Producer's Letter: Weekly Updates

Hi All,

I’m Ryan “Raxxyl” Wells, producer of PlanetSide 2. If you’ve watched the O:MFG series, you may have seen me a few times or heard me behind the camera during some of the late night antics around here. You also may have seen miscellaneous patch notes, forum posts, Reddit responses, etc. Anyhow, I’m here to briefly talk about one of our top community topics: Weekly Updates.

The short of it is that it’s a good concept that wasn’t always executed well. Our intention was to bring you something interesting and benefit the game each week, but it hasn’t been consistent and we’re going to make changes to fix that.

Most of you have probably noticed or heard that we didn’t put out a game update this week. That’s step one in doing this better: holding the update until it is ready. We sometimes take risks late in the development cycle trying to get a change up to Live to help improve the game. Most times, that works out, but once in a while, it doesn’t. It’s on us to decide if the update is ready or if that change can wait.

Next, we are going to do more concentrated updates, which will allow us to focus more time on getting them right. Sounds simple, I know, but it’s not always easy holding so many people back from trying to make the game better each day. This team loves the game and wants nothing more than to make it exceptional.

And of course, we are going to do more and better testing, which you can help with. PlanetSide 2 is a game of massive scale and it’s not easy to properly test everything without significant population. If you’ve got the time, drop by on our Public Test Server and help us test. Check out our Test Server patch notes, jump on and send us bugs via the in-game tool. Or check for scheduled play tests, which will happen more frequently now, and play with us. As we’ve mentioned before, each of the bugs submitted in-game are emailed directly to every one of our developers and QA folks where we review them and work on them as possible. It’s not as simple as fixing every single bug exactly when we get it, but we’re working on allocating more time to reviewing and bug fixing while we’re on Test Server. (Expect more info on this later, but we’re also working on a small reward program for folks that help us on Test Server.)

If you don’t have the time or interest in helping us test, that’s okay, we’d ask just one thing: support the game. If this game is as important to you as it is to us, support it in any way that you can. Tell your friends, bring them back, stream a play session, upgrade now, write a bug report, give RadarX a break, make a PS2 video, upgrade now, tweet @mhigby, show a newbie how to play, post on the forums, send us beer, etc. Have you upgraded yet?! All joking aside, we really can’t do this without you.

Thanks for your time and for sticking with us. We greatly appreciate your loyalty and dedication to PlanetSide 2 and I personally look forward to being with you all for years to come.

-Ryan "Raxxyl" Wells

Leave my Enforcer alone.

Edit: and thanks for the Pink Grunge camo.

Its good to hear this. I have tried to get myself onto the PTS, but the lack of population has kept me out. I would like to take a bigger part in the testing, but so little happens there.

One, nice, big incentive week to get it off the ground would probably do it wonders.

From one Ryan to another, I know Planetside 2 is in good hands. The community appreciates these kinds of posts because you show what we already know: you listen. Thanks and... Thanks!

Take the time you need for every update and don't rush them out too quickly. Better 2 working updates a month than 4 broken updates. For PTS : You could do weekly playtests, to test performance or to get a feel of the new bases (especially Hossin). It's always so empty there

I logged in as my TR character on PTS. I wanted to test out that new attachment(recently named) on the minigun. Well needless to say, the location of the test battle was deep into NC/VS territory, and the TR had to either fly, drive, or walk to the battle which was located literally across the map. From previous testing, my character had about 200 air resources, but I was gaining +0/+0/+0 on Hossin. This means I had no choice but to pull a ground vehicle to get there. So, I decide to grab my flash, and began my journey to the battle. After about 25 minutes, I finally got there (most of the main roads had NC shields, so I had to find routes through the mountainous terrain. Surprisingly, I was able to overcome the flash's horrible handling and didn't flip until about 90% of the way there. Then I flipped my atv and died...YEAH! So I spawned at a base to the north (which I was unable to redeploy to previously...i tried that first) and grabbed my harasser, decked it out with all the pretty cosmetics and minigun with thermals, and finally drove to the battle. After about 30 minutes....

Once I got there, my harasser was quickly destroyed trying to figure out what was going on. Ok, no biggie. So I spawn at the TR sunderer(that either wasn't there before, and/or didn't allow me to redeploy to...yes I TRIED THAT) Shortly after spawning. The TR sunderer was surrounded and I died. Then my screen goes black, and next thing I know I am instant action dropping onto Amerish....

