Platoon & Squad Leader Issues/Bugs/Discussion

Hi, my name is dstock, and I'm a squad leader. This past weekend, I stepped up and tried my hand at leading a platoon. The following post is a result of my experience in both of these roles. My intention here is to highlight some of the pressing gameplay bugs and mechanics issues that are severally hindering my effectiveness as an in-field commander. Please, read on.

For reference, SL = Squad Leader, PL = Platoon Leader.

Where to start? Leading a platoon (3 squads, one outfit + 2 PUG/friends) was, at the same time, one of the best and most frustrating experiences I've had playing Planetside2. Some of the following, IMO, are serious gameplay flaws and bugs. Some of the later stuff is more focused on improving teamwork and cohesion. I'll do a little table of contents so you can skip to the sections that interest you the most; this is probably going to get long.

Table of Contents:
1. Platoon Leader Bugs / Gameplay
A) Leadership assignment
B) General Chat Gripes

C) Smoke Signals
D) Delta Squad Woes
E) "Squad Objectives" Functionality
2. Platoon Cohesion / Teamwork / Gameplay
A) Squad Bonuses => Platoon Bonuses
B) Color Scheme Nerfs
C) Vehicle Locks
D) Smoke Signals, Again
E) Trooper Movement
F) Spawn Beacon Suggestions

1. Platoon Leader Bugs

A) Leadership Assignment: Due to some of the issues I'll cover a bit later, I find that over a 4-6 hour play period, I typically have to re-log/restart the game 2-4 times to correct bugs and chat issues. As an SL, this is no problem; you simply set someone else to leader, re-load the game, and they invite you back and can pass leader to you.
With platoons, this is way more complicated, allow me to explain. As a PL, you can individually assign SL and PL roles, if you are passing the reigns. I'll need to check, but if you do not manually assign the PL role before you leave, I believe it assigns it to the #2 in the squad of the leaving PL. Once you come back and are re-invited, you are placed randomly into a squad. From here, you MUST be promoted to a squad leader FIRST, or you will suffer some serious issues when you are promoted to platoon leader. You cannot place a spawn beacon as a PL, only as a SL. I also had issues with moving people between squads, I'm assuming this is a bug, though, as it only happened twice. Finally, you cannot promote yourself to SL once you are PL (chain of command much?).
Additionally, PL much like the SL can only choose the "Leave Squad" option for themself. If you were leading Alpha and come back in Charlie, your interim PL has to move you to your desired squad, as you have no way of moving yourself, with or without the PL role.
Suggestions:

• Drop the PL role to one of the other SLs when the PL leaves. This seems like common sense to me, promote someone who has a clue what is going on, instead of some random who is lucky enough to ride #2 in the PLs squad.
• Assigning another player to PL should automatically promote them to SL in their squad. This should be the default, let us choose if we'd like to PL without having the SL responsibilities.
• SL & PL both need additional options for themselves in the squad/platoon panel. The ability to move yourself between squads is crucial; it is terribly awkward to have to waste time to coordinate a leadership change just to get your SL back in the right squad.
• I want to see some small changes to the beacon system when in a platoon, I mention it here and I will elaborate below.

B) General Chat Gripes: Let me preface by saying I think the chat, particular the voice setup in this game, is ambitious and generally OK. That said, I have experienced some serious overlap issues, and I can't put my finger on what causes it. Typical Scenario: My squad is in a Galaxy, en route to the waypoint. I have the map open, talking to my squad/picking our route/setting waypoints etc. At some point, the voice chat gets stuck, and I can only communicate in one particular channel, regardless of which keybind I use. Invariably, my mic gets stuck open on one channel, and whatever channel that is has to listen to my squad BS until I can solve it. Roughly half of the time, I cannot hear my squad, or they cannot hear me during this time. This happened to me yesterday in leadership channel, and I felt pretty bad that the only other guy there, who was talking to me, had to listen to my squad as I struggled to regain control (sorry, Pugna!). Anyways, this issue is frustrating, and I wish I understood the cause better so I could help rectify it. This issue leads to ~70-85% of my game restarts, as restarting the game usually solves the issue. I have no ideas here, I just wanted to post my troubles and see if anyone has a better idea as to what is going on.

