Lots of complaints on replayability on station forums

[Venoxile]

You guys can post your ideas on how to make planetside more goal oriented and have more replay value.

I have a whole shit load, but it's 2:00 am right now, so i'll post 1. Some beta testers have been complaining about how the only tactic that seems to work well constantly is the zergling rush. Dying doesn't matter because you instantly respawn so everyone just rushes at eachother.
I thought a good idea would be to give players dignity, below their names on your screen show their kills/deaths or if they're a medic or an engineer some other sort of bragging rights statistic. Nothing that would take up too much bandwidth, an example below someones name: 100-50, plain and simple.
Probably would lag it to hell, but adding statistics gives players dignity, so they will actually try some strategies that won't get them killed over and over again...

[alphabet]

I have a little better idea..

Show your outfit below your name and make it possible to publicly declare war on other outfits. Make it to where you can declare war on even an outfit in your own faction, so that GP arent accrued. This will add some RP to the game and make politics an aspect as well.

Hell if we can ally why cant we declare war?

Jus my $0.02 worth,
alph

[TheAngelOfWar]

inner empire war = griefer wet dream.

perhaps slight loss of BEP per death? nothing detrimental, but maybe 20-50 loss per death will make the real rushers think for a bit when they cant get over BR3, and thats just from VR training...

[simba]

Originally posted by TheAngelOfWar
inner empire war = griefer wet dream.

perhaps slight loss of BEP per death? nothing detrimental, but maybe 20-50 loss per death will make the real rushers think for a bit when they cant get over BR3, and thats just from VR training...
BEUTIFULL IDEA! that will make it better, how much beps does every kill do? I would like a 1/5 of how many beps u get 4 killing u loose when u die.

GG

[nhedge]

it's an obvious solution.

[Tieom]

The only way to really, REALLY prevent zergling rushes is to make people care their amount of deaths. I played tribes 2 really suicidally, then I got a stats-tracker and didn't feel like dying pointlessly since it would be logged, permenantly. So I tried my utmost to use health wisely, and run back to equipment stations instead of suiciding/getting killed on purpose to get there faster. This made the game feel a lot nicer to me, for some reason...
In other words - FEAR OF DEATH. Even a slight fear will work wonders.

[Prowler]

very obvious.

[Kilgs]

PS tracks an absurd amount of stats for you.

[FalseMyrmidon]

zool, or zoolooman had a big long web site on how to make it not suck (have a point)

[Marius]

Also you could add a 2 minute delay to spawn or seomthing along those lines. Maybe more. That way when you attack you cant blindly rush the base and keep sending in wave after wave. It would allow for some strategy about using troops wisely.

[FalseMyrmidon]

http://users2.ev1.net/~jasonsharp/index.html
found it
excellent page on how to balance ps to make it non crappy

[LesserShade]

I was reading his ideas on the beta forums and I have to admit I like the hard lock idea, not sure about the whole matrixing thing though.

As it stands right now, once you achieve lock it is harder to keep it from getting broken by a handful of enemy soldiers that dropped in and got an AMS and run around phantom capping all the bases on the continent then it is to just straight up fight another army for control.

You end up playing an endless game of wack-a-mole. Cap all bases.. oh wait, VS are hacking facility A.. go to facility A and recap. Oh! facility B and C are hacked.. go recap B and C... Grrr facility D is hacked and so is Tower E and facility A again! %@#%@#.

[jeb]

the matrix idea is really what will take planetside from being a game with a rating of an A to a game that with a rating of A++++

right now it is just small battles with no overall perception of the world. that is because there is no front line that pushs or pulls. you just land on some barren continent and take over bases by yourself.

i know its hard to explain until you play, but each and everyone will see the problem when they play.

do not get me wrong though, the game absolutely rocks. i was an avid almost rabid fanboi before i got into beta last friday. now i feel like the polish is off the car, the fog has lifted. i still like what i see, i just wish it was slightly different.

[Seabass03]

Agreed Jeb. A few things need to be fixed before retail...fast or it will fall somewhat flat.

