Problems with PlanetSide 2 as I see them.

seeing as this is the only thread that the devs have actually acknowledged since release:


stop making this game into bf3 in the future. your fans deserve a game with more depth. while some of buzz's complaints are false and would not work, most of them are actually good and deserve a serious look, especially the parts regarding gameplay.

Totally agree brother.. Vehicle Side has to be fixed.. Farm or be farmed has to be fixed.. there has to be incentive to properly and efficiently capture a base.. It is a catastrophe such a great game.. Bases need to be defendable.. Less enterances.. Less windows.. more important contact locations that require effort to breach..

Not to mention the abundance of vehicles and the way liberators function.. flying tanks..

I'm completely new to the whole Planetside experience, never played PS1, never played PS2 in beta or any such, just downloaded it off Steam a few days ago and went for a ride. I've played plenty of PVP and FPS so I'm no stranger to meta-design in PVP or the basics of shooting/vehicles (or even hand to hand in other PVP games). So I think I am pretty representative of a reasonable player, with reasonable skills and a very high level of patience. I'm not superman but I can get the job done generally.

I also picked NC to start with.

The fundamental feeling I get from PS2 as a new player (and one who is deciding if they stay and spend money in the Store long term) is that I'm being fed into a meat grinder. It's an extremely unforgiving game for new comers and that should be a concern for the devs (and should be for the L2P crowd if they understood anything). Yes, its an open battlefield so you're going to die a lot due to opponents you didn't see and you're going to do the same to many of the enemy yourself. I knuckle down and learn the game, however, this feeling of randomness and for many new players helplessness is exacerbated by many of the issues listed in the original post.

Most of the problems that contribute to this are listed in the OP's summary but the issues that stand out for me are as follows:
1) The completely brutal hierarchy of Air>Tanks>Infantry and the overabundance of vehicles. There's no sense of realistic countermeasures, no balance, its not even rock/paper/scissors, its nuke/rifle/club.
2) Base design - as already discussed by the OP they actually punish the defenders and are essentially gigantic abbatoirs with all their killzones.
3) Ridiculous lack of balance between TR & NC vs the Vanu. When I fight TR I feel we're on generally some sort of level(ish) playing field, be it infantry or vehicle battles. Vanu on the other hand? Crazy. I'm not sure whatever accuracy/damage/range/recoil meta has been set up with the gun system but Vanu accuracy is radically OP. When you can get auto-burst down at ranges other players are hard pressed to hit at, or sniped in a run-n-gun encounter, the fine tuning of the system isn't working. Sub-30 to 40 metres and it feels more level fielded.
4) I don't feel I have the ability to overcome an opponent through clever play (partly a rehash of issue 1). The prime example of this is the complete ludicrousness that is the magrider. Did no one test this crazy before it went into the game? Think you're clever because you got behind the magrider with your infantry with shrikes? Oh no, he can turn on a time, strafe out of the way of your missiles and his HEAT rounds which allegedly don't have a big explosive radius blow away your whole group in one shot. What?

Not going to suggest solutions because I'm sure there are more experienced people than I in this thread but the meatgrinder effect is really not conducive to convincing new players to stay. The game does have great promise but I played EQ for 6 years and have had a taste of Smedley's crew of lunatics and don't have a lot of faith that there's going to be any real balance soon.

I support the suggestion of making bases more defensible (instead of even less!).
I would also like to see battles lasting longer.

Resurrected.

Every point you make is 100% legitimate. I would love to see all of these changes, all of them would do the game good.

Adding my voice to the crowd : a great read.

People care about KDR?

Have point rewards for defense and attack using a 'time in zone' model. If capping for 1 min you get 10 exp, for 20 mins 200xp, an hour 600xp etc. Players should be rewarded for there dedication. Its valuable enough that if you were stuck in a sticky situation for an hour it wouldn't have felt worthless, But its not so hefty that its is worth a cert farm. (not that forcing cert farmers to the defensive line is a bad thing) This would mean players have an incentive to stick out a base defense. Getting paid by the minute and for the kills they earn. NOTE: players would only receive EXP AFTER BASE DEFENSE OR CAPTURE. If the players do not reach the objective the players are not rewarded. There should also be a final cap bonus of say 500xp, because players need a reason to cap the point in a timely fashion.

This is how I think capping should work to prevent ninja caps.

A base that says 0/6 people on point should REQUIRE 6 people to start capping it.

A base that has multiple points, should REQUIRE the max number on EVERY point to start capping.

A base with no cap number aka the side bases on facility/bio lab cells, still only need one person.

Being "fun" is fine enough to me, but being "fun" with competitive/meta game reason would be pretty nice.

Vehicles should have stricter requirements of sorts, be it certing into a license to use and/or resource requirements raised. This would put more emphasis on gaining resources, and more importantly, infantry battles. Vehicles should be powerful, but should be in turn harder to gain.

MBTs and Libs should be gained only from acquiring special hexes. This includes being able to spawn them at the warpgates. Now, when there's a domination in effect and a faction is nearly being gated, a special reinforcement should go into effect allowing them to be spawned regardless at a warpgate. But limit it's usage to when a criteria is reached, spawning these go into normal requirements.

Factions need their "strengths" to go beyond whatever their values are now slightly to make them stand out. But in turn, the baseline mechanics need to be addressed first. Flinching for example needs to be toned down when hit. This will effectively remove the "RoF > All" that we see now. It just doesn't feel like Factions really have enough of an "identitiy" right now outside of the relatively shallow "lore", art direction, and MBT/ESFs. This needs to be expanded exponentially.

