Today Astraka and I performed some experiments. My fellow infiltrators, you're not gona like what we've found out: 1. When you fire a scout dart, you will be visible for enemies within 50 meter radius. The same distance as a non-silenced carbine! More that a non-silenced pistol or SMG! 2. Vehicle stealth does not work. Vehicles are still visible on a minimap. Also, lock-on time was the same. I have hundreds of certs invested in my Flash and Sunderer stealth. Turns out, this investment 3. You can hear a cloak or a silenced sniper rifle at 90-100 meters. I knew this before, but today we confirmed it. 4. TR silenced pistols are almost as loud as non-silenced. I believe most other silenced guns are that loud too.
1: Not a bug. Perhaps a forgotten design flaw, but definetly not a bug. Also well known. 2: You are aware that the only thing that stealth prevents is passive detection and radar detection, not spotting? 3: Not new, and have been confirmed with video proof earlier. That does not mean anything though, since the cloak can only be heard out to 100 meters during absolutely optimal circumstances. Any other interference will Severely reduce detection range. 4: Silencer slightly reduces the sound, but you get it for the lack of mark on the minimap, not for the reduced sound. The sound on the Bolt-actions when silenced are different. Lower, i cannot tell. But it's still a subjective view and you cannot really make any clear assessments from a one-person test of one single gun.
Yeah, I tested this one in a previous post as well; really sucks and I've had to seriously modify my playstyle as a result, ensuring I am far from where I want to be when I fire a dart, then cloaking immediately after firing and running. I believe this was unintended - and therefore I'm comfortable calling it a bug! Not sure that's what he's referring to...and this is also at the top of my list of things to test as well when I get another chance. For example, my reaver has stealth, and I believe it keeps my plane icon off of the mini-map. BUT it seems to only work when I'm inside. If I park it in a base, really hidden, with no enemies, and hop out to cap or hack or whatever, I've had many experiences where an enemy will beeline right to my plane and blast it when it should be really, really hard to see without a minimap icon to give it away. Might be bad luck, but happens way too often. He also mentions lock-on time not being affected. This is the ONLY reason to invest in more than level one stealth. If it's really not affecting lock-on times then anyone invested in this has hundreds of wasted certs and it's definitely a bug since it counters the description. Another one I've tested previously, and can confirm, but if you've got good audio and know what to listen for, I promise you'll hear it even in high action areas. Fortunately not many people have both the hardware and knowledge to make use of this. Are you sure there's no mark on the minimap? There's two silencers available for rifles, but only one for pistols, correct? I thought pistols could only apply the lesser silencer that doesn't hide the icon and just reduces sound and muzzle flash.
1. and, you know, make a really loud pinging noise and send a little ball of light flying somewhere. So if you weren't already planning to not be in the same place afterwards, I have to wonder why. 2. vehicle stealth is countered by being spotted, or having fired a weapon. As for the lock time, I've never even tried it because a whole extra second is such a waste of certs, but you should also make sure your vehicle attachments weren't silently reset. When you go into VR right now it takes them all off, but they don't look like they are until you re-log. 3. suppressors are really just for a cooler-sounding noise and not showing up on the map. Oddly enough this is closer to their function in reality (well, maybe not the cooler part) as they still make a pretty audible noise, but it's hard to tell where it came from. On the other hand, I was disappointed to learn that putting a compensator on my machine-gun didn't really make it louder. 4. I've actually never bothered to silence either of them so I'll just assume this is true.
Not sure if it does or not when you're outside of it, but also be aware that they might have seen you landing from pretty far away, or if it's another plane he probably has NV. Most things in this game are just generally hard to hide, anyway (unless they literally become invisible like mines sinking through the floor). The regular suppressor is what pistols get, which should prevent the spot appearing on the map when you fire it. The 'flash suppressor' is the one that reduces the range instead, and to my knowledge it's only available on automatic (or maybe some burst fire) weapons, probably owing to its side-effect being reduced automatic fire accuracy (more spread I guess).
