[Suggestion] Merge Emerald and Connery.

Don't blame the spawn system for a lack of detailed map information, though even that is kept terse for strategic considerations. Personally, I would say being able to see the active ally/enemy population in a region should be suitable and wonder what's so confusing.
(Also, don't blame the spawn system for being too lazy to transport oneself.)

You're being lazy if you transport yourself (i.e. drive or fly). It's much faster and more reliable to do a series of spawns across the map (each one takes about 10 secs for me). But either option is tedious and many people don't bother, hence the impression of a low population.

An ESF can ignore the instance locality of any specific point in the respawn system entirely and just fly to wherever the operator wants to go. It bypasses the algorithms introduced by the developers to manage population distribution and avoids the weird complications that can arise and take you to unintended places (that you might have not even been able to reach). In addition, whether by ESF or by tank, you have also managed to successfully transfer a (presumedly) strong weapons system into the battle of choice. The benefits are significant.

Impatience can breed laziness too. Tedium from doing, essentially, non-tasks, e.g., hitting the respawn button repeatedly, is an entirely a self-inflicted problem. At least with transport the potential of meaningful, enjoyable combat in between the ultimate destination and the origin point exists.

Sure, if you intend to pilot an ESF when you get to the destination, you should fly an ESF there. But for anyone else it is much faster and more reliable to use a series of spawns.

Faster, because as I say it takes about 10 secs per spawn. There is no way you're getting to the other side of the map by ESF within 30-50 secs of wanting to be there unless you're already in an ESF. On many maps it's going to take you that long just to get to the air terminal, or there'll be no terminal so you have to do at least one jump before you even start the ESF phase of the journey. When you add in the flight itself and the landing/bail procedure it will be at least 2-3 times longer than multiple teleports.

More reliable, because you can't get shot down while you're teleporting, obviously. If you consider the fights at random points along the way as fun, then do it for that reason, but don't pretend that you're contributing to base capture or defence by dogfighting deep behind friendly lines when you could have just teleported to the frontlines.

If you want to play with your ESF, play with your ESF. Obviously it is a massive force multiplier when used right. But it doesn't have any place in a conversation about transporting ground forces across the map, except as an example of 'how to do things as inefficiently as possible'.

Obviously. It's an ESF. (Also, I never fly for combat personally. I segued into it because that does matter to some people; but, the primary focus of my discussion on vehicles herein should remain transportation.)

What I am trying to impart is that the task you describe is considered tedium because of the user's detachment from agency and threat. The player isn't really doing anything fun or challenging (if one is not also the other) or being provided with any unique perspectives on a situation. Even the matter of pulling an ESF is much more engaging than pressing the same button once every ten seconds and that activity fills the void of interest that causes the fatigue. These results can even drag the game down for people who aren't directly experiencing them if it can reflect somehow on other aspects of the game that are beign experienced.

Okay, fair enough.

Classy Mr.T at it again. Yap was being full on racist with what I said, you know it. Your not even worth replying to. Way to twist things around for your own agenda, man your a tool.

We need 3 servers - one for each map... right in the middle of the USA. That will fix it...! We can have good game play that way.
When one server alert closes you get moved to the next server. That way over pop is not a problem.

I've said since the beginning they should have divided areas by north and south for the servers, to get more time zones for more persistent population, allowing them to better show off the scale/persistent environment aspects of the game.

Instead we got what we got, and have to live with it. if they were gonna merge emerald an connery they would be better off merging both with a central or mountain server...

Seriously. I'm in the Philippines and my brother is stationed in Italy, we play on Connery together at about 230 ping each and 90% of the time it's no big deal. The only time there's any kind of problem is if you're trying to camp in a corner like a ***** and wait for some guy to walk in, as he as a 1/4 second advantage on you. Playing from one end of the States to the other with sub 100 ping is a non-issue. If anything though, I say merge the Australian server with Connery, as half those guys play there anyway. The only time I experience any rubberbanding is when we have a typhoon and my ping randomly shoots up to 400-500.

