Are Devs ignoring the issues with how bad lattice has made the game?

Who is this "lot of us" anyway? Does the group have a Facebook page?

This shows exactly what happened, well said mate.
Totally agree...

it's not better, unless you are telling me that tanks are in fact supposed to be about 10s of driving, 10 minutes of shelling broken bases.
Also how would you explain the fact that infantry can farm inside a biolab unmolested, air can do bushido under the sky ceiling in the middle of nowhere but no cigar for mech. Even before you start considering air threats, mech accessible terrain is almost always in a vicinity of peasantry based AV (usually in a safety of a base) and base turrets.
Take the indar ex/quartz ridge, it's approx 700m. AV manas can reach to 450m, which is approximately 2/3 of that distance. Lancers? from gate to gate. Maybe you remember the ridiculousness without the pitstop in the middle.

And doesn't that tell you anything there is to know about mech? Do you really feel it it's a 1st class citizen in a combined arms game? It's broken, without a valid role and not cost effective. Compare lightning to an ESF in power and mobility, then do the same with an MBT vs liberator. **** is ridiculous.

That's the problem with the game design. If you had to actually secure reinforcement lines it would be a different story, but when everybody has access to magical teleportation and to indestructible dropships, why bother indeed.
Why even have stretches of land if they act as a loading screen for a team deathmatch in an arena that would look ridiculously cramped in Quake 1? We pay with crippled performance for it, it better be useful.

Too bad 2 factions are always **** out of luck because of the single tech plant. It's so much pleasure faceplanting into a 2/2mbt in a ****** lightning.
I have a brilliant idea, switch biolabs with tech plants. These biolabs on Esamir are pure cancer. The lattice has generally only 3 pathways from each gate (2x edge, crowded center) and almost everyday you see the whole faction cockblocked at 2 of them for hours.

Lots of people hate Lancer range. Lots of people hate Bio Labs. I'm not defending either. I play TR most the time, and out Infantry Range AV is terrible.


I see LOTS of Tank vs. Tank in the areas between bases. Anytime 2 large forces stalemate against each other, i's Tanks all over. And at other times it's Tanks in zergs.

I think "Air Bushido" is overhyped. Air usually is dominated by whoever has the most Air or AA, and the other side just hangs around the edges and looks for crumbs or gets swarmed and wiped out.

You complain about 10s of Driving, but it's only because Tank zergs are so dominant in the ground space between bases (plus Lattice) that there is no battles out in that area.

I'm all for adding non-Infantry based objectives. I'm all for adding Air Radar. I'm all for adding areas for Tanks to kill each other. But I don't want to see Tanks given areas to just dominate Air or Infantry: I hate Esamir.

What is it you want to be doing in your Tank in your ideal gameplay?

Server Smash is Boken and it's rarely played and hardly any of the player population play in it. Tanks have a major role/presence in the Standard game, that's the gameplay that matters more.

Tanks show up in much greater numbers than Air. And MBTs top the lists of most common killers. Tanks are also a lot more effective in numbers than Air.

I don't care if you point out isolated stats. It's the synergies of the game that matter. And Tanks are both highly used and highly effective in the Standard Game. I'm all for nerfing the most dominant Units (or buffing the least), but Tanks (and ESFs, and HAs) would all be in the Dominant category in Standard Play.

I don't like Invincible Gal Drops. I am all for removing them. But also, they don't really occur in the Standard game all that often (though when they do it's a mess, just like the rest of toxic presence of "hardcore organized play" in the Standard Game).

I am all for opening up the use of spaces between bases. But I think Lattice, Zergs, Infinite Vehicles, and Rewards based on Attacking kinda killed that.

I am totally down for them to just remove the Tech Plant limit on MBTs. And I am down with making more Tech Plants on Esamir. Esamir is best for Tanks, why make it so that using them is a mess? I hate Esamir, I almost never play there. I will usually log out instead of playing there or Hossin (and sometimes instead of playin Amerish too): life is too short to waste on gameplay you don't like.

That's why they need to just delete a bunch of bases. Remove the bad ones that can't support 48v48 (let alone 96+v96+) shift good base designs around on the map if needed based on what bases remain.

Add more OPEN terrain, and just plop some of those abandoned structures with a sundy garage down in their place.

