Please never make another Containment Site again

Running around in circles down look-alike corridors IS. NOT. FUN.

Please do not design such bases again.

Please also nuke them from orbit. Nuke all of the "new" Esamir from orbit if needed.

Over designing things (impassable terrain, base layouts that require looping back on yourself to get anywhere, overly strewn doo-dads that block passage (75% of Hossin)) are all bad ideas.

Take a good look at Indar and consider why it is the best, with Amerish a near tie.

Don't over-engineer maps or game play. Central Planning is bad. Repeat. Central Planning is bad.

This is an MMOFPS, not a "run-thru-once-and-done" solo RPG.

Individual Choice is GOOD. Central Control is BAD.

No, you don't know better than all of the players combined in all of the variable situations possible.

Esamir was fine before the campaign update, would had been a better choice to use Hossin for a redesign. Using the campaign to do that would had been perfect.

Like the old saying goes:
"Never look the gifted opportunity in the horse mouth" - Jane Douglas

They could just reverse all map changes from the erasing of the bridge from Crown to Ti Alloys, nobody wanted them, they did not produce any good results, whatever was intended with those was never made explicit to the players, and the cherry on the cake is the hole in the middle of the most popular continent. Astounding design failures.

I actually dread going to Esamir after this latest change. Getting stuck in one of those containment sites. Running around for 5 minutes trying to find where to go. Getting shot up and having to respawn right back at the beginning because I either accidentally strayed from the group, or having no available medics even when in one.

They're not fun. There was a reason why Subterranean Nanite Analysis was removed. This is just far worse.

The old Esamir had a biolab in the north in a position that caused a farm-fest and normally guaranteed the faction in the south won the alert. They redesigned it for that purpose. Now, the only people that win, are those that skip the map: cause if the storm doesn't get you, the BSODs will. It's even more fun when you're playing the nso: when you are on a winning faction only to BSOD towards the end of the alert, log back in and end up on the losing faction.

Ahhhh, Contaiment sites. Some cool ideas, mashed in a convoluted base where you'll spend more time walking to a fight than actually fighting.

Even when you finally learn the base layout by wandering long enough, you'll still need a *lot* of time to get to the enemy.


There's some cool stuff on it, like dropping into the Tempest Silo immediately gets you on A, garden section has gaps where you can shoot with nigh impenetrable cover, the light gates on C are cool and sneaking around the base is really fun and rewarding, it really rewards you for learning the layout, but it's overshadowed by having a five minute walk every time you die.


All I'm saying is, if you need to place pointing arrows on the ground so the player needs to figure out where they need to go, you've done something wrong. Base could definitely use some fixing.

If I was playing Doom, and demons were chasing me, the containment site would be awesome.

In a CoOp FPS that has many more mechanisms going on it's very bad.

Pro Tip - if you have to put arrows on the floor so folks know where to know, you have designed poorly.

Unfortunately it's a lesson they should've learned from ikanam; a lattice that used to be the best biolab of amerish is now something everyone actively avoids. Or even the bases with no spawns that wrel intended for pmbs but generate 0 fights. Or disabling TI and making everyone fight at a version of the crown which is 10000x worse than the fights TI produced (nukes included).

Containment sites look cool on twitter, and I think that's all they really care about. How they play out on live is of little concern to them. When you think about it they could've held much more playtests, they could've implemented just one containment site on live to see if it worked, and there was absolutely no need to replace biolabs with these things in the first place! Biolabs and containment sites could've coexisted side by side. But no we had to reinvent something that was a Planetside 2 icon, a base type enjoyed by an overwhelming majority of players, which laid the foundations of what planetside 2 fights are all about.

It's clear containment sites weren't designed for planetside 2.I honestly do wish they'd revert all continents back to their older stages. It seems that with every update the game experience worsens.

Yeah it happens on every continent. Alerts aren't fun and on top of that are meaningless, so obviously a fun fight is a perfect excuse to ignore them. Instead of fixing alerts, I guess it was simpler to delete the fun bases and force everyone including those who don't care about the alert into bad bases.

Containment Sites were definitely cool on paper. And they look great and offer some amazing opportunities.
But they are also a pain, for the points others pointed out before. You *can* get good fights there. But for that you need to get really lucky, and the other 9/10 times it's a drag.

I tend not to have strong opinions on bases. Maybe its my lower playtime, or my preference for support, or my recent need to huck water balloons and Pounder Frags into big fights. But I can safely say Containment Sites are unlike anything else on Auraxis, and that isn't necessarily a good thing.

The outer defences usually get absolutely no use unless the defenders are thoroughly thrashing the attackers, which tends to only occur if they've been successfully driven out of the sub levels. The AV and AA turrets only get manned when the enemy is being pushed out of the hex (and even then the turrets next to the gate shields might as well be props given how little they get use), the gate shields and SCU do NOT last against a big enough vehicle push (which is hard to counter as the vehicle terminals are outside, easily camped, and usually are also destroyed quickly), and the hackable shield towers and nearby crates and such barely see any use once the gate shields have fallen, which they do really fast. Its kind of sad because the outer defences are easily the best part in terms of base design. If the shields were less flimsy and the vehicle spawn inside rather than outside, maybe attackers would actually struggle to breach the base, and the interesting outside area could get use. As It stands, once the attackers breach the gate shields, the fight almost always moves to the sub levels. And thats where the fight proceeds to stay until either the attackers push through or the defenders push back. And almost always the fight up top proceeds to last no time at all if the defenders win as the attackers armour is thrown out.

