I made this most in another thread, and I'd like to do it again. I think its a good idea, though some may think its a waste of time. Planetside 2 is a fun game, but it can be so much better. From many aspects of this game, we can see that teamplay is crucial. Can we improve the teamplay coordination experience? Of course we can, but the question is how. I know you have been struggling with that, so I have what could be a solution to revolutionize Planetside 2, to make it one of the best experiences you can have on the internet. Devs, community relations team, Planetside 2 Youtube manager, whoever this pertains to, whoever believes they can cause change, please listen to this idea. Play the psychological game. Indoctrinate your new players into a new tactical gaming culture that will revolutionize not only Planetside but the gaming industry as a whole. Use mass propaganda to stimulate a response in your players. Make them do what you want them to do without letting them know its what you are doing. Let them think its their own idea. Here's how we can do this. First, go into your community and play around. Take a few streams, see where the problems lie. Read your forums and see both sides of the issues players are facing. After you understand the problems, find influential leaders in the community from each faction and server who want to fix those problems. Send them an email, arrange a meeting to discuss how you can add to the teamplay, then you get to work. Tell them the type of teamwork you want, in depth. I know what I want, and what many others want to. I want to coordinate attacks with a squad, platoon, outfit, or just a random group of randoms, tell them exactly what I want to do, and we do it. I want to huddle up, go to the map overlay, draw a plan of attack, and execute it. I want to say, "Hey, squadmate 12, I need to get you and squadmate 7 to wait here and blow up that vehicle when it drives back through here. Got it?" or "Alright everyone. See that spotted target? Prepare, aim, FIRE!" You must recognize that its not that we can't do that, but it is that we don't. The fact that it isn't out of our ability means that we can get this idea done. Take those influential people you gathered, those leaders, and tell them to do just that. Tell them to work together with constant communication, coordination, and cooperation. Call it the "Triple C Initiative" and tell them I coined it. Tell them to use the tools already in the game, such as the tactical map overlay, and coordinate with their teammates. Tell them to kick people from the squad who fail to comply and recruit another person. Tell them to create specialized squads and outfits built to take care of specific issues, such as an Air Squadron outfit who protects the skies, an Anti Air outfit that deals with aircraft, a Sniper Unit that takes care of infantry from a distance, a Medic unit that takes care of everyone, or an AV squad that takes care of vehicles in a strategic manner. Fund them for this where you can. Dump them some certs so they can get official outfits started with official recruitments. Tell them to help others become leaders and spread the movement throughout the community. Tell them to start with trusted friends who want to see change and gradually move to everyone else. Record the content as some new brand of teamplay. After you have the footage, put it on your Youtube, your website, your game. Brand it as some amazing initiative to inspire players to work together. Little do the masses know, you are pulling the strings. Write articles about this new wave of teamplay. "Promote" the new heroes to the leaders of the faction. "This is the New Rebel Leader of the freedom fighter movement, The New Conglomerate!" or "Welcome the New Emperor of the technological enlightenment era, The Vanu Sovereignty!" These people are functional faces of the community, new icons that the community will look up to. Tell these icons to continue to push the message of working together to accomplish tasks. Keep showing their videos, streams, posters, propaganda. Force feed it down your players throats for a month. Force them to comply without forcing them to comply. Change the way they think. Show highly tactical gameplay right when a new player joins the game, so they can simulate themselves into the new experience, into this new type of community. Continue to inspire players to work together with each other, regardless of if they are in the same squad, platoon, outfit, or even if they are not in a squad at all. Change the community. Add the necessary tactics and strategy tools as the need arises. We will no doubt need some new additions to continue to build this teamplay out. Get together with these leaders and listen to what they have to say. Try to help them out where you can. Give them whatever they need for this idea to succeed, because if it does, half of the problems that people find in this game will be solved with teamwork and higher levels of tactical gameplay. Build icons in this community. Be involved in your community. Take players who do something extraordinary and put a spotlight on them. Put squads who excel on a pedestal. Make everyone know their names. Build icons in the community. When people hear of an amazing thing someone did or how good of a person someone is for the help they provide, that inspires people. That create idolization, and when you hear of people in the game who are popular and famous in the community, that makes you want to play with them and work with them. If you reward players for doing their best, for being noteworthy, you make yourselves look good. You become a greater developers. For anyone who has continued to read this, please leave your support. This topic needs buzz. If the community relations team sees this and presents it to the devs, half of your problems will be solved. This game will be worth playing. This game may explode with a new passion. This game may turn into an experience. Don't you want that? Then help me help this game out! Please.
