The state of PS2 and what I feel must change.

I realise this post was directed at LordMondando, but I'd like to talk about ghost capping too.

It's NOT always some random dude bodging around in ESF or Flash flipping bases, it's often a small squad/outfit manipulating the opposition zerg by offering them XP targets that are not actually in their current vision.

Cap enough bases in one direction and the zerg will tend to head that way to recap those bases. This is because there is very little thought required in zerg-like gaming, so they are often very easy to manipulate.

The reason squads ghost cap is simple, defending against a zerg when you are not in another simmilar sized zerg yourself is not so much fun as manipulating the opposition zergs motions.

Ghost capping is the ONLY valid tactic you have right now to try and fragment an opposition zerg. Some of them just might break away to retake those territories, thus reducing the overall potentcy of that zerg. It's not even that good at this TBH, the reason being that ownership of territory is actually meaningless right now, so you have to rely on flipping a base so that the zerg sees "more XP available over there!" and heads that way, ignoring any thought that their opponents might want them to head that way in the first place.

Occasionally you can work an ambush into this ghost capping, but lack of player cooperation often means it does not come off, by getting your own zerg to an area and tempting the opposition zerg into a poor tactical position where your faction zerg has the upper hand tactically (if not numerically).

I have seen this happen twice since PS2 release, but iut was one of the first things I tried to do once I got a handle on how the system works.

You want to eliminate the ONLY valid tactic a small outfit has at manipulating enemy units behaviour because it takes a while to clean up the mess afterwards? That just shows the tactic has worked a tiny bit as you are no longer part of your faction zerg when you do this.

You wouldn't really need to do this if zergs actually went out looking for opposition zergs, but it seems that when you get zerg vs zerg it's actually a surprise to both parties, you will often see three zergs (one of each flavour) actively avoid each other trolling around the map only fighting grossly outnumbered defenders......

....that's until they stumble upon each other at places like Crown/TI/Crossroads/Zurvan on Indar. That's just not fun, but to put the zergs on rails (effectively) so they had little control about where they might meet each other would be just as little fun.

It's not so much fun when you see the continent pop stats in ratios like 3:1:2 either, but that happens quite a lot. All the population who are grossly outnumbered can do in that situation is ghost cap, since any resistance is futile and unrewarding against massively superior numbers, so they need to split of manageable chunks to get their fun, hence ghost capping territories.

To get rid of ghost capping you need to offer outfits and squads a different way to break up an enemy zerg.

Ghost capping is a sympton of low player numbers, not a symptom of the hex system.

I read the whole thing and, while I've never been a fan of your behavior/attitude from what I've known of The Enclave from my PS1 days from what I've seen from your Enclave videos in PS2, you do know the game very well and have its longevity in mind. I pretty much agreed with every point you made. As for your reputation and personality, I guess every story needs an antihero.

I don't know if you know your way around coding or not, or if you would ever want to work in the game industry, but you could definitely fit in somewhere as an "idea man" of sorts. Really wish you had Higby's job, even if it was just for decision making and design ideas and not actual programming work. If you had any sort of creative control over PS2, it would probably be a growing game right now instead of one that is already hemorrhaging players at an alarming rate less than 6 months after release.

Last thread buzzcut posted had some merit in it. This time it just looks like a lot of personal opinions (with rather flawed suggestions) that are liked up by outfit members.

Please do not use this thread as a reference devs. A lot of the suggested changes would influence gameplay in a negative way.

Edit: Seriously - more then half of the posts in this thread have been made by a handful of people.

It has fantastic points, Psycho.

You just fail to realize them. I absolutely hope the dev's take a look at this, deeply.

I don't think many people are "blindly following" anyone. Buzz simply knows the game and, like many of us, is a PS1 vet as well. Not to bash his little manifesto here or anything, but he basically just wrote up a long post and said the opposite of the majority of what is currently in the game. The game is failing and dying already and it has only been officially released since November 20th. That is pathetic and SOE should feel bad about it. It doesn't take a genius to realize PS2 needs to go in the OPPOSITE direction of where it is going right now, because there is a good reason this game is losing players left and right, it is mostly the game's design and execution to blame, but part of it is also SOE's customer service and bad business philosophy regarding PS2.

