S
Slane
Guest
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/top-beta-gameplay-issues-q-a-with-higby.14176/
I will post them here as the Devs don't seem like posting on these forums for some reason.
Question
Answer
TheSarcasticMinority
Spawning.
I think I've finally worked out the mysteries of the spawning system but why can't I have an option of spawning at any possible place? Until I've died there (often by a drop pod bug) I can't spawn at the nearby locations.
EDIT: I thought of another thing. When choosing a deployment pace you can't see territory colours and so don't know how close to the frontlines you are.
Higby
We don't give you every spawn point because we don't want people using respawning in lieu of transport. We're currently too restrictive with the number of spawn points you get access to, though, and we'll be expanding it to always including at least: Closest available Facility, Closest available outpost, as well as hard spawn points and squad beacons / galaxies within 500m of where you died.
Jesus_Faction
MAXes need a cooldown and/or resource cost. Adding more counters doesn't seem like it will be enough.
Higby
Yep, we're coming around on that. We've got a few things incoming to help with this:
1 - You'll no longer spawn in directly as a MAX but instead have to go to a terminal - this mainly affects squad spawning, and MAY affect spawning at a Galaxy as we may not allow MAX swapping at Gal equip terminals (TBD)
2 - Resource and timers are getting implemented for classes, we're going to play with it and see how it feels. Like vehicles, certs will exist to cut the timers down.
3 - Timer will make switching back and forth between configurations no longer be viable, so hopefully we see people using multiple weapon systems instead of just flipping over to dual burster / dual AI.
4 - still adding more counters, AP ammo should be coming soon.
5 - to offset all of this, the MAX AV and AA weapons are going to get buffed quite a bit. Their AI weapons are already pretty solid.
Malorn
Flak ineffectiveness leads to aircraft dominating everything.
Higby
Part of what we're doing to balance MAXes, including limiting their spawn (can't spawn in as a MAX directly) and probably giving them spawn timers and resource costs, will be making their AA and AV weapons a lot more effective to compensate for their reduced availability.
WookieeCookie
Idle players is one of my concerns.
If players will idle in base to collect Auraxium over night it will ruin the economy, and most likely force you to increase the Auraxium costs of items.
However, this won't do anything to stop people who idle, it will just make them idle longer. The players that will be hurt are the players who actually play the game.
My hope would be for better idle detection, and even possible punishments for players who don't participate in the game.
After all, they're taking up a server slot and possibly locking out someone who actually wants to play.
Higby
Yeah, I briefly touched on this in an earlier answer. We've got to do something about players idling for resources, and we're planning on it, but it's not at the top of the priority list right now.
Ezili
The keybindings for Ground and Air vehicles are identical which severely limits what you can change. Any alterations which are good for air make driving impossible and vice-versa. So how about distinct Air and Ground vehicle keybinds. And while we're at it. Please for the love of god let me bind the X and Y axis on my mouse for vehicle movement. I find the Mouse X = Roll default unplayable, and apparently it can't be changed.
The sensitivity for tower AA turrets is awful. I have to step my mouse up to 2400 DPI to make the turret usable, then back to 800 again for regular combat. You could make the AA turrets 3-4 times more sensitive.
Decrease bullet spread and increase recoil pretty much across the board. As many people have said having bullets spray all over the place is not satisfying and feels cheap whereas having to control for recoil is okay and makes the weapons feel solid. If I'm using a sniper rifle and I line up a perfect shot only to watch the bullet fly off to the side it's extremely frustrating. Also, how about a bit more velocity on sniper bullets?
Increase Medic and Engineer repair range. It's extremely difficult to stay in range of somebody to heal them if they are moving around. Particularly with lag.
Higby
I'll ask about adding separate air/ ground vehicle keybinds. That should be pretty straight forward. I'll also put in a request to allow you to rebind the aircraft roll.
Turret tracking speed is part of their balancing, although I'm not convinced it's doing anything except being irritating.
We've got some new recoil stuff coming online in the next week or so which should allow us to do some better stuff with the weapon recoil which, in turn, should let us decrease the deviation somewhat. Those two things will be part of weapon sidegrades too, so you'll be able to find one that hopefully works best for you.
