Planetside 2

[Mrbloodworth]

I'm sure your right.

Are you in beta Trippy? Me and a friend need more people to play with. I'm on East 1, as MrBloodworth. TR obviously.

[Ghambit]

Explain the map a bit more MBW.  You kinda lost me there.  I've only ever seen one continent with all 3 factions duking it out.   If there were warpgates we never used any.  So there will be three(3) of these at launch connected by warpgates??  I was under the impression they didnt want to go with warpgates at all.  Guess the design changed.

It kinda makes sense for this CB because 3 continents would mean you'd never see the opponent and it'd just end up being 1 contested continent anyways. 1 is fine for testing at this stage.

How's air combat?  I havent tried it yet cept to blow a Gal out of the sky from a tank  .  Supposed to be flying "saucer-y."  I did love the damage model for air stuff though. They tend to smoke when hit, bits fall off, etc.  It's a fairly photoreal effect.

I guess the iteration speed is ramping up a bit and I need to get back in there and check things out... if I can peel myself away from MWO and TSW that is.

[Trippy]

I'm sure your right.

Are you in beta Trippy? Me and a friend need more people to play with. I'm on East 1, as MrBloodworth. TR obviously.

Nope. And I'm NC so I would be shooting you if I was

[Malakili]

Explain the map a bit more MBW.  You kinda lost me there.  I've only ever seen one continent with all 3 factions duking it out.   If there were warpgates we never used any.  So there will be three(3) of these at launch connected by warpgates??  I was under the impression they didnt want to go with warpgates at all.  Guess the design changed.

I'm not sure if they will be conencted by warpgates or what the spawn mechanics will be, but 3 continents are confirmed. There is just the one for testing for now though.

[Goumindong]

Explain the map a bit more MBW.  You kinda lost me there.  I've only ever seen one continent with all 3 factions duking it out.   If there were warpgates we never used any.  So there will be three(3) of these at launch connected by warpgates??  I was under the impression they didnt want to go with warpgates at all.  Guess the design changed.

Press "M" see that bit thing that says "X Warpgate" where x is your faction name? The thing that you can always spawn at that looks exactly like the warpgates from Planetside 1?

That thing is a warpgate.

I think the game is shaping up well, though i don't like the layout of the current continent the actual combat feels good, there are interesting strategies which people can employ, there is progression. Different vehicles need different strategies and support levels in order to be effective [Tanks in enclosed spaces and/or alone with no anti air? Might as well just /suicide right now]

There isn't any command structure yet and the social structure isn't in with the exception of squads [and platoons, but that doesn't really do anything]. So the "bigger picture" isn't really there yet. But it definitely can be.

The biggest complaint is the map, but i don't think they're focused on that.

Second complaint is the day/night cycle. Its really really dark and I think that people will use gamma tweaks to sidestep the need for night vision. Night vision is pretty limited so it makes fighting at night an actual interesting challenge. This basically goes into the entire issue of video tweaks which can have gameplay effects.

Another thing to note: Since an area is "owned until its lost" there are some bases due to the lack of back hacking that are more or less impossible to take because the time it takes to take the capture points required to take that area means that the one capture point surrounding hexes will all be captured back before you can succeed.

They should probably take it a bit further and make a "front line" wherein points that are contested go neutral and don't count for either team [so that the defending force can't just abandon a 5 cap base to take the 1 cap hex behind it and save the cap]

[Surlyboi]

I'll have to log back in and play it some more. Too much of it has been session shootery for my tastes and yeah, base caps have been a shitshow based mostly on the open architecture of the bases.

I bitched about it a bit on the forums, maybe they listened to some of it.

[Goumindong]

Some are open, some are closed. The 1 cap points tend to be more open. I would say that at least 3 of 5 of the caps at most major bases are fairly enclosed, though I can definitely see for more of a structure like PS1 where you had an entire base to fight through to get to the cap point.

I am talking more about a geographical situation regarding the location and distance to bases.

That being said my issue with the continent is that it lacks cohesion and looks like it was constructed to be a "three area continent" rather than any sort of organic structure. Partially because of this there are pretty clearly defined areas. Though i can absolutely see why they did it [they've been changing the start locations around at different points], it lets them see how the different factions interact with different terrain types. But to play in it doesn't feel right.

