[Suggestion] Population is dropping: a fix

I said it before and I’ll say it again, the learning curve for this game is too steep. Not only that, but the discrepancy between nanoweaving veterans versus newbies is a gigantic deterrent to new players.

These new players get stomped so quickly and so much that they just don’t stick around. There should be no element in this game where a veteran has an advantage over a newbie in regards to damage versus TTK. None...but there is, and that’s bad for any FPS game where skill is supposed to be the underlying trait.

Some solutions:

1. Make nanoweave default.

This will increase the TTK across the board and make the game much more newb friendly. Right now, newbies with zero spent cents stand no chance against me, none. They’re too busy buying guns to realize that until they get full nanoweave they’ll rarely, if ever, beat a veteran, no matter how good their aim is.


2. Lower the headshot damage multiplier.

Make it 1.2 or lower. This will also increase the TTK and again give these newbies more time to get acclimated before they dump the game.


3. Increase the base experience gain.

I understand the need to push people to subscribe, but there are enough cert sinks (*cough* implants) that the base cert rate can be upped in my opinion, and this will allow newbies to better equip themselves sooner and be more apt to stay in the long run.

I would first put the HS multiplier at 1.5. Combined with the lack of Nanoweave working against headshots this still means an almost 2x higher DPS for headshots, thats plenty.
The current HS multiplier of 2x is already compounded by the Nanoweave not working against it. With full nanoweave, a headshot vs a bodyshot is a 2.5x higher damage a shot. Unfortunately during the terribly backfired MLG period where SOE tried to give higher rewards for skilled gameplay in the hopes of attracting more players they removed nanoweave working for headshots.

Giving everyone Nanoweave is a good idea, but alternative choices need to be added as well. Upgrade and combine currently useless choices to make them viable and mutate gameplay for the user so that the loss of nanoweave isnt as terrible.

I agree with the headshot changes 100% but for me the slow transitions between frag grenade, deployables, weapons, & class abilities is like pulling teeth in a heated fight. The animation switching feels like my arms are moving through mud and not consistent with what new players experience in other games.

Suggestion to stop player decline:

IF player does ACTION A often,
THEN do NOT make ACTION A annoying to do

Case in point: RESPAWNING.

Unfortunately back at DBG HQ...

Actual leaked transcript from previous DBG design session:

Ok gais, look, ok ok ok, what do players do a lot? Ya that's right, they RESPAWN!
Ok ok ok, now listen up, what do players want to do in our game, like, a LOT, like a WHOLE LOT?
<rubs hands together excitedly>
Ya ya ya! Get into BIG FIGHTS! That's right!
So, now...hear me out, cause this is ground breaking, as in, eating mashed potatoes out of old boots hipster ground breaking....
What we do is. ok ok ok, hee hee hee hee, omg gais this is genius...
WE MAKE RESPAWNING INTO A FIGHT REALLY REALLY ANNOYING TO DO.
HAH! JACKPOT!
I knoooo gais, totes incredible idea! It's like, we prevent players from doing the ONE thing our game is known for and was marketed on.
<takes a bow>
LET'S DOOOO THIS!!!!!!

The problem is when they offered greater performance with DX11, they unfortunately did not upgrade the servers and created a new host of bugs that in many cases are ending up being worst than DX9.

They bit off a little more than they could chew with robots, spawn changes and changeovers.

More hotfixes are needed and most players that pop in don’t want to stick it out.

have you ever stopped to consider than people are leaving because of other gameplay problems and not "oish i died in a fast paced shooter game"?
in my opinion planetside2 in have much greater problems than the shooting mechanics learning curve, which anyone who played in a computer before can learn. the tutorial need to be way more deep explaining, battle flow should get work on with buffs to sunderers and sunderers garages so fight wont end because someone blowed-up the sundy. construction should receive huge buffs and return to be fun and matter. the whole game is mess, the new spawn system is actually doing good to give more fights, but i dont know if you can solve the game's meta with spawn rework.

if they really wanted to save it they'd either get rid of vanu or combine tr/nc. the three faction thing sucks.

The three faction thing sucks? If you write down all the reasons why it sucks, I can almost guarantee it right now that all that will be worse under a 1v1 system.