We've got a bunch of little bugs with medic and engineer heal / repair tool range that we're dealing with solving. Hopefully you should see these things get better in the next two-three weeks.
headphase
In the squad overlay on the HUD, the list of members and their status (dead/alive) does not update itself. Yesterday we had a 9 man squad (all alive) but the HUD was still showing 12 players (from when the squad was at its largest), half of which were displayed as 'dead'.
In the squad management screen, there is a box called "private squad" that is ticked by default. Clicking it appears to do nothing (it remains ticked). What does it do?
Higby
We've got people working on fixing the issue with the squad list updating while I speak. Hopefully we'll have that fixed and up on beta this week.
Private Squad toggles if your squad will get filled with players using auto-squad or not, it'll also allow you to put your squad on the squad browser
Question
Answer
TheSarcasticMinority
Spawning.
I think I've finally worked out the mysteries of the spawning system but why can't I have an option of spawning at any possible place? Until I've died there (often by a drop pod bug) I can't spawn at the nearby locations.
EDIT: I thought of another thing. When choosing a deployment pace you can't see territory colours and so don't know how close to the frontlines you are.
Higby
We don't give you every spawn point because we don't want people using respawning in lieu of transport. We're currently too restrictive with the number of spawn points you get access to, though, and we'll be expanding it to always including at least: Closest available Facility, Closest available outpost, as well as hard spawn points and squad beacons / galaxies within 500m of where you died.
Jesus_Faction
MAXes need a cooldown and/or resource cost. Adding more counters doesn't seem like it will be enough.
Higby
Yep, we're coming around on that. We've got a few things incoming to help with this:
1 - You'll no longer spawn in directly as a MAX but instead have to go to a terminal - this mainly affects squad spawning, and MAY affect spawning at a Galaxy as we may not allow MAX swapping at Gal equip terminals (TBD)
2 - Resource and timers are getting implemented for classes, we're going to play with it and see how it feels. Like vehicles, certs will exist to cut the timers down.
3 - Timer will make switching back and forth between configurations no longer be viable, so hopefully we see people using multiple weapon systems instead of just flipping over to dual burster / dual AI.
4 - still adding more counters, AP ammo should be coming soon.
5 - to offset all of this, the MAX AV and AA weapons are going to get buffed quite a bit. Their AI weapons are already pretty solid.
Malorn
Flak ineffectiveness leads to aircraft dominating everything.
Higby
Part of what we're doing to balance MAXes, including limiting their spawn (can't spawn in as a MAX directly) and probably giving them spawn timers and resource costs, will be making their AA and AV weapons a lot more effective to compensate for their reduced availability.
WookieeCookie
Idle players is one of my concerns.
If players will idle in base to collect Auraxium over night it will ruin the economy, and most likely force you to increase the Auraxium costs of items.
However, this won't do anything to stop people who idle, it will just make them idle longer. The players that will be hurt are the players who actually play the game.
My hope would be for better idle detection, and even possible punishments for players who don't participate in the game.
After all, they're taking up a server slot and possibly locking out someone who actually wants to play.
Higby
Yeah, I briefly touched on this in an earlier answer. We've got to do something about players idling for resources, and we're planning on it, but it's not at the top of the priority list right now.
Ezili
The keybindings for Ground and Air vehicles are identical which severely limits what you can change. Any alterations which are good for air make driving impossible and vice-versa. So how about distinct Air and Ground vehicle keybinds. And while we're at it. Please for the love of god let me bind the X and Y axis on my mouse for vehicle movement. I find the Mouse X = Roll default unplayable, and apparently it can't be changed.
The sensitivity for tower AA turrets is awful. I have to step my mouse up to 2400 DPI to make the turret usable, then back to 800 again for regular combat. You could make the AA turrets 3-4 times more sensitive.
Decrease bullet spread and increase recoil pretty much across the board. As many people have said having bullets spray all over the place is not satisfying and feels cheap whereas having to control for recoil is okay and makes the weapons feel solid. If I'm using a sniper rifle and I line up a perfect shot only to watch the bullet fly off to the side it's extremely frustrating. Also, how about a bit more velocity on sniper bullets?
