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1: NC

2: NC and TR

3: NC, TR and Vanu

[DJ]

Yup, mystery solved. At least some good from Pro7, I was kinda pissed when I realized they won't let me buy those nice bundles regular PS2 players can buy.

[Duuvian]

The devs want to hear ideas from players about a new Empire Specific sniper rifle for each faction. I THINK they are supposed to be bolt action or similar to a bolt action, but I'm not sure.

Common ideas from the official forums include:

TR: Burst mode sniper rifle with low recoil and really fast burst fire rate, possibly with various burst modes, possibly with only one firing mode firing the whole magazine at once with a fast reload.

NC: Anti-material bolt action rifle, possibly firing a 1 round magazine in exchange for being able to damage tanks.

VS: Charge up sniper rifle.

About the above ideas, the TR one sounds pretty neat. Five or ten round burst sniper would be cool I think. I think the new rifles might be planned to be bolt action, but if the rifle just shot it's entire magazine it would be similar sort of. If it shot half the magazine in a burst, it's not quite the same as a bolt action but it also sounds appropriate for TR. The issue would be whether or not all the bullets land in the same spot, recoil would have to be low for that. Since the penalty is having to land all the bullets over the period of the burst, one burst should be a kill with all bodyshots or the empty reload should be close to the time of a bolt pullback on a long range bolt action. It would have to have an enormous hipfire crosshair though if one burst of bodyshots killed. In addition carry a bit more spare ammo. It would be nice if while the burst was accurate, it was just long enough that it required aim adjustment for enemy movement, and possibly was long enough that players with fast reactions could juke after being hit the first time (like when being shot with other weapons) before being mowed down by the storm of bullets. In the fluff make it a small caliber weapon to explain the multitude of bullets in a rapid burst, the extra ammo and the low recoil.

 The NC one could be good, but I'd rather Heavy Assault and maybe Engineer carried any possible anti-material rifles instead of the skinny little infiltrator. I think I'd rather see a tight spread bolt action (pump action?) shotgun sniper rifle as silly as that sounds that can perform at all ranges, though has to deal with spread at long ranges and is best at mid range. Perhaps make it one hit kill if all the pellets land with quite distant damage fall off ranges, with tight enough spread to make one hit kills likely at close range though you'd have to aim down the sights with a 6x scope or more, possible one hit kills though more likely heavy wounds at mid range and very unlikely at long range, though with enough pellets landing at long range to still be able to drop shields and wound. Either that or make damage dropoff drop off sooner while making the spread minimal even at long range to accomplish the same. I suppose you could let it use lower magnification scopes but then it would be a close range beast so I'd suggest forcing 6x scopes or more on it with a huge hipfire crosshair.

For the VS charge up sniper, it sounds OK as long as it only one hit kill on a body shot at extremely close (10 meters?) range. Almost one hit kill at long range would be fine at full charge with me; current bolt actions require two and a long range one body shot kill would obsolete those, difficulty of charge or not unless the charge to full is like 10 seconds. Also it's rounds shouldn't travel as fast as the lancer. As explanation as to why it in my opinion should only one body shot kill at extremely close range: I use the close range bolt action sniper quite a bit on infiltrator. It's difficult to get a headshot at ranges better suited to long range sniper rifles with the bigger scopes, as I use the 3.4x scope. However, it's not too hard to get a bodyshot, or two bodyshots if the target doesn't move. Even if I only get one body shot however, the target will have it's shields dropped and be wounded. If it doesn't have a medic heal it, isn't carrying a medkit, or isn't a medic themself then the next person they run into will have an easier time killing them, especially if they meet them before the shields recharge. It makes the bolt action rifles a good support weapon in addition to their role as headshot killers. If the charge up rifle wounded the bodyshot person even more, the charge up sniper could be slightly better at this support role (depending on charge mechanics) but would also get a critical assist with the bolt action getting a regular assist. In addition it would have another advantage in that at very close range it actually does one body shot kill in exchange for having to charge to full power.

