Producer's Letter: Weekly Updates

I really wish people would stop with the doom and gloom and just play. I'm one of those people who has sunk a couple hundred into the game and despite all the issues PS2 has had, I still enjoy playing because at the very least I know there is constant development behind the game and things could always keep getting better.

I have played games where the developers have just stopped giving a crap and did these piddly little updates (that did nothing substantial to gameplay) once every 6 months if the players were lucky. Sit back and enjoy the ride with PS2 because the roller coaster isn't over yet!

It's bad. But there are things to improve, for example the game is carshing and kinda laggy(in terms of FPS, good thing theres the 64-bit client coming.) also there i a thing that might help them, that is giving us what we want. (First at the PTS then at the live one if it gets enough fire) *cough*dark nights*cough* for example. But of course when it's good(not like large people wants 30x30m arenas and they'd implement it no questions asked)

i'd also like to see BIG patches and updates(like 1gb-3gb) once in a while to fix a ton of problems without generating other problems (The first PU was a excellent example of this)

tl;dr Devs just take your time, no rush and when you have the game a lot more stabile with the patch release it. rinse and repeat. Then people will start come back, because of the better experience they are getting

Yes, THAT is the camo we need to hand out to everyone free. Lol

I especially like the more certs idea.

I'm always disappointed when I find that my test characters don't even get as many certs as my main character.


Also, a 1 cert "unlock all" button on the cert page (You know the cert page. It's that little one between the social page and the depot) would be nice.
That way, you could make a character, hit the button, and instantly have 100% on all classes and vehicles. Everything that's generally a pain to go through as you need it.

I was gonna add that to the list too... should've made it "Bonus II. Type in '/tell soe unlockallcerts'" in the chat window to loop through and unlock all certs for major classes. It really is very time consuming to click, wait, click, wait, click, wait, click, when you're needing to test a properly decked out class.

Which is fine since in this day and age fans can make up for QA, but call it for what it is. I often like to think of the PS2 dev team as an indie, and were they to present themselves more in the light of their current situation (understaffed, underfunded) I think the fan support would be far greater than it is.

Smedley's proven they can open up a bit more with H1Z1 going as far as asking Reddit for marketing suggestions... how about Planetside 2? It's the pretension that they're Rockstar Games (who can pump $260 million into a game and walk away with a swagger) is what causes a lot of the nerd rage.

With only 30-40 able bodied hands to work on an MMO, you're effectively an indie.

for me the biggest thing keeping me from testing is the massive amounts of downloads just to test

big update? pretty much download the game again
small update? pretty much download the whole game again
teeny patch to change few things? pretty much download the game again

why such huge downloads anytime something has changed? as an aussie i just cant download that much each month - we get really small caps compared to americans (who i think even get virtually unlimited downloads?)

How is this different from promises of quality in the past? I've been with this game, following since December of 2012, how is this "We've boned up, we're sorry, we'll fix it" post going to change things? This is totally meaningless if in 2 months time everything goes to crap again. Put Ryan Elam in charge of more projects, at least when he was running OMFG, things got done in a way that wasn't buggy.

Moreover, how is refusing to recognize patterns in the playerbase, as to what it takes to get people to use the PTS going to help things? No one is going to use the PTS because you ask politely. Instituting something that actually rewards PTS usage WOULD go a long way towards putting people onto the test server. It's simple, make it akin to what SOE has for recruiter rewards. If you report a bug and it leads to the bug getting solved, people get points. This would be a form of reinforcement that would push people to try and report bugs, it would push people to FIND them. This would be a way to get the entire community working together to bug test patches.

Unless there are rewards for Using the PTS, the majority of people, will not use it. This has been shown Countless times now. Dedicated PTS players have been telling you this since the inception of the PTS. You cannot deal with every problem that comes up, but this has been a blatantly obvious one for some time.

We in Singapore get fibre Internet with unlimited caps and have a theoretical speed of 100+mbps in the future. Almost 80% of Singapore is now fibre ready. XD
Feel bad for aussies amd other countries. Theres alresdy mobile data caps and you guys have to also deal with home broadband caps. [why is there a cap in the first place? Lol]

I was on the pts last week when the first test was holding place.

But the location where you wanted to test it was so far away from TR warpgate, NOTE: with no lattice connection at all for the TR even remotely near, that I felt like I was being trolled.

I coudnt even fly there because I had no resources, TR people were shouting for a ride at the WG.

So I spent a few more minutes in the VR and then logged off.

You need to offer spawn locations prior to the tests.
The Sundere's also need to be invulnerable if used as a spawn.

With this you might have gotten a few more people, add a reward and you will get even more for the pts.

Is it really desperate to listen to your players? I guess you are a social game developer...
Lack of updates can chase away players, but so can frequent failed updates (as we have seen happen)

It would be a great idea to have test server events when you guys are questionable about a patch update, and during this event give small rewards for contributing. Not just playing but for reporting bugs or problems... give us a bugsmasher decal!

To clarify any moderation concerns, we are in fact keeping this thread on topic. We absolutely want your feedback but about the producers letter and it's contents.

If you want updates on feature X or bug Y, I'm going to ask you please post in the appropriate section of the forums in an existing thread (or make a new one if it doesn't exist). Thanks in advance for your help in keeping this on track.

Weekly updates were a mistake, particularly when stuff was pushed from PTS to Live within a week when it clearly wasn't ready (missions and the Lib buff both got negative PTS feedback and you pushed them anyway). Good call suspending that. Features should all be tested on PTS for at least 2 weeks and modifications made based on player feedback.

As some other people have said already, you need to reward us for playing on PTS. Most players just won't do your QA for free, and if the PTS is dead it doesn't do its job. Handing over occasional 250 cert bonus codes or 1 day XP boosts is very cheap compared to hiring more QA people again!

We need to see PTS patch notes, it's impossible to test if we don't know what's changed. For example I know that on the PTS right now you always see the capture point information at bases, even if you have a mission – awesome (and makes missions significantly less annoying), but I haven't seen that officially written down anywhere.

Thanks for the clarification. =)

still getting high ping problems on connery

While taking feedback on-board and making changes is appreciated, it all feels like too little too late. A lot of us complained about the weekly updates not long after they started, and I noticed the negative impact it was having pretty early. We are now seeing the realisation of those early fears, players are leaving the game by the bucket load, and I'm included in that. The game became so difficult to enjoy, every week there was an issue, downtime, game breaking bugs, poorly implemented features. Every week I would find myself logging off in frustration, or not logging on at all because I couldn't, and finding something else to play. It's a shame because for the time I was playing I really enjoyed Planetside 2. However, I no longer find myself motivated for log on, and I haven't played in several weeks. I might give the game another go when Hossin finally lands, and by then hopefully the majority of the major issues are fixed too.

Hopefully by then some other players also come back to the game, because at the moment player numbers are dropping, just check the stats since January:-

^^ Very true, WalrusJones. During O:MFG, I actually felt like I was contributing something to the game by playing on Test. Everyone was calling out for play testers on all their social media accounts. That connection seems to have been lost after that major update.

Now I only go to test to check out new weapons or practice flying,

So where do we send the beer? Seriously. Haha.

Wow SOE, are you now censoring posts you don’t like? This is the second time now I’ve had my post deleted.

A quality product ,not advertising, attracts customers. Look at games like Wow, Tribes, Everquest. All of them shipped (for the most part) as a quality game. This “letter” feels like a last ditch effort. As a person who has paid 200+ for this game, it disturbs me that you’re now asking for us to test a game that we already put money into. On top of that the censorship in the forums is rude and unethical. You should be able to take all forms of criticism from your customer(s).