Dead Outfit after 3 weeks

Five of us managed to persuade, blackmail, threaten, bully and intimidate some friends from University to finally agree to play Planetside 2.

We made an outfit and had 23 members in total. Only 5 had played before, so we had a lot of teaching to do with how the game works, and playing as an Outift in squads. A steep learning curve for the new players.

However, one by one they gave up, citing impossible objectives, inability to get far from or even out of the spawn room due to spawn room camping, being locked down by armour with high splash damage anti infantry weapons INSIDE our own base with the armour (usually a Harasser ) practically camping inside the spawn room or control point room, and the number one reason - getting fed up with slowly working towards a point only to be killed in less than a quarter of a second from who knows what direction and having to wait to respawn and go through it all again.

They also didn't appreciate the zerging and the fact that, at one stage, an enemy had 5 Sunderers surrounding our base, and while we worked to blow them up, another would just take it's place and we accomplished nothing. It was kill one Sunderer and two more would turn up. Also allowing enemy tanks and Sunderers to enter another faction's base when usually equipped with high splash damage weapons was the last straw for most of them.

And so, after just 3 weeks, I'm the only one left, and even I find it a chore to log on now. The others gave various ways in which to improve the game, but I doubt very much whether they would be acceptable by either the majority of players or by the Devs. However, here are the main points:

1. Either increase player hit points by 300 per cent, or lower weapon damage by two thirds. This gives you at least a chance to see where fire is coming from, have the ability to possibly counter it (run into cover, use rocket pack, put up shield etc. ) and not rage quit after spending ages working towards a goal only to be killed in a split second before you can even react to which direction the fire is coming from.

2. No more than one Sunderer of any faction in a Hex at one time. Primarily this was to stop zergs at control points when attacking a base, and also make the faction work to protect their Sunderer. At the moment, there's no negative effect to having your Sunderer destroyed, there's usually one or two more around and someone will just replace the destroyed one in a matter of minutes.

3. Do not allow armour of any type inside the walls of a base except for aircraft, either the perimeter walls and especially buildings. Stop the spawn room camping by armour with high splash damage against infantry.

4. Make Fragmentation Grenades and C4 against Infantry only kill a maximum 2 players in it's explosive range. Many, many times we were in a room doing our best to protect a Control Point, when Grenade after Grenade after Grenade were thrown in and eventually killed us all, with many Grenades getting 4 or 5 of us at once.

Those are the top 4 reasons, there are more, but the post is getting a bit long. I'm sorry that my friends left, but I understand completely their reasons, and agree almost 100 per cent with them. As I said, even I am finding it a chore to log in now , but I'll persevere and see how it goes for another week or so.

What do you guys think of the above suggestions?

Uhm.... no.

1. TTK is fine. You just have to learn not to do stupid things.

2. If they are setting up more sunderers than you can take down, you are probably being zerged. Flank or go elsewhere.

3. If the spawn room is being camped, either sit there at the shield door and farm a few fools or spawn somewhere else and bring back an armor column.

4. Grenade spam sucks but at least it seems to have cooled down a little since they nerfed the AV nades.

I doubt the first half of the post is even true. The suggestions are probably yours not theirs. 1/10.
Don't be stupid, don't act stupid, don't play stupid. You'll be fine.

I agree with some points...

I would reduce the damage output of spray weapons to increase survivability from spray and prayers - not sure by how much but enough to allow you to at least react when you start taking fire. Of course that will not help if you turn a corner and find yourself in a room with 5 enemies but current TTK is far too low.

As for armour attacking bases. The current base design paradigm of just putting walls everywhere annoys the hell out of me. It seems they have gone out of their way to make bases hard to navigate. Half the time I find myself wandering around looking for ways to get in or find a fekkin vehicle terminal. I would improve the bases anti-armour defences. Currently they are practically always destroyed, if you fix them one tank can take them down again in a few seconds, Make them tougher to give base defenders at least a chance to repel a small attack or slow down the zerg.

Sunderers are already pretty fragile, a MAX can melt through one pretty quickly and they can only spawn in a certain radius of each other. Plus the high XP reward for destroying them encourages people to focus on taking them out If they enemy is spawning Sunderers endlessly then that shows that the attacking force is too large for you to hold out against.

