Is the Game Better than it was at Release?

Honest question. Are you having as much fun? Balance issues aside, faction posturing aside.

Are you having more fun, or even as much fun, in PS2 now?

Or has the game gotten worse?

So, two questions to sum up:

1. Do you believe the game has gotten better or worse since its release, overall?
2. When was the period when the game was most fun for you (and why)? It'd be great if you could provide a GU or PU number to go with this one.

If you don't want to talk about performance, bug fixes, balance or populations, you then must mean only in changes to game mechanics? As net effect yes I think it's better. Indar updates, better cover and spawning in bases, shorter biolab capturing, able to deploy at other continents' warpgates (hint), diversified weapon models and sounds. The Esamir and Amerish updates were mixed with good and bad, Amerish mostly good I guess.

I wish so much we still had the populations at release, even if I can't remember much of how it was playing. Higher pop is just always good. More players to fight with and more cash for SOE to develop things faster and better. I looked back at some old update notes and saw that november 21 (1 day after release) they added the Jaeger server to west coast. Almost exactly 2 months later (27th february) they remove 1/3+ of servers. Later someday they remove at least 1 more US server.

The games funness has stayed that same IMO.


People are gonna do the mistake of saying this game isn't fun anymore because they have played it for a long time so obviously the fun will become less.

Expect biased opinions, because every online game feels fresh and exciting in the beginning and loses its flavour over time.

1. Better gameplay than at release, overall. (Though my game itself is less stable now.)

2. Most fun was between September '13 and January '14, when I still played regularly with Tiedemann.
2b. Or at launch, when the scale of the game was still fresh, and everything was still new and full of wonder. (Like the guy above said.)

I feel like the game has gotten really stalematey. While things used to feel alot more fluid, battles move alot more sluggishly now it seems. Also, they nerfed more things than I can count, which in my opinion was the wrong way to approach the issue. Now, instead of an arsenal of fun and unique weapons, we have a pile of poop that not only looks the same (At least for VS/TR) but barely feels any different from eachother. Not even the faction specific abilities shine anymore (some haven't been shining for awhile now). They finally managed to slow down with the constant stream of gamebreaking updates, and although it still broke the game for a bit it was a step in the right direction.

Maybe because I'm bogged down with work and other games, but I haven't really had alot of time to appreciate Planetside 2 anymore. I had the most fun playing last summer, since there was always a good number of people playing and the tides were always changing.

I expect bias out the ***, but that's the goal. The point is how the game feels. I don't want stats or spreadsheets, if people aren't having fun, that's a problem that needs to be fixed.

I don't mean discount those things. I mean that I don't want to hear "Well the game was more fun when I had an OP thing." Talking about aspects of the game being too weak or too strong is perfectly fine for the scope of what I'm asking.

That is actually a pretty hard question to answer.

I am probably having less fun, but more addicted to this game so I play about the same amount.

When I first started playing Indar and Esamir were usually fully populated and I always found good fights, where one side wasn't just steam rolling the other, as well as each side having a good amount of vehicles to combat the vehicles on the enemy team. Now it just seems as if one side is severely over populated and has a ton of vehicles, while the other side tries to fight them but with much fewer numbers to where they can't fight the vehicles and take the control point(s). It is one or the other but rarely both. It seems as if people lost interest in actually fighting each other and now just ignores the first person shooting in favor of the mmo base capturing game.

For me it wasn't a specific PU or GU. It was when my server merged for the third time. I started on Genudine, then it merged with Helios, and finally Connery. The first month of playing on Connery was extremely fun but after that I couldn't play my NC char because we were always over populated, followed by TR over pop then VS and back to NC. Populations aren't that bad anymore but the server seems to have lots of problems ping wise and is mostly just AOE spamming and bad fights so I stay away.

When I play on Waterson or Mattherson the fights are generally more fun, but due to air superiority dictating the outcome of most fights, and the population generally being less, the air is harder to combat for smaller forces and a good deal of the time, players don't even bother.

I can't remember the update that changed the resource costs of vehicles but to me that was one of the things that created bad gameplay. They increased the costs of all land vehicles significantly, but not air vehicles which was just stupid and backwards.

PU01+02 were great and I was able to tell the difference when my infantry only K/D went from a little over 4 to 4.5-5.0+ on my characters, but those changes have been reversed somehow and my ping is much worse to all servers and frame rates are still dropping. If only they can undo the last couple months worth of patching I would be extremely pleased with this game. Especially debuffing the liberator.

[Admittedly, I haven't played since the nVidia GeForce driver compatibility issue reared its ugly head.

But t'other day, I was reminiscing with a friend about our early days with PlanetSide 2 at launch, how epic it was, how much more enjoyable it was. And that inspired me to check the forums once again, and I saw this thread.]

For me, I don't think you can sidestep the performance and pop issues. They're intrinsic to having fun in PS2 (and most games).

I remember times in the early days when I manned an aircraft pad at the warp gate, repairing aircraft when they came into resupply. It was so busy there were literally queues for the pads. It was like being part of a giant, chaotic war machine.

Nowadays even the largest zergs are rather paltry affairs, aimlessly roaming the map, looking for a battle to escalate.

In short, the games runs too poorly now, and there aren't enough people playing it.

