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Continuing with my 5 year old nerf the Orbital Strike argument.
Nerf09
Member CommonPosts: 2,953
I've been reading over my 2 locked 2006 threads in the Planetside forum about nerfing the OS where 4 out of 5 players disagreed with me.
1) The Orbital Strike draws the metagamer personalities. The intended purpose of Command Rank was to create natural leaders, but the draw of the uber Orbital Strike death-ray-from-the-sky attracted the metagamers instead. Those seeking Command Rank formed squads for the sole purpose of leeching off of those who are grinding for regular rank, which in turn leech off those seeking Command Rank. Territorial expansion and faction pride takes 2nd place, or no place at all. If they could conspire with the enemy to hack bases, only to have them hacked back they would.
Metagamers are those who will buy gold, mindlessly grind for hours on end, and download hacks and cheats from the internet. I haven't played since 2006 but I hear Planetside is just loaded wall to wall with cheaters and exploiters. The only players left in Planetside are metagamers, and almost all of them have the Orbital Strike. Metagamers are the worse type of personality you want in a community, they're real jerks.
2) In warfare, defense is the ability to place a smaller number of soldiers in one area to delay or deny an area to a larger number of enemy soldiers using natural or man made barriers. Mines, spitfire turrets, and other CE abiliies do just that. If you can defend in one area, you could concentrate soldiers into another area to stage an attack. There is no defensive play in planetside because of the EMP orbital strike destroys CE in a broad effective area, and the regular orbital strike easily destroys stationary targets/players; and stationary usually means you're defending.
Any defensive strategy is completely removed from the game because, and only because, of the Orbital Strike. EVEN IN AN OFFENSE you have to use defensive tactics. If you capture a tower next to an enemy base you still have to secure the area, DEFEND the area, before moving onto attacking an enemy base otherwise the enemy will just take the tower back. With defensive options removed, that only leaves offense, which is just a game of everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off, it's kind of lame. There is no thought involved.
3) Infantry are suppose to be flexible, small profile, easier to hide, high in number (zerg); yet weak vs. armor or air on a 1:1 basis. Infantry strongest point is their spawn point, the AMS, it can be placed anywhere, High Tactical Flexibility. AMS's are always being taken out by the Orbital Strike, they are practically useless in the face of the OS. So as more players got their Orbital Strike abilities, infantry became progressively weaker (no AMS spawn point). So the developers tried to rectify this by buffing their Anti Vehicle weapons. This didn't solve anything since like I said, the spawn point is the most important thing to infantry, it only nerfed vehicles.
So the feeling you get when driving a tank, you want to feel uber and powerful, is removed by the AV buff. And the feeling of mobility and tactical flexibility from using infantry is still not there, because the AMS spawn point keeps getting OS'ed. The AV buff didn't bring any customers back, it only re-arranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.
4) I'ts lame. Someone pushes their I-win-button OS while they are invisible and insta gibs you, or all your CE and/or AMS you meticulously placed is destroyed. What's worse is that some of them brag about it afterwards, "I'm so awesome." Oh yeah sure you are buddy, you really displayed your skill in pushing a button on your map.
Comments
For what its worth I agree there are some serious problems with orbital strikes. The fact that it is hits everything at all heights makes tower defence basically a sit inside only job. And the fact that everyone seems to have it means I have experienced multiple orbital strikes in quick succession which is pretty frustrating when they are basically an autokill. I think flails are a much better and more balanced anti-emplacement/seige weapon and orbital strike should be either removed or limited.
Especially the EMP OS should be removed, it has an absurd destruction radius to all CE.
Reveal enemies should also be removed, it removes the tactical option of stealth and need for recon which is another tactic. All CUD abilities are really tactics reducers, it reduces all tactics to 1 thing: zerg offense. Zerg offense is fun for about 1-3 months of play until it gets rather boring. If SOE wants to retain any long term subscribers then players would need to do other things.
CUD abilities, for command rank, should be tactic/strategic expanding things not reducing things; and I can't think of anything other than global chat.
"leadership" in WWIIONLINE (the only other MMOFPS that exists) and Planetside is abysmal. In WWIIONLINE the "leadership" is defined as High Command, in Planetside it's those who grinded out Command Experience which isn't experience at all in commanding.
