Well, this is another one of these "PS2 is slowly dying" threads. Its not the first one we've seen, but I think its important that SOE pay attention to these numbers because it is quite concerning. Everytime they release a new patch and break the game, they lose players. I compared the population from last Friday (18 March 2014) to this Friday (04 April 2014). Its quite clear that players are rapidly losing interest in PS2. We had a worldwide population peak of 10639 players last Friday across all servers, and only 8417 this Friday.. That's 2200 less players in 1 week... a decline of 20% population in 1 week. In a game where the players = content, I think SOE should be concerned. See the graphs for yourselves.. http://borderlinetactical.net/rsnc/world-population/?world_id=0&zoom=4&totalpop=true
You can compare to a Friday from 1 month ago if you wish too. No doubts about it.. we had a significant drop in pop. You can blame it on whatever you want, midterms.. whatever. I think the real reason is probably due to the ridiculous amounts of bugs SOE incorporated with the last few updates.. or the lack of in game support when exploiters or hackers decide to make an appearance.
I'd like to see how things look once the semester is over with. That's nothing new. It's been like that since the beginning. Remember the invisible Gal/Lib incident?
Only too well. But when the game was newer, players were more "willing" to accept these kinds of bugs. Now that the game has been out for over a year, players are getting irritated when everytime they patch something, new extremely game breaking bugs somehow slip through.. like the invulnerability bug.. or the crash to desktop bug.. which btw.. the game has been crashing to desktop since alpha..
As much as I hate to say it, I've noticed a lot of smaller fights and fewer big ones as well.. Too bad really, I'd love for this game to succeed, however, the constant crashes, insane amount of bugs and in-game problems are sure to drive many away. Plus the lack of proper tutorial for new people on understanding the main objectives really negates on their stay and willingness to play. Most "new" people are friends being hand held for the 1st little bit on how the game plays, then MAYBE they stay but frustration from bugs and crashes usually draws the line. Too bad..
The rushed patches are causing such frequent problems that it feels like the game is in a constant state of being patched to fix what they broke in the last patch which may or not have succeeded in fixing what the patch before that messed up. Not to mention it just adds a lot of maintenance times doing patches so often. They need to slow down and focus on quality over quantity/frequency. There are certainly other problems with the game and we could rant about weapon/vehicle imbalance and bad base design and broken resource system and so, but I think the big one is it just it feels like the game is in disrepair most of the time now. That and the upgrade now ordeal on top of performance issues/bugs/bad hit detection/server lag/frequent maintenance and so on made it look even more like a seedy "free to play pay to win" microtransaction focused game that exists solely to suck money out of its players.
This game is getting more polished, but also it keeps losing its edge. If something is really fun, SOE nerf it. When there's some feature or meta in this game that is really good, SOE chooses to balance things out by nerfing so that everything sucks equally bad, instead of boosting other things so they are equally fun and good.
As some stated above last weekend was a dbl xp for members so that does change the numbers a bit. How much, I don't know. That said, the lag on Connery both times I've logged in tonight has rendered the game virtually unplayable. Couple that with the point flipping bug that was happening recently (fixed?) and air spam lately and I'm wanting to log in less and less. Oh and you can add to that the last two nvidia drivers not being compatible .
Server-side lag. Rushed weekly updates, that cause more bugs then they fix. Lack of polish and attention to detail. Crash to desktop issues. SOE continuously gets it wrong, year after year. It's obviously a management problem because it affects multiple products across multiple years.
Balance is good and necessary but there are lots of decisions I really do not understand. What reasoning brought them to the ADS/Jumping nerf? I just can't see it. The comments and planned nerf of the Overshield? These seem to come out of the blue and suggest a worrying dis-joint between the developers and the player community IMO. Lastly, I find the forum rather poisonous. This forum seems more hungry to "Nef the Other" than any other online game I have played. Which is strange when one of the defining features of Planetside 2 is the ability to play all classes. I just don't see it.
When Hossin comes out they're going to have to merge again, else you'll have completely dead continents being ghost capped.
Absolutely i have noticed less people playing, and its got nothing to do with external factors like double XP or school. Speaking with my outfit mates and from my experiences there are a few key issues with the game right now which is killing people's desire to play. 1- Input sensitivity has been changed (this is a massive issue btw) 2- Stutter, lag 3- Endless content patching which creates more bugs and fixes which do not fix or in some cases make things worse 4- Tired of hearing about control consoles and being told to UPGRADE NOW Currently i have a long list of players saying they will not return until ' things get fixed ' but gamers are fickle and the truth is they may not come back even if by some miracle SOE does fix these issues.
Yep, I reckon whilst that might not (maybe) be all of it, it likely is most of it. Double exp last weekend is bound to have gotten more playing, and ESO launch this week is likely to kept more than a few playing.
