If the scale slides, why not have the bases slide with that scale? Doors that open/close based on faction balance? Auto Turrets that deploy to defend bases when certain thresholds are reached. Bases need to become as dynamic as the player counts that can fight on them.
@@planetdude9202 No one said anything about invisible walls. He's talking about limiting the amount of doors, add defenses to bases to balance combat when it's 80% vs 20%
@@planetdude9202 imagine a wall with a sealed door on it, then once a certain player count is hit, the door unlocks and opens. Its not an invisible wall
Couple days ago NC and TR fought over the hill between the crown and crossroads for an entire alert. It was a constant back and forth with mainly infantry pushing. Easily one of the best battle's I've ever had over my +9 years of playing.
It is sort of a paradox built into the system based on the concept of war. In war it it is always beneficial to target enemy logistics. Since you can't win attritionally when 2 or 3 sides battle with immortal respawning soldiers, your only option ends up being targeting logistics which in Planetside means spawns.
Heh, this opinion makes me think that maybe increasing the respawn timer of dead players would be benefitial, then i realize this might cause an outrage so high among the sweaty community that the game might not ever recover at all xD
@@Komyets increased respawn time would not only cause an outcry of the sweats, it would punish worse players like me who just want to have fun. I'm not here to play redeploy screen full time, half time is enough
As someone who comes from Hell Let Loose, I like the idea of spawns being destructible & player made. If a base gets absolutely overwhelmed then a uneven fight should only last that 1min/30 seconds it took to obliterate spawns.
You're touching on the problem pretty well, but that will always be the unavoidable case in any open combat game. The point I think he is making is to cushion that concept a bit by making logistics either less appealing to target or - alternatively - making the combat outside of logistics lines more impactful to essentially push action away from logistics as much as could be reasonably asked for in a game like PlanetSide 2.
@@Komyets That's exactly how things worked in planetside 1. The more times you died in a short-ish amount of time, the longer it would take to respawn. You can tell how popular that was that they dropped it in the sequel.
I feel like this may just be a fundamental flaw of the 1v1v1 format. It will ALWAYS be in your best interest to encourage your opponents to fight each other, rather than fighting them yourself. This means avoiding drawn-out fights and going for quick decisive captures. I can't see any way to really fix this, honestly.
This is also a factor - but even in situations where two factions are just fighting each other on one corner of the map, fights are still often dumped on just because "we need this territory now, we don't have time to fight". The entire experience is very much all about "outcome" and less so about the "journey". It's a real shame.
Yeah I agree with this one. 1. *Faster vehicle respawns* would help a little, if the game let you just spawn directly into a vehicle at a rear base then more players would do that and the action would stay constant when the sundies were killed. 2. *Oshur* is part of the problem just by the level design (huge distances between bases; even huge distances between _vehicle_ spawns!). 3. *"Fight the winner" bonuses* would help a lot, where actions against the winning faction provide a big XP bonus. Basically this solves one form of boring fights, where Faction A gains huge territory then Factions B and C finally wake up and you get 30+ mins of boring double teams. Whereas if you encourage players to switch fronts _before_ territory is so extreme that 30+ mins of double team are needed, then that eliminates some of those periods of boring fights. 4. *More lattice links* are a solution to using a zerg to solve all problems (because while the zerg takes Base A, they'll lose Bases B, C, and D). That's the reason Battlefield's main game mode has always had multiple capture points: to spread players out and punish a force if they're too focused.
Base design, less choke points, more protection from spawn camps at bases (heck make the spawn protection/ pain field combat area around the spawn grow if you are being out popped that badly). Perhaps base defenses that activate if x amount of pop is present. Reduce the spawn circle for the defender so they can deploy defensive sunderers.
I'd argue that bases who are connected to the lattice should be auto akin to PBs. Add in another 1-4 hackables/overloads per base, dependent upon size, which control the guns so Infil have more targets. There's simply no reason why I should be able to roll up to an enemy base in armor, take a few potshots at the turrets and neuter the base in complete safety simply because someone on the opposing team didn't want to play garrison duty. If the base is cut off from the lattice, guns stop. If the controller is hacked/overloaded, guns stop. If the guns are destroyed, guns stop.
regarding armour stuff: Armour player here - I tend to farm infantry as an alternative to armour vs armour fights. I use pure AT weapons, but when nobody will challenge me, that 150mm AP cannon gets turned to infantry. Idle hands and all. I would agree its an issue with lack of direction for armour units to do something and often a lack of will on the enemy side to fight it. Generally the response I get to bringing armour is not the enemy bringing armour, they just bring a HA with rockets, further encouraging me to just kill the infantry. I don't own hesh guns, but damn, I really should, because a good 40% of the time I am just anti-infantry anyways. I would whole-heartedly agree with everything said here regarding armour, and would also go a step further in saying that sometimes the game makes armour V infantry too easy, and too appealing, with things like invisible flashes using shotguns costing a mere 50 nanites. At 50 nanites, you can't possibly deter or disable someone from doing that unless you spawn kill the crap out of them, via landmines or just camping the vehicle gate/terminal. Regarding gunned flashes, i feel like they shouldnt be capable of invisibility with a gun, and should be more expensive, IF they have a gun mounted. Just to pick on one thing as an example. As for zerging, yeah, I basically ignore infantry play because it makes it all pointless when you get squads redeploy zerging every base. That and the upgrades for infantry being so much more expensive in certs than armour, investing feels pretty bad when its all made pointless by zerging all day. I do wonder why miller/cobalt hasnt been merged either, since they removed the aussie server with higher pops than cobalt.
I agree on the spare time part, if your main target isn't there, you shoot anything else. On the other hand, while I like playing armor too, if I want to play infantry, I'm going to spawn as HA. Add the fact that I seemingly only ever get MBT at the warpgate and I won't even bother trying to take down a MBT with a lightning, because in the vast majority of times that doesn't work. And even if I get into a tank, if the enemy has multiple tanks shooting at infantry, BECAUSE your team doesn't have tanks, I basically have to wait until enough players decide to get tanks in order to make any meaningfull impact and not to get killed instantly by said tanks equipped to kill tanks. The invisible Flashes are infuriating and stupid with their ability to "lock down" (I know the can't really lock it down completely, but in my experience the flash is back by the time you respawn) a sunderer spawn. Especially for new players, who don't get to spawn their Flash with weapons. I think it would help nerfing the mobility of all (at least ground, because I have little experience with air) vehicles to make them easier targets for rockets or in the case of Flashes infantry weapons. An idea to discourage HESH spam even more, could be to nerf the direct damage to make it practically useless against other tanks, to the point where you can destroy a fully equipped HESH MBT with a stock Lightning in an equal skill fight. That could allow one to break HESH spawncamping even for new player without upgrades.
What I had in mind is that you get a bonus %xp and a penalty %xp based on a population, for example. If you fight in a 45%-55% zone, you get +20% XP, if you fight 30-45%-55-70% zone the underdog team keeps the 20% XP the upper dog loses the bonus, and if you fight in an area with 70% or more over pop zone you get -20% XP. AKA punishing zergs. Nothing game-breaking, but a little motivation to look for an even fight.
The first solution I can think of would be to change the spawn system such that the side with overpop gets exponentially longer spawns and the underpop side gets shorter spawns until they become instant at 10% pop or so. The same could be applied to nanites and XP gain as well. This wouldn't necessarily force zergs to spread out but it would encourage them to and, more importantly, give the underpop side a much larger fighting chance by being able to actually make a dent if they can kill the enemies fast enough. Revives would likely also likely have to have the same changes. Slowing down cap times based on overpop could work as well but the typical zergfits already don't seem to have a problem sitting around for hours fighting zero people so it might just make bad fights last even longer.
Pretty sure this was tried and failed miserably. Spawn camping by force multipliers makes defending harder and zergfits generally are lower skill anyway, so you are just punishing newer players more.
@@Aabergm it would punish new players that don't know what's going on, yeah, but I think that could be explained in the tutorial somewhere. "Hey dumbass, if you already have 3 to 1 advantage at a fight, go somewhere else or your spawns will take thirty seconds." Just limiting outfits to a much smaller number could also help, and preventing them from just mass inviting every player as soon as they reach BR6. My main idea is just anything to break up zergs and force people to spread out across the front.
Every time I have 'quit' PS2, was after being HESH camped, or being locked in a spawn room. The one that stands out to me the most was the time I got frustrated with a spawn room camp, decided to switch factions, got the "No battle was ever won in the spawnroom" loading screen, Alt+F4'd and uninstalled that very moment. P.S. 90% of my game time recently has been Infil/LA/Engi. Meaning, most every spawn I do is in relation to either avoiding vehicles (or camp walls), or killing them specifically. I am convinced that the Anti-Mat rifles are the only thing keeping this thing afloat.
The biggest overall issue is that it's a large scale combat game with all the designs for small, match based fights. Additional I would say: The MGs lack punch (overall and compared to other weapon classes) and there aren`t effective counters against force multipliers (vehicles and infiltrators). Planetside is designed around the idea that a massive amount of people fight it out and completely reduced the impact an individual player has, to a point where in big battles zerging became the only thing that actually makes a difference
I think a few things could help. Change the radius of the no deploy zones & no construction zones. Make it so people can park sunderers in more locations without anvils. Move structures to park sunderers & give them cover from the errant lightning or MBT. I think I'm also in favor of giving a Sunderer variant that's ONLY a spawn. Cloak field, Deploy Shield AND Blockade Armor. Make sunderers incredibly hard to kill. Hell I'd even go further and double the health of them. Make them slower to repair to compensate so they can be sieged down but make it so it's almost impossible for one person to kill, or one lightning to kill. Then you can still have your battle bus columns and we can have tankier spawns.
They can bring back bio labs to where people enjoy casually fighting in them. Though i believe the fights ends so quickly is because its predetermined in people minds its impossible to defend a certain base wither is a zerg of over pop like you mentioned, A2G spam, the inability options for casual platoons to even counter except by zerging due to their limited options of success rate of defending a base (try hards, cohesion issues because its a casual platoon, lack of skill, lack of arsenal) . Outfit Wars demonstrates a years long issues with A2G. The fact of how easy it is and spammable with a silo or just repull is just nuts. It completely decimate casual players and platoons. When the whole stigma behind people in Outfit war is A2G its amazing how they cannot make correlation issues over to live servers. A2G shuts down any counter play and same with vehicles. Its too easy to cheese A2G. The fact that you can be anywhere and escape when you want is just utterly broken. You cannot even lock on quick enough because the esf has both sealth and flares (8 section of window to shut down infantry, additionally its a cool down so in reality its 1/4 of the time being un lockable or killable.) Fun fact a A2G nose gun like banshee or shotgun for the NC can face to face a AA max and win. The issue with live server with Vehicles and air spam is there isn't enough A2A fights going around or vehicles fights which results in them pilling up into the bases that farming infantry fights. It doesn't help much that there are dedicated A2G players spammers with the point I mentioned above. The reason why there isn't much fights in A2A is because the air environment is where only a select few pro pilot controlling the entire map. And it gets worst when they cross alliance with each other for truths. Maxes push use to be effective in countering in a defending base. But now i laugh how ineffective or useless they are for countering. They use to help casual platoon to get their foot into the door to defend a base. But they are all useless because of A2G, Infantry nerf(how easily they are countered), Vehicles, removed the charge ability where the max ran 20 meters straight.) Also it doesn't help that casual platoons cannot compete on a competitive level against elite outfit infantry players because they got no tools to work with. I'm pretty sure the Outfit wars where PIGS fought GOB was a funny to watch but showed that casual players had 0 place in the community to be any mean effective or competitive. Everything including fights have been configured to the mindset that fights are either defendable or not defendable. Like you said I agree that fights don't last as long as they use to because of objectives. But another poiint to note is the inability for platoon to push back and defend a base and the only way to do that is to zerg. You got to fight against dedicated A2G spam, Elite outfits or players with a 4KD when a average casual is a 1 (PIGS vs GOBS example) (And its more complex because how strategic it gets), try hards vehicle outfits with 20kd camping the bases which only leads to infantry as a option. My point is zerg is probably the only option to fight against these situation. Its a numbers game. And it should always be a option. When Elite outfits nuke the entire casual base the game will die quicker. Casual players got no place when the skill entry of the game goes higher (just like apex). Though my point is not about the player base but on another perspective why fights don't last long.
I have to congratulate you for bringing the concerns of many players with this video into the limelight. The only thing I can add here is that sometimes fights need to move on. Variety is the name of the game for Planetside, given its scope. A game where you can go from 4.0 KDR headcliker Heavy to a complete gremlin-mode knife-only medic lol-build at a click of a button. Fights that have a back and forth are nice, yes, but there are many games which offer this back and forth in the form of an arena shooter. This is mostly seen in proper bio-lab fights or in bases which killing all enemy spawns is nigh impossible - aka Nason's. I would say that it is the base design itself that is at fault. Some outposts are just way too small and the sundie locations are far too obvious. It makes me wonder what would happen if you removed the sunderer no-deploy zone from most small bases, allowing the players to not only start a fight from close up, but not be afraid of bringing more sundies to keep the fight going since there is no risk to ''bringing it too late'' when the enemy has forced you off the point and outside the base - shooting at anything that is approaching it. The reason for this would also mean that pulling sunderers during a base defense also makes sure for the defender and that they can keep alternate spawn options up from any angle, not just close to their own room. I can, of course, see some bases with no no-deploy zones being utter and complete nightmare, but it is a different sort of problem than what we are having now. Jump pads are also an option. Many bases on Esamir have them and allow the defenders to very quickly traverse to the middle of the base, but not in a way that would prevent the attackers from shooting them as they try to get to their sunderers. Lastly, I sometimes do not want to be ''bogged down'' in a fight that seems like a stalemate. I am getting kills, sure, I am getting XP, but I want to play the objective. I want to see the map change and I want to sometimes also avoid fights that happen on bases I hate attacking or defending. Having a means to keep the fights fast should remain in the game, I think. Even if you need a platoon zerging down a lane to make it happen.
I couldn't agree more with fights needing to move on - there needs to be end conditions to these fights taking place and the variety of gameplay is without a doubt, also worth cherishing. I guess my primary concern here is that the "end" condition for most fights is that (as said in the video), the fight needs to be completely slammed and the FPS side of the game needs to be forced out. As opposed to the FPS side of the game being the primary dictator of a fight. I just feel like the method of pushing the lanes needs to change to be more engaging - because I agree, fighting at Nason's 24/7 is not my idea of a fun time either.
@@CAMIKAZE78 instead of point holds we need a minecart with a nuke on top to push a mile in the opposite direction (escort point). This would make fights really dynamic because one side has to constantly push a moving objective.
I like the sundy garages with force fields in Oshur, sure you can still get camped in there, but it takes a long time (compared to no force fields) to take them out. Letting sundies deploy within the no deploy area (in your own bases) should also help but still have no deploy areas around the sundies so it does not get abused. Maybe no vehicle areas (like the no deploy areas) besides sundies, could activate if base is overpopped. Auto bubble shields that grow out of the spawn area depending on enemy pop. I think a few things could be trialled to see what might work/not work.
You are nailing it, this is absolutely what really frustrates me about the game so much. There could be a TON of fun fights out there but that way no one "wins" thus most bases just get zerged for the bigger picture
Nerf redeploying. Don't let players get around the map quickly. Incentivise grouping up in Sundies or Galaxies. Fights are ended quickly when a C4 fairy sees a cap starting, then redeploying across the entire map to kill the fight.
Imo the most important part is to limit redeploy side and pop imbalance. It's either that, or you redesign each base to be more dynamic which is very difficult.
