Discussion - Why do alot of new players leave?

this is a good summation, thumbs up

In multiplayer games generally, players are the content... this is basic game design... players are the content.

so if we accept the premise that we WANT more new players in the game, and we WANT them to stay, become more experienced and provide better 'content' for all of us, what CHANGES can be made to reach that goal?

Possible suggestions:

SMALL Newbie continent on EACH server that is restricted to BR 1-20 with dedicated volunteer instructors who come in and teach strategy and run platoons. these servers may restrict certain weapons or vehicles like libs or battle tanks. base designs would be simple and easy to access.

BR 1-20 can go into the big boy servers, but always have a safe place to come back to.

Have teaching platoons on regular continents with volunteer platoon leaders that organize and train... members of these newbie platoons have unlimited nanites, access to high powered weapons, etc.

others? you tell me

LOL thanks, yea I seem to get that a lot, no one seems to like the fact that the background is the Original Osur from PS1 with the meteors falling out of the sky that pummeled it into the battle islands.

After reading a lot of comments it seems like the tutorial really needs to explain the cert system more than how to ADS and hipfire.

I haven't read any other post but I might, so if this is a re-post I'm sorry.

There is no deep meta-game, statistics are for many people more important than being the linchpin that won the battle. The game also doesn't offer much in that respect, it also doesn't offer the "nick of time" feeling you could get in other games. I maybe had that feeling three to five times in two and a half years of playing...

that was supposed to be Koltyr, did we end up not getting that cont?

I see different reasons that may make new players leave the game , in order to go back to other Fps.

- At first, PS2 is a relatively new game compared to older "brands" like BF or COD. Those had many sequels. So people may have spend a lot of time and money on these and have old friends playing, and don't have enough time or interest in learning how to play a new Fps.
I don't think the marketing of PS2 is as strong as BF or COD or others. Customers love marketing / advertising.

- Even if i do not play to Bf or Cod, i know that Ps2 requires a good and healthy computer. By the past, many improvements have been made to PS2 but it also required time spent (at least for me) in order to reach the required specifications in order to play the game in a good way. Many troubleshootings / patches / improvements / bugs and then. I doubt all players would search for minimum specs when they come at first on the game. They don't realize you need a relativly good computer in order to run it in the right way.

- Compared to any other Fps i tried, Ps2 is the one which offer the largest choices. Hudges maps, lots of equipment, lots of classes with diffrent gamplays. Evertyhing moves fast, everywhere,all time long. I guess newbies may be a bit "lost" at first : "Where should i go?", "What should i do ?", "What equipment and class should i pick up ?" . Some people may prefer to play at Fps which offer a spam of small maps, whith a short time of game : they'll not have to look for a destination , to look deeper for any equipment , and the action will only last 5 to 10 minutes. Having to make choices bore some people.

- As somebody else previously said, the learning curve is a hard for new players. I made a new second character, and thought that the Certs gain was really slow for newbies. So they have to be damn patient before being able to get decent armors , and gunnery. It's frustrating to die because you don't know the gameplay of a new game and you can't really reach any decent equipment. But they can increase the Cert gain by buying stuff at the cash shop ^^ .

New player come, log into game, he thinks oh my god starter zone is awesome lots of air units ground units, start instant action -> teleported into big fight, dies right after he lands. Start again, sees his/her fps is 15 and 200-500ms. Tries hard in next few mins, nothing changes, ppl just not rendering right. Exits the game - uninstalls the game.

I agree... Those of us who have been here for 18 months or so are kind of used to it and so kid ourselves that all is fine. For someone new, seeing headless peeps jittering around all over the place must be a big put-off...

T

The tutorial needs to not have the move&shoot part mandatory. Its insulting and makes people not want to try it.

My guesses are:
1) Latency. 300 ping can be a massive turnoff to anyone. Not to mention 600 ping
2) People are unwilling to grind.
3) People are put off by the toxicity of the community.

I see all your points, it's all mostly true. Trying to sum up the top problems and sollutions atm, putting it in a video after that Hopefully it'll help the devs a bit.

