I don’t play PS as much as I used to, Connery server is so dead, I just made new factions on Emerald, but even the fights on that server get’s stale. Usually Indar and Esamir and the more I think of it, it’s the stuff you guys have been doing to the maps that leaves me perplexed. Why were good areas of fighting removed from Esamir? Why did you ditch TI Alloys and those bridge battles from Crown, I often miss them. It seems like the more you try to rebalance the maps, the less fun the game is getting. Sure we all knew changes were needed and some bases were outdated, but no one ever asked for map reduction size. So I try other games, I was hoping Elite Dangerous Odyssey would replace Planetside, but they really screwed that release up. So I go to Call of Duty, maps to small to few. Then I move over to Ghost Recon Breakpoint - real beautiful game, but horrible PVP action. There are elements in all up coming titles that are mere shadows compared to what PS has to offer. When are you the developers going to pull it together and realize the foundation that was laid by previous successors was the work of genius and instead of running away from what the game is and embrace what it really is, massive multiplayer online first person shooter. Stop running from what you are, it still really is a great game. It reminds me so much of what America is becoming, a land of electric cars, when our country was built on gas and it was the love of speed, power and racing that took cars to what they are now. Can we learn to embrace the essence of what it is we saw? For the pursuit of the racing and fun is what so much was built on.
It has been my experience when actions are taken that mystify people as to why, it is because we assume the incorrect motivation. For example, often times politicians (from any "side" or any country) will do things that just seem so insane as to frustrate voters. Well when you realize that in those situations most of the time the politician is doing for themselves and not their country, well then the action makes sense as in we know why now. So I wonder then what the motivation for the changes were, because I don't know unless it's just folks hoping to make a name for themselves so when they change jobs they think they can get something better by saying "but look what I did for PS2!". PS2 has so much potential due to it's uniqueness but it seems to go to waste. I know it's all about the money but you figure with only moderate effort there could be 3x more people playing this game and subscribing to it. Electric cars. Why? Money and marketing. Unless you live near some "green" powerplant you are just recharging your not at all environmentally friendly battery with fossil fuels. Batteries DO NOT produce energy they only store it. Engines use fuel to CREATE energy. Not to mention the maybe global warming temp rise that maybe happens maybe 100 years from now won't because we will all be dead from plastic pollution because we were dingdongs and mass killed the oceans. But no one talks about that because you cannot make money off it. ok off the soapbox...
No, I see what your saying and it is very similar to this game. They’ve gone off building Sanctuary, Outfit Resources, Outfit Wars, Bastion Carriers, Collussus Tank, Vendors, Campaigns, Missions, Shattered Wargate, all these things like going green to save the game. In the end it was a complete waste of resources. Instead of using whatever they have that is built in, improving on it, to make it last longer. If they wanted to build containment sites, why did they have to mess with existing maps, when it’s clear they have the capabilities to build there own.
Not even that, simply producing the electric car pollutes more than the average car fuel powered car would produce in a lifetime. Simply mining all the resources needed for that huge battery harms the planet much more in terms of CO2 production and destroys the planet, producing and then shipping the car also pollutes. But yeah it's always easier to put the blame on the consumer, 'it's your fault you're causing global warning when you take your mini fiat 30 mins back and forth to work!' Meanwhile they drill through ice caps, travel around in private Boeing 747s and do god knows what that destroys our planet. But yeah consumer guilt is fun and electric car sounds cool. A bit back on the Planetside 2 topic, I feel they're caught up on trying to bring "new" and "unique" things to the game, and they forget why people played planetside from the start!
I agree that we need more focus on the MMOFPS side of the game instead of the incomplete and currently incompatible MMO strategy they have been pushing. The game was an MMOFPS first, the strategy elements were tacked on later without too much regard how it would fit into the existing game mechanics and gameplay flow. It has created friction in the playerbase ever since and that has become worse recently as they started rewarding the strategy elements more and more with free goodies and altering abilities that push the strategy even farther from the MMOFPS roots. They actively reward avoiding an MMOFPS fight in order to capture the most bases on a stragetic map that is about as complex as a game of tic-tac-toe. As for electric cars. America's unwillingness to embrace more fuel efficient cars, electric technology and the renewables that go with it has cost just the automotive industry billions. Similarly the focus on gas cars has promoted many choking legislations against public transport in order for car manufacturers to sell more cars, which has heavily restricted the poor segments in the American society in their movements and cost the American economy even more billions as those poor people couldn't find suitable work and had to settle for unsuitable work nearby instead. Electric cars are the future, as are batteries. Battery technology has advanced and become much less pollutant, not to mention that people often like to say "oh but batteries take all that mining and crap" but those headlines conveniently ignore how pollutant the oil drilling and refining process is. You can re-use a battery, you can't re-use the oil. Batteries will especially be the future if we can upscale them for national use. Currently we produce several % more energy than we need to keep our electric grid running because all large-scale storage methods we have take relatively long to engage or are inefficient. Proper batteries could cut off a huge chunk of a nations daily energy production as they can produce the estimated value rather than produce more in case they underestimated it. On top of that current renewables have a huge margin for error build into their estimated power generation because of this. Having reliable energy storage means that renewables suddenly have a much greater impact on the energy production estimates meaning less other powertypes need to be engaged.
