News: Community Interview with Jon Weathers

[Graywolves]

I really can't see Platoons undermining Missions. You're going to want to place missions and use them so that your group actually gets rewarded for accomplishing the objective. This could actually harm coordinated group play from a leader's perspective as you might find a more valuable tactical target. But half your platoon has invested this time in the "Defend the outhouse" mission and it has 1-2 minutes left.

Now your team is divided in trying to win or do more than grunting vs gaining rewards.

Personally I don't think myself or my group would be effected by this too much as we would recruit players who prioritize fun and winning over farming.




As far as losing information from groups not being an open book or posting their missions...so what? Seriously. If you wanted to assess the battlefied I'm certain you can gather where the battle is happening anyways assuming we gain the proper map tools such as hot spots.

But seriously if a group decides that they want to do their own thing and strike behind enemy lines or w.e, so what? Any individual could do that too.


Telling an outfit of even 15 people that "We're doing this mission" isn't proper coordination. That's like just squading up and pointing everyone where to go with a waypoint and nothing more. So what's the point?

You're not gaining anything from coordinating together unless you can actually work in synergy by working together, getting to know each other, and having the proper tools to know where each other are. One of the most useful things about platoons is you had gold,purple, and orange 1-10. It's so easy to go "I'm down, orange 3 on minimap." as opposed to "I'm down, need rez, by the south east entrance behind some of those boxes, one of the green dots on your map."

If we went double digits with 20+ people it one squad it would just clutter up the map too far.


tl;dr - Platoon or higher command is a good tool that will possibly be required. If anyone would be harmed by the mission v outfit relationship (however unlikely there is a relationship to begin with) it would be the outfit.

-edit- There will never be synergy between coordinated outfits and scrubs. That's the nature of synergy, people who play together more often will play together better the more they do so. On top of this many outfits make their own SOP(Standard Operation Procedures) that in my experience are sometimes VERY different. The highest amount of synergy you're going to see between the zerg and Outfits is that one will influence the other in where to go from time to time (they both get to influence one another, some outfits won't, but some outfits will definitely try).

-editedit- We've already gone without platoons in the original Planetside before they were implemented. I don't feel Massing everyone together through the mission system provides a better benefit. It replaces the Command chat primarily but as far as coordination goes it's basically just a giant global waypoint.

[The Kush]

Thanks Hamma! Awesome vid. And I know you said its not final but I really hope the ttk is increased

[Logri]

YES! Thanks for asking the question I submitted and it's even more cool that I got the answer I was hoping for

Hamma + Jennyboo = new personal hero of the day!
Looking extremely forward to seeing more of your footage

[Captain1nsaneo]

Thank you for doing this, good stuff in that interview. Really glad to hear about platoons. Maybe we'll get battalions too, but we'll have to wait for beta to see if it's actually needed.

Quick note about the VoIP and about players. If you've not seen it yet I'd HIGHLY recommend watching this:
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/harassment
The guys who do that series are consultants for game companies and know their stuff. That episode is their thoughts on dealing with verbal harassment commonly found in games and more importantly how to deal with it. The idea of auto mute for people who are muted by large numbers of the base is something that should definitely be looked at.

[LtCarman]

Originally Posted by Bags

I highly doubt this will happen. Auto-join is for those people who apparently exist that can't be assed to make their own squad or understand how to join one manually. The rest of us should be able to make our own squads.

See, that is what everyone thought before the BF3 beta rolled out. No way would DICE do something as idiotic as that. DICE only decided to add that feature when the community went up in flames about it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not comparing to SoE to DICE at all by any means. In my opinion, SoE is a great developer in my book. It's just that squads in FPSs are important to me and I want to make sure that it's done right. My best memories in gaming have come from playing PoE2 (a BF2 mod) on the Tactical Gamer server (wish I could've afforded a monthly subscription back then for PS1). It featured squad play that I have never seen in any other game since due the either a lack of a squad system or a barely functional one.

[Hamma]

Its a valid concern because as you said DICE failed and did it. I doubt SOE will make that mistake as important as Team Play is to PlanetSide.

[Stardouser]

DICE definitely tried to make a low flexibility squad system. It still is very low flexibility, in many many ways.