PS2 from a Milsim/PS1 Vet/Beta Vets POV and the major reason the game took such a dive.

There and back again.

Thats how you could describe my journey with PS2. I started playing the beta early after tech test and throughout the beta phase I was a strong advocate of making PS2 a bit more like its predecessor, alongside others. I then left in dissapointment when the release date was announced, knowing this would end in disaster. But more about that later.
Fact is, I returned yesterday and gave it a try.

Now, nobody probably cares about that anyway, but to understand my POV I should probably tell you a bit more from where I am coming from.

My gaming "career", if one might want to say so, was lined by pretty much three big games: PS1, BF2 and ARMA II. To be more precise, I am refering to Project Reality, a realism mod for BF2. This is what I play pretty much everyday. The mod requires extensive teamwork to a point where you get kicked for not using the included VOIP client. The maps are huge, almost as huge as a PS2 map, but incredibly more detailed. And yes, its a mod.

A big part of my dissapointment comes from the fact that it seems like mods always do so much of a better job than actual commercial titles, to a point where devs and publishers simply dont release mod tools in fear of mods doing a much better job (BF3 I am looking at you).

But enough of that.

My major gripes with PS2 is not the balancing, because it can be fixed. Its not the hackers, because these can be banned. Its the core design that is flawed IMO (yes, its only my opinion). Its designed to be chaotic. Not to have actual engagements that are plannable. You can win every fight by simply telling everybody to run straight ahead and start to shoot.

There is no point to scouting to find the enemies weakpoint because weakpoints can get instantly filled up with units again. There is no point in doing huge flanking maneuvers because either the Zerg just doesnt do it or your outfit just caps empty bases because it yields more XP. There is no point to something like SEAD or Air Dominance because for each destroyed aircraft, 2 other appear, for each destroyed Skyguard, 2 more AA MAXes appear.

On a tactical level PS2 is just such a mess. This is where my gaming background comes in. As a Milsim player I want to either give orders or take orders and want to see them executed. I am ready to do the dirty water hauler work as long as it helps the team. I have a knack for Battleplans and love to lay them out.

PS2 is too fast paced IMO and designed for players that love kills en masse. PS1 was slightly different. While still chaotic it was slower paced, it allowed you to take a breath (In PS2 you can be theoretically engaged in combat forever) sometimes and allowed for some very tactical movements and work.

There are no clearly defined battles. I wish I could go to a place one day and say "This was the place we successfully fought an overwhelming force of TR back because we flanked them from behind and killed their Sunderer." Instead, what happens is that fighting is always everywhere, there is no "Hinterland" or a frontline, just death raging everywhere.

I dont need to say how to fix any of this, since it has been said over and over again already. Its just sad to see a gamer like me doesnt have a place in this game, and believe me, I tried.

BUT another major reason for the IMO imminent failure of the game was the release date.

http://steamgraph.net/index.php?act...id=218230&from=1353279600000&to=1357599600000

Look at that Steamgraph link. It clearly shows the slow degradation of the playerbase for PS2 since release. Today, only about 8k-10k players still play the game regularily. This might be still impressive, but in a game with 6k player server caps but a plethora of servers this obviously results in empty servers/continents.

Now why was the 20th of November such a stupid release date.
Simple. The devs worked their butts off in the last two weeks before release for nothing. Easily the release could have been set for 2013 but no, couldnt happen.
They were exhausted and needed a break. So they took it, soon after release. And then the winter holidays came. What happened were over a month of absolute radio silence of the devs and no fixes being made to this clearly unpolished and unfinished game. People didnt realize the devs were on holidays/recovering from their work, so they assumed the devs had abandoned them, got mad, and many apparently abandoned the game already.
It was just stupid from a standpoint that they clearly knew they would not support the game for some time directly after release and still they assumed the game could sustain itself. One of my friend had conversations with some of the devs, and indeed, in hindsight they realized "mistakes had been made".

Now I am sure many of you ask yourself "Why another guy who just rants about the game without making a point?". Well, first of all, I was asked by someone ingame to voice my opinion, secondly I might still have some hope left that this is being read by the right people so we can actually talk here, instead of playing the usual forumside BS.

I wish you the best of luck in your travels.

I want an updated version of Planetside. I am a MMO and Strategy gamer not a twitch gamer. I loathe squad shooters.

