My first 5 hours of planetside 2

I'd say for a first time PS2er to get a .5 KD score is DANG good. I think mine was .3 or something, and I'm an experienced PS1 player. Anyways, it's pretty obvious that the OP was very frustrated when he wrote his post; PS2 is a frustrating game for a rookie to get into. But once you figure out it's ideosyncracies then the game will probably become exponentially more fun for you. Especially if the Optimization patch (coming in a few weeks) increases performance for you.

If anything, the plethora of good, polite and informative responces to what, in most forums would have launched a flame war, should be a good sign of the game's community. If nothing else.

Relax mate, Just keep playing and everything will come to you in due time, you have plenty of suggestions in this thread already,
If it's all too complicated for you now then pick infiltrator, stay far away and take your time comprehending your surroundings and other players gameplay / battle flow, also the Map has a "help" button that will make you clear all of it's functions and infos.

Start going where you empire has higher numbers than the enemies, it might sound lame but hey you wanna learn right?

Sunderers are a fidly point. If you click deploy the exact moment it gets destroyed, you get dropped somewhere. I don't know where, or how it chooses your new location, you just spawn somewhere. Its a minor annoyance.

Depending on deploying where you want to, there isn't that much of a choice. If you're dead you only have a certain amount of places you can go do depending on where you died. Warp gate is always accessible.
If you're in the warp gate you could go to the map, and look in the bottom left corner for instant action. If you're in the map when you do this, the map will be scrolled where you're going to drop. Giving you a bit more intel on where you're going.
You could also join a squad and deploy on the squad leader. This will make sure you will always spawn near your squad leader and stick with them from then on. (depending if the squad is semi-organized).

Alternatively you could also take a Flash and just drive to where the fight is. Just remember the flash is very weak and you'll die very fast when you encounter enemies.

Thank you to those with helpful replies.

Apologies also.

I still stand by some of my points, but was also wrong on a few.

Still cant find a squad who wants to help me though lol. Just gonna self learn.

You should take it slow and try to figure things out for yourself one thing at a time. You sound like one who has no patience. Spend less time on the field and more time in the menus and the map first. Try to get a gist of what the game is about first instead of hot dropping in and getting overwhelmed.

Engi - repairing MAXs/Vehicles and dropping ammo. Easy way to get certs, stay with/behind the Zerg.

Medic - healing and rezing infantry. Again stay behind, think about your positioning.

Flak armour helps a LOT with both for AOE and never ever stop moving when rezing, healing or repairing (some sniper will head shot you).




If you do come up against an aimbotter though you are doomed.

because lag effects people differently, the more aggressive you play the more the lag works for you, if he runs round the corner you see him after he see's you, anywhere up to half a second difference.
Hiding round a corner puts you at a disadvantage, hiding only works if the guy can't see you when he walks into the room,

i'll leave this thread to you guys, hf.

If you read the keybindings page, you would've seen you can zoom in and out with the mini-map.

This game is not GPU intensive, it's CPU intensive, using an AMD together with PS2 using bad multi-threading is what's adding insult to injury. The test server has resolved most of these problems already.

Acually infantry gameplay is fairly balanced right from the bat, the starter weapons are focusing on medium ranged combat and the most important "upgrades" can be unlocked in less than 60 minutes playtime. MAX and Vehicle combat however, requires a ton of certs and the average player hasn't even unlocked 25% of the vehicle weapons yet.

I should also mention that most of the time things are NOT upgrades, rather sidegrades, the only reason i'm not running the stock stuff is because i already unlocked all medals on them (sadly the reason i no longer use certain classes).

Must be blind, same thing keeps happening on many servers...

The bright side is I am not the only one who seems to be having this kind of kill.

The NC players seem a lot more skilled than terrans.

Just saw around 13 people get mangled round a corner. So popped out and grenaded the area, ran back past the corner, crouched and poked out and got killed. Saw no one...Above? Who knows.

Its a cluster ****, I guess some people like it. For me, it feels like im banging my head against a brick wall trying to find assasins well hidden.

Glad I'm not the only one though I guess...

This game just isnt my cup of tea...

Honestly, all lone ranger new player will get insanely frustrated at this game.

I did start the game in september 2012. By myself. I was a very good player at CS:S and I wasn't able to do **** on PS2. I almost said **** it, but I managed to catch a friend of mine who knew how to play. He was kind enough to teach me the basics because at that time, as some mentionned, there was no tutorial whatsoever. It was "Hello, you're a soldier, bla bla bla, here, take this weapon and fight". This friend showed me how the different bases layout worked and what I should do not to be killed. Then, he stopped playing (he's the kind of guy that changes games every 6 months) so I was all by myself. At that time, I was playing StarCraft II more and more so I stopped playing PS2 completely.

