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[Aklyon]

If you can't shoot well, be support. Bring a repair sundy to the party. Or an ammo one. Or find a deployment spot. Go help that guy setting up an ant base. BE the guy setting up a base if you've actually unlocked the things. Try (and probably suck at) flying a valk or a gal.


Theres plenty of stuff to do besides be a nuisance in LA gear or be a heavy.

[JimboM12]

If you can't shoot well, be support. Bring a repair sundy to the party. Or an ammo one. Or find a deployment spot. Go help that guy setting up an ant base. BE the guy setting up a base if you've actually unlocked the things. Try (and probably suck at) flying a valk or a gal.


Theres plenty of stuff to do besides be a nuisance in LA gear or be a heavy.

Support is quite fun in the beginning, but then I like that feeling of being one of the many and basic intuitive teamwork and all that jazz. There's just that special feeling being one of only 2 engineers sitting on a air reloading pad, ready to quickly repair incoming valks and galaxies. Or being a medic on the front lines, firing rifle rounds at a sniper post, seeing him panic and run and then whipping out the healgun, getting into a cover spot and rezzing the poor sod who took a round to the head. I don't take getting killed personally. Usually its kinda a compliment, only the engi who's repairing a max who's kicking ass can attract that kind of incoming fire. If I'm getting farmed on a certain map, I'll just move.

[Tiruin]

As a relative newbie, pretty bad at competitive FPS and mostly eschewing vehicles, I was still averaging 2 kills per death on my off days.  And a lot of those kills were 70+ BR, even a few 100.  Like Ozy said, latency matters a lot more than equipment.

Oh goodness, that last sentence makes a great point. I'm somehow relatively good at FPS games, but anything online has me lagging in crucial seconds to pull off shots that I can't even fight well. I can get kills but they're always at a detriment because 'suddenly dead' happens; usually I thought I got them, but the result is 'they're barely damaged while my shielded character is sooo dead'. Playing a support which is my core gameplay (because I like the utility and added helping others out) also doesn't fare well because of that; I try to put down a turret or heal that dude, and poof they're not present later on or it takes a bit too long to spawn the things I deploy. x_x There's also a second's worth of lag before healing/repairing anything that you hear the repair-gun sound and only see the meter fill up a second later. :V I'm an avid fan of tactics and moving about to help the folks I'm with even if we don't have clear communication other than a general inference of the goal at hand, but this doesn't work out because lag happens everytime.

I can't snipe and cloak to give supporting fire or spot people well because of that. I can't give armored support because people warp feet from their initial position (and that after firing a round and seeing it hit, it's always uncertain because there's that brief second's worth-or-less of lag that confirms or denies the damage despite it 'seemingly hitting on your screen'). I don't play HA or MAX, but stick to the other four well, and argh can I not even participate in battles above 18 people! It lags, and I can only fight in them from the farthest vantage point (aerial support used by other people since I need certs to get most vehicles/aircraft up to par, especially battle-craft).

Certs do matter though, as a tangible standard when talking about vehicular/aerial support. >_> And for all those other boosts that make the vanilla character better to give "minor" situational advantages. Like all those mines and C4 that cost hundreds.

Just...

They could spend a bit less time worrying about how to monetize the game and focus on meaningful content.[...]

This. Because the meaningful content leads to monetizing, and not the other way around. Along with everything else in this post.

[miauw62]

If you can't shoot well, be support. Bring a repair sundy to the party. Or an ammo one. Or find a deployment spot. Go help that guy setting up an ant base. BE the guy setting up a base if you've actually unlocked the things. Try (and probably suck at) flying a valk or a gal.


Theres plenty of stuff to do besides be a nuisance in LA gear or be a heavy.

I just don't find that very fun (even though most of my hours are in medic), and if you haven't fully certed Deployment Shield sundies will get nuked pretty quickly anyway.

Flying planes is mostly exactly the same problem as shooting because you'll just get destroyed by MR120s.

