Why is Planetside 2 losing so many players?

Yes and no. If you look at BF3/BFBC2, they support 64 vs 64, and to many in FPS genre that's pretty "large scale". And their maps are pretty large, they aren't small by any means. The Battlefield franchise is quite popular. However your point about most people don't want large travel times and uneven battles is dead on. Gamers in the FPS genre want to find people to shoot at right away. In this game you still have to run around to find fights a lot. And often when you do find fights, it's lopsided due to population imbalance.

Also too much of the fights involve spawn rooms. Too often when you die, you die with absolutely no chance to fight back. Such as when you leave the spawn room, you're bombed by aerial bombs and 100 bullets. Or you finally get out, you run around and bam there's a MAX that 1 shots you so back to the spawn room you go. You get clever and spawn elsewhere, you come back with a tank thinking you're all tough, then all of a sudden you blow up either due to ESF rocket pods which all happen within 2 seconds, or you get shot by rockets you can't even see nor avoid. Yes I'm talking about the cheese empire specific rocket launchers.

Long travel times between fights, unbalanced fights, spawn room camping from either inside or outside, and cheese weapons and mechanics pretty much made sure this game was gonna become a niche game in the FPS genre.

BUT the forums are well moderated..riiight? riiiight?

Probably been said a million times by now (at least I hope so)...

The answer is simple: no ******* persistence
No sancs, no cont locking, no base upkeep. You roll through base after base until you hit a brick wall of defenders, then lose the rest of your territory from the 3rd empire's steamroll until you put up a defense then the other empire rolls through the 3rd empire's territory while you two fight over a base, repeat. Absolutely terrible. It's a massive BF3 Rush map with many different paths and no lose or win condition.

There is no way to siege a base, because there are no NTUs that drain as the base tries to self-repair turrets/gens and player/vehicles spawn.
There is no way to sneak in and prepare a base for capture, because the spawn system allows defenders to jump in from KMs away at no penalty and stop you.
There is no way to passively defend a base against such infiltration, because ACE is nonexistent.
There is no way to win a continent because everyone has a mini-sanc on every continent.
There is no single entire-server-faction gathering point to call home, only tiny little bases (that vehicles can't even teleport between!) on the edge of the frontlines.
There are no prolonged battles between bases because there are no chokepoints.
There are no chokepoints because of bland map design requiring every cont to be perfectly square with no peninsulas or rivers with few bridges.
There isn't even a body to loot after you shoot it dead. No enemy trinkets to hold in your locker as a remembrance of that epic tower defense until assistance arrived. No scrounged up ammunition to sustain you through a treacherous gen hold because, for some insane reason, ammo is free and easily infinitely replenished. There isn't even a gen for holding because there are no NTUs to drain to make the base go neutral to make it easier to take; all because the defenders were really good... except for that one important bit that you snuck a whole platoon into (through three galaxies in tandem)

There are no stories in PS2. Even though PS1's gameplay and graphics are outdated, everyone who played it remembers it fondly. A few years from now PS2 will be a tiny fragment of history.

There happens to be another game that created a lot of stories entering its second decade. Eve Online. While CCP embraces the stories that arose from Eve, SOE has excised the interesting mechanics from Planetside that similar stories once arose from.

"Remember when SOE tried to bring Planetside back?"
"Yeah, what a terrible reboot, they forgot everything that made Planetside amazing."

I check the steam community hub, there are at least 5,000 - 6,500 people online from 4-9PM Central time.

Seems okay to me.

Well, as many people covered already: bugs, balance, perfomance.

Myself i find the game very dumbed down, i find the inf combat too random and vehicle combat too shallow. (i expect this is to cater to BF/COD crowd?)

Also the weapons and vehicles are not very fun to use

• 100 meters you can fire entire magazine with out killing someone, but 10 meters you instantly kill them
• Tanks wich are supposed to be some kind of backbone, but they instantly explode
• Vehicle "speed sensation" is off, so it feels like driving a tractor, even with the ESF's
• Weapons feel like they pack the punch of a BB gun.
• No kind of hit indication on targets, other than GUI interface (ie no blood or gibs)

Basicly, it is not rewarding to kill and blow stuff up.

