Campaign 3 - 3D spotting (poll)

[Henidhor]

I'm poor and can't afford a computer to give me good graphics. To see a soldier medium to long range away is a struggle and 3D spotting helps tremendously to even the playing field against players who have a more luxurious rig.

I have a 6750m with 512mb VRAM and have to heavily overclock my card and turn off Windows Aero Desktop to get 30-40 fps on low settings and I don't have much of an issue.

Edit: b/c i'm going to persuade you damnit
Not sure who posted the thing about communication being more important with 3D off but here's my counter.
TS3 is flooded with players yelling into my ear about where i need to be and what i need to do. Last battleday it was 8 players in my teamspeak and it still felt like 2-3 people were always speaking (yelling/aggressively talking) constantly. I usually tune everyone out unless someone specifically tells me to do something. This isn't because i don't care about what they are saying, but because it is incredibly difficult to pick out information among the noise of multiple people (some of whom i can't understand with their accents) talking while i shoot whatever weapon i am using. now you want to take away the ability for players outside of our 8 man teamspeak to communicate via 3D spotting, and emphasize more yelling. Now to properly play a 64 man game i will have to reduce the audio level of my BF3 game just to distinguish what people say in TS. This is very annoying as sounds are incredibly important for BF, the flag ding that lets you know you cleared a flag, the shhhhh sound when you fully heal, the suppressed bullets that you can only hear and not see on a minimap, and countless others. All gone so that i can hear 3 people yelling at me that someone is behind me, but i can't understand that they are telling me that b/c they are all yelling. All of this is avoided if i have my BF3 audio at normal levels.

As said by others, that's more of a discipline and organization issue. (and one of my concerns about 8 man squads, but that's another discussion.) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard the KI airforce is notoriously bad for this.

Someone said immersion in a more realistic experience
Dice made an arcade shooter, not a war simulator. I don't want to embellish on this as i feel it's not too important. I enjoy BF3 for how Dice made and balanced it. Trying to take BF3 and make it into a war sim leaves us halfway between, with neither BF3 or the war sim truly shining.

We try to do what we can with an imperfect tool and we modify it to the best of our ability. It's really just like hardcore. I'm not asking for frickin' ARMA I'm just asking for enemies to not run around with bright flashing Doritos over their heads.

All people here say, that 3d Spotting off will only affect Air.

Its not. You can STILL spot yourself (and see the doritos), but nobody else will see them. So as a Jetpilot, i still do the same stuff. Go high, press q, dive, shoot, kill.

So if you just voted 3D Spotting off, to make it harder for air, thats not the case.

Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure they don't. The number of people who've never played without 3D spotting and the amount of misinformation in this thread is staggering.

I still don't see any reason to have it off, even with the things brought up in this thread.

Dude, have you read anything in this thread?

EDIT/Disclaimer: Sorry if I sound angry/rude, it's way too early for me to be posting.

[FlashofSilver]

I still don't see any reason to have it off, even with the things brought up in this thread.

Dude, have you read anything in this thread?

EDIT/Disclaimer: Sorry if I sound angry/rude, it's way too early for me to be posting.

Well if you take Matsif's quote literally, it means he's read the arguments in the thread and considers them insufficient to sway him to the opposite opinion. Also, I do suggest that you review before posting - your overall attitude does appear to be quite negative in that post, whether you meant it to or not.

On the topic of vehicle health, I wasn't aware that they were affected under battleday settings. It's never been mentioned or raised before to the best of my knowledge.

[Ash2Dust]

3D spotting on creates air/armor/infantry rape/camp kill count situations. Jump on a server with 3d spotting off play a couple rounds. Then jump on a server with it on. Tell me your results of your q spamming.

Try as a gunner in a helo on Wake and make passes of flags while Q spamming.
Try it as a tank on perched on a hill looking at a flag.
Try it as an infantry covering a damavand tunnel. Infantry on Metro while smoked.

Tell me how it affected your ability to see those Doritos and also know theres hostiles flanking or a SL hiding. Night and day difference.

[Calloutman]

I'm poor and can't afford a computer to give me good graphics. To see a soldier medium to long range away is a struggle and 3D spotting helps tremendously to even the playing field against players who have a more luxurious rig.

I have a 6750m with 512mb VRAM and have to heavily overclock my card and turn off Windows Aero Desktop to get 30-40 fps on low settings and I don't have much of an issue.

It's more of a problem with resolution than textures ect. When you're playing on a low resolution there can be a big issue with spotting hostiles, especially when they are crouching in rubble or a shadow. Their outline is already very pixalated and these factors can make them almost invisible. A few times yesterday I was looking at an enemy directly at mid range, it was quite hard to know if there was actually a guy there. 3D spotting helps as you can just hit q. You can still do that to an extent and just listen for the 'enemy spotted' audio cue, but it's much less effective.
I'm still kinda for 3D spotting to be switched off though as the game becomes more tactical.

[dan1mall]

I voted to have it on.
Seeing as though I play this game for fun, and I enjoy it more if turned on.
If it gets turned off, so be it, not too bothered.

