how to make this game more FTP friendly.

IMO I would prefer to have a fractionned tutorial, in order to avoid a forced 4h tutorial on character creation. Just add a message like this until the player reach lvl15 or finish all tutorials : "if you die too often, remember to look at the tutorial terminal, at the warpgate".
For your idea of the "palce where you can test class abilites", I suggest to add 2 tutorial per class and vehicles (beginner / advanced) and unlock one weapon for free at the end of the advanced tutorial. (and for MAX, it should give the choice between second AI weapon, second burster or second AV weapon; not on the same arm FFS !)
Devs should also add a crapload of "learn from death" tutorials in order to teach new player to not stand still in the open, check for tankmines before spawning a vehicle or to avoid C4 while you're playing as MAX.

I like the idea to give reward to the player for finishing the tutorials. But in my opinion, you should also give these non-claimed reward when the player reach BR15 so veterans player won't have to lose 2hours doing all tutorial to get the free rewards.

Uh no Microsoft ran the servers. It was not battle.net or any other website. I would go to the multiplayer option in the game and be shown the games available. I did not need to even open my browser.

Id like to mention bringing back passive cert gain. I think it was silly to remove this for ftp players. Getting 12 certs a day isnt going to push someone back over the fence of becoming a member if they care about passive cert gain.

I also think that passive xp gain of 40 or 50 per minute wouldnt be a bad idea. Youd only get this if you are an active player, so doing a lot of shooting, moving, getting shot at, being in disputed territory, so that people cant afk farm it. And since daybreak cares so much about making membership more appealing they can increase this passive gain for members.

I suggest to name the tutorial "How to play multiplayer 1rst personal shooters for Dummies" with bright and big letters.
And to reward new players who completed the tutorial with a free 8.0 KDR.
Then DBG may also send a free gamer mouse + mousepad (with the right DPI presets integreted in the mouse) to each of those people.

'Cause PS2 is an incredibly hard game to play.

What game was it?


As far as the OP..

Certs for FTP isn't the issue. What are you going to do with those certs? They are supposed to allow you to advance your Avatar so you are capable do doing stuff that you can't currently do. By "doing stuff" I mean:

Light assault being able to carry C4.
The heavy assault being able to shoot at aircraft.
The MAX having dual AI, AV, and AA guns.
The infiltrator having recon darts.
etc.. etc..

So to make things better for FTP players you need to give them a faster path to "doing stuff". Cert increases would be a brute force way to accomplish this. It might be better though to change some starting loadouts. Medics should be able to do medic stuff. Heavies should be able to do heavy stuff.

Cert "sinks" are needed to separate the endgame from the main game. However some basics need to be free or very close to it.

Perhaps: Give directives and a *useful* reward for completing them. Example:
Kill 20 vehicles with dumbfire rockets. Reward: AV lock on rocket.
Kill 20 vehicles with AV lock on rocket. Reward: AA lock on rocket.

Kill 20 vehicles with Rocklet launcher? Reward C4.

Just do this with the basics though. If you want that second C4 pack... no rewards, just certs. Want that Annihilator? No reward... gotta buy that one.

The one I played the most was Mech Warrior 4, but there were a couple others I don't recall right now.

I didn't mean to throw a super long tutorial in the face of a new player, which looking at my post might not been clear entirely 'cus I intertwined some of the wording.
Basically as TL;DR: Give a new player a lore loaded, cool, concise and yet still gameplay informative tutorial.
All the listed ideas I've brought up should be thrown in the VR then and, if possible, in a very simplified manner in the introductory tutorial.
Breaking then the class specific tutorials up into beginner or advanced in the now hypothetically enhanced VR, could definitely be a thing I reckon; it'd depend on what the devs (community?) then consider as beginner or advanced classified knowledge or skills.
Furthermore while giving the MAX a second weapon for AI, AV or AA is a good call, I personally wouldn't give out a gun per done advanced class tutorial ('cus most beginner weapons, except for some oddballs, are really, really good). I'd rather give a player a reward for completing all beginner tutorials and then another reward for doing all advanced tutorials. And while I would not like to annoy the vet players with the beginner tutorials, man I could swear that a good bunch of after lvl. 15 players and also some high level folks still need some touching up on how to do stuff (so basically skip the beginner stuff for characters above lvl. 15 but not the advanced tutorials).