(you can't have a shallow game, that also lacks the special effects or sensation of a kill)

I don't agree.

I was around back in those days, i don't know about EQ, but DAoC had depth and took time to master. Back in those days things were primitive but there was loads to explore and figure out.

PS2 is fairly bland, it has potential (large fights, beating the odds as underdogs etc...)

But myself i already lost interrest, as the devs seems to be catering to a completely different demographic than me, i get the feeling they want to keep things simple and have flat learning curves.

I don't see the point in large scale warfare, if you don't have a chance to outsmart or outskill your numericly superior oponents.

The innovation factor of this game is nowhere close to that of the games you mentioned.

Right now the only reason I've considered for leaving the game is the ridiculous population imbalance. I really like the potential the game has, but when you have cases of 20% population against 40%+ the game breaks down to a boring experience on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you are always outnumbered and on the other you are always stomping the opposition until there people you are fighting avoid you. Which then becomes a game of ghostcapping with the zerg, which is also boring as hell.

It's interesting that you mention Eve Online, because for the first year or so of Eve Online it was a complete ghost town (I played Beta and after release). It was very rare to even see another player who wasn't from your corporation, and these "stories" you talk about were non-existant. There were more solar systems in the game than the number of players logged on It wasn't until a couple years after release that Eve Online started really gaining enough momentum to actually create stories. Most of the integral parts of modern Eve-Online didn't even exist at first.

Just to give you an idea, for the first YEAR of Eve Online they had less than 50,000 subscribers, whereas now (a full 10 years later) they have 350,000. I'm certainly not saying the same will be true of Planetside2, but I don't think we can completely write it off yet. I wrote off Eve-Online after a few months of playing but when I came back a couple years later it was much better and had transformed into a completely different game.

You're wrong, they support 32vs32.

Who BF3? Many servers are 64 v 64.

BF2 and BF3, NO servers for those games are 64vs64.

That's actually very bad. The larger, financially successful, long term stayers have much higher numbers. Hell, even something like EVE-Online which is as niche as MMOs get usually has concurrent player numbers in the 20-30,000 bracket. If 5,000 is actually correct, the game is on its way out.

actually it is, this game is watered down for scrubs and kids, its a true shame

You're half right and I'm half wrong, I was thinking BF2 and BF1942, both have modded 128 player servers. And BF3 during beta there were hacked 128 player servers, but after launch it stayed 64 players.

I started this thread in January and this is the third time its been necro'd when nobody posted for a month or more.
JUST STOP POSTING, THIS SHOULD BE THE LAST POST, THE OP IS NOT RELEVANT ANYMORE IT IS 4 MONTHS OLD!

If a mod wants to lock this I would be so happy.

So is planetside 2 dying anymore or not?

BF3 and 128 players?? Even 64 often felt too crowded, can't imagine 128 with those map sizes...

Personally I get bored if there's any less than 128 on the maps that are the size of Armored Kill maps.

You can definitely outsmart and outplay ppl in PS2. Yes you cant kill a zerg with 8 guys in PS2, thx god for that. DAoC bomb groups was horribad, exploiting piss poor game mechanics, lag and gear progression to nuke ppl into next week before they could react.

In PS2, like most FPS', you cant rely on gear to kill your enemy and one lucky shot will kill you. Is that shallow, then most FPS are shallow.

And just because a game is innovative doesnt mean its good, a lot of the most innovative games have crashed and burned because ppl didnt want "innovative", they want good balanced gameplay.

I think the devs should
1: Optimize performance. A lot of friends, me included, has terrible performance in this game. On my rig, it looks like a.s.s. due to having to run lowest settings.
2. Quests, auto waypoints n stuff. People like be lead towards some guaranteed fun. They don't want to drive around for hours, ghostcapping, hoping that the stars align and there's an actual fight.