C) Smoke Signals: I mentioned this in my guide about being a SL, but sometimes the SL smoke signals fail to deploy. Yeah, they don't work in the warpgate, I know that. But, I can't drop them ahead of time to mark LZ or pick-up points for transports because they seem to fail about 1/3rd of the time. Nothing happens, besides the cooldown triggering. I've started waiting til I am in an adjacent territory or actually inside the target, this seems to help a little. I think the biggest problem here is a lack of a resource to explain how they work.

D) Delta Squad: WTF IS WRONG WITH DELTA SQUAD? If I have 3 full squads, I can add one person into Delta, then I'm repeatedly informed on each subsequent attempt that the platoon is full. Uh, no, there are 11 slots RIGHT THERE. I've tried everything, shuffling people around, filling ABC squads first, filling delta from the other squads then trying to back-fill: nothing works. The only method I've found to increase past 37 players is to open the platoon to the public and accept random players, which isn't usually worth the hassle. This is a serious bug, and I would like to see it resolved ASAP. I'm in a small outfit with some RL friends and a couple buddies I met playing the game. We never have more than 10 or 12 people on-line. I can only imagine what this does to the larger outfits out there...

E) "Squad Objectives" Functionality: I mentioned this in my SL guide, it bears repeating. This 30-point cert should be the feather in an SL's cap. The attack command (Primary Target) works perfectly. I cannot for the life of me set a defensive objective, be that a person/vehicle/waypoint etc. Likewise, I cannot direct my squad to shield generators, outlying sub-bases (dunno the technical term, example are the ground facilities around the perimiter of a BIO lab), SCUs etc. without using the waypoint mechanic. I feel that leaders in the game have most of the tools we need, but they don't work well/at all, and this is holding back the gameplay. I'd like to see three changes here:
First, allow leaders to set more orders than "Attack." As above, I want to be able to direct squads to defend points, destroy generators, etc. It says in the description you can set attack and defend points, make it so. This seemingly has to be a bug.
Second, develop increased functionality for PLs. Add another tier to the cert, specifically for PLs, & make it reasonably expensive. PLs should be able to set 2 objectives for the whole platoon, in any combination of attack/defend/support.
Third, PL & SLs should be able to see the objective of the other leadership within the platoon. Some fights/territories/situations require SLs to make snap decisions independent of the group. Good, I support this, I want my SLs to be as self-reliant as possible, utilizing the Platoon for support and coordinated attacks. Maybe tie this into the second level of certification, even if it only benefits the PL, ie the PL can see the objective for every squad, but the SLs can only see their own.
Just a little bit of development would go a long way into increasing teamwork potential. This cert is a must have, imo, and should be useful enough to warrant that reputation.

2. Platoon Cohesion / Teamwork / Gameplay
A) Squad Bonuses => Platoon Bonuses: Is this an oversight? We reap huge rewards for supporting our squad mates, but get 0 reward for helping out our platoon. Yes, I understand there is lots of stacking potential to consider, but even if it's a flat-out 2% bonus per action, it would be something.

B) Color Scheme Nerfs: Bravo & Delta look like enemies. I've got a slight red-green color deficiency, and in firefights, I cannot quickly distinguish between Bravo/Delta squad-members and enemies. I've killed more than my share of Bravo comrades (not so many delta squad, see above in bugs section). Consider changing the shape of the HUD Icon, in addition to rebalancing the palette. Again, here is a detailed Relevant Thread for you to read. I will allow you to peruse it and leave feedback.

C) Vehicle Locks: Really simple: Separate the squad/platoon level lock. This may seem strange or counter-intuitive, but if I'm splitting up the platoon for two destinations, I want to make sure everyone can get the ride they need to their destination. In the same vein, Galaxies really need a better force-drop mechanism than using page down. It isn't hard, but it's awkward for something I should be able to do with, say, "B".

