Why so low playerbase?

Yeah. Everyone knows how obscure and unknown Steam is. Please, everyone I know used steam. I would say the vast majority use PS2 on Steam.

I don't use steam.

However I think with a game like this, especially with it's high system requirements. I think we will have more players in a year from now then we do today just because more people will be able to play the game. We also have TONS of things missing from Planetside right now that are "core" parts of the game.

Base fights right now suck. A lattice system (even if its just for continents). Tons of continents. More varied weapon and vehicle types. Lacking special abilities like combat engineering or orbital strikes (things that add fun and variety).

Its a very basic large scale FPS game with not much MMO Strategy and fluff, or PS1 must have's.

I don't use steam for PS2 but the trend on the graph isn't something I can just shrug off. I have seen a few of these threads over the past month and wonder what the real numbers from SOE look like.

At the same time I can say that while in game for the server I play on....it gets pretty busy on prime time with loads of fights big enough to make me smile and have a blast. I can imagine the frustration of a player on a less populated server when they are unable to even find a good fight.

I beg to differ. I play games on Steam almost every day, yet when I knew PS2 was coming out. I downloaded it from the PS2 website. Everyone I have talked to has gone to the PS2 website. Of 800 people in the outfit I am in on one of the servers I play only about 50 of them said they got it through Steam.

I didn't even know I could download it with steam until I read about it on here. Yet I am on Steam everyday. It was not advertised very well on Steam. While anyone who told anyone about the game was generally sent to PS2s website to find out more about it also saw the Play for Free button to download the game.

I won't deny that a good amount of players play it off of steam, but its no where close to the amount who do not. I like steam, but its a resource hog, and if I could play most of my games off of steam. I wouldn't even have it installed.

Then you change servers.

Being able to change servers should be as easy as logging in.

Log in
Chose character
Chose server

Just like Quake/COD/Battlefield games.

I'm finding it harder n harder to log in to be honest, with the never ending nerfs they bring to stuff you paid SC/CP for its starting to become pointless playing, that and the swarm of hackers in game.

I don't use steam either. So please, judging by the comments above you couldn't be more wrong

The majority of people DO NOT want to use vehicles. Why should they be FORCED to use vehicles? This is a major issue. Most of us see that LIBS are OP and refuse to use them regularly or at all because there is absolutely no skill involved. Yes NO SKILL. simply click the mouse button over spawn points all day long is not skill.

Every great ground battle has eventually been ruined by a zerg of tanks or planes.

COD BO has how many playing in the same instance? 1000's didn't think so.

I don't use steam and many of the people I play with don't either so Steam is just one indicator but certainly not the definitive source.

So they should not balance out overly powered stuff?

This just shows that most players don't want good matches, they just want to ROFLPAWN and flex their epeen. Yawn.

These aren't servers like Quake/CoD/Battlefield.

The game isn't built around a constantly moving population that can change servers when ever they want. Moving that kind of data all the time would be a huge under taking. It would account for really OP servers or not. You would have tons of one faction jumping to one server everyday. You will get precisely what we have now but without the low pop servers. It wouldn't fix anything, other than constantly having to move around to find a good server to play on, and in a few hours to the next day that server would suck again.

I look at it as Counter Strike. I had a select few servers I always played on, because my friends played there. People I liked to fight against played there, and we always knew we could find each other on those servers. If you make it like how CoD has made this game, it would be like random crap. You constantly find different players to play with, players to play against. No real community. No real adversaries. No real fun, hard to make friends when the same 5 people you played with yesterday are now on 4 different servers the next day. Your idea is dumb in my opinion. Its a cluttered mess of an idea. IT sounds good on paper, but not in actual use.

I am seeing alot of people with Camo and wearing decals which is good because it means they are spending money.

Planetside 2 is a great game and the MMOFPS genre should be bigger then Call of Duty or Battlefield if gamers had a clue and werent just sheep following the herd.

Once a kid get's past the age of 12, he should see how much better Planetside is to COD for example if you let him play it and made him think it was what all the "other kids played".

Again you have no proof of that Most people don't want to play with Vechs. I would beg to differ. I won't say most want Vechs, but if anything its right down the middle.

I like running around as an infantry, I have fun playing my Engy/Heavy/Light Assault, but I also like to get into the air sometimes, or in a tank. I think a lot of people have that same mindset. Its fun to do all three, and simply put, it keeps the game from getting to stale.