If anything, cutting each faction into splintergroups that fight amongst each other as much as against the others and randomly dividing players amongst these splintergroups based on faction, then combining/splitting groups as population grows and falls would be a better and more interesting game than a stale, boring 1v1. At least with a random distribution of splinter groups the maps will see full usage of all bases to fight at and by picking bases contested by multiple groups you can encourage large scale fights without zergs developing.

OMG i agree with demigan on something. I have played three faction games, Dark Age of Camelot and Planetside 2 and lots of 2 faction games and 3 factions is miles better. Even light years better. Remember light year is a measure of distance not time.

As far as removing headshots, thats a terrible idea. Things that are challenging give people something to work towards. Without challenge games become boring very fast. No replay value means the player base drops like a rock.

MOST people who play FPS games do so because it is challenging.

Plus the game is 6.5 years old. It is natural for older games that don't advertise to slowly lose population over time. Wow avoided this by lots of advertising. They even had Mr. T doing ads for them after like 10 years from release.

Another thing that is responsible for player loss is the poor patching. When you log in and get disconnected when you die, or the cloak on infil that worked yesterday no longer works, or you have people flying around beneath the terrain, these things have a far greater effect on player retention than a game mechanic that people EXPECT in a FPS game.

I’m not asking for the complete removal of headshots. I just feel the damage multiplier needs to be reduced.

1.2 to 1.5 would be good. The lower the better.

Nanoweave has to be default.

3 factions > 2 factions.

And Silken, I played DAOC as well, Morgan Le Fay server Hibernia. CAN'T WAIT FOR CAMELOT UNCHAINED. Long wait tho.

sad face

Agree with the Nanoweave by default - for all classes and not only HA.

The problem with increasing base experince is, it would benefit veterans even more than beginners. It's not that the base rate of experience is too low, but new players have no idea how to be effective. I'd say it wouldn't hurt increasing the 1500 Certs for the first 15 levels to something like 15K Certs for the first 30 levels.

Another problem is new players approaching the game like they're used to by the usual shooters. They think it's their weapons that hold them back and so they spend 1K Certs on a sidegrade. Meanwhile it's their positioning, game sense, knowledge of the area and what behavior is typically to expect from others that's holding them back.

Removing headshots is a bad idea, because that's one of the things that's known and expected by people who like shooters.

Head-shots are important in 1vs1 duels because they provide a TTK advantage, ending up in one player dead and the other [badly] damaged but still alive, but how many deaths are consequence of 1vs1 duels?

I suspect (there are no statistics unfortunately) it is a limited minority. IMHO most of the kills are the results of positioning, base knowledge, situational awareness and using the minimap, meaning opening fire first on an unaware or distracted player who is bound to die anyway (with or without head-shots).

Personally I would leave head-shot multiplier as it is or even going extreme (OHK for most if not all the weapons) but making head-shots far more difficult to achieve except for precision/semi-auto/slow firing/long barreled weapons, increasing bloom and mostly initial CoF, especially using sidearms.

However I am the first to realize those changes are too extreme and too late to be implemented. People are accustomed to have a stupidly accurate 0 CoF on weapons like the Gauss SAW (a machine gun, something that is shooting cheap/imprecise rounds and whose barrel needs to be replaced every X hundred shots because it overheats) or the Blackhand (a pistol... Have you ever shot with a pistol in RL? At 50m you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.)

nerf HA shield to be flankable from the back and to a degree form the sides so players that start with other classes than heavy assault have some capability to fight against them .. especialy when using classes to grind like medic or engineer and in situation were people not always have a teammate to assist them .. maybe even remove headprotection ..

ADD FRIGGIN INFANTRYDETTERANCE .... the biggest flaw of this game is still that it is TOO focused on kills for rewarding new or novice players with progression .. the same should be for weapondirectives to simply just deal damage because many weapons lack in killpotential ..
the simple action of being engaged in combat is what needs to be rewarded, doing damage or even just tanking some damage as max or vehicle with other people being around .. anything else should be rather an extra
there should be NO REASON to have to grind for certs using the ANT farming cortium for 2 hours a session ..


other than that my main critiquepoints are still aircontrols and G2A/A2G combat
aircontrols are superbad that many new players just give up on learning to fly and it rewards tryhards/veterans too much ..
vehicles/infantry lack in AA capability either in options or were available options can´t be used well enough for AA duty such as engineerturrets f.e. with their low pitch ...

