Don't Panic! Arena won't kill Planetside, it will save it.

Like if adding more of the same could change a single thing.
I've played ps1 for years and I've been playing ps2 since beta and imo the problem is ps2 if flawed right in its roots.
It's an excellent shooter but the massive part is exactly where it fails.
In ps2 strategy does not exist, there is zero depth, the huge maps mean nothing as everyone can teleport and it's ultra-rare to fight in sone places, alerts have no importance, outfits gradually lost their central role in favor of a lazy crowd of soloers and stat padders, personal achivements are considered primary while faction victory is often less relevant. Resources are a mere placeholder as force multipliers can be spammed. Vehicles feel made of paper and shoot peas to counter the fact there too many AV sources... And I could go on.
And all of this without even talking about balancing (Max Units, ESF just to mention the elephant and the hippo in the room).

Reality is ps2 should go back to the drawing board for some serious redesign.

At this point I believe PSA can make more good than harm, but ps2 players must give it a chance.

i went in to the deep end of doomsaying because they have superseded their own game...

this game has a diminishing playerbase, were we hope for big fights (and when those fights happen there is lag, latency and pop-in)
with a spawn system that the devs are actively pushing in the direction of dispersing players, making staying in big fights extremely difficult.

and now they take this game, polish it up and make it so the entire game is constant big battles, and from the look of the trailer it can handle those big battles far better than PS2.

why play PS2 when the playerbase is on the lower side, the servers cant handle big fights and the devs are pushing people away from those fights, when there is a game that looks the same, is way more polished and is centred around those big fights?
it makes PS2 obsolete, many players (including me) will jump ship and this game will be a graveyard.
why play PS_2 when PS_2.5 is simply better?

i've sunk six years and THOUSANDS of pounds into this game, so noone wishes i'm wrong about this more than i do, but you will see come january the hefty plummet in population.

Talking solo..., being able to play solo in massive fights is the reason why I’m still here. I was always interested in the “swarm behavioural” approach that PS2 can offer. Finding the most effective individual action in a given battle situation is my main anarchic NC ambition. But it’s great, that other players can basically do the total opposite with their strong hierarchic organization. PS2 is like a battle of concepts. And to contribute in stopping well-structured TR or VS platoons with a single Flail is fun rewarding and absolutely worth my below average stats. I don’t think that PS:A will offer this amount of freedom and diversity, not at all! And that's why it is not for me.

I really do think this is the end for PS2. What's frustrating is that Arena is such an easy out for them, instead of fixing things in PS2. Or maybe they just thought there are too many things to fix in PS2. Think about everything PSA solves.

HA/Max cheese
Zerging
Amnoying infils
Balanced fights
A2G balance
Dead and awful air game
People not playing alerts
Construction not being relevant
Infantryside
Vehicles having no point

And I'm sure plenty more. Daybreak probably looked at their inability to fix PS2 and said screw it, let's just chop everything we can't handle, and make the most simple game possible. But the truth is that those PS2 problems will never be fixed, so I absolutely bet on a mass migration of players.

The demise of Ps2 is obvious. It's been heading that way for years and with layoffs DBG aren't exactly rolling in it on the success front. H1z1 was even more prone to death-by-hacker than this game is. It's no surprise to see an investment company trying to milk what they can out of a failing IP, alleviating the above problems that I've mentioned before as well in Adamts' post.

It's a cost effective attempt at grasping a little more cash from something they couldn't get quite right. Not much different to the ZoS treatment of Elder Scrolls Online really. Mass PvP laggy or buckling your servers and making your promises look like lies? Reach for the Arena mode. Simples. Think like a business (as EA do) not as people who care about players and gamers (few companies now do and result in failure).

There are hundreds if not thousands of people who invested big in ps2. Most of whom left years ago and did try and warn people. Modernity + Better optimisation + removal of problematic symptoms + less chaotic + numerous other 2.5 features = ps2 graveyard. Post CAI and Wrel in the drivers seat, he's in as the captain that goes down with the ship. All too plain to see.

we still have 2 US servers and 2 EU servers,
if they hadn't straight-up replaced PS2 with PSA (PS2.5) we could have had a server merge,
the 2 US servers becoming 1 US server, the 2 EU servers becoming 1 EU server,
putting pops back up to how they were years ago, there was YEARS of life left in PS2,
and this DX11 news gave me hope that the next year of PS2 could have been one of the best.

but instead they've straight-up replaced it.
and what is worse, the pricetag will probably kill PSA too. (it should be f2p)
so they could be sacrificing PS2 for nothing.

