Gameplay shortcommings I struggle with.

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Mojo_man, Oct 11, 2016.

  1. Mojo_man

    So recently I've returned to PlanetSide 2 after nearly 4 years away. I'm pleased to say that the game has by and large improved tremendously, but there are still a number of things I struggle with, and it's causing me a lot of frustration. I won't claim to be a talented player, or even an "ok" one, but some of the things I've seen seem gut clenchingly annoying, and I'm wondering if I'm just missing something or if these are issues shared by the community?

    1) The Vulcan Minigun for the TR - I've come to LOATHE this thing. It's incredibly effective against infantry, Armor, and Air when you can get a bead on them. I've got two characters, one an NC and one a TR, and I can tell you this thing seems incredible from both ends of the weapon. I have no solid idea of how to counter this thing, as nothing I've tried ever works. You can't get a missile lock on as it kills you in under half the time that takes, and in a 1v1 fight in a Vanguard with something like a halberd vs a Prowler, you'll only win the fight if you never miss and take NO damage from any other sources while exchanging fire(And that's assuming the Prowler wasn't deployed). I actually genuinely feel like I'm cheating when I use it on the TR side. Massive damage, ROF that's quite possibly the highest of anything I've seen in the game, Excellent accuracy, and a reload that's 3x faster than it has any real right to be all combine to make this thing incredible.

    2) Harassers - These things are obnoxious. They cost less than half what a MBT does, but if you've got a driver and gunner who's anything other than brain damaged, the harasser is worth several MBT kills. They're hilariously cheap, very very effective, and (in my experience anyway) very difficult to counter if the driver shows any degree of competence at all. I'm sure there's a good way to get rid of them, but I don't know what it is.

    3) Extreme Pop imbalances - This is an all too common sight:[IMG]
  2. Savadrin


    So from the Harasser perspective:

    I'll take the Aphelion if I am gunning over the Vulcan, hands down. Why? I know how to use the burst mechanic which takes the Aph above the Vulc.

    The CoF on the Vulcan is hilariously bad. If the jeep is point blank on you then yes, you're probably going to die. But why is this surprising as infantry? Someone is shooting a minigun at you...not to mention that you can snipe with the Halberd with much greater effect overall, because you're not exposing yourself so badly to the insane number of ground locks that are everywhere.

    Expect Chingles to jump in with his nanite cost analysis about why the harasser is literally the best vehicle ever invented and how it makes MBTs obsolete. I'm not sure he's ever admitted to driving one though.

    And going after a competent tank crew is basically a death sentence in a jeep. If you pit a good crew vs a bad one, the good one usually wins, regardless of vehicle. If your MBT top gunner is bad and not paying attention, then yeah the jeep has a chance.

    A Vanguard with shield available cannot be killed by a Vulcan unless the tank crew is tunneling REALLY badly or gets caught afk or arguing over who gets more farm.

    It only takes 2 main gun rounds and like 1 click from a top gunner to kill a harasser. If the two of you with two guns can't kill two people with ONE gun that is smaller than BOTH of your guns, and having less armor, then I really don't know what to tell you.
  3. FieldMarshall

    The way continent populations work have been changed since the last time you played.
    There is now a queue for the highest pop empire to enter a continent. (As long as there are more than 150 people on the continent)

    It should be closer to even now (compared to 4 years ago) if you check the in-game continent populations.
    Server pop doesent matter as much as it used to. At least on the primary continent.
  4. Savadrin


    That emerald pop was probably when most of the TR players are at work, or asleep.
  5. Eternaloptimist

    The queueing system stops the overpop faction from adding more players to a continent but it can't do anything about players in underpopped factions leaving the continent, except make the queue time longer. So overpop can get high if lots of people leave. And there is a statistical thing going here - if pop is less than 150 there are no restrictions, so if there were only 100 people on the continent and 48 of them were in the same faction then you would get the stats showing on your screenshot (same as if there were only 4 people and 2 of them were in the same faction).

