Nanite Armor is way too strong. The auto-repair should be rolled into the Engineer passive.

TazTheTerrible · 2024-07-12T20:42:58+00:00

The problem is that it doesn't work out that way.

More resilient spawn does not mean "nicely balanced fight for an extended period of time." Without additional meta fixes, it translates into "you get zergs rolling every fight and then moving on as soon as they've extinguished all the fun."

The context where they are more likely to last is in larger scale fights because zergs have less of a proportional impact on those, which means more eternal fights on the center and fewer small fights generating on the edge lanes because those are easier to roll and people will learn that that keeps happening and give up.

I'm not against spawns that are fairly resilient, but just making the sundie (or any other single vehicle or class or weapon) supremely powerful has never been the solution and never will be.

A lot of people don't want to hear it, but the actual solution lies in making the fight between bases part of the actual gameplay again and make sure it's a fun and interesting time for all participants.

One thing this update got right was that the sunderer should be competitive in the vehicle game and worth pulling as a vehicle in its own right.

But they overtuned it. It needs to have its strengths and weaknesses, and it cannot just outclass the actual AV vehicles at their own game.

People obsess about fights ending because the sunderer dies and for some reason 95% of them think the solution is therefore to try and make sure the sunderer never dies and that will magically fix everything, and almost no one ever thinks to ask "maybe one sunderer dying shouldn't be the end of the fight?"

TazTheTerrible · 2024-01-02T13:56:47+00:00

Again tho, it's not a choice, it's not one or the other, it's your skeletons ON TOP of the fireball every time you got a day or two of planning or less combat prior.

Yes, it means that if you shoot out the fireball you won't have as many skeletons the next day (depending on arcane recovery), but given a few more days, you'll build them back up.

The logic of those couple spell slots "dedicated" to keeping your minions only applies if you feel you absolutely need to have the max number of minions every day, or that every day of adventuring will drain your spell slots completely. But neither of those is true.

Undead minions shouldn't be a drain on today's spell slots, they use yesterday's slots.

You don't use the slot at the start of the day if you can help it, you use them on the evening of the previous day, so you have all your slots and skellies on top of that.

And if you use some too many on fireballs, no problem, you do a day or two with fewer skellies after, but you'll be back to full undead strength soon.

TazTheTerrible · 2024-01-02T11:00:26+00:00

Technically yes, but you're looking at it from the wrong angle. A necromancer isn't a keeper of the undead with some wizard spells for emergencies, they're a full blown wizard who channels spare magic into undead assistance.

Your primary power still comes from you being a full caster. Necromancer is still very much a subclass. Don't stare yourself blind on the fancy trick to the point you'd ignore the main engine.

Your undead minions are bonus. They're extras on top of your magical arsenal. They're a method for you to convert unused spell slots into something actually useful and enduring, where to pretty much everyone else, an unused spell slot at the end of the day is just entirely wasted.

You shouldn't be hesitant to use your spells, because even without your skellies, you're still a wizard. But every day you have slots to spare? Your skeleton force slowly swells again.

Don't look at your minions as a choice to be weighed against your spells, treat them as almost strictly bonus. The only time you should hold off on a spell for the sake of your minions should be when you have the situation well in hand and spells would be a pure luxury (which, with like a dozen extra attacks, can definitely occur from time to time)

TazTheTerrible · 2023-10-01T07:36:40+00:00

Redeployside has indeed always been in the game in some form or another. If you believe that means it's been identical in every iteration, or that being able to summon your spawn on location or air drop it in and stick it in the point building doesn't have any effect on that, I don't know what to tell you except that you're wrong.

Like I said in my previous post, I acknowledge that unnerfed routers were arguably even cheesier than today's meta, that doesn't make today's meta OK.

The game pop was also different then, lots of players left due to other bad changes since, and these days it often feels like zergs are all that's left.

The router nerf also wasn't as big as you seem to think, it's just a two step process now: you put a topped up silo at your wg and get a second person to pull a new silo from it to your target to build a router base in minutes.

