Spawncamping Is Inevitable

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Jygal, Sep 12, 2014.

  1. Jygal

    *WALL OF TEXT INCOMING*

    Spawncamping is Inevitable. It always has been, always will be, and probably still will be in the future, no matter what changes they make to experience gain for spawn kills. Therefore, the earlier stated changes are futile and should not be made. I will attempt to prove this logically.

    [[FACT 1]]

    Every base must have a spawn room of some kind, that acts as a protected zone to the defenders within. This is a simple fact of game design and cannot be altered in any way without fundamentally altering Planetside 2 as a whole.

    [[FACT 2]]

    Every spawn room must have an exit or exits of some kind, where the protection provided by the spawn room ceases and the defender is fully deployed into combat.

    [[FACT 3]]

    Wherever a spawn room exit is located, defenders can be expected to emerge. Even a battle with very low casualties will still have a fairly steady stream of players exiting the protected zone to return to combat. This is also a simple reality of game design.

    Now, with these facts understood and agreed upon, let's move on to an actual game scenario.

    In any given battle, the goal of the defender is to kill the attackers and deny them access to the control point(s). The goal of the attacker is to kill the defenders and maintain a hold on the control point(s). These are the basic goals of team play in Planetside 2. Farming certs is useful and welcome, but the ultimate objective is always victory and success, if not for the individual player than for the group as a whole. Still with me?

    Right, so now let's say the attacker, through use of superior coordination, weaponry, or numbers, has seized the control point, killing a majority of defenders inside. Each attacker is now considering how to accomplish the ultimate goal of holding the control point. For this to be done, the defenders must be kept away from the control point as efficiently as possible. This is most easily done through use of a choke point, where the attackers can essentially fortify themselves into the defensive position and force the former defenders to assault a hardened target. Essentially, the attackers are now looking for the easiest way to kill defenders. Still with me? Good.

    Now here's where we run into the inevitability of spawn camping. While individual bases have different choke point areas that can be used by attackers and defenders, the ultimate choke point always has and always will be the spawn room. Take a look at the facts above, especially Fact 2; the spawn room MUST have a deployment point. That deployment point is the only place that the attackers KNOW the defenders will be, and thus it is by far the most efficient place to engage the defenders.

    Therefore, we have spawncamping.

    The only way this will ever change if it is no longer most tactically efficient to camp the spawn. And I don't think a paltry experience reduction is going to do that.
    • Up x 7
  2. LibertyRevolution

    This is why I I have said since Dec 2012 that bases should not have spawn rooms..
    You should spawn in a drop pod, good luck camping that!

    Oh, you want to pull a max? Pull an AMS sunderer.
    You want to coordinate your push? Have your commander set a wayppoint to land on, then countdown drop on the map screen.
    Want to do a max crash? Spawn at the sunderer.

    Spawn Camping Solved.
    • Up x 4
  3. Rellenar

    Or put differently, the best place to fight the enemy is as far away from the objective as possible, and the furthest from the objective you can push them is the invulnerable base spawn point. Spawn camping isn't a function of people being "cheap" or "lame", it's the natural consequence of having an invincible spawn and incentive to push the other team back to it.

    One solution would be to make it so the spawn point isn't invincible. Another game did that, once. Worked pretty well. Forget what it was called, though.

    That said, making spawn kills not reward XP would be good even then, since it encourages people to destroy the spawn instead of just sitting there deliberately killing people, which was an occasional issue in that other game.
    • Up x 4
  4. LibertyRevolution


    It was called planetside, you could rush in the spawn and destroy the spawn tubes..
    • Up x 4
  5. Jac70

    Yeah, I barely notice how much XP I get for a kill. I have never factored in how much XP I am going to earn by taking down someone who has just exited a spawn room. The system is fine as is now, especially the fact that you cannot see into the spawn room.

    If it is the case that the spawn room is overwhelmingly covered by enemy forces then you have lost that base and your best option is to redeploy and regroup. Altering Spawn Kill XP will change nothing.
  6. gibstorm


    It's not just the XP system. That want nothing to count. You don't get a kill for it either.

    So if 50 people are spawning at a sundry and you go to fight their you will be getting nothing every though you are in really danger
  7. MarkAntony

    We still get to keep them from fighting and therefore achieve whatever we want on the battlefield. Not being rewarded for that is just a slap in the face.
  8. gibstorm


    They just seem lazy. I am sort of ok with this at real spawns cause you can't destroy them.

    But at sundies. You have to get in their to destroy them this involves killing the people spawning. Just let people pick to spawn inside it. They they can look around and see if they want to come out.
  9. MarkAntony

    I was just making the point that this won't change anything. I agree 100% wiht what you are saying. This change is the epitome of stupidity. The only people at fault are the ones who let themselves be camped instead of moving on. (someone is gonna accuse me of victim blaming roflol)
  10. Taemien


    This is very true. The only thing that the change to spawn kill exp will do is maybe keep those cert farming zergling from TKing players who go after enemy sundies to stop the attack. Those turds would TK teammates playing properly because they were 'stopping the farm'.