I ran with a outfit at the start that was always making us run around on the ground with a few sunders or galaxies taking us to each point we were pushing. Sure it was fun the first hour, but then I am ready to jump in my Mag, or my Scythe and do something else. Instead I was told maybe this isn't the outfit for me, and sure enough it wasn't. So me and a few others left and found a different outfit that was open to doing everything. We still followed rules, we still did ground infantry operations, but we also did air attacks, tank attacks and such.

To say that most players only want to play infantry is an ignorant response and a wrong one.

I agree they need to be balanced. I hate when I have to go up against a tank line. The problem is, vehicles are always going to trump infantry. Its why humans made them. I don't think a infantry should ever be able to 1v1 a airship or tank. Hell even a 2v1 shouldn't win. The problem in this game is when 50 tanks go up against 300 infantry, the tanks have a chance to win. Although a good set of rockets/AT mines will actually stop a 50 tank zerg. I think the biggest issue with vechs remain air. Air units are to easy to run in, shoot up 5...6....15 infantry, run out, repair from almost death, and repeat.

I don't want to see air units become glass cannons, but at the same time making their damage so pitiful they are obsolete is dumb too. We need stronger anti air. It shouldn't take more than 2 rockets to kill an ESF, and 3 or 4 for a lib. while I can see a galaxy taking a lot more damage. As it is, you can shoot at libs all day and they generally take little to no damage because they can sit so high in the sky yet rain down so much damage.

I'm not saying they shouldn't ballance out the game but right now its just farmville for Liberators, and thats no fun for Infantry that have useless Weapons to counter them, even ESF's can barely fight Libs atm. i'm all for a good match but when G2A weapons are like rubber bullets whats the point.

Soon as i see a flight of Liberators coming to ruin a good Infantry battle i hit the logout button.

you mean a F2P game had a huge population at launch that didn't all stick around?

ABSOLUTELY UNPRECEDENTED!!!!!!

Yes, because server pop of majority of servers staying at low most of the time is not an evidence. Of course.

Then SOE should forbid multiple characters, you should be restricted to 1 server.

I'm sure the servers could handle a 1 kilobyte file or smaller whenever someone logs in.

Nobody cares if VS have Esamir or NC have Amerish. Why would a bunch of players jump to an empty server, and even if they did who cares.

No, you would get the opposite.

It would fix all the population issues.

You too lazy to look at a server list and pop numbers whenever you log on, to look for highest pop server? Or how about for the lazy folk we can have an auto-join button that auto-joins you to the highest pop server that isn't full.

COD had hundreds of servers, you would only have to remember about 5 servers for your region.

For US West the "real community" would be on Connery.

Connery

They're on Connery

It's actually the best idea to make full servers.

The number of SOE apologists in this thread trying to ignore statistical data from Steam is kinda hilarious. Not everyone uses Steam, of course, but their stats still reflect gaming trends quite accurately.

Planetside 2 is currently suffering from a condition known, to the science community, as "being balls boring". There's no real long term goals, there's no particular carrot to drive activity, and most of the people who expected something more from the game than it being a glorified deathmatch are leaving. Kinda to be expected.

Personally I'm sticking around a bit to see if SOE ever gets around to putting some actual depth in the game, but I'm not overly optimistic.

We can only continue to complain and gripe at SOE for functionallity and a more innovative approach to the game with future patches. it took Planetside 1 three months to get all their issues worked out with map design and back hacking.. though they didn't learn from the past and now their metric system is obviously showing it's worth, perhaps large changes of the game's infrastructure will occur in the next two months.

I don't use Steam, but the data is hard to ignore, especially since it mirrors the dropping in-game population indicators.

If you want to know why people are quitting, just read the complaints here on the forum. You may not agree with (or even understand) the complaints, but they are very real complaints from customers. For example, when there is post after post after post of "air is overpowered" and the population is declining, some people are clearly leaving because they don't like playing with the current balance of ground vs air. The other most common complaints are no meta-game, population/empire imbalance, hackers, and game bugs/performance. When SoE addresses those problems, hopefully some people will come back.

why should i use steam on a game with a standalone client? Hmmmmm? 3/4 of the people i play with don't play via steam.

There are many reasons why the steam numbers are lower. Players leaving is only a part of it, not all of it.