^ I really like that idea. As example it's just frustrating to see all these low level infils sitting still and taking pot shots; basically free points for any counter sniper (like me yay!). And when my Recursion voice pack then indicates a ragequit of the newbie sniper I just shot, I sigh. Short, specific tips after a certain death (as you said to tankmines, C4, the occasional sniper etc.) could really help with that problem and it also would stop me from wanting to scream at the newb: "TAKE COVER MAGGOT!" ('cus the game should do that. That would be awesome. )

Planetside2 gives F2P this:

100 Certs per BR 1-15
All the starter Classes have fully Upgraded Suit slot Abilities
All the starter Weapons have upgraded weapons
Free Cosmetics for Infantry AND Vehicle
Same chances and possibilities as Paying Players


What do you want more?
I mean there is a very big Aspect of gaming this game for free.
Planetside2 is not only NOT P2Win it even does upport the F2P aspect of the game since the last few Updates.

I don't think PS2 need to be more F2P friendly. However, it need to be more new player friendly (for both F2P and premium player).

Well that's indded a better idea to give one reward for beginner level completion and an other one for advanced tutorial. Do you think giving a DBC reward could be a good idea ? So DBG could tempt new player to the road of premium and eventually have more revenues.

Well that's a tough question actually. Giving minor amounts of cash out to players to incentivize them to spend more could possibly work (As far as I remember the now dead HAWKEN game and Heroes & Generals [in regards to warbonds] did that; also Eternal Crusade gave out real money currency per character via their campaigns and even The Crew sometimes shelled out some of these Ubisoft coins or whatever their name was). There are easily way more FTP game examples than the ones I mentioned (The Crew isn't a FTP game but the procedure is the same basically). Would be interesting to know this tactic from a marketing standpoint, with actually seeing the precise economic data of videogames which tend do that and therefore the involved spender habits.
Aside from that I mean DBG did already do the old incentivize trick to an extent with the free NS Tanto-P carbine. Gotta buy additionally all them other new exceptionals with real cash for the Exceptional II unlock tree (or was it another one of these special unlock trees?), if you're interested in that of course.

But: If a DBC reward should be adopted, I just hope it won't be like you know 249 DBC when every item then costs 250. Some companies like to do that.

Make subs relevant to each buyers by implementing tiers. As a vet I do not give a single solitary crap about certs. I do however want to feel like my sub keeps me relevant and get to play with the new stuff that comes out. You know, because I'm supporting the bloody game.

Currents membership is only really worth it for new/intermediate players.

For instance; Tier X / month
Swag tier: cosmetics and whatnots. Can trade swag with other swag lords;
Gun nut tier: always access to the newest infantry weapons. When a new weapon appears, you can buy the previous one at a discount.
I'm ten ton hammer tier: For the vehicle players. Similar to gun nut but I'm not sure exactly how this would work since most of the time vehicle weapons tend to rebalanced rather. Perhaps more focus on vehicle loud out?
Lead, follow, or get out of the way tier: Something to do with leadership stuffs.
I'm sure there could be more added here.

Please for the love of forumside don't start nitpicking my suggestions. I spent 5-10 seconds on each suggestion and I won't even bother to reply. The point is not what they contain but to offer different tiers to appeal to different players.

This game doesn't need to be more new player friendly. The free certs and free loadouts are more than ok and competitive from the start. But surprise the veteran has hundreds of hours of playtime and will kill the beginner. This has nothing to do with the equip.
Just yesterday we compared profiles an outfit member and me.
He is a bad player and he knows it. Despite of this he has nearly the same accuracy and even a decent headshot rate as me.
But still i kill more people a day than he does a whole month. So whatever he does, he does it terribly inefficent.
This is just experience, raw gametime more played this game than him. Nothing else.

