Quit planetside 2 after 20 hours - or a look of a new player at the game

Every game is dying. Every person is dying. The world is dying.

This is all irrelevant if you live in the present, though.

i dont use stream nomore but i did at launch. but no matter what the game isn't dying.

Steam stats only show if u play the game througj steam. I do not.

Next, yeah 1k certs for a gun is alot. Soe has lowered alot of the prices. Plus we can pick any gun we want. Its better then battlefield where u must painfully grind and waste points on guns u do not want.

I want an m60, oh wait? Its lvl 5 and i need 50000 points to get it? Yeah in ps2 its i want the em6?..'cool 7$ or i simply save certs till i can afford it. No wasted certs no wasted time with an unwanted weapon.

100certs in 1 hour, yeah thats good. What do you want? 1500 upon login? Cert gain is significantly faster then it used to be. Tanks used to be half a cert. Now all vehicle kills give u like 3
Infantry kills used to b 1. Now depending on their score in that like they can b worth 5, 6, 7..
Who knows..

This is the only part that matters to me and why I stopped playing. The reason I stopped playing COD and BF as well. The battles dont do anything or mean anything. There is no objective in this game, its just a never ending game of team death match. And I cant stand team death match.

Give the game a freaking point already. Getting frags was cool in like 1997. Now how about having a game where theres an actual war going on. One that has an objective. Id be completely fine with once one faction wins the maps reset. Warhammer did this and it worked great.

Have there be some sort of progression for each continent. Give each faction a capturable base on each continent that requires certain objective be meet before it can be assaulted. Then if that base is taken out that faction gets kicked off the continent.

And having every reward tied to XP is ********. I can get the best weapons in the game by doing the most trivial crap in the game because everything is based off XP. Its just bad game design. Theres no incentive to do anything because I can get the same reward by doing something as trivial as repairing vehicles. What do you get for repairing a vehicle, XP, what do you get for capturing a whole continent, XP. Who was the badword that thought this was a good idea?

I'm sorry to hear that the game didn't win you over. 20 hours is quite a bit of time to play, so if you've already decided you don't like the game, then more time spent playing will probably not change your mind. However...

As Vanu, I must say, the only gun you really need - at least as a Heavy - is the Orion. It's almost all that I use. Its rate of fire, reload time, and damage just cannot be beat in any situation. If you decide to come back to the game and pick up your Vanu character again, play Heavy, and use this LMG as much as possible.

Regarding the prices - it is a free to play game, so they need to make money somehow. Sure, the cash prices are a little high, but I don't have a problem putting $5-20 into a game I may only play 20 hours. Compare the 20 hours you played in Planetside 2 to the $60 you last spent on a AAA blockbuster type game and $7 per gun seems a little cheap to me. You can even purchase the new "pro" bundles as well, so that you don't have to buy everything one at a time or buy one of the massive bundles.

If you're looking for a clear "goal" or objective beyond alerts or capturing/defending the next base, then you should probably stick with Battlefield. I play to play with my friends and to find a good fight. That's all I need.

If you're getting camped, press delete and respawn somewhere else. This is probably the hardest thing to do, but you can't get fixated on a single fight all the time if your goal is to enjoy yourself. There's always a better, more balanced fight somewhere.

Regarding battle sizes, you should play on Connery. I mostly play late night, around 2 AM CST, but on Connery there is always a fight. When Hossin is added, I predict that SOE will finally merge Mattherson and Waterson.

Again, if you want to enjoy a free to play game in the long run, you have to spend money. It's just something that you have to get over. I've dumped $50 into World of Tanks, and $30 into Mechwarrior Online, and I don't regret those purchases because they greatly improved the game for me.

Huh? Battlefield is just as pointless as this game. This game is BF3 in scifi spandex.

Note to anyone trying to read this, the only interesting point I personaly bring up is the ''The game is Pay to win? '' area and down until you get to my Second point.
Feel free to skim read it.

The game is dying?
I hadn't noticed since there are still so many people around that it is hard for me to pick a target most of the time.

The game is Pay to win?
You want to lower the cost massively for guns?
Sorry but, since you've already admitted you're a new player, im gonna go ahead and say No.
For the simple reason of, many weapons have already HAD their costs reduced significantly..
See all those carbines, LMG's and what not that are between 100-250 certs?
They used to be 500-1000 certs each.
Cert gain's have also been massively boosted since the launch of this game, so getting a 100-250 cert weapon is not that hard.
It might take a few hours, but then you'll get a good gun, that will stay with you forever on that character.

