[Suggestion] Ten simple features that made Planetside great.

Just to clear up a few things here...

All bases had a control console (CC) that required you to hack it using a tool called a REK. Hacking a CC took a certain amount of time...One could obtained more certifications for the REK which would allow them to hack a CC faster... There were no such things as classes in PS1 therefore there was nothing called 'infiltrator' in PS1... There was a cloak suit you could wear that would give you the same ability as an infiltrator in PS2 but this has nothing to do specifically with hacking a CC... Anyone with a REK could start a hack on an enemy base... The REK had other uses such as opening doors and installing viruses in bases too....

As BlackDragonFun mentioned, only certain bases had this module that you had to bring to a connecting friendly base to capture the enemy base... The object that spawned at the enemy base when it was hacked is called a Lattice Logic Unit (LLU)... It was a little glowing ball that one player had to grab and take to friendly connected base in order to capture the enemy base... You had to bring the LLU to the CC of the friendly connected base within 15 minutes or the hack would fail and have to be started again... Only certain bases had this and all other bases used only the hack timer of 15 minutes... If an enemy resecured the hack (by using his REK on the base CC that was hacked) then the LLU would disappear and the hack would have to be reinitiated... The player carrying the LLU could not drive any vehicles and could not fly in any vehicles... He could only be a passenger of a ground vehicle...

were both playing an mmo, we both have time to waste
and who would turn down 'luxury' over 'bland' stuff they have all the time?

I find sitting for ages pecking away at a guy tedious, not luxurious.

Luxurious is bath salts and a massage.

Nobody sits right outside your warpgate and spies on you. If they spy on you they do it with a second account, in your faction, inside your warpgate.

Nobody spies in PS2, no need to when you got stuff like dorito spotting and thermal imaging.

We can do without the cloaker jerks.

The real benefits to capturing and holding a particular objective is how much of a good farm it is, not this stuff.

After watching a few old Quake1 videos, I realized that spawn timers don't do anything but make you wait longer and make it easier for the enemy to approach/camp your spawn point.

I'd rather have a realistic system of logistics where toys (the manufacture, transportation, storage and distribution) are spawned into at will, and the limitations is the natural limitations of a realistic system of logistics brings. Not bandaid fixes.

Then it makes it even easier for C4 fairies to fly or drive tanks around, hop out before they die and cheese. What happened to the good ole PS1 system where you were limited to agile armor if you wanted to fly/tank? Now that's something good we should bring from PS1, the infantry "class" system.

Too bad the Orbital Strike negated that.

PS1 never struck me as having any recognizable system of attrition. WWIIONLINE had attrition, PS1 had an obnoxious system where 1 ant driver would infuriate the 100 friendly players if he failed, or the 100 enemy players if he succeeded.

Infantry are as only as effective as their spawn point, and without the PS1 AMS (or cloaking sunderer whatever) infantry are nothing but inflexible, slow, soft, weak, zerglings that need to be buffed, just like infantry AV was buffed in PS1 because the Orbital Strike kept destroying all the AMS's ......and the EMP blast kept destroying all the CE. And everyone knows that an AV buff is the same thing as a vehicle nerf, so to pretend this problem didn't exist in PS1 is really putting on the rose colored glasses.

Bringing in BFRs with proper balancing and a defined role beyond "bigger, better tank" would provide greater sustenance than a majority of the OPs suggestions. The warp gates currently fill in as sanctuaries. Increased infantry timers just punishes the pushers but benefits the K/D w****es that actively avoid death already. If you think we have a sniper/HA abundance issue now...

Nanites and powering bases is a concept that should work in PS2 though. Yeah, one dude marching around to top of bases is pretty "meh." The thing with nanites is that it allowed for bases to be very defensible as opposed to the swiss cheese huts we have now, because like any good siege, if it's hard for the invader to push in, it's hard for the defender to push out. The ANT was the tie-breaker, forcing the defense to prove they could push out while the invasion force could settle with just cutting off all supply lines. That's strategy.

