I have experienced something very interesting. It was a coincidence because of a sudden random influx of new players but it brought a couple of things to my attention. Recently I had the most fun ever when playing Planetside 2 on uncommon times. We had some nice ground skirmishes, I had a 25v25 battle on Amp station, very cool experience, from time to time goofy things happened. Visually game was much more appealing, most players had default uniforms usually with no camo or camo that matched the setting like winter camo on Esamir, finally the soldiers looked like infantry men and not a clown parade, tanks looked like tanks. The game's performance was great. Basically in every aspect it was a fun and digestible experience. A Refreshing experience. But what happened after? Well what happened was the longtime vets came which know the game by every detail from graphics settings to gain advantage, PC equipment, to in game weapons and mechanics and on top of their experience they also have maxed out powerful upgrades... Redeploy side started happening, I had to start jumping all over the map, toxic strategies started appearing, Router fortified point zone, invisible quadbikes ramming, buggy ramming, infiltrators being used as assault shock troops, laser pinpoint headshot accuracy, etc., dozens of players being funneled into a small base due to lattice links, very linear gameplay which encourages super zergs, lag. And you can guess what happened with those new players. This is very similar to Team Fortress 2 matchmaking. When you you get matched up with these like weird clown looking (for some reason these types of people think glowing items are cool), super experienced players that play to shít on everyone, the whole group leaves instantly and looks for a new match. Basically nobody wants to play against these people but the Planetside 2 devs here do nothing but cater them with more items. The devs talk about new player experience but in the meantime they give everything to the vets which kill off the newcomers, hound them out of the game, with personal upgrades like ASP, implants and so on. Another thing I don't understand, what is the point of the lattice links? If I had more fun in a 20v20 fight at the largest base in the game, then why are hundreds of players being funneled into bases 5 times smaller? What is the point? If you search on YouTube "Planetside 2 large battle" there is not a single one which shows a cluster of players fighting for a building, all of them are open world battles, so this is prob not why they implemented the links. Just let the players choose where they want to fight, spread it out, don't funnel it and direct them into a simplified shít show. Like redesign the capturing mechanics to where one person can not start capturing a base. This lattice link design makes no sense here. How the game turns into a complete shít show during its normal hours is a clear indicator that it doesn't need more stupid items, additional maps, but a change. I can continue on and on about this, hundreds of issues I want to mention which theoretically can be fixed but I will end it here.
The higher the pop the more likelihood of finding organized groups and higher skilled players. Really man it sounds like you were playing off hours against people not very good at the game, then began having less fun when people of your skill or higher started showing up. It's a PvP game and this is expected. The solution to the "unfair" lack of match making is to use other "unfair" aspects of the game to counter. Fight that vet 5v1 if he gives you trouble. Pull your Max. Dunno. I've noticed the server gets super easy during these times: Saturday/Sunday mornings. I suspect the hardcore players that stayed up late are asleep or something. Everyone online seems to suck and you just carve through them like a hot knife through butter. Around 1:30 to 2am on weekends. Everyone is drunk and I apparently hold my liquor better than them. Again, find myself carving through people. Point of lattice system: those very 20v20 fights that you like. Without it you'll find a variety of the following types of enjoyable gameplay: 1v0 3v2 6v90 90v6
During prime time it`s the least fun to play indeed - cloakers everywhere, instand spawncamping and everybody and their mother run around with Betelgeuse or Godsaw (I yet have to encounter a single Butcher). Small battles are the real thing where the game shines. It really sucks that there is no alternative BF alike out there, so it's either suffering through the BS for like 30 minutes or not playing at all
At Planetside 2's launch, the lattice system didn't exist. Instead, it was a 'hex' system where the entire map was divided into groups of hexagonal sectors to which base areas were created and connected together. A big problem with the system is that it very easily allowed one or a small handful of players to start ghost-capping every single base touching their territory, essentially turning the game into a massive whack-a-mole emulator. The Vanu on Jaeger were rather notorious for this where the same players would continuously try to solo-cap a base, die, and then run back and try again.....for 6 bloody hours in a row! The only way to stop the behavior was to leave players on guard duty at those bases and try to back-cap whatever territory the ghost cappers kept running from. It was NOT fun playing guard simulator and Sony's solution at the time was to create the lattice network instead. In essense, the lattice system was a band-aid solution to a problem the old base capture system had created, so in essense the whole system is running on maps that are not designed for it.