    Pop imbalance also depends on which server you're on and the time of day. I play early eventings in the week and day time at the weekends and I've never seen imbalance like that on the EU servers.
  6. blackboemmel

    I'd really appreciate to watch some recorded gameplay of an average Vulcan Harasser crew, killing tons of MBTs with it. ;)

    1 brick of C4 or 1 aircraft or 1 Harasser with a better crew than the target.
  7. ColonelChingles

    Don't drive, but I certainly do gun for them. The only time we get taken out as a Harasser is if 1) we have stopped for repairs or 2) we have stopped because we crashed into a rock/tree. For a Harasser, it excels against slow-firing weapons that will miss often, even if those slow-firing weapons deal more damage. A dual Basilisk Sunderer, for example, is more dangerous than a Halberd Vanguard. The old adage, that speed is armour, certainly applies to the Harasser.

    And yes, despite how you consistently ignore solid data, the Harasser is either incredibly OP or incredibly inexpensive or both. A Harasser crew only needs to stay alive for 90 seconds in order to be able to pull an infinite number of Harassers, which given their performance is way under cost. Harassers also chew up Lightnings far in excess of how Lightnings are able to retaliate. I've easily demonstrated all that before.

    The Harasser simply is an incredibly lethal machine with high survivability at a very low cost. All those factors combined make it into an unbalanced vehicle that needs to get hit hard by the nerf bat.
    • Up x 4
  8. Ziggurat8

    Harassers are good money for dbg. By far the most customizations. People want their tricked out rides plus they're common pool. I don't imagine them changing them any time soon or at all.
  9. Mojo_man

    It was taken at 2pm central time on a Saturday.
  10. Towie




    Agreed - it's pulled more often than any other Harasser weapon and with good reason, it's super easy to use and extremely effective. Pulled more often than the Mjolnir and Aphelion added together - the NC and TR 'equivalents' which really aren't (Aphelion isn't bad - Mjolnir is).
    Incidentally - the only time when the Vulcan wasn't #1 was when DBG introduced TR Gatekeeper - which was even more ludicrously good with render-range accuracy and excellent sustained damage output. Gatekeeper is still popular but since the nerf, Vulcan is back on top.
    Yes they are - quite flimsy but you actually have to hit the bloomin thing.
    The only time i've seen a VS overpop is at 4:00am in the morning ! All servers are different but generally speaking, VS are the underdogs.
  11. Savadrin


    Your experience varies wildly from mine then, or we are fighting against a different class of player. I find that bad tankers are quite easy to kill, but more lately I'm running into a lot of tank crews that don't miss. At all. Makes life quite difficult when no amount of rocks, trees, hills, or dodging can get you an escape from AP rounds if you don't get the alpha kill.
  12. Mojo_man

    I'd be interested in seeing this data you've accumulated on the subject. Personally I feel like the Harasser is both too survivable and too cheap for how much it's able to accomplish. Very frequently, A harasser will zip in close to my tank, unload a mag of whatever weapon it's using (usually Enforcer or Halberd on an NC, Aphelion on VS, and ALWAYS a Vulcan on a TR) into my back, and begin to zip off. I'm a fair shot with my tank, and I run AP on both my Prowler and Vanguard, and I can usually land an AP round square in the things *** as it's running away. Thing is, one round is all I'll ever have time to fire at it, as it's 3 zip codes away before the second shell is ready to go. And I can guarantee you that thing will be back and at full health well before I'm able to patch up the damage it's inflicted, so the second round is usually when he gets me. Running away isn't even an option since un-upgraded Harassers can still run circles around High Speed Racer upgraded tanks ( And I don't even use that Chassis anyway).
  13. Mojo_man

    I wasn't upset that the imbalance was VS Specifically, just that it was so prevalent at all. I play both TR and NC, and I find it annoying to be in the faction with 50% pop. When mismatches get that extreme, other faction players usually prefer to not even bother fighting you or just to log off all together until numbers even out a bit. So really, it results in boring times all 'round.
  14. Campagne

    I don't disagree, just wanted to point out that it has already been hit by the bat. Hard.

