Why is the VS the Try Hard faction?

I don't recall him doing that, then again I haven't played PS2 in many months outside of 1-2 days so I can't say for certain. Though DVS is more than capable enough to ruin our own reputation and get an entire server near 100% against us.

In PS2 it was the normal zerg fit at launch. In the Archeage beta DVS was THE most hated guild on the Ollo server, we had to change servers for launch it got so bad. And in Rust... Lets just say that we pissed off the wrong people and our entire community suffered from DDOS attacks so bad it made teamspeak server hosts run and refuse to work with DVS ever again even with paying for their "impossible" protection plan. To put it simple. DVS is filled with ***-holes of all kinds and who tend to be higher skilled, it isn't hard to get a snowball going with people like that if a few go out of their way to start problems.

The main reason our outfit is so inflated with inactive members is that DVS is a gaming community and not just a PS2 outfit. We want our members to keep their DVS tags for if they ever want to come back. That's how it is for all games DVS plays. Our outfits/guilds/whatever is filled with inactive players so that the members can stay DVS and not log in some day to find that they have been abandoned in the name of stats.

We try to run an ops 3 times a week. Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. But it's often just a squad, maybe 1.5 squads. But Im not seeing a big return anytime soon from players being burnt out or balance problems that will never get fixed from either being ignored or just put on a shelf indefinitely. My reason I stopped playing is from NC being left to rot by the devs. I can't support/play a game that lets one faction be so far behind and will likely never get the will to play again till at least one more thing is done.

NS MAX weapons. The last massive balance problem I can see in PS2. The snowballing of VS is big, but made of lots of little things and the players growing them into "that" (points to the game), not much the devs can do to be honest without LOTS of work. But MAXes have been crippling NC since launch from shotguns and bases never made to support their 8m-15m ranges while going against MMGs that bases more than support. Leads to less NC MAXes in total. That leads to NC fighting more MAXes with less of their own. And that finally leads to NC being **** in alerts thanks to it all adding up.

DVS Gaming sucks. They had a group in Archeage and died all the time. It was funny. Also again, unless played in a LAN setting, stats in a client-side hit detection game aren't 100% or even 90% reliable. As long as latency assists or kills someone, that's not skill. It boils down to luck. It's safe to say that out of a thousand kills, a few hundred of them could have been latency assists. Yes I know how client-side hit detection works.

A long time ago, back in 2000 or so, I played a space MMO game named "Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative", it was basically a mixture of xwing/tie fighter mechanics and Elite, but set in an MMO. It had three factions to join. The blue guys (forgot their name) who were all about big tough ships and trading, the red guys (lets call them klingons) who were all about fighting and honor and other klingon stuff and their ships had more firepower than any other ship, and then there were the weirdos, the Quantar. Their thing was "mining" (an exceedingly boring and minor activity in the game) and they were religious and prayed to their god Hamalzah. Their ships were significantly weaker than the other guys, if faster and more maneuverable, but overall much weirder. Their color? Green. The Quantar were also the faction with the lowest pop at all times. I obviously joined the Quantar because, where else are you going to be a space islamist nutcase miner who went mad from all the lonely mining?

Occasionally there were server-wide events, where the three factions would race to accomplish something. Who won every time? The Quantar did, every time. Who had the best honor guard? The Quantar. Who had the best RP events? The Quantar! The best pilots, the best event organisers, the best people all around. Praise Hamalzah!

Meanwhile, the space Klingons were too busy fighting each other over "honor", and the blue guys were busy minding their own trading business to bother with "RP" or "Events", and only some small pirate factions showed a similar level of cohesion as the Quantar who were the main enemies of my clan (because you need to make sure those delicious deep space asteroids can be mined).

I think of this when I think of Planetside. It appears that if you make "religiousness" or "a common goal" a trait of a faction, and then that faction is the underdog population wise, it will breed better players, with more teamwork, than if you solely make "fightfightfight" or "individual freedums" the factions lore. I joined VS because I like weird. And VS was the "weird" faction, just like the Quantar were the "weird" faction in JG:TRI.

tl;dr: Factions performing vastly different solely because of their lore is nothing unique to Planetside 2.