I think this is one of the reasons i fell off playing this game as of late. I mean, i love this game and the community it provides. But sometimes as someone who just goes on solo sometimes to feed my fps urge. I do find it really frustrating when fights only consist off single outfits pop dumping or elite coodinated squads doing their best to make sure that a fight is never fair. This even goes from when this is coming from my own faction since i dont see how spawn camping is enjoyable.
Hi Cami Do you think that a 4 faction system would be more balanced than a 1v1v1 (in a hypothetical, ideal world)? I saw comment below suggesting the 3 factions is a problem in and of itself. What do you think?
Planetside is made of a bunch of concepts: FPS, class-based shooters, combined arms, sandbox, asymmetric gameplay, strategic gameplay, MMOs. It does very little to actually innovate and revolutionize these concepts though; rather, the innovative and revolutionary thing it did was taking all of them that usually exist in isolation or limited contact with each other and mash them all together in a way that (mostly) works. Therein is the core problem: the things that are hurting Planetside are the very things that make it unique and novel, and to try to fix it by chipping away at them is to damn it to a quiet death as its identity and unique experience, its main selling points, are eroded.
Personally I don't want "innovation", I want a prettier Planetside 1. That game encouraged people to actually work together, it made fights broadly enjoyable, and it made everyone feel like they had something to contribute to "the team effort". Honestly, some of the best feelings in PS1 was preparing waiting and heading out to fights with outfits and the faction. Dropping on a base, or pulling back to one and setting up a defence. Waiting for the enemy counter. Vehicles didn't feel like they totally stood on the feet of infantryside, and there were no headbopping sweaters that made you feel like all you were there for was to provide xp and certs to a guy who no longer has any need for either. The lattice and warp-gates felt more meaningful, so decisions on where to go felt more strategic and considered instead of fidgity redeployside.
I agree this is a problem, I was on connery the other day during an extremely low pop time. Only 1 good fight was happening and it was honestly super fun, until someone pulled a bastion. Keep in mind lanes were locked because of low pop but you could just see the amount of players on the server going down when that bastion killed the fight. To me though there is a much bigger issues that needs addressing. I've played PS2 for nearly a decade now and I've gotten many friends to try it out. Despite all being experienced in FPS's not a single one stayed for long. And they all had the same reason: The guns were too weak and players too tanky. This issue was somewhat helped in the Arsenal update with the nerf to nanoweave, but there's still times when I shoot people in the head 3 times plus some body shots and I still die, it's super frustrating. Plus they killed one of my favorite play styles as power knives are now obsolete. And now I'm crashing daily, lost all progress in an alert we were winning the other day because the entire server crashed, just so many technical issues. I really don't want to stop playing this game, but at the same time I want to be having fun. There's still fun to be had, but not nearly enough to be worth it through constant crashes and being armed with what feels like an airsoft gun. Any time I bring up this problem there's always some unhelpful troll who's response is essentially "git gud", but this is a problem that keeps many new players from playing. There is a skill curve, but new players getting completely dominated in less than a second while they still lose even if they dump an entire clip at someone and land multiple headshots and body shots is too big of a curve, it keeps new players away.
I want to add that if one faction overpop a base to the point that most people on that team has nothing effective to do. That Zerging will cause other bases to suffer underpop as a result.
There could be the inclusion of shield pylons that generate localized shield bubbles around them that are highly resistant to external damage and require either C4 deployed ON the tower from the inside of the bubble, or absolutely overwhelming external firepower such as prolonged HESH/rocket/bastion fire on the bubble to overload it. Several of these placed strategically around a base's vehicle entrances or areas with clear shots to vital infantry choke points from outside the base's "border" could provide secondary objectives that make it easier for assaults or defenses on the base. Think of the pylons like localized orbital shields meant to act as a screen for infantry, but can be disabled or repaired.
This would sadly probably be the best option to fix vehicle on infantry killing base fights. Expecting total redesigns is a lot of work, whereas this seems more doable.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said. I took a long break from PS2 and started playing again recently. I'd say perhaps 1 in 10 fights I got into were actually enjoyable, sustained, back and forth battles. The other 9 were extremely one sided (despite the pop count suggesting it was even when I deployed) and most of them were just 60+ people camping around 7 people trapped in their spawn room waiting for the timer to go down before the zerg moves on. So many of the fights devolved into this within 5 or so mins of starting. I think the population inconsistency is what's doing most of the damage here. With 24-48 players on both sides you can have really enjoyable fights at most bases I find. Any fewer than that and the action is a little too spread out - any more and it starts to become a bottleneck clusterfuck (can be fun, but sometimes it's just impossible to actually do anything except constantly die and be revived on repeat). But of course most of the time it's not an even balance or quickly becomes uneven. I love PS2, but it has some fundamental problems that I don't think will ever be fixed.
Another Idea I've had since the very launch of Planetside 2 was auto turrets on the main spawn that are 1) Indestructible and 2) put out a good amount of damage [vs Infantry, Vehicle and Aircraft) thus pushing back somewhat the spawn camping infantry and vehicles, and giving the defending infantry at least a chance to exist the main spawn and expand their perimeter of held territory. Add to that the larger spawn buildings should have multiple force field windows on the second floors (let alone more windows on the first floor) to allow defenders being spawned camped a way to clean out the campers so they can begging to push out and expand their held perimeter. Currently none of the Large Spawn buildings have any windows on their 2nd floors, and only 4 doorways on their 1st floors.
An idea I've had in the past to address the overpop/zerg issue is to increase the number of capture points based on the population at a base. The more attackers attacking a base then more capture points 'activate' at said base. A base with 3 capture points as a baseline could add 1, 2 even 3 more capture points. This would also have to include more spawn points for defenders so that the main spawn can't be camped so easily.
So fucking true, the fact what you can login, play for 2 hours and never find an 1:1 fight is the core issue of this game what comes from MAIN SELLING POINT - this game has persistent, open world map, with no movement restrictions between bases and fascilities. With only one soft restriction of being unable to spawn directly in overpop which can be completely ignored by various logistic methods, which allows organised groups to bring overwhelming ammount of manpower in to any point of the map. I wish Planetside 2 would be just another session, team deathmatch game, where each facility would be a separate map. Just like CS or BF or CoD or whatever... just bigger, featuring up to 96+ vs 96+ if size of "the map" is big enough to fit that. I mean, even TI Alloys wouldn't be such clusterfuck if it would be only 24vs24
always hated the removal of defensive sunderer placement, between that and cap timer changes, sure there are other parts at play with it, but it feels like bases fall too easily and quickly for any lengthy fights to really take place outside a few select bases per map. Many other issues to look at I know, still...
Oh boi, anybody here remembers old Crown and all 3 factions fighting for it? Battle that lasted for several hours, i swear i can remember i played like 2 hours fighting around Crown, went to sleep, woke up 6 hours later and fight was still going. Big iron columns clashing on the feelds, cheeky sunderers deployed on the back of the base (that north side where you could only climb by foot) and so on. Good days.
Perspective from a New Player (2 months). These critiques from this video may be more frustrating for streamers than regular players. Sometimes you’ll lose a fight due to skill or overpopulation. Just redeploy. No big deal. A new fight will likely happen on another base in 5 minutes. However, Something that could fix this video cirque is allowing base captures on ALL adjacent bases. For some reason some bases that are next to your own base cannot be captured. This created a funnel that forces overpopulation, IMO. Example : on Esamir, Rime Analytics and/or Aurora Materials Lab and/or Mani Lake Satellite cannot capture Apex Genetics. This creates capture funnels on Mani Fortress and Saerro Listening Post which forces overpopulation (Hopefully I have a current map up online as I’m writing, but you get my point). An easy way to break up Overpopulation is by multi-capturing underpopulated bases away from the overpopulation. But these forced capture funnels stop defenders from performing multi-capture overpopulation avoidance tactics. It also promotes overpopulation. If Mani Fortress was overpopulated, and I could capture the abandoned Stillwater Watch and Apex Genetics, then the other team would be forced to abandon the Overpopulation at Mani Fortress or risk losing 2 other bases because of it. Problem solved. There’s so many skills and items to learn in Planetside, if I don’t like the fight on a map, I just go into VR Training and work on figuring out what gear to level up in the future, which takes a good bit of time. Rejoining battle after that usually fixes the overpopulation. Eventually overpopulators will get bored of shooting at a spawn point mindlessly. So overall, from a new player perspective, the long learning curve is still probably the biggest reason for new players to leave. But if they stay, there really is no other game like Planetside. It’s a glorious game, and it can still be improved.
“allow base captures on all adjacent bases” We used to have this. It was replaced with the current system because it was even worse. It meant that zergs never had any incentive to fight each other, as they could simply do exactly that-capture an adjacent base.
This is a bad bad idea. If you have ever lead a platoon or even had an ear in the leadership channel, there is a decent amount of strategy regarding map deployments. There are certain bases that once lost are very difficult to recap, and there are bases that act as funnels for different lanes I.e. they are 'strategically important'. The last thing we need is the base/lattice system being even more irrelevant. The only continent I might agree with you on is Oshur, where you are forced to zerg or be locked in your flotilla. What the game needs is a total redesign on many bases to accommodate large numbers of players. Say what you want about containment sites but a coordinated platoon or squads can hold one for a very long time even in a 2:1 pop difference. The current bases aren't made to deal with huge fights, and need to be redesigned.
I feel like the comment about this being a critique from the perspective of streamers over regular players would be true... If the game had more population and if player retention was higher. But it's not, player retention is not strong because the everyday player who comes to this game with the intent of having a great FPS experience is robbed of that in most situations. I do agree that the long learning curve is a problem, but a lot of the "fights" you face in this game don't allow a fight to take place due to the "efficiency" comments we made in the video, about how it is best to just make sure the fight doesn't happen.
I am fine with zergs and fine with hardcore FPS tryhard gameplay but when MASSIVE zergs avoid each other or when TR and NC ignore VS completely and only fight each other at the edge of the map because "vs are unfun to play against" I feel like I am going to hurt someone. The fight killing by sunderer sniping is a peculiar situation, I can not comprehend how 90 people attacking the base only see one sunderer as a spawn option and think it is totally fine to play like that. 90 players and NOONE thinks about pulling another sunderer... you are just not in position to complain in this situation unless it is your sunderer that is deployed...
And this is exactly the nature of the problem. Zergs avoid each other because that is the "tactically smart" option to secure the most territory with the least resistance. Which doesn't breed great moment to moment gameplay.
Got a few ideas here, please here me out. Am happy to discuss them constructivly and in seperation to one another: 1. Why arent there revive blocks, like e.g. in battlefield (1)? When dying shortly after a revive, you should not be able to be revived again by a revive grenade, and it should take longer for a manual medic-tool revive. The between-time is longer for max-units. This prevents building/room locks by infantry to some degree. 2. Make vehicle ammo a relevant resource. Maybe ammo count could be reduced a little bit, so that the more-ammo attachment becomes more important. Also, make refilling ammo a manual task, by pressing (and maybe holding) a button in proximity to an ammo-sunderer. Dont know wether base-ammorefill needs be manual too. This averts the attackers attention from spawn-locking fire, prevents camping because of forced movement or dedicated setup, and gives defenders a moment to breathe. 3., this is a controversial idea: How about a resource (and time) scaling system, based on quantity and balance of attackers/defenders in the adjacent (capture-linked) territory? The more ground vehicles / air vehicles / max units / infantry unbalance there is on one side, the more expensive it becomes to spawn new vehicles (+maxes) of similar type (dont know wether explosives like grenades and c4 cost should scale too) or the longer the infantry respawn takes for that faction in their closest linked territory(/ies). Respawn time must have a max time cap, so that you can still participate the fight with friends and not have fights escalate into menu-waiting nightmares. Also, maybe spawns from outer regions to this unbalanced fight are discouraged for one faction and encouraged for the other, via said spawn time. This would help prevent spawn locks and balance fights out, while not preventing players from launching an organized zerg rush attack, they can still pull their vehicles from territory a bit farther away and then join together, but this takes time and dedication. Those rushes can then be countered after one or to bases by the defenders, because of the scaling resource costs. This keeps fights from escalating and gives it a three-base back- and forth in the worst case.
You know the zergs never bothered me all that much, they were easy enough to avoid. The A2G spam drove me a bit nuts, but again, I could just move on. The thing that got me was that I never could get good enough to compete with anyone not in a zerg orif they had vehicles. If didn't play constantly most of my fights consisted of PING PING PING dead, or a sniper popping my head from somewhere I never saw, or a LA dropping in from off my screen to one shot me. If I wasn't able to be in a coordinated group with friends I was simply not having fun. I would find myself pounding my fist on my desk in anger after 10-20 mins at which point you'd say to yourself "Why the hell are you doing something you're not enjoying? Gaming is supposed to make life bearable again, not continue the misery you face every day at work." Please note, that I am bad at FPS's and this is not necessarily a PS2 problem, it's a me problem. I have always been bad at FPS's, from DOOM to Quake to Hexed to Goldeneye, I have always been and will always be bad. PS2 was actually the first FPS game I played seriously and enjoyed. I guess I enjoyed the squad play side of it more so than the shooter side though, and as soon as my friends trickled away and stopped playing I went from having some fun getting my butt kicked but trying my best to help, to getting pissed off that I couldn't do anything anymore. Oh well, I hope everyone else still playing is having fun and that maybe my experience gives other some insight into the way I played the game. I hope that the game can continue to thrive for everyone that enjoys it =). Also, cheers Cami, I've always enjoyed your content and will keep watching my friend =)
Know that, like you, i am bad at FPS's too an extent, i enjoy different types of special gameplay more like masthead engie or stalker infil, or other vehicule based playstyles that does not push too much on me being bad. But I think just like Camikaze here and find that in certain cases, letting down a base that just got zerged to death or vehicule spammed, the game feels a little worst. but like you said I just move to the next base so it doesn't bother me that much. As for squad play, i feel less usefull in the presence of way more advanced players in my squad but at the same time i don't have to think as much about how to be usefull which made my gameplay faster. So between the two, it is more like a 50/50 to me. I hope you read it all and understood what i meant. And love your vids too Cami!
"I would find myself pounding my fist on my desk in anger after 10-20 mins at which point you'd say to yourself "Why the hell are you doing something you're not enjoying?" THIS. THIS THIS THIS! Planetside 1 I remember with so much affection and nostalgia. EARNED nostalgia. Fond gaming memories. CORE memories, because the game gave you real room to make them. PS2 far too often makes me just have those moments where I'm asking myself why the hell I'm still playing. In PS1 it felt like everyone had SOMETHING to contribute to the team effort. If you were losing it rarely felt frustrating. When you were winning you felt like you actually earned it. Nothing felt cheap or cheesy or designed to ruin your game. It's too easy in PS2 to get zerged, spawn camped, sniped, infil knifed, smg'd, light assault ambushed or C4'd. The TTK is so low and there's so many ways to die from seeming nowhere with no way to answer it. It's a death simulator. Redeployside is annoying, vehicles/infantry interaction is broken, etc. What social aspects of the game there are help a little, but again, all too often it just feels like constant redeploying. At least if you're playing to the badly designed objectives rather than memeing.
OW and similar community comps are actually a very good example of what Planetside could be with some more gameplay controls. By controlling populations a bit more and limiting options somewhat you can still let players make choices and also create a more fun gameplay experience.
