[Suggestion] The headshot advantage for the veteran and the hacker

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Rafabeatz, Jul 9, 2018.

  1. Rafabeatz

    Hello folks! First of all, excuse my English, it's not my native language.

    I play Planetside about 2 years ago, in PS4 with my outfit I managed to recruit more than 250 players, of which 180 remain with an activity of 35%. In PC I'm starting and of the 32 players that I recruited only 5 we played frequently.

    I realize that many players stop playing Planetside 2 because of the huge advantage that veterans and hackers have with extra headshot damage. If they kill you all the time and you don't kill almost anyone, the game stops being fun and you leave, so I think it's right to lower the damage of the headshot to better level the game, I know that many farmers will not like it this, but let's face it, playing always with the same people becomes boring and the community has stopped growing, both veterans and noobs are no longer playing. This game is very thought for the gamer pro, they must think of some strategy to also retain the one who does not have the aim as the one who always hits in the head. A humble opinion of someone who loves this game :)
    • Up x 8
  2. Xebov

    I feel the same. At least for full auto weapons it should be towned down.
    • Up x 2
  3. Halkesh

    As a veteran, I think devs should remove nanoweave armor before considering reducing headshot multiplier. Let's start by lowering the damage ratio to x2 instead of the current x2,5 and it will already help new players a lot.

    Then, once you have see how it change the game, we can consider lowering HSM.
    • Up x 1
  4. JibbaJabba

    If you look back at the history of changes that got us here, you can see it was never intended to be this way. It was all this big "oops" with nanoweave mechanics. The result is that us veterans absolutely massacre new players and they ragequit. They think there are hackers everywhere, or that the game is P2W or something. They don't understand how they can get the initiative, land all their shots, and still lose.

    It should be fixed for the health of the game.

    Sniper rifles and a few others should get the 2x multiplier. Full auto weapons like carbines and LMGs should not.

    I know this may piss off some veterans. I'm not some MLG killing machine or anything but it will affect me significantly. I'm willing to go back to game launch days where landing a shot first (to the body typically) was more important than the headshot. I'll adjust. There will still be *some* head multiplier so it will still be fun.
    • Up x 6
  5. Towie

    ...agreed.

    Some weapons might need a re-balance as they get their ultimate 'power' from being very accurate and therefore landing headshots more often, but overall, i'm in favor.
    • Up x 1
  6. UrielSeptimIV


    Yes, exactly. Most of the negative reviews in Steam tells that the game is P2W and full of hackers.
    I even had to explain them how to play this game and what is wrong with their aim. And only after THAT they often relize that Planetside 2 is an acual F2P game.
    But without any explanation they will just leave the Game frustrated.

    Please, devs, explain to new players that this game have high headshot multipler and complex shooting mechanics. Without this explanation people just leave the game thinking it is P2W. At least put it as a hint in the actual Training tutorial.
  7. LtBomber

    Just providing some numbers:
    Best case: A Vet with 100% HS ratio needs 4 Bullets on 143 weapons, thus 3x refire
    Bad case: A noob with 0% HS ratio needs 9 bullets on 143 weapon, this 8x refire (vs nano)
    Worst case: A noob with 0% HS needs 14 bullets vs a heavy with adrenaline, noobshield and nanoweave, 13x refire

    So HS are allmost 3 times faster at killing than BS with Nano (everyone uses) and over 4 times faster than on a heavy.
    If the noob also takes adrenaline nanoweave, he will still die in about 6 bullets HS.

    TL,DR: Nano armor doesnt impact good players, but punishs new/bad ones.
  8. UrielSeptimIV


    Oh, and can get worse.
    When I first played this game, I didn`t even know that was CoF increase while in ironsights. I have thought it was static, like in other shooters.
  9. JibbaJabba



    Aye once you know about it, this game has some really impressive bullet mechanics. CoF, Bloom, separate horizontal/vertical recoil, velocity, drop, damage over distance, etc.

    I think that was a huge design goal for them. Planetside 1 had possibly the worst bullet mechanics ever devised.

    But... they gotta fix this headshot thing. Noobs just don't know what hit them. The client side hit detection also makes a fast death look like an instant death.
  10. MonnyMoony

    I have to agree. I have been playing since launch and i'm well over BR 100, but the head shot advantage makes a small number of players virtually unbeatable.

    You can get the initiative, take them by surprise - pump them full of shots - and they'll still turn round, ping you in the head and you'll die before they even get to half health (especially if they are running HA with "I win" shields - which many do). This is also true of hackers using aimbots. Such players are difficult to take out anyway - but with the headshot multiplier - it makes it all the worse.

    This can be discouraging even for a seasoned player like myself. When I started out - some players were better than others of course - but everyone was learning the game back then and the playing field was more level. Some people today have 5+ years playing this game, having all the best weapons and armour/implant combos, learning all the little idiosyncrasies of the game mechanics (ADAD and crouch spam, clientside etc). I hate to think what it must feel like for a new player coming into this game with no kit and no experience.