I'm back since early september of 2013 (as a Miller VS). The game changed a lot. There is a tutorial, which can be helpful, but I had to catch up on the novelties through a lot of YouTube videos and I read this forum to learns some more advanced stuff. What ADS means, what BR means, what ADAD is, etc. And I convinced some of my non-FPS player friends to come with me. I trained them, and now, we form a group of 3 to 6 friends playing together and having a ****ton of fun each time. But, each one of them will tell you, it's only past BR10 (Battle Rank 10) that you can really kinda start to play by yourself and do the lone wolf, but they had me to teach them.

Also, if you don't like the ***********, then to go on Indar. My friends and I are targetting different places based on our mood. If we feel like going into big *** battles, then we go on Indar to fight at 48+/48+ bases and be prepared to shoot and be shot everywhere. And if we feel like defending low populated areas, then we go mostly on Amerish, when you'll find plenty of intersting (even at prime time) 1-12/1-12 fights in squads. But, you have to be very coordinated with friends/squad to do so and enjoy it. And, in that last setting, you're clearly avoiding the ***********, everything is pretty much as clear as it can get.

Anyway, if you like the perpetual war that this game has to offer, if you have a Miller Vanu character, I'll be pleased to help you (don't know what your native langage is, but I can speak english on Skype with my french accent) one or two evenings if you have questions. Don't expect me to "recruit" you in my outfit or anything, I only play with my french IRL friends and tend not to have IG friends (it's not PS2 specific, I'm like that in almost every game I play, I personnaly know and want to know IRL all my in game friends).

EDIT : As you can see in my signature, my K/D ratio is only 1.15. It was below 1.00 until I was level 20, like a week ago. And I'm a Heavy Assault, so it's my "job" to kill people. I started at around 0.3 and it slowly grew to what it is today.

Maybe this game isn't for you since you uphold the presumption of it being a AAA game with somesort of diluted gameplay like in regular FPS games rather than trying to understand it. I wish you all the good luck you need for future games.

If you want some help hit me up with a PM if u still wanna play on miller and I can show you the ropes on basic stuff, the rest is trial and error.

All of this support talk and mini tutorials isn't really improving the new guys' situation...

Playing BF4 a lot lately, and I can say that for the most part, I can approach BF4 almost literally the same way I do PS2... only I perform MUCH better in BF4 because everything works and it works reliably. In this regard, if a player has ever played Battlefield, there's no reason Planetside has an alien mechanic in what should be done.

Aside from that, Battlefield does a good job where Planetside absolutely fails: it provides a suite of basic equipment to the player that puts them on a very competitive and fair level with every other player, even ensuring BF4's battlefield augmentations (essentially, teamplay awarded perks) are newbie friendly by being survival focused and rewarding team play (this is seriously as a mechanic PS2 could afford to draw inspiration from.)

Planetside actually fails newb. Yes, the default weaponry CAN kill... it still lacks attachments. The player character still lacks suit slot and utility slot items. The default AV is still the biggest PoS AV in the game. Telling them to get into an outfit IS NOT a foolproof way to get them into the game. At the core of it all, PS2's newbie experience in fundamentally flawed in that initially, there is a fair bit of vertical progression before it finally becomes horizontal progression. And by "fair bit," I mean A LOT. Rank 1 nanoweave to rank 5 is entirely vertical progression.

Even if SOE's data shows tons of new unique accounts, I can't imagine they DON'T have an unacceptable turn over rate.

Things need to change.

The starter selection of weapons needs to come with every attachment unlocked. Suit slots should be globally unlocked, not on a per class basis, and the at least the first rank available by default. Alpha Squad weapons should probably be made readily available either immediately or for 100 certs tops, but with the attachments uncerted. I know I paid my $40, but what good is it in an emptying game?

Vehicles could stand to have rank one attachments for their default guns unlocked, and each slot as well. These changes still won't bring a newb up to par with veteran player (baseline options <<< fully certed, always, which is wrong for a competitive FPS) but it will help close the gap considerably and at least they'll feel like they have some options in approaching a situation. I imagine a lot of us here got started the moment the servers came back up with no more wipes in the foreseeable future (release) and we all were fairly uncerted, didn't understand the value of every certification, and the landscapes were mostly alien to us. This isn't the case anymore, and telling the new guy to "suck it up" when they're very well aware of the fact that other people just have MORE than them, and that it actually matters, isn't assuring them this is a great game when... CoD and BF4 actually do put you on a mostly even ground with other players that have been around for a long time. Ever wonder why they do so well? They're easy to get into. That has always been the key. Planetside 2 has been anything but.

