It has to stop and YOU have to stop it.

Every day, the population of this game gets smaller and smaller. Every day, it is harder to find decent fights on Emerald, it is starting even to effect prime time. Where there were 10+ squads rolling, there are now 5. Every day, people on my friends list, not just in my faction, log off in disgust. Every day, its the same thing; getting insta-killed by BR7-15 people with less than 50 directive points from ridiculous ranges that land every single headshot. Then there are the really blatant ones: A couple of days ago the VS held off an NC force that outnumbered them 3:1 at Tawritch for a solid 1-2 hours. They did this with an LA who was underground, had infinite ammo, and was killing everyone who got near the point instantly through the ground and walls. There was never a ban notice. He just logged off in boredom, I assume. This is not a problem with just the VS; I have seen NC do it, I have seen TR do it. In fact, I have personally followed around NC hackers on several occasions and shotgunned them in the back of the head specifically so they would stop ruining everyones fun.

This will kill your game dead, DBG. You need to do something to stop this, and you need to do it now.

Nobody will buy your cosmetics, nobody will buy membership, nobody will even be playing.

Every single balance issue is utterly irrelevant in the face of this nonsense, Gatekeepers, .75 ADS, PPA's, Scatter MAX's, Prowler DPS, Lancers, Pheonixes in groups, all of this does not matter if nobody bothers to play because of script kiddies.

I'm just not seeing all these hackers people are talking about.

Have to disagree. Cheaters are few. Annoying, sure, but I see them much rarer than forum panic threads like this would imply.

I rarely play this game nowadays, both because I got other stuff to do, and because PS2 is not fun. Balance issues are a big part of that for me. It's fun to compete. PS2 is sucks at being competitive, because vehicles > MAXes > HA > infantry is how the balance goes.

Hackers are rare, but it only takes one of them to ruin the game for some time, especially when you can't get away from them since they are flying all around the (alert) continent.

Also, everyone playing heavy assault as a kill-all class. Seriously, change the role to either be a damage soaker that doesn't do deal much (maybe with riot shields like the NC's Max) or to a suppressor with explosives and no shield, with guns that do splash damage like the lasher.

Come to Miller, its a free for all with the blatants and the clever ones, well they are still at it, but no shadow of doubt, their are hackers.

Welcome to the world of lowlife cheater gaming. Cheaters have been destroying great games for many years. Only a few gaming companies took stands against cheaters. The rest say they stand up against cheaters but in reality they really don't. Allowing cheaters to play because they buy items or spend real money is a poor excuse. People who protect their cheater friends live in denial or they cheat themselves. The free to play gaming model allows cheaters to play. Suspending a player for cheating is a joke and a major slap in the honest players face. Even banning a person for cheating, but allowing said person to turn around and just make another account and start cheating again is also a major slap in the honest players face. Gaming companies make the same mistakes over and over by doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Cheaters are cheaters, giving them second, third, fourth, 5,6,10,20,100 chances to play straight and honest is just not going to work. They are lazy lowlife cheaters period. They are going to cheat no matter what. When my subscription is up in December, I will not renew again. I will not purchase anymore DBC either. I am done supporting games that allow lowlife cheaters to take hold and ruin great games. I say let the cheat makers and the script kiddies support the game from now on.

I haven't seen the hackers that have been plaguing the game like everyone on the forums claims to be. However.. I have seen the drop in population.

OP is right about one thing for sure. There's not many squads available. When I log in during primetime on Connery and see about 4 squads when we used to see 4-8 platoons about six months ago.. there's an issue.

Perception is Reality.

If players are perceiving a vast amount of cheating, then our reality will become very real when they up and leave. And judging by the forum posts in the last month, its the cheating or the perception of cheating that is causing it. What Daybreak will need to do is take some measure to alleviate the issue.

That means getting rid of the cheaters by just about any means necessary. Lets face it, even one is too many. Lets get them out. And if the situation isn't as bad as players make it out to be.. do something to alleviate the concerns. The broadcast ingame doesn't do much when the affected players by the cheater logged off already.

It also doesn't do any good to allow blatant cheaters (100+ KDRs, 80+ accuracies) to go on for a few hours. These are rare, but when a player checks the stats of something suspicious and then still sees them a week later.. that's frustrating to be sure. What needs to happen is the inclusion of active Game Master/Moderators ingame that actively check for these cheaters.

If PS2 isn't profitable enough to do at least that.. its time to shut it down. If we can't get at the very least someone to monitor the servers, then the servers can't justify being up.

Miller has several blatent ones a day.

Flying super-MAXs that never miss from 300+m away, immortal Libs and ESFs that move like lightning and never miss, harrassers moving faster than Reavers with racer airframe and afterburners on (that can see you cloaked under a bridge and come and kill you), endless sunderers deployed inside rocks.

It's wonderful, adds to the gameplay experience absolutely marvellously.