The TTK is fine. Zerging is not, but that stems from abandoning the hex system entirely and from player mentality as well.

OP, kudos on getting a bunch of guys to play and try it out.
With all do respect, it sounded like a failure of leadership that got these guys frustrated. Many of your points could have been addressed by thinking more 'open world' because this game really is 'open world'.
This game is amazing to me even after 2 years because I love the problem solving exercises I need to do in an effort to combat a stronger force, and I'm 99% lone wolf and never actually talk to anyone. Yes it is a rather shallow game once you realize how you can affect the other side only by direct conflict but in that, there are ways to turn a battle.
23 guys? I would love to have 23 guys at my command and try some small group tactics on a zerg

If youre getting spawn camped then you have lost the fight. Go somewhere else. Stop worshipping the f****** timer. What do they expect to happen when they are in the middle of an intense battle? Do they expect to stand there and survive?

LOL all that stuff you just wrote only proves that you yourself have a steep learning curve still ahead of you
I could tell you every point where you went wrong and why each one of your suggestions is stupid...

But I'd just be repeating what the guys above me have already said.

So it seems you were being attacked by overwhelming numbers and you think you should be given a fighting chance to beat them, rather than have to change your tactics. Did you request reinforcements? No. Did you start spawning from another base and hit them from behind or the flanks? No. Did you get aircraft to come in and bombard them? No. You wanted to just spawn at the base and beat at least twice your numbers. You wanted to have an I win button usable in all situations, even hopeless ones. You put your friends off the game by leading them to slaughters and making them come back time and time again to be mangled by your p**s poor leadership.

This crying for nerfs by useless infantry players goes way too far in this game. If they are unable to single handedly take anything they face out they want that thing nerfed. They've had their way with vehicles. Tank shells have to directly hit an infantry guy to kill them nowadays. Not satisfied with that, now they want other infantry weapons nerfed so they don't die immediately, because, you know, it's not their stupid fault they died, it's either the other guy is using hacks or the game is flawed. Well the game is flawed but the flaws are where you have tanks that are barely effective in the open against infantry. Tanks that don't even have MG's to defend themselves against infantry. Tank shells that infantry can shrug off when they land right next to them.

The only thing that needs to change here is the spawn room. Make it so you spawn underground well within the confines of the base's buildings. You know like in PS1 where no tank could get at the spawn room at all.

Most of these problems are just you and your friends not being good at the game


The grenade spam is a real issue though, they need to fix that

Have you tried playing at battles where you're not hopelessly camped/outnumbered?

All of those problems sound like they stem from not doing that.

From what you said it appears that more than anything, it was poor leadership that gave you guys the hardest time. If the enemy has managed to get anti-infantry vehicles on your spawn room, that's usually an indication that you've been completely and utterly overwhelmed, and the only reason the base is still "yours" is because of the timer.

Similar story for Sunderer spam, the defenders were overwhelmed and forced into the base, however a well positioned AV nest can wipe out large numbers of vehicles easily - In fact Sunderer hunting is one of my outfit's favorites things to do.

Good leadership makes the difference between getting farmed and having the time of your life. As you found out, this game can be unforgiving for inexperienced leaders, but that's also one of it's greatest charms, and serves to increase the importance of outfits and quality leadership.

To respond to your ideas directly:

1. Planetside 2 already has a rather high TTK when compared to many other FPS games. The big problem here isn't dying quickly, it's the situation in which you died. If you get flanked or jumped, that usually means you had poor situational awareness. If you're getting farmed in your spawn, how did they even GET that close, typically it's either a tiny skirmish or you've been outnumbered and have already lost.
2. This would make it too easy. As someone from an outfit that hugely emphasizes spawn denial, I find it's already quite easy to shut out a similar sized force from almost any base in the game.
3. This isn't nearly as much of a problem as you found it to be, in any reasonable fight armor is usually forced to keep at range, assuming the base's walls and terrain allow them to do much. There's a reason why the major outfits on Emerald moved from huge armor columns to airborne infantry, infantry cap points and armor both costs resources and is surprisingly squishy once you get into a good position.
4. The flip side of this is what do you do when a tough enemy digs into a room? They're already incredibly hard to displace, the best way being to hope they left an entrance open and flank, MAX crash, or throw grenades and soften them up. Also, FLAK armor greatly reduces the explosion damage you take, it's highly recommended for point holding, as is assuming good defensive positions to minimize damage.

