Is there a problem with that? Maxes are supposed to be stronger, they cost resources. Of course they are the most used resources in the game so you may want to choose to pull a heavy assault and spend all those resources on the other equipment that your infantry can get... many of which straight up counter maxes. The thing that you guys seem to not understand is that infantry units are on the bottom tier of this game. Maxes cost resources and are on a higher tier. While you may debate on which infantry unit you will pull based off the situation, if you have the resources it is ALWAYS generally better to pull a max. It is SUPPOSED to be like that. Infantry are not supposed to be a viable equal choice to a max. If you are playing serious mode, infantry is what you pull once you run out of resources. All working as intended. The free units are not as good at killing stuff as units that cost resources. They counter the max because they are free and are still capable of killing him. Who cares if I fail 2 times I am respawning for free. If I kill him on the 3rd try I have lost nothing except my precious k/d but I have cost him infantry resources while using up very few of my own which lets me spam a huge number of stun nades or whatever I am using those resources on.
I think that MAXes have only one thing making them seem "OP" - great resistance against personal weapons even without support (16000 effective health with Kinetic Armor 5). Let's say, devs reduced their resistance by half resulting to 5000/8000 effective health with or without KA5. Then the following problems arise: When storming entrenched positions, MAXes may be killed even before they reach enemy. This may effectively remove MAX crashes strategy. MAXes are big targets thus easy to hit, so it will need much more engineers to keep them alive. What we can do to offset problems: To offset point 1 (one of the below): Give to MAXes big carriable shields. MAX carrying the shield has none or only one weapon and can not fire when carrying the shield. Explosives can destroy the shield. Give to all MAXes extremely deadly CQC weapons (like Hacksaw). MAXes charge in and kill enemy very fast. To offset point 2: increase repairing rate on MAXes. TLDR; Addressing MAX survivability problem is not simple "Nerf survivability". It must be done with certain buffs promoting more teamplay.
Well he has stated how he justifies his opinion already. He thinks that resources mean nothing, therefore in his head pulling a unit that costs half your resources is the same as pulling a free unit. Its crazy town.
When you can easily chainpull MAXes, the resource argument is completely invalid. Powerful units should not be spammable, that's my problem with MAXes. If what you say here were actually true I'd be fine with MAXes as they are right now, but sadly, there's something called Combat Medic that can render all my efforts worthless.
I guess we just disagree on the definitions of chainpulling and spam then because I have never seen anyone chainpull maxes unless they are good and stay alive for some time before dieing. I just don't see guys who lose their maxes in 30 seconds "spamming" or "chainpulling" them. Rejoice, resing maxes has been significantly nurfed in the last few patches. Still you complain.
Bads are gonna be bad, that's not the point. And for spammable I mean that you're able to just pull a TON of them at the same time. So? They should be unrevivable, that's the only way there can be a trade-off in the decision of pulling a MAX. Right now there's absolutely no reason not to pull them if you want to get as many kills as you want in the shortest time possible.
All I'm hearing is "because status quo". It's a "supposed to be" argument, but without a logical rationalization of why they should be. What we have is a shallower game where one class rules them all for indoor fights. In competitive play, outfits understand this and you see extremely MAX-heavy fights. In standard play, all the good players/platoons are MAX-heavy and bad players just get crushed because they didn't pick the "I Win" button. Overpowered things with no counter makes a game shallower. What we could have is a deeper game where each class has balanced capabilities in indoor fights, which would achieve a more interesting, varied mix of class in indoor fights. Logically, there isn't a need for MAXes to fill an overpowered AI role. Just as there isn't a need for a vehicle outdoors that acts as a god-vehicle that crushes all other vehicles of all types with no counter. It would simply make outdoor gameplay shallower, just as MAXes have made indoor gameplay shallower.
If you looked at it from a top-down view you'd realize that when one side pulls more MAXes then it pushes much further than the opponents. You act like K/D is all MAXes have, yet nearly every individual player's stats I looked at had significantly higher KPH and SPM. Between all three of those core performance metrics, you have a class which is inarguably more manpower efficient and crushes fights. Being overpowered that way causes a secondary problem where each of those little battles MAXes dominate are less interesting fights. They're not skill vs. skill exchanges where the more-skilled player wins, but lopsided slaughters. As a PVP game it's important for fights to feel very skill-rewarding. So the more balanced all the outside factors become, the more fun and skill-rewarding the game will be (because instead of a lopsided slaughter you'll have a difficult fight where skill is the deciding factor.) Which means that while it's fine to have soft counters where MAXes are good against a sub-set of infantry, but weak against a different sub-set of infantry (because class choice is part of the skill), it's not fine for the class choice to be a trump card that just automatically beats every other choice (because that won't be a skill-rewarding game.)
