Enough whining: Here are the SERIOUS issues that need to be brought up

This is not your usual Forumside post.


I'll try to stay away from the bickering and the petty balance talks that plague the forum and bring up actual issues with the roadmap and the future of PS2. I want to shine a light on what I believe is something not discussed enough and try to get a clear answer from SOE

So, everybody has been pretty much complaining about the lack metagame of PS2, or rather a combination of strategy and world persistence. The announcement of the Resource Revamp and Continental Lattice have been for many players the arrival of meaning and depth to the game...

BUT... now comes the complaints. I want you to look at those two on the roadmap for a second:

June - Resource Revamp

So, june is actually phase ONE of the RR. In phase one, there will be no ANTs.
Which means that the actual logistic game will not come in June, as most people believe.
Question:

• When will phase 2 of the RR be ready ?

For those not familiar with the upcoming RR, there are supposed to be Resource nodes, located over the map, from which ANTs (modded sundies...) can gather resources, and then drop them in a silo.

That means that EVERY CONTINENT needs to be redesigned to include those resource nodes. That is 4 continents and three battle islands. How much more time is it going to take, and can we expect to see the intersting part of it, phase two before 2015 ?

Another question, more subjective this time:

• Why is the RR so tame ?

Let's face it, the resource revamp is nothing compared to PS1's NTU system. At best, it can reduce the enemy resource income to a crawl, to prevent spam. Used as a siege mechanic, it only really concerns those fights where infantry is holed up inside a facility; but that doesn't prevent rockets to be used, ammo to be ressuplied, or MAXes to be revived. One good point is that it will prevent post-cap vehicle zergs.

But for the actual strategic aspect ? The NTU in PS1 allowed for more than sieges. You could deplete a base to turn it neutral and cut all the links and benefits, then ressuply it with your ANT to take control of it. Remember the PS1 lattice also worked because you could work around it.
No plans in the roadmap for this kind of things. Are we supposed to expect small scale logistics instead ?


May - Continent Locking

Now, for the continent locking. Planned for May.

• Will Hossin and Battle Islands be ready in time ?

There is one continent and two battle islands missing. Those need to be playtested. Hossin is about 80% done, but the Battle islands are, to my knowledge, nonexistant. So, will they be ready in time ?

• How do you take a warpgate ?

How do you take a warpgate ? Continent locking is nice, but how do you take a warpgate ? Do you capture all the bases on the map ? Do you push inside the warpgate itself ? Do you just capture the three outposts linked to it ?
And how do I push out of a warpgate on a new continent ?
Where can I find information about this, there is no explanation on the roadmap post; it's an incredibly important
part of continental locking, but no one knows how it's going to be in game.

• Are continents going to be re-scaled ?

Because continental locking implies we're going to see less 3-ways. ALL continents are designed for 3 way fights, in terms of shape, base placement, and number of outposts. If you only have two factions fighting on Indar, will it be 33% less players ? How many frontlines are going to be open for attack ? The 2000 player cap is long gone, is it going to be raised on two factions to compensate ?


Those are pretty serious and the lack of details leaked by SOE worries me.
A lot.

You worries ?

Continent locking can't work without the continental lattice. Its like putting the cart ahead of the horse, but that's exactly what SOE is planning.

I don't know enough of the resource revamp, but to me any limitation of resources to such a point that people can't play like they'd like to, will just drive away more people than do anything good. The RR needs to put in some strategic/tactical thinking into resources, but not outright starve people so various play styles are no longer viable.

Yeah you can. it's real easy.

Step 1) TR controls Indar
Step 2) Lock player spawning at Continent for 6 hours.

Tadaaaaa

Step1 is just real hard.

Remember when the Roadmap was delayed by a whole year ?

You'll break the game. Too many people on the remaining continents, lag fest, servers reloading, etc.

The continental lattice would spread people out over more continents and battle islands. We have too few continents for continent locking. By May, we may not even have Hossin yet!

I can't be the only one who actually has faith that the devs will know what they are doing, right? I mean, no game is produced seamlessly and without error. They are going to hit a bump every once in awhile and occasionally smack into a wall. That is how game development works. More people testing *hint hint cough cough* would be beneficial to them. Of course they are planning to also incentivize it, too. I will see if I can find the dev post in a minute.

