Active certs is needed. The way to reduce vehcile spam.

I made this proposal before but was met with a stonewall of people fresh of the COD boat calling me a bitter PS1 vet saying that i should adapt to PS2, etc etc...SO NOW! what we need is active certs.

Ill explain the concept further, but yes, it is essentially a throwback to PS1’s limited cert system, but incorporated into the cert current system for ease of programming and for players to switch to it.
I think we can agree that this game is dominated by vehicles, its not that they’re specifically OP, its their availably and that in the case of air, few people will bother to run a burster MAX to counter it, instead they want to nerf this, buff that, change resource costs etc. Which aren’t the core of the problem. The core of the problem is that EVERYBODY CAN ACCESS ANY VEHCILE THEY LIKE. And even without points invested in timers they can still probably cycle through them all with no regard to timers or resources.
Ill first go over some other ideas people have on countering vehicle spam and why they’re not as good of a solution as active certs.

Limited vehicles per continent, empire wide. I shouldn’t be limited in my ability to pull a vehicle because some other useless Dbag pulled one first, or worse a multiboxer did and is now sitting AFK in sanc while broadcasting “lol, got all your tanks.”on macro.

Up the resource cost on vehicles, this doesn’t solve the problem that everybody can pull a vehicle, after a major conflict at a base and its taken, everybody wants to roll-on to the next base, so they pull a vehicle, as medic, HA, LA, whatever, no plans to keep it running, they just plan to burn it.

Upping the timers on vehicles, again same as the above, doesn’t solve the problem that everybody can access them, while it solves people been able to spam them, but it doesn’t help with people that only play to drive vehicles, even at the best pilot or tanker, you can still have a quick random death, and if timers are 1hr like some people want, its not going to be an enjoyable game for these people.

So Active certs, while I wont be proposing an exact implementation with detailed pricing and exact structure because i see that as pointless for a concept and will only promote needless arguing. So Active certs.
I Believe players should have a cap on the amount of certs they can have active at any one time, lets say its 20000 for arguments sake. I guess you could have it somehow tied to levels to make them useful or something. How does this solve vehicle spam you might say? Well now to even pull a MBT that will be 2000 certs for a stock one, want it ******? Probably will cost you 5000. Obviously players would start with certs to unlock things straight away, classes would also be included in this. Maybe 1000 certs to unlock a class. They may have to make it so that players under BR20 can respec their certs. Obviously the goal here is to make people choose a class or 2 and then maybe a vehicle or 2. We never had the problem of 50 tanks surrounding a base in PS1 because 50 people didn’t have the cert for it.

So yea, you would only be able to have active 20000 certs, while certs would still be no refunds you would now have to play around with how many you have active at any one time so you could figure out a build that works for you. I would say that every minute you have the option to reassign 1 cert, so want to takeoff that 1000 certs in composite 4? Well wait 17 hours, go ahead. Now paying for items would NOT get around this, if you want to have that 700 SC station cash shotgun active and pull it anytime you like, then it’s going to take-up 1000 certs of your cap(or whatever the cert price is)

Now to further complicate things, in the case SOE feels there isn’t enough...lets go with AA around since thats not really hot right now. They could reduce the active cert cost for it or make it so everybody could just have it...provided they paid the cert cost or the SC to unlock it, yes im saying that its active cert cost and its price to unlock wouldn’t have to be the same, but for ease of use it would be simpler if it was, obviously.

If you don’t believe vehicle spam is a problem now, wait, history often repeats itself and the BR40 curse is lingering, it won’t be long now before it strikes and everybody and their mothers will have 5min timers on their fully equipped tanks and aircraft and it will be such FUN!

Hard cert cap and cert to drive?

Sign me up

I think vehicles will become less of a problem as more people get into outfits and get vehicle-counting unlocks. 20 people pulling magriders can cause problems, but 20 people with anti-vehicle launchers can solve that problem really easily. [GAB] loves to hang out at mesa skydock and just slaughter waves of NC air that try to come at us with our one squad of co-ordinated AA maxes.

What does this system do that tweaking the resource system would not?

no, helps only good players and people without jobs. dont want to sound nasty here but this is a dum **** idea im sorry.

I entirely disagree.

The idea is a throwback to an archaic system. I'm not saying your nostalgic or anything, but that old system has no place in this game. I find if you actually tactically adapt, vehicular dominance isn't even an issue. It stretches about as far as Magriders being the dominant presence whenever they're out due to the total inability to hit a dumbfired rocket on them unless they're slow/you get really close/you get lucky/you're a really good shot with nice prediction abilities - and ofcourse the rampant rocket pod issues.

Past those, anything in this game is easy to deal with tactically. While I know it may feel for some people that it's pretty stupid that everybody can just build a tank on demand - that is a strategy. And some platoons actually use that by turning themselves into armoured fists. And some want to use air wings. And so on, and so forth. If you cap the number of vechs, you just restrict the gameplay, all over a matter of preference. Vehicle spam isn't really an issue to me. When you consider the explanation on how they're "made", it genuinely makes no sense to cap them.

/Signed

Eh... i feel like its too late to fix the problem.

I love tanks. They're big targets.

This video was made possible by the Outfit's impressive level of organization, the element of surprise, and the SKEP launcher.

Without the SKEP launcher most of the Magriders here would have gotten away clean.

Do you even have 5000 certs?

Honestly, 20k is too high of a cap. The cap should be 8k or so.

Anyone who would complain about that, go check how many certs you have, you don't even have 8k total.

I just added some numbers together, and it's about 15k certs to max out medic and a scythe.

How many of you have 15k certs?

If there was a 15k limit, where 1000 would be spent on a class itself, and 2000 would be spent on a vehicle itself. That would force people to min-max.

I would be forced to max out my medic, have a stock engineer, min-max my scythe and min-max a lib... I might even be able to fit in a lightning if I was willing to sacrifice a bunch of things.

it's an excellent idea, in my opinion.

That above is indeed a problem and will only become an even greater problem as time goes on. SOE needs to suck it up and make changes, the sooner they do this, the easier the process will be. Great idea.

Would be nice to see something like this
Would reduce both tank & air spam, which 90% of the threads in this forum are complaining about

Even so I am not entirly sure if that system is the way to go

So the plan here is to punish players who cant farm certs every single day due to IRL obligations even more?

I'm sure this game will be extremely popular, just like Planetside 1 was. /sarcasm.

With the resource system already in place to deter terrible drivers/pilots, all I'm seeing is "Let the people who farm kills and get bored of the game because they play 20 hours/day be the ones to easily use vehicles"

People should accept that SOE wants this to be a casual friendly game. That's why its free to play.

Well resources dont limit anything at the moment
Even while using only Libs + Mosi, I am not running out of resources

Would like to see something like that:
Flash + Sunderer (without AMS) + maybe galaxy for everybody
Then choose 2 or 3 vehicles out of the rest you can drive, anything else gets locked

If you weren't a member of the overpopulated zerg faction, you wouldnt get as many resources as you do.

In my opinion they should lock resource pools to each continent. If you die every 5 minutes (and stay in the same continent) you most definitely won't be able to pull out any air/armor depending on what you spam.

I think the naysayers are misunderstanding him.
The 20,000 cert cap is just a figure he's using for arguments sake.

What he is implying that, if you want to be a dedicated vehicle driver, you can! You just need to put in a hefty chunk of your available points to unlock it, thus leaving you less effective at many other tasks.

With this system, you can focus entirely on being a tank driver if you wanted to, but again, this would make you a less capable infantry.