The state of PS2 and what I feel must change.

Many of the Buzz Suggestion will only Benefit Big zerg outfit like TE , what he is trying to do is to make the game more linear and predictable and it is not good. The thing is about PS2 is how we use our problem solving skill to get between our enemy. So take an example of this kinda of situtation " VS is moving through Howling pass Check point and TR trying to cap Quartz ridge camp. so what NC suppose to do ? well we took the mid of the map taking Zurvan and Tawrich and move to TR and VS warp gate from the mid until Ceres farm and Auraxium mine to cut them off" . What buzz trying to do is to make either NC took upon TR main Force or VS main force and does not have a choice between it.

The meta game that people have been asking for is already shown is merit in couple of month of the game release, but the things people cant see that kind of thing because they are to focusing on farming cert. A meta game is a game within game. it is how we approach a different scenario by using our mind instead our guns. How to effectively kill of the attacker ? destroy their spawn points , AMS sundie, spawn beacon, Satellite bases you name it. Defender need to prioritize that first rather than getting kills and this is applicable to locking up a continent in later month, where you have to destroy their ultimate spawn point (Warpgate) rather than racking up kills and get stomped later on.

if you read carefully many of Buzz suggestion only want to make defending facility more of a cert farm rather than trying to help the defender get the capture points back, it would only benefit the attacker more if the defender would come out and get shot by a HE prowler in the face. Yes i realize that as the SCU is down defender have no way of spawning and would only extend his life by trying to get to repair the SCU by those nifty tunnels,But still at least they have a choice to not get spawn camp trying to repair the generator Via tunnels or Prowler in YOUR FACE. All of the suggestion that Buzz have only benefit large Zerg attacking a not well defended place.

I just hope this thread will not get bump after my post and i hope people realize this kinda of exploit that he could use to make his gaming expeience more hurt the people he play with.

I have read 35pages but can't stand on his fanboy or TE supporting this idea.
im sorry i just want to give people my opinion on this matter. the game have a depth and only need a little tweaking so it can live up to it's expectation. making more engaging battle not linear experience .

Though I do grow to dislike BCP (particullary because of this post, due to my not liking people who steal others' thunders), what you are saying is a total bias.

Making the game linear will work absolutely other way around, benefitting defenders. In other words - defense is not the recapturing of the points captured by an enemy, that's called counter-offensive. Defense is when you not let the attackers take these points in the first place.

I'd take linearity over the random zerg fest directionless clusterfudge ghostcapping situation we have at the moment.

Agreed. We need some sort of linear game direction in order to direct the simple minded folk to important objectives.

again that is why I said

Air > Armor > Infantry

It creates a level play across all factions meaning any infantry can jump into air or armor, but they should not be able to dominate the battle field as air or armor unit does on a 1 vs 1 scale.

Going to respond to your entire Post 1 (only linked 1 paragraph). You're wrong, 100% wrong. Attackers are always at a disadvantage because there are 3 factions and offensive spawn points are always fickle. If SOE complies with this post the game is doomed. Offenders get grinded on by any good defense, not to mention the latent bonus to defensive air (closer to WG and friendly turrets)

As for 1 person in a spawn point, you seriously think that is a meta-game problem? SOE couldn't have it any better. That person can move around, but he likely gets camped. You realize in the same post you simultaneously argued that offenders have an unfair advantage, that defenders have an unfair advantage, and then again that offenders have an unfair advantage?

"Spawn-camping defenders is too good. Defenders are too good. Offense has too much momentum."?

No, defense always has the advantage because the more time you buy, the more the third faction bites them in the butt. This part of the game balance is fine. SOE please please don't listen. And restricting the available spawn points would be a huge mistake. Whole platoons would become fragmented from each other, unable to stay together. It would be nothing but frustration. Sorry if I don't read the rest of these suggestions, but this game direction would be frightening. Noob player-flow will always be poorly thought out, you can't fix that. Smart outfits will be in the right spot. You can't change that either.