That was the point! We're discussing class balance. If we talked about 10v1 situations or defending a biolab or beating newbie MAXes, we wouldn't be discussing class balance. We'd be discussing pop, base, or skill advantage (respectively.) So the point was let's not talk in circles about nothing, let's discuss class balance! Every counter listed requires more than 1 player. So they're not counters, they're being countered by the MAX. Which means that at least one infantry player is dying on average, which is more than you can achieve with any other class, which is why they're an automatic "I Win" class. Depth would most certainly be improved, as a result of there no longer being an "I Win" class choice. When you have one overpowered thing, it trumps all the other strategy in the game. It's like if you added a trump card rule to chess: You can move your queen as normal, or directly onto the enemy king, immediately winning the game. Normally a chess game involves a lot of strategic thinking because the choices are balanced and many viable strategies exist. But with the trump card rule, none of those varied strategies are viable anymore because whoever goes first will move their queen onto the opposing king and win. Game depth is essentially a measure of the amount of those viable strategies, and measures how long it takes to master a game. So the trump card rule completely destroys the depth of chess. MAXes are the trump card of PS2. If they were balanced, it would uncover a bunch of interesting viable class decisions that already exist under the surface, making the game deeper. In their current state, they trump all those viable decisions and are the one dominant strategy; the only viable choice. This creates shallow gameplay.
That's never going to change no matter how much maxes are nurfed you realize that right? Unless sony implements some sort of change that doesn't let people pull a certain class if there are too many in the area... which will never happen.
See my previous post on how trump cards limit the number of viable strategies (thereby making the game shallower.) Either being shallow is the problem, or there is no problem but being deeper is simply better. Either way you want to look at it is fine. It's the only reasonable definition of a counter in a shooter where manpower efficiency is so important. If your team dies 20 times to kill the enemy 10 times, under no circumstance have you "countered" them. They beat the crap out of you! They should be at the same level as infantry because indoor fights shouldn't suck. When there's a trump card indoors, fights suck. Er, the skill-focused competitive side of CoD is in no way a bad part of the game. That's the point of PVP games: skillful competition! CoD falls short entirely because of weak skill depth. In CoD aiming skill is abnormally important which means you don't get the multi-faceted skill depth that you see in deep games like Tribes where aiming skill is deeper due to weapons not being insta-hit, and movement skill plays a large role in fights. I'm not against vehicle gameplay, but things have to be reasonably balanced. It makes sense to balance outdoor and indoor portions of PS2 as their own ecosystems, so you end up with vehicles being dominant outdoors and infantry/MAX indoors. But while all vehicles are reasonably balanced (and the game would be better if they were even more balanced), MAXes are imbalanced indoors which creates the problem we're discussing.
I love it when I run into an enemy max and think "OH SH**!" but than I realize it has bursters and I just kill it.
As I said, make them unrevivable, that makes balanced squad composition more relevant so spamming MAXes would be a bad idea.
Are you serious? It is self evident why maxes are supposed to be stronger than infantry, the entire game has been created by its makers with this intent, and unless you think that the last 12 months has just been a really long and persistent bug or something I do not see how you can possible not understand this. Maxes are supposed to be stronger than infantry because that's how the developers want it. To balance them so that they are not always just the default choice they cost resources and have timers so you cannot just spam them and have to make the choice to loose other possible equipment when you buy one. That is reality. I get that you are lost in some crazy philosophical land because you just WANT SO BADLY TO CHANGE HOW THE GAME IS TO BE HOW YOU WANT IT TO BE. But until that glorious day comes lets try and keep in touch with real life. So what? If maxes weren't in the game you would see very heavy centric fights. If you are talking about only competitive play then I see what your problem is since resources don't come into play as much in staged fights as they do in real prolonged game play. In real game play you can see the depth that maxes actually bring, since the side with more skill will be able to kill off the enemy resources and eventually gain the advantage in resources and thus equipment (and maxes) which will give them the eventual victory. Remove maxes from this equation and there is no piece of equipment that will give you the power to break a 75 on 75 stalemate and it just turns into a mindless meat grinder that will never end no matter how skillfully you play since you cannot gain any sort of resource advantage that means anything. "Competitive" play simply does not have the scale to fully show max and resource depth. Your looking at a part of a picture, thinking you can see the whole thing, but you can't you are only looking at a small section of it. Also I have thought about what you have said about how vehicle gameplay outside is ok but somehow max gameplay is not. And basically what you are saying is that vehicles outside kill each other and infantry but because they look different from each other its ok? But because the vehicles inside happen to look simular to each other while killing each other and infantry its not ok?
