Rendering distance (roadmap intentions)

Then you should notice how much performance has increased from beta.

Me and my outfit find ourselves just moving away from big battles these days, attacking elsewhere because of this, I've had a few players already quit the game because of this issue, something really needs to be done

This was unique enough not to go into the threaded set up just to discuss this topic?



........

This is exactly how i feel... i WANT to believe in this game, but i dont have a good feeling about its future.

@Exoz:
Actually some time ago it seemed to me that they bumped up the render distance and now they turned it back down. I have a kinda slow PC for this game and it's very hard to play in bigger fights and when the draw distance was bigger and server crashed occurred (or at least i think so) fighting in bigger battles was flat out bad.
Now that render distance is back to low i have as bad time playing in bigger fights as i had when it was set to high. There's not much difference between having low fps and enemies popping up (whole squads) 10 away from you. And while there's a slight performance boost while flying and in small fights with lowered render distance it doesn't change anything because with low render distance i'm ineffective in air anyway and without paying for power slight performance boost doesn't help anyway. And if i were to p4power i couldn't play really competitively with my fps rate anyway.
The only real difference is that i play sniper, away from killzone and raging explosions i get a pretty decent frame rate and with better distance i can get pretty effective and actually have some fun from sniping.
If the distance drops to 20m i can't see how it benefits slower computers anyway, that's just plain stupid.

But going back to those server crashes and what i was experiencing when render distance seemed better (it wasn't longer it just dropped "slower") i'd say they're not telling all the truth when they say that's only client problem...

I've never had performance issues, not since beta started. My i5 3570k and GTX 670 run the game with ultra settings, and my FPS ranges from 90 to 30 depending on the situation. So I'm sure they made improvements, but none that affected me.

I will say that the stability of the game is all over the place. SOE introduces nearly as many crashes as they fix. I was playing over the weekend and I would just freeze up every hour or two, which didn't happen the week before. Plus I was STILL getting the flicker bug, which has been around for 4 or 5 months now.

Infiltrators need to see infantry at least at 700m, not at ridiculous 350m.

The render distance has pretty much made me quit infiltrator steady playing. I think I have the highest headshot count on the leaderboard, or 2nd highest. I've gradually moved over to heavy/engineer because of the render distance, because its the only way to actually kill people these days.

The game simply should not be live and collecting sub fees and microtransaction payments in this state.

Every developer that thought having a dynamic, server-controlled limit on the number and distance of visible enemy players in a shooter 100% composed of PVP content was a good idea needs to never be allowed to touch a computer again because they are woefully inept at their jobs, do not deserve a paycheck, and should be laughed out of the industry.

The infantry render cap is game-breaking. It's been game-breaking for three months of ***SHIPPING*** and the best we hear is "Yeah, we know our game is absolute dog**** and falsely advertised as a 'massively multiplayer' game, but developering is HARRRRRRD so give us more time. This totally isn't a beta that we're collecting money for or anything."

It's absolutely shameful. The sad thing is, SOE gets away with it because they're the only people in this marketspace right now. If there was any other accessible "MMOFPS" out there, nobody would be playing PS2.

Nothing else SOE does to this game matters. None of it. Not SMGs, not better spawn rooms, not tunnels under the bases, not buggies, not anything on the roadmap, not any of the (ridiculous) comments about the future of naval combat, not balance tweaks, not esports, nothing. Nothing SOE could plan for this game matters, at all, until the game can reliably and consistently render enemy players at acceptable distances.

I've been in fights before where the render distance was so short that you couldn't see enemies at adjacent pieces of cover. I'm talking 10 meters out, from one chest-high-wall to the next chest-high-wall, people just not rendering. Either you or the enemy would have to wander between the cover, appear, and then get promptly shot. Try defending an air tower during a big zerg push. It's impossible. You can stand on the airpad and not see the infantry on the ground directly below your tower, let alone the infantry in the surrounding buildings.

The state of this game is inexcusable for so many reasons, but none of them are as blatantly offensive to players as this stupid dynamic render cap.

If your Bastion was as crowded as Mattherson's was, that may be more of a raw lag issue than a hit indicator issue. I was having 3-5 second delays on everything (overshield activation, hits, getting shot, etc) I could line a guy up in my crosshairs and fire at him and wouldn't get confirmation (and perhaps kill credit) until several seconds after I sprayed the guy.

What's funny/sad is that SOE was working on a MMO called The Agency. Granted, it was conceptually nothing like Planetside, but it was a third person shooterish MMO designed around small-scale encounters in a variety of environments with PVE and PVP play. Eventually they scrapped it (and presumably other projects) to focus the majority of their efforts into Planetside 2 and EQNext.

