Just Admit It: You Hate the Core of the Game

This game is about doing daily quests, you are missing the point.

First, as a Planetside 1 Veteran I do not hate large scale battles or "zerging". It has always been part of this game. Planetside is also one of the few games that still manages to capture the meaning of the MMO FPS genre.

But rather than ranting about the present, I'll speak about the past. Because to speak about the past offers a basis to reflect upon, from where we came from to where we are now.

• Community -
  Back in Planetside 1, factions and their outfits obviously had their rivalry. But Planetside 2 has developed a level of "salt" and "toxicity" within the community that I feel was practically unheard of back then. The amount of PlanetDiva's today is astounding. It's probably what also drives away most of the new players.
  
  
• Loyalty -
  In Planetside 1, there used to be a system in place where you could only play 2 of 3 factions. Meaning you had to choose your main and alt faction wisely. Also, for example... If you switched from your NC main to your VS alt, you couldn't play NC again for 6-12 hours if I recall correctly. Why did this exist? It helped reduce or prevent players from spying and faction-hopping, by "flowing" over to one particular faction for an easy-win. For Planetside 2? This concept was completely lost.
  
  
• Leadership -
  In Planetside 1, there used to be a Command Rank system where you had to work towards getting "CR5". The "CR5" rank was important, because it allowed your most senior players to address your entire faction with "Global Chat". Meaning... A single player could address the entire faction and tell them where they wanted their major "Zerg" forces to go. Back then, our playerbase often listened. In Planetside 2 now? It would be like herding cats.
  
  
• Zerging -
  Ironically one of the few original aspects of Planetside 1 that had successfully transferred to Planetside 2. "Zerging" was always part of Planetside, because there always was and always will be players (especially newcomers) who simply want to log on and immediately start shooting and blowing things up. How many other games do you know which has over 200+ people fighting over a single base? This is one of Planetside's claims to fame.
  
  
• Oshur, and the Battle Islands -
  Back in Planetside 1, Oshur used to be a tiny version of Ishundar - it wasn't that impressive. However, one day the developers took Oshur and planned an event around it, breaking it up into the "Battle Islands". Consisting of 4 islands, Ascension, Desolation, Extinction, Nexus. Each island was very small, consisting of a few tiny bases. Each zone had a "theme". Such as "no aircraft" or "light vehicles only". If you look closely, Planetside 2 Oshur was designed after the "Extinction" Battle Island.
  

Why is Oshur's former Battle Islands important to this post? Because these were originally the "Small Maps" that were better suited for small scale operations - AKA, the CoD KDR Kids and their outfits.

When the dev's made Oshur, they should've just remade the Battle Islands. By either having each zone reachable by air or sea on a single continent. Or... perhaps making them each a tiny map, with 48 vs 48 players in mind - similar to how Planetside 1 used to have the "Cavern" system... but let's not talk about the caves.

"Its always been there" does not mean its good, or that its a requirement for MMOFPS's.

PS1 players tend to gravitate to the top of the diva's because their experience with an older game and their pink goggles makes them "experts".

Thats not loyalty, thats forcing arbitrary rules without knowing if it works.

For example people have said "oh noes when X is winning so people switch factions!". Then when you look at the actual numbers you see people leaving the losing factions (because the game doesnt make fighting a losing battle fun) but virtually no one joins the winning faction. Because faction-switching for some advantage is not a problem, minus a few edge cases for griefers that tell their buddies on another faction where the Sunderer is located or similar. But you dont stop that with "loyalty", or as I call it "forced arbitrary rules for no gain and only less gameplay to enjoy for everyone".

The concept being lost is a good thing, as it makes no sense to have it. Its as useful as the queue's that prevent players from playing the faction they want to be on.

Its a system that breeds elitism, rather than obedience. "I got this rank so I must be good".

If PS1 was released today players would play it way differently because the overall gameplay experience they have is far more varied. Gameplay has evolved and the science behind creating one is far better understood. It also means that players have higher standards. Just because someone tells them something does not mean they'll listen, especially in a system as weird, gated and limited as PS2 which ignores pretty much all sense when it comes to the design around leadership. Unfortunately too many players that do use leadership think its great because it puts them in the spotlight, rather than the players beneath them. Like you say, "people would listen", because you require blind obedience rather than actual leadership and pretend that when it works with blind obedience it means the tools are adequate.

You mistake a Zerg for a good fight.

Zergs is a mindless mob that uses numbers and single tactics to to overcome challenges. Say a Galdrop. Players who join for "simply start shooting" tend to gravitate to the long endurance fights like Biolabs which Zergs tend to hate. While they can absolutely be mindlessly spawning and fighting they dont do it for the cheese tactics. They often even have honor rules to keep the fight going, like not beelining for the Sunderer to end the fight.