No it's because the team stacking started to snowball uncontrollably.
At launch each side got some good players. I'm gonna time skip to last year where the pop pendulum stopped swinging and where VS started the stack.
So check it, VS starts winning the Alerts, so all the people that are slightly above average take notice of this and decide "I wanna be on the winning team because I'm too bad to make a difference on my own Faction." So they jump ship to VS.
The end.
Unless you were VS originally, you're probably a ****ter. Congratulations.

Maybe I could bring a PS4 perspective to this?

VS is generally underpop on PS4. Genudine (main US server) had 36% TR, 33 NC, 31 VS at the last peak. Ceres (main EU server), which is less balanced, had 45% TR, 31 NC, 23 VS. These numbers are pretty representative for VS.

VS does really well in alerts on both servers, consistently outperforming the higher pop NC (see here).

So what I'm suggesting is that, like PC, there is evidence of VS overperformance/tryhardism on PS4. But unlike PC, this is despite a clear population disadvantage.

As to why VS outperform, one factor is definitely organization. For instance, lots of the more organized players from Dust 514 collectively decided to go over to VS on Genudine.

Magriders also dominate Vanguards and especially Predators on PS4 at least. But that's quite a niche advantage really.

Another factor that I didn't see mentioned in the first few posts (sorry, didn't read whole thread) is this: camouflage. Seriously, the VS default 'camouflage' (i.e. dark purple) is amazing! By contrast, NC stand out like a sore thumb. But maybe this is less of a factor on PC, if most people use custom camo by now.

Around PC launch VS was also the under pop faction but held their own. They claimed back then, and still do today, that it was just them being good to overcome being so under popped. VS has had an advantage forever in PS2. At launch they held out while never having the pop to rightly do so. In near any event such as SOE Live, World Domination Series, or those likes VS came up top and by a truly massive amount as seen in the WDS to the point of needing a new points system and rules change. And now we have VS control over everything but 1 server.

VS having an edge is nothing new. VS fighting to keep it isn't either. What is new is players just now seeing how big the snowball has grown.


But I don't think PS4 servers are a good place to judge balance. 7 of the 8 servers have alert win %s over 50% for one faction. 3 servers have a 90+% alert win rate. There just isn't an even enough playerbase to see anything of worth. Plus console FPS balance isn't good for noting PC FPS balance from how they don't share enough in common between them thanks to control inputs alone.

Thanks, I agree with most of what you say. But personally I don't think there is such a massive difference between PC balance and console balance. We're firing the same weapons with the same stats. PC players do it better (due to mouse/keyboard and frame rate) but that applies consistently across factions.

If VS were stomping on PC but getting pwned on console then maybe there'd be a case for saying that it really was down to the VS players on PC being better than TR/NC players. But when there's a pretty consistent trend of VS overperformance, even on different platforms and multiple servers, that does suggest that balance is a little off.

Analog controls makes for some very different gameplay to digital in shooters even if everything is the same.

I started as a console gamer and changed to PC a few years back. A shooter may be an exact copy between the formats but they play out completely different. Kb/M makes aiming more important than movement, analog turns that around. Recoil control is almost nothing with analog compared to a mouse no mater the rate of fire or how high it is. Plus learning key placement is much harder than a button layout from how much bigger a keyboard is and needing the entire left hand to work, plus the right hand for mouse keys (I got 21* keys on my mouse alone) rather than just 4 fingers and both thumbs for a controllers 16 buttons.

* 21 mouse keys from 11 side buttons, M1/M2, the mouse wheel being 5 inputs, a ring finger button, and 2 spare buttons on top. Logitech G600 if you are wondering, and yes I recommend it fully.

Then we get into how FPS, user settings, and hardware effecting each PC player in their own way to either gain better performance, to work the system for an edge, or just make it playable. Console players all have the same thing. That leads to its own problems in trying to use the 2 formats to balance each other


To put it simply. A reason for a faction to be unbalance can be different depending on the format it is on thanks to how the player controls that format. Even if the game is 100% the same. What system it is played on is enough to warrant not using it in balance talks for another. Using an Xbone version to balance a PS4 version? I can live with that. Using console to balance PC, or the other way around? Hell no.

