Dear SOE...Population

Mattherson is not a ghost town, far from it. The problem is that the players have figured out that the lazy way to farm certs is to zerg cap a mostly empty continent (Amerish or Esamir most of the time). The developers have failed to give incentives to defending a point that you've just capped or to go where the enemy is. Nor have they put out incentives to players to stay on continents where you are outnumbered 2:1 or worse. So we end up with two or three zergs chasing each other around empty continents, often each zerg on their own continent.

Another issue is that you can rarely see where action is taking place. If the map would show things like "players killed" or something, it would be easier for other players to find zones of conflict.

That would kinda defeat the whole "persistent war" thing ya know.

Some servers will be merged where the player base is too low. This is a known fact of any and all MMO's. Additionally, fighting will be encouraged in the future when they tweak XP rewards again.... This is a trial and error kinda process where they have to figure out what it's going to take to encourage people into the same fight.

They've got lots of feedback and ideas from the community over countless threads how to achieve this.

Something WILL be done.

I think you are trolling?

LOL! if they dont merge servers game will be dead sooner than later. Why would ppl stick around on a empty game. Planetside is about big fights not a 6v6.

Also think about it. Most hardcore computer gamers have heard about PS2 by now, if they wanted to try it they would have because it is FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Growth is going to be hard for SOE because casual gamers who havnt heard about this game yet sure arnt going to spend as much as a hardcore.

LOL your post sez mattherson is not a ghost town and go on to say ppl just cap empty continents lol at you sir!!!!

go into a Cs:go server or bf3 server or any game for that matter and ask who has played ps2. You'll be surprised.

A victim in the sense that I've got the **** end of the stick because I randomly picked the wrong server on launch day. I'd be having a much better time if I had picked Connery on day 1, the fact that I didn't was essentially random.

You were being an ******* by assuming that this is a result of a character flaw on my part, that I was wrong for picking the wrong server and this is justice. Which is complete nonsense, since no one knew how population was going to shake out on day 1, and you have to pick one server and stick to it.

There will be new players, but it's not going to suddenly start flooding in.

There's no reason to suspect that there are going to be massive growth numbers suddenly that require opening new servers. Improving the server code and adding to the hardware capability of the current set of servers would do a lot to offset a slow growth of new traffic - and we're being optimistic by assuming growth. There's been no sign of continual growth, and in fact the peak numbers for ps2 on steam (not a total, I know, but reflects the total) are under 10k today.

They are killing the game now by not merging. The idea that some day it may be a big success and we may need to expand again, therefore let's not merge now is stupid. It's not going to be a big success without the merges, it's going to bleed to death as the main appeal of this game, the mass scale, fades further and further away. Even people like me, who are super enthusiastic about the game, spent lots of money on it, and have now played hundreds of hours are going to decide one day that capping a major base alone during primetime for the 50th time just isn't appealing anymore, and that the amount of time I spend searching for great fights which were all over the place on launchday is just too much.

You can't make wild accusations yourself and get mad because someone places you in the broad category of people writing countless posts like yours. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's the portion if my first post you chose to ignore.

I'm sorry, but honestly, how do you propose anyone actually listen to you? Straight off the bat you attack the developers, when I know for a fact there were no goals to be the next wow. T-Ray said this when we interviewed him for reachcast. You can find that interview when clicking the link in my sig. He makes further points that you and others might want to listen to. You can walk up to someone and say "hey idiot. I'm right and you're doing this wrong listen to me".

I didn't necessarily disagree with you. You must have missed that line.

I think you're approaching this completely wrong and are not considering everything, like most people. Telling them their game is dying when it is NOT the way to hope the see your post and listen.

What "wild accusations" are you talking about? Are they as ridiculous as saying that anyone who chose anything other than the highest population servers with no information to go on are being punished because of their character flaws?

I didn't "attack the developers" - I tried to give constructive advice and I fleshed it out more than the vast majority of posts on this forum. Your simplistic notions and lack of reading comprehension are sad. I don't know if you're a fanboy who's scared of even constructive, gentle criticism or just a troll.

Hey, SB.

