MLG & Nexus is the future

It was all around getting good even fights.

Currently you either Ghost cap, or defending a locked down outpost 4/1.

I cant remember the last good fight i had on a "Small scale" 24v24 or even Platoon vs Platoon.

The new changes to bases/outpost plus nexus is promoting infantry play. That will all boil down to tactics and skill. Suppose to overwhelming the enemy.

Thats why its going to be fun.

I think the game has had a solid foundation for a while. Who would spend hundreds of hours of their time on a game that doesn't have one?

Right now the development just needs to be focused on creating the sort of thing that will keep players going on. They specifically said the Nexus will play towards creating the "meta" everyone seems to talk about, but is never happy.

"base caps need to work differently -> "the new system is amazing!" -> "this system sucks",
"we want lattice" -> "this is amazing!" -> "lattice sucks"

(this is how it went with these + several other changes)

so, MLG is some kind of BF3 or CS version of Planetside 2? team on team?

what, the smaller the better? i don't get it. you have the only game where you can have thousands of random players on one server, which means a lot of surprises and unexpected turns due to the random spikes in enemy numbers and average skill level. and all you want is a smaller sandbox where you can have BF3 scale fights against the same enemy to the point where you can guess their every step?

BF3 was designed in 24-player battles in mind. The Battle Islands scale is 48 versus 48 players.

The core of the game - for me - is the team play and the battle islands seem like a good way to get a tighter team play experience out of PS2. Right now, players/units can choose suitable fights and it is too easy to manipulate your battle difficulty by relocating/pouring in excessive numbers. I'd like to hone my own and the outfits' skill and team play in a more balanced setting from time to time. I'd like to have more good outfit vs outfit action as opposed to "stomp zerglings" or "oh, 6-to-1 outnumbered, where is the rest of the TR?".

Do I have faith in SOE doing it properly and in a timely manner? Nope. Do I think the main game needs more depth and more continents? Absolutely. Do I prefer Battle Islands over the current casual PS2? I don't know. Let's see how they manage to pull it of. Do I want to go "pro"? Most likely not, as it'd mean playing the game for way too many weekly hours and overcommitting at the price of real life

so Battle Islands are a glorified, extra big, Battlefield Conquest... got it...

When I want to play Battlefield i will go play the real Battlefield game, which is optimized for this type of play and where all infantry weapons are available to everyone.
Considering the current state of the game, i dont understand how anyone can trust SOE with balancing a "battleground" with the 3 unique factions.

So much development time wasted...

I wonder if Battle Islands are SOEs way to make the Playstation 4 handle Planetside 2...

Makes no sense to me either.

I'm pretty sure the battle islands will actually make balancing easier. A more controlled setting will allow imbalances and exploitive tactics to be measured more easily. This will allow for fixing the more obvious balance problems both on the islands and in the main game. SOE has always seemed very focused on throwing new FotM stuff into the game, and this battle island thing just might force them to look at some of the balance issues more carefully.

Like i implied with my last post: I wouldnt trust SOE balancewise beyond the next daily sale.
They have to milk the shrinking playerbase to keep going.

(M40 Fury is the best example; nerf was postponed because it was on sale. What kind of reasoning is that?)
But i dont want to start a balancing discussion. !!! It was just an example !!!

I don't understand. PS1 worked well allowing the entire population to participate in battles. It wasn't restricted in any way other then normal population limits for each continent. So we have to have instances in PS2 because why? There's too much population? Or is it because the stupid bases aren't designed well, like they were in PS1?

Last time I checked this game was scraping by with 2x.xxx players. Last time I heard about MLG they were trying to tell me how awesome 48vs48 battles will be. You need to understand that there can´t be that many outfits who can even provide full platoons on a regular basis. Nor can you assume that every outfit big enough to deploy these numbers wants to do so.

This whole MLG/Nexus whatever business is SOE´s attempt to a attract players that would not normally play PS2, but people interested in small scale Planetside will stick with BF3 or CoD because those titles are optimized for that scale and crowd of people.

Ontop of that there hasn´t been a single gaming league that successfully supported teamsizes >12vs12 for an extended period of time. Afaik nothing bigger than 6vs6 lasted long, and those weren´t titles that were only played by a very small community.

People who watch gaming streams want to see a great display of personal skill and entertaining gameplay. 48vs48 does hardly leave any room for individual players to shine enough for viewers. That MLG stream they had going on the weekend was terrible, pure chaos and anyone not intimate with PS2 didn´t understand what was going on at all.

If SOE wants to go through with these MLG shenanigans they should at least ensure that it isn´t sucking up resources they could otherwise employ to work on the real planetside, the planetside that still has 20k players. Not the planetside that they hope will gain lots of new MLG Pro-Gamers.

P.S. : Last time SOE decided they are not happy with the community they have, and would rather attract a new one they ended up with neither. SWG anyone?

I dont think that these Battle Islands are the future, but i understand why they build them in. The devs seem to be unable to keep players in the game. Everytime a sever gets recommended the player numbers rise and everytime the recommended time ends the numbers start to shrink. Alot of players leave befor they even reach level 30. So my best guess is that they trying to open up more options to get more players. But honestly i dont think that this will work because of the way the game is designed.