(Even if I owned a mic, I still wouldn't talk. I do not enjoy conversing with people. I just do what needs to be done. **** guilds/outifts. I already boss people around for a living. I don't want to listen to people when I get home.)

Personally I'm just glad that for once a game had too much infrastructure on release. Though now I'm starting to see why so many seem to aim low.

Most of the conceptual problems with this games comes a certain someone's obsession with eSports and doing everything they can to try to emulate games that are staples of eSports.

This is literally the reason I was excited about this game. I had a really great time with PS1 and I wanted to experience that again.

So far, it's been Planetfield: Call of Modern Ghostcapping. I want the LLU runs, I want the multi-continent battles, I want the empty, neutral terrain where awesome vehicle battles occured, I want character customization, I want underground infantry battles, I want a reason to defend, and so on.

An example for further elaboration: I see the Sunderer as the ideal Squad Support Vehicle, something that an APC does IRL. You stick close to an infantry squad, act as an immense force multiplier to it and take hits for the squad. Now in PS2 due to the abundance of everything for everyone, nobody needs APC support, because everyone can be an APC for himself. And if you place yourself in a fortunate position to support infantry, nobody thinks about clearing the airspace first because otherwise you are Toast.

Sometimes I feel like I am the only one on the battlefield that takes all of these factors into consideration.

For a successful ground assault, you need
1. Air supremacy, because otherwise you get grilled by Bombers
2. SEAD or Supression of Enemy Air Defenses, to gain Air Supremacy
3. Long Range Fire Support and Suppression in either the form of sustained MG fire or artillery/tank support.
4. Mobile flanking units.

Instead, what you do in PS2 is give everyone whatever he wants, without restriction so you might only have 3. What happens, you get grilled by Bombers. Or you only have 1. and get bursted by AA.

And you dont even have a good ability to call for reinforcments.

In PR, you can place markers on the map, CLEARLY VISIBLE in bright yellow for all sorts of stuff. Transport, APC support, Tank Support, Supplies, Air support etc. etc.

In PS2, you can redeploy to the Warpgate and /yell for help, but nobody cares anyway.

Same goes for the command channel. I feel slightly insulted when I try to help my team by giving some orders just to be badmouthed by many that they just want to DO THEIR THING.

These people are part of the problem.

Mods typically are done better because the players making them do so with a passion. Not to say professional development studios don't have employees passionate about the game they're making, just the former group doesn't have $$$ and people concerned with them having a say in just about every decision they make.

Thats is a problem indeed. I am amazed to see how one guy without getting paid does a better job at creating big (4x4 km) maps than an entire design team that is getting paid for their work.

I dont believe its just deadlines ... maybe it is.

It's not safe to use Steam Stats. Many if not most won't connect via steam.

Deadlines, and the guy in charge having the final say. As far as art design is concerned, I don't think anything slips past T-ray, and he gets to give the go ahead or shoot down the concept as far as my development team knowledge goes. As a rule, concept artists can't afford to fall in love with their work. They can only afford to love what they do.

A single guy or small team putting together a mod on top of a game that's already providing the foundation of mechanics and an engine tends to have less snags. They take longer because there are fewer of them, but there aren't layers of what one might call red tape either.

I am aware of that, but even if this might be just a minor/faulty representation, the trend going down is still clearly visible and undeniable.

I agree with your points, but I have not yet lost hope. As you said, it's been a slow period because of holidays, but now I'm hoping we're going to start seeing more progress again

I also would like to see the game slowed down a bit. I want to see sieges, I want to see logistics matter more. And I hope I will so i'm sticking with it.

The steam graph would not give an accurate population as not everyone has downloaded it through steam.
I agree though, I would have prefered it to be more like the original, this really is nothing more than a BF3 game on a large map, the levels and certs give some character progression, but unless you are very good, you must spend money as it is a grind, 250xp per cert? that would make 250,000 kills to buy a weapon that more than likely is only a bit better than what you had.

I've played since tech beta, and still enjoy the game, I play every night, but I can't seem to play it for long before I get bored, exit out and load up something else, it's very repetitive, and I cannot see the game standing the test of time unless they make some broad changes, one of these would be continent lockdown, with the declining population on the servers I think it will be a must, talk of another continent coming into the game will only reduce the population on each continent.