Increase Medic and Engineer repair range. It's extremely difficult to stay in range of somebody to heal them if they are moving around. Particularly with lag.
Higby
I'll ask about adding separate air/ ground vehicle keybinds. That should be pretty straight forward. I'll also put in a request to allow you to rebind the aircraft roll.
Turret tracking speed is part of their balancing, although I'm not convinced it's doing anything except being irritating.
We've got some new recoil stuff coming online in the next week or so which should allow us to do some better stuff with the weapon recoil which, in turn, should let us decrease the deviation somewhat. Those two things will be part of weapon sidegrades too, so you'll be able to find one that hopefully works best for you.
We've got a bunch of little bugs with medic and engineer heal / repair tool range that we're dealing with solving. Hopefully you should see these things get better in the next two-three weeks.
headphase
In the squad overlay on the HUD, the list of members and their status (dead/alive) does not update itself. Yesterday we had a 9 man squad (all alive) but the HUD was still showing 12 players (from when the squad was at its largest), half of which were displayed as 'dead'.
In the squad management screen, there is a box called "private squad" that is ticked by default. Clicking it appears to do nothing (it remains ticked). What does it do?
Higby
We've got people working on fixing the issue with the squad list updating while I speak. Hopefully we'll have that fixed and up on beta this week.
Private Squad toggles if your squad will get filled with players using auto-squad or not, it'll also allow you to put your squad on the squad browser
katanaa
Earning auraxium, is the way it works now set in stone or do you have some tweaks up your sleeve? As of now, earning auraxium is mostly just about spending time in the game, and as you probably have seen for yourself, the warpgates looks kinda like swedish trainstations in the winter, all filled up with people that are gonna stay there for a while..
Are you planning to do something about all this leeching? (Give us your best solutions and we'll try to find loopholes in em!)
Any thoughts about earning auraxium from kills/other kind of activity?
If i remember it correctly (havent played ps1 for many years), in ps1 you got different amounts of XP when capping a base, depending of the size/length(?) of the battle. Any thoughts about implementing that formula in PS2, but with auraxium? People fighting for 2 hours to get a base, and finally capping it, would get a pile of auraxium to make the long fight feel worth it, and that reward would feel just awesome
Higby
Currently you do earn resources (based on region) for any activity that grants score (getting kills, destroying vehicles, reviving allies, etc) but only when a capture event is in progress. We're changing that so it's all the time not just when the region is being captured.
We do have plans to allow for some offline resource gain which I can't go into too much detail on it since that's still getting locked down. We will also be implementing some kind of idle timeout to prevent people from leeching resources, although that sort of exploit isn't really at the top of our priority list at the moment.
Static-Jak
So about groups, platoons, outfits and all that.
Instead of looking at new solo players stuck wandering around and just leaving them, I'd rather the game went ahead and tried to make it as easy as possible to form up into groups or platoons. Some guys would rather just be pointed in a direction were there's combat by a group and be told to go capture.
That's were something like a simple platoon giving these guys orders would be handy. Gathering up the herd instead of waiting for the herd to come to him. Maybe, and this is just off the top of my head, but maybe SOE could set up a handful of "default outfits" that anyone can join up to?
It'd be interesting to see how well these new random players would start to work together and form up a leadership. It would take longer than a normal outfit but it could work.
And yeah, after they're comfortable with the game they'll start to become more involved in the tactics and communication side.
I'm just thinking of how daunting it is to join a game this big and this complicated. If this game is to survive with a healthy population for the coming months/years, which has to be much, much higher than your typical game, then it has to be welcoming to new players and helping them form into groups and so on.
Plus, right now anyway, if I join a random group, its only 1 other person along with myself in that group. This has been happening since the last major update.
Just my 2 cents
Higby
Planetside 2 is all about teamplay, and making teamplay effortless and rewarding is one of our biggest goals between now and ship. We've got a few things working here to address this.
1 - VOIP helps a lot, proximal voip makes it easier to find groups (and allows for singalongs!)