[Deveral]

I like Zoolman's idea on Hardlocking and the whole matrix thing. I play games to fight people upfront, not running around. I used to play DAoC and when caping keeps in your frontier from the enemy, it seemed to be an endless cat and mouse game for 2+ hours and was pointless, there would be almost no action after the first keep or there would be none till the last keep. I think Zool's idea should be used but thats just me. See all you Terran's and Vanu's out there.

[Chanfan]

I don't think excessive deaths should be punished. Dying a lot can sometimes be an indication you are taking a few for the team - spearheading a charge down the stairs, or whatever - in a way that allows your team to be successful.

In other team games I've played, it's often drilled into the players that watching stats is the worst thing you can do. It tends to indicate folks who are more worried about their kill to death ratio than about how their team is doing. I think having such a system in game would be detrimental to team play.

If the endless spawn thing is a problem, they might need to adjust spawn times - or at least how quickly one AMS or tube can spawn. You don't want to make players wait too long by lengthening their spawn times, but perhaps limiting the spawns per location..?

[MrVulcan]

(no offence at all intended here, I am just strongly against these ideas)

Originally posted by simba
BEUTIFULL IDEA! that will make it better, how much beps does every kill do? I would like a 1/5 of how many beps u get 4 killing u loose when u die.

GG

ummm no....
This is an FPS, not a RPG, death is part of the game, you die often, every few min you die, its part of life. If battles lasted several min between 1 person and another person, then fine, but if 2 people are shooting at eachother, the battle lasts what? 10 seconds? 5 ?
If you had that, you would have no one fighting since they would be scared of losing their high rank. You would have a bunch of lvl 8-9s that would not go out doors.
Also, what about the high lvl commanders that would be targeted every few seconds?

This idea would not work, and I am glad that the devs agree with me.

Originally posted by Marius
Also you could add a 2 minute delay to spawn or seomthing along those lines. Maybe more. That way when you attack you cant blindly rush the base and keep sending in wave after wave. It would allow for some strategy about using troops wisely.

2 min wait to gewt back in action! You want to wait 2 min after a death to get back in game???? A battle lasting several seconds, and you want to wait 2 min to have anohter several second battle??? You take several min to get there, then fight for 10 seconds, then wait 2 min to respawn? They already limit it, you have to wait for an open spawn tube, you should not have to wait 2+ min to spawn in an FPS game. Play UT2003, or quake, or C&C ren, and wait for 2 min after you die once to move, see if you still have fun. You would end up spending most of your time in waiting to play. People wont pay for waiting to play all the time, they want to be in the game.

----------------
sorry if this offends anyone, it is not meant to be that way, hwever, I am strongly against these ideas.

[Euroclydon]

Originally posted by alphabet
I have a little better idea..

Show your outfit below your name and make it possible to publicly declare war on other outfits. Make it to where you can declare war on even an outfit in your own faction, so that GP arent accrued. This will add some RP to the game and make politics an aspect as well.

Hell if we can ally why cant we declare war?

Jus my $0.02 worth,
alph

Heheh. I spot a Jumpgater! ;)

Serriously though, entire empires (not just outfits) have declared war on each other. And letting outfits of the same empire fight each other would really throw a wrench into SOE's plans for the game IMO.

Not to shoot down your idea, but it only really works if the factions aren't in an all out war and there's open ended RP... which PS doesn't have... and I'm not sure if it should. We'll just have to wait and see.

[Drex]

Originally posted by MrVulcan


2 min wait to gewt back in action! You want to wait 2 min after a death to get back in game???? A battle lasting several seconds, and you want to wait 2 min to have anohter several second battle??? You take several min to get there, then fight for 10 seconds, then wait 2 min to respawn? They already limit it, you have to wait for an open spawn tube, you should not have to wait 2+ min to spawn in an FPS game. Play UT2003, or quake, or C&C ren, and wait for 2 min after you die once to move, see if you still have fun. You would end up spending most of your time in waiting to play. People wont pay for waiting to play all the time, they want to be in the game.



