1. Bugs unaddressed for months and years. I won't list them here. I will note one, as it has to do with the bad design...instant reload LA Rockets. And please, don't tell me DBG has a bug fix patch ready to go. They get no "we're going to do this in the future" pass anymore. Facta non verba. 2. Sunderer durability and bad design collide: A longtime ago, DBG, under the design guidance of Wrel, put LA Rocklettes in game. BAD IDEA DBG, BAD IDEA. At the heart of big enduring battles are sunderers. This made it easy to kill them. Players said as such before the add. So, later on, instead of IMPROVING the game, DBG had to rework sunderer durability. Yes. They created a problem, then they took diminishing resources to fix their own problem. Now add the long standing rocklette bug/exploit in the mix. 3. DBG (Wrel's) Spawn System Revamp. Very bad idea. Again, DBG showed they didn't understand the draw of their own product to customers. People play planetside for the HUGE battles. Not the battleroyales, not the Twitch MLG of Higby's days, but BIG MESSY BATTLES. So what did DBG do (under a long held design concept by Wrel)? They made the spawn system a mystery to new players (hey it says I can spawn here via the icon, but I can't, huh? Hey is that grey'd out? Why is there no spawn here but many where there are no fights? Huh what?) and they punished you for dying (cant get back to the fight as easily) and they made it maddeningly difficult to deploy to a sunderer 10 feet away. Wrel even stated the objective was to make it harder to get to big battles. "I am going to make it harder for players to do what they want and even pay to do". Brilliant. Who green lit that? <Looks at Andy Sites> The new spawn design was bad as the initial construction implementation as it TAKES AWAY FROM CORE GAMEPLAY. And I might add....DBG did this as population dwindled. "Hey look guys, aderpa derp, we have five different 1 v 1 fights on Indar at primetime! High fives everyone, high fives!" Folks, the problem with Planetside 2 is indeed an executive level who desires profit (which is good) with seemingly little to no understanding of the market and their existing customers (which is bad and prevents the profit). Planetside Arena is one example. So yes, the executive level is a problem for current and future games (I highly doubt future games are in store). But the DBG PS2 team itself, for years, has been a problem too. Sanctuary? An NSO Sniper rifle? Wrel's handling of ASP Respec (oh really Wrel, Sheep? How many times were you asked about ASP Respec and how have you answered in the past, now you call us Sheep?) Hey, Wrel, here's a small hint in the form of a question: How does a PS2 player gain access to ASP in the first place? Bonus question: What do your company execs reasonably need to see to keep the team employed? Toxic? Salty? Sheep? How about PAYING CUSTOMERS? Try that on for size, let it roll of the tongue.
We should just forget about it and look for better. They are making changes and moving development to PS2, as we can clearly see by the test server updates. If they keep updating the server, asking people what they want, fixing bugs, and following through, we should do as Cyrious said; view their mistakes as "water under the bridge."
Yes I have to agree the migration to DX11 created a whole host of new bugs, but with all due respect, it’s amazing the game is still running. Most games do stop working because of it. The new producer seems sincere about fixing the bugs. I thought all work would stop with failure of Arena. So any work or additions they can do at this point is a welcome sight. I’ve kept saying the Sunderers have horrible off roading capabilities, are the worst spawn points and the cloaking bubble is way to easy to spot. Glad someone else said it. Wrel is doing everything he can to improve the game, we all want a perfect eco system, the sad reality is there are limits to what you can do with coding and in many cases the engine is flawed and some stuff can’t be fixed no matter what you try, all you can do is mix the variables. I am glad Wrel canned the new player experience and frankly it is about money, these people can’t be expected to work for free, so the people who cause issues and want something for nothing, I hope they beef up the NSO robots and make memberships worthy. Life is about money.
Another thought is also that this game is honestly 7 years old at this point. Games rarely make it past their 5th year nowadays. With all the pitfalls that PS2 had to go through this is honestly nothing short of a miracle that this game is alive at all. I'm not trying to be like "oh you get what you get" as we still have the power to vote with our wallets (our only voting power it seems, mind you). I've played lots of good games that were online based before bad decisions ruined them. Dreadnought, Fractured Space....Hawken. The only thing I can do is do is 'vote' when I like something. I honestly agree though that something needs to be done about the levels of grind if you are anywhere interested in ASP. A free player might as well just not even consider it because by the time they even GET THERE the game will probably be shut down or flatlining due to age. If DBG wants to see PS2 bloom in players again it's going to take three major things. 1) Bug Fixes 2) Relaunch 3) De-grinding When a new player starts, it's already insurmountable enough to see the vast layers of classes and vehicles that can be played. It's even more insurmountable to see how much a single upgrade costs to max out or how much a new weapon costs...in both certs AND dbc. That ****, I guarantee you, is what causes 90% of new players to just burnout and leave more than anything else. They don't know how to get certs, they blow their starter certs on a weapon instead of upgrades, or they just spawn somewhere and get camped by BASR's or chain-headshotting heavies and then quit right there.
Although I agree on several points, this is really the time in which we should cut them some slack (okay a LOT of slack given the ast experiences). Arena has just been killed, the dev teams slashed and the survivors must be under immense pressure and afraid of loosing their job as well. Think about it. We are playing games, they are not. PS2 is an old game with a small but ferociously dedicated player base. The keyword is SMALL people, we do not bring millions with us. Have patience and give them support and keep in mind that poor improvements is obviously not good but shutting down the servers because DBG has lost any hope is worse.
Feedback to OP: Stop making it personal and laden with unnecessary clutter. If you want people to read and take in the stuff you wish to communicate then lay it out in an easy to understand manner because this is coming off as very much "I WANT TO SPEAK WITH YOUR MANAGER" in tone.
