spawn camping is an emergent phenomenon of the game mechanics, as such you can't directly address it without making up some unintuitive rules eg. where spawns mysteriously disable. A preferable way to address it is mitigation. Give players more options. In the current meta, sunderers carry attacker spawns 99% of the time. They are fragile and die when defenders have overpop or vehicle superiority. Biolab teleporters from adjacent bases are the model I'd like to see implemented at scale, at least to some modest degree. After capturing or defending a base, infantry can jump over to the next base via a teleporter or two, or even a jump pad. It doesn't have to be at every base, but there are a lot of base designs where this would vastly improve the lattice without fundamentally changing anything.
One thing I'd like to address is that in the write-up of the NZS, I included a full lore section which explains exactly why bases would go neutral. The Cliffs Notes version: The VS made a virus that spread between the bases along the lattice. It worked but the TR had safety protocols in place that were designed against cyberwar. Those protocols worked mostly, but the advanced virus corrupted all but the old core NS protocols of the facilities. The NC jerryrigged new transponders that work with the old protocols and allowed them to take control. The VS and TR learned of this and stole the tech from the NC. Now the facilities fail-over to NS control when in conflict with two empire protocols - resetting to NS default neutrality. As for your biolab example - I agree, and the NZS would work in that way. Imagine any biolab where the SCU is destroyed and can't be repaired, but the connecting base teleporter/spawns still work. That is how all Biolabs would function in the NZS. One key lattice change would be the need to go back to the original lattice connections that forced teams to go through the biolab, instead of going around it and cutting it off. The reason is that capturing a satellite base of a biolab should NOT neutralize the other satellite bases. We want infantry to duke it out in the biolab to gain control of the area, and only then neutralize the connecting satellite bases.
A lesson from Foxhole - builders didn't want to use trenches until the devs let them be asymmetrical to make spawn camping harder. What if the area around the spawn room had defense in depth? So a ring of structures that are hard for spawn campers to hold, easy for defenders to take over, and strong against the next layer of spawn campers? Base designers could get really creative here.
Spawn room camping is one of the major core problems with Planetside - it is a major detractor from the New Player Experience. My solution to this is called "The Neutral Zone System". The TLDR is "remove hard spawns from contested territories". The rules are pretty simple: 1. Enemy territories are separated by a neutral territory 2. When a territory is captured, all adjacent ENEMY territories become neutral. 3. The spawn rooms at neutral bases don't work 4. All empires must bring mobile spawns to attack the neutral base. For example, Indar opens up with unstable warpgates. All three lanes come together and The Crown is neutral. All three empires must bring spawns up and attack The Crown - no one is spawning inside The Crown's tower itself. Now, if the NC win The Crown, the adjacent TR and VS bases become neutral. The NC would have to push both lanes to hold The Crown. Focusing only one empire would leave the other empire to resecure their neutral base and neutralize The Crown again. I have a full write-up, including lore backstory, on the /r/planetside subreddit which is now lost, possibly forever. I'll see if I can recover it and repost it somewhere. The best thing about this idea is that all of the assets are already in the game, and the core part of implementation is recoding the LUA script that dictates capture mechanics. Also, zerging is separate issue and needs to be addressed with other core system changes.
This sounds pretty cool. They obviously have devs who can write semi-complicated code for events (e.g. Halloween bastion). This would probably introduce one of the most fresh experiences to date for the average fight, since you can theoretically assault a base from any direction. However, while player base spawns become semi-more-important, I doubt that system will benefit that much from this change (doesn't matter IMO).
I don't necessarily oppose this idea, but I'd like to point out that one of the resulting consequences of this would be the disappearance of holdout fights in cut-off bases in enemy territory. Overall it would require a massive adaptation from the playerbase, but I think it would be refreshing to at least try
It's part of the skill to behave in a manner you are not being spawncamped. Just like figuring out how to outplay campers. The game must be balanced, yes, but it's not the devs job to kill cheesy players.
@@derstoffausdemderjoghurtisthen tell me how to outplay 20 people looking at the spawn room that have three sunderers behind to respawn without having your own entire platoon to roll up from behind
@@santimantii6434 the ideal response, and the most "planetside" response, is you give up the base, spawn at the next base along the lattice and get some external spawns set up. A cloaked sunderer if you have one. If you have construction certs, a silo, spawn tube and router are good. Do those before the sunderer. This is thinking in the longterm after accepting that yeah we can't win this fight but we can get ready to win the next one. It does NOT solve the spawncamp issue, that is not a skill issue. The skill issue is "how do I deal with a fight I'll inevitably lose." The answer is to prepare at the next base.
@santimantii6434 one thing they should've never done is make it harder to aim through spawn shields, and the issue where shots will explode on the shield randomly. Such an odd change. I don't understand why they implemented it. People who are sitting there with their aim pointed directly at the spawn room deserve to get popped with head shots. In turn, making people fear constantly watching the spawn room helps people push out.
Complete off the wall idea: Piggy backing on the direction of what DBG has been working on, have bases able to use module slots, and add an "ODST" esque module. Essentially it can replace/suppliment the current spawn with a globally accessed beacon for the whole faction, for 2 minutes. Could also give more options like the 2 way bubble shield. Of course this then means putting a mini silo in each base
I had previously considered the idea that owned bases could be more defensive in the NZS. So, for example, you could have automated AA and AV turrets on the walls of an owned base. The reason that's possible is because when the base becomes neutral, those defenses would shut off. Incorporating your idea, those additional defense could be tied to the module system. Possibly even going so far as to add a "firewall" module that would prevent a base from instantly going neutral - maybe giving it a 60 second count-down to allow the owning empire to get defenders into it before it powered down.
Hi Commander - while over popped spawn camping is certainly a frustration, it seems like an easy enough problem to fix, a good deal of which could be improved just by better player behavior. 1. ALL bases need serious revisions to their spawn rooms, many bases (ex: Indar's Snake Ravine) are a single kill box with no teleporter or alternate route out of spawn. Additionally many bases have teleporters or "alt spawns" that are directly adjacent to the main spawn room, since both main and alt spawns access their points at least in parallel, if not directly via the same route it functionally does nothing to mix up the attackers fields of fire. In the more egregious examples of bad alt spawns, both routes may be covered by essentially a singular HESH round. Bases need at least 1 alternate spawn (and I support the idea of more), but importantly this spawn should be a near 180* away from the main spawn room. Hossin has the largest collection of good alt spawns such as the Ziggurat, where even a liberator overhead cannot cover both locations effectively or safely. 2. Greater XP incentives should be granted to underpopped defenders. As you noted, high skill vets often flock to these 3-1 fights to mop up easy kills, but more casual players are not swayed to step into a meat grinder for a minimal (10-20% XP gain). XP multipliers should scale exponentially to frankly absurd numbers (Maybe 1000%?), so that capable players are nothing short of foaming at the mouth to defend against a zerg, and even noobs can be incentivized where maybe a lucky nade with a 500% multiplier would be a big and exciting event for them. 2B. Though it will I'm certain be a hideously unpopular suggestion, I have always supported the idea of a XP penalty for those who mindlessly roam the map in a zerg. The hatred of me merely suggesting this points to how effective it would be if implemented. In the balance of Carrot and Stick - people always respond stronger to loss than gain. I understand that some bases need some degree of overpop, and for the purposes of securing a continental win sometimes zerging to ensure a capture is a sound tactical decision. And that's what zerging should be: a deliberate tactical decision made despite its known drawbacks, not a meta or a players entire gameplay experience. I think that any population over 60-66% in hex should face a similar exponentially harsh, and dramatic XP penalty. These added incentives and disincentives would work together to create a moment to moment equilibrium as players turn away from an XP penalty and look at a juicy XP incentive elsewhere. 3. To some extent, or at least sometimes - the phenomenon of being spawn camped is indeed the players fault. Players far too often only look at the direct approach to breaking through a enemy line, even within a competent outfit I find leadership simply banging their head into the wall rather than pursuing what I would call an obvious and more elegant solution. How many times have I been spawn camped in NS Material Storage 66/33 as my team sits in spawn and snipes out at careless attackers for 5 minutes, fully knowing this will do nothing to secure the base. How effective would it be if they all simply abandoned the base, pulled armor from the adjacent Crimson Bluff and reattacked the now mostly unguarded armor and spawns from the rear and with the attackers spawns gone slowly mopped up the rest of the base. How many times have I done an insane "Mission Impossible" esque move to put a superb defensive stealth sunderer in position behind the enemy attackers (effectively the worlds best alt spawn) only to have it ignored by my spawn camped brethren, until the base is entirely lost despite my begging and pleading to use it? How many times have I seen a skillfit place a tight spawn camp on a biolab with cracked out Adreno-SMG heavies, to "break" their spawn camp it would be as easy as to hit redeploy, wait 10 seconds, spawn at the connecting satellite base, walk through the teleporter - and viola, you are behind their lines and closer to the objectives than they are. Players refuse to look at the map, they refuse to look for solutions, the refuse to search for better options - 99% can only envision success or failure by walking directly out the front door. In short, this game does a very poor job of incentivizing "good fights" rather than "base captures" (at all costs, combat, fun and teamwork not necessary). This game often does provide insufficient options for defenders to break the same zerg that was not incentivized away, but also the players often fail to utilize whatever options they are given already.
To your point 2 and especially 2b. How many players and especially veterans do you really think are actually paying attention to either their xp multipliers or trying to maximize xp? The only time I've ever heard people taking about it are newer players who are cert hungry and sweaty vets trying to maximize score per minute (which is just the base xp without multipliers). The reason xp punishments are such an unpopular (terrible) idea is because in the best case scenario it does nothing. Nobody cares because they're just going with the flow not thinking and having a good (maybe not really good but you get what I mean) time or doing something where you're not caring how much xp you're getting. In the worst case it just pisses people off because they'd be actively punished for things that are not on their control. Things such as the defending force deciding to just fuck off the last moment of a cap, a friendly outfit dropping 96+ on the base out of nowhere, the steady increase in unbalanced population as solos or small squads roll up looking for something to do. Not to mention that there are already multipliers that apply when your faction is in underpop both in a hex and on a continent. It may be a contributing factor to some people's decision making but I'd wager that overwhelmingly most players don't even realize it's there
Spawn rooms need to be more like battlement or battle structures rather than a cube. Its the little spawn rooms that really need a way to battle forth from. Maybe in those rooms add timed modules to boost or push out shields or autoguns on the structure
Not a bad idea, something to give players an option to advance. Even just adding some player controlled turrets to spawn rooms really forces enemy infantry to back off and pushes the fight outside of the spawn box.
One of my driving reasons for coming up with the Neutral Zone System was my frustration with players that refuse to leave the spawn room. To this day, you can have a 50/50 fight, and it still feels like a 60/40 fight because so many players refuse to leave the spawn room. While I don't disagree in theory with the idea of more defensible spawn rooms, I feel like players don't need more encouragement to stay inside. However, this could be critical in the NZS because the goal is for "back-line" bases to be more utilized as staging points for logistics. That would naturally make them more targeted, so it would be beneficial to have hard spawns be more defensive since you couldn't use that defensiveness at the actual fight.
@@degenatron1604 so what im saying is.. pretty much give a small spawn room 3 module slots.. one gives a temp 3 to 5 sec shield to anyone exiting the spawn room. Another module could alter the field to actually riccoche' bullets back. Another could be something else that provides or encourages exit from that safe haven. And a way to fight out of it once you get pinned down to that room by multiple enemies
@@RumpleFoldSkin That's a solid idea. One thing about modules though is that they can be installed and sabotaged. How would you handle that? Where would they spawn from? How would the attacker be able to sabotage them? You don't want modules to be permanent. Otherwise, why not just build their functionality directly into the core functioning of spawn rooms without needing modules? And if that becomes the case, that loops back around to encouraging players to stay in spawn. The "safe exit protection" (coining the name) could be exploitable - so it should only trigger once per spawn. Still I could see certain players using it to get a kill, run back inside, and then redeploying right back into the same spawn room, and then repeating it. The ricochet mechanic was attempted but Garret couldn't get it to work (last I heard) because it kept crashing the client. Personally, I'd like to see the ricochet tried again, but only as a non-collision visual effect only to show new players when they are not doing any damage with light arms. At least one time a week, I stop what I'm doing and tell a new player "Welcome to Planetside. Your rifle and pistol will not hurt tanks at all, you need to use your [explosive weapon]." Intuitive visual language is an important part of video game design and I feel that is one area Planetside is sorely lacking. But I digress. I like your idea. I think there's definitely some room to incorporate modules into dev bases. I think you should flesh out your spawn room mods idea more.
