[Suggestion] Should Repair tools/medic tools require ammo?

Again, I don't know the details of the EMP Grenade that much. Didn't see Tools being affected in that linked entry, but who knows how updated that was (tag on it says 2-25-15, but that could refer to any content change on there, and wouldn't reflect any newer changes).

Specifically, I see the Revive issue in the Server Smash/Hardcore Organized Rapid-Deploy-Infantry Meta. It kills mixed unit, wider use of map terrain, etc. I find it repulsive as a Meta, but if the SS players love it, then it's hard to justify changing it... except that the game's slowly dying, and it's the lame gameplay (that being one type) that is pushing people out.

Some of those things are there for a reason. They give bases both strategic value and at the tsame time avoid endless streams of vehicles.

Designed by Morons? Or were they designed with the idea that dying should be a bit of a punishment? Dying should slow you down! Have you ever played on a TF2 Server that had instant respawn? It's next to impossible for one team to win unless the teams are so unbalanced it's a steamroll. OH GOD you died and have to take 30 seconds of your life to go get another plane instead of the 8 it takes you at the tower! Boo hoo.

That is the kind of thing people put into a game as a limiter....someone shot you down. IT should take you more then 20 seconds to have another plane back there to harass them. They reward should be a minute or two with out you doing fly overs. Yes yes, some people will indeed avoid stuff to minmax(avoid difficult things to do easy exp asap) Because that is a bit of human nature. The reward needs to be sufficient. But when we are talking times of less then 30 seconds just to get a vehicle back in the air and someone is whining about it...they are really just lazy fatties. So would you spawn at a further away base just so you didn't have to run an extra twenty seconds to get to the terminal? Because it will likely take you twenty seconds longer just to get back to the fight you died at. It doesn't get you anywhere all that faster. PS1 had bases that it always took about the same time to get to the terminal. Landing/ammo pads were a premium however. And planes would sometimes have to distances as long as half a PS2 continent just to get some ammo. ( Air towers were like gold for your army and people would often insert stealth teams just to take them behind enemy lines) This game doesn't have enough tactical stuff like that.

Respawn hopping is again...slower than just getting a flash. The problem with this game is it's too easy to get around with out vehicles. If you ask me I wish we could remove redeploy and require players to run back to the spawn rooms in order to redeploy. If your ESF gets shot down in enemy territory and you LA out. or your Tank gets destroyed and you hide...you should have to run back to friendly lines or die...not hide for ten seconds and get rewarded for your poor choices. But we are getting way off topic...

If I recall, EMP empties shields/Cloaker battery/Engi Turrets over heat/Spitfires won't fire/removes hud from players/sets off explosvies/ kills respawn beacons/shield recharge deployables/ and LA jet pack.

IT doesn't effect medic tool or Engi tool in any way.

Causing enemies to stalemate against each other can also be seen as a strategic use of force in cases. Your complaint is based more on intent and building agency that detaches intent from behavior is tricky.
In any case that does not explain how this favors the aforementioned groups. If they are already doing this successfully, then it obviously doesn't matter what condition the target/victim Vehicles are in at the time of engagement. For that reason, whether or not I find the same act undeniably deplorable as you do, I am trying to focus on the game in general. Independent aberrant behavior will always manifest because people disagree over basic terms of engagement.

The span of almost all bases can be run across in a minute, tops. There's also an assortment of teleporters and jumppads. The span of most all continents can be flown across (in an ESF) in a minute, tops. There's also redeploying which can take you back to your Warpgate from the base outside of the enemy's Warpgate on the other side of the continent in basic respawn time. Region-loading issues (remember the triple loading bar?) and the spawn list notwithstanding, neither of which the user has direct control over anyway, respawn timers rarely exceed ten seconds.
We're talking about in-game distances being perceived as "too far" or "taking too long." Even distance is an element of logistics that should matter more than it currently does and "things being too close" can be as much an issue.

I think he was unhappy because the weekly balance sheet shows eight hours less work and, from how you explain it, no one was trying to make that time up. Managers and supervisors can be sensitive about things like that. Trying to explain it as if it were a simple mathematic problem might at least qualify as "missing the point."