You then argue that the Influence system is unnecessary, without realizing it is another bonus to all defenders. Using available spawns (from death) to get to outlying bases to protect influence is a fundamentally brilliant system SOE created to give defenders an advantage.

To all you guys out there, a WALLOFTEXT is not always the best plan...think more carefully about the implications. My observation is that the majority of people offering "advice" to SOE don't even have a grasp on the current meta game.

But would turning it into a linear zerg fest clusterfudge be much better ?

Now that i think about it higher TTK would not do anything but that, require more time to kill. Its the movement speed that is so slow that even if you fire at someone, if someone else has a line of sight you're dead. That does not infact let smaller forces fight more men, unless it's a trench war with camping, and the one to go out of cover first dies. Not much of tactics imo.

Right now you don't even have time to make a decision, thats what i like about arcade shooters. Quick decisions, that can grant you a comeback instead of a sure death. The pure fact shields take a whooping 10 seconds to regen makes it so much harder to run away from fire.

Tactical positioning in planetside is pretty inconsistent, considering there are large open fields or basic things to hide behind, otherwise you need to be aware where the enemy comes from and that's it. The problem right now is even if you look away for a literal second and enemy just happens to enter your area in the same moment, you're already severely disadventaged if he started firing, and almost surely dead if the shooter is competent. You don't control things like these so positioning superiority while playing a role, also has a chance element to it and isn't a win button for every engagement. With a longer TTK and faster movement you could fire back in a more skilled manner outdamaging your opponent by having better prediction (because right now just increasing TTK would not really do that) or taking cover quickly enough to not die or hang on few bars of health, and wait for a good moment to fire back in a way that would even out the enemy adventage, thus making up for that chance with better overall awareness and skillset.

Your quote is unrelated, it is simply your most recent post.

You are 11th in "People who have killed me", also somewhat unrelated.

And every single thing you have said here is absolute 100%. I have made a similar post in regards to the removal/simplification of bases on Indar to erase these distractions and promote more flow as a quick-fix right now that could be done in a day or two of coding that would decrease the useless bases by over 10.

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/suggestion-soe-quickfix-for-indar.95298/

The intestinal blockage and wasteful ghost capping we are forced to do as forces scatter looking for a fight is redundant and is KILLING my drive to play this game I admire and enjoy.

Thank you for making this epic and common sense thread, and thank you for hosting some of the best fights I have ever had on Indar. I wish our VS numbers were higher to put up a better fight when you MAX crash us like you're some kind of professionals at this, but I'll keep shooting until I kill more of ya. My senses heighten when I start getting kills/killed.by [TE]. And thank the gods you can't hear my endless local chat.

You sir, in your passion, have swayed the direction of this game. If the devs haven't already considered your points, they certainly have thus far. I plan on playing this game until the end, and as soon as it gets bigger and better, I'll be investing more money into it beyond alpha squad. This game WILL succeed! And it will be thanks to bastards like you who know what you're talking about.

/Steakncheese
(p.s. hearing someone call out, "OMG Buzzcutpsycho is on the roof!" in TS3 gets you "I don't want to hear that name anymore." from a ton of people lololol. We used to have a thing, if you knife-kill buzz and screenshot it, you get a cookie.)

+2

Who's asking to be able to go AFK? Stop assuming things, you ignorant a**. God forbid I actually want to play the game than sit around and shoot a door for 5-10 minutes. Ideally, I would want the flow of a base battle should be designed such that the defenders have a chance to regain their position at any point until the attacker's bar is completely full. Multiple spawn rooms, multiple SCUs, more secondary objectives, etc with more mobility for the defense around the base.

Now that I have had time to read through this whole wall of colorfied text, I can say I disagree with most of Buzzcuts points.

First, this Battleflow thing, this can only be suggested by someone who has not a military bone in his body. I understand that he wants stable lines and such, but forcing "JoeNobody" casual gamer to go certain places because the fight was lost is just bad. I know many times I hate the linked places and I will just leave that area. If someone doesnt like fighting at the crown or Indar Excevation, they shouldnt have to spawn there because its the next fallback link. And I shouldnt have to fallback to the Warpgate if I can go somewhere else, say where my friends are or my outfit.