BR should have some cosmetic perks at set intervals outside of titles and decals. Different armor sets being available would go a long way. Make them available for certs/SC as far as I care if need be so the devs can get a new pair of skinny jeans they've been eye-balling, or perhaps some new and improved body building supplements if that's their thing.

Next, forget Twitter, seriously. I don't want to have to go there to know what's happening. I want to come to these forums to see what's going on. I don't want to have to search around to various obscure media outlets and fan-based external sites to see details. At least post here links to these articles.

Finally, greater developer interaction needs to happen ASAP. This is a key that's sorely missing right now in the grand scheme of things. We need someone that will come into these forums and give a developer POV on subjects. A strong relation will create a stronger community as we'll feel more important, thus it'll hook people even more.

Here's my two cents on balance: Drones.
Most of the time, I like to play on Amerish, but unfortunately the balance is usually like this: %70 NC, %20 VS, %10 TR. Thing is, there's maybe 20-30 people on the entire continent, w/ one side just walking into bases and capping.
What I was thinking was to put out drones from a base under attack to even out the sides. 2 VS and 30 NC? 28 drones to even the odds. Maybe more if the drones are weak:

• 1/3 the xp of killing a player? (~25-50 pts)
• Half or 3/4 the health of a MAX.
• Give it a laser that fires for one second and cools down in 2 or 3 secs.
• 3 or 4 hits to kill a player.
• Maybe add the default MAX 'nade launcher for anti-armor duty.
• No sneaking bots, give em a flashlight and a sound for hovering. Color em for each empire.

What do you guys think?

I thought about making the base turrets automatic if there's no pilot, maybe shooting at half the speed or accuracy of a normal player, but that'd make it a little *too* tough to take a base..
This, at least, would force invading players to use some kind of strategy.

Most of my problem is that the Vehicles tend to stick their noses where they don't belong and just bombard the crap out of buildings right through the open slots they call windows, making any sort of infantry defense worthless. Maybe keep the windows, but mount energy-sheild-things on them. (with a generator that can be sabotaged by a sneaky infiltrator) There. Problem solved. If you really want some firepower going out then mount a turrent real close to the window.

His points about KDR and Base Design ring the most true to me. The problem is, though removing KDR is easy, what exactly would create a good base design in this game? Is it as simple as putting overshields and 1-way windows on all the bases or is the problem more complicated than that?

Its slightly more complicated, but the 1-way shield would be a first step. Put simply, a base should be an infantry-only zone, the vehicles should help us fight our way to the base and then leave is to us. And quite simply, you can secure and dominate most bases with only tanks and 1 guy to cap the points.

So theres an extremely large problem here, but making the buildings safe is a good step (even if they'll become our prisons)

OP, what do you think of camping spawn shields? I'm really curious about this one. Is it simply not a problem for you? Do you actually not do that?

Yes, my sunderer...the non-combat vehicle....armed with double bulldogs with NV + full blockade armor. It's a better tank than my Prowler and it can spawn my team from it too boot.

I partially agree however this REALLY punishes new players who will have to wait what...15-20 mins to pull a vehicle? W/e, do it; I will just go afk and wait at the warp gate.

I would like to ask all the my victims of c-4 and AV mine traps how they feel about how (evidently) only HAs are a threat to ground vehicles....

With your proposals, you say that non-fatal grenades should be dirt cheap with this as well: spam grenades FTW? We already do that now with reg grenades: they are dirt cheap and easily replenished. Also, like I said over and over before; infantry is a threat to tanks. Multiple HAs, for instance, rip ground vehicles to shreds in no time flat. Hell, I watch you do it in vids over and over which is kinda ironic.

While I think many of your thoughts are pretty good, I really don't agree with a bunch of them.

Anyways, last thought: this needs to be a poll and or have down vote option. Right now people get to visably agree with you but no one can say NO THANKS which really skews this whole arguement to only one side.

edit. you know how you deal with KDR? Remove deaths from it entirely, don't track it at all; only kills. Fixed.

How can someone that plays this game as much as this nerd be so bad at it? I guess just because you play a lot and recruit anyone with a microphone into your pubbie outfit doesn't make you a good player.

All of this whining about vehicles being too overpowered is nullified by the fact that for 100 certs you get two tank mines. Two tank mines kill any vehicle. I have run right past lines of enemy troops and thrown mines under sunderers countless times. In fact, if I'm in a tank and close to a enemy tank, most of the time I'll just jump out and toss mines on them as it's quicker to kill them that way. I've taken out entire armored columns with 5-man squads with my outfit in less than a minute. It's easy if you all have tank mines.

As for all of the base capture stuff, sure it's not all that worth it yet. But, remember that is took PS1 a few years before it went from a "meh, this is fun but boring" experience to being a large-scale and multi-faceted game with many different continents. There are 3 more continents in the works and a lot of other stuff. I'm sure SOE could have waited another year or so for all of their planned content to be finished. But, I'm glad they didn't so we have something to do while we wait for them to finish.


I get why clueless pubbies would join this guy's outfit. But, what I don't understand is why anyone that has a clue about this game would listen to a word this guy has to say. Because he had a PS1 outfit? Hell, who hasn't had one?

We had autofiring base turrets in PS1. All they did was hassle enemy vehicles and remind them that the turrets were there and ought to be destroyed, LOL. Bringing them back would be fine.

No bots. No NPC's. None, ever. Except for the great alien invasion someday.

If they greatly increase the bonus for being outnumbered when they switch to a continent based XP bonus, this'll probably solve itself.