News: Matt Higby doing a Q&A at reddit!

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by Goku

The current one has too many angles for coverage.

Do a barrel roll. I hope the VTOL jets on the planes can go upside down. It'll help when flying... upside down.

[SKYeXile]

i do hope the flight engine is prettygood though and allows for some good manoeuvres, anything to end the turreting.

[hippieschuh]

well I hope its not so complicated as the one in bf2, I realy hate air vehicles in bf2.

They are terrible to control with a mouse. I loved to map the Ascend/Descend function to the thumb mouse buttons in PS1.

[Firefly]

I'd like to know about Alliance implementation, whether they plan on doing it or not and if so, what they can do. This was something they talked about in Planetside but never did.

[basti]

Any, an outfit alliance would be good stuff.

There will be big, big outfits with several different divisions doing different stuff. They will most likley split up to gain benefits.

[Firefly]

Originally Posted by basti

Any, an outfit alliance would be good stuff.

There will be big, big outfits with several different divisions doing different stuff. They will most likley split up to gain benefits.

That's currently what my Outfit is discussing - we have a couple of different divisions, and I'd like to be able to get them the maximum amount of benefits per team. However, without knowing how the outfit cert system will work, I'm reserving judgment on both outfit cert and splitting up. I do know that in WAR there was a guild that did exactly that - they used the alliance function to run multiple guilds as part of an incorporated mega-guild. They seemed to make it work.

[Higby]

Another skills tree question that we haven't gotten a chance to answer yet...

If there is any one question I would like you to answer if possible is the ease of changing classes. My point is this from your recent reddit quote

"You're never stuck, capped or locked in to anything with the PS2 cert system. Recerting isn't necessary because there's no restrictions on how many certs you can have trained at a time, just how many you can take advantage of on any given loadout."

Does this mean in some way that BR or Cert points are shared across classes? (BR 7 means BR 7 Engy/Medi/Heavy assault) So if me and my air cav group start owning this base then EVERYONE in the base can just roll AA maxes to counter us with no re-cert timer or equivalent? If so then I must point out that this will heavily influence gameplay for the worst as it is too easy to just change from BR7____ to BR7____ that easily upon spawning at a terminal..

If you're BR 10, that's on your character. Classes don't really have RANKS, they have CERTS which are locked or "gated" by the player's overall rank. So, if you're BR 10, you aren't automatically a level 10 AA Max since a level 10 AA max doesn't actually exist in a meaningful way. But, you have access to unlock level 10 AA Max CERTS, those CERTS would still require time to train and unlock.

So, while you can switch into a variety of roles, you'd be playing them completely untrained until you put some time into advancing all of them.

One final note: More advanced roles (Such as MAX or Liberator) may require advancement down a specific skill tree to unlock, for instance you may need to spend some time training Heavy Assault to unlock MAX skill trees, that way everyone can't just spawn an untrained powerful vehicle / weapon and still be very powerful with it despite not having any of the bells and whistles unlocked. This is something we're still playing with internally, we're doing a lot of iteration on these systems - when they're totally locked down you guys can expect to see a full expose on them get released.

Again, huge thank you for the questions and feedback guys... It's really awesome to have this community as a sounding board, sanity check and idea farm on some of these things.

[artifice]

Originally Posted by Higby

Another skills tree question that we haven't gotten a chance to answer yet...




If you're BR 10, that's on your character. Classes don't really have RANKS, they have CERTS which are locked or "gated" by the player's overall rank. So, if you're BR 10, you aren't automatically a level 10 AA Max since a level 10 AA max doesn't actually exist in a meaningful way. But, you have access to unlock level 10 AA Max CERTS, those CERTS would still require time to train and unlock.

So, while you can switch into a variety of roles, you'd be playing them completely untrained until you put some time into advancing all of them.