[Ghambit]

I will say they did a good job mixing up the base terrain/locations.  Sometimes there's a different strat. that should be employed in order to effectively defend/capture.  For instance, one of the large bases is inside a crater with only 1 or two places to get in-out of.

Air is also vastly more important in this game with the lack of AMS and the simple fact everything is so much more open.  AirQuake is gonna be common and whomever owns the sky has a serious advantage.

[slog]

I haven't logged in for 2 weeks, as I got a bit tired of it.  Any changes lately?

[Jobu]

Zurvan and Peris have some new capture mechanics that involve taking out shield generators to open up access to a central control point. Way more fun as an engineer to run around repairing things and keeping the attackers at bay.

[Malakili]

I haven't logged in for 2 weeks, as I got a bit tired of it.  Any changes lately?

They changed it so you have to own an adjacent hex to capture a hex an enemy hex.


Also, with regards to air quake, it is indeed insanely powerful to have air control.   NC had total air superiority on East 1 this afternoon and as Vanu (at about 25% vs. NC at 40% pop) we just couldn't contest them even with our pilots trying their damnedest.  It was basically just a matter of time before we lost bases due to the huge amount of fire power raining down on us from the skies.  It got totally out of hand.   It was still fun for a little while at least, playing underpop and trying to hold out has a certain appeal, but at the same time, it does wear you down :-/.  I think we could've held off a lot better with some air help, but without it, we were totally sunk and could barely even fight back,.

[Trippy]

The AA Maxes were pretty powerful in PS1. Is that not the case in 2?

[Ghambit]

AA isnt really in yet, as per a short convo I had on TS with some players.  Normal emplacements and secondary vehicular guns are still your best bet.   Anyways, with the way all air can hover and the amount of guns the libs and gals get, it's like being a Taliban with a squadron of AC130s flying around.

[Yoru]

The AA Maxes were pretty powerful in PS1. Is that not the case in 2?

AA MAXes and turrets were ridiculously powerful in early beta, to the point that almost no one even bothered with aircraft. They were hit suddenly and hard with a massive nerf, and have never quite recovered. It still takes way too long for an AA MAX or turret to down a mere fighter.

The only effective AA right now is other aircraft, and there's a huge disparity between the high-pop and low-pop sides. Sides that have been consistently high-pop are now unlocking the fierce AA missile pods, which might as well be called the "broom of the skies", whereas the low-pop sides mostly still have to dogfight with the default cannon.

For a week or so, anyone without AA missiles had to stay grounded. Fortunately, they've just unlocked the anti-missile flares (for about 1-2 days worth of cert points), which should help even things out a bit.

[Mrbloodworth]

I'll have to log back in and play it some more. Too much of it has been session shootery for my tastes and yeah, base caps have been a shitshow based mostly on the open architecture of the bases.

I bitched about it a bit on the forums, maybe they listened to some of it.

Me too, but in a nice tone.

The AA Maxes were pretty powerful in PS1. Is that not the case in 2?

I personally feel its way to early to ask this type of question. Any answer you get will only be a "At the moment" answer. Next week, it will change.

[Jobu]

Some fun videos starting to show up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rjAufUUi_E

[Mrbloodworth]

That's a lot of action for a warp gate. NC can't drive for S*** 

[shiznitz]

Did I see two aircraft trying to mate and then exploding in a ball of orgasmic fire?

[Trippy]

That's a lot of action for a warp gate. NC can't drive for S*** 

I used to do that (driving forward and back and forward and back...) in PS1 when people would call out for rides

[Ghambit]

Calling out for rides == shooting the vehicle

[Ghambit]

Beta just opened up for IGN Prime users.  Again, if you dont want to sub., just sub. for a month and cancel.  Game is worth it.
http://www.ign.com/prime/promo/planetside2

For normal non-sub IGN users it's available on Friday.

[Mrbloodworth]

Planetside 2 Gameplay, Scythe, Embarrassing NC Air Armada with Vanu Might

[Jobu]

Did I see two aircraft trying to mate and then exploding in a ball of orgasmic fire?

Why stop at simple, monogamous coitus? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI_KJf5lATo

[shiznitz]

If people are doing that shit, then the devs did something right.  I predict stacking wars!

[Mrbloodworth]

Below is a list of all of Higby's replies, with a contextual title (in bold).