The sub levels, admittedly, have some good ideas. The repairable shields at C, the destructible cover at B, and the ability to direct drop onto A are all really cool and make for some dynamic gameplay. The idea of having a base filled with vents, alternate routes and such is cool on paper... but doesnt pan out in gameplay. Nobody slowly crawls through the vents except to go from one of the sub-level hardspawns to B or C. Speaking of, I still have no clue how the Sub-Level hardspawns work, and going without them all but requires you to own a Sunderer, since I'm pretty sure you can't use the Ground Level spawn as attackers, thus a fight can quickly go pear shaped if someone decides to sneak out and break what is usually the only sunderer. So attackers and defenders alike have a long, loooooong walk ahead of them to get anywhere. Which can really suck if you get jumped, lost, or last 2 seconds once you get there.

Making your way anywhere in the base is extremely confusing, and the lines don't necessarily help as sometimes I end up at the locked off A rather than B or C. Further, the lines kill any reason to take the alternative routes, like the vents or side paths, and said paths are impossible to navigate without a map or really good memory on account of a terrible minimap. The size doesn't help, and as a result people usually try to play follow the leader to do anything, which usually results in points flipping with no one to watch them, which serves to elongate the suffering. And its so damn easy to be confused by people running around above! Pings on the minimap either lead to extreme paranoia or getting jumped because you swore that dot was on the surface.

And A point is a neat idea... but in practice, it becomes a case of "will anyone bother to defend the Tempest Siphon Terminal?" If a defender can bring it online, A immediately flips to the defenders, the cool access point is lost, and anyone that doesn't leave A immediately is dead. There is no XP credit for re- or de-activating the Siphon (which feels dumb given how vital it is to a successful cap) and anyone forced out of A is usually forced to go back up to the siphon. I sure as hell can't tell what other route there is to take, given theres so many one way drops.

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In short, Containment Sites are too big and have too many gimmicks thrown together that don't stick the landing. In an even fight, its a piece of cake for attackers to breach due to easy-to-break vehicle shields and a hard to defend SCU, while the turrets and vehicle spawns are ineffectual unless you are already driving back the enemy. On the other hand, the sub levels are a pain to take, due to hard spawns swapping hands, a single terminal being able to invalidate an entire room of defenders, and a complex corridor mess that makes getting to the points and the good fights to be had incredibly hard.

Most Containment Site fights end in one of two ways: Either one side gets overpop and proceeds to crush the other through sheer brute force approach, whether that be via people giving up or reinforcements arriving to a big fight; or the attackers lose all their spawns via sundy busting and losing the hardspawns i do not understand, which inevitably leads to a defender victory as the hostile armour usually buggers off once the fight moves downwards.

The only reason I bother is because usually, they're one of the biggest fights on the continent. Thats the only reason people usually bother, because the fights are fun enough to ignore most of the issues. But I much prefer Biolabs, even with the hardspawns gone. At least those don't take a damn travel guide to navigate.

Alerts are not meaningless when you're trying to get ISO and Exp (for ASP). Granted the ISO you get is a joke. Once you hit ASP 100, its another story.

Well if you think about it you get much more xp at a good nasons or biolab fight than you'd get in 10 alerts. Add boosts on top of that and there's seriously no reason to try winning an alert, especially if you play the game to fight. You get a bit of iso and xp for losing anyways, so it's whatever.

I literally can't play in them.
The raw amount of Geometry and Visleaf culling sub-processes it pushes to my CPU cache drags my FPS into the single digits or causes actual game freeze level hitching every other step I take inside of them when they're crowded.

The only thing I can do in them is try to deliver pizzas from my router base and throw down tank/prox mines near the pizza
I don't consider that "gameplay". A mobile APP waifu clicker usually has more interactivity

Containment Sites are way, way, way, to complicated.

I think it would have been better to have used existing mechanics that people are already familiar with. Everyone playing the game, even the most casual, have done the tutorial and have overloaded a generator, and then seen how it takes down a shield, that you can then move through. The Containment Sites could have one way shields, identical to the ones that surround spawn rooms throughout the game, those shields could come down by blowing generators, generators that would be identical to the ones seen elsewhere in the game. These would create the levels of the base that people would have to move through.

That way at each level you would have to control a large room within the base, overload the generator placed in an exposed location in the middle, doing that would then take down the shield that would allow you to push the spawn room; and in doing so move deeper into the base.

Its not easy making a new base, but I would have started with something simpler like that.

You know... I had a conversation with someone recently about a Containment Site.

Me: "I just started playing again, I thought they'd remove the direction arrows by now. Are they going to remove them?"
Player: "Remove them? They're here to stay. People are still getting lost down here."

• First mistake was designing it circular.
• Second mistake was designing it underground.
• Third mistake was designing it symmetrical.
• Fourth mistake was making aesthetics identical.

This is what happens when you create an annular subterranean base. Did you know people have played World of Warcraft for years and they still get lost in the Horde "Undercity"?

I have just come up with a band aid fix for containment sites. Recolour the terrain. Give the walls of this convoluted mess some colour, and slap some arrows and "this way to X" signs everywhere. If they aren't removing them, they need to make it way, waaaaay more obvious what is where and how to do sweet frig all in the base. And it would certainly help make the aesthetics more interesting.

I didn't even know it was circular. A linier progression in and out of the base would have kept things simple. There could be alternative routes for flaking and spreading out the masses, but you don't want people going around in circles.

The original game have signs around the bases - worked well and blended in with the aesthetics of the base.