The issue with the "if you cant see it, you cant damge it" rule.

MrMak · 2013-04-15, 11:31 AM

Well the issue with this is that infantry can see vehicles (and hurt them) at ranges where vehicles cant see the infantry (so they cant fight back). A simple solution would be changing the rule to "if either of you sees the other, you can damage eachother). in essence it would mean that evn tohugh a tank cant see what is hsooting it it would be able to gauge where the damage is coming from (say a tower) and shell the shit out of it till he gets hit markers.

Another little thing that would help is anew rule "if it can see you, its weapon fire always renders even if you cant see the shooter". Thiswould again hepl vehicles tell where the hell they are being shot from.

Goliith · 2013-04-15, 11:42 AM

The render distance issues is one of the things that is driving my friend and I mad in PS2, I love the game, but constantly being hit by things that dont render is good enough to get to hair-ripping.

Just last night we were Liberating it up, and were getting ripped to absolute pieces by Burster maxes that we couldn't find because neither they, nor their Flak or tracers were rendering, we were just getting that wonderful CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK noise as our health vanished with no indicators.

Rothnang · 2013-04-15, 12:10 PM

I disagree there for several reasons:

For one, the whole reason why combat range is condensed in media is because beyond visual range combat is boring to watch. If you watch helmet cam videos of actual firefights in Afghanistan or Iraq what you'll quickly find is that you pretty much never see an enemy on them, or if you see one it's just a little shadow on the horizon somewhere who quickly jumps behind cover. Real life war is pretty boring to watch (Until they call in the A10), despite how terrifying it is to the people who are actually there.
In movies and games however, the enemies are always close enough to actually look at them, because if you want to present your audience with a visual spectacle then it serves you well to have both combatants on the same screen.

Secondly, if you can hit infantry from that far away it will just foster a whole range of shitty behaviors that make the game worse for everyone involved. For example, I see a big group of enemies in my Liberator, what's to keep me from just going up to 1000m and then hitting that spot with a Zephyr over and over to farm them while well out of range of their AA? Well, I wouldn't do that, but you bet your ass someone would. Same thing with tanks and anti vehicle turrets. If those shells will kill people who aren't rendered suddenly you've created an incentive to just hang out at 800 meters somewhere, trim your guns on a high traffic area and just farm infantry with random explosions.
That doesn't make the game better for vehicles, it just introduces a cheap tactic that is neither going to be very fun for the drivers of vehicles, nor going to enrich the game in any way for the people who happen to catch the random tank shells getting hurled at bases. Nobody benefits when you counter lame with lame.

And most importantly: This shouldn't even be a discussion. Seriously. It should be a complete no brainer to any game designer that you don't put units in your game that can attack a player while unrendered, or well outside of any reasonable visual range unless you are very specifically shooting for a military simulation (And even then those units shouldn't be invisible due to a technical limitation, but deliberately to encourage the use of a recon system). There are certain things you just don't do as a designer, things that are well known to frustrate people and make their experience playing your game bad, and getting killed by stuff you can't see is one of them. People will even hate you for it if the unit doing it is stealthy by design. It's just a big giant "don't go there" in game design and it's shameful that it's being so liberally ignored here.
It's not even like the devs just flat out don't understand this. You can't fire while cloaked on an Infiltrator, and they took shotguns out of the infiltrator arsenal because it was overpowered, and they have vehemently refused to put stealth on a fighter. It's like they get the principle of the thing as it applies to an invisibility button, but just don't seem to get how it applies to visual range.
Planetside 2 is supposed to have a lot of action and be awesome to look at, and that means keeping the fights within the visual horizon and avoiding cheap and cheesy stuff that frustrates people.

It's not like this is the first game to ever have vehicles and infantry in the same game, so why is this such a huge problem? I can pull games out of my library that are over a decade old and don't have this issue. Ever played C&C Renegade?

HiroshiChugi · 2013-04-15, 12:52 PM

Originally Posted by Rothnang

Ever played C&C Renegade?

Yes, yes I have, and I STILL play it! xD!

maradine · 2013-04-15, 01:09 PM

Mandatory LOS/render rules around applying damage could preclude later inclusion of indirect fire. Intentional indirect fire, I mean.

Rothnang · 2013-04-15, 02:23 PM

Any unit based on indirect fire should rely on having forward observers that mark targets for attack. An appropriate recon system would have to be included in the game.

Artillery should not be effective by simply peppering a region that is known to have enemies in it with explosives waiting for kills. It should require deliberate shots against known targets that are relayed to you in some way by a forward observer.

So in that sense, the notion of an artillery shell doing nothing if it strikes an unrendered target doesn't bother me. It may not be realistic, but from a gameplay perspective in order for any indirect fire unit to not be a giant pain the ass you need to be able to shut it down by killing the forward observers.

Snydenthur · 2013-04-15, 02:30 PM

Originally Posted by MrMak

Well the issue with this is that infantry can see vehicles (and hurt them) at ranges where vehicles cant see the infantry (so they cant fight back). A simple solution would be changing the rule to "if either of you sees the other, you can damage eachother). in essence it would mean that evn tohugh a tank cant see what is hsooting it it would be able to gauge where the damage is coming from (say a tower) and shell the shit out of it till he gets hit markers.

Another little thing that would help is anew rule "if it can see you, its weapon fire always renders even if you cant see the shooter". Thiswould again hepl vehicles tell where the hell they are being shot from.

Yes, it is very irritating, but it has to be done this way or otherwise the performance would suck. If they could take damage when not rendering, it would be like they were rendering. So, suddenly we have a lot more players being rendered and physics applied to the weapon fire etc. There's not computer out there that could handle it. I hope some dev tells me I'm wrong though. It would be lovely to get kills even when the enemy suddenly disappears because of rendering.

