Stealing vehicles - MMORPG interview

[Krowser]

I ready this little post about SOE's view on stealing vehicles:

Tramell Ray Isaac: Basically jacking? It’s up for debate right now. It’s two different camps inside the building. Like, “Do we want jacking? How do you advance if you jack somebody’s vehicle?” It’s all because the cert tree actually goes based on the vehicle that you currently have in your faction. If I go steal a Vanguard and I’m on VS side, what happens? That’s the debate right now internally; some people want it, some people don’t.

I think it's a great mechanic that should be included in the game. You can see this in all the other shooters but what's cool about Planetside is the situation in which a vehicle is stolen. In Battlefield, if some poor sap turns around at the wrong moment I jump in his tank and go on a rampage until someone blows me up. That's the only story about stealing vehicles.

But in Planetside... ahhhhhh..

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I could be driving alone, a long way from my base, in a harsh and empty desert. The only features being a patch of cacti and a cracked earth road, which I'm following to the nearest base. When suddenly, I hit a mine! BAM!

I stop the tank and hop out, my repair tool in hand. As I'm inspecting the damage I start to wonder why a single mine was hidden here, perhaps it was a remnant of a battle weeks ago.
Before I can finish this train of thought, a sniper takes his shot and plunks me.

He had been hiding for some time, between the cacti, waiting for a vehicle to pass by. His ride was destroyed long ago and he was stranded in this lonely desert.

...

Ya know! Something like that!

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So, I think the best way to look at this is to implement it as it would happen in real life.

What I mean:

Let's say I'm used to driving Canadian tanks and I hop into a captured Russian tank. I'll know how to drive it, the basics are all the same. Gas, Brake, steering wheel, but if I see a button labelled Картофель пушки I won't know what the hell it's for and I probably won't be able to use it.

So to translate this into Planetside terms:

If I don't have a Medium Tank cert (Van/Prow/Mag), I can't drive a captured one. Simple enough.
If I have a cert and I do get a hold of another faction's tank, I can use all the basic features but the ''sidegrades'', as Higby called them, are unusable because they are advanced weaponry and I don't have the instruction manual. If the tank was in it's basic form I would have access to everything but anything different, any customisation is unavailable.

The real reason is because I'm not certified to use those weapons and it would be cheating (and silly) if I could use funky Vanu weapons while I can't even use my own faction's.

SOE, you know you're making a unique FPS game here, let's work to include as many unique features in here.