Cont Lock finally?

[Obstruction]

Originally Posted by bpostal

It's going to be needed when (don't laugh) we get more continents. It also adds a sense of ownership and a goal for players to strive for.

definitely lol'd. and i still don't get it.

is it possible that people just want this mechanic shoehorned into Planetside 2 to satisfy nostalgia for Planetside?

if they put this in as it is being described they will have to redesign or remove many other systems, including large systems such as resources and alerts. i just don't see that happening. they can't even fix half the bugs in the game 18 months after release, or half of the ones introduced in the last 18 months along with their half assed attempts to address core gameplay issues.

in fact, i suspect that Continent Locking was nothing more than a half assed attempt to address a core gameplay issue that existed in Planetside, analogous to the Alert system in Planetside 2. and if so, it would be quite ironic that veteran players pine for it while decrying Alerts and No Deploy Zones, etc.

[Azzzz]

Whats interesting about No Deploy Zones is...not one person asked for them yet they implemented it anyways.

Then again that seems to be their MO, implement shit no one wants or if they do add something that people want, it's usually half-assed or mind boggling retarded.

I haven't played PS1 but from what I get from everyone else that has, it worked, in many ways. It had everything most people wanted (BFRs excluded) or something that added a tactical aspect such as cont lock but had ew graphics.

Now why can't PS2 have the same shit as PS1 but look way better? Is this such a difficult task to execute?

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Obstruction

definitely lol'd. and i still don't get it.

is it possible that people just want this mechanic shoehorned into Planetside 2 to satisfy nostalgia for Planetside?

if they put this in as it is being described they will have to redesign or remove many other systems, including large systems such as resources and alerts. i just don't see that happening. they can't even fix half the bugs in the game 18 months after release, or half of the ones introduced in the last 18 months along with their half assed attempts to address core gameplay issues.

in fact, i suspect that Continent Locking was nothing more than a half assed attempt to address a core gameplay issue that existed in Planetside, analogous to the Alert system in Planetside 2. and if so, it would be quite ironic that veteran players pine for it while decrying Alerts and No Deploy Zones, etc.

No cont locking was not 'half-assed' as you say. It was very important and it drove the entire game.

Alerts do fine for what they are and are the most interesting part of the game as it is. But they have a big flaw. That flaw is the reward to the winner. If you want the reward (and PS2 is built on xp gain as the motivation) then you have to be on the winning side to benefit most and the result of that is population swings.

This was obvious from launch on Miller. TR population jumped as events started and grew throughout. TR therefore won the alert often with dominating victories which then in turn reinforced the impression that TR will most often win alerts.

Back in ps1 we did have alerts of a kind and different to those in ps2, but when they occurred we normally decried them because they were a distraction from the main event, ie 'the war'.

[JackD]

Originally Posted by ringring

That's not the idea, ie that every factino has something to fight on every cont. The purpose of continent locking (which is a term that doesn't describe what it actually is) is supposed to be a reason to fight and give each empire an overall aim. Either to dominate the entire world or to be dominated.

The big problem is that it cannot work with 3 or every four continents. It takes 7 minimum and 9 or 10 ideally. (ps1 had 10) The reason why we don't have it is that SOE finds continent creation very time consuming. At launch we were expecting 2 conts per year and we're way way below that, dev time is mostly spent on keeping the current game running and adding sweeties like new guns to the store.

To be fair, Esamir, Indar and Amerish got all redesigned. So we got three "new" continents but they are just more like Amerish 2.0 etc. the setting is still the same which makes it a bit dull after 1,5 years. And the lattice on Amerish lacks, all the big fights happend around the Ascend but not at it.

[Vanir]

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Vanir

Yea but, two of those three battle islands don't exist and even the first hasn't been looked at for a year.

If by posting that you're meaning that is what we're going to get next month it isn't, we're getting a very much simpler version and even that was pretty simple compared to ps1.

[Vanir]

Originally Posted by ringring

Yea but, two of those three battle islands don't exist and even the first hasn't been looked at for a year.

If by posting that you're meaning that is what we're going to get next month it isn't, we're getting a very much simpler version and even that was pretty simple compared to ps1.

Oh I know, the one we will probably be getting will be this but minus the battle islands and just have all the continents connect directly to each other.

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Vanir

Oh I know, the one we will probably be getting will be this but minus the battle islands and just have all the continents connect directly to each other.

Not according to Higby in the Reachcast broadcast he did.

Hossin will be added but there will be no lattice.
It appears that only three continents will be open at any one time and when one of those is captured that one will close the the one previously locked will open.
There will be an event of some kind triggered when a cont is about to be captured.

At least that is what I took from what he said.

Lattice and the BI's will come along later and working warpgates later still.

[Muldoon]

Originally Posted by Azzzz

Whats interesting about No Deploy Zones is...not one person asked for them yet they implemented it anyways.

It would be severely limiting if we only implemented things that people asked for. Personally I think No Deploy Zones were a positive change.

[ChipMHazard]

It's also not true that no one asked for something to fix sundies being everywhere at and inside bases. Devs saw the problem and fixed it the best way they could.