Yeah, honestly I would expect VS to be much stronger on consoles than they are on PC simply because controllers don't lend themselves well to recoil control, and VS pretty consistently have the least recoil outside of NS weapons.

NC is probably a nightmare on consoles, unless there's a hidden "recoil assist" fudge factor or something like that on the PS4. Though on the other hand, the NC MAX is probably pretty nice on the PS4: MAX recoil is significantly lower than infantry weapons anyway, and a shotgun with a 2 degree spread isn't likely to punish imprecision too much.

Recoil control with a controller is only a mater of how far you tilt the stick. High or low recoil, fast or slow ROF, it doesn't mater as the counter is the same but just how far you tilt the stick. VS will be better to control but not to the degree it is on PC in my opinion as with a mouse you can run out of room to move and jerking tosses off aim with slow ROF, not so much with a stick.

Plus NC MAXes have a bit more than 2 degrees of spread. Pellet spread on Mattocks is 2.5, of where the COF of 1.5-2 tells it to center at. You can have up to 4.5 degrees of spread with your first shot with Mattocks. Hacksaws can get up to 6.5 for the first shot. You aren't likely to miss thanks to 6 pellets per shell as you only need 1 pellet to be a "hit", but with spreads like that you also aren't likely going to do jack even with perfect precision thanks to not hitting with enough pellets to do damage. Without seeing the enemy health bar you never know how much damage to do.

Untold numbers of players got away from my Mattocks thanks to the RNG on top of RNG that is shotguns. It happens, all, the *******, time! If it was just one or the other I could learn the RNG and make it mine. But RNG on RNG is just impossible to learn and kills you more than C4. I hate shotguns, it's like playing a low level in Morrowind. Can't do **** till the game lets you based off dice rolls. All while you stand there looking like an idiot and getting shot from everyone else using proper aimed guns.

whats your PC main?

EDIT: nevermind. Why exactly are you complaining about VS?

The difference between NC and VS is that NC has people like you, who are content "being good with maxes", play an alt to BR9 and think youve mastered the alt faction stats game, and most importantly are in irrelevantly small outfits. All the while, VS has people like me, who started VS with a number of large, solidly led outfits from PS1, Ive been an active member of the community (both VS as far as leadership and pushing wins and our server, being the server rep for SS), and have actively striven to get better (starting with 22% accuracy and working myself up to 33). I lead a large, active outfit, You are content to be another number in a see of NC randos.

I put effort into myself, my outfit, and my faction. VS has many people like this. Emerald's VS stats show this. NC only has a couple, and its stats show this as well. My point? thats just how the chips fell.

http://planetsidebattles.org/match/48

You're whole server can now claim to be good. also:


I heard you can't claim anything until you hit 20% accuracy with a weapon.

on second thought, i dont feel like being a dick here. wish i could edit that stuff. have fun folks.

Calling me out for my stats/"alts" and going on a showboat boasting about himself. Funny and fits perfectly with the tryhard VS playerbase who is killing the game. If I gave a damn Id explain myself to you. But I don't and wont.

There is no " tryhard VS playerbase who is killing the game."

If you were the analytical type youd understand its not to showboat. It's to prove a point; you have no grounds to base your statements.

Well, it might be the email. When you join Vanu, you get an email from the devs (or at least you used to) thanking you for joining 'the blessed faction hehe!' or something like that. It also said we could expect special treatment and perks, like no bullet drop and the Orion and enemy bullets only landing on us 90% of the time and a tank that can drive on top of buildings, etc. You have to join VS first, though - you can't join another faction and then create a VS alt, or you're just a regular scrub. We also get extra DB cash, a perm cert bonus, and special offers in chat for discount p0rn. I'll probably lose my VS card for telling you all of this, but I'm about ready to retire anyway...

ITS A CONSIPRACY I KNEW IT lol