[Suggestion] Bio Dome base design revision, revisited.

Thanks for this post EIMR.

Technically yes, though consider killing a spawnpoint. If you kill a spawnpoint and kill an enemy, that death is more meaningful than if you first kill, let them respawn, kill again, let them respawn, then kill the spawnpoint.

Hence even in PS2, I play to kill players over time, by killing their spawnpoint, so I only have to kill once.

Revival and spawning in PS1 and PS2 are completely different in consequences.


Reviving (and healing itself) in PS1 was limited by the amount of "medical juice" canisters a medic could carry. If you revived someone, this also meant you'd have less juice to heal someone else. So you could choose to carry more medical juice... but then you could carry less ammunition, medkits, weapons or other tactical gear due to the inventory system (you could carry whatever you wanted, as long as you could fit it in your backpack and slots which was a set space).

Furthermore, only the advanced class of medics could even revive. And no, this wasn't inherent in the class. The certification system made sure not everyone could afford being a medic, because you could only spend a limited amount of certifications per character. Each player therefore had a unique setup and most players could not afford spending the points on medical certs if they wanted heavy weapons and varied weapons, etc.

Someone who would be revived, would start without stamina (could only step-walk) until the stamina meter was regained and only had as much armour points as he had the moment he died, until he or some other engineer repaired their suit. The engineer of course, also had limited canisters and had the same considerations as a medic and then some due to the Combat Engineering gear (mines/turrets/explosives) requiring more space in the inventory.


Each hard spawnpoints could be taken out with force. You just would have to fight or sneak your way into a spawn point. Repairing it required you not to just have engineering certification, but to carry a "gluegun". Which again cost a LOT of space in inventory, so most players only carried those when they had to. You could chose to kill their equip terminals so they couldn't get them out (unless they had some spares stored in a locker, which only smart players did while many players used it as a pure gun cache of enemy guns).


Also, a spawn would take 20-30 seconds and healing took a bit longer than in PS2 I think, so it would give you some time.


So a kill in PS1 was less likely to be undone at the push of a button, even if it was possible. And even if it was, it would come at a cost of time or personal inventory/capacity of someone, causing attrition.

Well obviously and I agree in broad lines.

I always try to post an all-encompassing view. What to work towards. The sequence, prioritising and grouping of implementation in an existing is often more debatable, because the effects and temporary side-effects of changes. Especially if they come without the appropriate balancing or counterweights.

It's basically the amount of work vs risk that's too low IMO. Snipers in PS1 had less damaging rifles, they had no cloak as cover and they were amongst the deadliest threats in game. Adding cloak just makes such a unit way more powerful.

In PS1, the "AMP-*****" was basically the closest you got to a PS2 infil with SMG. Only that SMG had a huge amount of downsides: it could barely kill due to sheer inaccuracy, small clip and low damage per shot and a TTK that took a couple seconds and often a reload, making it very situational and mostly for picking off the weak, incompetent and distracted. And because most players are incompetent and not situational aware, it was very lucrative even if it didn't really accomplish much as the user would soon be discovered and easily taken out without actually contributing much than a couple kills a rexo or agile (uncloaked combat) suit could have done too in open vizor combat. So the AMP was basically used for bullying the poorer players (and often used BY poorer players). I have a personal pet peeve against bullies, so while I recognise it is just a way to get kills and accepted it as a valid method which could be fought back against by the situational aware and even the situational unaware because they got a few seconds to respond, I didn't really like it because I didn't consider it very sportive.

The SMGs in PS2 though are about 10x as lethal and kill before someone can even turn around... So you can imagine how I feel about it. And then I'm not even talking about the fighting chance being on the receiving end of a shotgun gives. So I don't consider it very sportive... At all.


The other thing I have against killwhoring in general is that it is seen as "skilled", often as the only form of "skill", because it is the easiest type of gameplay to directly reward action with experience points. Not because it is actually harder, more meaningful or even more fun. Some people would judge other people by the amount of kills and deaths per session, without any regard to whether those kills and deaths were effective or meaningful at all (ie. accomplished anything for the faction).

