Please, share your input with me, do you guys think the game is competitive? I would say the most "competitive" thing about the game would be outfit wars, but please, share your thoughts.
This is abtually an interresting question if you add the word "still" so the thread title will become "Is Planetside 2 still a competitive game?" , and I want to respond what I personally think about this, but inbefore someone starts arguing with me by throwing tables with numbers, chance percentages of whatever or asking for videos with 100% hard proofs etc.etc., please keep in mind this post is just my own personal point of view based on my own gameplay experiences through the 7 years in this game. When the game was launched, my answer will be "Hell, definitely yes. *dakka dakka dakka * Yeehaaw!". New game with engine capable of 300+ vs 300+ battles, asymetric faction ballance, different "combined arms" strategy (=infantry, tanks, air support). Remember those old designed "Crown" fights? ENTIRE factions in one hex, 3-hour long insanely awesome siege fights, Outfits bragging on forum for days that they participated in a succesfull attempt to cap the THE Crown. I wish all mass PvP lovers can experience similar fights. After Construction update: "eh, some flaws ingame, but still definitely yes anyway" Some flaws already noticeable ingame (A2G infantry farming i.e., but nothing gamebreaking, bring some AA and you will be fine) Highly customizable bases in the open field, where everyone is able to contribute (important text is underlined, you will notice the reason latter in this post) with Silo resource resuplying? Wow, awesome. Lattice system reworked, lines now completelly bypassing greatly defendable points like Biolabs: "Uh oh, yes, game is kinda still competitive, but with great flaws now in the system" Why the hell devs did this? Completelly bypassing Biolabs just for the sake of disabling trenches position warfare, which were actually one of the greatest fight in PS2? Bastion + spammable OS update: "Competitive? This game slowly forgot that word meanings, Its now just a zergfit wankers fest, nothing else". More and more content being locked as "outfit-only" , only high-rank zergfit members are able to be effectively competitive now. (see the difference in the game course now? Now you understand why I underlined previous text) Game looks like wankers compete "My OS got 50 killz, hooray! Awwesome game!" another ******: "My OS got 71 killz, I owned you! OS are super funny, give me more" . In the meantime, hacker in his own gameplay ecstasy: "200 killz in da minute, my KDR 200, xaxaxa n00bz, I pwn ya all !" This post is written by the perspective of a zergfit member, who was on the both sides of a Bastion, being inside is an A2G artillery cert-farming machine, (game basically became a shooting range for you, and even when you are not in the turret, you still get "gunner assist XP"), and being on the receiving end which is instakill respawn after respawn after respawn. Still, I hate all these with passion. I like good fair-play long-lasting fights, but these became very rare in the game course, and almost non-existent nowadays after Bastion + spamm OS update. Well, in these "fair-play" fights, I have to admit I have one small "sin" here, I guess no one is without any flaws, I was UBGL spammer back when it was a thing (but i got bored after few days of this, and stopped doing that) (for new ppl, UBGL = UnderBarrel Grenade Launcher - a custom attachment to some weapons) Pff, just another pointless post in this empty forum, where devs are non-existent, and where only screams of displeased players echoing from side to side till they ultimately fade away in time anyway... Maybe i should read this forum way less frequently, its becoming toxic for me to see such amount of ignoring and non-communication from the developers on their own official game forum.Ok, time to stop this wall of text right now, dont mind this post and have you all good Friday and nice weekend Glory to the Papa Vanu!
It's not really for the devs, someone claimed that the game is competitive, and doesn't need any matchmaking/fair/balanced fights or "rewards" to be competitive. Thank you for your interesting reply, you are right; the game seemed to appeal more to tactics back in the early days. Unfortunately, many of these tactical oriented players have deserted the game I do recall having a much stronger sense of "winning" something back then.
Look, I love Planetside 2, in my opinion it's the best shooter of it's generation by a comfortable margin, and there is plenty of room for competitions in PS2. Who has the best outfit, the best stats. the most kills with X weapon etc. Or even in a more immediate sense who killed who in a 1v1, who won the base or the alert. However it doesn't have a real competitive scene. The things that make the game great, the massive unbalanced three way fights on the live servers are never going to be a good format for a real competition. Outfit Wars may evolve into a decent competitive scene if the qualifiers are changed to be skill based instead of a grind/zerg and the matches are 48v48 without a third team. That's a big maybe though but it doesn't really matter, the game is great at doing what it does and it's a lot of fun to log in and shoot stuff.
I think it's pretty competitive right now. Just use the tools right. The OW outcomes should be an indication that it really depends on who is holding the gun, not what the gun is.
I think the term 'competitive' is in the eye of the beholder. It's very subjective. What may seem competitive to one, may not be to another. We all play this game different ways, with different aims/goals we want to achieve, or the lack there of. To me, primarily it is not a competitive game. I don't spend my time trying to get into outfits that play to win every base, or to compete against other outfits in Outfit Wars. I just spend it playing with my friend doing all kinds of things, ranging from supporting the team, destroying those 'hard to kill' Sunderers, or just goofing around doing things that have no impact on anything at all. With that said, there are times where my friend and I do play more competitively. I do like to see my faction win alerts from time to time, so make the effort to do my part to make sure TR secure the win. I go to underpopped bases that are nearing enemy capture and help defend. I make spawns for the team in order to delay an enemy attack. All these little things add seconds onto a defence, or an attack, and this is what matters to me. Sometimes it can be about sacrifice. A lot of players hate getting killed, so bases, or even entire alerts are lost because players don't want to ruin their k/d ratio or just get killed in general. When I play to win, death means nothing to me. If I have to run into a capture point like a lemming just to flip the cap even for just an extra 1-2 seconds, it means everything to me. In terms of the game itself being competitive, it has competitive aspects. The act of being competitive, is to compete with another, so playing to win. Outfit Wars can be, if players play to win. Alerts can be, if players play to win. Outfits can be, if they play to win. The game itself can be competitive, if the players in it play to win. This then leads back to whether or not the player themself plays to win... which is not always the case. Thus, it leads back to 'competitive' being very subjective. It's based on a matter of an individual's personal opinion. Like-minded individuals will band together and play to win, others will not. It's just one big circle. Any game can be competitive, if the players within it are themselves competitive.
