HA, what do we do with you?

[Ranik Ortega]

Originally Posted by Treerat

What was the effective difference between the Cycler and the MCG? Ammo capacity. Sweeper and Jackhammer? Rate of fire increase and ammo capacity. Decimator and Phoenix? Guidance and ammo capacity. One version of the Lasher and it's improved version (which spawned MUCH moaning and hand-wringing by TR and NC)? Removing minimum range for lashes, small upgrade in lash damage and ammo capacity. Heck the difference between a Punisher's grenade launcher and the Rocklet Rifle & Thumper? Could it be.... ammo capacity? I think I made the trend pretty clear.

Adding extra ammo capacity can have a BIG impact on how effective a certain weapon stacks up against other weapons. It increases the amount of kills possible and likely before having to reload, it decreases the impact of misses on the outcome of a fight, and it can turn a weapon that would usually be reserved for special targets (ex. HALO's rocket launcher) such as armored vehicles into a "use it against everything" weapon. All simply by affecting how often the weapon can be used.

That is partially why I reacted so strongly there. Tinkering with ammo capacity, even though it would make a solid concept for a weapon modification, can have some serious impact game balance. Someone having access to to different weapons can be a far less troublesome problem because the weapon can then be added, removed, buffed, or nerfed without seriously impacting a weapon that is already balanced.

Hmm its an accessory which i suggested be restricted to HA class players using a MA rifle. Its not prevalent on ALL weapons.

[Traak]

I hope there's triple-shot JH's in the new PS. Why? I'm not usually NC, and never HA. Just make the recovery time AFTER the triple-shot longer. Make that giant triple-barrel shotgun kick like an elephant, not just a mule.

PS without the JH would be like, I dunno, gaming without energy drinks and Doritos.

[Death2All]

Originally Posted by Traak

PS without the JH would be like, I dunno, gaming without energy drinks and Doritos.

A healthy and enlightened experience ?

[Bags]

Jack Hammer won't be that bad without third person and warping.

[2coolforu]

LMG's are not balanced in a game like Planetside as they should be, look at any game that uses 'Arcade' LMG's and it becomes obvious that they are just assault rifles with a bottomless magazine and often more range and damage. Inevitably they just become overused and a replacement assault rifle (See Battlefield Bad Company 1/2 and the epic overuse of the MG36 (1) and M60 (2) and the medic class) or even Call of Duty where they are just reskinned assault rifles (RPD Is probably one of the most OP'd guns in MW1 and MW2). I see you mentioned ARMA as an example, even in ARMA 2 they are just 100-200 bullet assault rifles unless you play it like a real man and install ACE 2.

Now when you install ACE 2 you begin to realize why LMG's don't work in games that aren't used as training simulators for the military. The things weigh about 40 Kilos so its a pain in the ass to lug them around on 4 hour patrols through the 50 celcius desert, they jam like a motherfucker under sustained fire, as they heat up from long bursts that morons tend to use the dispersion goes up and up, they are big and heavy which makes them inaccurate from standing positions and firing in automatic is a good way to get laughed at, they are slow to reload, the ammunition weighs a fuckton (big boxes with lots of brass) and they are terrible in CQB. These are the real world disadvantages that mean we don't just equip every trooper with an M240 and let them be John Rambo, but how many of those disadvantages translate into Planetside?

Planetside 1 lacked an LMG and 'area denial' 'supression' and 'fire superiority' are gained via vehicle or assault rifle fire. You suppress people by firing on them a lot, I forced uncountable people to hunker down by just firing at them or above them with my cycler and allowing my team mates to flank and destroy them. Or maybe me and my friend fired on them with cyclers for greater effect. Why add a weapon class that is notoriously hard to balance and is VERY rarely used for its actual purpose, I have never seen someone suppress and area with an LMG in ANY game other than maybe ARMA 2 when playing it properly, I see jackasses using them like big assault rifles.

Inevitably I don't see any change towards realism, BF2's flight and vehicle mechanics are laughably unrealistic and shortening TTK's does not = Realism. In CoD I die from 2 shots from a UMP-45, that's pretty realistic however it's also takes 3-4 shots from the USP-45, a gun which uses the exact same bullet, you also die in a single knife hit yet its common to survive hits from a Barret .50 cal. Even then people don't just die quickly in real life, there's such a complex nature behind every injury - distance travelled, calibre, body armor, build, weight, impact location, psychology. Planetside won't be 'Realistic' until we have Epi, Morphine, Tourniquets, Plasma, IV's and a rehabilitation centre for the wounded.

