The Lattice is a false Messiah. Think twice.

[UberBonisseur]

Originally posted here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/i...d-rant.105491/


"Where they make a Zerg, they call it Flow"

-Tacitus

Originally Posted by Higby

Greetings Auraxians -

Many of you have requested that we take a serious look at the shortfalls of our territory control, influence and base connectivity in order to ensure we're routing players into great fights and encouraging a better overall battle flow.

I won't lie; the "new" old upcoming Lattice system does not sound like good news.

Taking it the other way around:

Convince me this will improve the actual strategic depth we've been asking for.

Since that and that only would set PS2 apart from the hidden deathmatch that is BF3 conquest mode.

Where is my tactical approach in this Lattice prototype ?

What we're doing here, in a nutshell, is reducing the number of adjacent territories from an average of around 6 to an average of around 3. Smaller outposts will have 2-3 connections in general, larger "hub" regions will have 3-5. "But, why?" you may ask. We see several benefits to doing this which have also been brought up by many of your fellow players who are advocating for some of these changes:

This Lane / Corridor approach means that rather than 5 different targets you can attack next or fall back to when defeated, we've got a more limited set of locations to fall back to. This will hopefully encourage fights to progress more often from outpost to outpost instead of "dispersing" after a large battle as often happens today.
Defenders will have a better idea of what targets attackers will be gunning for next, that predictability should hopefully encourage more active defense of outposts and facilities, as well as allow for proactive deployment of combat engineering.
Tactical severing of supply lines and base benefits will be more feasible as well as more understandable.

Okay. He made it clear.

Let's go over, one by one, those points:



-Limited ammount of connections:

From 2-3 to 3-5 connected territories, minus one for your own in the back, which means potentially 1-2 to 2-4 different territories to attack. That's not much. But setting facilities as big lattice nodes make up for that, right ?

Well... That means the only way to have an actual tactical approach; your only instance of choice will happen once you capture THE BIGGEST AND MOST DEFENSIBLE BASES OF ALL.

You are offered tactical choice once... you capture the hardest bases. Which means, in the order of capture hierarchy, from hardest to easiest, you have:

Continent => Facility => Tower => Outpost

Shouldn't ALL of the strategic approach revolve around taking what's the hardest to take ?

By making the facilities the CENTRAL POINT of strategic choice, you are essentially removing it. Worse, it could take the slippery slope of snowballing for who owns facilities. Anyway...



-Better predictability

Well that's pretty obvious. However, you're entirely forgetting what Amerish has accomplished: funneling attackers.

The TERRAIN does the job. While you still can Gal-drop all over the map, which is usually how my pals plan their territory conquest, the bulk of the ground force goes from base to base in a very specific fashion.

It's easily predictable for whoever can open his map and look where the road is leading.

Indar ? A barren desert for the most part. It's not nearly as bad on Esamir due to the limited number of bases.

-Cutting off supply lines

How do we do it ? Sure, it's easier, but... what's the plan ?

According to reddit, no clue:

Higby:

Well we'd like them to be benefits that greatly help defenders in territories. MBT benefit is ok, but the others suck in that regard. example ideas would be to make biolabs reduce hardspawner timers by 5 seconds which could stack. If you had 2 biolabs connected to a territory you were defending the hard spawns would have very short respawns, providing a spawn advantage for defenders and making severing the benefit actually worth thinking about. an idea for the amp station is tying it to a potential "anti-deployment" zone around the outpost / facility. if you had no connected amp stations it would be a small radius around the facility that enemy sunderers could not deploy - with an amp station that radius gets pushed out 100m or so, providing a different kind of spawn advantage.

Those are just examples of ideas we're kicking around, but hopefully you get the theme.

I can see why we have a problem with the current system:

It's BINARY while the adjacency can include a huge ammount of surrounding territories. If only one hex is in contact, the whole continent is linked. If the SCU goes down, the base is lost, etc...

You can fix that; INFLUENCE, a system that already exists, can fix that. Instead of having a flat +10 hp regen/sec with the biolab benefit, how about basing it on Influence ? The more you have, the stronger it is....

Which leads to:

Standardizing capture times - influence and # of players on the control point will no longer cause the capture time to fluxuate so defenders can have a better timebox to gather reinforcements or set up their next line of defense.
Making facilities which are under capture contention no longer provide adjacency for capturing other territories. If you are playing TR and own Xenotech Labs but it is being captured by the NC, you will not be able to use it's connection to to Crossroads to begin capturing Crossroads until you've secured Xenotech.

-Standardizing capture times (aka goodbye influence)

Remember, Influence ?
The more surrounding territories you have, the faster the base is captured ?



Turns out it is not exploited at all

Back in beta, Facilities had multiple control points, some of them located OUTSIDE the facility.

Unfortunately, those where placed in the satellites, far away from the actual base which left attackers no choice.

