Stop the complaints or start supporting.

Everybody complains but nobody supports...
If you asked me there's one reason why PS2 is in such a bad state.

It's us, the customers.

Why?
People complain about SOE being greedy...After all SOE is a part of Sony, and Sony earns an average of
45 000 000 000 dollars a year. So they don't buy SC to force SOE to improve PS2.

That's right. But think of it this way:
SOE is a part of Sony. Sony is a corporation. Corporations want money. In other words, contrary to a popular belief, Sony doesn't finance SOE. It's vice versa. SOE pays Sony. If SOE wouldn't give money to Sony, Sony would simply close it.

Same with PS2, if it wouldn't give money to SOE, SOE would just abandon the project. But if it would give a lot of income, SOE would spend much more time,resources and effort to make the game better to increase the income even further. So, perhaps it's not such a good idea to boycott buying SC...

Currently the game is in a very bad state. There were lot's of issues since the valkyrie update. What's worse it seems to me that both SOE and players are loosing interest in PS2 : server population is constantly dropping (hence the merges) and the updates introduce more bugs than fixes and very small ammounts of new content (more cosmetics for NS weapons? Really? That's on the Roadmap?) which is usually just another weapon to quickly earn money.

I can't tell for sure but to me it looks like PS2 is slowly starving and SOE desperately tries to milk some money from it before it dies.

I don't ask you to go on a shopping spree to save the game. But, if you resigned from spending money on PS2 to threaten SOE, perhaps it's a good idea to rethink this.

i may not have membership but i have invested close to $600 (yes you read that right!) in this freaking goddamn game!! and now it's almost unplayable, low fps, hitching, freezing...

how much more 'support' do they need to provide a solid game experience? you tell me

People complain because tech problems prevent them ftom playing. And Personally I think this drove away a lot of players over the last 2 years.

I love the game and I must tell you I dont have freezes nir hitching. But for many the is brutally unplayable. This snot what one expects after 2 years.

trust me, a lot of the people complaining have sunk money into this game already, and in its current state (the game) you cant expect newer players who are unable to play due to technical issues to pony up.

Oy vey, did I walk into the synagogue by mistake?

Supporting a broken product is wrong. You wont buy a car with a broken engine either.

If SOE wants money from their customer they have to offer a product that lives up to the expectations of the customers. The customers can always go play elsewhere but finding a new job might be a bit more difficult.

Horrible events, horrible weapon changes (while ignoring PTS Feedback) without refund, hitching that gets worse and worse, took away free certs for login without any reason...they dont give us many reasons to log in these days, much less spend any money on this game.

Maybe if SOE wouldn't break multiple aspects of the game and only fix some of them as well as most of the lead devs moving to different games/companies then people would be more inclined to give them money.

Why the hell would you spend money on your tank if hit detection is broken and you get launched out of it when trying to rep?

I think it's fair to mention Team fortress 2 in this thread. It generates a ton of income precisely because it works good and has a ton of new content every couple of month. It's still up, and it is much older game than ps2.

I payed a lot to support TF2 but I did not pay a dime to support PS2, only because I always had trouble with it. From the start. The times of good performance and no bugs for so brief, they are negligible.

OP makes a noble point, but the truth is - Planetside 2 offers STEEP prices for cosmetics and equipment, and no meaningful technical support. Some people invested up to a 1000$, it's an awful lot of money for a game. Sony is corporation all right, and they should know how "selling a product" works. You make it good and people love it. They pay for it. "I won't fix it until they buy more ****" is counter productive approach. It does not work that way.

Right now we see not "lack of support", we see incompetence and indifference to the player base. If planetside 2 is going to die it's because they put black and gold NS weapons onto the roadmap and screw up ENTIRE GAME while implementing it instead of making the game interesting and stable enough for me(or any other player) to INVEST into. They should really look on how Valve does it. And copy their approach to the letter.

First of all... I support the hell out of this game financially. Alpha-squad + Full-time Member since release + Heroic boosts + about 10 of those SC gamecards at various times (during the old 3xSC events).

That said...

Free2play players are also paying... they pay by being in the game, providing content to everyone. Being targets, competitors, teammates, etc. So for things like game balance and competitiveness their opinions matter as well. You can't just ignore a whole sub-section of the playerbase.

Honestly, If they said we can't provide the support to PS2 they'd like because they aren't making a profit, then I'd be all on board.... but they've never said that... and the issues have been consistent throughout the games release. None of the issues that are happening are anything that we haven't seen similarly throughout the lifetime of PS2 and even in Beta. So trying to blame this on free2play players is a bit misguided.

In a Market system, the biggest voice a consumer has is his wallet. By effectively saying you shouldn't be using your voice when things are unacceptable you are undermining the power of the consumer.

