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Planetside 2 is already on the decline.
tixylix
Member UncommonPosts: 1,288
They have too many servers and people are spread too thin, it's really hard to find a big battle these days. If you want big fights then you can only play during the late afternoon and evenings which is a problem Planetside had. The problem is a static server system they have where they cannot bring players together when the population is low, I have really no idea why they didn't address this issue from the first game. I've found myself not really logging in at all for various reasons but none of my friends liked the game, they all seemed to find it hard to work out what was going on and kept complaining about being spawn camped. Then you have this small windows you can only play if you want giant battles and I just got tired of waiting to play.
It is that classic cliche SOE tale of having a game in beta with such potential but with obvious issues, SOE ignores the players and launches the game way too early, then the population declines fast after launch and never recovers. SOE hasn't shown the ability to acknowledge what is wrong with the game, how to fix it and what players want. Now they're in the stage of buffing and nerfing stuff and pissing people off each patch, something that didn't need to happen at this stage but what should have been done in beta, the problems existed then.
I don't know what SOE plans to achieve with the weapons in this game either, they all look the same and play the same. SOE really seems to want to make every gun play the same way, I like every other Planetside player complained about the HA weapons. What they've done is taken away their personality and made them like any other gun in the game. The Lasher really just plays like any other Vanu rifle but with a slightly bigger effect, the MCG plays like any other rifle in the game, the only difference is it has a spin time which makes it worse. Then you have the NC Jack Hammer which is worse than the common pool one, it like the other shotguns look like rifles and it doesn't even sound like a Shotgun when you head it being fired at you.
This really exists to the vehicles too, you can be fired upon by the Lib and the projectiles don't seem to have any effects on them when they hit your vehicle. You often just sit in your MBT and you see what looks like rifle fire on your vehicle and ignore it, then suddenly you're dead and it is like wtf happened? Soon you realise it was a Lib.......
The vehicles really dominate the game, though I should say ESFs and MBTs. Sunds are useless for anything other than being the new AMS, I don't even know why it is in the game, they should have just made the AMS. Thanx to the main gun being on the driver seat of the MBTs The Lightning is useless and no one uses it, not even for the Skyguard cause AA is a joke in this game. What they've done is turned MBTs into the only viable ground vehicle in the game, it really should have been the Lib of the ground where you need 2 or 3 people to make it useful. You have the Galaxy which isn't all that useful because it is a massive target that gets fucked up so fast, not only that but capturing a spawn point in a base or spawning on your squad is so easy it makes it rather pointless. You have the Lib but using an ESF is much more effective, you can avoid AA like a piece of piss and rocket pods can easily destroy a MBT.
Overall though because you can customise everything what SOE has done is really taken away the personality of vehicles, weapons and the class system with no inventory really makes you not think about armour sets. I would have liked a mass of vehicles that played different roles just because it would be something else to look at and the same goes with weapons. Instead they all have this generic look that you put attachments to and even then you cannot always see much of a difference.
I also find base capture to be tedious and rather pointless as without a Sanc or more conts you cannot lock conts and own them like you could in Planetside. There is no sense of flow to the battle like Planetside had because of this and also the Hex system spreads people out too much. Instead of having these large fronts and masses of people coming together you now have people spread out over hundreds of tiny outposts. One person can capture an outpost and it then causes people to go and defend it but this is happening all over the map so it really spreads people out a lot and isn't all that fun. Each Cont as its own problem, Indar funnels the Vanu and NC upwards towards the TR so you find the TR fighting two factions and the other two ignoring each other. Amerish gives a massive advantage to the TR with access to two or three tech plants and Esamir only has one Tech plant so you tend to find the battles being rather lackluster.
What generally tends to happen in base captures is with Outposts vehicles just sit outside the spawn and you as a defender cannot do anything about it, as soon as you walk out you get shot at. I really don't understand why spawns were designed to have no protection and I don't understand why the capture system encourages this. Currently you just sit there and gain influence to cap and you have to camp the spawn, there is nothing else to do. They really need to ditch Influence and make it so you need a certain number of people on the capture point to get or have something that takes the battle away from the spawns like a CTF type system that Planetside had.
In large bases usually the defender gets spawn camped again, there is very little infantry only area in bases, so vehicles destroy anything in the courtyard which is basically 80% of the base. The only two bases where infantry isn't exposed is the Biolabd and the Tech Plant, these have their own problems though as the Biolab quickly turns into camp the teleporter which is basically a spawn. If however there are too many people then it becomes the attackers camping the spawn, quite often you cannot get rid of the attackers teleport as it is now behind the front lines. The Tech Plant becomes that BF3 Metro map where there is only one way in and it's just get shot as soon as you walk in and there is a spam of grenades.