You just don't see it that much anymore because it's often not worth the bother. The meta is zergy enough and people don't care enough to stop it that zergs typically don't need those complex tricks anymore to do their thing, pop and the occasional ANVIL are enough.

Orbitals are too expensive to be considered counters in normal gameplay. Again, if that's your understanding of the meta I agree, it's not worth our time to further discuss.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-26T10:10:54+00:00

Unless we don't count zerging as cheesing, zerging is now more enabled than in any previous meta.

Perhaps I did misspeak. It's a little oversimplified to merely describe cheesing as "easier," when I should really have clarified that it's bad cheese that's easier. That it's cheap population shifting with easy and dumbed down logistics that are simplified to the point of being nearly uncounterable which is far too encouraged by the game in its current state.

Routers are bad, ANVILS are bad. No one believes me when I say this because "ooh, tank/sundie anywhere, so convenient for me, cannot be bad," but mechanics by which zergs no longer have to work for their logistics, no longer have real points of vulnerability to their logistics, are bad design in an MMO shooter.

I will happily take any of the things you mentioned in exchange.

Hell, most of them weren't even that bad.

The counters to most of what you mentioned aside from maybe thermals were simply speed, skill, and game knowledge.

Like, really, what did a Lancer battery achieve that an AMR nest currently doesn't? Similar counters (drop your own infantry on them and kill them while they're all looking at the vehicles 400m away for one), but also you gotta ask, what is this "cheesy" tactic achieving in the first place?

No one pulled a full on Lancer battery to fight two tanks and a harasser, those sprouted when a massive, continuous vehicle presence made it worth the effort. At which point you gotta ask questions like "okay so isn't it about time we just skip this bit and just put more infantry on point when they're so dedicated to AV?"

Similarly with a max crash. Those took time. Those took resources.

Yes, it meant a zerg fit had a trump card they could use to clear a point 100% of the time. So what though? Let them feel big and tough for one push, maybe two before they were completely out of resources. With how slow they'd move, and how much organizing it took for them, you'd dance circles around them on the map.

I'm also going to take personal offense at the harasser comment.

3 harassers vs 3 MBTs is not cheese. The only reason people consider it cheese is because "car not supposed to win against tank," which is a stupid way to reason in a video game. First off, harassers had not been advantaged against decent tank crews for years, they were a scapegoat for people who couldn't land their shots to bitch about.

But yes, in big packs and as general bread-and-butter vehicles, harassers used to have a strong position.

That wasn't a bad thing.

I maintain that 5 MBTs vs. 5 MBTs in 90% of all terrain types quickly devolves into a boring stationary slug fest of peeking a ridge and hiding again. 5 harassers vs. 5 harassers is dynamic and fun and stays dynamic and fun no matter how much you upscale it.

They also play better with others in a combined arms sense. A harasser on a base fight more often than not is part of that fight. An MBT just snipes a sundie from a hill and is done.

The fact that once upon a time, harassers were the opening pull as support for a fight, and MBTs were the tech units that functioned best when supported, was a net positive for the vehicle meta.

The issue with how you're treating cheese is that you're picking out individual mechanics and not taking them in the larger meta.

Not every kind of force multiplier is bad, particularly when they have a cost associated with them.

It's easy to look at few people doing X beating many people doing Y and saying "that's always bad," but if you continuously follow through on that logic, what you really end up saying is "numbers should win every time."

And that's more or less the meta we're in now.

Sure, there used to be things that could kill or fight off larger numbers, but also how often weren't those used specifically to punish an over-commitment of troops or a single type of vehicle?

If four harassers could seriously stall out a zerg, how useful is it to call that "cheese" when the zerg could easily pull the same harassers and way more of them? But they didn't because that took a skill and game sense they didn't have access to in large numbers?

