Remove Sundy AMS

[Crator]

Originally Posted by Kerrec

If you balance a game based on certs and some arbitrary BR, then the game may be balanced early on. But once the game matures, and almost everyone has that arbitrary BR, then we'd be right back to where we are now.

Agreed, the ratio of available cert options to amount of BR that gives points to spend on the certs are used to manage this. There were only 20 or so BR in PS1 in the beginning. The amount of points needed in BR got higher and higher as you went up in rank and was much more stringent in PS1 (i.e. it took a long time to gain enough cert points via BR to get everything you wanted).

[Redshift]

Battles happen halfway between the nearest spawns, if you couldn't put an AMS in a CY then you'd never take a base. You'd have team A respawning 50 meters away every 10 seconds and team b respawning a 5 min drive away.

[Blynd]

If you have a sundy fitted out for AMS role then you loose the weapons but can still carry passengers and its your risk to get to the front line /base alive. This would make ams sundies a bit more vulnerable and make people think a bit rather then having 7 sundies at a small outpost and only 1 Can deploy as AMS so 6 are basically wasted. The ams sundie and gal both need looking at and their roles looking at as the gal is so under used

[Sunrock]

Originally Posted by Riekopo

All this debate about Galaxy spawning had me thinking. Maybe Sunderers should not even be able to spawn players. The ease of spawning makes the game feel like Battlefield or COD. Death would have more consequences and be less cheap if there were no mobile spawns. Players would value their lives more and be more inclined to stick together and organize so as to survive. The Sunderer and Galaxy would become what they really are, player transports. Facility sieges would become much more difficult for the attacker, making defense easier. The frontlines would solidify and change much less rapidly so players would feel like their actions had a lasting impact.

I wish there was a research server where ideas like this could be tested.

Sounds to me like you where not around in beta when the galaxy had an AMS...

[Badjuju]

Originally Posted by Riekopo

All this debate about Galaxy spawning had me thinking. Maybe Sunderers should not even be able to spawn players. The ease of spawning makes the game feel like Battlefield or COD. Death would have more consequences and be less cheap if there were no mobile spawns. Players would value their lives more and be more inclined to stick together and organize so as to survive. The Sunderer and Galaxy would become what they really are, player transports. Facility sieges would become much more difficult for the attacker, making defense easier. The frontlines would solidify and change much less rapidly so players would feel like their actions had a lasting impact.

I wish there was a research server where ideas like this could be tested.

Negative ghost Ryder. Players would spend most of their time traveling and nothing would get taken as reinforcements are always needed. You also remove an aspect of the game which has a tactical significance when the meta game is already week enough.

[Badjuju]

Originally Posted by Riekopo

All this debate about Galaxy spawning had me thinking. Maybe Sunderers should not even be able to spawn players. The ease of spawning makes the game feel like Battlefield or COD. Death would have more consequences and be less cheap if there were no mobile spawns. Players would value their lives more and be more inclined to stick together and organize so as to survive. The Sunderer and Galaxy would become what they really are, player transports. Facility sieges would become much more difficult for the attacker, making defense easier. The frontlines would solidify and change much less rapidly so players would feel like their actions had a lasting impact.

I wish there was a research server where ideas like this could be tested.

Players would spend most of their time traveling and nothing would get taken as reinforcements are always needed. You also remove an aspect of the game which has a tactical significance when the meta game is already week enough. Infantry would also be even less significant than it currently is which would be a step in the wrong direction.

We had AMSs in ps1 and deaths mattered more due to the nature of the meta game. This is mostly due to the outcomes of battles teetered on objectives that provided instant consequences or rewards (hack and hold, down able spawn tubes, debilitating gen) but were deep within bases. Unfortunately with a burning flag system one person surviving an onslaught or one person breaching a defense does not have the same significance as there is allot of time to recover as the flag slowly ticks.

Point being there are other aspects of the game which can be looked at to impact the value of staying alive or getting a kill with out simply making people's lives miserable for dying.

Oh, and we had amazing front lines in PS1 as well. This was partly due to the lattice system (not making the argument its necessary) but also thanks to a more open continents similar to PS2s Esamir or the bottom left quadrant of Indar. Rolling hills with scattered mountains and a few bridges for good choke points, oh and more areas with dense trees to allow for infantry advancements; as oppsosed to funneling troops through the map with the terrain (Amerish and much of Indar). We do see good front lines on essamir and the green areas of Indar while no one fights on Amerish so hopefully the devs pick up on this.

