Integration NSO Update -> PS2's Death IMO

Something I don't understand is that you do not need a balanced pop in a 1v1v1. It'll never be fair and the strategies are stupid anyways. They must be planning to turn the game into a 1v1 by merging some factions together and updating the lore. That's why I started a topic before questioning the choice of TR vs VS in 2020 smash but the ppl didn't get it and start talking about pointless topics. But this would so far be the only change that would make sense.

Planetside 2 is in such a fúcked stage currently, you couldn't believe. Like I get it but it's the best way to kill the game as well, because new players have no place and therefore its not fun because everyone is a meta slave. You will need to be impaired under the use of drugs, to enjoy this content....That's the reality, there's no way to enjoy this.

Naw, mine dropped off.

*Cracks Knuckles* Alright, time to make like a Demigan and deconstruct all your points.

What part of my comment was narrow-minded? You're the narrow minded one, pushing for these grand sweeping changes to how the game is played that not everyone will want. Honestly, I don't think you read my comments at all.

Like I stated, NSO has done nothing to harm the individual factions and I doubt they will eclipse the others in population. They exist primarily to balance overpop and to add more content to the game, thats it. My comment regarding that was only factual, as the NSO have not compromised faction identity and average alert wins hasn't changed much at all.

A seasonal content model doesn't work for every game. Especially given most Seasonal models expect you to pay for said seasonal content (e.g. battle or season passes). As I also said, the campaign added some unique stuff, renovated Esamir (for better or worse) and some of that stuff will permanently make it to live. I doubt the devs have the manpower to put out seasonal content on top of all the fixes and new content the game needs to stay afloat.

Yes, but if you reset all the progress, then what exactly would people have to earn? Would you just have to re-grind everything again, only for it to be rendered meaningless in a year? Let me tell you, that does not go over well. Bungie implemented such a system with Destiny (called Sunsetting) and it was universally loathed, because it made anything you did or earned over that sunset time period pointless. Whats the motive to, say, grind directives, if you don't get to keep the rewards afterwards for longer than a year? The reason people farm K/D is because its constant, a dubious badge of honor they can wave at people. If K/D reset each year those people would get fed up and leave. If levels reset, those that took a long time to max level would give up and leave. If you make content time gated, you introduce FOMO, piss people off, and then they leave. Which, as I said, is the absolute last thing we want.

What do you consider a necessity? If you know what you're doing, you can get enough certs to be fighting fit, and any weapon investments are for the sake of specialisation. You do get stuff from playing in a squad - additional XP, working towards directives, all of it ultimately funnels into Certs, which gets you "necessities". While I do admit implants need to be way more accessible than a horrid ISO-4 grind or a lootbox system, everything else is acquired via certs, which mandates you play the game.

Removing weapons from the arsenal will only make it feel smaller and stilted. The NSO have a smaller arsenal, which bothers some people (e.g. the "CQC" LMG is behind the directive), so removing guns only upsets people who liked those guns and the variety. If we want more weapon diversity, just add more guns, but with actually unique and interesting mechanics. Basically the Doku guns but better.

Lastly, this doesn't reduce the gap between players by that much. A lot of the NPE is defined by how you have no idea what you're doing beyond the basics the games tutorial throws at you, which don't cover much more than... well, the basics. People with more experience will always beat n00bs, thats how it always is. And removing reasons to play or making said reasons temporary will drive both new and old players away, as unless theyre dead into the gameplay there's no reason to play long term. If there isn't any reason to grind or goals to grind towards, then what reason do you have to play?

Ok, invite bots might be a problem. Dead outfits too. But if players are part of a dead outfit, they can leave and join an active one, which is way easier now since they got rid of losing merit on leaving an outfit. On Miller, we have plenty of active, large outfits. BHO, CTIA, KOTV, and more. The people part of dead outfits probably don't play anyway, or dont care for outfit ops and don't see a reason to switch. Getting rid of old outfits would just force the existing, active outfits to reform, which would be confusing to people who log back in after the reset to the sight that their outfit has vanished? Further, ******** could swoop in and steal a clan tag, forcing that old outfit to take up a new tag. And thats if they operate via a discord. Erasing outfits would not force new leadership into the role, it would just force the old leadership to remake their outfits once a year and discourage new leadership if their efforts are going to get deleted in a year or less.