One other thing I would like to see implemented is the ability to sell off your weapons and equipment to regain certs, even if you got half or a quarter back, it would cut the grind and enable you to clean out the gun cabinet of all the stuff you will probably never use again.

I can understand your disappointment.

Of course you do Germanius

When someone was first explaining this game to me during Beta, all of the details, especially the ones claiming the devlopers were listening to/working alongside the playerbase, gave me a lot of interest in the future of the game, though I had not been sold to playing it because the format is not something I immediately jump on (MMO-ish or FPS-ish). From the way it was being described, though, it sounds like it was an aspiring fanmade game based on the original PlanetSide. If the said description had included that a major brand was doing the development and publishing work for it, the confidence I had felt about the game would have not been such.

That's because I know the gamer community's desire for a truly satisfying MMO FPS applicant, and, while I felt that it was entirely a fan-driven project, as long as the team was personable enough with its players, it would be able meet and meld those various expectations. A pre-existing corporation introduces rigidness, albeit necessary for them, that would necessarily interfere with the compromise of those expectations.

This, this, aaaaaand this.

So much of what is wrong with PS2 is the result of PS2 trying to be more like Battlefield or Call of Duty to attract those players to the game. The problem with this, of course, is that people that play Battlefield 3 want to play Battlefield 3. They don't want to play Battlefield 2.5: Auraxis Edition. In trying to cater to the eSport crowd, SOE has stripped away much of what made Planetside unique, and in doing that they have stripped away much of the reason to play Planetside-as-facsimile-of-Game-X, rather than just playing Game X.

All Planetside 2 really has left to separate it from any other shooter on the market is scale. Scale works for a novelty, but it quickly wears thin. The reason Planetside lasted nearly a decade was because it offered a truly unique experience. It wasn't like anything else, so you had to go to Planetside to get that unique gameplay experience.

Now, you can get Planetside 2's gameplay just about anywhere. Whether you're on a 64-player BF3 server, or a Planetside 2 base with only 64 people rendering, what's the difference?

When I played BF3, I had a good friend that had never played Planetside, and I would frequently regale him with tales about how great it used to be. How empty and shallow Battlefield felt in comparison. When I heard that PS2 was really happening and was nearing Beta stages, I talked it up a lot with him, explaining how awesome things were, how great it was going to be to get good ol' Planetside mechanics back with modern graphics, how satisfying the gameplay was going to be when there was more to do than just sit on capture points watching tickets tick down.

He played PS2 for about a week, failed to see any major difference between it and BF3 except for more players, and went back to playing BF3. As surely as countless others have done.

Not a bad read, and I agree with many of the things you point out. A few things you need to keep in mind however. This game was not designed for milsim fans. If the game catered to milsim fans it would alienates a massive amount of the possible player base, just like Arma and Red Orchestra does. The release date was probably rushed, and it is unfortunate. We shouldn't be surprised by this though. Games that are designed to be F2P from the start are notorious for releasing incomplete. There seems to be a mentality that since the game is free it is okay. I can also somewhat understand it as it allows SOE to start generating revenue from the game, I dont like it but I can understand it. Heck even many full price games come out needing massive day 1 patches or just plain broken.

Then the F2P model also affects user numbers. People that would never buy the game start seeing reviews and such are willing to try the game because of this F2P. Many of these people were never going to continue to play regardless of the final product. They saw the game on Steam tried it, went ehhh and then moved on. Absolutely people are leaving the game and SOE needs to work on this, but the game was never going to maintain anywhere near the numbers it saw in late November. For many people the game is too big, they dont know where to go or what they are doing. For others it is too slow, they dont like that it taking 3 minutes to get from one battle to the next. To other pole the game is too fast, they want something slower and more deliberate. For these people since they have not spent a single dollar on the game there is no hesitation when it comes to just walking away from the game.

Our best bet is to hope that SOE continues to work on the many issues the game has, and they do it in a logical manor. There are enough players that the game should be generating enough revenue to warrant a continued investment and improvement from SOE. If they can curve the tug of war and stop the massive ghost capping with lockable regions/zones then combat lines should form up. That to me would be a good start of moving the game in the right direction.

I am well aware of that, but its just sad to see that the "milsim" part of PS1, which was the more slow paced gameplay and the ultimately existing bigger tactical possebilities were completely disregarded in the development of PS2.