Originally Posted by Khrusky
Proponents.
Give us a logical reason why prone is more likely to produce this gameplay than cover. I haven't seen a convincing argument yet about why a player who wouldn't hide behind cover where it's safe by crouching, would suddenly start diving into cover all over the place because now they have prone.
As he said, if we can't compare PlanetSide even to BF3 (which they've explicitly stated in the past is the basis for their overall game combat model) then no proof for either side can be provided. Beta testing would be the only way to know.
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Proneponents was a self indulgent pun.
First of all prone is a defensive posture by nature. To attack you have to advance. To advance you have to be able to move at a decent pace. Often crouch is at a borderline useful speed for crouching, so to keep crouch useful prone has to offer benefits other than moving. Harder to hit and better accuracy are no brainer bonuses. Planetside is also a game of maneuver however, so it has to be able to compete with moving targets (staying still becomes a death sentence).
This is probably why people don't want prone. Since movement is your best defence and TTK is hopefully going to be high enough to react to sudden threats, the target will likely just exploit the prone guy's immobility and kill him.
So for prone to be useful it has to have a reason to be used. Maybe where there's no cover, but engineers have deployable cover. Corner ambushing could be a good one, but there's really no difference between standing there as the whole point is to kill the guy before he can kill you. You would have to make prone players significantly harder to dislodge to make up for the inability to move.
Secondly there's a bit of gaming psychology here. Decent players who camp aren't really an issue. They're camping for a sound strategic reason, but in my experience in RTS, FPS, TPS when you don't know what to do there are two strong impulses. Bumrushing is one, standing still is the other. Since Bumrushing inevitably leads to death, if they don't learn how to attack they'll just sit. Even when no one is attacking. Even when there's an enemy push on the other side of the map. Prone then becomes an obvious choice. If you're not going to move why stand? They're getting an advantage without even putting any thought in it. This is a case of keeping something out of the hands of good players to prevent a stale metagame. It's the same reason why expanding is rewarded so hard in RTS, a fact that I doubt resident starcraft fanatic Matt Higby let slip by.