Can't comment regarding server merges. Don't really see population issues aside from late night, which is normal anyway because everyone goes to sleep. Presumably merging servers is a very large undertaking, and they don't see any reason to bother with current pop levels.

This statement confuses me. I will grant that some outfit resources need fixing or remaking (looking at you, bugged steel rain and pocket orbital strikes) but removing a defining aspect like Bastions and Colossi is taking it a bit far. It would be like walking back a huge part of the Escalation update, and neither is really seen frequently enough to warrant removal. It would be nice to have proper artillery, but we otherwise already have all this stuff in the game, and artillery would just attract the same kind of people as HESH farmers. We already use these tactics to battle, and if only Outfits had access to heavy vehicles it would put too much power in the hands of zergs. Ask Demigan about the old spawn timer system used for vehicles before Nanites existed, it would be like that but worse.

There are no "militias" - only random squads and platoons, and the only ones voicelead are usually outfit ones. Putting that much power in the hands of an organised force would be ludicrously unbalanced. Your "tank rework" comment does not make sense. I can't quite tell what you are suggesting, but I'm pretty sure it will heavily devalue both engineers and tanks, and third person is not THAT big of an issue. Why is it even an issue?

The Devs do struggle, yes, and construction is still a bit up and down, yes. But people keep sticking with it anyway, and who knows? Maybe they'll hear us and do some reworking. The construction update was years ago, and we've come a long way. Also worth noting is I'm 90% sure Planetside Arena was a demand from the higher ups to piggyback the Battle Royale craze, and once it crashed they pushed everyone they poache from the Devs back to Planetside.

Sure, you may find the SAW fun... but I don't. Its all a matter of opinion. I can't handle the SAWs colossal recoil, and as a compulsive reloader its long-*** reload time makes me cringe. I feel much more at home with the GD-22S. But that's just me. And that's how the gun is balanced. The SAW 3 taps at any range, but has a very hard to control recoil pattern and a slow reload to balance it. However, a lot of its power comes from its 3 tap potential. When it comes to bodyshots, its TTK suffers horribly against Nanoweave armour. Sure a case can be made for modifying headshot multiplier, but removing it entirely removes a fair bit of the skill from the game and puts a lot more power in the hands of those with higher end rigs.

Nah, people aren't finding sympathy with you because you come off as superior, knowing way more about the game than all these other people who have played the game just as much as you, and refusing to listen to and acknowledge criticism of your ideas in favour of continuing to bash the devs and cry "Dead game! Dead game!" If Integration is proof of anything, it's that the game isn't done for yet.

For all the steps they've taken back, they're still adding more content and trying to push forward. We might not necessarily agree that it's the right path, but we're willing to support them anyway, because this game is 9 freaking years old and any support it gets is a ruddy miracle. Declaring we don't deserve a brighter future because we continue to support the game and hope for it to continue running for years to come makes you sound elitist and honestly, kind of like an a-hole. Like I said, Planetside Arena was never Planetside 3, it was a spinoff probably demanded by the higher ups that crashed, burned, and made clear what we like. The implant loot crates are a problem, yes, but they're not necessarily essential and far from the biggest issue with the game. Also doesn't have anything to do with literally every game under the sun trying to push lootboxes around that time period, oh no, totally not.

So you're saying 1v1v1, aka the 3 way faction warfare, one of the biggest draws of the game, that leads to huge fights at places like Nasons, Mattersons, and Ti Alloys that everyone flocks to, is dumb and unfair, and that they are planning to make the game into a 2 faction game by merging factions and updating the lore. The lore that currently, by all accounts, indicates that the 3 way faction split is going to be maintained, that there isn't a chance in hell of any combination of the TR, NC, and VS aligning and combining their forces permanently, because they hate each other. The 3 way warfare that defines the entire map of the continent, and reducing it to a 1v1 would require removing a warpgate on each continent, reworking the lattices, figuring out how to combine the arsenals without giving one of the surviving factions a ridiculous buff, transferring everyones characters over to a new faction, simultaneously deleting all the cosmetics because the faction they are tied to no longer exists. An amount of work that makes Integration look like a drop in the ocean, and would ultimately serve to alienate an entire faction or twos worth of players, who would then likely quit. Thats what you claim is happening, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

What the **** are you smoking and can I have some??

