Nothing Certain
Bioshock Rejects
719
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Posted - 2014.05.21 06:58:00 -
[1] - Quote
As long as you allow infantry and vehicles to interact, meaning tanks can kill infantry, then you can't have balance unless you balance them as if they were equivalent to infantry. The description Hawk-eye makes of tanks makes no logical, rational or numerical sense but is instead based on an emotional appeal about how fearsome tanks should be. What is lost is that a tank is merely one player, no overwhelming advantage should be given to one player simply because of their chosen role. Haven't you learned this from Dust?
So the options are either don't allow vehicles and infantry to interact in any meaningful way or you balance vehicles 1-1 with infantry. The solution is to make vehicles cheap and comparatively easy to kill. A tank that costs as much as a proto suit should die as easily as that proto suit. Vehicles should be a different way of playing, not an inherently superior way of playing and any build that makes it so that it is not a 1-1 equation is not going to be balanced.
I have seen no argument about why 1 player should be given a huge advantage of other players other than "it is a frikking tank". The idea that balance can be achieved through a rock-scissors flowchart like this
IAV< INF< AIV< AVV< IAV
While it looks like possible balance when written this way, several things are left out. First the symbol (<) doesn't convey much information 1<2 and 1<1000 are both true but not equivalent. In this case the counter to a class is still vulnerable to that class, for example, infantry AV can kill infantry and an anti-infantry vehicle can fight back against an anti-vehicle vehicle, but in the case of tanks both AIV and AVV are totally immune from infantry. So to achieve balance either we have to give complete immunity to IAV and INF or we have to make tanks vulnerable to INF small arms fire and regular grenades. This is something that those biased towards tanks will not accept. Second, but related to the first, The flowchart only shows balance if each counter works equally effectively against its target class, thus infantry AV should be able to take out anti-vehicle AV as easily as AIV takes out infantry, otherwise this is not balance, it is completely imbalanced against whichever class can kill its target easier. Again, the pro-tankers will never accept this because they don't look for balance, they look for tank domination.
I'd really like to hear a rational reasoned argument about this. I have yet to hear one from the pro-tanking side. Their argument always amounts to two things A. I am a tank, I should dominate. B. Tankers spend more ISK. B is a valid argument when it is true, but in Dust, ISK expenditure only gets you a relatively small advantage. You completely break any chance of balance if you simply keep increasing capability with greater ISK expenditure. Why not just allow a 100 million tank that is completely unstoppable? The answer is because it breaks the game and so does this whole mechanic, so don't go down that road.
Because, that's why.
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