Couple ideas on possible fixes. First idea is the one that would cause the least change to the game: A dynamic pop-up style objective system. It would fix to the population dumping scheme by actively scaling the number of required objectives based on numbers of players that are going to interact with those objectives. (Thereby decreasing player amounts on one single objective, and bring fights down to a more manageable scale, which would hopefully drive the majority of fights away from a single doorway or hallway). This dynamic objective system would also subdivide the total pool of force multipliers deployed in the game, and encourage them to be spread out among the multiple needed objectives for the embattled hex. Actual gameplay execution might look like a capture point terminal spawning or coming through a capture room floor when a certain number of players are present. This could be based on player numbers either in the immediate vicinity, the local hexes, or the total continent. It would need a trial and error phase to get that nailed down I think (perfect test server material). I think this feature would be the least disruptive to implement fully. Other fixes I can think of are likely more disruptive (things like localized dynamic severe weather, localized dynamic PvE events, and localized dynamic resource drops) Those latter features would obviously upset the community more than it would fix the game
If they'd fix the spawn system it would certainly help with the zergs. Having to drive or fly from a different base to get to the fight would create more dynamics than just 96+ players spawning and rushing from the base itself within seconds.
If they make the speed chassis and shield mod free for the sundy I think it would make this solution a lot more enjoyable. Perhaps it would require a larger no deploy zone around bases?
@@jacobcurliss9687 Honestly I'd prefer they improve the vehicle physics so that Sunderers and tanks really feel like heavy vehicles rather than an oiled up ball rolling down a slip-n-slide. It definitely helps newbies with getting better with driving sunderers without having to worry about mines on the main road and help breed creativity in spawn spots.
Exactly. I know the twitchy kids would hate it but I can't STAND redeployside. How there is no meaning to getting from A to B. Redesign the bases to exclude vehicles from infantry fights, BUT MAKE VEHICLES NECCISARY TO GET FROM BASE TO BASE. BOOM, suddenly organic and meaningful vehicle fights happen.
Redeploy side was there since Day 1. Noone playing it cared about K/D (remember, Redeploy caused 1 D) becaues it was and is fun. The problems came up as soon as they dropped the hex system and invented the Lattice lanes. With hex you had big fights and could also have small ones because of the freedom of the hex system. With lattice you have only limited choices where to go to.
I'd love to see the addition or alteration of alerts. Bring in rotational alerts. New alerts with limiting factors or no restriction. This could give the devs options to play around with based on player counts or playstyles. For example the air anomolies we had in the past. Some other random examples could be, kill race alerts to see which faction can score X number of kills the fastest, or hex focused alerts where the map highlights X number of different bases and at the end of the alert the faction with the majority wins. Or maybe there could be an alert that focuses on the missions they added, similar to how the campaign made fights in hexless regions interesting for a short period of time. There could be a convoy that must be defended and captured and it's based on time held, whichever faction holds it the longest during the alert wins. (Most other games have game modes that could very easily be adapted into the sandbox nature of what PS2 already has.) The point is the devs could implement and adjust each alert based feedback all while providing players with a variety of combined or even restricted arms gameplay without completely devaluing the sandbox nature since the alerts would be limited time events that may or may not lock the continent. There would be no need to eliminate the current alert system either, but once or twice a day rotational alert could be seen as a fun way to break up the monotony of the same gameplay loop. Other potential ideas: Underwater alerts Infantry only Vehicle only Unlimited nanites Limited nanites Base supplying nanites Bastion fleet carrier alerts Construction score alerts Free Max suit alerts Point hold alerts Small squad alerts 2v1 faction alerts PVE boss alerts King of the hill Limited respawn alerts RTS mode alert Capture the flag Sunderer immunity alerts Single hex alerts... The list goes on... While most of these alerts could be seen as game modes, since they are limited events they can be prescheduled in an in-game calendar where the player base can decide to participate or not. Alternatively there could be some community voting in-game on what event is next. Or even what the reward is. But the objective of this is not necessarily to improve outfit power or control the continent but instead to be a change of pace to the gameplay. All the traditional gameplay of farming for Auraxiums or farming outfitresources or winning primetime territory control alerts or grinding KDR or directives would remain a mainstay. The rewards for winning the alerts could be as simple as the fun of participating. Or as mmo grind focused as a new set of directives with cosmetic rewards.
What if there are no objectives, the whole map will be divided into lines to make forces flow like through wide corridor (closed areas with pain field, turn off hexes with bad design). Factions will have some amount of bases that are permanently in their possession. And this pre-configured map will have some gray hexes where the most fighting goes. No capturing bases just big team death match with vehicles. In alert case the winner is the faction with most kills.
This problem has been particularly bad on Oshur lately. The underwater bases can be some of the best pure infantry fights out there. But the vast majority of the time, those fights never get to happen because galaxies get taken out instantly by people just spamming rockets from the surface. If we could place routers underwater, I feel that would really help. Considering how much player bases are encouraged on Oshur, I'm surprised they don't allow this.
I have for the longest while considered an option to change the battle progress is to move the spawn room to the capture points. And have multiple locations on the base unlock the spawn to be accessible by the attackers and innitiate the cap from the spawn room. With the capture timer itself being 30 seconds at the most with the next unlocked base having a short "grace" period before a capture can be innitiated there. A play from the AMP station playbook but without the GSD sunderer nonsense. This would potentially create a situation where there is no point to shelling a base and sitting there for five minutes in a spawn room because the capture point IS the spawn room and once that is lost, the base is lost. Making the game less about capturing the base and more about moving from base to base. In my mind, this would work for both small and large forces as the bases wouldn't be so large as to be frustrating for small units and large zergs would have a cooling effect on the spawn room shelling and camping because that IS the objective and at some point someone of your side has to go in there to capture. And they wouldn't be there for too long anyway. I would also couple this up with a rework for vehicle accessibility and reverting some of the changes done years ago. Making certain vehicles rarer like MBTs. Alternatively I'd like to see them actually going forward with the damn "maintenance cost" concept they had for vehicles and resources. As it stands now, entire sections of the maps could be removed and nothing of value would be lost. The ONLY place I have ever consistently seen a proper back and forth fight over terrain happening is between Quartz Ridge Camp and Indar Excavation Site. Those were epic long range fights and they were more about the terrain between the bases then the bases themselves. A distand second is the terrain between Mao Southeast Gate and Howling Pass Checkpoint. And saddly even those two have become somewhat rare in the times I decide to log on. Lastly, I am one of those people you hate. I have made it my mission to kill every single enemy spawnpoint I can find, as soon as possible. Sunderers take far too little effort and investment to use effectively to ellicit any kind of other response from me. They are trash and deserve to burn.
15:10 not for me, i get thrown in fights where my team is overpoping by like 90% constantly for some reason, even if there are 50/50 fights on the map. so i rarely use it
I loved the times where i strapped all the AT mines on my body and running against TR or VS sunderers, such bliss not to mention the smugness of denying them the spawn vehicle
There is fun to be had at all levels of this game. There isn't one day I play where I do not have to adapt and overcome some type of "issue". I do it every day and so do thousands of other players. Perhaps your definition of fun has so evolved that you have outgrown the game where no amount of changes to meta and weapons will present an environment engaging to your skillset.
Add ground vehicle checkpoints outside bases. A lot of maps have a lot of open space around bases. These capture points would require manned ground vehicles (not including flashes) to capture. That could make vehicle gameplay more relevant outside of just attacking infantry.
You nailed it Camikaze. The MMOFPS elements is the foundation of Planetside. The Outfit Wars took it in the wrong direction and so did the new upcoming tank guns. It’s now zergside or campside. I don’t play it much anymore after 20 years of devotion to a game I love so such.
i've been super tired of the inconsistent / nonexistent fights lately. i'm taking a nice looong break after outfit wars. game has been continually pushed into a more casual zerg or be zerged state for years now. players have been given super powerful tools to zerg harder than ever before and its not fun to play on either side. i spend half my session staring at the map for something even close to 50/50. maybe in the future the pendulum will swing back towards something i think is more fun, but until then... o7
>i spend half my session staring at the map for something even close to 50/50.< See theres part of the problem, the amount of people doing this means any 50/50 that does appear instantly has 20-30 people looking for a farm spawn on it and destabilise it.
This is so true. I tried fighting in a platoon, i did many times, its fun about 10% of the time. The rest of the time is pure boredom and constant redeploying. That is why i also play alone most of the time and keep looking for a even fight which unfortely happens less and less often. People hate bases like biolabs, ti alloys, the crown, but at least they sometimes provide a even, cool fight that lasts more then 5 minutes. Its pretty simple, you cannot have a game where redeploying to any base is this easy and not have people abuse it to optimize stratigic value.
In regards to your comment about vehicle's not having flexibility- one of my favorite (and unsung) jobs is hopping on a Flash with radar and hiding in a useful spot as a Medic on the rumble seat. Let your people know to look at their minimaps more often, plonk down your shield beacon, let your passive Triage ability work and reap the rewards!
@CAMIKAZE78 What if you remove capture points entirely and just have a purely score based capture, every XP tick obtained within the base (hex?) contributes to the attack or defence. If one team reaches +90% the base is secured and the fight moves along the lane depending on who won, (if there are two adjoining bases they are both attackable but the starting score is halved so instead of 50/50 it would be 25/75 favour of defender) that way zergs are negated because pop does not equal xp and you cant pop dump an xp tick. It does unfortunately mean you cant "steal" bases. It also makes ghost capping insufferable especially if you add a minimum amount of XP to start the capture bar. The only question becomes how do you incentivise players to deploy in to defend? Thoughts?
That’s one of the hardest things for me as a new player. I get really tired of fights ending within minutes. One of my biggest peeves is light assaults… seriously find no point in using sunders as within the first 5 minutes it becomes discovered we spend the whole time trying to prevent C4 spam to no avail as they never stop coming. If I feel like the fight was just getting good then out of nowhere within 5 minutes the sundi gets destroyed and I’m sent back to lateral points 600m+ away I usually just log off for the day.
Snipers and vehicles do the same thing regarding making sure infantry dont get to play the game, yet one of them has a counter (dont stop moving, or just shoot them back) while the other is just having more of the same (no the hitboxes and indirect damages make it impossible to dodge them same as sniper shots). I mean one of the only weaknesses of vehicles is anti tank mines but there is an implant in game where is passively and permanently makes them immune to it (sweeper hud). It would be great if they could give vehicles actual weakspots rather than just weaksides with extra damage%. Like an actual engine core that can take serious damage if shot at by infantry weapons, but in return make the vehicles stronger in the areas they were meant to be strong. Or atleast make repairing vehicles an actual skill based process rather than a passive and boring one (same for reconing). As for the zerging, i believe there should be more room for logistics and construction to have impact on the population of an area. Spawning should cost a resource relative to where you spawn (a resource that can be easily replenished by sunderers and ants) this way you can try to stop the zerg by being a bit more strategic about it without directly hitting the zergers in tge face. This will also make zerg redeployment into other side of he continent much harder, so you would have a fighting chance against them.
I really like your point about vehicles The only time I really havd fun with them is when im shooting other vehicles. Like if my side pulls a lot of armor I would often wait outside an enemies base hoping for a the enemies to spawn a lightning or sunder for me to shoot. I just dont find it fun to sit on a hill shooting at enemy spawn. I wish they had a more cut out design. Oshur is fun due to the amount of vehicle fights. That happen in it.
I haven't played in a long time, but I still think if you become spawn camped you get to teleport out of spawn to different areas of the base, or maybe a portal opens up in the spawn room for a few seconds for say 15 seconds, and then closes and that happens every one min. So, portal opens, as many people as possible pass through to a random area on the base, and it closes after 15 seconds, and won't open again for another 60 seconds. Something like that to keep the fight exciting and alive. Not only does spawn camping suck for the camped, but its boring for the victors also.
Having more points for more people, so if the base is full more points would be active to spread out the fight, a D point or some other objective.. maybe more points for longer point holds, for as long as theres fighting the point is active, or get rid of lattices and make it all out
I agree. We should bring back the old priority spawn system. I also firmly believe there should be at least some kind of morality in the game, but you can't force this. Things like killing the one spawn in a good small fight in off hours, max crashing with more than like 5 maxes. But I guess that's just things that make me mad and i'm ranting about here. I do think everyone agrees with killing fights by killing sunderers or spamming orbitals or using a bastion to lock down a spawn room.
I played Planetside 1 since the Beta and Planetside 2 since the Beta as well, until about 3 years ago. The biggest issue with Planetside 2 was not the zerg-style gameplay, it was the base design. In Planetside 1 you had only very few entry points to a base that could actually be defended with smaller numbers. That made a huge difference. Planetside 2 started conceptually wrong and they never fixed, because they treated open bases as a feature. Still there was a time, before Wrel took over, when the game very decent with the goal to collect victory points. Unfortunately these days are long gone. The reason why I quit was basically a combination of Wrel's ideas and a massive drop in framerate. My playstyle (light assault/shotgun) got nerfed and my framerate went from 180 all the way down to about 45. That's pretty bad for graphics that essentially didn't change.
Honestly I’ve thought about this topic before and after playing games like new world I think I figured it out. The problem is the fact that the player has to pick which faction they want to play in. Wether one faction is cooler or has better weapons players will start to gravitate towards one or the other and there will always be unbalanced fights. Besides PS2 I play battlefield and I’ve never once thought about which faction I should join. I just join the game. The same weapons I have the enemy has as well. I can join with friends if there’s enough space on the server. The matches are usually even and very fun to play. I think(might not be a popular opinion) planetside should do away with faction specific weapons. And assign you to the faction that’s currently in need of players. That way no one has too much of an edge over the other
My opinion is that that would pretty much ruin the game. Faction-specific weapons and traits are one of my favorite traits of this game like the RTS of old. Getting rid of that would make the game feel bland and samey. I don't mean to diss but Battlefield ain't the game to go to for success given their recent track record.
@@stormlordeternal7663 factions are not what killed battlefield therefore your point is completely moot. Factions were better off just being very very different from each other as opposed to the science guys with guns, edge lords with guns and liberals with guns we got now. The difference are skin deep except the flavor which is bound to create pop differences. If the differences were bigger people would be inclined to play them all and switch between them.
Kami, you should have been the one taking charge of the game instead of the numbers and stats guy, IMO!!! You’re shedding light on the real issues in the game from a prospective of an ACTUAL gammer and thats invaluable. Keep it up man! 👌
I think other spawn options than sunderers should be buffed, notably make galaxy easier to hide, give supplier ant an infantry terminal, routers unlocked by default and spawn beacon be able to make all nearby allies spawn to it. Also give maxed deployment shield a one way bubble to the sunderer.
I've been thinking about this for awhile as a swarm lord within skl. i split my squads, I rarely pull hesh, when I PL i rarely have more than 10 members of overpop at a fight because as others have said, I want the new player experience to be so much more than sitting on a point. I think my biggest conundrum and what I keep trying to figure out is. How do we get zergs to fight eachother? On emerald, it feels like more often the TR and NC zergs consist of so many bulldog sundies, hesh prowlers, cheeky battle gals, AA, and responding to that requires pulling an equivalent armor response yourself first which puts so much more onus on the responders than the people who piled up along the lattice and made sure no one has fun at the bases they're taking. Not to mention, once you've won this battle, you have extra force multipliers that kill the fight and the pop drops off. That's mainly the unsolvable problem here and I'm not even sure how to police it other than managing my pop on my own to try and have multiple decent options. When I PL, my main goal is to make sure I am contributing to make 2-3 fights 50/50 or 60/40 at worst. I WISH that it was more feasible, in some way, for my platoon to respond more cleanly to respond to say, a 96+ 25/75 fight in a way that opens up the lattice. I don't mind zergs, but what I hate is the zerg dance, where nothing actually CLASHES.
I really miss the old days... when MAXs had charge ability, TR prowlers had the 'perfect' lockdown, C4 with no delay... most importantly, tons of players to play with...
A huge part of the problem here, is that the devs removed all of the spawn limitations. It was by no means perfect before, but the old spawn priority system was a lot better than not having it, regardless of what solo players have been saying about being able to reach a fight easier: can't get to a fight if the fight is already dead.