But to the OP, yeah. These are critical parts of the game and cannot be half-***ed. Though the staging system seems like a good idea, especially so they can slowly ease things in instead of BOOM complete resource overhaul craziness.

No it wouldn't do any of that.

If Indar is 80% full, and the other continents are 20% full, locking Indar wouldn't "lag fests, servers reloading, etc."

They need to put in MEGABLOCKS! Imagine how much fun it'd be to fight in a ruined city with no vehicles!

Valid concerns. I have faith in the PS2 Devs (SOE don't evelope the game people) though.

Like some one sad earlier, if it's just The Nexus copy pasted 3 times so the mechanics work that'd be fine. Although I can see people being annoyed if they really enjoy the nexus and they are slated to have it removed later on.

Well, I did get a noticeable FPS increase because of that.

They made the game incorrectly from the ground up and are now struggling to put together something viable out of a structure that caved in on itself a long time ago.

These changes will add things that are desperately needed, but they won't change the fact that most of the complaints made in beta still haven't been addressed, even on the roadmap. This game would be thriving right now if they didn't try to pander to CoD and solo players and just made the game a proper PS1 sequel to begin with. Right now the big problem that's getting everybody down is that you've got a nice, big game that's never been done before; but zoom out, and you see nothing, and everything is irrelevant.

People will never stop complaining until perfection is achieved. The next problem that the community would kill itself over is the spawn camping; and that's such an ingrained part of the game in it's current state. You can't leave your spawn because in this game, you die before you can run 5 meters to the nearest cover, and when you get into a building, you're surrounded by 30+ campers who are running around in circles clipping through each other in a very tight space. Unless you're one of those lucky outfits that can pull out 50 skillsuits at the drop of a hat, nobody's going to be happy with that nonsense.

There's a ton of things they would have to do to fix the mess that the game is right now. No matter what system changes they make, the core gameplay is an inconsistent mess right now. To genuinely save the game from irrelevance, they would have to make the TTKs longer, remove at least 60% of the bases in the game, if not 80%, completely remake the remaining bases, completely remake esamir and amerish, remake or make drastic changes to most of their prefabs, and so much more. All of this on top of the current things on the roadmap, most of which were meant to be in the game a year ago.

Now it just looks like the devs are scrambling to bring back all the bitter PS1 vets by building systems into a game that wasn't made for them, and trying to keep the newbies from quitting by holding everyone's hand and treating the veteran players like idiots.

The game really is breathtaking when you first play it, but as time goes on, it becomes easy to see why so many have become bitterly dissatisfied and quit altogether. The worst part is that the scale and persistence aspects of the game have completely spoiled me. No other game is capable of scratching my itches. I'm stuck here.

That wouldn't change anything, other than make the zerg spend 20 seconds driving longer from one camp to another.

Real change comes with the PS1 AMS, PS1 mines, PS1 spitfires, PS1 motion detectors.

I'm sorry I forgot. Thank you for the daily reminder, based Tuco.

Yeah PS1 players aren't known for their ability to take in the big picture, just look at how much they defended their CUD I-win buttons

You know Tuco, you could just put it in your sig and you wouldn't have to write it down every single post

The continent lock will just lead to WDS style zergs on another continent. Ghost caps and EXTREME YAWN!

I'll be honest, the game had potential and a vision in beta.
Some things were bad and unpolished, like the resource system, GAMS, base design or general balance.

The change of TTK and Class system is alright, because I think they were reasonable; PS1 had pretty terrible gunplay, and while the inventory was great, classes make coordination and defining roles easier.

But I'll stick to my guns and say the Hex/influence system was really interesting.
Not every base should be made for 200 players, or it can lead to very repetitive base design like in PS1, big bases should attract lots of people and smaller bases should have a purpose, like towers, but with more perks.

The switch to Lattice (or rather, rush lanes) was the most painful thing the game ever experienced.
It delayed a year worth of meaningful content.

SOE is too busy creating brand new camos and other really important stuff for the game. They have no time to waste on such mundane things as balance.