Lazy Code, Lazy Design

Lazy.

4 Continents on, what, a 6 hour rotation? 6x4=24.

24 hours in a day.

Result?

Connery.

Get off work. ALWAYS the tail end of Esamir. This leads to Hossin, arguably the worst of the bunch (until Oshur, which, mark my words, will be the worst of the worst).

So every night on Connery, because of lazy coding and design, and a lack of action on DBG's end, the same continents. Hossin in prime time. This is such a glaringly bad thing that I shouldn't be surprised DBG ignores it in preference of Wrel tinkering with spawns.

But by all means, keep spending money and time on the spawn redesign and Planetfail Arena.

How do game companies keep missing the mark so often? This industry needs a crash (I work in banking and yes, it should have crashed HARD in 2008 and still should).

An offhand note, if you're in the South East of America, BB&T is, last I knew, an excellent bank that didn't get involved in the stupidity of sub-primes and hucksterism as did the other banks. It's founder quit in disgust at US Govt bank policy after 2008 (Allison) but I think his good vision remains there.

Back to gaming:

DBG, YOU NEED NEW MINDS ON YOUR GAME.

Sponsored by BB&T.




















Continents are not on a 6 hour rotation, you must be very unlucky if you always get Hossin and i doubt there's never enough people on Connery to unlock 2nd continent.

i definetively had a period on which i spawned primarily on hossin on cobalt, but to be fair that was past primetime ..

still personaly i would like that continents last a bit less than they currently do ..

like maybe instead of 3 to 4 events have 2 events and then the alert so the total continent time is around 4 hours ..

events and alerts were the continent has low pop should be shortened roughly by half, at least by a third ..

Can't remember where or who it was that suggested 60 minute alerts instead of 90. I think I'd be fine with that (granted that it's long enough to effect a change if the territory was horribly imbalanced prior to start) BUT at the same time I don't mind playing on Hossin if that's the only choice. I realize I'm in the minority here.

i take hossin over amerish any day of the week ...

Take a hint from mother nature.

Cicadas and other creatures that hibernate for many years then resurge, have evolved cycles that use PRIME NUMBERS. That way they are likely never to compete with another similar species that has a cycle that overlaps.

Make continent locks not evenly divisible by the day and you won't end up with the same continent at the same time every day.

The cicadas are out around my house right now. It blew my mind when I learned how long some of their hibernation cycles can be.

BINGO. I was thinking something very much akin to this when I created the thread title, "Lazy Code, Lazy Design".

Good post Jibba.

Speaking of cicadas, you don't know uncomfortably loud until you're a few meters from a horde of these things.



This ugly bastard is over two-inches long without the wings and is surprisingly loud.

Anyways, as per usual Warframe already beat PS2 to the point by making the Kuva Fortress cycle at a different rate than every 24 hours so playing at the same time doesn't force players to farm Kuva on the same planets. Why hasn't PS2 done this for alerts/continents yet?

And it's basically been doing this the past 2 months.

The REAL problem is that every weekend, a 2nd continent opens up and cancels out all the long term progress that would put Indar and Amerish in the prime time slot. ...IE: when the pop gets just high enough to reverse the changes that would have moved Hossin to a 8am time slot where it belonged...

In effect.... We ONLY get to see Indar/Amerish in the prime time slot for 1 Afternoon on the weekend ... as if by Accident

Good points iller.

Meanwhile, we have DBG focusing their limited time and money on Wrel's central planner mindset for spawning.

"We don't have enough food to eat, therefore, we shall make more shoes!"
--every central planner, everywhere

You work in banking so you should know Planetside 2 needs more funding. Sure it needs some new minds to bring forward new content, but the ideas are already there, mainly from the community.

Basically the game needs more funding so they can hire more people in order to be able to tackle both problems and add new content, and also upgrade the hardware and marketing of the game.

Relations with the community need to improve also, because many players are passionate about this game and have great ideas, and want to help improve the game. The devs need to be able to listen and filter good and bad ideas, and calm down uncertainty or shut down players trying to cause chaos in the forums, because of misunderstandings, in order for the game to evolve positively.

Also some money would be needed so they can hire a storywriter again in order to finish the script of Planetside 2's lure.

TLR: Money without good management makes matters worse.