Simply put, this game is obviously not hooking many players, and most of it is due to the reasons BCP outlined in this thread. At the end of the day, PS2 is either going to have a thriving community or it will fizzle out just like PS1 did and we'll be left with a game that only the die hard fans are still playing. While PS1 has been around for a long time, it has been an on and off "dead game" since about 2005 or so, Core Combat was partially to blame, but another part of it was a lot of people were not willing to pay a monthly fee for a FPS with no real end game. SOE learned from this with PS2, which is why it is F2P, but it's a TERRIBLE example of F2P, it comes across as a huge money grab. Look to Guild Wars 2 to see F2P done right, SOE could notes from Arena Net.

Well ghost capping is annoying to me only when it's done by only a handful of people. If there more than a squad's worth then by all means let them capp stuff. At least i know a fight will go on there,even if a relatively small one. But most of the time there's just 1-2-3 guys flying or running around just to annoy people.

He has a couple of good points in his post but most ideas seem to be ones that have been discussed a lot on these forums and people mostly haven't been agreeing with them. Suddenly when they're all put together they're brilliant for some reason.

Suggestions like nerfing the crown and sundy no deploy zones have always been demolished pretty quickly - why do they suddenly become good ideas now?

I'm sorry, I've read through half the pages on this thread and this seems too much like an echochamber for me. I'll try to look at it again later with a fresh mind and see if I'm missing something right now.

edit: I want to make clear that there are good suggestions up there and devs should sort through that, just don't take every single suggestion as the community's wish. Evaluate every suggestion on it's own and see if it makes sense. Seems like people are simply praising because they agree with the general theme and don't bother focusing on the specific suggestions.

Well we are not going anywhere , so lets just leave it as it is .
Peace bro .


Edit , lol I got the threads mixed up then !

GW isn't F2P .. So maybe you mean look at their cash shop

I agree with every single specific suggestion.
Though the "Make base turrets automatically shoot at vehicles and aircraft" seems relatively unnecessary.

Yeah it is .. The only thing they should Auto do ( if anything being Auto in a PvP game is ok ) is repair .. Not fast but slowly when out of combat auto repair over a space of 5 - 10 mins

And they should give zero exp if unmanned. In fact, they should give zero exp if unmanned regardless of whether they auto-repair or not.

I've cursed you numerous times on the battlefield Buzz, as I'm primarily NC now, but I respect your dedication to making this a better game. I like what I'm seeing here.

Your last post prior to this thread-naught was dec.10th. You are part of the zerg OP has decided to utilize for whatever reason.

Hence:

I don't care if the OP is ordering his outfit to bump this thread up. This game is no where near as awesome as it could be and just a few of the suggestions (like server merges) would be enough to fix it.

Server merges confirmed - Guess BCS has some weight

Post ergo hoc, propter hoc.

I told you so:

What absolutely 100% baffles me is that the designers of PS2 didn't at least sit down and play PS1 and write down alllllll the things PS1 did right and implement them into PS2. PS1 took time to get to where it is now. Why on God's green earth would you want to start from scratch and again have to catch up to mature the game? Why relive the same anguish PS1 developers went through?

Your research was done and in a physical, touchable form. Instead, you ignored it and said "Battlefield MMO, go do it" and now you're left cleaning up the mess after you discovered that it simply doesn't work that way. The mechanics in PS1 are tried, tested, and sound. There is absolutely no shame in creating PS2 around the same core foundations that took PS1 years to perfect.

Here's your TL;DR:

First and foremost, great job putting this post together. I appreciate the time and effort taken to give constructive feedback.

I agree with most of the points made in the original post. But some of them I disagree with.

1. Influence – I half agree with you here. I agree it needs to go, but I dislike the pure timer related capture points, as it was in PS1. They sort of work, but that puts us squarely in the “base is dead, everyone take a break while we cap”. You could argue that is how it is now, but I think it is less now than it was in PS1. Instead, I would suggest that the number of people allowed to hold a cap be increased from 2/6 to something larger (6/18?). This would have a two-fold affect: having more people on the point would decrease the cap time on an exponential scale, so in situations where there was an obvious steam-roll of a base, it would cap faster and cut down on the downtime, and secondly it would make it harder for ghost cappers to take empty bases because you would need subsequently more people to cap.
2. Vehicle Resource Cost – I think I disagree with this, but I mostly don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. Should vehicles cost more or less? My personal belief is they should cost more. I do agree the “resource meta-game” should be changed, with somehow giving players the ability to affect the enemy “supply lines” and slow down or halt the enemy ability to bring advanced weapons/vehicles against you.

All in all, a very good post with good suggestions. Interesting that the majority of these suggestions are basically PS1 re-envisioned.