D) Smoke Signals, Again: Another simple point: Smoke Signals should be visible on the HUD and Minimap. No real reason why they aren't, I don't get it. This bugs me as a SL, and more so as a PL. The concept is great, I really like using them, but this coupled with the failure-to-deploy bug mentioned above really hampers there effectiveness.

E) Trooper Management: This is a minor gripe, but it takes a lot of time to micro-manage troops while you are trying to keep your platoon moving. What I mean is, when I open my platoon to the general population, I invariable end up with 1-10 people that are in the platoon, and essentially still lone-wolfing. Not with the group, using 1-man vehicles, sometimes on entirely different continents. This is particularly an issue when redeploying to another continent. My current solution is to go first, start loading vehicles, and yell over chat that we are shipping out and to get your *** in gear. Anyone that fails to relocate after ~5mins gets the boot. The problem is, with the current system, we are required to look people up on the map via their # and impossible-to-read color designation, and then go to the squad panel and kick them. Just make it easier to see where people are, maybe put a map coordinate next to players names in the squad panel. Example: dstock -- G11(A) for grid G 11 on Amerish. And change the squad colors.

F) Spawn Beacon Suggestions: I love the spawn beacon, I've already spent more certs on it than any vehicle, class or weapon. I've got alot of time played with it, the following is a summary of my experience, outlined as a bullet list of changes/suggestions.

• Tell people what the damn cooldown is! Each rank says "further reduces spawn timer" and tells us absolutely nothing about the actual effect. Through trial and error, I have found the basic one is roughly 120-150 seconds, and each rank reduces it by ~15 seconds. This is just a guess, it is tough to determine due to the kill screen and not dying as soon as you spawn in Just spell it out somewhere, let us know what we are getting. I'm running rank3 now, because I just can't justify spending 300/500 certs for another 10 or 15 seconds off / rank.
• Allow players to see the status of the spawn beacon easier. Give the SL a HUD icon or something. I'm well aware it shows up on the minimap, but let's face it, the minimap sucks. A multiple-zoom minimap would solve this, easily, and I think it would solve alot of other gripes with the game. I ask for SLs based on who has a microphone (not necessary but really, really helpful) and who have the spawn beacon. As a PL, I want to know what the status of each squad's beacon is, because I can only see the one I place for my squad.
• Lower the replacement cooldown by ~1 minute. Maybe I am biased, it just seems overly long, currently. Most of the other stuff mentioned in this post is a bug/gameplay flaw/etc., this is my one fluff point.

TL | DR: Encourage teamwork by correcting these bugs and facillitating some of these changes.

Alright, I'm pulling the plug here. I've got some other minor things I'd like to bring up, but this post is already far, far too long. Couple that with the horrendous formatting on this forum, and I'm tired of typing. I thank you for your time. Please leave any feedback or suggestions, I'm always interested to hear what others think. I will do a re-cap in a few weeks to add any other glaring issues.

Wow, you did a lot of work on this great post...Good job!

Good points, I agree with your points over all. I would like to add a couple as well. Way points.. please put them on the compass. So I can scroll quickly to find it. I would like to have the ability to spam commands to the middle of a platoon members screens. They can be preloaded if needed but basic things like, need help at way point. Defend this position. Moving out. Etc. I also would like to have the ability to have a second in command. So if I crash it will go directly to this person but also that this person can handle orders and way points as needed. I don't like how the platoon leader has to do everything I tend to like to have one guy call make the decisions and another keeping the way points updated and facilitating. Currently, the system is not conducive to this type of teamwork.

The "Squad Objectives" ability I have unlocked maybe a week ago and still have not figured out how to use it.... there is no explanation nothing...

Also, have you unlocked the command chat yet? I am tempted to but every time I mention it to my friends they say it would be a waste. I think it could be useful if implemented right but so far it seems most of the squad unlocks have been cobbled together last min. If anyone has first hand experience on how that works I would be interested.

Compass waypoints would be useful, I hate being in a vehicle and not able to tell where the waypoint actually is (particularly liberators, is it above me on highground, or directly behind me?)