I once had the idea that the timers should run differently. the more overpop the slower it runs. should be easy to install for db. what do you think of it and if you would like it, share the idea as often as possible so that the developer gets the idea
Adding more points, different areas to spawn and defend from will help I think. The over pop is really the issue to contend with. I like the NSO goal but I think the NSO membership select a home faction kinda ruined the point. Its frustrating to see NSO ops fighting against a team that has way lower pop and is pushed up to their warpgate.
Population can shift fairly rapidly, for example a new continent opens and a bunch of NSO players jump on, they get put on whatever random faction the game thinks they should go to but not even 5 minutes later when the population on the continent settles down a little a bunch of them are on NC and NC have 40% of the pop but they were placed there when they joined so they stay there. To me it seems like a fairly easy fix that the server should do a check every now and then to see how the faction population is looking and if there are NSO on the overpop faction they get a friendly prompt asking them if they want to switch to faction X in return for maybe a selection of resources, certs, A7, ISO.. not a lot ofc but something to reward it. Would make sense for the lore too that mercenary can get a message with "A better offer" to join another faction.
@@TheHuffur As a NSO player, I do like this idea. You can even EASILY offset the inconvenience of having to sit through a loading screen, or whatever by giving a minor exp boost. My thoughts on this was to implement a new mission for helping factions out. Like when you jump in a continent, if your faction is overpop suddenly, you get a notification for a mission called turncoat or smthn, which swaps you to the underpop faction, and then gives you generic goals "Kill X many soldiers" "Defend X Base" yadda yadda.
My suggestion is to use the no-go zones as no score zones too. What I mean by that is killing players in that zone doesn't go on the scoreboard and doesn't generate certs. This is relevant because outfits competing for the same base need to rack up a higher score. So they have an incentive to spawn camp. Vehicles who have nothing better to do because there are no vehicle points, won't be incentivised to spawn camp. Especially Air to Ground ESF. There's an argument to say that players will do it anyway because it is easy and wins the base. But at least the game isn't rewarding the lowest level of spawn camping.
Oh on the reverse. You can incentivize players to stay in a spawn camp situation. If you make it so deaths don't count in the no go zone. Similar to how redeploy used to add a death to your stats. Now it doesn't. You could make the no-go zone a safe zone the defender death stats. That should hopefully encourage players to stick in a fight even if they are getting farmed in their spawn. This won't be relevant to the majority of players who are just looking for a good fight. But for the stat focused players/high skill players, who would normally abandon a fight as soon as it swings out of their favour, this will be the incentive to stay. And if your factions high skill players haven't abandoned the fight because of spawn camping, it gives your faction more of a chance to break out of the camp and develop a fun and interesting fight.
I was really hoping the new construction system would supplement spawns, but because of the no build zones this doesn't end up happening. Not sure how easy it would be to make this work, but would love to see how the game plays.
I understand why they need to prevent construction from being built close to dev made bases, but it would be nice to have a small subset of siege buildings made for assaulting bases and exempted from the NBZs.
🌶Just add a 5 second 75% damage resist buff to anyone leaving the spawn, add invincible automatic anti-infantry turrets arround the spawn area, that could be turned off by overloading a generator, make beacons have 1 hp and 40 sec duration, show nearby enemy routers and beacons on a minimap, make orbital strike deal the same damage to players inside and outside the buildings, but reduce the AOE and double the nanite cost of the Sunderer🌶 Resist buff will not allow enemies to contain you in the box Turrets will allow you to secure the area around the box once you break through to the gen room Beacons are supposed to be a way to quickly call for backup and not as an alternative spawn point Routers are asy to hide, when they shouldn't be Use orbital strikes to push enemies out of the buildings and chokepoints Sunderer is way too cheap for something that could be called a main assault vechicle
I don’t know if someone else has thrown this idea around, but I think it’s mostly a base-design issue. My solution would be to break down major bases into 3 to 4 areas, each is completely sealed off with its own capture point. When the attackers spawn with a set number of players (to avoid ghost capping) the first areas is opened for attack, and only when the attackers hold the first point for the timer’ full duration is the next area then opened for access. This way, the defending side would be immediately alerted when a base is being attacked and is incentivized to address it as soon as possible since that would place the defenders in more advantageous positions with more options. By breaking down each bases into different capturing stages, such design can also regulates certain play style in more controlled environment- for example, we can have the first capture area be relatively exposed with few structures or obstacles to allow the ground and air vehicles to have an impact, have the second capture area be surrounded by walls that would take tanks out of the equation while keeping aircrafts somewhat relevant, and then as we move onto the next few capture areas we will have purely indoor fight around rooms, tunnels or other features (like certain rooms where no explosions are allowed). Drawing from my own experience playing this game on and off for a decades, the fights with the most fun is always a fight where there are a wide range of options and one that whichever option I choose I can reasonably expect what sort of situations I’m getting myself into and what kind of enemies/threats I might face.
Well before giving my idea, let's think why zergs happens, and the easier path to counter it in an more abstract/idealistic perspective. In the most part, it's because it's easier for players to keep together after a easy win to just roll over the momentum to the next base, and this incentivizes those player to keep those number in that base, and just hive mind to the next one, rinse and repeat. With that in mind, there needs to be an penalty for keep all the forces withal any significant resistance, or incentive to move to another smaller fight. witch, if done correctly, speeds the fights evenly thru the all front lines witch is THE DREAM for any PS2 player. So my crazy idea, and I already know there's tons of edge cases that needs to be iron out before implementing (needs to show a message to the player when this scenario is triggered): Increase the timer/flags needed for a capping a base, if the attacker or defender shows with overwhelming number, this do not trigger if the opposition had been pushed out. I know hear me out: the frustrating part about an opposing zerg is the lack of support from your own faction, witch can be achieved if you faction has little more time to respond, AND if you're part of the zerg, the increased time should get bored and, in the very least, look at the map for other fights.
The XP % boost you get with faction imbalance...they could do something with that. When you are 20%, you get a 50% boost for 5 minutes or something. The spawn system prevents you from accessing some bases tho, which is annoying af. I'm afraid that taking a lot longer would make it boring. Imagine when there is nobody to fight on low pop, and you have to sit there for 7 minutes instead of 4... There is always a lot to consider, but I like the idea of teleporters. Maybe you can get one or two extra teleporters depending on your imbalance. Not sure about how much work that would be. We already have the SCU mechanics. Not sure if this is an issue tho. We do have teleporters. You can shoot with the 1way shield. Maybe they could make the whole spawn room roof a 1 way shield, since its hard to go against a2g.
Call me crazy, but I thought if you were spawn trapped, you were supposed to fall back to the next base on the lattice and bring up some vehicles. I do wish some bases had more teleporters/jump pads/turrets from the main spawn room tho.
If the people were smart this is what they'd do, but the people are not smart. We see fight right before us and want to try to shoot them, we don't want to go back a base and get a vehicle
@@lostandfound1621 New player here. That is what my friends and I have been doing, but really this falls under the vet players to do, and show how it should be done. A new player should not be expected to think about the battle moment with out first knowing the mechanics of the game.
Totally correct. There is no spawn camping problem but a lack of intuition. If a strategy isn't working, try something else. Banging your head against a wall can only get you so far.
From experience, spawn camping usually occurs in situations where the population disparity is large enough to allow for the attackers to push the defenders back towards the spawn. I remember saying that each base should have an ''overloadable generator'' in their spawn which, upon ''timing down'' would provide a sunderer-cloak-esque bubble that covers the defender spawn area for X amount of seconds, allowing for the players to regroup. The reason for the timer was that even if the players are not using local chat or are in a squad, they see the timer and go - oh, I can try safely in X seconds, thus allowing for coordinated pushes with the coordination not relying on a single player.
I just don’t leave the spawn room and camp them from the shields till the timer counts down to 30 seconds and redeploy when it’s a hopeless zerg scenario. Giving the campers nothing. The spawn rooms are cramped and have to many blind spots. Having anti vehicle weapons that actually worked would be nice.
I do agree with your general assessment of the situation and the problem. My first response would be to work more with the sort of dynamic spawning already in the game - make it so it's a lot easier for people in a zerg to go elsewhere and nearly instantaneous to respawn if you die when heavily outnumbered - that way the weight of the outnumbered side counts more heavily. That said I feel like the biggest issues with being severely outnumbered are the result of force multipliers being in effect. When you spawn at a severely outnumbered base, usually the vehicle terminal is hacked and a bunch of HE tanks and A2G ESFs are pounding the spawn in addition to the enemy infantry; which implies the defenders in such a situation would need easier access to force multipliers to even the odds. This could be handled by making MAXes cheaper above a certain amount of being outnumbered, but when it's just a handful of guys against a zerg with the timer ticking down, that might not tackle sufficient threats. Now the timer could be handled by having the speed of that being contingent on how balanced the fight is, encouraging zergs to spread out more or move up the lattice in order to speed up the capture while risking the defenders popping back at the base, but that'd arguably make attacks needlessly tedious when no enemies show up and there are hardly any fights to be had. Another option could be to have drop pods playing a bigger role - so in addition to the hard spawn the players could drop pod in to bypass the spawn campers and provide a more dynamic fight for all involved, but this could once again just be frustrating as you run the risk of the entire enemy force just homing in on where they see you coming in. Finally I think having more SCUs might be an option - this could run the risk of killing fights early; but at least with SCUs a severely outnumbered defender won't be put in the situation where they end up unable to fight back and just dying all the time. The question there would be: how do you prevent this from being an issue when fights ARE fairly ballanced?
I have a solution that is cost-effective. I think we should fix it by making MAX-crashing more accessible for defenders in their last stand, especially if overpopped. Do this by making MAXes cheap. Maybe even stupid cheap. It should be clearly communicated to all sides when it happens. Something formatted as simple as the MOTD or “Steel Rain can be heard overhead…,” it could read something like: “The defending base is experiencing a Nanite Surge (or some tech mumbo).” Ideally the spawnbase windows/doors might have a surging graphic with the capture bar HUD element sparkling or something for the duration. Maybe these occur during the last 1 min (or 15%) of a capture timer-might only last 30 seconds-and maybe they only occur if the defenders are being over-popped by the attacking faction(s). The base could have a cooldown. This is all arbitrary and totally tweakable to find the right balance that could fight off this spawn-camping problem without just handing defenders a free victory. It will also of course have some emergent gameplay outcomes and behaviors as a result, some of which I’ll detail here (this is your chance to stop reading :D) 1. People (especially new people) will get to play MAX, and more people will want to learn the class and ultimately invest Certs into it. 2. On defense, Engineers become more useful in infantry gameplay as MAXes are more common and it is more convenient to already be kitted to assist in the “Nanite Surge” or “MAX Crash” or whatever. 3. On offense, it makes explosive tools a greater consideration for loadouts and already engages with the versatility that Light and Heavy assaults have. 4. Explosives will become more common. Both from MAXes and from Infantry alike. This is a shift in the game’s feel that should be noted; not that it’s good or bad inherently. It would certainly change PS2 for worse to some and that should be considered. 5. Vehicles will have to be more engaged and prepared at the end of a capture than before. Armor is more likely to be rushed by defenders in the last stand, and it’s especially important for armor to be there to suppress MAXes-making the ordeal dramatic and risky for both parties.
so,many years ago i used to be addicted to a game called command and conquer: renegade, it was a 2 team war scenario on large maps with vehicles and infantry, base structures etc. some of you may remember. well, in this game at each base was a structure, one had a gaurd tower and one had an obelisk, these structures would strike you if you were within sight of it. and it was tough to try and sneak off a shot before it shot you. so i think about that as i was also considering a spawn room solution. perhaps a spawn room can be upgraded via module to raise a gun of sorts out of the roof that auto fires when it sees an enemy within a certain range of the spawn room it sits atop. this may force the enemy away from heavy spawn room camping.. ofc you have to allow them to take it out and for you to re-activate the defense gun.. as long as you have a defense gun up, your infantry is more free to exit the room and spread into adjacent structures, as the enemy is forced to back off.. and thus meet you in a more proper battleground where a fair fight can ensue.
