I should preface this by saying that I think very poor base design is the root of the vehicle spam problem. Almost all bases and outposts can be completely dominated by vehicles. The only exception to this are Biolabs, which explains why many people flock to those battles and refuse to leave. The Crown is another exception for similar reasons -- it can't be dominated by vehicles. If bases were designed better, with more cover for infantry, and more infantry-only areas, the vehicle spam wouldn't be such a huge issue. After all, in PS1, vehicle spam could be just as prevalent, but once the fight reached the base proper, particularly the courtyard, the ONLY way it could be captured would be to get out on foot and enter the base -- this is not the case in PS2, as every base has convenient openings for tank shells and bombs to obliterate the infantry inside. I suggested this in beta to try to reduce the vehicle spam, but I'll suggest it again, as it's a problem that's only getting worse: Modify the resource cost of vehicles Liberators should cost 750. The Zepher should also only fire one bomb at a time rather than six. MBTs should cost 700. Remove HE cannons entirely, or dramatically reduce their strength. ESFs should cost 700. Lightnings should cost 650. Again, remove the HE cannons, or reduce their strength. Reduce costs across the board for Sunderers, Galaxies, and Flash's. Dramatically reduce the amount of XP earned when in a vehicle. XP earned should be commensurate with the effort required to obtain it. Kill someone with a zepher or an HE shell? 10% XP. Kill someone with rocket pods? 20% XP. Kill someone with a knife? 200% XP. Do not reward players resources when gaining XP while in vehicles, and put a freeze on their resource gain entirely. Because 9 times out of 10, you will be in your vehicle long enough or make enough kills to earn ALL of your resources back. At that point, the only thing preventing you from pulling a new vehicle is the timer, which they can cert away, or just set up a vehicle rotation (Liberator -> MBT -> ESF -> Lightning -> repeat). Resources are currently NOT a restriction whatsoever, and they need to be. This would need to be tuned to prevent people from just hopping out of their vehicle for a few seconds whenever a resource tick is about to occur. Do not reward players for repairing their OWN vehicles or vehicles they have been in within the past 10 minutes. It's aggravating to struggle to take down a sniping magrider who refuses to get in close, only to see him strafe behind a hill to repair the second he starts to smoke -- I'm just rewarding the twit with even more XP. Why should a player be rewarded XP for fixing their own damaged vehicle? That they were damaged in the first place represents a small failure on their part -- don't reward them for it. In addition to this, but I know it's something the devs will be unmovable on: The pilot of an MBT should not be controlling the main gun. It's moronic that they ever were able to in the first place, and we warned you about it. Most of the tanks on a battlefield are 1/2. I know the devs want the players that spent the resources to pull the tank to have the fun of gunning it, but it's ruining the game. This should come with an improvement to sharing XP between the pilot and gunner. Players should really need to cert into combat vehicles to pull them in the first place, ala PS1. Maybe give all players one combat vehicle of every type per day (this would NOT include support vehicles) -- but if they want to pull it again, they need to cert into it. And it needs to be EXPENSIVE. I'm talking 2,500 for liberators and MBTs, 2,000 for lightnings, and that's on the low side (I personally think it should be ~5,000, but I can see how that could be tough to swallow).
I would be fine with all of this, but we need some way to learn flying so we don't blow 700 resources to crash 30secs out of our warpgate.
We tried higher resource costs during beta and it changes very little, in fact it makes people hang back and spam shells in more than before, so MBT's were even harder to kill as they wouldn't come close and could easily slip away to repair/rearm.
I agree with everything you said. I'd also add this: -You may no longer switch seats/roles inside a Liberator. Too many Liberators don't bother picking up a tail gunner because the bomber can instantly switch between the two. If you take off without a tail gunner, you should be at a severe disadvantage.
Crappy solution to Veh/Air spam = Higher costs, which leads to more camping. Better solution to veh spam. = PS1 Cert system. Too late now though
It's already dead, though. Planetside 2 is currently a vehicle-based game, where playing infantry is just a transitional state from one vehicle to the next.
What's worse is when you finally get out of the warpgate only to have some other pilot crash into you.
I cannot see it on the field on my server yet. We have a ton of infantry play. What server are you on?
Mattherson. Don't get me wrong, there is infantry play -- I was being slightly facetious. However, I play with a large outfit that's primarily infantry-based, so those infantry engagements are mostly done by us forcing those engagements (usually by clearing out all the tanks, first). But inevitably almost all our battles devolve into us being surrounded at an outpost by upwards of 30 to 40 MBTs and lightnings with a few liberators hanging in the sky, with no infantry in sight. It's at times like this where the horrible base design rears its ugly head, as there's hardly any places to find cover, and there's usually nothing to stop an MBT from rolling right in (tank mines only last so long, and are usually destroyed first by the indiscriminate shelling of vehicles). When I have my rocket launcher equipped more frequently than my LMG, it's a problem.