Would be awesome to see a new Biolab. Those are some of my least favorite bases to be in. Their current layout seriously seems to be absolutely random.

The thing is, even if we do this radical changes, I'm sure the game won't be slowed down, which means no healing engies and still taking 3s to revive. Thus, we need to find another way to improve ambushes, because we shouldn't limit infils to just be the ones who destroy the gen.

Well, PS2 is quite different to PS1. In PS1 as you have just told me deaths mattered a lot more, so having a cloak with OHK would be ridiculous there. The thing is, in this game you can kill a lot more and faster, and deaths don't really matter, so the reward isn't really big. Then, you are really vulnerable to being counter-sniped if you are targeting something, and unlike in other games, you are really easy to detect. Removing the cloak from snipers would kill them, because you are really easy to counter, you aren't that far away that it takes quite some effort to kill you, and the kills don't matter that much.
The SMGs while they kill really quickly, you need to be quite close, which is hard thanks to the state of the cloak and many other things, and killing somebody isn't that important, so they are balanced.

Thanks to the low TTK and low value of lives, we can do much more as killing with a cloak isn't that powerful, and I like that, because the cloak is flexible, and we shouldn't limit a class to just one role.

Quite true. Killing isn't really skillful, and judging somebody by how much they farrn kill is stupid. Guarding the Sunderer or denying the vehicle terminal might not give me as many deaths as the MLG battlegoose medkit HAs, but it is much more useful.That being, nobody killwhores with Infil, if you just want to farm kills you use HA, MAX or a vehicle.


And no, thank you. It's good to see another point of view, and unlike 99% of Forumside(and internet in general), you are logical and reasonable.

I still think it needs it. It's just a bit too hyperactive to be more strategic on a grand campaign scale. Responses take time (it took up to 10-15 minutes to organise 5-10 people in PS1 to get to a point before it turned, PS2 needs far bigger responses and thus more organisation). If you can't mount a defense or stall, you don't have that time to organise that response and it is just a zerg rush from one end of a line to the other.

Without organisation you get that people will take the road of least resistance and play avoidance of fighting (zergs) all together. What to me was the most appaling example of this, is that many players (who thought defense can't be more than just giving up once the attacker sees the spawns and that the attacker should see the spawns so easily) advocated that avoidance is how you deal with being camped: you stop fighting and leave / quit. Which means they tell their opponents to just go so they can get the hardware (base) and exp.

But where is the game in that? Or as the guy who attacked my suggestion earlier without any argumentation put it "why make this a PVE game?" Because if you tell players to leave you alone with the environment cause there's no winnable fight for them, where is the strategic element? Where is the PVP outwitting? If camping a spawn is the epitome of strategic combat in PS2, then PS2 has a problem, because nobody wants to be camped (unless it's lucrative for exp grinding, even if exp grinding should never be an end goal in itself since it is confused with progress).

People shouldn't be playing to get experience points. They should be playing to get experience. If they play to get points, they will do that which provides points as efficiently as possible, but they don't really know why. It must be some measure of progress, but what does it say? Same for "service ribbons". Kill X with Y weapon. What does it actually stimulate? Do you really accomplish something of a higher abstraction level than "repeat action Z V times" in the game? Is it just for personal pride?

Shouldn't one of the goals of a multiplayer be to bond as a group with your rivals and peers? Socialise with other people? So for a MMO, shouldn't that goal be even bigger? So is personal pride in a massive multiplayer co-op environment with group goals really that important? Or should there be put more emphasis on group performance, group cohesion, socialising, developing rivalries?

Obviously, meaning and value is given to things by humans. I know for a lot of PS1 veterans who were Command Rank 5 in PS1, the tactical and strategic element was a battle of faction dominance and a matter of rivalry and faction honour.

"We do not get zero-based on my watch."
"We go for global domination."

