Half Price Sundies + 7 Sec Respawn + AMS Shield

I did.

Not all bases are small outposts.

as gamer - i don't want to buy same game every year, i want to play same game for years, and it must be supported by developers (bug fixes, new content, etc.)

Correction. This whole change is about people not being able to defend sunderer.

It can die in 5 seonds. To a single infantryman. In a 48+ fight there is more than one person that finds this sort of thing an attractive kill.

Nobody can 100% reliably defend a sunderer, and still be able to hold the base they are assaulting. And I speak from bloody experience.

I have around 130 hours in my sunderer as a pilot, and I have tried defending it as both a stationary target, a battlebus, a GSD, a stealth sunderer, and while there were times it succeeded, most of the time it failed hard.

why does it fail?

Because the enemy knows exactly where you are.
Because the attackers when they attack cannot just sit near the sunderer, they must take the capture points and hold them for several minutes. They can't just abandon them and retreat back to the sunderer as fast as the defenders can move about (just imagine amp stations and the defender spesific jumppads, caves, and instant access to higher ground from spawn).
Because the enemy can approach in vehicle, from air, from ground, from within your own faction (teamkilling the sunderer), from instant action or beacon drop podding in. Therefore to properly defend sunderer you need air superiority, ground superiority, and you need to push enemy back to spawn to limit their movement). All of which can fail instantly depending on what groups are on the continent at any given hour or day.

The enemy has a ping advantage. You think he appeared from the drop pod, so you wait a moment to see, but by the time the pod vanishes he has already put 3 tankmines down and nuked your sunderer. If friendlies are spawning there they will by chance and happenstance shield him from bullets until his job is complete, and when worse comes to worst he can grab a galaxy, crash into the sunderer and deliver his payload in the wreckage and debris protecting him.
Terrain never favours your sunderer. It got better on Amerish / hossin with those garages, but even there it is not a universal solution to actually taking a base. You don't always find good cover, and you can be certain the enemy can just find a highground and drifterjet down, or use empire spesific weapons like the phoenix to come at it from unorthodox angles.

But the worst thing is that the sunderer is so goddamn fragile that it dies just as soon as the enemy gets close. It's like watching the bloody battle for helms deep with that stupid torch carrying bomber orc in fast motion. One minute the enemy is there. The next sunderer explodes, and the enemy clears up the base within a minute while you have to spend 5 minutes driving back to re-assault the base.

The second worst thing is that more people are headed for the sunderer than the point. Because the point is usually well defended by several people holding chokepoints and grabbing every advantage they can get whereas the sunderer itself usually have all the laggards and fresh meat respawning at it. Those dumb enough to poke their heads out and look at the spawn campers.

I have seen everything from 12 light assaults charging the sunderer from the air in drifters, to light assaults jumping over the cover and crouching under the sunderer right as it goes boom. I have seen enemies take their own sunderer and deploy over a squads worth of people from an odd angle onto the sunderer.

Clearly SOE supports me. They must have statistics showing positively that this is an issue because if not then this would not be a road they consider taking.

Well, you should not expect 100% success in anything. Yeah, eventually something will work.

If you have too few people in the overall attack to hold back and defend the sunderer then, IMO, that is a simple logistic issue and honestly one that still does not give defenders any tangible advantage- hence why it is often easier to attack than defend.

Another issue I see here is that you are saying "greater numbers causes enough chaos..." and to me that sounds like the whole "lone wolf" argument is right out the window since that "lone wolf" needs sufficient support to create the chaos necessary to be successful.

Just curious but how long does it take to drop enough explosives to take out a stock sunderer? How many for full blockade? How many for full mineguard?

It is not just that one person reaches the sunderer but then they also need the time to lay all that explosive.

This hardly sounds like a "lone wolf" scenario.

IMO, people are perfectly able to defend sunderers, just not 100% of the time and I see nothing wrong with that- being able to succeed in a situation is very different, in my mind, to being able to succeed indefinitely and 100% of the time.

This is my point- the only "spawn rooms" that ever should have existed, IMO, are the warpgates.

If people have issues with logistics and troop transportation, etc. then there are plenty of other options available to either speed up, slow down, or provide organization besides the cheesiness of a spawn room.

I'm not saying they should remove sunderer spawning per se but only because sunderers are not virtually (or entirely) indestructible. Like Galaxies, they require some coordination and care to maintain.

If I had it my way, the spawn options would be 1) destructible sunderers like we have now, 2) maybe Galaxies the way they are now, 3) an "instant action" that is global and based on relative faction player densities, 4) a squad based "instant action" that is oriented to the squad leader, 5) a platoon based "instant action" oriented to the platoon leader.

Then, just tweak the cooldowns for those appropriately to maintain the action for people who are not just throwing themselves on bullets/explosives.

Next, remove all cap points and timers- "capping" would simply be a function of territory control a la (you guessed it) relative player populations. Your faction would get a continuous trickle of XP based on the total area last "controlled" by your faction- controlled referring to those densities.

Yup, no lattice lines, no hexes no nada like that- there would be bases but these would be strategic by the nature of the base in that they would have terminals for vehicles/loadout changes/ammunition and would be designed in a way to provide genuine defensive advantages to the extent that players are actually at the base when people are attacking (since, if you are absent anyone could easily occupy that space).

From first mine to dead Sundy? 4 seconds.

You have 4 seconds to pick the red blip on your mini-map out of the crowd.
You have 4 seconds to figure out which body among the 5 loitering by the Sundy doesn't have a dorito.
You have 4 seconds to kill them, and disarm their mines before a rocket comes by (friendly or otherwise) and detonates the whole thing anyway.

