End work on Lattice now before any more effort is wasted.

EDIT: I really wish I could change that title. "The goals of Lattice have already been achieved" would say the same thing with a much more pleasant tone.


Lattice is falling into the sunk-cost fallacy. Every day the PS2 metagame is evolving and making the complaints that lead to Lattice - About the difficulty of finding a fight and the prevalence of ghost hacking - less and less relevant. As outfits become familiar with the Alert system and players gain a better grasp of how strategy effects the small scale game the battles are growing larger, the stakes are getting higher, and the amount of influence that even a single squad can have on a battle is higher than ever.

Hex works. It has problems, some of them significant, but Lattice is not the solution to those problems. Players on several servers, notably Miller and Mattherson but others as well, have demonstrated that large scale, high stakes battles can happen constantly under Hex as it currently exists. Lattice is no longer needed.

If Lattice is implemented it will totally destroy the strategic metagame that drives most outfit and squad interaction in PS2. Outfit coordination becomes irrelevant in the face of meat-grinder rush lanes. Players who have learned the system will find that none of that understanding matters - All that matters in numbers.

Lattice takes a large scale, combined arms, very fast and dynamic game and reduces it to a 200 player arena shooter with a limited map rotation. That's a step in exactly the wrong direction, destroying all the things that make Planetside unique, exciting, and that set it apart from the dozens of other FPS games on the market.

Lattice was proposed to solve a problem. But while it was being developed Players solved that problem for themselves. The complaints that prompted work on Lattice are no longer relevant. Alerts are largely responsible for this - A brilliantly simple system that served to provide clear goals and incentivizes large battles without fundamentally removing the key aspects of the game.

Basically, what I'm saying is - The Dev team won. They accomplished what they set out to do, it just took time for the metagame to mature enough for players to catch up to the potential of the game. Alerts have helped push players to really show what Planetside is capable of. Alerts are a system that add to what is there in a way that highlights Planetsides best qualities. More systems like Alert will help to keep Planetside fresh, fast, and dynamic well into the future.

The mission has been accomplished. What Lattice intends to do has already happened on the Live servers - Large, dynamic battles where players are important and their actions and input matters. The Devs have made a brilliant game - It just took the players time to figure it out. And now that we have small changes like Alerts, or the "Allies in hex" filter for the map, are going to help tune that game. Lattice is no longer needed and would have disastrous effects on the game. Please - set it aside as an interesting experiment and look at ways to expand and improve the game that we are playing right now.

Just wait until additional continents and the intercontinental gameplay go live.

The lattice will make much more sense then.

I too fear for the death of ghost capping, OP.

No, it won't. It will still straight-jacket players into constant, endless meatgrinders in a handful of rush lanes.

There is nothing about Lattice that improves Planetside 2. It changes Planetside 2 into a completely different, unrecognizable game. Intercontinent fights with Hex will be insanely good fun as factions struggle to fight to and control the warp-gates, pushing combat between continents and expanding grand strategy and scale to new heights.

Putting Lattice into that is a defacto map rotation system.

Again - Lattice is not needed. It does not improve the game. It was an interesting experiment, and should be treated as such - The experiment was performed and now we know that less choice, fewer options, and a more deterministic player experience is not needed or wanted in Planetside.

It's not a failed experiment - If anything it's very successful - Lattice has served to highlight what works in Planetside and demonstrated that while Hex has problems it's ultimately a very successful system.

@Giggly - That "argument" was childish weeks ago. "Ghost Capping" is such a small concern as to be beyond notice - Dispatch three people to resecure the point. If it takes more than three people then it's not a ghost cap - It's a battle. There is no need to go destroying Hex and radically changing the game for the worse because a few people don't want to take a few minutes to deal with flankers

Really, Giggly - If you don't want to put effort into the game beyond farming zergs there will always be biolab fights.

The other day an entire NC platoon was capping Nott Amp Station on Esamir while there were literally no VS there defending it at all. Nobody. We showed up and kicked them out, and then moved on to fight NC at Saerro Listening Post. Ten minutes later there was an entire NC platoon capping Nott Amp Station on Esamir while there were literally no VS there defending it at all. Nobody.

