Vehicle refunds

[headcrab13]

Originally Posted by Goku

This is why I though tanks will cost resources from awhile ago:

• Resources needed from this land to pull advanced vehicles

Yeah that is kind of confusing. It was in an earlier Q&A with Higby, and then he clarified later with those things I mentioned (no cost even to poor empires, etc).

I'm assuming by "advanced vehicles" they mean a standard vehicle plus upgrades like rocket launchers, better afterburners, heavier plating, etc.

[headcrab13]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Interesting.

Well. New question then will be can we get refunds on the mods when we tire of the vehicle or want to change it up.

Yeah haha, I figured you'd bring that up A valid question, though. I personally think if you go into heavy combat and return to the base with your vehicle intact, you should be able to get the majority of your resources back (if any were spent on upgrades).

[EVILPIG]

A refund for accidental pulls, say 30 seconds is appropriate, but nothing after that. You pay resources for the power of a vehicle. You get to run around and own with your aircraft/vehicle, you don't deserve a refund for it. If you keep it alive a long time, great, your reward is not having to buy another one yet. Refunds would skew the entire balance of having to pay resources.

[Stardouser]

Here's the solution:
If you don't drive the vehicle off the pad, you can get a full refund within 30 seconds, and you can get one refund per 18 hours for vehicles you have driven off the pad.

[Nobel]

This reminds me of the RTB system in WWII online, which I really like, although encouraging people to go back to base to "stay alive" and save their resources is not in the best interest of SOE financially, or the "fast paced" nature of the games design.

[Rocknoise]

Refunding vehicles would fit to new planetside style ... resources are important. I´d really appreciate those mechanics.

[EVILPIG]

Originally Posted by Nobel

This reminds me of the RTB system in WWII online, which I really like, although encouraging people to go back to base to "stay alive" and save their resources is not in the best interest of SOE financially, or the "fast paced" nature of the games design.

Return to base returned the vehicle to the pool your country shared, not a personal pool.

[kaffis]

I agree with Goku, here. I don't mind refunds to avoid penalizing misclicks, or garages whose purpose is to make the decision to abandon vehicular gameplay with a healthy vehicle (like when logging off, or when the outfit moves to an infantry-advantaged area, etc.) less punitive.

However, what I don't want to see is people pulling a vehicle, taking it to the fight, seeing a lot of scissors to their vehicle's paper, and retreating to swap it out for a rock vehicle. I'd rather see people have some incentive to stick around with that paper vehicle and cautiously look for rocks to kill.

This could be as simple as "I keep driving with my anti-infantry gun, even though we're losing the air war and those enemy fighters are becoming a greater threat."

Doing so promotes more teamwork -- you call for your team to bring in more anti-air instead of just taking your vehicle back to a terminal, fixing it up, and swapping it out yourself.

I think penalizing such casual tactical swapping will result in less variety on the battlefield, and fewer true combined arms operations as more people just "scout" what the enemy composition is and then call all their friends to turn in whatever they're using and spam the best counters to the enemy composition. And I think that's a good thing to strive for, because spammed counters and less variety ends up being shallower gameplay.

[Malorn]

Something to consider is that the permanent cost of the vehicle in resources may be an intentional resource sink.

Switching loadouts might be another one. I haven't heard anything about being refunded the resources spent on your previous loadout when you switch to a new loadout.

If they enable these sorts of partial refunds then it will inadvertently affect the resource income rate. Since we'd be getting refunds or partial refunds we'd have more resources than otherwise anticipated. One consequence of this is that they may need to tone down resource generation, which would have other impacts.

I think it's simpler and easier to balance by not having any refunds. On the surface refunds seem like a good idea but they create a ripple in the resource balance that can have other far reaching consequences on the resource dynamics because they have to be accounted for. I'd rather them not be accounted for and assume that any loadout used or any vehicle created permanently consumes resources.

If they do the balance right we won't need it anyway and instead of getting resources from stuff you already have/used you'll be getting it from new sources which makes it more dynamic.

