[Suggestion] Balance

The details of it could be discussed for hours, but the resolution to this seems simple. First, tally up everything that one might call "cheese." This includes vehicle weapons, c4, BASR kills past a certain distance, lets say 50 meters, etc. Those don't count towards MMR or count as reduced.

Also, its already evident there is a built in system concerning Savior kills. If a player gets kills where the enemy is not firing at them, it could either not count or be reduced.

This could go on and on, and I feel a bit like someone explaining how anti-bacterial medication exists, and its not rocket science to make it, however I can't explain how it all works.

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Making the game newbie friendly in what way? In an MMO way? Sure. In an FPS way, while keeping everything fair? Absolutely not. Impossible. You're dividing by zero.

What objectives would you present to distract the higher skilled players? Its my assumption that most of these players are only here to play an FPS. Does this task-based system lock out veteran players from certain zones/hexes? Well that's not exactly fair to the veterans, not letting them go where they want.

I've come to terms with it. The devs will always protect their base and that base fundamentally drives off new players. If they wanted to add big, new ideas they'd do so in another game. I don't know, EarthCorner or something.

Your solution is to give a free pass to certain playstyles regardless of them using it to farm or not. A simple and unfair solution.

You are explaining how anti-bacterial medication exists by saying we need to apply chlorine intravenously. Sure it would work if you pump enough in, but it would kill the host along with it. It has too many disadvantages to be worth it.

You assume that they are mutually exclusive. You can set up goals to be FPS but with an MMO goal. For example CTF gameplay where you arent limited in loadout while carrying the flag encourages FPS gameplay but with an MMO goal, unless ofcourse you start narrowing your personal definition of "MMO goal" even further.
Hell just the idea that you have seperate FPS and MMO goals is a bit ridiculous. Some of the first FPS's already had CTF gameplay and point-capture gameplay as well (Domination and Assault modes in UT99 for example). FPS goals is not just deathmatch measured by KD. it is also measured by the ability to complete goals. The highest ranked player in a CTF match has the most flag captures, with things like KD being relevant only for ties in flag captures.

PS2 is essentially a variation of UT99's Assault and Domination gameplay modes combined, then with a greater scale added in population. Thats it. Adding in more population did not instantly change the goals of these game modes and split them into MMO and FPS

You have a really weird idea's. Why should there be any lockouts for veterans?
A simple example: we add tertiary objectives to bases (tertiary=non-vital). These are a bit time consuming but make it easier to push forwards. Base design can encourage players to walk through these objectives and the mission system can guide newbies towards it, especially with a voice-over telling new players about the goal.
We add secondary objectives for veterans (secondary=optional but completing some of the total available is necessary). While newbies will be guided passed these, they will only pass them after a few tertiary objectives have made it easier to get there. These objectives would make veterans go through the paths of enemy newer players while being at a disadvantage. This draws some players to those goals while providing an advantage to the newbies in order to equalize the fight.

Examples of tertiary: placing a deployable power module to power something like a gravlift, jumppad, turret, shield etc, or gain access to it.
Examples of secondary: you need to shut down at least one generator to gain access to the objective, the pointroom for attackers and the Sunderer Garage for defenders.

A simple set of resource costing utilities could easily add such gameplay alongside a few contextual mechanics we already have in the game.

Which base is that? It changes from person to person what they think the base is. I've heard the base is Heavies, HE spammers, aircraft players, infantry players, vehicle players, infiltrators... and while there are definitely some things with more privileges than others I have found that true black and white is virtually unheard off.
Also I dont know what you have come to terms with, because you create divisions between FPS and MMO based on some barely defined set of rules I can literally only guess at.

Its pointless for me to offer anything here, because I'm not a statistician nor a game dev so I can't back things up. But I have known people to pursue that career and coming up stuff like Kill Value=1(TTK/weapon+damage taken) - enemy threat value blah blah blah is like, day 1 game dev stuff. And yes it wouldn't be perfect even then but nothing is ever absolutely perfect, that's why the MMR systems are never revealed. I also feel like even if I came up with the perfect MMR system for PS2 you still wouldn't like it.

CTF is a good example. In the shooter game Flag Capture, you play 32 v 32 matches in a generic fps format. You, being the good objective-based player, attempt to capture the flag. You succeed in this and win every match. You get the big shiny "You won!" screen at the end. However, you begin to realize that the other 63 players completely ignore the flag and focus on killing each other, and you of course. How does this make you feel? Do you consider yourself good at Flag Capture? Do you want to keep playing as the flag runner, or join the rest in the unofficial deathmatch? Or maybe you want to find another game to play that suits your objective-based playstyle.