Well I play objective scenarios on Medal of Honor multiplayer all the time which in a way can be similar to PS. When you die in objective games you have to sit out and wait for 1) the objective to be complete 2) an entire team to be killed or 3) timer to run out. So if you die you are definately going to be waiting to respawn and I think it's fun as hell because there is an actual RISK in dying. If you have nothing to risk by dying because you respawn right away and you're back in the action then there's no fun; the game gets repetitive and you stop playing. There HAS to be a penalty for dying.

[Cyanide]

I think that the game has soooo much potential. I'm sure it will be a very good game even if they released it to retail right now. However, i think the most important thing that it falls short of is a challenging specialization system. The game would be far more engrossing if it took time and skill to become a great galaxy pilot, reaver pilot, tank driver, tank gunner, or whatever. Right now it just seems as though you can jump into any roll and instantly pick it up and be proficient enough to be effective in battle. This is NOT conducive to a lasting experience. People get bored with things that don't challenge them. I know some of you will say "we don't want a sim". Well i'm telling you that if you did have more detailed and more difficult systems to learn it would be much more fun in the long run because people wouldn't be switching rolls every day and being good at one thing would give you a sense of accomplishment. There's no sense of accomplishment right now. It's too easy to do take on any of the rolls the game offers. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to switch rolls. I'm saying that the learning curve for each roll should be steaper so that it takes time to get good. That way you could make your own long term goals if you need long term goals. You could have a long term goal of becoming a skilled galaxy pilot as well as a skilled prowler pilot. Right now the game has no specializations. It has rolls. Anybody can take any roll at any time with almost no training or experience required. That is not a specialization. If you look at say Everquest. It has specialized characters. If you're a mage character your goal is to be the best mage there is and it takes TIME to become that. Well in PS it takes no time to become the best galaxy pilot or reaver pilot, or hacker, or whatever. THAT is the biggest problem.

edit:
I also think that punishing people for killing themselves repeatedly is not a bad idea. You should lose a small percentage of the experience you earned since your last death each time you die. That percentage loss should decrease in size with each kill you make. That way, people have the incentive to get more kills between deaths. Thus causing them to lose fewer earned experience points. That would be for BEP only. CEP should be handled similarly but with the amount of experience taking decreasing at a far greater rate with each base/tower capture you complete.

[Prowler]

The game ownz gg! :love:

[FraBaktos]

Originally posted by MrVulcan
[B
2 min wait to gewt back in action! You want to wait 2 min after a death to get back in game???? A battle lasting several seconds, and you want to wait 2 min to have anohter several second battle??? You take several min to get there, then fight for 10 seconds, then wait 2 min to respawn? They already limit it, you have to wait for an open spawn tube, you should not have to wait 2+ min to spawn in an FPS game. Play UT2003, or quake, or C&C ren, and wait for 2 min after you die once to move, see if you still have fun. You would end up spending most of your time in waiting to play. People wont pay for waiting to play all the time, they want to be in the game.

[/B]



I see. Well have you ever played any action game lately? like Counterstrike, or Ravenshield? You can end up waiting 5 minutes for a round to end. I really don't mind. Some of the most popular games make it so you have to wait a significantly long time to play again. Basically you're saying no one would want to play a game like counterstrike. or Ravenshield. (sarcasm) Well... I think a bunch of people still play counterstrike /sarcasm


Also, I am very surprised that the good people at SOE developing this game couldn't forsee most of these problems. It scares me. I really hope they can fix all this up, I don't want this game to fail.:(

[Airlift]

I don't understand what you all are looking for. It seems more replayable than most games to me just because you can fill so many different roles in a war that is being fought by hundreds of people around you. The game comes together better than Tribes, Weapons Factory or Team Fortress; its scale exceeds anything you can get on the market and probably for the near future.

This is speculation, but I am willing to bet you that the people who are getting burnt out all fit into most or all of these categories:

People who play for 6+ hour sessions.
People who spend almost all of their time on Cyssor.
People who spend most of their time on one character serving one role.
People who really wish they could roleplay as their character.