I've seen a couple of hackers on the EU servers but the more annoying things for me, and the ones I see far more of, are all perfectly legitimate (but frustrating) tactics...........grenade spam, unending and masive long range tank bombardment, Max crashes and C4 used as frag grenades. On the other hand I love how a seemingly foregone conclusion in a base capture opens up into a contested battle again when the enemy does a Gal drop etc. And I'm hoping the new ANTs will introduce a new dynamic in gameplay, like fighting for resource-rich territory rather than just bases.
I must say that on the EU servers I can almost always find a decent sized fight although they are rarer on Hossin than the other continents. Early evenings (like around dinner time) can be a bit quiet but that seems understandable. I hear that Briggs is pretty deserted and now you say Emerald population is getting low. Is this something to do with which geographical populations these servers cover? or are there too many of them?
There seems to have been a slight uptick in the number of forum posts about DBG not advertising, which is expensive ofc, but I'm pretty sure the game could stand to be a bit more visible to the general game playing public. And a bit more support for new player as well...........we have player studio, could DBG not offer links to some of the excellent player-made guides as well? It took me ages to work out what was what when I started.
Although I am a subscriber I can't help wondering if being a bit more generous with cert gain to new players (who presumably tend to start af F2P) would be a good idea. I am gifted with more patience than most so I didn't mind grinding for certs but now I am a subscriber I could not go back to that routine.

Hackers is what is killing the game? I am sorry, but did people ever play games before PS2? Do people know that a lot of the most popular games out there current and past ones, also have/had hackers?

It is a problem, yes. But it ain't what is killing the game, as a sole contributor whatsoever.

I have over 1000 hours in this game and there is not much cheating gong on. Some of them are obvious to everyone and some of them can only been noticed by someone who has played for a long time. The most common I see, are the subtle cheats but even those are uncommon. However by far the most common hack I encounter is someone spawning on an enemy sundy, to blow it up and teleporting behind me to get revenge. I am not making this up or daydreaming. I was personally contacted by an admin who asked what hex I was in, because he was tracking a hacker who just killed me. Which coincidentally, was one of those who spawned right behind me out of nowhere and killed me from behind.

Population is just low because of the BF3 beta. It'll jump back up in a week or two.

The hackers are becoming more common, starting to see them on Emerald now, maybe its just the population decline is highlighting the hackers as they're the ones sticking around, but this morning i was fight a BR40 VS HA in basically a 1v1 situation in a base, and he was getting a lot of headshots, i first just assumed he was some MLGPROSWAG alt, then i got the jump on him and he ran into a wall and teleported behind me and killed me while he was facing away from me with his LMG.

I reported him and logged off, its pretty demoralizing to see it happening in plain sight, this game needs some real anti-hack measures besides mass reporting.

I have over 1000 hours in this game (showing steam) and another 200-300 hours without steam and yeap, there is much cheating going on.
I dont know how bad other servers are doing but miller is some kind of a disaster. In my first 500 hours I have barely seen any hacker but now, since some weeks, I have to encounter them every damn day. Yesterday it was a flying and teleporting TR max, the day before it was a NC liberator flying faster than Son Goku and the day before, it was a VS LA and a NC HA in "lol-two-meters-beneath-no-one-can-kill-me"-mode.
The most bad one was a reaver pilot called something like suleyman. I was a stalker infiltrator looking for pumpkins. He has seen me (i was cloaked of course) from 300 meters above, tried to kill me and hit the damn ground without exploding. He then was trying to unflip his reaver for 20 seconds without getting any damage (he was this near, that I could see his life without implant) and then died because I candy cannoned his noobie reaver.
Too bad I've installed AMD Gaming Evolved after this, otherwise you could see a decent fail vid here.

Dont understand me wrong, I love the engagement of the devs in terms of the gameplay but
in my opinion, the staff respectively the mods/admins are totally overwhelmed in this case. Or not interested at all.

Btw, the "report player" button is a lie.

Nah, the populations are low because the game is decaying and has been for basically the last year, just looking at the pop stats the only increase in population for Emerald was the Watterson Matherson merger and its been in a slow decline ever since, its almost back to pre merger levels in fact.

Still have yet to run into hackers but I have seen some pretty genius ideas on taking on a room full of enemies. One is to equip drifters and drift around the roof of a building shooting down at people. Though I do personally get horrible connections at time which does lead to people teleporting and the always amazing tanks just soaring through the skys. Maybe I'm blind? maybe I'm lucky? either way I have yet to run into one of these people.

For population remember it's school time, near the holidays so expect it to be slow. Unless someones a doctor and wants to write a "Terminally Auraxis" Note for me to show my professors and boss.

Some servers seem a lot worse than others.

In the last 4 days I've seen flying MAXs that can hit you 100% from miles away, invincible Libs and ESFs that hit you 100% an move almost too fast too see, harrasser that move faster than afterburning racer airframe Reavers and can see you cloaked under a bridge.

As well as dozens of Sunderers deployed inside rocks so you cannot destoy them.

And bear in mind that you don't tend to notice blatent hackers if they are on your side (you just think you're winning), its only when you're being farmed you tend to notice it.

Just leave battle where the cheater is and boom problem solved. Thank me twice.

This. I'm wagering that without a Connery-Emerald Merger, the PC servers will be turned offline somewhere around February.

This is an expansionless 3 year old MMO. Its done very well to go this long. But no MMO goes on beyond 2 years without an expansion for long. What PS2 needs is something Daybreak can't provide, a ton of new game changing content to refresh the interest in the game.

Shut it down in Feb, let the PS4 version run for a year. Then announce development on PS3. That's their best option if they wish to keep the franchise.