That's a point to make - the Engineer and the Medic don't have "entry-level logistics." Their Tools completely bypass any form of logistical concerns, to the point where it would look like lazy design were not everything else in this game shades of that. (That's why I keep saying that we can not touch them, even if we wanted to, unless we affected all other aspects equally.)

I'm not even saying this from some kind of height of pompness or arrogance because I am in no position to talk from that plateau; nor, do I want to claim that this game is in any form perfect; however, you have a deplorable amount of meaningless whine mixed in with actual game concerns that can not realistically be addressed in the game's current state. Half of the things we could group under "new player experience," for example, are legitimate UX problems and the rest are just people complaining that the game doesn't doesn't cater to whatever they want on a silver platter. Some of the listed frustrations can be outright avoided - "redeploy hop(ping)" - by doing something else, occasionally much smarter - "self-transport (you'll be able to go right to where you want to be)."

It's quite a good idea. But I think in reality, it's just going to be annoying.
What is your underlying purpose for it? Are you saying it because it makes sense? Or because you want the game-play to alter?
If this came into effect, I think it would make it harder for good players to survive against the battle of 'attrition' that generally already occurs. i.e. It would even out the odds so that there is less division between 'noob' and 'pro' players. (which I don't like, I would prefer for this to be well distinguished)

I think it would be a great addition to the game if only the game had more PS1 in it.
In ps1 sure you ran out of med juice during a hectic 15 minute CC hold, but if you did you simply asked anyone you saw around you for some ammo for it. Or you risked looting some from a corpse (could be friendly or enemy). Often in those hectic generator holds or CC holds you'd intentionaly drop a box or two of 9mm ammo, shotgun ammo, med juice or engi glue (we had no shields in PS1, just body armour the engi had to repair, similar to a max now, there was a seperate tool for infantry armour repairs and vehicle armour repairs) so that anyone who needed it could pick it up without asking, so the floor would be littered with different ammo boxes dropped by different members of the squad not just the single almost ever lasting ammo pack the engi gets now.

I think this helped to promote the team aspect a lot more than an engi hitting F and continuing to fight like normal.

So i think for this to work we'd need a way of sharing ammo with other players without using an ammo pack.
Perhaps we could have some sort of inventory screen that shows our entire inventory, including the ammo, and to give it to someone else we simply click it to drop it on the floor.

Thought of another bonus for limiting medic tool to ammo.
Currently you dont see many medics healing, just reviving because it quicker, in PS1 it costed more ammo to revive than it did to heal, this would put more emphasis on healing before death.

Not sure how revive grenades, healing grenades and the medics 'F' area healing ability would fit into this.


TLDR: I like the idea, but it would not fit into the PS2 universe.

I think the idea is to reduce the potential for instantly-forming attrition and promote planning.

By way of exemplary theorycrafting: the current situation involves killing Medics as soon as possible because they can constantly keep resurrecting their own. If you don't kill the Medic before going down, that whole group is right back on its feet, nomatter how many times you encounter the group. What if, instead, you make killing even the non-Medics a viable tactic, thus that eventually the Medics will exhaust all the revival juice that is immediately available to them? Now that group has reason to maintain passage to a resupply-able location so that they can restock when in protracted fights. More to the point, maybe one player has to coordinate and switch off with someone else in doing Medic duties because he's used up all the revival juice that he could afford to restock for now?

No...it could be annoying you are right.

Honestly I know this isn't PS1 and it won't ever be. But the other night I was in a fight and i just watched this line of tanks standing back spamming the hell out of the base. When they would take an AV shot or two they would just back up and repair and be right back at it. I felt....this is kind of BS. DBG just tries to balance out Infantry by giving them more and more dumb AV options. When honestly....it might just give them a break if those tanks had to turn around and return for more repair juice now and then. It would see more territory used more often for supply sundies and generally I feel that if we could find a way to make this work it would inspire more tactical minded fun instead of....*spawn tank...point at nearst enemy base...hit W* Where could they approach from that would give them time on target and places to hide so they didn't have to return to base because they wasted all their nanites just trying to get behind the enemy some dumb way.

