an immobile target where as I can hit moving targets with pinpoint accuracy. Which I do... I'm taking him down to 1/4 HP before he gets out of LOS then I'm free to shoot the Lib again. I'm not making this up... not 15 seconds later (And I'd like to point out that it takes base Engineers ~30 seconds to repair an AA turret) he's back in the air after repairing and 1shots me again as I'm bailing out of the turret on the opposite side the rockets are coming from. The lib is only down to 1/2 HP and we lose the base b/c I never got enough time to down that LIB. Oh and also b/c AA turrets have less HPs than the lightest aircraft in the game and Pods have huge AOE.

I'm sorry. Yeah I'm not exactly a Veteran from Beta here but I've been spying and sabotaging and sniping for a long time, and FPS'ing in general for 15 years. That's a lot longer than this guy in the Scythe who was only shooting at an immobile turret once every few minutes. The immense care I took to get into this base is instantly trumped by some guy hovering over it who's given a huge "HERE I AM" Red marker the instant I get inside; robs my entire Class of any element of surprise here, and his hilariously overpowered $7 unlock robbed my entire Platoon of winning a Base that we had 95% Capped until the Above took place.

That's not even attempting to balance for skill. That's just a Blatant Money Grab by SOE as usual.


EDIT: Apparently I'm a little late on even reporting this since now everyone who went Air-to-Win is now QQ'ing 10x harder?? .... Is this is a new patch or something? If so, I guess it would just prove my observations were sort of right. I just wish they would have buffed Survival for EVERYONE (esp Turrets vs A-2-G) instead of nerfing Aircraft survival. This games ridiculously short TTK is the entire reason this thread was was so relevant

Skill as infantry: Very little. Following the trend of the CoD+ games that abolished any resemblance of having to control such things as recoil, It's predictably a hold LMB and wait for points game. The market has sided with FPS games being made as easy as possible in this regard, hence the extreme success of CoD, so don't know how much you can blame SoE for this.

Skill in Vehicles: Brain death. All accessible and all extremely easy to use coming with the most powerful infantry farming weapons in a game with large balls of infantry. Enjoy getting the largest kill streaks you will ever see in any FPS game all with the mere skill ceiling of having the cognitive function to be able to press your LMB. All of a sudden getting a few kills in a row has become utterly hollow and devoid of any sense of achievement.

Skill in Tactics/Meta: Derp. A Meaningless metagame and the game itself being focused solely around personal cert farming means zerg The Crown or whatever Biolab / Techplant is hottly contested and enjoy the biggest farm fest since you hit up those lvl1 Boars in WoW.