Props to you for taking a step back and approaching this with a rational mindset. Often times this stuff gets me so heated I find myself in trash talking match admittedly. I to have a ton of love for this game so it sucks to see people want to win so bad that they ruin the experience for everyone around them excluding the 70 people they have in their over sized platoons. Often times the response is well we are having fun.. The reality is that although they may be having "fun" its a quick cheap fun that doesn't really stick. Its more of a wow biig fight lots of people exciting experience fun. which is fine the spectacle of biig planetside has a place in the game for sure but there is so much more to it than that. I will even admit that from an outsiders perspective that giant scale is what draws you in at first. But then as your goals and ambitions change for the game so does your outlook on what is "fun" or not. In a perfect world my opinion is that that scale that we are talking about takes up about 20 mins of the alert the final pushes to determine who the winner is or even an event that gives you a buff or something. I just wish these zerg fit leaders would drop the ego and play the game like you want it to still be around in 5-10 years. This "shallow fun" that you are pushing isn't sustainable you and I both know it. I Just don't think these people really care what happens at the end of the day because after this is gone they will just move on to the next best thing or game and do the same thing all over again because it makes them feel good for even a moment. Anyway great takes Cami as usual keep up the good work and good luck with outfit wars casting and future content.
I’m a solo player usually but I love rolling with the Gohard outfit. Yeah yeah meme name but when I was with them we were sending squads to different fronts and only allocated more then 1 squad to areas with super high pop which was jaegars fist at the time.
One change made in Dead By Daylight recently that maybe planetside could learn from is reward the under populated team with more rewards (Dead by Daylight does this by giving the under populated side between survivors and killers 100% more bloodpoints at the end of a match) A way planetside could integrate this is giving the underpopulated side of a base, from the moment they enter the base to its capture from either side, 50% of the xp they earned whilst they were there, not earning the bonus if they leave the base. If both sides are relatively even ( with about a 10% leeway, 46v48, 21v20, 98v90) then they both earn a 75% bonus to all xp earned at the moment of base capture from when they entered the fight to encourage making a fight even when possible. Maybe my xp values i threw in here are too high for the devs to even consider but you get the idea
What if there were something like a nanite capacitor where if either the attacker or defender have more force multipliers, said capacitor would "overload" and would "divert nanite interaction points" to alternative capture points at different sponts around the base. Having the odd capture point spread out throughout the entire hex would keep fight from being bunched up, allowing the population to naturally spread itself thinner. I don't even think the bases would need to be redesigned. I'd be fine with extra capture points scattered around the the hex that are only active at certain populations on the test server to see how it goes.
Sound to me that they need to redesign the bases, some with the idea of being big and open bases suited to large fights. Others to be small, tight and suited to a small number of people. Also if the spawnroom is directly targetable by 1 shot weapons of any kind then some form of inate defensive terain should be implemented. Don't know how hard or easy that would be though.
Thanks for highlighting some of the ways that the game has improved since launch. One of the things that's changed since then was the addition of the lattice. I think that's one of the contributing factors to pop dump. There are only so many place that one can fight at and so fights tend to get concentrated. This is especially true when a faction is warpgated and there are now only 2 places that faction can fight at. The lattice creates lanes that a zerg can push down. I like the lattice, don't get me wrong. I don't want to remove it. I remember that ghost capping was fun, but defending against ghost capping was awful. I don't have any solutions. It's just something I noticed. I find myself wondering what it would be like if the lattice broke when a faction got warpgated. Would a faction stop themselves from warpgating another faction? I don't know. Just a thought experiment.
It comes down to encouraging gamers to try to think differently. And that is a herculean, one could say Sisyphean, effort. Gamers are looking for efficiency and are hard to change their minds. I notice that each server has different mentalities when compared to each other.
"Your map needs to change to accommodate(...) a problem you can't fix easily without a total redesign": **Construction**. Also, something I was thinking when you kept mentioning "Force Multipliers", is that while that can be a description of the effect of vehicles, ultimately that's not the only thing they are, they have roles and gameplay that when not filled can lead to these stagnant door fights, and overwhelming spawn rooms with hesh. More vehicle objectives would perhaps diverge attention away from "infantry farming", but if the infantry isn't pulling vehicles on their own to take the **fight outside**, this problem will continue.
I miss aerial anomalies They gave air vehicles actual objectives only they can acheive. It provided a chance for newer pilots to try their hand at flying and gain a bit of experience. Sure, one could say there would be more ground pounders in the air. However there would also be an increase in fighter planes hunting down said ground pounders. And speaking as an air pilot myself, it makes me happy keeping my fellow team on the ground safe from the dangers up above. Until I get hunted down myself, of course.
There are a lot of things that could be done to improve this side of the gameplay, which has been affecting everyone in the last years I suppose. Ideas can pop up everywhere: debuffs/buffs if the population is unbalanced, faster/slower respawn rate, more complex logistics to healing and ammo, autoturrets and yes, changing the layout of the map depending on the scale of the battle would help; but if there is a zerg horde outside why would I want to continue the fight? I'll simply redeploy to a different combat area, which is boring since I love to play in big fights. Why not implementing a REAL rewarding system for defending/attacking important objectives? Why not implementing a new and easy squad system (which I think they are doing) that would help flanking and cooperating for solo players that would make the combat more dynamic? These are only ideas that came into mind, maybe implementing them would ruin the game. But if we do have these ideas, why not the developers? Why put so much effort for a crappy water combat that is available only on one continent? This game has objectively a LOT of problems, we could sit here and talk for hours. I don't know, i'm just a player.
You make some good points, but I think that trying to cater to the 'fps' portion of the game is exactly how we ended up here. If I think about it, the main problem imo is that this mmofps moves too fast- ttk is really low (esp. with headshots), vehicles are really fragile, bases are quick to cap (taking only a few minutes), and if you don't like where you are on the continent, you can get to the other side lickety-split. This (and other factors) all culminates in a game where trying to win means bouncing around the map to capture wherever the enemy currently isn't, with brief breaks to kill a sundy and clean up a base where they are. If the logistics of the game were more central to the core gameloop (moving around the map, getting spawns in bases, providing ammo on the move, stuff like that) and the game was *slower* (longer ttk, esp on spawns, it took more effort to move from one side of the continent to the other), you'd be able to have better fights. They'd last longer 'cause the sundy wouldn't die to a single c4 fairy and the online tryhards wouldn't be able to pause, spawn in from 5 bases away, wipe you out, and return to what they were doing in a few minutes. This game used to have fights that lasted for hours (a day or longer if I've heard correctly) at specific bases, because they were just that hard to capture. Now the fights are all at the same few bases because the people want to go to the fight, and that's where the fights happen. Yes, that's circular logic, but why else does The Crown get the majority of the fight? Meanwhile the rest of the map is being dictated by the few people who are looking at the overall objective, able to bounce around as they see fit. To sum up, by trying to cater to the 'fps' side by letting people get into fights faster, the game has sped up and the logistics- the 'mmo' side- has suffered. Because the logistics has suffered, the fights are more lopsided and shorter. You want a primarily fps experience that's balanced? That's called an arena shooter. Planetside 2 was never meant to be that, and trying to make it act like one hasn't worked.
Vehicles should be cheaper (drastically) to buy, and easier to kill from the infantry side maybe. But at the same time there should be measures to make defending your mobile spawns more sturdy. If only construction could be allowed near deployed sunderers (Or deployed ants when we had those). That is to say there should be a small builadble radius around deployed spawns that extends into the “no deploy zone” letting you put up some basic walls and modules like pain spire and repair (useful but makes establishing a cortium supply very dynamic). These two changes make vehicles easier to implement since they are cheaper - but lessens the spam factor by making them fairly easy to down. However the heart of the operation, the spawn point, remains sturdy and hard to kill so long as the logistical support is robust enough to keep it so. And lastly maybe make capture timers longer so these kinds of scenarios can build up naturally. Can’t say anything about ttk or zergs though. You can see for ttk I actually prefer it, the counter measure is making the downtime smaller - which we havent done for vehicles since their cost is so freaking high. Idk guys. We all like spouting out ideas but I’m pretty sure none of it will be heard xD
What if we did this. Coded in where you would get extra xp for being under pop and less xp for being over pop in a single fight. This is encourage players to swap to get xp quicker at the under pop fights same with the players at over pop, they would go somewhere else to keep good amount of xp at another fight. More experience players that are finding certs would go to under pop fights. And I would image that it wouldn't be that much work.
This is pretty much my exact thoughts on the game that I've had for a long time. Unfortunately, PS2 is flawed at such a fundamental level that only PS3 can fix it, andI don't see that happening any time soon.
A PS3 is definitely a pipe dream as I read the situation (but I have been proven wrong before so we'll see), it will be interesting to see if things change at all over the years.
About HESH spammers. I'd like to see them removed for empire specific close anti infantery option. A shotgun for NC a dual wielded gatling or even a flame thrower for TR and a 100% accuracy laser with high damage fall off or slow moving high fire rate explosive orbs canon. Makes the tanks truly deadly if equipped to do so against large numbers of infantery at close range. Make them unable to kill an infantery if not direct hitting them. Sounds like a more viable solution to me.
Give large xo bonuses for figthing im hexes where your team is underpopulated, and that has a lattice link to one of your owned bases. People follow the xp and people should be incentiviced to join fights their empire is low on pop compared to the enemy.
I feel the same way about outfits prioritising captures rather than good fights. It certainly makes sense that the reward system is why they might prefer overpoping as apposed to maintaining marginaly higher or lower pop to try for that win. I think one issue with the vehicles is they arent exactly competent out of the box for most players and need a lot of investment to work. Maybe one solution that isnt redesigning the lattice system or changing base lay outside would be to disable inf and vehicle spawns in combat zones while also making the speed chassis and shield mod for the sundered free. At least these are some of my less matured thoughts about it.
I really really wish that this wasn't the experience infantry players have when interacting with vehicles. They is a massive amount of fun to be had in VvI and VvV fights that don't involve heshing, sundie hunting, or massive zergs of tanks or aircrafts. Small vehicle fights are where I have spent most of my thousands of hours playing this game but they get hurt way more than the toxic parts every time there is a change to vehicles. Its honestly depressing.
infantry are inherently underpowered against vehicles and air. A single infantryman has almost no shot at beating a lightning or MBT alone. Even then, pulling a lighting yourself does nothing against 3 tanks and a sunder on top of a hill. A solo infantryman also has no chance against an experienced esf pilot. VvV fights are great fun but they end up just being infantry xp farms instead. It would be a mistake to remove vehicles but I wish they were a bit different.
Glad you took the time to not just infantry point hold mindset rant and reflect how base design with small point rooms and no vehicle points etc are more the problem than any one or many force multipliers. That said to the zergfits if you are more than 70-30 then you still don't get to use these excuses just stop it
This has been a problem since the games inception and the devs have never been able to figure it out. I think their best attempt at that was applying higher xp rates to lower pop factions, I think this is a move in the right direction but still misses the nail on the head!!! These rewards could be tweaked further but I think to completely balance this problem they need to apply various "power ups" or "power downs" in hexes with population imbalances, the possibilities here are endless. Ex. Faction A Has 33. 3% pop vs B with 66.6% there is a 2:1 advantage for faction B. Faction A may receive 15% dmg boost, 15% health boost, & maybe 5%/s health regen when out of combat for 3-5 seconds. This gives faction A a huge advantage 30+%, this battle may now play out more like a 40%-50% vs 60%-50% battle. I know this might seem uncompetitive but I think these advantages or disadvantages would cause populations to naturally balance them selves out quickly, why would one want to go to an over popped fight when its a lot more challenging to rack up those kills on a player that does more dmg and has more health, or has what ever other benefits. You will also see players notice low pop hexes and quickly go there to receive the power ups to rack up kills, this should quickly balance out the fight by encouraging pop to rotate to that hex. I think should also apply to vehicles as well to hinder rolling armour zergs. Also the beauty of this game is there is so many hexes so the power ups don't have to be the same for every hex, this means the devs can test hundreds of different variations of power ups based on pop imbalances to see what works best and tweak them as needed. Some bonuses and power ups may work better for some bases than others, like maybe in very big bases where it takes awhile to travel throughout the entire base players could receive one time revives per respawn when the pop imbalance reaches a certain point.
I swear I'm only using HESH to aurax it, I'll swap back to AP after because I like killing tanks the most.....as for the fps, i think big platoons need to just slug it out more, they are so unwilling now it feels. Full platoon attacks a base with like 12 guys, a enemy platoon redeploys to fight them. And the first platoon leaves at the first sight of resistance. What, do they not want to play the game?
I miss the old big vehicle fights. alot of lightnings, ammo- & repair sunides and heavy tanks from all factions agansit each other. It it could last forever and not end in a quick zerg.
Best fight ive ever had on ps2 is a fight to defend a constructed base on a montain at around 20 vs 20 with very few vehiculs. I think made the constructed bases a part of the infantry fight could go in a better direction
One thing that makes me kinda sad about zergfits that gobble up newer players is that they don't actually teach them how to play the game. They get dropped into a mostly empty enemy base and told to capture the point. So that BR12 is standing around the control point for 3+ minutes, along with the other BR12's and 50 other teammates, never shooting their weapon, or getting into a firefight, wondering what the hell to do. And they do this base after base. Not only is it extremely boring, but it has a side effect of making the opposing force better at infantry fights by having to try to fight their way to the control point. So they're actually making their enemies better at the game. I dunno, that's just my opinion. Anyway, love the vids. Cheers.
am I the only one that goes to overpopped fights to try to get as many kills as possible to try to force myself to get better at the game? I do love me those 50/50 fights but when my team has too many players it gets boring because there isn't anything to shoot.
I preferred when there was no lattice system. My friends and I have a much harder time feeling like we can make a difference since it was added. We can still find our way but a 4 man squad feels punishing.
yeah i can think of a few outfits on ermerald, one of them is GOB and others, that ruin fights or just meme on outfits that want to play and not get pushed off a fight.or i've seen some just leave infantry and fight in air to kill bastions and then follow player around and ruin there fights.
Planetside 2 forgot 1 integral rule about game design:
“Players will optimise the fun out of the game”
Boom.
If the scale slides, why not have the bases slide with that scale?
Doors that open/close based on faction balance? Auto Turrets that deploy to defend bases when certain thresholds are reached.
Bases need to become as dynamic as the player counts that can fight on them.
This actually makes sense :D
All bases should have an SCU and 3-4 points that slowly come online the more people are at the base. Facilities are automatically 4 point bases.
That would be horrible...an invisible wall on a door that would say "limit met"....That's 100% anti Planetside....that's not the solution.
@@planetdude9202 No one said anything about invisible walls.
He's talking about limiting the amount of doors, add defenses to bases to balance combat when it's 80% vs 20%
@@planetdude9202 imagine a wall with a sealed door on it, then once a certain player count is hit, the door unlocks and opens. Its not an invisible wall
the optimal way to win in this game is to prevent fights from occuring. player retention remains a mystery.
Honestly this.
I think cuz most people don't actually care about winning tbh. I myself just run in get killed and get kills.
Anon is that you?
Increasingly the reason why I play less and less.
@@Logicon1138 how I wish I could go back to those times 😢
Couple days ago NC and TR fought over the hill between the crown and crossroads for an entire alert. It was a constant back and forth with mainly infantry pushing. Easily one of the best battle's I've ever had over my +9 years of playing.
I actually was part of it lol, played TR, had the best time ever lol
It is sort of a paradox built into the system based on the concept of war. In war it it is always beneficial to target enemy logistics. Since you can't win attritionally when 2 or 3 sides battle with immortal respawning soldiers, your only option ends up being targeting logistics which in Planetside means spawns.