Oh, and another thing about small fights is that somebody will just pull a MAX and then the fight is over.

I just want the game to be fun and let me shoot people but instead it's incredibly frustrating because I keep getting killed by the same bullshit every time. And then I realise that I could be playing a game which DOESN'T require hundreds of hours of frustrating grind to be fun, and I go do that instead of bashing my head against the wall.

[Egan_BW]

MAX certs are pretty bullshit. Why should I have to buy both LEFT and RIGHT arm versions of a minigun?

[Akura]

Oh, and another thing about small fights is that somebody will just pull a MAX and then the fight is over.

I've actually yet to see that myself. The main thing about a small fight over a base is that a MAX cannot capture the control point, so people are probably less willing to pull a MAX and thus lose the ability to (re)take the point. Most likely someone will carry C4 or AT mines, or are a Heavy Assault, and are thus equipped to fight a MAX. Unless it's a defending MAX against attackers who forgot a Sunderer(a very stupid idea), the MAX can be easily worn down, and at 450 nanites(the same cost of an MBT), they're not easily replaceable in a small fight.

MAX certs are pretty bullshit. Why should I have to buy both LEFT and RIGHT arm versions of a minigun?

You're buying the right to dual-wield. You have to cert both the front and back turrets of a Sunderer, as well as each individual gun on the Galaxy as well. Buying one gun doesn't give you two, and both weapons can be upgraded separately.

[Rolan7]

Plus the MAX is a big target that medics can't repair (only slooowly revive) so you better hope an engi went into this ground battle primarily to repair you instead of shooting.  All that health doesn't matter if you're stomping around at 5-20%.  I like going up against MAXes, they look cool and they go down fast like other infantry.  S'not like vehicles where you need heavy weapons.

[Kanil]

I get the feeling you just forgot how many certs it takes to get a class to relative parity

I was worried this might be the case, so I fired the game up last night, for the first time in months. Stripped everything I possibly could off my character, went in with the default shotgun, pistol, knife... and max level jumpjets because you can't downgrade after upgrading. No grenades, implant, tool, suit, or weapon attachments. I did alright, by my standards. Positive KDR, not quite a cert-a-minute (58/60, ignoring ribbons.) That's with "no" certs, and a thick layer of rust.

I realize that it's just one man's anecdote, but I really don't feel like I was thrown into some terrible hopeless pit of despair.

With regards to the medic gun, the last level strikes me as exactly the kinda thing you don't really need. I mean you get that warm fuzzy feeling of having done your job to the maximum, and not having to choose between waiting for him to stand up or leaving him behind and dealing with the nagging feeling that he might need those last 100 HP some day, but there's probably not a lot of fights that you would lose with medic gun 4 that you would win with medic gun 5. You could spend those 500 certs on something more impactful -- like C4.

As for your getting farmed comment, I was not specifically directing that statement at you. It was a response more to "new players exist solely for high BRs to farm" that was mentioned prior in the thread, I apologize for wording it poorly/not being sufficiently clear.

[miauw62]

The last level on the medigun makes your revive speed ridiculously faster.

[Rex_Nex]

There's a very large difference between a certed and uncerted player, but one of the reasons it "works" in planetside is because of the chaos. In a fair fight this game is absolutely pay2win/experience2win/what have you, but when shit hits the fan and everyone is all over, an uncerted player is more than capable of outperforming anyone else out of virtue of positioning and gunnery.

If fighting players with more eff hp, better guns, and more options than you bugs you, just don't play in orderly, fair battles. Eventually you'll be able to get a class or vehicle to the point where you can compete on even terms with any other player. Squads will always farm you, sadly :p

Not saying I think PS2 took the right route here, just that looking past it isn't impossible.

[Sordid]

My stance about PS2 is mostly the same. I want to love this game and it's given me some great memories, but it's not worth the frustration of constantly being farmed by people you can never beat because they have spent more time on the game. The developers don't give any thoughts to casual players: everything is balanced around veterans having a lot of clueless new players to farm so they can have their fun.