So I posted a pretty furious post about how I felt that my time was wasted trying to support the test event.

So to sum up my feedback of last night's test: Either pick a location were all 3 factions have reasonable access or make the resource system unlimited during testing to allow players to travel there faster. I feel like the trouble to get to the battle was not worth the time I wasted to do so. I am a PS1 vet, I love Planetside, I am a member, and I want to support the development side of the game. To me one of the most important things for PS2 development is sticking to PS1 ideals and traditions, so I want to make sure my inputs are heard during PS2 development.

I apologize if I came off as rude last night, but I was being HONEST in my frustration. It made me mad. Now it is a new day, ...and life goes on. Hope this feedback helps, since it is important to get all factions to the actual test location.

or mine, on Reddit

1) Does SOE realize that most player's performance has dropped since PU02? There are lots of threads on the forum and on Reddit about this. Personally, the game barely runs better than it did before PU01.

2) Is SOE going to fix this problem?

3) Post-PU01 patches degraded the game's performance. I'm not going to support a game that doesn't fix these problems.

so sexy!

"I Want To Believe"... But we'll see. All the same, your intentions seem to be good so they won't be misunderstood, at the very least.



Edit : I have to agree with the performance issues, you had hit a good spot prior to the Lib stuff(Not saying it's tied to that), what happened!?

That would require to have some updates on patch notes. If i take this update for esample, the changes to NARS are nowhere mentioned, as well as the Harasser Turbo changes, the same goes for weapon balance changes. It isnt needed to put up notes for every single small update, but it would be nice to have regular updates on the Testserver patches so players know what gets changed to give feedback.

Thank you RadarX for your support and the idea of doing a once a month update! But you should do a mid month bug patch?

I have to agree here. I notice patch after patch after patch on PTS, yet no supporting notes. Then I log in and have to look at everything and try to remember what has changed. Makes it tough to really focus on the "under construction" stuff in the game.

I ll give a try at the PTS as soon as I finished updating it.

I almost forgot about this. But someone on reddit a while back pointed out that flora and particle effects are locked on ultra settings unless they are completely turned off. This is the case for 'most people' anyway and could be effecting those that aren't just always playing on ultra settings anyway.

I guess it can be fixed by manually editing the .ini files. This is not really hard or necessarily a banable offense, but it is not something players should 'have to do'. and apparently no-one was aware this was a thing for quite some time, I think someone said it seemed to come out with the first liberator update but I am not sure, I am just going on what others have said.

You need another UPGRADE NOW in there. No, seriously.

Love to hear from the Devs.

Weekly updates were awesome but... They just came at too high a price. Their quality. I'm glad that more time is being put into the various updates though.

I hope that some time is spent on a few of the previous updates, as some things do need tuning.

Again, thanks Team, for the effort you have put in. I would send you guys pizza if I could.

I'm still waiting for the glorious return of pre-death screen patch netcode and optimization.

The game worked so well before that day, but it's been borderline unplayable for me since then.

Whatever you folks did over there, please fix it soon and I will consider upgrading now.

Thanks.

They need to make an "upgrade now" camo. Hand it out free to everyone lol

Thanks very much for responding about this. It sounds like you're taking some good and thoughtful steps in the right direction.

Here are a couple ideas maybe you could think about for getting people to test more.

TRIPLE TEST WEEKENDS

How about setting aside some special bonus XP weekends on test, and letting us roll certs earned during the special weekends over to characters on live?

I think a lot of people would consider playing on test if they could get bonus XP for an occasional test weekend, and roll those gains back to their live characters. You could have one weekend a month where people will get double XP (maybe even triple XP) for all game play on test, and put all the cert points earned during that special test weekend into a pool that we can then redeem on any character on live. Of course the Triple Test weekends would be timed not to overlap with the double XP weekends you're already doing on live.

INSTANT CERT-UP CONSOLE

Is there any sort of instant rank up ("cert up") mechanic on the test server?

One thing I've seen in other test environments is a console or button that lets you instantly max out a character of any class. That often encourages people to play on the test environment just to see how stuff works or whether a long grind that they're thinking about starting is worth it. You do have the VR on live, but it's got some notorious and long standing holes in the rule set that make it useless for testing a lot of things (no splash damage, targets with no resists, no moving targets, etc.). Having the ability to play maxed out characters on test might encourage more people to do it.