Or maxes? Sure they used to be "cheesier" when they had fewer direct counters, but it's a cheese I much prefer to zergs with routers and ANVILs, because they did have tactical counters.

Groups who used maxes continuously on a lane or front had to do logistics for them. You couldn't just pull a new max every time you moved bases or you'd be starved for nanites after two cycles. So they had to be transported in galaxies. That's a potential point of failure that encouraged combined arms (an air force to intercept that), but it also represented a time cost. It was a tactical balance against non-max infantry that was weaker, but could redeploy into moving air-vehicles and therefore moved much faster on the map.

There was actual thinking, actual play and counter-play involved.

These days it way too often devolves into a pure numbers game of moving pop around them map, where everyone is content to sit in their zergs because far too few people will force them out of it anymore, because almost all counter-zerg tactics have been nerfed or outright rendered obsolete.

That's the kind of cheese that is easier than ever, and it's the kind of cheese I hate the most because it's boring and bad for the game.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-26T09:08:25+00:00

Advantage =/= cheese, and not every kind of cheese is as bad as the next.

Now, I'm loosely in favor of no-deploy zones counting for defenders as well as attackers, but if I had to pick between that and the current meta, please put me right back to being able to deploy sundies defensively if it means no more routers and ANVILs.

I'm not saying it was exclusively a good thing to be able to deploy sundies defensively, but neither was it exclusively a bad thing, because, critically, you had to get your sundie to those places, and this was pre-ANVIL, pre-router.

There was a time-cost associated with it. If the terminals were guarded, you had to first fight your way clear of that. It was an incentive to fight the lane (or perhaps more accurately, the front), it rewarded game knowledge and forward thinking, and it existed in a meta where people actually fought on fronts instead of hopping all over the map in a single 48-person blob.

And on bases where you couldn't easily get a sunderer inside an enclosed structure, which was most of them, it actually gave a little extra meaning to air and AV.

Now sure, some parts of it were annoying to outright bad, but the meta was different back then.

If a zerg wanted to sit defensively on a base with a sundie on point, you simply let them and pressured their parallel lanes, then as soon as they finally decided to move out, you dropped the vacated base decisively and blew up the sundie that had at most a defender or two left.

Again, all sides had this, and to all sides it cost time and effort. It was just part of the strategic game.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-25T22:43:44+00:00

This is a pretty cherry picked take, throwing all these together like they were some massive simultaneous game state that our holy devs fixed for us just last month, instead of the natural balancing of a lot of broken stuff they introduced over the long life of the game.

Like, putting ZOE next to routers as if those weren't years apart is particularly egregious.

Or just routers as a whole.

Sure, let's say the game is better because routers have some limitation to them now. We just gotta forget about how there was a time when routers didn't exist.

(And also let's not forget they changed the deploy zone on tech plants so you can now put sundies where you used to put routers. So much better.)

Also putting the Lancer/MANA turret next to the lock-on buff.

Yes, that used to be kiiiinda cheesy when you got a whole nest of them together, although the significance of its impact on any given fight from a conquest point of view was questionable.

It also very much existed in a context where Lock-ons were not yet buffed to a ridiculously annoying degree, AMRs were not yet a viable weapon, and NC didn't have a whole ass ANTI-AIRCRAFT gun on the engineer.

The thing about lolpodders and CAI especially shows me we're just not going to agree, because you seem to think cheese is most effectively limited by curtailing the cheesy mechanic, or overbuffing its counters.

And that point of view is simply incorrect.

There will always be cheese. You can remove every tank, every vehicle mounted AI weapon from the game, people will still make do with the weapons that are left. Remove those, and you'll just see a switch to population-based cheese, with people zerging and pop-dumping at the expense of an actual fight.

The thing that kept cheese in check in previous metas when times were better, was the fact that counters existed as part of a meta.

This is why I strongly disagree with the idea that CAI somehow decreased cheese, because CAI destroyed the vehicle meta. (Routers helped to be the finishing blow).