These are things players work for that is beyond personal pride. So I would ask myself the question if I were a dev, do I really want to attribute so much importance and emphasis on exp gained per action made, rather than what these actions lead to?




But you know the best thing we had? A real time map on the PS1 website showing the flow of battle over the world in real time. It would show how many bases and continents had been captured by which faction over the past 24 hours, the past week, month, year! It made you say:

"Crap, they're losing OUR home continent. OUR. HOME. CONTINENT. I need to get out there and stop that!"

The war against your faction, was personal, rather than a background conflict, which it seems to be in PS2 (I feel the local fight matters more to players than the overarching campaign in PS2).




I know this is getting rather off-topic. But you touched on game philsophy, vision and how to design for such a philosophy and vision and I could talk for hours about this sort of thing...

So if this is your conclusion on the way it is, I then ask you, is this the way it should be? And tbh, it's the low hitpoints and armour combined with detection that kills them, not so much detection alone. In PS1 most snipers wore reinforced exosuits, since then they could carry a second weapon (often an AV missile launcher or AI assault melee weapon). They mostly died to infiltrators placing remote explosives underneath them.

Hard to get close? I'm going to have to disagree here. Getting close is a matter of approach route or be more patient and rush to your objective less. It just means your route should be longer than straight from A to B. It's easy to get close and personal anywhere in PS2 tbh considering the sheer amount of routes you can follow to get somewhere given the sheer amount of random debris, buildings and all. Part of hiding the shimmer is knowing what it looks like in front of different background textures btw. Granted, this particular check trick was easy in PS1 since you had third person at any time. In PS2 I would advise asking a friend to show off what you look like in front of something and then memorizing what kind of objects and background makes you harder to detect.

Sabotage and subterfuge is a pretty big, varied and flexibility and improvisation demanding role. Tbh. But you don't need such powerful tools for that. I would however change the part where you have to manually disengage and activate your cloak upon performing an action. It's needlessly convoluted and distracts from the tasks of an infil, worse, directly impacting its survivability and efficiency in stressful situations.

Agreed aside from the farming bit. Seen people get 200 in a row sniper killstreaks. SMG... Not so sure, a couple dozen at least, but I haven't accidentally come across farm vids like that (the sniper one was a suggestion on youtube once and was curious, I normally have no appatite for such videos since it usualy just shows few-trick ponies repeating their tricks).

Glad to be of service.

I've always appreciated your posts on here and on Planetside-Universe. The only thing is...your suggestions are very good and I do see things from your perspective, but it doesn't seem like your view of what the game should be is what SOE feels it should be. You seem to really prefer strategic gameplay and the 'big picture' of conquest. But this game looks and feels like it is being developed and designed for the immediate gratification and/or short (1-3 hour) play sessions.

Based on this, what could you propose which would improve the current direction of the game? This thread is about bio domes but what can be done to make the game better while still being in line with what SOE envisions it should be? The reason why I ask is because you specifically point out how the game shouldn't be about experience grinding and killwhoring...but that is what it is. And that is how the game has been made.

Good stuff, I see your point about Infils and how in a perfect PS2 they would be OP in their current form but you need to see that in PS2's current form all you're doing is limiting them further Could we split up the Infiltrator from the Sniper? Yes probably... Only if we buffed both enough to fit in the current PS2 or at least be fun to play, fun meaning they can farm lots of Certs, get enough Kills ETC; Things PS2 is all about right now in other words.

As for Bios... They are crap as they are now, the new version like Ikanam is not really impressive and just as small... I don't even care to start on this.

Quite true, but I don't see Higby making this game PS1 slow. At most, we could hope for taking 20 seconds to respawn, and that's the extreme. Thus, we need to focus on how to work with that.

Well, mounting a defense is hard, because you can't place anything useful and the turrets die in ten seconds. I think that we should encourage forming armor columns against other armor columns. Most zergs are unstoppable because people don't form armor columns, so they can't destroy the Sunderers. We do also need to be able to prepare defenses(I've read that Higby said something about this in his latest stream), and of course, introduce real sabotage.