    I have played a few FPS shooters over the years - and none of them felt as if you were being unfairly cheated out of kills as PS2 does.

    There should be a slight bonus for accuracy with head shots - but it shouldn't give such a clear advantage (perhaps 1 or 2 rounds maximum).

    All else being equal, if two people open fire at the same time, the more accurate person should win, but only just. If you do get the jump on somebody - you should have a good chance of winning.

    I don't think the devs care about new players though. There is more an more coming into this game to give ace players even more of an advantage. Take the Aerial Anolomies - this is nothing but a cheese farm for skyknights. Similarly ASP giving veteran players the ability to load out two primaries. You can't even unlock this ability till you get to BR100 (it took me around 4 years to reach that point). Implants are the same - it takes so long to gain them - and even longer to upgrade them once you do. You also have to chose between certing into weapons or implants - which a vet (who likely has most of the best weapons) doesn't have to do.
  11. FateJH

    That's actually reflective of where the developers wanted the game to go. Some of the earliest alphas of PlanetSide 1 had a number of more conventional mechanics more aligned with MMORPGs, included a persistent conceptual PvE world inhabitant called a Shifter (read: mob). The client itself still has the trappings of a semi-functional trading interface that went completely unused for the game's entire lifetime. The client still has a whole network packet devoted to it, as if it were a working feature! Even though head hitboxes are ubiquitous these days, PlanetSide intentionally avoided including them. Meanwhile, the game still retains its third person Infantry mechanics as well so it can't even be considered a full FPS; that's just a hat to sometimes wear.

    My personal opinion has always been that calling the franchise an FPS is selling it short. Even some design documents of the original game that I've come across seem to suggest that while the developers knew that shooting would be the big thing, they wanted to avoid it becoming the only thing that mattered. In the predecessor, even now, the developers have more ideas that just player shooting at each other, but they get pushbaxck for not being just player shooting at each other. Look at the current state of discussion involving PlanetSide 2 game mechanics where many players have fixations with one or more aspects of the game and can even refuse to journey into the others' domains.

    Back then, 2003, you could do something unique like that and still sell well. After the original Call of Duty released that same year, however, shooting mechanics in general changed and, as it went on, there were suddenly things people no longer accepted. "If it was too different from CoD," as I recall some developer once put it. PlanetSide chose to stick to its own ways in terms of its gunplay.
  12. That_One_Kane_Guy


    Not going to trod on one side of the fence or the other here, but looking at the absolute best and worst case scenarios regarding TTK is a little misleading. Yes there are times when you do hit 100% headshots or 100% bodyshots, or even miss 100%, but those are more outliers than an indication of a player's performance. I like to look at what the mean accuracy and headshot stats are for a certain weapon and then apply those numbers before looking at TTK.

    I'll use the Orion as an example as it is still quite popular and has users of widely varying skill levels.
    Per dasanfall, the average user has an Accuracy of ~20% and a HSR of ~24%. These numbers vary by about +/- 5% and +/- 7% respectively. Using these numbers we can begin to get an idea of the real-world performance of the Average Joe, the Pro, and the Potato. Using the numbers we have available for the Orion's ROF, Min/Max Damage*, and Player Health modifiers, I calculated the following:

    *Note that since the Accuracy and HSR are only averages, for simplicity's sake at Max Damage Range (<10m) I will be assuming these values are double.

    (TTK) Average User| Worst User| Best User
    Std (1000 HP): 0.95 / 2.88s | 1.39 / 4.07s | 0.69 / 2.18s _(min/max)
    Aux (1050): 0.99 / 3.02s | 1.46 / 4.27s | 0.73 / 2.29s _(min/max)
    Nano (1100): 1.04 / 3.07s| 1.53 / 4.48s | 0.76 / 2.40s _(min/max)
    Aux+Nano (1150):1.09 / 3.31s | 1.60 / 4.68s | 0.79 / 2.51s _(min/max)
    HA+Aux+Nano (1400): 1.32 / 4.03s | 1.95 / 5.70s | 0.97 / 3.05s _(min/max)

    If my math is sound, these numbers represent the best and worst you will most often see in game. There's still a performance gap, but nowhere near as extreme as the ideal numbers would have you believe. Take from this what you will.
    • Up x 1
  13. JibbaJabba

    So I guess what I'm hoping for is this.

    Take the bodyshot TTK of a common gun, maybe an NS weapon. For discussion sake let's say it's a 2.5 second TTK.

    Subtract from that 2500ms some slop:
    150ms of network+server latency.
    250ms of MLG like reflexes. (150ms if auditory, but lets go visual)

    Left with 2150ms. That means a veteran can get shot in the back and have 2.150 seconds to spin and land enough headshots to win. The headshot TTK right now is so short that 2.150 seconds is an eternity. As Bomber and Kane are point out the headshot TTK is sub-second on many weapons.

    We need to meet halfway on this. Change the multiplier until the headshot TTK is in the 1500 - 1800ms range. Body shots remain in the 2500-3000ms range.

    Result...

