Awful Fights, Not Much Fun - Bases

This game is just ****. I am not standing in any awe or wonder as to why people leave these days with the issues of the gameplay itself piled onto hitching / performance and other wonderful bugs. It's godawful and just not fun.

The bugs can be fixed but the gameplay is terrible

Too many uneven popped fights of "massive" scale fighting over tiny bases that for even some of the best, can support a solid 48 v 48 or 64 v 64. I think there is only 2 bases in this entire game that can comfortably support 100 v 100.

Something is WRONG when you have 96+ vs 96+ fighting at a base like Snake Ravine which even in the smallest of FPS shooters would be considered too cramped for even a decent 12v12 fight. That and when the population % is almost two to one odds with the overpoped faction further magnifying the disparity anti-fun through the grotesque overuse of force multipliers without any form of punishment at all. "oh but klypto we want carrots not sticks". Complete ********. There are always sticks, you just are just handing out pikes and pitchforks to people in those situations claiming those sticks don't count since you've passed on the blame.

Ever wonder why HE shells and that trash was so insanely overpowered? Ever wonder why we need to "reduce the lethality of the game"? Ever wonder why it's hard to get a good fight? Ever wonder why performance is so terrible? Ever wonder why the server dies and medkits don't work? Ever wonder why the new player experience is bad?

Base Design.

And no, I am not talking about we need walls separation of infantry and tanks. I'm not talking about does this base look pretty or not. I'm not talking about does it have enough cover in places. I'm not talking about making it more intuitive or paint arrows everywhere to make people know where to go. Anyone who believed that nonsense would solve the core problem is totally nuts. I'm talking about how this game focuses hundreds of infantry in handfuls of square meters of space in tiny bases, doors and hallways to be blown to giblets by the nearest explosive farm machine or shot six ways to sunday by the fifty people in the next room. Massive battles does not mean pack everyone into an area to where you have to be culling them out less than 25 meters away.

I mean, look at Server Smash. Talk about gross. Often it's just this disgusting gelatinous blob of meat made up of hundreds of players being packed into small buildings with cap points that could hold like 10-15 people spamming all forms of grenades. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy participating in server smash, but it definitely is not for the fights themselves that draw interest.

Picture a picnic blanket being suspended a few feet on the ground. Now put a thousand marbles on it. Sure some of them would come together and hit each other, and it's definitely cramped but it's still OK. Now put a giant bowling ball in the middle that has engraved on it "Capture Point A". All the ******* marbles just go there because there's nowhere else to go. You essentially put this massive gravity well or "fight-well" in the base for hundreds of people to pile their corpses on. It's awful. You need both more distributed and lighter bowling balls and a bigger picnic blanket.


Right now you have a system where objectives are so small and focused, it's as if Planetside bases were designed in a bubble ignoring the fact that more than 32 players might have to fight here. Even major facilities have too much focus on one room with a few side distractions. For example the Biolab dome is just too small and does not scale well at all. In fact, none of the bases scale period. I also don't think the base designers are bad, they just have the wrong approach and perspective to tackling base design for a game of this scale.




To fix this...

I want bigger bases with less centralized but dynamic objectives. Like if there's only 10 people attacking a base, the defenses won't be that high as it would be if 100 people were attacking or if overpoped.

By the way do this after the resource system, there's a reason why too.

Lets say your typical base with no enemies detected is powered down. No automated turret defenses, no shields are up, no teleporters are running, no extra terminals or capture nodes are active. The whole bases is in standby while it charges it's energy reserves and forwards a percentage of it's excess to the next base. It's just a lot of buildings with one capture point closest to the spawn room and then the spawn room. You can still manually man the turrets and pull vehicles but that's about it.

If a small handful of enemies show up, nothing changes, it's still just a base to fight on.

As soon as it goes to 12-24 enemies, the base AI should go "oh I should probably wake up and do something" and starts activating basic defenses like first level shield generator(s) protecting certain aspects of the outer perimeter. For example the vehicle shield gens on the amp station outer walls or blocks an access path or two for infantry somewhere in the base. Once it passes 24 it should be like "oh things are starting to get interesting" and activates another base node (capture point) to try and distribute it's systems and theoretically increase the amount of effort / time to take the base (assuming the defenders are able to hold at least one).