Indeed, we need more organization and discipline, we have too many lone wolves and few open platoons. We do also need depth to create strategies and meta-game. The problem is, the meta we have as seen in alerts, is redeployside and zerging, crushing with numerical advantage as fast as you can. Right now, we either have zerglings who just push a lane because they want a fight, usually with a zerg, or zerglings which redeploy armies across the map with a zerg. The first is a product of no organization and just wanting to kill with their vehicle, and the second is a result of the shallow meta-game, which is rigid and favors numerical advantage above everything else.

Many people just play for themselves or for certs. As certs are needed for everything and you require big amounts to enter the vehicle game, you have a game where many people just farm until they are BR100, because if not they are at a handicap. Then, I can't blame the people who play by themselves; usually there's almost no public organization and platoons are usually just zergs, and the maximum strategy is redeploying, sometimes you use a Galaxy. There is nothing to be proud of here. You miss quite a lot if you aren't in a good outfit. And except fighting in alerts, you don't do **** with your faction. You can't do strategic pushes thanks to lattice nor dominate another faction and push them back to their home continent. Basically, as there is no objective, nowhere to push, nothing to do, you don't really fight for your faction, at most you may fight for your outfit or the sweet 50% discounts.

While the solution is quite hard and complex, I think a first step to solve this would be to force everyone in a squad or platoon, and double or triple the cert gain when you play with the team. Of course, good leaders should be able to choose to lead the zerglings. I think that we will need another thread for this.

It could be improved, but removing the cloak from snipers would kill them. I think that sniper rifles should work for longer ranges and snipers harder to find, so you have a need for friendly snipers. Also, maybe this is OP, but I want to be able to summon a Wraith flash with nothing else. Staying in one place means death, but the cloak is too short for the long distances you need to run to find a decent spot.
Also, do you really think it would be balanced to give Infils more hp than other classes? Because I'm sure giving us 100hp wouldn't change anything for snipers. I haven't played PS1, but I think that this game's approach is better.

Um, what powerful tools? The sniper rifles which have the same range as an AR and are useless because it's impossible to headshot thanks to the ADAD strafing and people teleporting, the semiscout rifles with their ridiculous recoil and skill requeriment, the auto-scouts which are nerfed ARs, or the SMGs which require you to be at point-blank range to do anything and only the infil uses because we don't have shotguns? All of our weapons are worse versions of the other classes weapons or have ridiculous problems. The only reason why they are decent is because we have the cloak and we are skilled. If we only had sidearms, people would just use LA for flanking.

Meh, HA is completely superior at farming kills. Some fools will farm with infil, but they are just handicapping themselves.

I think the reason SOE designed the game as it is stems from two reasons and their derivative designs, many of which they copied without scrutinising if these elements should be copied.

1. SOE are intrinsically MMORPG developers, rather than MMORTS developers.
The model they applied is largely based on games where personal progression in a living world is the sole form of gratification. Just look at how DCUO for instance is developed (which is basically a hack-and-slash exp grind with fight style and healing/powering classes hamfisted in) or Everquest (II) and some other games.

2. Other "mini-map" multiplayer FPS games are not conquest games, but popular so tempting to copy.
I refuse to use the word MMO for anything below 64 players per map btw, rather than how some seem to use it, at 8+ players per map. World of Tanks is a team multiplayer online game, not a MMO for instance and that has 30 players, yet they dare call themselves Massive MO. Same goes for most FPS-deathmatch titles.

These games are setup in matches and mostly about scoring points, either in a free for all, or teambased. Objective maps are often second thought and balanced around small teams without much big hardware to use.

The problem is that the devs looked at these games to how a FPS game should feel in dueling combat mostly because they hoped to copy succes. Which is fair enough, but then they also copied the environments without completely realising environments are designed around a form of strategic balance of the game (at first, they're now very slowly drifting towards PlanetSide 1 by constructing rudimentary fortifications. They are getting better at that, but they're not there yet). In the aforementioned games, as these are designed such that a player has to keep moving and campers can be flanked in multiple ways so they don't completely dominate an area.