There's no vehicle that consistently dominates the others, MBTs are obviously stronger than Lightnings, but they require 2 people to operate at full strength, so the correct comparison would be MBT vs 2 Lightnings. If there's a problem with vehicle balance is that the Harasser is UP, but there's no vehicle dominating everything. On infantry gameplay indoors, MAXes dominate everything.
Both sides can pull maxes, and arguably the side that pulls them first is at a disadvantage since the other side can prepare to wipe them out. Then the resource battle begins. Everyone knows maxes are more powerful than infantry. No matter how many times you describe how maxes are more powerful than infantry and call it overpowered it does not make maxes overpowered simply by being more powerful. I'm getting really tired of this, you just keep saying maxes are overpowered simply because they are more powerful than infantry WHICH IS HOW THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE. You just don't like it and want them nurfed to be the same as infantry so you keep saying it. This game is not a 100 percent skill vs skill game. There are vehicles and maxes which cost resources and are MEANT to be on a higher tier than base infantry. They are supposed to have an advantage. You keep saying skill vs skill like its a magic wand that will make everything you dislike go away. I got bad news for you, any game that has vehicles and wants those vehicles/expensive units to be useful has to give them an advantage over the base units otherwise it is POINTLESS to have more expensive or rare units. O please, if you do not think that this game rewards skillful play, even as a base infantry unit, then you and I have not been playing the same game. Infantry in this game are far from fodder and are capable of being a solid threat to everything, including maxes.
That's precisely the problem, that it all boils down to pulling MAXes, there's no alternative to it. That's why the infantry gameplay is shallow when it involves MAXes. When no one decides to pull MAXes (or at least not in numbers, 1 or 2 MAXes don't change much in a big fight) the fights are really good and interesting.
You need to get your head unstuck from this whole counter subject. This is not rock, paper, scissors. Your rock max does not COUNTER my scissors infantry. You have a solid advantage, that is it. When I used the word counter what I meant was that infantry have many TOOLS that give them a chance to kill the max. Only if its overpowered which you have yet to demonstrate since you seem to think that if it is more powerful than infantry at all then it is automatically overpowered, even if it costs tons of resources. Sure, but to make your example more realistic I will add some stuff too it. Your opponent can also use the trump card rule at the same time you do, this prevents either of you from activating the trump card. All the pawns can fly and have a 25 percent chance to insta kill your queen. All the knights, bishops, and castles have a 75 percent chance to stun grenade your queen... hmm now its getting more real. This little comparison is absurd. Maxes are not an auto trump card, I doubt that even people who think they are overpowered believe this.
There is no such thing and true counters in shooters and in a game when you respawn free infantry for free deaths of those infantry are less important than you seem to think. Simple theory craft example: 10 vs 10 fight. I have 3 maxes, you have 3 maxes. All my regular infantry dies 2-3 times resulting in 20 deaths on my side, but they successfully kill your 3 maxes. My 3 maxes do less slaying of guys trying to kill them but are able to stay alive. So now your side has 20 kills and my side has only 10, but I still have 3 maxes and you have 0. Which of us is winning do you think? In your opinion. I like the game the way it is and like how the designers want it to be. You don't seem to like it and want to change it. Well I don't want to play cod. That is why I am playing this game. If i wanted to play a perfectly balance infantry fighting game like you are describing then I would play cod for sure. No one here wants that **** though because it is just not FUN. I am tired of fighting nothing but other infantry who look just like me with the same weapon as me. I want a combined arms game with tanks and airplanes and big walking armor suits. Part of wanting the excitement of that combined arms game means that i have to accept that those units need to be powerful. Certainly more powerful than the base free infantry that you can spawn at any time, meaning that if I either choose to be an infantry unit or am out of resources and am forced to be one that I will be one of the weakest units on the battlefield. Those more powerful units are prevented from becoming overpowered because they are reigned in by cooldowns and timers and a resource system. What I am hearing from you is that you want vehicle side outside of bases and cod inside of bases. That is not what I want for this game. I want combined arms, that means infantry, tanks, aircraft and maxes fighting side by side at EVERY level of the game. I will fight you tooth and nail to prevent your vision for this game from coming true, and I would be that I will be joined by tons of people. Though in reality I probably do not have to worry since I do not think sony would be dumb enough to implement your ideas. Part of playing a combined arms game is that infantry is always going to be the bottom guy on the totem pole. If you wanted to discuss tweaking maxes a little we could talk, but as it turns out you want to basically just nurf them hard and turn them into another infantry unit. That is a horrible idea, not only does it go against everything planetside is about it also will destroy any large fights in which the only way to break a stalemate is often a well timed max crash.
I honestly feel that they are too easy to kill as is for them to be completely unrevivable ever. It doesn't take much for a max to insta die.
