Alzir

Max there will be one day you bore of BF3.

Anyway Gary, that’s a good post, and I share a lot of your views, though let me give you my perspective from a couple of months of beta experience.

The first thing is of course that it’s not finished yet, but the recent announcement regarding the release date does suggest that we’re at least nearly there in terms of how the game will look on November 20th. From the state of the game update they gave us a couple of weeks ago though, we can expect some significant changes between now and then though which may address some of the bad you’ve posted above, but it’s hard to gauge by how much.

Some of those planned changes have already been implemented, with us currently sitting in a sort of half way house between their plans and the current build. One of the big changes they made was in removing Auraxium as a resource, which was previously used exclusively for unlocking weapons. This has however presented a few new problems, but let me address the unlock matter first.

Auraxium was generally a pain in the ass to accumulate. Even when NC sat and dominated the new continent (on it’s release), giving us maximum Auraxium gain, we were still facing hours of game play to unlock weapons (I saw a thread estimating 20 years for all certs and gun unlocks at one time). Now part of this may have been because they wanted to fully test the basic weapons, and indeed many of the current weapon upgrades, were unavailable until very recently. I can only guess that their main priority is in ensuring the entry level game is balanced, and it’s from this point on that they’re starting to evaluate the next level up. I fully expect more weapons to become available as the game evolves, much in the same way Eve did. I expect another part of this is in them trying to find a balance between the incentive for people to buy into the game, using their marketplace etc, and not turning away people who simply want to play for free. This could be why they’ve spent so long assessing the entry level game, given they may actually plan to keep you there a long time, should you not pay for station cash. All costs are being constantly tweaked at the moment though, so it’s impossible to tell where we’ll end up.

The way you gained Auraxium was the same as how you still accumulate the other resources, with control of the large outposts giving your faction +10 every 10 minutes or so, but this was such a slow rate, that many people just sat AFK at the warp gate so they could accumulate as much as possible. It was so slow that you almost had to do this. They initially tried giving you an Auraxium boost along with cert gain for earning XP, while adding an AFK timer to the game, but they quickly scrapped this in favour of just using Certs for everything unlockable, and removing Auraxium. The cert gain was massively increased (250 xp per cert now, compared with 1000xp per cert previously), so for us who’ve been in beta a while, we’re probably now seeing a much quicker progression in terms of unlocks, but it still requires a good investment of game time.

The problem this causes though is that there’s now little incentive to actually take bases, other than just having a fight. The other resources are so numerous currently that it really makes very little difference to your factions resource pool, if you lose territory. I think this is something they’re still looking at, so watch this space. At the moment this does look over simplified, as you say.

In much the same way as I expect them to increase the amount of weapons available, we’ll also start seeing new abilities for classes. What we have today is already miles ahead of what they had just a few weeks ago, so again this is a work in progress. I’m not sure whether we’ll reach the point where Infiltrators can use jet packs or whether we’ll see them given automatic weapons, in much the same way as I wouldn’t expect the light assault class to be given a sniper rifle unlock. You need restrictions within each class for balance, or just scrap the idea of having classes.

Regarding the facilities, I know what you mean, but I think of greater concern is how the capture mechanics currently work. This has been tweaked, and retweaked, scraped completely, and reinstated, over beta, and there are plans to change this yet again. I want them to do away with the slow capture rates, which only encourages people to sit around twiddling their thumbs, but add more to an assault, as in more objectives, and more layers to the defence. The wouldn’t necessarily be to make an assault harder, just more complex, in order to disperse the fight a bit more. I really dislike the zerging you see during the largest battles, so anything to change this would be welcome. How the facilities are laid out could do with a bit more variety (certainly the largest outposts), but I’ve never really been one to get into the lore of stuff, so the cosmetics really don’t bother me that much, although it would be that little bit of icing on the cake.

Anyway, last point, get on ts with us, I was on for ages over the weekend!

get on ts mate and make friends etc.

I’m off today as well so will be on with Alex this afternoon.

Yep will do, though I plan to watch the football at the pub between 3 and 5. Message me on origin if I’m not on TS outside those hours.

Prepare yourself though as you will be facing a learning curve and without exception those of us throwing ourselves into the game have needed quite a few hours to get used to the combat. It’s tough going at the start and you will die a lot.

Might be worth a try but doubt we have that mamy premium players.

Earlier lunch than I expected but you should have the key now. I also discovered another email from the devs dated 6th october with another key, in case anyone wants that.