Development Update – Forum Discussion - Jan. 25 2023

"Cheating
We are very aware of how much of an issue cheating has become. At the beginning of the year, we specifically dedicated developers to look closely at the issue and work on solutions. There is no one place or technique that hackers use, so we must tackle different problems independently and roll out solutions when we think the time is right.


Unlike other features and changes, we will not be detailing exactly when and how cheating will be addressed. We hope everyone understands why that is not possible. It is unfortunately a Red Queen's race that is never finished and must be constantly worked on quietly so as not to reveal workarounds ahead of time. We can already see that our efforts should bear fruit over time, and we hope that you will notice much less cheating and at greater distant intervals."


Thank God! All the bro-science appears to point to BE being worthless, especially in light of "hackfits" and others that run private cheats. I applaud you all for taking this head on. It would be great to shame the cheaters too, with in-game announcements when cheaters get perma-banned. Can't wait to see "gud" players become normal.

It gives some hope to see some more activity on the dev side after what feels like a very long time of "maintenance mode" sprinkled in with somewhat questionable projects. If the game starts going in a good direction again I will restart my subscription, probably a few people who didnt feel their money were going into anything will as well if updates start to deliver.


All that said, quickly looked through the thread and I am a bit surprised no one seemed to have either cared or caught this earlier:

"This hints at a longstanding issue with vehicles in general suffering from "Single Entity Problem" where vehicle capability does not degrade until it is destroyed completely, making them very binary. Presently vehicles are all in, which is where many of the balance issues stem from. But that is a deeper and more complicated issue to be tackled at a point in the future."

Casually dropping hints that vehicles may or may not be "single entity" in the future, with possibly areas/modules that can be destroyed to impact the vehicles performance(especially when taken with context earlier in the OP about Sunderer changes).

It is updates like this that gives me a little hope for the game because if that is something the team is wanting to do, its not a small change for the game but more like full active development of game mechanics. Something to look forward to, if it happens.

Just an Idea on the cheating issues. Would it not be possible to link a players account to a mobile phone number.
I'm sure that must have been done in other games already but I don't play many other games so I'm not sure?

That way it would make it much harder for anyone who does get banned to just create another account (without using multiple phones of course which would be fairly expensive).

I will make an effort to explain to the best of my current understanding...

The premise of the Sunderer changes by Daybreak was in response to a "hot take" where someone got it in their mind that too many smaller fights were being "forcibly ended" too soon. Essential by having the defenders "bum-rush" the attacker's Sunderer with counter-vehicles, light assault, or from the sheer proliferation of C4 that seems to exists in every infantryman's pocket. Thereby ending the fight while it is in its "initial phase" before it becomes an established fight.

So... Rather than addressing the actual concern which has to do with the abundance of anti-vehicle weaponry, players being able to freely redeploy across the continent, and poorly designed lattice systems (a.k.a. Oshur)...

... they instead side with the players who think that putting a "band-aid" upon the Sunderer will resolve this issue. Daybreak appears to have agreed this is the "solution". Therefore they wish to make Sunderer's have enhanced benefits for a specific purpose - as if the Deployment Shield wasn't already sufficient for static spawnpoint durability.

Sunderer's are "fine" as you say, save for their horrific driving/handling/roll-over tendencies. However... Let Daybreak cook. Perhaps it won't be a horror show upon the PTR and we'll see what they have in mind. One step at a time. Give them a chance.

Of course, the problem is... Daybreak has historically (and continues to currently) engage in the "sunken cost fallacy". Where Daybreak will create a "solution" to the problem, put it up on PTR, and then proceed to ignore all the valid player feedback and kick it out the door to live servers as-is anyways. Which then becomes a catastrophe.

If Daybreak makes these Sunderer changes like they did for the Oshur and Fortification Updates, then they 1000% deserve the harsh criticism they receive for being grossly out of touch as they often are while players demand a "rollback".

Think I'm wrong?

Look at the complete failure that Outfit Wars turned out this year. Daybreak needs to go back to basics. Period. Full stop.

