Is weapon balance all people care about ?

I mean 99% of the 'Planetside 2 Gameplay Discussion' threads fall into the 'Weapon X is OP. Nerf it!' or 'Faction Y is OP/UP'...

Is it all what GAMEPLAY is about ?

I remember a time when we had discussions about whether or not it was good to have people forced to stay on points to flip them, about whether timers were too long or too shorts, beacon placement, . You know... stuff about CORE GAMEPLAY mechanisms.

Now it seems people only care about lobbying for their own weapons/faction...

And orks were greener.

Nice point

You Sir are stark raving sane.

But what you are witnessing is the playerbase left.

They are satisfied with TDM and therefore weapons tweaks are all they can come up with.

A lot of the rank 100 TDMers would have moved on long ago, rank 100 being their objective and having met it lost interest.

Those of us longing for even the sophistication of an end of round CTF left long ago as well, the farce of a roadmap ample evidence why waiting any longer was futile.

Personally I only come back to prod the rotting cadaver with a stick in wonder of what this title was hyped to be and what it became.

The people left have what they want, somewhat like feeding caviar to pigs, just as the 150 players of SMNC have what they want and can't let it go.

Why would anyone bother about anything besides guns? Game is about shooting things, objectives/tactics are irrelevant.

Solution: http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/

Can you read ? There USED TO BE discussions about objectives and tactics so they must have been relevant at some point in time...

Nice but why is it not happening here ?

There are no discussions about core gameplay because core gameplay is perfect and enjoyable in every way. There can be no doubt that it is one of many things that contributes to the amazing success of Planetside 2 and it will remain so during the PS4 release that will in no way become a ghost town in less than 1 year.

Can you read your own posts? "have been relevant at some point in time" - i.e. not anymore. Ppl had hopes, they discussed cool things. Not much hope can live through 3 years of neglect.

I'm all style over substance... Looking good comes first No really, sometimes I just use gun XY because it matches my outfit nicely.
I could cry endlessly about NC MAXes, but I dont find the status quo half bad, so I'd prefer to instead of ******* things up, keep the game balance at the very well playable state it is right now and therefor all those people making up all that OP nonsense are pretty annoying because I can't know how detrimental they will get when the devs take any of that serious.
I've seen the downfall of 2 MMOs in which the devs listened to the community and it was much as if you knew the car crash is coming miles ahead.

Some of us older folks still want to:

1) Change the "redeployside" focus of the game.
2) Implement actual logistics and reasonable resources.
3) Promote combined arms gameplay.
4) Balance the new player experience.
5) Encourage the use of transports and open-field warfare.

Those are all "gameplay" debates. Just that it's drowned out under a sea of other complaints.

Because most people who like constructive discussion went to reddit.

How else can they feel empowered?

Weapon balance and bug/performance fixes are more important than new meta or other content.
Why build on an unstable foundation?

No, people simply don't care about something that is not shiny enough. If you want to get their support you MUSTN'T suggest a small change, it HAS TO BE a HUUUGE and COMPLETE AND TOTAL REVAMP of everything, adding mechs, space battles, aliens and all the ridiculous things that come to your mind...

Not really there is also the HA shield balance.

"Bomb drop time to take the exit" ----> [ ]

Lobbying or not, this is an online multiplayer game that involves shooting each other. The only thing that matters s balance. It should be the first, second and third thing discussed in every gameplay disccusion and design document for any versus mode game. This game has no single player campaign to focus efforts on, it has nothing but multiplayer, and so multiplayer needs to be the only concern.

No, weapon balance isn't the only thing we care about, it's just the only changes we actually see happen, so we tend to talk about them more often. After a while, talking about various gameplay changes that never come gets old, when instead we talk about balance changes that actually do happen.

But this is not a deathmatch game!!! I can agree that people spend so much time crunching numbers in an effort to know whether or not the railgun has more/less K/M than the Sniper gun IN QUAKE!!!

PS2 is not (never was as far as I know) meant to be a large scale Quake-like shooter where weapon balance is the Alpha and the Omega of all gameplay.

If the game is just another shooter, let's just reduce the map to Crown/Ti/Ceres Hydro.
You'll have people shooting each other 24/24 and nothing to care about but weapon balance...