Bases with Welcome Mats

Well, part of the reason bases are so hard to "defend" is that most of them already have welcome mats, due to a misplaced understanding of just what a defense is.

If the enemy is inside the base at all your defense is already failing. The PS2 idea of "defense" is that first you welcome the enemy inside your base, let them get comfortable, then try to pile out of the spawn room and push them out. A truly defensible position isn't designed to push out an enemy who has already entered and established control, it's designed to keep the enemy from ever setting foot inside it in the first place.

But that kind of defense would require meaningful travel time between bases, terrain around bases that is actually meant to be fought on, and effort to gather information on enemy movements so that they can be intercepted in the open field.

All bases should be hard to capture, regardless of size..
They should all favour the Defenders, that's the point of a base..

I personally would like the capture times on "main bases" to be a minimum of 15 Minutes.
Some main bases can be captured in 3 to 6 minutes depending on the amount of capture points..

There is no time to arrange epic counter attacks, or epic holds on the capture point..
I would also prefer they also had better SCUs and SCU shield generators, that aren't tired in to the capture timer..
And that all generators are changed back to damaged base, so one guy can EXP Farm them with out a tone of explosives, or playing as engineer. I also want EXP from Generators to be reward to the SOI and not just the guy who armed.

This Solo exp from generators is what creates greed and griefing when trying to defend and progress, when some random guy is wasting everyone's time by blowing Gens up and Turrets at a base they can't capture.

Phalanx Turrets should have auto defence AI like in PlanetSide 1, but the AI has a slow rate of fire using the auto defence.

And while we are at it, they should slap a AA Phalanx Turret on all the outpost spawn rooms roofs, ones that have no roof top on it that is..

H4YW1R3 wrote " Why bother defending any more? Why not just hand bases back and forth?"

LOL, but that's all we ever do. That's Planetside. The game with no fame!

One team Zergs, then the next Zergs, then one team Zergs, then the next one Zergs... It's how PS2 just is and people forget that and/or want more out of it than what it has to offer.