I don't understand the complaints about MAXes here.

Discussion in 'MAX' started by MostlySilent, Feb 11, 2014.

  1. Axehilt


    Me trolling? You're the one who just tried to claim infantry were a counter to MAXes, haha!

    Fewer MAXes doesn't mean they're magically not overpowered. The cost and cooldown of MAXes has never balanced their overpoweredness.

    Where did you say Lightnings weren't good? Well, my point in that post was that Lightning's roles were AA and AI and then you came along and said that was "not true".

    Most battles it's pretty easy to kill tanks from behind. I finally got some good playtime in yesterday (first in 3 weeks) and most of the tanks I killed were done that way.

    I've already stated what I'm asking for: balanced MAXes. 2 rockets is a 5.7 sec TTK, and MAXes have like a 0.8-1.2 sec TTK against infantry (or 0.0 sec for scatter MAXes.) That vast discrepancy is what makes MAXes broken, and what makes infantry combat revolve entirely around MAXes. The game would be much better off, much deeper, if MAXes were a balanced class instead.

    There are plenty of counters in PS2. AV tanks strongly counter AA lightnings which strongly counter aircraft which strongly counter AV tanks. A good loadout-based counter system already exists for vehicles and should exist at the infantry level too, but right now MAXes being overpowered prevents that depth from happening. MAXes are just too important.
    • Up x 1
  2. InfernoKoV

  3. Axehilt


    The individual effectiveness of each MAX wouldn't change by removing the cost/cooldown. So I suppose you've pointed out the perfect way of pointing out just how overpowered MAXes really are to players: have them imagine PS2 with no cost or cooldown on MAXes. The root problem is how MAXes crush infantry and/or have no counter. The solution is to balance MAXes so that you could remove the cost and cooldown and they'd still be balanced (probably by tweaking down their attributes a bit so they don't counter infantry as hard as they do, and then ensuring that certain loadouts actually counter MAXes (higher than 1.0 expected K/D).)

    Vehicles aren't overpowered because PS2 has two separate combat ecosystems: outdoor and indoor. Outdoors vehicles crush infantry but that's fine because there are a mix of viable playstyles outside. Indoors MAXes crush infantry, and that isn't fine because there isn't a MAX counter. That's the core problem! Whereas if MAXes were simply a balanced playstyle (as valuable as any other infantry class) with no cost/cooldown, everything would be fine.

    Your response to bridging the TTK gap is extreme and ridiculous. You're implying that we can't make a single step towards balance without making MAXes useless. Well...
    1. Balance means balance, not underpowered.
    2. MAXes would still be overpowered if they had a 1.25s TTK against infantry (up from ~1.0s).
    3. MAXes would still be overpowered if they had a 1.50s TTK.
    4. So obviously there's some room to explore the spectrum from overpowered -> balanced -> underpowered to discover the TTK where MAXes are balanced. What's the exact right value? I don't know, but the point isn't whether I know the exact perfect value right now but that we start taking steps towards balance.
    MAXes would still be important when balanced, obviously. That's what the word "balance" implies: that their value in the battle is of equal worth to any other infantry class (but not greater.)
    The counter system in PS2 wouldn't need changing for MAXes to fit into a balanced unit counter system. Just like how a Prowler doesn't automatically beat a Lightning (because either tank might be specialized against infantry, armor, or generalized), the loadouts of infantry should create interesting tradeoffs where taking a weapon strong against one type of opponent leaves you noticeably disadvantaged against other types. An example of this being if HA's LMGs were predominantly support-fire weapons (more like engy AI turrets) and their secondary was a choice of the existing rockets or a set of "heavy assault" weapons which were the best AI weapons in the game. The result would be a class with a lot more interesting loadout decisions in any given battle, since you'd have to choose between strong AV, strong AI, and probably a middle option (implement the Rocklet Rifle from PS1 basically; pretty good against all targets, but not amazing. The basilisk of infantry weapons.)
  4. Inex

    This is a pretty long thread, so I hope you don't mind too much if I ask for a clarification (or at least a page number for the explanation) about why a >1.0 KDR would be the bar set for a MAX counter?

