Tank mines - One Sided Fun

TLDR: Tanks mines kill vehicles too quickly and unexpectedly, forcing the player to use mine-guard or else their tank will instantly disintegrate without their control. Solutions posted on Post #2.



Let me start off by saying, I think these mine are not necessarily "OP". Meaning, you can't just endlessly throw them around and get an insane k/d without at least trying and/or being in the thick of things. But on that note, Shotgun Infiltrator's weren't "necessarily" OP either, they just weren't fun to fight.

There are lots of reasons why I don't like this type of gameplay, but let me start out with my biggest one:

It forces certs:
If you are driving any vehicles whatsoever and you don't have minegaurd, you die instantly from mines.

"So CERT for it!" you might say. Sure, but then why would I have options?

Ok I can have front/side/rear etc. armor and randomly die instantly without any control whatsoever... OR

I can get mine-guard.

If a mossy comes up behind me and starts flanking me, I "might" die.. but I also might mag-burn my way out of the situation and stay alive long enough for a friendly AA to take em out.

I would like to use a rear armor, since aircraft can give me some trouble. But you know what, pulling a tank and randomly dying instantly to something I have no control over isn't fun, so I'll get mineguard.

Hey, you know I would love to have some front armor and an AP gun on my mag. Man, with that and a Sauron cannon I will toast those prowlers!

Oh wait, that invisible mine on the floor might randomly blow me up and I can't do anything about it so I'll just get mineguard.

I don't want to sound cynical here, but you see the point. It's not to so much that it's "Overpowered", it's just not fun.

Anti-Personnel mines are similar as well, but at least as infantry you just die and respawn very quickly. You don't have to wait 5-10 minutes and then drive to a battle like you would in a vehicle. So for infantry you aren't always forcing flak armor(although I don't think one AP mine should kill you without flak armor, but it's definitely not as rough as anti-tank mines)

I'll reply to this thread with my own solutions.

Some solutions:
A) Allowing all HRNV scopes(Infantry and Armor) to see mines more easily, or at least see them at close range more easily. This adds a cool element of game-play where you have to tactically move through hallways and scout for mines. I think the spotting range for HRNV should be very low for infantry though, maybe 3-5 feet. Vehicles would need a slightly bigger range.

Pros: Fairly easy to implement, creates tactical game-play and still gives a player multiple options(HRNV scopes offer little magnification, so it would be a balanced trade-off).
Cons: This would exacerbate the already big problem where almost everyone has HRNV scopes. Implementing this change would require careful illumination of the mines, they can't be very easy to spot at range, but if they are too hard to spot then it won't make a difference.

B) Percentage Damage: Make mines do percentage of total health with a dot. Two mines will kill any vehicle totaling 100% total damage, but at least you have time to get out and repair. If you run over a mine during a fight, chances are you're gonna be taken out and props to that engineer for good mine placement! But if you are driving across a vacant desert and you happen to hit a mine, you aren't just instantly dead without any help.

Pros: It solves the issue.
Cons: it's kind of a bandaid solution and doesn't really help the "realism" factor, but it does work.

C) Move mine-guard to a different cert. One choice would be to make it a performance slot. You lose the ability to gain increased speed/performance.

Pros: You can actually choose to make a beefy uber tank(Front armor, magburner, mineguard), which is a cool tank "Tree". It free's up a lot of the certs you aren't using.
Cons: It will probably create the same issue as before, where instead of performance items you are getting just a mine-guard. In this case I think reducing mine-guard damage so that it "almost" kills a tank in two mines, instead of completely destroying it. This would destroy lightnings easily while putting tanks into red health, forcing repairs before they explode.

On AP Mines: Both infantry armor options Flak and Nanoweave at maximum level keep you from dying to these in one hit...so you have more than one viable option which makes it feel a little less ridiculous.

I agree with your statements. There are a lot of things in this game that are a pile of fun to use and terrible to be on the receiving end of. How does one balance fun versus balance?

TLR

I have mineguard and have tinned of fun watching engis throw resources down the toilet at my Sundy. Then again, I am kind of sadistic.

No

will make a longer post when wake up.

Yes, because getting shelled by tank spam and insta-gibbed by farmers is fun.

If your thesis revolves around the idea that getting killed abruptly ruins that person's "fun," and that preserving a person's "fun" is of paramount importance, then the most appropriate solution would be to remove tanks entirely.

