Flaws of current PS2 Battleflow (Suggestions)

[Mordelicius]

Why Battleflow should be improved next asap:
1) It's hard to find a fluid fights that go from base to base to base anymore.
2) PS2 will be released to PS4 soon - New players will be confused as hell, especially newbie, console-types who are new to MMOs.

Areas that need attention:

Redeployside - SOE Devs do not acknowledge this to be a problem. That's how out of touch the Devs are with the state of the game. The problem with redeployside are instant defensives resecures of bases with a touch of a button. It circumvents normal logistical limitations.

The fights are degenerating to either who is fastest to steal undefended bases or who has the biggest, unstoppable zerg numbers. Redeployment at medium to long distance should cost resources and/or should be tied to a timer.

Basically, VS Emerald redeploy, wipe offense. Redeploy again to find the base to 'steal'. Why are there so many bases to 'steal'? It's because they added unnecessary, new lattice links in Indar. PS2 Devs should visit Emerald once in a while. The population there is plummeting. The reason why VS do this is they have superior suppression fire weapons (lashers, precision guns, long range Maxes). All they have to do is get into position holding the points and supress. The TR nor the NC do not have supression fire capabilities.

The whole TR Emerald avoid fighting the Vanu (been saying this since the Waterson/Mattherson merger) because of their OP weapons and their redeploy spam. In any alert, you'll see TR driving hard into NC territories, while Vanu just take largely undefended bases. How bad is it? The Vanu Emerald run TR platoons to bolster their fighting capabilities/morale and 'win' alerts. Almost every alert is the same. TR attacking NC. VS basically ghostcapping/ mass redeploy spamming. Almost every TR win alert on primetime is a sham. The VS would rather let TR win and concentrate on NC because it's the TR who are afraid of them. Everytime the NC would get a lead (rarely), the VS will drop engagements with TR. TR do not go on VS offense (they are scared of VS). And what you got is a double team.

Current state of Emerald:
TR wants to fight the NC and avoid VS altogether.
NC will defend from TR zerg. Outnumbered fighting VS (losing territories, hard to counterattack).
VS is starving for a fight, but TR won't attack them while NC is underpopped against them because most are fighting TR.

Earlier, NC was holding the Crown. VS attacked twice, failed. TR zerg is driving towards Mao. What did the VS do? Mass redeployed and capture all the western NC territories at 3:1+ population ratio. It was actually 8% NC defending, but even scraping all available NC, it was 25% at best.

Alerts shouldn't cap a Continent - Under old alerts, Waterson used to celebrate a victory by queueing mass Galaxies and crashing them to opponent warpgates. It was fun for both sides. The fight also continues.

Nowadays, you get unceremoniously dumped to another continent. If you win, you can't even use a console to pull out a fireworks gun. Locking up continent after alerts break competitive momentum.

Resource 2.0 needs a rollback - The reason why players including myself are holding back on criticizing Resource 2.0 is due the fact that it was promised it was stage 1 of 3 stages.

Now that the whole thing is delayed indefinitely, they need to rollback all the awful changes that practically destroyed any reason to hold/capture any base. What's the point of capturing bases/objectives? NONE. Resources flow too freely and everyone just spam vehicles. Players also can't cap points inside vehicles. So, what's the point of encouraging objective plays?

Directives is antithesis of Objectives - I know it's too late to rollback Directives, but as it is, it only encourages farming.

Farming is antithesis to capturing bases. Sure there are some Directives on objectives, but for the most part players are now focused on farming for Directives. Perhaps they should tone it down a bit. I know they implemented it to sell a lot of guns and equipment and encourage completism, but it diverts alot of fighting flow to farming and more farming.

No-Deploy-Zone/Sunderer Issues - Sunderers spawn players. In a big fight, it is essential. There are other ways of spawning players, but in a 96+ fight, there's no substitute.

This No-Deploy-Zone prevents Sunderers from being hidden. A single Max can wipe out a Sunderer in any configuration. And it will outdps a maxed out repair engineer. Remove this monstrosity. At the very least, allow Sunderers to stick to buildings. It's funny they callously increased the sizes of these NDZ in many bases. It's as if they don't even know how hard it is to keep it alive and find a spot where attackers can't be farmed by defenders.