Another huge difference is that in these games, both opposing teams get equal players, with equal firepower, where hardware is limited to maintain within the controllable area of the opponents.

PlanetSide games however have more in common with the Command & Conquer series. Why? Because of the conquest element which is a driving force behind fights, the sheer volume and variety of combat hardware available, the organisation required and the frequent rock-paper-scissors-jacksofalltrade balancing that has to be done for balance and counterbalance. Dominance over an area is not just important, it is essential, in particular because groups are not balanced one on one. In fact, it is skewed to extremes: huge groups of enemies (50+) with huge amounts of tanks and aircraft might face groups of less than 10 players with just a couple AV missiles. Equalising terrain for attacker and defender in such an environment like CoD and BF games do, is simply going to cause massive bias to the bigger PS side.

Designing the RTS element to balance groups vs groups and task these groups and give smaller groups options to secure, stall and hold is therefore far more important than designing for "equalised" combat. One does that by adding rock-paper-scissors-jacksofalltrades balancing, limiting hardware somehow to remain within a controllable scope (one of the main reasons I am advocating "driver and gunner, not driver is gunner" for heavier tank units).

Yes, it's a FPS game too, but IMO FPS is simply a way to project the game on the screen, it is not "a type of game that has to be done in a specific way or else it cannot be good", which is an attitude I see in some "FPS game purists" (they're not, they're just picky about their game style). At times in PlanetSide third person is very important if not something you cannot do without and IMO infantry should have it too, simply due to the amount of situational awareness required in a MMO this size with so many threats. And yes, there were people in PS1 that wanted to have third person removed, but only for one reason: corner camping (as World of Tanks shows, there are other ways to deal with corner campers like proximity radar, or simply not showing on screen what is not directly in line of sight of someone on your team). Removing third person however has created a big gap in situational awareness. In PS2, infantry perspectives are almost designed like a Sim Game (and FPS infantry duelist players treat it as such), while vehicle perspectives are more designed for functionality (providing the player the info they need to make an informed decision, like can they back up, is there a threat behind you, what's happening on the ground below you, etc).




Anyway, if you ask what can be done with what SOE had in mind, remember that Higby and Smedley have said on numerous occasions they first wanted to make Battlefield on a huge scale and then mold it more towards PlanetSide by introducing the tactical elements. I think it's the wrong approach, but it does show that their actual vision is not to stay in what it is right now or stay really close to BF/COD type games. I think the best thing they can do is introduce objective gameplay as soon as possible and make some simple new maps and link these to one another using a global lattice.

It is going to be really hard to implement one system at a time, even if such a gradual change might make it easier to acclimatise for other players, such a strategy means you have to keep rebalancing and counterbalancing and be aware of unintended side-effects every time you introduce a new system. Hence I would have started with a global lattice and work from there by replacing "copied" continents for new ones. I would make sure you only implement something that has its counterbalances introduced and isn't reliant in any way on something that has yet to be introduced. This is going to be a very tough process given it's hard to change a course on a ship this big, tbh.

Leadership is something that has to be redesigned too, but yes, another thread. Forcing people in squads won't make them play with squads or each other. Providing incentives (like squad exp) and easy comms works better.

More hp than other classes? I meant equal hp for snipers should make it much easier to stay alive. Infils after all, are designed to die faster as compensation for their cloak. I mean, snipers in other games have equal hp to other players and do just fine without cloak. :/

Besides, if anything gives people away, it's hitpoint bars and names over their head.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this, I'm not so convinced they're subpar. And yes, that really has to do with the situational advantage you get from cloaking. The cloak should not be underestimated as a sort of power amplifier (through positional advantage, thus time advantage by engaging unsuspecting people).

I'm not really too concerned with balancing the farming power of classes against one another though. Performance in farming capacity is going to be different and shouldn't be too big.


Where it comes to experience earning, I think the amount of exp you can earn should stop much sooner, since I think it is important that characters are unique and have hard handicaps (can't perform certain actions) to create more reliance on other people to perform roles.


