NSOverhaul Progress 6/3/2021

I understand that, I just don't think it solves the problem. You can get to BR20 really quite fast, and a lot of players won't find an outfit by that time. It also doesn't help returning players. An account which has a BR21 character but hasn't logged in for three years is for all intents and purposes a brand new player. Any way you cut it there's going to be a large section of the F2P NSO playerbase that will have no knowledge of the community aspect of Planetside and are thus much more likely to stop playing in the long term.

Hopefully the decision to remove NSO outfits aren't already set in stone. I scored a good name and tag on Emerald and really dont want to lose the progress I made gathering resources for the armory.

Removing NSO outfits seems to be a pretty awful idea, seeing as it removes any reason to actually play NSO aside from the different gear. It removes any and all community within the faction, which for an MMO is one of the worst plans to go with. The fact that you must purchase Outfit-access through a membership is just the common NSO theme of "Paying for less" as you could literally just play one of the Empires. Pretty awful.

Would be great if you would reconsider this. Getting Home factions sure is nice, but it doesn't work as a replacement for proper Outfits.

Deleting the excisting directive progress of the NSO players that pay for what they have played so far is disrespectfull.

I've paid real money to play the NSO in the first place, i have put other goals aside because i have 2 expensive boosters going on my NSO caracter, i'm not the fastest in finishing directives, and I find deleting everything we've worked for so far in no way justified.


also the NSO outfits already were not to big, we also worked for our outfit armory and that will also be taken down. why do we have to force players to chose a faction after all, sound like a hypocritical idea with what the NSO's were intended to solve...., make it an option, we want to fight with our fellow robots!

also, if non-members will be put in a random faction, that means players with less experience (BR20+) will be switched from faction all day long, wich means the chance of getting teamkilled will be even higher. make it at least that players have to have reached ASP or so.

besides that, I don't see that big of a reason to be a member with this system. isn't limiting the NSO specific vehicles to the members a good idea? that way we get some appriciation for our coörperation to keeping the game alive.

another reason the NSO was launched was for the players that had done everything on all other factions to accept a new challange. wich was mainly getting new and unique directives, but also being limited to a certain arsenal. NSO's playing with faction specific weapons will ruin that, I'n my oppinion adding new weapons to the NSO as NSO specific weapons sounds more appealing.

I consider most fresh players below BR 60 noob over all, they sure know how to deploy at all, but still have to learn a lot. if you assign players to balance out factions i'd prefer players with more experience, think about ASP or 100+ players.

So my two cents on this update is it is a direct attempt by the staff of RPG to see how bad they can upset their player base. I was waiting and hoping that the NSO Update would be a good one and then I read the current update. I personally am not concerned with the Outfit changes as I am not in one on any of my accounts. But this part I really do not like,
"Directives
With the update, NSO will receive directives that bring it in line with the way each other faction operates, so players will see new Assault Rifle, SMG, MAX, Javelin, etc directives. This did leave the original Auraxium directive weapons in a bit of a weird spot, however. We've decided to allow these to become a legacy gift for the players who were able to grind them out before the update. Non-Auraxium variants of these weapons may end up in the Black Market at some point as well. I imagine this announcement might cause a rush to grind out these directives, but I want to stress that folks should do so legitimately (no stat padding, please) or risk losing their characters. You've got some time."

Sorry Wrel but you know people will be "grinding hard" for the weapons, so how do you determine a player who is spending hours grinding a gun as fast as possible as "Stat padding?" Isn't stat padding stuff like Two friends on opposing factions hacking terminals back and forth together? Or a single player making a base and letting it decay so they can rep it just to gain ribbons? Also There is just no reason to do this to those weapons.

To end on a semi positive note though, I am interested in the new arsenal for the NSO.

I loved the novelty I always wanted to play in NS, but as I live in Brazil it's impossible due to our currency being super undervalued but still people who like the game buy their daybreak points when they give it. It would be two very good things to increase even more the people who play here in Brazil would be to make a different price for our region and the main thing that would bring a lot of people to the game to have it translated into Portuguese.