Here we go with another person that thinks teamwork is the keys to the game. Outfit resources and Outfit wars, were dismal failures. The track record clearly shows, Escalation generated excitement, but it didn’t have longevity. They listen to Youtubers or players who were only about there own self-interests, really not about making the game better or more popular, but more to promote winning by the zerg, spawn camping and he who has the most numbers with vehicles, wins the game. If they truly dumped content into the game that was enjoyable, people would stay, because the real essence is in the solo player. The solo player who wants to build themselves, explore and boldy go where no man has fought before. Not enough maps, not enough new twists with existing weapons, they won’t give a direly overdue graphics update to the game and balance the stuff that truly needs to be balanced, firing a sleu of launcher rounds at a vehicle to destroy it only to be stomped by one round from a tank or sniper that can cloak, spawn tubes are antiquated when to many people get stuck in them with no ability to repel back. Things are just way out of whack.
Thats because it is. This is a combined arms game. This isn't a solo arena shooter. You need a team to take bases. That doesn't mean that one man can't make a difference, though. Also, what does all of this adding stuff have to do with my post? I never mentioned anything about half the stuff you are mentioning, and yet you are bringing them up here, and then the whole thread will get off-topic. Do you have anything about the actual post to say, anything about why creating a new sort of teamwork is either good or bad for the game? You say they listen to self-centered youtubers and players. I said they should go into the community and assess the problems. You say they promote zerging, but I am promoting actual tactics, things to beat zerging, checking your player resources and seeing what you can do with the amount of players you have on hand, a real change in thinking. You say they need to dump content into the game, but I am saying we have the tools we need to make the games better. Plus, as you said before, content gets old. It may generate excitement for a time, but it won't last. You need constant updates. Even if you eat to satisfaction, you are going to get hungry again, so you have to keep eating. Thats why I say we should start with changing the community. Giving a whole new experience to look forward to every day is much better than content that gets old after a week. So I ask you again, do you have anything to add to the actual post?
The problem is the devs can’t. March 2020 - 10,290 players Now - 4,190 It doesn’t take much to realize the game is dying.
Yes but the issue is it was a good game at the start. Sure, some pop was leaving after beta as with every game. But not at this rate. It was a unique and fun game. And yeah, we had a lot more strategy and teamwork in the early years. Then the devs for no good reason started making horrible updates. That changed Planetside 2 from a game that only needed a few tweaks and performance improvements into a broken mess few people want anything to do with. It's nothing compared to what the starting experience the game offered. It's evident by the people that come to check the game out that there's still interest - in the real planetside 2 - not what we have now. I'm pretty confident if they simply booted up an older version of the game a lot more people would join again and actually stick around and have fun.
It would seem to me the game is in maintenance mode. Sure, little things will be hung off the current game infrastructure but no rework of the infrastructure will be made. It's just not worth it financially to a company to overhaul an aging platform with a relatively small subscriber base. Hell, they won't fix long standing bugs and or mechanics everyone complains about. My advice: Enjoy the game for what it is, don't frustrate yourself over what you think it could be.
As we discussed before, doing only a media campaign would not succeed. The Escalation update may have "fortunately" happened at the start of many lockdowns, but the idea behind it spoke to people: cooperation, teamwork and being rewarded for it. Players flocked to the game, then found out that it didn't give what was promised. If you launch that media campaign next to progressive updates aimed purely at teamwork could be the way to go. And not just the footage captured during a PTS where players are much less restricted and willing to purely test the new stuff, but actual live gameplay. That would work. Not only would the updates encourage players to try out the teamwork stuff and how it synergises with other teamwork stuff but also it would better illustrate to the youtubers you want to enlist what your goals are. A key here though is that the first updates have to be aimed at small-scale teamwork of just two to four players working together. We have enough tools for the leadership part for now, make sure that the basis it has to be build upon is added.
Marketing is worth a lot, but will ultimately only go so far. It will get people's attention, but without a good product to back up the marketing you won't keep people's attention. Ultimately, given the free to play model, there is no value in getting large numbers to check out the game if none stick around. If it cost $60 to check it out, you could argue that you at least got the ticket money from them, which is what I think PSA was going for, but even that isn't worth much if people don't stick around.