The amount of things a player can do over time by changing loadout is often much underappreciated by players, who only look at single life actions. If you played PS1 and compared the situations before they increased the amount of certification points to after, you'll notice that more and more characters in PS1 started to use "optimal" loadouts and became harder to beat over time, because they could adapt to their situations and remove the appropriate downside of their previous loadout in the next engagement or for the next task.

The amount of medics for instance increased threefold. The amount of engineers (and mines and all) also increased dramatically. The amount of heavy assault and MAX units (way more powerful in endurance than in PS2 tbh) also increased, while the variety of weapons on the field decreased, especially the cheaper hardware that was used as "filler" for spare certifications.


But you had situations where you could find an enemy incapable of opening equipment terminals during a hack, therefore fighting in subpar spawning equipment (think almost as low as infil health, with small clip weak SMG, side arm and visible and without medkits). As the amount of certpoints available increased, the amount of Advanced Hackers increased as well, changing the course of many battles by removing the option to exploit gear and time advantages. (Adv hacker was a cert skill inherent to holding a REK, which affected both resecure times, vehicle take over times and options. For instance, it would have a three times as fast control console capture from those without the certification, it allowed the acquisition of gear in enemy bases as you could open enemy terminals and friendly bases as you could open friendly terminals while the control console was in enemy hands, you could hijack occupied vehicles, disable base virals, etc.

One of the best ways to examplify this, it meant that before, some people couldn't take out vehicles like AMSes, while with this cert they could steal them from you (think of the difference between not being to take out an AMS and having to wait for faction members with those skills, to hacing the certs to destroy them yourself, to having the certs to steal them and subsequently use them. So before you might have had to kill this guy once, where you could fall back on your AMS and he couldn't spawn, where now he'd take your advantage for himself, while denying it to you, without losing any advantages he already had due to his own unique cert choices like heavy weapons. All that because he got to have a few more cert points (!).

And if you than realise that these are advantages that in a single life may have limited effects, but also affect the performance of their allies and groups and over time remove a lot of inter-personal advantages from those that have only a distant base to fall back on. That AMS being taken over (that would before be destroyed or remain in place) now spawns other enemy forces too and denies all your forces to redeploy that used to rely on your AMS, your unique capability.


The cert system in PS2 is one of the main culprits that lives and deaths and character setups in general are so meaningless. On top of all the other things like infinite healing, repairing, ammo packs, etc.

TLR but I looked at the pictures and it looks like good stuff. The Ikanam changes, OP for or against?

Haven't seen, so can't judge. Will keep a look out.

don't suppose you'd like to kickstart a 'spiritual' sequel?.............. i'd fund the **** out of it

Just looked at this video of it:

After one minute I already can tell you this is going to be the exact same mistake we saw in beta with "neutral teleporters", namely, you'll get firing squads on either end of the teleporter (which is why my jaw dropped when I first entered a Bio Dome in PS2, ever, before there was even a single fight occuring in one. It just makes no sense at all to have such a discontinuity that absolutely requires camping a hard point, which HAS to be done on the receiving end, since that is the savest place to be, while people using a teleporter will be spawning and disoriented for a second).

I don't see how this is an improvement, rather than a complete return to the first mistake, which is using fixed undestructable teleporters in the first place.

It will be a huge farmfest on both ends as you cannot afford to leave them unguarded against potential MAX crashes, infils etc.

I frankly don't care about the other changes, because this will be the defining feature of that Ikanam design. The jumppads are basically teleporters with an arc and just as discontinuous and requiring one side to camp a landing point.


My response: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/ikanam-biolab.206926/

In other games(or at least BF3, I haven't played many shooters), snipers have a much longer range and other weapons aren't so good at long range; the map is much better, with verticality, buildings, and lots of space(while PS2 is much bigger, the action is packed in really small bases), also strafing is much harder, and snipers can get in superior positions(and respawn there). PS2 is too different from other games to do the same.

