Why is Planetside 2 losing so many players?

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by jdono67894, Jan 2, 2013.

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  1. Thardus

    Yeah, keep in mind that the Steam Winter Sale would be a big hit to a free to play game. Suddenly there's all these new games, so they can come back to Planetside anytime.
  2. Buntfunk

    I changed a small part in jest, but I quote to agree. This is what it boils down to, a shoddy deathmatch game that fakes being an mmo. Im rapidly losing interest. If this were really an mmo with some sort of persistence I would be more lenient on the shooter mechanics but come on, render distance anyone?
  3. Quake

    There is no Meta game. Even Daoc saved itself via the simple relic system and it's popular to this day. I cannot fathom that SOE cannot comprehend this notion Player Chase Ball.
  4. DeadAlive99

    I don't know yet if it's actually failing. I think it may be but it's too early to tell. As I said, there are players still playing it, and for many, that means it's a success. The only way I can define it is subjectively as I don't have numbers, charts, graphs, historical data of similar games, etc. I see that the game has fallen short of population expectations that the company set. I conclude this by looking at the population across the expanded server set. There's no way they set their sights on 'low pop' on 90% of their servers. This leads to one of the top complaints on the forums, that being, "where are the battles?"

    I also see many more categories of complaints than I've seen for other games. If you've seen them in some others, I believe you, there's a lot of games out there, but I think it is rare to see complaints across the spectrum as opposed to the most common types.

    I consider Tribes Ascend a failure, although the company and the current player base probably does not. They have roughly 50 populated servers 9 months after release, but countless people left the game, including myself, because they strayed way too far from the first two games in the series which were the ones that set the bar. If they had followed some advice from us veterans, then they could have 5 to 10 times the population, but they have too many problems which they seem all too happy not to address.

    This no longer impresses me. It only impresses if it works. Yes, I've been in the big battles, and it's very cool to look at......but in reality, you only ever interact with a small subset of those players. The rest merely serve as a 'cool factor'....and it is very, very cool, but it still has to play well, and for many of us, it does not.

    Yes, I'm sure there are examples, but I don't think it's the norm, certainly not with the popular games. I don't visit the cod forums although I've played cod4 and loved it. Everyone knows what cod is about so I can't imagine people complaining about metagame over there. It's cod.....you know what you're getting.

    You cut yourself off there. Yes, there are some of those. I generally see through those and don't read them. I don't think it's too difficult to spot and skip over the 'elitest' threads, 'gotta have it my way just like the last game', and see the countless other threads that are attempting to address real issues.

    (edited this section for clarity) Is there a lot of hype about balance? Yes, but I believe there are also balance issues and the stats don't always tell the whole story. The stats do not automatically reflect balance as the player sees it. The Dev's have to use their vision to deliberately imbalance the game so that they get what they want, and then the stats will reflect that deliberate imbalance, but the players won't always understand.

    I have no problem with vehicles being very powerful. They should be, but they shouldn't be taking over the game the way they seem to have in many cases. I think base design and anti-vehicle weapons can be adjusted to smooth this over.

    I believe it is. It helps in it's own way, mainly by expressing public displeasure, it ideally puts some pressure on the company, as potential players and reviewers can get an overview of the problems and complaints without playing the game. And again, many of these problems can be solved without harming the currently satisfied player base.

    I would expect more details. They have given some in the past, and they've had, what, 9 months of beta + release now to "think about it". I mean, if they are still clueless at this point and starting from scratch, then this game really does have a rough future ahead of it. There are simple, SIMPLE solutions to many problems that have been suggested thousands of times on the forums going back to beta.

    They do not need to go to the drawing board, and not every solution requires complex balancing. Base lockout timers would be gravy to implement, do wonders for the metagame, and not cause any imbalances at all, and it looks like they are not going in in the next patch. They are all hung up on this continent lockout thing which does not interest me in the slightest, and will not bring me back to the game.