Now you're a game dev for Flag Capture. Your boss is upset that the game is called Flag Capture and yet everyone just plays deathmatch. He says it feels dishonest, selling a game for the objective-based content and all anyone ever does it shoot each other. You make the "You won!" screen as shiny and bright as you can, but no one cares. What do you do to make the players care about the flag?

My assertion is there are only two things you can do. You can water down the experience so FPS is no longer fun and people might as well care about the flag. No one likes this. The second thing is that you can add some sort of "unfair" advantage to flag captures. Like every time you capture a flag you spawn a tank to ride around in.

We already have secondary and tertiary examples and we already have routers to subvert those.

Historically, the PS2 base has been divided into 3 sets.

Group 1: FPS tryhards

Group 2: Outfit-based players

Group 3: ESF/Lib/Vehicle mains

From what I can tell, the third group has fallen out of favor. Vehicles have received nerf after nerf, if not directly then through things like the additions of orbital strikes, routers, and bastions. ESF's just got the recent nerf in all new players getting lock ons from the start.

As far as you not understanding what I mean by MMO and FPS, think of it this way:

Define "skill" as reaction time and the very basics of gameplay.

For a game like Dota, if your five man team does not have as much "skill" as the enemy (last hitting and reacting to events on screen) you can still win through clever hero selection.

For a game like WoW, if you're not the best at battlegrounds you can farm up items and simply increase your stats.

For Planetside, if youre not the best at turning the corner and shooting the man, you can still hilltop snipe, vehicle main, or simply do Light Assault things. So yes, "skill" isn't everything in Planetside, BUT the devs will never knowingly and willing add more counterplay, or more cheese, to negatively affect the "skilled" playstyle.

You are trying to apply a fraction of a fraction of a 101 lesson you apparently dont really know anything about on a random game without any experience in it and expect it to go perfectly?

The math you describe would only measure gained statistics and not discern how they were gained or why. It would suffer from all the faults I already named.

You are deliberately creating a single scenario with people who are actively avoiding the main game and making it a deathmatch instead. At which point the players who want to play deathmatch will join a deathmatch game rather than a CTF one, making the entire hypothetical scenario invalid. Next game the only CTF player will be put into a game with CTF gamers.

Even though PS2 has no matchmaking for seperating these players a good game lets you do both. You can use the FPS gameplay to achieve the CTF gameplay. Using incentives you can make farming playstyles less attractive than actually completing the goals of the game.

We already see that in a way that is already the case in PS2. The easiest and most effective way to have pure FPS gameplay would be placing 3 Sunderers in the middle of nowhere and duking it out without destroying the Sunderers. That doesnt happen, what does happen is that players seek a base and try to complete a goal. Defenders will try to hold off attackers and eventually push them off, attackers will try to push in while holding their footing in the base. Players actively seek bases that are hard to capture since that increases the amount of time they can both pursue a goal and FPS gameplay. Contrast that to capturing the continent where most of the time is spend waiting for timers to go down while you make sure no FPS happens at all and its easy to see we need more of the first and less of the second. The second is completely a function of rewards being given for avoiding combat altogether and making the game as boring as possible.

Ask my boss where he got his information from because its clearly a fabrication, maybe he read it from an uninformed and highly biased player on the forums and took it to be true? Kick the marketing team for marketing the game as deathmatch despite the title since why else would it attract deathmatch-only players and instead of making the "you won" screen shiny I would change the gameplay so FPS players can play FPS while pursueing the goal.

All valid ways to solve this hypothetical highly specific and realistically almost impossible scenario.

No, FPS and MMO are not mutually exclusive. Again UT99, one of the early FPS games, had 2 game modes that when combined are essentially PS2, except PS2 uses larger maps and playercounts. Nothing else is different.

You have an extremely ultra-narrow view of gameplay which is holding you back. You also forget to look outside the box. You second post is a great example, you might as well go "there are 10 kinds of people, those who know binary and those who dont". Yes its true, but it is no valid way to group players in and then draw conclusions.

The game is quite balanced already, the only large balance issues that the game has are on the vehicle side with air holding dominance over everything else and then minor issues with faction MBTs and even lesser issues with faction secondary turrets.

Infantry fighting infantry is very balanced to the point the only imbalance is when one team has more people in the fight or its a bunch of randoms against a organized outfit but that comes with the core function of the game, use teamwork or throw enough bodies on a base and take it as anything else would be putting in artificial limits when someone tries to enter the hex. There could still be some tweaks to this that would make sense in the game world like a big overpop slowing down the spawn mechanics(OH no! using up too much nanites in the area! Its now taking a few extra seconds to rebuild people!).

