Roadmap, Players Site and Server Merges!

Hey all –

We’ve had a busy couple weeks here on the Planetside 2 team, and I wanted to talk about three things in particular that we've been working on.

First up: Roadmap Update. It’s been about a month since we've released the Roadmap website and so far it has been incredibly helpful for us on the team to see your ideas and suggestions on upcoming features. So, huge “Thank you!” to everyone who has participated in discussion of our upcoming features on Roadmap, and if you haven’t yet, please do check it out. We’ve already changed priority and direction on several features based on feedback and suggestions from the Roadmap site. In some cases feedback has caused us to reevaluate a feature and/or changed the scope of required work which will cause features to be moved forward or backwards in the schedule to match their new estimated delivery, so, you can expect to see a reshuffling of features on there soon. As we realign the features we’ll be going through each, giving more details where possible, and including the reasons for them moving in the schedule so that everyone understands how their favorite upcoming feature is coming along.

Speaking of shuffling, right now the Roadmap lists most tasks on the month they’re being worked on internally, which makes sense for our internal project management, but not as much sense when thinking about it as a “release date”. So, we will be shifting the months that tasks are listed in forward based on the fact that we generally patch at the tail end of the month, due to this, updates marked for “May” would show up in late May or, if delayed, early June, which many of you have let us know is a bit confusing. For game updates we are working off a 2-week cadence, so you can expect to see two major updates each month, and minor updates and bug fixes in between when and if necessary.

At the end of the day, the goal of the Roadmap is to give the an accurate view of what will actually be getting delivered month-by-month. It will never be 100% accurate 100% of the time, but we’re working on a plan to ensure it is kept up-to-date with our best estimates of when features will be released.

Next: Players Site: http://players.planetside2.com. We’re really excited to finally release the beta version of the Planetside 2 Players site! The website has a ton of really kickass character-focused features including: comprehensive character and progression stats, detailed stats on class, weapon, and vehicle usage, realtime & historical killboards for each character, friend status and more.

In addition to character statistics the site features leaderboards which can be filtered based on a number of criteria, like server & time period, as well as a PlanetStatus page which displays the current territory control of each continent for your server. Several features such as outfit browsing and certifications will be coming online in the future. The website is in beta so please be gentle and report any bugs you see with it here: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/planetside-2-players-site-now-in-beta.96152/

We’re really proud of the Players site and we can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it.

Finally: Server Merges. Next week we will be doing server merges to help even populations across all game servers. Right now we have a lot of disparity between populations on our servers, some are highly populated with active fights across all continents, some are not. This is a factor of which servers were most popular at launch, and players gravitating to one or two servers per locale. Now that the crush of new players from launch and the holidays has died down, and our server populations and incoming new players have stabilized we have a good idea of where each server stands in terms of player population, empire population and we can model merges to optimize the populations.

The following servers will be getting Merged:

US West:
Genudine and Helios -> Helios

US East:
Mattherson and SolTech -> Mattherson
Waterson and Jaeger -> Waterson

EU:
Cobalt and Lithcorp -> Cobalt
Ceres and Mallory -> Ceres

Connery, Woodman, Miller and Briggs will not be part of the merges.

You won’t have to do anything to participate, the entire server population will be moving, your friends, outfits & certs will all be coming with you. Those of you on servers that are being merged will just see that your character is on a different server the next time you log in after the merger is complete. The result of these merges will be a more consistent and full server population during off-peak hours, more players to support better utilization of all of the continents in the game and, generally a lot more massive in your massively-multiplayer. Shortly after the merges are complete we plan to begin offering server transfer tokens, so if you would prefer to go to a different server at that point you could.

Until next time, thank you for playing Planetside 2 and we’ll see you on Auraxis!

-
Matthew Higby (@mhigby)
Creative Director - Planetside2

I got your back Higby!

Sounds good Higby my concern is Connery has a very low VS pop and I was hoping you guys would be combining servers in such a way as to help balance factions also.

MERGES

Also, Woodman not effected.

I figured as much

I am saddened that Connery is not part of the current merge plan. On weekdays, Connery only reaches medium population between ~8 to ~11pm PST. All other hours it's at low population. So it too needs the boost to off-peak population that you speak of.

Please consider that.

while i do encourage player-base and a good server population in games, i do personally fear after these merges i will no longer be able to play at a decent FPS at 3 in the morning on Ceres, cant upgrade my PC off outdated hardware either, so, just have to hope for optimization on older CPU's, regardless hope this all turns out well,

We are considering that and keeping an eye on it. Our concern is peak population being beyond capacity and having excessive queuing. We will reevaluate once the new Helios has had a chance to stabilize after the merges.

And I can add that at the current 90% time or more of all fighting on Connery is Indar based. It needs help. I was planning a transfer to Matherson I can see no reason to change my mind after this announcement. Really we need the servers to be completely packed to the point of having q's for this game to work. I know alot will disagree with me but that is the reality.

No merging for Woodman?
Woodman is actually sooo empty. The biggest fights occur on Indar.
Amerish and Esamir are actually Ghosttowns...

Listen, I love the idea of server merges really I do. But Jaeger and Waterson?......dude TB's server + Jaeger? As if TR didn't have a big enough pop advantage AND TRAF's coalition. VS could have used the pop surge from SolTech really bad

I'll miss you, Genudine. Looking forward to meeting the folks on Helios though, see you guys soon

How about Miller ? Might be one of the servers with the highest population but it still needs some lovin'. There are fights going all the time on Indar but that's about it. Esamir and Amerish are just ghost-capped all day/night long.

Soltech + Mattherson! Hells yeah!

Now I can shoot my friends who are dirty Vanu on Mattherson.

Hurray for Ceres, hopefully Indar will get locked out due to overpop that people will have no chance to play on other continents and I can see Esamir again!

All in all, excellent post and plenty of info/clarification. Thank you.

Just one small nit to pick:

And the under-representation of VS on Connery shall continue...

EDIT: For now.

I hope you're goal is to have queues consistently during prime time. I want 2,000 players on all three continents!!!!

Well... Now I get to frustrate Total Biscuit. Thats... something...

Why wasn't it Jaeger and Soltech though? I'm not complaining, honestly I am curious, a lot of people considered that as read, because of Soltech's high VS population, and Jaeger's lackluster VS population.

I'm actually excited about this now.. an even BIGGER tr zerg you say? Bring it!

Dig it.

Jeager has a terrible VS pop in relation to TR and NC. And now we're being merged with a server that, from what I've seen on the forums, has a even LARGER pop skew towards TR, and also contains one of the best NC outfits.

We've already been having issues on Jeager in terms of pop, with VS not being able to do anything but ghost cap continents when NC and TR leave them. This is ridiculous. I was looking forward to server merges that were geared towards evening out massive population disadvantages, not making them worse.