Rise and Fall of PS

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by OneShadowWarrior, Oct 22, 2021.

  1. OneShadowWarrior

    I’ve played this game since the first when SOE and was a beta tester for PS2. It is safe for me to say the game that was on the rise with SOE at the helm is now spiraling to a hard fall. It was taken in the wrong direction starting with Escalation. So many other mechanics could have been addressed than curtailing to the masses and promoting cheap outfits to camp people then trying to do a 180 and bring new people in while selling out the veterans who supported this game thru the years.

    1. No new maps and Shattered Warpgate ruined the Esamir map completely.
    2. Containment centers although noble in intent did not do better than Bio Labs.
    3. NSO’s are another unfinished project with lack of polish.
    4. Roadkills never addressed, vehicles should not run over players this easy.
    5. Spawncamping, why can enemies so easily have full field of view at these locations and the camped are jammed like sardines shooting each other in these rooms because none of the anti vehicle or anti air weapons even work and you have no line of sight in these spawn rooms.
    6. Nerfing the wrong classes, I think cloaking and sniping is ridiculous, infiltrators long overdue for a overhaul.
    7. Medics and Engineers been broken for years, stuff like the rapid firing glitch, we’ve all seen it, never addressed. There was a time when medics ran with heavy assault, not anymore. Engineers are pure cannonfodder, even the Archer carried in a slot like the rocklett rifle would be something.
    8. The game seems to look graphically worst since DX11.

    Pushing Koltyr to low populations and then creating a crossbow that was over the top truly had shown me how the game has truly regressed.
    • Up x 2
  2. Demigan

    It was in decline in SOE times as well. They were slow to react to OP stuff like ZOE and the dozens of other ultra-OP weapons and mechanics. They would use draconian nerfs for things when they finally adressed them (except for air). They decided to keep and expand on the giant middlefinger that the G2A deterrent game "just to make people join the air-game!" Only for them to keep horrible mechanics that actively prevented players from actually joining it. Many of the problems that the game struggles with today were things that were problems in SOE times as well. For exanple the Escalation update just magnified existing problems and it is highly likely that SOE would have done similar things, just at the glacial pace they did from back then.

    1: new maps is too much work for too little gain. Add variations of current maps and add mechanics to ensure we use the large amount of unused space on the continents in our fights.
    Also lets remember how much SOE did and how it panned out.

    2: failed concept, but at least they pushed something out the door.

    3: didnt SOE leave just about everything unfinished as well? Like tower bases which took ages to be altered, only for the solution to be crap and need another alteration that took ages. Or when they did "finish" something it was usually a deathblow nerf. I struggle to think of anything SOE has actually finished.

    4: they did it somewhat. If you ram a tank with your own you dont have the chance to insta-explode anymore, or wreckage rolling down hills destroying stuff. Like the Flash suddenly turning into a OHK projectile upon its destruction, so much so that trying to ram one that was above you on a hill was heavily discouraged. Also this is a problem from SOE days ofcourse.

    5: again a problem left over from SOE. While SOE did try to solve it somewhat, they never had the intelligence or capability to truly solve it. Considering how blatant and obvious some solutions were, like solving the Hallway of Death, it astounding to applaude SOE. Blaming this on post-SOE is even weirder since it is a literal leftover from what SOE did in their vein and glacial attempts to do anything.

    6: SOE did a few good things I guess. If I am not mistaken they dod things like nerf the Heavy Overshield and make MAX's more expensive. But if I am not mistaken many changes also happened post-SOE, like the 0.75ADS nerf (for all the hype and how little it actually mattered in the end).

    7: how is this not an SOE created problem? And one by the playerbase at that. Players are pushing these classes in a corner and not wanting to have actual progress for them. Any deployable for some reason has to go to the Engineer because he drops deployables! And the Forwards Station could have made the Medic one hell of a good class with stragetic depth in the game, but players completely lost it and devs decided to throw it under the bus and create the Router instead so they could keep selling the construction system

    8: again, how is this not the cause of SOE? They had the graphics but it caused so much lag and problems for clients that they had to degrade it. O:MFG was entirely designed for it for example. And the step to DX11 was a sound one, if not entirely well executed. Something that SOE did just as much as current developers. Just at a slow, sloooow pace.

