In case you were curious, PS4 populations are already in a dire state

I am sad to report that it's not looking good so far for PS4. As of now, there are 4 US servers. One server, Genudine, is doing great, with even pops across factions and an overall High population. The others? Not so much.

I made the mistake of making a VS character on Palos, the second most populated server. In PRIME TIME hours, I have logged in and found VS to be at 15% global pop. I have never seen such a horrible pop imbalance in all my time playing PS1 and PS2.

I have now concluded, after a mere couple weeks since release, that my outfit needs to abandon Palos, abandon all our character progress, and move servers. My friends will not be happy.

I'm not sure how the pop balance is on the other two US servers, but what does it matter? They both report as Low population at ALL hours.

I sure hope the devs have a plan to address this, because right now, if you aren't on the Genudine server, the game is already almost unplayable. Last night as VS on Palos there was ONE fight for the VS on the entire server, and we were outnumbered 2-1.

That's the kind of thing you see of a game on its last legs, not two weeks after release.

I will be back in a bit, I'm going outside to see if the sky is falling.

So you're saying that having one single fight on an entire server, where you're outnumbered 2-1, during primetime, is not a big problem?

No, I'm not saying that- I do not play ps4, and this is the pc forums.

I have no way of knowing if what you're saying is true, or what it means to the big picture.

Though VS has held server pop for a siginficant portion of the time I have played- so it's hard to excite sympathy. Though at the same time, I can understand how beimg outpopped is frustrating.

I know it's the PC forums, hence in my title I put "in case you were wondering" because right now, the PS4 versions' health is important to the PC version's health.

The being outpopped isn't the real problem, it's the lack of good fights. Usually when you're outpopped globally, you can at least find a decent fight somewhere in the world. When total pop is really bad, and you only have one fight available, that sucks, bad.

General means PC. News to me.

Damn that was quick! Is there any particular reason why?

It's an awesome game... but it's 2.5 years old.... only new and shiny attracts large swarms of customers (not for long at that).

Same with EU on Ceres at least, today was the worst so far VS didnt manage to hit 20% that I saw with TR being the highest once more.

For sure but its "new" to the PS4 guys right? And free.

Other then Genudine the servers are dying

http://planetside2stats.com/

Current US prime time numbers
Genudine - 3022
Palos - 1053
Crux - 821
Searhus - 471
Xeles - 367

EU prime time ''highs''
Ceres - 1988
Lithcorp - 931
Rashnu - 586

It's a shame and I really wish it were otherwise. I'm not a console gamer but getting PS2 more exposure at this point in its lifetime is critical and the fact that the populations are dropping so rapidly is disappointing to see.

This game needs serious emphasis on design. It needs bases that matter, an updated resource system, incentives for players to login and play and do things beyond just shooting mans, because shooting mans gets old when there are plenty of other games that do it and do it better.

Blame the designers, for all their good intentions, for putting so much emphasis on the shooting aspect of this game at the expense of everything else that could have been done.

Blame the player base for not asking for more design changes, and for being locked in the endless and pointless cycle of nerf/buff nonsense that leads to nowhere but the drain.

I think what your seeing is the effect of new people who tried the game because its F2P and just didn't like it (insert reason here) so stopped playing. This sort of game isn't everyone's cup of tea, especially while its basically unfinished.
If it continues all they have to do is merge a few servers in each region and hopefully by then the headless zergs will have disappeared and what will remain is a bunch of good players who use all the tactics available, making for some great fights where you aren't just part of the horde and can effect the outcome of a battle through other means than pure numbers.
Personally i prefer these fights and avoid the huge battles. 100v100v100 is plenty enough. ideally i like the 48v48v48 scenarios.
My fav scenario though is when you take a small team to a base being thought over by the other 2 factions and really mess things up for both teams by killing Sundys and messing with their redeployments. Plenty of kills to be had and works best when your faction is low pop as its not expected.

p.s I'm on Ceres as VS for the record and although usually the lowest pop faction i can still find plenty of enjoyable fights

God damn those numbers are scary low, way lower than I thought, my guess is this is down to how poor release week was, there were like ques of like 800 for each of the U.S. Servers in the beginning from what people were reporting so they opened up 2 extra servers but the game ran so poorly in the first 3-4 days and servers were basically down more than they were up in that time period I'm guessing people just left and didn't come back.