Vehicles and infantry do have defined roles, here's the problem though - there's no cover for infantry in the open field. Consider this, for all you nostalgic people - how many trees/rock outcroppings were just positively littered across each continent, around bases, in the fields? A lot right? This is why infantry and vehicle balance worked. The old HE was roughly what we saw from tanks in PS1. There difference was that there were so many trees for players to duck behind in PS1, even if the tanker could splash behind the tree, he was likely to only nail one guy at a time. The rest would be engaging with their rexo/HA/AV/med/eng universal soldier setups. The tanks dominated in the open spaces, the infantry kept to the denser regions, and they were always fairly close. It was like a coral reef next to an open ocean. Fish with torpedoes vs sharks with lasers on their heads.

What we see frequently in PS2 however is a swarm of infantry piling up behind one or two points of actual cover, which is why the HE shell got nerfed into oblivion - one shell could take out half a squad with ease regularly, because the infantry had no where else to go that offered even a semblance of cover. In hindsight, SOE is so concerned with how their continents look being as they're hand crafted, they never really considered or haven't at least realized what is necessary for the meta of infantry-vehicle combined arms to work.

you said it was a luxury, not me, i just asked why you'd turn down luxury for the same blandness you get in the vast majority of FPS's(which ironically are so good you don't play them)

Once again I really appreciate everyone taking the time to read and respond. I should have put up a disclaimer at the beginning of the post saying how completely overtaken I am by nostalgia. I would have been utterly thrilled by just giving Planetside 1 a graphics overhaul and doing away with BFRs, but even then I don't really care that much about graphics. Unfortunately nostalgia is all I have left of what was once a very enjoyable and fulfilling gaming experience; I would do anything to have that back. I feel the same way about Everquest 1, but that's for a different discussion board. My sincere hope is that enough people share my views so that this game can really take off and develop the playerbase that a true Planetside successor deserves. Now to respond to a few posts.

How in Gods name could I have forgotten about the lodestar? For those of you that don't know about the lodestar it was an all-in-one mobile support platform for vehicles. It had proximity repair, albeit very very slow for balance issues, and also allowed drivers/pilots to rearm while they waited patiently. I also forgot about the liberator being tech, thanks for the correction. As for the size of the galaxy and lodestar being too big for other facilities: I'm positive this was done intentionally to provide another strategic advantage for capturing and holding the dropship facility on-continent as I truly believe everything in PS1 was done with a purpose.

What an excellent point to bring up. Completely revamping the indefensible meatgrinder-killfest facilities would be a great first step to try to capture new players. The current base designs are terribly noob-hostile. Even with the time I've invested in PS2 I still can't find the right teleporter in biolabs or even the airpad in amp stations. I prefer stairwells to all the cheesy jump pads and hover-elevators.

Are you suggesting that the game in its current form is noob friendly and is always attracting new players? If so, I strongly disagree.

Spot on. PS2 and Battlefield/CoD are not the same business model. If this fact isn't fully realized the game is destined to fail. How many iterations of BF/CoD have there been since PS2 entered development? I don't know for sure but it's definitely more than one.

Couldn't agree more with the gist of your post but anyone could carry a Remote Electronics Kit and hack the control console. There were two types of captures: hack and hold or lattice logic unit. PS1 was not perfect, but it was a waste of resources to completely discard the fundamentals and start from scratch.

Yes of course it was done purposefully, thats what i meant by 'balance reasons'. I agree, everything in ps1 was thought out, it didnt always work out, but there was alot more thought put into it than, for example, ''when you pull a tank in modern games, everyone expects to use the main gun'' - higby's response when asked why 1/2 MBTs are a thing, no thought of how it would affect the balance of the game.

worth a read

http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-making-of-planetside/

No, it isnt noob friedly and after your dumb change it would be COMPLETELY NOT noob friendly

So they wrote this April 2013, and didnt even mention the sequel that was already available at the time?
Nice article tho, the dev comments about the playerbase were particularly interesting.

I think it was mentioned before (it certainly came up within this last week in another thread.) The options that allowed small units to have big effects on battles. Part of the (yes I'm bringing this up again) Meta game.

Not gonna quote this as I normally would, but those that don't know how a PS1 scenario would play out, read this:
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...meta-game-in-planetside-2.82230/#post-1064685

I'm well aware, this isn't PS1. But it shouldn't be a sessions shooter with a PS theme and a bigger battlefield either.

