These are just my personal opinions of the game: PS2 is a lovely game, you start playing and you want to unlock stuff, make some friends and fight in squads against enemies. But after a while it dawns on you that there is no real point in fighting on these bases, its just repetitive and you keep fighting for the sake of just fighting, or it boils down to "farming" enemies and getting a higher D/K ratio which makes things even more boring because your literally just looking at numbers on a page instead of actually enjoying the game at that moment. Even with this new continent locking system there is not enough or arguably NO meta game to keep me interested for a long time, I play for a month or two but then quickly get bored and leave for several more months after that. But the main reason why I lack interest in continuously playing this game is SOE's inability to balance things out, just look at how many weapons they released and how some(or rather, most) of them are completely useless, one month they are good and the next month you wander why they put that weapon in the game to begin with. Same goes for vehicles, a bit of tuning here and there would be nice, but SOE always does these giant nerfs which are so over-the-top that it completely destroys some of the vehicles. There is nothing that bugs me more in this game then finding a nice group of people, get them all going in a certain direction with a specific vehicle and you keep training so you become better and then getting hit with a nerf bat that completely destroys what you and your friends tried to accomplish in all that time. Your time, your training and tactics, just gone in a blink of an eye. With small adjustments through patches you can still play your certain play-style and enjoy the game, but with big nerfs there is no way you can cope and SOE forces you to completely change your play-style. Seriously sometimes I feel like SOE have children trying to balance this game and they have no idea what they are doing, if something is OP then bring it down slowly until its in line with the rest instead of making it useless with a giant nerf in one go. Small steps and balance above all, making things completely OP or UP is counter-productive to finding a balance and it only annoys the players. -Harasser was completely OP for way too long, now its completely useless. -Anchor mode on TR tanks and maxes is questionable in a game where mobility equals survivability. -Lib is fundamentally broken, can't enter medium-large sized battles and its OP for small battles, they nerfed it into oblivion. -SOE talking about making tank combat be more close combat (wait...what...do they even play their own game?!?!) -Bases are WAY too close to each other which leaves no room for vehicle combat or real tactics and only enforces re-deploy exploits and shenanigans. -Bases have insufficient defenses, seriously why arn't there automated turrets or protective "dome" shields connected to destroyable generators?
Your viewpoint is easy to understand and logical. I play the game with different motivations and this is how I see it. PS2 is a bad FPS game if played that way. Hit detection is poor, play balance among classes is non-existent, zergs are the rule instead of the exception, death (resets) are a random occurrence that happen with great frequency in many situations, generally the game is a nightmare to solo through and the group play does not offer enough rewards to make up for all of the above. If however you play the game as tag, capture-the-flag, hide and seek with intelligent monsters as your opponents and very simple victory conditions in mind (capture-the-flag, fulfill the objective, contribute to the continent-wide situation at the moment) it can be very rewarding. Fleshing out your toon with the best gear is another victory condition that I use to keep myself occupied within the metagame above. It's a lot of fun to play hide and seek with a small squad, measuring my progress in the kill or two I get while they are wasting me a bunch of times and my side is winning the battle over the location in question. I don't really understand how people who are looking primarily at k/d can enjoy the game over any significant period of time. A kill or two and a fulfilled objective is something you can really enjoy over a short period of time. Trying to preserve your pristine k/d while all hell breaks loose around you seems like it would be more frustrating than anything else.
What's so sad about current FPS games on the market, when PS2 has good hit detection and if you can ignore bullsht spam, it's probably best FPS out there lol, perfect ttk, good weapon feel, large scale infantry fights, 'glorified' TDM clan v clan, good movement feel and latest patch gave solid metagame/reason to play. I genuinely think it's best FPS at the moment since it's not P2Win and it's F2P. QuakeLive/Quake is too old and too much Pacman styled but good alternative for hardcore people who want to play 'true competetive' FPS but too many 10year of experience players playing it, CSGO is dedust 24/7 camp festival.
One of the best things about PS2 is also one of the worst things, the massively multiplayer. It is really annoying when you try hard to accomplish goals but the other players on your faction are doing random things, not concerned about winning a fight or alert. Having to rely on others can be really frustrating as we all play for different reasons, and even in a large outfit, your efforts can go unnoticed due to how fast territory can be lost if other people on your faction don't even bother to try. Most of my issues are with the players and not the actual game. We shouldn't have ever needed lattice, players should want to find actual fights in a FPS game. We shouldn't have needed the liberator nerf, but players are always trying to take the easy road and made others see how unbalanced the liberator is in smaller fights. We shouldn't even need things to help balance population, but people suck and don't improve to where they don't need to rely on numbers, once you become competent and able to actually do well killing people, being overpopulated is pure ballz and you should realize it and want to switch to a lower popped faction. The saddest part is that we don't even realize that we are hurting ourselves, the majority of the nerfs and changes happened because of abuse. I was once killed in the middle of a spawn room by a player on a base A/V turret 400m away and I asked him, "isn't that an exploit, shooting me in the spawn, since the shield doesn't render that far?" and he replied "Show me in the ToS where it says that".... Which pretty much sums up PS2 gameplay.
