To the Call of Duty players ruining this game..here's your wake up call..

^ QFT, I don't get why everybody blames CoD or BF just because SOE changes or tweaks vehicle vs infantry balance. CoD to the FPS genre is like WoW to the MMORPG genre, they are both successful franchises that have the largest population around, and most importantly they make their players HAPPY. But they are both constantly demonized because they are the biggest and most successful, so anytime something is wrong with other games, people point fingers at these 2 games.

This is coming from someone who does not play WoW or CoD, but realize both of these games cater to their own audiences and they are very successful games that cater to a very large gamer population. But still, CoD is not the reason why SOE changed air superiority balance, because any reasonable individual would've agreed air during the first 2 months were absolutely ridiculous.

And in a game which there's no limits to the amount of vehicles players can spawn at a given time, is anybody actually surprised that vehicles and air both had their weapons of mass destruction tweaked down? It's simple mathematics, heck it's even more simple than that, it's common sense.

To anybody that keeps blaming SOE for balance changes, let me ask you, if you had a game, and majority if your players are infantry players, what would you do? Would you tick them all off and say screw them by making vehicles more powerful, by making air being the only counters to air, by giving tanks more weapons of mass destruction to slaughter your infantry audience? Or would you value your jobs and income and understand that this game really needs to cater to everybody equally, and since launch, this game has not been in favor of infantry.

1. For the first 2 months those who brought most air, won the war. No if's and but's, it was how the game was designed. It was Higby's design vision that ground should not kill air, but merely deter (which we all know didn't work).

2. For the first 3 months all MBT's and air ingame have access to HE rounds used to mass farm infantry players, until the patch this week that reduced blast damage a bit.

3. For the first 2 months building structures had no added shades and walls, no small windows, infantry were farmed no matter where they went, no matter if they were inside buildings or not.

4. For the whole time since launch this game has 3 continents full of open air and open terrain, making life very very difficult for any players on foot.

So seriously, who exactly is catering to CoD franchise again? This game is NOTHING like CoD, this game's vehicle vs infantry balance is worse than Battlefield 3 & BF:BC2. This game has issues of its own, they have nothing to do with any other gaming franchises.

Ok?

Yet somehow you're equating them with this game's CQC??

Quake and Unreal only had fast TTK's for really skilled players. Everyone else either Rail-wh***'d kill-steals to get theirs, or just plain DIED when taking on anyone who 180'd and then "danced" better at close range. Need citation?? Indirect Rockets took up to 3 hits to kill a full health player and really skilled players were often wracking up tons of HUMILIATION.wav's just b/c that's how much time they had to showboat on the scrubs.

it seems like a separate issue from call of duty at first, but when you boil it down, it basically equates to the "modern gamer" having zero attention span, and finding it an acceptable deal to shovel out hundreds of dollars up front to have everything, instant gratification, instead of having to invest time and effort into developing skill.

Yeah this is a great read. Thank you for finding it.

The bit that surprises me in the article is how he claims Red Orchestra (and similar games) are twitch shooters ("Call of Duty compressed their skill gap so much that these guys never needed to get good at a shooter. They never needed to get good at their twitch skills with a mouse.").

I always thought a twitch shooter is one where you run around nonstop, firing full auto in close quarters combat or doing 360quick/noscopes while jumping. Clearly RO isn't in that class.

I think PS2 gunplay is in a good spot for medium and long ranges. There's enough casual in to have a succesful game, yet enough room for thought, maneuver etc to provide an advantage. It's only the close quarters where mindless rushing seems to be rewarded too much. The easy access from 360 degrees of any given spot of a base just adds to this (at least instant action drop pod spam is reduced a bit, though imo spawn beacons should be more restricted as well. At the very least don't let them be deployed on goddamn tree branches..)

Yeah basically haha. That's why I'm happy prowler got nerfed. I never even bought HE so it doesn't affect me negatively ^.^

successful from a financial and business standpoint, of course. if that's the only metric by which you measure the greatness of a videogame, then they're the best games on earth.

Short term I will agree with you .. But looking at things more long term then I disagree
Unless they plan on a low retention / high rotation of player's which isn't very good for F2P revenue then depth need's to be added.
A lot of people who game's now a days are dumbed down for are fly by night's and will leave once the next game is released . The long term revenue will come from those dedicated to the a game due to its depth that keeps them engrossed.

No. Just for what is wrong with FPSs nowadays.

I imagine some people are just two young to remember games like quake and unreal tournament. Call of Duty and the era of console shooters has persistently dumbed down the PC FPS to it's current state.

There is very little emphasise on skill and being a good player anymore. Cheap kills are aplenty in ps2 unfortunately, I shudder every time I get killed that way. Close quarters game is fubar for me in ps2, where just about anybody with any weapon can gib you in 1-2 seconds. I like twitch gameplay as much as the next man but in overpopulated area with maps that can hold 2000 players it just turns into a cluster ****.

