Claymore OP as hell

Yes and im fine with that. What i have a problem with, and i have several hundred kills with betties, is that you can chuck one down at a base and then hit instant action and be 10 hexes away and still get kills.

You shouldnt have to wear flak armor to negate something as stupid as mines.

Tank mines that cost 50 resources shouldnt insta kill a mbt.

Its not necessarily an easy thing to defeat another tank. It takes aiming and at least a few rounds fired and hit to kill a tank with another 450 resource tank. But an engi can throw a tank mine down and for 50 resources and absolutely zero skill required blow up a tank?

Thats not balanced. Its certainly not fun. Its not exciting to chuck a mine down, its no different that opening the map or settings window or throwing down an ammo pack. No skill required.

Placing mines and C4 should be akin to hacking a terminal. It should require some amount of time and leave you completely vulnerable during that time, and there should be some proximity requirement, so i cant chuck a tank mine down and port to another continent and get kills off something i just dropped on the ground.

People talk about how easy they are to avoid, but half the time they drop into the floor or ground. In a harrasser they typically dont render until you are on top of them.

You have to spend all of your time looking at the ground because tank mines are all over the place.

Yesterday i landed my plane on a mountaintop on amerish and blew up because i landed on a tankmine.

These kind of things dont offer any kind of satisfying gameplay for the person dying to them. Someone gets in a tank and dies to another tank its like, damn how could i have played that better. When you run over a tank mine that didnt render or was stuck in the ground, or even clverly placed, its just agravating and stupid.

Especially when they have these bases where the pad where your vehicle spawns isnt visible from the terminal and isnt easily viewed, and some griefer has chucked some mines down.

If these cheesy game mechanics were removed i think it would enhance the reputation of the game along with the enjoyment of most people.

By adding different effects you would eliminate the absentee kills which is the real problem i have with them.

C4 doesnt bother me as much as tank mines. As someone who has used C4 i know that it is often difficult to deliver, and you have to actually be there and detonate it.

In a pvp game you should never have situations where people can kill other players without assuming some risk. This includes shooting out of spawn shields and throwing tank mines and ai mines around like candy.

It ruins the gameplay constantly having to look at the floor, or constantly look at the ground. How is that fun for anyone but the miners?

its called situational awareness. not to mention the implants and such. as for the tank mines in front of vehicle pad, ive learned over time to check before i spawn. its not difficult.

wow, I never knew that. Thanks for the tip.

To be honest, whenever I get killed by a mine, I just feel dumb for not having looked before rushing. Happens to me a lot

Lol read what i said. There are bases where you have to walk a mile and then redeploy to check if there are mines there, so yeah. Also they often dont render when you are in a vehicle, epsecially as i have said in a harrasser. And im guessing, based on your avatar, that you are one of the ones chucking mines around like candy, so yeah.

Situational awareness means constantly staring at the ground when driving? Thats supposed to make the game fun? In what way? It's definately more fun to be able to look around while you are motoring along.

Dunno how much you have driven, but yeah mines are everywhere because they are so cheap. EVERYWHERE.

Maybe thats cool with you, but dont give me some situational awareness crap. Situation is you are going max speed in your harrasser dutifully staring at the ground because people chuck 50 resource tank mines litterally everywhere, and you suddenly have a mine render right in front of you and no matter what you do you cant avoid it. Too late the car doesnt stop or turn fast enough to avoid them.

And so im supposed to not use the only thing that makes the harrasser somewhat viable, that being its speed, so that i can avoid running over the 50 resource insta killers?

Or should i equip mineguard which is only useful against 1 thing and not use something that would help me against many things?

Currently mines are not properly balanced, especially for vehicles. The AI mines are very annoying and cheesy, but certainly typically easier to avoid, and even when you die to them its just a free infantry unit you lost.

On the other hand dying to a 50 resource mine in a 450 resource mbt is ridiculous. If a mine costs 50 resources it should do 1/9 damage to an mbt. Or the price of mines should be increased. A 450 resource tank mine can destroy a 450 resource mbt.

