Huge Outfits and PlanetSide 2

[Captain1nsaneo]

Originally Posted by Hamma

One man shouldn't be able to deny vehicles to a whole cont

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! DO YOU EVEN PLAY CLOAKER?

Sorry, that was my knee jerk reaction to hearing that line. The one man not being able to make a strategic difference on the field goes against my experience playing as a cloaker and as a leader. I'm going to give two stories that are examples where one person changed the global situation.


For those of you who haven't played the original, each empire had 2 "home" continents. These conts were linked to your sanctuary and if an enemy captured both they would be able to spawn your vehicles. One of the TR's home conts is Ceryshen. No one really likes playing there because it's so high up that aircraft can't really move and there's lots of twisty nasty roads (I actually like it but then again my favorite cave is Annwn). I was bored of whatever I was doing at the time and set myself to the task of capturing Ceryshen. All of it. On foot. A couple hours later after running into no resistance the whole cont had turned a nice purple shade. So time to move onto the other TR home cont Forseral. About half way through that cont I ran into about half a squad worth of resistance so I made a call for backup and my outfitmates showed up and we finished off the rest of the cont giving the VS TR tech for the night.


Cyssor is the cont that everyone loves to fight on. That is a fact of life, so much so that the game earned the nickname Cyssorside. So here's the global outlook. VS are underpopped and TR/NC have a poplocked zerg fight raging on Cyssor. The VS want in on the fight but don't have any good warpgate links into the cont. So the VS really is just milling about fighting smaller battles on other conts with the TR and NC's leftovers but it's not really fun.
So I'm looking at this and decide that I really don't want to roam around with the other VS because that's dull. I'm looking over my map of Cyssor when I notice a base in the Southwest, Nzame, was very close to running out of power and losing it's TR ownership (the main fight was up NE). Grabbing a drop pod out to the south so I could hack out a spawn point for myself I went over to the close to neutral base. I find maybe one or two under prepared NC milling about the TR base so I setup some defense expecting some good TR to try to refill the base. While I'm sorting out my own refueling I make a call to an old friend to come and back me up as the base was in the 10% power left range. So the time comes and a few TR as well but by that time the tubes had been destroyed and the tower taken. At this point I make a global call for VS to show up and we start our 15min hack to retake the base.
For those of you who've never had to deal with the hacking/filling/capture of a neutral base allow me to give some detail. It takes 15 minutes for a base to be captured, however, if the base has no power at the end of the 15 minutes the base reverts to no owner and you don't get any experience. However, if you fill the base and the enemy hacks the base their hack will use the fuel you put in to make the base theirs. So the goal is to refill the base only after you've gotten close to holding for the full 15.
Remember earlier how I mentioned that the VS wanted to be on Cyssor but didn't have an opening? Well part of that lack of opening was the TR and NC killing any force we sent to take a base. That force was now coming to our little piece of heaven. Luckily VS drop pods started raining down and we started holding the base against the significant forces sent our way. About a half hour later the whole VS zerg was now infesting the Southwest of Cyssor.


One person can and should be able to make a difference. It is always a matter of finding where it can be done. To mandate that teamwork is needed to do anything clips the wings of players who make sabotage their line of work. I have more stories ranging from cat and mouse games to assassinations to intel gathering but those two exemplify how an individual can change the global scene. Game should be a sandbox, not a carnival ride that necessitates that you must have this many people to ride.