I really think this will help keep the Harasser in check more than anything. Even when I drive mine around behind enemy lines it's so easy to repair to full health with 2 people it's silly. Our only limit is ammo and half the time I'm running a walker...so I have almost 2k ammo in reserve. This would make repairing from the 3rd seat in the harasser more of a desperate move. Now days we just drive around and jump in the back and repair real slow but it doesn't really hamper us. It would make Harassers more hit and run or else they run out of nanites far faster.

The thing I feel the game lacks is any real depth. It just feels mostly like a TDM that moves base to base and there really isn't much of a reason to think about it. Which I would love to change.

I thought it destroyed spitfires?

Nerfing Engineers would already be a nerf to tanks and aircraft... not like you can repair other non-MAX infantry.

Being a bit greedy and asking for vehicle to be doubly nerfed, are we?

Nope, they simply stand there and don't do a thing till it wears off. But they live through it.

I am all for having limits (inlcuding delays) on Vehicles and other things. I applaud things like Rocket Pod small Ammo Pool so they have to leave the fight and reload (I think they should reduce the Ammo pool on Hornet, etc.). I just don't think this (making some bases take a long time to get to the terminal there, when it's easy/fast/safer to just take the time to spawn at a different base and commute back) is a healthy or meaningful way to do it.

I shouldn't have said Morons. It's not nice or fair or accurate. I know many Level Designers and they are often great and very bright people. My apologies. They are not morons any more than the rest of us, in that we all have areas we don't "get". They (Level Designers as a group) just lean toward certain obsessions/fixations/bias in game design, that is more aesthetics and less functionality.

I worked at Sigil as an Associate Designer. I worked with Level Designers, many of my best friends are Level Designers. I've had numerous friends who were Level Designers at SOE. I've discussed this issue with them at length: form vs. function. They share an obsessions with aesthetics. Of how it looks, of wishing they could control the settings of all players so they could control the visual experience. Many of them do not have a critical eye for function, MOST of them do not play the game.

The Art Department (and their aesthetics obsession) is why turning the game on high graphics makes it looks pretty, but does not attend properly to its playability. And I'm not just talking FPS, I'm talking visibility, clutter, etc.

Design and Art work together on Level Design. But it's often a tug of war. I'm not sure how it on PS2 Dev, but it could get pretty ugly at Sigil (though there were many times it worked great too). And even when Design does control the Art (or the Artist has an eye for design), it can often still go bad. Which is fine, so long as there is the flexibility (any budget for retouches? or a Level Designer willing to work overtime on their own dime?) or mindset, that will allow for corrections to be made later on. But so many Devs are so stubborn on making changes to their content. And themselves so close minded. And not just in bias (which is bad, but at least it's following a preferred criteria), but in just doing it "their way" even if feedback/playability shouts against it.

Well, SOE culture was famous for it's "dying should be punishment" ethos. It's one reason (of many) why it lost the war with WoW. But I don't know (and don't think) that exists as a Dev ethos in PS2. Sure, there are things designed to reward/punish, but they don't seem to hit the extremes of some of the things in EQ (or even Vanguard). And I am not against a reward/punish system, as long as it's productive and contributes to a better play experience.

Punishment and downtime are not the same thing (though they can overlap). Downtime is simply time delays in completing objectives. Punishment is actually delivering unfun to the players, though it can include delays as a form of that.

My Level Design complaint is that making the game non-intuitive (purposefully or not) or have arbitrary delays, without actual net gain in player experience, detracts from the game. *IF* they do have a purpose, and it can be seen to be productive, then that is a totally different issue. The gap in the Air Resupply Pads that players could fall through to their deaths was a good example of non-intuitive and unfun gameplay.

My complaint about Hvar is that not only is it unfun to repeatedly jump though all the hoops to get from the Spawnroom to the Air Terminal, but it's actually something players can workaround (faster and no hoops) by just spawning at the Warpgate and then wasting the time (thought less of it) to fly back. It's like you want to go to MdDonald's, but the one by your house has no parking, so you have to park and walk for 10 minutes to go there. So instead you just drive the McDonald's with parking that is 5 more minutes driving time. And nobody goes to the McDonald's around your house and it just sits there, and every time you drive past it to the other one, you facepalm.

