Dwindling TR Numbers

Devonaut wrote: "I remember once TR numbers were maximum and most continents would be TR's during peak times, nowadays its just rare for TR to get any continent, let alone be most populated. Any thoughts on why?"

Another reason could be that hacking gets old too doesn't it! (I'm not accusing anyone, just saying.) When the challenge is gone eventually, so is the player. Oh wait, I forgot, there is no hacking in this game, EVER!

There are two terms you need to be familiar with, skill ceiling and skill floor.
Skill floor is the entry barrier. If you can take a weapon and get decent results without needing much skill, it has a low skill floor. If it takes you a large amount of "skill" to get the weapon to work, it has a high skill floor.
The skill ceiling determines how far you can increase your performance with a weapon by getting better (more "skilled"). If the weapon works in a way that caps off how good you can perform with it very fast, it has a low skill ceiling.
An example of a low skill floor (and also low skill ceiling) weapon are G2A launchers. Easy to learn, easy to master.

You know how it is with opinions, they are like buttholes. Everyone has one and they usually stink.

Also, you can have my teal if I get your red. Deal?

Thanks for the explanation. I feel so noobish now.

So what about tr weapons makes the skill ceiling so low and vs weapons so high? If it takes x bullets to kill someone, wouldn't the ceiling be capped you can land all your shots to the head consistently? And what elements go into determining what a weapons ceiling is? A gun is a gun, I can see in a moba where this would come into play , but how in planetside?

On the color front, how about we just make theme tr dark red like blood color and call it a day.

For me personally my tr character is the least played because I just feel like all the weapons are the same and everything is just so generic and lack luster. Emptying a clip of smg ammo into someone and not getting the kill doesn't help either. You can have the fastests rpm weapon in the game but it doesn't help if the ammo doesn't do any damage...

Also constantly getting dicked on as a faction is no fun either.

Can't really give you a straight answer, because I don't think TR and VS are that far apart in their skill ceiling but I am also not someone that can talk about that with any kind of authority.

Generally, horizontal recoil provides a skill ceiling limit, because it can't be controlled by the player, unlike vertical recoil. CoF and CoF bloom are also factors that lower the skill ceiling on a weapon.
Basically, anything that introduces a random element into the act of shooting lowers the skill ceiling.

And I think your red is already sufficiently dark.

To me that means its harder to use. wouldn't that increase the skill ceiling meaning you can learn to improve using it?

My googling says its how the weapon can be used.

Using esl as an example, then phoenix would have highest skill ceiling, higher floor with lancer lowest ceiling and floor, and striker with higher floor but lower ceiling.

I don't know for sure here just my guessing. As ceiling from what I can find I that the longer you use a weapon the better you can use it. Like demoman in tf2, the bouncing mechanic opens up all sorts of options.

But with shooting straight line items, how would skill ceiling be defined?

Your def, would be an easier to use weapon would have a higher ceiling...not trying to be jerky here but just trying to understand it.

I switched from my TR toon with over 3k hours invested when they so called "nerfed" the Ravens and stealth nerfed the Pounders at the same time. And never looked back. The simple fact is the balance on TR is way out of wack. They no longer have any faction flavor that they can call there own. And they are simply left to rot by the developers, while they give TR options to other factions.

The only reason the population hasn't switched over faster is because of the late stage in the game development. To many people have way to much invested to make the switch. But it is getting to the point where even invested players are starting to switch and I fear it is way to late for the devs to reverse the change (especially with the resources they currently have).

Are you on Emerald? because its AOD

I can't think of a distinctive example of a high skill floor, low skill ceiling weapon in PS2. Imagine a G2A launcher with a really complicated lock-on mechanic. You'd have to practise some time before you can even get a shot off, but after that, there'd be not much room for improvement.

In regards to shooting in PS2 for the most part you are not shooting perfectly straight, thanks to the CoF mechanics. The larger the CoF is, the less impact your aim has on your chance to hit the target. Even if you have perfect aim, you might still miss and even if your aim is off, you might still hit. You reach a point where you do not hit more often, despite your aim getting better. You've hit the skill ceiling and the larger that CoF, the lower the ceiling.
I think weapons like the TAR,H-V48 and GR-22 have a low skill floor (most weapons do).They are easy to pick up and spray'n'pray at close range. On the other hand I'd like to see someone make any good use of them at longer ranges. The hefty horizontal recoil paired with the high ROF pretty much prohibits this. I therefore consider them to have a relatively low skill ceiling.
Weapons like the Gauss SAW are the opposite. Many consider it to be a good weapon in the right hands (high skill ceiling), but it's pretty much universally agreed that it's a bad choice as a starter (high skill floor).

I think its just that there is nothing that TR are really good at and all our factional items/ abilities are more leave it than take it.