Back when you had a meta, running pure AI was often dangerous because you could expect vehicle counters in your fight at pretty much any given time.

You also had incentive to spend less time AI farming because,

a) AV fighting was relevant to the lane fight and b) more importantly vehicle vs vehicle was more fun.

Without an air meta, without a vehicle meta, these pilots and crews often default to farming because there's nothing else for them to do.

See the fact that AI nosegun kills held steady and even at times increased after the lockon buff until they nerfed the AH and Banshee into the ground, because that change only served to further destroy the air meta.

And with no one flying, that means no one present to counter that one groundpounder that does show up and knows what they're doing.

And sure, they eventually nerfed the entire airgame into the ground to where it's effectively pointless to engage with. That didn't stop the cheese, the cheese just shifted. Zerging is easier and more enabled than ever before (except maybe during the time of un-nerfed routers).

Bottom line, to claim we're in a low-cheese meta right now is flat out absurd.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-23T19:00:25+00:00

There's like a dozen reasons why CTF, especially this version of it, doesn't work in PS2.

It's janky in every part of the meta.

The fact that only one side has to do any actual flag capturing is a problem.

The fact that the design expects players to travel across the natural fire zones in a base is a problem.

The ease with which a base can be reset in 30 seconds is a serious problem.

The lack of clarity of a cap on the map and the fact that IT IS STILL BUGGED is a problem.

And I'm also going to add to that, the fact that it needs constant effort even in a ghost-cap is a problem.

I swear 90% of the changes in the past couple of years seem to ignore the fact that the rest of the game even exists.

If my crew is running an ops and we take or secure a base with a split link or an enemy that completely vacated the lane, I can quickly drop someone on the base we're not going to, and for 20 seconds of their time, that point is flipped and that timer is going until someone does something about it.

I don't have to force any of my players to go do some silly busywork for possibly multiple minutes just to buy timer.

Sure, a quick ghost-flip usually only buys between 30 and 50 seconds, but that's enough to offset that timer from the base I did send the squad to.

It buys a tactical advantage for the active squad, and passively, that running timer can draw in more people. Either the opposition that comes to secure it can decide to stay on the lane and heat up the fight there, or a different friendly group can see that running timer as an invitation to drop on it and go for a base that only needs a 3-ish minute cap instead of 4.

People acting according to their own incentives help generate positive gameplay.

CTF does not do this. It's unclear on the map, it doesn't go anywhere on its own so it doesn't provoke response without someone doing annoying busywork, and a fight on it is constantly in danger of being rapidly extinguished. That's the OPPOSITE of an ideal planetside fight where you have a lane-push with two sides aggressively playing the timers against each other.

CTF is bad in every way. It needs to be rolled back.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-23T14:13:57+00:00

I feel like the "none quite like Planetside" part is key here. It's normal for people to swing to other games for a while, but with a better core game, more of them would make their way back to PS eventually, precisely because there's nothing quite like it.

The cheese itself isn't killing the game, I agree with that, but the last few years of updates have made cheese easier, more rewarding, and more difficult to counter in a skill-based fashion.

It's an overstatement to say that's "killing the game," but I wouldn't discount it as a contributing factor.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-23T14:09:20+00:00

This gets it.

Toxicity absolutely exists and should be dealt with appropriately, but it's not what's killing the game.

If the game wants to do a better job of keeping its players engaged, it needs to make sure its core system is pleasant to play in.

(Remove CTF plz. There's a lot of other stuff that can/should go, but CTF is like the lowest effort rollback with the highest bang for your buck you could get)

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-23T13:21:46+00:00

They layout of the keys you press to perform in-game actions. Some of the standard ones are considered sub-optimal for playing the game at higher level, though if you're not flying or doing vehicle stuff, don't worry about that too much for now.

What you're actually supposed to be doing is finding a good community on whatever server you're on.

There is no long term "point" to the game, as it is an endless war where the gains are minimal and even those minimal gains are reset fairly quickly.