The sunderer changes just falls right in line with Wrel's work in reinforcing the zergs and zerg mentality. The adding of the lattice, locking of continents, unstable warpgates, and the spawn anywhere system have dumbed the game down to whoever has the biggest club wins. There's no freedom to choose your fights any more. Everyone is funneled to the zergs. No more intimate 3v3, 6v6, 12v12. The fights that start that way becomes a one sided zerg within a minute or two. These changes have ran off all the smallfits and midfits, to leave the zergfits. Small groups or outfits of skilled players no longer matter. The dumbing down is worsened when taken into consideration the nerfs to classes and damage tier nerfs, buffing of shotguns, and the adding of AoE and lottery weapons.

The ability to take out sunderers, although not ideal, is at least a way to slow down the zerg long enough for reinforcements, or funnel the zerg through fewer spawn points.

By this logic, main battle tanks should be able to mount multiple top guns, instead of being sitting ducks for A2G or G2G depending on choice. Especially since Liberators has never and most likely will never see any real balance. It can take more damage than a main battle tank, deal more damage faster, defend against both air and ground, has the advantage of a 3 man crew as well as being almost as effective solo, and can easily fly away and repair.

As far as reverting goes, why isn't previous builds saved? At least the most recent, so that it can be reverted and re-patched to better effect. This just seems like common sense. Instead, we're stuck with gimmicks that are constantly added to a game that wasn't designed with those gimmicks in mind. And meanwhile, more and more bugs are introduced and hardly ever get fixed, while performance gets even worse.

Will there ever be an update on how planetside is going for the playstation? Its been years man

On the cheating front: Do what you need to do but please don't add kernel level anti-cheats. They are dubiously effective at best and have already been used as a malware infection vector for other games, looking at you genshin. Also as one of the minority of linux players and the current maintainer of the Planetside 2 lutris install script I would really like to press the case for not breaking linux compatibility as you tackle the hacking issue. There are currently no cheating software that can work under wine/proton and there likely never will be. The required DLLs for common cheating workflows are never loaded and cant be force loaded because they dont exist in WINE. Cheating is almost entirely limited to windows as an operating system and I would ask you to make sure that you dont break linux as collateral in dealing with a windows issue

I really like how the communication is now, keep going. Love the game since my first days back in 2015 <3

Finish and fix NSO.

Agreed. There is still so much work to be done on the NSO faction...

Greetings Mithril !

I cannot stress how much I look forward for a harder and more effective process in place to counter and eliminate cheaters.

I can say that, at least on Emerald, there's regularly cheaters ruining multiple entire hours of game time.

So thank you and the team for investing time into this glaring issue.

Kind Regards,

I am once again asking for you not to remove sundy proxy repair, it kills the battle bus which is already underpowered. I can no longer do sundy trains. It'll make pulling repair buses unfun and deter people from helping out allied vehicles.

LONG LIVE OSHUR!!!

I am joking. I am actually one of those freaks that likes Oshur, but sadly I know I am in an extreme minority.

I agree with what seems to be the majority consensus which is focus on the current bugs/glitches, clean up the game, and get back to the basics which may mean rolling back some changes that have not gone well. Not piling changes on top of changes that were already unpopular.

Personally for me just fixing the current in game issues and minimizing cheating would go a long way. One of my trivial pet peeves (obsessions) are the accounts running chat bots. There is one on TR that goes on multiple times a day. I really enjoy following the banter (both good and bad) and these chat bots ruin that social aspect of the game.

I also agree that the increased level of communication recently is much appreciated, and is also an important part of maintaining a sense of community that will help the overall health of the game.

The next update that resets all the keys on my keyboard again I'll stop playing this game forever... have a nice day.

all my inputs are borked /sadmoo

I logged in the the first time in years to say something very similar, and I must say I am thrilled to see that common sense hasn't abandoned this place yet.

"That is, to be a competent AMS, the Sunderer requires the deployment shield and that comes at the cost of supporting armor. This means that once someone has elected to take the Nanite Proximity Repair System, they have removed any further meaningful decision making from their play until they fully transition to infantry or reach a vehicle terminal."

So you're saying that anyone that plays with barricade armor or repair sunderers are not competent and lack meaningful decision making skills because they choose to play differently than what you intend? Wow...

dont kneecap players because of the four people who make videos on this game, only thing i really dont like about night is how infils get a massive boon but its real nice and thematic and just has nice vibes