You get the idea right?

Like at 100+ enemies it should be going "oh ****" and activating things like trashy auto-turrets that can be repaired when destroyed, all levels of shield generators, a pile of capture points, a SCU should be brought online to handle all the people spawning at the base, and some teleporters.

If the situation is bad, like the population is uneven in favor of the attackers, the base should step up the defenses a tier or two above the usual pop level in an attempt to balance out the fight.

The thing to keep in mind though is that this stuff is not supposed to be an advantage, but not free. It is not magical free defense to have the ultimate base that is impenetrable at no cost. There's a reason why that stuff is not on all the time. Each thing should drain energy from the base. You know, that nanite stuff that is planned in the resource system? Once you run out, poof, it all powers down and you are now at a serious disadvantage.

So basically a base attack starts in stages and involves logistics. If you just repelled a large force from your base, you should be pushing them back to attack. If they failed to keep up their supply chain on their base power to fuel them on their now repelled assault then Too Bad. Your defense is at a disadvantage. This also leads to sieging a base by cutting off the ANT supply lines to stop the enemy from recharging their base and defenses before moving in for the main assault against the soften defenses.

It would be kool. That is my conclusion with that sorta formed idea.

I'm tired of typing goodnight.

I've always been a strong advocate for the 'region' approach to bases. Wherein a hex is not captured by a single base, but a group of them. Maintaining control over the lot of them is more important then just zerg crushing each one.

By spreading out the fights you create more interesting ones. People can do more then press g and hope for kills. Then armor becomes more important, as controling the flow from one sub base to the next is critical, as that armor coming in can wipe your sunderers or press a flank hard.

It also alleviates work on the devs, as instead of coding and redesigning the game which, frankly, is simply never going to happen. Connecting the bases more fluidly and having a give and take to a 'core' base makes more sense. Advantages can be brought to someone in control of the base, but such control needs to be able to be threatened at any time.

There is no solution to the overpop problem. I doubt there ever will be. It's a simple fact of nature. SOE won't use the stick to discourage it, as it's bad design. You don't punish the player for something that isn't their fault. And while technically, it's not the underpop faction that's at fault, a side needs to be chosen. It would be better to seek incentives for the third empire to turn on the other in such a situation. If VS and TR are attacking the NC, then the TR/VS front is weakened. There needs to be a reason why one of those two factions would turn to bite the other in the ***. As it currently is, it's much easier to take the weakened empire's territory and then sit on it forever. See: basically anytime you log into Emerald.

Its an Emerald thing - I was seeing small fights to be found on Connery, but Emerald prime time is just a whole lot of lot everywhere.

Was it you or Alarox that was in the godmode vanguard in that western Amerish base comprised of a bridge with small box on top that 90+ guys were trying to enter?

You mean fights closer to 64 v 64 or 32 v 32? Because I hear that's a thing already being played.

I see a lot of BR100's that I haven't seen or those that have come back to the game.(TR/VS side, I have no idea what BR my teammates are unless they kill me.)
I still see a big player base in this game.

I do see a lot of players who I assume are F2P'rs
No camo, or the Blue free camo that was handed out.

We have what seems to me an influx of new players.
The fights do seem different in the past few months.
Leadership it seems on NC is lacking, but at the same time who are the players in the squads?
Do they have any experience at FPS's? do they have any idea how to be effective with what they do have atm?

Sometimes I think we have too many outfits and most of them have no clue how to lead anyone anywhere.
But that's just from my perspective.
I have not been in any outfit.
I have been in a squad less than 10 times.
I ignore all invites but am considering one repeated invite! (you know who you are, I just wonder why they are inviting me.)
To give it one more try, maybe even join the outfit. Maybe.
I have even considered forming an outfit called NPE (New Player Experience)
But it lasted a whole 10 minutes before I said Fkit.