In both games the self-proclaimed leaders make almost exactly the same mistakes, and they've been doing it for almost a decade now. This is the most common mistake, one of many:
-Imagine a battle where your spawn point is 1,000 meters away from the enemy spawn point. There are 100 players on your side, there are 100 enemy players. For the last 30 minutes your side has pushed up until they are 200 meters away from the enemy spawn point, then one of your so called "leaders" says, "let's form a bunch of tanks up to zerg in." 20 players on your side despawns to spawn a tank 1,000 meters away. "Wow cool we got 20 tanks, let's wait for more players to join."
-5 minutes have passed. Now you have 80 players on your side facing 100 enemy players cause 20 players on your side are sitting on their butts in tanks circling each other and taking screenshots of how uber they are. You're side is now 250 meters away from target being slowly pushed back. "Wow cool, we got 30 tanks, let's wait for more players to join."
-10 minutes have passed. Now you have 70 players on your side facing 100 enemy players cause 30 players on your side are sitting on their butts in tanks circling each other and taking screenshots of how uber they are. You're side is now 350 meters away from target being pushed back. "Wow cool, we got 40 tanks, join the massive assault everyone, let's wait for more players to join."
-15 minutes have passed. Now you have 60 players on your side facing 100 enemy players cause 40 players on your side are sitting on their butts in tanks circling each other and taking screenshots of how uber they are. You're side is now 500 meters away from target, the halfway point between your spawn point and enemy spawn point. Your side does their tank-zerg all the way till they are 200 meters away from enemy spawn before all their tanks are slowly wittled away by enemy fire. They're back at square one and absolutely nothing was accomplished.
Aside from the obnoxious 15 minute wait for the players who joined the tank-zerg at the first call for tanks, it's a common sophomoric mistake of these players I derisively call "leaders". One failed tank-zerg after another, on and on, month after month and year after year (for WWIIONLINE it's been going on since 2001), eventually the players stop joining these so called "leaders" with their sophomoric attacks and everyone lonewolves.
How does Command Rank in Planetside or the High Command in WWIIONLINE rectify this? It doesn't effect "leadership" one way or another. The TRUE LEADERSHIP comes from the mobile spawn drivers (WWIIONLINE) drivers, AMS drivers (Planetside), they are the ones truly defining where the players go and what players do because they control the spawn points for infantry and most players play infantry. It's what I did. I enjoyed scouting areas to most effectively put an AMS, places enemy tanks can't easily roll on through to blast the AMS away, behind hills, in ditches, behind trees, areas that could scatter the ant-trail of infantry-zerg on their approach, but as close to possible to the battle as can be. And then placing Spitfires in a defensive ring to protect from enemy aircraft, and mines in a defensive ring, depending on terrain. It was a thoughtful tactical exercize of the mind and sometimes enjoyed the hell out of it. I was controlling the battlefield, not the CR5's.
But as the month passed into years in Planetside and more players grinded towards CR5 with their borderline cheat abilities like "reveal enemies" and both kinds of "Orbital Strike", my AMS and defensive CE kept getting destroyed time and time and time and time again.
I can only enjoy a game where I can out-think my opponent, not out-spawn my opponent.
I tried other things in Planetside after giving up on AMS, but eventually got bored of it.
-Cloaking anti-Cloaker
-Cloaking CE jerk
-Mine sweeper (that rifle that shoots EMP grenades) but eventually I had to give that gamestyle up too because it was an obsolete tactic when so many EMP Orbital Strikes going off I wasn't needed. I found it fun, too bad it's obsolete due to EMP OS.
-Anti Aircraft
-Vanu flying MAX tree monkey. It was different, and different is good.
-Interdiction (a bridge, my AMS, and a bunch of landmines). But I suspect Reveal Enemies had much to do to that tactic's ineffectiveness and gave it up.
-I got bored with playing offense and assault the first 2 months, it's all you can do in these games, it's the only workeable tactic.
-I didn't even bother playing Recon, no need to with Reveal Enemies, another obsolete tactic from a CUD ability.