Good day, mr. Carey. I'm most certain that you will never read this, but I'm trying to get my points across because I played planetside 1 for five and a half years and I loved it, and I would like planetside 2 to be a deserving successor. For a start. I am not supporting planetside 2, because it has some terrible, terrible flaws that need to be addressed before any reasonable person would consider investing into it. However, after two and a half years, it has gotten to a point in which a couple of things work well. 1 - THE GOOD: a) respawn times. they're actually awesome, in fact. Not much to say, really. They're short, and even if you play like a stupid kamikaze (I do), you don't get penalized just because you want to get there and shoot **** up. b) instant action. This one's kinda a tongue-in-cheek. Its timer is perfect, and I use it all the time (I used it in planetside 1 a lot also). The fact you can't really pilot the droppod now is actually fair, and solves some exploiting you had before. c) game's free to play. A technically extraordinary title with massive fps battles. Certainly fills a niche, and is in fact unique in its kind for what I know. d) resources are awesome right now. They feel like planetside1's. If you roll vehicles or maxes with a certain patience and caution, you can chain roll them. This gives freedom of playstyle... and also reveals how terrible some of the gameplay choices currently are (more on this later). Just because of the above, I would have supported the game. Hell I would have supported it from day zero, if it weren't for... 2 - THE BAD: a) infinite networking issues. this is possibly the worse issue right now. This has regularly gotten worse over the course of time. Right now, I need TEN times the shots required to kill any player that's moving. Land vehicles take damage regularly. Air vehicles can't be damaged consistently. AA lock-ons don't work on certain people, while on others they work perfectly. And we're obviously not talking about flares. Albeit i regularly die to four hits (can tell this because of the audio), many moving players require 20 acx11 on-target shots to be killed. shielded ha players require two magazines. Stupidly, this can also be witnessed in virtual training to some extent. SOLUTION: create a benchmark, a tool or whatever the **** needed to tell people "you better don't play on this server because your connection is ****". Otherwise, fix what you broke and make it so that when i ******* see a hit indicator, the guys' health goes down for **** sake. b) the AMS, the most important vehicle in all of the game, is still a ******edly obvious piece of **** of a vehicle. I was waiting the 'shield' upgrade with much anticipation... to realize that shield replaces stealth. I am simply without words to describe how IDIOTIC this choice is. I roll with a stealth 4 ams whose life expectancy is 3.4 minutes average, and I'm a "multi auraxium" ams driver as I was in planetside 1, which know where to place them. Yet that's obviously not enough. SOLUTION: PUT A ******* CLOAK BUBBLE ON THE THING in the UTILITY SLOT THAT'S CURRENTLY FULL OF UNUSED TRASH. I could bet that just "one in a million" ams drivers equips **** on the utility slot. Don't even get me started on how ******** it is that anything can solo the ams. c) brain dead flawed technology balance. aircraft rule all. simple as that. With the resource revamp, there's something like 5 to 10 times more aircraft in any given fight. And AA is ****, so aircraft are free to farm infantry and vehicles like they want. shoulder mounted AA is ******** trash. missiles regularly explode in your face while steering right off the firing point max aa is a crippled, ineffective piece of **** that requires 3 aa maxes to SCARE AWAY a farming aircraft The skyguard is a brain dead obvious piece of garbage that can't destroy a hovering esf unless it's hovering no farther than 50 meters away, and that can be nosegun soloed by any liberator pilot with half a brain. even if you have 10 people locking on an aircraft, flares act as decoy for ALL 10 missiles SOLUTION: Fix aa damage and lock on times all across the board. Balance this **** so that one skyguard can actually destroy an esf that's hovering over a firefight looking for kills. INCREASE CEILING HEIGHT TO 2000 METERS, and make sure that all air damage becomes zero after a 500 meter threshold. This way flyers can duke it out outside of aa reach, and venture into risky airspace if they want to try to farm or bomb or whatever. d)tanks seem to mostly work as intended, but my tooth to pick here is with the magrider's climbing ability though (play as nc so this could be biased, to an extent) You regularly see magriders strafe hover their way into places any other tank would never dream of reaching. SOLUTION: leave strafing as it is, but make it so that the ******* thing is unable to climb better than a ******* atv. e) instant action: brings you to places where there's no fight, "just to capture", when there's hotspots on. I don't give a **** about opening a new capture point if there's a hotspot going for ***** sake. SOLUTION: let me choose instant action destination between 'hotspot' and 'new capture'. Is this so difficult to even think about? It'd just be a ******* checkbox in the map for ***** sake! f) cheaters: situation is somewhat better than time ago, but you still have them all across the board. I've noticed in particular a stupidly obvious increase and abuse of the esf aimbot. SOLUTION: ACTUALLY PUT SOMEONE AT READING AND SERVING THE ******* REPORT TICKETS. Before last patch, there were more than 5500 tickets in the queue! YOU MISERABLE IDIOTS! Do consider that if the game wasn't free in the first place, I would never have played it for more than one month, like the thousands of people that left in the last six months, and that required your server merges.