Where do you park in bases like the Allatum Botany Wing (without getting flanked by a tank)? That gigantic NDZ on Deepcore Geolab? Rhime Analytics? Bridgeward? Jaeger's Crossing (especially at C point, wow)? Ceres Hydrophonics (goodluck)? I can make a huge list. It's ridiculous. Snake Ravine, (under the bridge)? Ti Alloys? I could go on and on.

I don't often come to Amerish but last week, there was this base that's all sorts of awful. Even VS defending it and farming us NC was moaning on how bad the base design and NDZ is. Essentially, you cannot park a Sunderer outside a NDZ w/o being farmed or have your Sunderer get shot at from the Spawn point. The best spot coming north was behind ammo dispenser, but even that gets shot and flanked nonstop. I think it's that base west of Kwahtee Amp station. Horrible.

This is all because of that senseless No-deploy-zone. A simple solution would be to just remove that blight. That or give us a Sunderer that can deploy and and jam enemy Sunderer spawn or at least allow the NDZ to be disabled by a generator. All the PS2 Devs have to do is try to spawn Sunderers in any of those bases and see how long can it last.

Three-Point-Cap Revision - The problem with 3-point caps, an attacking force has to hold the majority while defenders do not have to spread out and just go through each point one by one.

An old suggestion is to keep a separate timer for each cap point, so it can be captured one after the other. http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=55755. Rather than give the defenders a luxury of camping one point while attackers hold 2 points. Give each point a separate time. If Attacker holds A for X amount of time, then it can switch. Attacker can move to B and hold it for another X amount of time. This will give the fight better balance. The defenders can't just turtle. they have to attack the A point that was recaptured and flip it again for X amount of time.

Lastly Biolab Changes on the PTS - There's a host of changes on the PTS Ikanam Biolab. It's going to make attacking Biolab even worse. The teleporter room has no shields. The underside of the Biolab can be camped by tanks shooting from the outside. And lastly, the NDZ prevent an attacker Sunderer from even parking, ouch.

The best way to fix the Biolab teleporter room is to just move it at the side of the airpad. Instead of having the landing pad structure, the landing pad would be the teleporter roof. Add ramp downwards and keep the shield. It will be hard to spawn camp because it's outside the biolab proper. Just offset the building a bit so it will fit instead of the Landing pad structure on the airpad.

SOE can't release PS2 in PS4 in this state, it will be another PC release part deux, where players leave as soon as they arrived.

Remember when they are all focused on 'promos' instead of balance at launch? This will be a repeat. The gameplay balance is not as bad as before. But there are still lingering issues with faction balance. Magrider hill climbing, evasion (they lowered all the tank range; what's the downside of this tank anymore), survivability and ability to wipe Sunderer spawns easily (Peek/Shoot/Hide spam). Try to defend your Sunderer against Mags sniping and dancing on a hill. That can't be done with a Prowler/Vanguard without prolonged exposure to danger. There's the no-render-over 300m Lancer VS squads and their no-downside guns, especially the 0.75x movespeed Orion which also has high precision and rate-of-fire, wow.

That and the Battleflow ought to be addressed before they even think of releasing this on PS4.

Post from Dec. 2012:

http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...000#post868000

Originally Posted by Mordelicius

Faction balance first before promotions.

Gameplay balance first before promotions.

They may lure in alot of new players but all these imbalances will simply enfuriate them.

Faction balance - Overpowered Vanu camps Esamir so they can spam overpowered Magriders. NC and TR leaves for Indar. whoever is losing that fight goes to Amerish. So you got a 3 different faction concentrated on 3 different continents. Then, all 3 factions will switch continents for easy capping on empty bases, rinse and repeat.

Gameplay balance - Air units need to be nerfed or be more expensive. I've never used air units before because I prefer infantry, but these units get too much kills and advantage.

Small/Medium base spawn rooms needs retooling to allow infantry to get out and not get farmed by air or mechanized units as soon as they step out. Give them 3 double-width doors. Open up the roof with shields so players shoot the hoovering aircraft right above the room while their nose is pointing just outside the door.

They can grab all the players they can with these promos but they will simply leave once they realise the game balance is out of whack.