If there is an anti-material/vehicle/armor rifle added, I'd rather the heavy assault got it as I said above. If infiltrators got it as a sniper rifle it would have to be kind of weak to offset the enormous range and cloak ability. Heavies would be forced to sacrifice their anti-infantry LMGs for more anti-vehicle that would be able to plink feebly away at tanks out of range of the lock on launchers and possibly out of infantry render range or at tanks behind cover with only a small piece sticking out that the lock-ons can't target and that the no-zoom rockets would require a masterful shot for. It might be a good idea to make it NS weaponry as well, in case of unforeseen advantages an ES weapon would give. To make it worse against infantry than vehicles, make it low direct damage but explode like flak would against aircraft, except against whatever vehicles it seems appropriate. Then make that a tiny radius explosion and have it do the damage type that daltons and other vehicle affecting splash damage do. Say in the fluff that personal infantry shields defeat/disarm the explosion somehow even when depleted but are still hit by the projectile. Maybe make Maxes vulnerable to them, maxes are fairly strong anyways and would give a reason to still use it in a biodome or such.

[zombat]

Burst fire sniper rifle sounds useless as a sniper rifle

If only NC gets an antitank rifle that would be incredibly unfair

[Spacefaye]

I'm a new player, and everytime I install Planetside 2, I just don't get the point of it, it doesn't feel like every other FPS I have played. The game's objective is to probably kill people and capture the objective, but to get to the objective itself takes about 1 hour. Crashing the plane you fly, hills you can't get past, the world is too large. I've played 24 hours and up to this point I literally did not see one enemy...

[DJ]

Hit M to pull up the map, find an area with lots of explosions, right click it and set a waypoint. Then either fly from warpgate to it, or redeploy to the nearest available spawn point. If you do the latter you may have to do it a couple of times, because redeployment is limited in range. Once you get to a battle it should be respawning you reasonably close by default.

[palsch]

Spawn manipulation is not intuitive but easy once you know how.

A quickstart guide.

I'm assuming here you are lone-wolfing and only interested in finding good fights rather than organised group play or playing objectives. These are best done by finding an outfit or joining one of the big outfits public squads on that screen, then following orders till you understand why those orders are being given.

As soon as you log in open the mini map and press Instant Action. This will zoom you to a location and give you a 10 second countdown till it drops you onto it. Use this time to assess the fight by mousing over the hex and viewing the information it brings up. IMO the best for new players would be a 24-48 population (on each side) with a no more than 10-15% population imbalance. Any more imbalanced than that and it is a spawn camp. Any more players than that and it is a zerg fest clusterfuck where you won't have a clue what is going on and only serve to be more cannon fodder. Finally look at the base capture timer. A long timer (10+ minutes) is a potentially great ongoing fight with a running defence in the open and relatively well defined positions and battle lines. A short timer (< 2 minutes) usually means the base is camped and falling soon, although not always. No timer or a timer somewhere in the middle can be a crapshoot, but you can often guess the situation based on the populations.

If the fight looks good, drop on it and enjoy.

Also note that if it drops you on an enemy base then there is a chance you won't have respawn options in that hex and might have to fall back to the rest of this guide. Hopefully there will be Sunderers and outposts nearby you can spawn at, but this isn't always true.

If IA looks like a bad fight then cancel it and assess the continents. This is hard if you are new and don't know all the details, but generally you can get an idea of how much territory you have and what the overall population is like. If you are overpopulated on a continent and don't hold much territory odds are there are some big zergs going on capturing bases. This is generally hard to catch up with as a new player and not fun unless there is a lot of resistance. I tend to ignore these unless they form up around me.

A continent with low population but plenty of territory would be my choice. These let you fight a series of running defences (with associated defence and population XP bonuses), picking your bases and more easily spawning where there is an attack. Still, you will get spawn camped quite a bit, so may not always be as fun as advertised.

A straight 33/33/33 pop balance with a reasonable split of territory (eg, Indar during prime time) is always nice, but be aware the battles will be huge zerg fests most of the time, occasionally with organised outfits dropping in to tear through them. These can be great fun depending on where the battle lines are.

Once you've picked a continent, hit the delete key (I think this has been remapped to u recently...) to redeploy. This is your main logistical tool. If you are in a rush you can type /suicide. This will save you the 10 second coutdown and instantly start the 15 second respawn counter, which is nice and fast, but will count as a death on your KDA if that kind of thing bugs you.

