Fancying something a little bit different, I rolled up a new soldier in Planetside last night. That’s one of the good points of being a Reservist – ‘alting’ becomes quite trivial to do, as ramping a completely new character up to BR4 takes minutes in the VR Training area, and BR5 and BR6 come swiftly thereafter, and also you don’t have the responsibility of a BR25 CR5 character sat in the next character slot down, that you’ve worked hard to achieve, and really ought to be using.

I picked NC, as they seem to consistently have the lowest population on my server at the moment, there being something of a Terran Renaissance of late, and picked out some quite specific certifications, with a definite set of rules in mind.

Some months before the Reserves deal started, and after long clamouring on the forums, SOE implemented a system to give support players recognition for their efforts. Previously, activities like healing people, repairing them and their vehicles, providing spawning facilities, transport and hacking all went largely unnoticed. They’d be essential for the overall progress of an offensive, but you never got any ‘points’ for doing them, which generally meant that they be the sole preserve of selfless and well-meaning players who preferred the bigger picture to the personal glory of one-on-one gun-fighting. (Hello there!), or maxed out players who couldn’t use up their extra cert points to buy any more useful ways to kill people.

It’s tricky though – how do you give points for repairing team-mates in a way that doesn’t just end up with two of them going to an out of the way spot and just shooting each other, and then repairing each other, for five hours? They came up with a quite elegant solution; you get points if the person you just helped (in any of the above ways) then goes on and kills some enemies. It tracks them for the next half hour or so, and when they get kill xp, you also get a fractional amount of support xp. You also get a set of support medals you can work towards for doing this stuff, based on the same criteria – if you heal someone and they kill an enemy, you get a point toward the First Aid badge. It’s a lot like the Boy Scouts in that regard, only with more automatic weaponry.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that is is now possible to make progress in Planetside without killing anyone at all, and this is the game I’ve set myself for my new character. Here come the Certs!

  • Medic (3): Allows use of the first-aid pistol, which heals friendly troops, or yourself.
  • Adv Medical (2): Makes the healing faster, and also allows you to raise the dead! We at Van Hemlock do not normally condone Zombies, but make exceptions in this case.
  • Engineering (3): Allows access to the armour repair pistol (for infantry and MAX suits), and the big glue gun (for vehicles, turrets etc.) Combat Engineering, the advanced upgrade of this, is not necessary for this particular experiment.
  • Ground Transport (2): Access to the AMS spawn truck, and Router teleport thingey, both unarmed vehicles, and also the ANT fuel truck.
  • Missing (1) + Implant: I’m only BR4 at the moment, but these extras will let me get the Surge Implant, which boosts run speed, letting me get to where I’m needed quicker, and I’ll unlearn Ground Support, and get Air Support instead, for the Lodestar mobile vehicle repair depot, and Galaxy troop transport.

None of these certs grant me any nasty dangerous weapons that could be used ot hurt people! My equipment load out:

  • Armour: Agile Exosuit (Infiltration Suit ,instead of Ground Support, can also work well here, but prevents use of the big vehicle gluegun, and requires you to manually keep swapping the two pistols over fomr inventory all the time)
  • Pistol 1: BANK armour repair gun
  • Pistol 2: Med Applicator first aid gun
  • Rifle: Nano Dispenser vehicle repair gun
  • Backpack: A REK hacking tool, three EMP jammer grenades and a huge supply of ammo bottles for the three support guns above.

I imagine people rummaging through in my fallen corpse backpack get quite a chuckle out of that, but I assure you it is entirely deliberate. The rules are simple – I am not allowed to hurt anyone. The jammers are a bit of a grey area – if thrown at enemy landmines at the right moment, they can cause the mines to detonate and kill any enemy troops over them, but I try to avoid that. They’re there to help me with sapper duty – safely disposing of enemy minefields, and also throwing them at vehicles is a non-lethal way of shopping them firing for a short duration.

Out I went, to see if this is at all feasible in any practical sense, and after a bit of a rocky start, it did seem to be working. 100% support takes a bit of planning. It works best where there are larger concentrations of more normal troops playing the game properly, so turning up at a four man tower defence, or speculative ghost hack is a bit of a waste of time, and can even cause resentment. In that kind of situation, having another soldier there who - for some unknown reason - does not shoot the enemy, is probably quite frustrating, when what you really need is another Heavy Assault guy, or AI MAX unit. Once I managed to Instant Action into a larger fight though, it did start to pay off, and before long, I was dashing about the shell-fire, patching up anything and anyone I could see.

It’s making life difficult for myself, certainly, and not for everyone. If someone shoots at me, I have to either run, or die, and so am often just an easy kill for the enemy, but I’m almost certain I was making a difference, once I learned where the fluid battle-lines were and how to stay just behind them. Snipers and AV chaps in particular seem to be too busy firing to take much care of themselves, so having me creep up behind them and fixing them up while they concentrate on the job in hand can help reduce the number of counter-sniper deaths that usually come with the job. My glue gun also helped keep a number of our vehicles in the field. Most dedicated drivers are also Engineers, but two glue-guns working on the near-wrecked tank halve the downtime between sorties, and after one or two, I started to work out where they were retreating to each time, and be there ready for when they did. Having a parked Lodestar there in future will help immensely. The MAX units in particular seemed to do much better with my suicidal one-stop clinic and workshop roaming the hills around them. MAXes are powerful, but their main vulnerability is their weakness to attrition – damage done to them stays done to them, unless help can be found, so right from putting the suit on, it’s only a matter of time, and unlike normal infantry armour, they have to wait five minutes before they can pull a replacement suit.

I raised a number of zombie minions, but this in particular is tricky, as months of reflex tend to kick in on death, and most people just hit the respawn button the instant they hit the deck, making them vanish before I can get to them, and of course, half the time whatever it was that killed them is still there, with more ammo, and I have to survive long enough to bring the other chap back to life.

It’s rewarding, but frustrating too. Many players in Planetside tend to become very self-sufficient very quickly, capable of healing themselves if they are BR25 Veterans, or not knowing that healing can be done at all, if they’re newer Reservists. In almost all cases, it takes players a short time to realise that someone is trying to heal them at all, and these support tools only work when the patient is stationary, resulting in me spending quite a large portion of the night chasing people about, and trying to jump them the moment they paused for any reason. Surge will help there I think.

I never did manage to get an AMS on the go, apart from a disastrous and doomed go at bringing one to a cave fight we’d already lost. A shame, as those things generate huge amounts of support xp and assists if placed well – but just running about with the above load out, on foot, I still managed to rack up about 70 or so assists, 28 deaths, and an entirely intentional 0 kills. My best moment was a tower defence, where I was crouched behind three AI MAX units at the top of the first stairs, and used my armour repair gun to prop the MAXes up and ensure they were practically indestructible to casual incursions, effectively giving them a very rapid armour regeneration effect, while they made complete mince-meat of the incoming Vanu for some minutes. I may have sworn to Do No Harm, but nothing stops me from enjoying seeing, or indeed indirectly helping, other people doing harm!

It was actually quite fun, and just another example of how the playground of Planetside can support many different games if you look hard enough.

MEDIC!