    Talking about that slow pace. If SOE hadnt decided to push the profits from PS2 down the moneypits of several failed games and had spend it in PS2 instead maybe they could have done something more or better. Although their track record is just as bad as current developers, if not worse since they actually build what could be the worst balanced game in the history of games when PS2 launched and were OK with launching it in that state.
    • Up x 1
  3. Liewec123

    SoE and DBG have both done their fair share of harm to the game,
    I worry more about patches now than I do back in the SoE days though.

    But SoE started the map population reductions, first from 2000 (2012) to around 1400 by 2014/15.
    DBG dealt the killing blow to population however with the final reduction to 900 and adding faction queues.

    SoE is iirc solely responsible for the graphical atrocities,
    in 2012 they gave us a game which could hold its own graphically with any 2021 game.
    But over the years they chipped away at the graphics, starting with the awful "operation make faster game"
    So instead of that 2012 game that looked like it was from 2021, we are in 2021 with a game that looks like it is from 2012.

    What we need (it'll never happen but I can dream) is a total revert to 2012 PS2,
    and then add in the content that didn't ruin the game, so we'll take valkyries, nso, (most) weapons, current-harasser etc
    And leave out the annoying c**p like bastions and OS.

    Its a complete sin that in 2012 We had a game that looked way better, was far more fun and had over double the players per map.
    How can a game be deliberately made sooo much worse over the course of a decade?!
  4. csvfr

    I've only played since 2017 yet was impressed by the game at that time. Not too large, still there were battles like taken straight out of a large scale action movie with tanks blowing up every couple of seconds and infantry not really being viable until a breach had been secured at the next base in the lattice.

    The first "bad" nerf i saw was reduction of flak turret range to 500 meters (it is now 750 meters). This impacts the realism of the game and makes it possible for liberators/ESF to just laugh at 501 (751) meters range versus a manned Phalanx. Explosions at range following an encounter is no longer seen.

    Then came Combined Arms Initiative, exiling what was known as "vehicle mains" from the game attempting to force players into infantry although the game mechanics is not really designed for this. Players were forced to cope with client-side mechanics, frame-rate dependent DPS, other artificial constraints, because tank guns became like trebuchets instead of giving the "action" kick. Personally I found my way around it with the NC MAX but got demotivated when this too was nerfed to promote more "fair" infantry play.

    Returning after a long break Escalation was released; to be fair it gave a long due shakeup in the outfit scene. Leaving my old Zergfit to create my own, knowing well how an outfit functioned I am to this day World Leader in Bastion kills (proof: https://voidwell.com/ps2/item/6009004/leaderboard 10K+ kills). It kept me playing until outfit wars earlier this year but the bugs the game always have had also concerned match times etc. making me be ready and allocate times even when at the last minute it became known that there would be none. Pure abuse by the devs is my thought on this matter.

    Leaving the game and just reading, I think the lack of will to fix bugs, ESF mouse accel to mention one, is what keeps gamers away besides the lackluster graphics.
    • Up x 1
  5. csvfr

  6. Demigan

    Operation: Make Faster Game was an ongoing effort to reduce things like infantry only rendering at 20m in large fights for example. Along with population reductions it was an unfortunate necessity.

    Also I hope your idea for reverting to the "original" game does not include reverting most nerfs? Because the game was rather bipolar at launch where things were either tickle machines or absolutely destroyed everything. The list of ridiculously OP cheese is miles long. As an example during one nerf of aircraft the pilots complained that their average killstreak was now around 50 rather than 90+, which shows just how horrible it all started.
  7. Demigan

    Checking that link says that the highest is 3k kills plus +/-500 vehicle kills? Where do you get that 10k kills from?

    Also I fail to see how combined arms was made for infantry?

    - many tank canons got buffed reload speeds.
    - no longer a great punishment to use HESH in tank vs tank combat, making it more available.
    - infantry rocketlaunchers got nerfed to deal less damage per shot, "compensated" by higher amount of rockets carried and in cases faster reloads. It just meant that infantry needs to expose itself more often to OHK fire to get a kill.
    - more armor options specifically meant to deal with infantry-AV.
    - flanks and front armor got the same armor ratings, making one of the infantry advantages of getting in the flanks more easily null and void. This was reverted soon after since it dumbed down vehicle vs vehicle combat too much, not because infantry was nerfed by it.

    I see virtually only buffs to vehicles in the CAI update when it comes to dealing with infantry. I still have to hear any reason why CAI actually nerfed vehicles versus infantry rather than supercharged them.
  8. csvfr

    The link is for one of the four underside cannons, the others are almost identical and 4*3K~=12K.