So I don't find the base captures all that fun and the annoying thing is that they don't last long either like they did in Planetside. There is no reward for defending, you're much better bailing and attacking another part of the map or shifting conts. Generally people switch conts because you're rewarded for winning but not defending and you gain more resources and certs. So quite often your base will be attacked and everyone bails and there seems to be very little resistance. Then you look at the map and you see the enemy are just attacking another base or are all on another cont.
You have these giant bases but they're actually really small, most of it is just for show and has no indoor space. When looking at the Biolab for the first time I thought it would have so many levels inside, there is only one and it doesn't really feel like an indoor area either. There are no doors to anything, so it is really easy just to wonder in, bases are so open and hard to defend.
I found myself having fun in this very flawed title but everything I want in the game like a Knife slot, enemy collision, reduced damage done to infantry by vehicles, a revised capture system or the Underslung MCG is stuff where the developers have said no to. I find it really hard to keep playing when I know that stuff that I want wont be in there but it is stuff that really annoys me. On top of that with none of my friends playing any more, it's really hard to enjoy a game like this on my own.
I remember in October when it was announced the game would launch in November that SOE were making a mistake. This was no secret, we all said it on the forums, the game lacked so much they were saying would be in the game. SOE said they knew the meta game was broken and they were fixing it, however they launched with the broken meta game and we still have yet to hear what they have planned. It's another case where the game will be dead before anything gets put in that makes people enjoy it. I just don't understand how SOE could screw it up so much, I really thought they had changed and learnt from their past mistakes, they keep saying they have and yet they keep making the same mistakes again and again.
The population is in decline, you can easily see it, you used to have battles everywhere and pop locks. Now you have servers that top out on medium, but are mostly low for the day and it's hard to find the big battles any more. SOE wont merge them in time either, they'll just let more people quit because they're bored of playing with a low pop. You cannot switch servers or make new characters as the stuff you bought is based on that character and not account bound which is dumb. They've put this dumb low character limit so you cannot make new characters to move with the time zones if you wanted to, unless you deleted one and accepted losing money.
I said similar things when SWTOR was launching, I made a post in Jan to merge servers because the population was clearly declining. It was easy to predict that the servers would be highly populated over Christmas but as people go back to work they'll lower by quite a bit. It was a very dumb time to launch the game, they made too many servers and they all quickly died. SOE are making the same mistakes as SWTOR and what they have done in the past and developers don't seem to learn.
Comments
Wow that must have taken a long time to write that out!
PS2 is not all about massive fights, during the day the war changes to a more tactical small scale taking over outside emplacements ready for the massive influx in the evening.
The mechanics are still being worked on interms of giving meaning to the base captures.
But....
Take a long hard look at what PS2 is, it is frankly a massive achievement and something that if I was on the development team I would be very very proud. It was not rushed off beta, it was ready to launch as a developing project.
The scale of the game and FPS mechanics.
I mean go back a few years and see what people would have said, their jaws would be on the floor with the graphics and all that amount of players. Yes PS1 was around but the gfx were very old. This game moves the whole industry in the right direction.
People are so spoilt today - if your friends just logged out and never came back because they were spawn camped then they are probably not the sort of player that attracts PS2, Kitty Online is more up their ally.
My main complaint was that just capturing static bases over and over again is lame. There are smaller games out there that do this much, much better than PS2, and with much better FPS physics and smoothness.
Smed has talked in the past about having player-made bases and letting the players dictate the shape of the battlefield. When that happens, I may take a second look and play again.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Hell 3 of my "normal" mates that don't work in IT play it
Also don't get the swtor thing at all, planetside is about as opposite as you can get from swtor while still being a mmo.
Lots of rant about this and that ...
I just played last night and there are pretty big battles ... lots of infantries, lots of tanks & aircrafts. In fact, the hill top i was going to snipe from have so many other snipers that i have to move to another location. (don't want the other side pay attention to a bunch of enemies at the same place).
Yeh. TOR is better off as an online action RPG. Essentially it is a story game ..the combat is slow and not very actiony.
PS2, on the other hand, has HUGE battles, pvp-focus, and very action oriented combat.
Swtor is pve and solo orientated
Bugger all in common.
That wasn't what I was comparing...
Servers are fine. Maybe a few could be merged but not all of them. Don't you prefer to not wait in a queue to play?
Ever notice how often "already on the decline" appears as a bizarre kind of Shadenfreude Christmas Wish?
Parental Gift Procurement Units: "What do you want for Christmas this year, little Jimmy?"
"To be First with a Prophecy of Doom on a message board!"
"We're just so proud!"
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Not in the true sense .. because you can choose your spawn point.