The next point the defence SCU painfield thing. No, no, ah HELL TO THE NO!

What are you smoking boy and why aint you sharing?!

SCUs are easy enough to pop. A single infiltrator can pop 2 generators, and the SCU long before any fight. So you can effectively RAMBO a Techplant or a Biolab before a fight even starts. Sorry not going to help the game.

Automated turrets adds the issue of how good do you make the AI gunner? Is it 100% accurate 100% of the time? Or is it less accurate? If you make it to accurate or cause to much damage, why should a person actively defend anything? Case and point WWII Online when AI defence was added. The AA was so powerful that it could instantly 1 shot a pilot in an aircraft moving at 400kph at 4km. It was so bad that you could kill four or five enemy aircraft just by getting them to follow you over a friendly town with one AI AA MG. Then there is the issue of additional server load, as now the server has to calculate the AI response.

AMS deployment zones.... REALLY?! If you cant handle a Sunderer parked on top of a cap point, then DONT LET IT GET THERE!

Influence system.... Its not the influence system thats at fault, its the ability to flip a point and leave and let the influence do the work. You should have to STAY on the point to move the capture bar.

HE damage, is not that bad. I play a LA without Nanoweave, or Flak, and I rarely die to HE fire. The trick is DONT BE THERE. If you dont like getting killed by it, DONT BE THERE!

They didn't listen during Beta. They aren't listening now. I have no doubt they are reading these threads but as Higby tweeted, they're just too busy to give this their full attention. We stand to gain nothing if this game succeeds other than a few years of gaming joy. We aren't stock holders. There won't be a bonus check come Christmas in Buzz's mailbox or anyone elses.

All of these points were made during beta ad nauseum. Lattice? Check! Spawn Camp Fests? Check! Screen shake and flinch? Check! Meta game? Check! Check!! Check!!! Post after post after post........................ We were accused of being PS1 homers and not evolving to understand the current FTP gamer crowd. What retribution for SOE will there be when this game has gone the way of Warhammer, Aion, Age of Conan. This game is probably headed for the same death spiral but the folks in charge are too busy building new continents and weapons to worry about it.

One last plea from a PS1 vet:

Planetside 1 worked. You had the battle tested framework for a fantastic game! Sure it had some flaws, but the game worked. It was well thought out. It was tactical. It developed leaders who rose from within the ranks to lead their respective factions. It required organized combat to succeed. Now go ahead and call me a PS1 homer or just a plain pessimist, but I've seen this movie before. Great potential, flawed execution. Makes me sad though because this is the one game I have been dreaming about since 2003.

Concerning your SC re-addition to the game, that would never work because people like me would just go behind lines and kill it when no one is there, crippling any defense that might happen there unless some wandering soul came by and repaired it. In beta you could kill an SCU (which was at every base, as I and you know) in two clips with a carbine. The overload may be better for defenders (who are present, anyway) but it still doesn't help the fact that if a SCU was at every base you would never be able to spawn behind lines because people like me would fly an ESF behind lines and kill it, then watch as the retreating force is forced to skip over a base because they can't spawn there anymore.

You couldn't be more from the truth. The instant action change would not benefit us as we should not be using it in the first place. Any outfit, including ours will exploit it until they make it so people cannot use it in the fashion that it is currently used in. We are not alone in that category.

Influence and battle flow, that helps the random players as well as other smaller outfits. Since we are a larger (roughly 150 guys/night) outfit, we can be more flexible in what we want to do and where we want to go. If we want to assign different squads to capture certain areas or all flood one area, we can, other outfits cannot due to their size and must roll with the "zerg" half the time.

Server merges, how does that not help everyone?

Deploy zones, again, does not really help our outfit. In fact, it actually hinders it because we cannot just drive dozens of AMS's up to a cap point.

