"Ghost Capping" is a term made up by lazy zerg herders

I know your ire for people like me. I see your 120 vehicle caravan congo line, steaming through the continent, getting your cert farm on while you listen to Kenny G.

I'm waiting quietly in a cozy corner. The point flips, you repair everything, and you all move on the the next point.
To the next 2000 certs for each of us reward for doing absolutely ******* nothing!

Yeah. You all left. So I took the base back. Well before I did that I hacked literally everything and mined the vehicle pad and cap point.

A few spawned back to try to stop it from happening but I spawned a sunderer and kill them all.

Then some lightnings or the new harrassers come back to try to take it back but I hacked all the turrets and blow them up too.

Am I still a ******* "ghost" at this point?

Oh but now you're an angry zerg herder. You can't get your "well deserved" continent cap points without the base I took back. So what do you do? Send a sundy or two to take back the "ghost capped" base?

NOPE.

You herd you're entire zerg back to the point.

But hey I guess whining about "Ghost Capping" enough can convince some devs that its a real thing.
For you it definitely is easier to just get the devs to force everyone to fight your zerg ball than it is for you to multitask.

But yeah if you even use the term "ghost capping" you're just lazy. There is no such thing as ghost capping. Its called getting flanked.

can you tell I'm excited about lattice?

While I agree that behaviour you describe is unacceptable and damaging to everyone including one's intellectual capabilities, yeah. It's ghostcapping. The definition of it.

Sorry I disagree. One thing is flaking, one thing is ghost-capping. Ghost-cappers just go on capture points, flip them, then leave. They do it just to disturb and force people to redeploy and resecure, in the best case they hope no one will recall so their faction will conquer many territories easily. Some say it's a strategy, but this is very arguable: forcing people to redeploy every 5 minutes just because 1 lonely players is flipping some point is a very bad game design.
This could be fixed quickly: if attackers don't stick to capture points then capture bar stops raising and starts decreasing. At least ghost-hackers would have to stay in the structure (maybe hidden somewhere), instead of flying to the next target. And this would also decrease pressure on spawn rooms, that became unacceptable since they changed capture rules.

I can agree to the base point.
The "issue" isn't.
At least not in the evening, early morning there might just be 20 people online.

Imagine one German soldier hiding in a cozy corner in stalingrad, waiting for the soviet army to move on and then cutting off their complete supply line. Logic? Not so much.

If their complete supply line relies on electronics, it's quite possible. It's as easy as bombing the generator or hacking the satellite uplink.
In that old scenario, he'd have a wait a realistic timescale, but just blowing the tracks for the railway bringing food and ammo to the frontline would sort of cut off their supply.
Looking at future drone warfare in reality, a single sufficiently equipped individual might as well turn a company if he has the security protocols and necessary equipment. It's not going to happen, as real militaries put some thought into things, but it's a possibility to be purposefully excluded, so players should work for that security as well, and be it by having a dedicated Infiltrator to lock the terminals when the Zerg moves on.

And in that scenario the player is dedicated to do so. He's not a random soldier who just lost the battle for a base.

Also: Waiting a sufficient time, as a german soldier, in a german uniform, in Stalingrad? Sounds like an awesome idea.Especially with all the foodsupply the wehrmacht had at that time.
And "future" soldiers are also specified for that and not just lucky marines, that survived 300 enemy tanks rolling past / over them.

Point is, there should be no way of encouraging behavior described by the OP, when the battle for the base is clearly lost. Capturing a base is worth nothing with mechanics like that.
I have seen enough situation where a hostile sunderer is deployed behind a friendly zerg, causing an enemy zerg to spawn there.
Now there are 2 Zerg attacking 2 adjacent bases, but NOT eachother. The one who start capture first wins and that usually is the faction that just lost the base.

I'm not even saying that this isn't the fault of the players themselves.

In Stalingrad there would have been tens of thousands soviets around to defend the city from any wanna-be brave Germans, after the battle was won / lost.