As for where you can spawn, it's a bit complicated. I'm just going to quote here;

    You can always spawn at your faction's warpgate.
    You can spawn at any Sunderers within 1000m.
    If your faction controls the outpost in the area where you died, you can spawn there.
    If your faction controls any neighbouring outposts, you can spawn there. (On lattice-based continents, "neighbouring" uses lattice links. On hex-based continents, this uses map hexes.)
    You always have access to the nearest major facility your faction controls. ("Nearest" is determined using either lattice links or map hexes, depending on what continent you're on.)
    Finally, the top three Instant Action locations are added to the "Reinforcements Needed" list. The algorithm that determines these spawns isn't entirely clear, but it tries to select outposts with active fights where your faction is at a slight disadvantage. (What constitutes an "active fight" and a "slight disadvantage" is frequently tweaked from patch to patch.)
    If you are in a squad, the friendly facility closest to your squad leader and any squad beacons are added to the "Squad Spawns" list.

I've checked this against the patch notes I can find and it all looks correct. Note that the squad leader spawn point overrides your closest spawn point as the default, so just spamming respawn while in a squad can often have you ending up well away from the front lines when your leader had fallen back to grab a new vehicle. I avoid this kind of thing by deploying by double clicking on the actual spawn points on the map rather than the respawn button. Also nice to avoid that useless Sunderer someone has parked under a biolab.

Generally I'd check the Reinforcements Needed bases first. This is a crapshoot, but often gives you a reasonable fight (using the same assessment as the IA fights). The next option is to deploy as far forwards as possible (usually a major facility or just one of those Reinforcement Needed bases where I'll never actually leave the spawn room) and redeploy again from there. If that's still going to take ages then I hit the insert key and see if joining a random squad will offer me any new respawn options. You'd be surprised how often this works.

If you can't get straight to the front lines then hit delete the instant you redeploy (eg, the instant the loading screen comes up). This will start the 10 second countdown even as you are loading the new location and let you redeploy again far more quickly. I can usually reach a fight within three hops even if it's a horribly long distance.

Again, if you are going on the offensive you should be starting in a nice group. Usually a counter-push against a failed enemy attack in my case. I'd recommend trying to get a gunner position on either a main battle tank or Sunderer for your first big pushes. Pulling your own vehicles should wait till you have seen how these pushes go.

[Siquo]

Alternatively:
- check out the platoon/squad screen ("P" or via the menu), choose a squad, check the map to make sure it's one where its users are pretty close together (this means it's a good squad) and use "deploy near squad leader". Squad play is recommended, soloing can be nice but only if you know what you're doing.
- use "instant action" (this will more likely then not deploy you in a disadvantageous situation and you'll be dead faster than you can say "boom")


Edit: ninja'd

[palsch]

BTW, weekly patch notes.

ESF weapons and changes. Not bothered myself but should be fun to see reactions.

Scout radars give experience like infiltrator recon darts. I actually tried my old Scout/Kobalt flash the other day and it was still great fun. Just gets killed faster since the stealth changes and you can't ditch it and go cap things while still seeing everyone around you lit up. Still handles badly but I've flipped fewer Flashes than Lightnings in the last month. Wish that was a joke. Five fucking Skyguards ended up roof down so far.

Resist shield has been fixed to actually resist a whole mess of things it should have been all along. Still not using it myself, but nice.

A mess of nice little bug fixes, and also this;

Jumping will pull character out of iron sights

May cause problems on slopes...

[Kanil]

Jumping will pull character out of iron sights

May cause problems on slopes...

I can't believe that retarded crap went live. Why would you purposefully make your controls clunkier than they need to be? Surely at some point someone would have realized that doing so is a bad idea?

ADS CoF is a value that already exists and can be tweaked without asking your players to fight your UI. Why they chose this instead is... mystifying, to say the least.

[Idranel]

Jumping will pull character out of iron sights

May cause problems on slopes...

I can't believe that retarded crap went live. Why would you purposefully make your controls clunkier than they need to be? Surely at some point someone would have realized that doing so is a bad idea?

ADS CoF is a value that already exists and can be tweaked without asking your players to fight your UI. Why they chose this instead is... mystifying, to say the least.