The OP's posting shows many things that are frustrating to new players and make them lose interest quickly.

And even after you got past that point and mastered the game, there are things that will bug you. That PS2 in the end mostly ends in one side spawn room camping the other to capture is just a sad reality.

Dunno, PS2 just manages to piss off new players and only few people stick with it for long. The guy who brought me into PS2 is gone by now, too

The problem is: If we had destructible spawns (as in PS1) that were NOT safeguarded by a safe-zone/shield, then all of this would not happen. Seriously, spawncamping is bad, yes, but its even worse that the attackers often (except for SCU bases, and even here they have to spawncamp 1/2 of the overall timer) have no other choice than to camp these spawns.

If attackers could rush the spawns and take them out (maybe even PRIOR to attacking the base itself) then it would be less frustrating for players.

IMHO:

- Make spawntubes destructible
- Remove safezones (instead add painfield that would kill potential spawncampers if they stay too long inside spawns)
- Make spawns more defensible/less prone to being camped by vehicles (e.g. by putting them underground)
- Keep the SCU possibility, but change it so that it mirrors PS1 Generators -> SCU down? Terminals & Spawn will also be offline

Best way to make new players stick to the game is tell them: "never go to big fights, they are complete crap in this game. The only fun ones are at most 24-48 vs 24-48"

You might as well just tell them to go play BF4 while your at it.

You might as well just tell them to go play BF4 while your at it.

There are two different types of folks coming to PS2.

Those who want the pseudo-competitive small team, small base infantry slugfests and those that want an "epic" experience of huge battles involving something akin to combined arms with eye toward strategic gameplay.

Neither of these modes are supported in their entirety.

The devs don't know which game their developing. The epic or the competitive one, IMHO they are mutually exclusive.

The "epic" game-play requires drop-in and casual players to flesh out the factions. It needs to be inclusive and new player friendly.

Because of that identity crisis, we get a hodge-podge of the two types and that causes serious issues.

There are too many bases far too close together. Good for infantry fights, but horrible when you add the vehicle layer with the range and fire power those things bring to bear. Which is exacerbated by a ridiculously broken resource system.

Made even worse by the fact that there isn't anything else to do in game but follow the flowchart (lattice) going from siege to siege.

The devs have taken the original epic gameplay idea and slowly tried to "band-aid" it with fixes for the sake of infantry players (rightly so in many cases) that seem a bit ham-handed or completely artificial. Which gives you a very "ugly", frustrating game.

The game is not a priority any longer and the devs are moving on to other things. New games are being developed and the resources simply aren't there for PS2 on the PC.

Higby has already pointed out on reddit and elsewhere that the only reason we have the devs we do working on the game right now is because of the PS4 version. When that cycle ends, the PC crew will get even smaller.

I don't think we can expect much more to come down the pipe other than tweaks and minor content additions.

The focus from now on will be monetization. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but considering the state the game is in seems almost counter-intuitive.

I'd love to see some of the ideas folks have make it into the game, but I don't think the assets are available to make the changes.

I've been playing for over two years now, and while I can be very critical of the game, I am one of its most ardent supporters.

Lately, however, I've had more and more trouble finding a reason to log in.

Did you pull vehicles from one base back, or did you just spawn into a ppa camp and expect to take the point with a few noobs?

The most effective way of dealing with the scenario above, if you have a squad/platoon, is to back up one base and destroy the sundies with vehicles of your own. Even if you do not get them all, you tend to create just enough relief for the forces within the base to push out.

Do not neglect a sunderer either, as you can create an alternative spawn for your allies enabling you to hit them from a new angle.

I know that feeling.
Everyone I joined with has since left (All but one, who gets on a few times a month).
The guys who introduced me to this game played the original Planetside, and had been playing PS2 since Beta.

The game has changed so much (and sadly, too much of it for the worse) that I cannot blame them for losing hope.
PS2 isn't generous enough with it's weapon strengths, too accepting of zergs and impossible to defeat scenarios, and doesn't teach new players how to begin the game well enough to enjoy it.