Planetside 2 has never forced players into teamplay. It is XP driven, you need to get XP to advance your character, but alot of the teamplay stuff gives alot less XP (or none) than the stuff you can do solo and Battle Islands or not, they dont seem to work on this problem.

I dont understand how they want to balance the Battle Islands, players need to get XP to cert into weapons and equipment, so a higher level team will allways have better chances than a low level team (so no balance here). Also speaking of teams, how should it work? If its balanced for 48 vs 48 combat, where do the players come from? I only know a small number of outfits able to get 48 players into the field. So what do we get, a random matchmaking where low level random teams get steamrolled by high level fixed outfit teams or is it just alot of developement time for an event that comes 2 times a year where nearly no outfit can participate due to lack of members?

While i agree on the Esports side of things. And SOE are trying to break the mold where BF3 Failed. There is a gap in the market for it. And people will watch it. But that all depends on what SOE's plan is.

As for the BI's Its not going to be pure Outfit vs Outfit. My squad can join another platoon then participate. Or team up with another outfit to get a full platoon size.

And PS2 has allot more than 20k players. Where did you get that number from? 20k players logging on per night prehaps. I was talking abour raw account numbers, That has to be over the 100k mark.

Also to boot. I dont see any MLG Pro players? MLG is a platform for tournaments and coverage of Esports. Offering exposure for PS2.

That might have something to do with your tendency to show up with a zerg and then claim victory for FU. Not that I don't have respect for FU, it's clearly one of the better outfits on Miller.

Activity: Online last 7 days

INI Elite: 57 Members (96%) Total: 59 Members
Free Lancers Union: 230 Members (61%) Total: 389 Members +150 Online yesterday.

I wouldnt call that the same size as us to be fair We are 2 Squads max on each night.

Show up for a zerg? -.- When have we done that except perhaps some minor times.

Many times we do the hard work and when the base is essentially taken the zerg appears and that's when the fight is over and I can spam chat.

Today we did an epic resecure at last minute and when we brought the SCU back up the TR zerg arrived (I said in /order for reinforcements). Who won that fight? FU or the TR zerg?

Let me explain better. We have had 230 members online in the last 7 days. yes. But many of them are:
1) Playing alone.
2) Regs who end up being kicked.
3) Casuals who don't play in our serious squads/platoons.
4) The rest who play seriously.

My point is in our active platoons/squads we have the same amount as INI, not 230 people at once.

Erm, well... yes and no.

Sure outfit rivalry played an important role. You had intense fights where you went toe to toe with notorious enemies, and the outcome often came down during the last minute of a hack. That was awesomesauce.

But the meta was much more than "will we beat outfit X tonight or not?". Crashsplash nails it ( <3 Hill) when he says that what made those fights and resecures matter was that it all happened in the context of the global conflict. Whether or not that hack trying to open Amerish went through would often shape the battlefield of your entire server for at least the next few hours. THAT'S what made those fights matter. If outfit X was attacking some random base on a continent where a threeway was going to happen anyway, then nobody gave much of a toss about it.

So no, the meta in PS1 wasn't just about outfit vs outfit, not by a long shot. PS1 meta was quite a bit about "playing for the empire" in a meaningful way (rather than just farm kills for yourself). The problem with PS2 meta has a lot to do with the limited impact single outfits can have on the global game, beyond just hauling their numbers at base X rather than base Y.

If it was pure outfit rivalry that made PS1 meta, surely you don't believe all the PS1 vets suddenly lost interest in that and now purposely avoid fighting where your crew is at?

Anyway, MLG is basically a new and regular rendition of Outfit Wars. OWs were a nice idea back then, because finally you could have a fair and even competition between two outfits. The main game doesn't provide that, it's one of the many things that makes Planetside unique that the fights AREN'T fair and even. They never are.

So MLG will provide a playing ground for competitive matches. Cool beans, our outfit will almost certainly compete provided we can field the numbers. But beyond putting the "my outfit > your outfit" disputes we all so love in a framework where you can actually keep score, MLG does nothing for the main game. It'll be nice if players get motivated to play PS more when there's competitions to be won, but what does that help the main game when they play instanced matches on Nexus rather than play on their server on Esamir et al? Planetside just doesn't lend itself to sports-like competition.

That's not even starting about how few outfits will have the numbers AND the will to compete, thus how rare even and exciting matches are going to be, and how little the vast majority of the casuals who make this game work at all care about some elite outfits' e-peenery.

Last time I recall was a couple of days ago at Hvar. 3 platoons of TR vs 1 platoon of NC, base gets zerged in minutes and FU claiming victory over /yell. Gave me a good laugh at least. Though to be fair, you're not the only TR outfit that likes to smacktalk in /yell when zerging bases with little resistance

But i seen about at least a platoon of your guys rolling around in tanks/sundays on Esamir yesterday.

Regardless this isnt the point of the thread.