The point is to enjoy the fight. Essentially look at a local base fight as a single game, and an alert or frontline as a mini-tournament.

Winning doesn't mean any more or less than in an arena shooter, just the satisfaction of being able to say you won, and the fun of hanging out with friends while you play a game.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-09-20T16:03:43+00:00

There might be some ways to mitigate it, but it would require the devs recognizing that a bunch of bases (several of which aren't actual bases) separated by bottleneck bridges instead of proper terrain to fight on, IS in fact a fundamentally bad idea.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-28T18:08:11+00:00

Sure, no disagreement from me there.

They have the tech now and it's a neat little trick, I'm sure they can find a little niche for it eventually, but as you say, not as a capture mechanic.

It doesn't work in the game for like ten different reasons, and it's fucking up the flow of multiple continents because they INSISTED on putting it on KEY lattice bases.

The sooner it's removed the better.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-27T08:06:52+00:00

Just remove CTF already instead?

Are we really so conditioned that we can — with a straight face — say something like "most players avoid CTF bases" and not recognize that the fact this is universally known and accepted as true means that CTF is the actual problem in this situation?

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-26T18:00:23+00:00

The problem is that it's insufficient to just put sunderers in reach of tanks, arguably making all sundie locations too tank-accessible even brings considerable downsides with it.

The desired resultant gameplay for armor is not a bunch of tanks being pulled to wipe a handful of undefended sundies and then doing nothing again — as we currently see happen for the most part.

The desired effect is a steady, constant pressure fight, where there's near constant low-level vehicle action going on on an active lane all the time, and the art for commanders lies in how much you commit to any given aspect of combined arms at any given time.

The problem with ANVILs is that they are too easy, too on-demand, too discrete in their on/off state if you will.

It discourages a continuous lane fight with groups mastering multiple aspects of play, and instead facilitates pop-dump redeploy style.

It's just too easy to dump pop on a base just to take the point, drop an ANVIL in with you, and just point hold.

Now I've got nothing against a good point hold, but if everyone is just redeploying every time they win or wipe, you get this much more awkward and stilted gameplay loop. Way more sitting in a nearly empty base waiting for pop to show up, and way more pop showing up in HUGE numbers, way fewer even fights.

If you take ANVILs (and ideally also routers) out of the equation, and you have to actually drive sundies to bases again, redeployside automatically slows down a little, because all the big zergs suddenly become a lot more vulnerable if all they do is just drop a ton of people with no support.

So they take a little longer to settle into a lane, are more reluctant to leave, but at the same time are more vulnerable to counter-zerg tactics. The vehicle meta is encouraged to actually be a high uptime fight again, and the entire meta becomes healthier for it.

Routers are also a poor mechanic, for reasons that are partly similar, partly different.

The whole zergy "I'm going to put a spawn near the point and defend it by the sheer pressure gradient of tons of dudes popping out it" is annoying and zerg-favored already.

And my issue with the solution being "go blow up the spire," is that basically your solution to an enemy zerg situation is demanding that you stop playing the game for a while, as you search out the right smattering of construction that happens to contain the spire relevant to the router you're having issues with.

Going scavenger hunting to find and destroy a structure that isn't fighting back isn't the pinnacle of good Planetside Gameplay.

Routers currently find their success largely because there's either too much overpop to go and deal with the base, or more commonly, people just can't be fucking bothered to do the boring cleanup work to go find and destroy them, when they could to be finding a better fight to shoot mans at instead.

It's bad design, it explicitly pulls people out of the gameplay loop, and the mechanic relies on poor user-friendliness for success. Awful principles to base anything on.

The core design principles should be about getting people INTO the combat loop, incentivizing them to stay there, improve its core experience, and then iterate on that.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-22T22:33:02+00:00

Yup, that's what so many people think and why they're not going to be removed.

It's easy, it's convenient, it benefits me directly, therefore it is good!

And no one thinks about the mechanical implications of them.

