News: Matt Higby doing a Q&A at reddit!

[Firefly]

If they're doing outfit specializations where outfits can specialize in a specific role, then logically you have two options (if you care enough to spec):

1) run an extremely specialized outfit that focuses on one discipline, and thereby get the max amount of benefits
2) run an outfit with a few disciplines - like, infantry and armour and MAX - and obtain less benefits than a single-spec outfit

If this is the case, you will definitely see outfits that split into smaller outfits and spec each according to a discipline. This is why alliances now become incredibly important.

It's also a dumb fucking idea to force an outfit to specialize in one single discipline. Even bailure outfits that focus strictly on one style of play - flying their little Mossies over a target and bailing out to do some infantry combat - are going to need to do a bit of spec'ing in air combat. Because if an enemy outfit which spec's in strictly air combat is sitting between them and their target? Yeah it's probably gonna be a goddamned turkey shoot.

I'm very much against having to split my outfit into two, three, or four different mini-outfits just to spec my guys in the best path that will help get an edge. In PvP combat, ANY edge is an edge. Yes we could be all relaxed and chill and just let our skills and teamwork and coordination compensate, but I'd prefer to do that *AND* have my little percentile bonuses. At the very least I'd like to have some way to link all of us together.

[nathanebht]

Originally Posted by Sirisian

The need for alliances could show a flaw in the outfit idea though. It sounds like SOE wants outfits to be only people that play the same way. However they implemented classes so that everyone plays differently. Kind of seems like if you wanted a well rounded squad you can't be part of an outfit that expects to be fully specialized in something. I see outfits as a bunch of random people that don't know each other just in it because they all fly reavers and the outfit leader said he'll put all the points into that.

Kind of wish there was an outfit system that was more neutral to play style. Unless you have enough skill points to fill multiple tree of skills or something. Or skills that are chosen affect a wide range of classes and vehicles. Should be interesting to see the trees I guess. The idea of Alliances sound like an outfit system for grouping players and specializing their skills, but that would boil down to "oh hey bob what extra bonuses do you want?"

Was thinking the same thing. I love driving tank. So I'm going to be in a specialized tank only outfit. How does this make sense when a mixed approach will work best for taking objectives? Be part of a certain outfit to get the correct outfit bonuses but for the most part be playing with other outside people?

On a side note, I really hope PS2 will have that mini-tank. Forget the name but I 'd that thing.

[Bags]

Lightning. Was always fun to drive.

[Malorn]

There might be more granular specialization. For example "aircraft"-oriented outfits might be able to specialize in specific aircraft. Infantry may be able to specialize in particular roles - MAX might specialize in specific suits.

So I would imagine it's possible for a combination of roles. For example an outfit like The Enclave could specalize in a few infantry roles, AI MAX, and Galaxies, which is precisely what they used a lot in 2003-2004. So they may not have to get everything in the specialization tree and might be able to cherry-pcik based on role & vehcile + some general things that apply to all of the roles/vehicles in a group.

[SKYeXile]

Originally Posted by Higby

Another skills tree question that we haven't gotten a chance to answer yet...




If you're BR 10, that's on your character. Classes don't really have RANKS, they have CERTS which are locked or "gated" by the player's overall rank. So, if you're BR 10, you aren't automatically a level 10 AA Max since a level 10 AA max doesn't actually exist in a meaningful way. But, you have access to unlock level 10 AA Max CERTS, those CERTS would still require time to train and unlock.

So, while you can switch into a variety of roles, you'd be playing them completely untrained until you put some time into advancing all of them.

One final note: More advanced roles (Such as MAX or Liberator) may require advancement down a specific skill tree to unlock, for instance you may need to spend some time training Heavy Assault to unlock MAX skill trees, that way everyone can't just spawn an untrained powerful vehicle / weapon and still be very powerful with it despite not having any of the bells and whistles unlocked. This is something we're still playing with internally, we're doing a lot of iteration on these systems - when they're totally locked down you guys can expect to see a full expose on them get released.

