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This was pulled off reddit.
[–]PS2 Creative Directorlas0m 72 points 3 hours ago*
First of all, as usual we appreciate all the discussion on this, seeing a lot of valid concerns. I wanted to address a couple of them.
1 - We've run the numbers too, of course. We're looking at average resource income and spend rates across multiple roles, i.e. people who play tanks primarily, those who play air primarily, those who play lots of stuff, etc. We've found that in general the resource income is about 3-4x the resource spend rate for most players, with a few exceptions. Not only that, but most of the time most players are CAPPED on aerospace and mechanized resources, including those who play those roles primarily. This is leading to resources being largely irrelevant. The only one that this isn't the case with is infantry resources, where you can spend without using, so more people manage to use those resources effectively without "wasting" their by earning while capped.
2 - The purpose with resources is to be limit the flow of force-multipliers being used, vehicles, explosives, etc. If you're upset that you can't chain pull tanks over and over every 5 minutes, I don't know what to tell ya. That's kind of the entire purpose of the resource system to limit players from doing that. It's never been the intention that tanks and aircraft are always available and you never have to "do without", however, our current tuning basically allows for that - making resources, and therefore one of our strategic drivers largely irrelevant. Did you know you actively earn resources by fighting in certain areas, in addition to the passive gain? Most people don't since resources don't really matter. If you want to get tanks faster, you can do that by fighting more in mechanized resource hexes. Mechanized resources are usually more plentiful outside of warpgates too so sunderers and MBTs, the backbones of forming a push are earned earliest. None of this matters or is important in the current meta - hopefully this tuning starts to make that gameplay surface a bit more.
3 - I know you're not saying this Roy, but just so everyone else sees it - this isn't a "Resource System Revamp" it's just a tuning pass. We still have longer term plans for more systematic adjustments to the resource game, including changes to the way you acquire and utilize resources. This tuning is an attempt to see what we can do to make resources more relevant in the current system without waiting several weeks for the new game systems to be coded and tuned. We also want to see what a more restrictive resource model feels like so we can refine the design direction for that larger change. These type of resource adjustments are fast and tiny changes to game data and are easy for us to adjust and even remove if it proves to be as bad as the doomsayers think it might be.
4 - Currently resources and XP are boosted by being under-populated. Of course hardly anyone realizes that resources are boosted since they don't matter very much right now, but they are. We are considering greatly increasing the resource side of that bonus, meaning that under-populated empires will have a lot more availability to spawn vehicles. I'm sure the first thought is "if we're zerged back to the wg we're screwed anyways so this doesn't help", and that's true and is already the case. Yes, if they're pushed back all the way to WG, this won't be as huge of a benefit, but if you're under-pop while you're being pushed back it could matter a lot. Being able to out-pull vehicles, MAXes and consumables while you're fighting to hold territory as an under-popped empire could hopefully prove to be an alleviation of the population imbalance pain that some players are feeling on a couple servers. edit: since I know someone will show up to bring up that if you're evenly popped and pushed back to WG you'd be hurting - that's true, but that's kind of the point. This is the component I'm personally least comfortable with.
Once again, the goals with this tuning is to make resources more relevant, decrease the time that players spend 'capped' on vehicle resources, limit chain pulling powerful force-multiplier vehicles such as MBTs, and, ideally, to allow under-popped empires to leverage force multipliers at a higher rate than their over-populated rivals while actively contesting territory.
At any rate, I'll take the concerns to the team, and we'll continue to discuss. I agree there are some big issues to watch carefully with this type of change.
The good news is it's a very simple change to implement, iterate and even to revert if needed. Like so much in Planetside 2, "TheorySiding" and mathematical models only get us so far (both ours and yours), it's really impossible to accurately predict the actual results until we can see it played by real players in real situations.
Higby su reddit riguardo al balance risorse (Concordo e spingo!)
