State of the game, your thoughts (personal opinions no bashing please)

Wait..... You were gone?

 

Are you a zombie? I have zombie protection.....

 

Come back to me.

 

I am unsure of how to respond to this statement.

 

The largest problem most of my RL friends and I have with PS2 is the spreadsheet balance philosophy adopted by the devs and the extremely inconsistent(money grab / careless and lazy incompetence) buffing/nerfing/ignoring of issues. Giant pendulum swings are silly, see: original magrider w saron when no tanks had high velocity shells, original HE/Zephyr + base layout, lancers, strikers, Reaver offset, harasser nerf, vulcan nerf, mossy nerf, 0.75ads + flinch mechanics, shotguns, et cetera. Even as bad as most of these things are/were, a lot could be done for the community with better tutorials and public organization incentives like gal drop off certs. There have been countless high quality posts on places like reddit and youtube explaining game mechanics, attacks and counter attack strategy options using those existing or suggested future mechanics, but in the end they seem to make decisions so k/d's and score/hr match, regardless of why they do or don't.

While some people view a clear disadvantage in game mechanics as a challenge, most do not and since it's a f2p game most just join the other faction and the server pops have a ridiculous spike that combines with lattice mechanics to kill the game. People are happy feeling like they're doing good and winning when they're sitting around with another 70 people staring at a spawn room hoping beat the others to gank the guy who just joined the server and hit instant action and by the end of an alert they're 40-4 with 5-20k/hr screaming like they just won the Kumite The situation's getting worse and worse because as the server pop gets smaller there is nothing at all for most underpop to do and they just leave the game. At least before, or currently on Connery, the server has a high enough pop for there to be lots of fights on diff continents for people to choose.

 

I think that the game is still fine. I don't like to get too scientific about it in terms of balance and such and to be honest, we can't expect for everything to be perfect, it will never be, but I do appreciate the fact that devs do reach out to the community and ask for our opinion on things. Ever since early beta most of the conversations in TS were about what the devs should do with the game. Yeah, there are things that we may or may not like so what I do is focus on the things I like.
By far, Liberator is my most favorite vehicle in the game, but in its current state, considering the AA, lock ons and stuff like that, it's no longer an A2G vehicle, now it's more of a A2A with a very high skill cap for gunners. It doesn't make it bad, it's just a different style of playing.
Things will always change and we may or may not agree with some of the changes, it all comes down to weather we'd be willing to adjust or move on.

 

As a PS1 player, I have to say that my original impressions about the game were very lackluster. I actually stopped playing it until about a month ago when I came back. During the last year, I can tell that they have drastically improved a lot of the basic mechanics. The game actually feels solid, competitive, and for the most part balanced. I have a few minor complaints like scat maxes absolutely dominating the indoors but even those can be overcome with an organized push or by careful planning and targeting by a light assault (prioritize medics, then engies, then the max) who can jump from door to door to window.

With that said, I do agree with Wrel when he says that the devs are nerfing fun. It seems like I missed out on a few unique changes while I was away which seemed to give more flavor to each faction, many of which seem to be either gone or on the way out. Regardless, I think the game is in a much better place now than it was at release. In its current state, I have no problem continuing to play it on a daily basis.

 

For a comparison - I'd expect devs to be referencing data in this type of way
http://forum.symthic.com/battlefiel...imal-attachments-burst-sizes-and-aim-targets/

This type of analysis shows what's possible and what the expected trade-offs are in the design.

What the PS2 dev team usually show(and then reference as their justification of over/under-performing mechanics) are simple k/d, kills per use, etc with battle rank distributions. There is a serious fundamental flaw with this method because it compares how broken mechanics interact with other broken mechanics, like Mossies having a high k/d because of striker support, or Vanguard shield being ridiculous vs vehicles but with poor overall stats because of the lack of acceleration to escape invisible infantry weapons. SOE also then makes the design choice to directly buff and nerf things from multiple sides at the same time. That is the mathematical equivalent of saying fuck it, I don't have a clue what I'm doing so I'll just keep throwing iterations at it until things look level. It's a mess, but they have a niche in the fps market with it being f2p and large scale.

 

Sony makes me wana PooP all the time!

 

How's te game with the new spawn update? I haven't really found time to play lately.