Hamma
2012-09-05, 10:37 AM
Via Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/zdwvj/all_of_higbys_replies_to_the_recent_beta_feedback/
To me Reddit is like reading egyptian hieroglyphics :lol: I'm sure I am not alone.
Below is a list of all of Higby's replies, with a contextual title (in bold).
Mini-map:
We're doing a couple things to make the minimap a bit more useful.
In vehicles the minimap will scale out proportionally to the speed of the vehicle, so you can see ahead of you a bit better.
We'll add a key that lets you expand and zoom out the minimap while held down, so you can quickly get your barrings without having to bring up the minimap.
Don't think these changes will be up this week, but they may be up next week on beta.
Bug: Invert-look in vehicle turrets:
Just got word that this is fixed, turret control now adheres to vertical look rather than vertical fly.
Cost and effectiveness of AA:
There are a couple issues going on here -
1 - not every weapon is in the game right now, there will be additional anti-air weapons coming in before the beta is finished.
2 - pricing is first pass for most things right now, we've got to do some pretty substantial balancing once all our rewards solidified.
Cool-down timers:
Cooldowns are good because they're mitigated by certs and implants. Players who are dedicated to that playstyle (tank, reaver, max, whatever) can get the cooldown to zero and not ever be limited by it, players who aren't are unable to just spam something that's extremely useful right this second, and players who don't know get to try out everything without having to sink time or effort into an initial unlock.
Cert and implant stacking:
For the Reaver it goes from 15 minutes to 5 minutes when you unlock all the certs. However, there is a 24 hour 50 Auraxium implant you can get that takes the reacquire timer straight down to 5 minutes. There is a bug on beta that cause these to not stack, they are supposed to, meaning that you can get your timer down to zero by having the cert line and the implant.
Separate control mapping for air/ground vehicles:
I'll ask about adding separate air/ ground vehicle keybinds. That should be pretty straight forward. I'll also put in a request to allow you to rebind the aircraft roll.
Slow tracking speed of turrets:
Turret tracking speed is part of their balancing, although I'm not convinced it's doing anything except being irritating.
Bullet spread, recoil and random deviation:
We've got some new recoil stuff coming online in the next week or so which should allow us to do some better stuff with the weapon recoil which, in turn, should let us decrease the deviation somewhat. Those two things will be part of weapon sidegrades too, so you'll be able to find one that hopefully works best for you.
Bug: Players currently have to be really close to heal/repair a friendly:
We've got a bunch of little bugs with medic and engineer heal / repair tool range that we're dealing with solving. Hopefully you should see these things get better in the next two-three weeks.
Bug: The mouse sensitivity in vehicle turrets is currently mapped to general mouse sensitivity, when it should be mapped to vehicle sensitivity:
We've been discussing some mouse sensitivity issues with vehicles today, this is one of the things we brought up. It will be fixed!
Balancing Maxes with a resource cost/cool-down timer:
Yep, we're coming around on that. We've got a few things incoming to help with this:
You'll no longer spawn in directly as a MAX but instead have to go to a terminal - this mainly affects squad spawning, and MAY affect spawning at a Galaxy as we may not allow MAX swapping at Gal equip terminals (TBD)
Resource and timers are getting implemented for MAXes, we're going to play with it and see how it feels. Like vehicles, certs will exist to cut the timers down.
Timer will make switching back and forth between configurations no longer be viable, so hopefully we see people using multiple weapon systems instead of just flipping over to dual burster / dual
AI.
Still adding more counters, AP ammo should be coming soon.
To offset all of this, the MAX AV and AA weapons are going to get buffed quite a bit. Their AI weapons are already pretty solid.
Teamplay and how they're improving it:
Planetside 2 is all about teamplay, and making teamplay effortless and rewarding is one of our biggest goals between now and ship. We've got a few things working here to address this.
VOIP helps a lot, proximal voip makes it easier to find groups (and allows for singalongs!)
Missions. We have a mission system that is still in progress that should be a global coordination tool. You, as a commander can place a request for different things, air support, transport, engineers, attack, defend, etc. These thing show up almost like minimap pings in a RTS / MOBA for players who are opted in to see that type of content. If you're flying around in a reaver and you have "air support" checked as a mission you're interested in, you'll see waypoints popping up for areas where other players have requested air support. This level of global coordination should help a lot get newer players to the types of things they want to do easily
Better onramps to multiplayer gameplay. We need outfit browsing / recruitment in game, squad browsing, etc. Tools that help you find a group of players to go experience the teamplay with.
Between those three things we think we'll have a pretty good handle on putting people into teams and teamplay situations.
Auto Run?
Not currently planned, but I'll see what people think. It probably wouldn't be terribly hard to add.
Bug: Squad list not updating (showing players as dead when they're alive):
We've got people working on fixing the issue with the squad list updating while I speak. Hopefully we'll have that fixed and up on beta this week.
