For strategy to become important population imbalance and double teaming need to be fixed first. Resource harvesting isn't a solution for those problems. If alert winner is going to be decided by weakest faction focusing on one faction more than the other then strategy element will always be overshadowed by randomness and maybe politicizing. Also redeployside needs to be removed. Most FPS games put conquest points far apart in order to punish blobbing and force players to spread across the map. In Planetside blobbing isn't punished because of the ability to move across vast distances quickly thanks to redeploy. I propose that players shouldn't be able to spawn on different lattice lane more than every X minutes. Winner is determined by 3 factors: strategy, individual player skill and population. Population imbalance is often result of intentional or unintentional double teaming (two factions focusing on third) and will always overshadow the other two factors unless some kind of compensation measures are introduced. Those measures need to be based on front populations rather than continent populations. Even perfectly balanced 33/33/33 population can produce imbalance if one faction gets focused on by others.
How do you expect to enforce any double teaming? Put in a weapons lock on anyone who is attacking a faction that is winning and alert, but only if their faction is not in second place? EVERYONE has been in an alert that was lost because the other two factions lost/won a base and caused that faction to go ahead/ fall behind. There would be literally no way to balance this unless they made only 2 factions. This just seems like salty-ness because you lost a close alert because the other two factions weren't doing what you wanted them to do. DBG has stated that they are looking into "Redeployside" and are even rolling out a fix to spot deployment into an unconnected base in the next update.
Personally I liked the way that Planetside 1 handled redeploy mechanics. I feel it did a better job of it than Planetside 2 does. I am not really sure why they changed it in Planetside 2 as it didn't really need adjusting.
Then we can agree that open-world PVP, the very core of Planetside's design, is at odds with having more 'strategic' game. Resource harvesting/revamp might do good by spreading fights over larger area but it won't fix this core issue. I'd propose an experiment. Devs should implement spawn queue on just one of the continents. I'm willing to bet that continent would become the most popular one because it would have no zerging nor redeployside. Player skill and team tactics would come first,
I'm not sure how that can really fix anything, because then you restrict the amount of people who can spawn in on an alert. Then there would be people who say that all the scrubs jumped in and caused there to be a queue, while all the good players had to wait. (Technically they have this with the cont queue, but that doesn't do much to fix the issue.) Given how everyday people think, especially on the internet, if one group has lets say 40%+ with 1 hour to 30 minutes left in an alert, one would think that all the other faction players would focus on them first. I think one way to fix this might be to reset the continent before the alert hits so everyone is at 33%. There is nothing worse than having an alert start when you have 48% of the map, because you know that everyone is going to be gunning for you first. I really don't think there is a simple way to fix this in any 3 faction game. These things happen all the time. Losing sucks, especially when you lose because the other factions are either double teaming you or they are fighting against each other and a loss of a base will cause someone to go from 33 to 34%. It's like losing any sport by 1 point. People always get made and look at the very end as the cause, and not the actual entire game (alert). Harvesting resources, which has been something that this game really needs would be a great way to bring WPvP, but most people will do whatever is the easiest in order to get the most reward.
Avoiding being double-teamed and trying to force the enemy to fight each other is part of strategy, on a much larger scale. Which bases should you focus your defense on and which should you let fall in order to get the enemy forces closer together and create more links between themselves than your faction. Same as not overexpanding in the first half of an alert to not get focused on for the second half. Redeployside though, that has got to die a million times over in the flaming pits of hell.
Double teaming is probably the most efficient anti-zerg mechanism in the game - when one faction outpops the other two it acts like a countermeasure to that population advantage. Why do you think there are three factions in PS2? It was designed so on purpose to achieve that effect. It was a smart decision if you asked me.
Strategy on macroscopic level does not exist in Planetside 2. It cannot exist because of redeployside. As long as players can teleport around the continent full platoons ignoring all ther ules of time and space there will never be strategy: anyone can join distant fights so it's not possible to outmaneuver the enemy.We've been telling this to the devs for years: Instant action and redeploy must be overhauled immediately this is a top priority. As far as I'm concerned I won't spend money in ps2 anymore until redeployside does not go.