PS2 BR is a result of the forums not being able to hack what PS2 offers.

PS2 BR is the result of devs catering to the lack of sophistication in the player base.

PS2 offered an asymmetrical shooter experience and demanded true team play- something that is light-years ahead of the average player.

In PS2 BR, the players have gotten exactly what they have asked for.

We live in the dark ages of gaming.

If you haven't been following the trend of the 'single player mmo', and other older games catering largely towards that demographic; then the reality is that people have precisely no interest whatsoever in working together. There are certainly exceptions but as a mass market rule - people online don't tolerate others, or basing their gameplay time around them, all that well.

It's a dark time for MULTIPLAYER. Not in terms of competitiveness but in terms of group depth and desire to arrange things. From the trinity gameplay of old mmo's to the leading of outfits in huge battles like ps2; leadership and interest in co-ordination is next to none. Far too easy to fit real life - with unconcerned and low stress drop in. Arranging things online is just too big an ask for your modern casual.

I felt the same way about Dx11. Cautiously optimistic. But now I have little desire to touch either game. The sad thing is that I'm back in the US after 4 years in Asia and I can finally play with awesome ping... Oh well.

PSA is a lazy fox for most of this game's problems, so it might be decent, but it still makes me sad they didn't ever fix PS2. As for an initial cost and subscription, that's going to cut cheaters down to a fraction if what they are, so it's also a solution to one of PS2s problems, if you look at it that way.

I don't think that's accurate. While in reality, PSA will most likely be all PS2 players, I'm sure Daybreak's goal was catering to the Pubg/fortnite crowd. There's no sense in catering to PS2 players because there aren't enough of them to really matter. They're after new victims.

One thing for sure if they do the same level of marketing they did for PS2 (essentially nothing) for PSA things aren't going to look good haha. If PSA only ends up having PS1/2 players it'd really be on DBG for doing terrible marketing the game, and cost of entry.

PS2 does not provide sufficient incentives for true team play. Directives, Certs., ISO and K/D are what people use to measure PS2. Team play truly only helps ISO - sometimes - and frankly ISO gives such random rewards that it is not really important to most people - at all.

I.e. In actual fact, PS2 is built for solo play and not team play because the risk/reward balance is weighted so heavily toward solo play.

Protip: you fps in game in arena will be just as shtty as in regular battles..so good luck and may the best casher win.

Or maybe we just don't have the luxury to spend 4-5 hours in gaming after we came back from university/work and still have real life needs, like cooking dinner or studying ? It is not about "being too big", it is a matter of priorities, and "casual players" like myself don't feel the need to invest all of our time in a game at the expence of our real life. As a casual player, I want to enjoy the game as an activity for my leisure time, not being a slave to it and have to adjust my whole weekly agenda just to meet some random outfit rule.

Now back to the topic : I want to believe that PS:A will save PS2, but at the same time I fear that it will not due to bad advertising from the gamers.

What do people do when they hear the name of a game they know nothing about ? Personnaly, I google it, and I bet many do the same. And oh boy, I did found a lot of rants about PS2 dying and PS:A being bad. Who, in their rightful mind, would try a game if every player who actually play the game, say that it is bad and dying ? Yeah those who prefer to make their own opinion, but at least a part of those who might have been interested will think it's isn't worth a try.

PSA won´t save PS2 for the simple reason that DBG long missed to jump on the train of battle royal games that are dominated by fortnite, PUBG and blackops 4 ...
and with the resources DBG have i just don´t believe they get the PR to draw in enough players to keep that game up long enough not to mention that it has a pricetag ... like seriously? ok 30 bucks by itself isn´t THAT much .. it is still a paywall to people that don´t know much about DBG or rather know about many negative decisions done by this company or formerly SOE ...
i just don´t see the game draw in anywere near the ammount of players of the aforementioned games, not even like 10% ...

i can see planetside still going for a couple years but i don´t see PSA being beneficial for PS2 in any way ...

i wouldn´t mind being proven wrong though ... i just find it highly unlikely ...

At least in China, he will save PS2. The reason why there are fewer PS2 players in China is that many people don't know about this game, and many people don't like games that have cheating players.

Did any successor ever saved the precessor and refreshed the community on the old server? If yes, tell me...