Dear SOE...Population

nope,its all good,this is a fps.

That never happened.

The thing is - we're losing potential new recruits right now. Players that would've joined the game and kept playing are going to be lost forever to you due to inaction.

When I first played this game on launch night, I was drop podded into this huge battle. Tanks fighting tanks, infantry running everywhere, air battles in the sky above - I was hooked instantly. Imagine all the new players joining the game right now - they auto-deploy into a ghost cap of an empty base. Do you thnk they're hooked? Do you think they stick around to see what makes this game great? What if they can't even find a good fight? Like it took me an hour to find a fight last night in primetime on genudine, and I knew where to look - they don't.

Every player/customer you lose now because you are failing to show them what's great about your game is probably lost forever, and for no reason. Take action now.

Half the servers are empty even during prime time. zzz

Server status - I'm guessing right now - 8 PM eastern, 5pm pacific, is roughly the peak time across the country. We have 0 high, 6 medium, 10 low.

Today for the first time i said "screw it, I can't play this anymore today". My friend and I (who I just got into the game) were trying to hard to get into big battles. We literally couldn't find any. We didn't feel like capping empty bases so we just logged out, it's a shame.

Does there really need to be 16 US servers? Seems like a bit much. Honestly I wouldn't mind waiting in ques if I knew my time spent playing was going to be worth it and full of action. As it is now, I spend more time moving from point A to point B and capping uncontested points than I do actually fighting :/

This needs to be fixed. Not just for the people who are already playing, but for the ones that are going to try this game, see the ghost town, and never log in again.

Hey man, like 3 servers out of 40 got high pop. Obviously there is NO problem.

Just kidding. Some people think because they are one of the lucky ones on the minority of servers that get high pop, all servers must be fine.

I'm sorry I only read the first nine paragraphs and the last paragraph.
You have a valid point there though. Sometimes i can't find anyone to fight so just fly around capping and practicing maneuvers

Yeah that was the launch of this excessivly hyped game. but the newness has worn off any unfortunatly it left many players with a not so good taste in their mouth. Many people has said well that is another rushed product and moved on.

It was not over-hyped, it was perhaps only over-hyped for Planetside 1 players or people that really were following it. I wasn't planning on playing planetside 2, I didn't hear anything about it, didn't read many reviews about it, and I frequent mmorpg.com where overhyping really happen with some MMO's.

The key here is for those that bought into the overhyping of say...warhammer online (just using it as an example since I was there), we paid $50 for a new game that was supposed to be a combination of WoW & DAOC and was supposed to offer better realm vs realm gameplay than DAOC. It turned out to not be true, I quit WAR 2 months later, WAR closed half of its servers within 6 months. Now talk about over-hype. That game had raving reviews going for it, they talked about it and advertised it everywhere, they had a huge marketing budget.

At least with this game, it's free to play. Don't like it, don't play it, you lose nothing. You pay any money into this game, you do so willingly per your own choice. I can definitely say this game was not over hyped. It was perhaps for planetside 1 vets like you, and for that all I can say is been there seen it done that with EQ1 > EQ2. Not much you can do about it, planetside 2 is what it is. I do see planetside 2 getting better over time, with it being free to play, people who rage quit and cry a river on the forums will likely give it a try again in the future. Most won't tell people about it, see it happen all the time. The base foundation of this game is very good, they just have to expand on it.

It IS a MMOFPS game, it is niche. It was never going to be as popular as a stanard FPS game like CoD & BF3, as it never was going to be as popular as a pure MMO like WoW. But it doesn't mean it can't be successful in its own way. Not everybody's going to like it, but I do predict more people will like it in a year or two than planetside 1 ever had subscribers.

I don't think this game was overhyped. I actually think this game had a fantastic launch, all MMO launches are stricken with problems and this one was pretty minor. And this is easily the best game designed to be f2p from the start.

The launch was so big because every cheap *** bastard tries every free to play game, but I think the sort of people who won't pay for games is also the sort of person who won't pay for computer hardware either. This game has unusually high requirements, especially for a free game, so you gotta know that a significant amount of people who try it can't even run it well. So you get a big surge of day 1 numbers followed by a lot of quitting.

The game, IMO, would be thriving right now with 1/4th to 1/3rd as many servers. We'd still have tens of thousands of people playing, but they'd all be having a blast rather than saying "hmm, another ghost cap... why am I playing this game?" - that's why this is so frustrating. It's easily in SOE's power to make this a great, thriving game, and they're deliberately trying to kill off their community with ghost towns. You have no idea how frustrating it is to watch them try to kill one of my favorite games of all time and be powerless to stop it. The only thing I can try to do is get the message out and keep this thread going, and hope they see it.

I know that feel, brother.

Right now the gamer-nerd part of me has its head in its hands from sheer despair.

I've been watching from roughly 4pm till midnight pacific time since tuesday.

8, a full half of US servers, have never gotten above low. Benson, Apex, Deepcore, Palos, Voight, Everett, Snake Ravine, Auraxicomm.

No server has ever hit high.

The gameplay experience cannot be good on those servers if they're perpetually ghost towns even in primetime. Any new players that try your game who happen to pick any one of HALF THE AVAILABLE SERVERS will not get a good gameplay experience and will likely leave.

How many players are you losing every day because of this?

NEED...MORE...PEOPLE...TO...SHOOT...AT, please SOE.

This is the number 1 issue I have with the game now, I hate my poor performance BUT this I consider worse, I'd rather have a good big fight with bit lower FPS than going around empty bases for hours.

First page for a compounding problem. I'm even doing this for SenorBeef who I previously flamed for his multi-faction server thread. That's how important it is.

Keeping this thread alive, as SOE deleted my polite request thread for reasons unknown.

Well thanks for the support. This should be the #1 issue of the fanbase and I don't see how anyone can disagree. What really worries me now are, as I said, the people who try this game now, get sent to a ghost town, never see what this game really offers, and leave forever. They're harming the long term growth of the game every day they delay the inevitable merges.

I'm sorry, but how the **** do you know what numbers SOE is running? Why don't you stop trying to tell them how to do business and let the professionals (who have been doing MMOs for years) do their thing? Unless you have empirical data from their servers how can you assume any of this? ****

TL;DR

I concur with the subject line. My amp station defense on Amerish last night was a 1v6. Two sunderers and two lightnings later, they took it =(

You ever notice how people who quote an entire long OP and then add 2 lines always have awful posts? Especially when they clearly haven't read the thread, and whatever points they feel they're making have already been addressed.

I do have data from their servers - not exact, but by their own definitions of low/med/high, which are likely generous to make the game feel more popular - half the US servers never hit medium. None hit high.

Plus, you can just see it. On launch week, there were huge fights everywhere. Wherever you went. Now I often spend a half hour just looking for a fight, capturing major bases without resistance.