Boom, a vehicle game emerges.

we need more open space for VP Gens anyways.

It's not much different to the NC. 450m on AV mana is the top contender, 400m for raven, 290m for phoenix. To make it worse we also don't have a true vehicle based, long range weapon which makes us pushovers in the Indar desert. Specifically thanks to the GK, i just ignore the TR/NC frontline in the Indar north and look the other way.
And quite recently i've seen TR maxes faring quite well, ************ mighty vanguards trying to move south from the howling pass like they were nothing. Just set up shop up on the cliff and laugh all the way to the bank. I don't know what their range is but they sure as **** reached to the gate and a bit beyond.

Personally i find the infantry range too long. i'd nerf the range of peasant based toys a bit, because i see no reason for them to be a threat to mech way before the mech becomes a problem to peasantry. In a game mutuality is good because it doesn't make one 100% hopeless (which is why i hate liberators and ESFs to a lesser degree with my guts because they are allowed to stay off the retaliation arc of their victims in their normal mode of operations)

But it's as is sniper battles were all there is to infantry play.
It looks like this:

Code:

          line        no-mans land      line
BASE+AV >    of        where AV zones      of      < BASE+AV
            tanks        overlap          tanks

or just overruning the opposition with overwhelming numbers.
there is zero depth to both setting up a line of tanks and to steamrolling with mech.
You can't maneuver for ****, because more often than not terrain forbids it because vertically walled canyons are the best thing since sliced bread apparently and where it's not impassable obstructions, it's AV with perfect view.

It's also because if you get mopped up it takes 10 seconds to respawn and another 20 to get to the terminal, but the enemy who had the numbers is already setting up shop on the perimeter and peasantry is flooding in. In most cases once you get mopped up you have zero time and opportunity to face the enemy again in the open field. The enemy wouldn't be able to reach your base after one skirmish if they had to traverse 1km in an organized manner instead of 200-300m.

tanks will never dominate air because they are not cost effective compared to air, not to mention that the mainstream builds have huge deadzones directly above them and conveniently enough air can hover and shoot down vertically. Air can bail when things go south and resort to opportunity attacks to whittle the mech down to nothing.

what i do already, securing spawns cutting off reinforcements and ****. Unfortunately because the game offers mouthbreathers the option to shell, when i do that i am often the first to be steamrolled by the mechanized reinforcements that arrive at the scene.

For all i care the base proper should be strictly off limits to discourage parking and farming. Given the medieval motte and bailey concept, tanks should be able to participate in fights over external parts (the bailey) but be disallowed in motte, but other than that should be rather occupied with cracking down on counterattacks and cutting off reinforcements.

Air don't have proper goals per se either, but it doesn't make them not useful.

But it shows how the minmaxed game looks. If we lived in the alternate reality where everybody listens to what they are told and gits gud, belongs to tight knit outfits, this is what would absolutely happen. A few months ago during the Vanu supremacy era, their outfits shuffled platoons worth of people around, extinguishing attack attemps and overwhelming in their own offence. The only thing going for tanks is that people just want to play tanks even when they know they are strongly suboptimal solution.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that for the same price as ESFs the lightnings are pure **** and for the same price as liberators the MBTs are pure ****.

No ****. 1minute old character can drive a tank. Air controls are broken and are not willing to suffer for literal hundreds of hours to become an elite nobody likes anyway. You are telling me here that the only thing that makes the game work "acceptably" is in fact the lack of skill in general populace because if everybody was a flying pro, tanks wouldn't make it 50m past the mech spawn gate, as evidenced by my every other experience with liberator outside of 96+ cluster****s where they do feel a modicum of respect to AP rounds.
I know i can't fly for **** and am not going to bother, especially when i always opposed being an airhole on philosophical grounds. It lures the biggest share of self-absorbed leetzors who feel entitled to printing 3 digit killstreaks, justifying their farm with "bbbut combined arms".

Lol. Yep, tanks are sure more effective when cockblocked in a canyon, farmed to oblivion without ability to even wiggle. I've seen 20 tanks and a bunch of sunderers spraying the sky with all they got eaten alive by 3 liberators just a few days ago, including my 2 skyguards. I've seen blobs wiped out clean by a swarm of nothing but 10 ESFs despite the presence of 2 skyguards, again mine included.

