Bailing mechanics

[sylphaen]

Hi everyone,

I am starting a simple thread to exchange opinions on how each of us thinks bailing from vehicles should work in PS2. Feel free to share !

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I'll start with my opinions: I felt that the bailing mechanism in PS1 was balanced in most vehicles and broken on some others.

What I liked:
- entering and exiting vehicles is not instant
- bailing animation when you bailed gave a chance for the defender to prepare or keep an advantage on the bailer: this made bailing more risky to use offensively.
- heavy vehicles forced you to have medium armor (i.e. less equipment) and would not allow the driver to bail.
- lighter vehicles like buggies benefited greatly from allowing RECO/bailing and fit the role of a light reconaissance vehicles were troopers have to get in/out often. It balanced their weakness in armor and made them less of a coffin.

What I did NOT like:
- air vehicles who could:
a. try to farm you
b. bail on you if they failed and have a chance for an easy kill with the vehicle explosion
c. pull out their heavy assault weapon if all else failed. By then, you were already quite damaged and made the whole slow and excrutiating death all the more frustrating.

I feel that air vehicles, for being already so powerful, should have been allowed to bail but be limited to standard armor and no-HA.

- the ATV bails with lag: the teleporting glitch made it just suck. I also feel that being able to shoot at the driver instead of having the ATV soaking damage would have made this more fun. It would have been nice on buggies too.

- Bailing at high speed without taking damage from it also gave kind of strange dynamics: ram/bail/finish him. (FYI, I used those so I'm not trying to criticize anyone using those, just saying it feels off)



Other thoughts:
- I played to BF2142 again a bit to guess what a mix of PS and BF would be and instantly getting in/out of vehicles is a very f***** frustrating mechanic, I find. Especially with the instant ownership switch of the vehicle. I find that PS1 was very well designed on that regarded:
a. first there was the hack time delay before switch of ownership: you could prevent it but it was also subtle enough that you be taken by surprise.
b. then, there was a small animation time as you got kicked out of the vehicle and the hacker got in. In a big fight, it gave a short for everyone around to realize that something was wrong yet it was short enough to give the hacker plenty of time to be rewarded for his skill.
- The faster TTK in BF2142 can be frustrating at times. I sometimes don't even realize what killed me unless I look at the log. I think a short TTK would feel very very frustrating in a large battle like those we had in PS.
- The titan assault play is still fun. It would definitely need to be larger in PS if such an idea is brought in the game. Short TTK, FF on and small corridors = cleaning a hallway with one shotgun clip.


As I said, just some thoughts ! Thank you for reading !

[Bags]

You have rexo. They have agile. You do the math.

Regardless, even if they couldn't bail they can just crash into you.

Your biggest complaint is with netcode, really.

[Traak]

If you bail within half a mile of the ground, your NanoRocketBoosterOMGPack lowers you to the Earth.

If you bail a half mile or higher, your rocket pack runs out and you start falling to the surface at an accelerated pace.

You can't draw a weapon, in fact, before you hit the ground or splatter on it, you can't do anything but enjoy the view.

The rocket pack slowly lowers you to the surface while giving off a telltale triple flare visible from across the continent.

Since this takes up all the room on your back, you can carry a knife with you, and nothing else, or maybe a pistol with one clip in it. No rifle, no flamethrower, no sniper uber OMGzz weapons. Nothing that can be used to initiate the uber-gheyness Orbital Strike, assuming they hate the playerbase enough to include it in this game.

If you are a pilot, your'e a pilot. The plane is your weapon. If you don't want to get hurt, then stay in the plane.

Pilots shouldn't be able to jump out to engage in grunt combat any more than a grunt should be able to lose his shotgun, and remedy it by whipping out a plane and flying away.

[Mastachief]

Should be ejection seats, so it never fails to work. Takes ages to land and a few seconds to exit the pod/seat.

[Mirror]

Lots of players will have an opinion on this as Im sure they will have been farmed by many players bailing from aircraft or just aircraft in general.

I'll just point this out. It doesnt matter what is improved, nerfed, buffed, simplified, given out for free or removed from the game because bad or average players will still get farmed by the better players. Rather than complaining about it do the right thing and focus on improving.

[SKYeXile]

Originally Posted by Mirror

Lots of players will have an opinion on this as Im sure they will have been farmed by many players bailing from aircraft or just aircraft in general.

I'll just point this out. It doesnt matter what is improved, nerfed, buffed, simplified, given out for free or removed from the game because bad or average players will still get farmed by the better players. Rather than complaining about it do the right thing and focus on improving.

Agiles with HA owning my HA/rexo/PS, ITS NOT FAIR.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by Mirror

bad or average players will still get farmed by the better players.