Heh, this opinion makes me think that maybe increasing the respawn timer of dead players would be benefitial, then i realize this might cause an outrage so high among the sweaty community that the game might not ever recover at all xD
@@Komyets increased respawn time would not only cause an outcry of the sweats, it would punish worse players like me who just want to have fun. I'm not here to play redeploy screen full time, half time is enough
As someone who comes from Hell Let Loose, I like the idea of spawns being destructible & player made. If a base gets absolutely overwhelmed then a uneven fight should only last that 1min/30 seconds it took to obliterate spawns.
You're touching on the problem pretty well, but that will always be the unavoidable case in any open combat game. The point I think he is making is to cushion that concept a bit by making logistics either less appealing to target or - alternatively - making the combat outside of logistics lines more impactful to essentially push action away from logistics as much as could be reasonably asked for in a game like PlanetSide 2.
@@Komyets That's exactly how things worked in planetside 1. The more times you died in a short-ish amount of time, the longer it would take to respawn. You can tell how popular that was that they dropped it in the sequel.
I feel like this may just be a fundamental flaw of the 1v1v1 format. It will ALWAYS be in your best interest to encourage your opponents to fight each other, rather than fighting them yourself. This means avoiding drawn-out fights and going for quick decisive captures.
I can't see any way to really fix this, honestly.
This is also a factor - but even in situations where two factions are just fighting each other on one corner of the map, fights are still often dumped on just because "we need this territory now, we don't have time to fight". The entire experience is very much all about "outcome" and less so about the "journey". It's a real shame.
@@CAMIKAZE78 doesn't this just mean that the continent locking alerts are the root cause of all these issues?
@@RBsRealm WOW you're right. No alerts, nobody cares. I feel like there would only be one fight on the whole map though
And frankly I'd rather they don't try to fix that, 1v1's can stick with the 95483952357823573485734875348 other FPS that exist.
Yeah I agree with this one.
1. *Faster vehicle respawns* would help a little, if the game let you just spawn directly into a vehicle at a rear base then more players would do that and the action would stay constant when the sundies were killed.
2. *Oshur* is part of the problem just by the level design (huge distances between bases; even huge distances between _vehicle_ spawns!).
3. *"Fight the winner" bonuses* would help a lot, where actions against the winning faction provide a big XP bonus. Basically this solves one form of boring fights, where Faction A gains huge territory then Factions B and C finally wake up and you get 30+ mins of boring double teams. Whereas if you encourage players to switch fronts _before_ territory is so extreme that 30+ mins of double team are needed, then that eliminates some of those periods of boring fights.
4. *More lattice links* are a solution to using a zerg to solve all problems (because while the zerg takes Base A, they'll lose Bases B, C, and D). That's the reason Battlefield's main game mode has always had multiple capture points: to spread players out and punish a force if they're too focused.
Base design, less choke points, more protection from spawn camps at bases (heck make the spawn protection/ pain field combat area around the spawn grow if you are being out popped that badly). Perhaps base defenses that activate if x amount of pop is present. Reduce the spawn circle for the defender so they can deploy defensive sunderers.
I'd argue that bases who are connected to the lattice should be auto akin to PBs. Add in another 1-4 hackables/overloads per base, dependent upon size, which control the guns so Infil have more targets. There's simply no reason why I should be able to roll up to an enemy base in armor, take a few potshots at the turrets and neuter the base in complete safety simply because someone on the opposing team didn't want to play garrison duty.
If the base is cut off from the lattice, guns stop. If the controller is hacked/overloaded, guns stop. If the guns are destroyed, guns stop.
regarding armour stuff:
Armour player here - I tend to farm infantry as an alternative to armour vs armour fights. I use pure AT weapons, but when nobody will challenge me, that 150mm AP cannon gets turned to infantry. Idle hands and all.
I would agree its an issue with lack of direction for armour units to do something and often a lack of will on the enemy side to fight it. Generally the response I get to bringing armour is not the enemy bringing armour, they just bring a HA with rockets, further encouraging me to just kill the infantry. I don't own hesh guns, but damn, I really should, because a good 40% of the time I am just anti-infantry anyways.
I would whole-heartedly agree with everything said here regarding armour, and would also go a step further in saying that sometimes the game makes armour V infantry too easy, and too appealing, with things like invisible flashes using shotguns costing a mere 50 nanites. At 50 nanites, you can't possibly deter or disable someone from doing that unless you spawn kill the crap out of them, via landmines or just camping the vehicle gate/terminal. Regarding gunned flashes, i feel like they shouldnt be capable of invisibility with a gun, and should be more expensive, IF they have a gun mounted. Just to pick on one thing as an example.
As for zerging, yeah, I basically ignore infantry play because it makes it all pointless when you get squads redeploy zerging every base. That and the upgrades for infantry being so much more expensive in certs than armour, investing feels pretty bad when its all made pointless by zerging all day.
I do wonder why miller/cobalt hasnt been merged either, since they removed the aussie server with higher pops than cobalt.
I agree on the spare time part, if your main target isn't there, you shoot anything else. On the other hand, while I like playing armor too, if I want to play infantry, I'm going to spawn as HA. Add the fact that I seemingly only ever get MBT at the warpgate and I won't even bother trying to take down a MBT with a lightning, because in the vast majority of times that doesn't work. And even if I get into a tank, if the enemy has multiple tanks shooting at infantry, BECAUSE your team doesn't have tanks, I basically have to wait until enough players decide to get tanks in order to make any meaningfull impact and not to get killed instantly by said tanks equipped to kill tanks.
The invisible Flashes are infuriating and stupid with their ability to "lock down" (I know the can't really lock it down completely, but in my experience the flash is back by the time you respawn) a sunderer spawn. Especially for new players, who don't get to spawn their Flash with weapons. I think it would help nerfing the mobility of all (at least ground, because I have little experience with air) vehicles to make them easier targets for rockets or in the case of Flashes infantry weapons.
An idea to discourage HESH spam even more, could be to nerf the direct damage to make it practically useless against other tanks, to the point where you can destroy a fully equipped HESH MBT with a stock Lightning in an equal skill fight. That could allow one to break HESH spawncamping even for new player without upgrades.
What I had in mind is that you get a bonus %xp and a penalty %xp based on a population, for example. If you fight in a 45%-55% zone, you get +20% XP, if you fight 30-45%-55-70% zone the underdog team keeps the 20% XP the upper dog loses the bonus, and if you fight in an area with 70% or more over pop zone you get -20% XP. AKA punishing zergs. Nothing game-breaking, but a little motivation to look for an even fight.
The first solution I can think of would be to change the spawn system such that the side with overpop gets exponentially longer spawns and the underpop side gets shorter spawns until they become instant at 10% pop or so. The same could be applied to nanites and XP gain as well. This wouldn't necessarily force zergs to spread out but it would encourage them to and, more importantly, give the underpop side a much larger fighting chance by being able to actually make a dent if they can kill the enemies fast enough. Revives would likely also likely have to have the same changes.
Slowing down cap times based on overpop could work as well but the typical zergfits already don't seem to have a problem sitting around for hours fighting zero people so it might just make bad fights last even longer.
This
I wish devs put more work in this direction
Pretty sure this was tried and failed miserably. Spawn camping by force multipliers makes defending harder and zergfits generally are lower skill anyway, so you are just punishing newer players more.
@@Aabergm it would punish new players that don't know what's going on, yeah, but I think that could be explained in the tutorial somewhere. "Hey dumbass, if you already have 3 to 1 advantage at a fight, go somewhere else or your spawns will take thirty seconds." Just limiting outfits to a much smaller number could also help, and preventing them from just mass inviting every player as soon as they reach BR6. My main idea is just anything to break up zergs and force people to spread out across the front.
THIS WOULD BE IDEAL!
Every time I have 'quit' PS2, was after being HESH camped, or being locked in a spawn room. The one that stands out to me the most was the time I got frustrated with a spawn room camp, decided to switch factions, got the "No battle was ever won in the spawnroom" loading screen, Alt+F4'd and uninstalled that very moment.
P.S. 90% of my game time recently has been Infil/LA/Engi. Meaning, most every spawn I do is in relation to either avoiding vehicles (or camp walls), or killing them specifically. I am convinced that the Anti-Mat rifles are the only thing keeping this thing afloat.
The biggest overall issue is that it's a large scale combat game with all the designs for small, match based fights. Additional I would say: The MGs lack punch (overall and compared to other weapon classes) and there aren`t effective counters against force multipliers (vehicles and infiltrators). Planetside is designed around the idea that a massive amount of people fight it out and completely reduced the impact an individual player has, to a point where in big battles zerging became the only thing that actually makes a difference
I think a few things could help. Change the radius of the no deploy zones & no construction zones. Make it so people can park sunderers in more locations without anvils. Move structures to park sunderers & give them cover from the errant lightning or MBT.
I think I'm also in favor of giving a Sunderer variant that's ONLY a spawn. Cloak field, Deploy Shield AND Blockade Armor. Make sunderers incredibly hard to kill. Hell I'd even go further and double the health of them. Make them slower to repair to compensate so they can be sieged down but make it so it's almost impossible for one person to kill, or one lightning to kill. Then you can still have your battle bus columns and we can have tankier spawns.
Pretty much what I was thinking.
They can bring back bio labs to where people enjoy casually fighting in them.
Though i believe the fights ends so quickly is because its predetermined in people minds its impossible to defend a certain base wither is a zerg of over pop like you mentioned, A2G spam, the inability options for casual platoons to even counter except by zerging due to their limited options of success rate of defending a base (try hards, cohesion issues because its a casual platoon, lack of skill, lack of arsenal) .
Outfit Wars demonstrates a years long issues with A2G. The fact of how easy it is and spammable with a silo or just repull is just nuts. It completely decimate casual players and platoons. When the whole stigma behind people in Outfit war is A2G its amazing how they cannot make correlation issues over to live servers. A2G shuts down any counter play and same with vehicles. Its too easy to cheese A2G. The fact that you can be anywhere and escape when you want is just utterly broken. You cannot even lock on quick enough because the esf has both sealth and flares (8 section of window to shut down infantry, additionally its a cool down so in reality its 1/4 of the time being un lockable or killable.) Fun fact a A2G nose gun like banshee or shotgun for the NC can face to face a AA max and win.
The issue with live server with Vehicles and air spam is there isn't enough A2A fights going around or vehicles fights which results in them pilling up into the bases that farming infantry fights. It doesn't help much that there are dedicated A2G players spammers with the point I mentioned above. The reason why there isn't much fights in A2A is because the air environment is where only a select few pro pilot controlling the entire map. And it gets worst when they cross alliance with each other for truths.
Maxes push use to be effective in countering in a defending base. But now i laugh how ineffective or useless they are for countering. They use to help casual platoon to get their foot into the door to defend a base. But they are all useless because of A2G, Infantry nerf(how easily they are countered), Vehicles, removed the charge ability where the max ran 20 meters straight.) Also it doesn't help that casual platoons cannot compete on a competitive level against elite outfit infantry players because they got no tools to work with. I'm pretty sure the Outfit wars where PIGS fought GOB was a funny to watch but showed that casual players had 0 place in the community to be any mean effective or competitive.
Everything including fights have been configured to the mindset that fights are either defendable or not defendable. Like you said I agree that fights don't last as long as they use to because of objectives. But another poiint to note is the inability for platoon to push back and defend a base and the only way to do that is to zerg. You got to fight against dedicated A2G spam, Elite outfits or players with a 4KD when a average casual is a 1 (PIGS vs GOBS example) (And its more complex because how strategic it gets), try hards vehicle outfits with 20kd camping the bases which only leads to infantry as a option. My point is zerg is probably the only option to fight against these situation. Its a numbers game. And it should always be a option. When Elite outfits nuke the entire casual base the game will die quicker. Casual players got no place when the skill entry of the game goes higher (just like apex). Though my point is not about the player base but on another perspective why fights don't last long.
I have to congratulate you for bringing the concerns of many players with this video into the limelight.
The only thing I can add here is that sometimes fights need to move on. Variety is the name of the game for Planetside, given its scope. A game where you can go from 4.0 KDR headcliker Heavy to a complete gremlin-mode knife-only medic lol-build at a click of a button. Fights that have a back and forth are nice, yes, but there are many games which offer this back and forth in the form of an arena shooter. This is mostly seen in proper bio-lab fights or in bases which killing all enemy spawns is nigh impossible - aka Nason's.
I would say that it is the base design itself that is at fault. Some outposts are just way too small and the sundie locations are far too obvious. It makes me wonder what would happen if you removed the sunderer no-deploy zone from most small bases, allowing the players to not only start a fight from close up, but not be afraid of bringing more sundies to keep the fight going since there is no risk to ''bringing it too late'' when the enemy has forced you off the point and outside the base - shooting at anything that is approaching it. The reason for this would also mean that pulling sunderers during a base defense also makes sure for the defender and that they can keep alternate spawn options up from any angle, not just close to their own room. I can, of course, see some bases with no no-deploy zones being utter and complete nightmare, but it is a different sort of problem than what we are having now.
Jump pads are also an option. Many bases on Esamir have them and allow the defenders to very quickly traverse to the middle of the base, but not in a way that would prevent the attackers from shooting them as they try to get to their sunderers.
Lastly, I sometimes do not want to be ''bogged down'' in a fight that seems like a stalemate. I am getting kills, sure, I am getting XP, but I want to play the objective. I want to see the map change and I want to sometimes also avoid fights that happen on bases I hate attacking or defending. Having a means to keep the fights fast should remain in the game, I think. Even if you need a platoon zerging down a lane to make it happen.
I couldn't agree more with fights needing to move on - there needs to be end conditions to these fights taking place and the variety of gameplay is without a doubt, also worth cherishing. I guess my primary concern here is that the "end" condition for most fights is that (as said in the video), the fight needs to be completely slammed and the FPS side of the game needs to be forced out. As opposed to the FPS side of the game being the primary dictator of a fight.
I just feel like the method of pushing the lanes needs to change to be more engaging - because I agree, fighting at Nason's 24/7 is not my idea of a fun time either.
@@CAMIKAZE78 instead of point holds we need a minecart with a nuke on top to push a mile in the opposite direction (escort point). This would make fights really dynamic because one side has to constantly push a moving objective.
@@goldenegg7447 game called Global Agenda had some bases like that
I like the sundy garages with force fields in Oshur, sure you can still get camped in there, but it takes a long time (compared to no force fields) to take them out.
Letting sundies deploy within the no deploy area (in your own bases) should also help but still have no deploy areas around the sundies so it does not get abused.
Maybe no vehicle areas (like the no deploy areas) besides sundies, could activate if base is overpopped.
Auto bubble shields that grow out of the spawn area depending on enemy pop.
I think a few things could be trialled to see what might work/not work.
You are nailing it, this is absolutely what really frustrates me about the game so much. There could be a TON of fun fights out there but that way no one "wins" thus most bases just get zerged for the bigger picture
It's an unfortunate reality of how the game plays right now, it's quite sad imo.
Nerf redeploying. Don't let players get around the map quickly. Incentivise grouping up in Sundies or Galaxies. Fights are ended quickly when a C4 fairy sees a cap starting, then redeploying across the entire map to kill the fight.
Imo the most important part is to limit redeploy side and pop imbalance. It's either that, or you redesign each base to be more dynamic which is very difficult.
all what need game right now - reworked spawnsystem wich will prevent 60\40 situations at every fight.
I think this is one of the reasons i fell off playing this game as of late. I mean, i love this game and the community it provides. But sometimes as someone who just goes on solo sometimes to feed my fps urge. I do find it really frustrating when fights only consist off single outfits pop dumping or elite coodinated squads doing their best to make sure that a fight is never fair. This even goes from when this is coming from my own faction since i dont see how spawn camping is enjoyable.
