[Suggestion] Annoyances

I wanted to sum these up for a while now, but never actually bothered to. Now I decided to take some time to sum everything that pisses me off in PS2 up:

1) Spawning into an enemy occupied spawn-room after a long loading screen. Yes, while the game was loading (for as long as defragmentation process of a 1TB HDD), the enemy has taken the base. I have now spawned just so I could instantly die and stare at yet another loading screen.

2) Same with a friendly sunderer. Spawn just to have it blow up into my face and instantly die without any chance whatsoever to react. Hell, I didn't even have a split second to see where I am.

3) Choosing a spawn point on the map, just to have available spawn points shift up/down or change completely and voila, I just spawned at a base I didn't intend to spawn at.

4) Game calculates your KPM and SPM even if you are afk on the map screen, browsing the items in the in-game shop or you're just setting your loadout up while not deployed. It takes general time that passes to calculate your stats. Which is... WHY? I am NOT playing at the moment, I can't kill stuff nor can I be killed! Only time spent ACTUALLY PLAYING should be taken into account.

5) Teamkilling. Accidental or intentional. Seriously, why does that influence ones K/D? I've been a victim of grieving too many times, as many others no doubt. If a friendly soldier kills you, that shouldn't count as a stat parameter.

6) Spawning in collision with a friendly sunderer. You instantly die on spawn with a precious dev tip to not kill yourself. Well really, silly me...

7) I won't mention hit detection. It's been mentioned so many times, that feeling when you get killed when you've been behind cover for over 2 seconds already. Wait, did I just mention hit detection nevertheless?

8) I can't tell for sure, but I've had the reason to suspect a person is cheating on almost a daily basis. I'm good at the game, not the best, but decent enough, and I've pulled some crazy kills in my PS2 career so I know I can expect the same to happen to me, but some players seem to do the impossible (literally). I do report them, but I feel it's completely in vein. I know I'm beating a dead horse with this one.

9) Some players (not calling this cheating) seem to have 2x or even 3x HP. They're good players, usually playing HA but not exclusively, and while I DO get hit markers on them they manage to kill me almost unharmed. Or run away after eating my whole clip or more. It's always the same people. They have 4k+ directive points, really good stats and a long history of playing so I'm certain (as one can be) they're not cheating, but HOW is this possible? I figured, maybe it's latency, their movement, whatever, but why always them, and only them? People try to zig-zag out of engagement with me all the time but I have no trouble finishing them off. What's different with these guys?

10) Playing a MAX, running low on HP, hitting Charge to get away only to find myself trapped in a slow-mo version of the ability, "Charging" at the walking speed. Yay.

That's everything I could think of at the moment.

alot of this is due to your own unfortunate timing.

you have hardware issues that cant be blamed on ps2

clientside hit detection is real, and this game probably couldnt exist without it

i agree with some


you have a lot of gripes, maybe you should take break, and play something else until you have to post your top 10 on their forums

Some seem legit, but I don't see you offering any solutions to the gripes. Like, if you were a dev, how would you address spawning at a sundy that's nearly dead?

My PC is a good rig. Like, really good. My GPU could perhaps use an upgrade and I could get a solid drive instead of HDD, but other than that it is top notch.

With all my gripes, I consider PS2 to be the best gaming experience available on PC. Thank you for the advice to take a break but really, I can decide that for myself. And no, I don't need one. Instead, how about improving on the uncut gem that the PS2 is?

My "unfortunate timing" is not only mine, I bet. And there should be a mechanism that battles many, many "unfortunate things" that PS2 suffers from atm. Which brings us to:

"but I don't see you offering any solutions to the gripes. Like, if you were a dev, how would you address spawning at a sundy that's nearly dead?" by JobiWan.

Well, in case of spawning into an enemy spawnroom, how about immunity, temporary weapon lock (can't kill nor be killed) and an automatic redeploy? Don't have to be a genius to figure something out.

As far as I know, there WAS an inability to spawn on the dying sundy, which seems to be removed now?

I did already give a suggestion about SPM and KPM calculation, I did already give a suggestion about teamkilling and K/D ratio, and as for cheats and bugs - just fix that I guess?

Everyone likes to think they have a good rig. But in many cases they actually don't. Or it was decent a year ago or whenever it was when they purchased it. So.. what's the specs?

Also it almost sounds like you have a 5900 RPM HDD. If you have a laptop (which is never good, no matter how new), this is VERY likely. If you didn't build your PC yourself (meaning you bought it and plugged it in), this is likely. Finally if you did build your own computer, and didn't know the difference between 5900 and 7200 (or 14400) this is likely since you decided to save 30 bucks.