A lot of the weapon sights are part of the gun's model. So animations of the arm will mess around with that. When different animations are interpolated it gets really messy.

Jumping around or using drifters is one example where the sights can be off by a couple of centimeters of where the bullets will actually go.
I suspect they simply chose the easiest way of sweeping that problem under the rug.
The SMGs and one specific shotgun still have a similiar problem where strafing (while not moving forward/backward) when ADS will cause the sights to jump to the side.

[TolyK]

I'm a new player, and everytime I install Planetside 2, I just don't get the point of it, it doesn't feel like every other FPS I have played. The game's objective is to probably kill people and capture the objective, but to get to the objective itself takes about 1 hour. Crashing the plane you fly, hills you can't get past, the world is too large. I've played 24 hours and up to this point I literally did not see one enemy...

WATCH THIS VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URIu143Si3w

[Toaster]

Good to know that they're fixing the Amazing Sliding Sunderers.


ON ES Sniper Rifles:

NO SHOTGUNS PLEASE for the NC.  High alpha damage does not mean shotgun!

I'm really not sure how interesting they can make an ES sniper rifle.  If anyone gets anything that's not one shot headshot and two shot bodyshot, people will whine.  Once you put those parameters in there, there's very little room for variation without going totally unique, like the anti-tank rifle... which would piss off the other two empires if only one got it.  I think they'd have a horrible time balancing that to not be either broken or useless... though I'd like to be able to snipe down ESFs.  Or snipe out drivers on glass-cockpit vehicles (like ESFs)

The charge up sounds interesting, but will it one-hit infantry in the body at full charge?  That's a can of worms.

[TolyK]

I'd actually think that a slower bullet velocity for a higher charge would be cool for the VS rifle... >.>

[Toaster]

Or a bullet that SLIGHTLY tracked its target.  It couldn't track much, of course, because of the high muzzle velocity, but it'd be enough to turn a near-miss into a hit.  Like... maximum 1 meter lateral movement at 300m range.

Or an airburst proxy sensor.  That'd be fun, though maybe getting too close to the Lasher.


If they really want to be adding ES items, they should be adding ES engy turrets.


NC:  A heavy recoilless rifle.  Very heavy damage (on the order of two shot headshot), semi-auto, low bloom.  Decent fire rate and good muzzle velocity.  Counterbalanced by no real zoom.

TR:  MCG turret, essentially, with the spinup.  To make it more interesting, give it an adjustable fire rate with a corresponding change in overheat time, though at max rate it'd have a ridiculous RPM like 1200.

VS:  Laser turret.  Fires a continuous beam that does more damage the longer you hold it on a target.

[palsch]

I think that counter-sniping rifles would work well for ESSR. Less raw killing potential but more effective against other infiltrators and with some more support value.

TR: 2 round burst with fixed, low first shot recoil (so easily learned two shot pattern). Alternate fire lets you fire each shot separately with bolt-action level recoil on each. You have to work the bolt after both shots fired, 6 rounds in the clip. 450 damage so that a bodyshot and headshot will drop most classes, but if shooting another infiltrator a single headshot will do. Basically a slightly weaker BA against most soldiers, more efficient BA against infiltrators. Not sure how to set the ranges/falloff.

VS: Semi-auto, no bullet drop, no scope sway. Hybrid between the mid-range snipers and the scout/battle rifles as far as stats, so not that much raw damage but reasonable rate of fire and flexible range. Fires cloak disrupting bullets that prevent the target from cloaking for, say, 10 seconds (alternatively drains their cloak energy). Rounds also reveal targets on the map to nearby allies without the need to spot them. Maybe also let shots drain some energy from other classes? Not sure.

NC: 900 flat damage single shot dart launcher. Drops an infiltrator in one shot, everyone else takes two unless already hurt, but leaves them with next to no health. No headshot multiplier, no damage falloff, ignores nanoweave (typed as explosive direct damage, like an Enforcer with no splash, so reduced by flak instead). Carries only 20 odd rounds total. Each shot needs a full reload. Think the old one-shot Enforcer but only against Infiltrators and without any splash. Deals very limited damage against armour (think a UBGL shot, but with Enforcer like range could be good in large groups).