It was an interesting concept. By controlling a great majority of surrounding territories, you could slowly but steadily capture the sieged base. You would lock defenders in until the capture process ended, but you also had to hold those adjacent territories for this plan to work.

Now that Facilities have either a single control point or all of their control points inside (except maybe Saurva on Indar), you can't use this system anymore. It still works on most Tower outposts, but not on the biggest bases of the game.
It's a great loss for the strategic aspect

Are with just forgetting that BETA had more strategy than the current game ?

By also applying this "capture block" adjacency thing, you also kill off preemptive capture. That's a big thing I like(d) with the BETA; if one of your bases was under capture, but had 0% influence, the capture would come to a dead stop, unlike now. But then again, it was not BINARY. Influence mattered and it was a slow and strategic process of gradually slowing down the enemy capture.

And you might argue:

"But, the current flow of battle is awful, you idiot !"

Yes it is. In which forms ? Ghost capping ? Zerging at the Crown ?

Then how about we adress those problems first ?

That thing right here, is our deployment menu



Notice anything ?

There are at least 5 of our territories under attack/capture.

NONE OF THEM ARE LISTED IN THE "REINFORCEMENTS NEEDED" SECTION.

How could you possibly defend your faction from ghost capping when no quick deployment options, visibility about those areas, or even XP incentives prompts you to go and stop those caps ?

Why can a territory cap itself when no one is on the point ?
Why can a single person turn a control point ?
Why does that control point remain when no one stands next to it ?
Why can you still cap a territory with 0% Influence ?

Ghost capping CAN be adressed, without fostering everyone into a lattice.
But you have not even tried to do so.


And The Crown ? Or any other "impossible" place ?



That's it. This is all it takes to fix the Crown. No more no less.

It's about stepping out from the BINARY side of base capture/logistics and start using a mechanic that has proven working in BETA.


Back to the main point:

Convince me this will improve the actual strategic depth we've been asking for.


Yes, this is a rant.

Because you bring the Lattice back doesn't mean it will be properly implemented. Not without a complete overhaul of anything else and a change of game mechanics.

Any improvement can be seen as the "Messiah update", because such an absurd ammount of awful design choices was made so far. You shot yourself in the foot multiple times, dragging down gameplay along the way, and now, it's like you're descending from heaven with the cure.

But it does not justify another phase of Beta, nor it should make the old one null and void.

In other words:

Think twice before you support this change.


Also a good read:
A take on fixing the Flow in one big picture

[Crator]

I never did really like the hex system. Give me multiple attack vectors with links and a hack-n-hold timer and I think things might work better. <shrug>

[Nathaniak]

I don't get the Crown-hate. The problem is not with the Crown - the problem is with almost every other base. The Crown is the right level of defensibility. Other bases are not. If every base was as hard to take as the Crown, players would be prepared to actually try to defend at other places, so we'd get huge fights at these other places. If your new invention is broken, but the plug never fails, do you get a worse plug? No, you make the rest of it better.

The Crown is a sign that players want defensibility, and are happy to fight for hours over a single base. SOE should read into that, and make every base as defensible. This way, we can actually have some proper fights across the map.

[ringring]

The lattice won't fix things on their own but it's a big part of the necessary jigsaw.

Some of the rest has been announced and they include the additional continents. We also need more 2-ways and fewer 3-ways and we need better organisation.

More 2-ways will be the result of more continents an inter-continental lattice, whach are on their way, plus better organisation which isn't.

The unfortunate part is that more continents will take time and the elapsed time it will take will test the patience of many. My ideal would be for the game to have lauched with 5 continents and to have expanded from there.

[p0intman]

some more reading material for you OP:
http://ps2.riptidegaming.com/?p=8
http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=51906

I'll let figment explain the rest, or somebody else. I'm tired of having to write about this.

[Figment]

Like P0intman, I believe I've said enough on the matter and will keep this short.


Less links allows for more control by fewer people. Our problem has not been that we can't beat the zerg, it's that we're not given the opportunity to. The zerg overflows us like a pebble in a river even if we hold any terrain for a short amount of time (eventually we'll get overrun due to base design).

We don't get to stall. We don't get reinforcements because the amount of options disperses the defenders as well as the enemy zerg. The problem is that the enemy zerg has the numbers to disperse and the defenders do not. In fact, a worse problem is that the enemy zerg has the numbers already present and the defenders has to get them into place. Which takes time. It takes a lot of time for a response to muster and if there's no obvious points to gather and any point fall too quickly, than such a response won't form and you're stuck with stinging your opponent till some of your groups ignore them and take the territory they left behind undefended by outghosting them.

See, our hold might stall them at our position, but when they attack a dozen targets and we can only hold a few while other people on our empire attack a dozen more potential targets for quick expansion purposes, far from enough people are considering defense and they won't be in the right places to defend together against a zerg.