Such a massive Shame, feel really bad for anyone who isn't on genudine/Ceres

It must be cool to wake up on the morning and think : "Today about 10 000 PS4 players, and thousands of PC players will have fun on the game i created".

No design change or whatever can stop players leaving and/or encourage new ones to join. The game is OLD, has been in beta for YEARS and we are acting like it SHOULD be on the rise now just because it got a PS4 release. Most people who is into the videogaming subculture have heard about this game in the past years, if they werent interested then, they wont be interested now, so forget new players joining en masse. If the devs do things right they can retain their current playerbase for longer, but thats it. 2,5 years is not that bad for a game, and Im sure the servers wil still be playable with a good enough pop for some time still, just dont expect a miracle, the playerbase will not grow significantly in the future.

First off, I am sad, but not surprised, to hear of how poorly the pops on console servers are going. That's not good for the game in any way.

Secondly though, you can thank your fellow Vanu brothers on PC servers for the following: Ha ha, sucks to be you. I really can't find the sympathy I should be giving you for this, and in fact I kind of hope that the suffering of the VS goes on for a bit longer, given the curse you, as a faction, have been to this game.

Here's hoping the PS4 version (and the PC version for that matter) get the support it needs to go on and perhaps thrive a little for once. You however - you can suck it.

Anyone who keeps saying 'the sky isn't falling' should just punch themselves in the teeth. The game is dying, just admit it.


From today:


Another thing to understand, these numbers are awful for Plantside 2. The scale of Planetside 2 makes it a runaway effect. People leave the game, the population goes down, the fights in turn go down. For a game where the cap is supposed to be 2000 per continent, not even having 2000 players logged in defeats itself. And then people quit the game which causes the cycle to start over again.

Really, PS2 is bleeding players and it cannot stop the bleeding. Less players playing = less people spending money = less developments coming out = players stop playing = less players playing = less people spending money = etc. I quit playing since the game is like a ghost town after 2AM-8AM on Emerald. If you're in during prime time, then great. Otherwise, its pretty horrible.

Also, Planetside 2 on Steam ranks near the bottom. The numbers are pretty terrible, no wonder PS2 is chugging along barely. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Wow those numbers are insanely low. After seeing BF4 and BF:Hardline numbers, www.bfhstats.com , I really thought it would sustain at least 4 NA and 3 EU servers on the ps4 with 3k+ peak population.

This is possibly the first fps game I have seen on PS4 that has lower numbers than its PC counterpart.

Actually, to beat a horse to death, heres an almost year-to-year comparison from July 2014 and July 2015


Changes in population:
Connery: -45.3%
Woodman: -100%
Miller: -0.4%
Ceres: -100%
Cobalt: +0.2%
Emerald: -45.8%
Briggs: -44.7%

So maybe I don't know how to number, but in general that looks pretty close to me. Almost every server has taken a severe population hit over a course of a year, by almost HALF. Thats if you take that information at face value. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are worse for the EU servers if the time was changed to match their prime times.

To me, what this information says is this: Planetside 2 is not worth investing in any other means unless it means to keep it afloat. Someone mentioned that a RELAUNCH could be done to boost the pop levels and in turn sales, but currently I think all $$$ is going towards H1Z1 and Everquest Next. At least for today, H1Z1 peaked at 16,000 players where as PS2 peaked at 3,700. Why would they put money in the game which has the less amount of people playing it? If H1Z1 tanks, PS2 will tank as well and anything else they have. If PS2 tanks, at least they have H1Z1 to fallback on.