News: Upcoming enhancements to the Planetside 2 metagame

[Malorn]

The squad leader spawn changes are intended to help with squad cohesion and keep your squad together.

Of the 3 changes...
1) You can spawn at a squad-owned spawn vehicle regardless of distance - this allows you to get back to your squad if you get separated or mis-click where you wanted to spawn. It could also be used to relocate a squad. Spawn beacons have done that for a long time, but it's also a pain to have people drop a spawn beacon anytime a member logs in and gets invited they then have to get to the squad. Currently the procedure is to drop a squad beacon so the newly invited person can join in. Allowing them to use any squad-spawn vehicles makes that easier. Helps disconnected players get back also.

2) Instant Action onto squad leader. Only works if instant action cooldown is up. This make sense and allows people who log in to quickly get to their squad immediately. No need for a beacon or sundy. With IA having a long cooldown I don't see the danger in this. I can see the possibility of abuse once every 30 minutes with a mass IA drop onto squad leaders. But on the other hand, that's kind of a cool thing for a squad to do!

3) Spawn on hard spawn points near squad leader. This is not the same as #2. It will basically put you at the closest outpost to your squad leader. Again squad cohesion. Seems like more of a fallback feature for when you don't have a squad spawn vehicle up.


These do allow rapid relocation of a squad, but that's already possible today. The important thing is to make it easy for the squad to stay together in this big world and not leave people stranded places or have them spend five minutes just getting back to their squad.