State of Directives on PTS - 7/24

Well i just got of playing a goo hour or so on PTS and i had a great time. there was a big three way at the crown and i was able to test some of the directives at that fight. One thing you guys need to put in the summary tab is a short description of what the directive system is, you know for the people that are new to it. Also with the new death screen inter face make the option of spawning with space or go to deployment screen with Esc more noticeable. I spent valuable resources spawn as a max two or three times at that fight. Other wise than that i had one of the best time on Planetside at that fight in my entire time playing this game. GG SOE.

Yeah, I agree that the Auto-MAX respawn got annoying considering I'm expected to pay resources for it. That should be a dialog or something to make sure that's what you want to spend your points towards.

Also, I did quite a few things that were part of the Directives sheet and didn't see any credit. I'm pretty sure "Kills" is self explanatory, but I didn't see any note of it on the progress bars, and I got PLENTY of kills.

Submitted in-game bug report. :/

If it's anything like what happened to mine. Next time you log in youll get credit & they will work accordingly

The directive system seems like any other achivement system, its kinda in the game already but you don't get points or see them so easily. They are in game under your stats, you can see you got 1000 kills with x,y,z gun. so with the directive it's more in your face.
But I like to see you can actually do something with those points, else its just a chase of who has no life and a epeen messurement.

If you could get specific directives camo or other cosmetics i guess it would have a purpose.

and btw nerf light-ppa to hell thx

Directives screen looks nice, I like it, but.
Not sure what to do to get them, maybe a little more info.
Its says I have 3 of 5 for repairing, but 3 of 5 what? don't remember doing alot of repairing,
so I ran around doing repairs, alot, still 3 of 5.
On the vehicle tab, looks like 2 tank and 1 air,
somehow I got them all, no clue how, why or what I did. zero info on those tabs. Its just icons.
I know its still testing. just think it should tell what I'm supposed to do.

btw, the new turret textures, Nice! I like'm!! My little red corvettes.

How do I fill up the bar of for weapon kills in the vehicle section? I'm in the Scythe section, see that I need to complete 2 objectives, and one of them reads "Dual Photon Pods - 0/10", so I take to the air and make a few kills with my pods. When I come back to the menu, the bar hasn't progressed a bit. This is a very bad case of bad interface, it should be immediately obvious what I have to do to get those objectives.

I tried to test the directive system, but actually I did not. I have no idea what to do or it is just totally buggy for me. I repaired like a maniac, pulled down my ammunition and what ever. But nothing happened. Do I have to do anything before? Accept a directive? If yes, than I haven't found out how to do it. So I agree with the guys above me. It needs a description, how it works.
On my first look it looks like an additional achievementsystem. As I hear "directives", I thought it would be propably something like a quest system, where platoonleaders can request airsupport for example, and the reacting pilots get a special amount on exp/certs.

for some reason I can't edit my post.
PS: I really don't like the Autospawn-System. Why did you change that? I spawned as a Max...this costs resources. I spawned on the wrong place (beacon was up and I landed on a neighbouring base). This will mess up smallsquad battles, where everybody counts. Don't do this as a default, please.

Biggest issue so far seems to be getting directives completed for stuff I didn't do. At first, it seemed like I was getting records of things I'd done earlier on test, but today I was getting directives completed for things I know I definitely did not do (Hornet Missiles, for example).

Just gave the PTS a whirl, haven't spent more than an hour but my immediate results are:

Death Screen & Auto Spawn
I do not like the auto spawn system. At the very least, give us an option to disable it and just have the regular left click on death take us to the deploy screen.

It feels restrictive from a user experience point of view as it takes control from you as a player and "hides" it behind keyboard button presses - this works fine for a console game, but for a PC user with a mouse and KB it is death. All the UI design on PC the version of PS2 revolves around the Mouse + Keyboard combination. Please keep that consistent or at least do not make it the secondary means of interaction with game ever.

Reduced Spawn Time
The 2 second reduction in spawn time is a huge change imo. It's a 20% decrease from the current timers, which are already pretty short from a logistics point of view and it detrimentally reduces the value of attempting offensive action without redundant AMS support. By allowing defenders to spawn even faster, the value of tactical play like Gal Drops and other "small unit tactics" becomes lessened, as it becomes even more difficult to fight the "waves of meat" the currenty spawn system encourages.

I did notice a lot more facilities with SCUs, so maybe that will offset the faster spawn times, though I've yet to experience any big fights on the PTS.

That's pretty much the feedback I have for now.

Is there a global chat on PTS though? I think it could really come in handy, if you need help testing some things out - we had to resort to using /yell and actually ask our "opponents" on the other side of the fights if we had any questions.

Just another small observation,

Auto Spawn
Auto spawn makes it more difficult to be a medic. If people do not abort the auto spawn, they will oftentimes spawn before you can reach them or they are even aware, that there is a medic in the area running to resurrect them.

The "die -> go to map" UI design allows for faster and easier access to information whether there is a medic in the area or not - this is important as autospawn otherwise will diminish the value of being a medic, if people don't disable autospawn somehow.

Recommendation: make auto spawn a toggle option in the settings rather than the default behavior of the death screen.

I just noticed the Auraxium rewards for guns and classes and vehicles O.O
I am stoked.
I wonder how many players already have these unlocked with the retroactive rewards, also how close I myself might be....to some glowing armor!

Black Camo??!! lol wow...I wonder if that is a typo lol ( QQ commencing. lol )

It is in the Exceptional category.
I wonder what all the requirements are for that.
Also who may have it already unlocked.
If they used haqs! lol jk.

Is that definitely going to be the case?

friend and i were testing something because we noticed kills werent counting at times and i wanted to ask here, kills only count towards directives as long as its a different person each kill right? If I kill the same person 3 times, it only counts him once, but I noticed if I killed another person and then go back to killing the first guy then it counts him as a kill once again.

or is there another factor im not aware of?

The new Heavy Assault directive added today is a really good change, getting rid of all those dumb launcher objectives was badly needed. Only thing I think it's missing is a vehicle destruction objective, but otherwise I think it's solid and encourages HA to do what HA does best now.

Medic and especially MAX need changes too I think, but maybe those are already in the works?

I had asked the same question and I was told that it was.
So I can say that's what I heard although I haven't been able to confirm it.
I believe they said it was on Reddit or w/e they use.

I was really counting on those directives. Right now it is really hard for new players to learn the mechanics. The tutorial doesn't help that much - after completing it i thought capture points are taken by pressing 'E' while near - like when overloading a generator

They could work like FAQ - You'd have a directive and an instruction how to complete it. Like revive a teammate:
1. Switch class to Medic
2. Switch weapon to tool (slot 3.)
3. Point at a fallen teammate and hold scope-in key (default - right mouse button)

People keep asking how to do it. There are more things like this:
- Make a charger
- Deploy AMS (earn 50 certs, go to...)
- Destroy enemy beacon
- Spawn in a Galaxy
etc.

Just adding my voice to all the others: I am not on test much and at very low BR. I jumped in and tried a bunch of things but saw no progress at all on the directives page. Others have noted the same issue. Relogging will show the updates. It just needs to be able to update the page without having to relog.

Just got a new laptop and waiting for the 8,000+ MB download. Much joy such boredom.

Only one more critique I have with the system:

Once you complete a Directive Tier, all unfinished objectives in that Tier still display a progress bar. I only tested this with my Medic, but it seems that working on those objectives does not change the progress bars in completed tiers.

All in all, just suggesting that progress bars of previous/completed Directive Tiers are removed, especially if you can never progress/update/complete them.