Also isn't any argument from 'Realism' pretty much moot when we are fighting as Space Marines with Laser rifles and hovering tanks on a Planet we travelled through via wormhole in a space ship 1000 years in the future which has a core of a made up material called 'nanites' that spawn vehicles out of nothing . It beats playing 'Modern Warfare 2 : Generic desert and fighting Russians in the White House with mournful trumpets playing in the background. I thought the game expected me to go and get pictures of the flag and start jerking off furiously to them while wiping a single patriotic tear from my eye.

[kaffis]

Originally Posted by Malorn

More I think on it the more I think they should just do away with Special assault entirely and replace it with Medium-assault gun attachment grenade launcher/rocket liek the punisher.

You can have my Rocklet Launcher when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

Not that that'll be hard to do anymore. Special assault got so neutered as the game went on. It was a lot of fun in the early days. Decimating MAXes, rapid-firing Rocklets with a reasonable bloom... *sigh* Now you've got me all wistful.

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

Now when you install ACE 2 you begin to realize why LMG's don't work in games that aren't used as training simulators for the military. The things weigh about 40 Kilos so its a pain in the ass to lug them around on 4 hour patrols through the 50 celcius desert, they jam like a motherfucker under sustained fire, as they heat up from long bursts that morons tend to use the dispersion goes up and up, they are big and heavy which makes them inaccurate from standing positions and firing in automatic is a good way to get laughed at, they are slow to reload, the ammunition weighs a fuckton (big boxes with lots of brass) and they are terrible in CQB. These are the real world disadvantages that mean we don't just equip every trooper with an M240 and let them be John Rambo, but how many of those disadvantages translate into Planetside?

Most of them can translate.

CoF penalty while moving to reflect their weight and awkward handling.
Long reload times to reflect the weight of the ammo, the bulky box you have to dig out of a pack, and the complicated reload process.
Heat that messes up the bullet spread
Decreased movement speed and turning speed to further reflect their weight.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Treerat

If I had to design the "perfect" (to me at least) LMG system I would be sure to incorporate a few limits based on the characteristics of actual LMGs. First is heat buildup as limit on how long the weapon can shoot before needing to cool off;

In Day of Defeat the machineguns had heat and if you overheated them you had to change out the barrels (in gameplay terms that meant you couldn't shoot the gun for about 10-15 seconds). If you fired controlled bursts you never had a heat problem, but if you had to unload for a short time due to a push you could do so. Heat management was one of the skills of being a machinegunner. Good mechanic, and easily tweakable for balancing.

They also had limited ammunition and non-machinegunner classes each had 1 box of ammo they could drop a machinegunner per-spawn. A push usually had friendlies dropping ammo boxes for the machinegunners as they ran by them. A good teamwork element. I'm sure Planetside will have some form of ammo-dispenser class as is common with Battlefield. I suspect it will be the engineer (in the form of building an ammo dispenser, or something like that).

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Vancha

My hatred for the insta-TTK of DoD aside, did you ever enjoy having to deal with DoD machine guns? Did you ever feel gameplay benefited from it's existence (other than when you were using it)?

I think the machinegun mechanics are what really stood out for DOD. They had very good tradeoffs - machinegunners were extremely vulnerable while mobile, ran out of ammo quickly, had a setup time, limited fire arc, had an overheating mechanic, a reasonable amount of deviation on the shots and were completely stationary after being deployed. That's a long list of downsides. As a result of that you got tremendous firepower on a position.

There were also many counters to machineguns. Snipers were the obvious one. The stationary MG's melon was just waiting to be popped by a sniper. That led to good machinegunners positioning themselves in places where they weren't particularly exposed but still had good fire arcs. In those places Grenades were usually good counters. Assault classes w/ smgs were also natural counters by flanking the machinegunner.

Tactically they completely changed the game. Rooting out machineguns, spotting them, and then taking them out were an important skill and part of the game. I played DoD before and after machineguns and after it was a far, far better game, both from an immersion perspective and in terms of gameplay.

Effectively a machinegun was similar to a locked-down DC MAX. Fast fire rate, limited firing arc, stationary, etc.