That doesn't change the fact that bailure was a broken gameplay mechanic.

Wow. My MAX suit is close to death. I better bail out of it in my Heavy Assault gear now.

Nah. Bailure is failure.

[Lonehunter]

The ONLY concern I have at this point is being able to bail when my craft is at low health. If they put another damn lock on bailing I got 10 people who are gonna say "fuck it" after I just got them excited from seeing good screens.

If you can't bail at low life then why allow bailing at all? It only encourages hot dropping and wasting a vehicle.

I can see there should be ways to balance it though, while dropping you can use no weapons, you must be very visible (the blue streak from bailing in PS1 was avoidable to prevent detection). I also think we should fall slower, helps us guide our landing and gives that enemy pilot 1 last chance to take us out. Parachutes seem to archaic for PS, but I'm sure something could work.

[Xyntech]

I like the ejection seat idea for aircraft, especially if the pod is vulnerable to being destroyed mid air before it lands. Gives the pilot one last ditch option to try and survive, but in a lot of situations they will be as good as dead anyways.

No more easy bailing onto bases and towers either. Leave the hot dropping to galaxies.

I think PS2 is already moving in the right direction though, with the fact that only rexo will be able to use HA. Combined with the most important part as Bags mentioned, improved netcode, I think the ability to abuse netcode will go down.

As a pilot, I'd prefer not to have enemy pilots bail the moment they started to lose a dog fight and chase me off with a striker.

[EASyEightyEight]

I'm still for removing bailing, but instead having pilots lose control and they crash land. Depending on variables, they could climb out of a scrap heap with a few bumps and bruises, or be char-broiled alive in the satisfying explosion sparked upon impact with the ground. Would make things a bit more epic for the downed pilot in my opinion anyway.

Good news is, either way, I wouldn't expect pilots to be bailing with a rocket launcher or heavy weapon this time around. At best they may be packing a typical shotgun or rifle, making them minimal threats to the victor. Easy pickings.

[FastAndFree]

The Ejection Seat should be a piece of equipment that either degrades the performance of the plane (reduced agility due to mass or less ammo capacity or whatever) or replaces something actually useful for combat.

That way those who want to use their aircav as a flying taxi can do so, while those of us who want to use them for what they were actually meant will get an edge. (Or just remove it outright, but I guess that's wishful thinking)

With respawning crews an ejection system does not serve a combat purpose anyway - strategically it makes more sense to have the pilots die the moment their craft is disabled/destroyed so they can be back in the air faster.

edit
Then again, I guess it is inevitable that those who want to piss their opponents off by denying them BEP/killcount/satisfaction will find a way to do so anyway (example, a few days ago a TR Reaver pilot must have had his ejection seat fail, because he flew his craft into the ground and rocketspammed himself to death. You know who you are.), so anti-bailing measures would mostly only inconvenience the "rapid response spec ops whatever" kind of aircav users

[Dahlian]

Bailing out is very nice for immersion. One of the reasons I liked good ol Battlezone was the whole experience of being catapulted into the air when my hover craft exploded.

I could see it as a customizing option for most vehicles. I don't think it should be free or standard option. It definitely needs a negative edge to it.

[CutterJohn]

Not really a fan of bailing. Its not like any other vehicle type got the instant chance at living. Sure you could bail out of ground vehicles, but then you're just a softy in the field right next to your dead vehicle, and most ground vehicles were perfectly capable of handling that. Most air and AA, on the other hand, were not. Its like a get out of the enemies sights free card, or even more annoying, deny the enemy the kill card.

So.. If you want to keep bailing, thats fine, but imo make it take a few seconds to land, during which time AA can track you just fine. Flak impacts you. And once you land, its no instant switch to offense. Its then much harder to use to deny kills, harder to use as an instant transformation into an AA MAX hunter, but can still be used by fast response.

[Traak]

In other words, deny the rewards of cowardice, and the cowardly actions will not be as prevalent.

[Xyntech]

Killing vehicles should also count for a lot.

Maybe killing a vehicle within 5 seconds of it being occupied counts as the exact same amount of XP as you would get for killing it with someone in it and also counts towards your kills. At that point, you may actually be hoping a pilot bails so that you can double up on kills and xp.

After 5 seconds of no occupants, the vehicle no longer counts towards your kills and starts slowly reducing in how much xp you get for killing it until it reaches the base level of experience that you get for killing any empty vehicle. Maybe about a minute of being empty until it reaches that minimum?

Edit: would also be funny, to fuck with K/D whores who are bailing to try to avoid getting a death, if having your aircraft destroyed within 5 seconds of you exiting it still counted towards your number of deaths. You are still alive, so it isn't quite as bad as dying, but you still don't get to keep that inflated K/D ratio