Here's the big one: People who NEVER defend.

I read a lot of complaints on the beta forum that go like this:

You end up playing an endless game of wack-a-mole. Cap all bases.. oh wait, VS are hacking facility A.. go to facility A and recap. Oh! facility B and C are hacked.. go recap B and C... Grrr facility D is hacked and so is Tower E and facility A again! %@#%@#.

To which I don't respond, but this is my favorite forum, so I say you are not defending your bases. And then the response would be there is no motivation to defend. To this I say The motivation is that you don't want to play musical bases.

[Cyanide]

I don't think anybody here wants the game to fail. But yes, it is rather disheartening that some many obvious flaws were not spotted earlier in developement. Of course, there are plenty of lead game designers who have their "vision" and if you suggest anything different than what's already in their "vision" they think you're a dumbass because their egos are gigantic. So i'm sure there were a couple people on the dev team who saw these problems and the designers didn't think anything of it. Seriously though. They couldn't see how people could abuse the grief system? It's hard for me to believe anybody could be that blind.

[MrVulcan]

**Non of this is meant in ANY way to be offensive, just expressing my own views on the matter, even though it may not sound like it, I do respect all other views on the matter, jsut expressing my own thoughts and ideas here**

Originally posted by Drex
Well I play objective scenarios on Medal of Honor multiplayer all the time which in a way can be similar to PS. When you die in objective games you have to sit out and wait for 1) the objective to be complete 2) an entire team to be killed or 3) timer to run out. So if you die you are definately going to be waiting to respawn and I think it's fun as hell because there is an actual RISK in dying. If you have nothing to risk by dying because you respawn right away and you're back in the action then there's no fun; the game gets repetitive and you stop playing. There HAS to be a penalty for dying.

1st off, dont take me wrong, I understand where you are coming from, and swarms do create issues, issues that do need looking into, however I belive that they can be countered by good tacticts more than a base wait respawn time. You need to attack, not just defend, attack their spawn points all the time, ensure that they can not jsut pump people on the field, make them walk for several min to get back to the battle.

You have to understand that there is a big difference between having 10-20 people playing in a battle and 500 people playing in a single battle, deaths will happen much faster. There is a penalty for dying, you are our of the loop until you can respawn and walk/fly/whatever back to the frontline. This game is meant to be much more intence than bf1942 and MoH where a valid tactic is just to camp all the time. It is not a sniper match like BF and Medal of Honor are, thus it needs to have you in the action right away. The point of this game is to make a constant war, not rounds of fighting like the current games. I play BF1942 semi-often, and it is not a bad game (Ill admit that I love C&CRen and UT2003 much much more as they are not sniper matches/run for the vechs games and alow much more intence fighting).
You do risk dying, it is a problem, people to not just get up right were they were and run after you again, there is a wait to get vechs again, etc. But you need to be back in the action fast, not waiting at a load screen for several min each time you die. With hundereds of people shooting, death happens very very fast, entire lines of troops get torn apart in seconds.

In the end, I feel that the wait to get in should be less that the length of the fighting itself or esle you are spending all of your time waiting to play the game, insted of playing it. Many of the swarm problems would go away if they did not have their spawn locations close to your base, that means that you can not play a 100% defensive game, insted you must attack, it forces the defenders to attack and defend. This is the way it is in great games, as it forces you to be dynamic, and not just play sit and wait, but actually puts a stress on commanders to solve the problems, and come up with solutions and counters for things. if you could wait for people to come back, or have to wait for long spawn times, there would be little want to attack bases, since you could spend much more time playing just sniping at people from the bases or forests.
A long wait time leads to sniper games, this is the opposite of sniper games (ie: medal of honor/BF1942) snipers have their role, but it is not the main force, thus you need to be in battle faster, not waiting to be in battle.

People want to get that thrill, they dont want to just sit around and camp all day w/o moving afraid of being shot.

Thus I say that tactics, not respawn time should counter swarms. Destroy their spawn points, dont just camp and defend. They can not keep coming if you destroy their spawn points.