I personally didn't mind them (I rarely played them) and enjoyed the gameplay they created. Especially in the WWII setting, machineguns were the most lethal thing on the battlefield (50% of all casualties were inflicted by them during the war). Learning to avoid machineguns was another skill in the game. It just raised the bar all around and led to a more rich tactical environment.

In Planetside context they'd have even more counters (infiltrators, aircraft, especially bombers). A support machinegun class would also make snipers more relevant. In return they would be hands down the best infantry anchors, and holders of territory the other assault classes gained. Indoors they'd help pin down corridors or defend and again, add value to Infiltrators and snipers indoors. I'd be a good dynamic I think.

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by Ranik Ortega

Am I also going to have to explain why the sky is blue?

If they decide to make all skies blue in Planetside 2...Yes.

Originally Posted by Ranik Ortega

Area denial & Suppression. The same thing can be achieved with multiple riflemen but the point of an LMG is as a force multiplier with very specific tasks in mind. Nothing quite like having some enemy machine gunner nearly take your head off and having to maneuver around the bastard to take him out. Or just mortar/grenade the bejesus out of him

Now, while I know thinking about PS2 in the context of PS1 is a critical error, when you say "area denial & suppression", I remember thumpers, radiators, maelstroms, pounders and to a lesser extent, lasher spam. Just one of those was okay, but as the number of them went up, gameplay deteriorated rapidly.

But you're right, LMGs could probably have their place so long as they were implemented correctly, and not the instagib walls of death as in something like DoD. I quite like the idea of having to be crouched and unmoving, but maybe that's just because I snipe a lot...

Now funnily enough, I've been writing this over the space of an hour or so while doing other things, and Mal's gone and replied to me.

Originally Posted by Malorn

Stuff

I think my apprehension comes from DoD's style in general, and the fact that I continue to relate ideas to PS1. DoD's TTK was very much binary, in that you were untouched, or you were dead. Very rarely was I ever just "injured". It was so easy to kill/die in that game, that both success and death in huge quantities was inevitable. Godly players aside, I never saw the good players doing much better than the new ones, simply because random spastic spraying in the direction of the enemy could quite easily land a kill.

So to say that it's implementation of LMGs were the best achievement of DoD doesn't mean much to me, simply because the entire game seemed utterly utterly horrible and horrible in terms of balancing.

Now not only do you have me imagining such an LMG camping the backdoor of an interlink, but then you cite grenades as their counter, which translates in my brain to "thumper spam is the counter to DoD LMGs indoors" (and I'm guessing you could add MAXs to that, too).

Like I said to Ranik, I certainly made the mistake of dismissing the concept rather than trying to think of a way it could be implemented well, but right now the LMG you're pitching is coming across as my idea of FPS hell and everything that's wrong with them, heh.

[Ranik Ortega]

Originally Posted by Vancha

stuff

See

http://www.planetside-universe.com/f...731#post577731

[Treerat]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

LMG's are not balanced in a game like Planetside as they should be, look at any game that uses 'Arcade' LMG's and it becomes obvious that they are just assault rifles with a bottomless magazine and often more range and damage. Inevitably they just become overused and a replacement assault rifle (See Battlefield Bad Company 1/2 and the epic overuse of the MG36 (1) and M60 (2) and the medic class) or even Call of Duty where they are just reskinned assault rifles (RPD Is probably one of the most OP'd guns in MW1 and MW2). I see you mentioned ARMA as an example, even in ARMA 2 they are just 100-200 bullet assault rifles unless you play it like a real man and install ACE 2.

Now when you install ACE 2 you begin to realize why LMG's don't work in games that aren't used as training simulators for the military. The things weigh about 40 Kilos so its a pain in the ass to lug them around on 4 hour patrols through the 50 celcius desert, they jam like a motherfucker under sustained fire, as they heat up from long bursts that morons tend to use the dispersion goes up and up, they are big and heavy which makes them inaccurate from standing positions and firing in automatic is a good way to get laughed at, they are slow to reload, the ammunition weighs a fuckton (big boxes with lots of brass) and they are terrible in CQB. These are the real world disadvantages that mean we don't just equip every trooper with an M240 and let them be John Rambo, but how many of those disadvantages translate into Planetside?