The Prowler is more artillery than a tank and gets shredded.
Lockdown? Just makes you a huge target. Especially with the Max.
Chaingun? Good sometimes, but often ehh.
Striker? Garbage, worthless and ignorable.

And at range our guns are dog****, unless you specifically choose guns that dont have our "high rate of fire" trait. When I started playing Vanu and NC it felt like... like I had aim assist or something. The difference was insane and immediately noticeable. Bullets were going right where I shot them and my guns werent kicking all over the damn place.

And at close range.. NC just crush us to death.

As someone else said, If i wasn't so many hours into TR I would reroll and not look back. And even then.... I know a lot of people who are.

Then you, sir, have yet to have lay a good old fashioned siege to a base with a Prowler.

I haven't! might take a while to grind the certs to do it from scratch though.

Ok, you've convinced me. I'll start a TR character just for the Prowler. That reload speed when locked down!
Played with prowler for a little bit, but without lock down.

With another engineer for the gunner, we can have 2 spitfire turrets guarding our locked down prowler & can set up AV mines to protect our flank a bit. I'll probably die a lot, but losing expensive tanks can be a good way to learn.

Does smoke from UB smoke launcher cancel lockons? can pump out as much of that as you want as engineer.
Jump out of prowler when locked onto, shoot smoke & hop back in.


How's the aiming on a prowler for those 2 shots these days? (after the latest patches)

Simple, people are playing VS now. Myself included.

Why? Because I personally believe that the VS are the best faction. Cuz scopes/sights don't block half your screen and weapons are accurate.

Honestly, hands down, I respect those poor NC bast*ards for being able to hit anything with those inacurate guns. And the TR for being able to the recoil on their guns.

But for me, low recoil and high accuracy has always gotten me furthest in any FPS game. Those ironically also happen to be the VS traits, hence why I switched over.

I don't think UB smoke breaks locks. But if you're siege tanking, you shouldn't be in lock-on range anyway. I try to stay just within infantry render range. Anyway, you'll need max lockdown, max zoom (those are the two most important ones). I would recommend AP just because you'll be able to out fight most of the stuff sent after you. Just keep an eye out for LAs, aircraft, and Harassers in that order.

Pretty hard to argue the VS weapons have a high skill ceiling. The NC weapons have a high skill ceiling due to their harder to control recoil. VS have better damage application per position. TR kinda just get stuck in the middle, weak damage high ROF low recoil means lots of ammo needed and lots of hold mouse one down, reload, repeat. Plus lock down isn't great for tankers.

TBH apart from some obvious outliers the guns mostly do the same job - avg. 0.5s TTK.

Don't forget the OP didn't link any data/source when stating 'TR are dwindling'. I don't think they are.

The red is about as dark as it can get.

OLD - NEW

The tr on emerald do have a group of people that keep playing. Two months ago I noticed NC got a big boost, running 30-38 %.
Then this last month it was vs 32-35, NC 32-35, and tr dropped to 23-28.

This was during certain times. Not that the battles are bad, there are many great fights to be had.

But that's just me, I love this game , and know that the longer we play like this the better we will get.

The NC/VS have some weapons that are just better than the TR where it counts the most i.e. taking/holding a base.

Prime example TR have fractures and a striker to stop Tanks where as the VS/NC have MUCH better AV options at long range.

The TR just aren't a competitive faction to play.

I love my TR toon to death. I have almost 1,000 kills on my RAMS, great sniper rifle. I guess the reason we don't have many players is because new players hear that VS is easy mode and that entices them greatly. As far as NC, never really noticed a difference on Emerald.

It's because TR infantry combat isn't suited to be competitive IMO. High RoF = More Recoil
Thats all fine and dandy but even the best players are better off with the *dink dink dink dead* that VS and NC can provide.
I'd like to see something that helps reward players for being good even with our spray-and-pray style.
This is my personal bias but as a Counter Strike player I'm used to hip firing everything. Thus I'd like to see TR infantry hip fire bloom values tweaked to reward that kind of play. The only reason I stay is because I found an outfit I like and this character is certed...

I can tell you why I don't stick with TR. It's simply because I look at my weapons loadouts thinking of a gun I would like to use. I might settle on something for a few minutes but normally I just realise that I could just play another character and have more fun. I've got auraxium with most of the LMG and carbines so it's not like I'm going to just use an offbeat gun just to get rewards. Weapons being purely competitive is not the main problem just that the best TR options often feel unsatisfying for some reason. Like Jaguar used to be a satisfying weapon to use and now it just isn't and you don't get the impression that anyone cares enough to actually make changes for the better.

I suppose that if I was in some sort of really active TR outfit then I might have long play sessions on that character doing some hot aiming at an empty doorway for 10 minutes and pressing redeploy action.