And those leadership things? They are all aimed at stopping the fight. The 200+ battle is what the leadership avoids or tries to shut down, if not go to the forums and proclaim they 200+ battles are a problem because the people there do not follow that leadership blindly.

Even if you added those to PS2 perfectly as you wanted they wouldnt work because the COD KD kiddie mentality isnt the problem. The reward system is the problem. Certs, ribbons, medals and directives all focus on killing the easiest target (not necessarily their intended target) to achieve them, which fosters a mentality that kills are the most important. Getting 10 vehicle kills is deemed less important than 11 regular kills as it scores you more rewards. The only other games in town are "attempt to just have a fight" (the people you insult by calling them things like newbies) and the leadership game of capturing bases which just incentivices cheese and single-sentence strategies to achieve your goals.
Changing the reward systems and giving less focus on killing infantry should be a priority, just like capturing bases should become less important than the fight you had there. Creating a good and enjoyable fight should be what leaders try to achieve when pursueing their goal of winning an alert or resources, rather than destroying fights for ASAP wins.

Nah. Outfits grow roots at purple resource bases. The game should be renamed "The Crown".

Both definitions apply, they arent mutually exclusive and that is not the core issue.

This isnt some unique thing happening to some coalitions, its pretty much the status quo for the entire leadership/outfit part of the game because thats how that part of the gameplay is set up. It encourages viewing the leadership as the only important character and everyone else just has to obey, and any failings are ineviteably shoveled on anyone who does not blindly obey. "If only you people had listened" is pretty much the standard cop-out. Just like the whole "everyone was stuck in a Biolab fight so we lost and its their fault" stick. Its never their own fault because they are leaders and thus geniuses who can do no wrong.

Toxicity is baked into the leadership roles and the reward system. The encouragement is in capturing territory even if its at the expense of having fun. The rewards even encourage outfits to not intervene in enemies capturing territory just so they can capture it back and gain the resources.

Why focus on MMOFPS as the only communication equivalents? Even Battle Royals like PUBG, where only up to 4 players coordinate, have a deeper and more robust system as they realized that voice comms is simply not adequate for in-depth communication at a reasonable pace.

What you need are simple, quick systems that give contextual information. Q-spotting is a simple basis to start from: one click of a button and you warn all your allies within a certain range of an infantry/MAX/vehicle/aircraft. But it doesnt let you truly communicate with someone currently busy that an aircraft is approaching and they should whip out AA, it doesnt let you request an airstrike, or let a player tell people "this vehicle here is an important target", or even do something as simple as give an estimate to the health of an enemy vehicle/aircraft.

They quite literally have a radial menu in place if you hold Q above friendlies, its even contextual based on the player being in a vehicle or not. A similar contextual radial menu with contextual information would do more for PS2's coordination capability than everything done so far combined. Do a similar radial menu for holding V to designate something on the ground and you have a decent start.

Its 100% with the set up of the gameplay and how that creates a culture/meta. A good gameplay/meta encourages the players to play in a fun way. That means that everything already affects how you use the leadership tools. Most games have you join groups by first letting you enjoy what they do so you team up, which already fosters a sense of commeradery and cooperation from the start. PS2 has no such thing as sticking together is already incredibly hard unless you already are in a group, which means you join groups in an impersonal basis. Then there's no tools for anyone except the leader to actually communicate outside of a voice comms system that barely works in a 3-man team that is standing next to each other, let alone a 48 team where people are all over the place and you teach most players to ignore voice comms since the information rarely is useful for you unless its extremely general. And hey look at that, leadership in PS2 is pretty much giving general "everyone do this" orders.

The very basis for cooperation and teamplay is missing, only the top of the hierarchy has the means to communicate and even that is so hampered by how you place it and how little context it gives that its nigh useless. And the only actual contextual system is gated behind leadership, only available on the mapscreen if people have it on and not intuitive to use at all. Even just saying "this part of the orders can be scrapped" is impossible and forces you to completely remove everything and redo only the parts you want.

The commanders point of view is why we are in this mess. Because its the only thing anyone ever cared about and its what caused all the problems.

What you need to do:

- focus on what the non-leaders can do first, and let them communicate quickly and efficiently with ANYONE, no stupid gating it to only players in your squad/platoon/outfit. The contextual radial menu for spotted enemies would already do much of this.

