[Graph] Planetside's population relative to August 2013

Here's data (and as the SOE Dev said you have to take it with a grain of salt) on population that's been annotated with in-game changes and events:

okay I'll bite...

...what was "OMFG"? ...the only thing I can remember from that timeframe was the Optimization push which also only lasted about 2 months before performance started dropping again

It stood for Operation Make Faster Game, and was essentially the same as the optimization push.

I think "The new Esamir" was a mistake... The old open Field had so nice Tank battles, and really unique Air battles.... now you have nowhere this open field.

But in general, PS2 is getting older, and there is not sooo much really exiting stuff coming out. (Like more Weapons like the Phoenix for all factions, which are FUN) instead we get Striker -> Striker nerfed to "death", Fracture --> Fracture nerfed to death (actual the Pounder for 250 certs is better now!). Harasser -> Nerfed to death, Liberator -> Is going to be nerfed.

I am NOT saying everything is bad, actuall i like the Pounder, because it was useless before the buff and right now it is really strong, but why can you give the Factions really FUN weapons. Like a REAL Chaingun.

Give us the old Esamir, i never ever met somebody who told me "the new Esamir is better".....

Btw. The new Amerish is MUCH BETTER! Than the old Amerish, and nearly everybody says that.

Like Wrel tells in his Video "Nerfing Fun", STOP NERFING THE FUN!!!

Strictly speaking you cannot say for sure one way or the other as there may be some sort of delay effect.

Like, for example, Halo 2 sold more than Halo. But a lot of that was due to factors like there being more xbox consoles in peoples homes, Halo already having very good word of mouth at launch and there being more marketing for Halo 2. So you can't draw any conclusion from sales saying that Halo 2 had better game design or art than Halo and could almost say that the sales of Halo 3 were more informative about the quality of Halo 2 than the sales of Halo 2.

That's true, and one of the biggest problems in non-laboratory science.

Ideally we would want to isolate the single variable that we're testing for (like the ESF update), keep everything else inside and outside the game constant, tweak the variable, and then observe the results.

But that simply isn't possible with most real world phenomenon we'd like to observe, so we make do with the most plausible or likely changes.

What we do see is a marked decline immediately following the ESF update, which was preceded by increases in player population. Could that have been attributed to changes in the game that happened a month ago? It's possible of course... but I wouldn't heavily bet on it. A week of lag time perhaps would be reasonable, but a whole month?

Other explanation besides the ESF update exist, like decreased performance or back-to-school effects. Which I think still rank as more possible than changes made back in December.

Well it might be worth pointing out the fact that like literally 99% of games released decline faster than PS2.

Why aren't you currently playing the hundreds or thousands of games you've played in the past? The answer usually boils down to "those games are old and I'm bored with them", which is in a very general sense the reason those players aren't playing PS2. Granted, they tend to usually come down to specific failure points, but almost always even the player themselves wouldn't be able to tell you what that specific thing was.

ZOE nerf = Players returning to PS2

Old ZOE should never be implemented again. While current ZOE could use a buff.

I think that's worth considering of course. Taking a look at past games to try to figure out why they did or did not succeed. What they did wrong and/or right.

I was just hoping that SOE Devs, with access to statistics and data that we do not have, might have their own theories on why the population was declining slower or faster at different periods. Sure games might decline overall in time (perhaps an exception to this would be chess or poker or something), but I think it's not too farfetched to find that the rates of decline (and what arrests that trend) can be affected by the changes that the Devs implement.

Take for example the "TR update" that happened on April 16. For about a month afterwards, the TR were the dominant faction across all servers. I think that's a good example what shows the power of patches and updates in changing the distribution of the game population... why not the overall level as well?

Holy ..... iv always played steam and didnt know that, thank you, no one ever mention it to me. Its gonna be a pain but o well here it goes unistall reinstall i guess.

I haven't played the game in 3 months. Before that, I was playing at least every friday and saturday night since release, so over a year of regular play.

I didn't stop for any particular reason, but when I have time to play games, I try to muster a reason to play this game and I can't. When I think of logging in, I think "I'll be doing the exact same things I was doing before." The game offers no depth.

This is not a case of "All games are repetitive." I played PS1 on a near daily basis for 7 years. After one year of PS1 play, I was still super hooked and couldn't get enough of it. PS1 offered depth and roles on orders of magnitude greater than PS2. After one year of PS2, I stop at my PC and think, "Ugh, I can't be bothered."

During the time that I haven't been playing, several updates have happened, and literally not one single thing in those updates has even given me a passing interest in playing.

I'm considering playing this weekend, but if it happens again (staring at the PC and asking why bother) I'll probably wait till Hossin before I play again.

This makes me sad, because PS1 is my favorite game of all time, and I really, really wanted PS2 to be another 7 year obsession. I'm surprised how easy it has been NOT to play it.

January saw a big hit to performance (fps)
Introduction of the stutter hitch
Not able to use up to date nvidia drivers
Broken hit detection
Then
Lib update that meant not only can tanks spam spawns with impunity but libs can too.
Killcam/map that people hated
Mission system that is not properly introduced and is just a in your face pain intended for newbies only but woth no toggle off.
Implant system no one want.
Repeated delays to proper content (continents)

The player base has final had enough

Also:
Invulnerability bug
Auto capture bug
"We lost a control console!" Vocals added, and quickly removed
Server lag

So can you provide evidence to us showing the opposite or the,"correct," information? I'm sure you can't for variety of reasons, some being:

1. He's absolutely correct, and you cant afford to admit the game is failing at this alarming rate.
2. He's off, but its worse than he provides.
3. You have no way of actually calculating that, but must reject any notion of hard, failing numbers.

I'm pretty sure it would fall under "that's proprietary information that can't be released due to competitors or shareholders".

The population decline may not be due to nerfs, but rather because people want to play other games? Nerfs are rather annoying and can certainly put a player over the edge, but overall I think the population decline is quite simply due to new games getting released that people would rather play more than PS2. What SOE needs to do is release meaningful updates to get players to come back from playing other games. Please SOE, less nerfs, more content.

It seems like it.

Planetside's population seems to dependent on how much hype this game can bring in terms of updates. O:MFG didn't only increase player performance, but the game was brought up in certain news articles and gaming sites. If SOE would announce and release hyped game updates in a timely matter then we might see a playerbase that not only sticks around but also grows since it's getting media coverage (and even for free).

oh god the memories of the dark age of vanu overpop is coming back to my mind,all of those 7 year old,those zerg,purple map and doing nothing but ghostcappin away from vanu,ARGHH THOSE DAMN PTSD IS COMING BACK TO HEAD, i remembered it all like yesterday...

He already agreed on that the graph with relative population is... relatively correct, which is more than I'd expect from a game dev in any game.

I suspect that there are many reasons for not giving out actual numbers. Reasons you and I might not understand because we aren't running a massive company.

But in all honesty I don't care, I just wanted to make a graph showing population increase and decreases on a month by month base so that we can see certain trends during the year and get a better idea on population discussions. I'm not interested in how much players SOE has or how much money they're making.

from aug to november, small decline from not much updates

from november to jan small increase from people coming back to play after performance update

from jan to march small decline from not much updates

from march to now massive hemorrhaging of players from ultrabuffing the lib to godhood, making the whole game 5% of people nonstop farming free certs with unkillable libs and 95% of the players rage uninstalling or trying desperately to find ways to avoid daltons

we should see some return to the game since tirelessly spamming the same 3 libs with flak for 2 hours making no progress gives ribbons now