"We need a gunner!"

[Azren]

Hello

This topic was on my mind recently, and I would like to see other people's opinion on it.

Here is a quick rundown on how I saw PS1's dilemma with missing gunners for vehicles develop:
In the early days it took a lot of certification points to aquire any vehicle, so if you chose to be a driver, you didn't really have much to go on in close combat (and vice-versa). Much of the community decided to go with close combat style characters, which resulted in an overflow of gunners looking for vehicles to board. You did not really see any vehicle calling out "We need a gunner" in those days.
As the game developed, getting cert points got easier and the points needed for specific vehicles got decreased. In the long run this resulted in every character having access to some sort of vehicle. Getting a gunner at this point got hard, only people who were bored of driving themself jumped in to gun.

In relation with Planetside 2, this issue will probably be the same, only escalated greatly.
As I understand the system, a character only needs to unlocks a vehicle (spend time to learn the skill) to use it. Apart from lost time, you do not need to put anything else into them. Of course this will result in every character having unlocked some vehicles, or maybe all of them in a very short time. From my experience in PS1 I belive that getting a gunner at this point will be very hard.
Of course the current gunnerdriver model of MBT-s does not help this issue either. While in PS1 one had to find a gunner for the main gun (which was the strongest ground based gun at the time), in PS2 we would be looking for gunners to take the secondary gun. I think most people would rather just pull their own vehicle and use the seat switching buttons to get access to the secondary gun if needed. Will getting gunners still be possible at this point?

For the sake of this argument strictly stay with random gunners, not with your friends over teamspeak, ect.