- focus on altering rewards so it encourages players to work together. More directives, certs, medals and ribbons for what the local group does (irrespective of their squad/platoon/outfit/random status!!!!!). If one player overloads a generator and another player holds off enemy advances in the next building, that other player should be just as rewarded for overloading the reactor as the guy who actually did it.

- change the map hotspot functionality. Instead of it showing the average position of weapon usage it shows the average position of all allied players and any enemy player that has been spotted in some way (Q-spot, radar, sensors, shooting in close proximity). This average position would be coded so you can see what type is there (infantry, vehicle, aircraft, a combination) and where they were positioned in the last minute or so. Due to the hotspot system's slow update speed of a minute or more it does not lag out your system, it gives you a general idea of what is located on a position (but individuals can easily move far away or avoid detection to keep themselves hidden) and lets both players and leaders assess and communicate about situations far outside normal radar range and give contextual commands. A leader would be able to select a block indicating infantry/vehicles/aircraft and select a contextual order for people to carry out ("there's vehicles here, AV strike from <direction>!").
That map change is crucial, as it lets players also guess how a battle is progressing and what is needed should they spawn there. It also means that a player observing a vehicle column at an enemy base forming up does not need to be part of a squad/platoon/outfit to communicate it, just spot them and players can see the general whereabouts of the vehicle column and prepare without needing to be part of their team, just their faction.

Then we both need to be more clear which one we refer.

Well, it has taken a while but you've made your point very clear to me now, and you've made a compelling argument. I will still take beef with your argument on the effectiveness of voice chat within platoons and/or squads from my own experience but for everything else I am pretty much in agreement.

You know what? I like these ideas. I'd love to see them implemented in-game and it may be enough to convince me to give this game another serious try. The million dollar question is: Is there a ghost chance in hell of getting the dev team to listen, let alone actually create and implement these ideas?

People also complain when it rains, yet it benefits the plants in which they breath their oxygen from.

Kinda like any new player having a good reason to play and enjoy PS2 even if partaking in a zerg. Be thankful PS2 is still "breathing" for soon to be 10 years. Not all servers are as popular or "healthy" as Emerald is.

PS1 is the foundation by which PS2 stands upon, by which a number of things still remain or were derived from. But of course those who missed out have have an inherent disparity to contrast upon what can resolve a problematic situation. The PS2 players only have PS2 to base their opinions upon.

If it wasn't for PS1 players demanding a lattice system, you'd all be back to PS2 post-launch status and using aircraft to unflip ghost caps incessantly performed by VS players 24/7 looking to get lucky.

I was there post-launch for PS2. And constantly having to unflip ghost caps at Scarred Mesa Skydock was one of the most tedious things to do. No thanks.

It did work, because I was there to witness it while it was present - though there are some here who are unable to say otherwise. There was a sense of pride in one's faction which ultimately lead to a number of players dedicating and devoting their time to the success of their main faction on a daily basis.

I would know, because I was there even during the hard times. Fighting against odds of 30% vs 70% or worse in a 1v1 on PS1. Because for as long as we delayed the enemy, it bought our faction time to secure victory on another continent before our reinforcements arrived.

... That was when Planetside fought their battles across multiple continents on a global scale. Not a perpetual 3-way as showcased in PS2 which would've been regarded as a "useless stalemate" by PS1 leadership standards.

As for the rest, I'll simply say that in this day and age that the modern masses don't like taking "no" for an answer. I'm not surprised people have come to hate abiding by rules. Players today like to imagine that even a pawn can move as the queen does in Chess, especially when the queen said you can all eat cake.

Hardly elitism. Because if you actually put in the time and effort, you could earn Command Rank on your own while leading a public squad. When you play the game long enough, you get used to the "ebb and flow" of things. Along with a profound sense of accomplishment when you obtain your hard-earned CR5 status.

After all, you'd be surprised how many players didn't care to pursue it, even though there was nothing stopping them from doing it other than making the commitment to themselves.

I got my CR5 status from leading the pubbies. And I did it on my own, because my "outfit" already had a waiting list and I was last in line. Come to think of it, I obtained my CR5 status before the second in line got his.

This is Planetside 2. The business model is free to play. You don't pay a membership unless you want to. What does this mean?

Means your average "free to play" player has every incentive to have a natural magnetism to a particular "T Shaped" hallway beneath Nason's Defiance in a 3-way conflict to maximize their certs per hour.

And those players can play however they want, even at your dismay. Because this was how the game was designed. And the "Sunken Cost" fallacy is why it is practically impossible for PS2 to change its business model. Because how do you redesign a game knowing you have to give a customer a refund for every non-cosmetic purchase in the game?

You can't. Because that's Sony's fault for making it this way.