Edit: The misclick situation could be avoided by giving you a "grace period" of a few seconds after buying something to destroy it and buy something else and get a full refund. That seems like a good scenario for refunds that won't affect the overall resource balance but does allow a limited "buyback" option for misclicks.

[Blackwolf]

Originally Posted by Goku

It can't work this way. If a vehicle is 100% you get 100% resources back according to this. Allowing people to get a full credit back will put the whole point of resources for vehicles to being nothing. Just due to them knowing they can get the full amount back and not being more thoughtful as to what to pull.

On the flip side, people would care a whole lot more about keeping their vehicles alive rather then wasting them on reckless behavior.

Personally I think if you decon in a friendly territory, you get a % based on the % of health it has back. If you decon in enemy territory, you'd get back half of it's "value" (a vehicle with 50% health would give back 25% worth of resources).

This means that when you drive the vehicle out of the base and into enemy territory, you have to think before simply abandoning it to go assault the interior. Because if you come back and it's gone, you just lost all those resources.

[Stew]

No reffund for vehicules buy on purpose i mean as soon as u have use the vehicules for even a second their is no refund !

A purshase is a purshase people will have to learn to buy their thing properly !

If any refund mecanics is in place anyones will be able to transform any (( NOT destroyed yet vehicules in another )) And will have INFINITE ressource whiout even have to harvest some new ones !

SO iam badly agains it, its agains the entire ressources collections WAR !

[Talek Krell]

As Malorn pointed out, vehicles are probably one of the economy's money sinks. And if PS2 vehicles are as survivable as PS1 vehicles then refunds would result in a lot less money being sunk into them. I think a partial refund would be most appropriate. I would base it on a combination of time used and condition of the vehicle. A fresh tank that you bought by accident could be turned in for a full refund, where a fully repaired one that you've been romping around in for an hour has essentially paid out to you and can't be just traded in. Or at least not for full price.

The condition does need to be a factor as well, or we may end up with people deconstructing and buying a new vehicle instead of just fixing the one they have.

[Soothsayer]

My view on this changes depending on how scarce resources are and how expensive upgrades are.

A lot of the options have been covered, all that I can add is that they should use veh acquisition from PS1 as a baseline. If your faction holds 1/3 of the continent then it should take about five minutes to accumulate enough resources to purchase a vehicle with the sidegrades you want.

Even the five minute rule could be too conservative, given that the devs have stated as a part of their marketing that they are trying to speed up gameplay. Speeding up the kills for one person ultimately means speeding up the fodder on the other side of the barrel.

Every time you have a successful run (one that lasts longer than the time to acquire enough resources to pay for the next vehicle) then you're rewarded with another chance to do another run immediately after the current one if you get owned right away.

At no point should you be forced to a certain playstyle due to resource limitations. There should always be an option for pulling a vehicle, albeit you may not be able to pull a vehicle that is as customized as you would like. Much in the same way that you would never assume to be unable to pull a basic loadout as an infantry due to resource limitations. Core playstyles should always be available, their advanced variants will be more resource intensive and will be an advancement over the basic (free) stuff.

[EDIT: Back on the thread topic though, I don't have a problem with a refund on resources when you recycle a vehicle. If you've kept it alive it's your prerogative as to how to dispose of your vehicle. I think that if there are conditions to be met as to where you can scrap it and what state it has to be in when it gets ground up that covers a lot of the objections raised.

Assuming that sidegrades are the only thing that actually costs when pulling a veh, I'd like to see vehicle rearm terminals come back. This could be the point where you would recycle your veh or swap the loadout. If there was going to be a place where you could get any kind of refund (full or partial) this would be where it makes sense to do that.]

[Figment]

How about you just accept you spend the resources and have to make a strategic decision to pull something now or in five or twenty minutes?


My word, decisions! D: Strategy! TOO COMPLEX! MUST ZERG!

[Soothsayer]

Originally Posted by Figment

How about you just accept you spend the resources and have to make a strategic decision to pull something now or in five or twenty minutes?


My word, decisions! D: Strategy! TOO COMPLEX! MUST ZERG!

Thought experiment: Consider Planetside 1 with 20 minute vehicle timers. What happens?