Dear Developers - Team play AA and ESF: The fundamental, game breaking design flaw of PlanetSide 2

nvm

You have no clue about good level design.

If you can spawn there, people will spawn there. Be it veterants like me or new player for many differents reasons. Before you actually know the base is completly over run and the spawn room is camped, you have to spawn there in other to know that it is indeed camped. If a new player get podded in and instantly killed, where will he respawn, thats right in the nearest spawn point. I could continu like that the whole day with many other exemple why someone would spawn there. Be it because you hope you can exit it or for revenge.

Its a bad mechanic design, its a bad map design, its ******* terrible. Anyway, a spawn room can be camped even if the base is not captured, even far from it. Look at the stronghold on indar for exemple, even if enemies are not inside the base, a tank can place itself on the hill and SPAM away.

If it was a good level designer with a minimum of brain he would have made the spawn building unreachable for any kind of vehicules with roofs, cover, steps and barricades.

It is one thing to be camped by infantry, it is another to be ramped by a couple of tanks and liberator. We would have easily avoided that terrible mistake with indoor envirenement anyway.

I'm just gonna have to say that this depends on your outfit. When ours plays, we all hop on TS together and there are a few people very clearly giving orders to various platoons, dispatching each squad to problem areas if needed. We combine air and ground forces, and literally roll over the competition: last night, we took an entire continent (Esamir), except for the enemy warp gates naturally, and held it until we decided to go to Indar instead. A coordinated group, using proper tactics and utilizing vehicles in the right way, will dominate, and they won't be going lone wolf trolling for as much exp as possible. It can be done...

You just mentioend the "mission system" they wanted to implement to give Playeres "Tasks" to complete.

"Air support at grid H8", "AA needed in G6"

Unfortunate, the game was rushed...soooo we dont have it, no coordination. You can place funny symbols on the map like "DEFEND!" or "ATTACK" but even if you do noone knows it because it doesent get broadcasted...normaly if something like this has been placed by a commander it should be automaticly broadcasted on the continent like.

"Attack at grid C6 has been placed/ordered"...

So rigth now we have a pretty poor "command struction" in PS2. The most time even the /reg doesnt work.

As I told you on another thread, I feel a little sorry for you when I read your opinion on outfits. Being in an organised force and "roleplaying" the game is the best way to enjoy it.

Now you are right about the rest. If I wasn't in an Outfit, I wouldn't play this game.

- The "Mission System" that was sold to us before the Beta totally disappeard, and now we have only these ridiculous *attack there* and *defend there* icons.
- teamplay not rewarded on a large scale. Sure an engi or a medic will farm xp resing or resupplying, but an independant squad has no reward for supporting an attack, or providing air support when needed.

I am very aware that it is hard to implement, but if the devs don't move on these subjects, their 5 years plans will be totally useless because in two mounth the player population is gonna drop, they ll just get bored of just zerging. Only the outfits will remain for a while, the servs will be merged, and in 1 year the game will be dead.

Join a good outfit and these things become a non-issue

Wrong. I've racked up a lot of XP as a dual Burster MAX. Also being in a good outfit where 3 or 4 of you are targeting the same planes turns then to falling debris in short order. Then being backed up with Engineers and support troops to watch your back. You can make a massive impact on the game.

How wrong can you be? If you are in an outfit that doesn't work together, then that's your fault, not the Devs. As I've said before, join a GOOD outfit. If the outfit you're in doesn't know how to use their abilities and numbers to support each other, you're not in a good one.

I tend to get a higher cert gain per hour when playing with my outfit then when I'm pugging it. When you work with a a couple squads of organized players, it's amazing what you can do. 24 organized guys can take out 2 or 3 times their number of unorganized players.

You're main problem is that lack of team play by the people you are with. Find a better outfit that knows what teamwork is and you'll change your tune.

