Hello, As a player I have a bit of experiance: I've been playing Planetside 2 for about 3 years with breaks, I have a high lvl character, tried out all the factions, played as a lone wolf as same as an outfit memeber etc. I'm writing about it so that you know, that i know what im talknig about, when i say that this game could use some mechanics forcing players to behave in a more racionall way. And by "racionall" i mean properly reacting to situations that take place on the Ps2 battlefields. Here are some ideas that came to my head: 1. Experiance penalty for fightning in a overcrowded fight. The way i see that work is if the amount of players of one faction exceeds a certain number, all players of this faction, in that hex, would recive lowered xp. The words "certain number" are very important here- Dev's would need to come out with an algorytm to deterine that number, that would concider things like: - number of players of a faction the continent, - amount of links between the teritory of this faction and the enemys, - relation betweene number of players of the fightning factions on that hex, - size and importance of a base in that hex (number of points to capture, if its a techplant or a watchtower for egz.)etc. What this might do is force players to move out of a overcrowded battles, and bring the fight to other hexes of the battlefront. Also it may take care of zerging-outfits that use to zerg, would be forced to come out with more sophisticated strategies, divide their forces and manage all around the map, not only in one hex. 2. Experiance boost for countering enemy armor swarming a friendly base. The way i see it work is if one facility is being surrounded by enemy armor, the players that make the effort to pull their armor in an other hex, and come to the rescue, would recive a significant xp boost. This xp boost would only work if they fight in a friendly hex-this rule is suppose to prevent "tank spamming" for any other purpouse than countering enemy armor. What this might do is reduce the amount of useless "spawnroom warriors",by giving people a better reason to pull tanks, sundies and harrasers from nearby hexes, and try to change the corse fo the battle, instead of shooting at a building from behind the unpenetrable walls of their spawn. 3. Experiance for players who spawn on a sundy right after its been deployed. The way i see it work is if during a hard battle, one player makes a heroic attepmt to create an additional spawn option for his allies, tho ones who spwan on the sundy in a certain, short time(15s for egz.), right after its been deplyed, recieve experiance just for doing so, since they are the ones who will defend it. What this might do is encourage players to both pull sundies and defend them during battles. Too often i see someone making an effort but getting no help from his allies. 4. Experiance for overloading the generators should be split over all allied players in the building, or generators nearest proxmity. The way i see it work is if a player is overloadinga generator(or saving it from overload), all allies that cover him get the same amount of xp that he does. What this might do is not to make situations like the one i saw the other day happen: 2 players running to save the gen-first one steps on a mine(he was an engy i think) and dies-the other is a medic but does not care, goes for the generator instead picking the first one up. How stupid of the medic that was... well i dont need to tell you guays that, if an enemy would come to stop them, he would most likely kill the medic and increase the chance of destroying the generator. Who knows maby there was even a stalker sitting on the gen waiting for his prey-mines are one of their weapons after all. But who cares abotu that, if the medic can secure xp for himself, why would he help his m8 out, its not like he needs someone to cover him, right?(<sarcasm) So thats all i came up with to force or encourage players to react properly to situtations on Ps2 battlefields that I personally find trubeling. To the Dev's(hope you read this): Maby You have or haven't noticed it yet but players care mostly about two things: certs(xp) and k/d. That means they will always find the way of lowest effort to get these things, so if you want to make them act in a certain way, you need to work with these values. If there is any type of behavior, that breaks the games enoyment value, the best way to cope with it is to give the player the alternative that he not only can, but will be more likely to take, due to benefits it brings(the carrot), or force him to it by penalizing that behavior(the stick). P.S. Sorry for my english i hope you got the point.
My thoughts: 1. No, absolutely not. numercial superiority is a tactical advantage and perfectly legitimate in real as well as in game, Punishing initaitive is wrong 2. I've no particular objection to this idea but why only vehicles and doesn't this encourage vehicle overpop by defending faction? Why not just give defenders an xp award if they recap a base within a certain time or after having reversed the countdown timer before it had nearly run out. (I've been in lots of successful last ditch defences when the timer was seconds away from flipping). 3. Not a bad idea but I suggest only for spawning at the sundy nearest to the enemy. Presumably they'd have to be engaged in a fight within a short time of spawning to qualify. There is already driver xp for anyone who gets a kill shortly after spawning at his or her sundy so maybe an extension of that? 4. There seems to be no shortage of people willing to overload generators so I don't see the need fo this.
