How the low TTK neuters weapon variety

Totally forgot about this in PS2. I remember being out played by a Vanny driver. We ambushed him and took him down to half health, and he just retreated to his lines using the beach by driving his Vanny submerged in the water while popping out once in a while to reset the vehicle oxygen levels.

Back to topic: I'm not sure if it the TTK that's responsible for variety, only the Dev can answer that. I wished there was more variety, as of right now variety of the weapons is like have a sandwich for each empire, for the TR you add an extra pinch of salt, for the VS you add an extra pinch of pepper and for the NC you add an extra half pinch of salt and pepper. I was really hoping for a burger for the TR, a Gyro for the VS and a Salad for the NC. It really felt like that in PS1 for the most part. The devs have a lot of work ahead of them if they want to make the 3 empires feel different.

Fully agreed -
The only interesting (not necessarily good) weapons in the game are -
1. The Lasher - for having AoE.
2. The Gauss Saw / Reaper DMR- for being unusually slow and high damage.

That is all.

Perhaps a way to get around the lack of weapon variety (what I wouldn't give for a spinfusor) would be the addition of rpg-eque status effects.

Stop laughing, and hear me out. I promise I'm not as dumb as that statement makes me sound.

Rightyo. From my standpoint, I was struggling to think of weapons that could work within the current framework, and realised that TTK does effectively prohibit certain old-style weapons. I've read the entire thread and I can see the entirely valid arguments made by both parties. Full disclosure for anyone reading into my post: I personally think a slightly higher TTK would make gameplay more tactical, only because of the size of battles. In any given battle, you melt because there upwards of 30+ rifles on you at any one time. That being said, I quite like it where it is...it sacrifices tactics and teamplay somewhat for a far more visceral experience.

Onto how I reached my conclusion. Let's take the example of the Spinfusor, because this is what I was trying to figure out how you might implement. That weapon was a beast, but only in skilled hands. Why wouldn't it work? TTK meant that it would need to kill everyone in a small area (if effective damage was translated), slow movement speed means the weapon's skill requirement goes through the floor. Spinfusors were great because everyone moved like rockets, so it was damn near impossible to land a direct hit on someone. The splash damage meant that predicting a landing was a good skill stepping stone. But there was another element to this weapon besides direct damage and splash damage...

Knockback.

Only slight, but it was there and it had its applications. Immediately I wondered what would happen were some weapons given modifiers to playstyle? Then it hit me. WE ALREADY HAVE THIS (in a manner of speaking). I think it's the Lynx, but it has an increase to strafe speed. I recall something in my collection has increased ADS accuracy, and something else bonus to hipfire. I started running through other effects that could be useful;
-extra suppression/screen shake, stacking damage debuffs, movement speed reductions on hit
-move speed buffs, class modifiers, stability, etc
I noticed a lot of correlation. I used to play a bit of The Old Republic (boo! hiss!) and I recall a lot of these abilities from my minor forays into the PvP arena. You can all see where this is going.

What if the solution to weapon variety was to add weapons with additional, FPS focused characteristics? I mean, the stacking of a lot of these would be a mighty pain in the rear, which is why the weapons would have a reduced DPS. Their raw damage output would be mitigated by their ability to change the nature of the battle. I know it sounds like "+3 CARV of Smiting", but perhaps you could make a weapon like a "Concussion Rifle" or blame nanites or something. This ensures that the majority of players, with a focus on being able to handle themselves, would steer away from these weapons...whereas skilled players, with a large amount of time sunk into the game could bring them along and introduce advanced effects in order to manipulate player movement/suppress MG nests/whatever.

So. Thoughts? This was more or less word-vomited out, and I haven't really given much thought to balance/implementation. I know the game's physics engine isn't the best, so there may be issues there. Any insights/suggestions/criticisms would be welcome.

You serious? Well for starters the rocket launcher had alternate fire modes. Single shot, charge up for triple shot, or shoot grenades.

There was also an acid gun. That would kill people that walked over the acid. And a flak gun that bounced shots off walls. And a laser rifle that shot a slow projectile and a fast one. And if you shot the slow one with the fast one then it created a powerful explosion. And a Plasma Rifle with secondary fire that charged up an ally making their gun hit harder. That's only about half the guns in the game I believe. Yet way more variety than PS2 really has.