Or he could be referring to a glaring problem in PS2's "teamplay" design: it encourages players to avoid or destroy the core gameplay features. PS2 core gameplay: large amounts of players fighting one another with lots of space to do it in. PS2 "teamplay" gameplay: avoid large fights, ghost cap, zerg and prevent any fight from continueing. Its basically just a waiting+walking simulator at that point on a map that is about as tactical as tic-tac-toe. It was already like that for a long time, but then the devs decided to add fuel to the fire and double down on it with outfit wars, outfit resources and the outfit armory, not to mention the base redesigns that actively make defending increasingly unworthy, which all encourage one-sided battles over fun large scale combat.
Now, with the lattice system, we more commonly get 4v3 or 100v10 fights. Much wow, so different. I only play occasionally these days, because it's just gotten mostly unengaging, but I can not remember seeing a single solid 30v30 fight*. Not "can't remember in the last months", but "can't remember *period*". I vaguely recall they existed back when I joined the game in 2012 and a while after that, but that's about it. I also remember having more fun back then, despite being objectively very much worse back then, so there's that. *: meaning it lasted for a good while and was decided by the players there, instead of by some zergfit that decided to dump 1000 dudes on top of a fine fight that did not need their meddling.
Well change everything in general. For example, I went to an extreme recently and did something probably nobody ever does. I played the game with no interface and no weapon attachments lol. So, no mini-map, no spotted targets, no labeled allies, no hit markers, just iron sights ...And I must say it is perfectly playable and fun, even though I am handicapped to the largest possible degree. It is fairly easy to differentiate friend from foe if you search for the traits like box shaped, round armor, colors and even by sound of a weapon firing. At Close, medium range it takes me minimum 0.5 seconds to recognize the target. (This heavily depends on factions cause when you are NC any target with round shaped armor is either TR or VS so it's easy, but when you are TR it's harder when you face VS, NSO needs to display much more faction color) When you play with no HUD, the biggest difference compared to regular gameplay is that you advance slower, you don't want to sprint into the unknown and also you use much more ammunition cause of all the firing in open battles, you got to make sure (And you must lower resolution to enhance color). I am able to get kills like usual just much slower. Now, I am not trying to say we should have our HUD removed with all those features ...What I am trying to say is that even the most extreme changes such as this can enrich the game in indirectly interesting ways. Like for example instead of holding shift, sprinting around like I am cocaine and aiming a red/yellow dot sight on an obvious enemy like we always do....Without the HUD we have to use our senses now, hearing, our sight, we would need to think before acting. About the discussion before about the ANT having a towing cable tool....When you have a can of Pepsi you consume it and you toss it in the trash. You don't put in the refrigerator to save for later, bring it with you in your bag just in case. You don't think much about it. That's the essence of what I'm trying to say. All we do is hold w, run around, drive around and shoot at obvious targets without thinking much and I would want to bring much more to this and when you have to involve more of your senses, the gameplay slows down as in the example mentioned above. That is what I am trying to achieve here, I want the gameplay to slow down so there can be more than just holding w. And stick your 'manouvers' with your buggy up your *** lol. Nobody likes it when you do drifts in Third Person, and use turbo to evade slow moving projectiles, it is disgusting, if that's what you had in mind.
Not the same. Don't even try. You've either forgotten or you weren't there. The problems we see during off hours today were constant even during primetime then. Saw one of these fights yesterday. And day before that. There are certainly stretches with bad fights, particularly off hours but to act like there is never a good fight is disingenuous.
Youtube recommended me this PS2 video for some reason and I found it pretty funny. They are talking about 'one big problem' that may be driving new players away from the game. But in the background they are literally mowing down new players like grass, like garbage ....Oh I can clearly see the 'one big problem' lol. And they are trying to gain pathetic benefits with high FOV, Yellow dot sight.... I could not finish watching their video cause it takes them forever to get to the point and it's like a complete joke anyways. Full upgrades, equipped with the best weapons, attempting to gain pathetic benefits and completely shítting on new players while talking about improving their experience. As I said before, what happens to a TF2 match when a player mows everyone down like in that video? Everybody leaves and searches for a new match. Nobody wants to deal with people like that.
What specifically is the complaint other than the guy being good? Is he doing something unfair that another person could not do? Sorry, just not following the point. "high FOV, yellow dot sight"? Don't get what you're trying to say.
