Mines staying active when switching class

[Captain1nsaneo]

Solution: Persistent mines but quantity and quality are locked behind cert barriers. To plant a goodly sized field you would need to invest points into the engy tree. This gives engineers freedom to play how they want and will prevent CE spam by players who do not focus on the engy tree.

[Talek Krell]

Originally Posted by Captain1nsaneo

cert barriers.

A cert barrier is just a timer that has to tick down before everybody will have tossed a couple of points into the tree to get some free kills every once in a while.

I think the solution to this should be:
1. Make the mines disappear 2 or 3 minutes after class switch or logout (to catch people who disconnect).

2. Make engineer fun to play. You guys are all talking about "having to stay an engineer" like it's some sort of a prison sentence. If you don't find it fun then don't do it. If no one finds it fun then the class design needs to be revised until some people find it fun.

3. Make mines easier to deploy. Given how much of a pain in the ass it was to set up a mine field in PS1 (lay 6 mines, run back to the term, lay 6 mines....) there probably needs to be an easier way anyway. Make it so that mines only consume a small amount of nanites, make it so that the engineer lays down some sort of automatic mine generator instead of laying the mines manually, whatever you need to do.

[Knocky]

i see no problem with laying mines and suiting up in a MAX.

We can do this right now after all.

[Hmr85]

I believe mines should stay up for 10 to 20 minutes after a player swaps to another class. I also believe a good way to help take care of excessive spam would be limit how many can be deployed. So If I can put 20 down and I put a extra one down it removes one of my mines elsewhere. Same as it was in PS1.

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by Talek Krell

A cert barrier is just a timer that has to tick down before everybody will have tossed a couple of points into the tree to get some free kills every once in a while.

No, it does help. Only a certain percentage will play long term, and they will be replaced by a constant influx of new players, so while passionate vets may one day get to that point, the average player will not.

Originally Posted by Talek Krell

I think the solution to this should be:
1. Make the mines disappear 2 or 3 minutes after class switch or logout (to catch people who disconnect).

2. Make engineer fun to play. You guys are all talking about "having to stay an engineer" like it's some sort of a prison sentence. If you don't find it fun then don't do it. If no one finds it fun then the class design needs to be revised until some people find it fun.

3. Make mines easier to deploy. Given how much of a pain in the ass it was to set up a mine field in PS1 (lay 6 mines, run back to the term, lay 6 mines....) there probably needs to be an easier way anyway. Make it so that mines only consume a small amount of nanites, make it so that the engineer lays down some sort of automatic mine generator instead of laying the mines manually, whatever you need to do.

I think this is a reasonable solution though.

[PredatorFour]

Mines should stick around like in PS 1. Then we have some flexibility in our play styles which is being restricted with the new class system.

[ThGlump]

Easy solution to prevent mine spam. If they kill someone while you are on another class you dont get kill/xp. This will prevent everyone to spam them and then switch to other class to get more kills from them, but allowing some players to use them for increasing defense not caring about kills.

[Shogun]

i don´t see any problem with mines staying on the field at all.

it it aint broken, dont fix it!!!!!
the ps1 system works fine and i don´t remember any flamy discussions about changing this in ps1. you could lay ce and do whatever you wanted afterwards.

the support part of the engineer role is already cut down to almost useless state. don´t make deployables useless, this will be the death of the engineer role, and nobody will bother laying any deployables at all.

dedicated engis used to spend some really big amounts of time to CE up strategical bases. would you do this, if you knew all your work will be deleted as soon as you switch to another class?
leaving the cont or the game should be the only decay inducing situations to prevent too much littering.

[headcrab13]

I didn't play an Engie all the time in PS1, but I was always annoyed when I spent 10 minutes mining an AMS or tower, and then suddenly got sniped in the face while all my mines evaporated.

Mines should stay deployed after death, but disappear when switching to any other class.

[Stardouser]

I'm seeing a lot of people who think that if you spend a lot of your time deploying mines, they should instantly poof just because you respawned as a different class in order to respond to changing battlefield conditions. That's a difficult attitude to understand.

[GuyShep]

Mines should go off after being placed or after the player changes class, but only after a significant amount of time has passed, say a week or so.

Engineers shouldn't be forced to stay Engineer in order to maintain their mines, but should be encouraged, say perhaps increasing mine damage on any mines that happen to explode if the player who placed them was playing as an engineer during the explosion.

[Grognard]

I see a lot of good ideas I can agree to...

The premise, it seems to me is... limit mine spam, without degrading the utility of the Engineer class. With that in mind, I'd agree to:

1. Limit on totality of mines layed. However, it needs to be balanced with the fact that we have huge bases, less continents, and more players, but perhaps less engineers due to class system.

2. No immediate loss of mines upon class change, rather a loss of "kill" if you change class. You maintain the empire utility, but limit the killwhore minespam, while rewarding the dedicated engineers.

3. No immediate loss of mines upon logoff, rather a duration time limit, I favor 1 hour. However, and to that, degradation... less damage, and/or misfire likelyhood as the timer approaches termination altogether.

[ThGlump]

Originally Posted by Shogun

i don´t see any problem with mines staying on the field at all.

it it aint broken, dont fix it!!!!!
the ps1 system works fine and i don´t remember any flamy discussions about changing this in ps1. you could lay ce and do whatever you wanted afterwards.

True you lay CE and you go do play as a MAX no problem. The thing is you still had your CE cert even as a MAX.
This isnt ps1. In PS1 you had to cert CE so you can lay mines, and if you had that you had less certs for another stuff (before they broke it with BR40). And you could change it only every 8 hours.
In PS2 everyone will have access to mines anytime, no restriction, just spawn for a few minutes as a engi. Thats the problem. You dont have sacrifice any certs, any equip, to spam mines, just some time.

If you take it to PS1 its like you had another character just for laying mines (some did), but those mines dissapeared after 15 min when you relloged.

Another thing is scale - possibility to have 40000 mines laying around is kinda scary

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by ThGlump

True you lay CE and you go do play as a MAX no problem. The thing is you still had your CE cert even as a MAX.
This isnt ps1. In PS1 you had to cert CE so you can lay mines, and if you had that you had less certs for another stuff (before they broke it with BR40). And you could change it only every 8 hours.
In PS2 everyone will have access to mines anytime, no restriction, just spawn for a few minutes as a engi. Thats the problem. You dont have sacrifice any certs, any equip, to spam mines, just some time.

If you take it to PS1 its like you had another character just for laying mines (some did), but those mines dissapeared after 15 min when you relloged.

Another thing is scale - possibility to have 40000 mines laying around is kinda scary

There's got to be a way to balance it without forcing people to be enslaved to the engineer class.

What I think is this: Laying mines should be a strategic job you do for your side, and not a thing individual players can do just to lay out traps for free stat padding kills.

How about your empire gets a certain limited resource of mines shared from a kind of common pool? And what about you get some kind of support points for deploying them, but you receive nothing extra for kills? I mean, the game should keep track of the kills your mines received, but not for the purpose of giving you lots of extra points.

[dsi]

Mines aren't a short term weapon, why treat them like one?