The problem is that the organized play has enough synergy on its own. It doesn't have need additional leg up in having access to and exploiting to the fullest the teleporting techniques your average pub has no idea about. No **** the game is rock-bottom when it comes to player retention. Either you belong to an elite exploiting powerful toys with barriers to entry or you are crushed by platoons of enemies who appear seemingly out of nowhere wherever you go. The game is barely alive, there is zero benefit in having 2 different games within it.

This is what happens when you clone the core of Battlefield without much thinking. Everything in the reward structure screams individual farm instead of PTFO. I started as an infil main assuming there would be a lot of scouting to be done, observing the enemy movements, spotting and **** for the "greater good". What i got for that? Peanuts, bottom of the barrel SPM which is tied to the char development, while people exploiting the skillstick of the week were laughing all the way to the bank. You can try to convince players to do the right thing but at the end of the day the incentives speak louder than words.

For example if i were to design a ptfo game i'd think twice about granting ANY xp for mere peasantry kills. Kills are merely means to a goal and its the goal that is supposed to be rewarded. The very existence of K/D/KDR in the tab screen is laughable, assuming it's about PTFO. I'd also think about granting the bulk of the cap xp after some time to curb the round-robin where cap-n-forget to lose it in the following 5 minutes was the name of the game. But that's meaningless theorycrafting and that ship has sailed years ago.

I understand the lattice on Indar is getting a bit of rejig on the latest test server update. Seem to remember reading a few facilities being removed from the lattice altogether.

I don't think the devs are so oblivious to the issues the players continue to have with the game. It's easy to be cynical 'cause the game's three years old and hasn't done a great job of retaining its playerbase, but I think some credit is due to DBG for attempting to address some of the long-standing complaints.

amen to that.
Once in a blue moon you can experience mech flowing pretty much freely in all directions between Xroads, Regent rock and Vanu Archives and when that happens it's pure gold. You have rolling hills that add weight to skillful maneuvering, awareness against flanking and communication are of utmost importance too.

Coincidentally the number of bases and the average distance between them as a consequence of them being tightly packed in a finite area were a major source of the hex failure. Numerous, tiny 1-2 hex territories meant sometimes there were 5 options open after the cap and with 300m distances the defense was always finding out which one way too late, when the base was already overrun and they had to start in a locked down spawn. No **** all-out offense was the name of the game back then. Defense was always 2 steps back and always fighting uphill.

Certain bases have been removed altogether .. and now the Link just bypasses where they used to be ..

Ie: Broken Arch



This area is no long a stand alone HEX and the Link goes straight from Crossroads to Tarwich Depot ..

One thing to point out is that with the inclusion of the construction system , bases and objectives ( VP Gens ) will begin to pop up outside the Lattice and allow for a lot more " strategic " freedom both in were to build them and how to attack / defend them ..

It's too bad Star Citizen is vaporware and all people are paying for is Robert's new yacht.

I am willing to take a chance on it.. it better than wasting hours on PS2 with dumb graphics that are never going to get better. And if the guy falls though the ground and goes bellup - he is going to prison for 20 years..... going out on a limb with world wide investor (users) paying for development has a no contract deal - you pay jail time for that.

I am willing to bet that the PS2 dev's cost DBGC well over 2 million a year or more just in DEV pay.
Sebastien - just so you know I looked up the number of regestered user and it is way bigger than PS2 was at any point in time of any year. Sebastien it's ok to be rich if you do something good that people like. It's ok to have a yacht and bask in money.

Bump -- Sebastien for 75 million dollars you have to give the people what they want. And PS2 could have had this also, but Smed made the wrong choices and here we are at this point in PS2. Sometimes people get into a rut and the business goes bellup.
Strong Business people have a clear vision of the future and stay on track to reach that goal. Just like good football coaches do.

PS2 has just stopped making a clear vision of its future. The users (investors in this case) don't want latice lines and the DEV's ignore the investors so they pull out of the DBGC business. They move there money just like the stock market does and put it some where else, that they think will be a winner.

I remember when DOOM was so high end my video card could almost not run it. But by todays standards it is a low end video game. This is what has happened to PS2 - they dumbed it down when they should have stuck it out and gone to 4-8 cores and 2 GB V-menory