PS2 essentially has about 5 weapons. Pistol, Automatic Rifles, Rocket Launcher, Sniper, Shotgun. Pretty much the same arsenal as every other military shooter ever made. Most of the variants of those weapons look, and function 90% the same, and have no alternate fires.

I'm also pretty sure that the high TTK of PS1 was largely because of netcode. The fact that we can have low TTK and such good shooting mechanics in a MMOFPS shows how far the technology has got in that time.

Also a lot of you requesting very different weaponry seem to not understand that PS2, while occurring in a Sci-Fi universe, is still based on real military technology. You can't have hundreds of people running around with chainsaw launchers and shark mounted lasers on one battlefield.

I'll say again that I'm a big fan of current shooting mechanics and weapons (to which a lot will still be added, don't forget). The weapons really are very situational and I've seen new players commenting how much crap this or other weapon is and then fall in love with it once you tell them in what situation to use it.

I would also like to see slower TTK. I avoid infantry combat in this game because I find it boring that an enemy can kill me before I even have a real chance to fight back.

It's not based on "real military technology," it's based on Battlefield 3. There's a big difference between realism and copying a popular game to try and pull in someone elses audience. And I don't know if you missed it, but PS2 has awful "netcode" as well. Players routinely teleport around if their ping is high, the game has big hitreg issues, you can die around corners 100-0 due to the lag compensation, cqc fights often end with you killing the enemy and then dying 2 seconds later to the person you just killed...

But please tell me what room there is in the game for "a lot more weapons to be added" that don't fill the same niche that other weapons already do, simply making other weapons in their class useless or being useless themselves. I'll be waiting a looooong time for an answer.

SMGs, different pistols, more launchers, melee weapons, flamethrower, more grenades and mines. These may not seem like interesting classes to you but if not, you might want to look at another game. I'm not sure what you expect from this game. These kind of weapons work well in large battles as well and they are plenty differentiated as is.

I love how people think 4-5 shots minimum to kill someone is 'low'.

Try playing Arma..

Also how would some guns having bullets made of foam and others made of slightly more dense balsawood.. improve gameplay. Infantry battles being people running around each other in circles shooting for hours, sounds pretty terrible. Also where do things like cover come into this, optional extras.

Players routinely teleport, because in a lot of cases. Players are playing from all over the world, and the inherent lag involved in that.

On Miller you have people from the U.S east coast and Russia playing each other.. I'm surprised it happens as little as it does. On a lot of U.S servers you have Chinese and Australian/N.Z players etc. How do you get around that by 'netcode'? Eve online had to adapt its netcode (as it has one single server) by introducing intentional lag, into the game. that sounds like a bad idea...no.

SMG's are Carbines with sliders further to the right or left, "more launchers" made me laugh, a reskin and some stat changes is not a new weapon. More melee weapons is never happening due to the TTK, Flamethrowers were removed because they would never work with this TTK, "more grenades and mines" is not a new weapon, especially grenades - no grenade has any relevant use outside of the base flak grenades. The developers have already proven that they can't create useful grenades that don't kill people so i'd expect us to get "Flak grenade EXCEPT BETTER" soon enough.

Seriously? People don't teleport except in bad games, no matter what their ping is. In a well designed game, ping offers nothing but disadvantages.

I certainly would like to see TTK be a bit higher. I think PS1 had too high TTK but PS2 has it too low. Instead of 1-2s TTK make it 4-5s.
I think it might reduce a lot of the frustration new players experience as well as maybe make the weapon imbalances less stringent.

I agree 100% with the OP, well done.

Ok, so eve introduced intentional Lag to solve its problems, what should PS2 do in terms of its basic server infrastructure.

PS2 already has lag compensation.

You don't look like you like this game too much. Maybe find something else to do. This isn't the game you're looking for.

I enjoy the fact that you had no reply other than "they'll just change the stats on the current weapons+a bunch of things which can't be added for the very reason this thread exists." Thanks.

Do you expect me to give a longer answer to a guy who doesn't see a difference between the current launchers or the current grenades?

Yeah the current grenades, like "Grenade that kills people, grenade that half the population can see through, grenade that blinds people when another grenade could just kill them." Now that's variety. Excuse me while I throw my flash grenade into the room and blind some people that my frag grenade would kill, and then charge in there and fire my automatic weapon which has 50 more RPM and 40 less bullet velocity than my other automatic weapon.