The Pigs On The Wing have enjoyed multiple years of success in base capture, squad coordination and country wide ops in Aces High 3 (we still participate heavily in Friday Squad Ops). Planetside 2 offered all of that plus FPS action which AH3 did not have. We do our best with a sub 30 person crew to have an effect on the tide of war when we are online here in PS2. Sometimes we succeed when we don't get distracted by squirrels. Is it competitive? I would say yes. Competitive enough to get a large squad from another multi player online game to come over and start spending time as newbs when they are kings of the virtual world elsewhere.
Yeah depends on what you mean by "competitive". If your focus goes to team play and victory over other players, then yeah. You can drop off two opposing outfits on a base and, after some length of time, be able to identify the team that "won" the fight, the team that "lost" the fight, and both teams can take steps to improve their chances of winning next time. But if by "competitive" you mean like: esports/MLG, we can measure an individual's performance and determine how good they are by comparing them to other players? Absolutely not, and if you play PS2 with that mindset it will wear at you real quick. PS2 has always, from day one, had fight-changing issues and compromises in its design (clientside) which make it impossible to know. Like, sure, now if you throw a bugged LA with survivalist at a sunderer and they blow up the sundy in record time, does that mean they're better than everyone who's blowing up a sundy in an intended way? Sure, that's a newer issue. Before that, the game would regularly forget to tell you an enemy player exited a vehicle. If an enemy who jumped out of a vehicle killed you when you couldn't see them, does that mean they were better in that fight? Even before that, way back around beta/release, there was that issue where sometimes your shots wouldn't register properly. Did any fights anyone lost to that bug prove anything? What about those times someone with an awful connection runs through a door and shoots someone with a shotgun once while the victim's game says they're still behind a wall? Even if this game was perfect and had 0 issues/compromises, just the scale of it wouldn't make it a valid individual/esports competitive game. Players could still move around unnoticed by enemies (where luck is a larger factor than in other games simply because they can have 96+ other players looking for them), and get kills by players who had no idea they were there. There's only so much control one individual can have when there's so many players in the fight. Just an anecdotal thing: this game's conditioned me to just give up when I see someone start shooting at me (I'll die if I fight back, I'll get shot through cover if I flee, so whatevs), so I'm almost completely helpless in 1v1s. Yet my KD is somehow above 1 because I can sometimes accomplish things when I'm not the one being shot at. So am I good because I play a ton of medic and die with the healing applicator out sometimes but still maintain a >1 KD or not? Or maybe it doesn't matter... And that's just talking about kills! I haven't even gotten into: how to evaluate the 'worth' of a medic; someone who only really excels at leading squads, sundy/galaxy deployment, air "deterrence", etc. Probably through stats planetside 2 doesn't even record, but anyway...
Oh, I apologize for my wrongly writen words in that sentence, the word "pointless" was addressing my own wall-of-text post because I was somewhat saddened by the current course of this game and was feeling pointless to address my post also partly to devs. Definitely not your post, your question is actually a thing to think about for a while. Once again, sorry for my wrongly writen words, I meant my own post as kinda pointless, not your post. Actually I believe that even writing a post just for the players, not for the devs, can sometimes be a very good post worth reading it. I remember some great ingame player-driven events started just as a small post starting with "Hello guys, yesterday I got an idea about ....., what do you think?" . And, forum is after all a platform to share ppl's thoughts, ideas, suggestions etc and to discuss these things with other ppl, isnt it? So dont be affraid to share your thoughts : )
No its not, if it was competative, every faction/class would all have access to the same goods, to remove any and all possibility of arguments that one faction have better weapons then the other. Since each faction has its own "flavor" that alone directly removes it from being competitive. Unlike RTS games were there are factions that have their own play style, Planetside 2 does not have a different playstyle among factions. Be in Vanu, TR, or NC, you are still playing a shooter, a heavy support on NC plays no different then a TR heavy, but the weapons you have access to effect the balance of the game, even in minute ways. PS2 is, and always will be just a meme BF2142 clone thats just meant to be played for shiggles.
Potentially any activity can be competitive, hell I remember competing about how far I could piss when I was a kid. That said, and although it's surely a matter of taste, I'm sure there are objective elements to it. I feel that the competitive sides of PS2 can be insanely fun and addictive, and that is whatver the subject, there are tons of ways, from competing for the number of kills or to win an alert, and each can be individual, cooperative or "mass" (like alerts or faction wide things). So yeah, I wouldn't play this game otherwise. However, by competitive, people sometimes mean something official, like OW or tournaments, basically competitions. And on from that angle, I feel the game is very suited for competion, but though they are trying, I don't feel the devs are doing a very good job about it. But that's on them, not because if the game.
