So you hear it a lot amongst Planetside players, or at least those on the way out, that the game just isn't fun. You capture points, camp spawns, take the base, go to the next one, rinse and repeat until you either hit the enemy warpgate or liberators blow up all your Sunderers and no one pulls new ones. We agonize over how potential game changers like the continental lattice and more robust missions and directives seem pushed further and further away behind an endless stream of new guns no one asked for. We hear about how new players struggle to get a grasp on the basics of how to play the game. We even go at each others' throats over weapons being unfair, maybe with more than a little self-interest based on how recently those guns have killed us, as if to try to vent the frustration we have with our gaming experience as a whole somewhere. All those things may have their own merits to them, but I'd like to talk about an experience I had with the game: It was just this Sunday on the Waterson server. The NC on Indar were trying to wrest control of Mao Tech Plant from the TR, starting with a big battle going back and forth between Camp Connery and Mao Watchtower. I usually play light assault or get into tanks as an engineer, but I was uncharacteristically playing Infiltrator for a while. A bit earlier I had something of a "a-ha" moment regarding proper sniper positioning, and I wanted to try getting over a mountain between the bases on a Flash to snipe at the Terran solders from behind. Getting the Flash over the mountain proved to be a futile effort, having to make the trek on the other side by foot, and realizing that my choice of location to cross over was if anything, closer to the tech plant than the bulk of the action would normally have me regretting my lack of foresight. This blunder however turned out to be a blessing in disguise, however. Getting closer to the tech plant allowed me to get a view on a lone Phalanx anti-vehicle turret firing from the gun deck towards the general direction of where the fighting was. Who knows the guy was hitting anything from there, probably not, but I figure if he's going to stay up there I might as well try to kill someone in this life, and so I ventured forth, far behind enemy lines towards the still locked down Mao Tech Plant with my barely certified infiltrator using bone stock weapons. It wasn't too hard getting into the place undetected. There was no one actually there to watch me enter, and even if there was I was deliberate about my use of cloak, only turning it off safely behind cover to recharge before running from cover to cover while invisible. I made it to the lift pad and started my ascent up, trying to quickly plan my next move. I started the ascent uncloaked, but figured I would cloak a bit before entering the gun deck to be able to assess the threat up there while invisible before uncloaking in a quiet corner and making my move on the turret. Bad news for me however, I uncloaked just a bit too late, late enough that those close enough to the top of the lift would have heard me come up. Good news however, was that the TR soldier manning the turret was still there. Worse news however, was that he had switched to an AA turret, which was now facing my general direction. I ran for cover immediately, being fired upon all the way there. Even when I made it there safely he was pounding away in my general direction. I take assessment of my situation. Even if I could get close to the turret while cloaked to hack the turret, he'd see or hear me uncloak next to it. He could get out when he wanted, I wouldn't have any element of surprise and due to the clientside delay he would have the advantage in a straight up fight. I don't have any anti-armor weapon I can damage his turret with on me, and even if I tried to run he could follow me out, and at best I'm running for my life for nothing. Luckily for me, I had ducked into the bay behind the now empty anti-vehicle turret he was using earlier. A quick hack job later and he's finding himself sorely outgunned. I blow up the turret, but I see him escape before the final shot was fire, someone who clearly knew when to fold them. I take stock of my situation again. I don't know his class, though I could make out he definitely wasn't another infiltrator, so anti-vehicle weaponry isn't out of the question. If I'm up against a Heavy I'm in bigger trouble, since he could either rocket the turret I hacked to blow it up and me with it, or force me into a head on fight I couldn't win. Either way, I can't swing my turret around to shoot at him if he approaches, and if he makes an escape it's only a matter of time before he comes back with a class better suited for the job. No choice then. I have to fight. I leave the turret and brandish a bone-stock Mag-Shot, running out from the booth just as he rounds the corner. There's not ten feet between us. An enemy light assault or engineer, with a carbine. It's life or death as we open fire on each other, all the rush and thrill of combat far from the main fighting, knowing that I'm both outgunned and at a shield disadvantage. If his aim is on, even if we open fire at the same time, I'm dead. His aim was wide and he put his magazine into the turret behind me, and I pick him off while he's reloading. No time to celebrate. I do what I can while I'm up there to hack as many turrets as possible. Several of them were already destroyed, perhaps a Reaver flew by earlier and that's why he switched to the AA gun. I hack about half of the intact turrets to my side before realizing another problem. Now that I killed him, he knows I'm up here.If he's smart he'll come back and put a stop to my hacking spree, probably as a heavy with a much bigger gun and shield, and I'm not likely to get lucky twice. I have to contemplate an escape route. If I take the lift pad back down I might run into TR on the way down and get picked off. I