The 1v1v1 mechanic mitigates the major issue of spawn camping: killing all fair fights. Unless you are getting hard double teamed(and most of the time that is for a good reason), I've found at most 1 or 2 bases are being spawn camped while fights can exist elsewhere (or made if one person can make the effort to get a sundy), at least on Emerald where I play. I do think this becomes a problem in lower pop continents, and that has more to do with overpopped factions than players on the hex; I would like more thought on how to combat that issue. It would be nice to have a reason to play PS2 during off peak hours. There is a example of bases where the defenders have multiple entry points - containment sites. These bases are brutal for the attackers when the defenders can pull through 1 of six options the attackers need to cover, even more when they have topside deployables. I'm not sure adding more points of entry is a good idea unless you are willing to give attackers more good options as well.
The only way to really solve this problem would be to change the spawn system to allow players to spawn outside of the spawn room, at random locations around the base, as long as there weren't any enemies near those locations they could spawn there in a radius. That would fix the problem by allowing defenders to spawn throughout the base instead of at a specific point which is easily camped by attackers with superior numbers.
I think there should be a "detection zone" around spawn rooms that count enemy players, and when the detection zone has more than twice as many enemies around it, players are auto-spawned in the teleporter side of bases. Or for every 10% players are outnumbered by in a defending hex, they get a 5% bonus bonus to either health or damage.
As attackers infantry can't access a limited area around defender spawn add a vehicle restriction which only affects ground vehicle and has moderate damage with larger radius then infantry one With moderate damage tanks can go in fire a round and go back and this will allow some challenge for tanks and people with harassors won't run over whole platoon in checkpoints Also they should add a device which restrict cloak and recon device work just like emp does but instead of destroy attackers recon it minimizes the radius and restrict cloak abiltiy in room size room for both defender and attackera So we don't have clockers appearing on our face with one shots weapon and they have some consequences of going on points as well
I think the micro-lattice idea is great, but I think the way to go about it is to redesign only a few bases on each continent, and see how people like them. I think any new idea needs to be tested early and in a small incremental way, to figure out if it makes sense and not waste dev resources on something people don't like.
Impractical but funny idea: "Zerg defence" OP gun dispenser in spawn. Only activates during massive population differences and when the defenders have a very slim chance of winning. Gives the defending side a chance of break out of spawn and score a bunch of kills, even if they are destined to go down shortly afterwards. Defenders have fun, attackers have a more challenging or risky opponent even when fighting low pop so they also get more out of the gameplay. TBH the max suits are very close to what I'm looking for here, but they can still go down pretty easy in overpops. Maybe like a 1x free max token lol. Maybe this could be reworked into some other kind of tactical advantage but giving defenders tools to have fun even in overpop fights would add a lot to being on defence and encourage players to fight back against zerg hordes, slowing down the steam roll. However, like you mentioned, it can't be a permanent advantage or else in an even pop fight it'd just be defender sided.
We need to use the carrot, not the stick on this one, I think - And the way do that is to tempt the defender out of the spawn room by offering something in return for the risk: 1. Add a roof like the hardlight canopy right outside the spawn room entrances. It would give the defender an opportunity to peek outside and be more daring without getting HEAT shells and bolt action shots to the face immediately. They could still get attacked from the sides when standing under this roof, so its more like a soft exit rather than an extension of the spawn room. 2. OK, this one is more crazy, but hear me out... Moving anti-infantry turrets! There would be some sort of (train) track going in a loop around the base - but the starting point would always be close to the spawn room. When entering, the turret starts moving. The player is only in control of aiming it - the turret moves along the track at a fixed pace. The player can exit whenever they want to along the track if they feel like. If the turret gets broken along its route or if there is no longer a player inside - then it will move back to the starting position before stopping.
A few friends and I started playing this game last week. We have a little under 30 hours in so my opinion here might not be experienced enough to understand the complaint here. We talked it over and came up to the conclusion that spawn killing is not even an inkling of a problem in this game. While we have run into areas where we were the ones being spawned killed, and others where we were doing the spawn killing, at the end of it all it takes a simple redeployment to get to a new position or bring more spawn points to the battle area. (Not sure if its unique to the continent of Oshur, but I have even seen people spawn Sunderer's from the sky.) The fact that there is so many options to move and reenter the killzone makes the "spawn killing problem" null and void. The other point was the power balance topic. @timestamp 5:00 "8 players communicating through discord does not equal 8 random new/pug players." While, yes there will be a clear difference in dynamic and composition here, at the end of the day that is no different than playing any other game and having a 4v4 where only one teams is communicating. You can't look to punish a team because they were smart enough to form a group. Everyone has the same access to the squad "Join now" button. So if any changes need to be made there, it would be needing a better incentive to cooperate with your squad other than just "you might win more often." We came into this game thinking that because we had zero experience or in-game upgrades for so many years that we would get hammered from the get-go but that turned out to not be the case at all. Even if other players have better upgrades or field knowledge the power balance against us newbies does not feel so over whelming as some people make it out to be. It could be our virgin eyes here but we are having a really good time in the game. Specially in those situations where there is a choke hold with lots of people in the area.
I do think this issue should be addressed because it still happens and its still unpleasant for most people. The scaling teleporters solution seems the most practical to me. I don't think the issue of having to defend multiple entry points is a real issue. Those teleporters can have the same spawnroom limitations by being kept to extremities on roughly the same side from the same direction, there just need to be enough obstacles and line of sight divisions in place that would discourage the enemy from relying on spawnroom camping as their defense strategy. There are plenty of other chokeholds they can camp which offer great defense without neutering the fight. I think we should stay away from any artificial solution that tries to add more spawn restriction mechanics. Wrel's spawn priority system is really the best one we've ever had and taking a risk to "fix" it will break one of the few things keeping Planetside fairer than it usually is. Thanks for keeping the convo going Cyrious.
I didn't realise how bad I am at coming up with ideas for video games until these last two videos. I know I wish people would use teleporters more often though. Too many times I see damn near everyone rushing out the same door over and over getting killed. Then I take the teleporter and you can hear crickets.
A good way around this would be like maybe a means for a button to be pressed to send a call to other players who aren't already in a battle, kind of a super simple coms type thing whereby any player not in a battle can be beamed or picked up and taken to the required location, conscripted. Maybe add in special bonuses for coming to the aid of a one sided battle that encourages people to go to places where the fight is uneven. As a player myself, albeit new and not very skilled I do pick locations with vast difference in alliance members, but I can see why people don't, especially if really trying to improve their KD ratio. Giving people special rewards from there faction, or having some benefit to themselves or the faction would really make it far more worthwhile really.
The big thing i can think of for a spawn mechanic related fix are beacons. At the current point in time, a good chunk of players abuse spawn beacons in an attempt to glitch into spots and have nearly on demand respawns to said beacons. Ie tops of towers, rock clips on indar ect. Knowing full well that a decent chunk of the pug playerbase wont ever think to look in x/y/z location for them.
Yes imbalanced fights are a huge issue, its why i quit the first time and yes its worth sinking all your available dev time into. The worst thing to me is my favorite fights (24-48 players each) are very unstable nowadays, either you have a 6 player fight or a 100+. I like to keep the fights proportional, if a base can't handle 96+, either don't allow ppl to spawn there anymore or cut the XP rates. I also would like to reward players for staying in a lane when they are losing a bit, right now if you are up against 60% defenders all the attackers just leave, there is no point in trying, so the fight just dies. if you reward players for staying in a lane and for staying when the fight might not be winnable at least you get a bit more stable fights. what you then should avoid is giving the 96+ zerg that is facing 1-12 opposition a bonus they don't deserve bonus xp
The root of the problem lies with vehicles. If the base your defending is getting spawned camp, the base back from it is where the cavalier(vehicles) should be coming from to redirect players attention off of spawn. More dynamic vehicles combat gameplay will help this a lot, short of fixing over pop factions. Buffing harassers vs sunderers is a simple idea getting attackers to split their attention. Also not locking down spawn locations helps, while locking spawn locations actually hurts this and the game at the same time. No one likes when they are having a good fight to be suddenly no longer able to join it and the server decides to make one side win by spawn locking.
Spawn Camping is older than the actual game. Players got tools to overcome the tide. You can't just always spawn in and fight. You might have to join a squad and pop a beacon, go to the other base and pop a Sundy. Might need a an armored crew to pop em. Air support? Oh and you can have a router too. I truly believe that the biggest issue for me on PS is the disparity between new players and vets. No vets will agree with me, but as a new comer the disparity of the implants are huge. Implants should not be a thousand hour grind, and yeah, it does give the edge to the wearer. If it's too hard for new players, y'all gonna end up fighting bots for fun, cuz no meat will show up.
The solution, or at least part of it is right in front of you: Multiple control points per base. Dedicate what resources are available to slowly swapping single control point bases out for base with 3 or more points. There would also be nothing wrong with an E and an F point. If a base only has a single control point and you are a leader of a team not powerful enough to reach that point then there is no point in going there. Better to let the zerg stare at a timer ticking for 4 minutes and hope they get bored while you make a difference somewhere else. Conversely, 1 time when I was leading a pick up squad on Amerish I took my squad to defend Splitpeak Pass in a situation where we were outmatched. We went and held the underground D point to slow the timer while I yelled on command about what we were up to. We held for long enough for reinforcements to save us, with little enough time left on the clock that our D point hold saved the base. These moments are what make PlanetSide what it is, and this one would have been impossible if Splitpeak Pass had only had 1 point. The other big thing for avoiding spawn camping is that spawn rooms need meaningfully different exits which are easy to swap between. 2 examples: how many exits are there on tower bases? How overwhelming does a force need to be to properly spawn camp a tower? Compare this to interlinks on Oshur, with 1 long corridor to 1 exit. Interlinks are the worst facilities in PlanetSide, dethroning even containment sites.
perhaps a few seconds of some sort of buff when you leave a spawn room. something like 5 seconds of invisibility or a few points more of health for X amount of seconds or X amount of meters from the spawn. or just make the restricted area bigger around spawn. my 2 cents
Either automatically spotting enemies or giving them an outline like in other games might be interesting to see since they can't hide or encourage more organized gal/Valk drops
I don't know but if word gets out that the developers have reduced the no deploy zones on the map, then we'll see a huge influx of players, for a time at least. I'm certain of that, the no deploy zones are too big.
add killstreaks in the game that can only be activated in a spawn room terminal. If your trapped in spawn an get 5 kills, you can place a new spawn location anywhere on the map at that base. It cant be destroyed but will last for like 30 seconds only. 10 kills you can buy artillery strikes or something to destroy vehicles / waves of players. Makes it so defenders can push through the overpop and the zerg will be more hesitant to spawn trap the other team since they could give them easy killstreaks.
A hex based overpop xp multiplier would be nice. The basic would be your over popping faction would lose a percentage of xp based on your overpopof your faction has 100% of the pop they'd lose up to 50% xp gains and the opposing faction would gain that much xp bonus.if your faction is outpopped 40:60 your out popped 20% they'd lose 10% xp gains and your team would earn 10% more xp gains In that hex
@@clownymcclownerton1653 I'm quite sure a hex based one was implemented at one point. Something like 10% xp. You can see it pop-up when changing hexes quickly. Or could, not sure if it's still in the game.
