Warning, very unpopular opinion! Why kill-cam desperately needs to return

[Wahooo]

WHO THE HELL ARE THE PLAYERS YOU ARE TRYING TO HELP AND WHY DO THEY MATTER?

Originally Posted by Rolfski

Problem is that the average, casual player probably doesn't bother to dive into a feature like this. He just gives this game a try, gets farmed all the time by hardcore vets that want this game become even more hardcore and quits in frustration.

^^^^^
If they can't be arsed to use a feature to help them learn, and obviously dont' have the mental capacity to figure out how to stand back and watch for the massive bright tracers after they, or someone around them died, why do they deserve to be spoon fed such critical information?

Farming ok, camping ok... camping to farm not ok? You are making no sense. As a sniper I rely on the ability to sometimes get to a good spot where I CAN camp... if it is a good spot then I will be farming, but farming with a purpose. You know killing heavies with RL so my tanks are ok, killing snipers so my heavies with RL stay alive and shoot their tanks. Sometimes I go to great lengths to get to these spots and do what I can to try and stay hidden and keep people guessing. I play smart and do what I can to shoot first anyone I think might have the ability to find me... BEFORE they find me. To think my position is compromised the first time I kill someone? No thank you not for me.

For the players that REALLY need this as a feature as much as you want to say they do? I can't see them gaining as much as the players that don't need it to whom this type of things becomes a MAJOR advantage.

[Angrytortoise]

lol it's a good thing I get bored at the office. incoming wall of text haha.

Originally Posted by Rolfski

You said it yourself, the game has already many artificial elements that aid you. Kill-cam is just another element in that row, which really makes me think why people hyper-react so much on this one.
What made kill-cam in COD such a traumatizing experience that people are so raging about it? For me personally, it was a great feature in COD that really improved my game play. It never destroyed my tactical play, never felt to me that I couldn't go stealth, never gave me the feeling it revealed my "secrets". If anything, it made me stay more mobile, which is not a bad thing.

Kill Camera is not just another "artificial element" akin to tracer fire or HUD damage indicators. The only one of the examples that I listed which I'd even really drop in the category of artificial interface is the damage indicators on your HUD but really that's just to compensate for the games inability to provide you the sensory information of where your getting shot. It has a clear purpose of filling the role of identifying an attacker via a physical indicator of getting hit, something you would be able to do in real life which you can't do in a videogame (ie ouch I got shot in the back of the leg so he fired from behind me) the game can't make me feel the ouch so it gives me the display; these are functions essential for simulating sensory information. a kill-cam doesn't add to sensory immersion it takes away from it.

Secondly, I don't really see how this is hyper/over reacting to the concept of kill-cams, a lot of people have given logical arguments why they think it's a bad idea; but I havn't seen too many people getting emotional over it or anything lol. It's not that they were mentally scarred by playing games with killcams, it's simply that they don't believe it belongs in Planetside and while you may have enjoyed the kill cam function and never found that it inhibited your gameplay experience doesn't mean that it doesn't affect others (hell I used to play a ton of CoD and I can think of thousands of times where I got an easy kill on an opponent who had just caught me by surprise because I saw where he was on the killcam); it's a fact people play differently and for different reasons; the kill cam is a feature that has a notable negative impact on some of these players while bringing very little in the way of necessary depth.

Finally you have to look at how it would affect competitive play; I mean to start with you have a feature that punishes a player for winning an engagement which in of itself is derp, and then you have removing tactical positioning and ambush techniques. In a game like Call of Duty where you're restricted to a self-contained 20ish minute match with sporadic spawn locations the gameplay is by necessity much more hectic and altering, your team of 6-9 players is almost never holding a static front, even at the pro level it's pretty much just a giant shitshow half the time so you're constantly relocating because the enemy spawns are constantly adjusting, it actively/intrinsically promotes a close quarters run & gun playstyle.

Planetside is a whole different ball game where you regularly have large static fronts where battles can last hours along a front that may only shift 50 meters from where it began and it has much deeper/long term strategic goals as well as room for varied styles of gameplay. Should a sniper who picks off some nosey infantry getting too close to a key unscouted sunderer position be a waste of time because he could see the sunderer on his screen? Kinda lame in my opinion.

As for you concern about new players.. Well I can understand them being confused about strategic objectives, how to spawn vehicles, and general unfamiliarity with how to interface with the environment/where to go etc..sure..but a kill cam won't solve that. As for the actual combat...pretty damn basic to be honest, there's a red team, a blue team, and a purple team, you have a gun, when you shoot at stuff it gets hurt, if I see a hail of bullets coming from a hill at me I know somebody in a hill is shooting at me and I better get somewhere he cant see me, get sniped by someone you can't see..ok I know that's not a safe place to stand...that's all basic common sense lolol, if that's whats holding back the player base you're referring to it's not the games fault. I've personally introduced a few people to PS2 and while they might take a while to get used to the gunplay/objectives/interface there really wasn't that huge of a curve.