New PlanetSide 2 Continent - Oshur

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/303888100
For those who have not forgotten about /\ New maps (continent)
this is the incentive just what you need ! [ DB ]

thanks for insight - oshur.

As much as I love RGB on my computer, I'd prefer not giving my eyes a psychedelic exercise when trying to read text.

I don't think anyone's forgotten about Oshur. I was really excited for the continent. Seemed to be the "best" one so far. But yeah unfortunately it was just swept under the carpet for years.

However the devs have already hinted we might see it's release in Q4 this year or early Q1 next year. It makes sense to release it at that time too, for several reasons:

1. Bastion fleet carriers now exist. It wouldn't be too hard to implement the rotating bastion warpgate now, since much of the assets are already available.
2. Vanu artifact contaminating a continent. Sound familiar? I'm guessing this would likely be the perfect buildup for the next campaign. This isn't confirmed, but it seems reasonable to assume the next (or one of the next) campaign will take place around investigating this Vanu artifact on Oshur.
3. The team is pretty big now and there seems to be a bit more investment into it, now that H1Z1 isn't a priority.

That's not to say that we'll see it for sure, or that it'll be a good continent to play on, but it's not unlikely that this along with the next campaign will be the devs next major focus after the NSO overhaul.

That said this thread is supposed to be related to constructive comments about the NSO overhaul, it's best to post unrelated comments in a separate thread in the planetside 2 discussions:
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?forums/planetside-2-gameplay-discussion.32/

So, these new weapons are exclusive to nso only ? thats great and all, but the original faction specific weapons could also do with a modern redesign, new sound effects and all of the above mentioned, they havent changed since alpha .. why is this "major update" only concerning the nso faction !? not interested in playing as an nso, or starting a new char.. so what does this even mean to me ? nothing i guess.. just more laser beam weapons to be shot with, yipee.. been playing TR religiously since day 1, no idea where this robot faction came from, as it stands currently they do zilch to balance out the population, people want to play their faction theyve been grinding away for almost 10 years.

I've been thinking about how to go about the situation regarding the NSXA weapons that are the current weapon category directive rewards for NSO, and I think I've come up with a pretty decent idea.

Instead of solely returning them to the black market as non auraxium versions, you could instead, or also (you could do both), have the auraxium versions as rewards for completing (a) new black market directive(s) available to all factions. If you don't want to reward them all at once, then do several iterations with one being a reward for each, like the exceptional weapon directives right now, in which case they would return one after the other since there aren't that many black market items. This would also be fitting since the current black market weapons don't have a directive line for themselves.

Many of us could have but didn't grind out these shiny weapons because our priorities were to play with our outfits on other factions and / or wait until the NSOverhaul. Just because we had priorities shouldn't mean that we should miss out on having something that looks cool when it's still possible to have it in game; many of us dislike time gated content, especially when it ends up being time gated with such a short notice.

I don't have any NSXA weapons on my NSO character, but I know that if I did, I would want anyone to be able to get them, nice flowing skin and all.

I hope all of this is considered, and that if not through my suggestion, then through someone else's idea the NSXA weapons return in all their visual glory.

I'm looking forward to the update, keep up the good work RPG.
Thank You

I love Planetside 2, its my absolute №1 favorite FPS game and i wish it only the best. But if this update goes as written above, it will instantly kill the game for me and i will never touch it again. Here is why (please read the full detailed explanation):

First of all, you should remember that this game is also an MMO, and MMOs usually require huge time investments from the player. In order to keep the player satisfied with the game for thouthands of hours, the game must have good gameplay and replayability (obviously), but MOST IMPORTANTLY it must have a proper FAIR progression system that will act as a long-term goal for the player. Such system would allow the player to feel good about completing hard and/or grindy achievemnts by rewarding him with exclusive items (or some other more abstract rewards (like directive points!)) which he can then show to other players as a representation of his skill and experience in the game. For that matter, in order to maintain its value, the system must be fair for every single player: newbie or veteran, paying member or free-to-play player, slow casual player or hardcore speed-grinder. This way, the time and effort of any player is rewared equaly and therefore, these achievements have equal value for everyone at any time and can accurately represent players' accomplishments.

