i read the update notes and it seems to me that only Indar is required to have only 8 VP to lock down. now i know that indar is usually overpopulated and the other continents are not getting much love. there are plenty good reasons for that, level design just plain out sucks on other continents, to name one. - i mean look at esamir, at the age of plasma rifles there are walls around bases but that's not all, people can just casually shoot over them from the hill 5 steps away. a plain average medieval engineer ROFLing himself in its grave to death a 2nd time. obviously the issue is way more deeper then that: choke point control, line of sight, travel time.. anyway.. i think DB just wants to spread people to other continents. this being the easy way contrary to reviewing gameplay at the other continents (a sign that decision makers do not understand and/or don't play the game). so just make people fight where they don't want to fight? screw having an adverse effect on gameplay? well, if anything, Indar should take 15 points and have alerts disabled on it. blatantly going against player preference like that has (or will have) immediate repercussion from player community, conscious or otherwise. obviously i am trying to be constructive and shave of some of the chronic lack of excellence this game suffered from since beta.
the biggest indar nerf i saw from the livestream was that they're removing all indar A points from inside towers and putting them outside. i really really hate when they make it easier for the attackers than the defenders! A points inside towers are one of the very few things that actually need a coordinated push to capture, i love the push up the staircase, it just feels really actiony! most bases now the enemies can just roll up and park a sundy closer to the capture points than the defenders spawn room is... Crown for example was once an EPIC battle, now its probably the easiest base to casually capture. since Crowns are awesome and impressive they should rename the base Fedora, to match its lameness!
That's the trend I've seen. If too many players play on one continent, make it less available. If too many players use 1 type of gun, nerf it. that's how they seem to spread usage out.
DBG are the evil themselves every Monday morning all the DBG employers can make a suggestion on how to piss the players off and the best ones are selected for the next update
Indar is getting nerfed further than the VP system. Those bases people love to grind in are being overhauled or removed entirely. Indarside will die. Apparently the 'vocal minority' aren't the only ones who dislike Indar. But the devs themselves. Which isn't surprising, its still in its Beta form. Amerish and Esamir were changed from their Beta forms, Indar's next. Thank god.
OP, everything that you hate about the other continents I love. Indar is a horrible horrible place where vehicles can farm almost every base. Scared Mesa Skydock is one of the only good places to fight on that continent because vehicles can't take jump pads.
In fairness, even Esamir is "beta". Indar is more like an alpha. There's a video floating around from SOE Live (2013?) where Higby is talking about the Esamir walls. They were trying to find a solution to the HE spawn farming in Indar, and decided to try putting big, obnoxious, low dev time cost walls around everything. They weren't really happy about the solution, but the data showed that it was working and fights were spreading out instead of having the majority of defender deaths be from MBT HE within 5m of the spawn shield. Of course after a couple more years of experience you end up with bases like the new Quartz Ridge. If you ever want to see the difference between Indar base design and real base design, do a side-by-side look at what Quartz Ridge used to look like.
You're absolutely right. Though that is why Esamir is next after Indar. Amerish is the only real finished continent, and it happens to be my favorite out of the four. Hossin just needs some of those vehicle blocking plants removed and most complaints will go away. Not all, because some hate the bases, but I rather like them. Simply because of how different they are and how unpredictable the battles can be.
Heh, I suppose Hossin also needs players who aren't running the game on actual potatoes. Half the complaints I see are people complaining about 'lag' (i.e. "My framerate is bad"). Which is so sad, because there are a lot of people who also complain about how Indar bases need to be changed because they're too simple and too close together - apparently not realizing that their complaint has been resolved, and it's called Hossin.
I've noticed that with the VP system battles stall now on Indar and other continents but Indar more so because from my frequent viewing of the map there are simply more vehicles playing on Indar. I personally don't want to see the capture points changed and would suggest that instead they do what they did to MBTs a long time ago and apply that same requirement to Sunderers (yes those seven hundred of them on the map at once), simply not allow them (Sunderers) to spawn except at tech plants or the warp gate.
I've made suggestions in the past that have caused the lonewolf/casuals cry foul. But those suggestions haven't been as severe as your Sunderer restriction. So what would you say to those players? Cause restricting Sunderer spawns would force coordination to pulling them, or push people into galaxy drops. That's a bit beyond the lone wolf and the casual player. Not saying I disagree with your suggestion, just playing devil's advocate here.
