It kind of blows my mind that we're nearing a decade of PlanetSide 2 and the devs are consistently getting such a basic thing wrong. The game is more fun when both teams have at least one guaranteed spawn; it doesn't even need to be a good one, just something to rely on that can't be popped by one player with C4, a Lightning, a Liberator or what have you. This is one of the biggest things PlanetSide 1 did right: every base had a guaranteed hard spawn for attackers -- towers. You couldn't destroy it, you couldn't A2G it, you couldn't HESH it; you had to go inside and spend 45 seconds hacking without dying. Want to know why Bio Labs were popular before? They had hard spawns and protection from vehicles. You could actually fight there. Want to know why Bio Labs aren't popular anymore? The hard spawns are gone. It takes forever to get from Point A to Point B and find a target (this is the same reason people hate Containment Sites -- it's too big, and takes too long to get from the spawn to the fight). Hell, damn near every unpopular base has this issue. Northpoint, Stillwater, Vidar Observation? No spawns. New Crown? Spawns are too far away. Sbarro's Pizza on Esamir? Spawns are too hard to set up, too much for the average zerg to pass through. There's no reason to seriously interact with any of these bases because they were poorly designed. Now, you want a good base, one that people like? It's the ones with good spawns safe from harassment. It's your Waterson's, your Elli Tower, your Nason's, your Crux Mining Operation. You can count on a fight lasting in these spots because they offer reasonable and accessible routes of attack for public squads to actually perform, spawns that are harder than average to pop. This kind of thread may be falling on deaf ears, but I really hope they can stop mucking up what the playerbase loves. Even if they can't be ***** to add towers to every base, they should at least undo the Bio Lab change and give Sunderers an option to trade offense for defense -- meaningful defense, something that can actually give them the staying power they need to sustain a fight. How about dropping a top gun for a Defense Dome that boosts damage resists by 20% a pop? Just spitballing here, but something's gotta give. It's such a shame to throw out good bases, complete content that people were fond of, for some real hodgepodge replacements. Would love to hear from others. Thanks for reading.
The thing isnt the hardspawns, although they would help.. Biolabs were immensely popular in the past even though you could only reach them using the same rules as now: with the teleport building. This was fine because of one simple thing: spawn rules. The change to make the teleport buildings spawns was, as far as I can remember, specifically because the new spawn rules made it hard for players to spawn in a sunderer near an adjacent base. Many sattelite bases of biolabs were so far away you could not spawn in at a Sunderer there, and walking to the teleporter from the sattelite spawnbunker is often too far for convenience. On top of that even if you can do it you often cant quick-spawn due to the spawnrules picking a closer spawnpoint/the spawnbunker. So spawnrules are what holds biolab fights back, and my suspicion is that this is a continuation of the "lets remove any fight that lasts" ideology that already cost us TI Alloys, which at the time of removal was said to be temporary but quickly after Mithrill told us that they had zero plans to work on TI Alloys. So the fact that this change was hidden in the middle of a list of small changes is no surprise to me. As for Biolabs themselves, they are popular because of the way the fights are set up. They offer resistance against things like Zergs and entire platoons dropping in, which makes it easier for players to enjoy the fight for longer rather than being stuck watching a timer as the spawnroom is being camped, then waiting for the attackers to get their crap together and start assaulting the next base. It is a fight that keeps going and doesnt interupt itself every few minutes. Rather than introduce hard-spawns I would let players buy resource-costing utilities that can fortify a local area either as a place to launch attacks from or to defend it. Such utilities would focus on delaying enemies rather than killing them, and warning allies that enemies are trying to bypass them. This can be a mine-layer that deploys very low-yield mines which are easy to spot and destroy, but are lethal enough that just running through the entire field can kill you and give sound + minimap-warnings that they are being cleared. To make them not OP in other scenarios the mines could deactivate as long as allies are nearby, forcing players to not be close to their own mines. Or a shield that has a bit of health and slows the passage of enemy players and vehicles, forcing them to either slow down or spend time firing their weapons to clear it etc. That way players, both attackers and defenders, can fortify positions. Attackers mainly to protect their Sunderer and create holdouts from which to attack and defenders so they can prepare areas prior to attacks.
Disappointing but also true. And very good points. Why get rid of the thing players enjoy most? Those stalemate grinders that seem to go on forever are some of my favorite fights. Meanwhile, riding a Zerg that runs unopposed for 30 minutes during an alert is absolutely mind-numbing and frustrating when it's the only "fight" on the map. It's like playing musical chairs while holding a gun.
Developers: Ah but you have to understand, no one likes those fights! After all if a squad or platoon cannot zerg it within 15 minutes then it is not teamwork and we should try and remove it, right? To facilitate this we've already been designing rewards that encourage finding easy fights where you can roll over the defenders with numbers, griefing or single-move tactics like Gal-drops. In the meantime we have not created any additional rewards or incentives to defend anything but a base you captured as an outfit. In fact the way we set it up encourages outfits to let territory of "allies" fall so they can take it instead! We also have to think of this popular term of "battle flow", which comes down to "bases have to trade hands to make interesting gameplay". On Esamir we could design a few new bases so we made it as hard as possible to defend! People have also been opting for hard time limits for defenders to defend, for example by requiring cortium for defenders to spawn but not requiring attackers to need cortium at all. We will keep degrading defender capabilities until there is no point in defending anymore, which means we have reached maximum battle flow as attackers just walk in and have a few minutes of watching a timer before moving to the next base! What do you mean, there wouldn't be fights anymore if defending was nigh impossible? You would have fights in the field right? Exactly how, where or why I don't know, but since fighting at a base is almost impossible it has to be in the field!
Different players come to this game. Some just want FPS, while others are playing an RTS where the troop units are played by people. I'm ok with protection of logistics being something the attackers have to do, but it should be reasonable. Demigan you are completely correct regarding bio lab satellites. While there were battleflow reasons to not allow the defending faction in a base to deploy a Sunderer on the control point, when they changed that they should have changed the layout of the satellite bases so that the teleporters were outside the no-deploy zone. There's no reason not to have the jump pad beside the teleporter so that one spawn can service both. Doing it this way would make supporting spawn points in a bio lab more manageable without making the game play outside the dome completely irrelevant. As for containment sites, I have nothing good to say about them. They managed to annoy everyone without pleasing anyone.
