Higby Answers Questions and Talks About Upcoming Balance Adjustments

Greetings Star Citizens Auraxians!

Engineer Harper here with another important message from Command! Diplomat Higby of the Secret Order of Editing (SOE), recently released a transmission on Spreddit discussing some of the changes coming to the nanite database. This transmission also explained some recent changes to the nanites. As some of you may know, the SOE is an organization containing diplomats from each Empire ensuring that the war on Auraxis remains fair and humane (after all, when the TR wins and we get back to Earth, we don't want people to say we won unfairly, nor do we want to be tried for crimes against humanity!) The original transmission can be found here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/...anyone_at_soe_who_will_answer_some_of/cftp3g5

A free transcript is provided below, but by pressing the "like" button below, you show my superiors that I am doing a service to the people you can do me a favor and help ensure that I get my weekly food ration!

I look forward to this April Combat Update.

And thanks for the heads up, Harper.

I'm looking most forward to that Resource overhaul.

Should do a lot for the game

Restoring harasser mobility he says. I hope turbo becomes as good as it is on flash. Sick of the fake turbo it has always had.

Gratzi.

Why couldn't they post this on their own forum?

Ittallic wall of text in a font that looks bad on my screen and hurts my eyes.... ...needs tweaking

1 - Why was ADS removed from jumping?
In PS2 bullets fire from the center of the screen and when we need them to be "inaccurate" for some reason we have to use a cone of fire. When players are moving, jumping, etc the cof kicks in to keep the bullets from going dead center. In order to give people some idea of where the bullets are likely to go in the CoF while they are ADS and can't see their CoF bounds, we made the reticule move off center a bit within the bounds of the cof in order to provide some feedback about the inaccuracy. You could see this really clearly when jumping while ADS - you had a massive COF, bullets flew everywhere, and the sight veered wildly all over the screen, so you had no real expectation of accuracy. Several months ago threads like this started popping up with people questioning why the bullet isn't hitting where the reticule is at all times and saying it was unintuitive, based on this feedback we went about removing all the places where we were using ADS sway to simulate inaccuracy, so when you strafe now, the dot is significantly less offset, etc. The cleanest solution for jumping was to drop ADS while jumping. We discussed making bullets follow the sight line of the weapon instead of the center of the screen, but that was a several months long revamp of our entire projectiles system, so it wasn't a possibility.

| 2 - why harasser sucks?
The nerf was too harsh. We are doing a general balance update in April that will include a restoration of some of the Harasser's legendary maneuverability.

| 3 - population balance
We don't have a magic bullet for population balance, but we do have more and less subtle solutions. More subtle is things like XP bonuses, which really don't provide a huge motivation for joining a losing fight, less subtle would be things like respawn timing adjustments for heavily over populated empires - something we don't really want to institute and luckily haven't had to. Most suggestions we get here just straight up don't work, or punish paying players who want to play on a single account and do nothing to stop free players with multiple accounts. Right now population numbers are pretty cyclical, driven by factors like balance and tuning, and our plan is to keep addressing macro balance issues between empires to make sure they're all competitive. In terms of game systems, the resource revamp we've currently got scheduled in June is doing the most to try to provide a handicap to under popped empires, by dividing resources between the number of players on each empire, giving the smaller forces an advantage in resources and force multipliers. I'm excited to see how that works out, but I have some concerns about it's effect on moment-to-moment balance, especially for newer players.

| 5 - cap xp changes to help fix zergs
Setting up rewards so they better represent risk/reward is definitely something that many of us have been discussing. I don't have an exact answer for you right now, but it's something we've talked a lot about, and something that we're talking about potentially addressing with the 2nd phase of resources (Facility Power).

| 6 - rewards for platoon / squad leaders
I want to, we've discussed giving squad leaders some % bonus of all XP earned by their squad within a certain radius, but don't have a final plan yet except to say that this is something we want to address.

| 7 - ZOE isn't very good right now
Joshua and I were discussing the MAX abilities this morning, we want to fix them, and may make some tweaks in the April combat tuning update, but no promises yet (the changes we were discussing are probably too big to fit in for that update). We do agree that ZOE is a bit too limited right now (So is Lockdown, and to a lesser degree the riot shield) and want to improve all three of them.

| 8 - State of the Striker
The Striker is in a tough spot as a weapon. It's basically the opposite of what we want out of a great feeling gun in PS2, or at least it was before it got over-nerfed. That is, when you're playing against them it's impossible to deal with, when you're using one personally they're unsatisfying. We will have some buffs for the Striker in the April update.








....umm, where the hell is question #4?

"The nerf was too harsh. We are doing a general balance update in April that will include a restoration of some of the Harasser's legendary maneuverability."
GOD DAMN IT
The current harasser isn't lacking maneuverability.
Well great they are gonna buff Turbo when I doubt even half of people even use it and its gonna change nothing,

My guess is since this is a viewed as an official forum they have to take more caution in what they say, as people tend to have a tendency to mistake "planning" for "promising". So if they change something there is huge outcries of "you promised this!". By not really posting it here they can at least fall back to "we never officially said that".

Thanks for fixing the formatting! I couldn't get it to un-italicize.

Question 4 in the original thread was asking about vehicle physics improvements, which are already scheduled on the roadmap.

Does Higby even MLG bro?

Ah okay that makes sense then, plus there was a whole thread started on the forum about it too
(plus the one radar locked, lol)

Good job at relaying this important/interesting information to the Planetside 2 Official Forums WyrdHarper,

Now we just have to ask Higby about the many TR specific weapons which need attention such as Vulcan, Marauder, MCG, ect. Although I'm left wondering how much he knows about TR weapons. Saying the Strikers are impossible to deal with is not at all true in their current state. Flares, evasive maneuvers with AB, and using cover makes it very possible to deal with them. Hopefully they don't buff the Striker as much as they change the mechanics of it entirely. Luckily Higby realizes that it's not a satisfying weapon to use, and hopefully he'll realize that that probably won't change unless the Striker ceases to be a lock on launcher entirely.

IIRC that's the exact reason that they have given for using reddit and twitter, that they can say what they want to without coming under as much official scrutiny, because everything they say on these forums is more of "official business" than a social media site.

The Harasser maneuverability changes are a welcome sight as the turbo changes back in December were unnecessary with the addition to all the other changes made to reduce the overall survivability of the harasser.

so april will fix every thing they "broke" i hope the esf afterburner got re-buff and the afterburner moved to the passive slot, since right now its almost impposible to fight back an a2a esf when doing a2g, currently im staying away from the pods,the risk of using them is too much.
EDIT:also fix the fury too pls,make it a rocket launcher straight firing or re-buff the splash damage,currently the is no reason to run them, compared to halberd and bulldog

Harasser wouldnt still be any better with just its former turbo back. The damage output or the durability should make a return aswell, doe not both of them at the same time.

Harasser getting a buff.

And where is Higby's thread about it at the official Planetside 2 Forum? He rather posts on reddit? Seriously?
A simple copy & paste would have been fine... thank you WyrdHarper for informing the community about this quiet interesting thread from Mr. Higby!

That's funny I mentioned the resource handicap to overpopulated empires to reflect the difficulty of pumping out that much equipment to that many soldiers/pilots/drivers in a previous thread somewhere here.