IT'S GETTING BORING!!! EMPTY BASES NO DEFENDERS

Like what? There is no other game even remotely similar to PS2. There is no competition.

Ive stopped playing for now, I kinda raged quit after i spawned in the middle of some outpost with my squad trying to defend the outpost against about 10 TR aircraft all with rocket pods and just farming the hell out of the spawn.

What can you do against one aircraft when the AA defences are so ineffective SOE? And then ADD another 10 more aircraft spamming stupid overpowered weapons on everything that moves or attempts to fight back. Well theres not much point is there.

Double EXP weekend only brought MORE rocket pods to the battle & more aircraft. Soon everyone will be capping bases by AIR and ground forces will have left the game because all they seem to be doing is moving from empty base to another till they get discovered by the AIR Force and get ***** to hell yippy..

Bases are a complete joke, cap empty base move to another cap another empty base spawn camp the hell outta anyone who trys to spawn there... Yea great gameplay there.

Time to move on i think. It was good for F2P whilst it lasted i suppose, but now the game is doomed because of its design are destorying the dynamics of enjoyable gameplay.

There is nothing wrong with that. I doubt however that it would be good for anyone involved if your players just left because of this.
Alternatives are present as long as you are willing to improve, discuss an argument.
What you did was go into a seizure and started to post in all the frustration you had in PS1.
What about PS1 then? The devs there made the game THEY wanted to play too, so why was it bad in your opinion? Oh wait, are you having a set of double standards here? If you didnt like it, then it was bad, but if you like the current set and someone else does not, then its self-evident that they are wrong? What?

Seriously. Pipe down with those emotions and quit implying that everyone who has issues wishes to bring back the worst experiences in PS1.
Why not simply assume that they want something better or a middle ground?
You are essentially talking and argumenting with your own points and arguments.

Complaining about A2G when AA is about to get a huge buff.

What do you do? You all grab your own ESFs and take it to them in the air.

The empty base syndrome IS a problem. The fix: 2X XP for defense kills and instant alerts when a base is attacked. Problem solved.
It's also a symptom of the self segregation that the empires are imposing on themselves. Don't want to cap empty, uncontested bases? Go to the continents where your empire doesn't have the pop advantage and "Go get 'em Tiger!" I'm sure you get plenty of defense then.

But, I think you're right. I think it is time you move on. You just weren't a good fit with us. Be sure to not come back too.

Gee thats a Dropship Center.
Could even be the Dropship center Azeban on Amerish ^^

Erm, call in air support? Spawn at the nearest tank/air base and get and AA group or aircraft? Don't re-spawn at the base being attacked? etc etc.

Actually, the game will improve as many of these flash-in-pan players move on to the next big thing.

No, what I did was post the problems of the old systems. Problems that come right back when you import those system back in. No thanks.

Why was it bad? Why did I leave? A simple answer:

BFRs.

That's why. THAT'S when I left. They DID make the game they wanted to play - it had Big Freaking Robots that drove all other vehicles off the field and that is when I decided I didn't want to play THAT game.

Everything else was FINE. It's wasn't perfect, but it was good.

And that is my point. PS1 was fine, but people complained endlessly about it anyway. PS2 is fine, but people will complain about it anyway. Even worse, PS2 is getting better: the devs are grinding out more content and patching bugs and working to earn our love every day. And what d they get from us? This endless flow of sewage. People like Monroe act like PS1 didn't have these same problems. Yes it did.

When BFRs came out, I didn't complain. I didn't like it, but I didn't complain. I realized that the devs vision of the game was not what I wanted to play, so I left.

If the devs make that mistake again, there won't be an ultimatum, no swan song of discontent. No, I simply won't be here any more. I suggest anyone thinking about posting about how bad PS2 is, just leave. Save your wasted effort.

I wasn't talking to or about "everyone". I was replying to a single poster and his misguided perceptions of PS1.

Because from what I see in the game and from what I hear in these forums, the large majority of players are unwilling to put in any effort into the current system before they decide it needs to be changed.