Hi Cami
Do you think that a 4 faction system would be more balanced than a 1v1v1 (in a hypothetical, ideal world)?
I saw comment below suggesting the 3 factions is a problem in and of itself. What do you think?
Planetside is made of a bunch of concepts: FPS, class-based shooters, combined arms, sandbox, asymmetric gameplay, strategic gameplay, MMOs. It does very little to actually innovate and revolutionize these concepts though; rather, the innovative and revolutionary thing it did was taking all of them that usually exist in isolation or limited contact with each other and mash them all together in a way that (mostly) works. Therein is the core problem: the things that are hurting Planetside are the very things that make it unique and novel, and to try to fix it by chipping away at them is to damn it to a quiet death as its identity and unique experience, its main selling points, are eroded.
This.
if this is turned into CoD but in space or whatever I'm out and not looking back.
Personally I don't want "innovation", I want a prettier Planetside 1. That game encouraged people to actually work together, it made fights broadly enjoyable, and it made everyone feel like they had something to contribute to "the team effort". Honestly, some of the best feelings in PS1 was preparing waiting and heading out to fights with outfits and the faction. Dropping on a base, or pulling back to one and setting up a defence. Waiting for the enemy counter.
Vehicles didn't feel like they totally stood on the feet of infantryside, and there were no headbopping sweaters that made you feel like all you were there for was to provide xp and certs to a guy who no longer has any need for either. The lattice and warp-gates felt more meaningful, so decisions on where to go felt more strategic and considered instead of fidgity redeployside.
I agree this is a problem, I was on connery the other day during an extremely low pop time. Only 1 good fight was happening and it was honestly super fun, until someone pulled a bastion. Keep in mind lanes were locked because of low pop but you could just see the amount of players on the server going down when that bastion killed the fight. To me though there is a much bigger issues that needs addressing.
I've played PS2 for nearly a decade now and I've gotten many friends to try it out. Despite all being experienced in FPS's not a single one stayed for long. And they all had the same reason: The guns were too weak and players too tanky. This issue was somewhat helped in the Arsenal update with the nerf to nanoweave, but there's still times when I shoot people in the head 3 times plus some body shots and I still die, it's super frustrating. Plus they killed one of my favorite play styles as power knives are now obsolete. And now I'm crashing daily, lost all progress in an alert we were winning the other day because the entire server crashed, just so many technical issues. I really don't want to stop playing this game, but at the same time I want to be having fun. There's still fun to be had, but not nearly enough to be worth it through constant crashes and being armed with what feels like an airsoft gun.
Any time I bring up this problem there's always some unhelpful troll who's response is essentially "git gud", but this is a problem that keeps many new players from playing. There is a skill curve, but new players getting completely dominated in less than a second while they still lose even if they dump an entire clip at someone and land multiple headshots and body shots is too big of a curve, it keeps new players away.
I want to add that if one faction overpop a base to the point that most people on that team has nothing effective to do. That Zerging will cause other bases to suffer underpop as a result.
There could be the inclusion of shield pylons that generate localized shield bubbles around them that are highly resistant to external damage and require either C4 deployed ON the tower from the inside of the bubble, or absolutely overwhelming external firepower such as prolonged HESH/rocket/bastion fire on the bubble to overload it. Several of these placed strategically around a base's vehicle entrances or areas with clear shots to vital infantry choke points from outside the base's "border" could provide secondary objectives that make it easier for assaults or defenses on the base.
Think of the pylons like localized orbital shields meant to act as a screen for infantry, but can be disabled or repaired.
This would sadly probably be the best option to fix vehicle on infantry killing base fights. Expecting total redesigns is a lot of work, whereas this seems more doable.
Absolutely agree with everything you've said. I took a long break from PS2 and started playing again recently. I'd say perhaps 1 in 10 fights I got into were actually enjoyable, sustained, back and forth battles. The other 9 were extremely one sided (despite the pop count suggesting it was even when I deployed) and most of them were just 60+ people camping around 7 people trapped in their spawn room waiting for the timer to go down before the zerg moves on. So many of the fights devolved into this within 5 or so mins of starting.
I think the population inconsistency is what's doing most of the damage here. With 24-48 players on both sides you can have really enjoyable fights at most bases I find. Any fewer than that and the action is a little too spread out - any more and it starts to become a bottleneck clusterfuck (can be fun, but sometimes it's just impossible to actually do anything except constantly die and be revived on repeat). But of course most of the time it's not an even balance or quickly becomes uneven.
I love PS2, but it has some fundamental problems that I don't think will ever be fixed.
Another Idea I've had since the very launch of Planetside 2 was auto turrets on the main spawn that are 1) Indestructible and 2) put out a good amount of damage [vs Infantry, Vehicle and Aircraft) thus pushing back somewhat the spawn camping infantry and vehicles, and giving the defending infantry at least a chance to exist the main spawn and expand their perimeter of held territory.
Add to that the larger spawn buildings should have multiple force field windows on the second floors (let alone more windows on the first floor) to allow defenders being spawned camped a way to clean out the campers so they can begging to push out and expand their held perimeter.
Currently none of the Large Spawn buildings have any windows on their 2nd floors, and only 4 doorways on their 1st floors.
An idea I've had in the past to address the overpop/zerg issue is to increase the number of capture points based on the population at a base. The more attackers attacking a base then more capture points 'activate' at said base. A base with 3 capture points as a baseline could add 1, 2 even 3 more capture points. This would also have to include more spawn points for defenders so that the main spawn can't be camped so easily.
So fucking true, the fact what you can login, play for 2 hours and never find an 1:1 fight is the core issue of this game what comes from MAIN SELLING POINT - this game has persistent, open world map, with no movement restrictions between bases and fascilities. With only one soft restriction of being unable to spawn directly in overpop which can be completely ignored by various logistic methods, which allows organised groups to bring overwhelming ammount of manpower in to any point of the map.
I wish Planetside 2 would be just another session, team deathmatch game, where each facility would be a separate map. Just like CS or BF or CoD or whatever... just bigger, featuring up to 96+ vs 96+ if size of "the map" is big enough to fit that. I mean, even TI Alloys wouldn't be such clusterfuck if it would be only 24vs24
Hard pass on that team deathmatch stuff.
there's 805194290 billion other FPS dthat do that boring shit.
I fear that developers focus too much on new content, instead of fixing bugs, balance and gameplay in general
always hated the removal of defensive sunderer placement, between that and cap timer changes, sure there are other parts at play with it, but it feels like bases fall too easily and quickly for any lengthy fights to really take place outside a few select bases per map. Many other issues to look at I know, still...
Oh boi, anybody here remembers old Crown and all 3 factions fighting for it? Battle that lasted for several hours, i swear i can remember i played like 2 hours fighting around Crown, went to sleep, woke up 6 hours later and fight was still going. Big iron columns clashing on the feelds, cheeky sunderers deployed on the back of the base (that north side where you could only climb by foot) and so on. Good days.
Perspective from a New Player (2 months). These critiques from this video may be more frustrating for streamers than regular players. Sometimes you’ll lose a fight due to skill or overpopulation. Just redeploy. No big deal. A new fight will likely happen on another base in 5 minutes.
However, Something that could fix this video cirque is allowing base captures on ALL adjacent bases. For some reason some bases that are next to your own base cannot be captured. This created a funnel that forces overpopulation, IMO.
Example : on Esamir, Rime Analytics and/or Aurora Materials Lab and/or Mani Lake Satellite cannot capture Apex Genetics.
This creates capture funnels on Mani Fortress and Saerro Listening Post which forces overpopulation (Hopefully I have a current map up online as I’m writing, but you get my point). An easy way to break up Overpopulation is by multi-capturing underpopulated bases away from the overpopulation. But these forced capture funnels stop defenders from performing multi-capture overpopulation avoidance tactics. It also promotes overpopulation.
If Mani Fortress was overpopulated, and I could capture the abandoned Stillwater Watch and Apex Genetics, then the other team would be forced to abandon the Overpopulation at Mani Fortress or risk losing 2 other bases because of it. Problem solved.
There’s so many skills and items to learn in Planetside, if I don’t like the fight on a map, I just go into VR Training and work on figuring out what gear to level up in the future, which takes a good bit of time. Rejoining battle after that usually fixes the overpopulation. Eventually overpopulators will get bored of shooting at a spawn point mindlessly.
So overall, from a new player perspective, the long learning curve is still probably the biggest reason for new players to leave. But if they stay, there really is no other game like Planetside. It’s a glorious game, and it can still be improved.
“allow base captures on all adjacent bases”
We used to have this. It was replaced with the current system because it was even worse. It meant that zergs never had any incentive to fight each other, as they could simply do exactly that-capture an adjacent base.
This is a bad bad idea. If you have ever lead a platoon or even had an ear in the leadership channel, there is a decent amount of strategy regarding map deployments. There are certain bases that once lost are very difficult to recap, and there are bases that act as funnels for different lanes I.e. they are 'strategically important'. The last thing we need is the base/lattice system being even more irrelevant. The only continent I might agree with you on is Oshur, where you are forced to zerg or be locked in your flotilla.
What the game needs is a total redesign on many bases to accommodate large numbers of players. Say what you want about containment sites but a coordinated platoon or squads can hold one for a very long time even in a 2:1 pop difference. The current bases aren't made to deal with huge fights, and need to be redesigned.
I feel like the comment about this being a critique from the perspective of streamers over regular players would be true... If the game had more population and if player retention was higher. But it's not, player retention is not strong because the everyday player who comes to this game with the intent of having a great FPS experience is robbed of that in most situations. I do agree that the long learning curve is a problem, but a lot of the "fights" you face in this game don't allow a fight to take place due to the "efficiency" comments we made in the video, about how it is best to just make sure the fight doesn't happen.
I am fine with zergs and fine with hardcore FPS tryhard gameplay but when MASSIVE zergs avoid each other or when TR and NC ignore VS completely and only fight each other at the edge of the map because "vs are unfun to play against" I feel like I am going to hurt someone. The fight killing by sunderer sniping is a peculiar situation, I can not comprehend how 90 people attacking the base only see one sunderer as a spawn option and think it is totally fine to play like that. 90 players and NOONE thinks about pulling another sunderer... you are just not in position to complain in this situation unless it is your sunderer that is deployed...
And this is exactly the nature of the problem. Zergs avoid each other because that is the "tactically smart" option to secure the most territory with the least resistance. Which doesn't breed great moment to moment gameplay.
Got a few ideas here, please here me out. Am happy to discuss them constructivly and in seperation to one another:
1. Why arent there revive blocks, like e.g. in battlefield (1)? When dying shortly after a revive, you should not be able to be revived again by a revive grenade, and it should take longer for a manual medic-tool revive. The between-time is longer for max-units. This prevents building/room locks by infantry to some degree.
2. Make vehicle ammo a relevant resource. Maybe ammo count could be reduced a little bit, so that the more-ammo attachment becomes more important. Also, make refilling ammo a manual task, by pressing (and maybe holding) a button in proximity to an ammo-sunderer. Dont know wether base-ammorefill needs be manual too. This averts the attackers attention from spawn-locking fire, prevents camping because of forced movement or dedicated setup, and gives defenders a moment to breathe.
3., this is a controversial idea:
How about a resource (and time) scaling system, based on quantity and balance of attackers/defenders in the adjacent (capture-linked) territory? The more ground vehicles / air vehicles / max units / infantry unbalance there is on one side, the more expensive it becomes to spawn new vehicles (+maxes) of similar type (dont know wether explosives like grenades and c4 cost should scale too) or the longer the infantry respawn takes for that faction in their closest linked territory(/ies). Respawn time must have a max time cap, so that you can still participate the fight with friends and not have fights escalate into menu-waiting nightmares. Also, maybe spawns from outer regions to this unbalanced fight are discouraged for one faction and encouraged for the other, via said spawn time. This would help prevent spawn locks and balance fights out, while not preventing players from launching an organized zerg rush attack, they can still pull their vehicles from territory a bit farther away and then join together, but this takes time and dedication. Those rushes can then be countered after one or to bases by the defenders, because of the scaling resource costs. This keeps fights from escalating and gives it a three-base back- and forth in the worst case.
You know the zergs never bothered me all that much, they were easy enough to avoid. The A2G spam drove me a bit nuts, but again, I could just move on. The thing that got me was that I never could get good enough to compete with anyone not in a zerg orif they had vehicles. If didn't play constantly most of my fights consisted of PING PING PING dead, or a sniper popping my head from somewhere I never saw, or a LA dropping in from off my screen to one shot me. If I wasn't able to be in a coordinated group with friends I was simply not having fun. I would find myself pounding my fist on my desk in anger after 10-20 mins at which point you'd say to yourself "Why the hell are you doing something you're not enjoying? Gaming is supposed to make life bearable again, not continue the misery you face every day at work."
Please note, that I am bad at FPS's and this is not necessarily a PS2 problem, it's a me problem. I have always been bad at FPS's, from DOOM to Quake to Hexed to Goldeneye, I have always been and will always be bad. PS2 was actually the first FPS game I played seriously and enjoyed. I guess I enjoyed the squad play side of it more so than the shooter side though, and as soon as my friends trickled away and stopped playing I went from having some fun getting my butt kicked but trying my best to help, to getting pissed off that I couldn't do anything anymore.
Oh well, I hope everyone else still playing is having fun and that maybe my experience gives other some insight into the way I played the game. I hope that the game can continue to thrive for everyone that enjoys it =). Also, cheers Cami, I've always enjoyed your content and will keep watching my friend =)
Know that, like you, i am bad at FPS's too an extent, i enjoy different types of special gameplay more like masthead engie or stalker infil, or other vehicule based playstyles that does not push too much on me being bad. But I think just like Camikaze here and find that in certain cases, letting down a base that just got zerged to death or vehicule spammed, the game feels a little worst. but like you said I just move to the next base so it doesn't bother me that much.
As for squad play, i feel less usefull in the presence of way more advanced players in my squad but at the same time i don't have to think as much about how to be usefull which made my gameplay faster. So between the two, it is more like a 50/50 to me.
I hope you read it all and understood what i meant. And love your vids too Cami!
"I would find myself pounding my fist on my desk in anger after 10-20 mins at which point you'd say to yourself "Why the hell are you doing something you're not enjoying?"
THIS. THIS THIS THIS!
Planetside 1 I remember with so much affection and nostalgia. EARNED nostalgia. Fond gaming memories. CORE memories, because the game gave you real room to make them. PS2 far too often makes me just have those moments where I'm asking myself why the hell I'm still playing. In PS1 it felt like everyone had SOMETHING to contribute to the team effort. If you were losing it rarely felt frustrating. When you were winning you felt like you actually earned it. Nothing felt cheap or cheesy or designed to ruin your game.
It's too easy in PS2 to get zerged, spawn camped, sniped, infil knifed, smg'd, light assault ambushed or C4'd. The TTK is so low and there's so many ways to die from seeming nowhere with no way to answer it. It's a death simulator. Redeployside is annoying, vehicles/infantry interaction is broken, etc. What social aspects of the game there are help a little, but again, all too often it just feels like constant redeploying. At least if you're playing to the badly designed objectives rather than memeing.
OW and similar community comps are actually a very good example of what Planetside could be with some more gameplay controls. By controlling populations a bit more and limiting options somewhat you can still let players make choices and also create a more fun gameplay experience.
