as the title says, with the new resource costs what is the real point to timers? cert dump? you cant pull more than 3 or 4 of any vehicle save the flash. so why is the timer still enforced, pull 2 tanks, die, and no more tanks... so why try and restrict it farther with a timer?
Yeah cert time is only worth it for the first 4-5 levels, then its just a waste of certs. The trick is to try and balance the timers to the resource gain.
The power of the timer is to restrict the dominating faction. When the timer is balanced with the resouce income and skill, a player will be able to pull a new tank when next the player actually needs it but the reckless glutton will be restricted. All sides will experience restriction with any number - few to many - of its players during a well-matched session. The faction with little territory typically will not notice the timer. The faction with enough resource flow that they could build a monument from all their own tank wreckage accumulated from a single session will be restricted by it each time they play foolhardy.
When the new resource system goes in, I believe they intend to remove all timer cert lines and refund the certs. This is because resource access will be considerably more restrictive for a dominant faction while being slightly less restrictive for an underdog faction - thus eliminating the need for a brake on the dominant faction's ability to pull vehicles.
Timer has its uses if you have full resources and you pull MBT for example. Now if you stay alive for few minutes you are most likely going to get the remaining 100 resources passively by that and can afford a new one. Or if you are fighting in area that gives the said resource you need, lowering the timer is helpfull as you will quickly earn the resources back.
Yeah I mentioned that back in beta actually: Cooldowns are a limit on how often you can pull vehicles. Resource costs are a limit on how often you can pull vehicles. Typically it's bad design to duplicate purposes like that. However in their defense it's really not terrible in this case, because each balances the other -- if their first guess on cooldown or resource balance was wrong, it's less of a risk because the second limiter would keep things from getting out of hand.
That's not really what happens though in practice is it? In reality, the underdogs vehicles are numerically outmatched by the superior faction. As such they are more likely to be destroyed, and as a further affect are more likely to be on timer cool down. Certainly the timer could be balanced to give underpopped Empires an advantage over the dominant ones, but that's really not the case in the present game. The more players you have the more tanks you can roll. There is no mitigating factor for faction strength currently.
That's not at all related to what I was saying. You can't fault the timers on that since no faction can field more tanks than they have players and no faction is limited by spawning only as many as the enemy's numbers.
Timers are there so if you clear out a vehicle zerg they don't come back instantly. There's nothing more infuriating than fighting off waves after waves of explosives wielding land/air vehicles, and no amount of resource revamps is going to change that.
