SOE and their part in the TR promotional fiasco of yesterday

You know what else is toxic? SOE itself. It manages to make changes to the game every single patch that drives away paying customers. That and the fact that the game is riddled with so many bugs and performance issues.
You want to point the finger at the community that's fine I'm sure it's pretty obvious. But nothing exists in a vacuum. I feel like the crap people put out in the game is a direct result of how SOE treats Planetside 2 and it's playerbase. It's karma and cyclical.

Let's add to the fact that in one day a new player no matter if it's promotional or not is going to have a really bad day if he's not part of a good group that will help him get certs and set him/her on the right path of self-sufficiency.

So where are the tools in the game to get people into good outfits and not the ****** pub outfits that just spam outfit invite? Where do the outfits that actually teach people who want to learn get recruits? Where do single players teach new players? What medium exists? It's non-existent. As a new player you just bang your head against the wall until a seasoned player pulls you aside and tells you to stop doing that and shows you the light. And that's only if you're lucky to get that kind of help. No in-game mechanic exists otherwise if you want to improve.

There needs to be an ingame medium (text-based, etc...) where players can ask direction questions in a chat channel that seasoned players sign up for worth like for 500 or 1000 cert points (whatever seems fair) so trolls won't cert it. I feel like there are some genuine people out there (including myself) that would take time out of playing to answer questions so people understand how to play the game before rage quitting because they die everywhere they go. Heck I'd even invite them to teamspeak (whatever you use for out of game comms) and show them how groups that know how to play roll. Even if it's just for a a few minutes.

Then there's the fact that if you want to level your characters and get all the goodies you have to pay a lot of money in this game. Either that or be super good at farming pubbies of all manner (even NivX uses boosts lol). So F2P is a joke in that regard.

You want solutions and less toxicity. Make a better game that promotes more diverse gameplay instead of these horrible bases (like 80%) where vehicles spawn camp and different objectives instead of just "bring lots of people here". What happened to LLU's (capture the flag) from PS1? Rabbit Events, etc?? That breaks up the monotony quite a bit.

If we want more savvy and less toxic people in the game, SOE needs to raise the bar and make this game require more thinking and less (oh yea let me grab my farming vehicle so I can make certs off other people's stupidity -- or let me grab my [insert souped up class] and totally dominate people because they hide behind choke points instead of pushing through to the objective at hand).

The stupidity and toxicity you see in this game is endemic to the game itself because of the way it's designed and because F2P players (for the most part) don't understand that their P2W counterparts will most likely farm them endlessly, which is SOE's fault for false advertising.

I wanted to add that new players should have the ability to advertise themselves to others, so people that are looking to teach new players can pick and choose what kind of people they want to teach. It's great that you can advertise your outfit, but the other side of the equation is still missing (new players advertising what they want to learn or get out of the game) so that it matches them up with the outfit that's right for them.

If SOE wants to remain F2P, they have to allow these players to communicate more efficiently with the seasoned players of this game.

What I have found in my time playing this game, as a seasoned PS1 and PS2 vet, is that stupidity abounds in great quantities because new players never had the chance to get shown the good aspects of the game and only encountered the negatives. How do you expect to grow and learn from your mistakes, if there is no one there to correct you. It's even worse if you join an outfit full of people who don't know how to play the game because you will never understand how to improve then. You will be surrounded by people who at a 48+ fight refuse to push a point or do anything else except hug some corner or small chokepoint and refuse to push the objective because everyone is afraid of dying or failing because their K/D will plummet if no one follows.

As I've said many times in this post, the medium to teach new players in this game is lacking. If you want the douchbaggery to stop, you have to at least address this side of the equation.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/2buf0b/to_the_people_mad_about_tking_and_other_stuff/

Same post via reddit.

I still don't understand how TK'ing is still on in the warpgate. People are getting all hot and bothered over a new vehicle that's not even out, yet this issue persists for months now with now attention from the devs, even though it's super urgent because getting TK'ed out of the blue in warpgates every time you login is sure to make all players (F2P and paying) rage quit never to return again.