1: Showing up at 50m radius (same as a carbine) was well known? I've never seen anything more than conjecture on this at best. We thought it would be nice to have some confirmation & hard data on it regardless. Hopefully people less knowledgeable in this area (like ourselves) will find this information useful. 2: Of course we were aware that Stealth doesn't protect against spotting. We tested it multiple times and in multiple situations where theoretically Stealth should work. The vehicle stealth simply was not working at all. Using previous notes on where vehicles show up on radar without the stealth, it was found that there is no difference between the two. We also tested lock-on launchers with a vehicle with stealth, and one without. The time to lock-on did not change. 3: In small, lightly defended bases this is an absolutely critical piece of data. Knowing that your cloak is audible within 100m to people without audiophile headphones allows you to better assess whether using your cloak is a good idea or not in those situations. I myself try to refrain from cloaking in those situations to better conceal myself from what small defending force may be present. 4. I've read numerous times people saying that your suppressed weapons only sound loud to you, but not to other players (similar to what people used to think about the laser dot). Hopefully this will dispel that rumor. As for one single gun, despite not mentioning it when did use several during the course of our tests confirming this was the case. Ironically enough it wasn't that loud. We didn't test distance extensively with this, but noticed if you fire it at a certain distance away from the person trying to listen, the noise doesn't hardly show up at all even when you close the distance. Obviously if you are close to the area where it is being fired at (towers come to mind) than the sound is still easily noticed. Not super useful but interesting nonetheless. We did check & reset them. A couple of times in fact. The Stealth just plain wasn't working. Not audibly no, but I believe it increased their minimap visibility by 15m. I didn't write that one down unfortunately.
Oh yes, it is a bug. Design flaws are also considered bugs, and usually they are the hardest to bugtrack. When Astraka fired his weapons, I even had to ask him if he forgot to put silencers on them. That's how loud they sound. Silencers should significantly decrease the sound.
This stuff really drives me crazy, and it's why I've also run some similar tests before on my own. There's no reason for us to have to guess what things do in this game, and no excuse for descriptions to be totally off. I'm still raging at the wasted certs to increase lock-on time, even as small as it is - I opt for scout radar over flares on my reaver and I'd take anything to help. Testing it is a pain in the rear, but really necessary to perform at our best. I'm also on Waterson; let me know if I can help with any other testing you want to do. I've got some test chars in each faction with hundreds of unspent certs that I can put into whatever needed.
Already knew most of this but this isn't an attack on you for putting it up. In fact, thank you for posting this. It gives something for new players to look at and be aware of while making their decisions. Stuff like this is a good service to the community.
Thanks for you efforts in debugging this class. I kindly ask you to do one more final step: open a ticket for each of these issues. Writing here on this forum give the problem almost no visibility, but if you open a ticket devs will be forced to answer soon or later, and at least they will put these fixes in the "to do" list. Thanks again!
This seems like a good thread to ask in, so does anyone know what the range is on the maxed radar dart?
Hey guys, I just tested the Vehicle Stealth 4 slot. As reported here first, it clearly gives NO increase to lock-on time despite its description, meaning anything past level 1 is a waste of certs (1,300 at level 4). I tested with two accounts on side-by-side computers and recorded video on both. There's a thread with the video in the Vehicles forum that I started, as well as a post in the BUG forum. Bug forum post is here: BUG Forum Thread: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...e-reduction-does-not-work-video-proof.121131/ If you agree with my results, please up-vote that post so that it gains attention and moves up the list. If you want to discuss my findings I'd recommend the Vehicle discussion board as it seems a more appropriate spot for this particular problem. Vehicle Forum Thread: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...me-increase-does-not-work-video-proof.121137/ And thanks to the original posters who inspired me to waste 2,300 certs (stealth + annihilator) to test this! P.S. - in response to another question above: "What is the range of a maxxed sensor dart?" I happened to test this at the same time I was testing stealth. Range at max level is exactly 50 meters radius (and I have video proof of that as well if required). Now my next question is what is the max range of level 1? I didn't think to test this at the time; I'll have to do so and see what the difference is.
Well, I tried to test this again while doing my vehicle stealth tests. Level 1 is so darn pathetic though! Right when I'm about to narrow in on the exact distance it runs out. But I *think* my tests showed it was only a 10 meter radius? Does this sound right? Next time I'm able to test it again I'll do so, but wow - if it's only 10 meters no wonder people think it sucks!