    Around the time combined arms was rolled out there were multiple atrocities, such as surviving a tank shell hitting directly if flak armor was equipped. Versus someone with poor tank aim, an HA may dance around (aka shuffling) and actually take out a lightning. The tanks got buffed reload speed yes, but resistances were overhauled resulting in less damage per shot, removing the advantage of skilled play including aiming, flanking, and positioning. At one point even directional armor was removed, then reinstalled. Shell velocities suffered the most resulting in tank fights at range becoming a rare sight usually carried out by people trying to get from one base to the next over dedicated tank squads. Getting close (<100m) and spamming shells is the new tank game, something that just doesn't attract players to stick with the tank. HESH became more viable yes, just what the game needs /s. With reduced threat from vehicle-vehicle interactions, a well positioned HESH tank can farm much more. I did not claim that CAI nerfed vehicles vs infantry, but that it removed a significant part of the vehicle ecosystem.
  9. JibbaJabba

    The big ones I think.
    • Broke the Aircraft controls - wrecked the air game, made it so it would never work again.
    • CAI - Fixed nothing for infantry (see next), wrecked a whole playstyle for those that digged vehicles.
    • Nerfed infantry rockets
    • Destroying the "popular" base over and over again... Crown 4x over, Ti alloys, Biolabs, Subterainian nanite, Mani Fortress.
    • Outfit wars (long term this wrecked out fits, not helped them)
    and...
    • The Cloak. Literally having an invisible playclass in a 3D shooter and knowing how broke it is. But the sting of losing all those tankers to CAI makes them too scared to lose the cloak crutchers. So they instead loose new players in large swaths for years and burn out the paying veterans.
  10. MonnyMoony

    Esamir is a missed opportunity.

    When shattered warpgates first arrived, people used to play a lot near the shattered warpgate. There seemed to be a lot going on in that area and you saw people salvaging the derelict vehicles quite often (which added interest when VS pulled a prowler or TR pulled a magrider)

    All of that seems to have disappeared though - and now we have been given these sprawling containment sites that aren't very interesting to play.

    Can you even pull salvaged vehicles any more - or was that function removed. I can't recall the last time I saw one.
  11. RabidIBM

    I wouldn't blame DBG as much as the OP, but they have certainly made mistakes. I would say that the mistakes started at money, and dominoed from there. Pulling money out of PS2 to invest in failed projects rather than reinvesting it in the game that was already profitable, trying to kill PS2 by replacing it with PSA, and now trying to strengthen the bottom line by squeezing existing customers harder when they need to focus on increasing the number of customers.

    In short, PS2 will perform better if it stops getting money ripped out of it.
  12. csvfr

    The thing is that apparently there is a very easy workaround for the mouse acceleration. The trick is to simultaneously (or exclusively) send input from a joystick and then the mouse acceleration disappears.


    Some actually created simple scripts to constantly send a negligible controller/joystick input when flying that removed the mouse acceleration. But unfortunately there are many that don't have a joystick/controller. In any case I don't see how hard it would be for the game to do that whenever piloting an aircraft as a "speculative fix". And it would make the dervish accessible because in its present state it's almost impossible to control.
  13. JibbaJabba


    Aye folks have been trying to hack this for years because dev won't fix it.
  14. OneShadowWarrior

    Once you go DX12, HD, Ray Tracing, Nvidia Reflex and DLSS, very hard to go back.

    A 9 year old engine, compared to BF3, Planetside was ahead of it’s time, but not anymore.
    • Up x 1
  15. csvfr

    Newer games have graphics and especially textures that look much better than PS2, but that's pretty much it. I feel like the AI is lagging way behind with enemies behaving like traffic lights. E.g. Peeking from cover at fixed rhythmic intervals every 10 seconds, oblivious to the fact that their friend was just killed doing the exact same thing. Or sneaking up on someone from behind for a violent takedown with another enemy 2 meters away not noticing a thing. One sort of miss planetside then where the opponents provide a more realistic and fun experience.
  16. dngray

    It's still a great game with plenty of people playing.. No other game offers anything quite like Planetside2.
  17. OpolE

    NEVER having the Planetside 1 metagame made it fall. You fight for F-all all day being told when the continent will shut by ALERTS. stuppppid game