Having been able to participate in the 2 recent landgrabs over the weekend, I wanted to share some thoughts on balancing and structure.
The first LG I sat on the sidelines in the fort and watched the 3 players from AO that showed up get shutdown for an hour. Which was to be expected with no turnout. Obviously they had no intention of winning just taking the opportunity to do some PVP for fun it seems.
The second LG at redsands I joined in to get a feel for what is was like trying to fight HC, there was a significant turnout in players for this one and it was pretty fun.
The first and most glaringly obvious problem that I had (aside from only 3 players showing up to the first one) came down to identifying enemies and friendlies.
These fights are chaotic, with avatars running around at 90 MPH with speed buffs. Keeping track of who’s who is not easy and I found myself hesitating too long before shooting due to needing to read names / soc tags. Everyone on my radar was either green or yellow also, which may have been a bug? When I was sitting in the fort spectating the first one, everyone was red on the radar, but I was in the non pvp safe zone next to the marker the whole time, and not in a team. So not sure how that is actually intended to work.
I was fighting Artanis up on the roof at one point, and ate a rocket from Narnia that Image shot because he thought I was an enemy. IMO he probably threw the whole land grab at that point :P.
The point being that there needs to be better UI indicators for players on your team or at the very least players that are currently in control of the LG marker. If I’m needing to put my crosshair on someone moving 90 MPH across my screen, I need to be able to shoot them without second guessing. Marking targets was happening, but IMO it shouldn’t be necessary to just identify enemies. It should be used to mark priority targets. Maybe I’m dumb and missing something obvious here regarding identifying targets, but idk.
The schedule for these events needs work, maybe prioritize weekends? I have to work as i’m sure most players do, I also understand having multiple timeslots catering to a global playerbase. You will never please everybody, maybe it really can’t be done any better, but I’d maybe be able to hit 2 of these out of the total rotation consistently.
Another issue that I noticed, is the lag / desync seems pretty awful with vehicles. Sometimes I’d eject from my vehicle on the roof and end up falling behind the wall a significant distance from where i was intending to exit. Kind of annoying but I just started ejecting later.
Something i noticed, aside from game mechanics and lag, was that it SEEMED like there was no plan from the attackers. I just hopped in the LA and asked for a team invite so it may be the case that they were coordinating more than it appeared.
I was up on the fortress walls as much as possible trying to fight the HC players that had free reign on everyone below. I’d get in a fight with one of them and another would show up to help in most cases. Or someone on the ground would look up and launch a rocket up my ass. Then defenders up top would continue to take free shots at everyone below who already had their hands full trying not to get turned into red mist by a nano swing.
From what I’ve seen, HC has a pretty effective strategy for defense. It doesn’t seem like anything super crazy. Maybe they all have hand drawn maps of rotation routes, but it seemed like they just had a simple game plan that was effective and easy and stuck to it. They spread out in groups, have some of their lower hp (sub 500?) players on high ground rotating to assist. Attackers need to counter strat, or at the very least fight for and take high ground inside the fort. If i had even 2 more players up there with decent gear and hp to tank a shot or 2 it would have been a much more effective attack. As I said, I just asked for a team invite and did my own thing so I’m not trying to throw shade at AO or the other attackers, I have no insight into the levels of coordination they have and I can’t see everything thats happening all at once.
Many of the players on HC side are very killable by some of us on the lower end of the spectrum (I’m around 350 running 10mg pills and items) you just need positioning for the attack to take as many advantages as possible. Mechanical skill and knowing how to jiggle peek from cover is pretty significant as well. No you aren’t going to be able to kill them with an LR40, but should you really?
It did feel slightly impossible to kill some of them at times, hitting them for 150-300 with a Camo BGH didn’t really do shit, but the reality is MA cannot nerf these players. That would be completely backwards and retarded. They need to introduce more tools so that their opponents can deal with them, HP% reduction mindforce chips that can stack from multiple players IMO, I don’t recall if HP reduction debuffs were part of the new chips. It would need to be significant after stacks are built with a decent duration for it really to matter.
Someone recently had mentioned craftable ammo with buffs or debuffs in another thread I believe, same idea. Give me an ammo that does 50% less damage but also lowers the targets HP equal to 25-100% of the damage dealt (maybe different levels of this ammo), that stacks (up to 60% or more of total hp?) with lowish duration and can be refreshed at max stacks. Make it craftable with oils and other cube food (use makeup if you want) to increase markup. I’m not a game dev, or expert in balance, but something along those lines seems reasonable.
Also make slots for MF chips that run on cooldown so they don’t need to be equipped and can just be fired off as an ability please for the love of god. PVP aside, the games so fkn laggy i get locked on my resto chip after equipping it for 10 seconds before my goddamn weapon will come out again sometimes.