Sadly, I imagine many players will rail against these suggestions, just because if there's one word I could apply to these forums, it's apathy. It's easy to give advice. It's hard for people to actually sacrifice something to actually attempt to improve the game's health.

PS2 might be one of the hardest FPS games as a newbie, its brutal and very frustrating. Its the EVE online of FPS.

CoD/BF/CS or whatever doesnt prepare for the massive air and tank zergs spamming every ince of your base with explosives. Combined with PS2 very open, come from all directions style of play.

Before you know the base layouts and the "common" flow of battle/angle of attack you wont stand a chance in PS2 and that takes hours and days to get down.

PS2 is not for casual play, until you have learn the way the game "works".

About the different weapons and upgrades:
a) the starter infantry weapons are some of the best weapons in the game. Fast Rate of fire/high DPS, low recoil, large mags. You only really need to get a new weapons of you got a special fighting style.
b) Infiltrator class and MAX unit does have weak starter weapons.
c) most vehicles got better weapons when upgraded.


About the lag, i run
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i5 - 3,40 GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Video Memory: 2048 MB RAM
Video Card: nVidia GeForce GTX 670

and i normally can get a stable 45-50 in even the biggest battles and above 60 in small/medium battles.

i tuned out as soon as he brought up his k/d ratio. this is like the #1 FPS where K/d shouldnt mean anything. PS2 is the very antithesis of following a k/d.

Regarding deployment points, click on the deployment target on the map (accurately! I end up dropping in the wrong place by misclicking sometimes) or in the list on the top left of the map screen. You only get squad deploy (drop pod near squad leader) and squad beacons (drop pod by the beacon) if you're in a squad, and in the case of a beacon if your leader currently has one up.

The first time I landed on auraxis I didn't have any problems knowing what to do. It could be that while the game was downloading I read some stuff instead of ************. Who knows?

I don't really have problems with haxxorz in this game, is something you eventually get used to on F2P games. And you learn how to counter it or recognise it. Because of your choking reaction I assume you don't really have a lot of F2P experience, so I can't by sure if you're getting hit by a haxxor or you run into the enemy frontline and got instagibbed.

COD is the most cheesy FPS out there. The learning curve is extremely low, the potential is lacking. No insane hard to use guns with a massive advantage if you learn how to use them.

Go play A.V.A pick an Ak47 and come here to tell me you're good at FPS games.

Some days ago I had to log with a new account because of prosieben ********. I join the VS and the NC and started playing HA. My KD/R was over 3.

Planetside 2 is the first F2P game I saw with actually competitive stock weapons, if you suck with them is because you're a scrub, not because the weapons sucks.

Pro outfit platoons are high end. Maybe you think that is not, but is not easy to get in one (some of them force you to buy premium). And those platoons can hold bases with numbers of 10 to 1.

Massively certed weapons, vehicles are high end. You can have a fukfest farm of exp by just massacring all the scrubs around.

So yeah, there is end game, and you're a scrub. Because of that, you're the end gamers profit, an exp bag waiting for a bit of farming.

While you are on the forums
1) Go to the outfit recruiting section.
2) Find your server
3) Find an good outfit on your team
4) Apply to said good outfit
5) Profit!

Do not go asking pubbies for advice.

I agree with what a lot of people have said about newbie players being at a disadvantage (nanoweave etc.), this wasn't the case in PS1 and I wonder why it was introduced in this game. The FTP model perhaps.

Anyways regarding performance.

We often read people say something along the lines of 'in xxxx game I can play flawlessly on ultra whereas in PS2 I have to turn my graphics down to low'.

This is the wrong way to approach things and in fact if you have a halfway recent card (mine counts and it's more than 3 years old) turn your graphics up.

As people say PS2 is CPU intensive and that's because it is tracking a lot of objects simultaneously, a lot more than in BF or COD. Compared to that your graphics card is having an easy time of it.

If you want to see whether your PC is CPU bound or GPU bound press alt+f in game and in the bottom right cornor it should the current fps and to the left displays either [CPU] or [GPU] for CPU bound or GPU bound. I bet you will find that it shows [CPU] bound in busy areas and [GPU] when you're in areas with no other people around.

So, as I say the advice is to turn your graphics up and I'd say everything on high except for shadows. Beyond that you'll have to wait for the Make Game Faster project that's currently in progress at SOE Towers.