If you want a 20% effort solution... Here is one: increase the restricted area twofold, add some cover for defenders close to spawn in some bases. I don't think there is any other low effort solution here.
Idea: increase the spawn time for the group with more population based upon ratio of atk to def like if there are 30% more attackers they take 30% longer to respawn in hex and same if the defenders are more ratio the spawn time. It happens in the back end there are no rules that must be followed you redeploy button just takes long to complete.
@@Grimhavens but its not doing better its just punishing the team that has more people to ensure a fair fight. Just having more people isn't doing better.
@@davidmcmillon913 Exept giving up a base point to take a different point is always a valid strategy. If you have low people you can always regroup. What if the team with more people did exactly that? You would punish them for having a better strategy or charging in as one unit? At the end of the day, if they win, however they won, that means they are doing better.
Out of bounds like the spawn room type. Put those up on places where vehicles can see the spawn room. Ah, no such luck on tower bases lol. Then they either have to duck in and out of the zone reducing the spam or they bring air where we have aa maxs available.
Easiest, lowest effort: Remove No-Build-Zones. The main downside is performance and It covers all the other aspects, see a zerg going down a lane? make extra spawn points in the next base. Secured an important base? fortify it. Making siege bases would also prolong fights over defending a sunderer.
spawn camping is not a problem. The problem is players mentality fixating on one base. Instead of organizing and moving one base back, taking armor and retaking they just start crying..
More buildings closer to the spawn. There's just too many bases that have plain open space when running out of spawn, "forcing" the cheesiest gameplay. More routes, more cover and more destinctive features that really define bases is needed. Fort liberty, kwahte mountain complex, nason defiance and some others I cant think of the name are great basedesign. And in the meanwhile we have 12x the same copy pasted construction site on hossin, that are horrible to play, whyyyyy?! it drives me insane. They were supposed to be placeholders.
literally just discourage zerging at a base level by making it involve a choice - as a player, do I want safety in numbers or more nanites to spend? If nanites were scaled off of hex population (more pop means less nanite income) then zerging would still be possible, but after a zerg barrels down a lane past 4 or 5 bases, they will be drained of nanites. heavy-handed spawn rules or additional scripting for dynamic teleporters is too complicated and reduces player choice too much. The freedom for players to move around the map is one of the best parts of this game, but sa we are discussing here, zerging/spawn camping is probably the biggest downside of that freedom.
Spawncamping is not a problem, its a natural mechanic of the spawn system. You have to spawn somewhere and if the enemy knows where this is, they're gonna intervene in your ability to move. It doesn't matter how far it is, it wont matter the obstacles you place, the opposite team will realize the best place to hold you off. Remember that anything that removes player agency, like preventing them from going to the fight they want to, is inherently not fun but even less fun for the lowest teir of exposure players first. The old hands will know how to circumvent any restrictions on population caps, and the new players will be stuck back at base. Thats bad. In the end the spawn system is not terrible but its definitely the best we are gonna get. They tried vehicles, placeables, and beacons. They've used shields, teleports and jump pads. None of these things have made all the players happy. Your trying to fight an impossible battle cause you got to spawn somewhere and the enemy will likely be there.
I don't have a negative experience with spawn camping because I understand how to deal with it. I do think it would be good to expand spawns and otherwise making more fights workable
There is no spawn camping in its definition in PS2 because you can ALWAYS redeploy somewhere else. NOONE is forcing you to spawn while spawn camped. Unless you are abusing infinite revive mechanic and spawn beacons the games always revolve around spamming tanks and killing sunderers.
leave it as it is just make it so the respawn rooms are more easily defendable normally they are just small rooms where the defenders end up bottle necking at a single door or window. Allow the defends to safely shoot from the spawn room so any enemy just out in the open not worrying about cover camping the doors can be picked off make it so the attackers need to consider their positioning rather than letting them cluster up around the spawn room spamming bullets and explosives at the doors or windows. As silly as it sounds maybe add a indestructible anti infantry turret on top of each spawn room or at least one that could be repaired from the inside of the spawn room it won't be enough to stop the attackers taking the point but it might be enough to push the attacks away from the spawn room or into cover and let the defenders get out and into the fight.
*Planetside 1 will answer your video. You can spawn camp. You can take the tubes so the spawn camping is over. You can take the GENERATOR so the spawn camp is over. You can neutral a base so the spawn camp is over..... PS1 METAGAME DESTROYS PS2. Who is the new creative director. I need an interview*
People need to be more organized. If one sees a spawn camp, write in a region chat that defenders need to redeploy on the previous base, and start a counteroffensive from there. Unfortunately, this either never works, or not enough people redeploy to do so. In that matter, I don't think the game has any problem. The options are there. People just don't use them wisely, or the smart options have to be thought for them. On the spawn itself, players are protected. They have time to think, to observe. If they want to become a farming material for the attacking faction, that's on them.
No, it's not a real problem. If the pop is more or less balanced there is always a way out to capture. It's just a skill and coordination issue (keep calm and respawn!😉). But, if it's really overpop, and although it's in attack (drop, sundy etc.) or in defense at the spawn room, we always end up being wiped out. So if there is a massive spawn camp, don't give away free kills... Just go quickly elsewhere to have a chance to cap before being flooded again!🤷♂ It's Planetside... There are sessions like that. Even in a well organized and motivated outfit, if there is a tsunami in front, the problem is not the spawn camping!!
Well then, someone train a AI to predict planetside 2 battle outcomes based on API information. When it's really good at that. Use that info to govern spawn rules. Who in the community can make that air work?
Don't make any adjustments for small fights - in your 8v8 vets vs noobs example, how would you even regulate that? People will figure out how to game any way you tried to "Fix" it, and you'd just make it worse. For big zergs camping points - add an inner defense that periodically triggers when a base is being zerg'd that every minute or two zeros out shields and disables all mines, c4, turrets, etc. - a giant emp blast basically.
This problem doesn't exist. It's just ballooned for no reason. I am an old/new player who returned to game after many years, and i can tell, that this is not a problem at all. There is no such thing as spawn camping during equal fight. It only happens when it's a x3 advantage in numbers of players on location. In which case getting spawn killed is simply your choice. You always have ability to redeploy to another base. And think about it from another perspective. If there is a spawn camping - that mean there is more of them than your allies. And if that's the case - it also means that somewhere on a map there is less of them than your allies. Wasting zerg in one location, when it could've been used somewhere else for a better effect - is never a good idea. So, i don't see a problem. Game is already balanced in this regard better than you can imagine. It's all about player's choice. They have choice - getting killed on spawn and stay food or play somewhere else to take role of a hunter. I think the only solution is too give players advice by some sort of in game acknowledgement by faction leaders, that it is better to retreat from said place when there is simply more them, than us. Some sort of in game message with voice.
It sucks when a good fight ends abruptly because someone killed the only sundie, but we cannot expect every defender to make a decision on how long they are going to allow a sundie. For defenders, it's like an objective to kill spawns and end the fight. Devs could focus on making spawns survive longer though. More bases could have those shielded garages for example.
@@Bilbo__Baggins Good fight dies = Someone lost. This is part of the game. Brainless sunderer deployers crying in chat is pathetic to say the minimum. Your sunderer died? You lost the battle. Reposition and try again. This is not FarmVile.
Obviously not the Commander.., Some of you should work on being more self sufficient Having a friendly cloaked bus already in place Having a base w/ a router sphere Learning how to deploy from such spawns Personally, I’d just like to see some not even spawn such a base Not only provides incentive to watch a door But it may make it harder to spawn Lastly plan to counter… Woohoo you stole my base? Let’s see you try an hold it Much less advance…
@@clownymcclownerton1653 Then what? They could fix Instant Action to deliver you to where you have a disadvantage, but Overpop is an strategy to win too. IMO, A2g Spawncamp is the only problem. For that, I'd make the spawn room roof into a shield (instead of only a thin rectangle), so you can use lockons and help people get out. Still you can shoot people as infantry. If you have enough people to make unconfortble to shot opposition outside, then maybe start going out or for teleporter rooms. Beyond that, make it rewarding for people to go and rescue a base that is almost taken. This game desperately needs a better rewarding system for different playstyles, and players need to know that attaching to a same playstyle 100% of the time is not supposed to happen. Same goes for the "whY yOU kIll fIghts?" crew.
I had an idea for a "stricter spawn control" Give each base an ideal maximum fight size (say 12-24 on small bases, 24-48 on large, 48-96 on key facilities such as amp stations) These ideal sizes will soft restrict spawns in the hex once defenders spawning at the hard spawn exceed that cap. By soft restrict I mean players won't be able to select the spawn from the map and players currently using it will face an increased spawn time. For attackers, their spawn limits will be regulated with similar rules applied to sundies and routers (with each having their own soft cap of 12-24). This is to encourage an attacking force to bring enough spawns to support the number of players and to spread the force through the base. Spawn beacons I feel should have a fairly long cool down between being able to spawn at it so it is more of a get the squad together in the hex rather than an infinite spawn wherever you want. Construction base spawns could either share the cap of the hex they're in or be limited by a small cortuim cost per spawn. For an ideal rework, this whole thing would also include some base redesigns to better fit the ideal fight size as well as provide multiple good defendable bus locations for the larger bases. A UI update would also be needed to see how overwhelmed each spawn point is and encourage payers to use less in use spawns. I also want a small medic nerf to avoid bypassing the fight size limits with medics alone. A short cool down of maybe 2 seconds between revives.
How big of a problem it is? None at all, the raw situation is beautiful. Trying to prevent natural conclusions from taking place is to the detriment of the meaning of the game. It makes every interaction, every position, every change of situation of lower impact and importance. Pvp sandbox games are routinely and inevitably killed by safety advocates. Adding safety to any sandbox game comes to the detriment of meaning, slowly turning the game more and more towards a bland experience devoid of said meaning and the soul that made the game successful. Do not remove stakes and consequences. For example the counterpush making it through towards the point with the difficulty and potential consequences of failure being part of the overarching meta-narrative that the players experience. If you want to kill any sandbox pvp game you lower stakes and consequences. I've seen it happen at least a dozen times over 20 years of gaming. The owner listens to safety advocates until a bland and soulless game remains. Any step towards some form of consequence mitigation, safety, away from the initial success of the game, removes the soul of the game and it's reason for existence. If you want to play a safer game, play a different game, don't change the game for everyone to be the same as all other games. We have different games for different people for a reason, and dragging everything to similarity will remove their reason of existence.
spawn camping is an emergent phenomenon of the game mechanics, as such you can't directly address it without making up some unintuitive rules eg. where spawns mysteriously disable. A preferable way to address it is mitigation. Give players more options. In the current meta, sunderers carry attacker spawns 99% of the time. They are fragile and die when defenders have overpop or vehicle superiority.
Biolab teleporters from adjacent bases are the model I'd like to see implemented at scale, at least to some modest degree. After capturing or defending a base, infantry can jump over to the next base via a teleporter or two, or even a jump pad. It doesn't have to be at every base, but there are a lot of base designs where this would vastly improve the lattice without fundamentally changing anything.
One thing I'd like to address is that in the write-up of the NZS, I included a full lore section which explains exactly why bases would go neutral. The Cliffs Notes version: The VS made a virus that spread between the bases along the lattice. It worked but the TR had safety protocols in place that were designed against cyberwar. Those protocols worked mostly, but the advanced virus corrupted all but the old core NS protocols of the facilities. The NC jerryrigged new transponders that work with the old protocols and allowed them to take control. The VS and TR learned of this and stole the tech from the NC. Now the facilities fail-over to NS control when in conflict with two empire protocols - resetting to NS default neutrality.