As far as the game goes I agree 100% that the more they change the more they move from the roots of the game and that inherently is a huge problem. Philosophically it might be the main problem. I really disagree with you on the electric car thing. I am not sure super huge batteries mined with slave labor and containing rare earth elements is the way forward and I question how sustainable that is. The marketing won't question that and will tell you to go out and buy buy buy an electric car because reasons. I also question whether electric cars are any better environmentally than an efficient gas engine. Again, marketing will tell you it's the second coming but that's just marketing. Overall though, having more choices as a consumer is the win in that situation. Your point about the American car industry not being open to change hurting it, not sure i agree with that either but it is an interesting thought I will stew on for sure.
What do you think oil drilling is done with, good cheer and well defined workers compensation? It's an unfortunate fact that much of the first world riches is still build on modern slave labor. Clothing, electronics, mining, drilling, large scale manufactured goods and even farming for various base materials to make things like chocolate still have massive portions of slave labor in them. That's why the entire fair-trade businesses started to form to combat it. Just like early cars were much less efficient than modern cars so does battery technology advance now that we finally started building electric cars with a purpose. There is also a huge difference in how large-scale batteries would work and the materials contained within, which uses less rare earth materials and doesn't suffer from battery degradation like lithium-ion batteries do. While electric cars started worse off than the gasoline car that had a century of worldwide technological advancement behind them mordern electric cars are already surpassing gasoline cars due to the combination of better, longer duration batteries with less materials and the fact that more and more electricity can be generated and stored using renewables. America has been dragging it's feet during environmental summits for decades, one of their main points was that it was an attempt to harm their large automotive industry by limiting them. While they were dragging their feet other countries started surpassing them in their automotive technologies and doing better in car sales as other cars improved faster. Only Tesla, which still came late to the market, has managed to keep up by going so all-in and buying so much promising technology from others that it could close the gap and is now ahead. But tesla is miniscule compared to any of the other vehicle production facilities. The marketing is to blame: that of the American car industry rather than the electrics. Yes both sides have lied about the capabilities of their cars such as deliberately installing chips that identified if the car was being tested to get better ratings. However electric cars are going to be much more efficient and capable in the long run specifically because we haven't put in the decades of development that gasoline cars had into them, but we are doing that right now. And if Graphene ever gets to be made cheaply in high quality and large quantities then the question of electric versus gasoline is instantly gone.
It's not. They complain there's too much oil drilling and then decide their solution is to drill and mine for rare minerals to make bigger car batteries. Batteries which decrease in efficiency with each charge until they eventually stop working. The average life expectancy of an electric car is 5-8 years, whereas a traditional car is 10-15. So we need to buy electric cars twice as often as petrol cars. I really wonder why the industry is advertising electric cars. Also keep in mind electric cars require a whole new grid infrastructure to be installed, which will pollute even more and make a company or two a lot of money. Hybrids currently are the best choice as they combine the best of both cars. They pollute the least and still last almost as long as a classic car. Of course, this has nothing to to with planetside and I'm not quite sure we should be discussing this stuff on the official game forums. Let's keep it game related as much as possible!
I haven't played for roughly three years but I still keep a watch on the game's progress to see if I want to come back. Thus far my chief complaint has remained; the bloody forced population balance. The core reason I played the game was to engage in a fast-paced large-scale organized battles that you just can't get playing any Battlefield game or really anything else. The core reason I stopped playing (and haven't since) is because of updates that made my reason to play impossible to achieve. I don't want to wait 30-60 minutes to join a continent my outfit was operating on because either the TR or VS didn't feel like playing that night. The other updates I've witnessed since my "retirement" has sent mixed messages on what they want the core of the game to be, and this is probably PS2's root problem; the core elements of the game have been mucked about so much, especially over the past 3-4 years that one can't tell what the heck the devs want this game to be.