Of course, if the terrible, nasty rush lane system was implemented... oh wait, they still would be able to do that because all of VS were fighting at a base on the other side of the continent. It's almost as if the new system will have almost no impact on the game at all, other than preventing players from doing ******** things, like certain VS outfits on Mattherson flocking to Scarred Mesa Skydock from the northern warpgate and sitting there with full platoons while TR and NC completely ignore them and cap everything in the north.

More and more I believe this comes from a cruel lack of attrition.
People will keep rushing head-on into Biolabs as long as the Sundy is up because there is no downside doing so.

And why would they redeploy anywhere else ?
Not only the map doesn't let you pick any outpost of your choice (I can't hammer this enough) for respawn, but look the deployment screen:

"Reinforcement needed" always send you on a enemy facility satellite.
Never on your own attacked base. Never.

So, you hope that the system will prevent people from doing what they like to do, by forcing them to do what you would like them to do?
I think I somehow misunderstood that.
@gigastar: Well, then we better wait with it until we got at least 5 continents, shouldn't we?

That's something a lot of Lattice supporters like - They think it will force everyone to play the way they think the game should be played.

Of course if people wanted to grind zerg all day then we wouldn't have had so much complaining about The Crown back when it was Crownside 2 all the time.

Folks who complained about the Crown pointlessly sucking up all the players into an endless farm? Welcome to Lattice - Every fight is an old school zergfest Crown fight

Folks who hated the pointless chaos of UES? Lattice is all UES, all the time, every day, with no alternatives.

So let's put it aside and find ways to improve the game we've got instead of changing it into something simpler, more frustrating, and less interesting.

Wow, it sounds like a lot of things are going to change because you can't ghost cap as easily anymore.

The hex system makes the game tedious and boring. Most fights are pointless, you cannot create stable front lines, no bases have any extrinsic strategic value. Most battles are cut short because of the need to redeploy to another hex. Attacks and defences break up because of territory shifting on the map... one min you can be in an epic battle the next the enemy just melt away because of something happening on the other side of the map. 12 people often have to waste time chasing a couple of infiltrators around an empty map. Links between bases make no sense according to the terrain, impassable cliffs and narrow ravines are no obstacle at all they can be bypassed by a galaxy crew, so terrain is also useless strategically.

Some of my friends don't play as much as they used too, all give the same reason... too much chasing around the map.

The last thing I want in a wargame is a stable frontline.
That's like, a contradiction in itself.

Lattice is a PS1 feature and therefore has to be included. Let's not fall into the Battlefield 3 situation where you make a game nothing like the previous titles in the series.

"Because the previous game did it" is not an argument for anything. The previous game didn't have headshots, physics, a real flight model, ballistic weapons, camo, in game voice, or lumifiber.

I've had this in my sig ever since people started talking about how lattice would add more structured battles to the game. Battles aren't structured! And there's no such thing as "battle flow". If what you're doing has structure and moves in an orderly fashion, it can't rightly be called "battle".

Your complaints about battle flow need to be taken up with your high-level commanders - You can direct battle flow consistently, but outfits need to work together. As for extrinsic strategic value - Go assault Scarred Mesa, Crown, Crimson Bluff, or Indar Excavation. Each of them is an incredibly valuable fortress that can anchor an entire sector of the map.

Any attempt on the north warpgate requires that you hold Mao and Connery. Holding Dahaka is almost impossible if you don't have Indar Ex. Pushing out of the South East means you must hold Rashnu and Tawrich .

The strategic value of locations is there. Towers are fortresses. Well defended high-ground is the death of those galaxy crews you're worried about. Holding the right locations lets you move tanks or securely re-supply aircraft.

Lattice has none of that. Nothing has any strategic value because there is no choice or decision making - You can't choose where to go next, you can only follow your rush lane. So if one base would be better than another as a base... tough. You can only advance from the connected base in the lane, no matter how little sense that makes.

If you think the game is tedious and boring with pointless fights now just you wait until every single battle is an hours long zerg-grinder. I'm sure you'll enjoy dying every 5 seconds trying to push out of a spawn-room and being stomped by hundreds of camping maxes as you try to get into a tech plant.