Do what now? Look, some yahoo posted pictures instead of actual replies, so maybe you got a little confused. I'll give you that benefit of the doubt only this once. If you reply to me without going back and reading the thread chain and understand the "conversation" that you just butted into, I won't be as nice.

Oops, my bad.

Pretty good seeing as how that was the only thing you could pick out of my post to find fault with.

Well put sir, well put.

Cant these issues be addressed individually? You make it sound like its a black/white yes/no situation. I doubt thats the case.

As you said PS1 had good elements. Why not focus on those instead of implying that he wants to bring over ALL of the negative ones?

But thats exactly the point, or is it not?
There is simply a lack of meaning to what you are doing as a player.
You take a territory and move on and hope that someone takes your territory from you, so you can then once again retake it for resources, cert and XP. There is nothing involved with defense.

I fail to see your point on this note. Please elaborate.

I understand that you were addressing the flaws in what he wrote, but as i said: is there honestly no middle ground, only black and white choices? If he wants something from PS1 in PS2 then this game is now ruined and you will leave?

So, the goal of this game is space utilization!?!?!

Look, its simple.....

People didn't like the Lattice system because they get rolled by the zerg and want the freedom to capture undefended bases by themselves. I get it.....dealing with the zerg is hard and you don't want to do something hard for your XP.

What will happen is the people in the zerg will continue to stop playing because its BORING. And you will respond with "don't let the door hit ya"....well, here is the thing.......for the game to survive, it needs the zerg more then the random people empty base capturing.

PS1 was slowing being killed FROM THE SAME THING. Dude, we are a month in and populations are already a problem.

I am glad they are building the game they want, because they will be the only ones playing it in a few months....

I call bs, I distinctly remember PS1 being called Cyssorside for a reason. And I recall personally, fighting over the same handful of bases in south Cyssor over and over. Base battles in PS1 were just as much the grind vs empty base paradigm. Either you had a meatgrinder where you had committed defenders at a defensible base or you had empty bases that you were rolling thru.

Server merge.

Other good ideas trying to award more points would be cool, but more players to actually attack and defend all these bases would be better.

Two words, server merge.

baron bases should have NPC turrets defending them. Defending bases should reward EXP, for every 15 minutes a base is defended, defender should be awarded 250 EXP.

Yeah. From my time in PS1 it was also just a large grind when the zerg hit each other. Fighting over the same few bases all day long as long as the populations on each side held up. Nostolgia is a powerful tool that eliminates all of the bad and only makes you remember the good.

A lattice system here would be an even larger farm than the ones in PS1. It would drive more people away and make the vets scream for other changes to try to bandage the flaws introduced with the lattice system on this scale. It would be a never ending cycle of crying that something doesn't work, changing it, realizing the change doesn't, blame it on something completely unrelated, and then crying for more changes

Rofl, exactly.

The question is, why are people avoiding each other to cap empty bases when defending a meatgrinder gives you so much more exp? The answer, gamers like free stuff. When you can get xp for free without having to fight for it, they'll do it. People talk about boosting defensive bonus as if it's a silver bullet solution, it's not. You already do get better exp defending. At the Crown over the weekend I was getting 35k+ xp per hour. After losing it, while on the attack with lightly defended bases, I was only getting 10k xp per hour. It's mind boggling why anybody caring about progressing your characters would prefer to take empty bases. The people preferring to avoid having to fight will continue to avoid having to fight. Many of these individuals don't like fighting, they die a lot, and they get frustrated by dying. So they avoid fighting to get free xp, which is what empty captures do.

They had this problem in DAOC until they fixed it by adding benefits to holding bases, such as giving guilds the abilities to claim bases. This makes guilds want to protect their own, because it'd be a shame if they lose a base to some random pug. They also had relics which were realm owned, so people had something to protect. Warhammer Online also had this problem, they never really fixed this problem, and really people wanted to avoid fighting because a large portion of the playerbase are not good at it. If they can get free stuff (free xp or loot) by capping empty bases, then people will do just that.

