So... We're basically in O:MFG 2 ?

It's not like they've been adding all these crazy amounts of content to begin with. So basically we'll keeping on going the way we've been going. Adding a gun or two here does not ******* count as content, especially when the guns are just reskins of ones that were already in game to begin with. How about finishing up all this half ***** stuff? Missions, resources, base designs, Valkyrie buffs, lightning fixes, class updates, outfit crap, lattice updates, meaningful bases or new weapons/vehicles. How about taking all the damn suggestions people have been giving and doing something with them? I mean really who cares about new content when there hasn't been any new content to begin with.

I also don't have any huge problems with performance outside of the memory leak and occasional hitching.

Well I don't have any issues with them fixing their stuff.

But I do have to agree with Outreach above me.
What grand new things have they implemented?

Hossin? I do admit it is a nice continent, but they worked on that for HOW LONG?

The valkyrie? A light aerial troopcarrier that in concept should enable squads to deploy faster and stealthier, but in reality is basically an underwhelming cert pinata? Its slower than the galaxy, has a fraction of its tankiness, a fraction of its weaponry, 50% of its costs and 50% of its capacity. AND the galaxy is actually stealthier - all you have to do is fly at the ceiling. Oh and the Galaxy doesnt need to use an upgrade slot for hot-dropping troops.

Golden weapons? .... Ok yes they did that, but who considers that actual content? It's a nice to have for some people and it gives SOE the money to run the game, but it's neither work to create nor is it "content"

A half - ***** missions system? Maybe I'm wrong, but afaik all it does is mark the next fight to you/the squadleader and hand out 20% bonus XP if you're in it. I remember there being talk about platoon/squadlead being able to assign missions! Alpha 2-5 camp that generator, 6-12 attack that position!

The outfit stuff? I'm not the leader so I'm not really touched by that, but I hear its cool. Sadly not really helping the core gameplay.

Resource revamp? It is still "Phase ONE". And even that doesn't work out too well. It works reasonably well with vehicles. Consumables have become abundand and almost unlimited, although, with the exception of C4, I don't see this as a problem.
But the combination of nanites, removed timers and, in worst case, Hossin lock bonus.... Oh god WHY???? MAXes are so riddiculously easy to obtain. Surviving 9 Minutes in a MAX is no great feat, with Hossin you need only survive 4,5 minutes to pull the next one. Even if you die there is a good chance a medic will pick you up. I am often literally FORCED to pull a Pounder-MAX to combat those swarms of enemy MAXes and I freaking hate those things for all the killing power they provide. And I never kill enough - at least not enough that have to respawn.

Sorry, that rant got a lot longer than I intended. But I think many can relate.
Basically I think we desperately NEED new content, or rather we need them to finish what they started.

But in the last two weeks I've been shot by ******* ROCKS. The player that was really shooting didn't render until after I was long dead - and as we all now, one can't hurt what one can't see.
Even worse sometimes I can't see enemy projectiles - including EXPLOSIONS of enemy weapons. I got killed by a LPPA - and I had no chance of realizing he was around. He murdered me and a dozen others and I saw neither the projectile nor the explosion. No chance to get to cover or get the AA out since I only noticed it when he killed me. Then I saw it in the deathscreen. Bravo.
There is NOTHING that makes me want to smash my keyboard in someones face more than death by a bug that ******* supports my enemy. SOE could as well have given them a wallhack or a total invisibility upgrade, it would have had the same effect.

Sorry again for ranting again. I'm just kinda pissed off and tired. Essentially, when they got the stuff thats already there to work instead of frustrating the players THEN we can go back to new content. One can play the game - most of us are proof of that.
And I guess most of us like the kind of battle PS2 enables us to fight.
But I think everybody agrees that it would be better for everyone if the game doesn't require a personal MAX armor against annoyance.

