It doesn't take much when you're facing him with higher numbers, I'm discussing equal numbers scenarios I don't mean dominated in a 1v1 scenario, I don't get dominated either in those situations, I refer to the whole battle. 24 vs 24, all infantry without MAXes, the attacker team decides to pull 15 MAXes, a few engis and medics to storm the point, they will just slaughter the defenders, because that's what happens every single time, unless the skill gap is extremely high in favor of the defenders. Now, what's the only choice the defenders have to break that point hold? You guessed it, pull MAXes supported by engis/medics. And that's my ******* problem with MAXes.
Personally, I love how the biolabs work out. And Maxes are easy to kill, it just takes some focused fire. I've 1vs1 them before with shotguns. You just gotta take out their engineer support and they go down like flies.
So what is your point? Thats like me saying that outdoor combat boils down to pulling vehicles. If there was no max in the game, indoor combat boils down to pulling heays. Or indoor combat boils down to who has the most numbers. At least with maxes as a unit its not all about who has the most manpower. I have to say I totally disagree with you. The occasional VERY small fight with just pure infantry may be ok, but in reality it can face the same problem as large 75 on 75 fights. Without some sort of game changer, as long as the pops are relatively even, neither side will ever win a fight. There is simply too many enemy infantry for any sort of skilled player to really make a huge difference. Fights come to a stalemate that no one can win. It doesn't matter how well you do your heavy crash or whatever you think you are going to do in you dream world of no maxes, it will just be choke points being spammed by infantry all year long. What happens in the current game is that if you are in a stalemated fight it turns into a battle of resources. Which side can kill the most enemy maxes without losing their own. After a while, if you have won the resource war, you can pull a max crash and push the enemy troops back with that max crash into their spawn room, they are then spawn trapped and it is hard to come back from that even if they have managed to kill a large portion of your maxes off. You won the fight thanks to maxes thanks to having won the resource war, which was won in a large part by your default infantry doing work and killing more enemy maxes than they killed of yours. In your guys little dream land there will be no maxes, therefore no resource battle, therefore less depth. And even worst it will be an eternal infantry stalemate with no maxes and no other ability that any unit has that possesses enough power to force an equal number of infantry back in their spawn room to win you the fight. It would end in stupid stupid stupid battles that are simply unwinnable and unloosable until one of the sides gets tired and logs off.
Well balancing MAXes wouldn't make PS2 anything remotely like CoD, so why even voice that concern? Plenty of players here want PS2 to be a better, deeper PVP game by balancing MAXes. I haven't seen the stats of all posters, but certainly of the ones with stats in their sigs there's a definite trend of high-end players agreeing with me, and low-average players being the only ones disagreeing. What's not fun about Tribes? Tribes was a blast, yet classes are pretty well balanced and the heavy's firepower and armor are sufficiently balanced against its weak mobility so that entire matches aren't dominated by heavies. Players felt very powerful as a heavy, but the disadvantages were nicely balanced against those advantages. With balanced MAXes, inside bases we'd still have a variety of classes (which CoD doesn't have unless something's changed in the last few games) and loadouts which act as soft counters against certain targets. And as long as no one loadout is the dominant god-mode loadout, that's going to be a much deeper and more interesting game than "Pick MAX -> Win Easily" which is boring.
Wrong. A squad full of heavies would be defeated by a balanced squad (at equal skill/numbers of course) That's already a thing here, the one who pulls most MAXes wins. That kind of big fights don't even work well in this game because of lag and render issues anyway. And they are stalemated even with MAXes, what usually breaks those stalemates is when one of the 2 sides brings more numbers. And I don't see the problem with those stalemates, this game is a FPS, the point of the game is to shoot at other people, and the point of it being massive is that you can have, as the devs advertised, battles that last for hours, if there were no MAX spam, that would actually be possible without the need of superdefensible bases (old Crown for example) That would work in a fictional world where new people don't arrive at a fight with fresh resources, oh, and if MAXes weren't revivable. In my little dream, if you pull a Exoskeleton and its HP gets to 0, that Exoskeleton gets destroyed, like it happens with tanks, period. For the rest of what you said, as I pointed above, I thought the point of this game were the massive battles that could last for hours.
Rock/Paper/Scissors are hard counters. Soft counters are still counters, but I assure you MAXes are a pretty damn hard counter because they have a substantial advantage over infantry. Soft counters are more like Heavy Assault vs. other infantry, where you have a durability advantage but your expected K/D isn't a whole lot higher than 1.0. MAXes are a much stronger counter. Which again, wouldn't be a problem if they in turn had a counter (that wasn't a MAX.) But instead we get tic-tac-toe: play the one overpowered strategy for a tie, or lose. Paying resources to be overpowered doesn't make for good gameplay, and leads to a lot of rich-get-richer problems. Hence the reason the devs have voiced a desire to redesign the system because it's not working. You're describing tic-tac-toe. When both players play the single overpowered strategy, a tie is achieved. I'm describing a step forward which would be chess, where there is no single overpowered strategy and a variety of viable strategies exist. Why would you want PS2 to remain tic-tac-toe when it could be chess?
"Because: status quo" is the argument of the unimaginative. Why are they supposed to be that way? If it fails to make the game deeper -- and in fact makes the game shallower -- then why should we accept the status quo? We all know how the game is (and how that's a result of dev intent), but what we're talking about is a way the game could be much deeper than it is. Why accept tic-tac-toe when we could have chess?
Of course it's not a bug. The way the game is is a result of dev intent. And did the game launch 100% perfect, or was there room for improvements along the way? Sometimes designs are provably shown to be lopsided, and have a clear path towards a balance that would result in much deeper, skill-focused gameplay, and that's what happened with MAXes. Even back in beta when players were clamoring for the resource cost to be added to MAXes I pointed out that wouldn't really change the fact that they were overpowered (and it hasn't.) Honestly I had hoped they would've ended up solving the problem from PS1 where they had cooldowns, by simply implementing them as a balanced class instead. Just like TF2's heavy weapons guys, you'd end up with a class that felt meaty and powerful but if they pull all heavies you just snipe/demo them to death (soft counters). Citing a clear imbalance, with statistical evidence, and suggesting a clear, logical path for improving the game not only isn't "crazy philosophical land", but is pretty much the most rational way to make suggestions for a game. Right, and gradually each class would be balanced so that their overall value is useful in any given indoor fight, and the result will be interesting class decisions. I'm totally fine with fixing the second-most-broken class in the same patch we fix the most-broken class. I'm not certain that HAs are that second-order problem*, but whatever the next-most-broken class is I'm all for balancing it! (* Personally I see much better performance from Infils than HA. Which is awkward, since I'd love to see some solid design tweaks to classes where HA are no longer a do-everything class with a shield on top, and infils get an improved toolkit for point-hold scenarios, but if the stats say HAs actually need to be stronger and Infils need to be weaker then that's what would need to happen.) My experience is just unorganized play, so that's mostly what I'm talking about. Certainly the problem is worse in competitive play. Eventually unorganized play will catch up to that and we'll see dense MAX use (and threads like this one will increase in frequency, and my infiltrator will be less and less effective and replaced with more HA play.) If bases are too defender-biased, that's another second-order problem that needs to be fixed. The only reason you need something to break a zerg stalemate is that a base is too defender-biased, like a Biolab. MAXes tend to naturally accumulate in the defending team more (because they're more likely to be able to revive MAXes on the points, because the hard spawn is so close.) So by balancing MAXes you actually wouldn't change the amount of stalemates much because it affects both sides of the equation. But yeah, defender-biased bases suck and more bases should provide balanced gameplay where the skilled team wins.
