New Forum Structure

Vehicle Forum Reasoning-
•Had a community largely composed of vehicle users, which provided balanced discussion on vehicles and stopped nerf threads in that section.
•The community was extremely polite and intelligent, unlike many people who just make an account to whine in general discussion.
•The community would provide extremely good feedback to all vehicle changes, and suggest what could be done to make them better. (I know SOE doesn't give two craps about community suggestions but this is still a thing)
•It provided a place for vehicle users to feel comfortable outside the more infantry-biased General Discussion.
•You have a seperate forum for each infantry class. Each of these forums are only posted to like twice a day, so inactivity is no excuse. In fact, since you think that the different playstyles invoked by each class deserve their own forum, why not create a subforum for each vehicle, identical to what infantry get?
•Vehicle-based threads in General Gameplay Discussion and Nerfwhining are buried or turned into a whine on how the vehicles are OP.

So RadarX, It's been over 24 hours. Where is our constructive response to our constructive critic?

Actually I've got an additional question. What is your reasoning for keeping 6 subforums open for infantry class, but not one subforum for vehicles? How does this improve the general structure?

I don't think SOE likes being called out.

Yeah...so let me just do it again.

Remember this gem of a thread here?:

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...ging-order-to-the-planetside-2-forums.160797/

Where Piesto and Luperza, who sadly doesn't work here anymore, promised us more developer interaction? Yeah, that quickly went down the drain didn't it.

I imagine though there's a reporting structure. RadarX can't simply say whatever he/she wants to say or feels like saying. He has to go up to the boss, get instructions on how to respond (or if to respond at all), and then can come back here. Naturally this takes time.

I'd imagine it to be sort of how ambassadors work. They can't make foreign policy, all they can do is communicate foreign policy. In the same way RadarX has to be careful of what he says, so he likely has to get it cleared ahead of time.

I'm sure if it was up to him, he'd address all our cares and worries.

Sounds fair enough. I hope you are correct.

So. Now that it's clear that SOE no longer really cares what vehicle players think, and our one place we had that was slightly on topic is gone, I think it's time we did something different.

Obviously, SOE isn't going to bring back the vehicle forums, and we don't want all of our posts to get buried here. As a compromise, as of this moment, I am going to start using the Medic Infantry subforum as the vehicle forums. No one really posts there as no one really cares about medics, and I am going to claim it for the marginalized vehicle users. It'll be like England creating the country of Israel.

I'll see you fellas over there.

Though pessimistic, this thread just isn't going to see the variety of objections you may feel is required to reopen the Vehicle Forums or to give a lengthy response, we have basically said all that could be said without being a public speaker or poet. One reason for the lack of attention being that a good deal of regular posters who would undoubtedly decry the change have stopped posting/visiting the forums. It was the only good place for good (or bad) back-and-forth between vehicle users without being buried or derailed by infantry players. Another being how fruitless protesting it in the forums would appear to be as vehicle players never garnered much, if any, sympathy from players outside of the Vehicle section itself.

The reason/s the few of us who have been vocal about the removal should already be obvious to you and require no more explanation or reasoning. But what the hell, I'll give it a shot; here are some gripes:

1) Our single, consolidated forum was removed while the six lightly used infantry class forums made the cut. How would that look to you?
2) Forum mods should be well aware of the general attitude the (greatly outnumbering) infantry players have towards vehicle players, and how the consolidation would effect vehicle-oriented discussions/threads.
3) Even beyond a posters own vehicle of choice, there was a sense of community in the Vehicle Forums that was lost with its removal.
4) While not always the most civil part of town, it was a unparalleled resource for load-out, vehicle strategy, and Q/A feedback for new vehicle players. Help and discussions easing aspiring tankers/flyboys into their respective game would actually stay constructive if not vaguely on-topic while such threads would, more often than not, be buried quickly in General.

Adding to my prior post, if cutting some of the fat out of the forums was the goal of this change you could have easily axed 5 by consolidating the separate infantry forums into one. Leaving a focused subforum for both infantry and vehicle discussion/suggestions alike, as many of us believe whole-heartedly they are equally important facets of this game.

I'm still baffled how one requires justification to exist while the other(s) did not. Is this truly representative of Sony's view on the importance of vehicle play and its respective community in comparison to their infantry counterparts?

The main thing I want is to understand your reasoning for doing this. So far this is what you've said:

Improving the general structure with these changes is entirely subjective so I won't touch that. However, this change doesn't seem to "provide visibility to the great ideas" from the suggestion forum nor from the vehicle forums. If anything the suggestion threads fall off the front page and die more quickly, and I've seen significantly less threads discussing vehicles.

So what is your goal here, really? It seems obvious to me that merging the suggestion and vehicle forums hasn't consolidated discussion, it has simply chopped off those two arms of the forum. I can understand merging the suggestion forum to an extent, but I see absolutely zero merit in merging the vehicle forums.

If your goal is to push me to reddit then consider it a success.

I still wish you could bring it back because right now it is nearly impossible to have any serious tank discussion.

FTFY

Next move? Force everbody here to log on reddit.

After 1+ months, I still feel the same way - the vehicle discussion forum was the only real area of the forum where I felt constructive discussion was taking place. Honestly, I cannot think of any non-cynical reason why it was removed, other then that it's frequent posters seemed to want the game to be taken in a direction the developers do not intend or desire.

I find myself having lost interest without a place to go on the forums where I can find content about my preferred area of gameplay, vehicles and vehicle oriented topics.

I think I could get back into the game if it returned, but the removal of the only subforum I enjoyed visiting, combined with the refusal of customer service to assist me in an admitted UI bug (which resulted in the loss of thousands of certs) is just too much.

So long, Planetside 2, and thanks for all the fish. I may return at some point, and i'll probably visit the forums here and there... but for now, I think i'm done with PS2. To everyone still enjoying the game - I hope you continue to do so, and to SOE... this is an amazing game, I wish you all the best of luck in it's continued development.

Surely someone at Sony will come back to this thread.
Surely.

RadarX is just typing a real long and well-thought out reply, just have a little patience.

You used "well thought out" in the same sentence as "SOE".

SOE's Planetside 2 team is probably the best I've encountered so far. You guys give them too much ****.

welcome to forums. where people come to complain. the forums fill up any time people think something has gone wrong, but when things are going right people play the game. so my conclusion is that the sign of a healthy game is an empty (or at least less active) forum. problem is, that is also the sign of a dieing game.

Any moment now.