Mini-map:
We're doing a couple things to make the minimap a bit more useful.
In vehicles the minimap will scale out proportionally to the speed of the vehicle, so you can see ahead of you a bit better.
We'll add a key that lets you expand and zoom out the minimap while held down, so you can quickly get your barrings without having to bring up the minimap.
Don't think these changes will be up this week, but they may be up next week on beta.

Bug: Invert-look in vehicle turrets:
Just got word that this is fixed, turret control now adheres to vertical look rather than vertical fly.

Cost and effectiveness of AA:
There are a couple issues going on here -
1 - not every weapon is in the game right now, there will be additional anti-air weapons coming in before the beta is finished.
2 - pricing is first pass for most things right now, we've got to do some pretty substantial balancing once all our rewards solidified.

Cool-down timers:
Cooldowns are good because they're mitigated by certs and implants. Players who are dedicated to that playstyle (tank, reaver, max, whatever) can get the cooldown to zero and not ever be limited by it, players who aren't are unable to just spam something that's extremely useful right this second, and players who don't know get to try out everything without having to sink time or effort into an initial unlock.

Cert and implant stacking:
For the Reaver it goes from 15 minutes to 5 minutes when you unlock all the certs. However, there is a 24 hour 50 Auraxium implant you can get that takes the reacquire timer straight down to 5 minutes. There is a bug on beta that cause these to not stack, they are supposed to, meaning that you can get your timer down to zero by having the cert line and the implant.
Separate control mapping for air/ground vehicles:
I'll ask about adding separate air/ ground vehicle keybinds. That should be pretty straight forward. I'll also put in a request to allow you to rebind the aircraft roll.
Slow tracking speed of turrets:
Turret tracking speed is part of their balancing, although I'm not convinced it's doing anything except being irritating.

Bullet spread, recoil and random deviation:
We've got some new recoil stuff coming online in the next week or so which should allow us to do some better stuff with the weapon recoil which, in turn, should let us decrease the deviation somewhat. Those two things will be part of weapon sidegrades too, so you'll be able to find one that hopefully works best for you.

Bug: Players currently have to be really close to heal/repair a friendly:
We've got a bunch of little bugs with medic and engineer heal / repair tool range that we're dealing with solving. Hopefully you should see these things get better in the next two-three weeks.

Bug: The mouse sensitivity in vehicle turrets is currently mapped to general mouse sensitivity, when it should be mapped to vehicle sensitivity:
We've been discussing some mouse sensitivity issues with vehicles today, this is one of the things we brought up. It will be fixed!
Balancing Maxes with a resource cost/cool-down timer:
Yep, we're coming around on that. We've got a few things incoming to help with this:
You'll no longer spawn in directly as a MAX but instead have to go to a terminal - this mainly affects squad spawning, and MAY affect spawning at a Galaxy as we may not allow MAX swapping at Gal equip terminals (TBD)
Resource and timers are getting implemented for MAXes, we're going to play with it and see how it feels. Like vehicles, certs will exist to cut the timers down.
Timer will make switching back and forth between configurations no longer be viable, so hopefully we see people using multiple weapon systems instead of just flipping over to dual burster / dual

AI.
Still adding more counters, AP ammo should be coming soon.
To offset all of this, the MAX AV and AA weapons are going to get buffed quite a bit. Their AI weapons are already pretty solid.

Teamplay and how they're improving it:
Planetside 2 is all about teamplay, and making teamplay effortless and rewarding is one of our biggest goals between now and ship. We've got a few things working here to address this.
VOIP helps a lot, proximal voip makes it easier to find groups (and allows for singalongs!)
Missions. We have a mission system that is still in progress that should be a global coordination tool. You, as a commander can place a request for different things, air support, transport, engineers, attack, defend, etc. These thing show up almost like minimap pings in a RTS / MOBA for players who are opted in to see that type of content. If you're flying around in a reaver and you have "air support" checked as a mission you're interested in, you'll see waypoints popping up for areas where other players have requested air support. This level of global coordination should help a lot get newer players to the types of things they want to do easily
Better onramps to multiplayer gameplay. We need outfit browsing / recruitment in game, squad browsing, etc. Tools that help you find a group of players to go experience the teamplay with.
Between those three things we think we'll have a pretty good handle on putting people into teams and teamplay situations.

Auto Run?
Not currently planned, but I'll see what people think. It probably wouldn't be terribly hard to add.

Bug: Squad list not updating (showing players as dead when they're alive):
We've got people working on fixing the issue with the squad list updating while I speak. Hopefully we'll have that fixed and up on beta this week.

