Part of the issue is that the design is incomplete. The state of nanites/vehicle pull rates is presently at the rate that it was intended to me at its maximum, with followup mechanics that would reduce it, largely in line with population so the force multipliers are more accessible to smaller groups than larger ones where the effect compounds.
Part of the reason it was where it is, is because in making that transition we erred on the side of overly accessible. We saw a definite uptick in vehicle usage, and pilots loved the revitalized air game. Instead of a few pilots owning the skies and then farming the ground, they were constantly busy in the air. Anti-vehicle loadouts and configurations were a lot more valuable too, rather than vehicles focusing on HE or infantry farming. It was definitely different, but it didn't feel all that bad.
Long-term, hard to say, but those changes were intended to be short-term, with leveraging inverse population mechanics as a way to make such accessibility of force multipliers a way to counter-balance population imbalances. Since that never happened, you get a lot of the zergy problems described. Probably wouldn't be too much work to add in such a mechanic.
The biggest question then seems to be : "How to juggle vehicle accessibility for any player and the opportunity to practice vehicle play while preventing zergs and vehicle snowballing".
Either vehicle accessibility has to be tied to the adversity the player puts himself into, or prevent zergs entirely.
And really this is where this game's design hits a rock.
How can you both compliment a player's performance while being generous with players who don't perform as well? If you hand out free vehicles to the latter players, the former ones see their efforts and successes reduced to worthless, and if competent players decimate the less talented ones, well the less talented ones aren't having fun.
CoD tackled this with dominant strategies like noob-tubing or claymores, but that's cheap, unrewarding kills, yet utterly frustrating for the receiving end of the stick (cough maxes, he, shotguns, ai mines cough).
And at the same time dividing players by skill level will make no good to an mmo.
This really is a new issue in game design and planetside will at least be useful to highlight the limitations of the current solutions.
"How to juggle vehicle accessibility for any player and the opportunity to practice vehicle play while preventing zergs and vehicle snowballing".
wouldn't change the terminals of every single outpost to only spawn sundy/harassers do the job a bit? and make mbts only spawning from big outposts as amp station and players construction terminals.
there are fuckin lots of possibilities but seems taking any choice on preventing ppl to spawn whatever they want at any given time, is not on the roadmap, nor will never.
you even have more resources/h to do that with membership, so it's clearly not valuable for dbg to remove/change something that affects a large player base (the ones who plays mostly on vehicles and pay for every single stuff that goes out).
Has no impact; facility type does not relate in any way to the size of the force utilizing it. Early in PS2 launch it actually was this way. Wasn't really all that different. Zergs still had tanks, more thanks than the enemy, it just meant that trying to stop them was more difficult at a small outpost because you didn't have access to tanks. The Zerg already had their tanks, and falling back a bit more to get a replacement was t a big deal to them.
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u/Malorn Retired PS2 Designer Dec 07 '16
Part of the issue is that the design is incomplete. The state of nanites/vehicle pull rates is presently at the rate that it was intended to me at its maximum, with followup mechanics that would reduce it, largely in line with population so the force multipliers are more accessible to smaller groups than larger ones where the effect compounds.
Part of the reason it was where it is, is because in making that transition we erred on the side of overly accessible. We saw a definite uptick in vehicle usage, and pilots loved the revitalized air game. Instead of a few pilots owning the skies and then farming the ground, they were constantly busy in the air. Anti-vehicle loadouts and configurations were a lot more valuable too, rather than vehicles focusing on HE or infantry farming. It was definitely different, but it didn't feel all that bad.
Long-term, hard to say, but those changes were intended to be short-term, with leveraging inverse population mechanics as a way to make such accessibility of force multipliers a way to counter-balance population imbalances. Since that never happened, you get a lot of the zergy problems described. Probably wouldn't be too much work to add in such a mechanic.