Factional Weapons Cause Faction Pop Imbalance?

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by Pyreal

Will Factional differences lead to pigeonholing of play styles and imbalanced factional populations?

Probably. In order to try to solve this they are allowing customization to essentially "sidegrade" any weapon into the other factions to make up for situational advantages.

Personally I said this like a year ago that their whole design is a bit flawed for allowing balance. We had this problem in PS1 where the developers and designers were fixated on creating RTS type balance. However, RTS balance assumes multiple class of units fighting together to even out differences in the system without respect toward any 1v1 balance, which is an admirable system. I don't believe the game needs to be balanced 1v1 across classes. However, we have a problem when the same class for different factions are so asymmetric for situations. Also using the customization system with certs so that players can match another faction's class is kind of awkward. Especially when one faction might have a situational advantage that is far more common.

Also I'm not sure if we'll see it in PS2, but we had suppressive fire in PS1 with the CoF system that favored fast firing weapons. That is someone getting shot once would have their CoF spike a little bit. Luckily it didn't come up much, but if the fire rates are too disproportionate then we might start seeing problems with spray based weapons.

My ideal system, as much as some other vets would hate it, would honestly just be to scrap all the situational weapon balance across factions and make each faction a reskin of the NS to ensure players are choosing their faction based on lore and not a playstyle. The concept that somehow each faction is missing out on 2/3rds of the playstyles is sure to cause imbalance issues in the future. We saw this in PS1 with the heavy weapons which were impossible to balance because they were specifically designed to be balanced situationally. For anyone that hasn't played PS1 this meant the NC were amazing at defending and camping, TR were amazing at medium to close range (which made them good at mossy dropping), and VS were good at spamming (so good in fact doorways could be blocked with orbs).

Needless to say if every faction was balanced such that every paired weapon across factions was identical except for skins (on the weapon and projectiles), including HA by converting them to a MCG variant, we'd see a huge balance in gameplay. One that would allow the cert system to be utilized such that everyone could move into different playstyles without getting stuck with a default one.

The chance of seeing this kind of balance? None. We probably have years worth of patches to balance weapons, or developers that hope people won't realize the problems because of how complex the battles are. Or they think that if someone feels unbalanced in a situation they'll work toward getting certs to balance their weapon with the other faction's weapon.

Right now the developers have made some key changes that will help with overall balance. Giving the burster flak MAX weapons to all the factions was one of the best starts seeing as that was one of the most situationally advantageous weapons in PS1. If they can extrapolate that with all the weapons we'd be in good shape.

edit, was just talking someone in IRC about this. Some of the situational inbalance totally changed how much people enjoyed battles. As a VS bridge battles on Esamir and outdoor battles on Ishundar are some of my most memorable because of the lancer and sniper combo. Other factions have totally different viewpoints on what was fun. If we could allow all factions to access to every playstyle you'd see some very varied soldiers in such a way that the game would be enjoyable for everyone in every situation.

edit, I wonder if the weapon customization to mimic other weapons is to replace the weapon looting. Kind of odd switch really.