Players in Planetside should be forced into a logical like that, or the easy counter for it should be forbidden.
Zergs are part of the game, and that won't change in the next few months until outfits get more important. (Annoying but fact, believe me; I'd change it if I could, I'm part of a military realism outfit for what it's worth, but it is how it is.)
But Zergs are stupid. They don't think. They just move. Incorporate that, or force them into 'logical decicions'. They won't do it by themselves.

I think a good idea would be to have a penalty on the capture point of recently captured bases.
This timer could be influenced by the amount of forces who took it.

For example:

2 min. - Enemys

5 min. - Squad

10 min. - Platoon

15 min. - Platoons

This will make sure that a base is actually defensible and that former defenders will move on to the next place to fight the zerg there. Sabotaging is still a possible, a probably quite viable, a mayor and - most of all - a legitimate thread. But it's not enough to capture a base anymore.

I have nothing against infiltration and sabotaging. Only against it also being viable for a basecap.

Could also work if Infiltrators weren't able to hack infantry terminals AND aren't able to flip bases. But I see this won't happen so don't rant about that suggestion. Rant about my others, if you really need to.

And Zerging is a term used by people who are too incompetent to play an MMO as an MMO.

Small teams are capable of massive disruption IRL
If the area that the enemy is operating in is remote you can literally cut off all forms of communication, and thats actually one of the biggest concerns for WW3. Kiss every comm and camera satellite goodbye, those giant radio towers? One of them can be turned into a high-powered frequency jammer to where no digital signal will be able to be sent uncorrupted for hundreds of miles. (one tower would shut down an entire PS2 continent)
50 cals can take out an engine block, causing a road block, and a conga line begging for an air strike.

Basically peeps that use the term ghost cap just don't want you to be able to do anything but fight their armor column in an honorly fisticuffs.



And this will be the worst part about lattice. Forcing you to fight the enemy zerg on their terms. And then continent locking to ensure that you can't go escape the zergs spawn camping in another continent.

Oh one thing they neglected, they didn't lock your computer to only play planetside 2. Critical oversight.

What you are describing is not ghost capping. Ghost capping is when you fly your ESF there, flip the point and leave.
If you are there, taking a base they just left, that is back capping.

Zerging is throwing lots of low level units at a smaller force to win by overwhelming numbers instead of skill.
So every time your platoon goes and attacks enemies detected, or enemy squad detected, you are zerging...

Back capping and ghost capping are for people who are bad at game. #RIP

Shut up you whiny idiot. People like you are in the kind of outfits (or not in one) that sit platoons to ghostcap two hexes away from every major battle while the rest of us are outnumbered.

Also you're an even bigger idiot if you think that hiding and ghost/back capping is called flanking. It has nothing to do with flanks or maneuvering around an enemy and every thing to do with exploiting a poor game design mechanic. Lattice cannot come fast enough and I hope terrible players like you who advocate for ghost capping quit in droves. You ought to just play an offline FPS or counter strike if all you do is hide and ghost cap.

Lol look at the military analyst mind on this guy. It's pretty funny to watch guys cling onto bad and dying mechanics in games then grasp desperately and poorly conceived analogies like 'signal jamming radio towers' to justify their bad ideas. Do you even realize what you're saying? You go from some Info Wars paranoia schtick about small groups of bad guys bringing down our GPS satellites with radio towers they converted into signal jammers, then 50 caliber bullets shooting through engine blocks... and that's supposed to help justify back capping, a stupid 'tactic' which makes PS2 tedious and unfun.

Lattice can't come soon enough to make all you guys rage uninstall.

Translation "Whaaaa! OP can actually accomplish something without defeating my army!"

And who is thet whiny idiot? I don't need to invent phrases to try and get the game developers to defend my conquests for me.

People play this game differently. I don't enjoy *epic* battles that people who flame me will be so fond of.
And before you say "go play BF" umm no the fights that are capable of being found in PS2 are more than adequate.
I'm capable of finding the engagements that I like and so are you.

I'm ok with you fighting your fights the way you want to but you've just shown that you lack the grace to return the same consideration to me.
You'd be perfectly fine with people who don't enjoy lane zerging to just leave the game.
Nice.

