Is the population count decreasing

Entire outfits that were once popular in beta have basically disappeared of the face of the earth and the only continent that sees action is indar

Examples please

Naw id just say theres peaks and valleys like everything

Last night terran had all of esamir so I wanted to go to the other continets. But they were all full. Cobalt. Plenty of people were areound at 01:00. I'm sure some still played the alert that started a little later.

It's funny when an alert is near and 50 people are standing at the warp terminal.

he has none he is just following proper MMO forum doctrine... no matter what is currently going on with a game there MUST be at least one post made claiming the population is dying every week if not every other day

Yes, it is.

the game play is boring, and simply is not progressing as fast as some people had hoped.

We just got Alerts and Ribbons to help lessen the monotony of farming and grinding specific gun medals... and only a short while ago the effective XP reward for killing vehicles was increased. Functions like Orbital Strikes and Worthwhile/Important territory control have been constantly pushed back. Many would say that these things have happened too slowly, and only goes on to further show that in-spite of what they may say of future updates, Serious nagging problems are simply not getting resolved in a timely manner and will continue to not get resolved in the near future...

Poor Base Design, glaring vehicle and weapon balance (reaver any one?), objectives and missions, fleshing out classes, re-vamped resource system... Things that have been on the mouths of many of the people that have been critical of this game since Beta and still yet to be addressed or even acknowledged by SoE or those that develop this game.

you sound upset... maybe you need a nap

people come and go.

This stuff is not quick to make and anyone that thought it wasn't doesn't understand what's required to actually make it and get it into the game, I mean come on its only been out a little over 4 months. There are lots more changes on test server right now effecting lattice on a cont, changes to cap mechanics and changes within bases to be more defendable that we've all been waiting for, so it is getting done but people need to stop expecting it to come at the click of their fingers.

Actually Many of the things which NEED to be implemented don't take all that much time at all...
The Ribbon system, for instance, is something which some half-baked coder could of pounded out in a weekend, XP changes should of happened after the First double XP event, the previous patch Just gave us the much needed cleaned up the Medal UI which was filled with weapons you could never access (tracking TR and VS weapons on an NC Player?) again a glaring oversight which could of been fixed in a day or two, we have still yet to get a kill/medal tracker for Vehicle based weapons despite the code being in the game since beta...

Yeah, Sure!

there are a ton of changes up and coming...

But they've had to Merge servers once already due to low player count, and there is no promise of any of the things that have been mentioned by Any one from SoE of actually being implemented into the game.... Orbital Strike, Hossin, Cont Locking... funny how things which they originally they said we would have by now are 'Unscheduled' updates on the road-map.

The 1v1 platoon maps and outfit brackets are probably keeping them busy.
Maybe there'll be options for infantry only in those fights, then people can play their CoD version of PS2.

Can't disagree with you as there are a lot of things we were meant to have now.
Last we heard the first run of Hossin has been made and was handed off to the next team that has to do all the fixing over the whole cont, balancing and other bits so could still be a few months out. Cont locking can't be added until we have this 4th cont because the game runs the 6000 players a server with 2000 a cont, so if you only have 3 conts and you locked one then where do all those players go, off the server, so they need to have the 4th cont and then it'll probably be limited to only one at a time that can be locked. As for orbital strike I just hope it gets left out all together.

I understand the issues that they are running into, it is just that the problem is that it is taking too long for them to resolve these issues and implement much needed things in the game, which is what is off putting to a large chunk of the player base.

i mean, if you look at it from a generic players point of view... Things important to the game's structure and future- extra conts, Objectives, faction equalizers -are continually getting pushed back in favor of what... An Revolver? A dune buggy? Faction Specific Rocket Launchers? Things which, by comparison, don't seem important at all, and ultimately end up just contributing to the faction and player imbalance.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AmUavphHXmIxdFhHUzJfN1VYalRnWS0xMnBUdTJpM1E&gid=3

This was the data pulled on 4/1.

As you can see, in one month (from 02/24 to 03/24), the number of active players dropped from 449,000 to 222,000.

In one month, the population was cut in half.

I'm assuming that whenever the data is pulled in early May you'll find a similar theme.

Planetside 2 is dropping closer to APB: Reloaded on the Steam stats, which is not good since I left APB because of the dwindling population among other things. (Yes, I realize people play this without Steam, including yours truly, but the comparison still stands) Looking back, I wonder would SOE still have released at November knowing what they know now.

But don't despair, MLG and eSports will save us all...

Ok bye then.

Yeah, a pretty miserable looking trend on the active characters graph from mid January, that is for sure. Like a submarine that has just klaxoned "Dive, dive, DIVE!!" before being sunk.....

Is there any hope??

I came, I saw, I left.

I can't really tell right now because server merges really helped combine the declining servers into more healthy populations. It looks good at the moment but obviously the merges should tell you something. Bottom line things look good right now.

You might find the gameplay engaging and worthwhile, I've been bored since beta. There's no meaningful pull except endless certgrind for the next shiny (aside from a few meta things like outfit communities).

Fighting over the same bases which trade hands multiple times per hour is tiring. The capture mechanic is flawed when a single person can initiate it while defending said location has little or no reward. Continent locks and its rewards are insignificant other than to fuel forumside threads. Resources are heavily skewed to the current winning faction. Have territory? Get resources so fast you won't know what to do with them. Have none? Get used to to not being able to pull assets any time soon to retake them. And if you do scrape some, get ready to be owned by a lot of opposition assets. Base designs in most cases heavily favor the attackers.

Once you find your preferred playstyle and work towards certing into it you will hit the end of the cert tree after a while. After that then what? If you've no interest in anything else there's little reason to continue playing. I happen to like a lot of things in PS2 so I spread the certs around, but I can see a lot of others looking elsewhere for their flying/tanking/sniping/whatever fix once they meet their goal because there's little incentive to diversify for them.

There's been improvements for sure, but the most attention seems to have been on monetizing the depot, while relatively little has been done on the design side to make planetside 2 less certside 2. Alerts has helped spreading the population around to the other conts, but this only really works as intended when the server's full. When this isn't the case (which is more likely most weekdays and nights) the favor lies with whoever has the most population to easily dominate the other two factions and the current mechanics allow an easy way to gain quite a bit of xp for little effort (alert? Hop to your alt on the winning side, get cont lock, free xp! There is absolutely no downside to this).

The only reason I come back is for my outfit, the fun fights at odd locations and the interoutfit strategies. For a casual time I go elsewhere. I do have high hopes for this game as it has a lot of aspects I have always wanted in a game. Massive combined arms fights with integrated voip and overarching strategy layer. It's just unfinished and feels unrewarding at times. That being said I have experienced some moments that I will forever remember and are truly special (full server continent fights with loads of players at the same time), while all the same it brings forth moments that feel like wasted time (massive underpop steamrolls).

There's a lot of work to be done still and it's a bit saddening to see relatively little has been done in the overarching bit. There need to be many more continents and servers need to get bigger with more population spread for the off hours. Only during primetime can you get the ultimate PS2 experience right now, if the game doesn't start to lag terribly or plain crashes. Interest in the game is there and as soon as SOE gets around to fixing the omissions players will flock back.