    For the same resources, I could expect 5-8 kills out of AP mines or grenades (yes, I know... good grenades, not the flubbertastic default ones). Why wouldn't I expect the same out of the MAX? And if I expect 5-8 kills out of the MAX (which isn't a bad estimate of what you'll get, assuming no Engi support) then why wouldn't 3 rocket toting HA's be considered a counter? That's half as many infantry as you'd normally cut through, and you probably wouldn't even kill them all.

    So in short, I'm wondering why you've set the bar at 1.0, when the resource investment suggests anything better than 0.2 is better than expected.
  5. Boomotang

    Invalid argument. You obviously had more skill than opponents. These situations cannot be used as examples because both sides must have equal skill, meaning the drivers won't let you flank them.

    Your standards...:cool:
  6. InfernoKoV

    So first you say the effectiveness of a MAX isn't affected by a cost and cooldown then you say you want to reduce their effectiveness so that the cost and timer can be removed... Your post contradicts itself in several ways. It doesn't matter if it's individual or not, the timer and cost is in place that they cannot be spammed. Just imagine killing waves apon waves of MAXs. In its current state you can see waves, but after it is dealt with it's over and things go back to normal.
    You mention indoor and outdoor which really isn't relative to this conversation at all, but let me ask you a question... What counters infantry indoors? MAXs right? Now remove MAXS and what's their counter? Other infantry. MAXs are just as easily countered by infantry as infantry are themselves. A MAX doesn't have near as much flexibility as other classes do. Speaking of Classes, you should see them more as loadouts themselves. Heavies are designed to take out armored things, that's why they come equipped with rockets (all of which are effective). A MAX is either stock, resistant to explosives, or resistant to small arms fire. Against regular fire they have the equivalent of 10000 health before bonuses, meaning they're equivalent to 10 infantry that have no resistances. Against explosives they have the equivalent of 4000 health before any bonuses, which puts them equal to 4 infantry that have no resistances. These numbers should show you that it doesn't take a whole lot to kill them... Everything does damage to them and when you consider and realize how much damage a single infantry can put out it makes a lot of sense. Infantry can deal more than 1000 damage a second.
    You're trying to balance something where balance has already been achieved.
  7. InfernoKoV

    People just want to complain for the sake of it. They're viewing MAXs simply as another class of infantry when it is a lot more than that. I don't understand it and it really confuses me because when I'm a MAX I get ***** by everything... I spend more time looking for ammo nd repairs then anything else. Sure I can stand my ground for a bit, but I'm very limited in what I can do. I don't have a shield that replenishes itself like infantry and I don't have the option of carrying med kits that repair armor.
  8. Axehilt



    The inability to spam an overpowered thing doesn't make that thing balanced. It only makes an overpowered thing unable to be spammed.

    Yeah, fielding waves upon waves of MAXes would be possible once MAXes were balanced and had no cost/cooldown. Since they'd be balanced, they would be adequately punished for that mistake when the enemy fields all MAX counters and beats them back. That's how balance works: one simple strategy like MAX-crashing no longer gets you an easy, massive advantage -- you actually have to play smart to avoid being countered.

    Indoor vs. outdoor ecosystems is relevant anytime someone brings up tanks' dominance against infantry. Because while that's logical, MAXes' dominance against infantry isn't logical (in terms of creating deeper gameplay with more interesting player decisions.) One ecosystem has a bunch of balanced playstyles (most vehicles are balanced in value outdoors, and the ones that aren't should be.) The other has one playstyle that's dominant (MAXes) and a bunch of lesser playstyles (infantry).

    The numbers you list are exactly why they're overpowered.
    • You: They kill 3+ infantry per life, so they're balanced.
    • Me: That's exactly why they're overpowered, one player consistently kills 3+ players a life! This means your side ends up being vastly more efficient with each player's life, which lets you gain a massive advantage over your opponents.
    I have no clue how you come to the conclusion that crushing domination of infantry makes them balanced. Being unbeatable indoors is the core problem.
  9. Axehilt


    My standard is to look at the actual balance of things by removing factors like skill and population.

