No fights during primetime...crisis mode reached

What was it, 3000 players per server?

Even if everyone bought subs it wouldn't be enough to sustain it, now that you mention it, it is kind of very curious how they planned on making any cash out of this.

Consider that a pretty sizable portion of the playerbase are university students and most of them have finals right now. Also it's getting close to Christmas so a lot of people are traveling and visiting family. If it's still like this on Jan 7-14 then I might want to voice some concern.

That's just it, by the time of release they didn't plan on making cash out of this. The plan, almost certainly starting well before release, was to recoup their losses to the greatest extent possible.

It's done all the time, though usually with lower budget titles. They do some math, figure out the cost of extending dev time and compare it to the potential for increased revenue. If it looks too costly, or just too risky, they cut their losses and ship what they have.

That's all pretty intelligible, and pretty transparent. You'll have a hard time finding someone who knows the industry who doesn't recognize the pattern we're seeing here. What's amazing is how many of the players stubbornly refuse to accept what is happening, even when the numbers are right in front of them.

The current population cannot sustain this game, and the population is STILL GOING DOWN. I don't know how anyone manages to fool themselves into thinking this game has a future. I really feel kinda sorry for them.

The Planetside 2 Community says: "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" "Ready my escape pod!!!"

Honestly though, I think people are over reacting a bit here. Planetside 1 had a much worse new player experience (mainly due to its age) when it first came out and this game is getting great reviews and buzz to help keep new players flowing. It's going to be just fine.

Server merges may happen but they'll do them when it's time. I think they're focused on what they need to be focused on right now - getting the game to run more solid performance wise and to squash most of the problematic bugs that they didn't want carried over from beta and into launch. Sever merges shouldn't be priority just yet.

-Niric

Calm down, every SOE game is being or has already been converted to F2P, and every new SOE title will be F2P. There's no conspiracy theories here, it's simply what they do now. If people would just walk outside the planetside universe they'd know some things around them.

I usually am pretty quick to pick up on things like that, but I only just recently heard of the player per server numbers which I thought would be way higher (by like at least x2)

3000*30 servers is 90.000 players, which isn't that much.
Steam currently show 15k ingame.

Its kind of weird, because 15k concurrent players isn't that bad for a MP shooter. Blacklight Retribution has maybe 1k tops. Tribes 500.

Keep in mind that the game also launched with VERY poor optimization.. I have a handful of friends from PS1 who are just waiting to upgrade their current systems or the optimization patch in January. Had the game launched properly with optimization in effect I don't doubt the player base would be at least 5k people more.


Also.. I was just on Matterson for about 4 hours.. had no issues finding a battle.. dunno what anyone is talking about. Idc if the server says the pop is low.. as long as I can still find battles without trying I'm happy

I discuss this at length in my thread about the subject. Basically, the thing that makes this game unique, the thing that's going to hook players, is population density. Splitting the US into 16 servers is insane. People are going to sign up, join, not see any battle for the first hour, say "wtf is this" and quit, and they're lost forever.

It's not that the game doesn't have enough players. The game could fill up 4-6 US servers pretty well. It's just that SOE is deliberately running ghost towns that are killing the whole reason this game is awesome.

The population has been terrible. I took major bases - bio labs, amp stations, etc. without a fight on friday and saturday night, on a double XP weekend. And this is on Genudine, which is one of the original and fairly busy servers.

Look at their own stats. No server has hit high in the last few days, and 8 US servers never hit medium. The other US servers alternate between medium and low. We don't know what they classify as low/med/high, but MMOs are usually optimistic about these numbers to make people feel the game is more in-demand than it is, and SOE can't even hit their own probably conservative "medium" numbers on half the US servers.

This is insane, and they risk killing the game for no reason. An immediate merge is needed.

Since you don't understand what the OP was pointing out, I will try. Each one of the continents has an empire population of 50%+. What this means is that if you try to go to any other continent, you will be destroyed by sheer numbers, and to make things worse you won't have resources while the defending force will have full resources + tech plants.

You are right same situation is on EU servers... we dropped from very high population servers to medium/ low. But only merge can make it better, Addind new contitent is bad idea.

Well to be fair of every aoe game they only have 3 high servers right now. My guess is the didn't want overly filled servers on release and planned on a merge from day one. It would also explain allowing cross faction characters now in plans for those merges.

Three things would fix this....First, Merge servers. Second make FORCED continent spawns. When one continent is at 90% on all three empires, allow another to start filling. It's stupid that each empire on every server just keeps the zerg on a continent with no resistance, just to stomp the few that come. It's boring. Third, add a smaller continent (think oshur-like), except with NO vehicles. This is coming from someone who primarily uses vehicles. The **** gets old.

Thought of another....Facilities need immediate rework. The base caps aren't fun. It needs to be something closer to what PS1 was....Make them mostly interior for the defenders. You should have to spawn in a detached building just to get stomped by a tank when you leave the door. It's not fun. There are way too many poorly thought out designs in this game. It hasn't even been a month since release and I'm already tired of it, and i'm not the only one. I can log on for about 5 minutes, kill a couple people, log off thinking what's the point. This is the first time in my gaming life that I've been this quickly bored by an MMO.

What does this "bad new player experience" mean? i never played PS1 and only tested this one week before relase, never really had any problems understanding how this game works as its pretty much same as any other FPS game with capture&hold objectives.

Maybe there could be more tutorials or something, but in the end this isnt super complex game that requires you to be an Einstein.

Usually when I hop online on my EU server I see the US servers at ''high'' or ''very high''... So yeah...

EU servers have same population drop . ... from very high and high to medium and some on low population ... and dont say that this is for some collage exams... game is very unbalanced in numbers of players for each faction and in gameplay - guns, tanks .... we will see what holidays brings.
I think one thing can solve this .... POPULATION limit on each map... if map can take 2000 players it will be 675 cca for each faction on each map ... with this system,there will be less number of zergs and and warp gate capping or overpopulated fights.. when your faction has to stand against 2X more enemies.

Me and many others don't use steam for Ps2... Only games which actually require steam =p

Ehm... Woodman and Miller are just as busy as usual... When playing in the morning it's always low, afternoon medium, evening + night high\very-high and maybe a short 2 minute queue...

Having absolutely HUGE battles on Woodman (EU) last night. Amerish was stormed by Vanu and taken.

yeah, i'm hoping for a merger or something soon. The only way this competes with other online shooters is if the insane numbers are there. Thats the real draw of this game, besides that there really isnt much special about the gameplay. If i'm only going to fight 4-5 people at a base i may as well opt to play a game with a tighter, round based experience with better designed maps.

Just merge the damn servers SOE, this is just silly.

Totally wrong. The special bit is the massive map. Even if you are only 'fighting 4-5 people' at a base, in PS2 you have the option of the following:

- Running away in almost any direction.
- Calling for backup.
- tactical retreat.
- Flanking on a massive scale.
- Hiding

etc etc.

No other game provides such a range of options. In BF3 for instance there is nowhere to run - the map is so small.