2 - Missions. We have a mission system that is still in progress that should be a global coordination tool. You, as a commander can place a request for different things, air support, transport, engineers, attack, defend, etc. These thing show up almost like minimap pings in a RTS / MOBA for players who are opted in to see that type of content. If you're flying around in a reaver and you have "air support" checked as a mission you're interested in, you'll see waypoints popping up for areas where other players have requested air support. This level of global coordination should help a lot get newer players to the types of things they want to do easily
3 - Better onramps to multiplayer gameplay. We need outfit browsing / recruitment in game, squad browsing, etc. Tools that help you find a group of players to go experience the teamplay with.
Between those three things we think we'll have a pretty good handle on putting people into teams and teamplay situations.
DarkWeeble
Territory changes hands far too fast for me to feel that I make any difference. Is this going to be fixed by more bodies in the server able to fight, longer lockout/cap times, different capture mechanics?
My ideal scenario is that the map shouldn't be completely different over two hours of play. I have no problem if my actions don't persist over a full night. That's totally expected.
Higby
Most of this is in the hands of the players right now and that's how we want it. I've seen fights over one region go back and forth for hours. I don't feel like "lock out timers" are the solution, they're a hamfisted mechanic that basically disables your ability to have fun in an area for a certain amount of time. Having the adjacency requirements in game makes it a bit more predictable where people will attack and you'll have to defend, which should keep fights moving in a less random way - but in terms of putting mechanisms in place to lock bases down I'm not a fan, players should be what holds territory, not timers.
We are making some changes to facilities which make them more defensible and which should make fights over them be more sustainable. This will ideally slow the overall progression through territory, but an overwhelming offensive force is still going to be able to make some quick and decisive gains. That's how it should be IMO.
EvilElephant
What's up with all the Anti-Air being extremely expensive? Right now there is really no counterplay until you've grinded a few thousand Auraxium.
Edit: I should clarify: This question is not about the strength of Anti-Air, it is about availability. Strength may be a valid concern, but this question is not about i. Right now, new players and even longer ones that can't/won't Auraxium farm do not have Anti-Air. With the only exception of a fighter every 15 minutes with a ****** cannon.
This is frustrating for such players and counter productive to a beta test. We can't give feedback on weapons that we don't have and even the feedback that you do get is based on a false premise, namely that only few have those weapons. But a few months later everybody will have some form of Anti-Air.
Higby
There are a couple issues going on here -
1 - not every weapon is in the game right now, there will be additional anti-air weapons coming in before the beta is finished.
2 - pricing is first pass for most things right now, we've got to do some pretty substantial balancing once all our rewards solidified.
wiredmessiah
Turning inverse on for flying should not affect turrets. Every time I switch between them I need to go into the settings and flip it.
Higby
Yeah, we've got this fix on our radar. We'll either be making Invert Vertical Look be authoritative for turrets (instead of invert vertical fly) or just making a third option for turrets.
Edit: Just got word that this is fixed, turret control now adheres to vertical look rather than vertical fly. Rejoice!
Earning auraxium, is the way it works now set in stone or do you have some tweaks up your sleeve? As of now, earning auraxium is mostly just about spending time in the game, and as you probably have seen for yourself, the warpgates looks kinda like swedish trainstations in the winter, all filled up with people that are gonna stay there for a while..
Are you planning to do something about all this leeching? (Give us your best solutions and we'll try to find loopholes in em!)
Any thoughts about earning auraxium from kills/other kind of activity?
If i remember it correctly (havent played ps1 for many years), in ps1 you got different amounts of XP when capping a base, depending of the size/length(?) of the battle. Any thoughts about implementing that formula in PS2, but with auraxium? People fighting for 2 hours to get a base, and finally capping it, would get a pile of auraxium to make the long fight feel worth it, and that reward would feel just awesome
Higby
Currently you do earn resources (based on region) for any activity that grants score (getting kills, destroying vehicles, reviving allies, etc) but only when a capture event is in progress. We're changing that so it's all the time not just when the region is being captured.
We do have plans to allow for some offline resource gain which I can't go into too much detail on it since that's still getting locked down. We will also be implementing some kind of idle timeout to prevent people from leeching resources, although that sort of exploit isn't really at the top of our priority list at the moment.
Static-Jak
So about groups, platoons, outfits and all that.
