"Why are people not playing PS2 as much as we thought" Some of the devs and other PS2 players ask

That's what I'm saying. Why would you take the path of least resistance aka the path of least fun?

With infrequent use, its actually a highly effective tool at breaking up a front line stalemate. The key problem is breaking the stigma as an OS being a killing tool, and designing in a way to make it recognized as an area denial tool. Two of the keys to this is a heavy projection, and reasonable time to evacuate.

In practice, it should be as effective as an airstrike at breaking up a line. And like most airstrikes, the enemy can see it coming, have time to react, and then forced to deal with the after math. Unlike a full airstrike, the window of opportunity is smaller, but its guarantied to force them out of the area until it hits.

A PS1 OS projected for 5 seconds before hitting. For PS2, I would consider 10-15 seconds, but over a wider area, more well tuned toward the pacing on vehicles. And to put arguments on the warning to rest... having the projection scale in intensity as the timer counts down not only aids the attentive players, but also creates a crescendo of urgency that players will find rather intense.

I always find this to be a decent visual example of something that starts out feeling ominous, but grows in intensity as it goes.

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That would also make a prime candidate for what a VS Laser strike should be modeled after.

Why aren't people playing? there's are several reasons.

1. The initial launch is long past. The time of greatest interest has come and gone and now any new player is either a referral from a friend, or someone who liked what they saw in the reviews. which brings us too...

2. The reviews are not all that amazing. With most saying its a decent game, with occationally epic moments, but hamstringed by multple techincal issues. That leads too...

3. The game runs like ***. Lets be quite clear, SOE's quality control has been abysmal. it took nine updates, NINE, to fix the terrain flickering glitch, the stuck in revive glitch is still around, the moment a fight reaches more than 48v48 performance takes a nose dive, and the game will still crash at any time regardless off whats going on. the average player has to put up with a lot to keep playing this game. so...

4. There really isn't that much to stick around for. When BCP, what ever you think of him, left he specificly called out that he was leaving because there didn't seem to be any point in playing. He was absolutely right, when BIG BATTLES lose their novelty what keeps slogging out in the trenches? We capture territory for territory's sake, we cap continents because that's the closest we get to an end goal unless there's an alert. This gets even worse when you are constantly a squad or platoon leader and spend most of the fight staring at your map. Currently the game is skinner box stack on top of skinner box, and skinner boxes get old, quickly. Other games, like league, use new content to keep things fresh; unfortunately a new type of gun doesn't keep it fresh, and frankly the content that would keep it fresh, continents, doesn't have the player base to last out side of the weekend after surge.

those are the big four big ones but here are a couple other reasons:

5. this game is hard to get into. You are thrown headfirst into a very complex game with only a flirting link to some "get started" you tube videos on the patcher. I almost quit day 1 out of sheer frustration out of trying to understand what the hell was going on.

6. Either there isn't enough being spent on advertising, or the targeting profile is terrible. This was a game that had my restraintbefore it came out, but I didn't know it'd launched until a friend told me. and I still barely see PS2 ads even when looking at PS2 vids.

changes are to drastic, this is not the game i signed up for

i would still play.. now i just log in to get my certs until my membership expires

i have no render problem or technical issue whats so ever , in fact never had besides the occasional FPsecond drop, no big deal

Did I **** your mother or something? LOL i mean seriously. you made some backassward connection that made no sense, did it in a very rude manner, and then when i call you on it, prove you wrong, and, by your own admission, approached this correctly, your still taking the offensive. take the ***** out of your *** dude. its s simple disagreement.

you REALLY love my name for some reason.........what gives with that?

and no, you needed it explained bud. You, again were making connections that diddnt exist, and when I explained it to you, you pretended like the English language was different 2 days ago from today. I responded the way I did originally, because you went so far off base, and failed to differentiate 2 simple concepts, and instead tied them together, when there was no connection. Instead of simply disagreeing.

You bet. Everything that hasn't been complained about should fit into 140 characters or so.

Game just sucks **** and is full of cheaters thats why we dont play it that often. Planetside 2 is the worst game because theres no admin worth a damn cheaters just keep coming

I am only wondering if anyone can post the link to the reddit thread posted by Scatterblak (who posted this tread on reddit) cause I don't use reddit (don't ask why because we will get off topic) and if you do I will very much appreciate it.

Skill has little to do with anything that happens in this game. When I kill someone in an even fight, I usually figure it was lag or the player was a noob. When someone kills me in an even fight, I usually figure it was lag. When someone kills a lot of people in a row, I usually figure it's either a lag switch or stealth cheats. Sometimes I take damage before the game even bothers telling me that the other guy fired a shot. Sometimes I kill somebody who isn't able to hit me for some reason I can't comprehend. Sometimes someone in front of me magically appears behind me, and I honestly could not tell you if he was cheating or not. No, it's not me, I have a 30mb/5mb connection and I get 100 ms to the server. The gunplay and netcode in general are extremely weak.

There's nothing to do. It's not exciting. I feel mild annoyance when I lose. I feel mild annoyance when I win. The "massive battles" of tug of war are just plain sad, in the few cases when they do happen and one side doesn't outnumber the other 4 to 1. Victory and defeat are the result of the ebb and flow of fourth-faction cert hunters, not teams. The continued restriction of game mechanics (oh, now it takes TWO minutes to destroy a generator!) just makes things worse.

When I see a BR 100, I don't feel envy or respect. I feel a slight sense of pity. Oh, that poor bastard. He spent so much of his life in this game, and for what? Was he even having fun? I know I'm not. I come off a session going "Why the HELL did I play THIS game again?" I get the impression that everyone with any sense quit this game long ago, and those of us still here are just too dumb to know better.

MLG? This game? Fat chance. Big Rigs has a better chance of going MLG than this does.

This video does a good job explaining the "Higby pls" process and why this game was released "unfinished" and "everything gets pushed back":

IMHO, the addition of Orbital Strikes is probably going to piss some people off. It is just going to dumb down a game further. With the addition of player missions, instead of calling for a dedicated air squad to help blast a zerg to bits you just press a few buttons and take it out without any other player to player interaction. It would make battles become zerg vs orbital striked zerg and more steam rolling will occur.

I've been here since the tech test. I'm still here because this game has the potential to be great. It's just not great right now. There are moments that happen that make me think this could be the game that ends all games, but those moments don't last very long. Out of all the time I play, it happens 5-10% of the time. The remaining 90% is mostly just me playing for an hour before I get bored. I know what SOE is trying to do here, there just has to be a better way. I support them fully and that is another reason why I am still here. They aren't selling out and are making a game that pushes limits which is desperately needed in modern gaming. Wish other devs had balls like them.

Performance. A game like this requires a massive population to deliver the kind of gameplay people expect from it and the F2P model is a good way to try to achieve critical mass. However, the game definitely won't perform well on older hardware, which will limit the growth of the player base considering most F2P players are likely not able or willing to spend money on better hardware.

Boredom because there consistently aren't enough medium to large sized battles. This has to be discouraging to new players considering it's an MMO and there's definitely not a sense of 'massive multiplayer' when you scan the world map and see a bunch of front lines that have no fighting on them. Most new players won't even know to use the redeploy option to try to spawn near a decent sized battle, instead they will spend significant time traveling in a vehicle or on foot trying to find enemies and eventually get bored of the game.

Perfomance problems and lack of competition on the market. You bet the schedule slips and QA mishaps we've seen would not be tolerated if Planetside 2 had direct competition in its niche.