Planetside 2 is DYING.

yup, I quit for months after I araxiumed my prowler

And I auraxiumated my HA armor and never use it because it looks lame, anticlimatic, out of this game. I expected something different (some bulky armor or something) but not a glowing circus costume.

games that have staying power are easy for casual players to find a fun, balanced fight
PS2 isn't.

can it be fixed? sure, easy. i don't expect it will happen tho.

There are less and less people playing a video game as time goes on? SOMEONE CALL THE PRESS. This has happened to virtually every video game in history. The ones it hasn't happened to it just hasn't happened YET.

I do agree SOE/DBG could have made the game a lot more successful though. They shouldn't have released the game in the state it was in. At release it had lots of bugs, lag, balance issues. Perhaps most importantly the performance of the game on most people's systems was terrible at the time. All those things combined meant people just tried the game when it first came out, saw what a mess it was, and never returned. First impressions are important and PS2 made a horrible first impression on a lot of people.

The game has improved massively in all of those regards since release, plus there is a lot more content, and a lot of systems in place to make it more understandable for a new player. If the game had been released now I think the player retention would have been a lot higher. The problem is there aren't many new players trying the game anymore. I've chatted/talked to some people in other games and most of them haven't even heard of PS2. I doubt DBG has the budget for a big PS2 marketing campaign at this point but it really would help get more players in the game, and they'd probably be more likely to keep playing since the game is pretty stable and well balanced now.

From a financial point of view it probably makes a lot more sense to put resources into H1Z1 at this point though. Zombie survival games are the craze right now and they sell like hot cakes. Objective-based shooters aren't that popular, unless you can slap a STAR WARS sticker on it to get people's nostalgia money.

From a purely selfish perspective I'm not that upset about player numbers dropping, because 48-96+ battles have never been fun for me. As long as the player numbers don't drop to the point where I can't find medium sized fights anymore it's fine with me.

After playing for nearly 3,600 hours and dumping thousands into PS2 into membership, cosmetics, etc; I've more or less quit Planetside 2. The game has grown stagnant; the promised meta game does not exist, and it's stuck in a perpetual beta state. I will not play (or invest) again until there is real progress in development.

League of Legends, DOTA2, SC2 and CS:GO are among the largest games around. All 4 are not casual and new players usually get destroyed. The latter 3 all have much higher barriers to entry than PS2.

The game is dying because it is a unfinished game run by one of the worst companies in gaming, it really is that simple. Even players who want to play and support the game get chased off with threats of banning for self defense and no customer service by DBG.

The Victory Point system seems to have directly added to its lingering death. Now, the only times you find real fights is during prime time, off-hours? It is nothing except ghost-cap zergs. Almost nobody is deploying to where fights are, they are deploying to where they aren't, so they can get little to no exp or combat and instead wind up getting a pittance while patting themselves on the back for their amazing ability to stand around.

It is Ring Around The Ghost Cap, exactly like the days of the Hex system, but worse by dint of having far fewer players around to counteract it.

Time and time again for the last couple of weeks I have logged in only to find no fights at all except for ghost-capping zergs. Why in the hell people play an FPS in order to not play an FPS I haven't the slightest idea. If you want strategy, GW2's massive WvW works better, if you want strategic FPS go play Arma, which also does it far better.

lol, there it is

It's not dying. The population has leveled out over the last few months. Base building should bring in more players

Being alvie would mean all continents are 75%+ filled from 15:00 to midnight. And there still being 14 servers. Today we have 5 servers that can barely have enough activity on 2 continents.

http://www.therebelscum.net/world-p...&zoom=4&daterange=1447173900000,1449765900000

Set it to all worlds combined and All time for time period. The game is still shedding players, it's just run low on players to shed therefore the concurrent user drops have gotten much smaller but the game is still losing about 5% of its daily peak concurrent users every month.

For comparison BF3 and BF4 have each lost under 0.2% of their peak concurrent users since January 2015. Warframe, another F2P, game has gained 18%. PS2 has lost 5%, every single month.

I think if the lattice system was dropped or at least changed so SOME of the base fights would change for once, most vets would come back. That's the main reason I've been on and off, the fights never change and there's never any strategy because even the strategy gets stagnant when it's the same meta over and over.

I know this name he's the chump who's always in a battle gal full of people who cant actually fly an ESF so they resort to cheeze tactics. Garbage.

Back to the original topic. I believe this game has died because of the proliferation of easy mode weps (lock-ons mainly) that are meant to prop up bads. SOE/DBG have the attitude to **** on a vet to get 3 bads in the game, but what they don't realize is those bads are and always will be bads and thus their attention span won't keep them in the game for very long anyway, whereas the vet was probably here as long as the servers were up.
So they actually end up losing 4 players in this scenario in the long run because they are trying to make the game too easy instead of promoting proper skill development.

I believe this is what we have seen play out over the years. New easy mode equipment introduced and needless nerfs applied. Lifer vets become angry SOE/DBG doesn't give a dam about them and quit while an influx of bads come in to play with the new stuff, realize they are still bad in spite of the new stuff and quit a few months later as well.

From a business standpoint I think this is just stupid, as most vets I know were paid subscribers (most bads are f2p in my experience) which is more of a steady income stream than selling a few trinkets to some guy who's here for a month or 2.
I was subscribed myself but I pulled my subscription after the introduction of yet another lock-on launcher, and I won't be spending another dime on the game, until they start fixing balance issues.

this ^
a stable population of 100 or 200 players during prime time on a server (three continents) is pretty worthless as a gaming experience

Such unprovoked rudeness I've endured in this thread. What a silly and stupid thing to say. My passengers randomly vary from the most casual to the best people to have ever played, and my ship is almost always flying alone, not in the typical gank squads that are so popular among the tryhards. So I don't know what you mean by "cheeze tactics".

I tend to think the worst thing about games like this are people like you. Elitist and awful little creeps who overuse terms like bads, sh*tters, easymode, etc.

Base building and the ANT might bring back some old faces to try it out, but when can they land the update?

See, the way I see it, the pop is going down very fast, just the past week has shown a huge difference, off hours had almost no populated fights, just ghost capping everywhere. So if they want to save this game, they need to act fast.

I also wanted to throw my 2 sense into the ring on the VP system. It's crap and has caused alerts to be meaningless. I would say the VP system is the reason why people have once again made a mass leave from the game. The alerts weren't the best before, but at least it was a "go for the win" instead of "well this alert can give you 3 VP".

Advertise the game. Buy an ad spot at movie theaters for Sci-Fi/action flicks.

Are you accounting for the time of year? Pops tend to drop as the school year ends and holidays start.

Drops in spring too when school start. And summer when good weather starts. And in autumn when school starts.

You know nothing, Jon Snow. Except how to create unintended irony.

RAAAAAHHHHH BADS RUIN IT ALLS!!!11!