Instead of looking at new solo players stuck wandering around and just leaving them, I'd rather the game went ahead and tried to make it as easy as possible to form up into groups or platoons. Some guys would rather just be pointed in a direction were there's combat by a group and be told to go capture.
That's were something like a simple platoon giving these guys orders would be handy. Gathering up the herd instead of waiting for the herd to come to him. Maybe, and this is just off the top of my head, but maybe SOE could set up a handful of "default outfits" that anyone can join up to?
It'd be interesting to see how well these new random players would start to work together and form up a leadership. It would take longer than a normal outfit but it could work.
And yeah, after they're comfortable with the game they'll start to become more involved in the tactics and communication side.
I'm just thinking of how daunting it is to join a game this big and this complicated. If this game is to survive with a healthy population for the coming months/years, which has to be much, much higher than your typical game, then it has to be welcoming to new players and helping them form into groups and so on.
Plus, right now anyway, if I join a random group, its only 1 other person along with myself in that group. This has been happening since the last major update.
Just my 2 cents
Higby
Planetside 2 is all about teamplay, and making teamplay effortless and rewarding is one of our biggest goals between now and ship. We've got a few things working here to address this.
1 - VOIP helps a lot, proximal voip makes it easier to find groups (and allows for singalongs!)
2 - Missions. We have a mission system that is still in progress that should be a global coordination tool. You, as a commander can place a request for different things, air support, transport, engineers, attack, defend, etc. These thing show up almost like minimap pings in a RTS / MOBA for players who are opted in to see that type of content. If you're flying around in a reaver and you have "air support" checked as a mission you're interested in, you'll see waypoints popping up for areas where other players have requested air support. This level of global coordination should help a lot get newer players to the types of things they want to do easily
3 - Better onramps to multiplayer gameplay. We need outfit browsing / recruitment in game, squad browsing, etc. Tools that help you find a group of players to go experience the teamplay with.
Between those three things we think we'll have a pretty good handle on putting people into teams and teamplay situations.
DarkWeeble
Territory changes hands far too fast for me to feel that I make any difference. Is this going to be fixed by more bodies in the server able to fight, longer lockout/cap times, different capture mechanics?
My ideal scenario is that the map shouldn't be completely different over two hours of play. I have no problem if my actions don't persist over a full night. That's totally expected.
Higby
Most of this is in the hands of the players right now and that's how we want it. I've seen fights over one region go back and forth for hours. I don't feel like "lock out timers" are the solution, they're a hamfisted mechanic that basically disables your ability to have fun in an area for a certain amount of time. Having the adjacency requirements in game makes it a bit more predictable where people will attack and you'll have to defend, which should keep fights moving in a less random way - but in terms of putting mechanisms in place to lock bases down I'm not a fan, players should be what holds territory, not timers.
We are making some changes to facilities which make them more defensible and which should make fights over them be more sustainable. This will ideally slow the overall progression through territory, but an overwhelming offensive force is still going to be able to make some quick and decisive gains. That's how it should be IMO.
EvilElephant
What's up with all the Anti-Air being extremely expensive? Right now there is really no counterplay until you've grinded a few thousand Auraxium.
Edit: I should clarify: This question is not about the strength of Anti-Air, it is about availability. Strength may be a valid concern, but this question is not about i. Right now, new players and even longer ones that can't/won't Auraxium farm do not have Anti-Air. With the only exception of a fighter every 15 minutes with a ****** cannon.
This is frustrating for such players and counter productive to a beta test. We can't give feedback on weapons that we don't have and even the feedback that you do get is based on a false premise, namely that only few have those weapons. But a few months later everybody will have some form of Anti-Air.
Higby
There are a couple issues going on here -
1 - not every weapon is in the game right now, there will be additional anti-air weapons coming in before the beta is finished.
2 - pricing is first pass for most things right now, we've got to do some pretty substantial balancing once all our rewards solidified.
wiredmessiah
Turning inverse on for flying should not affect turrets. Every time I switch between them I need to go into the settings and flip it.
Higby
Yeah, we've got this fix on our radar. We'll either be making Invert Vertical Look be authoritative for turrets (instead of invert vertical fly) or just making a third option for turrets.
Edit: Just got word that this is fixed, turret control now adheres to vertical look rather than vertical fly. Rejoice!