I haven't spent a dollar on this game. It is what I love about it.

Right now its just hard to support PS2, the last thing worth giving money (IMO) to SOE was when they fixed cloaking on low settings but how long did it take them to FINALLY fix this blatant blemish on the game? An almost solid 2 years after the games official release... that is just way too damn long a time frame to fix something so blatantly broken and quite frankly these timely moves to fix things or implement features is just extremely discouraging...

Doesn't help that the roadmap is currently featuring gold and black guns of weapons already in the game, that's just a slap in the face to people looking for meaningful content being added to the game, it screams GIVE US MONEY even when the devs have done nothing to deserve it. At least adding helmets is somewhat worth it as its benefiting both the player that made them and soe at the same time so its a win win on that front while adding unique content even if its not meaningful... adding guns already in the game with a black or gold texture instead of its default is not unique content, its reselling the same exact thing to us with a new paint job (literally).

I've said it multiple times in the past but... SOE or whoever is the boss of higby (or maybe even higby himself) needs to wake up to what they have with PS2 and properly designate the NEEDED man power and resources to this game so that we can FINALLY get the awesome stuff that we the players who have payed out the but for this game deserve. People LOVE this game but develop a love/hate relationship because people like me see the potential in this game and see it squandered over and over again with content that just doesn't matter with each update or is just poorly executed like the Valkyrie.

SO concluding, Im still optimistic for the future of this game but that future is probably a lot farther away then it ought to be, I hope SOE doesn't let this game implode on itself from more half ***** or non sensible design decisions, Anyone else remember Star Wars galaxies?

If they'd stop BREAKING things EVERY patch I wouldn't mind so much!

I don't mind them tinkering and changing things, but when they add a patch during prime hours (Yes, only America matters right?) that renders the game borderline UNPLAYABLE for the next 24 hours ...

i've paid for 2 years and i won't be paying ever again.....

I don't think SOE has any idea on what direction they want to take the game.
Now my extreme solution to this would be pull the game and do extensive developer testing/patching on it.
I personally believe that if they had the same resources as they did at launch this game would be at least 6 months further ahead in development.
They can't do it over night but it has been almost 2 years and there is so much missing from the game:
1. NO FACTION TRAITS (outside of terrible VS pistols)
2. NO METAGAME WHATSOEVER
3. NO COMBINED ARMS

There is a fine line between supporting a game to make it better, and chucking money at what has a chance to be a lost cause.

If this game had quality updates/patches on a regular basis with steady improvement I might start spending money on it, but right now I only play it because I can play it for free. It also seems to be slowly but steadily dying which makes it seem like a bad investment.

Although it was a very promising concept, the game has clearly been poorly managed for a long time, as many people warned since day one since that's just SOE's reputation. They don't seem to have a clear idea of where they want to take the game from here. It feels like an extended beta. I don't expect giving them money will change any of that. They've had their opportunities to turn things around, and many of the changes they made to the game were unnecessary or just bad even when they seemingly spent a fair amount time/effort/resources on them.

I have spent way more money on this game than anyone should on a video game. I have a right to express my problems with it. And if you disagree, you are wrong.

Sony's electronics conglomerate has steadily been on freefall in MFG profitability and market share. Meanwhile games have already overtaken the film industry. The corporate offices of every platform recognizes at some point that they need game makers more than the game makers need them...unless it's Steam in which case "HeadCrabs" would be a better concept to define the relationship. BUT, Adoption rates for every new platform or phone are always slower (except Mac which is a marketing driven political/religious following) until there is actually enough high marketability software available for that platform.

Forthermore, SOE is only just starting to experiment with User generated content. Depending on how things go, their profitability could spike up immensely on certain titles. How this all matters to planetside.... has more to do with the new "All Access" program which is them literally imping the NetFlicks entertainment bundling meta to offset the costs of ALL of their individual studios with a net profit margin that attracts more investors through deceptively "better" potential dividends. This entire process is reinforced by the artificially low Federal interest rate which was reaffirmed this week to be kept targeted at still almost 0% well into 2015 despite the horrendous debt that social media giants have taken on amid collapsing profitability. (read: another Tech Burst is imminent).

TL;DR for the economically challenged: PS2's studio right now is so downsized and insulated from these factors that Higby could boil a frog in real time on his Livestream and no one would A> witness it, or B> Care, or C> even realize what just happened since the process has been so steadily and deliberately metered out



addendum: yes I totally just GlonnBocked MottHogby and S.O.O.(N)

LOL

what Alan Kalane says has some truth to it
but as much as i love this game i cant pay anymore money to it
next month i will stop to pay for membership
if PS2 is dying because of it, so be it (let us hope its not)
i start paying again for this game after some stuff have changed, not only the bug parts