Problems with PlanetSide 2 as I see them.

I was actually coming over to post something similar about the Vehicles. As it stands now, it is far too easy to obtain a vehicle, and the continents are swarming with them.

This can be addressed in three ways. One of which is creating one Universal Resource. Next is to vastly increase the resource cost of vehicles. Last is to vastly decrease the amount of Resource gain. This will force people to use their vehicles wisely, and to do everything they can to save it and not die in it.


Next, I think that for Vehicles a Rock - Paper - Scissors approach should be taken. As the vehicles become rarer, they should become more powerful, but specifically vulnerable to something on the battlefield. Base Turrets should be vulnerable to MBT's. MBT's should be vulnerable to the hit and run Medium Tanks. The Mediums should be vulnerable to Base Turrets. All of it has some give or take based on the equipment mounted, but the vehicles should be most powerful in a specific role.

Past that, the OP is firing on all cylinders. I especially agree about the Universal Certifications. If I buy a specific scope for one rifle, it's ridiculous to have to rebuy it for another or a different class. With this, the cost of them should go up.

As much as I don't like Buzz and his band or merry men. I have to agree with his points/post.

I made an earlier post but I want to add to it and go into some details.

With regards to base design, I agree that the spawn rooms need to be re-located, or changed in such at a way that they cannot effectively be camped. It doesn't have to be a massive change, only enough to prevent camping.

I don't think bluntly reducing the damage of HE cannons is the answer. Reducing the fire rate of HE cannons and their ammunition capacity could be useful; that way, a single well placed shot could do signifiant damage without spam... And it would reduce the spam of HE from many vehicles, too. But the base design change should massively help the problem of HE spam when defending bases, though.

The AMS farming is an issue, yes, but I don't think making troops immune to damage just after spawning is a good idea. I do, however, think that they should have massively reduced kill XP, or perhaps not registering a kill on the attacker's score until they are either a sufficient distance from the AMS, or after a certain time, like 10 seconds.

I don't think there should be no XP for capping empty bases. Because this will punish players who take the initiative and take sectors that the enemy isn't defending. Instead, there should be more incentive to encourage players to stick around and defend bases, rather than just follow the massive zerg to the next base.

With resources, either combat vehicle costs should be increased, or the timer for Resource income increased. I agree that resources are not really factoring much into things (unless a faction is pushed right back to their warpgate).

As for the KDR, I think that the stats should be recorded, but I also agree that assists, heals, repairs and various support actions should have a prominent place in the score, also.

I've said in my previous post that I agree with giving incentive to AA, adding a bonus to players who hit enemy aircraft is a great idea. It could be like 5+ XP for each hit, or something. To give players some motivation to clear the skies. This will also help with the amount of aircraft that farm etc.

As for the influence system, I think that base capture timers need to be adjusted, but I think that fundamentaly, the influence system is good. Because this allows for tactics when capturing, say a Bio Lab. You can surround it and capture it faster... However, I think that influence should only serve to increase capturing timers, not reduce them. 100% friendly influence will have the default timer, and it will get increasingly longer until 100% enemy influence, which will be un-capturable. There could also be a timer displaying how much more time is remaining on the UI, to complement the bar.

I find this critique a bit one sided. BCP is asking for nerfs and re-balances that would favor his outfit's preferred game-play style. Said gameplay style makes them extremely vulnerable to zephers and grenades. Instead of changing tactics, they come here and ask for a rebalance.

If said rebalance takes place, everyone will have to adopt the same tactics as The Enclave.

Drastic rebalancing is almost never successful after launch, and tends to be a waste of developer resources. Instead, I would suggest to update your tactics from PS1.

You clearly don't know who Buzz is.

I've talked to the guy and he seemed pretty down to earth... Though he exploits the very things he complained about, he's right.

SOE will have to re-work a LOT of things in this game or it's dead in 60 days.

I don't know what I can say that hasn't been said already.

+1, good job. Long *** read but it makes plenty of sense.