You don't get it do you? Your not going to notice it on your end, its the other way around. Because the game handles interactions at the client level it creates a disparity in what the other player sees.

rubber banding, dying after you hit cover, damage compression are all effects of high ping players. To them the game runs fine, it everyone else that gets screwed.

What you don't get is how short a time .2 seconds is. I'll give you a hint, it's less than your reaction time http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime. The only time that could even be an issue is if you're camping, in which you deserve to die anyway, go out and have a real fight. And even if you were correct, I'd see rubberbanding and all that crazy **** with my European and Australian friends I play with, which I don't. The few people that do warp around are either manipulating their ping or live on a mountain in the middle of Tibet, and they're seeing people rubberband as well. And as far as dying after you reach cover, that's not due to 200ms ping, even in an ESF you can't travel far enough for it to really matter in .2 seconds, find something else to blame.

You'll find out publicly in about eleven weeks. You're welcome. By the way, if you have played this game for any serious length of time, you would know that this is exactly how DBG operates and they have done this from the start, once they started screwing up the game and not advertising it properly. They're not going to change now with the same people making the same bad decisions. Also, they have to merge servers since the population is, after a brief, post construction respite, now losing pop again and simply cannot sustain the present number of servers.

The easiest way to get rid of lag wizards is for daybreak to stop using garbage clientside hit detection and get some good deticated servers

You forget that gamers have above average reaction speeds. Additionally, the ping works both ways, it takes 230ms for you to send your location to the server, then however long for the server to tell me you're there so I can shoot you. Additionally, even if .23 seconds were half of your reaction time, how do you not see artificially cutting your reaction speed in half (by buying yourself half of that time in lag) as being a problem?

I notice the game gets a lot easier playing on connery vs emerald just living in florida, it's a big deal whether you deny it or not.

I started playing online games in San Diego, and got pretty spoiled with awesome internet. When I first moved to the Philippines I was pretty bummed out at having 200-250 ping to all my favorite games. After sucking it up and rolling with it, I don't find much of a difference at all. Granted, I'm no competitive gamer, but this isn't the most hardcore game either. Sure .2 seconds is .2 seconds, but as long as you're not camping, I don't feel it makes any difference in 99% of situations. In a game like CoD, which is much more twitchy, much more competitive, and people are all rounding corners and running around like crackheads, it would have more of an impact. But seriously, we're talking about Planetside here.

Next thing you will be claiming is the sky is red and made from marshmallows. Thanks for the laugh.

I suppose we should tell the folks in the farmers leagues, the Planetside battles teams, the scores of individual scrimmage teams, and hordes of small outfits focused on small squad tactics (which have been around since PS1) that they are not competive.

What an idiot...

So what you're saying is that it does matter, just not if a person has your outlook on the game (most of the time anyway, sometimes even with a very casual mindset it still matters)

that mentality is dangerous to society.

You couldn't be more wrong. I had satellite internet for 2 years and planetside was the only FPS game I could play online, because if I paid my $15 a month I wouldn't be kicked from every server in the game after spending $60 on it at the store.

MLG try hards who take the game so seriously 1/100ths of a second are a make or break issue should go play in the big leagues with sponsors. There's plenty of games with seething and toxic communities they'll fit right in with.

You try playing this game when the enemy has more than a full second to have shot and killed you before you even knew they were there, and then tell me the problems are only on your end, deal? Thanks to planetside's good netcode I was able to enjoy the game and reliably play support and actually get to shoot once in awhile too. Yeah life isn't fun when the lowest ping available to you, regardless of how much money you have, is 1400ms. And no, selling the house and financing a brand new home is not remotely reasonable over an internet connection. After 14 years on 56k, 2 on satellite, 3 on EVDO, and now quite a few on DSL, I can plainly say you couldn't possibly be more wrong.

As far as those saying high ping gives you an advantage... Then explain to me why at 200+ms I'm constantly trading kills, and at 50ms or lower I'm winning every single encounter that normally would have been a trade? It's because a low ping is a massive advantage. Not to mention, if it was such a massive advantage everyone would be downloading (insert name here) while they're playing games simply to out MLG everyone else.

It's a pretty well known thing...