You are right, hence why I said they need should add the needed tools to do so. If thats an update to benefit teamplay, go right ahead. A media campaign, an initiative won't do anything without help, but its a start. That's not what forums are for. As long as the forums are open, there is an avenue to advocate for change. If you decide to say, "The game isn't gonna change, so I'm not going to try" doesn't get you anywhere. Let us have a hope, even if it is misplaced. This post is a start. Plus, 4,000 players is a lot. While the hype has died down, we still have numbers to work with. Now if that was only 100 players and they were spread across different servers, we'd have a problem. We can build those numbers by giving old players something to return to and new players something to come for. Make your game seem like the best game, nay, make your game the best game, let people know about it, and players will come and stay. Is that not what you want? So stop giving up, and try. You guys give up too easily. You guys say, "No, that won't work because...." Stop saying that! Say "I want this to work, how can we do it? What can we do to make this work?" Stop giving up on something you once found so much joy in! Stop being quitters! Exactly! So lets give them an experience! Lets give them a better reason to come back and to stay than a few updates here and there. We can surely give them that too, but lets give them time well spent. Lets give them fun. Lets fulfill the reason why anyone games! Lets give them an experience.
Want to improve the player experience? Remove features that leaves players thinking they could have done nothing to avoid it. If players die and come away with a solution to the death that's where you can adapt and grow as a player. But when you die to one of the 13 cloaked bolters, A2G jockeys or HESH tanks aiming directly at your spawn in the contested base, or the constant OS rain randomly popping in willy-nilly 2 seconds after the last, you just don't have an option... You have 2 options; move somewhere else (ghostcap duty) or stop playing. It's like playing Donkey Kong with invisible barrels. And that's no fun..
Then rebalance it instead of removing it. Make things that you don't like harder instead of removing it. You mention cloaked bolters. I hope you are talking about CQC BASRs, because if you are, I can agree that those are OP with clientside, and I already made suggestions on how those can be fixed. A2G is unbalanced, as I have already said before. I have given fixes on that and tanks in general on other forums. I haven't mentioned OS, but whatever. Its an OS. Move. Leave. Thats what you are supposed to do. Or you blow it up. Its not rocket science. All of these things won't revolutionize the game. They'll just make it more playable for people who are new, who have no backbone, or who like to whine. Do you have anything to add regarding the post on player relations and the Triple C Initiative?
Rebalancing stuff like cloak have been discussed at length in hundreds of threads. If you want a rebalance you need to shoot higher. I'm shooting way high in hopes that the realization it's broken and needs fixing sinks in. Regarding OS: Move or blow it up? Yes, I had VERY little issues with OS when it was a basebuilding thing. When it's a map-click deployable epeen tool it's just silly.. One time at Echo valley we had, what..close to 10 OS spammed in quick succession on Miller. Another example of it being silly is the term Rage-OS: When it's so cheap to use you just drop one after you've lost a base for no good reason there is something wrong. Also people dropping them on a single max, on a crowded spawn "just because" it's all things that makes the new player experience less fun. They don't understand what's happening, why it's happening and in many instances how to avoid it. (standing under a branch no thicker than your arm will save your life in the middle of it, while running like heck 20 meters outside of the blastarea will send you flopping to your death. Leaving, as you suggest, is your only viable option when it comes to OS and all these other cheese mechanics really, and that's just what the new players are doing. They are leaving.
Then put me on the dev team as a dev who doesn't develop anything other than ideas. What do you think about that, Zhakathoom? The cloak isn't truly the problem, but how it interacts with the game. Weaponlock guns for 1 second after decloak, which I guess would give someone at least half a second (?) on their side to react. Make the decloak sound act as a weapon does when it fires, and leave a dot on the map that can be seen from anyone within 35 meters. Make CQC BASRs harder to use. Probably other things. As for the OS, I guess a triangulated attack using the map makes sense lore-wise, because you are just plugging in coordinates and nuking the place. Maybe give it a full minute to charge up with a warning sound playing on the base. Make it mark on the map where it is coming from and tell players that they have a minute to destroy the targeting module for the OS (some module that would be added if it isn't in the game already) before the base gets nuked. Make a longer cooldown for full size OS's, and a shorter cooldown for small targetted OS strikes, saying that it takes longer to recharge a full than a short. Makes sense? What do you think?
There was another part of this post that I remember that would tie in nicely with this topic: basically (basically) removing redeploying. Right now, we don't need to drive or fly anywhere, but we have the freedom to. Why not refocus redeploying from quickly leaving and entering a battle (which can be reserved for instant action) to having it so we can leave territories where battles have ended or aren't happening or getting out of tight spots (actual tight spots such as behind a rock and you can't physically move or stuck in a crack and you can't hop out, not "uh oh, a heavy is looking for me, better redeploy to save my KDR) where you can't get out of otherwise? That way, we NEED to drive to bases, we NEED to fly to bases. We NEED to transport our allies, we NEED to scout for vehicle convoys and air squadrons. If we NEEDED to do those things and we were rewarded for doing them, they'd be done. Then we would have more avenues to encourage basic teamplay and advanced squadplay.