Couple ideas on possible fixes. First idea is the one that would cause the least change to the game: A dynamic pop-up style objective system. It would fix to the population dumping scheme by actively scaling the number of required objectives based on numbers of players that are going to interact with those objectives. (Thereby decreasing player amounts on one single objective, and bring fights down to a more manageable scale, which would hopefully drive the majority of fights away from a single doorway or hallway). This dynamic objective system would also subdivide the total pool of force multipliers deployed in the game, and encourage them to be spread out among the multiple needed objectives for the embattled hex. Actual gameplay execution might look like a capture point terminal spawning or coming through a capture room floor when a certain number of players are present. This could be based on player numbers either in the immediate vicinity, the local hexes, or the total continent. It would need a trial and error phase to get that nailed down I think (perfect test server material). I think this feature would be the least disruptive to implement fully. Other fixes I can think of are likely more disruptive (things like localized dynamic severe weather, localized dynamic PvE events, and localized dynamic resource drops) Those latter features would obviously upset the community more than it would fix the game
If they'd fix the spawn system it would certainly help with the zergs. Having to drive or fly from a different base to get to the fight would create more dynamics than just 96+ players spawning and rushing from the base itself within seconds.
If they make the speed chassis and shield mod free for the sundy I think it would make this solution a lot more enjoyable. Perhaps it would require a larger no deploy zone around bases?
@@jacobcurliss9687 Honestly I'd prefer they improve the vehicle physics so that Sunderers and tanks really feel like heavy vehicles rather than an oiled up ball rolling down a slip-n-slide. It definitely helps newbies with getting better with driving sunderers without having to worry about mines on the main road and help breed creativity in spawn spots.
The new spawn system is not the problem. It just makes the root cause more obvious. Zerging will always exist unless you incentivize even fights.
@@Chrispins never said it was, simply that it would help the situation.
Exactly. I know the twitchy kids would hate it but I can't STAND redeployside. How there is no meaning to getting from A to B. Redesign the bases to exclude vehicles from infantry fights, BUT MAKE VEHICLES NECCISARY TO GET FROM BASE TO BASE. BOOM, suddenly organic and meaningful vehicle fights happen.
Redeploy side was there since Day 1. Noone playing it cared about K/D (remember, Redeploy caused 1 D) becaues it was and is fun. The problems came up as soon as they dropped the hex system and invented the Lattice lanes. With hex you had big fights and could also have small ones because of the freedom of the hex system. With lattice you have only limited choices where to go to.
I'd love to see the addition or alteration of alerts. Bring in rotational alerts. New alerts with limiting factors or no restriction. This could give the devs options to play around with based on player counts or playstyles.
For example the air anomolies we had in the past.
Some other random examples could be, kill race alerts to see which faction can score X number of kills the fastest, or hex focused alerts where the map highlights X number of different bases and at the end of the alert the faction with the majority wins. Or maybe there could be an alert that focuses on the missions they added, similar to how the campaign made fights in hexless regions interesting for a short period of time. There could be a convoy that must be defended and captured and it's based on time held, whichever faction holds it the longest during the alert wins. (Most other games have game modes that could very easily be adapted into the sandbox nature of what PS2 already has.)
The point is the devs could implement and adjust each alert based feedback all while providing players with a variety of combined or even restricted arms gameplay without completely devaluing the sandbox nature since the alerts would be limited time events that may or may not lock the continent.
There would be no need to eliminate the current alert system either, but once or twice a day rotational alert could be seen as a fun way to break up the monotony of the same gameplay loop.
Other potential ideas:
Underwater alerts
Infantry only
Vehicle only
Unlimited nanites
Limited nanites
Base supplying nanites
Bastion fleet carrier alerts
Construction score alerts
Free Max suit alerts
Point hold alerts
Small squad alerts
2v1 faction alerts
PVE boss alerts
King of the hill
Limited respawn alerts
RTS mode alert
Capture the flag
Sunderer immunity alerts
Single hex alerts...
The list goes on...
While most of these alerts could be seen as game modes, since they are limited events they can be prescheduled in an in-game calendar where the player base can decide to participate or not. Alternatively there could be some community voting in-game on what event is next. Or even what the reward is. But the objective of this is not necessarily to improve outfit power or control the continent but instead to be a change of pace to the gameplay. All the traditional gameplay of farming for Auraxiums or farming outfitresources or winning primetime territory control alerts or grinding KDR or directives would remain a mainstay. The rewards for winning the alerts could be as simple as the fun of participating. Or as mmo grind focused as a new set of directives with cosmetic rewards.
What if there are no objectives, the whole map will be divided into lines to make forces flow like through wide corridor (closed areas with pain field, turn off hexes with bad design). Factions will have some amount of bases that are permanently in their possession. And this pre-configured map will have some gray hexes where the most fighting goes. No capturing bases just big team death match with vehicles. In alert case the winner is the faction with most kills.
This problem has been particularly bad on Oshur lately. The underwater bases can be some of the best pure infantry fights out there. But the vast majority of the time, those fights never get to happen because galaxies get taken out instantly by people just spamming rockets from the surface. If we could place routers underwater, I feel that would really help. Considering how much player bases are encouraged on Oshur, I'm surprised they don't allow this.
I have for the longest while considered an option to change the battle progress is to move the spawn room to the capture points. And have multiple locations on the base unlock the spawn to be accessible by the attackers and innitiate the cap from the spawn room. With the capture timer itself being 30 seconds at the most with the next unlocked base having a short "grace" period before a capture can be innitiated there. A play from the AMP station playbook but without the GSD sunderer nonsense. This would potentially create a situation where there is no point to shelling a base and sitting there for five minutes in a spawn room because the capture point IS the spawn room and once that is lost, the base is lost. Making the game less about capturing the base and more about moving from base to base.
In my mind, this would work for both small and large forces as the bases wouldn't be so large as to be frustrating for small units and large zergs would have a cooling effect on the spawn room shelling and camping because that IS the objective and at some point someone of your side has to go in there to capture. And they wouldn't be there for too long anyway.
I would also couple this up with a rework for vehicle accessibility and reverting some of the changes done years ago. Making certain vehicles rarer like MBTs. Alternatively I'd like to see them actually going forward with the damn "maintenance cost" concept they had for vehicles and resources.
As it stands now, entire sections of the maps could be removed and nothing of value would be lost. The ONLY place I have ever consistently seen a proper back and forth fight over terrain happening is between Quartz Ridge Camp and Indar Excavation Site. Those were epic long range fights and they were more about the terrain between the bases then the bases themselves. A distand second is the terrain between Mao Southeast Gate and Howling Pass Checkpoint. And saddly even those two have become somewhat rare in the times I decide to log on.
Lastly, I am one of those people you hate. I have made it my mission to kill every single enemy spawnpoint I can find, as soon as possible. Sunderers take far too little effort and investment to use effectively to ellicit any kind of other response from me. They are trash and deserve to burn.
15:10 not for me, i get thrown in fights where my team is overpoping by like 90% constantly for some reason, even if there are 50/50 fights on the map. so i rarely use it
I loved the times where i strapped all the AT mines on my body and running against TR or VS sunderers, such bliss not to mention the smugness of denying them the spawn vehicle
There is fun to be had at all levels of this game. There isn't one day I play where I do not have to adapt and overcome some type of "issue". I do it every day and so do thousands of other players. Perhaps your definition of fun has so evolved that you have outgrown the game where no amount of changes to meta and weapons will present an environment engaging to your skillset.
Add ground vehicle checkpoints outside bases. A lot of maps have a lot of open space around bases. These capture points would require manned ground vehicles (not including flashes) to capture. That could make vehicle gameplay more relevant outside of just attacking infantry.
You nailed it Camikaze. The MMOFPS elements is the foundation of Planetside.
The Outfit Wars took it in the wrong direction and so did the new upcoming tank guns. It’s now zergside or campside.
I don’t play it much anymore after 20 years of devotion to a game I love so such.
i've been super tired of the inconsistent / nonexistent fights lately. i'm taking a nice looong break after outfit wars. game has been continually pushed into a more casual zerg or be zerged state for years now. players have been given super powerful tools to zerg harder than ever before and its not fun to play on either side. i spend half my session staring at the map for something even close to 50/50. maybe in the future the pendulum will swing back towards something i think is more fun, but until then... o7
More than fair to take a break mate, can totally respect that. Cheers for sharing your thoughts and don't be a stranger.
>i spend half my session staring at the map for something even close to 50/50.< See theres part of the problem, the amount of people doing this means any 50/50 that does appear instantly has 20-30 people looking for a farm spawn on it and destabilise it.
It's interesting how this mirrors real life military strategy. 'The best battle is one that doesn't happen, or that you can win before it starts.'
Superb video. Well thought out. You bring up some heavyweight points, and I disagree with only your conclusions. I really look forward to our podcast.
This is so true. I tried fighting in a platoon, i did many times, its fun about 10% of the time. The rest of the time is pure boredom and constant redeploying. That is why i also play alone most of the time and keep looking for a even fight which unfortely happens less and less often. People hate bases like biolabs, ti alloys, the crown, but at least they sometimes provide a even, cool fight that lasts more then 5 minutes. Its pretty simple, you cannot have a game where redeploying to any base is this easy and not have people abuse it to optimize stratigic value.
Noticing these issues a lot more lately as well. Good fights that last longer than a couple minutes are very rare now on emerald at least.
In regards to your comment about vehicle's not having flexibility- one of my favorite (and unsung) jobs is hopping on a Flash with radar and hiding in a useful spot as a Medic on the rumble seat. Let your people know to look at their minimaps more often, plonk down your shield beacon, let your passive Triage ability work and reap the rewards!
@CAMIKAZE78 What if you remove capture points entirely and just have a purely score based capture, every XP tick obtained within the base (hex?) contributes to the attack or defence. If one team reaches +90% the base is secured and the fight moves along the lane depending on who won, (if there are two adjoining bases they are both attackable but the starting score is halved so instead of 50/50 it would be 25/75 favour of defender) that way zergs are negated because pop does not equal xp and you cant pop dump an xp tick. It does unfortunately mean you cant "steal" bases. It also makes ghost capping insufferable especially if you add a minimum amount of XP to start the capture bar. The only question becomes how do you incentivise players to deploy in to defend?
Thoughts?
how about adding hard spawns in those bunker assets but only make them active during unstable warpgates?
That’s one of the hardest things for me as a new player. I get really tired of fights ending within minutes. One of my biggest peeves is light assaults… seriously find no point in using sunders as within the first 5 minutes it becomes discovered we spend the whole time trying to prevent C4 spam to no avail as they never stop coming. If I feel like the fight was just getting good then out of nowhere within 5 minutes the sundi gets destroyed and I’m sent back to lateral points 600m+ away I usually just log off for the day.
Snipers and vehicles do the same thing regarding making sure infantry dont get to play the game, yet one of them has a counter (dont stop moving, or just shoot them back) while the other is just having more of the same (no the hitboxes and indirect damages make it impossible to dodge them same as sniper shots).
I mean one of the only weaknesses of vehicles is anti tank mines but there is an implant in game where is passively and permanently makes them immune to it (sweeper hud).
It would be great if they could give vehicles actual weakspots rather than just weaksides with extra damage%.
Like an actual engine core that can take serious damage if shot at by infantry weapons, but in return make the vehicles stronger in the areas they were meant to be strong.
Or atleast make repairing vehicles an actual skill based process rather than a passive and boring one (same for reconing).
As for the zerging, i believe there should be more room for logistics and construction to have impact on the population of an area.
Spawning should cost a resource relative to where you spawn (a resource that can be easily replenished by sunderers and ants) this way you can try to stop the zerg by being a bit more strategic about it without directly hitting the zergers in tge face.
This will also make zerg redeployment into other side of he continent much harder, so you would have a fighting chance against them.
I really like your point about vehicles The only time I really havd fun with them is when im shooting other vehicles. Like if my side pulls a lot of armor I would often wait outside an enemies base hoping for a the enemies to spawn a lightning or sunder for me to shoot. I just dont find it fun to sit on a hill shooting at enemy spawn. I wish they had a more cut out design. Oshur is fun due to the amount of vehicle fights. That happen in it.
I haven't played in a long time, but I still think if you become spawn camped you get to teleport out of spawn to different areas of the base, or maybe a portal opens up in the spawn room for a few seconds for say 15 seconds, and then closes and that happens every one min. So, portal opens, as many people as possible pass through to a random area on the base, and it closes after 15 seconds, and won't open again for another 60 seconds. Something like that to keep the fight exciting and alive. Not only does spawn camping suck for the camped, but its boring for the victors also.
Having more points for more people, so if the base is full more points would be active to spread out the fight, a D point or some other objective.. maybe more points for longer point holds, for as long as theres fighting the point is active, or get rid of lattices and make it all out
I agree. We should bring back the old priority spawn system. I also firmly believe there should be at least some kind of morality in the game, but you can't force this. Things like killing the one spawn in a good small fight in off hours, max crashing with more than like 5 maxes. But I guess that's just things that make me mad and i'm ranting about here. I do think everyone agrees with killing fights by killing sunderers or spamming orbitals or using a bastion to lock down a spawn room.
I played Planetside 1 since the Beta and Planetside 2 since the Beta as well, until about 3 years ago. The biggest issue with Planetside 2 was not the zerg-style gameplay, it was the base design. In Planetside 1 you had only very few entry points to a base that could actually be defended with smaller numbers. That made a huge difference. Planetside 2 started conceptually wrong and they never fixed, because they treated open bases as a feature. Still there was a time, before Wrel took over, when the game very decent with the goal to collect victory points. Unfortunately these days are long gone. The reason why I quit was basically a combination of Wrel's ideas and a massive drop in framerate. My playstyle (light assault/shotgun) got nerfed and my framerate went from 180 all the way down to about 45. That's pretty bad for graphics that essentially didn't change.
Honestly I’ve thought about this topic before and after playing games like new world I think I figured it out. The problem is the fact that the player has to pick which faction they want to play in. Wether one faction is cooler or has better weapons players will start to gravitate towards one or the other and there will always be unbalanced fights. Besides PS2 I play battlefield and I’ve never once thought about which faction I should join. I just join the game. The same weapons I have the enemy has as well. I can join with friends if there’s enough space on the server. The matches are usually even and very fun to play. I think(might not be a popular opinion) planetside should do away with faction specific weapons. And assign you to the faction that’s currently in need of players. That way no one has too much of an edge over the other
My opinion is that that would pretty much ruin the game. Faction-specific weapons and traits are one of my favorite traits of this game like the RTS of old. Getting rid of that would make the game feel bland and samey. I don't mean to diss but Battlefield ain't the game to go to for success given their recent track record.
@@stormlordeternal7663 factions are not what killed battlefield therefore your point is completely moot. Factions were better off just being very very different from each other as opposed to the science guys with guns, edge lords with guns and liberals with guns we got now. The difference are skin deep except the flavor which is bound to create pop differences. If the differences were bigger people would be inclined to play them all and switch between them.
Kami, you should have been the one taking charge of the game instead of the numbers and stats guy, IMO!!! You’re shedding light on the real issues in the game from a prospective of an ACTUAL gammer and thats invaluable. Keep it up man! 👌
Appreciate the kind words mate.
I think other spawn options than sunderers should be buffed, notably make galaxy easier to hide, give supplier ant an infantry terminal, routers unlocked by default and spawn beacon be able to make all nearby allies spawn to it.
Also give maxed deployment shield a one way bubble to the sunderer.
I've been thinking about this for awhile as a swarm lord within skl. i split my squads, I rarely pull hesh, when I PL i rarely have more than 10 members of overpop at a fight because as others have said, I want the new player experience to be so much more than sitting on a point.
