No Deploy Zones

Probably the worst-named feature in PlanetSide 2. Putting the word "no" in a feature name is not going to make it popular, but it is an important feature that I believe has been misunderstood over the years. So for the rest of the blog post I'll simply use a much better sounding acronym.

NDZs were added fairly early in PS2's lifetime and were something I was adamant about to fixing flow.

NDZs In Crayon

So what's the purpose of the NDZ? To encourage the flow of combat to be around the capture point instead of the spawn room. When you can place an attacker spawn point next to the capture point, the fight shifts to be between the capture point and the spawn room with pressure to push in on the spawn room. This is illustrated by my amazing artistry skills below.

The attackers end up staring at the spawn room, the defenders end up sitting in it, and in order to have any real chance at defending they have to destroy the two attacker spawns. This is a tremendous advantage to the attacker and essentially shits all over the fight.

The NDZ ensures that the attackers can't completely secure the capture point simply by parking spawns on them, and pushes the fight to be more around securing the capture point than containing the spawn. (Yes, I know this won't happen ALL the time, nothing is guaranteed in an open world MMOFPS, we have to do what we can to encourage fun behavior and discourage unfun behavior)

Here's the same situation with a NDZ.

They can still place spawns right outside the spawn room on the opposite side, but that's rarely an issue unless the base has some really bad flaws (and some of them do). Also a spawn over there doesn't really help the main fight in most cases. The main point here is that players generally spawn and move towards objective, and by ensuring the NDZ is about the same radius as the defender spawn you typically get fighting in the combat area and around the capture point instead of around the spawn room. It doesn't eliminate spawn camping by any means, but it does move the fighting out away from it when the numbers are reasonably close.

Proper NDZs

NDZs are best utilized when designing an outpost. Unfortunately most were retro-fit. Here is an early image from when Wokuk Ecological Preserve was under construction during Amerish revamp. The big wireframe red sphere is the NDZ. It covers the entire main combat area of the base and is centered on the capture point (or rather, where the capture point will be).

The green ruler is the distance from the capture point to where the edge of the NDZ is. It is exactly 100m. The NDZ completely encloses the spawn room and teleporter exit, visible at the top. This gives the defenders a slight distance advantage over where attacker spawns are placed.


You can also see the NDZ while Fort Liberty was being created (very early stages!), along with some of the thought processes: https://www.twitch.tv/planetside2/v/43293995

Problems with NDZs

I know what some readers are thinking - "but this NDZ at <outpost> is terrible" - and they would be right. An NDZ is only as good as its placement, and most NDZs were placed hastily and a bit too conservatively to be of value. In those early days when they were initially created, we had about 250 bases that needed to have NDZs added to them. Many NDZs were not placed well, to the point where they didn't really do much to stop the behavior they were intended to stop and ended up not making much sense to players trying to park Sunderers. We also didn't know what would really make a good NDZ at the time, so there was some experimentation involved. And we were very busy so fixing them up was left to be done during revamps instead of an explicit NDZ correction pass. It would probably only take a few minutes to fix NDZs at most bases, but even if it was only 5 minutes, that's still nearly 21 man-hours to fix/verify them at every outpost. For one person that would be over 3 work days doing nothing but placing spheres. After a day of that just about anyone would want to be eating a shotgun. And that's also why they weren't placed well - even if very fast, not easy to place them well, so those doing the placing erred on the side of having an ineffective NDZ over a poorly placed one that might severely disrupt the fight. And that's how we got to where we are.

Another issue is that due to how they render on the map, multiple areas placed in a base for an NDZ would create overlapping circles and cosmetically would look rather awful. So we needed to use only one NDZ area - a sphere - for each base. That sphere is not always the right shape for what the NDZ needs to be, and some outposts had elevation extremes that made the NDZ very difficult to place properly. Sometimes you needed a rectangular NDZ, but that looked bad on the minimap so it was avoided.

Also NDZs are a bit unusual for 3-point bases, as they break the normal rule that the NDZ should be around the capture points. In these bases the NDZ should be around the spawn room, or cover a large area around it so attackers cannot put pressure spawns right outside the spawn room and control the entire area. Having attacker spawns next to the capture points is actually OK, as it still promotes fights between spawns and capture points, and most 3 point outposts had those points spread around the spawn room in different directions, making it far more difficult for an attacker to secure all three at once. In these cases having a NDZ around the spawn made the most sense. One example is Nason's Defiance, which actually has intentional sunderer spots under the capture point at A and very close to B.

A final problem is only a problem at certain outposts, and that is that the NDZ only affects attacker spawns. In most cases this is OK, as destroying a defender spawn at the cap area is part of the fight progression, and defenders moving up spawns helps push out attackers and create an offensive front. However, certain outposts are extremely defensible in certain areas, making removal of the spawns very difficult to the point where it breaks flow. These bases need attacker and defender NDZs. Fort Liberty is a good example, I am sorry to say. Sometimes level designers make mistakes. :(


So hopefully that clears up some of the NDZ misconceptions. They have a good purpose, but unfortunately many aren't placed well. It is one of the many challenges of going with ~300 unique hand-crafted outposts. Where they are placed well I believe they are a big reason for some of the better flowing bases.