With the current resource system there is virtually no cost for tank mines. I can throw my full stack down every time i spawn and never run out of resources.

The written purpose of mines is to control the number of vectors of attack by making certain vectors disagreeable. While the defense of the area doesn't stop jsut because the person who laid the weapons are gone, I would at least grant that they, by not being in the same hex, or near the mine by radius, have moved onto other issues and there might be a reason why they should not be awarded the experience for the kill. The intention of the mines and even the Spitfire turret is that they support the Engineer and his allies by allowing them to control the amount of attention they need to focus. That's a double-edged sword, but neither here nor there. Reasons to make the equipment that was set-up vanish should be airtight and well-argued.
It's easy to just eliminate the experience awarded for remote kills. Arguing for the elimination is harder.

It didn't take long for you to start calling inanimate objects names, but whatever. The main problem is that the mines operate via proximity and there's no way to get close to something that works via "proximity." The only two ways you cvan handle this without requiring people run directly over the mines is (a) allow crouch-walking to get close enough to disable the mine in some safe manner (tool or knifing it), or (b) Sensor Shield stops the mine from detecting the player.
Also, don't forget that an Infiltrator's EMP Grenade is now a potent tool against mines, something only two classes (including his own) can lay.

Actually, the cost would be 100 resources for two AT mines, more if the unlucky target has some level of Mineguard (in fact, you can cert into more Mineguard protection than the Engineer can place AT mines by his lonesome).

None of the classes special tools and abilities are skillful by themselves. They're all rather blunt objects that have a certain effect. The more skillful matter is how you apply them to a given situation.

Actually, you're not especially vulnerable while hacking a Terminal, unless you equate vulnerability to visibility. I can (and will!) look any direction I want and hack the Terminal from any side of the Terminal that I want, and can drop darts and shoot at enemies while hacking, so long as I stay close enough to see the prompt or the progress circle moving were I to look at the Terminal. I could run tight laps around the Terminal or even only be in an adjacent room separated by a wall, and I could still hack the Terminal.

I admit those distant pads are obnoxious. I've been complaining that SOE/Daybreak should have been working on those fixes a long time ago. They should have never been "things" to begin with.
Before that, however, tank mining the Vehicle spawn is a valid means of denying enemy armor support. It's hard to argue how different tank mines at the foot of a pad are from tank mines at the end of the road leading from the pad. Assuming the spawn pad is in an accessible place, what would it matter where they are if you never checked?

Like it or not, these are passive counters to people being too active. it'd be no different from you walking out a door, immediately running to your left, then getting shot in the back because you didn't look to the immediate right. Your argument "but someone was still doing the shooting" isn't as valid as you think it is; AP Mines and AT Mines are shots that have been flung into the hopeful future. It's rather like getting sniped. The person doing the action and the person being affected by the action are so far apart, physcially, and in thought processes, it's almost like they're in separate worlds.

in what games are vehicles supposed to survive against mines made specifically to destroy them? and situational awareness is learning how to dodge. and my avatar is infiltrator...not sure what that has to do with a engineer class utility..
here lets go over how theyre used and how to avoid them since you obviously dont know.

people put em on roads. usually in the center. always stick to the sides of the roads (or dont use roads at all) that way even if you do hit em, chances are youll only hit one.

people put em in front of vehicle pads. god forbid you run 20 ft to check, or even look the life before if youre that worried.

people durka durka mahamijihaad them. there isnt really a problem with that, cuz its essentially an advanced skill C4. just shoot em.

use the implant if you have that big of a deal with em. me being on Emerald, i dont die by tank mines very often, and if i do, its because i was carelessly driving down the middle of the road as fast as i could. its not that hard to dodge them even at least second. or if youre in an area where you think tank mines could be, spam the Q button.

all in all, you just have to use your brain. and if you die by tank mines a lot, either you suck, or they have good tank mine placing tactics (yes its a thing)

I don't like it when people cherry pick their arguments in an attempt to paint things differently than they are. I agree, in the case of shooting, there was and still is some disparity in the effectiveness of the various weapons across the different factions. I've defended the NC Scat max more times than it's worth defending, not because I like it (I don't, I hate it), but because people were taking the stats from a very specific situation, and applying them to everything, without even looking closely at how each max unit handles that same situation effectively.