As for your biolab example - I agree, and the NZS would work in that way. Imagine any biolab where the SCU is destroyed and can't be repaired, but the connecting base teleporter/spawns still work. That is how all Biolabs would function in the NZS. One key lattice change would be the need to go back to the original lattice connections that forced teams to go through the biolab, instead of going around it and cutting it off. The reason is that capturing a satellite base of a biolab should NOT neutralize the other satellite bases. We want infantry to duke it out in the biolab to gain control of the area, and only then neutralize the connecting satellite bases.
A lesson from Foxhole - builders didn't want to use trenches until the devs let them be asymmetrical to make spawn camping harder. What if the area around the spawn room had defense in depth? So a ring of structures that are hard for spawn campers to hold, easy for defenders to take over, and strong against the next layer of spawn campers? Base designers could get really creative here.
Spawn room camping is one of the major core problems with Planetside - it is a major detractor from the New Player Experience. My solution to this is called "The Neutral Zone System". The TLDR is "remove hard spawns from contested territories". The rules are pretty simple: 1. Enemy territories are separated by a neutral territory 2. When a territory is captured, all adjacent ENEMY territories become neutral. 3. The spawn rooms at neutral bases don't work 4. All empires must bring mobile spawns to attack the neutral base.
For example, Indar opens up with unstable warpgates. All three lanes come together and The Crown is neutral. All three empires must bring spawns up and attack The Crown - no one is spawning inside The Crown's tower itself. Now, if the NC win The Crown, the adjacent TR and VS bases become neutral. The NC would have to push both lanes to hold The Crown. Focusing only one empire would leave the other empire to resecure their neutral base and neutralize The Crown again.
I have a full write-up, including lore backstory, on the /r/planetside subreddit which is now lost, possibly forever. I'll see if I can recover it and repost it somewhere. The best thing about this idea is that all of the assets are already in the game, and the core part of implementation is recoding the LUA script that dictates capture mechanics.
Also, zerging is separate issue and needs to be addressed with other core system changes.
I actually like this idea. This could also help promote construction bases being more useful.
They should try this for a month and let the players vote to keep it or not.
This sounds pretty cool. They obviously have devs who can write semi-complicated code for events (e.g. Halloween bastion). This would probably introduce one of the most fresh experiences to date for the average fight, since you can theoretically assault a base from any direction. However, while player base spawns become semi-more-important, I doubt that system will benefit that much from this change (doesn't matter IMO).
This is actually a really cool idea! I would be very interested to see how it played out in practice.
I don't necessarily oppose this idea, but I'd like to point out that one of the resulting consequences of this would be the disappearance of holdout fights in cut-off bases in enemy territory. Overall it would require a massive adaptation from the playerbase, but I think it would be refreshing to at least try
Look I know we haven't even gotten to the video yet but. Yes. It's exhausting and absolutely keeps people from truly getting into this game.
It's part of the skill to behave in a manner you are not being spawncamped.
Just like figuring out how to outplay campers.
The game must be balanced, yes, but it's not the devs job to kill cheesy players.
@@derstoffausdemderjoghurtisthen tell me how to outplay 20 people looking at the spawn room that have three sunderers behind to respawn without having your own entire platoon to roll up from behind
@@santimantii6434 Fight somewhere else, or spend 7 minutes per respawn driving there.
Real skill issue
@@santimantii6434 the ideal response, and the most "planetside" response, is you give up the base, spawn at the next base along the lattice and get some external spawns set up. A cloaked sunderer if you have one. If you have construction certs, a silo, spawn tube and router are good. Do those before the sunderer.
This is thinking in the longterm after accepting that yeah we can't win this fight but we can get ready to win the next one.
It does NOT solve the spawncamp issue, that is not a skill issue. The skill issue is "how do I deal with a fight I'll inevitably lose." The answer is to prepare at the next base.
@santimantii6434 one thing they should've never done is make it harder to aim through spawn shields, and the issue where shots will explode on the shield randomly. Such an odd change. I don't understand why they implemented it. People who are sitting there with their aim pointed directly at the spawn room deserve to get popped with head shots. In turn, making people fear constantly watching the spawn room helps people push out.
Complete off the wall idea:
Piggy backing on the direction of what DBG has been working on, have bases able to use module slots, and add an "ODST" esque module. Essentially it can replace/suppliment the current spawn with a globally accessed beacon for the whole faction, for 2 minutes. Could also give more options like the 2 way bubble shield.
Of course this then means putting a mini silo in each base
I had previously considered the idea that owned bases could be more defensive in the NZS. So, for example, you could have automated AA and AV turrets on the walls of an owned base. The reason that's possible is because when the base becomes neutral, those defenses would shut off.
Incorporating your idea, those additional defense could be tied to the module system. Possibly even going so far as to add a "firewall" module that would prevent a base from instantly going neutral - maybe giving it a 60 second count-down to allow the owning empire to get defenders into it before it powered down.
Hi Commander - while over popped spawn camping is certainly a frustration, it seems like an easy enough problem to fix, a good deal of which could be improved just by better player behavior.
1. ALL bases need serious revisions to their spawn rooms, many bases (ex: Indar's Snake Ravine) are a single kill box with no teleporter or alternate route out of spawn. Additionally many bases have teleporters or "alt spawns" that are directly adjacent to the main spawn room, since both main and alt spawns access their points at least in parallel, if not directly via the same route it functionally does nothing to mix up the attackers fields of fire. In the more egregious examples of bad alt spawns, both routes may be covered by essentially a singular HESH round. Bases need at least 1 alternate spawn (and I support the idea of more), but importantly this spawn should be a near 180* away from the main spawn room. Hossin has the largest collection of good alt spawns such as the Ziggurat, where even a liberator overhead cannot cover both locations effectively or safely.
2. Greater XP incentives should be granted to underpopped defenders. As you noted, high skill vets often flock to these 3-1 fights to mop up easy kills, but more casual players are not swayed to step into a meat grinder for a minimal (10-20% XP gain). XP multipliers should scale exponentially to frankly absurd numbers (Maybe 1000%?), so that capable players are nothing short of foaming at the mouth to defend against a zerg, and even noobs can be incentivized where maybe a lucky nade with a 500% multiplier would be a big and exciting event for them.
2B. Though it will I'm certain be a hideously unpopular suggestion, I have always supported the idea of a XP penalty for those who mindlessly roam the map in a zerg. The hatred of me merely suggesting this points to how effective it would be if implemented. In the balance of Carrot and Stick - people always respond stronger to loss than gain. I understand that some bases need some degree of overpop, and for the purposes of securing a continental win sometimes zerging to ensure a capture is a sound tactical decision. And that's what zerging should be: a deliberate tactical decision made despite its known drawbacks, not a meta or a players entire gameplay experience. I think that any population over 60-66% in hex should face a similar exponentially harsh, and dramatic XP penalty. These added incentives and disincentives would work together to create a moment to moment equilibrium as players turn away from an XP penalty and look at a juicy XP incentive elsewhere.
3. To some extent, or at least sometimes - the phenomenon of being spawn camped is indeed the players fault. Players far too often only look at the direct approach to breaking through a enemy line, even within a competent outfit I find leadership simply banging their head into the wall rather than pursuing what I would call an obvious and more elegant solution. How many times have I been spawn camped in NS Material Storage 66/33 as my team sits in spawn and snipes out at careless attackers for 5 minutes, fully knowing this will do nothing to secure the base. How effective would it be if they all simply abandoned the base, pulled armor from the adjacent Crimson Bluff and reattacked the now mostly unguarded armor and spawns from the rear and with the attackers spawns gone slowly mopped up the rest of the base. How many times have I done an insane "Mission Impossible" esque move to put a superb defensive stealth sunderer in position behind the enemy attackers (effectively the worlds best alt spawn) only to have it ignored by my spawn camped brethren, until the base is entirely lost despite my begging and pleading to use it? How many times have I seen a skillfit place a tight spawn camp on a biolab with cracked out Adreno-SMG heavies, to "break" their spawn camp it would be as easy as to hit redeploy, wait 10 seconds, spawn at the connecting satellite base, walk through the teleporter - and viola, you are behind their lines and closer to the objectives than they are. Players refuse to look at the map, they refuse to look for solutions, the refuse to search for better options - 99% can only envision success or failure by walking directly out the front door.
In short, this game does a very poor job of incentivizing "good fights" rather than "base captures" (at all costs, combat, fun and teamwork not necessary). This game often does provide insufficient options for defenders to break the same zerg that was not incentivized away, but also the players often fail to utilize whatever options they are given already.
To your point 2 and especially 2b. How many players and especially veterans do you really think are actually paying attention to either their xp multipliers or trying to maximize xp? The only time I've ever heard people taking about it are newer players who are cert hungry and sweaty vets trying to maximize score per minute (which is just the base xp without multipliers).
The reason xp punishments are such an unpopular (terrible) idea is because in the best case scenario it does nothing. Nobody cares because they're just going with the flow not thinking and having a good (maybe not really good but you get what I mean) time or doing something where you're not caring how much xp you're getting. In the worst case it just pisses people off because they'd be actively punished for things that are not on their control. Things such as the defending force deciding to just fuck off the last moment of a cap, a friendly outfit dropping 96+ on the base out of nowhere, the steady increase in unbalanced population as solos or small squads roll up looking for something to do.
Not to mention that there are already multipliers that apply when your faction is in underpop both in a hex and on a continent. It may be a contributing factor to some people's decision making but I'd wager that overwhelmingly most players don't even realize it's there
Spawn rooms need to be more like battlement or battle structures rather than a cube. Its the little spawn rooms that really need a way to battle forth from. Maybe in those rooms add timed modules to boost or push out shields or autoguns on the structure
Not a bad idea, something to give players an option to advance. Even just adding some player controlled turrets to spawn rooms really forces enemy infantry to back off and pushes the fight outside of the spawn box.
One of my driving reasons for coming up with the Neutral Zone System was my frustration with players that refuse to leave the spawn room. To this day, you can have a 50/50 fight, and it still feels like a 60/40 fight because so many players refuse to leave the spawn room. While I don't disagree in theory with the idea of more defensible spawn rooms, I feel like players don't need more encouragement to stay inside.
However, this could be critical in the NZS because the goal is for "back-line" bases to be more utilized as staging points for logistics. That would naturally make them more targeted, so it would be beneficial to have hard spawns be more defensive since you couldn't use that defensiveness at the actual fight.
@@degenatron1604 so what im saying is.. pretty much give a small spawn room 3 module slots.. one gives a temp 3 to 5 sec shield to anyone exiting the spawn room. Another module could alter the field to actually riccoche' bullets back. Another could be something else that provides or encourages exit from that safe haven. And a way to fight out of it once you get pinned down to that room by multiple enemies
@@RumpleFoldSkin That's a solid idea. One thing about modules though is that they can be installed and sabotaged. How would you handle that? Where would they spawn from? How would the attacker be able to sabotage them? You don't want modules to be permanent. Otherwise, why not just build their functionality directly into the core functioning of spawn rooms without needing modules? And if that becomes the case, that loops back around to encouraging players to stay in spawn.
The "safe exit protection" (coining the name) could be exploitable - so it should only trigger once per spawn. Still I could see certain players using it to get a kill, run back inside, and then redeploying right back into the same spawn room, and then repeating it.
The ricochet mechanic was attempted but Garret couldn't get it to work (last I heard) because it kept crashing the client. Personally, I'd like to see the ricochet tried again, but only as a non-collision visual effect only to show new players when they are not doing any damage with light arms. At least one time a week, I stop what I'm doing and tell a new player "Welcome to Planetside. Your rifle and pistol will not hurt tanks at all, you need to use your [explosive weapon]." Intuitive visual language is an important part of video game design and I feel that is one area Planetside is sorely lacking. But I digress.
I like your idea. I think there's definitely some room to incorporate modules into dev bases. I think you should flesh out your spawn room mods idea more.
Gamers camp in cover just out of reach of the defenses, whether they're cube or castle.