P.s. on an ipad so forgive me if strange out of place words pop up thanks to autocorrect.

[Badjuju]

Originally Posted by Blynd

If you have a sundy fitted out for AMS role then you loose the weapons but can still carry passengers and its your risk to get to the front line /base alive. This would make ams sundies a bit more vulnerable and make people think a bit rather then having 7 sundies at a small outpost and only 1 Can deploy as AMS so 6 are basically wasted. The ams sundie and gal both need looking at and their roles looking at as the gal is so under used

Could be worth looking into, it would be nice to see more variation. Only question is would they be too vulnerable? However I don't see people warding off attackers with in the AMSs too much. It could force more team play as well since people would have to get out of the sundies to defend them. I would be all for testing this to give the sundie more diverse roles and possibly more tactical game play.

This may even pave the way for the return of the cloaked AMS. Right now it would be silly with so many on the field, but if they were utilized less and were more vulnerable I could see it happen. Maybe utilize it in the armor slot so you trade armor for the cloak.

As far as gals go, their role is far less significant due to the nature of the objectives, particularly the burning flag system. I preach it all the time but the hack and hold system along with other ways to cripple a base leaves you with a far more dynamic meta game. The quick hitting attack which the gal drop isn't nearly as impactful or terrifying as it was in PS1. The ticking flag gives all the time in the world to recover if possible. You can't swoop in for a clutch rescuer by stoping a hack or bringing up spawn tubes. Dropping offensively can swing things in your favor but with the burning flag system, if they have more players they will probably recover, especially once spawn rooms are not so campable.

Burning flags and almost no primary structure to bases favors the Zerg and significantly cripples the effectiveness of precision attacks. Unfortunately with current state of the game if your not zerging via gal drop then they are nothing more than floating buses. The panic associated with the gal drop is gone, and only large outfits can be slightly effective with them currently.

[Ruffdog]

Nah. frankly, people in-game should value their lives less not more.

[Rivenshield]

Originally Posted by Kerrec

Add a generator inside the base somewhere. The generator powers a device that prevents an AMS from spawning people, within a specific range.

That way attackers will have to cross a no man's land to get to the walls, then destroy a generator that will allow them to move up the AMS.

That is an excellent idea. +1.

[GuyShep]

Honestly, an AMS/Sunderer split would really help. Give the AMS a really high price, while lowering the price of the Sunderer. It'd at least convince people to use the Sunderer in more various ways.

[Rivenshield]

Originally Posted by GuyShep

Honestly, an AMS/Sunderer split would really help. Give the AMS a really high price, while lowering the price of the Sunderer. It'd at least convince people to use the Sunderer in more various ways.

Yeah. It's a bit reminiscent of what happened in PS1 when they let everybody run around with BR30 and be a One Man Army. The Sundie is suffering from feature bloat. They need to divorce the fighting functionality from the support functionalty.

[Rothnang]

I don't really mind Sunderer AMS, since Sunderers are pretty easy to track down and destroy.

I actually hate spawn beacons way more than Sunderers, because people always put them down in the most ridiculous places, and their render distance is pretty short, so if they are places a small way outside the base they are impossible to see. It gets so tiresome to have to scour the antenna mast of your base for beacons every two minutes.

[Figment]

Originally Posted by Kerrec

There's a big communication problem between you and I. In your reply, I have no idea if it is my suggestion that you say "PS1 did from the start" or if you are defending your suggestion because it is how "PS1 did from the start"? I have no clue what you are trying to say by quoting me.

Most the suggestions I made were done in PS1 and created a gameplay flow that is much smoother and creates a far more natural restrictions on attackers. The AMS in PS1 was never an issue, simply because only a small percentage of players had access to them as they invested in them at the cost of not investing in something else.


If you ever played C&C Tiberian Sun, imagine a game where the most powerful super-units and super-weapons are not numerically restricted to a small percentage of the player's weaponry.

That's what PS2 currently is.

Yes, there's a big problem with base design. Denying an AMS sunderer from deploying right up against the wall of a base is something that would change "base design". It would make it a bit more defensible, for a bit longer.