Again, huge thank you for the questions and feedback guys... It's really awesome to have this community as a sounding board, sanity check and idea farm on some of these things.

i think im still mega confused...

but what i think you're saying is: say im BR20, lets say I can have 10 loadouts, in each loadout i can select 20 skill points worth of certs(of however many i get at BR20)

So i could essentially have:
A pilot loadout
An indoor gruntloadout
a max loadout
a medic loadout
a ground support loadout
an air support loadout
an infantry sniper/outdoors loadout
an engineer loadout
a thumper spamming loadout
a cloaking loadout

However, i can only be putting my accumulated points overtime into so many tress/specialisations/classes, so maybe only my pilot and infantry indoors loadout is anygood, but the rest are rather basic.

Am i assuming correct, because this is what its sounding like, and it sounds like thats to many options.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Matt Higby

...Liberator...

SWEET! Implicit confirmation that Liberators are back! Hell yeah! My second favorite vehicle after the beloved Vanguard

Ok back to discussion...

[dsi]

I really don't see the point of Outfit Alliances when the game isn't a FFA like Eve Online is, there are already 3 Alliances in the game, NC, VS, and TR.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

i think im still mega confused...

but what i think you're saying is: say im BR20, lets say I can have 10 loadouts, in each loadout i can select 20 skill points worth of certs(of however many i get at BR20)

So i could essentially have:
A pilot loadout
An indoor gruntloadout
a max loadout
a medic loadout
a ground support loadout
an air support loadout
an infantry sniper/outdoors loadout
an engineer loadout
a thumper spamming loadout
a cloaking loadout

However, i can only be putting my accumulated points overtime into so many tress/specialisations/classes, so maybe only my pilot and infantry indoors loadout is anygood, but the rest are rather basic.

Am i assuming correct, because this is what its sounding like, and it sounds like thats to many options.

From what Matt describes, this is sort of what I believe it looks like.



(Ranks and cert tree is purely for demonstrative purposes)

From what he describes, roles may be orthogonal to the giant cert tree and each cert may be bound to multiple roles.

So in the example above, the "Pilot" role might have access to all of those certs (and some infantry certs, etc), but if you don't train the cert you won't be able to use it.

Someone who is BR 2 cannot train for Liberator, but they can train up to Galaxy. Once they get BR 3 they can then train Liberator. But if they want to go the Reaver route they'd have to go down a different branch in the tree and likely not be a Liberator pilot.

[Malorn]

Also, I'd be willing to wager that the time it takes to train a skill may have the BR as a factor. So a skill at BR 1 may train very fast, while a skill at BR 10 might be significantly slower. Its probably non-linear so noobs can get up to speed with the basic certs in a matter of minutes while veterans training their super-advanced-reaver-cert takes weeks or months to complete.

[SKYeXile]

i was thinking something the same Malorn, until i read:

"So, while you can switch into a variety of roles, you'd be playing them completely untrained until you put some time into advancing all of them."

in order to switch to a variety of rolls, i would essentially have to have the certs to afford them, you would think.

[Volw]

@Malorn:
Yep, sounds reasonable. They've mentioned it will take at most 24 hours to train a skill, so I'd suspect getting a few low BR skills is going to be fairly quick. Will probably allow creating a semi-decent class within one playsession.

[Captain1nsaneo]

Originally Posted by dsi

I really don't see the point of Outfit Alliances when the game isn't a FFA like Eve Online is, there are already 3 Alliances in the game, NC, VS, and TR.

Alliances as in outfits on the same side that want to work together. So a VS outfit wants to work with another VS outfit they'd make an alliance with each other that would (in theory) give the outfits a way to easily communicate. Such a thing would be impossible across battle lines like between a TR and NC outfit.
The reason this is in our minds is that with the new outfit specialty system larger outfits are going to want to be able to best serve all their members at once but will be unable to do so as they won't be able to work up two different tech trees at the same time. Thus the compromise would be to create several outfits under an alliance. Each outfit in the alliance would be specialized for a part of the outfit tech tree and members would go between outfits in the alliance as their interests dictate. This isn't idle chatter either, I know I've had prior conversations about this very thing with old outfitmates.
Seems like a way to prevent this would be to make there be multiple types of outfit points that are acquired by members actually doing this or that type of fighting or support. Those points would be spent on the upgrades alongside a time to train cost and/or a resource cost.

