In the struggle to dominate and control Auraxis, there are countless jobs and roles to perform. Many of these involve the support of your fellow soldiers and these actions have, up until now, been largely thankless. The tireless support personnel, who repair damaged wall turret systems, provide support positioning Advanced Mobile Stations, or operating Galaxy and Lodestar vehicles have done so out of the desire for the greater good for their Empire.
With PlanetSide version 3.7 we introduced rewards for such activities. These rewards are tied to when opposing forces are overcome, rather than handing them out at the time when the support activities are performed.
The way the process works is this: Support activity is recorded. When the supported unit overcomes an enemy in the future, they will pass back a share of experience and possibly a merit worthy kill (depending on the factors of the kill). The unit scoring the kills will continue to pass back this bonus experience and merit kills for a period of time starting with their first kill after being supported. The length of time is determined by how much support they received. If the supported unit dies and respawns (is not revived) then they will no longer pass back support experience and support merit kills. One exception to this delayed start of when support experience and kills are passed back and recorded is after a hot drop. The timer starts immediately after bailing from a Galaxy.
Each person that you support tracks that activity in what you could consider a �support bucket�. The more you support them (for instance, the more times you repair their armor that was damaged by enemy fire) the more you fill in this bucket. How much this bucket is filled in will determine the size of the % of experience from kills that is passed back to you and for how long experience will kick back. The timer is dormant, waiting after the support is rendered (repairing someone�s armor, for example) until the supported soldier scores their first kill. This allows you to support someone and much later, when they start scoring some kills (and haven�t died in the mean time) they will still reward you for that support.
For example, if you repair base turrets and the fight eventually comes back to that base. When someone gets in that turret you repaired a while ago and scores a kill, they will kick off the dormant timer and now kills they score with that turret will give the person who repaired it a slice of the kill experience and possibly kill records toward Merit Commendations. Of course, if you were the repairer of said turrets and you logged off or left the zone, you would no longer receive support experience or merit kills.
What type of activities can lead to obtaining Support Experience (SEP)?
The following are different categories of activities that can lead to your acquisition of Support experience and assist kills counting toward support Merit Commendations:
- Healing another soldier.
- Repairing another soldier or vehicle either with a BANK, NanoDispenser or Lodestar.
- Hacking a terminal or locker, or providing an AMS or Lodestar terminal for others to obtain equipment or ammunition.
- Providing an AMS for soldiers to spawn from.
- Reviving another soldier.
- Having soldiers bail from your Galaxy
- Placing or owning a router.
Examples of How SEP is gained.
To illustrate the different scenarios in which SEP can be gained, a few examples of each are listed below.
Healing or Repairing: You heal a friendly soldier just outside the door to a hotly contested tower. You heal him for 25 damage and he now has a record on him that will start to feed you experience and assist kills toward merits. However, as the fight rages, the soldier you healed doesn�t die, but he does take more damage from plasma fired by the enemy out the door. You die trying to get in the door. Just because you died doesn�t affect the support you had done on the other soldier. That will only be erased if he dies and is not revived.
So, you respawn at the nearby AMS and come back. You see the soldier you had healed before and heal up the damage he took from the plasma, further filling in the �support bucket� and building a greater percentage of experience you would get from his kills (if and when he scores some). You then join the rush in through the door and your Empire captures the tower. The soldier you helped landed some hits, but never got a kill, so your �support bucket� on him has not triggered and is still dormant, waiting for him to score a kill.
Now, you head down toward the base and the soldier you helped gets a kill of an enemy on the wall. The experience share from that kill is reported and saved up. If you had supported him more, you would have obtained a bigger % of experience share. The enemy that the solder you supported was a unique kill so it will count back as an �assist kill� to you, the person who supported him, and toward support Merit Commendations.
Hacking: You are an infiltrator, sneaking through a lightly contested enemy base. You make your way to one of the nearby equipment terminals, hack it and switch out your armor to a MAX suit and head to the spawn tubes to tear some enemy forces up! Behind you another friendly has hot dropped on the roof, and comes down into the base and sees in passing that the equipment terminal is available. He swaps out of his Agile armor for his Rexo heavy grunt load out. By using a terminal that you hacked, you are now flagged as having supported him. When he scores his next kill (without dying) he will start off the time period where he will give back experience and assist kills back to you.
AMS or Lodestar: You position a Lodestar where friendly vehicles are rearming their vehicles. Just like #2 above, just the fact that they use the equipment portion of the Lodestar functionality will flag them as you, the Lodestar owner, as having supported them. This is the same for the AMS, if someone uses your AMS to equip themselves. The Lodestar will also flag vehicles as having been repaired by you, much like scenario #1 above.
AMS spawning: The AMS also will tag soldiers spawning at it as having been supported by the soldier who owns the AMS. So, when those soldiers go on to score enemy kills, they will pass back a share of experience and possibly assist kills to count toward support Merit Commendations. Even if the AMS is destroyed, friendly solders who had spawned at it would continue to give back these rewards until either their timer runs out, they die and respawn, you log out or you leave the zone.
Reviving: Reviving fallen friendly solders will not only flag the person who revives them as having assisted them, but it will also keep their death from canceling all support related shares they are currently tracking from being cleared.
Routers:Both for the owner of the router and the placer of the router pad receive a slice of support experience and kick back assist kills toward support merit awards.
How can I tell if I got credit for Support Experience
The feedback system for support experience involves 3 main user interface elements: the Session Statistics Bar (otherwise known as the K/D bar), the Character Statistics page and messages to the upper chat window.
Session Statistics Bar
A: and SEP: were added to the Session Statistics Bar when SEP was brought in.
The A: stands for assist kills. This displays the number of support assist kills that have been logged during your current play session. This is displayed after the K/D: area.
The SEP: stands for support experience. Experience that comes in from support activities counts directly as battle experience and advances your battle rank. So, this counter is redundant to the current BEP counter. If you do not incur other methods of gaining BEP and only engage in support activities, your BEP and SEP counters would be identical. However, the SEP counter allows you to see at a glance how much experience all your support activities have brought in for you. The SEP: area is displayed after the CEP: area.
Both of these new areas on the Session Statistics Bar will only display to you if those counters increment. This is to keep a big ZERO from looking you in the face as you play.
Also of note with the increment of assist kills. The current system can end up counting a single kill as multiple assist kills. For example, you repair a friendly solder, heal them, they then purchase from your AMS and then score a kill. This would increment your assist kill counter by 3: one as a repair assist, one as a heal assist and one as an equip assist.
Character Statistics Page
Two tabs were added to the Character Statistics page: Assists and Support when SEP was brought in. Like the existing kill statistics, each of these new tabs has columns for each empire that is further split into totals ever and totals for this session.
The Assists Tab lists: All of the assist kills that have come in for your character, by type of assist (revive assist, heal assist, repair assist, terminal equip assist, etc.) as well as your vehicle driver assist kills (where you are driving and a gunner in your vehicle scores a kill).
The Support Tab lists: All of your revives by the armor type of the avatar you revive.
Chat Messages
Given that individual support exp messages can come in very frequently and by themselves they can be some smaller numbers, the PlanetSide team have elected to collect your support experience into regular messages that let you know how much support experience has come in over the last 5 minutes. This will match the increment shown in the SEP section of the Session Statistics Bar as described above.