I think my biggest conundrum and what I keep trying to figure out is. How do we get zergs to fight eachother? On emerald, it feels like more often the TR and NC zergs consist of so many bulldog sundies, hesh prowlers, cheeky battle gals, AA, and responding to that requires pulling an equivalent armor response yourself first which puts so much more onus on the responders than the people who piled up along the lattice and made sure no one has fun at the bases they're taking. Not to mention, once you've won this battle, you have extra force multipliers that kill the fight and the pop drops off. That's mainly the unsolvable problem here and I'm not even sure how to police it other than managing my pop on my own to try and have multiple decent options.
When I PL, my main goal is to make sure I am contributing to make 2-3 fights 50/50 or 60/40 at worst. I WISH that it was more feasible, in some way, for my platoon to respond more cleanly to respond to say, a 96+ 25/75 fight in a way that opens up the lattice. I don't mind zergs, but what I hate is the zerg dance, where nothing actually CLASHES.
I really miss the old days... when MAXs had charge ability, TR prowlers had the 'perfect' lockdown, C4 with no delay...
most importantly, tons of players to play with...
A huge part of the problem here, is that the devs removed all of the spawn limitations. It was by no means perfect before, but the old spawn priority system was a lot better than not having it, regardless of what solo players have been saying about being able to reach a fight easier: can't get to a fight if the fight is already dead.
I agree with you. If you happen to find an even fight, that lasts a while, PS2 is at its best. But this fights are sometimes days apart, which is sad.
Props to you for taking a step back and approaching this with a rational mindset. Often times this stuff gets me so heated I find myself in trash talking match admittedly. I to have a ton of love for this game so it sucks to see people want to win so bad that they ruin the experience for everyone around them excluding the 70 people they have in their over sized platoons. Often times the response is well we are having fun.. The reality is that although they may be having "fun" its a quick cheap fun that doesn't really stick. Its more of a wow biig fight lots of people exciting experience fun. which is fine the spectacle of biig planetside has a place in the game for sure but there is so much more to it than that. I will even admit that from an outsiders perspective that giant scale is what draws you in at first. But then as your goals and ambitions change for the game so does your outlook on what is "fun" or not. In a perfect world my opinion is that that scale that we are talking about takes up about 20 mins of the alert the final pushes to determine who the winner is or even an event that gives you a buff or something. I just wish these zerg fit leaders would drop the ego and play the game like you want it to still be around in 5-10 years. This "shallow fun" that you are pushing isn't sustainable you and I both know it. I Just don't think these people really care what happens at the end of the day because after this is gone they will just move on to the next best thing or game and do the same thing all over again because it makes them feel good for even a moment. Anyway great takes Cami as usual keep up the good work and good luck with outfit wars casting and future content.
I’m a solo player usually but I love rolling with the Gohard outfit.
Yeah yeah meme name but when I was with them we were sending squads to different fronts and only allocated more then 1 squad to areas with super high pop which was jaegars fist at the time.
One change made in Dead By Daylight recently that maybe planetside could learn from is reward the under populated team with more rewards (Dead by Daylight does this by giving the under populated side between survivors and killers 100% more bloodpoints at the end of a match)
A way planetside could integrate this is giving the underpopulated side of a base, from the moment they enter the base to its capture from either side, 50% of the xp they earned whilst they were there, not earning the bonus if they leave the base. If both sides are relatively even ( with about a 10% leeway, 46v48, 21v20, 98v90) then they both earn a 75% bonus to all xp earned at the moment of base capture from when they entered the fight to encourage making a fight even when possible.
Maybe my xp values i threw in here are too high for the devs to even consider but you get the idea
What if there were something like a nanite capacitor where if either the attacker or defender have more force multipliers, said capacitor would "overload" and would "divert nanite interaction points" to alternative capture points at different sponts around the base. Having the odd capture point spread out throughout the entire hex would keep fight from being bunched up, allowing the population to naturally spread itself thinner. I don't even think the bases would need to be redesigned. I'd be fine with extra capture points scattered around the the hex that are only active at certain populations on the test server to see how it goes.
Sound to me that they need to redesign the bases, some with the idea of being big and open bases suited to large fights. Others to be small, tight and suited to a small number of people. Also if the spawnroom is directly targetable by 1 shot weapons of any kind then some form of inate defensive terain should be implemented. Don't know how hard or easy that would be though.
Thanks for highlighting some of the ways that the game has improved since launch. One of the things that's changed since then was the addition of the lattice. I think that's one of the contributing factors to pop dump. There are only so many place that one can fight at and so fights tend to get concentrated. This is especially true when a faction is warpgated and there are now only 2 places that faction can fight at. The lattice creates lanes that a zerg can push down. I like the lattice, don't get me wrong. I don't want to remove it. I remember that ghost capping was fun, but defending against ghost capping was awful. I don't have any solutions. It's just something I noticed. I find myself wondering what it would be like if the lattice broke when a faction got warpgated. Would a faction stop themselves from warpgating another faction? I don't know. Just a thought experiment.
It comes down to encouraging gamers to try to think differently.
And that is a herculean, one could say Sisyphean, effort.
Gamers are looking for efficiency and are hard to change their minds.
I notice that each server has different mentalities when compared to each other.
"Your map needs to change to accommodate(...) a problem you can't fix easily without a total redesign": **Construction**.
Also, something I was thinking when you kept mentioning "Force Multipliers", is that while that can be a description of the effect of vehicles, ultimately that's not the only thing they are, they have roles and gameplay that when not filled can lead to these stagnant door fights, and overwhelming spawn rooms with hesh.
More vehicle objectives would perhaps diverge attention away from "infantry farming", but if the infantry isn't pulling vehicles on their own to take the **fight outside**, this problem will continue.
I miss aerial anomalies
They gave air vehicles actual objectives only they can acheive. It provided a chance for newer pilots to try their hand at flying and gain a bit of experience. Sure, one could say there would be more ground pounders in the air. However there would also be an increase in fighter planes hunting down said ground pounders. And speaking as an air pilot myself, it makes me happy keeping my fellow team on the ground safe from the dangers up above. Until I get hunted down myself, of course.
There are a lot of things that could be done to improve this side of the gameplay, which has been affecting everyone in the last years I suppose.
Ideas can pop up everywhere: debuffs/buffs if the population is unbalanced, faster/slower respawn rate, more complex logistics to healing and ammo, autoturrets and yes, changing the layout of the map depending on the scale of the battle would help; but if there is a zerg horde outside why would I want to continue the fight? I'll simply redeploy to a different combat area, which is boring since I love to play in big fights.
Why not implementing a REAL rewarding system for defending/attacking important objectives? Why not implementing a new and easy squad system (which I think they are doing) that would help flanking and cooperating for solo players that would make the combat more dynamic?
These are only ideas that came into mind, maybe implementing them would ruin the game. But if we do have these ideas, why not the developers? Why put so much effort for a crappy water combat that is available only on one continent?
This game has objectively a LOT of problems, we could sit here and talk for hours.
I don't know, i'm just a player.
You make some good points, but I think that trying to cater to the 'fps' portion of the game is exactly how we ended up here.
If I think about it, the main problem imo is that this mmofps moves too fast- ttk is really low (esp. with headshots), vehicles are really fragile, bases are quick to cap (taking only a few minutes), and if you don't like where you are on the continent, you can get to the other side lickety-split. This (and other factors) all culminates in a game where trying to win means bouncing around the map to capture wherever the enemy currently isn't, with brief breaks to kill a sundy and clean up a base where they are.
If the logistics of the game were more central to the core gameloop (moving around the map, getting spawns in bases, providing ammo on the move, stuff like that) and the game was *slower* (longer ttk, esp on spawns, it took more effort to move from one side of the continent to the other), you'd be able to have better fights. They'd last longer 'cause the sundy wouldn't die to a single c4 fairy and the online tryhards wouldn't be able to pause, spawn in from 5 bases away, wipe you out, and return to what they were doing in a few minutes.
This game used to have fights that lasted for hours (a day or longer if I've heard correctly) at specific bases, because they were just that hard to capture.
Now the fights are all at the same few bases because the people want to go to the fight, and that's where the fights happen. Yes, that's circular logic, but why else does The Crown get the majority of the fight? Meanwhile the rest of the map is being dictated by the few people who are looking at the overall objective, able to bounce around as they see fit.
To sum up, by trying to cater to the 'fps' side by letting people get into fights faster, the game has sped up and the logistics- the 'mmo' side- has suffered. Because the logistics has suffered, the fights are more lopsided and shorter.
You want a primarily fps experience that's balanced? That's called an arena shooter. Planetside 2 was never meant to be that, and trying to make it act like one hasn't worked.
Vehicles should be cheaper (drastically) to buy, and easier to kill from the infantry side maybe.
But at the same time there should be measures to make defending your mobile spawns more sturdy. If only construction could be allowed near deployed sunderers (Or deployed ants when we had those). That is to say there should be a small builadble radius around deployed spawns that extends into the “no deploy zone” letting you put up some basic walls and modules like pain spire and repair (useful but makes establishing a cortium supply very dynamic).
These two changes make vehicles easier to implement since they are cheaper - but lessens the spam factor by making them fairly easy to down. However the heart of the operation, the spawn point, remains sturdy and hard to kill so long as the logistical support is robust enough to keep it so.
And lastly maybe make capture timers longer so these kinds of scenarios can build up naturally.
Can’t say anything about ttk or zergs though. You can see for ttk I actually prefer it, the counter measure is making the downtime smaller - which we havent done for vehicles since their cost is so freaking high.
Idk guys. We all like spouting out ideas but I’m pretty sure none of it will be heard xD
What if we did this. Coded in where you would get extra xp for being under pop and less xp for being over pop in a single fight. This is encourage players to swap to get xp quicker at the under pop fights same with the players at over pop, they would go somewhere else to keep good amount of xp at another fight.
More experience players that are finding certs would go to under pop fights. And I would image that it wouldn't be that much work.
This is pretty much my exact thoughts on the game that I've had for a long time. Unfortunately, PS2 is flawed at such a fundamental level that only PS3 can fix it, andI don't see that happening any time soon.
A PS3 is definitely a pipe dream as I read the situation (but I have been proven wrong before so we'll see), it will be interesting to see if things change at all over the years.
About HESH spammers. I'd like to see them removed for empire specific close anti infantery option. A shotgun for NC a dual wielded gatling or even a flame thrower for TR and a 100% accuracy laser with high damage fall off or slow moving high fire rate explosive orbs canon. Makes the tanks truly deadly if equipped to do so against large numbers of infantery at close range. Make them unable to kill an infantery if not direct hitting them. Sounds like a more viable solution to me.
Give large xo bonuses for figthing im hexes where your team is underpopulated, and that has a lattice link to one of your owned bases. People follow the xp and people should be incentiviced to join fights their empire is low on pop compared to the enemy.
I feel the same way about outfits prioritising captures rather than good fights. It certainly makes sense that the reward system is why they might prefer overpoping as apposed to maintaining marginaly higher or lower pop to try for that win. I think one issue with the vehicles is they arent exactly competent out of the box for most players and need a lot of investment to work. Maybe one solution that isnt redesigning the lattice system or changing base lay outside would be to disable inf and vehicle spawns in combat zones while also making the speed chassis and shield mod for the sundered free. At least these are some of my less matured thoughts about it.
I really really wish that this wasn't the experience infantry players have when interacting with vehicles. They is a massive amount of fun to be had in VvI and VvV fights that don't involve heshing, sundie hunting, or massive zergs of tanks or aircrafts. Small vehicle fights are where I have spent most of my thousands of hours playing this game but they get hurt way more than the toxic parts every time there is a change to vehicles. Its honestly depressing.
Couldn't agree more mate. The VvI and VvV sides of the game are really shallow right now, and I do wish it could be something more.
infantry are inherently underpowered against vehicles and air. A single infantryman has almost no shot at beating a lightning or MBT alone. Even then, pulling a lighting yourself does nothing against 3 tanks and a sunder on top of a hill. A solo infantryman also has no chance against an experienced esf pilot. VvV fights are great fun but they end up just being infantry xp farms instead. It would be a mistake to remove vehicles but I wish they were a bit different.
Glad you took the time to not just infantry point hold mindset rant and reflect how base design with small point rooms and no vehicle points etc are more the problem than any one or many force multipliers.
That said to the zergfits if you are more than 70-30 then you still don't get to use these excuses just stop it
The biggest problem is zerging. Outfits should have max player limit so that they can only make one or max two platoons.
This has been a problem since the games inception and the devs have never been able to figure it out. I think their best attempt at that was applying higher xp rates to lower pop factions, I think this is a move in the right direction but still misses the nail on the head!!! These rewards could be tweaked further but I think to completely balance this problem they need to apply various "power ups" or "power downs" in hexes with population imbalances, the possibilities here are endless. Ex. Faction A Has 33. 3% pop vs B with 66.6% there is a 2:1 advantage for faction B. Faction A may receive 15% dmg boost, 15% health boost, & maybe 5%/s health regen when out of combat for 3-5 seconds. This gives faction A a huge advantage 30+%, this battle may now play out more like a 40%-50% vs 60%-50% battle. I know this might seem uncompetitive but I think these advantages or disadvantages would cause populations to naturally balance them selves out quickly, why would one want to go to an over popped fight when its a lot more challenging to rack up those kills on a player that does more dmg and has more health, or has what ever other benefits. You will also see players notice low pop hexes and quickly go there to receive the power ups to rack up kills, this should quickly balance out the fight by encouraging pop to rotate to that hex. I think should also apply to vehicles as well to hinder rolling armour zergs. Also the beauty of this game is there is so many hexes so the power ups don't have to be the same for every hex, this means the devs can test hundreds of different variations of power ups based on pop imbalances to see what works best and tweak them as needed. Some bonuses and power ups may work better for some bases than others, like maybe in very big bases where it takes awhile to travel throughout the entire base players could receive one time revives per respawn when the pop imbalance reaches a certain point.
I swear I'm only using HESH to aurax it, I'll swap back to AP after because I like killing tanks the most.....as for the fps, i think big platoons need to just slug it out more, they are so unwilling now it feels. Full platoon attacks a base with like 12 guys, a enemy platoon redeploys to fight them. And the first platoon leaves at the first sight of resistance. What, do they not want to play the game?
I miss the old big vehicle fights. alot of lightnings, ammo- & repair sunides and heavy tanks from all factions agansit each other. It it could last forever and not end in a quick zerg.
Best fight ive ever had on ps2 is a fight to defend a constructed base on a montain at around 20 vs 20 with very few vehiculs. I think made the constructed bases a part of the infantry fight could go in a better direction
I think outfits should communicate together to organise events to verse eachother if this isnt already happening.
One thing that makes me kinda sad about zergfits that gobble up newer players is that they don't actually teach them how to play the game. They get dropped into a mostly empty enemy base and told to capture the point.
So that BR12 is standing around the control point for 3+ minutes, along with the other BR12's and 50 other teammates, never shooting their weapon, or getting into a firefight, wondering what the hell to do. And they do this base after base.
Not only is it extremely boring, but it has a side effect of making the opposing force better at infantry fights by having to try to fight their way to the control point. So they're actually making their enemies better at the game. I dunno, that's just my opinion. Anyway, love the vids. Cheers.
Appreciate the thoughts mate, definitely agree.
am I the only one that goes to overpopped fights to try to get as many kills as possible to try to force myself to get better at the game? I do love me those 50/50 fights but when my team has too many players it gets boring because there isn't anything to shoot.
Yep, I do this as well. Once a fight starts to feel a little campy, i get the hell outta there and find something else.
I preferred when there was no lattice system. My friends and I have a much harder time feeling like we can make a difference since it was added. We can still find our way but a 4 man squad feels punishing.
yeah i can think of a few outfits on ermerald, one of them is GOB and others, that ruin fights or just meme on outfits that want to play and not get pushed off a fight.or i've seen some just leave infantry and fight in air to kill bastions and then follow player around and ruin there fights.