So what kind of specs are you actually running?

Hit detection has always been a problem, and it boils down to how the game distributes a lot of the work to the clients. Hit detection is a client side calculation, so whoever' computer tells the server "I GOT YOU!" first, scores a hit. This makes effective hit detection an issue of your own computer's performance, and ping.

When I rebuilt with a new mobo and CPU and a faster GPU my hit detection improved slightly. Just slightly. I expect it to improve dramatically when I get my machine back on the wire. PlanetSide is not a good game to play over wifi.

Loading times have indeed increased. I have no idea why. I get absurdly long load times, and I load PlanetSide from an SSD instead of an HDD.

And it pisses me off when I tap charge and somehow...fail to actually charge. It always happens if I go to charge while taking damage, and it gets me killed as a MAX quite often. I'm not sure if it's a bug, if it is it needs to be fixed, and if it's not then it needs to be done away with. Charge is a MAX's principle means of escape, evasion, and engagement. I shouldn't lose my charge because I just happened to activate it at the precise moment I took a bullet. That seems like an unnecessary nerf.

As far as the game calculating your stats when you're loading or looking at other things, I think it should. If it "paused" then it would lead to even more stat padding. Stats are already useless as they are. Further enabling stat padding just reduces its relevance even further.

Dude, it's good alright?

MSI Z97 Gaming 5, Intel 4970K, 16gb Kingston HyperX, 7200rpm ( ) HDD and ATI Radeon 5850 Sapphire Edition (yes, my GPU should be upgraded but that only affects in-game FPS, not loading times).

Why is it SO popular to rant about how stats are useless? Stats aren't useless, and I like dealing with stats. How is it better to calculate inactive game time? How can you "stat pad" if the game is paused, I'm completely oblivious to this "fact"?

The game should care about your performance WHILE PLAYING the game, not while taking a piss or eating a snack, answering the door, taking a phone call etc.

If stats mean little to you, they make a difference to me. I bet that 90% of people who claim they don't care about stats actually DO care. This way they just seem "cooler". We have 2 scenarios:

1) "I don't care about my 0.7 K/D I play the objective and I help my team win alerts! I am super useful as cannon fodder, I literally drown the enemy with my own corpses."

2) "What? You mean to say I have 9 K/D? Yeah, maybe, I didn't check, I don't care about stats. I just play casually and do Godly because I effortlessly do everything perfect" <finishes the sentence while going through his Prince-Valiant golden-locks hair with his long fingers)

Bottom line, that's ********. Everyone cares about how he performs. If he plays the game seriously, that is.

What is your usual ping and connection status with Cobalt?

a better question might be what is the result of his ping, download and upload on speedtest.net testing on a server located in the same area as the server he plays on?

you can have the best computer in the world and it doesn't matter as long as you have potato internet speeds and bandwidth.

Here's the problem with stats, and why the game should penalize your stats for inactivity while logged in:

Statistics is a scientific discipline. It is a discreet method of distributing data in a way to discover patterns. The problem comes from conclusions based on these patterns, and that is why statistics like KDR are useless in a game like this where so many other variables are in play, because so many conclusions may be drawn from a distribution that only compares your number of deaths to your number of kills.

When I'm running a MAX I have very high KDR, but that doesn't mean I'm a particularly good MAX player. To determine that we need to organize the data in a more complex fashion than mere death to kill ratio that blends your entire play session.

The same thing goes for things like kills per minute, which is merely a distribution of your total kill count over a period of time. It doesn't reflect your effectiveness at all. To do that the data would need to be organized in such a way that mor complicated patterns are observable.

Allowing the game to pause data collection would merely lead to players intentionally opening the map while moving in order to mask the fact they are in transit. This would greatly inflate the perceived effectiveness of full time gunners who then try to pass off their inflated stats as superior skill to people who are largely ignorant about what a given statistic is really measuring. It would actually diminish the value of your stats, not increase it.

Hey man, just wanted to let you know I was having some of your same problems. I actually made 2 major adjustments that totally changed the game for me. First one is, I upgraded my rig from a HDD to an SSD. Holy crap are load times no longer an issue. I rarely have a load time that lasts longer than 2-3 seconds. I feel like that would solve most of your problems. And honestly man, you don't need to switch up your whole system. You can easily just get a 120GB ssd for like 60 bucks and slap that on your system as an additional drive...and just place your newest and favorite game on it, wipe it when you move on. Anyway, it really helped for me...made online gaming much more enjoyable in general.