[Azzzz]

Originally Posted by Muldoon

It would be severely limiting if we only implemented things that people asked for. Personally I think No Deploy Zones were a positive change.

Apologizes then. I was going off what I generally hear from in game. Seems there was more negative comments towards it than positive. And I was more so referring to the no squad deploy inside bases instead of sundies but then I should have more so stated it more clearly.

[Mordelicius]

Originally Posted by Muldoon

It would be severely limiting if we only implemented things that people asked for. Personally I think No Deploy Zones were a positive change.

So far there's only one official reason why it was implemented: to make Attacker and Defender spawn equidistant to the cap point. And that's something that can be easily debunked as false equivalency (a logical fallacy).

The reason being is that attacker Sundy spawn can be blown up while defensive spawn is indestructible. Hence, attackers have to apply extra players to the Sunderer so it won't simply be blown up.

If the developers were simply worried about parking Sundies right next to the cap point, they could have easily adjusted the radius to around 10-20 feet. Instead, they had to make it large, again, to satisty the equidistance argument.

The negatives far outweigh the positive. The NDZ has been voted down at least 2:1 at the official forum (2000+ against vs. 1000 yeas). This mechanic restricts gameplay while reducing the unpredictability of game (a hallmark of PS2 up to that point). I made so many posts on how toxic NDZ is to gameplay (even before they finally decided to implement it).

Also, this is more of a philosophic battle about how PS2 should run more than anything.

"For NDZ": Developers should have tighter controls of mechanics leaving less decision to players. Something that I accurately predicted as a slippery slope. Since NDZ was implemented, they also disallowed players from dropping mines on Vehicle pads and mines on infantry jump pads.

Again, rather than letting players clear the mines themselves(which shouldn't take more than 5 seconds on most bases), the developers feel it's their role to be an invisible guardian.

All this does is make pvp stale. A player blowing up in vehicle pad is that player's fault because the pad wasn't checked for mines. In a middle of a fierce, contested Tech Plant fight, mines on the vehicle pads can mean a loss or a victory.

Instead, if you ask the PS2 developers, that meta fight for the vehicle pad shouldn't be even part of gameplay . This is one of multitudes of reason why I often say that the PS2 devs don't even play PS2. Alot of gameplay, meta and balance context is foreign to them.

"Against NDZ": Hands off. Let the players decide and fight it out. This is the type of philosophy the new SOE game, H1Z1 foster. When somebody asked Smedley if there will be a safezone, he answered "what is a safezone", meaning it won't be implemented. In, short they are letting players decide the gameplay.

Is it a suprise to anyone why that type of Laissez Faire gameplay is what makes games like H1Z1 very popular?

In PS2, they operate in another direction, there's too much gameplay interferance mechanics that the Devs sprinkle inside the game.

Instead, they should just give players more tools. A Spawn Jamming Sunderer would have sufficed, rather than a No Deplay Zone. Deploy a Spawn jamming sunderer. Any enemy sunderer caught within the AOE radius cannot spawn players. That would have been a much better alternative. And that's something that have been suggested way before they implemented the NDZ.

One of my many, many posts about the NDZ (this one after it was implemented): http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=55971

Related: Suggested fixes to Spawn Camping/ Sunderer Wipes: http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=56877

[Muldoon]

Originally Posted by Mordelicius

All this does is make pvp stale. A player blowing up in vehicle pad is that player's fault because the pad wasn't checked for mines. In a middle of a fierce, contested Tech Plant fight, mines on the vehicle pads can mean a loss or a victory.

Personally I disagree with a lot of your post, but this was the biggest one I disagreed with. There are lots of new players playing Planetside each day, and are learning how to play. The game is already really hard to learn, and having a new player blow up on a vehicle pad is a quick way to getting them to uninstall. Without new players, the game dies.

Call it hand holding or what have you, being able to place mines on the vehicle pad is one of the cheapest things you could do and added very little to the game.

[bpostal]

Originally Posted by Muldoon

...There are lots of new players playing Planetside each day, and are learning how to play. The game is already really hard to learn, ...

At the risk of going off topic, while I may complain (a lot) this is one of the reasons I'm not as angry as I would otherwise be when it's mention that Planetside had much more depth. Especially with the latest free release of Planetside it's become obvious that the game isn't new player friendly.

As more and more mechanics are added to PS2, such as the intercontinental lattice and cont locking, the game must remain easy to get into. Of course, these same mechanics need to provide the depth, the meat, that veteran players need to keep us engaged.

[BlaxicanX]

My heart is torn on the argument regarding casualiziation of the game. On the one hand, the ambitious gamer in me says that people need to nut-up and learn how to play the fucking; I jumped into Planetside 2 in 2012, when the game was merciless toward new players, yet here I still am.

On the other hand, I am the only person out of my entire circle of friends who plays it. By their own, personal admissions, the game was too frustrating for them. Even as attackers, they felt like they couldn't go two steps without getting killed by a thousand different things.

So idk. The complexity of the game definitely needs to be toned down, I suppose. Not sure how to go about doing that without sacrificing the depth, though.