I started playing this game with 4 friends. All long time vets from Planetside 1. Players who I have fought in thousands of battles with. Players who were wayyyyy more excited for this game then I was. For months, all they talked about was Planetside 2. After the first 2 months, all of them quit. Largely due to the low server populations, lack of large scale battles, lack of metagame, & poor base design. Since then only 1 of 4 has tried playing the game since they all quit. He played for about 2 hours & couldn't be bothered to play any further. This concerns me a great deal. Players who were die hard Planetside players who were absolutely in love with the universe & lore cannot even be muster the will to log into Planetside 2. These are players with 1 year premium accounts & several thousand SC. If my personal circle is indicative of the playerbase to even a small degree, you should be very very concerned. I know Planetside 2 was built with the intent of "Developing the game over 1.5 years" & content takes time. However, you need to realize in 2013's gaming market you don't have time. Players are fickle. If they don't get a good first impression with a product they move onto other games & regardless if you make sweeping changes down the road, they will never return. They have moved on. Planetside's success is based upon server populations. I play on one of the most populated servers - Waterson & I can honestly say that Amerish/Easimar are almost always ghost towns. Even on Indar I commonly have to redeploy 3-4 times just to find a good battle. If you want this game to succeed you need to merge servers immediately.
If you're from PS1 then you should know how MMO development is. Not everything that everyone praises about PS1 was there at the beginning either.
4 people you say. How about ~ 700. I used to be a member of an outfit with 700!!! members. ~20 online on a good day, weekends... Now, it doesn't matter if it was a noob outfit which leader invited every 'tagless' player he saw, that's irrelevant. What's relevant is that 700 players joined it and they are nowhere to be seen. This is a single outfit of a single faction on a single server (I heard 2k is a server cap? or was that a continent cap ), so like.. over 1/3 of the server is missing? Maybe not all of them quit, maybe some rerolled different faction on the same or other server, still, it's a big and relevant sample size that shows you in how much of a trouble this game is. Lately I see more BR 1-10 players then BR 10-100. Old players are leaving in droves, it's down to the newbies to keep the population at somewhat playable level. Not good and definately not sustainable.
No, sadly they won't. This game had it's chance. I bought a brand new 660ti just to play this game, got playable frames (30-40) for a while, now I am seeing 15-25 again. That's unacceptable. Cheating is rampant and not part of the road map for moving things off of the client and adding encryption. Hit detection is never even being talked about but is a huge problem.
I sincerely hope they do return. I really do. I am however going to deem that unlikely as every game that has disappointed them, they walked away from & never looked back. Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2 (Lost Shores Update - Gear Treadmill), Starcraft 2, DayZ, the list goes on. As working adults there are sooooo many games on the market & we all only have so much free time. So choices have to be made. Right now, they have chosen not to play Planetside despite fully investing in it financially which I find alarming. If players who have hundreds of dollars put into the game (1 year membership + SC) cannot even be bothered to log in, why would free to play players? SOE needs to keep in mind the gaming industry has changed a s-ton over the years. They are not just competing with FPS's, but every game entering the market these days. Planetside's success rests on server populations & right now they are all "LOW".
It only makes sense that ps1 vets would be the first to become disillusioned and quit. They have been hyping up this game for themselves for so long, imagining an experience that will never exist. In the end video games are only as fun as you make them.
We have a small squad of 15, we can't be bothered with it either now. It's become a drag just to log on and some of them have dumped PS2 for.....omg....groans..you won't believe it..... European Truck Simulator 2!!! Yep and actually it looks alright lol - i even downloaded the demo on steam so there you go. No MP yet but there might be so maybe we can get a convoy going. Thing is SOE made PS1 so they knew all the pitfalls of the game and then chose to ignore them so to say "it's an MMO and PS1 had the same issues" is the same as saying "SOE made the first game and learned nothing from it and are repeating the same mistakes except this time with shiity base design and hexes"
Farming Simulator 2013 master race! It actually does have multiplayer though so you can farm with all your friends! That said I still would rather play Planetside 2.
The game launched recently. Every MMO gets a big drop in population due to the players that want to check how the game is and see if they stick. Not everyone decides to keep playing forever. And there will always be people crying "the game is dead" at this natural phase in the life of a MMO.
We have an outfit of 1,450 on Cobalt server. ~60-~70 online at prime time. ~20-~30 at off-peak times. If we put enough notice in through the week, we can maybe muster ~150 people online at the same time. I'd love them to add a "last online" tab to the outfit menu - not just to try and organize the outfit and cull all the people that quit, but just to see for curiosity sake just how many people have quit.
Yeah, I can testify to that. We are also lacking a bunch of PS1 vets that were super excited about the game but quit shortly after the release. In all fairness tho, some of them thought they would get PS1 with shiny gfx and 0 extra hardware requirements. As for the server merges, I think 9/10 agree that they are absolutely neccessary. I really hope SOE stops ignoring this and gives a statement on when they will do this. And I really hope they aren´t considering "other methods", because there simply is no substitute for a merge at this time. Players are leaving left and right, I notice that in our own outfit, it gets increasingly harder to find new players and replace the ones that lost interest.
LOL we were joking about ETS2 and whilst I was looking up news games for the PC for us to migrate to, I saw this very game and looked at it on youtube. Have you looked at the new Elite game (and do you remember the original)? That could be quite awesome indeed.
So? SOE got what they wanted. No need to fetch an empty beer bottle, you instead get a new one from the fridge. PS2 might get gameplay updates once BF4 has shown what they are on about. -k