I'm still confused about the new cert/class system. I think it's mainly the use of the word class as I can pull up around 3 different examples of class mechanics from FPSs and RPGs and they're radically different from each other. The current explanations make me share Sky's worry about people being able to do too much at the same time. It also inspires the worry that too much of the game will be locked up behind cert level requirements and training times thus creating a significant 'End Game' where before the end game was just a few vehicles (Vul, BFR, FV) allowing people out of the tube to experience most of the game.
My real fear is that this system will prevent people from finding out what they love doing. For example, if the pilot tree requires me to fly or work through using mossies before I can use a lib or gal and I don't like flying mossies but I would enjoy libs and gals I'll never know as I won't spend the time flying mossies. I may find something else I enjoy but I'll miss out on something I would have really enjoyed.

And once again I seem to have written a wall of text. Sorry guys.
Btw, I'm ok with the shop selling game affecting items as long as the affect is negative.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by SKYeXile

i was thinking something the same Malorn, until i read:

"So, while you can switch into a variety of roles, you'd be playing them completely untrained until you put some time into advancing all of them."

in order to switch to a variety of rolls, i would essentially have to have the certs to afford them, you would think.

The diagram I posted above is not consistent with that statement.

I think the confusion is that a "role" is part of the cert tree. It makes more sense to me if a role is not part of the tree, rather it is a set of nodes in that tree. Doing so allows easy sharing of certs across multiple roles without causing complication in the cert tree.

Example:
Suppose you have 4 certs: Medium Assault, Heavy Assault, Buggies, and Vanguard. They appear in the tree in whatever way you want (it doesn't matter).

The role for "Vanguard Driver" could be defined as the set of certs that includes Medium Assault, Buggies, and Vanguard.

The role for "Assault Infantry" could be defined as the set of certs that includes Medium Assault, Heavy Assault, and Buggies.

If you are missing a cert in the role, or you aren't high enough BR to unlock that cert then you simply don't have it. That woudl explain why you could switch into roles but not have anything certed. In the MAX example they'll have prereqs to fill before that role could even be used to prevent newbies from just spamming MAX and making it more of an advanced set of infantry certs (those prereqs might not take long to cert, so a dedicated newbie to max would still be possible depending on what BR levels the prereqs and max suits appear in the cert tree).


They might provide views of the cert tree, such as a view of the cert tree filtered by a specific role or set of role. So it might dim out all of the certs in the tree not in the role you specified. Each cert might also have a list of roles to which it is applicable. That + filtering could allow some pretty powerful tools for viewing the cert tree without complicating it.


This gives them a lot of power, even with Squad Leader certs. Squad Leader may itself be a role that cherry-picks various certs from across the trees to sort of build a decent soldier, but it also picks up a lot of stuff in the command tree. They could even have a "Commander" role that goes even deeper in the command sub-tree and has fewer non-command abilities. (Imagine a commander who basically only has pistols, but can drive a few vehicles and has tons of command bonuses, orbital strikes, and that sort of thing). There's a lot of flexibility in this design. They can make new roles on-the-fly and if a cert is a balance issue in a given role they can simply remove it. (Don't like mosquitos dropping with HA? No problem, just make sure neither appear in the same role.)

[Bags]

No upgrade today sadly

[WellWisherELF]

Originally Posted by Firefly

Because if an enemy outfit which spec's in strictly air combat is sitting between them and their target? Yeah it's probably gonna be a goddamned turkey shoot.

Air vehicles won't be able to "sit" anywhere anymore, they're taking a more realistic approach towards air physics/combat.