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

People care way more about having fun over getting certs in most cases. Of course they usually go hand in hand which is why back capping a base or defending one against an elusive enemy is no fun and no certs.

If back capping was intended as a lever then its gone too far. A quick couple of back cappers can totally change the map in less than 10 mins. Frontlines are way too fluid and people are spread out all over the map attacking one moment, defending the next unable to follow a clear strategy because no base can be locked down.

I mean, with both current iterations, they are pointless.
Cutting off in both systems has no impact.

In the Hex, back capping is easy and useless
In the Lattice, back capping is hard and useless

Pick your poison.
However, I'm enclined to say the Hex had much more potential because it introduced NUMBERS.
Influence could and should have been used as a way to gradually impact multiple factors (cap times, resource costs, spawn timers...) rather than the binary On/Off state of SCUs for example.

The Hex system has this advantage that it can be adjusted.
I wonder how they'll manage to balance out Lattice benefits.

Now, what would happen if, when no one's in the radius of a cap point, it slowly turn neutral? Say, within 20-30 seconds?
Defenders would easily be able to pass by occasionally to keep it up, or keep someone in walking distance if you need the "cap points" to hold off the influence of a taken point.
But a "Ghost Capper", as much as I probably haven't noticed any in the past weeks, could only leave for his fighter/flash when the base was nearly capped already.
Larger bases could have larger radii, with faster neutralizing for attacks.
Also, what happened to the "neutral hex" system proposed months back?

I have. Extensive, when it was released, before Core Combat and the BFR Scourge. It was awesome. It was also a radically different game, an arcade shooter, a much simpler game made in a time when computers were far less complex and Everquest was still the king of what I don't think we were even calling Meta yet.

Back in PS1 fights regularly devolved into multiple hour long meatgrinders just trying to move thirty feet down a corridor. VoIP was extremely primitive, internet forums were lumbering, primordial versions of themselves. Experience was gained and used in completely different ways. Connection speed was appalling - What you saw on your screen was really sort of a vague impressionist portrait of what might or might not be happening on a distant Sony server.

The game had a completely, utterly different foundation - Vehicles worked and were balanced differently, resources were handled in a completely different fashion with NTU silos and ANT runs. Most of the game devolved to siege warfare while you waited for a base to run out of NTUs and tried to prevent supplies, ANTs, from getting in. It was lots of fun, but it was also very 12th century. The interior fights everyone is so nostalgic about really amounted to tons of players running around spamming grenades and shotguns because your system could barely process what was going on and even if you could the shooting mechanics were so simple it didn't matter - Put gun on badguy pull trigger.

Planetside was an amazing, innovative game. It should have sparked a revolution, a move away from the small, limited arena shooters that dominated the market then and sense. It's easily one of the best MP games every made.

But it was 10 years ago. And gaming has moved on, the capabilities of the internet and personal computers have moved on, the communication systems we use have moved on. Modern games see a level of analysis, tactics, and strategy that Planetside 1 just barely touched the soft end of.

Lattice worked reasonably well in PS1, depending on what your objectives were. Fights were massive, but they were also static, extremely deterministic, and often amounted to pure numbers. And as much as they excite my 16 year old heart they were boring - Standing around a corner waiting for a bunch of people to try to rush the dual pounder max locked down up the stairs, dying to the grenade spam, then doing it again. And again. And again. For forty five minutes or an hour. Or longer. Some of those damned fights lasted for days. And while a days long siege sounds really cool looking back through the haze of years what it really amounted to was a lot of standing around in doorways throwing grenades at people you couldn't see.

PS1 was great. But it was also the only game that had ever attempted what it was doing. Gaming is a much more sophisticated industry now. The players are smarter and more experienced.

We can do better than Planetside. And the head-long rush to try to recreate Planetside 1 is rooted in a lot of vague, nostalgic memories of how great things were a decade ago when we were playing a game with no physics, the simplest arcade shooting mechanics, and a slow pace of play.

Trying to shoe-horn those mechanics into Planetside 2 isn't going to work. Planetside 2 is not that game. It's much, much, much faster. It's more sophisticated - the complex shooting mechanics, quick TTK, high mobility, and sophisticated communications allow for much tighter, more precise applications of force. It has more breadth - Every vehicle can assume multiple roles. Every player can take on a variety of roles. Things are less specialized. The terrain is less locked down and deterministic. The resource and vehicle systems encourage fast moving combat over wide areas, without demanding the inevitable 2-hour minimum siege.

And even when I was playing Lattice had the exact problems people think it will fix.

Zergs would form, steamroll a base for the experience, and then move to the next base. If they ran into a nut they couldn't crack they would leave and go to another base in the Lattice. It was extremely common to have two large zergs circling around each other on a continent - One would attack a base just as the other left and they'd play leap frog like that all night, never actually meeting for a real battle.

Lattice didn't fix that in 2003. It's not going to fix it in 2013.

I played PS1. It was great, but it also had enormous flaws. Trying to fix Planetside 2 by turning it into Planetside 1 is, at best, going to give us the problems of both games without fixing either.

Internet voting is worse than useless. There's no way to get a representative population. I read once that something like 95% of players will never visit the forums. Of those who do 95% will never make an account. And of those who make an account only a fracion will ever post anything.