The players are doing what they gotta do to earn certs to pay the bills. And if maximizing kills is how it's done, then that's what they'll do. And quite frankly, just shooting stuff is fun enough.

We didn't need to shut it down. As CR5 players, we would tell our "Zerg" where to go. And they'd almost always listen.

When I lead public squads in PS1, they would follow the waypoints and the sequence of bases that I specified for capture. In the PS2 community, when I observe public squads, I see a waypoint up and more than 70% of the squad is spread out between four bases.

Your problem is a community problem, exasperated by game design, with a factor multiplied by the business model.

Congratulations, you had inadvertently explained precisely how base capture worked in PS1 in hopes of fixing PS2.

It was based upon your contributions, added with the duration of the fight, bonus' given for participating in a squad/platoon and multiplied by the intensity of forces present there prior to capture. All of which would continue to accumulate for as long as the battle went on as you participated.

If you captured the base then you were awarded the juicy "combat jackpot". If you lost the base, you got fiddlesticks and it went to the enemy.

But in today's PS2 community, that just means every player who wants to leverage the system will attend every winning fight and abandon every losing one. Because there's people who cannot simply play the game and enjoy it, without min/maxing their own personal gain.

It's almost like people will just jump on their winning faction's alt because they have no character restrictions or loyalty to force them to accept the loss. Imagine that.

Not really, it's pretty clear from the context and even without context the message is still the same: It reduces the will of players to do a certain action.

A good example is World of Warcraft. They had a mechanic set up to discourage players from playing for hours and hours (which causes burnout and reduces player counts) by reducing the XP gain over time. The players went nuts about how unfair that was as anyone playing for longer would be punished! Oh noes!
So what they did was just flip how they said it. Players were now "rewarded" for not playing all day and would get an XP boost that would diminish the longer they played. Except it was quite literally the exact same system as before intended to discourage players from playing longer by encouraging to play shorter. Both "discourage" methods in one example, because everything that discourages something also encourages something else. In PS2's case it encourages mostly to destroy the game you are playing by avoiding fights or stopping fights from continueing.

Repeat the idea's ad nauseum in a way that attracts attention over and over again untill they see sense.

I've posted several idea's which I was pretty much the only one making threads about that have made their way in the game or at least made it to the test server at some point. For example the Forwards Station I proposed was in the test server (although altered) and was changed at the last moment to the Router because the construction system had it's HIVE's scrapped and the devs wanted to keep construction relevant.

I proposed the ANVIL when the devs put a prototype vehicle crate in the test server for a little while. The ANVIL would let outnumbered players have access to vehicles outside of the base without needing access to the vehicle pads which are almost always lost the moment the enemy shows up at your base. It became a gated method to boost attention on the Outfit update.

I proposed an NC weapon that would have limited laser-guidance. For a while on the Test Server a TR mashup of the Vulcan and Gatekeeper were available before they were removed again.
I proposed an NC weapon that could charge up and pierce vehicles, where charging up would reduce overall DPS but increase damage per shot. For a while on Test Server a VS weapon that did exactly that was available. At the same time the NC got a charge-up weapon that couldn't pierce and the charge-up was basically the reload time after which fired the moment it had charged and was worse to the Halberd in every regard except muzzle velocity.

I proposed a jumpjet that had several charges and launched the player in one direction with high mobility but also risk as slamming into the scenery would damage you. It made it in the game as the Ambusher Jumpjets with only one charge and no self-harm aside from falling too far.

I proposed the idea of having fluid squads, where players in the neighbourhood are added to your squad to play with and if players leave for another area they join a squad over there instead. Apparently they were working on it (it was in the roadmap) and people were against it for some reason. No idea what they were against since it would be optional for players to pick and would make it easier for more casual player to work together on a local scale without players from the Squad being all over the map, but it only goes to show how bad the "teamplay" crowd has become that they'll shoot down something that would improve cohesiveness and cooperation without the need to constantly manage the location of players across the map.


So posting works, even if the overall community doesn't necessarily support it. However you likely wont get it in the game the way you propose. Unfortunately at the same time the devs have also listened to complaints of many leaders who say that Biolab fights or similar long endurance fights sucking up tons of players is a bad thing as it leaves less players for them to scream orders at, and the devs have been breaking down such fights in favor of outright removing bases or removing the ability for defenders to actually defend for a long time.

Dropping on an even fight with a zerg is basically griefing everyone on both sides.

So you enjoy griefing while playing in a platoon, and the only time you enjoy playing solo is when you're also griefing. Gotcha, you're a griefer. Why can't you enjoy playing the game while not griefing someone else?