This game is an MMO, why don't we have a raidyell channel like every other MMO game where we can have oversized, centered text to announce updates to everyone. Fully Agree, even if it's just another comm-rose with options like you mention.

I'm fully on board with the 2nd in command / master sergeant role. Reading this and my other guide, it becomes painfully obvious how much time I spend looking at the map. Part of my success last night was due to having a real "rising star" type leading bravo squad who could keep everyone on task and moving while I made tactical decisions and organize transports. This is purely selfish, but I'm kind of tired of having to ride passenger everytime we go somewhere. I have like 2-3 days of game-time played, and I have purchased a Lightning 1 time. Perhaps, have a PL, a primary SL, and then 2 auxillary SLs?

Using squad objectives: You have to choose one of the control points (A, B, C, D), put your cursor over it and hold down the spot key. This brings up a comm-rose with one option, on the bottom, that says "Primary Target" or something to that effect. This works perfectly. You have the option to offer Primary Defense on players & vehicles, but it doesn't work. Definitely bugged. You also get 0 points for your squad following the orders, and they don't get any bonus either. SL/PL is a hugely important support role, I'd appreciate some reward for it, and even more so, I want my squad to be rewarded for following directions.

The command chat is very hit or miss. There are several problems, as I see it. Having another voice chat channel leads to even more mic frustration via bugs. The channel is hilariously underpopulated; I play on a medium population NA East server, and I've never seen more than 4 people on it at once. I think alot of people are in the same boat as you, they don't know if it is worthwhile and subsequently don't unlock it. Finally, the requests I do see are usually, "Need another squad/platoon on XXXX continent to help with ZZZZ base." The channel is universal across all continents, so it can be hard to muster the support you actually need (IE, already on your continent. Most people don't want to pull up stakes and ship their whole unit to another continent to help). An improvement to the "Empire-wide Objectives" cert would help with this as well, being able to put a small text message underneath the icon to clarify what is needed.

Good post, thx for the feedback.

Yes, I learned the second in command trick playing lotro. My buddy would lead and I would facilitate. It was great as we could react to situations much quicker as he never had to stop to kick someone who was being a pain or to invite. The same principle seems to work very well here I just happen to be the one with all the squad unlocks in our group so It limits me if we are pugging. I either lead and facilitate or facilitate.

Ha, that's pretty funny, I learned it in LoTRO, also. One person "leads" on voice/gives orders, the other person plays secretary, handling invites, preparation and loot distribution. Cheers!

No one else plays SL/PL? C'mon guys, chime in.

Another couple thoughts:
1. keep the current platoon way-point option, but also provide the ability to drop squad specific way-points as platoon leader.This way you can direct different squads to different areas of the map and such without alot of confusion.
2. Give us a setting that allows us to have any squad member drive a vehicle without having to lock it from the general population.
And please add horns to the sunderers at least please. Speaking of sunderers allow us to turn off the ammo sign when we turn off our lights too....

Agree with all above.
One more thing that is bothering me is that when I am in a squad I cannot see any of the other squads. If I could se the other squads it would be easier for me as squad leader to gather a platoon.
IMO they should look at how the BF2 Commander/Squad leader system was set up. It was simple and somewhat effectiv.

I'm on board with changing vehicle permissions. I was under the impression that if you let someone else drive, as long as you stay in the vehicle, you can unlock it and not force them out. I'll double check this, been wondering about it.

Fantastic ideas. We have issues with our platoon all of the time, quite annoying!

I wish my squad mates and other squads in my platoon could put markers down on the map. It's very often that someone spots an important target, be it a concentration of force, an armor column, a sunderer, a fortified position, or an important objective. The problem is that it is very hard to relay to your mates where your information is relevant. I would like to use forward scouts but it is very hard to coordinate their information on troop movements and positions without UI support.

Generally the game needs more ways to convey spatial information to your teammates.

Totally agreed, squad-members should be able to ping a spot on the map to bring it to the leader's attention.

Spot on mate

Trying to convey this info on Squad/Platoon voice comms links can be very hit and miss

One of the questions I have: Do further cert levels of the squad beacon reduce the timer for squad members to spawn on the beacon, the timer between placements of the beacon, or both? The description is a little ambiguous.