The core problem is a central planner mindset in the game design today (Controlled pathway theme park), as opposed to the player choice design (MMOFPS) that made Planetside 2 truly great.
What arrows on the ground telling players where they are "supposed" to go? I don't know what you're talking about! In all seriousness though, yeah, you nailed it. They have very much fallen into dumbing down their product in hopes of boosting mass appeal. That, combined with an insistence on every major patch adding "content" in hopes of building hype to push marketing. Unfortunately the new content comes at the cost of never finishing that last patch's "content" because it's old news and fixing it wouldn't generate hype, so move on from it like a nonsensical plot point in a Disney Star Wars movie. I could at least understand the marketing angle if they were doing any marketing though. Seriously, just run a bare bones cost ad campaign just to remind the world that this game still exists, and you know, downloading it again for a few hours of nostalgia would be...free!
Good discussion. I appreciate you laying out your thoughts in the manner you have. But ultimately I disagree with you on most of your points. I live in the US south and I have seen many a drilling rig, there is no slave labor there. I cannot speak for the rest of the world however. But enough of that. As mentioned we should stay on topic of the game. And on that note, I say I still very much enjoy PS2 but the missed potential does frustrate me some. But I enjoy it very much regardless of that.
In the rest of the world it's bad. Last Week Tonight did a piece on the American side and there is a rather steep deathtoll and other problems. Some explosives technicians have to do 3 days straight without sleep occasionally, BOMB TECHNICIANS. The people working there are often wage slaves. Hence I mentioned "modern slavery". Most of my points aren't based on marketing, but on my interest in the subject and the scientific articles I look for. It's not that hard to find articles like the top here: https://www.google.com/search?q=bat...5mAEAoAEByAEIwAEB&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp Which for example concludes that electric cars are 30% more efficient over their lifecycle than combustion vehicles. There are also considerations often ignored, like how an electric car has fewer and simpler parts. Maintenance of a combustion engine requires more oils and lubricants which themselves are heavily pollutant in both production and use, requiring specialist facilities to get rid off similar to batteries however at a far higher frequency than batteries. This isn't about agree or disagree based on what you believe on marketing, this is about looking for as unbiased as possible sources that look into the problem. When you look at the anti-electric car people you often find them holding the electric car to far higher standards than the combustion engine. "But what about the battery mining and production!". Ok that is fair but then you need to take into account the absolutely massive drilling+refining process of oil, not to mention the by-products that are also created and further manufactured when producing gasoline? Ofcourse above electric and combustion engines is the Hydrogen fuel cell car, with the Hydrogen produced through green energy. It's just so hard to produce and cannot use the existing gasoline infrastructure or the electric grid infractructure. Despite it's higher energy content the way it burns/explodes is safer in case of accidents. PS2 can still reach the pop-culture heights if it manages to make some changes to its gameplay flow. It already survived for much longer than the average game based on it's uniqueness. Bank on that uniqueness, improve it, focus on it. The strategy elements are secondary to the large-scale MMOFPS combat that lets you loose on the world.
Pardon my selective quoting but I wanted to address just a few certain things. And again, I appreciate the well thought out discussion. Please understand I do consider this a discussion and NOT an argument. You mention searching out unbiased sources. If you think John Oliver and Google searches are unbiased sources then all I can do is plead with you to cast a MUCH wider net. I am not saying they are useless sources but both tend to be VERY 1 sided. I don't think you can directly compare drilling for oil and the creation of batteries for electric cars. Why? Creating a battery for an electric car is single function activity as all it does is create a battery, period. Drilling for oil does not just ultimately create gasoline. It creates MANY things we all use everyday. I am certain we could make a long list of things in a Tesla that come from the refinement of petroleum. Your comments seem to be very much aimed at America. Places of the west like America and the UK etc are NOT your main pollution issues. Both countries regulate heavily. Your current issues are China and India which don't regulate very much or don't enforce and pollute freely. So to shake your fist at the USA or Europe as a whole might be somewhat deserved but certainly it is out whack as far as priority goes. But with all that said , CO2 and global warming are not a primary concern at this time in my opinion. It gets all the press because there are any number of ways to make money off it. The real immediate danger in my mind which gets no press because there is no cash to be made off it is plastic pollution and primarily in the ocean. If we cause a mass kill in the oceans (while the planet will ultimately be fine) humans are screwed and in a very quick and devastating way. Now as far as PS2, it's an interesting thought that it can gain mass popularity again. I guess that is possible but I cannot recall a situation in which an older game ever pulled that off. But because of the games uniqueness (which you pointed out and I agree with 100%) I think it is possible. But it would take a good bit of work and I am not sure the owners want to put that much into it. But I would LOVE to see it. If they threw in some fixes, bettered things like the client side latency and reworked graphics they could dang near market it as a brand new experience.
