Why people hate tanks/combined arms? (or at least seem to)

The official explanation is that they don't want to limit the "fun".

The probably real explanation is that it would significantly reduce SOE's revenue. PS1 was subscription-based, whereas PS2 is free-to-play. Therefore in order to make money off of PS2, they need to maximize the amount of weapons and cosmetics that players will purchase.

If you limit players to a handful of vehicles or classes, then players will only purchase weapons or cosmetics for those vehicles or classes. This limits what players might spend their real money on, which is bad for SOE.

For example, say I was limited to MBTs, Lightnings, and the Engineer class. So I would get cosmetic upgrades for my MBT and Lightning, maybe a weapon or two for each, along with Engineer-specific armor, a helmet, and maybe a carbine or two.

Whereas if I could pull any vehicle and any class at any time, I might be more tempted to grab some cockpit decals, other class armors, more vehicle weapons, etc.

This is why the old PS1 system will probably not work in PS2.

Basically, vehicles and air can be separated into two categories: support (for friendly infantry), and anti-support (to destroy enemy support). Many people want the 'support' removed, leaving only 'anti-support'.

infantry are by far the biggest infantry farmers, and the biggest ruiner of balanced small fights is by far more infantry flooding one side or the other. so lets all just ease back on the sanctimony and self-righteousness.

HadesR actually hit the nail on the head; if you place the reward incentive where you want the behavior, players will fall in line. however, I would nerf all infantry kill xp into the ground, not just vehicle kills vs infantry. then I would carefully re-balance xp rewards so that average xp per hour is maintained or improved as long as players fight for objectives or support friendlies.

if your aim is to reduce or prevent farming in a game based on grinding xp, you have to change the way xp is earned. you will never get xp-hungry and stat-obsessed players to give up strategies that make progress, or earn high scores/kdr. it's basic game theory and at least some knowledge of the field should be required of MMO producers.

This only works for people who play the game for the rewards. Apart from Galaxies and sunderers, vehicles play very small role in the game and even then they only revolve around Sunderers (for example spawn a massive number of aircrafts/tanks and destroy all sunderers). They are never used by organized people to supress infantry and achieve objectives because they are useless at it. Compared to ordinary infantry that is. It's just tedious and largely ineffective to spawn vehicles.

About this issue:
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...vehicle-balance-by-better-base-design.190332/
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/balanced-base-design.184350/
Devs never read suggestions.

i guess that's why they had to redesign esamir and amerish, and nerf harassers and liberators into the ground. because no one farms xp or uses vehicles to suppress infantry. i also had no idea that organized people don't use vehicles and that they are useless. thanks for the informative post.

Well as far as I know they don't use them. Outfit I am in doesn't use them and the reason is that they are useless. Vehicles are not a threat to what we do. Well PPA is mildly annoying. Rest of the vehicles just get instantly destroyed with coordinated lock on attack. There is really no point even pulling vehicles to kill sunderers anymore. It's better to have squadleader from each squad of platoon to spawn a Galaxy and have members spawn in and drop on the sunderers, die and drop again.

Really, the only time we pull a vehicle like MBT or ESF it's just for fun and derping around for like 10-15 minutes.

Pretty much this hits it on the head...

That is the one thing most of these tankers and air users can't get through their heads.

Their chosen vehicle of choice be it tank or air has to be weaker and easier to take out is due to them being able to be spammed and pulled in such large numbers at any moment and anywhere..that is the only way they can be and I use this term roughly "balanced" as they are now.

The only way you can get a true combined arms and proper balancing as well as make vehicles a bit stronger is specialization and limiting the numbers capable of being pulled at any given moment.

This is 100% true and the primary problem with this game as it sits now. And also why we will never have proper combined arms or proper balancing between vehicles,air and infantry.
Until this right here is changed and I doubt SOE will ever do that..this game will continue to be the clusterf*** "combined" arms game it is.