More realistically, mines have to be quick and powerful because tanks are cheap and numerous. Any discussion about changing mines must by necessity also discuss how to address vehicle spam in game. Quick and fast solutions involve increasing resource cost and changing timers so that they start on vehicle destruction, not from original vehicle spawn. More in depth solutions that create complexity would be an overhaul to the resource system, perhaps implementing some sort of "fuel" resource that vehicles require. I would gladly cede the power and suddenness of mines in exchange for making vehicles more precious.

Could just remove HE and HEAT, frankly. Suddenly tanks are anti-vehicle weapons. Of course you'd have to rein in things like c4/mines/lockons, etc...but you don't have to REMOVE tanks...

Mines are fine. Mineguard vs other armor forces you to make a strategic choice. I run all my tanks with side armor and try to avoid the most obvious paths where the enemy would place mines. It's up to you how you configure your vehicle and how you play with it.

Tank spam - One Sided Fun

Think its fun to get killed by a tank spamming through a tower door from a distant hill?

There are multiple ways to avoid dying to a tank:

- Stand on an incline
- Run away(it's funny but true)
- Fire back (Lock-on/C4)

There are already lots of tools that deal with tanks, and Infantry will always outnumber tanks. I 100% agree that the tank spam is a problem right now, and I have some solutions for that but they require massive change to the entire system.

I am trying to point out a small tweak that may help fix the problems the current tank mines cause.

Pretty much this. You know that feeling, when you're running along in your tank and all of a sudden BOOM, you're dead instantly and there's not **** you can do about it?

That's how we feel when people spam HE shells at us. Sucks, doesn't it?

Against my better judgement, Added a TLDR version. Don't know how much info you can get out of two sentences, but go for it

Yes, but then you respawn in 10 seconds and you're back in the fight.

A tank driver has to wait 5-10 minutes and then pull a tank from a location that might not even be nearby.

And my arguments hold true for both tank mines and anti-personell mines, it's the same issue.

Let's stop comparing dying to a tank shell and mines please, they are actually very different.

A player controls a tank, you can see a tank and avoid, it doesn't always kill you in 1 hit, it can miss and the list goes on. A mine is basically a one-hit guarantee kill that forces you to cert around it.

The issue is definitely not mines laid in advance in strategic positions, but rather engineers using mines as superior c4 charges on vehicles that have become stationary. Usually TR tanks or Sunderers as they have a deploy functionality which renders them quite helpless to suicide engineers.

I use tanks a lot, and I play engineer and drop mines a lot.

I rarely ever die to a tank mine, unless someone runs up to me and suicides. Also, a lot of my mines kill flashes instead of tanks because they are first in a zone usually.

I don't see any real problem with them except being able to throw them at armor.

You can drive around mines. You can choose not to travel in obvious paths where mines are likely to be, or to shoot paths ahead of you that are likely to contain mines to detonate them before you get there. The list goes on. People do not have the mine placement cap or the resources to lay large minefields, so just don't drive in places that are obvious trap points for mines.

Regarding timers, I'm just going to quote myself from another thread because I'm tired of having to retype this stuff.

Well it's fun for a while.

It's like creating a super weapon that at first is really fun to use, but then it's just to easy and boring. You have to make it so that when you lose a fight, it really feels like that player was just damn good. It's a tricky thing to do, but that's what makes a great balance between fun on both sides.

We don't always admit someone was better than us, but the closer you can get to them admitting it the better.

Well I have stopped using my beloved Magrider "DevilGirl" *you know the decal*.
I have to grind up the cert points for full mineguard and IR smoke. Plus max reload speed.

When not in a tank I am an infantry engineer. Im the one laying mines in chokepoints.

The problem is not mines at chokepoints. The problem is the 5 engineers running ATV's at you trying to get a mine kill or LA throwing C4. Its more efficient to suicide run on an ATV than to place mines. I don't think that's what the dev's intended.

"One-sided fun" is a nice succinct way to descibe a lot of things in this game.

Regarding mines, I don't fully agree that they force certs. For Sunderers perhaps as they are a prime target for 'suicide mining', in some ways that's a separate issue. For everything else it offers piece of mind and allows you to drive whereever you want without concern for dying by running over mines. As a mine user I generally avoid driving in the sorts of places I place mines. The same applies to AP mines, whilst I do use flak armour it's more for grenades than mines. I'm consious of the sort of spots mines are placed and always try to look out for them.

Probably the one main thing I really hate, now that liberator spam is all but under control, is the "throw mines at vehicles" mechanic. Its just stupid. Mines should only be used to place in areas you think a vehicle might be going in the near future, with the hopes that they will run over it. Not thrown at stationary targets like prowlers and sundies.
It needs a fix.