Hex has problems - Lattice won't solve any of them and it will create a huge number of it's own problems.

Actually there is no front line at all in the hex system. If you have a connection to a hex you can cap it no matter how isolated from your warp gate or how impassable the terrain. You can even hold a cont cap by defending any one hex on the map. The system is so fluid that it negates any defence or advance. This is why you need some stability - it allows for progression and resistance. Instead of having to use tactics to cut off, surround and flank the enemy the hex system allow it to be done strategically by instantly creating new fronts from thin air. A few infis can threaten to cut off a platoon from the warpgate in less than 10 mins, all they have to do is stand next to a cap point for 20 secs. Strangely, no one is interested in forming a garrison or doing sentry duty in a war game. Much more interesting to ghost cap empty bases and imagine you are being tacticool I guess.

P.S Sorry but holding any base means nothing, if you leave it to cap back territory then you lose it - if you don't leave then you get cut off. No base in PS2 has any significance.

Actually, the same people who solo empty bases are often the same people defending their own against soloists/small squads, because they appreciate what one guy can do to an undefended base. The usual procedure is to flip the points on connected bases and then return home to stop the timer on your own. And no, ghosters don't just pass each other on their way back and forth. Ghost fights are vicious, dastardly, and relentless.

When two individuals/groups who really, seriously want each other's territory (as in during an alert) meet, what happens next is all-out combat. No standing around waiting for timers to tick down, because while you're in one place they're in another. No stupid meatgrinders, because the side that would be ground finds better places to go, and the side that would be doing the grinding has to go out and answer the challenge. No farms, no pointless zerging, no sending platoons against a single squad. This is what PS2 should look like, all the time. Maybe there should always be an alert.

Instead, what are we testing? Zerg lanes.

There is no mechanic at all that forces you to stay in one 'rush lane' you can attack from one lane to another. You can use a base in another lane to attack across the map. You can attack the enemies rear if they have not defended it from an unconnected base and so on. The difference is you have to actually defeat the enemy and remove them from a base by defeating them in a battle. Not just keep them busy while a few infiltrators cap around them. You cannot just ignore other squads, you have to fight them if you want to gain territory. There is a reason to stay and defend bases, you can be much more sure of help arriving, rather than just redeploy to the WG pulling gals and dropping on a weak hex.

Sorry, no, PS2 should not be about ghost cappers duking it out 2v2. Farms, meatgrinders, pointless zerging and sending platoons against single squads are exactly what the hex system promotes.

Poor leadership promotes sending platoons to deal with squads. Everything else is going to be more of a feature in Lattice than it ever was or could have been in Hex.

The point is - Ghost capping isn't a problem. If one or two guys are ghost capping bases behind you then you dispatch one or two guys from your platoon to deal with them while the rest of the platoon keeps pushing forward. If it takes more than one or two guys then it's not a ghost cap - it's a battle.

If there is a problem with ghost caps it is that players are somehow unwilling or incapable of stopping them with the minimum necessary force . Right now there is a "Ghost Cap" happening on Indar - A small number of friendlies and enemies are skirmishing over Indar Comms Array. If the defenders are even remotely competent they'll clear the enemy out of that base without any problems at all, resecure it in all of thirty seconds, and move on. It involves all of 6 people out of two thousand on the server. That's all it takes - two or three kills plus thirty seconds. It's such a small part of the game I can barely even remember dealing with ghost caps - They can be taken care of that quickly, then you're back with your platoon pushing the front line.

That's not a problem - that's the one thing people can latch on to and exaggerate out of all proportion with reality to justify a massive change to the fundamental structure of the game. Because they think that change will provide some illusive missing quality that the game lacks. The thing is? The large battles are already in game. Hex Works, and it works very, very well. Players who are unsatisfied with Hex are unsatisfied with Planetside, and no amount of changes are going to help if your problem is that you don't actually like Planetside. You don't want 2v2 battles that are resolved in moments and have little or no influence on the course of battles. And to solve that "Problem" you'd cut so much out of the game that it becomes a bloated version of a conventional FPS right down to fixed map rotations.

Lattice is not the solution to any of Planetside's problems. It's the birth of a host of new problems.