Esamir: Skyrim Still A Spawn Zergfest

As predicted, attackers have found all the holes in the base, no matter how tiny to get all their spammy shells of zerginess to hit the spawn, from all around the base.

The towers only protect the attackers from retribution, for defenders must leave their base just to shoot back and expose themselves.

All the extra buildings, trees, rocks, hills and walls do, is protect even the air from proper retaliation.

What protects us stops us from defending.

As you can see in the following picture; the new designs on many bases are laughable. Once the Zerg (now concentrated with lattice) gets steamrolling, thats it, its game over.


Notice how many people are on the cap point.

0.

They are surrounding the spawn as usual.

I don't understand how in any game, spawn shelling and spam should be tolerated. In the 'olden' days of gaming, you lost some serious respect in your gaming community for doing so.. even throwing a nade with no target was considered spam, even if it wasn't at a spawn point.

Apparently modern gamers just don't care about reputation and respect from their peers, or PS2 is so full of non-paying players they just don't care about all this. This kind of thing contributes to;

PS2 NOT BEING A GOOD GAME.

SUGGESTION: Perhaps we have to implement something silly like pain or self damage or self vehicle damage when shooting at the spawn itself.
If you shoot at the spawn and hit it, that damage is reflected on you.
You have no business spamming the crap out of a spawn point. It is poor gamesmanship, frustrating for the defender, and MUST be boring for the attacker...

Hey camp spawn like a noob all you want. Hey, sit in that tank and look at us. Hey, fly around and try to kill us when we're out.

Something has to be done. This is madness.
Or perhaps we need a mass exodus out of the game. Oh wait that already happened.

In all pics the attackers have over double the defenders number. How do you think that is going to turn out?

Esamir seems to have more spawn option to favour the defense, but it's not supposed to be a defender 'I win' button.

Trying to fight a battle that is this much of a lost cause , SOE needs to give you the title "Rambo" or something.

^Talking about BF "baserape" or something?

Look at the Octagon, or Geological Survey camp, and tell me the Spawn room(s) aren't trapped behind walls and force defenders to walk through chokepoints. The spawn room "cover" backfired in those outposts.

Had me till you started complaining about spawncamping.

Spawncampers in older games were looked down upon because they were farming kills and players couldn't do anything about it. PS1 introduced the idea of spawn suppression. When you can't get out of your spawns, you've lost your base, spawn elsewhere. The only reason people spawncamp is because they have to. If players at a lost base would just give up and go somewhere useful, it wouldn't be an issue.

E-honor is for people who care about e-honor. Everyone else will use A2AM or ***** jeeps or just plain shoot you in the back. War is hell and this game has no place for pistols-at-dawn.
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Re Esamir base redesign: Not a fan. The walls are obnoxious for all sides concerned. I was under the impression that Esamir was supposed to be a vehicle playground. It is.. up until the point where you have to do something important. Just like snipers, vehicles can't cap bases. So you have to get out which means you're probably going to lose your vehicle. A vehicle that just got a higher resource cost. Bad combinations across the board.

Esamir used to be my fave continent. Not so much anymore. I like the lattice, but the devs gave people what they wanted which was "more defensible bases." The upshot is that the front lines are much, much more static and the gameplay occurs in fewer bases. No matter how fun it is (if you like twitch COD fighting) it gets boring.

IMO the lattice is fine, and the uberforts could have been fine (But they are jails more than forts) but adding them together = a war of attrition with no sense of dynamics and flow.

I guess at the octogon the spawns are a bit claustrofobic

But then again i dont play esamir much anymore

Perhaps taking drastic action like creating self-damage when shooting a spawn shield or building of any type. Since players can't police themselves, and are so fearful of players leaving spawn and offering a defense; perhaps this action is in order.

GU14: Player's vehicle/person/esf takes damage relative to output when player hits a spawn zone with ordinance of any type.

These bases are NOT defensible. Instead of SOE listening to random people, they should listen to the base defender types like myself, and others who stay behind the ZERG and hold off multiple enemies all the time.

If one cannot see out of one's base, one cannot repel attackers from said base. If one must EXIT one's base in order to defend it, that is also ridiculous.

I would pose that bases are now LESS defensible, due to loss of LOS (which is the reason castles were built high, and with walls, offered height and SIGHT advantage over the attacker). The walls enclose the defender, while the attacker can easily part a Sunder on the other side of the wall, at multiple points, and flood the base with infantry. Since the only ranged defending classes are HA's they have no option to shoot from range, and its up to LA's to do the job, cause everyone ELSE CANT GET OUT OF THE FREAKING BASE TO DO ANYTHING. This is attacker advantage.