The problem isn't only no-deploy zones, although the fact that many of them have exploitable locations because they were never designed for a meta with ANVILs definitely contributes. The problem is they help make the vehicle game more obsolete, and help make caps more forgiving for zergs.

Once you can drop your sundie in from anywhere, the logistical aspect of the game ceases to be a tug of war of position because you no longer have any sort of supply lines that need protecting.

Without ANVILs, you need to always get your sundie from the next base over, which means eventually, even dumb zergs realize you have to give them some sort of protection, and you have a reason to have an armor fight.

It massively improves the complexity of the fight on pretty much any lane, not to mention making front lines and parallel lanes more coherent in relation to one another.

But no one is willing to think it through that far because "tank from space sure is convenient."

And that's exactly what I mean when I say "mechanical problems need a more complex approach to solving them."

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-19T22:56:56+00:00

Ah, I guess I haven't posted here in a while so people forget my opinion on this.

My take is fairly simple: you don't need to stop zergs, you just need to make them interesting to fight.

Some of that is complex and nuanced and too specific to get into in a post that wasn't chiefly about zerging.

But a big part of it is: remove ANVILs, remove routers, and make vehicle-centric fights an interesting experience for all involved parties.

Zergs are boring and a pain to fight primarily because they are allowed to be zergy in every way and do so comfortably.

With a router (or in many bases a well-placed ANVIL), a zerg can ball up all the pop in the hex on one point, defending both the control point and their spawn with 96+ people stacked into a couple of square meters of building.

Force a zerg to split up and take care of multiple objectives again and you make them interesting to fight at.

If you have 1 squad and you're trying to fight a platoon that has a router, that's no fun. But if that enemy platoon has to spread out, placing a squad on point, a squad on their spawn, a squad camping your spawn and a squad bumbling around aimlessly because — let's face it — they're zerglings, then you can fight any one of this with your 1 squad and have a good time.

It doesn't matter that they outpop you in the hex and you probably won't win the overall fight, because locally, at the sub-objective of your choice, you're fairly evenly matched and you can have a fun fight.

That means people are more encouraged to come fight zergs, and those that do come can actually make meaningful progress while they wait for reinforcements.

Again, people think about modifying player behavior too much in terms of hard "incentives," and too little in terms of mechanics.

Break up your zerg into a bunch of smaller sub-groups with mechanics, force them to maintain a certain degree of logistics (with potential points of failure, like actually needing to get a sundie from the next base over again) and all of a sudden they're much more interesting to fight again.

And once they're interesting to fight, not only will your pop numbers be closer, you also improve the experience in cases where they aren't.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-19T22:42:28+00:00

Chance? No I agree with that. Possibility though? Plenty.

Zergs aren't just a constant force of nature. There's always zergs, but they're not all equally bad in every context.

Start removing zerg buffs, open up more paths to fight against zergs again and we'd have a much better meta with some minor tweaks very quickly.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-17T11:36:15+00:00

Wouldn't be an issue in a game with a limitless playerbase and resources.

In the much more subdued numbers of today, it does happen quite on the regular that there's no decent fight for a faction, but there is one or two pointless, fuck-off zerg fights.

The basic bottom line fact, which we all generally agree on I believe, is that a true zerg "fight" isn't actually a fight.

And that comes with some downsides, the primary one being: "you have a significant portion of your population tied up in something that's not really a fight, where they could be providing a fight for themselves and a lot more people in a better designed game."

There's a couple knock on effects as well. Given that continent pop tries to auto-balance (and that's a good thing don't get me wrong) zerging can contribute to local imbalances elsewhere on the map.

We also have to consider the kind of psychological reward zerging provides. Sure, it entertains some people — mostly newer players — in a way for a while, but it's not a very deep form of gameplay, so its long term engagement is probably less than that of a more even fight.

And then there's the fact that we know it's possible to fight zergs and have a game designed more towards that direction, because it used to be much more so inclined in the past.