It's why so many Weapons/Certs/etc. in this game are just not being used: there is no effective quality control that works to make the elements in the game sidegrades. Lotta this is in that the Devs don't play the game, some is their stubbornness, some is their aptitude, some budget, some laziness, ego, preference,etc. It's all the same stuff you see at almost any business, school, task, etc. Think of the sheer number of workarounds players use to play PS2. All those workarounds are examples of bad design in the game. Bad design is totally understandable in the short term, things happen. But neglected bad design for months/years is dismal. Workaround also foster the Broken Window Theory effect, where people who see small scale ignored problems start to view the system as unhealthy and broken.

If it took me 1 second less to get in Air at Hvar from Hvar than it did to spawn at Warpgate and get to Hvar, then I would be fine with it. If I was encouraged to spawn at Hvar, then enemies could actually fly to it and try to intercept/disrupt me. But I just pull from the Warpgate, and good gameplay elements are lost and unfun is delivered.

But in this case it *IS* faster (and safer, and less cumbersome) to spawn at Warpgate and fly back to Hvar.

I am not complaining about delays in spawning Vehicles. I am complaining about content that is trivialized by other content, with no apparent gain.

If I were designing bases (or collaborating with a Level Designer as a Content Designer), I would play through each unit and note deploy time it took from each location. I would then set a standard "player spawn to vehicle spawn" time limit to make sure to follow (with the option to break it if it added something to the game). Just like I would try to take different vehicles/Infantry over the different terrain to make sure players could get access where I wanted, etc. Not just building terrain for viewing, but actually building terrain for playability too.

I am not against longer flight times back to resupply. That is not the issue I am complaining about. I am complaining about skipping content because other content is just better. Spawning ESFs at Warpgate and not Hvar to get an ESF to Hvar, using a Dalton as A2A and not using the actual A2A role gun. Taking OFF the Forward Grip on some guns because it actually reduces accuracy. Etc, etc.

The worst abuses of fast deployment are Organized Play. Though I agree that even the average lone wolf still has a very quick deploy.

While I value a game that features tedious logistics, I don't think it's something the FPS mass market want. I would address this by making a Server (or even pocket Continent) with "alternate rules" where players who wanted tedious logistics could indulge in it. I would advocate all manner of alternate rules "pocket continents" where people could try all kinds of stuff, it's no worse on a mass appeal than Hossin, and that's in the game.

If you want to develop a tedious logistics game (and you want it to still be a battle game and not a Road Warrior survival game), you need to deal with Gank Squads. Roaming farmers with superior mobility/fireopwer who pick off players trying to travel. You can do this through any number of means: better non-Squad communication tools, (better/easier) Radar on ally areas, etc.

Ok

Good points, limiting how many times a medic can revive other units would stop the annoying 'revive hopping' that occurs. There will be other negatives to this change, but overall I would certainly suggest at least trialing it.

In regards to tanks, why not make it so that you can't repair something while it is being damaged? It kind of doesn't make sense to be repairing a hole in a tank while it's still under fire anyway =\
The same for medics, it should be done out of combat.
Perhaps have a 5 seconds timer after you've stopped receiving damage before repairing/healing can be done?
Thoughts?

You seem to be locked into "contrarian mode".

It's A2A Ganking. It's just farming. I've been in Gank Squads... we don't talk about any Faction Support strategy. It's just "too much flak here, clear the area", "I see a Reaver at x base, let's jump him","ok, let's take a brake for everyone to re-supply, meed-up at x base".

I'm not saying that it's less Faction Supporting than other types of farming, griefing, etc. But it is what it is.

If they add gameplay that results in a large increase of empty ESFs on Air Pads, we will see an increase in people prowling Air Pads for easy scores: Air, Vanguards, Squad Beaconed Infantry, etc.

Nothing massive, just an increase... of gameplay... that has nothing to do with the intended focus of this game.

Try thinking of it in relative terms...

