Higby on 20% Difference

[Graywolves]

I know at a first glance alot of players (myself included) were hasty in judging the "veteran's 20% over a nooby" thing. And that alot of us took liberty of trying to figure out what 20% meant. Now I know there is the thread on this but it's a huge wall of text and nobody wants to read that so I gathered everything Higby said on there and posted it here so that we're all on the same level and understand what is actually planned.

We're going to have hundreds if not thousands of certs at launch. These will vary from certs that unlock new weapons, implants, vehicles, weapon/vehicle attachments and class skills to ones that allow for faster reloading, less cone of fire, larger ammo capacity, and yes, additional damage. When we say overall 20% increase in power we're talking holistically, not necessarily "each of your bullets do 20% more damage! a winner is you!".

The spirit of the PS2 cert system is very much based around the PS1 paradigm of advancement by addition of situational flexibility and overall breadth of gameplay options. A good fps player playing light assault with minimal certs will always kick the shit out of a bad fps player playing light assault with a lot of certs.

Edit: MasterChief096 - I'm definitely not trying to bust up your thread by stating any of this, it's a great poll and I appreciate seeing everyone's point of view. I just want everyone to understand what our goals with the cert tree and power growth actually are. Carry on!


Quote:
Originally Posted by MasterChief096 View Post
From what I understand you mean that the potential 20% increase is going to be spread out between the various stats? Players won't be able to solely increase damage by 20%, but rather keep unlocking certs (in the form of modifications/implants/whatever) that upgrade a weapon or vehicle base stats by slight amounts. So an example would be a veteran with maxed out MA certifications might have a 20% advantage over a new player, but its going to be something like 3% damage difference, maybe 6% ROF difference, 4% accuracy difference, 7% clip size difference?:Endquote

Correct. We definitely are relying on tradeoffs more than anything else. Most of our weapons for a class are "sidegrades" rather than upgrades, but there are upgrades here and there that essentially follow the model you suggest. We also unlock things like weapon attachments such as a scope or flash suppressor would be part of what we use to calculate that 20% advantage, although exactly how some of those are calculated gets a bit tricky.

Also, medical certs will be replaced with using various roots, meditation and acupuncture to cure combat wounds.

The goal is for the 20% to encompass everything. By everything I mean: "everything" everything. We're really paper-rock-scissors too, even if you had a 20% damage boost, hell a 100% damage boost, your assault rifle isn't going to kill a base totally un-certed tank, and if you had a 100% health increase that tank would still kill you pretty damn fast.

As for new players, Planetside 1 despite being "balanced" and "fair" to new players still is next to impossible for people to succeed at day 1. Theres way more than just veteran power growth that makes a game difficult for new players, knowing maps, battle flows, knowing how and when to fight, learning what different enemy types are capable of, etc. is by far a bigger barrier in a game like planetside than weapon damage for new players. I know lots of experienced FPS players who go 1:20 their first few sessions of planetside and I'm sure you all do too, right?

The growth afforded by the PS2 cert system to an mmorpg character growth curve isn't even comparable.

Using some back of the napkin math on a hugely simplified example. A first session player would pick up a gun that did 10 damage per shot and start blasting at a guy with full health, assuming he hit every shot and didn't get any headshots (he's a noob, afterall!), it would take 10 shots to kill his enemy:

Shot # damage done health remaining
1 10 90
2 20 80
3 30 70
4 40 60
5 50 50
6 60 40
7 70 30
8 80 20
9 90 10
10 100 0

Imagine we were talking about a straight 10% damage increase, what does this look like?

Shot # damage done life remaining
1 11 89
2 22 78
3 33 67
4 44 56
5 55 45
6 66 34
7 77 23
8 88 12
9 99 1
10 110 -10

Would you look at that... still takes 10 shots to kill.

What about 20%, surely that is an insane TTK decrease...

Shot # damage done life remaining
1 12 88
2 24 76
3 36 64
4 48 52
5 60 40
6 72 28
7 84 16
8 96 4
9 108 -8

1 less shot to kill, not exactly curb-stomping and face-blasting noobs off the map. And, this is already an out of bounds scenario because we're not going to have a 20% increase on damage to begin with.