We tried everything, Giving out free stuff. Nerfing nearly everything in this game at least once. Improving the tutorial. Implementing a mission system.
None of it worked. And why? Because this no no coop-mmo-game. The experience come with learning from experienced players, talking to them, playing with them.
Be more new player friendly, invite them to play with you, give advice, take their hand. You may loose 0.1 k/d in the process, but gained a friend.

In essence I agree with the crux of your point. Membership benefits are cool IF you can actually get on to play, which isn't always the case. The sub is actually pretty damn expensive, 12 quid a month isn't exactly a bargain given the 500 DBC costs 4, and the priority queuing, while I can only say this from a ps4 perspective, has a negligible impact.

Point here is f2p gets quite a lot for downloading the game. While I'm happy to support the game through membership and occasional DBC purchases, which I do, I really can't shake the notion that membership really is overpriced given the apparent boons it offers.

I have to agree with OP. Even if you subscribe from BR001, with double XP weekends and heroic boosts, you wont unlock everything by the time you hit BR120. I know, because that's the route I went and, you just never have enough certs.

The grind in this game is crazy, way bigger than in World of Warcraft... although, not as huge as in Elite: Dangerous. Planetside 2 takes the second spot in the most grindy games that I have played.

ofcourse you wouldn't unlock everything with XP boosters by the time you hit BR120. BR is based on XP. Certs are based on XP. if you gain double the XP you'll gain double the certs and double levels.
and regarding the grind:
to fully cert a playstyle you need like 2000 to 3000 certs. some are more expensive, some are cheaper. like for the heavy all you need is 1000 certs for adrenaline shield and 1000 certs for 4 medkits and you are done.
For the valkyrie you buy the CAS, slap on hover 3, Radar 5, stealth 5 and you are done, thats about 3500 certs.
The liberator is more expensive due to amount of weapons.
anything you want to invest past that into something is simply more options like ambusher and a pump action for light assault instead of just maxing skirmisher and harrassing people from the rooftops.

and all that with 50 to 100 certs per hour is rather easy to achieve considering that the game is free

Haha, well I play all 3 factions, along with every aspect of the game. Which is the full Planetside 2 experience. Limiting yourself to a single class or vehicle with one loadout on only 1 faction? That's missing out. You need hundreds of thousands of certs and that is a incredibly long grind. Too long.

thats 20 to 30 hours. and noone forces you to completely cert a playstyle and then not use it to obtain certs to unlock a new playstyle.

id like to know where you got your numbers on how many hours it takes to cert something out. for a single class. becuse even from BR1 to br 50 you are not going to cert out a single class that easy in that short a time. and thats playing none stop for the full time. unless your state pading by haveing someone sit on your ammo pack in warpgate like MOST if not ALL of the cheaters on this game do.

the whole idea behind the XP boost i put in my first post is to make the game more noob FTP friendly. most new players till they find a GOOD outfit that can help them blow there first load of verts on a gun. then when there refund comes in at br 15 thy make back about another 1k and blow it on a gun. not knowing that thy need C4 armour upgrades nad other things. so now a BR 15 joins an outfit and is told oops thy screwed up and got the wrong stuff. you cant sell the guns back that you bought so your stuck with them. and you can refund your certs so your stuck with what you got.

take in that a casual bad player that is not able to play this game as well as some if not all the br120s and there smurfs that are br7 and up a standered casual is going to make 5 - 10 kills every 15-20 mins. solo. with a squad to follow sometimes thy will make a few more kills.

for my self. in the 8 hours i play this game i can make a whooping 200 certs a day. on a good day. on a bad day. which has nearly been everyone of them since i came back minus the 2X Xp weekend we just had i make only about 100 - 125 certs a night. if that. and thats not every night thats only the nights im on.