There are several progression systems currently in the game: Battle rank, Certs (or equipement), Implants, kill counts, K/D, and DIRECTIVES.
The first three systems can be progressed much faster (or even bypassed instantly!) by paying real money, which makes them completely IRRELEVANT in terms of representing experience of a player. Kill counts and K/D (and KPM) can't be improved by paying money (otherwise the game would be considered a P2W trash), but there are no clear defined goals in them and you can't reliably show everyone how many kills you have or what's your K/D (with the only real way of doing that being sites like ps2.fisu). That leaves the game with only one system that can act a (somewhat) reliable representation of your experience with the game — Directives.

Auraxium items always had the label of being directive-only and therefore, acted as a direct representation of the achievements, associated with the respective items. For example, if you see a player with and auraxium sniper rifle you can tell that he is a skilled (or at least experienced) sniper, because in order to get it he would need to make at least 1160*5=5800 kills with different sniper rifles. A more general (and also more important) example would be directive points: if you get killed by a player and see only couple of hundred directive points on his kill card, you know that he is probably new to the game (or he just doesn't care about grinding directives); likewise, if you get killed by a player with thouthands of directive points, you know that he must be a veteran because the ammount of the directive points is directly proportional to the lower bound of time and effort required to get them.
(For the sake of argument i will ignore the illegal ways of getting directive points like automated farming with third-party programs, payed account boosting or straight up using someone else's account. However, since every player can do that, creating and deleting new charecters to farm easy directives remains a valid and fair way of getting directive points (though i don't really like that the system allowes for such strategy))

The decision of locking the old NSO directives clearly indicates that not a single person in the current dev team understands what a truly fair (and therefore, good) progression system means. I will now try to explain how badly that decision will affect the directive system (and the whole purpose behind it):

Lets say there are two players X and Y. Both of them are equally skilled and both of them casualy play the same ammount of time per day. They are also both completionists and enjoy to slowly grind directives. When NSO first came out, player X decieded to buy a membership and play the cool new robot faction. Player Y on the other hand, continued to play regular factions and slowly but surely continued to complete their respective directives thinking to himself — "I still have plenty of directives to complete on my NC/VS/TR charecters, i'll buy the membership and play as NSO when i first finish these in a couple of years (or get some spare money!) or when the NSO faction becomes free". Time passed and both players X and Y completed equal ammounts of directives on NSO and non-NSO charecters respectively. Now this update post hits and the player Y knows that with his casual pace he won't be able to complete all of the old NSO directives (maybe because he plays other games too or he doesn't want to burn out on PS2 or he has a real life job that eats a lot of time or he still doesn't have spare money). Player X however, already auraximized all of the NSO weapons and completed all the directives. After some time the actual update comes out and the new directive lines are introduced, while the old once are locked forever. So what is the situation now? Player X already has some of the new directives partially completed because he already auraximized old weapons, AND he retains the rewards from the old directives (auraxium guns and directive points), while player Y has more directives completed on regular factions. Lets say from that moment both players X and Y only play NSO. After some time Y auraximizes the same old NSO guns that player X did previously so he recieves the rewards from the new directives. Meanwhile, player X auraximized the same ammount of newly introduced weapons but completed more directives because some of them were already partially completed from the beginning.
In the end, both players have spent equal ammounts of time and effort throughout their PS2 career (and therefore have equal experience in the game) but player X has more auraxium weapons and directive points then player Y, who can no longer obtain them. The only difference between these players is that X spent real money on the membership during the right time, while Y didn't (but even if Y did spend the same ammount of money he would still had less rewards because he had no idea that NSO directives would be locked). For both of these player the 'win condition' was to get more directive rewards then the other player. In this case, player X obviously won, which kind of makes pre-patch version of NSO faction pay-to-win.
This way, directive system betrays its primary purpose and stops accurately representing accomplishments of the player.