About your objections: 1. You might misread my intentions - im not opting for equal pop fights all the time, but i think the numbers of players in one hex need to be put in check. Everyday there are situations where there are 1 or 2 big fights on the map and close to non activity on other hexes. 2. Xp reward for recaping is a very good idea. About vehicle overpop: it is some thing that is already happening, wouldnt it be better if it at least happen to defend and puch the enemy out, than to just camp a base? Also remmember that after the defending vehicle leaves a frinedly hex to try to camp the next base he is no longer recieving bonus xp, and would fall undr the rule from the first point. 3. Well your are right there is a bonus for kills after spawning already, but maby this "carrot" is too small for people to care, at least thats what it seems right now. I dont see any harm in getting that additional xp even if you are not in a fight as long as there was some additional mechanisc preventing abuse, like cooldown on this bonus. 4. Yes there are not enough people doing that, but maby if someone would cover their back, it would become more frequent. Making overloading a somewhat benefitial group effort, might just do that.
Your "reactional" behavior probably stands for emergent behavior. For example, emergent teamwork is an engineer that teams up with a MAX. There's no chat required, there's barely any interaction at all, yet the Engineer can let the MAX know that he'll support him and keep him repaired by sticking close and using his repair gun on him a moment, the MAX in turn will change his behavior to make use of the Engineer's repairs and will try to keep him safe. But what you are suggesting isn't emergent behavior, it's punishing players to use some behavior. The stick is the worst implement to use to get the behavior you want. The carrot is what you need to go for. And your stick is pretty damn weak at that: Imagine taking away 100% of the XP gain from a fight if there's too much overpop. This is an extreme but it better shows the consequences. The players on the overpop side now feel punished because the fight might actually be a good one (and only with an overpop can you really break a good Biolab defense for instance). But now the question starts: Who's going to leave? Where are they going to leave to? So you were enjoying a fight and are now overpopping an enemy. Do you leave because you are punished? Or are you going to play a waiting game until someone else leaves so you can stay? Even if players leave for other battles rather quickly you've still reduced their enjoyment of the battle temporarily, and you've just forced players to a fight they might not even enjoy. Then there's the question: What if one faction overpops? What if the other fights are also overpopped by your faction? Swap factions? A game is supposed to give you an experience, and since you have different factions players should be able to pick the faction they want to play right now without being punished for it. Now here's an example how you could do it otherwise: instead of your stick by reducing XP value's, which in fact do nothing for the balance when you are outpopped unless players start leaving, you could give them a carrot that actually affects the balance. Increasing XP modifiers is just as bad as reducing XP modifiers. If you want to balance the game, you start giving the outpopped players gameplay advantages. Just imagine it as if the faction command allocates more equipment and resources so they can win a battle with less combatants. For instance: All resource costs are reduced by a %, that % is based on how much you are outpopped. This means the outpopped players will have access to more force-multipliers that they can use to even the odds with their opponents. You can also give other perks. You can put a terminal in the spawnroom, when accessing this terminal you use a droppod to drop somewhere within that base. The range of the droppod increase the more you are outpopped. If worst comes to worst, you can always get some superweapons in the mix. Imagine if players are capable of getting the Colossus Tank or Galaxy Gunship when you are seriously outpopped to even the odds. Increasing the XP modifiers will only increase the amount of spawnroom warriors who will try to benefit from an easy kill. XP modifiers are a terrible way to get anything done. A better way to prevent spawnwarriors is to create alternatives to exit a spawn and attack. The droppod terminal is an idea. Giving Medics a deployable spawntube is an idea. You could even add a utility that allows players to spawn on your character as you move around-->only if you are outpopped ofcourse<-- Better yet: Just add new spawn methods. The Sunderer can hardly be used by the defenders in most bases, since most bases do not offer enough protection and the attackers are almost guaranteed to have vehicular superiority. The game focuses too much on kills and too little on achieving a goal. What goals you have are either group goals like capture points where no one can take credit or generator overloads where only one can take credit even when someone else does all the work for them. The same for things like destroying Sunderers. A better way would be to add more goals to achieve, preferably by using the playerbase. More players = more goals and targets to take out. This can instantly be used to balance the usefulness of all classes and vehicles against each other. For example that deployable spawntube. It gives both the defenders and attackers a way to push the frontline or set up alternate spawnpoints. If it's a medic exclusive it also means that the Medic becomes much more important in the overall game. Destroying the Spawntubes would also become an important goal to increase the travel time between the frontline and spawner, which gives the LA and infiltrator an important role in tracking these down and taking them down. This can be an important factor in the gameplay that can easily be rewarded. A player with multiple spawntube kills on his name does for more than a player that simply kills a bunch of people. Add more of those type of deployables (vehicular ammo towers, vehicular repair modules, disruption devices against scan equipment, deployable cover for infantry or tanks, power modules that temporarily buff players that access it etc) and the amount of goals and achievements increase with the amount of players. The thing players care the most about it KD and enjoyable gameplay. You can give players alternatives to hunt for than KD, such as by rewarding vehicular destruction more or hunting down force multipliers like MAX's and deployables and giving out rewards for it. For instance, destroying multiple vehicles is now shown off in a vehicle/death ratio and if you kill X vehicles you can get a temporary buff to your resource gain/maximum resource pool/instant resource reward. This rewards players for anti-vehicle play and also keeps them in the fight even when they use the more expensive vehicles excessively in the dangerous AV work. This in turn can give the gameplay a massive boost. If your targets aren't farmable, or if you are rewarded more for targets that aren't farmable, then it's more prestigious to show them off while you are having much more engaging fights than "farm some players that practically can't defend themselves over and over again".