[Timealude]

I dont see how adding a kill cam would help. You can die from pretty much anything in this game. If you get killed by someone with a shotgun, most likely they are moving and you couldnt have prevented it anyways.

[Wahooo]

We should also probably have the IFF's on all the time rather than spotting. That would help new players. OH, we should also have the IFF indicators visible through walls that would also help new players. OH OH OH... also the hit arc that we already have, should turn yellow if an enemy's gun is pointed at you.

Yeah... a little trolling but as far as i'm concerned not any different than kill cams.

[BlaxicanX]

Kill-cams aren't necessary because this isn't an arena shooter where killing individual people matters. You're walking down the road, your head explodes, the kill-cam shows that the guy who shot you is hiding in the cliffs above. Okay. Who cares? He's just one guy out of a hundred enemies in that base. You won't even have time to get a vendetta against that guy because you'll be too busy getting killed by his 50 allies who are right in your face. Even if you did have the time to hunt this lone camper, the chances are that he'll have either moved or have been killed by YOUR 50 allies by the the time you've respawned anyway. It's hard to be "sneaky" in planetside because 1. almost all of your shots are tracers, meaning any shot you make is going to be seen by 20 enemies , and 2. every shot you make paints you on the radar. So if you cap one guy from a distance, congratulations, there's three enemy infiltrators aiming at you now.

It's a pointless mechanic for this game.

[Canaris]

I think bro as you can see from the cross sample of players here on PS-U the killcam ain't popular and wouldn't get a very warm reception if this mini tsunami of hate is anything to go by

Got to say I'm not a fan of them either and I was rather vocal in their removal during development. I just don't think they benefit a game like PS2.

[Shamrock]

I'm totally against the idea of kill cams, but I would welcome a temporary one from level 1 to 10 so new players would have a slight crutch helping them transition into the game.

[Gatekeeper]

I'm in favour of some form of kill cam overall. So, I've tried to summarise common objections to kill cams below, and then provide some counter-arguments, or ways of minimising these problems:

1) It would prevent snipers being effective by revealing their location.

As people have already pointed out at length in this thread, experienced players tend to have good situational awareness, and often being killed by a sniper (or seeing a team-mate die to one) is enough to give away the sniper's rough position. That doesn't make sniping obsolete, because the important part is getting the shot. After that, maybe you displace, maybe you just rely on the battlefield being too busy/dangerous for them to come get you, or maybe you just bet that you (or your buddies) will kill them if they do. Or maybe you're just somewhere they can't get to. Whatever.

The point being that snipers are never really completely hidden after they fire their first shot, and if the kill-cam is implemented in a careful way (revealing rough direction the shot came from, for example - rather than exact position) then it would help new players know where death is coming from, but wouldn't really change much else.

2) It would reveal exact numbers and disposition of enemy forces, especially at key locations like AMS Sunderers, choke-points or capture points.

Instead of a kill-cam that shows the exact position and surroundings of your killer, we could have a system where the camera just rotates towards them (perhaps with a small zoom), or maybe a 'victim cam' that shows you your last few seconds of life in slow-mo, and gives you a chance to see the shots coming in, or the mine you stepped on. Maybe both? Maybe an option? (which would let people just turn it off if they find it annoying).

Point is, if there's a problem with traditional kill-cams, that doesn't mean we can't add something to help new players learn the ropes.

3) As a veteran, I don't need a kill cam.

Although veterans would benefit less from a kill-cam, this isn't really an argument against them. If you can be found by veterans anyway, but new players will fall prey to you over and over, then all you're really doing is preying on the weak - and making their experience with the game a hell of a lot less fun in the process.

Is this the community we want to be? A bunch of veterans hiding in hard-to-find nooks, farming noobs and chuckling to ourselves about how clever we are as we drive them to other games?

4) It would reduce the game's skill ceiling.

While situational awareness and stealth are key skills in PS2, this wouldn't eliminate them (especially if the kill-cam is present in some limited form, as suggested above). Knowing (roughly) where the enemy was after you die is a world away from spotting them before they kill you.

Also, forcing ambushers and campers to displace or defend themselves more often just makes these more challenging, skilful tactics for veterans to employ. And doesn't it make sense for the skill burden to rest with us, rather than with new players?

5) The game is so easy to learn that there's simply no need to help new players.