I once had the idea that the timers should run differently. the more overpop the slower it runs. should be easy to install for db.
what do you think of it and if you would like it, share the idea as often as possible so that the developer gets the idea
Adding more points, different areas to spawn and defend from will help I think. The over pop is really the issue to contend with. I like the NSO goal but I think the NSO membership select a home faction kinda ruined the point. Its frustrating to see NSO ops fighting against a team that has way lower pop and is pushed up to their warpgate.
Population can shift fairly rapidly, for example a new continent opens and a bunch of NSO players jump on, they get put on whatever random faction the game thinks they should go to but not even 5 minutes later when the population on the continent settles down a little a bunch of them are on NC and NC have 40% of the pop but they were placed there when they joined so they stay there.
To me it seems like a fairly easy fix that the server should do a check every now and then to see how the faction population is looking and if there are NSO on the overpop faction they get a friendly prompt asking them if they want to switch to faction X in return for maybe a selection of resources, certs, A7, ISO.. not a lot ofc but something to reward it.
Would make sense for the lore too that mercenary can get a message with "A better offer" to join another faction.
@@TheHuffur I like that idea
@@TheHuffur As a NSO player, I do like this idea. You can even EASILY offset the inconvenience of having to sit through a loading screen, or whatever by giving a minor exp boost.
My thoughts on this was to implement a new mission for helping factions out. Like when you jump in a continent, if your faction is overpop suddenly, you get a notification for a mission called turncoat or smthn, which swaps you to the underpop faction, and then gives you generic goals "Kill X many soldiers" "Defend X Base" yadda yadda.
My suggestion is to use the no-go zones as no score zones too.
What I mean by that is killing players in that zone doesn't go on the scoreboard and doesn't generate certs.
This is relevant because outfits competing for the same base need to rack up a higher score. So they have an incentive to spawn camp. Vehicles who have nothing better to do because there are no vehicle points, won't be incentivised to spawn camp. Especially Air to Ground ESF.
There's an argument to say that players will do it anyway because it is easy and wins the base. But at least the game isn't rewarding the lowest level of spawn camping.
Oh on the reverse. You can incentivize players to stay in a spawn camp situation. If you make it so deaths don't count in the no go zone. Similar to how redeploy used to add a death to your stats. Now it doesn't. You could make the no-go zone a safe zone the defender death stats.
That should hopefully encourage players to stick in a fight even if they are getting farmed in their spawn. This won't be relevant to the majority of players who are just looking for a good fight. But for the stat focused players/high skill players, who would normally abandon a fight as soon as it swings out of their favour, this will be the incentive to stay. And if your factions high skill players haven't abandoned the fight because of spawn camping, it gives your faction more of a chance to break out of the camp and develop a fun and interesting fight.
I was really hoping the new construction system would supplement spawns, but because of the no build zones this doesn't end up happening.
Not sure how easy it would be to make this work, but would love to see how the game plays.
I understand why they need to prevent construction from being built close to dev made bases, but it would be nice to have a small subset of siege buildings made for assaulting bases and exempted from the NBZs.
🌶Just add a 5 second 75% damage resist buff to anyone leaving the spawn, add invincible automatic anti-infantry turrets arround the spawn area, that could be turned off by overloading a generator, make beacons have 1 hp and 40 sec duration, show nearby enemy routers and beacons on a minimap, make orbital strike deal the same damage to players inside and outside the buildings, but reduce the AOE and double the nanite cost of the Sunderer🌶
Resist buff will not allow enemies to contain you in the box
Turrets will allow you to secure the area around the box once you break through to the gen room
Beacons are supposed to be a way to quickly call for backup and not as an alternative spawn point
Routers are asy to hide, when they shouldn't be
Use orbital strikes to push enemies out of the buildings and chokepoints
Sunderer is way too cheap for something that could be called a main assault vechicle
I don’t know if someone else has thrown this idea around, but I think it’s mostly a base-design issue. My solution would be to break down major bases into 3 to 4 areas, each is completely sealed off with its own capture point.
When the attackers spawn with a set number of players (to avoid ghost capping) the first areas is opened for attack, and only when the attackers hold the first point for the timer’ full duration is the next area then opened for access. This way, the defending side would be immediately alerted when a base is being attacked and is incentivized to address it as soon as possible since that would place the defenders in more advantageous positions with more options.
By breaking down each bases into different capturing stages, such design can also regulates certain play style in more controlled environment- for example, we can have the first capture area be relatively exposed with few structures or obstacles to allow the ground and air vehicles to have an impact, have the second capture area be surrounded by walls that would take tanks out of the equation while keeping aircrafts somewhat relevant, and then as we move onto the next few capture areas we will have purely indoor fight around rooms, tunnels or other features (like certain rooms where no explosions are allowed).
Drawing from my own experience playing this game on and off for a decades, the fights with the most fun is always a fight where there are a wide range of options and one that whichever option I choose I can reasonably expect what sort of situations I’m getting myself into and what kind of enemies/threats I might face.
Well before giving my idea, let's think why zergs happens, and the easier path to counter it in an more abstract/idealistic perspective.
In the most part, it's because it's easier for players to keep together after a easy win to just roll over the momentum to the next base, and this incentivizes those player to keep those number in that base, and just hive mind to the next one, rinse and repeat.
With that in mind, there needs to be an penalty for keep all the forces withal any significant resistance, or incentive to move to another smaller fight. witch, if done correctly, speeds the fights evenly thru the all front lines witch is THE DREAM for any PS2 player.
So my crazy idea, and I already know there's tons of edge cases that needs to be iron out before implementing (needs to show a message to the player when this scenario is triggered): Increase the timer/flags needed for a capping a base, if the attacker or defender shows with overwhelming number, this do not trigger if the opposition had been pushed out. I know hear me out: the frustrating part about an opposing zerg is the lack of support from your own faction, witch can be achieved if you faction has little more time to respond, AND if you're part of the zerg, the increased time should get bored and, in the very least, look at the map for other fights.
The XP % boost you get with faction imbalance...they could do something with that. When you are 20%, you get a 50% boost for 5 minutes or something. The spawn system prevents you from accessing some bases tho, which is annoying af. I'm afraid that taking a lot longer would make it boring. Imagine when there is nobody to fight on low pop, and you have to sit there for 7 minutes instead of 4...
There is always a lot to consider, but I like the idea of teleporters. Maybe you can get one or two extra teleporters depending on your imbalance. Not sure about how much work that would be. We already have the SCU mechanics.
Not sure if this is an issue tho. We do have teleporters. You can shoot with the 1way shield. Maybe they could make the whole spawn room roof a 1 way shield, since its hard to go against a2g.
Call me crazy, but I thought if you were spawn trapped, you were supposed to fall back to the next base on the lattice and bring up some vehicles. I do wish some bases had more teleporters/jump pads/turrets from the main spawn room tho.
If the people were smart this is what they'd do, but the people are not smart. We see fight right before us and want to try to shoot them, we don't want to go back a base and get a vehicle
@@lostandfound1621 New player here. That is what my friends and I have been doing, but really this falls under the vet players to do, and show how it should be done. A new player should not be expected to think about the battle moment with out first knowing the mechanics of the game.
Totally correct. There is no spawn camping problem but a lack of intuition. If a strategy isn't working, try something else. Banging your head against a wall can only get you so far.
From experience, spawn camping usually occurs in situations where the population disparity is large enough to allow for the attackers to push the defenders back towards the spawn. I remember saying that each base should have an ''overloadable generator'' in their spawn which, upon ''timing down'' would provide a sunderer-cloak-esque bubble that covers the defender spawn area for X amount of seconds, allowing for the players to regroup.
The reason for the timer was that even if the players are not using local chat or are in a squad, they see the timer and go - oh, I can try safely in X seconds, thus allowing for coordinated pushes with the coordination not relying on a single player.
I just don’t leave the spawn room and camp them from the shields till the timer counts down to 30 seconds and redeploy when it’s a hopeless zerg scenario. Giving the campers nothing. The spawn rooms are cramped and have to many blind spots. Having anti vehicle weapons that actually worked would be nice.
I do agree with your general assessment of the situation and the problem. My first response would be to work more with the sort of dynamic spawning already in the game - make it so it's a lot easier for people in a zerg to go elsewhere and nearly instantaneous to respawn if you die when heavily outnumbered - that way the weight of the outnumbered side counts more heavily.
That said I feel like the biggest issues with being severely outnumbered are the result of force multipliers being in effect. When you spawn at a severely outnumbered base, usually the vehicle terminal is hacked and a bunch of HE tanks and A2G ESFs are pounding the spawn in addition to the enemy infantry; which implies the defenders in such a situation would need easier access to force multipliers to even the odds. This could be handled by making MAXes cheaper above a certain amount of being outnumbered, but when it's just a handful of guys against a zerg with the timer ticking down, that might not tackle sufficient threats.
Now the timer could be handled by having the speed of that being contingent on how balanced the fight is, encouraging zergs to spread out more or move up the lattice in order to speed up the capture while risking the defenders popping back at the base, but that'd arguably make attacks needlessly tedious when no enemies show up and there are hardly any fights to be had.
Another option could be to have drop pods playing a bigger role - so in addition to the hard spawn the players could drop pod in to bypass the spawn campers and provide a more dynamic fight for all involved, but this could once again just be frustrating as you run the risk of the entire enemy force just homing in on where they see you coming in.
Finally I think having more SCUs might be an option - this could run the risk of killing fights early; but at least with SCUs a severely outnumbered defender won't be put in the situation where they end up unable to fight back and just dying all the time. The question there would be: how do you prevent this from being an issue when fights ARE fairly ballanced?
*Further to my comment, spawns need to go under/in bases and not be exposed to the outside elements*
I have a solution that is cost-effective. I think we should fix it by making MAX-crashing more accessible for defenders in their last stand, especially if overpopped.
Do this by making MAXes cheap. Maybe even stupid cheap.
It should be clearly communicated to all sides when it happens. Something formatted as simple as the MOTD or “Steel Rain can be heard overhead…,” it could read something like:
“The defending base is experiencing a Nanite Surge (or some tech mumbo).”
Ideally the spawnbase windows/doors might have a surging graphic with the capture bar HUD element sparkling or something for the duration.
Maybe these occur during the last 1 min (or 15%) of a capture timer-might only last 30 seconds-and maybe they only occur if the defenders are being over-popped by the attacking faction(s). The base could have a cooldown. This is all arbitrary and totally tweakable to find the right balance that could fight off this spawn-camping problem without just handing defenders a free victory.
It will also of course have some emergent gameplay outcomes and behaviors as a result, some of which I’ll detail here (this is your chance to stop reading :D)
1. People (especially new people) will get to play MAX, and more people will want to learn the class and ultimately invest Certs into it.
2. On defense, Engineers become more useful in infantry gameplay as MAXes are more common and it is more convenient to already be kitted to assist in the “Nanite Surge” or “MAX Crash” or whatever.
3. On offense, it makes explosive tools a greater consideration for loadouts and already engages with the versatility that Light and Heavy assaults have.
4. Explosives will become more common. Both from MAXes and from Infantry alike. This is a shift in the game’s feel that should be noted; not that it’s good or bad inherently. It would certainly change PS2 for worse to some and that should be considered.
5. Vehicles will have to be more engaged and prepared at the end of a capture than before. Armor is more likely to be rushed by defenders in the last stand, and it’s especially important for armor to be there to suppress MAXes-making the ordeal dramatic and risky for both parties.
so,many years ago i used to be addicted to a game called command and conquer: renegade, it was a 2 team war scenario on large maps with vehicles and infantry, base structures etc. some of you may remember.
well, in this game at each base was a structure, one had a gaurd tower and one had an obelisk, these structures would strike you if you were within sight of it. and it was tough to try and sneak off a shot before it shot you. so i think about that as i was also considering a spawn room solution.
perhaps a spawn room can be upgraded via module to raise a gun of sorts out of the roof that auto fires when it sees an enemy within a certain range of the spawn room it sits atop. this may force the enemy away from heavy spawn room camping.. ofc you have to allow them to take it out and for you to re-activate the defense gun.. as long as you have a defense gun up, your infantry is more free to exit the room and spread into adjacent structures, as the enemy is forced to back off.. and thus meet you in a more proper battleground where a fair fight can ensue.
