So after spending my coffee time this morning reading through posts on Planetside2.com forums, I've come to realize that I disagree with a lot of what is posted.
It seems like people on the official forums blame a lot of the games issues on faction specific weapon imbalance, which blows my mind. The game is fairly well balanced for a three sided game, the few disparity's are obvious though. But reading on the forums about which factions weapons are stronger just drives me nuts. For the amount of guns in the game and the incredibly small differences in RoF, TTK, Reload, etc I find it amazing that people think FactionA wins more often because of their weapons. It really bothers me the most when I see people saying Vanu have it the best with the bullet drop, because 90% of fights happen in a range so small that bullet drop doesn't even have to be considered and when they're outside of that range the VS have damage drop off that everyone conveniently ignores when debating the minimal differences in weapons. Does anyone really feel that the weapons are that imbalanced? Do you guys get pushed out of defending a base and blame it on the faction balance/weapons? It feels like it's the most talked about subject on the forums and it blows my mind because it's one of the few things that are extremely well done compared to other tri-faction or even two faction games.
One of the least talked about subjects in PS2 seems to be player skill. Probably one of the more interesting subjects to me because this game wants to delve into the MLG market. I'd venture to guess that most of time someone pulls some amazing shot the first word that comes to mind is hacker. I personally don't do that much, I usually just take another drink, but I know from the /yells, the posts on forums, and the hilarious videos of legit players that people believe any sort of obscene player skill must be a hacker. If PlayerA from FactionA wipes out a room on his own someone yells bullshit as soon as they revive. Truth is it doesn't happen that often because usually someone reacts quick enough once something like that happens and with the short TTK that guy is taken care of by the pray and spray method. When is the last time you lost a base due to the skill of your opponent? Skill seems to be well balanced in this game IMO, for good or bad. The great players still can dominate in their own way but they don't make enough of a difference in a large fight that they really change the tide of the battle themselves. This type of game play is great for the lifetime of the game but the attraction of the game should be based on something like meta-game/strategy which is really lacking right now. I think one of the few places where player skill shines is in the aircraft, I have no chance against some of the good pilots on Waterson, where as I can still get a lucky shot or two in against the great infantry players. While I don't think player skill has an immense impact, I prefer it how it is because it means that teamwork and/or strategy is still required to dominate.
Which brings me to the third deciding factor in the game, population. I think population plays far too big of a part in the game right now. Population overwhelms any potential weapon imbalance as well as any potential player skill difference. Zergs destroy any tactics involved in defense. Doesn't matter if you have the best strategy and the best players, you're going to get overrun by the zombie horde if you attempt to fight it. Unless of course you have a zerg to counter it. While I'm fine with this style of game play, the problem is that there's not always a zerg to counter the opposing zerg. The zerg vs zerg mentality works until one zerg disappears. Then you have a handful of people getting crushed attempting to defend and a zerg of bored people taking empty territory. You can almost always login and find a zerg vs zerg fight, but lately it seems that one side has multiple zergs while another faction only has one. Eventually the side with one zerg gets flanked by two zergs and people just split and head to another continent. The problem is there's no good reason to fight outnumbered. There's nothing that gives you a chance to fight outnumbered. I enjoy being on the underdog side in most games because you always have something to work towards, but in Planetside 2 it feels like you're just being punished for being on the underdog faction. How they can fix/change this, I have no idea. It may be perception that has lead to one side being underpopulated, maybe it's this fourth faction so many talk about, or maybe it's just that there's no appeal to being on a certain faction. Either way, the fact is it's not fun to get run over day after day because you simply don't stand a chance against the overwhelming number of players running at you. I think one thing that could really help the issue is giving more incentives to defend territory you control, as well as make it easier to defend that territory. I think the closer a base is to your warpgate the more value it should have. Small changes can go a long way in this game, as some recent balance adjustments have shown, I wish they'd do some small tweaks to try and even out the populations on servers. Worst that happens is the faction imbalance shifts to the underdog and then they can tweak from there.
Time for more coffee.
tl;dr - Weapon balance is as good as it gets, get over the minuscule differences; Player Skill vs. Player Teamwork is really well balanced; Population needs to be close to even across factions for this game to work.
2013-02-25, 10:39 AM
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