Well yeah. That's how free to play games work. The veteran players are the whales who actually buy lots of stuff in the cash shop and thereby pay for the whole thing, but whales on their own would not make a large enough community to make the game playable. That's where the newbs come in. There's no such thing as free, everyone is selling something to somebody. Youtubers don't upload free videos out of the kindness of their hearts, they do it to get your attention and then they sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Same with free to play games. You think the devs are giving you a free game? No, they're luring you in so that they can turn you into content and sell you to the whales. You pay for a free to play online game with your time, you pay by playing it and being content for other players.

how the fuck is this relevant? the game is so badly designed its just absolutely not fun. some weird economic rambling isn't going to change that.

You missed the point. The game is not badly designed, it is in fact very well designed. It's just designed for something other than what you want. You want the game to be designed to be fun for everybody. What it's actually designed for is to be fun for whales so that they spend even more money on it and a soul-crushing Skinner box grindfest for everyone else. That's how all pay-2-skip games work. Any game that allows you to unlock stuff by playing or by buying it with real money has to be unfun by design. If unlocking the stuff by playing was fun, people would just do that instead of spending money.

You expressed your confusion about why the game was so veteran-focused as it is; I explained to you why that is as clearly as I could. If you think this 'weird economic rambling' is irrelevant, by all means, continue to delude yourself into thinking that the devs and publishers with decades of experience in this business are complete imbeciles who don't know what they're doing. You're so much smarter than them.

[Egan_BW]

Ah yes, these absolute geniuses of design who made so much money that they had to merge servers several times to deal with a plummeting playerbase, and who sony decided to sell off to another company.

[Rolan7]

@Sordid
It's possible to have buyable side-grades, like in TF2... arguably.
And I insist that the upgrades in PS2 aren't *that* big a deal.  When it comes down to it, tactics are more important - when you're facing down a tank, do you have a heavy in your squad?  Or are you alone?

That aside, you're absolutely right.  And I enjoyed PS2 as a skinner box, because I love such games.  The "worst" kinds of games, upgrade-athons and "idle" games.  I did pay in, but only the one-time upgrade (which was like $20, very good value for the enjoyment (not time) I got out of it).

[Sordid]

Ah yes, these absolute geniuses of design who made so much money that they had to merge servers several times to deal with a plummeting playerbase, and who sony decided to sell off to another company.

The game's still going, isn't it? And it's Planetside 2. The first one was released in 2003. 13 years and still going is not exactly what I would call failure. Please, by all means, point me to a more successful game development career that you've had. Then I'll take you seriously when you say that PS2 devs are idiots.

I don't like the way PS2 turned out either, but the reason for those design decisions is a little more complex and nuanced than "the devs are dumb".

[Cyroth]

I don't think that there is much difference in infantryside between a certed player who knows what he is doing and an uncerted player who knows what he is doing.
At least not if Daybreak didn't fuck up the balance since I've stopped playing.

I've aurax'd every non-SF/non-burst carbine that existed up to that point (yes, on all 3 factions), including the directive ones, and my K/D differs between the best and worst one by maybe 0.3. (I'd have to dig up my stats, but I think it was between 2.6 and 2.9). That is not much of a difference, and I think 1200~ish kills is enough to make the stats somewhat accurate. (also note that the starter guns were not the worst ones)
Most basic cert lines are also "good enough" on rank 3 (which you get for a total of 50 or so certs) to not make any real difference in most situations. The heal/repair tools and C4 being the big exceptions IMO, those and MAX units.


Now vehicleside, thats where the balance between certed and uncerted is out of whack.
A fully certed 2/2 MBT with an AV/AV setup can easiely beat 2 or 3 barely certed 2/2s running the basic HEAT/Basi, same for Lightnings. A Harasser needs a bazillion certs to not be a deathtrap and so on.
But that something I've complained about ever since the game launched, so I don't think this is going to change.