Also.
''Well, I guess I can unlock the guns just by playing the "F2P" game...oh wait, if 100 certs an hour is a good rate, and a gun is 1000 certs, that means...10 HOURS FOR JUST ONE GUN?! I don't wanna wait for 10 hours for a new gun, I want some gun variety! Running with the same gun for so long just isn't fun to me.''

10 hours?
As far as I remember, the average cert gain of most players used to be around 50-60 certs an hour.
That's not 10 hours of gaming if you've ever played a game before, At most it will be 5 hours of game time.
Also, there IS a trial system for all weapons except the luxuary versions with gold plating and stuff.
You want a gun that temporarily might net you kills / certs faster? Trial one, each gun can be trialed every 8 hours.
Want a gun to get some variation for a while? TRIAL it.

Your second point about the squads and such, I dont care about.
I am a lonewolf, i've been a lonewolf since the launch of this game.
I have spent a grand total of 50-60 minutes total with squads over the course of my long playtime.
So sadly, I wont give any input on this.

Your third point... You have two options if you are playing alone and you're spawn camped with a bunch of random people.
You either Redeploy to some other base OR you throw some heroic speech about what these random people should do.
Also, the spawn camping can be beneficial to part of your First point up top.
It can help you grind certs, since for some reason, people are still dumb enough to play Peek-a-boo with you while you're invulnerable inside the spawn room.
You can shoot them, they cant shoot you.
Easy certs to be gained there, but I warn you.. It is boring.

Your fourth point.
What server were you playing on to not find a single big battle at any given time?
Even during the night time hours (I live in sweden) I still find plenty of people fighting at bases.
You want to constantly be in the big fights?
Then look for the area on the map that says ''48+ enemies detected''.
I guarantee that you wont get bored trying to hide from all of them.
Picking them off one by one.

Also, you want to merge all the servers?
Why?
Most servers I play on have a good amount of people on them.. Cobalt, waterson, Woodman.
I have no problem finding BIG fights on them at.. any given time actualy.
If there are no fights going on, on say.. Cobalt, I log into Waterson, because chances are there will still be a lot of players online there due to the massive time difference between My country and the server location of Waterson.


All in all, I will round up what I have said down here.
The game is not pay to win as much as it used to be.
Many things have had their costs reduced massively, even Good guns such as the LSW, Serpent, one or two of the MAX weapons..
Shotguns, pistols, many other Carbines and LMG's..

I do not care about squad play.

Getting spawn camped is not the end of the world and unless you can persuade people to try and exit the spawn room, then Redeploy.
At the end of the day, its your choice of what battle you feel like being in.
Do you want to sit in a spawn room OR go somewhere else, where your empire might get off of their lazy ***** and actualy try to win?

And lastly.. Dont claim there are not enough big battles going on in this game.
you have several servers to choose from.
Some of them have Different peak hours for the different parts of the world, while other one's might fit you more.
I play on american servers And European servers so that Im guaranteed to always have big fights on my hands.
If you dont want to move between characters often, then go to a server that has a High population.

That will be the end of my long.. Post.
Bye.

Actually you won't be better then any one else in the game... you'll play better, but not Be better.

just because you put 500 hours into CS doesn't mean you'll start a match with 120 health rather then 100 like the person that just bought the game. Just because he bought the game that day doesn't mean he'll have a smaller magazine or be unable to hold certain grenades...

as far as the game is concerned, the two of you are identical.

Planetside 2 is not like that, what with cert upgrades, SC unlockable guns, and resource rate altering implants, the guy that spent 1000 hours or 50 bucks on this game will be undeniably superior to the person that just installed it. Not only in skill, but statistically, having anything from a faster movement speed, to a more effective class ability, to a harder hitting weapon, to more health.

Which means on a competitive setting...
to Win you have to Pay... either with cash or time...

because it doesn't matter how skilled you are if you don't got the swankiest newest gun released, because SoE's design ideology seems to involve releasing laughably OP weapons initially and then nerfing them down by the time they get ready to release the next batch of OP weapons. which mean's you gotta ride that OP band-wagon if you want to be competitive too.

Not too sure why I'm responding but oh well. Most of my responses are embedded in the quote in bold.

While it's good that you at least brought in a graph to support your point I'd guess that the majority of people don't use steam and I know that for me I started on steam but it became unworkable after a while so I switched to the launcher and I know that several other people in my outfit had the same problem which could explain some of the decline in numbers. And every game loses players over time.

250 cert weapons bro, Haymaker, MSW-R, off hand HEG and offhand Mutilator, Emperor, you think you can't have good variety as a free player? Realistically, if you're playing this game in a semi serious fashion 4-5 nights a week for an hour or 2 you can easily unlock all the 250 cert tier guns which are some of the best in the game in a couple weeks. Fact is SOE is probably the most fair F2P gaming service on the market by a large margin. You get a financially stupid amount of content for free here.