If you think that, you're kidding yourself. Even if you found it easy to learn, a lot of players really don't. PS2 is a complicated game - try talking a new player through it some time, and you'll probably see what I mean. As veterans we should be finding ways of bringing new players in to the game, helping them to learn it and encouraging them to stay. Being elitist about it is ultimately self-defeating.

6) The game needs veteran players more than it needs new players, so helping new players at the expense of veterans is a bad idea.

We're all here because we came through those early battles and kept going, so we've all learned how the game works and we don't need help any more. But for every veteran PS2 player, there are several who tried it and found it confusing and frustrating and ultimately gave up. As we saw in PS1, whittling the population down little by little to an ultra-elite hard-core of veterans is not good for the game. We need fresh blood! Every multi-player game does.

Sure, lets not make changes that will drive off veterans in droves - but if we can come up with a compromise that makes the game less intimidating/frustrating for new players without ruining things for vets, then that's got to be a good idea.

tl;dr - Helping new players is good for everyone, so let's come up with a compromise solution that helps new players but doesn't ruin the game for vets.

[Sunrock]

Originally Posted by Gatekeeper

6) The game needs veteran players more than it needs new players, so helping new players at the expense of veterans is a bad idea.

I truly wish more people realized this.

Besides the transition from noob to veteran is not that hard and goes very fast if people better understood the value of joining established Outfits in the game. So if any one whats to do something to help the noobs help them organize. No game mech in the world can be better then players helping players to learn the game.

Originally Posted by PredatorFour

Are you for real ?????? Saying camping is a problem in an arena shooter i can perfectly understand but in a shooter where there is objectives on a massive scale?? It's insane to say camping is a problem in planetside!

"oh look at them campers holding the objective! We need to change that!" ..or
"look at them campers holding that bottleneck stopping our massive TR zerg from going through!"

It's like going back in time and assaulting a castle...."stop camping the walls we can't get in!"

Like someone said earlier this is a troll thread, i'm out!

Yea those that seriously QQ over campers in PS2 have no fucking clue what they are talking about. I even wonder if any one can talk about sad topic with a strait face.

PS: Every game is not for every one. If we try to make every game likable by every one we will just end up making games that no one likes. So keep the kill-cam out of PS2 because we who play it does not like it and the reality is that value of it is very small to newbs anway.

[Roderick]

I have never been a supporter of the kill cam. It always reveals more than it ever should and just takes the "covert" experience out of an FPS game.

[Dragonskin]

This game needs kill cams as badly as it needs aimbot hackers.

[Angrytortoise]

Kill-Cam is a horrible idea, put plainly players should not be rewarded for having poor situational awareness. The "lets remove an aspect of combat for the benefit of new player adjustment" is just a bad line of thought; you could easily replace "kill-cam" with something like "autoaim" following that line of reasoning.

Besides you already have visual indicators as to where your being fired upon from via tracer fire/sound, and damage visual indication on your screen (red circle fragment damage indicator when you get hit which is common place in your vanilla shooter and anyone who's ever played a round of CoD should be familiar with). All the tools are there to be utilized; no point replacing them with an unnecessary crutch that removes or at least blatantly hampers legitimate tactical options in the game.

The only way kill cams would have a positive impact would be on a time delayed release where you could analyze your deaths after the fact, and for the lols factor on retarded deaths. somewhere between an hour and a day delayed so it doesn't give the viewer a tactical advantage in the immediate but honestly don't really think it's needed.

[Ertwin]

Originally Posted by Angrytortoise

The only way kill cams would have a positive impact would be on a time delayed release where you could analyze your deaths after the fact, and for the lols factor on retarded deaths. somewhere between an hour and a day delayed so it doesn't give the viewer a tactical advantage in the immediate but honestly don't really think it's needed.

That would actually be really cool. It would cover all the reasons Rolfski has for wanting a kill cam, but with none of the downsides.

[Sunrock]

Originally Posted by Ertwin

That would actually be really cool. It would cover all the reasons Rolfski has for wanting a kill cam, but with none of the downsides.

It would but it would mean SOE needs to pay for allot of new servers to store that info on too.... So I don't think it's realistic.

[Chaff]

.
If you want Killcam feedback. Perhaps it can be provided in an after-the-fact type manner....like two posts prior mentioned.....

....go to VR, sit in a "virtual theatre (with pop corn ?) and watch you previous death(s) since you logged on as your current character. Perhpas require the player to stay in VR another 5 minutes to prevent taking advantage of any killcam info. While in VR "Killcam Theatre", you are unable to access any voice, keyboard, communication....

Would something along this line work for the commuinity ?

...perhpas grant players under BR10 some minor-to-modest XP while watching ? Hell, a BR 100 could watch Killcam footage, but only as a learning tool.
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