This seemed to be a well-received thread. Have their developers ever responded to thoughts like these? We should keep this thread alive and maybe they will take heed.

So glad you mentioned the Universal Resource. This is the way to move forward. Give us only one pool and let US choose what we want to spawn or use it for, be it one MBT, two lightnings in quick succession or lots of grenades and c4. The current system of three pools makes it so everyone is garaunteed to have a tank AND an aircraft waiting for them even if they are doing heavy infantry ops with C4, etc. It's stupid and leads to constant vehicle zergs. Wish they had listened to this feedback in beta.

The 2 ways to fix the zepher is:
1) make infantry AA more frighting and effective to scare of libs.
2) give the zepher a slightly bigger mag (10 rounds?) but a MUCH LONGER (4x-6x longer) reload time to allow infantry to spawn as AA and attack the lib.
Without being farmed

The way I see PS2 is that it has been nothing but a slightly entertaining cash grab that is still in beta.

It will NEVER fully recover from the mistakes it has made.
It will also NEVER fully address all the points because it is simply too far away from doing so. Also, it wants to cater to the larger, casual crowd and so cannot address many points. In addition it wants to retain the same incentive for players to pay for items and items will become less desirable when nerfed, so the devs will not do this to avoid loss of money.

Planetside 2, although enjoyable, is going to die pretty fast for a triple A F2P game.
So disappointing

EDIT:
The reason why there are so many flaws is more to do with the player base and player mentality rather than game design. This is partly due to the F2P (P2W *cough*) nature of the game.

The game can only do so much to influnce players to play a certain way. Sadly, PS2 had done very little.

F2P is PS2's worst enemy. True story.

This is why PS1 was WAAAYYYY more tactical and strategy based - because mainly serious adult gamers played it because it had a fee.

I am a bit so so on Buzz' post, so here are a few of my thoughts.

I will agree that the statsystem needs work and that as it is now, K/D seems to be the only thing to "messure" your abilities with and that is silly since it is one of the most useless stats in the game. However If you don't take risks because it hurts your K/D then it is your loss.

I do not agree with Buzz even the slightest that resupplying ammo and healing/ressing is a not worth enough xp. If you are not earning a ton of xp as a Medic, then you are doing it wrong.

Farming kills to get XP.....that will never change, even if the xp for kills were ½ of what they are now, people would still farm.
Giving some sort of immunity to newly spawned is an idea I hope will stay on the paper. You know the risk when you spawn at a Sundere and if you get killed more than once at the same sundere, then you were fooled twice, shame on you. If you don't like getting killed when you spawn, only spawn in bases.

I do agree that cap'ing and especially defending should yield more xp, but ONLY if there was a fight during the takeover (like they had in Planetside 1). I kinda like the influence system, but I will agree that capping a base goes very fast, making defense harder. On the plus side this does give a more dynamic battlefront and game.

Making bases more defendable and creating more areas were vehicles can't come. Yes please. In Planetside 1 there was a continent where you could not spawn "advanced" vehicles (like tanks), I hope we get one of those in an upgrade.
I don't think the HE is to good at what it does (killing infantry), but it is too good at killing armor. If HE got a nerph vs armor and AP got a little nudge up towards armor, we would get that Rock, Paper, Cissors thing going.
I do hate Liberators when I am playing infantry (and odly enough love them when I am the pilot). I think the biggest problem with Liberators is, that most fighter pilots is more busy rocket podding infantry than keeping the skies clear, not that I would frown if they at some point fix my grounder so it can actually hit flying objects.

They had EMP grenades in Planetside 1 and I was very fond of them, it would be nice if one more infantry class would get them (only Infils have them now I beleave).

Defendable structures. Buzz suggest closing a few windows and doors, I wish they would bring back some of the bases from Planetside 1. Partly underground, rooms connected by hallways, fighting from room to room....ah those were the days.
I know some players have an issue with grenades, but when I die to a grenade, it is 90% of the time because I wasn't paying attention or because I got greedy spawncamping.