Please SOE, fix the stuff. PLEASE. I LIKE this game. I think this is the right decision.
... But please, really do what you said you'll do. Don't fix 50% of them and then return to business as usual to increase the *********** further.

yes and no

Saying it's entirely SOE's fault for sloppy servers can only go so far. Even if they for instance, took all their top infastructure away from PS2 and put it into the new games latest cashgrabs they're building (ZombieCOD-theMMO & Elffin-Minecraftquest), it still wouldn't explain the ridiculous behavior that's popping up now unless you or your opponent were using Satellite Internet. What's really going on is client-enforced Desynchs to game the net-code. It's so prevalent it's starting to affect everyone just like DDOS'ing the server would.

Maybe they should just tear this down and start on a new DX12 based engine. The statement made by Smed couldn't have been any more generic. Those are ongoing issues so what's new? Absolutely nothing. And I don't know how many times they've told us they were going to fix things. It's such an empty statement coming from them now.

Your graphic settings greatly affect the the visibilty and render distance of effects. Players with the right graphic settings have HUGE advantages. For example, compare low and ultra particle quality:

Low particle quality: Render distance for tracers and smoke trails on low particle quality is very short. Incoming fire often doesnt render at all, especially when driving a vehicle. No explosion, no sound, no tracer, no rocket trail. You cant see where the shots are coming from.




Ultra particle quality: Render distance for tracers and smoke trails on ultra particle quality is very high. This is very helpful to find out where the enemy fire is coming from.




Ultra particle quality can be a real performance killer though. Some effects are not optimized at all it seems. Example: I get almost stable 60FPS in a open field battle with lots of tanks and infantry. Then ONE dual pounder MAX starts shooting and my FPS drop to 20! I could give more examples, but i dont think its worth the work to write them down. To sum it up:

PS2's performance is very bad, because the game has a serious lack of optimization. Even a current high end PC cant ensure a high, stable framerate on max graphic settings in this 2 year old game.


EDIT: A friend watched me play PS2 in the Christmas holidays ... He asked me "Is this a Beta?", because of the obvious FPS drops and lag (rubberbanding yay!).

This is promising. My latency before the patch was around 50-60...post patch, I have seen it reach 10,000. Yes, 5 digit latency. (Briefly, of course)
CTDs are rampant and getting a stable frame rate in high combat (which may be my hardware related) seems much harder than it was. The medikit issue, weird hit registry problems.

Them working to fix bugs before adding more issues is actually really good news.

Now we're in Operation: Make This Game Work on PlayStation 4

Basically Consoles are ultra budget PC computers with extremely low end (compared to PC high end) parts in order to make it cost effective enough to be sold at the prices they need to be at ($400 and under) for the console market. SOE, being part of Sony, really wants to push Planetside 2 to Playstation 4. Except this is problematic because the game engine they went with for Planetside 2 was designed to look "good" (your personal preferences aside) even many years after the game came out which means it's going to be a bit demanding. This conflicts with the ultra budget specs of the PS4.

So basically we've been stuck in "OMFG" forever because someone upstairs, presumably Smedly, really wants to push PS2 to PS4. They turned a game where most of the vehicles and such looked pretty amazing to bland unified garbage in an effort to fix things. While some things were pretty smart and made sense, such as removing 4 barrel objects and replacing with 1 barrel object that was 4 barrels, I for one find the game looks vastly more ****** now than it did at the start and I've gained little to no performance.

The lag and such has been there since day 1. You get a 3 way battle, it happens. Ironically, probably the most effective way to do this is to spread people out more by discouraging the possibility of 3 way battles by creating a more elaborate conquest system like they had started to plan towards. This would keep many fights to a faction vs faction rather than a 3 way cluster!@#$ all the time. Anyone who played Planetside 1 will tell you while there were certainly 3 way battles they were pretty rare and you mostly had two factions primarily on continent at a time. Also having game play that rewards farming just encourages as many people to pile into a base and farm each other as they can which also does nothing to help with lag.

Just another case of SOE chasing their own tail as they ignore game development to chase issues created by a lack of game development.