What the Private Squad toggle does:
Private Squad toggles if your squad will get filled with players using auto-squad or not, it'll also allow you to put your squad on the squad browser.
Custom chatroom channels:
Sure, we're adding ad-hoc channels to the game so you can create your Brony channel or whatever, and then you and all your friends can voice and text chat. We'll probably create some defaults like Outfit Recruitment also.
Changes to earning resources:
Currently you do earn resources (based on region) for any activity that grants score (getting kills, destroying vehicles, reviving allies, etc) but only when a capture event is in progress. We're changing that so it's all the time not just when the region is being captured.
We do have plans to allow for some offline resource gain which I can't go into too much detail on it since that's still getting locked down. We will also be implementing some kind of idle timeout to prevent people from leeching resources, although that sort of exploit isn't really at the top of our priority list at the moment.
Speed in which territory changes hands and lockout timers:
Most of this is in the hands of the players right now and that's how we want it. I've seen fights over one region go back and forth for hours. I don't feel like "lock out timers" are the solution, they're a hamfisted mechanic that basically disables your ability to have fun in an area for a certain amount of time. Having the adjacency requirements in game makes it a bit more predictable where people will attack and you'll have to defend, which should keep fights moving in a less random way - but in terms of putting mechanisms in place to lock bases down I'm not a fan, players should be what holds territory, not timers.
We are making some changes to facilities which make them more defensible and which should make fights over them be more sustainable. This will ideally slow the overall progression through territory, but an overwhelming offensive force is still going to be able to make some quick and decisive gains. That's how it should be IMO.
"Yes I think many people agree that the time it takes to capture anything, especially outposts/towers, is way too fast. The consensus I've seen both here and on the forums consists of some combination of the following ideas:"
Make capture times (ticker/ticket system) take longer for everything. A solo player should not be able to cap an outpost in under a minute.
Modify the influence system so that instead of it providing a flat number of tickets towards a cap, so that it instead increases the rate of capture. This combined with #1 should make the base fights last longer, and require some coordinated effort to take the adjacent hexes instead of solo capping whack-a-mole.
Remove the lock out timer on the satellite points that have a spawn. Capping a base should not lock out attacking empires from the hard spawn they own outside of the base.
Provide some kind of indication on the map that a hex is being capped by an enemy.
We are likely to be doing all of these, as well as removing lockout timers, removing adjacency rules and probably making the rate of [2] a pretty large multiplier, like a 100x difference bettween 0-100% influence.
To me Reddit is like reading egyptian hieroglyphics :lol: I'm sure I am not alone.
Below is a list of all of Higby's replies, with a contextual title (in bold).
Mini-map:
We're doing a couple things to make the minimap a bit more useful.
In vehicles the minimap will scale out proportionally to the speed of the vehicle, so you can see ahead of you a bit better.
We'll add a key that lets you expand and zoom out the minimap while held down, so you can quickly get your barrings without having to bring up the minimap.
Don't think these changes will be up this week, but they may be up next week on beta.
Bug: Invert-look in vehicle turrets:
Just got word that this is fixed, turret control now adheres to vertical look rather than vertical fly.
Cost and effectiveness of AA:
There are a couple issues going on here -
1 - not every weapon is in the game right now, there will be additional anti-air weapons coming in before the beta is finished.
2 - pricing is first pass for most things right now, we've got to do some pretty substantial balancing once all our rewards solidified.
Cool-down timers:
Cooldowns are good because they're mitigated by certs and implants. Players who are dedicated to that playstyle (tank, reaver, max, whatever) can get the cooldown to zero and not ever be limited by it, players who aren't are unable to just spam something that's extremely useful right this second, and players who don't know get to try out everything without having to sink time or effort into an initial unlock.
Cert and implant stacking:
For the Reaver it goes from 15 minutes to 5 minutes when you unlock all the certs. However, there is a 24 hour 50 Auraxium implant you can get that takes the reacquire timer straight down to 5 minutes. There is a bug on beta that cause these to not stack, they are supposed to, meaning that you can get your timer down to zero by having the cert line and the implant.
Separate control mapping for air/ground vehicles:
I'll ask about adding separate air/ ground vehicle keybinds. That should be pretty straight forward. I'll also put in a request to allow you to rebind the aircraft roll.
Slow tracking speed of turrets:
Turret tracking speed is part of their balancing, although I'm not convinced it's doing anything except being irritating.
Bullet spread, recoil and random deviation:
We've got some new recoil stuff coming online in the next week or so which should allow us to do some better stuff with the weapon recoil which, in turn, should let us decrease the deviation somewhat. Those two things will be part of weapon sidegrades too, so you'll be able to find one that hopefully works best for you.
Bug: Players currently have to be really close to heal/repair a friendly:
We've got a bunch of little bugs with medic and engineer heal / repair tool range that we're dealing with solving. Hopefully you should see these things get better in the next two-three weeks.
