Esamir sucks - convince me otherwise

Ding, ding, ding.

PS2 used to be at least somewhat honestly, organically fun, despite the crippling bugs and the ease of cheating. Want to go somewhere? Just take an ESF and go. Want to mess with people at the next base over? Use the influence system. Want to ___? Do it.

And now everything's confined, latticed, walled off. Can't destroy those generators, it's not allowed. Can't pull another vehicle, resources won't allow it. Can't go here, can't go there. "Continent locking!" Really? Restricting access to whole areas? In a f-ing MMO? A COD battle island is in the pipeline, and Hossin's not looking any better either.

I spent a lot of time in this game. BR 70, and if I stuck around for captures or otherwise cared about exp I'd probably be BR 75. Fun is dead, and the CoD/PS1 degenerates are dancing on its corpse.

Even talking about this game is painful for me now, like trying to deal with a relative with Alzheimer's. You're a shadow of your former self. Just hurry up and die already. I'm going back to my favorite FTB Unleashed Minecraft server. At least in that game you get to do things.

There was a person I was conversing with briefly on these forums in another thread who lamented a contrast I made with Minecraft reagrding how MC doesn't require its player to do anything but offers them only the option of utilizing the gameplay feature. I wantto say the topic was about shotgun CQC effectiveness but something makes me think otherwise. His complaint, whatever the topic was, indicated how he was dissastisfied that they added content to Minecraft after he already felt the game was good enough and that some of the newer content was not really his cup of tea. Nonetheless ...

Minecraft is a completely different sort of game and even MMOs have rules and make changes over time, some of which are designed to curtail what is observed as exploitation between players, one of whom finds it "fun" and the other that finds it untolerable. Frankly, the generator thing you mentioned is nothing but a kind of harrassment so I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted; the other guy certainly didn't. If you know anything about FPS games you should know they are intended to be highly structural games, where the rules and bounds of engagement try to be well-defined. In single player games, enemies spawn in certain locations, follow certain patterns, and respond to situations in controlled methods. Only the most impressive and consistent emergent behavior is allowed. In Planetside, however, there's nothing but players, so the bounds that define how gameplay works need to be very strict; people are far too creative and unempathic, if you allow them to be under their assumption that "it's permissible gameplay."

In Planetside, you can't put monsters that your character has no chance of killing to hypothetically block their progress, or give them waist-high fences, or broken bridge quests (the equivalent of locked doors work, however). They can go anywhere so the importance that thir ability to do things is limited somehow. We've already sen the big steo back from the all-accepting inventory system of PS1. Consider another example: the capping of bases that surrounded the directly conflicted region but not staying to mind the cap. The first part - before the "but" - was fine, strategically, as long as the main fight did not peter-out. In my ongoing opinion, it permitted options. The system, however, was being treated as far too abusive thus that the players played ding-dong-ditch with each other and they actually avoided each other; and, these actions were ruining the gameplay experience in total.

Personally, you sound like you'd enjoy Minecraft a lot. The problem may just be that you don't like seeing the limitations of your gameplay and that's one major failing I think the lattice possesses - it's always visible there, those colored lines on the map. If Minecraft were to take away something you'd enjoyed doing for a long time but it wasn't properly documented behavior or a properly sanctioned activity, then you would feel the same way as here, that they're taking away something you believe allows the game to be "open." Dwarf Fortress, to use another example, used to spawn awesome tales of lone Legendary warriors bashing away armies of foes with martial tarnces and Dwarvenly might, their extremities exploding from their bodies and their skulls never to be found again. It was fun, but much like Minecraft, and much like Planetside, one only had to look at the developer's own notes the realize this was just an avenue that was ventured for its simplicity.

The last major update to Dwarf Fortress curtailed the ease of "super-Dwarven" military; Minecraft, according to Notch, keeping in mind the person I mentioned above, was always going to head in something like the direction that it has; and, Planetside 2 was always slowly going to become more like Planetside 1. The developer said it, if only enough people would have listened.

tl;dr, you were too focused on how the game was fun because of the way you played it, not how fun the game was because of the way the game was intended to be played.

My problem with the new Esamir would be some of the lattice linkage and some bases were moved. One of the greatest pushes was from Jaeger's Fist to Jaeger's Crossing. Now they are across the street neighbors. It sucks when you are trying to take Jaeger's Fist and getting heavily shelled from Jaeger's Crossing.

Esamir needs to be stretched out. Seriously.

Ahahahahahahahaha... ahahahahahaha... oh man, it's.. ahahahaha...

Again: FTB Unleashed. Not vanilla. Not even close. Vanilla MC is kiddy mode.

Bullcrap. I've been on both sides of the generator situation. Granted, keeping generators up in multiple bases was a lot more fun before they drastically limited the respawn system.

Bullcrap! Unless you're talking about spunkgargleweewee like CoD. Tournament FPSes have generally tried to be as unlimited as possible. Tribes. Red Faction Guerilla when people still played it. Quake in all its forms, Unreal Tournament, even old 2.5Ds like DN3D and Doom were limited principally by technology. We were given a goal and tools to accomplish that goal. Players exploited the hell out of everything. It was genuinely fun.

Again, technological limitations. Game companies spend many, many man-hours of programmer time trying to overcome them.

Normally, I'd agree, but in the case of Planetside, it's the other way around. This game has some of the least imaginative, least interesting players I've ever seen. The reason people demanded all these limitations is because they couldn't form counters, couldn't devise strategies, didn't want to do anything other than "everybody run to the next base and wait for the cap timer". Which is why lone ghosts could take over whole continents.

There were so many ways around this. So many ways for the game to incentivize smart play and not 4:1 platoon-vs-squad snoozefests. None of them were ever even seriously considered.

Yes you can. They're called "zergs". And their blocking is far from hypothetical.

You're right, the fences are much higher than that.

It takes exactly one person to counter this in one base. With more open redeploy, it takes exactly one person to counter this in every base.

They still do. Have you even noticed the population threads? I called this well in advance, the moment the lattice system was first proposed. You can't force people to fight when they're not winning. They have no incentive. Most PS2 players play to win, not to have fun or play as the underdog. They usually have alts on the other sides. If they're losing, they'll just switch to another alt or go to a different lane or continent or play on a different server or play at a different time of day (this is what broke Mattherson TR's back).

The hex system gave people a more convenient way to dodge these unstoppable zergs and either break them up or punish them for zerging. That's gone now.

The more you take out the ability to leave situations people don't want to be in, the more people will leave said situations anyway by simply not playing the game.

No, I'd laugh and wait for someone to inevitably make a mod to put it back in. Notch can't do to (PC) Minecraft what Higby's done to PS2.

And now we just tame dragons to do that for us. Or we edit the raws.

Ridiculous. If they really intended that from the get-go, the hex/influence system would never have been developed.

This is the way the game is intended to be played? With people just trundling from one base to the next, encountering no real opposition and switching to the other side when they do? Good thing I don't play it anymore, then.

What makes me scratch my head is that the Esamir walls have no catwalks. And as someone said on page 1, the walls are a cage. If you had catwalks around the top of the wall so you can crouch behind into cover, then yeah, I'd be totally understanding of the walls.

Also I think the walls are WAY too high.