Are we looking the same game? Because what I'm looking at looks amazing.

[2coolforu]

Originally Posted by Bobby Shaftoe

Time is not a good limiting factor viz; huge numbers of people being CR5 in PS1 and there being a large number of BR40s, there would be even more if the game was still well populated.



Well lets see what some obvious variables of RECHARGING SHIELDS might be.

Strength of the shield (or damage mitigation)
Recharge rate of the shield
Delay before recharging

It's funny that people have said that PS2 is now more about skill, yet there was never any power difference in a brand new player and a 9 year vet, yet it's been said there's up to a 25% difference in 'bare' certs and fully specced out ones.

The PS1 BR40 had a fuckton of experience of game mechanics but his gun or vehicle was never any better than the BR1 newbie just starting the game, yet everyone whined about those 'super soldiers', whilst the PS2 'BR40' now actually have a 25% advantage on top of their game experience and it's all okey-dokey, especially when that 25% advantage when scaled up confers an even bigger advantage in actual fights.

Access to everything means there is no scarcity and no choices to be made, you've got access to everything you need for any situation you're about to enter into. There is only a 'soft limit' via resources to prevent 665 people hopping into aircav (which could be fun) which will no doubt be even more OP than in PS1 dominating the area around a base, camping the exits, having 1 galaxy land and everyone just hops out and into their prefered fully specced out class for a base assault.
The only way to stop that is make Air prohibitively expensive or AA extremely powerful (this plz) and then you get the AirChavs riddling you with 12mm and gibbing you with rocket spam on the forums for suggesting they get denied their god-given right to farm anyone that isn't 2 feet off the ground.

I'm advocating a proper combined arms, team work oriented game, with outfits working together to cover each others weaknesses, what weaknesses will there be once you've got everything? The only time this is really going to happen, is in the early life of the game when everyone (people/outfits) is still 'specialising'. People (mostly) loved the early days of PS despite it's flaws, I want PS2 to last as long as the original did but they're going to make it hard for themselves when someone joins 3 years down the line and has to fight against people with access to everything, a wealth of game experience AND having an actual 'power' advantage over them.

Bittervet Bastards may post huge diatribes like the above but that's because some have played PS1 for NINE YEARS... they see stuff being implemented like 3-ways; which led to stale fights, no lattice/off cont links; so now you have to fly your 'spec ops' right OVER the frontline and many other things that actually REMOVE options/tactics/strats from the game and you shout us down for pointing it out!

We're passionate about the game and want PS2 to be even better and so when we have concerns for the game because of design decisions that replicate 'off' things from PS1 we want to try and help point it out and if possible suggest alternatives or mitigate some of the worse aspects of it because we're looking at things in the long term. It's not a case of 'hurr we're better than you', it's a case of we've seen this before and it didn't work out well.

Dude, I played Planetside from the beginning. If everyone went aircav I'd have a field day in my skyguard, my grind would be from ear to ear if I saw a sky full of jets.

And FYI 25% scaled up doesn't make for a bigger advantage, 25% is the same proportion no matter how great the value is.

I'll also give you the fact that shields can be altered to have faster regeneration rate. But that doesn't give any grounds for what you said which was, if I go back and check;

"Oh, the HA doesn't need to heal himself, you get regenerating shields, that you will be able to spec into to no doubt boost it's value, damage reduction, recharge rate, so you can keep your gun out now instead of being helpless swapping between med app and bank. "

Well no, you'd be able to spec one of those things at a time, with the others losing power as a result. A faster recharging shield would have less power so you'd lose in a one on one fight against a person of equal skill with the same weapons and armor.

You have no idea how much you will go down into HP and require a medic, medics will be required no matter what to get people revived near the front lines.

The cert system has a lot of flexibility in it too, noone on EVE has every cert. They could make some certed abilities take months to learn, require thousands of cert points. You seem to think that everyone is going to have everything when it's not the case at all. Everyone has some semblance to the bare bones classes with absolutely no diversity or specialization, from the small amount of video we've seen you can obviously see you can change the cloaker from a ninja-style class to a shotgun class or whatnot. The lightning can be an AA vehicle, AT vehicle or all-round. People will have to spec into each one which could require months or years for each to become fully diversified.

[Bobby Shaftoe]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

And FYI 25% scaled up doesn't make for a bigger advantage, 25% is the same proportion no matter how great the value is.

Arbitrary very basic example [10v10] 10 damage per shot, 100hp vs 125hp as the only variable:



As shown, you may have a 25% INITIAL advantage in a single attribute but that conveys into a greater overall advantage as a result. You add in additional bonuses to damage, even with a corresponding reduction in hp (keeping a total 25% [eg 10%hp, 15%dmg]) means the vets could still 'instagib' even with 9 instead of 10 troops.