MrMak · 2013-04-15, 05:32 PM

Originally Posted by Rothnang

Planetside 2 is supposed to have a lot of action and be awesome to look at, and that means keeping the fights within the visual horizon and avoiding cheap and cheesy stuff that frustrates people.

So what you are saying is that if infantry shoots a vehicle which in tunr cant see the infantry its ok. But if the vehicle were to shoot at said infantry it would be cheesy and frustraing? For who exactly? The infantry bing shot at by something they can clearly see? The Tank driver who can actualy somewhat defend himself? Please enlighten me.

maradine · 2013-04-15, 05:41 PM

Originally Posted by Rothnang

Any unit based on indirect fire should rely on having forward observers that mark targets for attack. An appropriate recon system would have to be included in the game.

Artillery should not be effective by simply peppering a region that is known to have enemies in it with explosives waiting for kills. It should require deliberate shots against known targets that are relayed to you in some way by a forward observer.

So in that sense, the notion of an artillery shell doing nothing if it strikes an unrendered target doesn't bother me. It may not be realistic, but from a gameplay perspective in order for any indirect fire unit to not be a giant pain the ass you need to be able to shut it down by killing the forward observers.

It bothers me greatly. I'm not saying spotting and teamwork shouldn't be emphasized - they should - but an artillery round not exploding for damage because no one was looking is preposterous. I'd far prefer an arbitrary limit on the availability of the unit vs. an arbitrary limit on the basic mechanics of what a gun is.

Rothnang · 2013-04-15, 07:04 PM

Originally Posted by MrMak

So what you are saying is that if infantry shoots a vehicle which in tunr cant see the infantry its ok. But if the vehicle were to shoot at said infantry it would be cheesy and frustraing? For who exactly? The infantry bing shot at by something they can clearly see? The Tank driver who can actualy somewhat defend himself? Please enlighten me.

It's stupid and frustrating either way. The right answer is that the infantry can't shoot the tank before the tank can see the infantry, that way there is no issue with invisible units at all.

A tank gun at 700 meters is just as hard to hit with as a dumbfire rocket at 300, and if you'd be shooting at things you can't even see I wouldn't call that a serious improvement to the current broken state of the game. The whole problem is that infantry has too much range, not that tanks have too little.

Originally Posted by maradine

It bothers me greatly. I'm not saying spotting and teamwork shouldn't be emphasized - they should - but an artillery round not exploding for damage because no one was looking is preposterous. I'd far prefer an arbitrary limit on the availability of the unit vs. an arbitrary limit on the basic mechanics of what a gun is.

I agree with you that if generally possible an artillery shell should explode no matter what, however, I would still design it in such a way that its rate of fire is relatively low and its splash radius not particularly big, so that precision is paramount to effectiveness. Similarly to Artillery in World of Tanks, it's incredibly deadly on a good hit, but you can't expect to just shoot in the general direction of where you think enemies are and kill something, despite the shell landing.

The problem arises with weapons like a Zephyr, or the Viper, the raw volume of fire they produce combined with their substantial splash damage means that if they were viable at beyond visual range you could easily spam a high traffic area with them to get kills without actually aiming at anything.

The really big thing that I think is a substantial pitfall here is simply that if they changed tanks to being able to kill infantry at extreme range it would just validate their broken design and force tankers into an extremely lame mode of gameplay where all they do is spam distant targets while watching for hit markers and XP-roll.

We need to have is combat that happens at distances were all combatants can see each other. We once had that when dumbfire launchers were still the standard option against tanks, but back then HE was much more powerful and Flak armor didn't exist so tanks always won. These days they are denied the chance to even really fight.

Falcon_br · 2013-04-15, 08:33 PM

I just hate when I fire a lock on missile in a reaver and it run out off render distance.
Maybe in those cases they should still receive damage, well, it works for mines outside of you render distance.

Ghoest9 · 2013-04-15, 09:53 PM

These rules dont exist for game play reasons they exist for primarily server/network reasons and possibly for anti-hack reasons..

deal with it

MrMak · 2013-04-16, 09:24 AM

Originally Posted by Rothnang

It's stupid and frustrating either way. The right answer is that the infantry can't shoot the tank before the tank can see the infantry, that way there is no issue with invisible units at all.

So im shooting at a tank. I hit it dead on. It recieves no damage becouse aparently im not rendering to him (somethign i have no way of determining). THATS NOT FRUSTRATING AT ALL!

Majarrok · 2013-04-16, 09:42 AM

Originally Posted by MrMak

So im shooting at a tank. I hit it dead on. It recieves no damage becouse aparently im not rendering to him (somethign i have no way of determining). THATS NOT FRUSTRATING AT ALL!

And that would really mess with rocket launchers.

Rothnang · 2013-04-16, 09:59 AM

Originally Posted by MrMak

So im shooting at a tank. I hit it dead on. It recieves no damage becouse aparently im not rendering to him (somethign i have no way of determining). THATS NOT FRUSTRATING AT ALL!

The point is that you wouldn't have any weapons that can hit a tank at beyond your render range. This crap was never an issue when most people were using dumbfire launchers because you can't land pinpoint accurate hits with them at 500+ meters.

Getting really sick of these double standards for infantry in this game. When the Phoenix was killing infantry from beyond visual range the wah wah army mobilized and got it nerfed within a week, even though dying as infantry costs you nothing. But if vehicle players are sick of the same shit being done to them in a unit with costs and cooldowns it's a huge debate.