Planning on Posting this on Official forums

[FlyingMongoose]

This is exactly what I intend to post.

As a small outfit member (compared to that of The Enclave or others), and I play as Vanu, I find that small outfits have little to no influence on the game or even capturing areas and other members of my outfit agree.

The Lattice looks promising, and I'm sure it will help some, but ultimately. As a small outfit you will still feel you have little influence unless you join the Zerg, which, to me and many others is less rewarding.

So I have the following proposition (based loosely on Arkfall damage basis when it comes to the game Defiance).

First let me allow explanation of Arkfall and the damages.

Arkfall is a server-event, if an individual player starts in on an Arkfall, they can do damage to the point of taking out and completing Arkfalls by themselves, but as more people join in the total damage done by an individual can be reduced, however, as more people are taking shots assuming all do take shots the time taken to take down "Arkfalls" remains the same.
Okay, so basically this means the more people the less damage an individual does, but how does this apply to a game like Planetside? I am not proposing damage reduction as it does not apply here, what I am proposing is dynamic capture time based on total of attacking players within a given area.

As an example (these times are not final they are just used as an example).
One (1) individual Player goes to a small base, single capture point, lets say it takes him 1 minute 30 seconds (IF he remains the ONLY player at that base as the attacker). As more friendlies come into an area this time dynamically increases. It makes capturing still possible, but still holding out worthwhile.

With a still remaining maximum of 20 minutes for large bases but still dynamic based on total attacking population.

This means, large battles can last longer, while smaller outfits feel like they get an influence on the outcome of territory control. This can also overall balance the territory control based on per-continent population. Because territory balance can be controlled in such a manner it provides more possibility of balanced population control. Lastly, it means that small outfits actually have a small ability to hold out just long enough to capture when facing a large outfit, doesn't mean they'll be able to hold it. But it can help, ultimately though, it can also enforce longer/more interesting battles for the smaller points as well, and provide an incentive to capturing and holding them.

Any input on how to edit this would be great, as I know I will probably get flamed no matter WHAT I post there. I just want to throw this out there.

[K2]

I say no for two reasons.

1) I feel like in practice this will not work at all how you envision it.

but most importantly

2) That post seriously needs to be proofread a couple hundred times.

[FlyingMongoose]

I say no for two reasons.

1) I feel like in practice this will not work at all how you envision it.

but most importantly

2) That post seriously needs to be proofread a couple hundred times.

On #1, what is your interpretation of the end result?

On #2, it's almost 2:00 AM, feel free to quote for edits.

[Didzo]

It took me a bit to figure out what you were saying, but once I got it, I... never mind, still don't really get what you're getting at other than to have the capture time be dynamic and somehow based on populations.

You need to be more specific with the mechanics of the idea before putting it out there.

[Cineo]

This will get nothing but negative impact on the forums because its loosely based on the old influence mechanic that people hated. They hated it because you didn't have a definite set time to re-secure the point and that made finding what troops to send to what bases confusing. Large and small outfits alike like having a definite capture time so they know how long they have to hold out or how long they have to re-secure. Also I think Higby said that their playing around with reducing cap times at smaller outposts. Which would be more beneficial for small outfits like us to focus on.

[CaffeinePowered]

This will get nothing but negative impact on the forums because its loosely based on the old influence mechanic that people hated. They hated it because you didn't have a definite set time to re-secure the point and that made finding what troops to send to what bases confusing. Large and small outfits alike like having a definite capture time so they know how long they have to hold out or how long they have to re-secure. Also I think Higby said that their playing around with reducing cap times at smaller outposts. Which would be more beneficial for small outfits like us to focus on.

This ^

I feel like the original proposal as you have written it would lead to three bad outcomes, frustration as cap times go up, super fast steamrolling by smaller groups, and exploiting by larger groups - take the base, send everyone to the next objective, cap very fast with the skeletal crew you left behind.

[[fr31ns]Karrde]

Still, something needs to be done about large outfits piling into gals and showing up at a fight in 30 seconds, blowing everyone to pieces due to low TTK in 15 seconds, and having no recourse to take it back.  In planetside 1 it was virtually impossible to do what is common place now.  Several times last night the entire VS force got wiped by 5 full gals of NC.  It was pretty much over in less than a minute.  Sunderers were down in seconds.  Everyone was wiped.  At least in Planetside it not only took a lot longer to get a gal to a fight but it was also a lot tougher to wipe out the spawn points and mop up the ground troops due to slower movement and lower TTK.  Large outfit resecs are becoming the norm and there is virtually no defense against this unless you have the zerg backing you up.  It's just over before it begins and by the time people realize what's happening most of the force you had there are already kicked a base back.  It's becoming very hard for small, well organized outfits to have meaningful impact on gameplay outside of shenanigans ops.

[StolenToast]

Karrde link=topic=6932.msg266393#msg266393 date=1368116098]
Still, something needs to be done about large outfits piling into gals and showing up at a fight in 30 seconds, blowing everyone to pieces due to low TTK in 15 seconds, and having no recourse to take it back.  In planetside 1 it was virtually impossible to do what is common place now.  Several times last night the entire VS force got wiped by 5 full gals of NC.  It was pretty much over in less than a minute.  Sunderers were down in seconds.  Everyone was wiped.  At least in Planetside it not only took a lot longer to get a gal to a fight but it was also a lot tougher to wipe out the spawn points and mop up the ground troops due to slower movement and lower TTK.  Large outfit resecs are becoming the norm and there is virtually no defense against this unless you have the zerg backing you up.  It's just over before it begins and by the time people realize what's happening most of the force you had there are already kicked a base back.  It's becoming very hard for small, well organized outfits to have meaningful impact on gameplay outside of shenanigans ops.

I think it's because Gals are cheap.  They are giant, intimidating, lumbering war-machines but guess what?  Every BR-1 jackoff can pull a Gal, and the difference between a well-certed Gal and a stock one is marginal.  A stock Gal serves its purpose just fine.  So you've got a platoon of 48 soldiers and that's 48 Gals that can be pulled at any time.  Only one person from each squad needs to pull a gal (and resources are so abundant that I almost always have 750 of everything) and you can get multiple platoons to a target in no time.  Hurray you took that one.  Where do we go from here?  Oh we go back to the Gate and pull more Gals.  So you basically have twelve chances to take twelve hexes, and by the time you've exhausted all your Gals timers are up and resources are back so you can just do it all again.

tl;dr: Gals need to be expensive or restricted.

The other reason, as everyone mentioned already, is super-low TTK.  The fact that we even HAVE OHK weapons is crazy.  A small platoon is just too fragile, and numbers outweigh skill almost entirely.  But that's nothing new, that's the whole problem here, even above the Gal thing. 

[KorJax]

But gals are already "useless" outside of doing outfit ops so why would they need to be nerfed? That's arguably their only strength.

All they need to do is make it so outposts can easily be captured by smaller outfits vs. needing a big force like a facility, and give more optional "small" objectives that can be done around the map that give spec-ops and small outfits a reason to exist. I.e. maybe two different gens from two different sides of a region must be blown at the same time to do X? Make it so under the new hex-lattice that all the old outposts still exist and can be actually back-capped (so I could fly into TR territory and capture an outpost with 6 people on point or something), but they don't contribute to the overall lattice progression and they only offer spawns/minor boots/radar coverage/secondary whatevers.

AKA more secondary objectives that aren't really appropriate to zerg, or would be HARD to do unless you were organizing with a small outfit. AKA making smaller outfits more useful "naturally" instead of artificially doing it via artificial cap time increases/decreases that can be easily exploited.