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/ping-issues.216135/#post-3118403

Here you go perfect case in point. A whole bunch of people who "no longer play". Who still use the forum and complain about ping issues but have never even opened a support ticket.

Of the 20 or so people I have introduced to the game that quit.... It was pretty much a standard list for all of them.

1. Lack of 'good' non-force multiplier spammed fights. This is because of a unfinished resource system that makes it far too easy to spam vehicles, max units and even consumables such as mines. It makes it feel meaningless to kill said vehicles/maxes and results in many fights being 100% or more overpopulated with said force multipliers. Even with redeploying as it is in the game it is frequently impossible to find a good balanced fight that isn't just a complete farm fest for one side. This doesn't just hurt the people playing, but it also tends to make stream viewing boring as well, which also hurts the game.

2. Boring and shallow vehicle game play. Vehicle combat aside from ESF nose gun duels has a significantly lower skill ceiling than infantry combat. This makes it boring and dull to play in a vehicle. The catch 22 however is that vehicles are much more powerful than infantry, almost forcing you to use them if you want to participate in some fights at any level other than bottom of the food chain. All vehicles are excellent infantry farming tools and have very little emphasis on what should be their primary roles and are for the most part poorly done, poorly designed and poorly balanced with crippling, extremely poor infantry/vehicle/air relationships.

3. Complete failure to utilize large scale of the game. There is no meta, no strategy, no real meaning or goal for outfits to achieve. No means to victory and a complete failure to support any real competitive scene. This leaves the game meaningless, shallow and largely just a crappier free to play BF or even CoD series game that is F2P. It always bothered me, why waste the time to make a game based around such large scale maps and combat, only to completely fail in every possible way to utilize that size in constructive ways. What we ended up with is a shallow game that has the worst of both lobby based games and the worst of open world games. We got the shallow meaningless game play that the regular shooters have combined with the play to crush cancerous zerging from open world games. They need to work towards adding depth, skill based mechanics and meaning to harness the good of both sides rather than so much of the bad.

4. Too much cheese. Too many easy to use super fast TTK/OHK means of killing players. Too many weapons that have low skill ceilings but are the most effective at something. Too many skill equalizers. To all the people I play with the sniper rifle was the only real OHK that made sense. It required the most skill to use of all infantry firearms and was very unforgiving in exchange for the ability to OHK only on a head shot. Shotguns made absolutely zero sense to them, that such easy to use and low skill ceiling weapons would be granted such terrifically strong TTKs. Lock ons were another unfavorable feature. Skill equalizers being added in to dumb games down in a backwards effort to cater to the 'casuals and noobs' is actually a big turn off to long term replay-ability and undercuts any efforts to add competitive, meaningful game play.

5. Lack of any mechanics in place that try to create good, roughly evenly matched fights, harness the power of egos/epeen or try to directly players against proper opponents. Why is there not a way to try and get outfit vs outfit fights built into the game? For example, why isn't the game trying to direct 20 TIW against 20 GOKU to try and spark a inter-outfit battle, oppertunity for some epeen and adrenaline rush? Why isn't the game trying to nudge new players against other low tier players in low value territory? One of the greatest downfalls of this game is that in its current form the absolute best place for a end game pro tier player/outfit to be is slaughtering hordes of low tier players for maximum farm and stats and to AVOID combat with apposing top tier players. The game should be trying to to pit high end players and outfits against each other, and those fights should yield the greatest rewards. Pub stomping ****ters shouldn't be such a great way to advance your char and farm.

The one thing I want to point out that everyone stated was actually done well is anti cheat. None of them ever felt cheaters were ruining the game or even effecting them at all. For a free to play game SOE did a very good job combating cheats. So whoever was in charge of and doing the heavy lifting in that department was much better at their job than pretty much everyone else that touched the game and they deserve credit for that. I just wish the rest of the team was equally competent, but they clearly are not.

Need more achievements, doritos, and moutain dew to keep them interested.