There are so many factors to consider when it comes to finding the solution.
Which ones are the key factors and which ones aren't.
Who is assessing the information and making the decisions?
We certainly don't have all the information necessary to make those calls imo.

It comes down to the player base and money.
What are the Demographics? idk, we can only speculate.
The company needs to make money, if it doesn't, they have to make adjustments.

I feel your pain Klypto.

100 vs 100 fights were the reason I kept playing because you can't really find those in any other FPS. So don't really care if they're on some small base. Zerg against just a handful of players is boring ofc. But zerg vs zerg is just epic.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in for improving the game to make it more enjoyable for everyone but I don't really mind the current state either.

Good to see at least one person doesn't mind being randomly slaughtered for 5' from every direction, worse than Happy Tree Friends ever could be. Good thing we don't have gore otherwise such situations would have been beyond silly. Though I wouldn't mind just a tad bit, just saying. But beyond those comments, it's lame and frustrating when it's Zerg against Zerg in small facilities. And it makes our PCs moan and beg too.

I pretty much agree 100% Klypto.

As someone who used to churn out a lot of maps for Unreal and Unreal Tournament back in the 2000 - 2002 era (with an average rating of about 8 out of 10 on Nali City so I can't have been that bad) I honestly can't understand how a lot of the bases here got through the initial planning state, much less how they ended up in the live game.

It is not even just on Indar, those bases can be found on every continent up to and including Hossin.

The worst and most obvious offenders are the ultra small ones, pretty much just 2 or 3 real buildings (often single floor ones) with a few container sized ones. Those would have been depressingly small even in more conventional first person shooters, for a game like planetside they actually shoot so far past "sad" that they come out somewhere near "hilarious".

But there are a lot of others, too. Often with loss obvious problems.

One of the major problems is how easy it is to camp them, one way or the other. They often have only two or three choke points that completely decide the flow of the battle. The Hexagon on Esamir (both spawns in the same walled of area with only 3 exits) and the Construction sites on Hossin (only one point, only one logical place to deploy sundies, point can only be reached through few meatgrinders by both teams) are the offenders for that point which come to my mind immidiately.

Then there are the bases which are large enough to offer a good fight in theory, but which are only accessible by very limited lines of approach. Old crown which only had a narrow backdoor and a almost as narrow main street is one such offender.
As are Mesa Skydocks and that one Hossin base of which I can't remember the name just now, which are bases that can only be entered by air or a small number of jump pads and elevators.

Spawns which are way to close together are another point. Why do we even have 2 spawns in some bases, if both of them are so close you could place 2 lightnings in between and then hop across without ever touching the actual ground?!
I couldn't drop any names right now but I am sure there is at least one base with both spawns so close I can conviniently fly from one to the other as LA with an almost uncerted jetpack. Again, what is the point?
(On the topic of spawns. Spawnrooms on the very edge of a base are what provoces spawnroom shelling. Could bases get another one or two layers of buildings on the outside? Preferably buildings that are large enough to offer protection.)

Other bases are large enough in theory but so devoid of any points of interest that you'll rarely see anybody move away from the spawn, the single control point and the most probably sundy location. Well with the exception of a handful guys trying to flank.

We also have way to many one point bases in this game. Even the smallest maps in other games that have a domination or king-of-the-hill style game mode have multiple points. Why does this game that aims to be massive limit itself to single control point bases?
Back in beta we had many more 4 point bases. Why were they removed at launch or shortly after? Incidently that "bad omen" of reduced points and the addition of the lattice, which produced larger fights and at the same time managed to make them boring is what drove of most of my squad sized outfit about half a year after launch. (yes, they actually called such an early developement a bad omen).
I was not in the Alpha and early beta (we arrived in Alpha Squad), but I have heard there were 5 and even 6 point bases, but they were phased out because Alpha lacked the player number to make them interesting. (That is what the few Alpha guys I know told me anyways.) Now we lack bases of the right size to accomodate our player numbers.
Can we connect the dots please?

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In short, the two points I think are most important, and the most lacking aspects in base design currently, are what I'll now call "points of interest" and "lines of approach".