Seeing as how Planetside 2 barely qualifies as an MMO due to this render distance BS, I kind of wish they'd've just finished The Agency and not bothered with PS2. At least if The Agency turned out to be a bad game, it would be bad because the game itself was bad, but not because of a fundamental failure to develop the game properly.

I simply don't understand how they care about trying to cater to everyone else, meaning those with slow pc's. Do they find it acceptable to have the ppl with the better pc's leave instead? Becuase the game won't render players? What's the thought process here, really. Also, PC's are only getting better relative to the game. We want to play the game, it's great, but how can you enjoy a game that becomes disgusting to play precisely when more people are actually fighting (which is the game's forte). I REALLY hope you will make rendering distance your number one priority on the fix list.

We can hold off on all the other features you were working on for like 3 MONTHS, if you devote 100% of your resources to the rendering distance issue and just get it done.

Like someone above me said, it doesn't matter what you bring into the game if this still exists... it's killing planetside2 ;(

This guy said it best. It doesn't matter if SOE solves all of PS2's metagame issues tomorrow and the game suddenly has hundreds of motivations for you to keep playing or to lock the continent. It doesn't matter if SOE & MLG magically begin competitive tournaments next week with a state-of-the-art ladder system. It doesn't matter if 6 more continents are released tomorrow. NONE of this matters if they don't fix this render distance issue. The fact that they even acknowledge it and place it on the Roadmap is disgusting in itself because an issue this big and game breaking should simply NOT get through closed beta. I'm appalled that it's lasted this long, especially considering I remember Higby stating they were aware of and were working on it back in OCTOBER. They should be devoting 100% of their resources into solving this before working on anything else.

Great job ruining your reputation Mr. Higby. You knew very well that your "mmofps" where "battles take place between thousands of players" cannot render more than 50 units at the same time! Shipping the game in such an inexcusable state is akin to fraudulently deceiving your customers for me.
Literally no one could have expected you to pull a stunt like that. Last time I played such a fundamentally broken game was APB on release. I hope this game has a brighter future.

I will make sure to stay away from future products Mr. Higby's name is attached with.

I really hope SOE is listening to us on this issue. This has been a major fundamental problem since the end of beta, and aside from a workaround for pilots being in the 6 month roadmap, the only word I've heard from SOE about this was one vague tweet from Smed and one vague post from RadarX saying "work on optimization is an ongoing process".

I have half a mind to think that SOE is just going to wait it out, until hardware technology catches up in a few more years and then they can just turn the dynamic rendering system off.

SOE, say it aint so.

I keep getting locked with missles from the crown while I have tank/sundy down @ ti alloys or ceres hydrophonics, and I can never see who the hell is shooting at me... . Also happens loads when Im flying, I get heavies locking onto me and if I want to kill them I need to go 10 m from the ground IF IM LUCKY to go to low altitude in the area they're in, it's just bs it's been pissing me off more and more. Same shizzle happens when Im in a tank/sund in a big column of vehicles, I just see my hp drop and there's no liberator above, nothing and then I blow up becuas there's invisible people shooting invisible missles at me.

Please do something, I don't know how much I can put up with this frastrating crap anymore ;/

I've played the game since release, and this issue finally made me quit back in November. Ever since I've been checking back every couple weeks to see if this has been addressed. With the state this is in, unfortunately, I do not see a bright future for PS2.

The problem is obviously server-side. If it were for client-side optimization they would have simply put a draw-distance slider in the graphics options. No, this is about how much information the servers can send at any one time. Admittedly, constantly sending ~500 players the locations, HP, ammo and weapons of the other 500 players around them is a huge amount of data.

The fix? GET BETTER SERVERS. Or better yet, develop technologies to resolve this issue, by lowering the amount of data packets required, or only sending a packet every 100ms instead of every 10ms (which would be acceptable as this is an MMO), or even making the packet-rate dynamic based on distance! That way distant enemies might jump a bit from place to place, but at least you could SEE them. You know what, even a hybrid system would work here. Keep the dynamic draw distance, but set a LOWER LIMIT to it, for say about 100m. You know, the range in which infantry are actually EFFECTIVE. Or, at the very least, if someone is shooting at you, MAKE THEM VISIBLE.

There are so many ways to go about this issue. But limiting the player's ability to see who is shooting at them, and who they're shooting at? Seriously?
SOE need to wake up and realize this singular issue is killing their game. I seriously cannot believe they haven't fixed it by now.

Last night, near The Crown, I was flying a Reaver and was miraculously keeping it in the air after several strafing runs on enemies. Suddenly as Im afterburning away, another Reaver magically appeared directly in front of me, also afterburning.

We collided head on, because he didnt appear until he was literally almost touching me.