A response regarding BFR's

[Larington]

Though I don't believe for a second they would be added any time soon, after listening to T-Ray talking about BFR's on the Reachcast I feel the need to step in and try to explain why I feel BFR's are an unwise addition to the game, regardless of the specifics of the implementation.

A long time ago in a Planetside 1 far away:

In Planetside 1 I think everyone had pretty much grown accustomed to there being a certain way things are done, combat would almost be in phases effectively (I've dubbed these 'Spheres of Combat'), you'd have combat between bases, transitioning to/from combat to secure a base courtyard then transitioning to/from interior combat. Troops always had a sphere of combat to go to where they'd be free from air & vehicles if they just wanted a straight up fight Footsoldier versus Footsoldier.

The outdoor/courtyard sphere's of combat would include infantry pushes, whilst aircraft and ground vehicles do their best to either provide support out in the field or help breaking into or out the courtyard depending on who owns the base.

When BFR's were introduced they HEAVILY disrupted the existing outdoor & courtyard spheres of combat. BFR's could be configured for Anti-Air, Anti-Infantry and Anti-Vehicle. This meant you could put three together each focused for one of those three tasks and they'd be nigh on untouchable. Alternatively, a BFR could hang around a vehicle re-arm point and no matter what came over the hill could near instantly re-arm for it.

Countering the BFR: So what about the existing tools in the game that could counter a BFR?

Infantry AV weapons - The moment the regenerating shield gets to 50% a smart BFR pilot just backs down behind the hill and waits for the shield to regenerate. If you somehow managed to get underneath a BFR as a soldier, the BFR could often walk backwards faster than you could run forward to try and stay under the guns, making taking the thing out from underneath very hard. BFR's were in theory supposed to be weak against lots of small arms fire hitting them, but no BFR pilot with any intelligence would get close enough to infantry forces for this to happen, instead they sit off at a distance and use the BFR as a mobile long range artillery or sniping unit.

Reavers - Couldn't do enough damage to them before being shot down or chased away, flight variants would just jump to the nearest friendly AA or troop cluster for protection.

Liberator bombs - An attentive BFR pilot watches the radar, the moment a lib shows up on radar the BFR pilot merely needs to use the strafe jets to sidestep away from any bombs (Yes, even with lower altitude bombing runs, believe me I tried many times).

Tanks - The AV equipped BFR tears through enemy armour. My least favourite memory from Planetside 1 was the night I tried to run an in outfit tank squad as a little event, we crested the hill with, I think, 6 magriders and a single, SINGLE, 2 person NC AV gunner variant BFR was dealing so much damage (And tanking so much damage) that we couldn't knock it out before the whole mag group was obliterated or fleeing.

Orbital Strikes - Attentive BFR pilots would just run mode away from orbital strikes.

That's before I mention the flight variant BFR that had a habit of hopping several hundred meters away from you at the first sign of trouble and it could sit on base walls & roofs making pushing out into the courtyard of a base extremely frustrating.

In the end, the solution to BFR's ended up being 2 person drop teams who'd drop on top of the damn things from a Mosquito with decimators and jammer grenades (As I said before trying to run/sneak up to them was an exercise in futility, it had to be an drop style ambush of sorts). That's great for the players doing that but for everyone elses vehicle/air combat, well, they're suddenly obsolete. The first BFR's started to show up and suddenly a lot of the real combat seemed to retreat to the indoor fights only, the one place where BFR's couldn't go.
The outdoor fights were changed forever and NOT in a good way, you either had plenty of BFR's on the field or you went home, period. Whereas previously a zerg of infantry without armour support or air support could manage without, this did not apply when the enemy had BFR's - you would NEED your own to compete.

The Future:

In Planetside 2, my concern is that the same could happen again, not the same mistakes exactly, new & different mistakes (The nature of which I couldn't begin to guess) and as before everyone will have grown to consider the game as operating a particular way, if something comes along that severely disrupts regular play like BFR's did then we could lose players because of it.

One of the reasons I had to speak up on the PSU forums about the frequency of the alert events was because their high frequency started to disrupt normal operations for us, we'd be pushing down a lane on Indar and suddenly an alert would go off and draw loads of friendlies away to the alert.

I know BFR's in PS1 will have their defenders, but in PS2 so did the super maneuverable magrider, the prowler gun velocity bug & the pheonix one-shot-kill before those were rebalanced, all of which were clearly not ok.

I mentioned sphere's of combat above for a reason - I honestly think any dev time that might go to a mech concept that could disrupt the existing spheres of combat in PS2 would be better off spent on creating a new sphere of combat, like naval/coastal warfare with a super-heavy vehicle. Like a super powerful destroyer/cruiser which as well as being powerful is also HUGE and hard to miss (Without the issue of driving a super-mech between trees/obstacles) and not only do you have a combat crew operating the on board weapons but also a crew dedicated to doing repairs and hunting down any infils attempting to get inside the boat to sabotage critical components like the engines or C4 users hitting weld points (You've played the super tanker level in Deus Ex, yeah? Destroy the 4 weld points, reverse the bilge pumps, cruiser tears itself apart). The super heavy cruiser would be lethal versus tanks and troops on the coastline, but that's ok because the tanks/air could still retreat inland* and by being so big it would necessarily have poor movement/navigating speed too.



TL: DR:
In short, I'm not saying you can't have some kind of large heavy hitting, heavy armoured target like a mech/BFR, but I *am* saying I don't think the risk (That a signifiicant number of existing play styles would be severely disrupted) of adding mechs would outweigh the benefits (Cool feature/selling point) of adding them. Ff it's something that slots quite tidily into the existing gameplay like the Harasser did, that's not so bad, the issue is if there was a substantial impact on the way things were prior to the change.

Alternative approach: People are assholes, many don't want a fun or fair fight and will do everything they can to achieve a path of least resistance. Let's discuss the ESF for example, the main counters to ESF's are lock ons & flak, the bestest of the best will run with maximum rank stealth (And often don't need even that) & flares to neuter lock on effectiveness and will flee the moment they take 1% damage from flak or get hit by a single ground based lock on missile, all while having incredible damage output. They'll also often favour battles where superior friendly numbers makes it hard for the enemy to field any AA at all (EG 40% or less defending enemy population). I guess it's absolutely the right way to play it, but at the same time it's a little bit broken. I'd absolutely expect a similar kind of min-maxing to happen if BFR's were introduced to PS2 in some form.

* - Subtle point I'm attempting to make here: BFR's disrupted vehicle/air combat and there was nowhere really for vehicles/air to go to escape BFR's (Like infantry can retreat indoors), but a super heavy cruiser would never be able to follow a tank/ESF inland like a BFR could. That's why I suggest a new Naval/Coastal sphere of combat that still has some separation from existing spheres of combat (Outdoors & Courtyard combat spheres) as a compromise.