The reason that people dont play much now?

Fail

Excellent post & fully agreed, especially on the points highlighted in green, less is more sometimes

The servers aren't populated enough when I'm online. I get on, and the biggest fights have less than a few dozen people involved. That's why I'm pissed there wont be any cross-platform: the game could've used the higher populations.

* Lack of new content
* Only endgame is typical FPS point grinding.
* Performance


I think PS2 is ultimately going to be seen as the victim of too many cooks in the kitchen... or maybe the wrong cook (Higby). He has been very devoted to all things MLG and making PS2 more generic... and I think PS2 would've been better off making a really kickass and utterly unique game - THEN seeing if there was some fit for competitive gaming...

Instead of makng a game the harcore players really, really love... they've made this.

I think the game needs more depth....more things to do.
Like ? crafting(w reverse engineering and discovery)...housing......actual resource gathering for crafting

Game crashes, lack of new content, lack of meaningful metagame, population balance (it's hard to find a decent fight with even numbers on my server. Zerg or be zerged) and the strikermonkeys.

You forgot about gardening!

yay minecraft

I think the game is just getting old and people are moving on to other titles because they're bored.

"We call this, Tactical Rose Bedding"

Shooting goats, chickens and dog in Arma 3. I only play PS2 when I see some of my friends/outfit mates are online on psu site these days. But when I play, I enjoy every minutes. Competitive game that allows having multiple characters of different factions on the same server? Yeah what could go wrong.

I play much less now due to the complete and utter lack of skill, awareness and organisation of 99% of my servers outfits and general player population. (Miller)

>Outfits want to sit and farm,
>They like to let the enemy take key positions just so they can take it back later,
>I have never seen a coordinated attack using say a light assault squad or other tactically thoughtful decision made by an outfit in months, they know only 'Zerg' - the skill and leadership of PS1 sadly never touched this game.
>Players care only about K/D, and as a result they have no honour or pride in attacking the enemy where it hurts.
>The skill level of players has hit the floor - I see soo much stupidity all around me - lack of paying attention to the mini-map and what's going on around them..e.g. no defending generators either while attacking or defending, little use of tunnels when being attacked.. etc etc

Simply put, the game was much better to play in January then it was from June on. They fundamentally changed how the game was played from a tug of war system to a timer. Latticed dumbed it down, & they totally redid my favorite map Esimir to something untank friendly. That plus not wanting to put any money into it because SOE (not the planetside developers) pissed me off, keeps my playtime down.

BF4

For my side it simply the bad hit, damage detection engine.

Also it seems that most normal player left the game and only the elite player stayed. I got owned so often by guys with NS-7 PDWs .. that i simply think i must be an extremly bad player.

The mentality of <50 BR players is like the seaguls in finding nemo.

i dont play anymore because the vehicle/infantry balance is fubar and the vehicle gameplay just isnt as fun as it could have been
i miss PS1 style massive vehicle battles where you diddnt have to worry about every infantry having OP AV and it was more vehicle vs vehicle
the vehicle gameplay is just not fun in ps2 compared to ps1

I've worked on a lot of games, and Planetside's Population Over Time has stayed amazingly stable for the time it's been out. Way more stable than the games I've worked on (although it's pretty understandable, since I worked on content-driven games (PVE) and player-driven games like PS2's PVP focus are inherently going to sustain longer.)

Yesterday was one of the lower points, purely due to Battlefield. Over time (especially if BF4 is as buggy as it is now) players will come back if PS2 releases new toys players are excited about. (And by toys I mean lethal killing weapons and vehicles.)

I played a non-TR on Miller.

What site only shows 2 moths at max. The game has been out for ~10 moths. Then is PS2 birthday?

You might want to check the date bar at the bottom: TheRebelScum hasn't been tracking population for even two months yet, so of course it looks quite stable...

The actual trend looks more like this (remember this only includes players from Steam):
http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&jstime=1&appid=218230&from=1352534400000&to=End Time

From TheRebelScum we notice that across all servers there are at most 11k players online at once as a whole in the game in the last 2 months. And even that graph shows a slight downward angle. Since Steam shows about 6.5k steam players peak for the same period and about 30k at launch, I assume that the game had something like (11/6.5)*30 = 50.7k players at launch, online, at one time. Which means there's roughly a fifth of the playerbase left now and a full year hasn't passed yet.

The rate of player loss has slowed, obviously, but I don't think the amounts we have now are suitable for a game like this. With a favourable assumption that players are all concentrated on primetime servers only, that 11k players divided over 4 servers is just 2750 players per server, which wouldn't be enough to poplock two continents. And since we also know the playerbase is dwindling..