Also the steam charts look very normal and probably only represent about half of the average playership. This game is not for everyone, and the last 6 months the game's population has actually been very stable. In fact if you want the truth the game feels more populated now than it did at launch. The absolute peak numbers were very short lived, what you should really look at as a long term player is the average playership in a month. It doesn't really look that bad anymore does it? At Dec average of 12k or so, and now an average of 4k with that number being fairly stable for 5 months straight. At launch we had more than twice as many servers and the population was badly split between congested high pops and fairly empty low-med pops. Now the population is a much better spread across the servers we do have. I play Connery and Waterson. Waterson is my favorite, the faction balance is better compared to Connery. Both servers feel a hell of a lot more populated than my old defunct server Jaeger did.

The very high number in Nov represents the COD and Battlefield guys who popped in to check us out, and felt in over their heads. That crowd doesn't want an MMO. The people who stayed are the MMO player crowd, or at least the ones who figured out they like MMOFPS games. It's a different style and also a rather niche style. Planetside will never have sales like COD or battlefield, it's just not a style which appeals to the average gamer long term. If you're complaining about a 10 hour gameplay unlocks then you might not be an MMO player at heart either. We have what we have because of the nature of the genre, not because SOE has a bad pay model. I think we're doing very well considered.

If you were providing constructive criticism, then you'd be giving suggestions on fixing the problems.
Right now, it seems more like complaining.

Reply in blue above.

This is something I have thought about, basically what challenges players new to PS2 face. When your experience is shaped by getting killed repeatedly by players with a bunch of cosmetics and strange weapons you don't have, it would be hard to not think the game is P2W. On the forums, we've played enough to know that the game isn't exactly P2W. It is, however, very much Pay2NotGrind, as we all know.

Another problem, IMO, is the ease with which players in vehicles, like Harassers, can just farm new players all day. I'm pretty sure a lot of people quit playing during the first month of release due to ESFs/Libs just destroying everything in sight. Now we have the Harasser, which accomplishes basically the same thing but on the ground. As a veteran player, I get pretty irritated whenever a Harasser comes out of nowhere, launches some Fury/Marauder grenades up my *** and zooms away. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be to be a new player and get killed by these things repeatedly? It simply isn't fun at all. At this point, KDR is not a measure of skill but how much you've learned to avoid dying to cheesy crap and/or use the cheese tactics yourself.

Players are the content, sure, but the metagame updates need to come as soon as possible to make even new players feel like they're doing something in the game other than getting killed repeatedly.

You know everyone talks about PS2 dying when overall I expected it to be much worse until the PS4 launch with the optimization patch. Honeslty this game is still under heavy development and should not be retaining people.

Overall in 2 years when us die hards finally get what we want and the game is stable and has meaningful meta, we will rejoice over the population boom(and the fact that people will have a computer than can play this game).

Until then I feel bad for all the new players that join because this game really is 1 or 2 years away from what it can be.

Also price in this game may seem high but is on par with other F2P games. $5 would be a bit better but anything lower would be too low imo. Also beginning this game may feel like it is P2W but if you stick around till BR30 or so and put certs into your classes than the game becomes a whole lot better.

Like all games there is a learning curve, PS2 just makes that curve harder because you are not going up against close ELO rated players but everyone from the pros to the noobs.

That graphic looks about average for most games. Not omg great, but not truly depressing either. Combine that with the non-steam launches and you would likely get 50-100% more. 9-12k peak users is about what some freemium games I worked on got at peak, and they were considered pretty good for their niches.

And it hasn't steadily been losing players according to that, it's been decreasingly losing players. With a stabilization of users. I imagine as they release new content people will come back and then drop it again. That's kind of the rare bird about free-entry games: it is literally no sweat if you pick it up and put it down at will. It's not like WoW where getting back into it often requires buying an expansion (yet).

I'm not trying to be the game's savior, but I also have to say something when a statement seems to misrepresent the data shown, especially in relation to other factors that I'm actually pretty aware of, having worked in the industry.

They are extreme, and I wouldn't like to pay those amounts. That's why I view the SC store as like JC Penny. If you absolutely don't care about money or have to have something, you can pay the full exorbitant price. I prefer to wait for x3 station cash and stock up on it. Maybe $20-$40 so I get $60-$120. Then whenever possible I wait for a sale on the gun I want. Usually they are half price. So instead of $7.00 for a gun, I pay 7 / 3 / 2, or a little over 1 dollar. A lot more reasonable.

