State of the game 12/6/2012

Hello everyone,

As you may have heard this weekend we are running a double xp weekend to say thanks for your patience during our launch. Our stability is in good shape now. Client crashes are down 95%. We have a patch coming next week to address a bunch more bugs and make some balance changes Matt Higby mentioned in another post. In addition we will be making big improvements in the infantry render distance issue. We get that it isn't good sometimes so this will be a big improvement. We also have a new anti vehicle weapon coming.

We continue to work on bugs and optimizations. We have something we hope will be a big improvement coming in January. It's significant and needs real QA time before we can put it out. That's only one optimization. The team continues to improve this and won't stop.

In early January we will be putting up our plan for the next 6 months and open that plan up to your comments and change requests. It's not written in stone and you're going to have the opportunity to weigh in and have us change it based on your collective feedback. We are hard at work on a lot of cool stuff like orbital strikes... Vehicle transport.. And other fun things.

One other important issue I wanted to address - cheating. We are all aware of the cheaters who us aimbots and other tools. We are tracking and banning these people. I don't want to pretend there is a magic answer to this. We have a great deal of tools at our disposal and people who fight this every day. I assure you this is a top priority and with each patch you'll see us address more of the things we see and a lot of stuff that you may not. Please continue to report using the /report function. You may not see the drone strike but when the idiot disappears quietly and without fanfare just know our anti hacking team has no mercy and enjoys the job. Please help us fight the good fight and understand that this is a war and its one we won't stop fighting.

Thanks for playing

Smed

Would enjoy some vehicle transport... Prowler on a Bio Lab... Yes Please.

Vehicle transports?

Yo dawg, I heard you liked transports...

thank you thank you thank you

It's great that you guys are paying attention and listening to us. Really appreciate it. Now if only the other "free to play" games under SOE could do the same...

Excellent info! keep up the good work, and im hoping to see this drone come down and obliterate these hackers!

im really looking forward to crossing off the render distance thing off my signature

Sounds fantastic, the more info you give out the better. I hate being left in the dark.

It sound great what is coming up, but I hope you find a way to get rid of the hackers in the game which is killing it

I really can't express enough how great it is to know that PS2 not only has a great dev team that is in tune with the community, but the President of SOE itself tweets and writes us great posts and updates to keep us informed so we know what's going on behind the scenes! I hope to be a part of a team like that at some point in my life and its really inspiring to see how you strive to have 'open doors' in terms of the development of PlanetSide 2.

PS1 was my favourite game of all time all the way through highschool and college and afterwards, I always dreamt and hoped that out of ANY game I've ever played PlanetSide deserved a next-gen sequel most. Having the future of PS2 (even knowing that it's actually OUT now) in your hands is a really, really big sigh of relief. I can't wait to see what's to come and really wish I could help out some how. If I can't work for you guys then I would be honoured to do QA work for free once you get a test server up and running!

Thank you Smed, and the whole team over there at SOE for making my dream come true! <3

Awesome news
Cant wait to see how that big optimization patch turns out in January

Awesome. Involving the community in the direction of the game is great!

I also hope the release process for these smaller patches will improve as well. Change whatever needs to be changed, but it's important to communicate these changes (no matter how small) to the community in patch notes. Nothing is worse than "stealth" changes since it leaves the community in the dark and it gives an unprofessional image to the dev team when changes are accidentally being slipped into the live version.

edit: This is in regard to previous patches with no notes and the patch today, where it seemed like the patch notes were being written by the players as they discovered what changed (Anti-Tank mines, Composite Armor tooltip, etc) instead of the other way around.

In twitter post it was said you guys (and girls) have ready to go optimization patch, a big one. Will this be pushed down to January or will we be getting it in the coming days?

Thank you.

Just for clarification: is a render improvement coming THIS next patch (Tuesday) or was your comment on it something referencing a fix coming down the pipeline?

A major engine update that requires a month of QA testing? Could this be the DirectX11 supprt us AMD folks have been crying for?

Calm down folks. He's obv trolling here, he is talking about warpgates and transporting vehicles across continents.

While I'm happy at most of the OP's proposals, I'm unhappy that there has been no overnight (my time) update on the issue of compensation for removal of functionality from paid-for weapons. This has quite simply put me off ever paying for any aspect of this game ever again. I don't often talk in such absolute terms, but this has teed me off 100%, make no mistake about it.

Even if the official position is the simple legalistic one of "you signed a EULA", we should be told. Confidence is an important feeling to instil in customers in relation to making purchases in a micro-transaction based game, and at this moment I have no confidence in SOE.

You see! Was it so hard to spend 10 mins of your time letting us know what you are up to behind the curtains? lol just kidding, thanks for the update, though I would like to see them more frequently (refering to that almost silence for 2 weeks after launch)

Its nice to see you guys prioritize issues that affect people the most.

Keep working and we'll keep complaining and together we'll reach the game you envisioned this to be.

o7

But we already have those
http://imgur.com/SJTGp
http://imgur.com/fDISL

In Januar we get a 6 month plan?

Dude, we want the 3/5 years plan already. Pretty much every time you mentioned it you said it will be there shortly.

Anyway, dont stress the team over Christmas, kay?

http://john-smedley.livejournal.com/

Posted on August 11 this year.