Second change I made is just getting less involved in infantry combat. There's like 3 different games inside of one game here, and thats the infantry game, the vehicle game, and the air game. Now, I wouldn't go into the air game with your current problems...because the same rules will apply. However, you could get into the tank game. Maybe start certing into a Lightning, have fun with it ya know? Or better yet, make a new friend who has a good Vanguard/Prowler/Magrider. It's fun as hell to go tanking around with someone you're voice chatting with. Heck, you can even hit me up if you have an Emerald account.

Anyway, I get your frustration...but you don't have to leave the game. Just switch it up man

oh youre definitely right about this stuff.

people tend to choose their strongest areas, and claim that that is the only stat that matters.

if the dont have stats to lean on at all, thats when they bring out the "i dont care about stats" bit

I have literally the exact same setup (same mobo, CPU, and even RAM), only difference is the GPU which is a GTX970. I used to have a similar GPU on my AMD system which I have used with this on, a ATI Radeon HD 5870 when I had to replace my 970 not long after I got it (been running great since the replacement).

My loading times are quick. So its not the game. There's something you've got going on with your system to make it cause the loading times. Mine are usually within 5-10s. No loading times on respawns in the same area.

I use a HDD drive and do not even have a SSD.

Now if you try to spawn in at a base on the frontline that is falling in 5seconds that's your own fault. Going from Warpgate to across the map can take from 5-15s on average for most people. A base WILL flip mid spawn if you choose to spawn at it when its on the verge. This is the reason you can check the capture timers.

The reason the base is showing up is because it is being attacked and has less than 50% friendly forces there.. likely because they redeployed out of a failing base. You need to take personal responsibility on this one. The tools are there for you to see if its about to flip or not.

As for Sundies... that's PVP. You can and WILL be Engaged, Attacked, and Killed anywhere outside the warpgate. If you decided to spawn in to a hot zone its on your to defend yourself when you get there. Sunderers are volatile. Tell your squad to defend it while you spawn in. If you're not in a squad then don't worry about dying on spawn in. That's what solo players are for, free kills for team players. We got to get our certs too.

Even the 980gtx has issues with large battles. Yes you have always needed a beast computer to really enjoy this game but some of the battle concepts by jamming 200+ people into one hex creates lots of issues that goes outside of having the best computer on the market. They haven't been able to fix the the large battle issues. My 980 takes massive frame drops in large fights, this games over 3 years old, think it's time to rethink the base designs. But we all know this isn't going to happen.

1) stats ARE important

2) pause while redeployed. While NOT "in the world". I never suggested simply bringing up the map pauses the game and stat counter.

Yes, but your stats are measured the exact same as everyone else's in this game, they're relative. You just have an irrational desire to see a bigger number.

Stats are important in the same way religion is important. It's great that you care about your individual performance and want to share this with other people. But, at the end of the day when I open up the map and look at territory control, nowhere do I see, "IronMouse did really good today!" I see regions of red, blue, and purple.

The only objective metric in this game is territory control. The rest is fluff.

That guy out there who waits for an opportune time to contest a point in order to delay an enemy advance doesn't get any praise on the leader boards, but he's being a thousand times more effective than your KDR ever will.

That medic who tosses a perfectly timed rez grenade and saves a squad just long enough to capture a base only gets score credit for those rezes. The fact he carried the day goes unnoticed in every stat in the game, yet he's being more effective than his or your KDR ever will.

Even the MAX who locks down an entire corridor and only scores a handful of kills--but keeps anyone from trying to come through--is being more effective than his KDR.

The most important aspects of the game aren't tracked at all. I'm glad you're keeping up with your own performance metrics, but honestly that only matters to you, and you only.

And as for pausing the timer when you're loading, it makes no difference at all. Once your data set gets so large, once you have so many kills and so many deaths, there's nothing you can do to budge the average. Every move you make--regardless for the timer--just feeds into that average and reinforces it. Such is statistics, and why it is a subjective science.

It's even not about me personally. I do want what I suggested naturally. But it also only makes sense. I cba to argue over this, and I don't see the reason you DON'T want something logical to be implemented (ie measuring stats WHILE YOU ACTUALLY PLAY), but whatever man, my post is directed to the devs, not you. Think what you like.

That's just it, your proposal isn't logical because it adds a layer of complexity to the code without actually doing anything. Once your average is set, you're not moving it. It will remain where it is no matter what you do. You cannot fight the mathematics. Therefore, stopping stat tracking for any period of time won't affect anything.