With regards to our current one to two man crewed MBTs. MBT was supposed to stand for medium battle tank, as a hybrid between the lightning and the never added HBT- heavy battle tank. The HBT would had been a three man crew, with a driver, a gunner and a optional secondary gunner, and would be considerably stronger then MBTs in both terms of health and fire power. HBTs were never added to the game, and later they planned for you to be able to cert into allowing your mbt to have a three man crew. In reward for the driver giving up his ability to gun, the main cannon would be made considerably stronger, however I have yet to hear any news on this since beta.
Maybe it is the bases people should stick with getting changed then. Your proposals above will make it so a large organized Outfit always has tanks and the small unorganized will always have none. It also leads to more 'Battle Buses' being used to get around the draconian measures you look to take against vehicles. One guild with more of the map and 200+ people will be able to field tanks and libs at all times compared to the guild of 24 with less territory who will never have a chance in the open. They will rotate their timers and resources so that they have 20-30 tanks at all times. You even go farther to hurt the smaller force by making no resource gain while in a vehicle. Making it more of a boon to have the bigger force and more territory.
I agree with all of this. On my server, Grenere or w/e, it's horrible. It's low population in the evening to begin with, and everyone is in a vech of some kind. My squad and I will rarely leave a biodome unless there is a major battle somewhere else. I also think that having more options to destroy vech's at a range would help keep the vech spam down, from an infantry unit that is. Heavy rockets should 1 shot a lightning, 2 shot medium class, and 3 shot or even 2 shot large vech's. Lock-ons should be more deadly and longer followingtime. Either give heavies more options, or make them stronger, as mentioned, then give another class some kind of ranged option. I would say engineers could have maybe the weaker versions of heavy rockets, but they already have tons of mines so I'm unsure. ATM I find it frustrating to have to switch to a heavy just to fire back at tanks spamming at me. Especially to see them just move as rockets don't travel nearly fast enough. Shelk
I can understand limited airspace and land-vehicle resources, but Infantry resources should not be slowed down(grenades, C4, medkits etc). Regarding the Certs, I certainly do not support having to heavily cert into a vehicle for it to become a viable option, especially when a lot of the players just earn 30-40 certs an hour. Rather than giving them a Cert cost, give all vehicles a bigger cooldown and share the cooldown of land vehicles and air vehicles individually?(galaxy being a third cooldown) Tanks/Sunderers - 1hour Airplanes - 1 hour And then remove the option to cert into their acquisition speed. (This would still allow outfits to pull out a tank column if they combined their cooldowns to create fun/interesting play) Vehicles are supposed to be powerful, we should rather focus on reducing their availability rather than strength.
WOW! so the solution to the over abundance of vehicles. is to basically take vehicles out of the game?! this thread is rediculo9us and displays a blatant ignorance of how a combined arms game works. Things like "zepher should only fire one round at a time"?. how about no! make it less universal by limiting its damage against armored targets. its an anti-infantry killing machine that requires at least 2 people to operate and is HIGHLY susceptible to ESF and AA damage. Remove HE?! yes because giving tanks a VERY limited infantry capability is the perfect solution............how about you make the HE more defines. little to no damage against vehicles and it destroys infantry. that will stop most of the spamming. vehicles cost your full resource pool?! sure if grenades cost 250 each as well i suppose. if your getting 100 aroespace resources every 15 min, then it would take you 1 hour and 45 minutes to use a plane. a little extreme dont you think? especially considering that you want to neuter them? Im sorry but I could write a reason of stupidity on nearly every suggestion but ill just sum it up with this: this is a combined arms game, DEAL WITH IT. vehicles are SUPPOSED to have an effect on every aspect of gameplay JUST like infantry does. stop trying to make this a COD/BF3 with a huge map. inf gameplay exists in 99% of the games out there but a true combined arms gameplay exists in only one game that I know of: PS2. If you want to suggest changes to make the game better do so in a may that adds depth and playability, not just horrible attempts to nerf the dog snot out of anything that kills you.
The game worked fine in PS1 with multiple people manning a tank. In fact it worked better than in PS2 since coordinating with multiple people usually meant more planning going into attacks and defense and more coordination. That would definitely counter the zerg mentality.
