Tech plant - all the fight outside now?

I worded that badly, was agreeing with you.

They should set up the bases as if the faction has built the facility not to be taken. why would they put the generators outside of the walls? They should be underground, underneath the tech plant. There should be sunderers with launch pads. galaxys with vehicle lifting support. Bombs, interpretable shields using say a mirror sunderer (after all the shields are just light) deployable defense wall/structures. considering they all exist in game I don't understand why it isn't possible. I think they should re-arrange the bases from the ground up, place the buildings in such a manner that seems logical. Then be creative with tactical solutions to solve these actually defensible bases. Make this game a little more challenging. Its just a frag fest at the moment.

Tech plants were one of the few bases I actually saw interesting tactics evolving to take it as it was somewhat of a challenge. Gate crash sunderers through the "front"shield, taking the gun deck, heavy assault AV grenades over the shield to kill the Sunderer, max crashes, light assault swarms, galaxy drops ahead of the zerg to destroy the SCU etc. They needed to make small changes to make it less of a farm but this is making defense totally impossible. As soon as the shields are down it will be game over. I thought increasing flak armour was a sensible change to stop the explosives being such a nightmare but this is just a game changer.

In the big picture I really don't understand why they insist on making defense so hard. There are literally no points now in this game you can make a worthwhile stand... They seem to have some sort of idea that we should have enough players to defend the walls of their over sized bases somehow. Not that its really worth doing anyway when you can just bypass and isolate any base with the way the hex system works. I was annoyed enough about how biolabs are now riddled with entrances and made effectively undefendable. The defensive designers of the far future really need to be shot. This game is becoming way to casual and light weight when it comes to strategic and tactical play which should be the hook for long term players and outfits.

QFT

No clue what you are smoking kid, but sending in 2 sunderers full of maxs and engineers with shield busting utility was one of the most fun things I have done in this game. You must have sat at the back door like a re-re. Tech plants were the best way to avoid being farmed nonstop by vehicles.

Again to me this is just a huge step in the wrong direction. At this time SOE is trying far too hard to make the game more accessable to casual players. Making it too similar to other games like Battlefield and other popular shooters. They are so desprate to have a large player base that they are making more cases for why people shouldn't play Planetside 2.

If people want to play BF3 or any other game they will do so. Infact it's becoming even more the case as a reason to play BF3 over Planetside 2. While BF3 it is unstructured and limited to smaller fights than PS2. The game is far more tactical, rewarding people for playing as a team over just random infantry work in a quick and satisfying way. It may not be perfect, but every change SOE makes to water down the game increases the likelyhood that those that have vested intrest in the game will get bored. At this point the only thing that seperates the game from others is the MMO element and the large war. But if there's no enjoyment, no tactical benifit to play in an organised way. Those that look for that will go else where. BF4 is soon or already in beta as part of the public promotion phase. Not to mention that as always there are plenty of other games on the horizon that can easily grab the attention of any number of players. Irrespective of their game prefrence and requirements there will be some thing soon they may want to invest time in.

The problem with this is that ultimately they have to justify why people will come back. To be honest, outside of missing some thing that's only in PS2. There isn't much of a case for this at all. By effectively dumbing it down, they have also done some thing far worse than simply testing different set-ups in beta. They have made the playerbase play style and expectations easy. Now if they decide to go more tactical there will be far more resistance. People will not want to make their experiance harder or more difficult. At least from a casual stand point. Which is what they are catering for at the moment as far in as it's been said and noted in the changes. How can it get more tactical when there will be a larger portion of people who have had it easier, now suddenly put in a position where they have to play a much more difficult game.

I don't remember any one game where they have made it more difficult and been capable of retaining their playerbase. Unless SOE is hoping those that have invested money will remain, and are trying to increase that number. I can't possibly understand the reasoning, and it worrys me greatly that it may be a pivitol point in Planetside 2's developement and it doesn't bode well for the future.

^^^^^^^^
Very well addressed OniKiy

From the start of development that players had feedback in for PS2, the Veterans have raised our concern about not encouraging Teamwork and Squad based Co-operation. They have made this game far too convenient for the lone wolf player, Like making MBT's a single player vehicle. Yes you can put a second gunner in the tank but the tank should require 1 driver and 1 gunner at the very least. They have given the ability for 1 person to ghost capture a base. They continue to encourage Zerg type fighting rather than reward actual team based defense. They should have scaling HP to assist Defenders against overwhelming enemy numbers. They should have Turrets that auto fire defensively like in PS1. They should have Combat Engineer abilities like Planetside 1 where you could set up base defenses to discourage empty base captures by 1 or 2 players.