Now let's have a bit of history. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember when back in the day a similar bad decision was made: One of the first seasonal directives had introduced an auraxium weapon (i think it was Auraxium Slasher) and rewarded standard ammount of directive points. This created a similar problem of 'missing out' which i illustrated above in much detail, but at least it didn't involve real money and everyone knew the exact dates of the start and the end of the event from the beginning (so they could adjust and plan their playing schedule accordingly beforehand). That time devs quickly realized that it was a huge mistake and had never to this day used auraxium weapons or directive points as a reward for seasonal directives (which is their primary difference from regular permanent directives).

All of the written above suggests that in order for such a system to be completely fair for everyone it has to permanently remain unchanged: new directive lines could be added indefinitely but once they are added (no matter how numerically unballanced they might be), they have to remain the same forever, otherwise those who didn't do them in time will miss out on opportunity if the directive requirements get buffed; analogously, those who managed to do them in time will get angry if the requirements get nerfed over time (because they had to grind more to get the same rewards). I can think of only one example of a permanent directive line being changed — when devs added 5th auraximized gun requirement to Gold weapon camo directive line. Hopefully, you can now see that it was a mistake, though obviously way less dire then those described before.
This idea of requirement consistency applies not only to the numerical values of the challenges (like kill counts or other conditions), but also to the list of weapons and number of condition types required to complete the directive. This is because adding a weapon that is easier to kill with or an easier-to-complete condition would reduce the overall diffuculty of that directive line for future players.

Lastly, i want to mention directives that require money like Exceptional directive series. I'm not particularly fond of that concept, however since they remain unchanged for the whole lifecycle of the game they can be concidered somewhat fair because you are not forced to immediately spend money in order to 'not miss out'. You can just buy required weapons when you feel like supporting the game and go through that auraximization grind like everyone else.

Conclusion.
The decision of locking the old NSO directives is a spit to the face of every completionist out there, especially to those who didn't complete the directives in time (but could definetely do that if they were not being locked). It reduces the value of the only good progression system in the game. PLEASE, don't ruin one of my favorite games for people like me, who deeply care about fair progression.
I understand that the concept of a completely fair system is hard to grasp for many people, even for experienced MMO veterans. But i hope that whoever managed to read this post to the end can understand what i was trying to say.
Besides, if you really want to reward pre-patch NSO players, there are plenty of different ways to do that, for example by giving them an exclusive decal or a title or a banner or maybe even a unique camo (but not auraxium guns and directive points).

Just putting these by each other to reiterate that this example is based in reality. The only difference here is that I've had continued access to NSO through membership; I simply chose to play with my outfit on other factions and grind directives there. I am currently slaving my way through the Engineer directive, but am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel to that one.

Could you please allow NSO Defectors to use their shield while in a vehicle seat? Doesn't make sense why they couldn't and adds a new strat.

What? Where are my skin updates? I demand proper feet for security force skins.

Sorry but I can't see any sense in removing NSO outfits. Their roster may be scattered between the three factions but having that community outside of those three factions provided a very unique, and rewarding atmosphere that wasn't based around faction loyalty. Taking all of the time and effort that some of these players have devoted to building these outfits, earning Merit, gathering resources, etc, and just saying 'well into the trash with you' is a huge slap in the face. Enough that I imagine more than a few would quit the game over it. It should be that Freelance can join NSO outfits, and if they sign up for membership then they can align themselves to a faction. You're effectively, literally, locking anyone that doesn't want to pay the sub out of every bit of content associated with Merit because you wanted a 'clean solution'? Take the time to rethink this, and code in a better system rather than saying that the 'small number of NSO outfits that found some success' will have to deal with it. You're marginalizing a dedicated playerbase that's poured a lot of time and effort into this unaligned faction. You should be creating MORE community opportunities, not cutting them in favor of a naked cash grab.

Can you please address the bundles offered for NSO characters? All of the existing bundles give NSO a fraction of the goodies that a normal faction character would get for the same price. There are a lot of older players like myself, for example, who can't play infantry anymore with infravision...just can't see anymore and I'm already wearing reading glasses to see my monitor.