One side of me wants to say they did it because the "Indar T" makes capping Indar very hard. The jaded part makes me feel like they are capitulating to the vocal minority that hates Indar. I guess we'll see after they revamp Indar here... if the continent caps just as fast as the others... and they put it back to 10 points or leave it.
Made as a point to broaden the discussion... Remember pre high-walls-of-Esimir and how play was entirely different? Remember when some continents didn't even have Hex Lattices on them and it was all ghost capping all the time? The only continent I have issue with is Hossin. Hossin without the Interlink facility isn't the Hossin I want to play on. As for the Sunderer suggestion, it's a strawman for any discussion. Could have commented about capture points being taken by cloaked infiltrators or a half dozen galaxy repair sunderers hovering above a capture point dropping player after player and keeping MBTs alive while shooting into spawn rooms or how hex lattices favor ghost capping or any other feedback about the game. We can suggest changes, we can open dialog about how those changes effect play but at the end of the day we simply don't know what the devs intend. Why is Indar being treated differently? Are we simply between updates that make the story and flow more complete? It's like wack a mole. Throw theories out and hope for a response, the more intense the theory perhaps it gets a dev response? ^ That and I had decaff this morning...
Sadly, the issue isn't Indar which has been popular for a reason, but the lattice system in my view. I don't know why they don't overhaul the linking and system in general, as it has been suggested many times, but just force-alter the entire continent doesn't seem that great. Although I just wait until its up at PST, maybe it is for the better. Nowadays Indar and Esamir are my least favorite continents, mostly because of lattice stalemates/repeating battles. Somehow though the vast majority still loves both of them most, which ends up in PS2 being awful in faction overpop times like it has been at Cobalt for weeks now. There is only one continent to go to, which usually is Indar or Esamir, seldom Amerish and never Hossin. That said, the VP system on top of lattice and continent locking doesnt work out very well currently. But it came along with VS pop declination, so the fact is biased. It sucks tremendously just getting "continent locked" out of "nowhere" right now, killing off the very last of nice battles.
I'm hoping it is just a test and they change all the continents to lock with 8 VP. I think continent rotation is good for the game.
Well, technically the continents are rotating. The problem is that Indar gets left out. I can't speak for every server, but here's how it works on Connery: Indar is the 'default' continent. Enough of the population likes the warm familiarity of Indar that they will go there whenever Indar is available. They'll generally drag the people who don't care (or don't know any better) along with them. This in turn drags in the people who just want to go where the fights are, and so on... until all that's left are the people who detest Indar, but won't log off. So you end up with most of the population on Indar, and less than two dozen people wandering around the other open continent. The interesting part is that this population is only very rarely even. Generally that second continent will have something like a 50-60% overpop. Whichever faction has the dominant position will quickly ghost cap the secondary continent and move on to the second. In this manner, the other three continents can go on a full rotation in the time it takes for Indar to lock once. Shortly after the VP introduction it wasn't uncommon for Indar to go for days without locking while the other continents would be lucky to go a couple of hours (Hossin especially seemed vulnerable to the 'touch two WGs', but that's just anecdotal). And if Indar does lock? Then you'll see the face-palm inducing scenario where this is happening to two continents simultaneously as the factions work together to deny any fights for however long it takes to ghost cap two continents and unlock Indar again. How do you solve the pop imbalance? Drop the pop cap across the board. It was 1,100-ish per continent last I heard, so maybe dropping to 450-600? Instead of "First locked, first unocked" like we have now, dynamically unlock continents based on whichever one has the least amount of time 'open'. Change the continent population mechanic to be dynamic. instead of a flat cap, you simply cannot have most of your forces on a single continent. "Upgrade Now" to be put to the head of the Indar-queue. Don't declare an alert, but simply award 3VP/hour to whoever is in the lead of Indar. Replicate last year's "Indar locked 4-eva" bug. Finish the revamp of Indar bases to make it not such a horrible place to play.
To put it plane and simply.. Indar/amerish is the best in my eyes. They both have plenty of cliffs, Low trees, and areas to hide that keeps you safe from skytards looking for easy kills. Hossin sucks because its a pain in the *** to navigate and lock ons are pretty much **** because the trees are high enough that they serve as lockon breakers for the air units. So a good enough pilot can fly with complete immunity to rockets that aren't dumbfired. As for esamir? Being on a white, Barren frost land tends to only be fun if you spend most of your time driving vehicles.
