Originally Posted by Figment
It's not just valueing something.
It's about being able to defend and protect your gains for a period of time.
"We" (group of PS1 vets everyone knows from the "whining") asked for this since alpha and early beta base designs: being able to tug-o-war a whole campaign from base to base, rather than steamroll back and forth. Being able to drive people off a continent, rather than just back to their continental spawnpoint.
Eh.
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But you must value the thing that you're fighting over. Otherwise, why else would we even bother fighting? SOE could reskin the guns into pot pipes, make them shoot smoke rings that look like flowers and we can all drop acid and play the worlds first MMO for Hippies!
We, as players, must value the bases and areas we're fighting over. They don't need to be the most important, or even be a defining moment in our Planetside memories, but they need to matter enough to fight over.
Bases lose that sense of value when they change hands so often. You say that one should be able to gain and defend that gain for a meaningful length of time. I agree. But you can't overlook what a sense of accomplishment, of value, that you gain when you can take and hold something. That sense of value is what people are missing and it's one of the reasons fighting in this game seems so meaningless.
Think of fighting on your Home Continent. For me, I held the territory on Solsar and Hossin (being TR in the later part of the game) in a much higher regard than Searhus, for example. Those two continents and the bases on them, hold a much higher value and I will fight harder for them.
You can never overlook the importance of value and sentiment or you can miss out on one of the driving factors for players.
Speaking of players, it's no wonder that with the relatively short amount of time it takes to flip an empty or mostly empty base that we've seen the rise of redeployside.
Since before Day 1 the most important thing you needed to do is act and react faster than the people on the other side. If a base is going to start flipping on the other side of the continent I'm going to take the fastest way there with the most firepower. Nowadays this means that a platoon can be almost anywhere within seconds. They will spawn in a protected area where they can pull MAXes and anything else they may need.
It's a good thing we've had two years to practice camping spawns.
The reason battleflow is poor is because the fastest and most economical way to move around the battlespace is to redeploy hop or juggle squad leads and defensive markers. The game needs to slow our ability to react by redeploying or they need to raise the stakes such that if you redeploy you're leaving yourself very vulnerable (i.e. A cap point is 'weakened' and thus caps in half the time if attacked again within 5 min).
Increasing the benefits for attacking the locally overpopulated population wouldn't hurt either. If the NC have 50% population, what reason do the VS and TR have to fight them other than that they have to?
That's my 2¢