Ease
Speed
Risk

Hvar Spawn room to ESF at Hvar vs. Western Warpgate to ESF at Hvar.
Mao vs. Northern Warp Gate
Peris vs. Western Warpgate

I am not complaining that it takes 6 hours to get to the Hvar Air Terminal. I am complaining that the entire Hvar Air Terminal is obsolete 90% of the time. What is the point of the PS2 Military of building base assets it makes no sense to use? Or Weapons it makes no sense to use? Or Loadouts? Etc.

So much of this game is so poorly balanced/designed, that it is largely obsolete and not used. It's like a 32-character Fighting Game where only 3 characters are viable at the top tier: why make 29 characters that nobody ends up using?

Think how much of the development time would have been saved (usable for other things) if they just made Tankbuster and stopped there. Why bother with the other Nose guns for the Lib? Was the Design and Art and Code time really worth the 10 Unique Users of the Spur last month? Their total 27 kills for the month?

Why use an inferior Weapon? Why develop an inferior Weapon with no follow-up efforts to fix it? Directives? To give the other guns a sense of perspective and easiness of consumer selection and product satisfaction: yeah, I am using the BEST one?

My wild idea is to actual change obsolete stuff so it's usable.

...

Perhaps I was unclear. He wasn't complaining that people weren't working overtime to cover for time lost. He was complaining because he couldn't figure out why the schedule (as it was) didn't add up to 40 hours total. It was a bookkeeping thing, not a oh-no-our-productivity-is-down thing. He was doing 8 x 5 = 40, without realizing that 1 person missing 1 day for a 5-day work week is 8 x 4 = 32.

It's mathz. Not miracle-man-month.

All good. If it helps any, I don't put you up on an particular pedestal.

Let it rip...

It would have helped if you actually broke down WHICH examples were (1) Meaningless whine, and which were (2) actual games concerns that can not realistically be addressed in the game's current state. It makes trying to reply a special exercise in confusion.

PS2 Devs have had YEARS and varying levels of Staff to work on things. I worked for Sigil, I am familiar with what budget/labor things need, and how the Dev process works.

"Meaningless whine" is a bad excuse for not tackling easy fixes for lingering bad content.

"Can not realistically be addressed" is a bad excuse for incompetence or laziness or not caring.

You'll notice "Fix Population Balance" is not on the In Development list. And yet I've seen more than 1 post across PC forum, PS2 forum, PC Reddit, and PS4 Reddit crying out for a fix to to Population Balance problem. I see Bounties is on the todo list. I don't remember any players asking for that. Perhaps you can link the deluge of posts that cried out for it. PS2 Devs are largely pursuing pet projects, they are like a volunteer mod community.

You are the guy who opens up the restaurant and then goes out of business, and then blames other for not "getting it" and showing up and buying your food. I am the guy who opens up, goes out of business, and says, "who was my intended customer, how could I have reached them better, how could I have made it work?"

It's a lousy New Player experience because when you log on as a new player... you find a game experience that is built for "not you":
1) PS2 Dev personal projects
2) the existing playerbase (high level players)

I could sit down with new players, one after another, and watch where they are hitting walls. Then I could take notes and figure out how to clear out those walls. Then sit down and test again to see if it worked.

Why do we have Instant Action button? Who is it for? Answer: it's for the Devs. It's for the Devs to be able to say "see, we have 'Instant Action' in our game". It's not there for players.

I know a lot of people get fixated on buying into and creatively rationalizing an opaque system because it is the one they are in. But there is no actual substance to doing so.

alright see, i noticed a huge debate on features and this is all that matters:

heal gun heat mechanic (with the ability to heal self with tool)

revival prevention mechanic (players cant be revived when executed)

execution mechanics with custom execution types which can be bought from the store (pistol, knife, etc executions on dead players to force them to respawn)

engineer ammo pack supply types (one that supplies explosives, another that supplies bullets, maybe a crate for vehicle weapon resupplying)

engineer perk that when they are in a vehicle it recieves a buff like medic which offers aoe healing.
(This could be aoe ammo restoration, vehicle damage resistance increase, etc.)

engineer turrets should be open to be used by other players

spawns need to not be boxes exposed to the open where vehicles can attack them, but also allow enemy infantry to get inside them.