I have replied on similar points and opinions and i can only repeat myself:
Yes. You are indeed right. If i had a "good outfit" and "roleplay" then i would have more fun.
However: This doesnt necessarily tell anything about the game, since everything is "more fun" if you play it with friends or "role play" it. Tetris is more fun, twister is more fun, breathing is more fun with friends. By this standard, you could play with sticks and stones and still have fun.
Conclusively: What you wrote doesnt really contradict my original point.
If there would be more team oriented content in the game, you too would have more fun with your "good outfit" and so would every each player too.

This being said, you also should understand that the great majority of players will never have a "good outfit" due to a myriad of reasons such as language barriers, attitude, age, personality, intelligence, sexual orientation, skin color, number of fingers and limbs, etc and if there is no fun for the great majority of the players then the great majority of the players will leave which is bad for everyone involved with the game.

tl;dr - We do lack the mentioned things. This isnt really a question but a simple fact.
This doesnt mean that you cant have fun with a well organized outfit, but then again, you can have fun doing basically anything with a well organized friends circle. From the business perspective, you should take the worst player and add elements that doesnt necessarily screw up gameplay/balance, but still add a fun factor that takes away the frustration from having less skill and/or having no "good outfit".
Examples being:
- Customizable outfit emblems and decals that can be put on vehicles/armor.
- A progression/leveling system for the outfit itself
- Outfit skills and bonuses
- Emphasis and rewards based on being in a platoon or outfit
- Team, platoon, outfit objectives that actually award something thus promote team, platoon, outfit play
- etc

The alternative is what we are having now: FarmSide 2 with mindless, brainless zerging, devoid of any social interaction and/or strategy.
Needless to say that this wont satisfy the expectations of any player on the long run, which in return is bad for everyone involved with the game. Fans and devs alike.

We agree

I stopped reading OP when this was stated. You clearly have no clue what a hard counter is. Go look up some definitions of hard and soft counters before you go on a massive wall of text.


In addition to this, you clearly do not play in an outfit and/or have friend within the game. If you had friends or an outfit that is specifically dedicated to teamwork, well, 90% of that drivel you typed would be meaningless, more so than it already is.

Though I will say, this game definately needs ability for squad/platoon leaders to set objectives that actually give players a bonus to xp if they follow orders.

And then what I did was find a good outfit. We chat and use team play all the time. We pull vehicles needed to win. Sometimes its 15 tanks, sometimes its all on foot.

I think if the OP were to do that, he wouldn't have written his post. He's playing a game as a lone wolf and wondering why no one is doing anything together.

Its a F2P game, you will have zerglings, if you don't like being the zerglings don't zerg. Try the outfit recruitment forum.

Mission mechanic or not, you're going to get people doing whatever the hell they want like a pack of cats wherever you go if you're just joining pug platoons.

My mission system is platoon commander telling my squad to hold X objective or to switch to a class to counter and incoming threat. In a game like this, we need to create some of the content ourselves. It works and it makes you more effective than two to four zerg on the enemy side.

Those of us that played doom are like 30 now dude.

It doesn't matter what the lead designer likes or dislikes.
Generation CoD likes shallow dumbed down mechanics which give instant gratification without trying too hard and generation CoD has big wallets. So shallow dumbed down mechanics is what we get.

As far as I'm concerned none of this matters until they get more meat into this game when it comes to the macro-scale stuff. Until they add more continents, meaningful conquering mechanics, and meaningful resource control mechanics, none of this matters. You can already play in an organized outfit and do all that stuff, which is great fun I'm sure, but at the end of the day it matters little in the overall war. That is a much bigger "fundamental flaw" with Planetside 2 than individual unit balance or a backwards rewards system.

Don't take this the wrong way; I agree with you to some degree. I think you are being a bit disingenuous because you CAN certainly get around this stuff by playing with an organized outfit if that's what you want, but otherwise I think you are mostly correct in your criticism here. My point is that even if this stuff was addressed, it doesn't matter until they expand on the macro-scale of the war.

Hope that makes sense, don't think I explained it very well. Just woke up.

What is it now, then? Daikatana? Go play Daikatana.