Well I enjoy it quite fine, as do the several hundred people who log on and play during prime time on Miller. And I'm frankly **** at this game, as far from a meta slave as you can get. As I said, Integration if anything has breathed new life into the game, drawing new people in, giving vets more reason to play, etcetera. The only things drugs will do is make your arguments make sense logically.

If you don't like the game, that is perfectly fine, but the rest of us want to enjoy this game, see it flourish again, so telling us we are wrong for enjoying it will just make you sound like an a-hole and make it more likely that we ignore your points. Like you ignored mine in favour of telling me why I was wrong. And the one point you did directly quote rather than snip? You didn't even address that point and went on a tangent about the game dying. But who am I kidding? Whether or not you read this, you'll probably inevitably ignore everything I've said before and after this post in favour of spouting more bull-**** and declaring how the game is dying. Again.

I'm not going to reply to everything, just these last 2 because we have different views, I've already said mine and it would be too long and pointless.

So, you you got to ask yourself, why was the community smash a 1v1? Why was it, if you believe the 3 faction warfare is the biggest attraction. I'm very sure it didn't need to be a 1v1.
Nasons, Mattersons, and Ti Alloys (Nason's the best IMO, due to size). Those are completely pointless, custerfuk chaotic, laggy battles, over absolutely nothing. It's the attraction for cert farmers and definitely not new players, it's hell for new players because nothing makes sense.
If you play with an outfit, you earn 3x less certs than if you where to farm it.
And yeah reworking everything after doing such a massive change is essential but why wouldn't the game need a redesign ?
You want to see it flourish again...Why did the average player count decrease by 3000+ players, in one year after the largest update? And it's not because of the no school situation, during the summer break pop doesn't rise by much. What went wrong here? We always go back to the same number we had before with the same old hand PS2 players. Why could it be?

Btw you've jokingly proved my point lol. You need to be impaired under the influence of drugs or alcohol, to be able to enjoy the content of the game. "What the **** are you smoking and can I have some??"; "The only things drugs will do is make your arguments make sense logically." I know it was a joke but was it? I wouldn't come up with that.

...I called it. I put in the effort to answer each of your points in detail, with explanations and such. And you've barely answered anything. No response, no effort to contradict me, just "I've said my views, and I don't care about yours, no matter whether your arguments make sense or not". Clearly we aren't going to agree on anything, you aren't going to try to answer my arguments and instead talk about something else. But hey, I'm feeling masochistic today, lets beat my head against a brick wall.

Or maybe because you don't like replying line by line you don't want to comb through my whole spiel. Which is fine, but you can just say "post too long, don't care + ratio". Save me half an hour...

Ok, but that doesn't have any bearing on your comment believing the game was going to be compressed into only 2 factions against each other. Which I reiterate, is insane, and makes you seem like you're high on narcotics. Hence the "can I have some drugs" comment, because whatever makes you think that there is ANY evidence Planetside is going that route after checks notes... over 9 years of three faction gameplay with a fourth, unaffiliated group being added, has to be extremely good ****.

In response to this point itself - I don't know. I went looking, found your post about community smash. It mostly devolved into a debate about faction balance and you having supposedly wack opinions. However, I dug a little deeper and discovered this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PlanetsideBattles/comments/fv6n6q/community_smash_8_06062020_2000utc/

1. Community Smash was built around two teams, presumably for balance reasons. This was decided by the organisers, who were community members.
2. The answer regarding your old post of why it was TR vs VS: "The event will be ‘’Faction A’’ Vs. ‘’Faction B’’. The respective Force Commanders will pick their prefered faction and warpgate." Basically, it was the overarching leaders choice of what factions each would take. A lot of stuff was restricted, and ultimately one side opted for VS, one for TR.
3. Point 2 has apparently been the case for past community smashes: #7 was NC vs TR, #6 was NC vs TR, #5...was NC vs TR. The one you posted about was TR vs VS, #9, and #10 is occuring soon. The event is strictly on a 2 team basis. Not sure why it isn't 1v1v1, but I couldn't tell you. Thats on the organisers.
4. And lastly, it's worth noting that we have an official 1v1v1 mode now... that is held very infrequently and hasn't been officially held outside of its 3 alpha tests. But Outfit Wars exists. I guess.
5. If you really are stuck on this particular point, I could always track down one of the Community Smash organisers and ask why it's 1v1 instead of 1v1v1.