On the issue of air being affected. I can honestly say that I dont think itll matter much.
Pilots will be distributed evenly next campaign, meaning that air parity will most likely be aqcuired. Meaning there wont be a lot of time to shoot at infantry anyway. And as far as shooting tanks go, I never really use the tank icon to aim anyway, sure it helps to figure out where the tank is, because my wingman can just say: tank alpha, spotted. But instead of that hes now gonna say: tank alpha, left of building.

[MotherFo™]

3D spotting is lazy. It promotes individual skill and air power over team play, not something we at gc should be aiming for. I'm not surprised LoA liked it on, and I expect the other fly boys to vote the same way, but that is the single biggest reason why 3D spotting should be off. Air should not be able to kill infantry, especially hidden infantry, so easily.

Soflams were why 3D spotting was turned on after C1, but I think they are less of an issue now.. And even if they aren't, they are still less of an issue than planes.

BF3 sounds should never be more important than information passed over TS3. If it is, then again comms discipline is an issue. I have my BF3 turned down so I can hear TS3, I would expect most people do. If you don't then why are you even coming to GC? Aren't you just pubbing? I'm not saying you should leave, I'm just asking what do you get out of it that's different from pubbing? Seriously, you're missing out on a large part of GC.

Unfortunately we can't affect individual vehicles health. If we were to set jets to 100% health we would set soldiers and all vehicles to 100%. Personally I'm in favour of that, but I think we're in the minority there.

1. Loa and many others can get kills regardless of people being spotted.

2. As epox explained, some of us (including myself) that don't have all the settings turned up with our slower computers don't have the draw distance (the distance where troops, objects, etc show up) to see as clearly.

3. Your statement "Air should not be able to kill infantry, especially hidden infantry, so easily." erks me. Why? Because, after the last patch, ECM is still broken and not very reliable for helicopters and it's basically a forced choice of both the pilot and gunner running with some sort of counter measure. When ecm worked, several months back, the gunner could actually get away with running thermal optics. 5n0m4n did this a few times. I can tell you right now, that if 3D spotting was off and thermals on and ecm worked, it'd be a very bad day for you infantry. There are many factors at play here.

4. Soflams are still seriously broken. I mentioned this in my previous post and explained the problems.

5. That statement was pretty harsh to make towards a new member. I assume he comes to play with friends, play organized battlefield, show off his talents, win, and be a part of a great community. StarfisherEcho's post is great for defending bf3 sounds. I know that if I didn't have a balance and couldn't hear in game sounds, it would certainly negatively affect my abilities. That goes for everything. Infantry, armour, air. I think it's crucial in all aspects. Especially in air. You need to hear where your enemy is especially in a dog fight, sound direction is everything. It may be a comms discipline issue, but many suggestions were either turned down or never given a fair shot. Also, a432 is loud...everyone knows that.

6. I thought jets had 100% health, but just didn't self heal like the chopper?

All the air guys are going to want 3D spotting on.. there is no getting around that. You get up there and spam the Q button like crazy. Nothing wrong with it. I spam the crap out of it. It all depends if we want more of a challenge. Some people do, and some people don't. Let the democracy decide! We should test it some more though so people get a feel.

There's more infantry than air guys. It's not just us spamming Q. It's us also relying on the infantry to do the same. This change would also make the MAV pretty useless.

What I'd really be curious about is how the jet pilots feel about turning on the hardcore setting where they can't 3rd person view. Limited to the cockpit.

I think we need to stop trying to turn BF3 into BF2. *puts on flamesuit* 3D spotting been around since 2142. As several people have stated, after having it off, they want to leave it on. I feel like certain mindsets need to be broken. Ex: Recon players can be very valuable teammates. They are not useless, especially in GC.

There's still my suggestion of leaving 3D spotting off on ground only maps like tehran.

[Jobo86]

styphon wrote:
3D spotting is lazy. It promotes individual skill and air power over team play, not something we at gc should be aiming for. I'm not surprised LoA liked it on, and I expect the other fly boys to vote the same way, but that is the single biggest reason why 3D spotting should be off. Air should not be able to kill infantry, especially hidden infantry, so easily.

I would just like to say as a heli pilot, it most definitely is NOT easy for a heli pilot to kill infantry. After they buffed static and mobile AA, nerfed my rockets, made soflams indestructible, made ecm work about 80% of the time, buffed stingers AND I have to worry about top tier jet pilots trying to take me out of the air, my job is far from easy. I rarely get any kills as a pilot agasint infantry, usually I just spot em and soften em up for MotherFo to finish off. If that's not team work I don't know what is. My points mainly come from armor and assists. Turning off spotting because people are tired of getting death rained down from above on them isn't enough of a reason to affect the entire game. Isn't that why there is only 1 heli and numerous ways to take it out? I don't think this big a of a change should be implemented to try to even the playing field for the infantry, as we've got enough going on up in the air. Also, we aren't invincible, you just gotta take us out .

[.Sup]

There's still my suggestion of leaving 3D spotting off on ground only maps like tehran.