The same walls that allegedly give defenders protection from tank and air spam.... has failed. That is the point of my OP, your other statements are irrelevant. This is not a whining or complaining post.

If I was a beta tester, would it be so for just observing and reporting in-game behaviour. Oh wait, we're all beta testers cause PS2 allegedly is far from complete!!!

The redesign was to address this problem, and I posted screenshots of exactly the positions the enemy was taking. ALL or most of them were spamming spawn, with NOONE else sitting on the cap point.

The point was to show how the redesign failed, as players adjust and DO Find all the holes they can still use.

And yes, I SHOULD COMPLAIN, when my spawn point is COVERED with EXPLOSION SPRITES, and I cant even see out of the damn spawn to leave it anyway.

I am against walls, etc, closed windows, etc. Because it limits my options to defend and counterattack, as much as it claims to protect me.

I didnt get screenshots of those bases, the Octagan doesnt have this problem so much, but most other bases do, and the attackers have already adjusted to where they need to park in order to spam the spawn with tanks. This keeps everyone suppressed, so that even our AA MAXs cant leave the spawn to deal with the 3-4 ESFS rocketpodding the spawns as well.

It is CONSTANT SPAM (firing with no intended target), that covers the spawn room with explosives, so that noone can leave.
The new design has done nothing to resolve this problem.

OP is not about the Zerg, but the fact that they have all found the LOS to the spawn, and spammed it out of any defense to be had, which defeats the purpose of the base and continent redesign.

The point of the image is not to show the numbers of attackers, but the positions that they take up to enable themselves to gain an LOS towards the spawn, in order to continue spamming it as they did before the map changes.

Walls, rocks, hills and covers, etc were to cut down on this; which it did - for a week. Then the players adjusted, found the holes and here we are back to square one; attackers spamming the **** out of the spawn whilst leaving the cap points unattended.

In all three cases, there was no defense; the zerg rolled up, took their spawn spamming locations, and went to town. The changes to Esamir were to supposedly stop this, so people could get out of their spawn.

You only saw the meagre defense numbers since most just left the server at this point. After being pushed back on the LAttice from I think Frostfall? with the same tactic, I stuck around to get screenshots. The attackers were unaware nor did they care for how many defenders there were; they were spamming nonetheless.

The entire bottom half of your post was about e-honor and spawn camping. If you think someone responding to half of your post is irrelevant then you're confused with how public discourse works. You presented two related ideas and you got responses to both of them.

I agreed with half of your post; the walls are causing more harm than good. The other half was misplaced, e-honor trash. Next time you don't want someone to comment on something you believe, keep it to yourself.

The map doesn't show infantry unless they are seen (as portrayed in the last picture by the red dots around the spawn room). As someone else pointed out, there are 48+ enemies in the area and yet we see maybe a dozen at most.

So what we got here is not that the bases are un-defendable, but rather that the defenders left because they were having a bad day, leaving a handful of you to soak it up.
And the attackers shouldn't have to care if somebody is there or not. One of the points of the game is to capture territory, so there they are capturing it. They aren't going to send a tell to your faction asking politely if you could send a few troops over to accomplish this.

The problem stems from everyone being able to pull a tank they gun. Even the bases in PS1 had chokepoints that were camped by vehicles...just not NEARLY as many vehicles.

double.

Really? You have nothing to say about the OP, so you're going to take me to court over a SINGLE FRAME screenshot?
Please read the OP again. WOW.
The OP was showing how the base redesigns only stopped spawncamping and spamming for a every short time, but the attacker has already figured out the LOS to continue their assault.
If you had also continued to read through the entire topic, perhaps other information or clarity to my position would have been evident to you; or maybe net.
Just wow, man. wow.

Before the defenders got locked into their spawn rooms and had their walls turned against them, they failed to keep the attackers out of the same chokepoints.

And in any concerted defense situation, it isn't sufficient to just sit behind your walls and kill choke point lemmings. You either have to range out of the base to keep the attacker off balance, or you have to have a counter-attack from another base to break the siege.

Without one of those, defenders will probably get pushed back, camped, and will lose.

There's no LOS, so one can't even begin to mount a defense. Looking at a single chokepoint while blinded as to the numbers, types of units, etc doesn't help at all.

Ok then.