It's a measure that has to be taken into consideration. Obviously the game is doing something right if millions of people play and PAY for. These COD arguments are like blaming Tetris for everything wrong with Bejeweled.

It's nice to see some devs realizing what a blight CoD is and actively working to retain depth and trying to ease CoD players off the life support and into the real world of gaming.

I'm not equating Quake 3 gameplay with PS2, I'm just saying THAT is where my FPS background comes from and THAT I play fast/twitch compared to other people who comes from a different gaming background like arma or BF3.

"These" people call med a COD player for some reason and just counter argue that way. I see no logic in this. I see people move slowly around corners as they scope in, trying to make less sound. While I run full spead with CQC weapons. It's just different gameplay styles brought to the same game.
I've had success playing the way I do in PS2

But the modern gamer isn't what it used to be. Most people are gamers now...it's no longer a niche hobby enjoyed by nerds. And while nerds will master useless skills to enlarge their ******(I keep telling my girlfriend that double-dodging instinctively is a life skill that's useful outside of iCTF), most people will not, and most people don't want something new. Does it make the phenomena any less horrible? No. But at least true gamers know that, in general, this isn't coming from their ranks. New gamers don't wear the blame either, nor do casuals. IT IS NOONE'S FAULT. We can at least rest knowing that much. Times have changed whether we like it or not.

Someone once wrote (and forgive me for not knowing who it was, probably Yahtzee) that the way to kill a genre is to do it better than anyone else has. Make the best game in genre-x that is possible, and every subsequent game will be compared unfavourably to it. COD4 is that game for multiplayer shooters. Unfortunately, the whole edifice needs to die so that fresh ideas can brew.

I wouldn't pin the blame entirely on call of duty. I have friends whom only play Battlefield and exhibit the same sort of behaviour, overall I feel it's a collaborative effort of the modern military shooter sub-genre.
Planetside 2, I observe, has the same problem as modern military shooters. Movement is very slow, and time to kill is very short in the majority of close quarter engagements, means that skill has very little role to play. It's usually whom has the first shot, or the most damaging weapon that wins out, and it is more difficult for a skilled player to take on more than their number in a fire fight.

That's why I mostly derive my enjoyment from flying ESFs these days, there's just nothing engaging about the shooting mechanics for infantry.

Yup, they are both franchises built over time though, this is why they sell without putting any effort to it.

The original versions of both games were actually pretty high skilled, from medal of honor (the original design of CoD) to the first few years of WoW.

What happens is that, people are extremely simple minded in the vast majority of human existance, this was discovered by WoW, by deluding players and simplifying games, the potential of growth was ensured, it's just like fast food franchises killing local diners in an area that never had them.

Who do we blame? not ourselves, we blame:

Greed.
Deluded lazy players.
Developers for allowing it.
The mixing of business with art.

Mostly we blame developers for doing that, as gamers themselves, they should know at what point they hand over the game on a platter to the new player and how the learning curves of their games affect those who practice or are simply better than others at games.

Welcome to Hollywood, music, TV and radio.

of course you're absolutely right. why bother to make a game if it's not going to sell? and as the market becomes more shallow and hyperactive, so too must you cater your product to accommodate them.

it's a chicken-and-egg scenario. do you blame the games, or the people buying them? activision only gives the people what they want, at the end of the day.

Not everyone who plays CoD is stupid, and I'm sure not everyone who played or tried to play Red Orchestra was a CoD player. CoD players aren't some sickness to the world that go around killing games left and right. There is nothing wrong with having a fast paced shooter, there is always a game that leads the rest in every single genre of games. If your game is dying due to CoD players and cant attract anyone else then it probably wasn't that great in the first place. I dont think I've ever heard people say LoL players are killing Dota 2 or WoW players killing GW2.

Not a fan of CoD but Gibson just sounds kind of ******** that some ideas they had that they thought were cool weren't well received. I mean, honestly, this momentum thing does sound like it could be rather clunky.

Innovation and depth are great, but its not always going to work out the way you envision (note how alot of the innovations on PS1 designs are slowly being reverted back to PS1 concepts (PS2 hex system changing to micro-hex rush lanes... which is really just the PS1 lattice system...))

I gave you props for bringing up Paradox. I think they're the best in the business at the moment for creating new things, despite their lack of polish, and not spoon-feeding you. I've got over 10 titles of theirs...

I also think that this "spoon-feeding" or "streamlining" going on right now is the reason for the movement to it's exact opposite. It's the reason roguelikes are massively growing in popularity. It's the reason hardcore perma-death mods like Day Z took off. There are a lot of people out there who are tired of being treated like they're five. These gamers are tired of training wheels that never come off.