What do you think made people quit PS2 the most?

Faction imbalance, predominantly.
Hacks, especially before they were decently policed.
Cert grind, just because I haven't unlocked a single 1k cert yet

Because of the loss of Higby's hair...

Well, I have just returned from a half a year of not playing (and most likely will leave again in a few weeks), and I can say certainly what drove me away:
1. faction imbalance - both in equipment (not so much, though) and in numbers (this HAS to be regulated somehow, give large penalties to overpopulated factions or something)
2. monotony - not enough roles to play. you can be a footsoldier, a land vehicle pilot, an air vehicle pilot, and a platoon leader. that's it.
3. the last straw for me was when some people have received tens and even hundreds of thousands of certs as a compensation for buying several identical weapons on the same account. average player has to spend several days to get just one thousand, and these players have received several years worth of certs. needless to say, even good players have a reeeealy hard time standing up to someone who has all the best gear upgraded to the maximum.

0 skill weapons shouldn't be introduced... at all
Even if it doesn't finish you off, its very annoying for all vehicles and forces you to cert into IR smoke/flares

Christmas time Zephyr and lolpods. (pre-nerf)

People thinking they can solo warrior the other factions into submission, then realising without team play planetside 2 will be very painful.

join a squad, join a squad

I lone wolf and it works nicely tbh
I don't like outfits and squads because they are unfun and very rarely do fun/special stuff

wwithout a shadow of doubt: lolpods.

-Bad performance
-Terrible map/base design
-Lack of metagame
-Catering to ADD solo player instead of teamwork

For some play styles it might be ok, but if you are alone in a max suit for example and you think your having fun then you have not played in a good team and are missing out.

Until more continents and continent locking are put in, people will continue leave.

But it will probably be to late by time they actually realise people won't be playing the team deathmatch for 1+ year.

From talk from people who are not heavily invested in the game and community.

I guess Bad FPS and stability #1

Random deaths and now knowing what you are doing #2

and maybe explosive spam from air when it comes to balance.

Some PC hardware enthusiasts like to be elitist and talk about if you don't want to constantly upgrade your hardware then you are everything wrong with gaming. But people play the game and have problems with it then stop playing. They don't want to play the constant upgrade game when they have a choice of hundreds or thousands of other games that work perfectly well.

Planestside 2 is a weird game. When you first start playing you will just be dying constantly from random things and will have no idea how to find a good fight. You can use instant action but the chance of that giving you an enjoyable fight instead of instant death or a fat load of nothing is not good.

And at the start of the game when there were the most new people to lose air power was just pretty obnoxious. You could be having a good fight then some ***** esf pilots would dive in and just kill everyone instantly with pods. In the big fights there would just be libs farming sunderers and spawn camping all day long.

the fact that PS2 is more like battlefield than planetside

strikers, zerging, overpopulation, and the steep climb of the learning curve when you first join; once you get a good loadout on your favorite class or vehicle, the whole cert grind isn't that bad

- Burned out.
- Overpopulated faction, underpopulation.
- Found a new or better game.
- Nerfs and more nerfs.
- Overpowered and poor balance.
- Riddled with Hackers and Cheaters as Buzz claimed.
- No Meta game? (smaller outfits are dying)
- Pay to Win
- The Negativity on the forum
- Road Map schedules keeps being delayed.
- No real attainable goal, no endgame, pointless continent warfare, and endless team death match.
- too much focus on keeping kill/death ratios positive reduces teamwork and risk-taking, as Buzz claimed. The problem is so prevalent that a player is constantly driven to do cheesy things to get kills because the game, in its current state, revolves around trying to get as many kills as possible. You never login and say, ‘Where is the frontline at?’ Instead, you login and say, ‘Where is the farm at?’”

I agree with the rest but this game is far from P2W

They certed everything they wanted. Since there is no point to play this game other than XP, once you unlock what you want, it's over.

Big problem for NC right there

Performance is the biggest legit issue the game suffers as F2P. Despite all the 'lololz get a i7 hyperthreading will make game run better, makes me a better person, lol newb' crap. A huge percentage of the market is never going to have mid-high / high end systems and so a lot of people play with their standard PC, get 20fps for a week or two and decide to come back latter. From my entire interaction 9 months or so with the community, the only loss thats actually been significant comes down to this. This is the one that means thousands of people who'd be happy to play Ps2 and dig the 'massive scale' USP are not.

and hopefully finally we might see some big gains on this in the next couple of months with mutlithreading optimisations.

Then theres bitter Ps1 vets and metagame, and the perception that PS2 as stands is just TDM (tdm doesn't have objectives, so these people tend to not have particular great grasps of the game mechanics but hey ho). Which should have been addressed earlier, but is now. So i'd expect a lot of them back and a few claiming SoE bent to their demands and such.

I honeslty, don't think SoE were ever planning not to massively develop the metagame, but its a difficult balancing act and requires just a bit of creativity. So things take time. More focus earlier on would have been nice, but whats happened has happened.

The rest, by and large is people who come to this game thinking they are pro at a particular play style, can't adapt to the scale of the changeable nature of the fighting, of course also the threat to their e-ego - and kick up a fuss before leaving (or pretending to leave). this much like the media lensing effect (for example in the UK, certain papers report crime like it was endemic, despite the fact that crime rate is in fact falling and historically very low - people perceive that these crimes are represenative and it is as a whole a sigificantly larger problem than it is), makes things seem a lot representative of the entire player base than they infact are.

Probably the novelty wears off after awhile, and unless you have an outfit or friends continuing to play the game it can get pretty boring running around by yourself all the time.