Money won't solve the issues. Money is always needed, yes. But consider how the DBG staff and budget available now has been used.

Imo: Poorly.

I used to have 4 paid accounts with DBG. One (this one) has been active since 1999 (Verant/SOE days). The other 3 accounts were 15 years old. I shut those three down a few months ago. Why?

Bad Mgmt. In a nutshell, the announcement of Planetside Arena. With Planetside Arena DBG was telliing me this:

Despite having 4 paid accounts, and despite being a long term paying customer (20 years), I would have to pay MORE for a battlepass for a scaled down mod of Planetside 2 that could only lead to the demise of Planetside 2 itself. I closed three of the accounts and will likely close this one soon. This account is older than most of the DBG staff have been classified as adults.

Here's a similar bonehead move from banking:

A major east coast based bank hired one of those Up-And-Comer-Overly-Degreed-Hipster types to manage their credit card portfolio. Said genius immediately saw a large number of long term credit card holders would always pay their bill on time and therefore never incur late fees. Late fees were profit in said genius's mind. He was too dumb (ie overly educated) to understand that late fees were a deterrent meant to cover costs and to remedy bad behavior. Instead, genius boy saw late fees as the GOAL.

So this hipster genius boy, let's call him Kaden, informed all credit card holders that if they paid their bill on time all year, then a yearly fee would be assessed on their account. In other words Kaden PUNISHED his bank customers for being financially responsible...

Market response? Thousands of responsible customers cut up their credit cards and sent the pieces back to the bank in mailed envelopes. An unknown number of them removed their deposits from the bank. Customer deposits are WHY banks exist (not late fees as Kaden assumed). But Kaden didn't know that.

So...in nutshell...Kaden thought players logged on to Planetside 2 to be forced to spawn in undesirable places vs the main fights. Therefore, Kaden focused time and money on punishing players for WANTING TO DO WHAT PLANETSIDE 2 WAS DESIGNED TO DO. Oh sorry....I mean, Kaden and the bank...errr....well....you get what I mean...

Here's another glaring problem with DBG. They are given direct customer (did you hear that DBG? CUSTOMER) feedback. Most companies would kill for customer feedback and in fact spend millions of dollars trying to solicit it. DBG routinely ignores it and when customers finally blow (cut up their credit cards), DBG invokes the self-fulfilling prophecy of: "Well none of their criticism is constructive and I am too good to engage."

Snowflakes.

DBG response? Call the customers "Salty Vets". Guess who is most likely to have a paid account Mr Smug Kaden? Thaaaaat's right. Salty vets. Say buh-bye.

Keep watching that paying customer graph line descend. How'd that work out for Patrick Soderlund?

Hold on, where was this comment made? ... I saw a meme comic on DasAnfall referencing it and now I'm super curious

Lol you're right, The problem with DBG is their poor management skills, and their complete disregard of proper customer feedback.
The thing is DBG has more games to manage than simply Planetside, and given the little revenue it generates, they don't seem to care much about it. This is why they give unrealistic deadlines to the Planeside 2 dev team, and overall run that development section very poorly. Sure the planetside 2 devs aren't geniuses, and don't seem to have much interest in community relations, but the fact they are neglected by the rest of the company doesn't help.

Although it's hard to blame DBG for neglecting planetside 2 on paper, it is a pretty bad decision, since this game does have the potential to be popular and generate revenue, and has the marketing benefit of being one of its kind. However the way they manage the planetside 2 development team is really underlining their low standards and lack of ambition, and also highlights the fact they don't care about the Planetside 2 community. This is pretty evident when seeing how Planetside arena was announced and well...yeah. Not only did no one from the community want a BR, the devs weren't even able to release it as planned.

Those issues really are related to the poor management from the company leaders. However, the management on a micro scale isn't completely disastrous. It's important to realize that the dev team is given unrealistic dates to release content, are not given the adequate tools to produce it, and all this is decided not by the planetside 2 development team, but by higher ranking officials in DBG, that have probably never even seen the game, much less have and understanding of how it runs.

Despite this, the planetside 2 dev team is still able to release content. -of course its complete garbage and nowhere near the potential of what Planetside 2 had to offer, and we've all yet to be impressed by an update. However, noting all the obstacles the team had to face, it's still a minor achievement. And the "effectiveness" at dealing with the bugs generated by updates suggests the devs would have been able to release a decent patch, with longer deadlines.