can't jump off the gun deck obviously, unless you consider suicide a suitable escape option. Looking around quickly, the last turret I hacked is next to an air terminal. That's the ticket, I think. I hack one to my side and, as fast as I can, spawn a Reaver and fly back towards the main battlegroup, making the quickest escape I knew how. In measurable terms I didn't accomplish much. The entire episode was maybe five or six minutes, and in that time I killed one guy, hacked three turrets and an air terminal. Given that the the tech plant wasn't even up for grabs yet, and that it's unlikely the turret gunner was hitting much of anything at Mao Watchtower from that distance, I probably didn't affect the main battle at all. But at the same time what I played through had to be one of the most thrilling experiences I have ever had in a first person shooter. What started as a detour, caught onto by chance due to a blunder on my part, turned into a wonderfully organic little adventure, in which armed with little more than a cloak, a pistol, my wits and more than a little luck, I fought my way to a victory entirely of my own. And the more I think about it, the more I realize this sort of encounter could only have happened in a game like Planetside 2, where you have such a massive environment in which the circumstances change very rapidly, and you never know what might be going on a little beyond the battle at hand. Maybe the game isn't where it could be. Maybe what I experienced was just a fluke. I went out looking for one thing and ultimately found myself in a very different situation. Maybe everything bad people say about this game is right and it's only a matter of time before it dies out, but Planetside 2 could shut down tomorrow and I'll still always remember that one time I went out on a botched sniping run and got into an adventure like no other shooter could have provided. And for that, I'll always be grateful.
I had a horrid experience today. I log on and see a fight at esemir munitions corp, i deploy. The base was surounded by magriders on the hills and liberators above. the base is obviously designed so infantry can battle over the bridges that connect the the towers. None of the NC were smart enough to deal with the threats of liberators and magriders. they were all trash players with no good outfits or players in sight. no teamwork no nothing just a steam roll on all sides. The experience left me so sour i couldn't enjoy the game for the rest of the day. All i wanted was a good fight but the players are sooooooo bad they can't win with even odds. I understand these bases are designed to be defended by large outfits. but... I dont see that happening ever again.
Nice story, OP! This, to me, highlights some of what the game itself should be aiming for in order to help curb issues with population imbalances. For me, some of my own best-gameplay-ever experiences come from PS1, where a single squad was able to stymie a zerg ten times its number through guerrilla warfare, clever use of chokepoints and sabotage. PS2 offers the options, but it doesn't offer any tangible benefit to them beyond the experience itself - much like your own story illustrates. You said it yourself: the impact on the greater scale of things was probably negligible. When we get a situation where it doesn't have to be negligible, I think PS2 will really take off as a game. Ghost capping is not fun, but ghost trolling a zerg in such a way that it directly impacts the other group's ability to function effectively will create (dare I say it) strategies beyond simply throwing numbers at lanes. I look forward to that game; it'll be awesome. And it'll have far more stories like yours.
Boy, did I pick a bad day to start this thread, what with all the rage against implants (which I will not be getting into in this thread). I suppose there's several points I could be trying to get at. One of course is that these kinds of organic, spur of the moment encounters are a lot of fun and the game has so much potential to encourage and reward this kind of gameplay. Maybe I'll make a suggestion thread later talking about how they could do more things along those lines. There's raw untapped entertainment where, in a game world this large, you could just go around and see what you run into. But the point I was trying to get at perhaps most strongly was the notion of finding the fun. It's pretty easy to get bogged down in the ho-hum meat grinder of head on confrontations, constant back and forth struggles over the same terrain, and seemingly endless obsession with statistics like KDR and SPM. Admittedly this is the kind of experience the game currently rewards, since as it stands right now the game rewards making kills considerably more reliably than almost any other action, even important supporting ones like providing and keeping up AMS support. Even beyond that though, sometimes there are opportunities like this waiting out there where, even if they aren't worth much in the way of certs or better statistics, represent a kind of experience that's valuable in itself. The back and forth slog between two swarms of players isn't everything. So when you log in to Planetside 2 next, I suggest trying something really different. Not something simple like play a different class than usual. I mean stuff like breaking away from the big fight entirely and going somewhere where you aren't "supposed" to be. Go way behind enemy lines and see what you run into. Try coming at a battle from the exact opposite direction everyone else on your side is attacking from. Maybe do what I did out of necessity by choice and challenge yourself to fight at a disadvantage, where the only thing really standing between you and a long trek back from the spawn room is your own wit. The fun is out there to be had, and perhaps you'll have an adventure of your own, the memory of which is worth more than any number of certs.
