Severe Population Decline! Anyone Notice?

Last night, Connery hardly even pasted 1000 players while every night Connery is at 1000-1200 players for 5-6 hours. I think dropping 32 bit support has effected this but PS2 has been declining before this update was implemented. I hope the PS4 version will bring more people to PC and revive this game because I really don't wanna see it die.

http://www.therebelscum.net/world-population/?world_id=-1

http://steamcharts.com/app/218230

PS2's population on steam is at it's lowest that it has ever been and it keeps declining. Currently at 4:14 am EST there are 1131 people playing on steam and 470 not using steam to play so 1601 are online right now.

The devs need to introduce something new like the battle Islands or special alerts that take place in some special region like a new map such as an urban combat area and who ever wins the alert gets extra certs or something, this special alert can happen once every two days during peak hours on each server.

PS4 is not sharing servers with the pc sadly to say. So there wont be no extra players in pc like I was hoping .

I'd be willing to bet the extra publicity will bring new PC players. Most people who would play on PC wouldn't go buy the PS4 version to play on an inferior platform, and I think PS2's main problem is that nobody has heard of it. I have run into one other person ever who has even heard of it.

The lack of advertising is always something I scratch my head at.

Don't know about how much population decline but on cobalt it's been like a month now the population is really unbalance, we tend to have:
VS: 22% pop TR: 42% pop NC: 36% pop
It's starting to get really boring for finding a good fight, it's like hey you can chose overpop faction and getting bored fighting no one or low pop faction and get your *** kick all day, i really hate the fact that people can just change faction like that on the same server.

I would say you can notice the decline a lot as of late. There is no single reason for it though.

- release didn't go smooth
- game didn't run well enough for over a year
- imbalance issues all over the place and not so decent fixes for it
- bait&switch store policy (which was given up too late)
- cheaters
- hackers
- shallow content
- people reach lvl 100 and simply quit

The really amazing thing is that the final verdict on Planetside 1 is that it wasn't a commercial success. Still it started with 25k subs at a time when no other FPS-game at the time had any subs at all and it kept a loyal playerbase of about 1k players until the very end. It is very hard to believe that Planetside 2 will ever come close.

That's false. I know literally hundreds of PC gamers in a few clans are moving over for many reasons.

The platform may be inferior but the experience is better for many reasons and the raphics are all on high or ultra except the environment textures look a bit lower.

No hackers either, ever.

The decline is sad, I have 4 characters and I remember when I first started playing in October 2013, there were loads of people playing. I had originally forgot all the details of my beta account which is why I made a new one but I eventually found the details of it and returned to only playing on that since it had the special beta skins you can't get anymore.

The main server I play on, Connery, with my BR 44 Vanu I have noticed a sharp population decline. I have BR 26 NC on Emerald and they have also experienced a decline. I remember from 10pm est-3am est Connery always had 1000-1400 playing every week day night and even more on Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Now there are 900-1200 online on Connery from 10pm est - 2:30am est.

The population levels continue to decline, hopefully it is declining to the point where it just stops and population levels only rise/fall 1-5% every month because of the dedicated player base who won't quit playing, this will be the best worst case scenario for Planetside 2. Our hopes now lie in the PS4 version since if it is a success then it will bring many more people to PC, I would say at least 20% of PS4 players will also play it regularly on PC or maybe even fully switch. PS4 will also have way more people playing than the PC version due to PS4 being the top selling console right now and the fact that PS4 does not have many exclusive games with multiplayer at the moment.

And worst. Of the new players that have been joining lately, apparently most are squeakers.

Yesterday my outfit leaders accepted a new player into the outfit and turned out to be a kid comparing the game to TF2 in every possible way... it was horrible

Summer. Every year, at this time, all games seem to be dying.

You are likely going to see a push during august/september when things get back to normal again.

There must be something that keeps people playing. Take CS for instance. That's basically the same map that people play over and over and over again for years. TF2 isn't much different. PS1 had people playing the same maps again for years too.

Why is it that people reach lvl 100 in PS2 and simply quit? In my opinion there is something lacking. If you lose, you usually didn't have a chance. If you win, it's usually a complete pushover. Either that or even worse: It is a complete stalemate - which also happens a lot - in Bio Labs or certain towers. Indar Excavation Site anyone?

The first adjustment that I would make is to eliminate stalemates by introducing a tie-break-mechanism like it was in PS1. If a base runs out of energy it turns neutral, end of story. Energy lasts for roughly 45 minutes until the batteries get refilled in some way. Maybe use the old ANT for that (which was a funny concept) or come up with something different, it doesn't matter. The important goal to be accomplished is to eliminate stalemates from the game!

Once a game like this loses momentum its hard to stop. You get the "I'm not playing because there aren't enough players" mentality and it just snowballs. It would take a major content addition coupled with a marketing push and neither is going to happen. Better hope the PS4 launch goes well and it attracts new players across the board or it might be lights out.

Yes and no! A lot of people don't quit for good. They just get burned out or don't like a certain element, give it like half a year and come back to see if anything has changed. I for instance did that a couple of times. This means that there is a group of players that can be convinced to return. I know that there are a lot of people in my outfit who would come back instantly, if the game was presenting a challenge for them again. It's not that they hate the game, they just find it boring in it's current state.

Don't forget that there are still many PS1 hardcore fans out there, hoping to come back one day when Planetside becomes Planetside again.

Because PC gaming seems to be going the way of hardcor games becoming niche and indie game becoming the norm. Cs and the whole series WAS amazing but the fact that such a bland and outdated game has so many players compared to what I'd call better games speaks volumes to me.

Never has PC been this casual. I see alot of games that should be on mobiles more than decent releases an alot of the decent releases are lacklustre or have stupid monetised methods.

It really pisses me off.

Another thing that eems to creeping in is that people care way more about unlocks and levelling than what the actual experience is like.

Cobalt? The same Cobalt I play on? Because I've been seeing decent VS and NC numbers and inferior TR numbers almost every time I'm on, and if anyone has over-pop it's NC.

+1. Once there is a worthy meta game, a working inter-continent lattice, and proper resource management this game will get a strong following. I mean, they're so damn close to having created a masterpiece and a game which stands so far ahead of everything else out there.

Might it also be steam sale days?

Summer time people go on vacation and usually spend less time in front of their computers

Note worthy thing is that render distance looks shorter on some videos and to hide that there is thicker fog.