That leads me to believe that the micro management is acceptable, its simply the macro management that ***** over planetside. Money can't solve the poor management, but it can give planetside 2 devs a chance to hire more team members and purchase adequate tools in order to complete the tasks despite poorly chosen due dates.

Since DBG is a pretty big company, they don't have much ***** to give about a old game called Planetside 2 that never really generated huge funds. So Planetside 2 will never really get much attention in and out of DBG, meaning it will never generate enough funds to earn significant money input from DBG, and will continue to be poorly managed and underfunded.

Unless I or one of use becomes a billionaire and purchases the game, funds it properly and markets, ect..
The game will slowly continue to fade away

Well, DBG isn't a big company actually.

And Planetside 2 not generating a lot of money has a lot to do with DBG's poor mgmt of it (also when under the SOE banner *cough* Matt Higby and MLG *cough*).

So just as the current dev's created a self-fulfilling prophecy of "toxic" gamers and "therefore we do not engage", they also created the low profit prophecy themselves. And...then they blame the players.

I make no distinction between groups within DBG (devs, mgrs, execs, etc); as a company, they manage things poorly from a customer perspective.

They routinely miss the mark on what the market wants.

Also, in the "what a shock" category, Connery is still stuck with Esamir after work hours and that leads to Hossin. Same. Maps. Every. Day. And. Night. At least a week in a row in a rut.

BUT FEAR NOT! WREL IS TINKERING WITH RESPAWN CONTROL!

Wait, WHAT? Ooooohhh. DBG.

Lazy code, lazy design, lazy DBG.

Hey DBG, I used to be a HUGE FAN. I am no longer. Your failure (surely) to understand why, is why you will fail to get any new games off the ground.

Based on how you guys handled Everquest Next and Planetside 2....do you REALLY think Planetside Arena will do well? REALLY?

Side Note: I stopped buying ANYTHING that Electronic Arts releases. I used to buy a lot of their games. But I wouldn't buy or play an EA game today and I totally ignore anything they announce. Zero faith. Based on EA stock prices, I am in the zerg.

Welcome to the EA zone DBG.

Looking more to Indy game companies now.

6 PM primetime PST/MST, same map. Esamir. To be followed by Hossin. Every. Day. The. Same. Map.

Been a week that I've tracked it.

Meanwhile, the DBG team talks about devoting time and money to coding a social hub.

The only other dev team I know that is as clueless about their customer base is the EA/DICE team in Sweden.

WW2! Revisting our flagship game BF1942 but with huge improvements!

Like...

1. Every soldier wears aviator goggles!
2. Every soldier has tattoos!
3. Every soldier looks nothing like a soldier!
4. Every soldier is an SJW warrior!
5. Not a single soldier wears a helmet!
6. Reflex sights on an M1 Garand!
7. Prostectics for snipers! And a barbed wire cricket bat in combat!
8. Explosiony goodness and a color palette that screams Spongebob and Teletubbies!

Yes! We here in Sweden, a country that stayed neutral in WW2, know what we're doing! Don't like? DON'T BUT IT!

Good work DBG, you're gaining ground on EA/DICE Sweden.

Hi OgreMarkX, I had to take a break from this game to calm myself from all the PS2 frustration. I ended up trying a game called Subnautica. It's an exploration survival game that, I think, is well done. More importantly, I found it fairly relaxing. It starts a bit slow, but becomes fascinating as you follow the story. Check out the trailers. Anyway, just a recommendation for you. Cheers!

July 18th. 6 PM MST. Esamir. Again. Same. Every. Day.

Meanwhile, swaddled in a sweatshirt, work is being done on making re-spawning even more annoying and a social hub that really isn't for Planetside 2, but is actually for the microtransaction-fest known as Planetside: Arena!

Idiocracy is here muh friends. It is here.

Hey Gunner10, thx for the recommendation, I will look into it. Some others:

SQUAD (early access)
Hell Let Loose (early access)
Camelot Unchained (loooong build time, no real access yet, but I have faith!)

January 19th.

Hey Gais, repeat maps here, guess what maps Connery had for primetime again?

ESAMIR AND HOSSIN AGAIN YEA!

Modders can't randomize or semi-mix the map rotation. Developers could though.