An honest question, you really think that you should be able to defend a sunderer with 100% reliability?

I doubt, and hope, that the shield would provide anything close to that.

You have absolutely no concept of how respawn times affect gameplay, do you? Halving respawn times is a massive change.

To be fair plenty of times the squad I've been on has gotten direct orders to destroy a Sunderer at a specific location. We even have drills down where we can do suicide Galaxy runs for particularly high-value targets. Occasionally it's even destroyed before I hit the ground.

But the times I've been ordered to defend a Sunderer? Ummm... maybe twice? And when have I heard a full squad being ordered to defend a Sunderer? Pretty much never. Sunderer defenses pretty much only happen if the squad is pushed back to their Sunderer... and in those cases it's essentially game over unless reinforcements are en route.

People tend not to defend Sunderers because it isn't fun or profitable. You might be able to increase their fun (not sure how to do that) or profit (increased EXP gains from kills around the Sunderer to make up for not fighting on the point) to encourage people to defend Sunderers. The "easy" solution is just making Sunderers more affordable and plentiful, but that's probably not the right solution.

And Sunderers are already plenty tough... with as much HP as a MBT and that from the sides and rear it can meet or exceed MBT armor. Really for a truck that is way too much protection. It shouldn't be able to take more fire than a Lightning.

Nobody brings sunderers to fight now as it is, I don't see it changing much. Players see an AMS on the deploy screen and click on it, because there's no reason for them to bring a sunderer to spawn on when there is already a sundy to spawn on. I know a bunch of infantry have full mechanical resources, but they won't go out of their way to help people that aren't themselves. (Not what I personally believe, just what I've noticed from people).

The 7 second respawn timer literally will not affect me in any way, because I still have to wait for the loading screen. Most of you people with your high-end computers probably don't even have to wait for a loading screen every time you spawn, but I do, even if I respawn at the same place I just spawned

I cannot agree with this enough.

I still think we should wait and pass judgement on the new changes when they are released, rather than philosophizing about it now. I'm skeptical about the faster spawning, but it could possibly be a beneficial change that goes against my expectations. I don't feel there is enough live server testing for this to be removed as-is.

I'll ***** and moan endlessly at a later time :3

Well, I guess one way to look at it is that nobody can complain about the Vanguard shield now.

All three factions will have a Vanguard shield that has no duration limit and no cooldown.

Against a single player? Yes. To that end the shield is a step in the right direction.

People dont defend their sunderers because it is a pointless. This certline attempts to adress the issues of sunderer durability when deployed. It takes the place of blockade, mineguard, and stealth. It is good for the game.

For the defenders:
You know its there.
You know its durable.
More than one person goes for it.

For the attackers:
You know its there.
You know its durable.
You know more than one person has to go for it.

All good things have its share of haters. People who love easy kills and cheap thrills. Killing any sunderer, no matter the defence is relatively easy right now. Maybe not so much after the buff.

So naturally I should also be able to defend my MBT against a single player as well, regardless of what weapons/vehicles/tactics he chooses to use against me, right? If you think a vehicle should always be able to stay alive, you're playing the wrong game.

A thing to remember is an engie can't repair the shield, it has to recharge. Meaning if someone is so much as plinking away at it with an engie turret/Phoenix/Lancer/whatever it basically means the sundy will be vulnerable to attacks as its shield will be down.

Another thing to note is this shield is only active when deployed. Meaning if it runs over a tank mine or gets attacked en-route to a fight, it is a goner.

So this new ability is just going to make a deployed sundy not so solo'able which is a good thing.

The main reason why it's pointless to defend a Sunderer is that they're cheap enough already. If you really need to keep a spawnpoint alive that is under threat, instead of having 4-5 players defend a single Sunderer, simply have them bring their own. And by the time the defenders managed to blow up the first 5 Sunderers, the attackers had enough time to go back and bring 5 more. With the even cheaper Sunderers in the future this is only going to be reinforced.
This change seems to be made with only unorganized Zergs in mind, where no-one even stops to think and pull a spare Sunderer even if they see on the map that their side is down to one. What it does however is nerf the ability of individual players to have influence in such an unorganized zerg situation.
And talking about teamwork here is nothing short of hypocritical. As long as a Sunderer can be spawned, driven and deployed by a single person, there is no reason why it shouldn't be able to be destroyed by single person. Especially when that single person needs to spend more resources on explosives to destroy the Sunderer than the owner had to spend to spawn it.
If you hate having a good fight ruined by a single suicide engineer, make sure you've got a spare Sunderer nearby instead of just rushing off to farm more kills.
And don't park the bloody things right next to towers or walls unless you actually want to feed the C4 fairies.

I just find it funny that instead of nerfing the obvious offender C4, and mines they continue to dance around it and buff/nerf other things, which mostly leads to other undesirable effects, lol.

Game should be real fun for vehicle players when they can't kill a sundy cause of the shield and infantry are pouring out of it every 7 seconds, and all the tank splash is basically removed so you can't even kill the infantry spawning and trying to defend it, oh and theres 6 more sitting next to that sundy idle, lol.

Silly pony. The logistics of the game and the brunt of the attacking force are not relying on your tank to keep up the pressure on a base.

The increase in hp is only when deployed. I did some testing on the PTS and it only takes 1 vanguard AP shot to down the shield or a round of tankbuster (and because the sunderer is not using blockade you can easily rip the rest of its hp apart with explosives should they be nearby).

This change is only good for the game. Not just because a single player must struggle a little bit more to take it out, but also because it makes vehicles relevant to taking down enemy sunderer. Don't you see? You are barking up the wrong tree.