To be honist, I can not stand sniper games, they are a completely different style that non sniper games. It is the difference from b41942 to ut2003. UT2003 is much more in your face intence action, and does not alow camping to be a valid tactic most of the time. Bf1942, the best weapon is 1. Run for the vechs, or 2 grab a sniper gun, and go at it. I would prefer to grab a chain gun, or shotgun and go at it, and actually move vs sitting still, it creates a much faster style of play, and forces you to think on your feet, not jsut sit down and aim.

I guess it is just prefered style of play in the end, but I am tired of sniper games, and long wait times to play, in ut2003, you spend 99% of the time shooting and actually in the game, in BF, you spend only about 20-30% of the total time in firefights.

**Wow, this a long post, didnt realise that I typed so much until I look at it :lol:

[Tieom]

Woah! That zool guys idea is pretty damn nice.
Get on it, Devs.
:cool:

[Drex]

MrVulcan the only "tactic" that seems valid in these large battles is to zerg. You die, respawn right away at the same battle you just died in and start shooting again? That's not tactics and that's not fun.

[MrVulcan]

Oh, im not arguing that the respawn rate may need to be change, or a limit on how close you can park your spawn points to the base, they do need to be changed, just saying that a 2 min respawn time is far too extreme, and other ways need to be found to change the problem of zerg like play than a 2 min time. Perhaps like you can not park a spawn point withen an inner ring of influance, or somehting, etc, but you can not have people waiting long periods of time to get back in the game universe.

[Seabass03]

Zool's stuff is great but I am sure the developers will ignore it.

[Prowler]

Zool has some good ideas. :cool:

[Airlift]

Cyanide, is your main complaint really that the learning curve isn't steep enough? This is supposed to be massively-multiplayer, but if you make everything hard to do, it will never be more than another niche hardcore gamer's haven.

The grief system definately has flaws, and it is being worked on.

A couple of other general points to add to the thread:

Punishment for death in a FPS runs counter to the whole nature of the genre. Your punishment is that you died and the other guy didn't. Experience loss is bullshit and I will not play a game that involves stupid punitive measures for not being better than the other guy.

Again, I have to say that if you think the only valid tactic is to grunt rush until the other side gives up, I have one piece of advice for you:

http://www.clanstfu.com/images/cyssor.gif

In case this message is a little mean-spirited, here are some smilies:

:D :) ;) :D :p :eek: :eek: :) ;)

[LesserShade]

Originally posted by Airlift
To which I don't respond, but this is my favorite forum, so I say you are not defending your bases. And then the response would be there is no motivation to defend. To this I say The motivation is that you don't want to play musical bases.
Ok, here's the deal. I actually rather enjoy defense, and I NEVER play at laguku.

The example came from a few nights ago when TR was attempting to get continental lock on Forseral. We had finally pushed NC off the continent and Vanu out of the last tower. My best guestimate was that we had somewhere along the lines of 6 squads on the continent still. Well, the VS that remained would hack vehicle terminals, drive 2 or 3 AMS out into the middle of the continent and then start phantom capping bases that were empty. It is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to cover every facility on the continent. My squad was fairly organized, being on TS we got a galaxy together, loaded up and just sat idle at a base until we saw a hack on the map and then we would respond to that base, recap and wait for the next base hack. At every hacked base except for 1 or 2 instances, the base was completely empty when we got there.

It is crazy to assume that after achieving continental lock that people will split up across the continent and guard each facility's CC for hours on end to defend against a handful of phantom cappers that may or maynot even visit the base you are defending.

Anyway, I guess if musical bases is just a part of the game, the devs may as well remove the whole continent lock feature of the game because there is no real reason or benefit to having it. I'd rather the damn gates be open so that enemy forces could get to us easier and we could have some more action.

[LesserShade]

Originally posted by Airlift

http://www.clanstfu.com/images/cyssor.gif

!! :rofl:

oh yeah I completely agree that experience loss for death is absolutely absurd. Having to respawn and run back to wherever you were fighting is punishment enough, you dont always have an AMS parked inside the base you're assaulting you know :ugh: