Game mechanisms encouraging defense?

[MrC]

Well? Are there any?

Is there anything that encourages people to wait around defending, or will we be attacking empty buildings?

[Incompetent]

Facilities are absolutely essential to victory. In Planetside you have to work as a team to achieve your goals and a good team player will stand around a dropship center to make sure the offense can do there job. And nothing quite matches the satisfaction that comes from mowing down Vanu that just wandered into your minefield.

[MrC]

Errr yes, but just because it's necessary doesn't mean people will do it. =)

If the servers are crowded enough it might not be a problem, but if heavy fighting isn't happening at every base constantly, most people will go looking for action instead of sitting around defending when they might not see anyone ever.

That was a major problem when I played World War 2 Online. Of course, that was when it was essentially a retail public beta so the problems might have been fixed. However, it was pretty bad when you could sit around defending a front line base for an hour and never see any of the enemy.

Or attack and capture a front line base and see hardly any enemy forces.

[�io]

Well obviously if there is no one attacking a base you don't stand there and wait. Leave a minimum crew if any and lots of auto-defenses and go defend the bases that are under attack.

[MrC]

Then it becomes a game of scrambling to be at the right base.

There's no fighting at one base so you head to another base. Before you get there the attack ends and another base is under attack. You head in that direction, etc. =)

The point of keeping a defense at a base is because you don't know where the other side will attack, and you can't very well predict until it's too late. So instead you save spawn/travel time by having a reasonable defense everywhere an attack might occur, as well as having people attacking and others reinforcing where necessary.

[cujoman39]

why defend when you could attack?

i hate campers!!!

[Doobz]

thats why mobility will be key in this game.
those outfits who can move the fastest and have the best intelligence of where to be at the right times will be the most successful.

knowledge is power, and speed is ur weapon

[MrC]

Cujoman: What fun is attacking if there's nobody defending? Are you really interested in walking into an empty base?

[cujoman39]

no base is going to be empty their will always be people suiting up and as soon as a base hears gun shots everyone will scramble.

[�io]

Ok

1-Bases don't get taken over in 5mins, when you get alerted a base in under attack you'll have plenty of time to get over there and help if you so choose.

2-MrC i'm curious do you actually like PS? No offense but all your posts in this thread sound like you want to find something wrong with the game, first you complained about defending now it's about getting to the right base. At least wait till you play the game, maybe it will be the best game you ever played. :)

[cujoman39]

anyone agree with me?

[Doobz]

yerp

[MrC]

Dio- Seeing as I haven't gotten the chance to play it yet I can't say whether or not I like it. =)

I am very interested in it, and though I've never played a pay to play game before I'm quite sure I'll play this.

I'm not looking to find something wrong, I'm asking what solutions the Devs are taking to prevent a major issue I've seen before. It's an issue that is inherent to PvP games with multiple simultaneous objectives. People only defend where there's already a battle so they know they'll see action. When the other objectives are attacked they're easily overtaken because of insufficient defense. Overtaken so quickly that any defense there might be doesn't have time to reinforce.

This can be prevented by adding incentives for people to spread out. If attackers spread out, defenders can see action anywhere and will spread out. Another option is to somehow reward people for defending evenly, regardless of whether the base they are defending is under attack at the moment.

Anyway, it seems I found the answer without your 'help'.

"Also, there are protections in place to keep certain areas from becoming �too popular� causing players to ignore everywhere else. As more friendly troops arrive in a specific area, or at a specific base, the threat level will go down. Which means, less BEP�s and CEP�s"

[Hamma]

Honestly we wont know if many of these things are at issue until they get a full compliment of people in game.

[Lexington_Steele]

There is a problem that many persistant games suffer from that other online games do not. The problem is finding evenly matched battles (which are the ones that are the most satisfying to fight in)

Plantside will not be like Tribes, Global Operations, CS or SoF2, in the regards that you not will usually have two even teams coming to battle in a relatively small area at the same time due to the persistant nature of Planetside.

You will probably find that most battles, in planetside, will be very one sided. Only once in a while will you find two relatively even forces coming to battle.

[�io]

All good points. I guess just like ANY other topic here we will just have to wait and see. :)

[Chryse]

I think a number of people who play these kind of games tend to think in an offense-first frame of mind. They come in to play, to frag, and to see action. People don't want to pay to stand around when they could be attacking.

Let's face it, defense is boring. You have to sit and wait for the enemy to come to you and then the defender tends to have to react to the enemy's initiative. It's absolutely a trueism that life as a combat soldier can be described as "hours of unrelenting boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror."

That said, there are ways for squads to liven up defense just a little bit by incorporating an "active defense," meaning, sending out armed recon patrols in areas that are likely to be avenues of movement for an enemy approach, or feigning an attack on a nearby installation and seeing what response the enemy has (thus tipping a hand as to who is in the area).

Whomever it was that mentioned that mobility is essential (please forgive me for forgetting your name) was absolutely correct. Without ways of gathering intelligence outside of parking some stealthed scouts around some enemy installations, there cannot be a good way of setting up prepared defenses with dug in squads providing overlapping fire and prepared kill zones.

That said, I'd like to see some kind of certification that allows for commander or infiltrator-types to get some kind of intelligence on enemy movements. It would be up to them to make sense of whatever information they get and act on it, like real commanders do. Only then can you effectively have classic defense actions. The rest of the time it'll just be hasty defenses and meeting engagements or simple overrunning of installations.

[Medicine Man]

Well I'm not sure about FPS in a MMO setting yet but I do know how DAoC works. When the game first came out there really was no reason to get other realms towers or "bases", except for seeing on screen when you checked your realm status that you had lost a base. Defense therefore really did not have to wait that long in many cases if Realm v. Realm action was occuring because an opposing side would almost immediatly try and retake the tower. I think that a game only devoted to base capture, and territory claiming would have the same effect at a much greater speed. The HART system also expediates the process by allowing teams to surgically install units in hotspots to help in defense. Long term defense is not what I see, the previously mentioned quick mobility is more likely.

[Jinxmasta]

I do see some flaw in the stealth scouts idea... why would anyone want to be a stealth scout? I mean, you wouldn't get any BEPs unless you belonged to a squad which was defending the base that the attackers were going to which is very unlikely! The only way I see it is once the attackers leave the base, there will be minimum defenders and so once you've told your commander that attackers are coming, you can attack their base. Of course, one man against one base is pretty hard.

[Chryse]

Well, the stealthed scouts idea was just having them standing outside the enemy installation watching what's going on. Again, dull for the scout player, and there's no incentive to do it when there's no BEP's or CEP's given for doing it.

Going to the comparison to DAoC and the RvR action, there, on the frontier, stealth classes usually prowl the known travel routes and routinely send out recon reports to their guilds and alliances. That'll probably be the same thing that happens in PS but I would like to see something a little more strategic... like allowing scouts to plant some kind of sensor on the map which could give a commander viewing the intel map an idea of what's moving around out there. I wouldn't give out specific information, maybe the sensor could just ID contacts as being small/large, surface/airborne, static/moving, etc.

One thing I had my tribesmates do was to lay down good sensor nets, that way I had a good picture of what was going on on the battlefield from my post at the command map.

To put this back on topic, I just think good intelligence leads to massing forces either for attack or defense and, as any good commander will recognize from Sun Tzu's Art of War:

"It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy's one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.

"If equally matched, we can offer battle; if slightly inferior in numbers, we can avoid the enemy; if quite unequal in every way, we can flee from him.

"Hence, though an obstinate fight may be made by a small force, in the end it must be captured by the larger force."

[Jinxmasta]

A stealthed scout can put out sensors and stuff as long as they have a combat engineering cert.

[Doobz]

let me tell you, being a lone scout/sniper out in the middle of enemy territory, watching their every move with my skeeter nearby, and then tailing them to report their destination, it would be exhilerating to me :cool:

[�io]

Originally posted by Doobz
let me tell you, being a lone scout/sniper out in the middle of enemy territory, watching their every move with my skeeter nearby, and then tailing them to report their destination, it would be exhilerating to me :cool:

Yeah we are not all about getting the highest ranking and 0wn j00. Some of us play for the fun of it. :)

[Corbie]

I dunno if anyone has considered this yet.. but, there is an implant that increases your damage with melee weapons.. and those melee knives that every faction has look pretty rough.. wouldnt it be possible for a scout to sneak up on any stragglers and essentially "backstab" them? ...that would be one way to pass the time.

Another would be to invest in the hacker certs and if the chance arises...steal some of their important vehicles.. such as their mobile bases..or any tanks they may have. there are plenty of ways to be a nuisance if ya put your mind to it.. and i imagine that a good scout..who knows how to keep himself alive and still cause the enemy greif..will be a big asset to any team.

[�io]

Yeah i'm hoping that with the implant you can 1 hit kill a light armor if you get close enough to slice him up good. :p

[CDaws]

There's so many certs to choose from and the combonations of certs, implants, equipment, weapons, and armor is limitless. It will be very interesting to see how players customise there characters.