I'm giving up on PS2 and just going to be a noob playing PS1 at max settings to scratch my itch. Its too bad they don't find a way to monetize PS1 with adverts or micro-transactions to continue supporting it properly.

Because round based games are totally unfriendly to noobs...

Oh, wait.

Maybe I don't find it bland?

Maybe just because CoD does something it doesn't automatically make it ****?

Want a longer TTK - go play ******* DOTA.

maybe you have ADHD?

not at all, CoD does what it does very well apparently.............. so why do we need another game just like it?.................. if it's so fantastic you'd think it'd get played for longer than a year though!

when it's an mmofps with hovertanks. i will.

edge don't seem to write an article just because sequel around or whatever. a genuine 'interest' piece rather than 'advertisement'.

Requoted for relvence on a few things.

"WHY PS1 wasn't recylced as much as it should have in PS2"

[Over time, though, the endless nature of Planetside’s war created virtual combat fatigue. “That was definitely, if I can take the egg on my own face, a mistake,” admits Lawrence with surprising candour.]

What he means here is that you cannot just have a game of this scale simply have people shoot at eachother and that's it; one of PS2s issues and a major reason why new people quit. You're going to die a lot, even in PS1 you die repeatedly. The difference was that in PS2 there is virtually nothing else to do as a new player but die repeatedly to the chaotic mess that this PS1 devs refers too in another comment below. In PS1, Metagame tactics meant there was more than just "more combat with more players".

[“One of the things I wanted to get in, but didn’t, was a system where players had a greater impact in terms of the rules of the war.” Too busy fighting technical issues, the dev team sacrificed plans to allow players who won a continent the ability to restructure its supply lines, bases and defenses.]

The equivalent of an End Game reward. Win a continent, restructure it's lattice so your team and try and hold it better next time.
This is important because one of the strengths in a game's longevity is player created modifications. Map Making, Mods, Models and Skins all contribute but understandably in an MMO this is hard. This is why MMOs rely mainly on DLCs and Expansions to keep themselves fresh because otherwise, Players will quickly wear out due to the static nature of game world.
In this design that was never implemented, PS1 would've had a far less Non-Static world than it already had; letting players redesign some of the fundamental game play systems for themselves and too their liking. And the plan was to tether this as a Reward for winning a continent. Brilliant idea; and of course one that PS2 has likely never considered.

[“We didn’t want Planetside to turn into pure chaos with 500 players running around,” McCann laughs. “We gave the players objectives and then let them decide what to do.” The levelling system offered committed players the chance to become Command Rank tacticians, guiding the deployment of troops.]

Hm, pure chaos with 500 players running around. Sound familiar?
Fix; give a variety of objectives that are tangible and malleable to the progression of the game so that players have the choice of which to pursue and know that they are REQUIRED to do some of these objectives to move forward. The order and time in which they do them is entirely on the shoulders of the rewarded leaders; leveled vets who progressed to their leadership level.

[For all its flaws, Planetside deserves a medal of honour for its staggering ambition. It proved that not all MMOGs had to follow the Tolkein-esque, quest-based template. “I think my corporate overlords would have enjoyed making much more money on it,” Lawrence admits when quizzed about Planetside’s legacy, “but it was successful in that we created an MMOFPS, something unheard of at the time.”]


And of course, the nail in the coffin as to WHY PS2 doesn't build on these features. It doesn't make money being deep, complex and intriguing. It only makes money milking masses of ADD FPS players already consumed by current 10 year box shooter craze. Obviously, this has failed for PS2 as players like those do not retain. Even worse, I think many would be surprised as too how many of those seemingly "simpleton" players are actually interested in a game of that level of complexity. We cannot and should not ever doubt the intelligence of a playerbase. To assume that all just want simple and stupid is a foolish way to go and it only serves to leave those very players distrusting of your business and development philosophies and disheartened at the change that no Developer has the balls to push out a break through like PS1, ever... again.

I do, thanks for highlighting my borderline-disability

I play PS2 for the fast-paced massive battles...what possible way could that be improved if everyone has to hack away at each other for 20-30 seconds to kill anyone?

We already have stalemate situations happening all the time - a longer TTK would only increase that happening, and slow everything down...What possible reason could you have to think that's a good idea?

i've had sex, speed isn't everything, often more enjoyable to take your time.