I know, especially with that ESXraptor accent... Just kidding, always fun playing with you

It reduces the timer for squad members to use the beacon again. As far as I can tell, that is the only effect.

Thanks!

That's effect enough, honestly.

Yeah, I agree, the cooldown between beacons isn't too bad. The reduction / certification seems to be linear, so I still advise not going past the 200-cert level.

I'm shotgunning certs all over the place, trying to balance my play between infantry, ground vehicles, and aircraft, so climbing that particular certification branch is still low priority at the moment.

First of all, Dstock, I would like to thank you for posting a well thought out and well contructed post, it's good to see someone put ideas together in a cohesive post and give reports of issues without whining, then giving suggestions on how to remedy them.

As for being a platoon leader, I am a Lieutenant in my outfit and regularly run our 2nd Platoon. We usually have a Lieutenant running each platoon while the outfit leader, the Captain, calls objectives. We use ventrillo in addition to squad, platoon, and outfit chat. Platoon leaders set rally and Gal drop points with the platoon waypoint give orders to the SL's via platoon chat. The SL's are responsible for getting their squad's waypoint set and taking or defending their objective. They use ventrillo to relay info to the PL's and CO (The outfit Captain). We use Sergeants and Lieutenants as SL's (Sometimes a corporal if we run out of Sgt.'s). Comms discipline is a must during combat with this set up, but it is very effective, we have also begun basic infantry training to help with unit cohesion. We are starting with train the trainer to train our SL's and PL's how to lead others then we will have them train our enlisted members. It takes a lot of effort to do but it's a ton of fun and very rewarding for us, the trick is good NCO's like others have said, train them up well and trust them to take care of their objective.

Also I agree on the Bravo/Delta color scheme, I can't tell them apart either =)

Great post. I agree so, so very much on your points. I am frequently a platoon/squad leader and am often frustrated by the platoon interface and its many buggy or difficult to use features.

I was going to write a post myself but you have covered almost everything I was going to write. However I would also like to add some things;


1. Squad Specific Waypoints

Allow the PL to set squad specific waypoints which only the PL and the relevant squad can see, or at the very least be able allow the PL to see each squad marker set by the squad leaders. Currently as PL you are able to set one platoon waypoint, which becomes cumbersome when you want to direct different squads to different areas with no direct and easy way to do so, other than having good squad leaders at hand, which is often quite rare.

2. Smoke Signals (again)

I really wish anyone who owns smoke could place it. I can't count the amount of times an individual platoon/squad member has found something in a specific area to bring to the platoon/squads attention, but has been unable to describe the exact location with any more detail than 'north' etc. Allowing smoke signals to be used universally would make it so much easier.

3. Squad Descriptions and Settings

This currently is quite bugged. Often when a new description is being set in a different squad, the description and settings of your own squad appear to change before your very eyes. This can often lead to confusion, especially when SLs are unaware of this strange bug.

I would much prefer if the platoon leader was able to set the squad settings and descriptions for each squad himself, rather than having to rely on his squad leaders - which would allow for more accurate and 'unified' descriptions to make individual squads in the platoon easier to find in the listings.

4. Squad Objective Markers

This is more of a suggestion and a fix rolled into one. Currently, as you mentioned in your post, it is broken and will not set defend/attack markers on certain objectives. I would love to see a visible arrow onscreen (like a nice visible 'Attck this!' sign) both ingame + on the tactical & minimap - similar to the way squad/platoon waypoints work, but a smaller and more accurate marker on very specific objectives. Currently like you say, PL and SL are limited to the waypoints, which tend to be difficult to set on specific objectives (since they will always set on the highest point - attempt to set the waypoint on a generator inside a building for example and the waypoint will be up on the roof).

There is probably more, but I can't think of any that come to mind right now, so I will leave it at that.

Really great thread I really hope the devs see this, as the majority of it is actually bug fixes, and the rest is just basic stuff to help promote teamplay, which can't be a bad thing, right?