The 'imbalance' of skill and experience is also a core function of the game, as it is with any skill based game. One mistake the devs made imo is include the K/D as a stat because that immediately made a lot of people think it has anything to do with being successful in the game.

I get semi frequently tells on my NSO character that im 'trash' because they can see my KD on recursion when I kill them or they kill me and sure, its only like a 1.5 KD.
But im often fighting MBTs and stuff with my Javelin, I dont care if they kill me and call me trash after I solo kill their MBT and they jumb out and kill me, I see that as a win for me by a large margin as killing the MBT was my goal.

PS2 has a lot of different ways people can contribute to the faction and that is all that matters, people who struggle with the FPS shooting because they are new can be really valuable medics/engineers as it organically teaches them how people play the game, they follow behind and can see who is successful or not and what they are doing, where are they going in the base, what cover is used/how is it used etc.

Imo someone dying 10 times but kills the Sunderer pouring out enemies into a losing fight is worth 10 people in the base with +5 KD. Someone sitting on a Flash with radar but get few/no kills is also very valuable.

Not everyone that plays the game plays it for the KD, not everyone plays it for the faction/objectives either and just wants to drive around on a semi-OP Harasser shooting at random stuff for a while.


For me balance in a game is important, its also why Im often found talking about air or MBT/Harassers because thats where the most imbalance exists within the game that can actually be fixed. Pretty much everything else is just part of the game being open world and a mix of skill/experience.

Attempts to appease the balance-babies is what has led to this mess.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the makers of Flag Capture have another game called Deathmatch. Its exactly the same in every way but without the capturing the flag objective. However, twice as many people play Flag Capture than Deathmatch. We have already established that roughly 98% of the players of Flag Capture are only concerned with the deathmatch elements, and they are all aware that the other game exists. Can you find a reason why these people would prefer to play Flag Capture?

There is something I like to call the "Curtain Moment." Its when the player sees behind the curtain to what a game actually is. In Flag Capture, that moment comes quick. The player will realize that no one cares about capturing the flag within an hour or so. Additionally, there is no reward for capturing the flags besides a "you won!" screen and a win ratio on their stats page. A debate could be had that the hour the player spends unaware were actually enjoyable and worth getting tricked. After all, if Flag Capture is free then the player gets to feel like the best flag runner ever for an hour. But is it worth the deception?

Planetside 2 has many, many curtains. It also has genuine balance built in to help non-top performing FPS players compete with the rest (sniping, vehicles, light assaults/cloakers attaining angles of attack one would never get in most games). Personally, I would like to see more of this. However I doubt we ever will.

Are you sure? If someone wanted to know what Planetside 2 was about and how to be successful and enjoy yourself, would you state that the most important aspect was contributing to the faction? Do you think the dev's share this idea, rewarding beneficial faction play above all else? How many directives involve contributing to one's faction, or playing a class in a way that contributes to that faction, and how many involve killing mans?

What are you smoking? Seriously where do you get these scenario's? Fever dreams? I dont know why I should even react to the content of these posts. They prove nothing for you. You might as well go religious on me:
"God exists!"
"How do you know?"
"The bible says so!"
"Why would you believe the bible, its written by people"
"No its inspired by God, so its real!".

To better understand things its often useful to boil them down to simple scenarios. The question I asked, "Can you find a reason why these people would prefer to play Flag Capture?" Is useful on multiple levels.

The most important being the answer. "The reason people play objective based modes, like Flag Capture, over pure 'kill' modes, like deathmatch, are so that they can play with a deathmatch mindset against people who are playing for objectives." This is both obvious and ubiquitous across pvp-based games as a whole.

It also reveals that you are either not taking me seriously or you lack the capacity to imagine even the simplest of scenarios.

And I, personally, play with that same deathmatch mindset. And the reason I don't go play Counterstrike, or Overwatch, or whatever other shooters are out there, is because I would quickly get "balanced" into this or that rank. So in this thread I'm working against myself.

So let me change my tune.

Yes, please add all the smoke, mirrors, and "curtains" to make new players think they're playing an mmo and will be rewarded for all their contributions to their faction. Make the "you won!" screen as bright and shiny as you can when they die 15 times to overload a generator to help them take a base. But don't you dare actually give them something useful to use against me while I play my shooter game. I demand all the "fairness" one has when playing an FPS, while giving other players no advantages they would normally expect from an MMO.

Any class with any sort of supportive ability has that as a class specific directive. Obviously there are plenty more that require killing mans since every single weapon type has directives and there isnt much else you can do with weapons.
How many mission objectives are about killing mans and how many other objectives are there?
How many bases or alerts are won by killing mans?

Seeing your other posts its clear that you have already made up your mind and are a rabid kill/KD player that have convinced yourself everyone else is exactly like you because there couldnt possibly be any other ways to enjoy games, so I wont bother engaging with this anymore since its just as pointless as trying to talk religion with someone that cant accept that people dont have the same beliefs as they do.

Yes it is. However what is not useful is then filling it in with ridiculous imaginary numbers. 1 out of 64 players actually play the CTF objective? I played most versions of UT for example and while there is a small portion that would try to statpad in CTF or Onslaught or whatever they want to call the game mode next game they remained a minority. A minority you could easily deal with since their "FPS" gameplay was focused on stat-padding and the goal of capturing the flag was less efficient for that than grabbing a tripod or Goliath on a badly balanced map and shooting people from across the map with it.

The simple solution: make more stats and more prominent stats that focus on completing the objective.
For example in PS2 you see many stats displayed, but kills is actually represented multiple times in combined stats like KD and almost center of your screen as well in the TAB screen. In the meantime things like vehicle kills are not even shown.

By adding more stats to try and achieve and making other stats more prominent you can solve this problem. Track the amount of vehicles you kill, split it up in heavy, light and air units for example. Add a counter for the amount of times you were present/had recently interacted with a chokepoint just before it was taken (which the game can potentially recognize using a slightly advanced hotspot system).

Changes like that help players focus on completing goals to get the stats they want to achieve. It also helps discern between farmers and non-farmers. Its stupid that you can kill 6 tanks in a single life and if you dont kill the drivers you are considered less skilled than the guy farming infantry in a tank/MAX/whatever.

No it isnt. And you basically give away your game here: you say that virtually all players are a weirdly defined "FPS" players who only join objective based games to farm the objective-only players, the same players who are virtually non-existant in your hypothetical scenario.
I have no idea where you get your idea from and it makes no sense when you actually join FPS games. Maybe you joined one of the few games with a bad culture but it is definitely not like that in any FPS+objective game I've played.

What I did see in those games is that the way you present the game heavily influence the culture in those games. A bad intro and display of the wrong stats, achievements and sub-objectives can encourage players to pursue the game in ways it was not intended. HIVES are a great example: while objective-based it encourages players to avoid combat and look for bugs and unintended area's to set up their base. Even though the design had been intended to let players build their own base and have large-scale fights in and around them with large groups of other players. But the way those stats were earned directed players into the opposite direction.

I am not taking you seriously because I do have the capacity to imagine the scenario and what is wrong with the scenario. Although I have taken you seriously enough to provide some background on your own scenario.

Oh how noble! You admit you are a bad player who knows he's there for the wrong reasons and then assumes almost every single player is the exact same as you.

So you admit to being self-serving and a little bit sociopathical, I get it. But I am not talking any more smoke and mirrors than what drives you already. With the right incentives, goals and gameplay you can align the FPS crowd and the MMO crowd. With the wrong ones you can just as easily make the MMO crowd a bigger problem, like HIVES demonstrated. Assuming you even subscribe to the extremely badly chosen division of "MMO player" and "FPS player".

There was/is very little incentive to play as NSO. No one really likes losing all the time, and the ones that do are the try-hards that don't bring in the $$. Player satisfaction as a whole is more important than draconian player balance rules when there are other avenues to balance. You have to think -- NSO players (paying members), were being forced into factions with the lowest population, which has the GREATEST chance at losing and having a very unpleasant gaming experience. Unhappy customers =/= winning business model.

And pay-to-lose was a big ole meme, we rarely saw NSO players, and most NSO players back then were most likely just Directive hunting, which lines up well with shooting mans and ignoring everything else. DBG all but admitted it was implemented poorly when they changed it.

Oh hey, the religion metaphor again. If we're playing that game, its much more akin to me being a near-millionaire, and advocating that we should tax the billionaires. The counter-argument is "that's not fair to billionaires" and my rebuttal is "when billionaires and high school graduates are competing, its not fair to begin with." The counter to that is, "Life isn't just about money, man" and its time for me to realize that either A) I'm talking to billionaires, B) I'm talking to poor people that are scared I'll "hurt the economy" or C) I'm talking to people who genuinely believe the system is fair/money doesn't buy happiness. Oh or D) I'm talking to people that agree that it isn't fair but any meddling with the system would be a waste of effort and could only make the problem worse. This argument holds up better in real life than it does here because, you know, we could just play other games.

In FPS games you'll find objective-based distractions here and there, but they are always closely related to FPS. Being a good flag runner and being a good FPS player are virtually the same thing. If you're looking for something that distracts FPS players in Planetside, look at the Directive system. A couple years ago, I bet if you polled all PS2 players and asked them how much of an FPS player they were, 90% of the one's who answered "I care only about FPS and not about MMO" would still admit to chasing directives, which again is a non-FPS MMO goal. However today its apparent from the frequency of directive/auraxed weapon users that the Directive system is beginning to fall apart as a distraction.

Make that "you won!" screen as shiny as you want, I don't think it'll help.

The population of gamers who want to "FPS" people who are trying to "MMO" is massive. Think of all the people who want to farm kills in an FPS, or kill people hitting rocks in survival games, or kill people taming dodos in Ark, or shoot people looting buildings in Tarkov, or backstab people trying to farm bear pelts in a number of MMOs. This is hundreds of thousands of gamers. While I can't say with with certainty what percentage of Planetside players fit this description, you're whole, "When I play CTF on FPS games most people care about the flag so selfish kdr gamers hardly exist" perception just isn't correct.

And I vaguely remember of a game called HIVES. I'll look it up to see what happened, although you mention that catering to the MMO crowd killed the game, and immediately bring up bug exploits so I'm skeptical.

Its only because I'm cursed with the knowledge that these sort of FPS-first MMO-second games eventually consume themselves. So in the end I'm still being selfish. Also I actually do enjoy the MMO aspects of the game and wish they were rewarded more, in a game-altering way and not in a sparkly, useless "good job you took the base" sort of way.

You live in your own world dont you? You barely even acknowledge what I say and mostly just reiterate your own twisted view of the world. To Botji you even represent yourself as the saviour with the solution to the problem, being so noble as to harm his own wealth. Yet you've consistantly said this is an unfixable problem because of the players all being exact copies of you.

You make no sense, you live in your own fantasy and barely recognize the arguments of others. Is it any wonder you are compared to a religious fanatic?

I don't see the point in this topic. Players have the freedom of choice to join whatever faction they like. Regardless if its overpopulated or underpopulated. And now there's the NSO faction which was designed to alleviate low population issues.

And even if a NC/TR/VS player had the option of being "flex faction", wouldn't that snub all the NSO players out there after they've potentially sunk cash into their character to fulfill that role? What else could you possibly ask for or expect?

Furthermore, I presume that you are experiencing some sort of problem on your home server where there must be a massive faction disparity? Which server do you play on? What kind of problems are you specifically encountering there? Is your faction the underdog on that server?

There's really nothing stopping players from flat-out boycotting any 1 of the 3 original factions, essentially turning the game into a 2 faction game.

Players have free choice to opt-into any faction they want. It's a F2P MMO FPS PvP game about war. And war isn't fair.

Fact of the matter is that Planetside 2 is aging similarly as Planetside 1 did or any other game. Eventually the numbers dwindle, and you'll be faced with server merges with possibly high ping latency.

You've made two suggestions; making the "you won!" screen prettier and adding more base objectives which would get bypassed or ignored by the same mechanics that bypass/ignore the current secondary base objectives.

I could further address what Botji said, and continue to say things like, "And how many missions does one need to complete before they get one single advantage in an FPS scenario? Does capturing a base help me shoot mans better?"

Escape from Tarkov works as a fine example. If you successfully do a loot run without getting ganked before escaping, then the next round you can show up in body armor, upgraded guns, grenades, etc. No one complains that its "not fair" because you earned the right to that advantage. In Planetside 2 you can mmo your little heart out and the devs/player base will tell you that you haven't earned **** and you deserve to 1v1 that FPS player with 150 directive score and a betel because otherwise its not fair.

I think there have been some good points and exchanges here, let's not devolve.

Just shows how badly you live in your own world. I already specifically told you that I would not change the "YOU WON" screen. And the secondaries would not just be bypassed, but that goes over your head.

Your comparisons are also bad.

I know I said I wouldnt bother engaging anymore but now you got me curious, what are you even talking about?

Did you just go from "Deathmatch/Kills/KD is the only thing that matters"
to "We should 'tax' the high skill FPS players to make the game more balanced for the lower skilled players" ?

I cant really see any other logical meaning behind the really bad analogy you did. Could you bother typing in plain text what you would want to happen because now im just confused?