It's the most illogical and overlooked thing to this date, and no one makes a big deal out of it because we're not all jammed into wg like we used to be when we login. Fix it, or put a bandaid on it until you can get to it, but don't just leave it there like that for months with no end in sight. C'mon SOE seriously what are you going to do about it?

We also have the problem that when a lot of new players come take a look because of a promotional event, the other two factions rev up their HE and Zephyrs in preparation for the culling.

It's built into the game though. It's not their fault.

You're not supposed to stop playing the game SOE's designed because it's a special day. That's the way the game was meant to be played. And yea you might sit there and call me cynical, but if the game mechanics promote that, they are not to blame. It's SOE's fault. The ball is squarely in their court. The players that do it are just reflecting that bad game mechanic of spawn camping every single inch of a base/wg.

It is their choice.

All sides have a choice. And on a day to day basis (regardless of what happened yesterday) people do exactly what they did. Please don't act like people don't mercilessly spawn camp like they did yesterday any other day of the week because they do and I know you are a liar if you claim otherwise.

Moral codes aside and the ethical choice to treat a new player nicely or show him the same lack of mercy you do to seasoned player, the game mechanic of spawn camping in this game is endemic to like 80 if not 90% of bases in this game. That's the glaring error people are missing in their rants about "what X outfit did on this date" that occurs on all servers at any time of the day on any other day besides yesterday.

Oh wait so we're supposed to show them how the game isn't played on a daily basis to sucker them in, and then farm them/camp them mercilessly once they're hooked into the lie? Yea so even if you got people not to farm/camp them, you will still be doing a disservice to them because you would be lying your ayce off about what the game is really like.

The biggest problem is how the older more "pro" players grab their farm tools and wreck new players with HE, Pods, MAX's, Libs, basically any force multiplier and take advantage

The event last night on Emerald where Angry Joe and some other popular Youtubers (though I have never heard of them) meant the TR server total pop when I logged off was 42%, have no idea what it was for the rest of the evening because I didn't check.

I myself did not realize what was happening till I asked in chat why so many TR BR 1's? Despite this the TR were warp gated on Hossin. Both NC and VS were avoiding each other from what I could tell to farm the stream players... and they effectively made sure they would never come back to the game in the process.

These events when Youtubers bring literally hundreds of players back over a few days are a god send to the game to have new blood and the "pro" players use their force multipliers to wreck them. GG, you are helping kill the game, we need these players to want to stay you bloody idiots. At least farm them as regular infantry if you are going to,at least give them something they feel they can fire back at, at least give them a fighting chance.

TLDR
The issue are force multipliers farming infantry, they need to be looked at and their effect against new players.

This game absolutely sucks for new players, and farming is the number one plague killing this game.

What happened yesterday?

The game is designed in such a way that farming is all there is.

The original idea was to make an "epic" experience based around huge battles involving hundreds of players.

The problem started with the maps themselves. Too many bases, too close together capped off with a broken resource system.

Add a large population strung along the lattice (flowchart) with these things and you get Planetsiegefarm 2.

Few things scale correctly in this game. Vehicles especially and if you add well certed experienced players to this mix things get ugly real fast for new (low cert) players.

SOE paid a bunch of youtubers to livestream PS2 yesterday. They all played TR and were pretty much warpgate camped for their entire livestream.

I think a few more weapons aimed at helping new players, priced at 1000 Certs, will alleviate this issue.

What will you expect that would happen?

This game is a nightmare for a new player. You are at clear disadvantage on every situation.
You have subpar weaponary until you get certs to modify them, you got abysmal vehicles until you and spend thousands of certs to improve them, you have worse support abilities then others and last but not least, you have no fkin idea what you are doing.

Combine all these + the ppls who just abuse and farm the helpless noobs instead of teaching them and i can guarantee 9 out of 10 will quit and say the game is P2W (witch it basically is unless you wanna be cannon fodder for months)

And this is from PS1 veteran who played PS2 in early beta and recently started playing PS2 again.

