Well as the title indicates, I was wondering if it would be possible to get a bit more transparency from the devs, in an organized manner. To start a yearly or at least quarterly roadmap would be cool. Doesn't have to be super specific, and it's ok for minor details to change. Goals/steps could be color coded in terms of priority or likelihood of being completed. But it would be great to have some sort of roadmap anyone can look up and identify what's going to be coming the next few months, what's being worked on. Is it the "temporary lattice system", finishing Hossin? A new campaign? NSO overhaul? There's tons of stuff so I feel it's easy for the players and devs to get lost in this. Even for some people who may be interested in picking up the game its a bit difficult to get a gist of what state the game's in. At least a basic roadmap would give everyone a sense of direction and vague idea of what to expect in the near and far future. Secondly, a common thing in the industry is to have a spreadsheet or some sort of tracker where the daily progress of the developers is inputted, so it can be monitored which tasks are being worked on by who, which ones have been completed, etc. I'm assuming DBG as well has one of these. Obviously I don't want to compromise any details, but would it be possible to make a copy of this sheet shared real time with the community? Block of the dev names to Dev_1, Dev_2, etc and any sensitive details can be removed as well. But this way we get an idea of what bugs are being tackled, what's being focused on etc. I feel a lot of people don't understand the shear amount of work the devs are doing on the daily. This is a great chance to share it with everyone, and also allows players to check that their concerns are being addressed! Currently our GM's doing a fantastic job relaying information to and from the team. But ofc the time we are annoying him asking for updates to which he nicely responds could've been used for him to report more bugs, discuss ideas with the community, etc. Sharing the dev's daily task load helps alleviate some back and forth between us, our CM and the dev team. A third thing that I feel would be of major benefit to the game is publishing stats relating to the operations mods are doing. More importantly, publish stats relating to the number of cheaters banned. I would separate it into two categories, the "hackers" and the exploiters. Maybe publish the number of reports relating to each category as well. Additionally, add how many of these cheating accounts were linked to the same IP (this was done back in the SOE days, so I know it's possible although idk how much effort it takes). A major issue for this game has been cheaters - or more correctly - the belief of cheaters. And with such rumors spread, when people enter the game and get quad headshotted by a br 40 Betelgeuse heavy or see a guy extrapolate into a wall, they immediately attribute it to "hax". We all know it's not true, but for some reason there aren't regularly updated stats, and even digging up the old ones is no easy task. I would publish these, a bit like the fisu population count. https://ps2.fisu.pw/population/ Except here it would be total cheaters, cheaters per server, how many were hackers, how many were exploiters, how many were the same individual just making new accounts. Of course other information like number of players renamed, banned for toxicity, etc could be added, but the most important is that the game regularly publishes that there's an insignificant amount of cheaters, compared to the widespread belief it's infested with "hackers". Lastly it would be great to see a bit more player and DBG interaction. What I mean by this is answer questions during livestreams, make them as frequent as possible. Summarize them if you can, as understandably not everyone will be willing to watch 2 hours of streamed replay, so maybe make a vid or quick post summarizing the key points to takeaway from the stream. If it's too much work, no worries, there's plenty in the community who will do it for free I'm sure. What is even more important is to make the community feel they are included in discussions. Maybe try to conduct polls to ask players what they would like to see first in terms of update a, update b, or bug fix c for example. Maybe add contests of ideas for the game, even if it's something as little as to name a base or new weapon for example. I'm sure the community is capable of far more. You've got players who've invested nearly 9 years on the game, 18 years on the franchise. There's some really talented and passionate people out there I've seen design bases, weapons and mechanics extremely well. No need to take the controversial mechanics or updates they suggest, but public designs for models? That's a golden opportunity to improve the look and feel of the game without costing anything (yes, I know it will take work to implement but much less than starting from scratch)! But make the community feel like the game is a bit of their brainchild as well, and you'll gain player respect and trust, and opening the path to their heart will often open their wallets as well. Even in game the little surveys they had back then asking questions like "what's you favorite playstyle?" or "do you like this weapon" offering small rewards was a great way to make players feel like their opinions mattered a bit. But yeah overall working with the community especially on a game like this is a great way to align devs and players towards a common objective each party understands, and could help improve the game and make it survive even longer. Of course I don't know how feasible these ideas are, I didn't want them to be too time consuming and drain valuable resources from the team. But if it's low effort/high impact or something near these waters I would definitely recommend looking into it!
I do not know what is more sad: either seeing the original message or realizing people from the community (paying customers at the end of the day...) need to explain they would like transparency and not hype such as: "Planetside 3 will expand beyond the battlefields of Auraxis for "full-fledged galactic war" featuring empires "exploring, colonizing and conquering one another within an expansive galaxy", executive producer Andy Sites said in a blog post."
" PS2 offers a very unique experience that the current, active community enjoys. Trying to incorporate different game systems or styles of play or even trying out new modes would be disruptive - potentially catastrophically. We don’t want to upset that balance, as it would be unfair to our current PS2 community." - Andy Sites It's also interesting to see them say one thing, and then proceed to do the complete opposite. They've twisted planetside 2 so far from what it used to be at it's core, whether it be the invincible a2g, the 1hk cloakers, shotgun ambushers, bastions, outfit wars, etc... All this stuff that disappointed and caused people to leave, despite making statements like this. It's quite confusing to most of us. And I think it's a sentiment shared by most fans of the franchise. If you look at those update notes, there's over 10 000 people who have taken a look at them. That's far more than are actively playing the game. There's interest in the game, less than during the launch ofc, but still considerable interest. We need to ask ourselves why these players who are aware of the forums and regularly check on updates (presumably these are players who were active and left the game) aren't playing the game! But yeah the game should've taken a much more transparent view and embraced more of the community's feedback and ideas. After all, if one group wants the game to be fun and succeed, it's probably the group of people playing the game!!!!