One final note: More advanced roles (Such as MAX or Liberator) may require advancement down a specific skill tree to unlock, for instance you may need to spend some time training Heavy Assault to unlock MAX skill trees, that way everyone can't just spawn an untrained powerful vehicle / weapon and still be very powerful with it despite not having any of the bells and whistles unlocked. This is something we're still playing with internally, we're doing a lot of iteration on these systems - when they're totally locked down you guys can expect to see a full expose on them get released.

Again, huge thank you for the questions and feedback guys... It's really awesome to have this community as a sounding board, sanity check and idea farm on some of these things.

Will we be limited to the number of classes we have access to? Meaning, will we be restricted to say only 3 classes and then switch between those classes at any time? or will we have access to all classes?

[Manitou]

Originally Posted by Firefly

That's currently what my Outfit is discussing - we have a couple of different divisions, and I'd like to be able to get them the maximum amount of benefits per team. However, without knowing how the outfit cert system will work, I'm reserving judgment on both outfit cert and splitting up. I do know that in WAR there was a guild that did exactly that - they used the alliance function to run multiple guilds as part of an incorporated mega-guild. They seemed to make it work.

Interesting, we may discuss this as well.

[Volw]

Matt, a small question / request.

Are outfit scores going to be calculated the same way as they were in PS1?

I'm from Renegade Legion and we held the top spot on NC Werner pretty much forever with outfits 3x - 4x times the size of us way behind us in rankings.

It would be nice if relatively small, specialised outfits would be valid yet again, instead of favouring massive, zerg outfits, like most of the MMOs sadly do.

Cheers,
Volw.

PS: I don't care about the score, it won't make my penis any larger. However with the new resource system in PS2 I would still like to know if small outfits won't get shafted! ;-)

[basti]

Originally Posted by Higby

Another skills tree question that we haven't gotten a chance to answer yet...




If you're BR 10, that's on your character. Classes don't really have RANKS, they have CERTS which are locked or "gated" by the player's overall rank. So, if you're BR 10, you aren't automatically a level 10 AA Max since a level 10 AA max doesn't actually exist in a meaningful way. But, you have access to unlock level 10 AA Max CERTS, those CERTS would still require time to train and unlock.

So, while you can switch into a variety of roles, you'd be playing them completely untrained until you put some time into advancing all of them.

One final note: More advanced roles (Such as MAX or Liberator) may require advancement down a specific skill tree to unlock, for instance you may need to spend some time training Heavy Assault to unlock MAX skill trees, that way everyone can't just spawn an untrained powerful vehicle / weapon and still be very powerful with it despite not having any of the bells and whistles unlocked. This is something we're still playing with internally, we're doing a lot of iteration on these systems - when they're totally locked down you guys can expect to see a full expose on them get released.

Again, huge thank you for the questions and feedback guys... It's really awesome to have this community as a sounding board, sanity check and idea farm on some of these things.

Neat. But i see a big problem right away: Time.
No matter what you do, at some point i will be master of all classes. This may take years, but it is possible.

edit: just to clarify: i understand that right that until i put some time onto training for a "class" (we need a better term, really!), im just able to use the basic stuff? Like, for example Magrider requires you to train lightning first?

[Volw]

Originally Posted by basti

Neat. But i see a big problem right away: Time.
No matter what you do, at some point i will be master of all classes. This may take years, but it is possible.

Yeah, but still, you will be only able to play one class at a time.

So you will be equally 'certed' against a newish person that only specialised in one class.

[Lunarchild]

Originally Posted by basti

Neat. But i see a big problem right away: Time.
No matter what you do, at some point i will be master of all classes. This may take years, but it is possible.

edit: just to clarify: i understand that right that until i put some time onto training for a "class" (we need a better term, really!), im just able to use the basic stuff? Like, for example Magrider requires you to train lightning first?

They can always make more certs you want to spec in...

[Rbstr]

I don't really see a problem with someone that's played years and years having a wide variety of specialisation, as long as it remains compartmentalised.

There's also easy remedies without instituting hard caps, like make each additional skill take longer...this can be as crazy as say: up to 45skills they train under a day, after that they creep up to months or years long.

[Firefly]

Alliances yes or no?