"Createdtopost" Hit the nail right on the head Prioritize damage control and high yield fixes like flight ceiling and other shtufd
Good Luck new producer: My number one problem across the board with SOE games: Launchpad, somebody could fix that and I would be less worried about other issues. Good Luck new producer.
Aircraft pretty much do rule in warfare. However, it takes boots on the ground to take and hold positions. I have never seen an aircraft over a point and take it while playing PS2. I guess it could happen, but a non-moving aircraft is a pretty easy target.
If you have problems with the Launch Paid, here a couple of tricks that usually work for me. I've noticed some Launch Pad problems are related to the Launch Pad trying to squirrel away DNS information on your computer connection somewhere. Also, some of the launch pad functions can look like virus/malware or what not to virus checkers. The first thing to do if you are having Launch Pad problems is to go to this website and look at the top the main forum page to see if the server is up. (HINT :: if you can't get to the Forums, then SOE has probably taken them down too for whatever). If this happens, you can try to start the launcher to get downloads if you don't connect, you know why. (NOTE:: PS2 can be a bit squirrely with the launcher updates. if you see you are connecting and getting an update, you might want to try to see if the "play" button works before closing the launcher. I've had issues with PS2 where it - at least appears - that I have to redownload updates if I do not go into the game after down loading them and taking a character into the game. Even if the game crashes when hitting "play" follow the steps below like you had shut the launder down manually) If there servers are up: 1) try to start the launch Pad, 2) Let it do it's thing, 3) wait for any updates to complete and the play button to light up, 4) close the launcher, 5) run your virus checker (set the scan for folder for the game is if you want to try to speed this up), 6) wait for your virus checker scan to finish, 7) restart your computer, 8) wait for it to come up all the way, 9) run your virus checker again, 10) the virus checker finish, and 11) start up the launch pad again. Worse case scenario :: 1) to the run the Launchpad, wait for downloads, wait for the play button to light up, shut down the launcher, 2) run your virus scanner and wait for it to finish, 3) totally shut-down your computer, 4) unplug your modem's power supply for several minutes, 5) plug your modem power supply back in and wait for it to come totally up, 6) turn on your computer make sure it is all the way up (running a virus scan to completion is a good way to make sure your computer is totally up), 7) run the launcher, wait for downloads, wait for the play button to light up, shutdown the launcher, 8) run your virus checker, wait until it is complete, 9) restart your computer, 10) wait until it is all the way up (might want to run the virus checker again), 11) run the launcher again --- and you should be good to go. This make sure that your computer is stabilized, that the launcher is stabilized, and that your virus checker is content and not causing any time-out errors by checking what is going on while the launcher is trying to connect to the servers (to the game and to SOE). Generally, this has helped me on any computer game that uses a Launchpad.
it is.. a money making gimmick. It's SOE. What did you expect? They pop out games like a woman buys shoes. Then toss them away after wearing them for one day. basically, they build a game, hype it up, then abandon it and give it a skeletin crew of lazy low skill, low paid devs to manage it and occasionally add mediocre content while it drains money from the player base for its lifespan of 2-4 years until it dies. Then they close the server and add a brand new "Gimmick" in its place. That's SOE's business model, it's all they have ever done with Video games since SWG. There stock continues to drop every year also, with the occasional spike because of it.
Hello Mr. Carey It is nice to have you here and thank your very much for your letter. I hope we (community) can work together better than before if all your goals you were talking about will be made real. What I would like you to change/point/take a look into is handling feedback from players about upcoming changes/nerfs to basic game mechanics. Of course I am talking here about the tank cannon nerfs. You see, your team, SOE ask us to go to PTS and test changes and give feedback. You tell us that there is not enough people on PTS etc. So we go there and for one month we are testing, giving feedback on changes on forum, reddit, even twitter. Many constructive feedbacks, threads with many good points. Feedback was major negative towards this changes. Very negative. Yet, thank to great Tank-Community it was mostly constructive with many proposed changes that team could use instead. However the feedback was completely ignored (there wasn’t discussion even about one of the nerfs, nothing was revamp, reverted, changed) and changes went to live. That is not good attitude to handle players. We give up our time to help you test changes, players with hundreds of hours in vehicles, and we are ignored, because (so it seems) SOE expected positive feedback and couldn’t belive that we do not see the brilliant idea behind their changes. I think that this is the thing you should talk about with your team. If you want to just push changes on live- fine, it is your game. But if you ask for feedback, help, testing upcoming changes and then you ignore it completely because feedback was not supposed to be negative and players dare to have better ideas- that is very “middle finger” attitude (sorry, lack of English words) towards players. I hope you understand our point here and we can work better together to make game better for everyone, not only for Mr.Higby vision. Thank you and good luck to you in your producer job.
yeah David, I lost a lot of my life to Everquest, too. Planetside 2 is no Everquest. This free-to-play instant gratification subscription model is ruining gaming.