The "points of interest" are what decide where in a base the battle takes place. Those are spawn options, good sundy deploy areas, control points, SCUs and major generators (the old stripe shields). We need them to make the battle cover larger areas and prevent us from sitting on top of each other. Honestly, almost all bases in this game are lacking in that regard.
Points of interest are generally to close to each other, short times to get from one to the other encourage blunt force tactics and mass zerging (the 30 guys insode a room Klypto mentioned)

"Lines of approach" are what dictate if a battle becomes stale or not. Generally look at where the attacker or the defender have to dig themselves in to prevent the enemy from reaching their objectives. If those places are too few then we get a stale meatgrinder battle or a factions sitting on opposite sides of a door lobbing grenades inside.

They both go somewhat hand in hand and can be lessened quite a lot by adding one or the other.
Even with 12 total and currently relevant points of interest a base will be a meat grinder if you can only get there through 2 narrow corridors.
Even with 2 dozen entrances and a well thought ot network of streets a base will be a *********** if there is only one control point and nothing else to draw players to other places on the map.

Currently, sadly, most of our bases fall into one of the above categories.

Nice post Klypto. I may take a couple minutes later to form a proper reply, but I totally agree with you.

I really like the scale of some of the new buildings on Hossin. In particular, the high ceiling buildings at the construction site bases, seem like a much more reasonable scale then the small two stair case - two story buildings that appear everywhere else. Also nice large buildings with a lot of open space and cover, such as A point at Auraxis Firearms or all three buildings at NC Arsenal(not crammed 5 feet apart like at NC Aresenal, but the building scale itself seems appropriate for large fights)

Adding more of these appropriately scaled buildings and at the same time, spreading the buildings out, and giving additional objectives, ie. Multiple SCUs that attach to multiple different spawn rooms, Generators that were worth taking, ect could really help spread out the fights and improve the experience.

Ok, so...you really except the devs. to read your post when the first sentence starts with; "This game is ****" You won't be missed...

That are some really good ideas for bases Klypto, would be really cool to see some of them go online and make the game a bit more fluent again ( But it'll take some time for sure until they get somewhat bug-free implemented ).

They should put limits on spawning and also limits to redeployign on bases that have already got some pop and they should force fair fights, this game is not fun otherwise unless you want to video tape 60vs30 spawn camping and put it on youtube to show how game has amazing graphics and that theres so many people playing at one base lol... SOE needs to wake up and start doing things not just adding camos, directives and stupid unimportant stuff noone ever asked for.

Base attack stages in MMOFPS games:

Stage 1: spawncamp
Stage 2: profit

You already have that option, your friendly zerg can attack 2 adjacent lattice lines that are only 600 meters apart, that's walking distance y'all. But they don't. It doesn't matter what devs do to bases.

Strange, the reason I play this game is due to the epic (Zerg) battles. Sometimes you get steamrolled. And sometimes you are the one doing the steamrolling. My favorite is when you get into a push pull between a couple of locations.

Personally, I think the term Zerg is silly. When being used in a derogatory sense it is usually due to someone complaining because the other side put up more numbers and got their *** handed to them. It happens, deal with it. Bet when you are the one crushing everything Zerging you don't complain.

Yesterday? I was tanking in that area with AlphaSinJackal for 4 hours last night if so.

Good points, good post, logical approach, logical fix.
10/10
I really like the ideas, they would discourage the swarm syndrome. I'd tell you who I was, but I would be lynched in-game by the infantryside.

Big battles are fine and part of the game.

People need to except that some of the battles are meat grinders and not built so you can get a 5 kdr. Some times you are going to have to take land by spilling your blood for ever inch

Small outpost should be the size of a tech plant main plus crescent building. Large outpost the size of an amp station, and main bases should be full on cities with dozens of different kinds of objectives.

Why does indar have more barren land now than years ago in ps1?

Ferkin lol, I suppose you connect through Tor and 7 Proxies to post that as well? Fear of persecution from your peers in Planetside 2 over a Forumside game-play opinion.

This game is serious f*cking business.