It's part of this game just accept it guys, main purpose of redeploy is to sent player into front line to fight quickly as possible, I don't think everyone want to spawn at warp every time they die after walk or drive a vehicle for 10 minutes to frontier and get killed within a second. If you really want to fix over pop, rid of redeploy isn't help at all, it will be worse then now. To fix this problem, base system should help under pop side by enable or disable something like 1. If defense side is too over pop, base will enable SCU for disable other side to spawn into this base. 2. If attack side is too over pop, base will enable extra turret and enable some oneside shield for some room close a capture point with teleporter inside that room. something like that to balance war power between attack side and defense side. But if you want a tactic warfare like WW2(supply chain, troop carrier, mislead information), I don't think this game going to give it to you like those people who cry for 16v16, 32v32, 64v64 battles.
It would be nice to see some semblance of advanced strategy actually used in the game more so then it rarely is (zergs are the most basic of strategies), most of the time it seems people are trying to go solo while not being competent enough to do so even while in a squad/platoon. With the proper strat you can easily overcome a population imbalance. 2v1 faction teaming up is to be expected in a game like this, you cant win em all. Population issues have a lot of factors that go into it like whether or not a faction is properly rallied to the proper fight and not scattered across the map, whether its prime time or not. enforcing a pop cap in a fight would probably do more harm then good.
NO. This is a mistake that has been in the game for too long: if you want to join a fight quickly Instant Action is the button you have to push. But devs are too blind to see no one uses Instant Action because Redeploy: - Has no cooldown. - Gives you choice about where to fight (aka you avoing being overpopped or spawn when capture timer is close to expire). - Makes you start from the spawn room instead of landing in a drop pod. - Can be used to teleport a huge mass of players to territories under attack because spawn locations on the map do not update in real time. Instant Action and Redeploy must be overhauled. Devs must redesign Instant Action so that it becomes the button for those who want no downtimes in their battles, while Redeploy must be the tool to help team cohesion and reorganization. Right now Redeploy is just getting exploited to win alerts by moving huge masses of players in real time from a base to another. It allows to bypass defenses, wihtout having to spawn transport vehicles. This completely killed all the strategy. Redeploy is what makes Planetside 2 look like a meaningless team deathmatch: you fight in a base, steamroll the enemy, teleport elsewhere. Like when you change map once the match is over in standard fps like CoD
Instantly dead button ? don't said like you never try it, about redeploy why don't listen official video.
2 suggestions how to fix redeployside were: a)Planetside 1 mechanics (I never played it so I don't know) b)When you spawn on your desired rush lane you shouldn't be allowed to switch lanes more than every X minutes (I'd go for 10 or 15 minutes) Funny thing is we have this population imbalance which ruins the FPS aspect and at the same time game is strategically shallow. So my question is: whats the point? Why don't devs simply implement spawn queues - if you die you and your faction has more population in the region then you have to sit in the queue until one of your teammates die so you can replace him.
TR on Miller used to have major population advantage back when Striker was OP. What happened? Did NC and VS team up against TR? Hell no, VS and NC would go fight each other because dealing with TR massive overpop "was not fun". 3 way faction system only works as intended if all factions have equal chance of winning. If the weakest faction is weak beyond hope (that is usually because they lack organized leadership dictating redeployside) then they will randomly focus on one faction more than the other and thus determine the winner.
I think your assessment holds true as long as factions are organized and have equal chance of winning. In that case population imbalance is caused by player choices and strategy. However in most cases when majority of population consists of lone wolves the 3-way faction system only creates random imbalance. There is no strategy involved and pop imbalance nullifies any potential strategy smaller platoons might attempt to execute because they will find themselves outnumbered (or on the other hand will have so much numbers that they won't need any strategy). What needs to be stressed is that current system only works if players are organized. Most often they are not.
Wait, you suggest something you don't even know !? Imbalance pop is part of this game, you should watch their tutorial and you will get what's they build for this game.
I never said it was my suggestion. How do you manage to read things which were not written lol Also thanks for informing us that pop imbalance is part of the game.