I don't see your point here. The whole idea to disable 3D spotting is because of air and consequently air maps. The air makes it impossible for infantry to hide and makes it too easy to kill/destroy ground forces, it requires zero skill to spot someone on the ground. Same can be also said for infantry and armour but that does not get affected that much but air is just too superior with 3D spotting enabled. I understand why so many air guys want it enabled but from an infantry point of view its hard to stay alive, even when well hidden if this setting is enabled.

This is an informative poll, it decides nothing, as VK said there will be another test run next week with 3D off so those who are not familiar with the setting can see the effects of the setting being disabled.

[MotherFo™]

There's still my suggestion of leaving 3D spotting off on ground only maps like tehran.

I don't see your point here. The whole idea to disable 3D spotting is because of air and consequently air maps. The air makes it impossible for infantry to hide and makes it too easy to kill/destroy ground forces, it requires zero skill to spot someone on the ground. Same can be also said for infantry and armour but that does not get affected that much but air is just too superior with 3D spotting enabled. I understand why so many air guys want it enabled but from an infantry point of view its hard to stay alive, even when well hidden if this setting is enabled.

This is an informative poll, it decides nothing, as VK said there will be another test run next week with 3D off so those who are not familiar with the setting can see the effects of the setting being disabled.

The poll itself and the OP never said to limit/nerf the air power, it just said 3D spotting in general. Initial responses were yes and no, then about being on the receiving end of Loa, and then team work and tactics and skill. Hence, my suggestion. Then came the air responses. Mine was more directed at people wanting teamwork, tactics, slower paced defensive gameplay, but not upsetting all the air guys and making their lives more difficult on the air maps.

In the later half of the campaign, I felt air was pretty balanced. We also had strategies to deal with it. I thought that was the whole point? To strategize and work together to overcome? Air was pretty balanced early in the campaign as well. It didn't really get thrown off until guys like 5n0m4n and Sturdywings showed up. There was also the patch that made jets impervious to AA and stinger missiles. After they left and things got fixed, we overcame. Even Zapper has said things weren't that bad.

[styphon]

The biggest point for those wanting 3D spotting of is because of air, so I don't think your suggestion would work MoFo. This is one of the black and white issues where you either like it or don't and I think it's just going to have to be one way and those who don't like it will have to put up with it. Those of us who hate 3D spotting had to do just that last campaign after losing the vote to the majority.

[matsif]

Dude, have you read anything in this thread?

I read every post up to my second post, and all of the ones following. I am still on the side of keeping it, but I would like to play an organized scrimmage with it off before I make a final decision.

I am not an air guy, and I do see how it does give air an advantage, but I also see the point the air guys (especially helo guys) make about the soflams.

we should have a scrimmage between the armies with it off for the whole battle day before the BFI (as stated by the higher powers than me) and then open the poll again.

[mrBLUE9]

I've only seem ex-KI guys complaining about the air, so maybe this was more of a balance issue than a spotting issue. I don't want to speak for the whole Hitcorp infantry here, and I strongly encourage any of my former teammates to speak up, but as I said before I can't even remember being killed more than 2 times by a jet in the last campaign as infantry. Yes, the Motherfo/Jobo chopper mowed us down quite a lot of times, but it was more our fault for not using stingers than any spotting advantage. But again I would like to hear more from former Hitcorp infantry.

[FlashofSilver]

I've only seem ex-KI guys complaining about the air, so maybe this was more of a balance issue than a spotting issue. I don't want to speak for the whole Hitcorp infantry here, and I strongly encourage any of my former teammates to speak up, but as I said before I can't even remember being killed more than 2 times by a jet in the last campaign as infantry. Yes, the Motherfo/Jobo chopper mowed us down quite a lot of times, but it was more our fault for not using stingers than any spotting advantage. But again I would like to hear more from former Hitcorp infantry.

Well there are two possibilities here - either it really was a balance issue, or Hitcorp members are less vocal. It's not possible to say which is which.

[styphon]

I've only seem ex-KI guys complaining about the air, so maybe this was more of a balance issue than a spotting issue. I don't want to speak for the whole Hitcorp infantry here, and I strongly encourage any of my former teammates to speak up, but as I said before I can't even remember being killed more than 2 times by a jet in the last campaign as infantry. Yes, the Motherfo/Jobo chopper mowed us down quite a lot of times, but it was more our fault for not using stingers than any spotting advantage. But again I would like to hear more from former Hitcorp infantry.

Umm, I wasn't KI. I was a TA.

[mrBLUE9]

I've only seem ex-KI guys complaining about the air, so maybe this was more of a balance issue than a spotting issue. I don't want to speak for the whole Hitcorp infantry here, and I strongly encourage any of my former teammates to speak up, but as I said before I can't even remember being killed more than 2 times by a jet in the last campaign as infantry. Yes, the Motherfo/Jobo chopper mowed us down quite a lot of times, but it was more our fault for not using stingers than any spotting advantage. But again I would like to hear more from former Hitcorp infantry.

Umm, I wasn't KI. I was a TA.

Yes, I know, but you played for both sides, right? Did you notice this jets killing soldiers situation in both KI and Hitcorp?

I'm beginning to think this is all Loa's fault. (In the good way)