    I think they have fallen prey to over-complication and wild fantasies, and they need to just get back to the basics and put the fun back in the game that many of us can't find.
  5. Enu-NC

    straight up, the only thing in common about this whole game that ruins it. is META GAME

    it has no meta.. its like alot have said.. teamdeath match on a continent. 3 teams..
    continent lockouts wont help. wooo we play'd'd'd'd so well's on that therrr De_dust2 that we "own" it and we dont have to play on that map for a day or 2.

    and some say that this game is "not a failure and a success on some level" -NO IT'S FAILING

    WHY? cuz the only other game that this game should be measured up/next to. is PS1. of which this doesnt even come close.

    a simple fact about the game is that, your battle there... has zero impact. on the battle 1km from you.. or 1 base over.. other than a flood of zerg coming... if you win your battle here.. does it provide a real flank? no, cuz your cap will get re-capped in 3 minutes and there is impact other than it made your map blue there instead of red or purple.

    GG
  6. MasterChiefette

    Because the basic game is broken. All it is, is a bunch of COD/BF2 maps connected together. It is just a running battle from one map section to the other ad nauseum.

    Want a better game? Add 6500 planets. These planets have resources. Corporations are formed to control them. The corporations fight for the planets because they have resources that is needed to build armies - armies with which to control planets. Oh wait....CCP all ready has done that - with EVE Online.

    Planetside 2 could do something like this...but it would require redesigning the basic game. Adding tons of new continents and allowing outfits to actually control territory and resources - and that also means being able to fight people within your own faction. I am not sure SOE has the resources nor the inkling to pursue such an endeavor as that would mean scrapping what we know of this game and creating a whole new game.
    • Up x 1
  7. Mishkel

    I agree that there is none but DAoC really isn't a fair comparison. Simply because DAoC had a HUGE pve crowd.. and even they would go into darkness falls etc Or the frontier back when you had to go there for your epic armor quest (the final one).

    You also had to level up any class you decided to play as opposed to cert out and done. Then there was battlegrounds so you could decide what level of RA's/gear you wanted to face. (of course those came later).

    Altho if you purely looked at the first few months of DAoC compared to PS2.. then I'd say PS2 is pretty epic fail. To me it simply comes down to all the cheating/exploits and the long term high BR exploiters taht are still running around ruining fights. I never felt the impact of Radar in DAoC as much as the crap in PS2 affects the battles around me.

    At least with DAoC it only really started to lose population after they relased an expansion that was exactly what they said it wouldn't be... PS2 hasn't even got that excuse.

    Then again the game runs well for me and I know for some it doesn't (which in this economy and supposedly bad pc/hardware sales who is gonna upgrade to play this). Along with bugs and the fact as mention that taking/holding bases means absolutely nothing pretty much. You can't even leave a base because one guy who was hiding in the geometry will just pop out and ghost cap the entire thing. Even if you stick around as he hops from point to point you won't find him because he's inside a wall etc
  8. AndreyMusaty

    No, I don't think it's how Steam works. At least, Steam can very effectively keep track of you running the game -- the launcher is still required to run the game and this is what Steam is watching for. So number of online players on Steam is a good metric, at least for keeping account of Steam players. Then again, it's a very limited metric, since, for example, EVE Online only tops 1,250 players in the mid of a Monday on Steam, while their numbers show something like 15-30k of players.


    [IMG]

    Then again, a typical game session in EVE is way longer than on Planetside 2 (1 hour is usually the time you take just planning stuff out or making a single big mission or something like that).

    And while Planetside 2 is sure nowhere near the top in the list, it peaks up to 12k. So I think it is still a success. And if SOE keeps its promises about future development, I can see PS2 getting a similar graph of active players over time, too.