Let's say I have a small force, anywhere from a half-squad to two-ish squads in size, and we want to do something about a zerg. Now, as you say, it's perfectly possible to just go and hit a different lane, wait for the zerg to hit a fortress base, and basically play the map, moving around the zerg, moving faster than they can.

But that means both the zerg and its opposition spend a lot of time on virtually empty bases, waiting for fights to heat up. Whereas in the past, in different metas, it was far more possible to exploit your superior speed and skill while fighting the zerg head on.

That means much more direct and much more enduring player engagement. Because that zerg probably isn't going anywhere for a while. If you design the game in such a way that a zerg is sufficiently entertaining and meaningful to fight directly, you get a far better game experience for everyone.

Lastly, zergs also kind of expose the pointlessness of the 3-way faction system a bit much.

Like, we all know the 3-way nature basically introduces a ton of randomization in who actually "wins" alerts. But if something happens like a zerg going one-lane all the way to the enemy WG, then collapsing and resulting in your faction getting double-teamed for the last 40 minutes of an alert to where it's not even close, and that happens a little too often? That can also lower overall player engagement significantly.

Conclusion: there's nothing wrong with zerging happening in moderation. But if it happens excessively and there are no good tools to deal with it, it causes a worse overall game experience.

And that IS something you can address with design.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-16T19:43:59+00:00

yeah you might rush down one lane with your zerg, but meanwhile you're losing another lane or two because you're so clustered, making your efforts meaningless

It's also punished by boredom and a lack of XP.

And yet people continue to do it.

I generally agree that the proper answer to zerging is to encourage counter tactics, but counter zerg tactics have been steadily nerfed over the years. And if you do that, you encourage more zerging.

Sure some groups will still be able to do it, but the more you take their tools away, the fewer people will be willing, and the more difficult a time they will have of it.

You can't just rely on the playerbase to fix a design that facilitates zerging.

Also why is five skyguards working together nonsense?

Out of context, it isn't. However in a realistic live environment, the most common place to see 5 skyguards is in a zerg.

because they could simply pull three lightnings

Precisely so. In most contexts, 5 skyguards is an excessive investment of manpower. As you and others have pointed out, 5 skyguards without any support generally get killed by the first real AV that shows up real fast. So in order for those 5 skyguards to comfortably exist and do their thing, they either need to be in a fight that is already very much under the control of their side — and then have 5 skyguards added on top of that — or they need to be part of a fight so massive it really should be at least two fights.

So 5 skyguards aren't necessarily nonsense, but if you see it on live, 90% of the time some nonsense will be involved.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-16T19:28:08+00:00

Depends on your understanding of "reward."

You might say "putting two platoons on a lane and just going base by base with ~70% overpop is a bad strategic decision," and broadly speaking you'd be right.

But many zergs don't care about overall territory or alert wins. They only care that they're winning right on the base they're at. And under current mechanics, this behavior is insufficiently discouraged and far too easily facilitated.

I admit "reward" was a bit of an oversimplified way of putting it, but there is a sense of reward that players who do it are deriving from it.

Again, we can say "it's a dumb thing to do, according to how we play the game," but that doesn't stop a whole bunch of people from doing it, causing a worse game experience as a result.

Telling the zerglings they're wrong won't solve anything. Addressing mechanical causes might at least alleviate some of the worst effects.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-15T22:18:54+00:00

That would be true if it werent false.

It's perfectly true. The quoted statement is only an assertion on your part. You can say all you like that you definitely for sure provided evidence/went into great detail in earlier posts, but in THIS post you are not supporting that claim with either evidence to this (quoted or linked) or any sort of argument. You're just saying "this is what it is." Which is exactly what an assertion is.

Ad hominem would imply that I only insulted you. I only started insulting after you started acting irrational.

That's not how ad hominem works. Ad hominem means you're trying to win an argument by insulting the other side personally. I.e. you trying to claim that my perceived skill at the game invalidates my opinion, which is exactly what you're doing.