If you ask any player of Planetside 1 what kept that game going for 10 years, they will tell you:
it wasn't the graphics
it wasn't the weapons
it wasn't the solo kill stats
it wasn't vehicles and vehicle spam
it wasn't zerg fests
it wasn't the base caps
it wasn't XP grind or certs

It WAS teamwork, coordination, over coming overwhelming odds, community, and the players.

Sorry to say but despite the communities best efforts to make the above things happen the groundwork hasn't been placed or reinforced by the dev team to build that up.

Think of a base as a map to have a death-match on rather than an actually defensive structure. So the generators are something to fight over not something that makes sense for a defensive structure. An actual defensible base might slow the action and people will get bored which terrifies the designers.

When you see things like the AMP stations where infantry can wander through the front door, enter the high security doorless shed right next to it and push the "explode generator" button you realise each base is intentionally broken.

Defense doesn't slow action, it actually increases the action per area. So what happens is that instead of driving across the whole map in 30 mins you spend that 30 mins in one location. Action per sq area is increased at these defensive areas. When assaulting a base if a Spawn point is placed in a close area to the point of attack you are able to get right into the action quicker. Bases are seriously broken!! And as long as they develop more than one way to attack a base then boredom should never set in. Right now Boredom is killing this game because it is nothing more than a zerg rolling across a continent capturing empty bases. If they run into resistance it is quickly squashed because defenders have no ability to put up a defense or even incentive to do so.

The generators being placed outside the main building is not a bad thing in itself, but combined with uncovered approach from defenders' spawn (no teleporters, no underground tunnels shielded from attackers, no covered catwalks - nothing!) defensibiliy took a nosedive.

There is already no real incentive to capture and hold the Tech Plant for protracted periods of time (damn that vehicle sliding making tanks behave like cows on ice! who would want to play them now?) and now that protracted and challenging fight fun factor is lessened with no real defensive assets added on the outer perimeter...

no one complained? Is that a joke?

Well we are complaining now, lets see if we get some changes back the right direction.

It's an awful idea. The other bases at least have walls or some way to funnel armor. Tech station is now a wide open armor zerg. No strategy whatsoever required. You cannot defend the base without having a huge armor/numbers advantage. It was a kneejerk decision that destroyed the defensibility of the base. Now it's another base trade scenario.

A difference.

Pre patch:
Defending Tech battle went back and forth for 2 hours. Very fun. Lost Tech once, used teleporter from spawn to mass rush with maxes and take gen back, destroy enemy sundie. Once gen back up engies able to repair SCU.

After patch:
Generators were destroyed, zerg flowed into base deployed sundie destroyed defenders. Defenders could not cover ground from spawn to tech without getting farmed. Battle over, players redeployed elsewhere.

Had one good fight after patch in Tech plant. Expert sundie driver drove sundie up stairs and parked it in corner next to gen in Tech. Even when our gens went down they could not pry us out. Eventually a tank got a lucky shot and destroyed sundie. Game over.

Bad change. Defending is not fun anymore. Only hotspots I go to now are BioLabs. Can still have a fun infantry battle there without massive A2G missiles and tanks swarming looking for cheap kills.

I really hope this is just a temporary fix to allow easier capture while the design of the Tech Plant is being looked at.

Tech Plants used to be the most fun bases in the game since they required some diffrent strategies then other bases (mass light assault rushes, coordinated 100+ player hot droping and multiple shield defuser Sunderers packed with Maxes and a couple of engineers + infiltrators). I still have not had any intresting fights at a Tech Plants after the patch. As far as I can see it has basically transformed the Tech Plants into Amp Stations with extreemly poor defencive capabilities.

I understand that they might have been frustrated for the unorganized zerg flooding in through the two choke points in the back only to be gunned down over and over again, but a how is that diffrent to what the same people are doing at the crown all day.

If the motivation for this change was that the Tech Plants were too easy to defend, a better alternative would have been to add a couple of additional entrances not accessable from ground level or maybe move the elevetor from the flight deck closer to the middle of the base so you don't enter right next to the 2 open doors where the main zerg is flowing in.