Also, while 100hp might be the difference between life and death while you are in firefights, it doesn't matter in any other situation, and I usually don't get in firefights while sniping.

BTW, do you know that when you cloak you lose your dorito? Thinking that what most snipers do is cloak, aim, shoot and cloak, the dorito or name doesn't really matter. What usually gives snipers away is position, either it is a bad one, or you are too much time in one. The problem is, 12 second of cloak aren't enough to get to another position, specially one in which you can continue to shoot to whatever you were shooting(a chokepoint or terminal). So, somebody just decides to kill you, and you can't do much because you have a sidearm, and even then, the enemy can just respawn and try to kill you again.

Sniper rifles are quite different from other weapons, but most times it requires more skill. The semi-auto scout rifles require much more skill than other weapons for not a big advantage(they have the same range as ARs and the alpha damage advantage isn't that good). The auto-scout rifles are just carbines with less ammo, and SMGs are worse than shotguns(they OHK at the same range). They aren't useless, but the cloak isn't that good, and even if it was better, shall you need to kill more than one person or defend yourself, using only your sidearm would mean your death. Doesn't matter how good your ambush is, killing one person and the medic with just your pistol is impossible.

That seems interesting, but I think that in practice it would be hell. I think that if that was changed, there would be per faction one medic, two infils, three engies driving vehicles and the rest HA. Why do you think that limiting the amount of certs wouldn't make PS2 a ****hole?

Because removing the limitations in PS1 made PS1 a ****hole...

Ya that was my initial thoughts as well, it was hard to judge at first when it sneaked onto live with the hidden active jumppads :/

Higby stated that he someone will the camping the neutral teleporters with a scatmax... I think their goal was to bring the fight outside of the biolab, but with ikanam being the -ONLY- biolab with this style (other than the walls around andvari) people are still going to instinctively camp the teleporter room AND the air pads. The one way jump pads leading onto the air pad breaks the flow leading out of the biolab.

Pubbies aren't going to fall back off the air pad, back to the teleporter and push out on foot from the neutral TP. Maybe they will once, get cut down and go back to camping the air pad. It'll be interesting to see how it'll play out on live, the short time it was up Ikanam motor pool was pretty much untakeable.

I really don't understand how these level designers are taught to design bases. If they're just given a box set with buildings and items and told "make something", or if they're first conversing on what kind of flow vision is needed.


I even wonder how long the discussion on teleport design has lasted internally. I mean, was it "Beam Me Up Scotty == cool factor" or "how could we best allow people to get in?"?

The thing is, I fear they're somewhat desperate for ideas that do not require redoing half the Bio Lab art (and subsequent coding/markers or whatever). But... they're going to have to do that if they want a good, solid flow.

Yeah, let me explain to you the problem with the Infiltrator being an Infiltrator.

1) The game applies no practical limits to the number of people you can bring to a fight.

2) The game applies no practical limits to the number of people who can perform a certain task.

3) The game applies no practical limits to the roles people can play.

Here's how Planetside 2 Infiltrators would work if this was actually, you know, a good game:

A small advance team sneaks past the enemy frontline, where attackers and defenders are stalled fighting over a couple kilometers of open desert. These players are very good, tactical ninjas. They've spent every cert they got investing into various wetwork tools and abilities, to the detriment of all their other fighting abilities (because we're playing a GOOD game, where not everyone can just click 'Infiltrator' and be given it instantly). They sneak into the base, taking out a few loners, and break in to cause immediate damage to the base, weakening the distant attack. With all the damage to the base, defenders have trouble repairing it to full strength. No generator means no power, means no equipment terminals so they can't pull their engineers.

Now here's how this works in Planetside 2.

A couple of galaxies are pulled at the warpgate, thirty people in a platoon pull their Infiltrator class, drop on the base, and blow it to **** in seconds and the defenders can't do anything about it. But it's okay, because they repair the damage in seconds, pull their own infiltrators from their untouchable spawn room terminals, and rehack everything.