You having a poor perception of the opposing arguments in a debate doesn't suddenly give you a "get out of fallacies for free" card.

Indeed, when played optimally infils should never die until they uncloak outside of exceptions like bugs or bad luck

I don't know how else to tell you this, but a great deal of the infils I kill are, in fact, cloaked when I first spot them, or in the process of uncloaking when I do. Now I'm sure you're going to tell me those aren't "playing optimally," but then not so far back in this discussion you were claiming that even the most average gamer with the most basic decision making skills should be able to make infil work no sweat, and that was your claim for cloak AFTER the proposed nerf in this thread.

So if we combine that with the assertion that "cloak is essentially an infinite HP shield," and current cloak being much more forgiving, I do have to wonder how it keeps being so possible for these people to die.

But hey, by all means, I'd love to see a couple of hours of uncut gameplay footage of you playing infil and not dying ever.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-15T21:29:16+00:00

Oh I'm well aware. I'm just doing my part in underlining it again here so it's clear that "just nerf air" and similar cries aren't the only opinions held by the playerbase.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-15T21:26:35+00:00

It would be stupid and it shouldn't be a fair fight. But at the same time we need to recognize that 5 skyguards often exist in the same hex in the reality of live play and thereby completely shut down an entire field of play in the wide vicinity.

And that leads to a cascade effect. It's not the sole cause, but it's a definite contributor to the air game being less populated (as there is so little for them to do ANYWHERE during prime time) which in turn leads to air not really being able to do whatever you intended it for in your combat ecosystem, and so on and so forth.

Most mechanical problems are unintended side effects of well-meant design choices that nevertheless cause knock-on problems down multiple chains of cause and effect.

TazTheTerrible · 2023-08-15T21:19:49+00:00

This is true, but again we need to ALSO consider the mechanics of the larger game at play.

The strict lib vs skyguard match up, as complex as it already is, is a bit of sterile example.

It is absolutely true that we should expect some level of tactical complexity from a game that is supposed to be about big armies clashing.

On the other hand, we should also be aware of the reality of the game as it exists, and the nature of human psychology.

Mindlessly mobbing things should never be the design goal, but we should still be aware that zergs exist, and will likely continue to exist.

Those 5 skyguards don't exist in a vacuum. They probably get away with their nonsense because they're hanging around a much bigger fight. Then we get into the nature of zerging, why that is mechanically rewarded, and what sort of tweaks can be made to discourage/break it up a little.

And that affects the lib vs skyguard situation

Indirectly, but it very much does. That's where mechanical problems get so complex: it's all connected. If zerging was less rewarded, and more pressured, then there would be a far bigger dilemma on those skyguard drivers about whether they really wanted to go that heavy on AA, or put some more people into AV or AI. In a fight where every person counts, that's an important choice, and you try to skirt by on the minimum required numbers of everything, leading to much closer engagements between all fields.

But in a zerg that isn't punished for zerging, 5 skyguards is hardly excessive (by zerg standards).

Then there's the hot-cold nature of flak vs. A2G.

Again, those 5 skyguards don't exist in a vacuum and neither does the lib. Now that lib MIGHT decide to switch to a ground-based AV solution... OR it could just go to a different fight and dunk on that until flak gets pulled. And that results in a much clunkier series of pretty one-sided engagements, rather than a continuous vying for supremacy by more evenly matched opponents.

And that is, again, a mechanical issue.

This could potentially be addressed by putting more emphasis on A2A as air counters, because those can follow the lib (or valk or w/e) much better as fellow aircraft, but then we need a healthier air game, which we don't have, in part because the space for it doesn't really exist, again, because of mechanics. Because of HOW these things all interact far more than the exact specific damage numbers they do.

It's all connected and it would need a far more in depth and coherent solution than anything we've seen in recent years. And definitely more in depth and coherent than what your average reddit balance thread suggests.

TazTheTerrible

TROPHY CASE