    When skill and population are factored out, ESFs still beat tanks handily.

    Which is why even though one of those tanks did have equal skill to me, I still killed him.

    Certainly tanks are able to equip a Walker for AA, but that's fine because it sacrifices capability in their primary role. The tanks who specialize in their ground-killing capabilities end up taking weapons which leave them progressively more vulnerable against air (inversely proportional to their capability against ground) which is a balanced and interesting tradeoff.

    So even against same-skill tanks, an ESF still has a strong advantage and the worst case scenario is you force them to turn their rear armor to the frontlines (leaving it vulnerable to friendly ground forces) and both of you take significant damage during the Walker vs. Rocket exchange, effectively zoning each other out for repairs. Much more commonly, you see AV/AV tanks (including in the hands of equal-skill opponents) which are strongly countered by ESFs.
  10. Axehilt


    "Counter" in games is a term used to describe efficiency. In the case of PS2 what matters most is manpower efficiency. Which means that if your expected K/D is less than 1.0 you're not being efficient and you're not countering your target. In fact the reverse is happening: your target is countering you.

    So if you have an LMG and a Rocket and the LMG's expected K/D against MAXes is ~0.25 (guesstimated) and the rocket's expected K/D is ~0.60, then yeah obviously the rocket is dramatically better to use against MAXes and we all agree on that. But the reality is that most of the time you're still expected to lose the match-up, so it's not a counter to MAXes.

    As for 5-8 kills per MAX, I've been going with the safer estimate of 2-3 K/D with MAXes in their current state, since that's my guess at where it lands in same-skill match-ups. 5-8 sounds unreasonably high since most of my stats on DA put me in the Top 5% of players and I only have a 3.5 K/D with MAXes (which includes mostly uneven-skill matchups.)
  11. Boomotang

    All of these arguments can be applied to MAXes in a similar fashion.
  12. Inex

    Which would make sense, if MAXes were free. But as they have a INF resource cost associated with them, I think it's useful to compare the opportunity cost of taking grenades/mines/medkits instead of the MAX. 30 seconds of wandering the forums will give you a montage showing how a medkit can be worth another 1-3 kills per life. Grenades can be a free kill, assuming you can master the space-time bending nature of their bounciness (or just get stickies). Mines are also another largely free kill.

    So for the cost of a single MAX, I could get ~5 medkits/mines, or ~8 grenades, and each of those can be relied on to add roughly 1 to my KDR so long as I can keep them in stock.

    So it confuses the hell out of me that you're asking for a MAX nerf when it's far costlier, and gets you less kills.

    I'm just going out on a limb here and thinking that if you're in a top 5% of anything on DA, then you probably have a decent infantry KDR. I'll magic up guess of 1.5, because I don't actually care what your exact KDR is. Given that, a MAX suit for you is +2 kills for 350 inf. resources, (keeping in mind that since you lose the MAX when you die, a 3.5 KDR means you are expecting 3.5 kills before being kicked back to normal infantry classes) or 1 kill per 175 res.

    For roughly the same res cost as a single MAX kill you could have a grenade, a mine and a medkit all at the same time, almost guaranteeing the same +2 kills as the entire MAX. Those don't come with a timer either, or any of the other downsides of a MAX. So it looks like the worst case scenario puts investment in 'belt items' (I have no better name for the inf cost stuff.) at roughly double the efficiency as the MAX. If the MAX is OP because of its effect on KDR (and thus your side's efficiency), wouldn't it then follow that those items are all OP as well?
  13. Axehilt


    This entire thread has been about how there is no counter to MAXes, which makes them overpowered.

    There is a counter to tanks.

    So no, nothing that I just described applies to MAXes. At least not until they become balanced, which will cause them to have a counter.
  14. Boomotang

    Explosives counter both quite nicely.
  15. BITES

    Still shocked this troll-o-thon is going on ... since the guy has 0 ability to see outside of his own bubble. Its like arguing creationism with a devout <insert religion here>.
    Yup ...
    FTFY ... cue sperg.
  16. Axehilt


    Counters have a higher than 1.0 expected K/D against their target.