This has also been there forever. It doesn't have anything to do with Particle quality but render range for various units.

One of the earliest things they did was adjust what does and doesn't render for various units. So for example a Liberator up above can be shooting that tank and the infantry repairing would never see it because he's an infantry at that time. Just like the Liberator wouldn't see the infantry. Different units render differently to each other. There's also a case of being in a vehicle and being hit but not knowing where because it's an infantry doing like a Lancer at you but you can't see because the game is designed, for your optimization, to not render that opponent.

I mean we're talking about an issue that has been there since beta. Rendering in this game has always been screwed in huge battles which has always been hilarious because this is a game marketed to having huge battles.

...and to think that all you've said is just a tiny fraction of all the negative things in the game? ...well, that's why I play way..way less than I should have

we all know how long omfg took them. this basically is just covering up and having an excuse for not adding any new content since all of them are working on ps4 while pc version goes down the toilet

Didnt you read further in my post? Render distance for effects (not players!) like smoke trails and traces is very high on ultra quality. You might not be able to see the AV MANA turret that is is shooting you from a hill 300m far away, but you can see the origin of the rockets and break line of sight. You cant do that on low particle quality.

This is great. When performance increases, more people are able to play, more funds can be made, and maybe, just maybe, they'll start improving the ES side of things.

Tin Foil Hat on...

What if the lag/performance issues are part of a ruse to excuse the lack of new content? The state of the game today is a far cry from earlier road maps. Furthermore, SOE has been challenged in churning out new content in their other games (notably EverQuest). If SOE Live was any indication, they are already hyped on the new best thing: H1Z1. Yes, save your $$$ for hats and knives in H1Z1.

This is great news. It would be nice to have a game that doesn't crash, and where all the current content works as it should.

I'm all for stability, but geebus this game is two years old now.

The issues are more than just about performance. The massive identity crisis the game has is killing it off.

The devs need to make the decision to either run the game as advertised, as an "epic" experience of massive combat OR the small team, small base competitive focus they keep trying to hammer down our throats.

The two things DO NOT MIX!.

What do you get when you have a huge map, a million bases and a lattice that funnels gigantic zerg armies into a little base designed for small team combat with unrestricted resources?

You get "Farmvilleside 2" and it's ridiculous.

It's no small wonder so many of the new players are overwhelmed and ultimately leave disappointed and frustrated.

As it is, the games focus is not on team play, but the solo player and self-aggrandizement. The Directives exacerbate this idea further by making players even more likely to forgo the team and stick to their own personal objectives while making them prefer areas in which they can farm for kills in order to achieve their goals.

Exactly what this game should have avoided from the start.

Certain devs and their preference for E-sports created this monster and have cultivated a player base that has devolved into one of nerf this or buff that. Since the only thing that means anything is stats (and means to improve them) which are directly connected to personal ego.

This game was supposed to be something "new" or at least offer something more than the tons of log-in, bouncy, spammy, small base, small team, kill "x", earn a ribbon, rinse, repeat, FPS crap that exists today.

Instead, we got the exact same ethos spread over a huge map with a rapid turn-over "lobby"... our beloved "re-deployside" mechanic.

I understand that there are folks that like this kind of thing. There are people who don't need anything more than the ability to log-in and spam for a few kills in their nice bright set of combat-pajamas, then check their stats and log off before heading to work or school.

I get that, but please devs, stop blowing sunshine up my *** by telling me the game is more than that when it clearly isn't and quite possibly was never meant to be anything else.

Please... pick an ethos and stick to it.

Your loyal players who came for something different deserve that at least.

I am a noob to ps2, played a bit at after beta, but long term vet of PS1.
Strange to see/hear similar long standing problems that plagued PS1 to the end.

EG, getting beaten in a 1v1 by a player that started as, and completed the fight as a prone corpse.
I giggled when he slid off along the floor, but makes identifying threats somewhat "novel".

So far the fights do not match the epic feel of PS1, but that could very well be my entire lack of experience with PS2.