Planetside 1 lacked an LMG and 'area denial' 'supression' and 'fire superiority' are gained via vehicle or assault rifle fire. You suppress people by firing on them a lot, I forced uncountable people to hunker down by just firing at them or above them with my cycler and allowing my team mates to flank and destroy them. Or maybe me and my friend fired on them with cyclers for greater effect. Why add a weapon class that is notoriously hard to balance and is VERY rarely used for its actual purpose, I have never seen someone suppress and area with an LMG in ANY game other than maybe ARMA 2 when playing it properly, I see jackasses using them like big assault rifles.

Inevitably I don't see any change towards realism, BF2's flight and vehicle mechanics are laughably unrealistic and shortening TTK's does not = Realism. In CoD I die from 2 shots from a UMP-45, that's pretty realistic however it's also takes 3-4 shots from the USP-45, a gun which uses the exact same bullet, you also die in a single knife hit yet its common to survive hits from a Barret .50 cal. Even then people don't just die quickly in real life, there's such a complex nature behind every injury - distance travelled, calibre, body armor, build, weight, impact location, psychology. Planetside won't be 'Realistic' until we have Epi, Morphine, Tourniquets, Plasma, IV's and a rehabilitation centre for the wounded.

Also isn't any argument from 'Realism' pretty much moot when we are fighting as Space Marines with Laser rifles and hovering tanks on a Planet we travelled through via wormhole in a space ship 1000 years in the future which has a core of a made up material called 'nanites' that spawn vehicles out of nothing . It beats playing 'Modern Warfare 2 : Generic desert and fighting Russians in the White House with mournful trumpets playing in the background. I thought the game expected me to go and get pictures of the flag and start jerking off furiously to them while wiping a single patriotic tear from my eye.

Well part of the problem you missed is that you aren't describing light machine guns. It's the problem with what is called a "General Purpose Machine Gun" - basically a weapon that supposed to function as both a LMG (single-operator from a bipod) and a medium or heavy machine gun that has a crew and uses a tripod or other stable platform. Those weapons are heavy, if only because they have to shoot a full-sized round with it's attendant problems (recoil, heat, etc). Without those problems you pointed out (primarily weight), things like the M-60 simply can not function as effective medium or heavy machine guns, but those problems seriously hamper their usage as LMGs. Now a "true" light machine gun, like he M249 SAW for example doesn't have those problems. It is light weight (under 20 lbs fully loaded), readily usable by one person including standing fire, has a quick-change barrel and is reasonably stable when sustained fire is needed, and they use ammunition that is both lighter (ie. intermediate rounds instead of full sized ones) and available as belts or even same clip used by the rifleman (some only use clips). In fact, some LMGs are little more than a rifle with a longer barrel, bipod, and the option for full automatic fire; those weapons have very little difference between their handling characteristics outside of close-quarters and those of the rifle they are based on.

And while everything doesn't have to be "realistic", it does help a number of areas. One is that it simply increases the number of ways players can play (which translates into more people and better retention). Another is encouraging more emphasis on playing smart (sometimes called tactical play) instead of the brainless charge-until-they-run-out-of-bullets that ruled PS. Another is that reaching a good game balance can be much easier when there are consistent (and better understood) rules and limitations underlying the weapons in a game. Finally, while suspension of disbelief is fine, any good writer can tell you that requiring too much can actually be worse for keeping someones attention than too little; making things more believable through what is called "realism" (or simply the presence of familiar concepts and rules) helps reduce the amount of suspension of disbelief needed.

[Treerat]

Originally Posted by Ranik Ortega

Hmm its an accessory which i suggested be restricted to HA class players using a MA rifle. Its not prevalent on ALL weapons.

Addendum & replacement for prior post:
After going over your MA+ idea again, I'm less leery of it. The requirements for heavy armor and crouched for extra accuracy would correct for the "run around shooting until the clip ran out" issue. If the attachments were off-limits to big-hit-low clip weapons (shotguns being the obvious ones) and the weapon combination that resulted traded off some of it's accuracy in the first 3 shots and while moving and had a "resettle time" after movement (to allow the emulation of firing from a braced standing position such as a trench while keeping it from totally supplanting MA as a primary weapon) I could see it being very workable. In fact I would say that minus the heat issue, it has a lot of the good points of the LMGs from BF2142 which I consider some of the better implementations without turning them into fixed weapons.