It's a ******* joke. This game is a team deathmatch shooter, not a strategic game nor is it a tactical one. It's like when people say they want tanks to be able to knock holes in walls... there's so many ******* tanks, the walls would never be repaired, they'd all be knocked out within seconds of the first enemy tank showing up.

I love every part except the bit about infiltrators. Just because I have an SMG doesn't mean I can't hack. I think it'd probably be better if you could instead trade your motion tracker for a remote hacker, or maybe get rid of your primary in exchange for some kind of better hacking ability. Forcing people to trade away combat options to become more hacking oriented instead of just breaking one of the few thing infiltrators actually have a useful role in doing.

Couple of things on this:

If you would want to drop behind an enemy force and do anything while a base is in an undefended state, great. You could do that in PS1, you can do it in PS2. You can create the terms of the fight from either side in that situation, depending on the state you can leave a base in.

In PS1, you would leave such a base (that is likely to be attacked) prepped with some form of remote alarm: you'd leave mines and automated spitfire turrets. If these were set off, you'd get a hot spot (combat signal) on the map for a minute or so. This would allow players away from a base to realise something is going on. This too is not quite possible in PS2 and the amount of mine an engineer. Indeed due to, as you pointed yourself, PS2 not limiting the numbers on anything, so they fear tons of mines while mines become utterly useless in their current state for a single engineer.

And that's just one other example. I can name you a couple dozen examples and I've always critiqued the certification system for this (see also my explaination of how a fight completely changes if people got a few more certpoints in PS1 and get something as inoccuous as advanced hacking).



I'm in full agreement with you (as I also told EIMR) that limiting the capacities of players and having them make trade-offs. I'm also in full agreement that side-line rules need to be changed.




However, I will also say that if people want to drop ten infils with a Galaxy, they should. If these infils all want to hack out MAXes, they should. However, these ten infils should come at some sort of cost. One such thing is that they shouldn't be armed to the teeth. Dropping ten infils on a base in PS1, would likely see them all shot unless the base was empty or heavily understaffed.

The spawnroom as I think I touched on before, should IMO become vulnerable once you take down certain objectives. And yes. IF a crew wants to wreck a behind enemy lines base... They totally should. You can always put a limit on how far down a lattice you can destroy things, but in PS1, you could kill any base and attempt to drain it from power, then hold it. Which is a ridiculously hard logistical and strategic challenge depending on how long it takes to drain a base. However, it could be a very strategic thing to do.

A genhold on a hub base or source base of certain base benefits (particularly Interlink Radar, cave benefits and Vehicle Tech) could make a big impact on the front line by shifting the balance of power through attrition of heavy units and removing the all-seeing radar, or disabling courtyard shields, etc.

I just don't think they should get ANY experience points for destroying PvE support equipment. I find it ridiculous because it incentices people to just destroy stuff you might want to use later, you should destroy or repair it because it's a need, not because there are no repercursions and a reward attached to it. It just makes other people having to repair stuff - though I don't mind them getting exp for repairing those.



Overall I'm in full agreement. As I've said many times over, PS2 has a long way to go. I just can't write down my vision for every aspect of PS2 that I'd like to see in one thread. If it was up to me, teamwork would get way more incentives through reliance on others (from tank driving without being able to gun, to not instantly switching seats, to not being able to perform all types of actions as a character). Attrition would be a far greater deal (harder to make use of enemy terminals, no ammo packs, limited healing, reviving and repairing without supplies from a supply vehicle, no instant getting into vehicles at a mere touch, but having to be in specific entry points so you can't abuse it as a quick-shield/save, etc). Choices made would have long term effects. Characters would be unique specialists (so you would have multiple characters). Inventory would be self-determinable and self-limiting. Jacks of all trades would be weak and limited in things they're not specialised in. Sieging a base that's being held with an epic hold dry of resources would have always been a thing.


But then I'm more of a chess player when it comes to PlanetSide style games. To me PS2 should be an RTS, but as you say, it's currently a deathmatch.