    Boy, I wish I could see real absolute numbers of players on each server at all times, in, say, precision up to 100 players or so. That 'Low', 'Medium', 'High' doesn't say anything to me (although one can guess that High is probably in the ballpark of > 500-1000 players?)
  9. Rusky

    I'd say High is certainly more than 2000 since servers on High usually have Indar pop capped. At least I noticed this on Miller, I was on when the server was Medium and Indar was full when I tried to warp there (so that's almost 2000 people on Indar alone since not all factions were at 33%)
  10. Dreez

    Patches and fixes aren't coming out fast enough, which means people get really tired of unbalanced
    gameplay, that in turn, appears as favorism towards a specific faction.... Vanu.

    Best tanks, strongest Airunits, best rifles. Remember, The devs stated that each faction was going to have
    their own strong side. But i know that in warfare, whoever rules the sky, rules everything. So giving a faction
    air-superiority means that the devs didn't do their homework on warfare...
  11. CaptainYamerica

    People are leaving because people are impatient. They expect balance and perfection in a manner of days. Gamers are so spoiled these days. How I wish they could have been around for the early days of games like EQ or DAoC.
    • Up x 1
  12. Sevre

    Out of the 8 RL friends that I play with, only 1 has it linked to Steam. In other words: this is not the evidence you are looking for. *jedi hand wave*
  13. ScrapyardBob

    Well, if you look at the latest Steamgraph numbers:
    http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&jstime=1&appid=218230&from=1353387600000&to=End Time

    You can see that a bad day is about 9000 and a good day is 12-13k. So we've had about 30 days of pretty flat active player numbers. It's not growing, but it's not shrinking either. And once some of the 6-month plan items get done, I think we'll start to see more daily players. Considering the initial number was 30k and we're leveling off at about 40% of that, it's not too shabby.
    • Up x 1
  14. Cowboyhomer

    Said the same thing a thousand times but they wont listen to FACTS....
  15. CaptainYamerica

    It's not JUST that, but look at the time people had to play over the early weeks/months as well. it was holiday season. First of the year is ALWAYS a slow time of the year. Especially in a retail world. This is also why there aren't many marquee titles released in gaming or in movies at this time.

    I don't think we can really judge these kinds of things until after a good solid year after release, if even then.
  16. DeadAlive99

    Exaggerate much? Nobody expected everything to be fixed in "days". The game was in beta for what, 6 months? And it's been over 2 months since release. "Days". Yeah...

    You've got it backwards. Actually, it's the corporations that are spoiled. In the old console days, the games had to be fully functional and debugged before release, since the games were released as hardware. These days, software and the internet has spoiled them. They can release a complete steaming pile and then spend the next few years 'fixing' it, or adding content. Unfortunately, that means the customer, or potential customer, gets stuck with an inferior product for a couple of years before they get it cleaned up, and even then many companies just give up and move on to the next title without finishing the work. DICE's battlefield series has been notorious for releasing as alphas and patching up to a beta.

    The standards have slid downhill. "Quality first" has been replaced by, "quality when we get to it.....or not". Tell me again who is spoiled.
  17. Zapier

    To be fair, those 'old console days' also consisted of multiplayer being 2-4 friends... maybe 8 in very rare circumstances. Much easier to debug and make fully functional... and if it sucked and you bought it... well, you bought it. You couldn't tell the company to fix their game or make it more functional... you just had to wait to buy the next one if it ever got there.
  18. Dulu

    Lack of a meta game.

    Cheap, disposable, spammable vehicles. Most of which are capable of absolutely dominating infantry.
  19. FORSIGNUP

    This game have errors. This game lag. This game teaches to be nationalist.

    The Terran Republic are a conservative, authoritarian, collectivist nation who strive to regain contact with the homeworld and reunite the warring factions.

    This game have errors. This game lag. This game teaches to be nationalist.

    The Terran Republic are a conservative, authoritarian, collectivist nation who strive to regain contact with the homeworld and reunite the warring factions.
  20. Tharrn

    Err... looking at the Steam Graphs and using all data (beyond 1.1.2013) there is an overall upwards trend again after the post-launch drop. Just sayin'.
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