Bug: The mouse sensitivity in vehicle turrets is currently mapped to general mouse sensitivity, when it should be mapped to vehicle sensitivity:
We've been discussing some mouse sensitivity issues with vehicles today, this is one of the things we brought up. It will be fixed!
Balancing Maxes with a resource cost/cool-down timer:
Yep, we're coming around on that. We've got a few things incoming to help with this:
You'll no longer spawn in directly as a MAX but instead have to go to a terminal - this mainly affects squad spawning, and MAY affect spawning at a Galaxy as we may not allow MAX swapping at Gal equip terminals (TBD)
Resource and timers are getting implemented for MAXes, we're going to play with it and see how it feels. Like vehicles, certs will exist to cut the timers down.
Timer will make switching back and forth between configurations no longer be viable, so hopefully we see people using multiple weapon systems instead of just flipping over to dual burster / dual
AI.
Still adding more counters, AP ammo should be coming soon.
To offset all of this, the MAX AV and AA weapons are going to get buffed quite a bit. Their AI weapons are already pretty solid.
Teamplay and how they're improving it:
Planetside 2 is all about teamplay, and making teamplay effortless and rewarding is one of our biggest goals between now and ship. We've got a few things working here to address this.
VOIP helps a lot, proximal voip makes it easier to find groups (and allows for singalongs!)
Missions. We have a mission system that is still in progress that should be a global coordination tool. You, as a commander can place a request for different things, air support, transport, engineers, attack, defend, etc. These thing show up almost like minimap pings in a RTS / MOBA for players who are opted in to see that type of content. If you're flying around in a reaver and you have "air support" checked as a mission you're interested in, you'll see waypoints popping up for areas where other players have requested air support. This level of global coordination should help a lot get newer players to the types of things they want to do easily
Better onramps to multiplayer gameplay. We need outfit browsing / recruitment in game, squad browsing, etc. Tools that help you find a group of players to go experience the teamplay with.
Between those three things we think we'll have a pretty good handle on putting people into teams and teamplay situations.
Auto Run?
Not currently planned, but I'll see what people think. It probably wouldn't be terribly hard to add.
Bug: Squad list not updating (showing players as dead when they're alive):
We've got people working on fixing the issue with the squad list updating while I speak. Hopefully we'll have that fixed and up on beta this week.
What the Private Squad toggle does:
Private Squad toggles if your squad will get filled with players using auto-squad or not, it'll also allow you to put your squad on the squad browser.
Custom chatroom channels:
Sure, we're adding ad-hoc channels to the game so you can create your Brony channel or whatever, and then you and all your friends can voice and text chat. We'll probably create some defaults like Outfit Recruitment also.
Changes to earning resources:
Currently you do earn resources (based on region) for any activity that grants score (getting kills, destroying vehicles, reviving allies, etc) but only when a capture event is in progress. We're changing that so it's all the time not just when the region is being captured.
We do have plans to allow for some offline resource gain which I can't go into too much detail on it since that's still getting locked down. We will also be implementing some kind of idle timeout to prevent people from leeching resources, although that sort of exploit isn't really at the top of our priority list at the moment.
Speed in which territory changes hands and lockout timers:
Most of this is in the hands of the players right now and that's how we want it. I've seen fights over one region go back and forth for hours. I don't feel like "lock out timers" are the solution, they're a hamfisted mechanic that basically disables your ability to have fun in an area for a certain amount of time. Having the adjacency requirements in game makes it a bit more predictable where people will attack and you'll have to defend, which should keep fights moving in a less random way - but in terms of putting mechanisms in place to lock bases down I'm not a fan, players should be what holds territory, not timers.
We are making some changes to facilities which make them more defensible and which should make fights over them be more sustainable. This will ideally slow the overall progression through territory, but an overwhelming offensive force is still going to be able to make some quick and decisive gains. That's how it should be IMO.
"Yes I think many people agree that the time it takes to capture anything, especially outposts/towers, is way too fast. The consensus I've seen both here and on the forums consists of some combination of the following ideas:"
Make capture times (ticker/ticket system) take longer for everything. A solo player should not be able to cap an outpost in under a minute.
Modify the influence system so that instead of it providing a flat number of tickets towards a cap, so that it instead increases the rate of capture. This combined with #1 should make the base fights last longer, and require some coordinated effort to take the adjacent hexes instead of solo capping whack-a-mole.
Remove the lock out timer on the satellite points that have a spawn. Capping a base should not lock out attacking empires from the hard spawn they own outside of the base.
Provide some kind of indication on the map that a hex is being capped by an enemy.
We are likely to be doing all of these, as well as removing lockout timers, removing adjacency rules and probably making the rate of [2] a pretty large multiplier, like a 100x difference bettween 0-100% influence.