However, one of my fav tactics is to find one of those enemies trucks with a spawn point, and snipe at the respawn. I can often get quite a few kills before i have to move on (or die).
I may not be camping the same player though ... obviously if someone die one or twice spawning at this particular point, he prob wise up and spawn some where else.
Planetside 1 is still around, i think playing it might give you a bit of perspective as to why the issues with PS2 are such big issues, and not to the point of, a few tweeks of the combat etc, but we're talking major flaws with the whole game itself, from air vehicles, to the sheer lack of ground vehicles, and what they have done with them, the MBT of each is a point of note, the lightning tank was meant to be the single player tank, fast, manoeuverable, but offset by the fact it only needed a single player to operate. MBT's needed a driver, and at least 1 gunner, the driver btw, didnt have access to a weapon, and instead concentrated on keeping range, and out of harms way, which wasnt easy, and certainly wouldnt give time to also try and hit things with the main gun. But that was only half of it, how about the marauder jeep, or the harasser, or the deliverer, raider, ams, sunderer, which also btw, was the only vehicle that had side turrets that gave 'cloaked' vision, not to mention 2 artillery guns and 2 machine guns, the deliverer had 2 machine guns and was also amphibious. Making sunderer's spawn points was not just strange, it is probably one of the daftest things they've come up with, the AMS was an unarmed vehicle, but it could cloak on being deployed, which made it of hugely tactical use, by providing, if only for a short period of time, a reasonably safe spawn point, and if the driver was an engineer, he could surround it with mines, and cloaked turrets, not to mention scanner jammers, or/and scanners to pick up cloakers, having the engineer just a glorified ammo maker is another issue.. although, imo, an important one, as it was one of my favourite skill sets.
imo, they could have avoided most of the issues with PS2 just by upgrading the graphics of PS1 and leaving alone something that didnt need fixing.. except maybe BFR's, they really needed to get rid of those monstrosities
I don't understand this game at all.
I get the game itself, but it is pay-2-win. and newcomers who don't pay-2-win are at a ridiculous disadvantage.
In Unreal Tournament, without pay-2-win, newcomers were already at a disadvantage because of the lack of skill, add in pay-2-win and any player is going to be at such a disadvantage that it will take a lot of real cah or time to and deaths to enjoy the game.
FPS where players have advantages outside of skill seem pointless to me.
All the real upgrades must be earned and can not be bought with cash
Well, I don't think it matters what you would like to call it, a FPS where characters can progress by spending money or playing for an extremely long time, is going to become a hostile place for new players really quickly.
At least in UT and Quake people start out on the same foot, and at least that game had different servers for different difficulties, in PS2 total newbees are bunched up with vets who spent hundreds of dollars on items.
It just seems pretty ridiculous to me.
You can pimp out starter weapon and make kids with people completely decked out in buyable weapons.
I'm guessing your mothorical skills are not that good and/or have too old pc.
Planetside is a mmo
What will "hundreds of dollars" get you
It will get you a whole bunch of guns, of which you can only equip one at a time.
All the real upgrades are earned in game, armour, sights, rail attachments, ammo upgrades, carrying capacity, c4, alternate grenades etc.. you can't buy those.
You forgot about the rampant hacking and griefing. In most MMOs, these problems aren't a big deal. However, PS2 is purely PvP, which makes cheating absolutely intolerable. Every single death leaves you wondering... what really happened there?
Of course, if the game wasn't F2P, cheating wouldn't be an issue. Heck, I'd pay money for separate 'members only' servers just to get away from the F2P noobs.
Aren't you the pro pve Anti pvp person?
If so why would you be playing planetside anyway, there's no pve in it?
I just logged oof PLanetside 2 and there was still huge battles ongoing involving tons of infrantry, armoured veichles and aircrafts.
On a side note i really helped at some point with my MAX AA taking down several smaller crafts and having liberators fly away, or shooting down a couple.
I don't know where do you play, but where i play there are always some big battles going on, as AA operator i find myself often giving some help to the ground troops if anything i feel sorry for some of the smaller crafts pilots, if you know how to aim you can make their life very hard when they came for a strafe.
Sorry we are having opposite experiences.
Just yesterday we had a fantastic three way huge scrap between Vanu TR and NC all assaulting the same target, hell i am not even that good in this game and i have tons of fun, and yes i did play PS1 had fun with it, and i am having fun with PS2.
Is perfect ? Naw, not at all, but is fun as hell to play, even for people like me that aren't crack shots or have the reflexes of a teenanger on a mountain dew rush.
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5120/7210363296_8357bee9de.jpg
Greifing? Wtf? How can you be greifed in a pure pvp game, you make no sense.