@TR5L4Y3R

If you manage to get the drop on an HA from the back, and your aim is better than just spray&pray, you already have an advantage. If the HA is not in a fight they probably don't have shields up and if they have shields up they're usually already distracted by someone else shooting at them.

Damage done is already rewarded with kill assists giving XP for the amount done to a target. Damage done is also rewarded indirectly with XP for ammo packs as well as spotting and recon.
Damage taken by MAX units and vehicles is rewarded indirectly to the engineer who does the repairs. Damage taken by infantry is rewarded indirectly to medics with a shield generator and by healing/reviving.

If you don't want to spend hours grinding Certs in an ANT, then don't. Why would you even do it? There's so much other stuff to get Certs from and have a lot of fun while doing it.
If you have made up your mind about what class to "main", it's easy to get that class to a viable point with the 1500 bonus Certs in the beginning (although it wouldn't hurt if there were more bonus Certs for new players). You also can gather experience in playing that class while doing it - and best case you find someone who's good at the class to ask them for help about stuff you don't know. It's a MMO after all.
Guess where you neither learn anything about the game, nor get better, nor have fun? In an ANT 5 kilometers away from the next fight driving circles. It's not worth to put in hours of farming Cortium into whatever you want to buy. Get the "direct rewards are the only reason I play" mentality out of your mind and start playing to have fun and improve your skills - the game will become much more than some chore. How do I know? I've been in that exact mentality.
What if you didn't make up your mind about what class to play? You can always put Certs into the "usual" farming stuff. Medic gun and shield, and to a lesser extent Engineer gun and ammo packs, are exceptional ways to get XP - and they don't require much skill either. Meanwhile you can practice shooting and observe others play the game to check out playstyles you like.

Well, population has seemingly evaporated to pre-hype level, which is to say it's crap.

You know, you should have addressed some of these issues before all of these people returned. What I said is, in my opinion, a gigantic freaking hurdle to keeping newbies around. It's quite obvious that the surge of new and returning players did not last.

You guys really are dumb.

And, the graphical lag is just as bad as before it seems.

Nanoeve armor isn't too bad now, it is one cert for 20% small arms damage. A small buff to 30 would increase some livability, but veterans would also benefit from this so.. I would like to see nanoeve armor apply to headshots, to prevent noobs from being sniped. Apart from that, fair suggestion.

not taking sides here, but my little personal obsession can't help but to make a quick post with some easy nuumbers


Here is steam chart :

https://steamcharts.com/app/218230#All

-from 2012 until today, you can "zoom in" and also change the beginning and end date.

I know a lot of people will say "'BUT NO EVERYONE USES STEAM".

So just as a complementary info,;

https://ps2.fisu.pw/population/?world=0

That's another, though it only goes back to 2015.


____

Personal opinion, of course the population is decreasing, it's a 7 year old game that isn't being developed anymore, just maintained.

It's been decreasing for 7 years.. It's a miracle the game didn't die years ago, goes to show what an under-rated gem SOE made.

you failed to mention the toxicity and daybreaks inaction on teamkilling,im assuming it's the pc version your talking about, but regardless of platform here's a reason why toxicity hurts the player base and causes decline:
a lot of people are not going to take these types of actions by toxic players such as using teamkilling,chat and voice to harass and bully them, daybreak games announced they wouldn't get into this and start banning players for this,which is part of the reason they may leave or at the very least not make it a high priority to play. im now one of them when it comes to the ps4 version.i don't even bother reporting anymore because i just don't see them caring anymore and am critical of the company because of this.
me and my friends tried to prevent players like this from getting into our outfit using a no team killing rule,quickly fell apart and we just don't paly as much because of the various issues (toxicity being a one of them,sure you can try to save the game by trying something like this, but its hopeless as you aren't the company.)
point being:
this is one of the issues here, and ive found it's impossible to fight toxicity, thats the company's job and their just not willing to help.

we basically gave up on the team killing and toxicity issue, it makes it less fun,i even decided not to spend a dime on another membership on the ps store.
regardless, this has been my worst negative experience with the game, both as a noobie and br100 vet,im sure you may have had a different experience unlike me, but as much as i love the game, to me it's just been a failure from the start and isn't worth playing as much,use to play 15 hours a day, now only every once in a while.
Note: these are my views and opinions towards the game,company and ithe games future and may not reflect your experience towards the game. just wanted to clarify this.