The 1v1v1 mechanic mitigates the major issue of spawn camping: killing all fair fights. Unless you are getting hard double teamed(and most of the time that is for a good reason), I've found at most 1 or 2 bases are being spawn camped while fights can exist elsewhere (or made if one person can make the effort to get a sundy), at least on Emerald where I play. I do think this becomes a problem in lower pop continents, and that has more to do with overpopped factions than players on the hex; I would like more thought on how to combat that issue. It would be nice to have a reason to play PS2 during off peak hours.
There is a example of bases where the defenders have multiple entry points - containment sites. These bases are brutal for the attackers when the defenders can pull through 1 of six options the attackers need to cover, even more when they have topside deployables. I'm not sure adding more points of entry is a good idea unless you are willing to give attackers more good options as well.
The only way to really solve this problem would be to change the spawn system to allow players to spawn outside of the spawn room, at random locations around the base, as long as there weren't any enemies near those locations they could spawn there in a radius. That would fix the problem by allowing defenders to spawn throughout the base instead of at a specific point which is easily camped by attackers with superior numbers.
I think there should be a "detection zone" around spawn rooms that count enemy players, and when the detection zone has more than twice as many enemies around it, players are auto-spawned in the teleporter side of bases.
Or for every 10% players are outnumbered by in a defending hex, they get a 5% bonus bonus to either health or damage.
As attackers infantry can't access a limited area around defender spawn
add a vehicle restriction which only affects ground vehicle and has moderate damage with larger radius then infantry one
With moderate damage tanks can go in fire a round and go back and this will allow some challenge for tanks and people with harassors won't run over whole platoon in checkpoints
Also they should add a device which restrict cloak and recon device work just like emp does but instead of destroy attackers recon it minimizes the radius and restrict cloak abiltiy in room size room for both defender and attackera
So we don't have clockers appearing on our face with one shots weapon and they have some consequences of going on points as well
I think the micro-lattice idea is great, but I think the way to go about it is to redesign only a few bases on each continent, and see how people like them. I think any new idea needs to be tested early and in a small incremental way, to figure out if it makes sense and not waste dev resources on something people don't like.
Impractical but funny idea:
"Zerg defence" OP gun dispenser in spawn. Only activates during massive population differences and when the defenders have a very slim chance of winning. Gives the defending side a chance of break out of spawn and score a bunch of kills, even if they are destined to go down shortly afterwards. Defenders have fun, attackers have a more challenging or risky opponent even when fighting low pop so they also get more out of the gameplay.
TBH the max suits are very close to what I'm looking for here, but they can still go down pretty easy in overpops. Maybe like a 1x free max token lol.
Maybe this could be reworked into some other kind of tactical advantage but giving defenders tools to have fun even in overpop fights would add a lot to being on defence and encourage players to fight back against zerg hordes, slowing down the steam roll. However, like you mentioned, it can't be a permanent advantage or else in an even pop fight it'd just be defender sided.
We need to use the carrot, not the stick on this one, I think - And the way do that is to tempt the defender out of the spawn room by offering something in return for the risk:
1. Add a roof like the hardlight canopy right outside the spawn room entrances. It would give the defender an opportunity to peek outside and be more daring without getting HEAT shells and bolt action shots to the face immediately. They could still get attacked from the sides when standing under this roof, so its more like a soft exit rather than an extension of the spawn room.
2. OK, this one is more crazy, but hear me out... Moving anti-infantry turrets! There would be some sort of (train) track going in a loop around the base - but the starting point would always be close to the spawn room. When entering, the turret starts moving. The player is only in control of aiming it - the turret moves along the track at a fixed pace. The player can exit whenever they want to along the track if they feel like. If the turret gets broken along its route or if there is no longer a player inside - then it will move back to the starting position before stopping.
A few friends and I started playing this game last week. We have a little under 30 hours in so my opinion here might not be experienced enough to understand the complaint here.
We talked it over and came up to the conclusion that spawn killing is not even an inkling of a problem in this game. While we have run into areas where we were the ones being spawned killed, and others where we were doing the spawn killing, at the end of it all it takes a simple redeployment to get to a new position or bring more spawn points to the battle area. (Not sure if its unique to the continent of Oshur, but I have even seen people spawn Sunderer's from the sky.) The fact that there is so many options to move and reenter the killzone makes the "spawn killing problem" null and void.
The other point was the power balance topic. @timestamp 5:00 "8 players communicating through discord does not equal 8 random new/pug players." While, yes there will be a clear difference in dynamic and composition here, at the end of the day that is no different than playing any other game and having a 4v4 where only one teams is communicating. You can't look to punish a team because they were smart enough to form a group. Everyone has the same access to the squad "Join now" button. So if any changes need to be made there, it would be needing a better incentive to cooperate with your squad other than just "you might win more often."
We came into this game thinking that because we had zero experience or in-game upgrades for so many years that we would get hammered from the get-go but that turned out to not be the case at all. Even if other players have better upgrades or field knowledge the power balance against us newbies does not feel so over whelming as some people make it out to be. It could be our virgin eyes here but we are having a really good time in the game. Specially in those situations where there is a choke hold with lots of people in the area.
I do think this issue should be addressed because it still happens and its still unpleasant for most people. The scaling teleporters solution seems the most practical to me.
I don't think the issue of having to defend multiple entry points is a real issue. Those teleporters can have the same spawnroom limitations by being kept to extremities on roughly the same side from the same direction, there just need to be enough obstacles and line of sight divisions in place that would discourage the enemy from relying on spawnroom camping as their defense strategy. There are plenty of other chokeholds they can camp which offer great defense without neutering the fight.
I think we should stay away from any artificial solution that tries to add more spawn restriction mechanics. Wrel's spawn priority system is really the best one we've ever had and taking a risk to "fix" it will break one of the few things keeping Planetside fairer than it usually is.
Thanks for keeping the convo going Cyrious.
I didn't realise how bad I am at coming up with ideas for video games until these last two videos. I know I wish people would use teleporters more often though. Too many times I see damn near everyone rushing out the same door over and over getting killed. Then I take the teleporter and you can hear crickets.
Love how much you are pumping out right now !
Nohomo
A good way around this would be like maybe a means for a button to be pressed to send a call to other players who aren't already in a battle, kind of a super simple coms type thing whereby any player not in a battle can be beamed or picked up and taken to the required location, conscripted.
Maybe add in special bonuses for coming to the aid of a one sided battle that encourages people to go to places where the fight is uneven.
As a player myself, albeit new and not very skilled I do pick locations with vast difference in alliance members, but I can see why people don't, especially if really trying to improve their KD ratio. Giving people special rewards from there faction, or having some benefit to themselves or the faction would really make it far more worthwhile really.
The big thing i can think of for a spawn mechanic related fix are beacons. At the current point in time, a good chunk of players abuse spawn beacons in an attempt to glitch into spots and have nearly on demand respawns to said beacons. Ie tops of towers, rock clips on indar ect. Knowing full well that a decent chunk of the pug playerbase wont ever think to look in x/y/z location for them.
Yes imbalanced fights are a huge issue, its why i quit the first time and yes its worth sinking all your available dev time into.
The worst thing to me is my favorite fights (24-48 players each) are very unstable nowadays, either you have a 6 player fight or a 100+.
I like to keep the fights proportional, if a base can't handle 96+, either don't allow ppl to spawn there anymore or cut the XP rates.
I also would like to reward players for staying in a lane when they are losing a bit, right now if you are up against 60% defenders all the attackers just leave, there is no point in trying, so the fight just dies. if you reward players for staying in a lane and for staying when the fight might not be winnable at least you get a bit more stable fights. what you then should avoid is giving the 96+ zerg that is facing 1-12 opposition a bonus they don't deserve bonus xp
The root of the problem lies with vehicles. If the base your defending is getting spawned camp, the base back from it is where the cavalier(vehicles) should be coming from to redirect players attention off of spawn. More dynamic vehicles combat gameplay will help this a lot, short of fixing over pop factions. Buffing harassers vs sunderers is a simple idea getting attackers to split their attention. Also not locking down spawn locations helps, while locking spawn locations actually hurts this and the game at the same time. No one likes when they are having a good fight to be suddenly no longer able to join it and the server decides to make one side win by spawn locking.
Spawn Camping is older than the actual game. Players got tools to overcome the tide. You can't just always spawn in and fight. You might have to join a squad and pop a beacon, go to the other base and pop a Sundy. Might need a an armored crew to pop em. Air support? Oh and you can have a router too.
I truly believe that the biggest issue for me on PS is the disparity between new players and vets. No vets will agree with me, but as a new comer the disparity of the implants are huge. Implants should not be a thousand hour grind, and yeah, it does give the edge to the wearer.
If it's too hard for new players, y'all gonna end up fighting bots for fun, cuz no meat will show up.
Agree 100% on the "8 coordinated players aren't equal to 8 randoms". Capped Pale Canyon just the other day with 25% pop.
The solution, or at least part of it is right in front of you: Multiple control points per base. Dedicate what resources are available to slowly swapping single control point bases out for base with 3 or more points. There would also be nothing wrong with an E and an F point.
If a base only has a single control point and you are a leader of a team not powerful enough to reach that point then there is no point in going there. Better to let the zerg stare at a timer ticking for 4 minutes and hope they get bored while you make a difference somewhere else.
Conversely, 1 time when I was leading a pick up squad on Amerish I took my squad to defend Splitpeak Pass in a situation where we were outmatched. We went and held the underground D point to slow the timer while I yelled on command about what we were up to. We held for long enough for reinforcements to save us, with little enough time left on the clock that our D point hold saved the base. These moments are what make PlanetSide what it is, and this one would have been impossible if Splitpeak Pass had only had 1 point.
The other big thing for avoiding spawn camping is that spawn rooms need meaningfully different exits which are easy to swap between. 2 examples: how many exits are there on tower bases? How overwhelming does a force need to be to properly spawn camp a tower? Compare this to interlinks on Oshur, with 1 long corridor to 1 exit. Interlinks are the worst facilities in PlanetSide, dethroning even containment sites.
perhaps a few seconds of some sort of buff when you leave a spawn room. something like 5 seconds of invisibility or a few points more of health for X amount of seconds or X amount of meters from the spawn. or just make the restricted area bigger around spawn. my 2 cents
You're first idea of having lets say one more exit in spawns is the best I think
Either automatically spotting enemies or giving them an outline like in other games might be interesting to see since they can't hide or encourage more organized gal/Valk drops
I don't know but if word gets out that the developers have reduced the no deploy zones on the map, then we'll see a huge influx of players, for a time at least. I'm certain of that, the no deploy zones are too big.
add killstreaks in the game that can only be activated in a spawn room terminal. If your trapped in spawn an get 5 kills, you can place a new spawn location anywhere on the map at that base. It cant be destroyed but will last for like 30 seconds only. 10 kills you can buy artillery strikes or something to destroy vehicles / waves of players. Makes it so defenders can push through the overpop and the zerg will be more hesitant to spawn trap the other team since they could give them easy killstreaks.
You can’t really affect this without affecting the battle flow in a even environment. The problem isn’t getting spawn camp, is the zerg.
A hex based overpop xp multiplier would be nice. The basic would be your over popping faction would lose a percentage of xp based on your overpopof your faction has 100% of the pop they'd lose up to 50% xp gains and the opposing faction would gain that much xp bonus.if your faction is outpopped 40:60 your out popped 20% they'd lose 10% xp gains and your team would earn 10% more xp gains In that hex
Already been done. I think it's still in the game even. No one cares about it.