    I used to drive them, those were the good old days...
  15. Mojo_man


    Wait, these harassers I find so irritating are the ones we have after they've become less powerful?
  16. Campagne

    Haha, yeah. Before they got nerf'd into the ground, they were stupid powerful. An upgraded harasser with a good crew and a Halberd could decimate any MBT without much difficultly. Very fun to be in the harasser, but no so much the tank, as you know. :p

    Now though, I think their power mostly comes from their weapons more than anything else.
  17. ColonelChingles

    Yeah, your thoughts are pretty much correct. The Harasser is overpowered because it can take several hits from a slow-firing AP cannon and survive, despite the fact that it has an already high rate of evasion. If the Harasser were weaker and only took a single hit from an AP cannon to die, that would be a bit more fair. But to give the Harasser that much durability and agility is far too much. Add in the high DPS and inexpensive price and you have an OP wrecking machine.

    As for the data...

    • Up x 1
  18. Mojo_man

    I found that data really interesting. Where can I find data comparing Harasser performance to MBT performance? Also, your data was specifically about Vulcan Harassers (Which I'll admit are far and away the most dangerous kind), but what happens to Harasser vs. Lightning Statistics when we figure in ALL Harassers and ALL lightnings?
  19. Towie

    You can get the raw stats from ps2oraclestats - so for example, if you want to see what kills various vehicles, you can see it here - http://ps2oraclestats.com/monthly-vehicle-deaths/ However, to get the sort of info chingles produces, you need to do a bit of calculation.

    Raw stats don't tell the whole story but can tell a story. For example, the only Harasser weapon killing Lightnings in the top 24 across all factions is the Vulcan-H. If you look at what kills VS and NC Lightnings, the only other Harasser weapon to appear is the Gatekeeper-H (actually the Aphelion sneaks in at position 24 against the NC).

    So both Gatekeeper and Vulcan are good at killing Lightnings but many more are pulled so you also have to take that into account.

    Gatekeeper-H was game-breakingly good and it took DBG 6 months to nerf it to merely excellent. Looks like they are changing both versions of the GK (currently on PTS) - worryingly they are removing the recoil from the -H version so we may yet again see the Billy Goat 1/3 Harassers, coming to a mountain far away from you soon...
  20. Calisai

    All dependent on certain times. From Last weeks Graph you can tell that there are times when the other faction are high as well. There are trends though that can make it appear overwhelming depending on your normal playtimes. For instance... the last 3 nights during primetime the NC were tops with between 36-39% pop. Whereas on Mon & Tue night the TR were tops with the VS only getting 24% total pop at times.

    So you can see major fluctuations depending on day of week, time of day, etc. A lot of these times match up with certain large outfit nights, etc.

    Even taking the day you were talking about... at around 8pm: NC had 37%, TR had 36% and VS had only 26%. So you can see where if you were a VS logging on Saturday night, you'd think the same thing.

    They've implemented queue caps for continents to try and alleviate as many issues as they can, but there is only so much they can do. You can't force people to login and also can't force them to stay if they want to logout (one of the major reasons for shifts in population during alerts) Its just something to live through. I complain about it as well, just not much they can do about it.

    However, just like weapon balance... you only notice the problem with its your faction on the negative side. Each faction has their instances of over-pop, zerging, OP weapons, etc.




    [IMG]




    One of the questions is how to make it so playing with a mismatch like that is fun or at least not frustrating. One of the reasons that pop swings become so extreme is that when someone is having fun, they tend to play longer, when someone isn't they cut their session short and log off.

    We used to see it during late night alerts. During the first half of the alert, pops would be even, but as the alert progressed, the winning faction would start getting higher and higher pop. Why? The losing factions were deciding to log off, maybe to go to bed, maybe to do something else, but they weren't winning and for some that's enough to not have fun, so they decide to log off. When you are winning, or its a close battle, you tend to stick around a bit longer... cause you're having fun, so maybe sticking around 15 minutes after you really should be leaving isn't so bad right?

    It's hard to balance pops when the #1 factor contributing to it is player motivations.