I was thinking about Warframe, and how I've kept going back to that game because of the new maps and gameplay mechanics, to some extent the new toys. Then I look at PlanetSide 2, and it seems creatively bankrupt. Not even the new content is interesting.

So no, I don't think the game is more fun now than it was.

Do you believe the game has gotten better or worse since its release, overall?

Worse. It's like they started the game off in a clear direction, then a month or two after release, they decided it was the wrong direction, attempted to make a U-turn, and have been spinning out of control ever since.

When was the period when the game was most fun for you (and why)? It'd be great if you could provide a GU or PU number to go with this one.

Late beta (when I got into it) to march 2013. I loved the days of playing with a large outfit around the clock to achieve grand strategic goals. Every bit of it. I loved rolling through large swathes of territory with a horde of tanks just destroying everything in sight until we got to the enemy warpgate, and I loved it when both sides would fight tooth and nail to get that one last territory they needed that decided control of the entire continent. With the inclusion of alerts, those goals have been forgotten, and with the lattice and the changes that came with it, the means of achieving those goals are all but lost. The game has greatly lost its overall luster over time. They've made these giant and catastrophic changes to the core gameplay, and now we've gotten to a point where they've just left them all unpolished and unfinished for almost a year now.

Gameplay: Equal.

Hex had problems, Lattice has problems
Traded ghostcapping for repetitivity

Indar was bad, Indar still is bad
Amerish is good, Wallamir is bad

Even if you consider balance/bugfixes/populations, it's outdone by the year of excrutiating lack of content.

The Planetside 2 Development Team is deeply committed to the concept of horizontal progression, so much so that for everything they fix... they break something else.

Pretty much gotta agree with this. I'm currently in a semi-break period. Just doing some outfit stuff, but keeping my In-Game time to a minimum. North worth the frustration from bugs and lack of content to play for much on a weekly basis...certainly not when I have life. (Yes, I am willing to sacrifice some of my social life for gaming...if the game is worth it.)

Better.

You only have to look through the archived threads to understand why and for me its taken a leap forward every time they have refined base design but then took a step back at the same time as they would often remove a outside base terrain feature that acted as a "back road" and reduced flanking while making zerging down a lane more imperative.

Improved base design solved a lot of "The Liberators and Tanks are spawn camping!" that we had at the start. Improvements to base design reduced ghost capping. Improvements to base design made it more likely a smaller organized force could defend against a larger unorganized force but not a larger organized infantry force with support vehicles.

Any advances in the fun of the core gameplay has always been tied to the quality of the base design in accounting for that this is a combined arms game and I surmise that any future improvements that impact just how fun the core game is will happen when the Lattice opens up more so its no longer lanes and increase flanking and FOBs for vehicle combat, SCUs at every base to stop spawn camping and reduce arbitrary wait times to capture, more variations of capture mechanics than point capture, and every base getting automated AI turrets and barricades configured, upgraded, and tweaked by the defenders for the attackers to puzzle solve in violent, sneaky, and crafty fashion alike.

Better base design means better missions and more options for player creativity.

Basicly, the more this game becomes like PS1 but as if the PS1 design had the tools and resources of today combined with the creativity of the modern gamer who enjoys Minecraft and Arma 3 at the same time, it will only get better.

That and official support for Canon Ball Death Racing leagues and dancing animations for ingame Rave parties as a game with in the game Dare to dream, dare to dream...

Overall better. New toys and options to play with. More quality of life and variety stuff, not a whole lot of new content. Base redesigns made sense and added some diversity.

Really no more or less stable than it was at release for me, same with performance. I guess there were people that benefited from performance improvements. On my almost 3 year old (built under 1k$) PC I can't tell the difference, so I don't know who those people are or what kind of antique hardware they tried running this on. Anytime anyone posts their hardware specs on forums it's always better than mine, and I have always run everything on high without hiccups.

I would say definitely better. They;ve tweaked a lot of things to make it more accessible such as adding ribbons and lowering the points to gain certs, they've improved bases and done a lot of add ons and even attempted to rectify the technical problems. But they still have a lot to do and plus there are still things that need to be addressed.

But they're going the right way, even if its a bit slow and perhaps they should have added this stuff from the start. Which is probably the point most people would argue. Presumably.

Overall I'd say it's better but the lack of meaningful content is making interest in playing very hard and the server issues are starting to get tedious.

Better by a mile. Nearer release Infiltrators were bland, continents were a mess, ground vehicle gameplay was absolutely zergy (as opposed to relatively zergy), air gameplay was superficial, infantry AA/AG was horrendously inadequate, redeployment was at times a pain, weapon balance was iffy and we didn't have Lumifiber.

The game improved in so many aspects that at this stage it is hard to portray a positive aspect from back in the day without being delusional or making stuff up. The only significant flaws the game has are right at the core of the game, which means they will take a while to implement (resource revamp) or, as is often the case, SOE will simply stick to their guns and change nothing.

I miss the Crown.

Really, really bad.

Can't say that much - we adapt as the game changes - its just what it is now vs. what it was back then.

But one thing I can say for sure - no lattice was more fun, especially pre-lattice Esamir.

The lattice makes for these boring slugfest we have today.