Thins like flinch and screen shake are like being Michael Jay Fox in a Michael Bay movie. This really has nothing to do with our outfit.

Giving outfit leaders and platoon leaders more tools at their disposal is not something that will only benefit us, it will benefit everyone.

Again, you and many others like you try and advocate that all Buzz tries to do is push agenda's for his outfit and time and time again, people like you sound more ignorant every day. Your comments also prove you never even read his posts and decided to just jump on the bandwagon. People should actually read the context of his posts and then discuss them rather than discussing him as a person as this thread is not about Buzz, you just make it about him.

Guess the point went over your head .. O well

Make it so the SCU can only be attacked if the base can be attacked. That would fix this issue, wouldn't it?

Battle flow requires reduced spawnpoints and/or lattice - NO. All we need is more information on the map. Mark large enemy blobs for all allies so we can actually go defend or respond to things before the base is completely surrounded and camped. [Link]. This is all we need for the meta game to develop and it's very simple.

SCUs required in every base - NO. We had it in beta. Lonewolfs. Lonewolfs EVERYWHERE destroying all spawns at all times.

Painfields after SCU is completely blown - YES. I also get frustrated at my team sitting in the spawn doing nothing productive. Even if we all moved out at once, we'd get insta-gibbed by the force outside. So why are we there? And if there's 15-20 people trapped in the spawn at this base, how many are in spawn at other bases right now? How much of my empire is just sitting in spawn right now because the game mechanics encourage it? If the SCU is lost and you don't have another spawnpoint, the battle is lost. Painfields on the spawn when SCU is gone just make people move and stop trying to farm.

Automated turrets - Hell NO. AI is dumb, which is why I play multiplayer games. I can always exploit the AI and the game becomes boring. Automated turrets would only stop noobs who don't know how to exploit them yet. Now I AM for having more turrets in general and making the geometry around them protect repairing engineers... So u actually have to drop a team of infantry in and take out the engineers before you can realistically kill the manned turrets. Also give turrets much more coverage (at least 270 degree spins). Add a "turret shield generator" so when its up your turrets get a deplete-able overshield like the heavy.

AMS Deployment zones - NO. Let the meta-game develop. People will start putting mines on the common AMS spots with no game changes needed. My outfit already does that at Quartz ridge on the southern rocks, where most enemy AMSes set up. Tons 'o kills. This could be the norm for even casual players if the "enemy blob" system were implemented [Link]. Its essentially a warning system that lets you defend territories before the enemy has already taken it.

Influence System - The influence system is fine. You know what it does? It makes it so you don't have to sit 15 mins at every base after the fight is long over. Some may like sitting doing nothing, but I don't. "Defenders" are not going to come spawn in a base that is entirely camped by a zerg and everything destroyed. They'll just get obliterated. Making the attacking zerg sit longer doesn't make defense any more possible. Influence also allows for siege situations where you surround the territory, then only need to hold one point to two points in order to flip the base. This is good for strategic play. The crown needs points a little further out from spawn so it's possible to hold them as an enemy. Although, people will learn to take even the current crown quickly as time goes on.

Instant Action - Hell YES. Now that's just a great idea

Server Mergers - YES. Needs no explanation

You obviously know nothing about BCP personally.

Here's the problem I find with the current system as a casual player.

I FINALLY find a good, large, fight. Eventually we, the defenders, get pushed out and over run. If I'm not in a squad I'm SOL... where's the new rally point? Nobody knows because we aren't communicating.

If I"m in a squad the squad / platoon rally point is set on the OBJECTIVE... not where we are going to rally up and push back... not where we may want to build up a defense for the enemies next move. MAYBE you have a good leader and they move the way point quickly but usually they A) suck or B) are still alive at the current objective and haven't taken the time to move the way point yet. All the while his dead squad members are popping all over the freak'n place and are now spread out. MAYBE you have an excellent leader who actually communicates clearly with his squads and tells you where you should be rallying at.

In a lot of situations good or excellent leadership can make up for shortcomings of current systems but these leaders are so rare.