It would also make it harder to destroy them. Being able to LA on top of them with Boomers (C4 for the newbees), because they place it conveniently close without having to cross an extremely short TTK crossfire is quite considerate of the attacker.

Placing them against walls just makes them siege towers. That's not a problem. The problem is how easy they can get on the walls and spread from tower to tower, not to mention the sheer length of the walls that has to be defended, while the spawns keep getting camped and are too decentralized and easy to cut off from the defenders by forcing a 360º vector attack inside the courtyard, so nobody can get to the walls to defend them in the first place.

AMS placement has virtually nothing to do with it.

Also, you keep bringing up Certs, why? Certs can be completely bypassed with a bit of real world money (Station Cash). Also, once you earn and spend them, what you bought is always there. The problem isn't Certs, it's global resources. Like you say, you blow up one Sunderer, and another one rolls up in its place. The problem is they are too available, and that's a RESOURCE problem.

Because unlimited certs and unlimited vehicle access is moronic design. I talk about certs in a restrictive manner. What we have in PS2 are not cert points, they're consumption points.

You should really have played PS1 to understand the concept of certing one thing excluding the option to cert something else becomes it becomes too costly for you to cert since you can only spend a limited amount of total points which don't grow over time after you reached the highest BR level.

PS2 doesn't restrict you, THUS it's an extremely big issue to balancing numbers of units: there are no restrictions. Resources are not a restriction, since you only need one or two per squad and you can bring 12 per squad if you want. Base benefits are not a restriction, because it's virtually impossible to deny them - by the time you deny someone tech, they just pull MBTs from the warpgate and they have almost the same travel time because the continents are so small (even though too big in relation to the outpost density to determine where they'll go and thus too big to lay ambushes).

[Figment]

Kerrec, try spending 26 points (max. limit before the incredibly stupid BR40 change) on all the certifications in here and see how much you can actually do opposed to a single player in PS2.

http://wiki.planetsidesyndicate.com/...Certifications

Particularly note how much you would NOT have. Note that WITHOUT GETTING ANY SUITS, SUPPORT TOOLS OR INFANTRY WEAPONS beyond the free basic weapons, you'd already need over 30 points to get access to all vehicles.

Meaning it's well beyond impossible to do everything and universal soldiers were a myth.



Until the GM Brewko became developer and added BR40 in 2009, which gifted ALL certifications in game free upon reaching BR40. Basically ruining the entire carefully balanced gameplay balance in a single patch. Since that change we saw a massive increase in support tools being available, a massive increase in heavy assault weaponry (shortest TTK CQC weapons), a heavy increase in MAX units (most powerful CQC units), air vehicles (fastest to move around, excellent firepower and armour which many could not afford if they wanted tanks for instance), BFRs (we all know how loved those were) and basically removed all uniqueness from characters and completely removed the need to play on alternate characters with different playstyles due to their own unique certification setup.


PS2 does that from day 1 and then went a few steps further by creating a larger amount of high firepower units, which were then made even worse by also making them solo vehicle units on top of making them available to everyone.


The consequences are obvious, they'll be spammed in massive numbers and completely dominate and overwhelm any difference in group size by sheer brute force. Which dumbs down the game incredibly both on a tactical, strategic and social level.


So yeah, it's an incredibly big issue, that I can't blame new players for since they can't comprehend as they're used to only small games where massive spam in great group size difference do not occur.

[Karragos]

Originally Posted by Riekopo

All this debate about Galaxy spawning had me thinking. Maybe Sunderers should not even be able to spawn players. The ease of spawning makes the game feel like Battlefield or COD. Death would have more consequences and be less cheap if there were no mobile spawns. Players would value their lives more and be more inclined to stick together and organize so as to survive. The Sunderer and Galaxy would become what they really are, player transports. Facility sieges would become much more difficult for the attacker, making defense easier. The frontlines would solidify and change much less rapidly so players would feel like their actions had a lasting impact.

I wish there was a research server where ideas like this could be tested.

Picture the spawn rooms when you are under siege, and how many people do not leave the rooms because they are afraid of dying. Now apply this to those same people who would have to run/fly/drive 100-2000 meters to get back into the battle. These people would probably rarely attack anything. I think your suggestion would dramatically affect combat in the game in a very negative way.