its not from lack of skill eather. its more from unbalanced weapons armours and the known hackers that are in the game cheating but are never banned. on shoting you in the face after snaping to you while your empting a gun into there back and had them dead to right but your gun did no damage to them. or going around a corner and geting one shot head shot by a sniper that has yet to uncloak yet but somehow managed to fire while still cloaked,

if i my self am lucky i can make 1000 certs in about 2 weeks.

that 100 certs eather goes into a gun i want to use on a class that needs a better gun. or it goes into upgrading an armour i need becuse the default ones are not the best ones. for some of the classes. or buying fully upgraded c4 for each class that can have them or buying persanel mines or buying tank mines, that 1000 certs is gone in moments. and it takes another 2 weeks to get it back up again to waist it on more things you need.

the grind is to long. its unfriendly to none memeber players and it hurts the over all of the game. add into it the only way to earn xp and certs from br1 - br 15 you have to go into the main game its self where a low br gets there " welcome to planetside " instadeath to a BR 30+ the moment thy hit that J key for the first time and drop in to battle. this drives players off the game unless that br 1-15 is a smurf of someone else that is higher BR. and understands the game

add to it that you get tuns of verts the first 15 brs and then it drops lower after. this does not make a player want to stay eather. there siting there going " well i got all theses certs from br 1 to 15 now im makeing dick for certs wtf is wrong here " when thy find out that there boosted ammount of certs came from compleating there objectives and stuff but thy will never make anymore ever again thy rage quite becuse the learning curve on this game is steper then normel FPS so they leave to games like ironsight.

by giveing ALL none payed memebers a meager .5 boost to there xp makeing there XP gain at all times 1.5% over what we have now. it will permet them to make the little bit more needed to get there certs faster. helping them FIX there screw up much earlyer then before and takeing them less time to gain the needed 1000 certs that they will need to BUY each thing that is needed to cert out there vehicals or there classes.

now i get some of you " memebrs " dont agree with this. mainly becuse you have put money into the game. and feel that everything should be hidden behind a pay wall, but times are changeing the pay walls need to become less and less and things need to be ajusted in a way to catter to the less privliged that do not have access to large sums of money thay can throw at a game that is free to play.

some of us have to pay rent. pay for food. pay for school books for collage classes. pay for gas . electric garbage water, ect, some of the casuals have bills and that extra tiny bit of cash they might have at the end of a mounth just cicles over to cover the late fees on there next payment of rent or to take there RL GF out to eat becuse its something they have to do insted of play a game all day grinding out deaths

so look at it from a casuals point of view that is unable to play 24/7 and cant aford to buy the over priced memberships.

a minor xp boost would not kill this game. would draw in more people. and make more people that CAN spend cash on it . want to .

my NC alt is at BR30 has the medic, Engy and Heavy certed and i even got around to buying the promise for 1000 certs. and thats without the 1500 certs you get gifted in the first 15 battleranks because the character is that old.
and again, it doesn't ******* matter if you statpad or play normally:
XP == Certs == Battlerank
if you reach BR30 you'll have the same certs as anyone else at BR30, only varied by directive rewards.
and no i do not have membership,you can literally see that i do under my forum avatar.
just as every reason you mentioned you want a 50% XP boost is just straight up silly. the rate at which you gain XP already is more than 3 times what you gained at launch meanwhile a lot of stuff you can cert into also got cheaper. and having more certs doesn't mean anything if the player is dumb enough to spend it on new weapons. that is your fault,not the game.

I believe those were player provided or 3rd party hosted servers. Microsoft facilitated the server browser, but that's it. I could be mistaken.

Point of all this being: Someone has to pay for the servers. When it comes to an MMO, they can't really be hosted by individuals. Since this is a F2P game, something has to give somewhere. If you aren't getting all you want from the F2P experience then ... /shrug. Become a paying member and help the rest of us keep the game alive.