Solution, implement locking mechanism (it's coming in the future), and allow Outfits to claim facilities so they are more inclined to defend them. Give those claimed facilities an added bonus so people will go there and defend them. And give the whole faction a bonus for having these claimed facilities in your color. We don't need to reinvent the wheels, these issues have cropped up before in earlier realm vs realm games. They weren't MMOFP, but they were setup very similar to Planetside 2. Dark Age of Camelot, back in 2003, had a 3 realm faction based realm war system, a persistent battlefield just like Planetside 2. But what they did differently was to have 3 frontier maps, each owned by a realm unlike Planetside 2 where 3 maps currently are free for all. So when someone stepped into your realm's territory, it was personal, you wanted to defend them. Right now it's just another facility, and you don't even know if you are supposed to own it.

Now as I mentioned earlier with relics, in order to have a relic war in DAOC, you have to sack all the fortresses in a realm's home frontier. And it's until then, that the relics are able to be raided. Losing a relic meant you lose your realm's bonus, whatever the bonus may be. So people wanted to defend it, it was a symbol of their realm and nobody wanted to lose the bonus. As you saw attackers take over forts, you start thinking "are they going for the relic?" As they take more forts, you realize they are, so you scramble forces not only to get ready to defend the relics as a last stand, but you had to send people out to recap your own forts. if you recap the forts, relics are safe. If you successfully defend the relics, relics are safe for the time being. Either way the mechanics of DAOC made it so people wanted to defend.

Simply adding defensive xp when defending already nets you the most xp in the game won't all of a sudden make those looking for free xp stop empty capping.

I was addressing them individually. I looked at each one of the "ideas" and simply reminded people WHY the devs went away from those. For example: The lattice System.

The Lattice System was a fix to something that wasn't really a problem: back hacking. Back hacking is a part of the game, but it had gotten "out of control" and so the lattice system was introduced. The consequence of the lattice system was to funnel the entire continental population into 1 or 2 bases. PS1 could barely handle the load and we all know that PS2 can't handle that load.

The hex system was implemented specifically in an effort to spread the fighting across wide areas. Unfortunately, human nature doesn't follow suit. We tend to have a heard mentality. We also tend to want to win with ease. Hence, we still Zerg from one base to the next.

Importing the lattice system is NOT going to solve that problem. What will? Addressing the REAL problem. Defense.

Defending stinks.

First, no one defends, so those that do are very alone and easily overwhelmed even by single squads. Why? Because who wants to sit around a base waiting for the bad guys to show up? It could be HOURS before anyone arrives to fight. No one wants to do that.
Second, defending is a losing battle. It's always been that way ever since PS1. People will deny this and recount the time they pushed back the enemy zerg on a sunny victorious day. And they will forget the hundreds, or even thousands of times, when the defense got pushed out of the base. Sometimes quickly, sometimes after 4 hours, but more often than not, the defense lost.

How do you fix this? Well here's the real trick: How do you fix this without a ridiculous amount of rebuilding of the game. One of my biggest pet peeves with gaming communities is their complete lack of understanding at how much work goes into asset creation in the game. If your idea starts off with "Just rebuild the base so that it..." please stop right there. That's NOT going to happen. Sure the devs have made some major changes to Indar since beta with adding walls and gates to bases, but that's all prefab stuff. That's stuff that could be quickly placed, but it still takes a lot of time to weave together the "mechanical" elements of those assets (tying a new generator to a gate shield for example).

So instead, suggestions need to be easily implemented. Something that is a value tweak. Something that keys off of assests that are already there.

My suggestions for improving defense:

1. Instant updates of the map showing when a territory is being attacked.
2. Redeploy buttons for any friendly base that is being attacked.
3. +50% XP for all actions on friendly territory. (with a pop-up "+50 XP Defense Bonus")
4. +100% XP for all actions within 20m of a Objective (With a pop-up "+100 XP Objective Bonus)
5. Defensive Spawn Bonus: Defending players get 1/2 respawn time as attacking players.