Certs: Sure it would be logical if, when you unlocked armor for one class, it was unlocked for other classes. As for C4 guns on vehicles and so on, I think it works fine as it is. We will be swamped in C4, mines, ect soon enough.
Remember we have only been playing for a few months. We are not ment to have everything yet. One year from now, we will be drowning in maxed out infantry and vehicles (most likely it will be less than a year actually).

Lastly Medic revives. Leave them as they are. If you want a Medic to res you to 100%, play in a team that has such a Medic and only accept resses from him and shields recharge just fine, if you want them to charge faster, put certs into it "but then I loose my armor...." yes and that is the tradeoff you will have to make.

Here's some more suggestions I think that would help:

Capturing points should give more XP and certs to those involved, the larger and better defended the base, the better the rewards.
Defending a base should give more rewards depending on how long you hold it, so actually trying to hold onto territory becomes meaningful.

Also perhaps increased universal bonuses for the amount of territory your faction owns, gives real incentive to capture more.

Redesign the bases so that there is actual tactical significance to them... as has been said plenty of times already, they're really badly designed. Even some of the placements are just wierd... a turret that faces a cliff face? How useful is that? Wouldn't you build some sort of turret ontop of the cliff instead?

I've already suggested things like being able to close doors and windows from the inside to better focus defenses, others have suggested one way shields on the windows. Both would help.

The redesigning is an important part of that though. Bases should be set up in a way where a significantly smaller number of defenders can hold a base if they know what they're doing. With buildings laid out as they currently are, that won't work.

I think vehicles should be more expensive. If you're in a combat vehicle, losing it should be pretty significant to you for a while. The little transport ones, not so much, they should remain cheap.

Personally I've never paid any attention to my KDR, I'm just playing for fun, I die a lot. But I'm playing a medic mostly, so I'm not always equipped to kill stuff (It doesn't help that I spend about as much time getting shot by my own team as by enemies on my server... they're pretty useless bunch.)

Disagree with the KDR comment .. It could be removed and a lot of the problem's would remain ..
In a game where Kills = XP = Cert's = Char Improvement, player's will tend towards finding the path of least resistance. They will find cheap ways to get kills, they will use the current " Farm " item, they will try to keep themselves away from Death ( downtime ) as much as possible, they will play more selflessly.
KDR isn't the Elephant in the room, it's just a boil on the Elephants backside ..


As for the rest .. Tis only repeat's of what other's have been saying for week's , so agree with alot of it as I agreed when they were originally posted.

Nothing really new or unknown in there but I will give it a bump as I agree with two things in particular

- Vehicle spam is out of control
- Defence is a joke (and the tech plant shield gen change is just another example of how they are getting things wrong over and over)

I have a Major gripe about the liberator being a team based vehicle also. They really need to give xp to ALL gunners when a kill is received. It would make it worthwhile while being a tail gunner.

Who read all 35 pages up to this point?

Agree 100%

Buzz cutt wankahh

Great post, you covered alot of the problems and some solutions.
Its always easy to spot the problems but alot harder to find the solution to it

Exp is the carrot on a stick that the masses will follow. Adjust the exp model and you instantly change the flow of the game.


Defender only jump pads at Amp Stations would be a good change. It would need to be obvious to the average player though. Likely different model/clearly colored in the defending faction's color compared to a neutral jump pad. It could potentially work for Bio Labs but other places have jump pads that are basically for the attackers benefit (the three at Vanu Archives, or the one at Mesa Skydock are good examples) so jump pads can't just have a blanket change of "own the facility to use them."


The influence system seems ok, it's just not leveraged enough. The TR Bio Lab on Indar is a good example. One of the four control points is down on the ground in a building. If you surround the Bio Lab for 100% influence you can just sit two people on that point and eventually take the facility, even if you can't bust past the defending zerg. Most facilities aren't like that Bio Lab though. About the only other time I've really seen splitting control points over a long period come into play is three control point facilities where one of them is in a tower where the defenders are spawning. Everything else is so easy to overrun that the attackers usually have every point or none of them shortly after the fight starts.