Forums are a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction. The Devs use reddit, they know exactly how skewed online voting is - Roadmap is a quick and dirty way to gauge interest, that's all.

PS - I just went and looked for the Lattice post on the Road Map. A.) It's not called Lattice. B.) It is pretty far down the page behind things like Hossin and outfit recruiting. And I found this interesting - C.) It has two hundred fewer likes than mutliple cosmetic slots for vehicles

More people care about blinging out their sunderers than care about Lattice.

Also - Lattice has 600 upvotes. Planetside is currently the 14th most played game on Steam, with 6k players logged in today and a daily peak of 8k... Logging in through Steam. It follows behind L4D2... and CODBLOPS2.

One tenth as many people as have upvoted Lattice in several months as are playing Planetside 2 right now, and counting only the players logging in through Steam it's one house down from CoDBlops 2.

then we need an in game voting system

To add - the simplest way to solve the problem for small servers would be to rotate the continents so that only one is in play at a time. A server that has a small, poorly organized population isn't going to suddenly improve because of Lattice. It'll just be a small, disorganized population back-hacking each other on Lattice instead of on Hex.

Alternately - Battle Islands might be the way to go - Smaller, far more compact continents that are more realistically scaled to the populations of small servers.

Good idea, too bad SOE won't do it because it's SOE

They need to get the avatar server switch in soon so players can move their characters to populated servers. Or just server merge more servers together once they get more continents in.

Though I've been arguing for Lattice over the past couple of days, I've come to realize the Lattice is unnecessary. The resource system needs to be overhauled, and deep base captures should be allowed. There should also be a system to try and lockout infiltrators which the infiltrators would have to circumvent somehow in order to gain control of a base. Continent locking should be necessary. Base layout needs to be adjusted to make them more defensible. Base layout also needs to be adjust so not every base is the exact same. Lattice isn't necessary. Just give us more options for attack and defense. Automated base defenses tied to a base computer would be nice, too, in addition to the current manned turrets. Give us more objectives, and multiple ways to capture and defend a base. The "take down generators and SCU, stand on point" approach should only be one of two or three methods to take a base. It should not be the only option.

Its too late dude. In this business you don't spend this much resources on something and not ship it.

They're going to ship it, they have to. Or someone will get demoted. And I imagine that someone doesn't want to get demoted.

Agreed, the Alert system has addressed everything this 'corridor' system was supposed to solve. Just add a system whereby bases cannot be flipped until attackers control all points simultaneously.

What are you smoking? The lattice is supposed to direct the battle flow. The alert system does nothing to direct the battle flow.

The Alert system makes people fight over bases, instead of just certs, because the territory gives certs.
The only thing we really need to direct battle flow is cert rewards. If attacked bases gave a map-visible bonus to xp gained to the defenders, if preventing a capture at the last minute would grant extra points, if resources had more meaning than to just signal the point you should start idling at the warpgate, people would certainly fight more for things.
One of the most fun experiences I had recently was fighting over the Bulwark during an Alert on Esamir, and managing to neutralize the point with a rush a second before it was capped, thereby securing the territory experience for us as the alert ended seconds later.
That sense of urgency, combined with good map and base design, would sufficiently redirect battle flow.

Aw. I still have nightmares about that.

I notice a lot of people are complaining about preventing backhacks, but removing backhacks and deep captures from the game would remove options that all the teams need. The devs should be encouraging emergent gameplay by providing the means to come up with inventive strategies and tactics. They don't need to be removing these sorts of things from the game.

I will admit that there are infiltrators that probably spend a lot of time farming generators. However, the way to deal with this is to reduce the amount of XP gained from generators that are not heavily contested. They should not block backhacks and deep captures outright.

The lattice is incredibly popular in game, but not on the forums.

This is because there are a few very vocal people on the forums who are spamming this forum. Add 10 people to your ignore list an all the sudden everyone loves the lattice.

They further multiply their whining by reporting every pro-lattice post to get them censored.

I second that, I will miss cleaning up their mess ( repair tool = XP farm ) the most boring job on Auraxis

Agreed. Many outfit mates of mines just don't read the official forum, but sometimes someone asks when it the lattice coming out to live servers.
It all reminds me GU07 when they introduced the jetpack sound: forum was monopolized by a bunch of doomsayers crying all the time "THIS IS THE DEATH OF LA!" then... nothing happened.

I understand the OP misgivings about a more structured battlefield, but not all players care to think strategically. In fact a large population of Planestside 2 just wants to experience large scale battles and compare k/d ratios. so do we throw that crowd under the bus, they leave and the large scale dynamic of planetside 2 warfare deflates into skirmishes....i should hope not. So you strike a balance. the lattice system will not end stalemates. But that doesn't mean that strategy and specialized outfits wont put an end to it. Its those stories I'm looking forward too.

The lattice is not supposed to end stalemates (don't even know what you mean by that). The lattice is supposed to direct the flow of the battle a bit better. You still have tons of freedom with the lattice system. All the doomsayers seem to think that the entire population is forced down one lane, whilst there are easily 8-10 options available all the time. The lattice will /improve/ strategy, as there currently is NO strategy.