You are trying to fight a war with an imaginary rule book. As I said in the above statement, the attackers are not here to worry about your feelings or how many of you are present to fight back. They have been given an objective to take a point and that is what they will do regardless on if you are present or not.
Now, as others have pointed out many times before, if you end up locked in the spawn room it may be decisive to mobilize your *** to the next point. From there you can either pull armor and flank them or you can construct a better defensive line, seeing how if you were spawncamped your current line obviously did not hold.
While you may show grievances about the current base design, they are not by any means the reason you ended up where you were. The maps clearly showed that you were outnumbered 2 to 1 and they had armor where you didn't. If you have a grievance, that's fine, detail it, but don't lay false claims to it.
As for your imaginary rulebook, I'll leave you with a quote from my AOC guild webpage:

First rule of pvp is if you are trying play fair you are already at a disadvantage.

Feel better now?

I've seen this problem happen at the Octagon. After that, our outfit took to actively defending the outside of the wall, using the wall itself as a way to defend the inside with minimal troops.

If we got pushed back to the wall, it was time to have a squad or two deploy from a nearby base and at least bring AV Harassers to try to destroy some Sunderers, allowing the defenders a chance to push back out and keep the base viable.

The walls could surely use a parapet and catwalk, but I think perhaps those types of things should become part of some new "base upgrade" system like Guild Wars 2 has. When you first get the base it is defensible against small numbers but not large. Someone starts to upgrade it and they get some reward for doing so, and then the base is more defensible against large hosts.

Have you been to Hossin. What is your opinion of the defenses there (I am not trying to redirect here, I'm asking).

I am of the opinion that Esamir walls need ramparts or something, catwalks onto of them, mostly covered so that they can shoot down at things outside of the walls.

This does beg the question though: How defensible should the base be. How many people should be able to hold off how many people?

I'm assuming your fighting the TR, you aren't going to get fighting out by the Point so no one is going to flash on your radar. And you can't spot that far away because it's through multiple walls... We have no way of knowing how many people are on the point tbh.

No true scotsman aside, just... why? How will that prevent spawn from being locked down? I mean it's difficult for vehicles to get a bead on spawn now, ESFs can, but ESFs are not that difficult to disperse. 3 heavies can scare off an ESF with LMG fire, and if you have 5 ESFs pounding on your door and no one in the base proper to deflect them it's time to pull back, or try a max crash to break out. And even if you push the vehicles out, people can just stand in nearby buildings and shoot you as you come around the corner.

I'm not disagreeing here, camping spawn is silly... but why are you developing to punish someone? Spawn is already a bunker, how would you change it?

I dont go to the test server ,so no. I haven't bothered downloading the test server. I dont like to be a free beta tester for SOE, although it seems I am forced to by default anyway.

That would help, but my OP was more about how the attacker has already bypasses the base redesign and are back to spamming the crap out of spawn again, therefore nullifying any defense to be had, much like pre-walls, etc

Can't answer that question. If it is a Zerg, no amount of design is going to stop it. However base designs can be done to minimize the amount of spam (especially at spawn points) that helps the defender get out to where defense can be made. This spawn mechanic needs some serious work as well.

In traditional warfare, it is assumed you need to approach any fortification with 3:1 odds in order to even have a chance to take it.
So let's go with that number.

Now, when there is no spam to stop me, or limited spam, I can defend an outpost, tower, pretty damn well. If the enemy can simply roll up, spam teh crap out of a spawn point so noone can leave, the battle is already lost. Why not just put the cap point near the spawn point where everyone camps anyway.

This is a 1 frame screenshot, while radar is in operation, which in fact had higher infantry numbers. Again, the point of the picture used in the OP is to demonstrate that enemy units are positioned and focused on their ability to bypass the new base designs and continue to spam the spawn, nullfying the purpose of the changes in GU13. I have other issues with GU13, this is just one of them.

not sure how 'no true scotsman' logical fallacy applies to anything.
As i stated, i can deal with camping infantry. They're not the ones who kill me. I've done this in small fights when HEX was king, and I'd fight at bases with no zergs. I was VERY effective at defending these bases, and pushing back anyone who'd camp our spawn. It's usually tank spam that keeps us locked in spawn. Again lets not drift off topic. This OP was bout vehicles being able to still hit spawn, regardless of GU13 changes.

Changing spawn mechanics and redesigning bases to accomodate it is a whole other discussion. Right now, GU13 imposed walls, trenches, rocks, trees and mountains on Esamir, that are still being bypassed, which contributes to the lack of defense, and ability to leave one's spawn to do so.