Sometimes the general data lends itself easily to a skewed point of view simply because one faction's variant forces it's users to think about how they use the weapon. This wasn't the case with firearms, in truth, no one uses compensation time in their DPS calculations, their effective range considerations, or the simple fact that it is easier to land multiple shots when you don't have to click the mouse for every single round, and there was a time when NC had to do this way more than the other factions, and still do with some weapons. It isn't necessarily a bad thing if that additional skill level is met with an equal reward, but at the time it was not.

I don't disagree, the Claymore plainly does more damage, and has a better chance at killing people largely due to that fact combined with the trigger time, but the argument wrenched was making is that we hove no hope of meeting the kill ratio TR's mines provide, and I disagree with him, solely because what wretched is looking at is recent data, which doesn't exactly allow you to consider all three variant's histories.

What is interesting to look at, at least in my view, is the actual stats for these weapons over the last full year (or more, it remains consistently the same)

http://ps2oraclestats.com/?stat=kills&weapon1=1045&weapon2=1044&weapon3=429 (slider at the bottom of that readout lets you adjust the time period)

This shows that Claymores have always outperformed the other two variants, even well before their laser sight problem was rectified, the trigger time was removed, and the BB and PM received what I'm calling their 'flashy light' nerf. This is interesting because it says something weird about a weapons that was at one point, arguably, less powerful than the other two: Something about it has allowed it to intuitively outperform the other two options.

It should be clear that the trigger delay is not what makes the Claymore more effective, and damage certainly hasn't really changed much. That can only really mean one thing; The claymore has a placement mechanic the other two mines do not have, it forces you to think, at least for a split second, about trying to trip people with the claymore, instead of just getting them to set it off; You draw an invisible line out from the center of the claymore with your mind, or a cone of fire out doors, and imagine someone tripping that wire as they walk past it.

With the Bouncing Betty and Proximity Mine, you think about it having a trigger radius, and this is an important difference because it encourages people to place those mines in the middle of common footpaths, instead of off to the side, and unfortunately for those mines, the middle of a foot path is the first place people look for everything, so unless people start thinking about hiding their mines, they remain ineffective simply due to their trigger mechanics (not the delay).

The only acceptable OP things are the OP things on my faction, got it.

Using the description of a weapon is no way to go about balance.

The discription of shotguns was accurate before they got nerfed.

The description of lib guns and zoe max and rocket pods and HE tank rounds and every other thing in the game that has been nerfed due to overperformance was accurate.

AV mana turrets were accurately described and got nerfed.

Mines are too cheap and too easy to deploy, and their risk reward ratio is extremely unbalanced.

This isnt an RTS. The simple rule of pvp games, or every other pvp game i have played, and ive played most of them, is that you cant damage people without being at risk yourself.

In fact tank mines were themselves nerfed already because they were overperforming. With the new resource system they are once again so cheap that they are overperforming.

A complete change of the mine mechanic is in order.

Drop and kill mechanics with no proximity requirement or even a need to detonate arent good in a pvp game, and whats worse is that it affects new players more than older players who know how to deal with and avoid mines more easily.

I understand you wanting to defend an EZ mode way of acquiring skilless kills, but imo it would be more interesting and more fun if the mines were changed.

What i think would be perfect is to change them so that they (ai) mines remove shields, but they should be invisible. That way as an inf i can throw some mines down outside a room or whatever and they will blow up and alert me to the presence of the enemy and remove the enemy's shields so that when he comes around the corner he is basically half dead. This along with the other options i mentioned earlier would give more depth to the game while removing cheese.

Sounds like a win to me. Most people i talk to don't like cheesy kills.

That's very true. I always forget about that even though I've seen it happen.

Still, the problem with that is it's far too unreliable. Mines are very good at things like protecting you from the one entrance you can't watch and catching the guy that tries to flank you. You're just lucky if you get multiple kills.