    If a vet and noob go toe to toe, the vet is still going to win easily. The vet will win the TTK by about a second.
    If a noob gets the drop on a vet, things are going to be even. Headshot TTK will not be enough to overcome latency and reflexes.
  14. LtBomber

    Yes, you are right, i just provided numbers and hoped for anyone else to make his own picture. You did, and it looks similar to mine.

    However, shouldnt bei the combo depicted above give 1500 (=1000+50+450) HP stacked with 20% damage reduction on bodyshots?
  15. Lee Weldon


    It's not completely untrue that its not p2w, while some of the starting weapons you have are quite competitive, being the bolt driver for nc or the orion for vs, i'm over rank 60 and I still don't have a kitted max or an upgraded tank. You still even before considering headshot multiplier have a huge significance in lvl 5 ability, optimized grenades, hell even the best lmgs pretty much outperform the gaus saw by about 20% just because it cannot take what I would consider good attachments. I think the cash shop model somewhat relies a little on each purchase being a semi-upgrade, people like to throw the comment out there often enough that each weapon is only pretty much a sidegrade but you're lying to yourself. People are also being toxic a lot of the time to the overpopulated factions telling them to swap etc etc, but no like 1500 certs for ability level 5, 1300 for a new gun with attachments.

    The headshot mulitplier is actually the only thing that was letting me achieve KDA's of >1 with my new characters that i've just made, in any case there is some sort of interaction between skill dependancy and gear dependancy.
    If you increase the gear dependancy leads to P2W
    If you increase the skill dependancy leads to veterans stomping

    Even as a semi decent player, I feel that there is another bubble of protection in that you cannot take any gun to headshot another player, you basically have to pick up a gun with a 20% damage reduction, that is capable of landing shots more accurately to even go for the headshot multipliers and thats simply because the hit box of the body is vastly larger than the head. When I play with the tanto, I'm taking ROF 600 (would typically have an encompassing 167 damage model but instead has a model of 143 damage that would usually be on a gun with 800+ rof). Now once again I feel people are going to shut me down on this but in some games this is more forgiving because the only real fps games I played before this were cartoony, still had headshot multipliers but didn't have any COF/bloom mechanics involved. A lot of these games, really old school, but I remember a time when crouching was just to reduce your hitbox and offered no accuracy advantages.
  16. Magma52

    The time to kill in this game is very long compared to Call of Duty/Battlefield. The only way to consistently kill quick is to get good and land headshots. New players dislike the long TTK as it is. You think a bunch of new players will want to play a game that caters to bad players? Forget it.

    Nerfing headshot damage will drive the good, experienced players away. If they leave, all that's left is bad casuals who can't aim and those who play around with the Minecraft mechanics all day. Good luck maintaining your online FPS player population with those kind of players...
    • Up x 1
  17. Demigan

    The biggest problem I see isnt just a headshot multiplier. Most weapons have a COF growth that makes going for headshots after the first shots a bad decision unless you are very close. But there are a line of weapons that remain good for headshots until much longer ranges, and these are invariably chosen by certain skilled players to lay waste to everyone with a damage curve way higher than the skillcurve considering the extra skills required for "normal" weapons to have similar damage profiles (such as trigger discipline, more focus on recoil control and COF control/RNG prediction of how likely it is to keep scoring hits). Naturally such weapons are deemed "high skill weapons", because the whole sniper idea that permeates all FPS games where a single headshot is somehow superior to landing multiple headshots with an inferior weapon translates here as well.

    Reducing the headshot multiplier is a good idea as it promotes other weapons as well. If we could have less "on headshot kill" implants as well we can remove ourselves from the toxic "use only a portion of the game's weapons" doctrine it promotes.
  18. That_One_Kane_Guy


    Whoops I had the wrong number for the Overshield. For some reason I was sure it was 250, not 450. I actually wasn't applying Nanoweave correctly either, since it apparently stacks with shields and the the HA Overshield, meaning that instead of 1500 they would have 1790.

    So roughly the same ratio as before just with a larger number.

    Bad Good Average
    1.39 4.07 0.69 2.18 0.95 2.88 Std
    1.67 4.88 0.83 2.62 1.13 3.46 NW
    1.46 4.27 0.73 2.29 0.99 3.02 Aux
    1.74 5.09 0.86 2.73 1.18 3.60 Both
    2.49 7.29 1.24 3.90 1.69 5.16 Both+OS

    *okay seriously screw trying to import charts in this forum
  19. Lee Weldon

    yes but even though I tend to think the sniper rifles are kinda overpowered, and sorta battle rifles and those sort marksman rifles, you can't really change much about them to make them balanced, you can only really buff every lmg/assault rifle a little, but even then I used to play battlefield hero and I was commando class, the soldier that could heal in that game, could pop out from a corner, land two shots on you and a dot that would light you on fire and kill you. Theres a fine line between these weapons with great areas of effective range and those being absolutely useless.
  20. HippoCryties

    Yeah whenever I kill a noob I will always message him and try to help him.