Remember, this is a perfect fire focus/shift target minimal overkill. In game this simplifies into faster tkk on target for the vets and slower for a newbies. 1 v 1 a newbie would never win. This ties into the longevity of the game, how long does the newbie have to fight at a power disadvantage for? In one specific role, maybe a month, what if they want to try something else, back to the disadvantage again. You then say, well all 3 Empires will have high level players to balance it out... no, that just means newbies on all Empires have to fight at a disadvantage.

You then say, 'well if the newbie is really skillful, they can still win', yes, in which case why are these bonuses in the game if skill is meant to be the deciding factor, why does a newbie have to fight at a disadvantage to someone, simply because they haven't played as long.

It's worse than the BR40 situation in PS1, a 9 year BR40 vet HA weapon was the same as a 1 minute old BR1 newbies HA weapon, yet you're all cool with the PS2 system and having better weapons because they now can't carry an ACE (counterable with jammers) or top up their health after a fight!

[GuyFawkes]

Have to agree with Bobby here , I hope the game does well but I go with the side of caution on many things . The devs need to always look at the game from a new player perspective. Whatever may appear cool and awesome at first glance can quickly turn into a turn off.
You multiply the 25% possible improvements into a 3 yr vet outfit squad and that might as well be just be god mode.

[2coolforu]

Why would one empire have all maxed out vets and one empire have none? If you want an example closer to what we would see in a real world situation then compare it in damage/weapon terms.

Player 1: 125 hp Player 2: 100 hp

Weapon damage: 16 per shot (Guess at an assault rifle damage)

Shot 1: 109/84
Shot 2: 93/68
Shot 3: 77/52
Shot 4: 61/36
Shot 5: 45/20
Shot 6: 29/4
Shot 7: 13/0

So it confers a one shot advantage, now 25% is the maximum difference we've seen quoted. This is the amount a player who's had 5 years game time can expect to get as an advantage and it gives them a one shot advantage, an advantage of about 0.1-0.2 seconds depending on the RoF of the gun.

Now obviously I've just pulled these numbers out of my ass to get an idea, but 6-7 shots from an AR sounds reasonable to me for a standard TTK.

For damage

Player 1: 100 HP Player 2: 100 HP
Damage: 020 DMG 025 DMG

Once again the vet will have a one shot advantage, not too overwhelming I think. It's a fair price to gain a large diversified customisation and certing system, I'm sure the magnitude of improvement a veteran can gain will be subject to balance during beta.

Not to mention that the cert system is going to undergo an exponential relationship if its anything like EVE, meaning you can very quickly close the gap, perhaps gaining a 20% damage increase in 1 year, whereas 25% takes 5 years. A 5% difference is nothing, changes in ping will matter far more than that.

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Ieyasu

I wasnt aware any of the team that made the original planetside were working on the second. In fact Im pretty sure its a whole new group of devs is it not?

erm, (memory failure) John Whatshisname did the ps engine and now works for NVidia and is consulting physx. hang on while I google.... John Ratcliffe

not exacrtly on the team but close (at least closer than me certainly)

[Bobby Shaftoe]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

Why would one empire have all maxed out vets and one empire have none?

You missed the part when I mentioned the relationship of this for the long term life of the game, why should a new player NO MATTER THEIR EMPIRE CHOICE have to, not only learn the game mechanics but also have to deal with inferior weapons whilst doing so, it's a barrier to entry.

Let me break it down into the simplest terms:

PS1: Old (high level) players have in addition to experience, a power advantage because of BR40
PS2: Old (high level) players have in addition to experience, a power advantage because of all certs/upgrades

In both games, old players have an advantage in addition to game experience, regardless of the scale of advantage it is still present, it was bad in PS1, yet by some bizarre set of double standards, it's totally fine in PS2!

Remember these bonuses are before we even take into account the balancing between all three factions' weapons and equipment!

[2coolforu]

In Planetside 1 a Br20 had a huge advantage over a BR1, you could get transport and have medapp + engineer which meant a lower rank player had zero chance in open combat if there was plenty of cover to hide and heal behind.

It's an MMO, there has to be some sense of improvement and customization. There is a leveling system and a certification system that tries to avoid pure power and concentrate more of diversification just as the certification system in Planetside did. If anything the abilities of having a med app + engineering + AV + Special Assault + HA gave a far greater advantage than 25% imho.