    Now SOE is taking their farm away instead.
    • Up x 1
  11. FieldMarshall

    Its not inevitable. Its just that SoE decided to "make" spawncamping a problem and not go with their already near-perfect spawnsystem instead from Planetside 1.

    Look up the mechanics for Planetside 1 (or download planetside 1 and try it out yourself, its free now).
    Spawncamping doesent happen there, because of how spawning works.
    1. The (3) spawntubes in the spawnroom could be destroyed by ~3 decimator shots each.
    2. If all tubes were down you couldnt spawn there until an engineer repaired them.
    3. Spawnroom had painfields like in PS2 making it hard to camp them. You couldnt camp them from outside the spawnroom so you always took constant damage if you wanted to stay there.
    4. Spawnrooms had 3 exits leading to different parts of the base.
    5. Spawnrooms were located in the basement of a base. Not possible to vehicle camp.
    6. There were no spawnroom shields. Instead you had doors that enemies who hacked them could open.
    7. Since the spawntubes were located in the basement and enemies had to walk all the way down to get to the spawnroom,
    and reviving medics were far and few in between, the defenders also had more chance of pushing back attackers that were near the spawnroom

    Sure, you could not destroy the spawntubes and camp them instead. But then one of two things happened.
    Either people stopped spawning there (as they died as soon as they spawned. Like what happens in BioLabs sometimes)
    Or some random guy would destroy the tubes anyway. Either way, the problem was nonexistent

    Also, all bases also had generators that functioned like SCUs (preventing people from spawning if it was destroyed).
    Best part was that it wasent behind a shield, so everyone who could hack the door to the generator room could get there.
    And destroying it wasent timed, you just had to deal damage to destroy it. Thus the word MAX crash was born
    • Up x 4
  12. BobSanders123

    How about we remove the spawns in the minor facilities? Just wipe them off the map. Keep all the terminals and stuff. That way you could park a sunderer there and use it as a temporary base.
    Battles between bases are really fun. Battles for small bases are really bad. Just because you can't leave the spawn room without dying. Everyone is crammed.
  13. r4zor

    And THIS is IMHO the only solution to current base design and spawncamping issues (as well as using less jumppads/lifts and teleporters).
    • Up x 2
  14. ZomboWTF

    Dropping inside of your own base to defend it without having a beacon would be a nice feature, and would mix up fights a bit, i agree

    also, with the redeploy feature like it is now, i really miss the old "sunderer and MBT" convoys going from the warpgate and rolling up the map to the enemy, i would like if there would be more limitations on where you can pull MAXs MBTs and ESFs
  15. ZomboWTF

    i never understood why PS2 went away from hackable doors, that was so ******* cool metagame for an infiltrator it's painfull to see it gone T_T
    • Up x 3
  16. Genetic

    Its always suprised me how badly designed the spawn room/building in PS2 is , considering spawn camping in the scourge of every and any FPS game since the beginning of time and they go and make it so you can suround the building with tanks and aircraft .

    PS1 seemed to have it pretty nailed to down to the point that yea a tube could get camped by some lame **** but that wouldnt last long till someone just took them out and it worked in such away that either the defenders or attackers could make an active push to either resecure of take down the base

    i always thought that a base fight should always be defendable by a minority population but that way these bases are at the moment ive seen 75%+ defending still lose because of spawn building camps
    • Up x 2
  17. r4zor

    Aye. The spawnbuildings are really crappy compared to PS1. They often dont even have enough terminals ...

    Any base in this game becomes neigh undefendable as soon as the attacker has 55% pop... In PS1 my Outfit held bases against three times our numbers (sometimes even more).
  18. OldMaster80


    This is imho a very good idea.

    BTW I'm shocked to see how bad is the rooftop of spawn rooms. It does not allow any kind of counterattack, you can't effectively clear the area from up there: you are just a target.
  19. TheMish

    Or AI turrets that fire grenades at 10 thousand rounds per minute, explosive radius is 5m and the explosive damage is 1000, direct damage is 5000, bullet velocity is 1000m/s, and never over heats.

    I guarantee you, then there would be no spawn room camping. Because there wouldn't be anything left.
  20. Crashsplash

    I can understand when SOE change game systems from what they were in ps1 to new version in ps2 but understanding becomes a little thin when it becomes obvious that they don't work as well and then they have to add a band aid and that doesn't work either and so another band aid is applied and so on and so on.

    If they'd confines themselves to retaining what was good and improving what wasn't I'd have been far happier.