Seriously, its because they're millenials. Don't worry about them leaving. I'm more interested in keeping the 26+ crowd. You know the ones who actually have money and run to a wiki instead of a forum when confronted with something that gives them defeat.

The concept of the game is good, but the design is bad in lots of cases. And too many bugs, it feels like an alpha game at times.

Only being able to spawn at some bases is a big design flaw. It causes bases to be captured unfairly. And a faction taking over a continent at the end of an alert, if though the territory control is balanced is real cheap.

The map design is poor also. They try too hard by adding so many barriers and stuff, it makes gun fights bad. Only in some places of each continent there are decent designs that allow for good fights. Planetside 1 had these all over. Planetside2 doesn't. There isn't even bridges across water. Which is a must have.

I could go on forever with the bugs and bad designs, but I don't have enough time for that.

I started playing at launch, and abandoned the game for a year before coming back. Why did I leave? Because I was getting farmed by air that would just hover over my head, and even if I ran into a building, they'd hover around and around, firing into the windows until explosion damage killed me. There was nothing I could do about it except ditch the game, so I ditched the game. Why did I come back? Because I really want to play this type of game, and there really isn't any competition from anything similar. If there was, I'd likely be playing that. I haven't been able to get any of my friends to play this game with me, so I'm alone here. Two friends gave it a try, and immediately left because they started at night against the vanu and couldn't see them. Others made it to level 10ish, but don't have a lasting interest, because for them, it's just spawning, dying and repeating. They prefer slower pace RPG MMOs with story and a feeling of accomplishment. Some of that has been addressed in the game, with things like outfit recognition when capturing bases, but the kill-board system doesn't seem to work at all.
ESFs are keeping me on the edge of raging out of game for good though. Seriously.

I think the fact that someone from 400m away can just put his cursor over your head and press the mouse once to kill you is probably a reason. It doesnt happen much to me but when I play infiltrator and do this to 6 guys in a row I feel like im using a hack or something its just too easy and reward unskilled player and discourage team play. Even if close quarter infiltrator is overpowered at least its useful in teamplay.

I'm not a pew pew player. I don't enjoy FPS style games, but having an open mind, an interest in Sci-Fi, and this being free to play - I gave it a go. I mean, I wouldn't be out anything except an hour or two of my game time. My Guild wasn't running a raid that night. I had nothing doin'. You want to talk about the newbie who drops after an hour? I think I probably fit that demographic to a T.

Before I explain why I quit, let me explain why I came back. My Youtube suggestions planted the video, "Flawed", which I watched and which I think does an excellent job at capturing just how beautiful this game is. Out of all the MMORPG's I've played and all the RTS games I've played, and even out of all the FPS games I've played, Planetside 2 is the most beautiful, most stunning, most epic game engine I've ever had the privilege of running though. I have a gaming rig. I've spent more on my video card than some spend on their entire computers. I have no issues playing Planetside 2 on max video settings.

I was an early adopter of Planetside 2. When it popped up in my Steam feed I jumped in. I grabbed some guildies and we span camped a Sunderer. We took a Libby for a spin. We had a riot just goofing off. Everyone had the same thing to say about the game, it was gorgeous!

We had no issues figuring out what to do (as some have said), we had no issues figuring out our way through the certification process (experience with crafting in MMO's prob helped), we had no issues figuring out the game at all. We had an entire guild to draw from so our Outfit was quickly populated with people who already knew how to organize, plan, notify, schedule... We had our own Mumble server. We had our own forum, website, blog, Twitter feed, - all supported by four professional web developers (I'm one of them). When I say we went in hard, we went in HARD.

The first 10 ranks were easy. Dropping some coin on the game, just because it's so beautiful and because we wanted to reward the developers (hi guys!), was an easy sell. I got in on a Fathers Day sale and waited until the double point sale shortly after, which is to say I spent $50 and got $200 in SC.