However, what I'm going to say is that a lattice system without well designed supportive gameplay will not be sufficient.

*capture options*
*capture mechanics*
*base design*
*tools*
*weaponry / units*
*command system*
*communication system*

These and more all work together to influence gameplay flow. If even one of these stinks, the system can topple over. When PS2 started, most of the above were empty shells and the gameplay based on top of it had a very weak foundation and would frequently breakdown. Today it still does, but less frequently as you see that some of the issues have been partially adressed to make them less flawed.

I'm saying less flawed, since I'm not really content with any of the above sub-systems. They each have a lot of development to go.

[UberBonisseur]

Originally Posted by p0intman

some more reading material for you OP:
http://ps2.riptidegaming.com/?p=8
http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=51906

I'll let figment explain the rest, or somebody else. I'm tired of having to write about this.

I've already read it.
And you are too deep into the mindset of BIG BATTLES = BETTER

If you can find the Orangesoda "Indar re-imagined thing" I actually come up with a similar mindset of conclusions;
-He just EXCLUDED outposts from the lattice and gave them benefits (resources, radar, stuff) rather than including them,
-My proposition INCLUDES the outposts in the Hex system using Influence to dynamically change respawn times, benefits, and capture times.

Originally Posted by Figment

Less links allows for more control by fewer people. Our problem has not been that we can't beat the zerg, it's that we're not given the opportunity to. The zerg overflows us like a pebble in a river even if we hold any terrain for a short amount of time (eventually we'll get overrun due to base design)

Fewer people also means fewer people.
PS1 had from 266 to 400 players on a continent. A squad/platoon easily made up 20% of the total faction on a continent. Not the case in PS2. It's just a matter of relative numbers, smaller battles make individuals more valuable.
You can easily win a 12v12 Crown battle, but not a 100v100.

However, unless there is a huge overhaul of strategic/logistic mechanics, the only meaningful thing you can do is busting the vehicle zerg.

[Figment]

But even if there's 100 vs 12, we could stall them with the appropriate CC resecure mechanic.


You know how often we held a place for three hours straight in PS1 against a full platoon with just 5 people? All we needed to do then, was get ONE guy into the CC alone for half a minute to a minute. Hell, I did that whole "resecure to stall for another 15mins" on my own back then several times a weekend. Meanwhile, our faction could finish up other fights and respond without half the continent having been lost.

Now we need to continuously hold it for 10-20 minutes, while we can't even find a way to get there in time in the first place.

[UberBonisseur]

That is base design though.


Can't say I agree with most of PS1 super-tight corridors and doorways. And BR40 universal soldiers. It was like thermopylae. Both epic and annoying beyond belief.
But at least NTUs could break the holds.

[Nathaniak]

I'd be in favour of a system where you didn't have to hold the base to take it. The bases could therefore be much more defensible. You could overwhelm it by sheer force, or you could contain the defenders until... something. I don't know. Maybe a re-implementation of ANTs would act as a siege-breaker?

[basti]

Think twice?

We are thinking about this since before the beginning of time itself.


Trust us here mate. This change is better than anything else they could do. It doesn't adress all issues, but it is a gigantic leap into the right direction, allowing a proper look at the other issues, rather than trying to fix stuff while the major system is broken as fuck.

[p0intman]

Originally Posted by basti

Think twice?

We are thinking about this since before the beginning of time itself.


Trust us here mate. This change is better than anything else they could do. It doesn't adress all issues, but it is a gigantic leap into the right direction, allowing a proper look at the other issues, rather than trying to fix stuff while the major system is broken as fuck.

mate,
we cannot be seen agreeing like this, it hurts my credibility as a leader of the NC.

Thanks in advance.

For real though, How are we on the same page like this?

[Ghoest9]

The problem with the current model is that their is no battle front at all. Just isolated battles of various sizes.

The lattice will have problems - but it will bet betterthan we have now.

[Redshift]

So long as they add back some semi defendable generators that can be used to break lattice links i'll be happy, that would be one giant step in the right direction as far as making smaller outfits usefull again

[UberBonisseur]

Originally Posted by basti

Trust us here mate. This change is better than anything else they could do. It doesn't adress all issues, but it is a gigantic leap into the right direction, allowing a proper look at the other issues, rather than trying to fix stuff while the major system is broken as fuck.

The last thing I can do is trust; this game has none of the mechanics which made PS1 work. It's entirely different in the classes, vehicles, base design and flow.

I can see the appeal of a lattice to the veteran crowd but it has been a shot at nostalgia rather than going in detail about how it would work, and seeing how Higby discusses about it, we're in very early stage, thus it'll take at least 4 more months of non-improvement till we get something potentially decent.

In other words:
While it might or might work, it requires another phase of open beta.