This week Planetside 2 population reached the same level as last February (1 month before Escalation

According to fisu population chart :

https://ps2.fisu.pw/population/

This week's population average is 2.8k.

Average population in the second week of February was 2.9k.

Escalation launch saw the population peak at 6.2k during the 2nd week of March) but it has steadily been declining since.





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Explanation ;

I'm not going to attempt to provide an explanation. That would require a lot of work and a very very long post.

However, I would like to suggest what I fee is maybe the number one and most important reason.

This is a classic and famous quote from Nietzche (a famous philosopher) : "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

Though it obviously isn't the same, and we're not talking about life but an online video game, I think the principles are similar and relevant.

That is to say; give players a reason, a point, a reason why, a meaning, "a why", and they will bear any bugs, any gameplay, any lag, any difficulties and frustration that a game may have.

Without a why, players will not "bear" any "how". In other words, if what you do in the game feels pointless, if there's no meaning to it, no "end game", then players will eventually get bored, and before that, if frustrated by bugs or other issues, will simply not bother.

Fighting is fun, awesome fun, but it isn't an end in itself, it's a means to an end, and PlanetSide 2 has been lacking, for many years, an "end".

Some of the most fun in the game is fighting to win alerts, when you have good commanders and it's a competitive alert. And thinking about things strategically like "they went here so we need to go there" is interesting.

I like the idea of being able to push and even capture warpgates (let the losing faction then respawn as NC ops maybe?). But there needs to be a way for the defending team to be able to respond with backdoors and counters. A tug-of-war design philosophy is bad game design because it gives advantage to the side that has 51% and creates snowballing. Savage 2 had a good response to this; the objective was to kill the enemy base but there were ways to build garrisons (spawn locations) in backdoor location by the enemy base, forcing them to pull away from your base and defend their base. It was possible for a team that had map control to get overconfident and lose to clever counter strategy.

Another clever game element was that once the gold ran out on the map, buildings would lose all their armor, take double damage and couldn't be repaired. It worked like an overtime mode to end stalemates; all the buildings would be destroyed eventually, just who got who's first.

Tech plants, biolabs... the ownership effects don't do enough to be felt. But if they did I feel it would create snowballing.
I think... the fighting only along on faction borders needs to go. There needs to a way to take something behind enemy lines in a limited way.

You can already do that, but players get tunnel vision and don't understand that Sabotage is very useful. Take a small team behind enemy lines, hack their terminals and turrets, and plant mines everywhere you think people or vehicles will go. Then pull a few Lightnings or Harassers and hit the enemy spawn points in the back.

Surprise!

Can you capture anything not linked to the lattice network?

No, and frankly I don't see why you should be able to capture bases deep behind enemy lines without having to push your frontline to that spot. For instance, I shouldn't be able to start capturing bases right up against enemy warpgates when all of the main fighting is at the center of the map. In that same vein, I don't think VS, for instance, should be able to start capturing a base that's in the middle of the NC/TR front. If people could do all that, it'd be pure chaos.

Looks lets go back to the actual premise of the thread here.

In essence OP is saying: The game feels pointless at times and needs more of an objective.

I gave some suggestions for how to make it have more of a purpose. But it would require some other tinkering.

You are arguing against my tinkering. Sure. Fine. Also totally pointless. Lets go back to what the OP is saying.

What the game needs are mechanical adjustments to encourage deeper strategic play, and to de-emphasize the zerg/farm mentality, which I'd say is a root cause of a lot of what's wrong with the game. The meta needs to reward fighting over strategic assets and gaining territory when it benefits you most; in its current state one faction is allowed to freely zerg the others until they trigger a lock alert, then they're double-teamed into oblivion and one of the other factions wins because they undercut the third. Occasionally you'll get one base that acts as a population sink for two empires (notably Biolabs), and nobody ever wants to leave the stalemate to actually do something that advances your empire's agenda.

It doesn't help that there's no incentive to actually defend a base, other than if you already own it; you're only rewarded with War Asset resources when you successfully capture a base. War Assets also dis-incentivize intra-faction cooperation; outfits in the same Empire compete with each other for resources and base ownership.

Excellent. I agree with everything you've said.

Everything else ive posted are just throwing out suggestions and ideas for how to get there.

Just quickly repeating what I wrote in another thread on the subject.

Ideas for a meta that doesn't promote farming?
Here are mine:
1) More XP for successful captures, as well as finishing a point cap (currently that's like 10% of a contest ping?).
2) Same amount of XP for a successful defense as for attack.
2.5) Give the same resource drops for defending as for attacking; maybe shift base ownership after a successful defense if another outfit exceededs the saved point pool of the originally owning outfit.
3) Increase XP scaling based on facility population ratio, adding +1% XP for every % your faction is underpop (including going into negatives for outpopping factions, I'd say up to -66%; that also makes ghostcaps less appealing).

How to improve player retention:

1. Nerf headshots
2. Remove nanoweve, or only make it available to new accounts (NOT new characters)
3. ???
4. Profit

Btw there are some updates on the horizon, so the player count will rise.

You need updates to keep existing players not updates to attract new players.

or updates to keep the new players

While no-one should expect to check out a game for the first time and own people, I know a few new players who kept getting farmed by headshot try hards, and logged off never to return. I'm in the camp of adjusting headshot damage down slightly, or let it not affect shields (because that doesn't make sense anyway)