About six months after launch (I played casually, whenever my primary toon wasn't raiding with the guild) I started to see things I didn't understand. I saw a guy run though a wall. I saw a guy run through the air... These aren't things my MMORPG brain could comprehend so I reached out to a couple of friends online who play FPS primarily; one of whom is a top ranked CoD player. He got me in touch with the lingo and explained how to spot the hackers. I dropped the game shortly after without spending half of my Station Cash. My guild mates experienced similar issues and shortly followed suit.

Over the last two years I've returned every 6 months to play 4 hours - just to evaluate the situation. On my last return I gave the game every single benefit of the doubt I could with respect to hackers. I am happy to say that I'm still here and that I haven't seen any wall hacks, I don't think I've experienced any aim bots, nor do I think I've seen any other signs of hacking in the last 40 hours.

My issues now are much simpler. I'm BR28 and every time I'm killed it's by someone above BR80, usually BR100 and the only toons I can kill are lower than BR20 of which there are very few (which is to say that I concur with the op's a prior argument). This means that my K/D is crazy bad. If K/D is how you talk about Kill to Death ratio. I don't know, like I said, I'm not a FPS player. I am not entirely hip to the lingo.

My other issue is with Outfits. I've been a part of three thus far. My own guild and two other absolutely abominable groups full of a-holes and d-bags. I wrote that off to bad luck, but I've had consistent experience playing pick-up with many platoons. Maybe this crunchy granola hippy shouldn't be playing FPS games, but WOW, the language some of you use, the sexism, the racism... truly unbelievable. Nothing makes me rage quite faster than having to listen to that kind of crap and Sony doesn't pay me to babysit.

Since returning to the game and having no outfit - I just solo as an infiltrator, medic or engineer and turn down all invites. I just don't need to hear that kind of crap.

So in answer to the OP, the reason newbies quit is because of the imbalance between newb and vet. If getting OHK'd repeatedly by BR 100's every 30 seconds doesn't ruin it for you then it's the language in the area chat or pick-up platoons that does. I don't know how anyone lasts long enough to hit BR100 with language like that. Perhaps the BR 100's just ignore it or perhaps they participate in it, but I seriously don't see the difference between the two.

Maybe I shouldn't have picked TR to play? I only played TR because I found that the difference between NC blue and Vanu purple was too close to differentiate at high speed so playing TR meant I could shoot anything that's not red. Simple.

I'm pretty close to quitting again. I'm really tired of getting OHK'd every 30 seconds by some platoon of BR100's playing on Esamir. Happy the hackers have been dealt with, happy with the game overall, no issues figuring it out, but losing repeatedly to OP a-holes is tiring.

I think the game is too confusing and frustrating for new players. I think most experienced players have "figured out" how to actually play the game (redeploy hops, best loadouts, keybinds, sensitivities, settings, best units, counters, how to get Certs, Loadout progression, etc.), and this kind of knowledge is not available to new players... even if they hunt for it on the internet, cause either it's not organized or they don't know what they're reading or it's out-of-date.

If players just try make a character and play, they get routed through Instant Action into a nightmare death loop. Getting dropped into and farmed at some Base being zerged by the enemy, and then getting respawned in the camped Spawnroom of that base over and over.

If they spawn Air, they can't figure the controls out and crash and die to a Tree. Or they manage to not crash but get ripped apart by enemy Air farming inside their Faction's territory or by AA if they make it to the Frontline. (this is true even for many players who have played the game for 2 years)

If they spawn ground a Vehicle, they have to drive to battles. And will likely get picked off by someone either before they get there or when they get there. Or they won't have enough passengers in their Vehicle to make it work right.

If they try to play as Sniper as TR or VS, they get confused their Sniper Rifle doesn't OHK with headshots... like every other FPS out there.

New Players also are very aware that they don't have access to most guns and don't have many Certs. And they think it's a scam when they see how low their Cert rate is and how much Guns cost.

Some player join a Squad that is not really playing together and just kinda random. And have a bad experience.

The New Player experience at the time the game Launched was MUCH better. Instant Action took people to the best battles. Everyone was pretty much on the same level in terms of Certs and game knowledge. And most people just ran around as Infantry and shared Sunderers to spawn at.