You also completely missed the spirit of my statement, why would one side in a large battle all have 125hp, or 25 damage rather than 20 and the other side have no advantage. The veterans are going to be more or less distributed evenly throughout the empires by the law of averages, it's simple. In a one-on-one fight a veteran has a one shot advantage as I showed. That's far better in my opinion that the new guy not having a med app + engineer tools + decimator + heavy assault weapon or what not that a day one player in Planetside would be missing.

[Bobby Shaftoe]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

In Planetside 1 a Br20 had a huge advantage over a BR1, you could get transport and have medapp + engineer which meant a lower rank player had zero chance in open combat (1)if there was plenty of cover to hide and heal behind.

It's an MMO, there has to be some sense of improvement and customization. There is a leveling system and a certification system that tries to avoid pure power and concentrate more of diversification just as the certification system in Planetside did.(2) If anything the abilities of having a med app + engineering + AV + Special Assault + HA gave a far greater advantage than 25% imho.

(3)You also completely missed the spirit of my statement

(1) Requiring specific circumstances to actually use your 'support' certs doesn't mean you're OP with them.

(2) They fully certed into infantry combat, in a game that was all about massive Infantry/Vehicle fighting, they specialised into one of those playstyles, requiring transport/rezzing/hacking support to do their thing. Many games have methods to keep you in the overall fight longer with heal mechanics, why was it so bad in PS1? The whole premise of med/eng making them OP is silly because they're at short range (due to 80% of fights being inside bases/towers, design problem, not cert problem) and they have to get into cover, pull out their med, then eng and all the while you're doing what? It's your problem if you're going to give them time to do that, not the cert system.
'Yeah but they're behind a corner so can 3rd person me', that was a problem with the 3rd person mechanic, not the cert system. Can you imagine how much slower PS1 fights would be without a basic selfheal/repair mechanism available? That would relegate people into being healbots standing around whilst everyone blobs the medics.

A BR 8 or 9 could have RExo, HA, med and eng. Thats all you needed to have a 'fair' fight with them, then it was down to 'skill', technically all you needed was HA/RExo in a straight up fight, BR3.

I've also said in other posts/threads that they could just tweak the cert costs/numbers et voila, no more super soldier.

(3) The spirit of your statement isn't taking the long term larger view into account, I've already said that every newbie (because there will be a high turn over of players, otherwise how will it succeed?) regardless of allegiance will be at an actual combat (the most important part of the game!) disadvantage.

You're just trading the 'out of combat sustainability' of the slow paced PS1 for outright 'faster killing' in the faster paced PS2. How do you even try to balance this before even taking into account each factions differing weapons!

[2coolforu]

Originally Posted by Bobby Shaftoe

(1) Requiring specific circumstances to actually use your 'support' certs doesn't mean you're OP with them.

(2) They fully certed into infantry combat, in a game that was all about massive Infantry/Vehicle fighting, they specialised into one of those playstyles, requiring transport/rezzing/hacking support to do their thing. Many games have methods to keep you in the overall fight longer with heal mechanics, why was it so bad in PS1? The whole premise of med/eng making them OP is silly because they're at short range (due to 80% of fights being inside bases/towers, design problem, not cert problem) and they have to get into cover, pull out their med, then eng and all the while you're doing what? It's your problem if you're going to give them time to do that, not the cert system.
'Yeah but they're behind a corner so can 3rd person me', that was a problem with the 3rd person mechanic, not the cert system. Can you imagine how much slower PS1 fights would be without a basic selfheal/repair mechanism available? That would relegate people into being healbots standing around whilst everyone blobs the medics.

A BR 8 or 9 could have RExo, HA, med and eng. Thats all you needed to have a 'fair' fight with them, then it was down to 'skill', technically all you needed was HA/RExo in a straight up fight, BR3.

I've also said in other posts/threads that they could just tweak the cert costs/numbers et voila, no more super soldier.

(3) The spirit of your statement isn't taking the long term larger view into account, I've already said that every newbie (because there will be a high turn over of players, otherwise how will it succeed?) regardless of allegiance will be at an actual combat (the most important part of the game!) disadvantage.

You're just trading the 'out of combat sustainability' of the slow paced PS1 for outright 'faster killing' in the faster paced PS2. How do you even try to balance this before even taking into account each factions differing weapons!

If you don't think that having eng + med gave you a collosal advantage in 90% of battle situations then you're just being completely obtuse. It was not hard to break off from a combat situation, if you had med+eng that meant full hp, especially easy to do in outdoors/long range battles and just as easily done in corridor fighting if you weren't afraid to cut it close with your weapon draw times.

What it meant for a new guy is if he allowed combat to break for even 3-4 seconds he lost the battle. If he got into a situation wherein the opponent could break combat for the time it took to holster a weapon and draw a medapp (about 1.5 seconds) then he would lose the fight.