@@theoperator3712 there's a faction based one not a hex based one
@@clownymcclownerton1653 I'm quite sure a hex based one was implemented at one point. Something like 10% xp. You can see it pop-up when changing hexes quickly. Or could, not sure if it's still in the game.
If you want a 20% effort solution... Here is one: increase the restricted area twofold, add some cover for defenders close to spawn in some bases. I don't think there is any other low effort solution here.
Idea: increase the spawn time for the group with more population based upon ratio of atk to def like if there are 30% more attackers they take 30% longer to respawn in hex and same if the defenders are more ratio the spawn time. It happens in the back end there are no rules that must be followed you redeploy button just takes long to complete.
This just sounds like "punish the other team for doing better."
@@Grimhavens but its not doing better its just punishing the team that has more people to ensure a fair fight. Just having more people isn't doing better.
@@davidmcmillon913 Exept giving up a base point to take a different point is always a valid strategy. If you have low people you can always regroup. What if the team with more people did exactly that? You would punish them for having a better strategy or charging in as one unit?
At the end of the day, if they win, however they won, that means they are doing better.
Heres an idea: Construction. Build your respawn locstions.
Out of bounds like the spawn room type. Put those up on places where vehicles can see the spawn room. Ah, no such luck on tower bases lol. Then they either have to duck in and out of the zone reducing the spam or they bring air where we have aa maxs available.
a jumppad like in the boat to get across the base..
that would be sick
Easiest, lowest effort:
Remove No-Build-Zones.
The main downside is performance and It covers all the other aspects, see a zerg going down a lane? make extra spawn points in the next base. Secured an important base? fortify it. Making siege bases would also prolong fights over defending a sunderer.
spawn camping is not a problem. The problem is players mentality fixating on one base. Instead of organizing and moving one base back, taking armor and retaking they just start crying..
More buildings closer to the spawn. There's just too many bases that have plain open space when running out of spawn, "forcing" the cheesiest gameplay. More routes, more cover and more destinctive features that really define bases is needed.
Fort liberty, kwahte mountain complex, nason defiance and some others I cant think of the name are great basedesign.
And in the meanwhile we have 12x the same copy pasted construction site on hossin, that are horrible to play, whyyyyy?! it drives me insane. They were supposed to be placeholders.
literally just discourage zerging at a base level by making it involve a choice - as a player, do I want safety in numbers or more nanites to spend? If nanites were scaled off of hex population (more pop means less nanite income) then zerging would still be possible, but after a zerg barrels down a lane past 4 or 5 bases, they will be drained of nanites. heavy-handed spawn rules or additional scripting for dynamic teleporters is too complicated and reduces player choice too much. The freedom for players to move around the map is one of the best parts of this game, but sa we are discussing here, zerging/spawn camping is probably the biggest downside of that freedom.
Spawncamping is not a problem, its a natural mechanic of the spawn system. You have to spawn somewhere and if the enemy knows where this is, they're gonna intervene in your ability to move. It doesn't matter how far it is, it wont matter the obstacles you place, the opposite team will realize the best place to hold you off. Remember that anything that removes player agency, like preventing them from going to the fight they want to, is inherently not fun but even less fun for the lowest teir of exposure players first. The old hands will know how to circumvent any restrictions on population caps, and the new players will be stuck back at base. Thats bad.
In the end the spawn system is not terrible but its definitely the best we are gonna get. They tried vehicles, placeables, and beacons. They've used shields, teleports and jump pads. None of these things have made all the players happy. Your trying to fight an impossible battle cause you got to spawn somewhere and the enemy will likely be there.
I don't have a negative experience with spawn camping because I understand how to deal with it. I do think it would be good to expand spawns and otherwise making more fights workable
How do you deal with it?
instead of more teleporters, which would require a bit of planning on the base, why not drop pods?
There is no spawn camping in its definition in PS2 because you can ALWAYS redeploy somewhere else. NOONE is forcing you to spawn while spawn camped. Unless you are abusing infinite revive mechanic and spawn beacons the games always revolve around spamming tanks and killing sunderers.
Agree. Its kinda pandering to people who don't understand a combined arms game. Lots of infantry bots out there lol
leave it as it is just make it so the respawn rooms are more easily defendable normally they are just small rooms where the defenders end up bottle necking at a single door or window. Allow the defends to safely shoot from the spawn room so any enemy just out in the open not worrying about cover camping the doors can be picked off make it so the attackers need to consider their positioning rather than letting them cluster up around the spawn room spamming bullets and explosives at the doors or windows. As silly as it sounds maybe add a indestructible anti infantry turret on top of each spawn room or at least one that could be repaired from the inside of the spawn room it won't be enough to stop the attackers taking the point but it might be enough to push the attacks away from the spawn room or into cover and let the defenders get out and into the fight.
*Planetside 1 will answer your video. You can spawn camp. You can take the tubes so the spawn camping is over. You can take the GENERATOR so the spawn camp is over. You can neutral a base so the spawn camp is over..... PS1 METAGAME DESTROYS PS2. Who is the new creative director. I need an interview*
There isn't a new one. There is an opening on their website for Creative Director. You've got my vote! Do it!
@@CMDRCyrious LOL I just want to be legacy guidance. The voice of reason
People need to be more organized. If one sees a spawn camp, write in a region chat that defenders need to redeploy on the previous base, and start a counteroffensive from there. Unfortunately, this either never works, or not enough people redeploy to do so. In that matter, I don't think the game has any problem. The options are there. People just don't use them wisely, or the smart options have to be thought for them.
On the spawn itself, players are protected. They have time to think, to observe. If they want to become a farming material for the attacking faction, that's on them.
No, it's not a real problem.
If the pop is more or less balanced there is always a way out to capture. It's just a skill and coordination issue (keep calm and respawn!😉).
But, if it's really overpop, and although it's in attack (drop, sundy etc.) or in defense at the spawn room, we always end up being wiped out.
So if there is a massive spawn camp, don't give away free kills... Just go quickly elsewhere to have a chance to cap before being flooded again!🤷♂
It's Planetside... There are sessions like that. Even in a well organized and motivated outfit, if there is a tsunami in front, the problem is not the spawn camping!!
Well then, someone train a AI to predict planetside 2 battle outcomes based on API information. When it's really good at that. Use that info to govern spawn rules. Who in the community can make that air work?
I would say it’s an issue, but not nearly as much of an issue as with the new CTF mechanic.
Don't make any adjustments for small fights - in your 8v8 vets vs noobs example, how would you even regulate that? People will figure out how to game any way you tried to "Fix" it, and you'd just make it worse.
For big zergs camping points - add an inner defense that periodically triggers when a base is being zerg'd that every minute or two zeros out shields and disables all mines, c4, turrets, etc. - a giant emp blast basically.
This problem doesn't exist. It's just ballooned for no reason. I am an old/new player who returned to game after many years, and i can tell, that this is not a problem at all. There is no such thing as spawn camping during equal fight. It only happens when it's a x3 advantage in numbers of players on location. In which case getting spawn killed is simply your choice. You always have ability to redeploy to another base. And think about it from another perspective. If there is a spawn camping - that mean there is more of them than your allies. And if that's the case - it also means that somewhere on a map there is less of them than your allies. Wasting zerg in one location, when it could've been used somewhere else for a better effect - is never a good idea. So, i don't see a problem. Game is already balanced in this regard better than you can imagine. It's all about player's choice. They have choice - getting killed on spawn and stay food or play somewhere else to take role of a hunter. I think the only solution is too give players advice by some sort of in game acknowledgement by faction leaders, that it is better to retreat from said place when there is simply more them, than us. Some sort of in game message with voice.
Yep, dpawn camping is VERY BIG problem of PS2
Wonder if you'll talk about destroying spawns asap as well
It sucks when a good fight ends abruptly because someone killed the only sundie, but we cannot expect every defender to make a decision on how long they are going to allow a sundie. For defenders, it's like an objective to kill spawns and end the fight.
Devs could focus on making spawns survive longer though. More bases could have those shielded garages for example.
@@Bilbo__Baggins Good fight dies = Someone lost. This is part of the game. Brainless sunderer deployers crying in chat is pathetic to say the minimum. Your sunderer died? You lost the battle. Reposition and try again. This is not FarmVile.
@@Bilbo__Baggins Oh I completely agree with you, sometimes the best move defenders can make is get rid of every spawn before overpop get to them.
Obviously not the Commander.., Some of you should work on being more self sufficient Having a friendly cloaked bus already in place Having a base w/ a router sphere Learning how to deploy from such spawns Personally, I’d just like to see some not even spawn such a base Not only provides incentive to watch a door But it may make it harder to spawn Lastly plan to counter… Woohoo you stole my base? Let’s see you try an hold it Much less advance…
Spawn camping isnt the problem, overpop is
If you cant farm in any way on an overpop, is the so called skill issue.
@@anubisTC not saying that I'm saying the cause of spawn camps is overpop
@@clownymcclownerton1653 Then what? They could fix Instant Action to deliver you to where you have a disadvantage, but Overpop is an strategy to win too.
IMO, A2g Spawncamp is the only problem. For that, I'd make the spawn room roof into a shield (instead of only a thin rectangle), so you can use lockons and help people get out. Still you can shoot people as infantry. If you have enough people to make unconfortble to shot opposition outside, then maybe start going out or for teleporter rooms.
Beyond that, make it rewarding for people to go and rescue a base that is almost taken.
This game desperately needs a better rewarding system for different playstyles, and players need to know that attaching to a same playstyle 100% of the time is not supposed to happen. Same goes for the "whY yOU kIll fIghts?" crew.
@@anubisTC I 100% agree with you
I had an idea for a "stricter spawn control"
Give each base an ideal maximum fight size (say 12-24 on small bases, 24-48 on large, 48-96 on key facilities such as amp stations)
These ideal sizes will soft restrict spawns in the hex once defenders spawning at the hard spawn exceed that cap. By soft restrict I mean players won't be able to select the spawn from the map and players currently using it will face an increased spawn time.
For attackers, their spawn limits will be regulated with similar rules applied to sundies and routers (with each having their own soft cap of 12-24). This is to encourage an attacking force to bring enough spawns to support the number of players and to spread the force through the base.
Spawn beacons I feel should have a fairly long cool down between being able to spawn at it so it is more of a get the squad together in the hex rather than an infinite spawn wherever you want.
Construction base spawns could either share the cap of the hex they're in or be limited by a small cortuim cost per spawn.
For an ideal rework, this whole thing would also include some base redesigns to better fit the ideal fight size as well as provide multiple good defendable bus locations for the larger bases. A UI update would also be needed to see how overwhelmed each spawn point is and encourage payers to use less in use spawns.
I also want a small medic nerf to avoid bypassing the fight size limits with medics alone. A short cool down of maybe 2 seconds between revives.
How big of a problem it is? None at all, the raw situation is beautiful. Trying to prevent natural conclusions from taking place is to the detriment of the meaning of the game. It makes every interaction, every position, every change of situation of lower impact and importance. Pvp sandbox games are routinely and inevitably killed by safety advocates. Adding safety to any sandbox game comes to the detriment of meaning, slowly turning the game more and more towards a bland experience devoid of said meaning and the soul that made the game successful. Do not remove stakes and consequences. For example the counterpush making it through towards the point with the difficulty and potential consequences of failure being part of the overarching meta-narrative that the players experience.
If you want to kill any sandbox pvp game you lower stakes and consequences. I've seen it happen at least a dozen times over 20 years of gaming. The owner listens to safety advocates until a bland and soulless game remains. Any step towards some form of consequence mitigation, safety, away from the initial success of the game, removes the soul of the game and it's reason for existence. If you want to play a safer game, play a different game, don't change the game for everyone to be the same as all other games. We have different games for different people for a reason, and dragging everything to similarity will remove their reason of existence.
What about a buildable portal that vehicles can go thru. Vanu only obviously.
respawn timers. Go absolutely ham on the respawn timers. 20 secs for 80 % overpop, 1 sec for the 20 % underpop. Something like that.