A lot of tank fans want an armour buff. A lot of Infantry fans want less tank spam. A very simple solution for this would be to double the resource cost for lightnings and MBT's and increase the timer whilst instead of giving tanks a straight buff just buff the rear armour a bit and allow more of the defence slots and an extra utility slot to be used at the same time. The cert cost of these should be increased by a large amount as well. MBT's should require 2 crew. The driver operates the secondary weapon This way tank fans could work their way to having a competent tank and infantry fans get less tank spam. AV turrets are too easy. I feel guilty when I spam them from a hill. Instead of nerfing them make smoke emitters interfere with their laser guidance. Make them cost 50 infantry resources to deploy as well. Its not bloody rocket science SOE!!! Once you've nerfed and counter buffed vehicles into extinction we lose our combined arms game and no one is going to buy your vehicle weapons or anti tank weapons. I don't want to sit and farm infantry all day at bases. I want a combined arms game! I want to fight other tanks and support infantry in open territory.
Part of the reason why vehicles are ineffective is that the render distance issues have not been fixed. When vehicles can actually see what's shooting rockets / flak at them at all distances, they might have a chance to survive. So this is not entirely a balance issue, and fixing the render distance would go a long way to restoring vehicles to effectiveness. Personally, I suspect that SOE are not capable of fixing the render distance issues, because the engine is CPU bound and cannot make good enough use of multiple cores. The lack of any announcements about this probably means they have no good news to communicate (but feel free to prove me wrong, SOE).
Sadly this, and I don't think it will change any time soon. This engine is far from optimized and I doubt it ever will be during PS2's lifetime. They should have just used unreal like Dust514, the results would have been a lot better.
To be fair to Forgelight, Unreal Engine would perform far, far worse if used for Planetside 2. Forgelight's problem is just that it has to render at least an order of magnitude more stuff than any other PC game out there, in a big battle. Unreal Engine is not known for its scalability. Dust 514 will be 32 players max., apparently, which is hardly ground-breaking. Bioshock Infinite and Dishonored are typical Unreal Engine games - small levels with loading transitions. Developers like Unreal Engine because it's tried and tested.