I played low BR characters and high BR characters, I notice as a br1-8 char I get about a 1:1 KDR, as a BR25 character I got 2-3:1 KDR operating still as an infantryman. This is not even counting the effect and advantages that 3 implants could give you, second wind, pshield + audio amp could provide a mountainous advantage over an opponent.

Now the point I'm making is, if you are saying all this is balanced because the newbie could defeat this by fighting in situations that denied the use of med app, how is that any freaking different to fighting in a situation where you land 1 more shot than your opponent. I'd say it's far easier to land an extra shot than it is to set up situations to deny implant and med app use.

[Bobby Shaftoe]

Originally Posted by 2coolforu

(1)I notice as a br1-8 char I get about a 1:1 KDR, as a BR25 character I got 2-3:1 KDR operating still as an infantryman. This is not even counting the effect and advantages that (2)3 implants could give you, second wind, pshield + audio amp could provide a mountainous advantage over an opponent.

Now the point I'm making is, if you are saying all this is balanced because the newbie could defeat this by fighting in situations that denied the use of med app, how is that any freaking different to fighting in a situation where you land 1 more shot than your opponent. (3)I'd say it's far easier to land an extra shot than it is to set up situations to deny implant and med app use.

(1) I think that's pretty indicative that a low BR could still do well, BR25 let you use more weapons for various situations, you yourself said there has to be progression, in PS1 that was being able to be effective in more situations, which is no different to PS2 system of putting certs into specific classes.
(2) Implants can be disabled (which I believe are making a return in PS2, can they be disabled?)
(3) That's the whole point, why should a newbie HAVE to land an extra shot using the exact same equipment! In PS1 in a straight up fight with the same gun he just had to hit you the same number of times to kill you, as you did him, in PS2 he has to hit you more times! If you bring up healing/repping, then your shields in PS2 come into play too, yours will no doubt recharge faster, be stronger or have less downtime. He still has to do the same things in PS2 as he did in PS1 AND also hit you more!

BR8 wasn't a huge task to achieve, yet you were then on even grounding with the 'super soldiers', 6 cert points put you on the same sustainability footing, you don't know how many certs you have to invest in PS2 to reach parity with some maxed out vet, yet NONE OF YOU ARE CONCERNED about that balance aspect whilst still screaming about a loadout you could fight on equal terms within a day or two of play. (or an hour nowdays, since bep inflation)

Your imbalances in PS1 are still present in PS2 yet for some reason you don't see them.

[BattsTR]

Originally Posted by DrifterBG

People here have to remember this isn't Planetside 1. This is Planetside 2.

I was long time Planetside 1 player that started at launch. My outfit is known because we used tactics, teamwork and we got things done. Not one of us is griping about how it isn't like it used to be. We are all looking at the new system and thinking "how can we use this to our advantage?" and not "how is this holding us back." If you want to sit there and focus on how it sucks, you'll get owned. If you sit there and focus on how you can make it work, you'll flourish.

So we have classes... big deal! What's the difference between classes, and your inventory favourites? If anything, classes allow you to have multiple 'favourites' under a certain theme, give you a skin, and some added perks to go in with customizations. You will have various selections of weapons for that class too, so you're not "stuck" with inferior weapons.

If anything, you should be happy. This avoids the "supersoldier" problem everyone gripes about.

If you want to see it as "restrictive" you can go ahead. This just eliminates team-based operations since you can do it all. You used to be able to carry a MCG for troops, a decimator for the MAX units, and stow away a rocket launcher for vehicles/aircraft. Uhhh... how about no.

You are part of a vast army. Just because you're no longer able to hit everything and make it hurt, isn't restrictive. It forces you to THINK, PLAN your loadout, and make use of those customizations.

Also, no prone = no dolphin diving = enough cod kiddie tears to fuel the game for 9 years.

The thing is it was fun to be able to handle all situations. That's what I liked most about Planetside. On one hand I could go defend a back hack against 5 people myself, or do outfit specific ops with many of the excellent outfits i was in. That said I will still give the new game a shot, I've played countless other FPS's that are restrictive when it comes to loadouts and enjoyed them, but Planetside was 1 of a kind with its freedom.

[Hermes]

This thread is very flammable.

If each of theses topics mentioned generates a 10 page thread by itself I dont see it ever being a good idea to list them all in one post with snappy one/two line answers that start with "Really?".

It's hardly going to end each of those arguments when 10 pages failed to.


If this is supposed to be a thread about positivity (which I think we need in equal doses to the rants and arguments) then you could have phrased it all very differently

The game is going to be superb. As long as we step back and recognise the great things that are going on from time to time it's ok to look back and make sure we are bringing enough PS1 magic with us.