This game teaches players bad behaviour.
when I started I did not camp at spawns and tried to use tanks against other tanks.

Now I camp spawns with my tank and ignore other tanks to farm infantry.

Epic fail???

Gg SOE gg, that's what you get for making Farmside 2.

Quite a few of those new players were on indar, or amerish where I was. tr got gated on hossin, but was doing all right and having large fights on other continents.

The way the game is set up these days, each faction tends to pick one continent and focus on it. So I see each faction has a nice pop advantage on one cont, while they get pwnd on the other two.

WaaWaa

Your post is one of the most clear presentations of the present state of the game, what is wrong with it and what needs changing. Most likely the Mods here will shut this down as being 'non constructive' so I am glad that you have also posted on Reddit. This needs to be reposted, added to, bumped and hammered home to SOE and the farmers who are killing the game for both new and old players alike. Well said.

The fact that SOE solicited popular Youtubers to make an event is actually a bit clever from a cost vs. exposure point of view - it brings the game to a lot of people, who otherwise probably wouldn't know it existed.

However, putting everyone single one of them on the same faction at the same time instead of agreeing on them splitting out to different factions at different dates or maybe just on the same day, that's where the whole idea just goes **** up.

I mean, the surge of new players who are just "hanging out" must have severely disrupted the regular daily flow of the server andof course the existing player base responded in turn by forming an alliance to crush the overpopulated faction.

Anyway, apart form the fact that I don't agree with P2W having that much of an impact on how much one can enjoy the game, I completely agree on the points about there still being very poor guidance for new players, a problem that is compounded by the fact that there is still no large scale channel of communication where people actively can ask questions as the game unfolds.

It is beyond ridiculous that almost all the "training material" requires players to drop everything in their hands, alt-tab and open their browser and ask friggin' Google about it and hope something shows up.

The tutorial was a good start, but there hasn't been the requisite follow up material in-game to explain how the more advanced stuff like large facilities and alerts work, which I think is a great oversight in this day and age of ingame "hand holding tutorials" (A lot of people actually rely on those to learn how games work nowadays).

I reckon I recall, that back in the day in Planetside 1 a new toon was automatically added to your faction's NPC run "newbie outfit". All it really did was give you a shared chat chanel with all the other new player characters on the server, until you found an outfit you'd like to join, at which point you could just leave and join the other outfit.

I mean, why don't we have something like that? Why do we have to re-invent the deep dish for a sequel, when this kind of simple mechanic could do so much to welcome new players to the game?

And what about some kind of profile page that actually matters, where you could maybe write a bit about yourself, maybe tick boxes with "looking for Outfit" and "looking for Squad" and all those things, that you'd almost expect from a modern MMO?

The outfit recruitment page in the social tab was a decent step towards making the game a more social experience but we are far from there yet.

I've been thinking a lot about starting an outfit on my main faction simply called "Bootcamp" or something along those lines, which primarily would be for lower BR players and/or people interested in teaching people the ins and out of the game. The idea is basically to help new players learn the fundamentals of the game (how to plan your gear progression, basic squad play/dynamics, combat training, how to attack/defend different types of facility etc.), get some contacts on their friends list and then get these players funneled into good, active outfits interested in recruits.

However, while I think the idea of a player driven "Newbie outfit" would do a lot of good, I also think it won't work because new players are very likely to either get absorbed into zergfits the moment they pop out of the warpgate (where they just end up as meat for the grinder) or they might just end up dropping the game before they get picked up and shown the ropes of what they should do to start getting success.

And success is imo. the primary determining factor as to whether players are willing to stick with a game in the long run, so let's get the tools to provide those, such that the new players will get more "Wow, that was cool" experiences than "Highby this, I'm getting defecated on" experiences.

Going to agree with this, used to hear new players asking for help all the time, helped a few myself.
With the warpgate the way it is now, not one. Its just a mad dash to the warp terminal or redeploy and I'm gone.
Don't know what new players do now.. just quit likely.