I agree. Genudine VS experience something similar. Lately, some leaders like Isoroku have been taking pug platoons on mad dashes to Mao just to get the attention of the TR to come fight. Literally. Isoroku's patter to the platoon goes something like this:

Guys, we're heading straight to Mao. We don't care about anything else. We don't care about defending. We are taking Mao because the TR will pay attention if we take Mao and come fight us. Fights are fun. Tech plants are fun. Just so you know, we're probably going to lose that fight because the TR will bring everything they've got to re-take Mao. So, what we're going to do is just hold it for as long as possible, just so there's a fun fight. The longer we hang on, the more fun we'll have. They'll have fun, too. And when we lose, we'll redeploy to the warpgate and maybe do it again.

He does something like this everyday with VS pugs just to keep our troops entertained. I think it's completely rational and the something we can do in lieu of the missing mission system.

I'm of a mind that we can be a little more straight-forward in our desire to have some friendly competition. Like opposing factions agreeing to go to Esamir or Amerish at roughly the same time with roughly the same number of forces and duking it out. This takes a modicum of communication/cooperation - but not any more than required to set up a knife fight between rival gangs under the highway bridge ("Meet Us on Amerish in 30 minutes with your platoon(s) and no zerglings..."). Races to Eisa by balanced forces, for example, might be fun.

It's a thought, anyway...

i never said played i said heard of. they simply dont want to play it.

Before the AU servers and release each region had 3 servers, I'm almost sure. Of this I'm not so sure, but I think the brunt of population mainly focused on one server per region. This according to Smedley himself is one of the reasons they have names instead of numbers now, he mentioned the overwhelming preference players had for US West 01.
There were always "ghost" servers that were listed on the game launcher but not in the game. I think those are the "extras" mentioned before, there for eventual overpopulation. There were still a couple left.

What SOE should do is have 1 server for every region with large player caps. This would really make PS2 shine.

But we don't know if that's possible.

Cap is already 2k per cont and 6k for server. That's pretty good. However, we're not at 2k per cont...are we.

i dont think we are even at 2k per server online at a given time loollllloololoolloolollolo

I have probably played PS2 for an hour to 2 hours in the last 2 weeks because of this issue, regardless of bugs or any sort of issue if a game.

This is a massive scale battle that is advertised yet my server has small population, I've invested to much time into a character to start over so I have been playing other games.

I like PS2, but I'd rather put more of my time into playing natural-selection 2 full 18 man servers instead of playing on my empty server on PS2.

Here's my take on all this.
As a new comer to pc gaming.
I fell in love with this game.
the big scale fighting.
all out mayhem and destruction.

this game is what i always wanted .
something no console game has been able to give me for the exception of killzone 2.
but even that its small compared to planetside 2.

Problems i see with this game since like i said I'm new to this is as follows.

this game suppose to be F2P but it really is not.
i have spend on this game $200.
something that i have never done with no other game that i have bought including they're dlc's .
If you don't spend no money your completely crippled.
worse if your new to this like I am.

the other problem is the amount of certs or station cash everything cost.
basicly almost everything is 1000 certs or station cash .
thats $10 dollars for each thing . that is just crazy.
how many people can actually afford this.
I'm sure not many of us.
also this problem forces alot of us to spend countless hours of play time just for hopes of getting as much certs as we can actually get.

The first week i played this game on connery most of the time there was massive fights.
amazingly fun.
I'm at mattherson now because i followed my friend to this server.
theres still massive fights but not what you would expect from a game of this scale.
i miss this . the mayhem is missing alot of the time.

i feel that merging the servers will help in this regard.

over this weekend i didnt play much because i just didnt feel like being in a zerg just capping empty bases.
i actually went back to play battlefield 3 and had more fun because there was more action there.

my point of all this is this game has the potential to be such a fantastic game and I'm seeing it slowly fading away.

No server merges described in Higby's post. Only buyable server transfers. Very disappointing.

Guess the players who picked the "wrong" server at launch need to pay for the privilege to play the game on a populated server.

I'm so glad I chose Connery at launch. Seems to be the most populated West coast server, unlike Genudine, which is low almost every time I check.

buyable server tokens was the nail on the coffen for me. Very insulting. first one should be free other after that they can have ppl buy. very insulting indeed,.