Really? People who like large epic battles play a game that has emphasis on large epic battles? SOE is taking steps to ensure that large epic battles remain the focal point of the game. Take your stupid opinions and bad ideas to a single player game like CoD if all you want to do is be a super soldier army of one.

Or just invent new terms and attempt to make them seem like a big issue because you can't handle a game the way it is?

Yeah alternatively the 50 extremely vocal (whiney) individuals that actually have a problem with it could just deal with it.

That's the problem isn't it? In a game about fighting you have a strat that revolves around not fighting. Two separate games that directly compete with each other is not conclusive to a cohesive experience. Basic game design dude.

I agree wholeheartedly! Zerglings who actually wanted to fight instead of steamroll horribly outnumbered defenders would break up and attack nearby bases instead of balling up into one unstoppable horde. Fortunately, the hex system punishes them for this.

Heh, well the ghost capper just flipped a point that drew some arbitrary lines on the map cutting off the flanks of an attacking force. Its hardly a spectacular battlefield movement, just using a game mechanic to slightly delay the most badly lead zerg that you can imagine.

Its not a true ghost cap because you are still there, ninja capping. Its no more 'flaking' the enemy than playing a game of noughts and crosses.

Its not even a strategic move becaue you cannot hope to defend the base, if the enemy doesn't just recap it before the timer is up they will come for it later. Theres no worry, they have ninja cappers too who are doing exactly the same thing which totally neutralizes your effort. You are not blocking their advance or doing any material damage to the zerg, they have loads of routes to take and will probably just ignore you.

If its a true zerg you are just doing them a favour anyway and they get the xp all over again for flipping the base.

I think we have to differentiate between 3 forms of gameplay:

"Ghostcapping"
"Normal Combat"
"Zerging"

All of these are phenomenon, that are actually happening, whether you want to call them this way or not.
Both extensive "ghostcapping" and "zerging" are undesireable.

The game is about taking as much territory away from your enemy as possible and holding it.

Against a huge "zerg" you can't really do much on a campaign map scale, if there isn't another "zerg" around. Of course you can kill stuff and farm certs, but that's not what the game is about. Even big Outfits can't really control a huge swarm of players, a "zerg", mindlessly trying to farm certs and only achieving basecaps subconsciously and by chance.
If you think this is overall desirable... I pity you.

Something similar quite similar can be said about "Ghostcapping", only that it appears differently.
"Ghostcapping" contributes to taking territory, yes.
"Ghostcapping" can be quite challenging, and give the impression, that it involves skill. Some people "Ghostcapping" might actually be very skilled.
"Ghostcapping" can be very effective, yes.
But despite all those facts on a game with the scale of Planetside 2, it shouldn't be possible that a handful of people should have more influence, than a "zerg" in practically the same area of influence. Sabotaging is fine, like I already mentioned, but it shouldn't be viable to capture whole bases, that were just overrun. Not how "zergs" are controlled right now.
You can mine, farm, camp, hack, kill, annoy me as much as you want behind my frontlines, but if 1-5 people can backcap a base, that was just captured by 300 people, WITHOUT KILLING THEM FIRST, I get angry.

Like I mentioned before: "zergs" are mindless and don#t understand when to defend and when to attack / roll out. That is why, usually after a base is capped, everyone rolls a vehicle and moves to the next base, the second it flips. This will only change through 2 things:

x Change to capture mechanics
x MUCH MORE incentive for useful / teambased gameplay, that causes 80% of the playerbase to form "zergs"

Don't ask me which those are, but we don't need a lattice, a change to scu shields or whatever SOE has planned. Those won't stop the problem.

About the current state:
"Zergs" and "Ghostcapping" feel very toxic to players who like to roll as a bigger organized outfit, that doesn't want to only stick around and defend everything, because they can't make a push. And this will be the reason why we get all the gameplay changes, because it is to easy. People who ghostcapped will have killed their own playstyle eventually and thankfully. And there will be a change to how zerg will behave in the game. For now just stop it, or accept that people hate you.