Ty for your replies i see flaws in me ideas now, especially the 1st one. *About the second one i need to appolagize - i havent made my self clear: the bonus for people countering armor wit their armor, should be granted only to those who are currently in a vehicle or have deployed their sundy. Without that i do agree on potential increase in numbers of spawnroom warriors. Im really glad you guays took your time to read this thread and posted your thoughts about the subject aswell.
XP for the most part, is not a big enough motivator to get people to do what you in most situations. More/less XP would not change things in 1-3. People zerg because it makes them win, people want to win, they also tend to just got forward to the next base, not looking at the map or populations much. There are ways to prevent zerging that have been talked about elsewhere such as nanite adjustment and spawn timers. But it doesn't seem like DBG or SOE before them care about zerging, they have even encouraged it through certain changes. DBG does care about server/continent population balance though, which is great. #4 however is long overdue in this game. This game is about teamwork. all allies within 30-50m of the generator should get credit for the overload/stablization/destruction with xp and objective support ribbon progress. allies near repairing engineers could also get some escort XP. This would also encourage people to stick around and make sure it blows up, since they can still get xp for that, whether they got it for overload or not.
At any given moment you have between 8 and 12 methods of attack. That's the number of possible lattices you can push. That's per continent. So double it since you have two continents open at any given time. So if the enemy pools all their peeps at one base. Attack the empty base. Swallow your pride or whatever missighted ideal you have against ghost capping. If the base you attack is important enough, the enemy WILL show up. The issue isn't that fights get out of hand. The issue is players aren't taking initiative. There's nothing to fix. If players won't go anywhere but two fights then they LIKE fighting in stupid numbers. There shouldn't be a penalty in exp for it. That's just what players WANT to do. Let them do it. If you don't want to do it, you don't have to. The choice is yours. Besides even if you took session exp away (aka -exp, not merely penalties to gain), it still wouldn't fix anything. Most players are like us. Playing for 3+ years. We've got our stuff spent. What do we care about exp? You're going to punish the 1 out of 10 noobs who make it off Koltyr for something we don't give a damn about. And the best part is, they won't even understand what is going on. Leave it alone. Vets won't care. Innocent noobs will suffer. And players should be able to zerg each other if they want to. They have a choice not to. They really do.
This. A million times this. Planetside 1 did the combined arms, tactics, strategy, and co-operative play so much better than Planetside 2. The resulting feeling of sense of purpose, of belonging to a collective, of achieving something after protracted periods of gameplay, and of having something to fight for was an immense feeling that is entirely missing from Planetside 2. I was watching one of Wrel's videos a few days ago. He is undoubtedly a very good FPS player. But after a few minutes I started to tire of what I was seeing. The thing that kept coming into to my mind was "what?...what?...WHAT?...JUST WHAT?". He pulled Flash after Flash after Flash. Ran a few people over, C4'd a Lightning, killed a good few people. Died a lot. Respawned. Did it all over again. Why? Supposedly for the kills. That kind of gameplay seems to both epitomise the game and miss the point of a Planetside game by a huge margin. Planetside 2 is set in a massive world. We have massive maps. We have massive battles. But everything is pointless on a massive scale. It brought to my mind a similar feeling that I have for another game. There is a game called Creativerse. It's a Minecraft type game with graphics that don't make your eyeballs fall out. When you first start playing it, the world seems huge (and it actually is). Then after a while you realise that 98% of the game can be played and completed in about 50 square metres. Soon after that you realise that what you're doing over and over is pointless. You're carrying out pointless repetitive actions that might as well be condensed down into a fraction of the virtual world that you inhabit. Planetside 2 is like that. All it really needs is a couple of worldwide servers with two small continents on each server so that the giant TDM can repeatedly take place around the clock. Hence the continent locks. Who needs all these continents anyway? Who actually cares about the grander scale? This game could be so deep and so enjoyable. This game is such a waste of a wonderful idea.