So, based on designing for its purpose instant detonation seems better to me.


A bit of an aside: In BF2142 I used to recreate the advantage of a delay by using mines and trigger detonated RDX in a combined trap. The mines alerted me of enemy presence, I waited a few seconds and then detonated the RDX, killing the medics as they went for the revives. I could stop an entire squad (6, plus revives) from back capping like that.

It doesn't work as well in PS2 for a number of reasons, including having only 2 blocks of C4 instead of 5ish RDX and blast radius. Otherwise I would be attempting the same thing lol.

You could stopped there and I would have laughed just as hard >_<

IMO, the real problem with AI mines is that you can survive the NC/VS ones just by running full speed. No armor needed, just don't slow down, and you live.

No, you don't and I would contend this is why stats suffer. As someone who played TR to 97, VS to 88, and NC to 56 I've used them all extensively. The average VS and NC player could stand some TR trainong on proper anti infantry explosive deployment.

Almost every numbnut scrub on VS and NC throws the stupid things down IN PLAIN SIGHT! Right in the middle of a doorway, in the middle of stairs, in the middle of a room, in the center of a gangway or catwalk. They put precisely zero effort into concealing their trap and then wonder why they rarely work.

As a TR explosive specialist you quicly learn if you want ANY kills you have to hide them around corners, behind terminals, in bushes/rocks, or otherwise conceal them as best you can. That experience translates directly over to proximity mines and bouncing betties. I place them just like I would a claymore and I get kills all the time. You have to get them RIGHT on that edge where you can't quite see them but close enough to be in the inner blast radius if they run by. Oh and guess what... can't see those right lights if they are behind a corner!

A little effort would go a long ways toward changing the stats!

Then you're going to die to my proximity mines and betties because I place them around corners just like i did claymores.

The lasers are still there just much more thin and not as bright. They used to be thick, bright, green beams that stuck out half a feak'n meter and the stats reflected how absurd they were. Also note they have red, vertical, stripes on the sides... and they stand up off the floor. Not exaxtly hard to spot from 50m away if not concealed.

Before the lights on PMs and BBs they were very hard to spot. This is because the colors and textures blend in very well with the colors and textures of almost all buildings. Unlike the red on a claymore which is nowhere on building textures. Plus the PMs and BBs are much lower profile instead of standing up like a red striped, green laser shooting, sign warning everyone in a 50m radius.

I almost never see NC and VS place mines like claymores. I'm astonished by the sheer amount of stupidly placed explosives by NC and VS. It's like they try to find the most obiouvs spot and drop them. I often see dudes in full sprint just chucking them out. Then these people wonder why they rarely get kills?

There are great spots for BBs and PMs but most people put zero effort into thinking about how and where they deploy them.

Finally a voice of reason! Yes!

I think this is really the only legit concern here.

All this noise about claymores being impossible to spot and that you can't place PMs or BBs like claymroes is totally false and obfuscating the real problem.

No, they aren't and that's what he's trying to tell you... you're a victim of your own preconicved false notion. I've used all three extensivly and I get tons of kills with all of them using them all the same exact way! Place them like claymores and you get more kills; its that simple.

Your victim does NOT have to run right over it.
It does NOT have to be visible to your enemy.

Ok. I will try this out and get back to you. I must admit I haven't considered placing them like claymores because I perceived them as fundamentally different. I am not above challenging my believes. Let me try this out over the weekend.

And maybe i just think clays are easy because I learned how to place them long ago (BF2) and it has become very easy to me. That is why I have said over and over that one doesn't have to think about placing them. It's like second nature to me.

This! I've always hated the "fire and forget" mechanics in fps games. Either you shoudl have to do it yourself, and be there in person to ensure the kill, or the automated types of weapons should be strictly non-lethal, forcing you, the player, to actually be present and finish the job.
Would force TACTICAL usage of deployables, as you wouldn't just be able to chuch one down and get a random kill, but would need to put the in strTegic positions where you know their detonation would put your opponent in a very awkward position.