This gives defensive players the ability to quickly see and move to bases that are being attacked, and creates defensive players by giving them them best rewards in the game. This could be coded and implemented within a few days without a major rework of the game. It's just "rule changes".

Because they cause more problems than they solve.

I have always said: "The Goal is The Fight." People never really understood that. I don't need a bigger meaning than to kill the enemy. They are there, they want what I have, I kill them. The fun comes in finding new ways to defeat them. The game isn't even a month old and we as a community haven't even begun to scratch the tactical depth that is available to us. And we likely won't until many of the "flavor of the month" players weed out and we're left with just the core community.

There COULD be if you wanted there to be. I've offered my ideas on how to buff defense, but they aren't NEEDED to defend. You just have to have a group of players who WANT to defend.

And that leads to the point I was trying to make:

The game will only be as good as what you put into it. It takes EFFORT. This is not a rail-shooter that will drag you alone and pop-up targets in front of you so you can expend minimal mental effort to "get some action". The devs have ONLY provided tools and a place to use them. It is up to us as players to utilize them to their maximum potential. We aren't even close to doing that yet (or at least most of us aren't - and yes, i'm including myself in that).

It seems to me that the gaming community (not just PS2) is stricken with this "Code my problems away for me" mentality. Let's look at how we as a community can solve our own defense problem:

1. Organize. The tools are there. There is no excuse not to. And by "organize", I mean more than just "Zerg Swarm".
2. Scout. The tools are there. Send out players in ESFs equipped with radar to find the enemy Zerg.
3. Communicate. The tools are there. Scouts report back. Leaders direct the counter strike.
4. Respond. The troops go to the defense location, repel the invaders and attack surrounding areas to turn the tide back.
5. Repeat. Send out the scouts.

It's there. It's ready to do. People just need to do it themselves. How much do we expect the devs to do for us?

"I can only show you the door. You must walk through it."

Only if it's BFRs. But like you say: Shades of grey. It may not be ruined, but is it "better"? From my experience, most likely not. Before the BFRs, there was a steady whittling away of what PS1 was. The game was being pushed towards less co-op, more deathmatch. Players given more certs because that's what they asked for, but in reality, they should have had certs taken away. A reality that came to be only in PS2 (the class system is a correction of PS1's over-certed "cookie cutter swiss-army knife" players). Frankly, I don't have much faith in players to know what will make a game better. They usually just want what's easier.

Ahhh...a WALLED base, with only two gates, and a back door. That's DOOR, mind you, with a LOCK, leading to a defensible corridor.
And catwalks.
And underground spaces.
And true indoor spaces, behind more locked doors with goodies to hack, or viruses to inject.
And modifiable turrets!

Ah! Sweet nostalgia of thought-out bases designed for actual defense (even if they weren't perfect)!

From the developers POV: Abso-F***ing-Lutely

That space costs MONEY. Real money. More money per month than you've EVER put into Planetside. Getting the most use out of that money is critical.

We kill the Batman?

I don't like it because it limits tactical options. If all you want is non-stop Zerg, then the devs could just roll the E3 version of PS2 out. One base, endless spawning. Go for it.

The other bad thing about the lattice system goes back to Space Utilization. The areas between SOIs was rare fought over. Bridge battles were the exception. In PS2 I've already been in far more open-field armor battles than I ever was in the 2 1/2 years I played PS1.

No, it needs MORE than a zerg. You said it yourself - the zerg is boring. It doesn't need "random empty base captures" either. It needs long lines of skirmishes. Empires need to be fighting across their entire front line.

Slowly being killed...for 9 years? Wow, that's the slowest death EVER.

The reality is that there will remain a core of players for this game. Servers will be consolidated (why do you think you can't have the same name on two different servers?). It would be foolish to try and make massive changes to PS2 to keep players that aren't going to stay anyway - that will just make them lose core players too.