During the last month or two, I’d been focusing my online obsession on Planetside. My interests come and go, and I tend to flit from title to title, dabbling in all of them, and not really getting that far in any of them, but Planetside, with its drop-in style of play and almost negligible career progression is slightly unusual in my experience, in that it’s the first, and only online game that I’ve actually won!
By ‘won’, I mean ’have gained enough Experience Points to reach the maximum level’, Battle Rank 23. Don’t get me wrong; I am not bragging here, as to be brutally honest, anyone with less than this rank is effectively still on the tutorial.
Rank is linked to experience gained, and experience points are dished out mostly for killing other players. You get some for refuelling bases, and some for being at a base when it’s captured, but nowhere near the amount a homicidal killing spree can grant, but for most half-way competent players, BR23 is an inevitability, and more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’. There is no way to lose experience points.
But I feel quite chuffed. I got there in the end, taking three or four times as long as most players, but for me it was more about determination than skill. Next is the crawl up the rare and coveted squadleading xp, CEP, to CR5, which I may not bother with, not being an inspiriational Leader of Men, and all. I certainly wouldn't die for me, so I wouldn't expect anyone else to. But it was the addition of merit awards for support activity that really got me interested lately.
Healing people, repairing things, providing spawn-point trucks, flying transport planes, etc…all these things are essential to the overall advance, and yet were not directly rewarded in any fashion at all. While some people still did these things anyway, out of a sense of duty rather than recognition, it generally meant that to make personal progress, you had to concentrate on simply killing as many people as possible, and hope someone else had empire progress covered.
The problem was always that awarding BEP for helping team-mates was always thought to be too exploitable. Take a pal, go to an out of the way spot and just shoot, then heal each other indefinitely, until BR23 is achieved. To be honest, I couldn’t see an answer to it either, but the Planetside team, a skeleton affair on a ‘maintenance only’ game, still managed to come up with an ingenious tracking system.
If you heal/repair/help a someone on your team, the game then monitors that person for the next half-hour or so, and every time they get a kill, you get some experience too, about 10% of what they get for the kill. Genius, and quite possibly why I managed to finish BR23. I spend a lot of time doing support stuff, partly because the idea of tradeskills in a war-game is so absurd that I just had to do it, partly because ‘if I don’t do it, who will?’, but most because I’m not fast enough for Counterstrike gameplay, but still like to think I’m helping the greater effort.
They also added medals for the above activities, and the very night they went in, I gain three in quick succession for providing spawn-trucks, and ended up with about 30 times more Asisst kills, (as above), than actual Kills, all without really altering my normal play style at all. I’m sure all the Ubermenschen Super-Solider types quickly took up the support equipment purely to fill the medal cases and by now, have them all and have already gone back to their Heavy Assault killing sprees, but I just thought it was nice to be recognised for something I was quietly getting on with anyway.
More later, but here’s a link to the latest Dev Q&A at Stratics:
Stratics: Planetside HoC, August 2005
Expect me to have an Opinion about in-game ads, and some bitching about Teamspeak, soon…