+1

Tough to argue with anything you've written there and I know I'm guilty of it because my score is higher doing my own thing than working with my outfit to accomplish goals. It's sad, but this is what happens when you rush out a game.

lolwut.

So let's see here, Doom released in '93, so that would make it 20 years ago next year. Meaning that anyone that had been playing Doom when it was relevant would be 20+ years old... if we take a bit of a stretch and say that five year olds were playing the game, that would make a person 25. More likely they'd have been closer to eight or ten, making them 28~30 now.

Don't think you can use "kids" to describe that age group.

Thats a misconception, there is an audiance for game like planetside and there is one for game likes CoD. Players who like planetside are not nessessarely those who like CoD but they are not mutualy exclusive. Trying to make a game to appeal to an audience from another game, in others words trying to steal their custumers, ALWAYS end with the copycat failing. Just look at all these MMOs that tried it with World of Warcraft.

That doesn't matter to management. They see the buying power of the CoD crowd and say "I want that". And thus PS2 caters more to the mainstream with its short attention span and desire for instant gratification.

Planing attacks on enemy bases? Boring.
Defending bases when the enemy is not already at the doorstep? Boring.
Instant action, quick kills and shiny numbers popping up? Yes, please!

The "Use more teamplay" rebuttle has been a long overused falacy when it comes to solving basic design problems with team games. People are quick to apply this "solution" as if it were some kind of universal ointment, not just in PS2, but in almost every MP team game I've every played.

If it were that easy...... it would already be happening...... but because it isn't, that doesn't mean players just don't want to cooperate with each other, there are other more fundamental hurdles getting in the way. Telling someone to "Join an organized outfit" like it was as simple as buying an item in the PS2 marketplace called "1337 Outfit of Teamplay".... is typically the hamfisted response of people naive to the core problems while being who are fortunate enough to not encounter the root of the problem because they are the minority who belong to an outfit already.

"Use more teamplay" is a cheap dismissal of the fundamental issue at hand. If you don't encounter the issue, great, fantasitc, you are among the lesser of the 2000 players on the server who are not so fortunate. "Join an outfit" is not a viable or desirable option for all players and their situations.

If this is the basic premise all of your game design is based on, I'm sorry but you are not designing a game for a "Massively Multiplayer" market.

First off, people are saying "more teamplay" solves the issue of Aircraft versus everyone else. Does an ESF player need to join an outfit to ensure he can play his game the way he wants and have fun doing it? NO? Then why should Infantry and Tank players be REQUIRED by the basic design of things to have to join an outfit to ensure they have an environment that allows them to have fun playing their game?

second, how is teamplay even expected of a player that wanted to call for help and try and spark teamplay in his own interest? If I'm standing in a sector when a Sunderer rolls up and 12 guys jump out.... it's clear they want to take my base... but I can't hold back 12 guys, so how do I call the attention of other faction members to the problem I'm facing? I'm sure there's a few random players that might want to come fight at my side. Do I use the /Region chat command? I'm the only one in the sector! Everyone else is outside the sector! Spend certs to unlock the squad leader channel? But I'm not a squad leader! I need a squad.... my friends are all offline.... and even if I could chat globally to other squad leaders, how do I motivate them to come help me? What incentives are there for them to come to my aid. Use the Attack/Defend Markers? (More CERT investment?) When was the last time you reacted to a Defend Marker with any sense of priority? No one cares about defending sectors in this game. They'd sooner let the entire map fall and then attack them back after the enemy has relented and gone elsewhere. So... I'm ****** here... may as well get some kills (if I can) then redeploy to the warp gate.... great example of fun to be routinely had in PS2.

What if it isn't a sector under attack, what if it's just me and a few others hiding under a tree because there is an Air-Zerg overhead and we can't play unless someone else decides to come help us?....

Again, this utopian idea that everyone here is playing the best interests of everyone else, just doesn't exist and that's why the model of "deterrent" versus "counter" isn't effective or fun for many players who are currently subjected to it in game.