It's true that they don't transfer to other factions unless they are generic weapons, and not even all of those do. The top guns for main battle tanks, for instance, don't. I wish that they did. You do gain access to the weapons that you get on all characters. So for instance all my characters have the NS dumbfire and lockon launchers. Not great, but not terrible.

I wouldn't want to wait that long, either, but I do see plenty of people who do, and get satisfaction out of never paying money for a gun.

• Infiltrator: pretty much every sniper rifle sucks. Lot of reasons for that, and the infiltrator update is still waiting in the wings. The Parallax has great range but at that range you can't one-shot someone and hitting a moving target is pretty hard if he is randomly moving at all. Right now I feel the better Infiltrator long range weapons are actually the scout rifles, since they have no drop and better ammo capacities, at least for VS.
• MAX: yeah, it's an investment. However, when you get them on sale, the prices are a lot more reasonable, and the 2nd MAX weapon is pretty cheap for the cert cost, if you stay with the default one, which I don't notice a *huge* difference between those and the other VS AI MAX weapons.
• Scythe: my primary weapon configuration I chose is actually the stock one: Saron and External Fuel Tanks. Throw on stealth, nanite armor, racer frame, max zoom on the Saron, and you have a great long range Sniper Fighter. A lot safer and you can still dogfight up close.

Most of my friends that play just ride around in my vehicles. You don't have to have the vehicles spiffed out yourself, just have someone to let you ride shotgun or even give you one. Nice having it yourself, but you can still benefit.

I agree that some initial "certs" should be granted, perhaps upon completing some tutorial to show you know how to play the game. Prices are high, yeah, but I know why they do it. With games I worked on, maybe 10% bought anything. Perhaps 25% of those bought them at full price, the remainder waited for sales. We definitely catered to our "Whales" a lot more than this game does, though. In those games, you could definitely buy things to just flat out make your life super easy. Level to max in a weekend instead of 3 months, and so forth. This game has been fairly "sane" in comparison.

This is true, though when I look at games like BF3, aren't those equally as pointless? Between server resets, was there ever any longevity of purpose in Counter-Strike?

Much like being in a more organized softball team is better than being in a disorganized softball team. There isn't any point to it, but it feels nice to run with a proper set of villains.

And when you get in really good squads and outfits, you pull off some REALLY amazing stuff!

Taking part in alerts gives you enhanced experience, which can lead you to get new guns. I doubt they would give out camo because that is a straight aesthetic upgrade that they want to give out for something more rigorous than simply achieving an objective after 2 hours. They do have those refer-a-friend bonuses which are... rather extreme to get. I could see emblems being available for participating in great events. I hope their events get better.

The best way to defend a base is to counter attack the attackers with an organized force. Also using specialized grenades super helps. Being trapped in the spawn room truly does suck, but is avoidable. Usually when defenders are able to "break out" of the spawn room, it is usually because some mobile attack force destroyed the attackers that were besieging your base.

Not a bad idea. I've seen it suggested before.

Such is the problem with games that have enough servers at startup and then the game shrinks to normal proportions. Someday games will have single universes like EVE Online, and then it won't be an issue so much anymore.

I don't know about large-scale battles. I played for 2 hours today and participated in 2 huge battles that each lasted for 20 minutes.

First idea is terrible. Continent locking will fix this and give some meta game. Second one will happen eventually, I imagine, to every game.

As are we all, but I'm not trying to swap out my body just yet!

Meh to be honest I think the game will suffer a massive loss in players in the next month or so since so many games are coming out I really can't see planetside 2 growing especially since it unoptimized and require a monster pc to play. You won't see a massive jump in player base in a month or 2 in planetside 2 since it require a good computer and mostly no one has a good pc to even run this game.

I think I saw you in a Scythe on Hossin earlier today.

I don't use steam to run planetside 2. Why would I?

This game may not directly involve expertise in biology, but a key point that sharpe makes is that as a Biology PhD student he has great experience with statistics, which is required in the field.

An argument to authority is not inherently a fallacy; it's only a fallacy if used to argue that the authority is 100% accurate on this particular matter. It's a probabilistic argument; being an expert in a field increases the likelihood of this person being correct over that of a layperson. I give sharpe's argument that statistics are often misleading more weight than the opinion of the layperson on the internet.

As to whether you can get away with publishing poorly designed statistical analyses, peer review is cutthroat, and the burden of proof is on the author. All the reviewers have to do is state why they think the statistics are incorrect to force the draft to be revised. Simply bringing poorly constructed statistics to an argument means nothing in and of itself.

Nope was not me I never set foot on hossin . Also I can't fly for **** and if it was me count to 30 i will most likely crash by then lol.