I've said already, the 3 way fights attract so many players for a REASON. Cert farmers might enjoy it, sure, and new players are better off staying clear until they know what they're doing, but there is no way every single person at these massive fights is a cert farmer. Sure its pointless and doesn't play into the capture the continent gameplay, but thats its own problem. Sure its chaotic and a clusterfrick. But there is a REASON so many players flock there, even if they are just going to be fodder for cert farmers or god-level players. I go there because they're the best way to get stuck into a hectic, 3 way fight that actually feels like the 3 faction MMOFPS the game can be. Sure I don't do well, but I still find it fun. As do a lot of others judging by their popularity.

Sure, Ti Alloys was a mess of a fight, but all their efforts to fix it have either lead to complaints or moving to a new big fight. Remove the bridge to you can't get farmed by vehicles? Now Crown has no chance of taking Ti. Remove Ti? Now everyone who went there is sad, the hex stands out like a sore thumb, it becomes harder to push through the middle as you now have to go around to get anywhere with the lattice system, and the big fights just end up happening elsewhere. If the devs want to fix these huge pileups, they need to give more benefits to fighting elsewhere that don't involve ghostcaps. Its just less fun and profitable for some people.

Depending on the farm method, sure, but squad XP is a thing, Zergfits are a thing, big farming machines like the Bastion exists, merit exists... there are a lot of benefits to playing in an outfit. Heck, some outfits probably revolve around farming. Lot easier to earn certs when you have a team at your backs working towards the same goal and increasing your odds of lasting longer and building a streak.

I can't speak for those numbers without a source, but Planetside is an old game. Not everyone sticks with it forever and ever. Some leave for newer games and come back later. Hell, I left in 2017 and came back now. Making such sweeping redesigns and overhauls to the game would be an immense amount of work (like I said). At that point, you might as well make Planetside 3. And given how old this game is, I don't know if a totally new game will bring in the audience it needs without even more overhauls than you suggest, overhauls that, in some cases, would run counter to your suggestions. And a new game requires a lot of money that the Devs might not have. Not after Arena crashed and burned, the higher ups probably want to play it safe. Otherwise we WOULD have had Planetside 3 by now I think.

The problems you see... aren't necessarily there for everyone, like I said. The major gameplay changes we need are widely agreed to revolve around things like: the New Player Experience; making Zergs less dominant; making Alerts more fun to play beyond zerging and ghostcapping, especially for the underpopulated or losing faction; motherfrigging wraith flashes, and more. A total rework of how the game is played from the ground up would not work for everyone and would probably drive people from the game. I literally talked about that in one of my points you didn't quote. But whatever, you clearly aren't interested in rational discussion. If you gave me a real reason for your points I would consider them, but all you come off as is egotistical, holier-than-thou, and dismissive of anything that doesn't automatically agree with you.

Aside from the fact that quote is out of context, referring to your frankly ridiculous leap of logic regarding factions being reduced to only two as opposed to "proving your point", you DID come up with that comment about drugs. Right here.

You really didn't read my post at all. Either that or I'm misreading your comment, which isn't hard given some of your statements didn't make much grammatical or logical sense. But putting that aside, regardless of the playerbases size, I'm pretty sure those who enjoy the game do so without any need of drugs. If you think taking drugs would make the game playable to you, then by all means try it (if you are into drugs or if it is legal wherever the heck you live). Maybe it will make you actually read and RESPOND to most of my comments rather than ignoring them and coming up with more reasons the game is dying or that I'm wrong without actually challenging or disproving my arguments.

Tl;Dr:

• Community Smash was 1v1 because the organisers set it up as such, and the empires were picked by each sides leaders
• Big three-way battles may be pointless to you, but farmers are clearly not the only ones who get enjoyment out of them given they keep happening, though I do concur newer players should steer clear initially
• Reworking everything would possibly drive out what few players we have, content resets do not work on a non-season pass model and are not liked even there in some cases, and the overhauls you suggest could outright kill the game
• Not everyone sees the same problems you do, some enjoy the game regardless of problems, and your general attitude indicates rather than rational discussion you just want to force your points regardless of any good arguments I might have, which makes you come off as an ***
• I haven't proven any of your points, clearly people enjoy and engage with the game without getting high, and if you think getting high will allow you to enjoy the game, try it yourself and maybe it will clear your horrible bias and attitude and allow for rational, open debate about what Planetside can do to become better