Powerful personal opinions you are sharing here. Compared to you Wrel is just a random guy that has no clue about anything, especially not about PS2. Right?
Oh I get the criticism of my post, and actually agree with it....especially the clarity one. Great point. My problem is patterns. The team's pattern is to work on things the customers don't want or don't care about, but we've been conditioned to be happy with what we get....because...reasons... The team's pattern is to not test (NSO jump pads). The team's pattern is to not admit a problem (LA Rocklettes). The team's pattern is create a problem and instead of fixing it, they paste a new problem over it (Work on sunderer's durability sparked by LA Rockelettes...work which is more an opportunity cost than it is game improvement). Now add the need to make a profit and the possibility of a detached executive level...and Houston, we have a problem. Then add the PR value of a team member referring to players as "sheep", "toxic", "salty" and you get closer to an EA Dice's former exec who successfully got Battlefield V low sales. Yet, we, as paying customers are expected to say nothing, in order to be "good team players". Just like the young British officer in September 1944 who tried to warn the Allies about German tanks near Arnhem, Holland. "Oh he's just toxic, ignore him." Boom, failure. I spend money on Everquest, happily. I do not spend money on Planetside. Sheep don't have money. And according to PS2 team, I am a sheep.
I dislike this point. Sunderers have had the Sunderer shield for a long time now and those make it incredibly tough for C4 fairies to blow up a Sunderer. There's also the Blockade armor which both increases the health and severely reduces the effect of C4 on the Sunderer. Both of these options have been available since long before the inclusion of the rocklet rifle specifically to enhance the endurance of Sunderers. The question is, if everyone is so adamant about the Sunderer being a core point of PS2 and that it needs to be tanky to survive, why does no one put the actual things in place to beef up their Sunderer on there? It's mind-boggling how many people complain about the Sunderer's supposed weakness while you can make it have 2500 regenerating shield health on top of it's 5000 health or add 1250 health+40% extra C4 damage degradation. Yet when push comes to shove all the people complaining are using repair or ammo sundies most of the time. Are you freaking kidding me?
Sunderer health pools, and I believe resistances, had to be adjusted after LA Rocklettes were added. My issue is that the time and resources needed to do that could have been used otherwise -- an opportunity cost of resource usage. I have seen a pattern of design decisions which repeats that opportunity cost problem and no matter how anyone gift wraps their criticism, it is not well taken, and focus moves from the criticism to the critique. Watch politics, you'll see the same process. Your points on HOW people use sunderers is well taken. I think people deploy rep or ammo sundies simply as a side effect of having driven that type of sundy for a different purpose (armor escort). Solution: ALL sunderer types, when deployed, should be equally and significantly difficult to destroy, with each type having a unique flavor to keep things interesting. ANTS with cortium should fill the roles of support for both armor and infantry. Criticism starts softly and kindly and is therefore safely ignored, in time it grows louder until it is ignored as a shout, and you can be sure that by then, it is too late.
I disagree with this. Sunderer health pools shouldn't have needed to be adjusted simply because the tools to combat this were there. The Sunderer shield was added because Engineers were supposed to have too easy a time blowing up Sunderers and stopping fights. The Rocklet Rifle addition only works well against non-shielded targets that would also be vulnerable to those Engineers. The tools are there, people who complain just refuse to use them and ask for automatically integrated tools instead so they don't have to think to protect their Sunderer. And while I agree with your other points I cannot agree with this one. I see it in many other things as well, but it's not just the devs that suffer from this. For example the repeated requests for more continents that would ineviteably suffer from the same core gameplay problems as current continents for example and all the time and money that has been wasted on Oshur are massive blows to what the game could have achieved in the meantime. Yes the devs have made a lot of horrible mistakes, but can you blame them when 80% of the idea's on the forums or reddit are even more horrible but still held by large sections of players? Who's criticism can you trust if most of the players seem to have horrible idea's and rarely can agree on the same subject? I don't think that is the case. Armor escort usually means more than 1 Sunderer and that means there's time to bring in a new armored/shielded version before the last Sunderer is destroyed. Additionally I see tons and tons of Sunderers that were bought and driven to the target area where they could instantly be deployed. When a base is captured you should stand on the road to the next base and just watch the kind of Sunderers that pass you by to the next base, and you'll find that barely any Sunderer will have shield or blockade armor. Yet as a rule the attackers of one base will almost certainly have vehicle superiority and don't need a Sunderer Escort in the first place to get to the next one. Sounds nice, but I don't think they should be equally difficult to destroy. I would like some player-made defenses in a form of mini-construction system that can be used in bases. For example we could add specific points in bases that have a spot for a small generator that powers something nearby, but players have to buy it with cortium (ANT) or resources (Sunderer) and bring it to that spot. A few basic protections could be added to a Sunderer Garage this way for example, meaning a ceiling-spitfire or a shield or whatever could be powered as long as the generator isn't destroyed. This would also help the defenders set up defenses prior to the enemy attacking and create small secondary objectives to attack or defend. Other idea's would include things like a sandbag wall/deployable large shield (as big as the Sunderer), a minelayer that places low-damage mines for area denial (say 150 damage each mine that are slowly replaced once destroyed or detonated), fields that disrupt vision the farther you are from the source while looking at it, a tripwire laser that spots anyone walking through etc. There are people who start criticism by shouting, but they usually offer the least helpful advice. The bigger question is: How do you find out which criticism is correct and on the point and which one isn't if you don't know for certain you have the right answer yourself?