    Explosive don't.

    So no, explosives aren't a counter to either.
  17. Dragonblood

    My 2 cents: As ong as 1 medic, 1 engineer and 1 Max unit are together more effective than 3 Max units, they are balanced.
  18. Axehilt


    Paying a price doesn't mean something isn't overpowered. It just means you pay a price to be overpowered.

    Grenades/medkits are nice, but I think you're over selling them.

    Grenades I very rarely use (in part because I'm usually in MAX/vehicle; in part because there are only limited situations where they're useful; and in part because, like most players, I'm pretty bad at using them more when I should.) Out of the 5445 infantry resources I've spent on 121 frag grenades, I've landed 56% of my shots (68 hits) which has resulted in 21 kills. So that's a cost of 259 infantry resources per grenade kill. I'm less confident of my grenade skills than my other skills, but I would guess that's still better than average. (Pulled up a random other player, Boomotang from this thread, and he's spending 360 infantry resources on grenades per kill.)

    Medkits rarely affect mid-fight health, so aren't really comparable to MAXes (and nades) which are advantages used mid-fight. So while they can heal you back up between fights, it's not common that they're useful in the 2-4 secs that it takes for an infantry vs. infantry exchange to finish. Are they useful in the ~5% of infantry fights where you simultaneously meet the criteria of being health-damaged and having the opportunity to hide briefly behind cover? Sure. But those are fairly rare.

    So while it's fine to have consumables that heal you up between fights (medkits), or provide alternative attack vectors during fights (grenades), the part where it becomes a problem is if you can spend infantry resources to just flat-out win a fight (MAXes).

    Basically it's much more a matter of manpower efficiency than resource efficiency (kills per infantry resource.) Because since I only get get +0.5 K/D by being MAX (3.5 K/D, 826 SPM, 62.1 KPH) instead of Infiltrator (3.0 K/D, 652 SPM, 64.1 KPH) it's clearly not the most efficient use of resources. But that just doesn't matter because I always have plenty of resources and MAXes are always the top predator of the indoor battlefield -- if you can clear the point of all targets, all you need is any newbie in a non-MAX class to cap the thing while you guard them.
  19. Axehilt


    The thread is littered with my use of evidence and logic.

    Whereas your posts have brought no evidence of your position, you come from a suspicious background of over 50% MAX playtime, and you've basically only focused on undermining my position.

    So yeah, I totally agree that this feels like a religious debate, because you're arguing pure belief while I'm arguing for objectively measurable fact.
  20. Axehilt


    I don't get less kills. I get higher K/D and SPM than my next-best class. I'm asking for MAXes to be balanced in value on the battlefield so that they can have their infantry cost/cooldown removed (since that isn't balancing them anyway)

    3.5 is my overall MAX K/D. Certainly I go on 30+ killstreaks with a MAX too on occasion, but the overall K/D tells a better story of what's happening, and when you add in SPM and KPH the full effectiveness of something is revealed. Certainly if you want to reveal your character name(s) we can parse through them and I can act sufficiently impressed should your MAX K/D be over 5 while maintaining a good KPH/SPM (because that's truly impressive stuff!) So although I enjoy related tales like the 16-killstreak that won an alert for my empire (where three of us, me as a MAX, cleared a ~20-enemy capture point) it's not quite as useful since it omits all the times it didn't go so well.

    And to be clear you can really only compare these stats with your own classes. I can't measure my 3.0 infiltrator K/D against somebody's 0.8 MAX K/D and say that infiltrators are stronger than MAXes, because that's simply skill difference. But I can compare my 3.0 with my MAX's 3.5 to say that yeah I get a lot better performance out of MAXes.

    It'll also give us more individual player data which shows MAXes to be clearly superior to the other infantry classes, despite all those other consumable advantages infantry have. I can make that guess with a large degree of certainty since it's been the case with every player we've looked at so far in the thread.