I also use sources such as scholar, science direct and sci-hub (sci-hub to try and circumvent the ineviteable "what a great article now I got to pay for it's content"). However it's much easier to use Google, which lets you search your own bias very easily. Type a conspiracy theory once and you'll get tons of recommendations about everything from Yeti to Global Warming to vaccines to the end of the world and how phones "irradiate" people etc etc. The point is that you need the right search words and be selective about the articles you find, if you find them with google doesn't matter. What matters is who made it and who they are affiliated with. A research done by a company will almost always result in a positive outcome for the company as they specifically tailor the question and research methods to give them a favorable outcome. "free" research without any monetary reward for specific findings tend to be more neutral and unbiased. And while John Olliver is definitely not unbiased, the point is that they specifically look for articles and evidence to make their program. It is a starting off point, and strangely enough a far more reliable source of information than many other things you could try. Why can't you directly compare drilling for oil with the creation of batteries for cars? "We drilled 10 barrels worth of oil. 3 barrels went to the refinery to be altered into X amount of gasoline and X amount of by-produts of gasoline. This caused X amount of pollution. Then further transport to it's destination can be calculated alongside the average Miles Per Gallon/Litres per Kilometer a car drives in <area>. This creates a lifecycle of Y pollution". Do the same for batteries. Also we are creating more and more without petroleum. As we learn more about how much was lied about for example many plastics and recycling we start using alternatives more and more. My comments are based on America to start with as that was the first topic brought up. "America and electric cars". So I brought up how America's lack of going for efficient and electric cars has hurt it. Then when you brought up rare-earth materials I did not mention America until I returned to their policies and their marketing. You instantly came back with "I'm from US and drilling isn't slave labour here!". So I continued with that thread afterwards. There's no fist-shaking, just using an example of why going electric is actually a superior option and that detractors of progress have spread the lies about it being bad. There's half a dozen ways we are destroying the world. But as far as I was concerned the initial discussion that caught everyone's attention was the electric versus combustion angle. Some games like Syndicate and Syndicate wars never really amounted to much of a popularity in gameplay, but some of their lore has been (a now obscure) pop-culture material. PS2 however is an MMOFPS that is still alive. We know that the game still has a lot of people's attention in the back of their minds, the Escalation update showed that. If the Escalation update had brought what was promised, don't you think that word-of-mouth could have introduced more players to it? As long as the player retention is higher than the amount of players joining then we get a netto gain of players. Add in some low-key commercials like internet banners and Steam attention and you can draw in more players. The game might be old, but even remasters of C&C managed to gain a lot of attention because of the cult-classic status, despite the disastrous last game(s). If you can create that culture and make it a classic you can blow new life into the game. But to get that culture you need to have the gameplay to match.
The game really needs core data values integral to its main functions in all aspects of the game further expanded upon put to fresh new mechanics that expand upon this, added to the game regularly that give the game a breathe of fresh air constantly instead of just repackaging what is ultimately the same old product over and over again (this practice and what is then rebalancing the game and doing bug fixes for what is usually a games given first year being on the market is what this seems to usually be in gaming, not to truly criticize this game as planetside 2 is one of the best games on the market to this date), ultimately have more actual customization into what is discernably a players power in the game further expanded upon beyond just the class, equip screen and nano augs section; vehicle selection. Just getting gun velocity to a proper function in this game so each gun has a proper realistic feel based on actual physics is what feels like a needed even if it would force a rehaul of map design on each continent in the game ( NC guns would be proper long range engagement guns, VS guns would even be better at this maps properly compensating for longer range engagements should be a given with this) Only 4 Continents in game for how long the game has been out needs to immediately be alleviated, a proper urban combat setting map continent emphasizing infantry play would do wonders for the game or blatantly even what would be a 2nd ice or forest or swamp or desert map anyway.
Yeah planetside 1 had over 30 continents? Planetside 2 barely has 4 (Hossin isn't finished)?! Doesn't give the best impression of the game's state. It also gets a bit frustrating with continent rotation always on the same maps. We need to finish Hossin and add some fresh new continents.