What the Private Squad toggle does:
Private Squad toggles if your squad will get filled with players using auto-squad or not, it'll also allow you to put your squad on the squad browser.

Custom chatroom channels:
Sure, we're adding ad-hoc channels to the game so you can create your Brony channel or whatever, and then you and all your friends can voice and text chat. We'll probably create some defaults like Outfit Recruitment also.

Changes to earning resources:
Currently you do earn resources (based on region) for any activity that grants score (getting kills, destroying vehicles, reviving allies, etc) but only when a capture event is in progress. We're changing that so it's all the time not just when the region is being captured.
We do have plans to allow for some offline resource gain which I can't go into too much detail on it since that's still getting locked down. We will also be implementing some kind of idle timeout to prevent people from leeching resources, although that sort of exploit isn't really at the top of our priority list at the moment.

Speed in which territory changes hands and lockout timers:
Most of this is in the hands of the players right now and that's how we want it. I've seen fights over one region go back and forth for hours. I don't feel like "lock out timers" are the solution, they're a hamfisted mechanic that basically disables your ability to have fun in an area for a certain amount of time. Having the adjacency requirements in game makes it a bit more predictable where people will attack and you'll have to defend, which should keep fights moving in a less random way - but in terms of putting mechanisms in place to lock bases down I'm not a fan, players should be what holds territory, not timers.
We are making some changes to facilities which make them more defensible and which should make fights over them be more sustainable. This will ideally slow the overall progression through territory, but an overwhelming offensive force is still going to be able to make some quick and decisive gains. That's how it should be IMO.

"Yes I think many people agree that the time it takes to capture anything, especially outposts/towers, is way too fast. The consensus I've seen both here and on the forums consists of some combination of the following ideas:"
Make capture times (ticker/ticket system) take longer for everything. A solo player should not be able to cap an outpost in under a minute.
Modify the influence system so that instead of it providing a flat number of tickets towards a cap, so that it instead increases the rate of capture. This combined with #1 should make the base fights last longer, and require some coordinated effort to take the adjacent hexes instead of solo capping whack-a-mole.
Remove the lock out timer on the satellite points that have a spawn. Capping a base should not lock out attacking empires from the hard spawn they own outside of the base.
Provide some kind of indication on the map that a hex is being capped by an enemy.
We are likely to be doing all of these, as well as removing lockout timers, removing adjacency rules and probably making the rate of [2] a pretty large multiplier, like a 100x difference bettween 0-100% influence.

[Ghambit]

Calling out for rides == shooting the vehicle

proximal VOIP.  Nice.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yeah, the other night, someone was singing "Dont forget about me" while flying around as a Light assault in the Enemy base.

I joined in.

[Ghambit]

I have plans to sing that Dwarven misty mountain song from The Hobbit, just before battle.

[shiznitz]

I have plans to sing that Dwarven misty mountain song from The Hobbit, just before battle.

You must be Vanu.

[Goumindong]

So uhh, Magriders don't take fall damage. As in, you know the big bridge at j809? You can drive right off it and not take any damage.

[Ghambit]

I have plans to sing that Dwarven misty mountain song from The Hobbit, just before battle.

You must be Vanu.

yyyuuuuup   

So uhh, Magriders don't take fall damage. As in, you know the big bridge at j809? You can drive right off it and not take any damage.

[Surlyboi]

FUCKing. Barneys.

[Goumindong]

The vanguard is still a better tank

[Mrbloodworth]

Big patch today. Server are down currently though. 1.2 gigs.

But someone did see this when they tried to log in.


I do not believe its been announced officially.


Also, YAY!:

[Ghambit]

I sense MBW is starting to get giddy. 

Digression: Im all for squad patches and so forth, but they should NEVER say "Planetside 2" on them.      I mean really.  Really?  They're not serious about that Alpha Squad patch are they?  Tell me it's hidden in a player's bio or something and not visible ingame.  Matter of fact, if they put any non-fictional ads whatsoever in this thing I won't be playing.

The vanguard is still a better tank

In the center and in skirmishes, yah.  On the flanks... no.  And you can still run over people, so yah.       My Mag squads in PS1 routinely shifted the balance of power once we were allowed to flank in large engagements.  Then it's just a matter of mowing down your opponent's lines from the sides.  Mowing through an attrited base in close quarters (if you're a good driver) was also wise.