The Current State Of The Game

When the bastion and other changes were announced I for one was not happy. I saw it as nothing but a move to a Zergfit meta and predicted such. Well I left for a while but have returned for my outfit temporarily. And I am sad to say I was correct in spite of all my detractors at the time.

Now, I spent a few weeks joining random platoons and squads. Out of 33 I stayed with for a while I come away with a poor assessment. No leadership at all, most were lucky if they got a way point. No coordination or cohesiveness and platoon mates scattered across the continents doing their own thing. Only to be air zerged every time you turn around. Oh and the air to ground is insanely out of control now days.

I then started leading again and must say command channel is more useless than ever. No cooperation seems to be the order of the day. That or one person screaming at another because they are not doing what he wants. I blame a good portion of this on NATO. One of the worst ideas ever to come from the player base that degraded into a swinging wiener competition. Members wanting to be in charge of everyone and in the end destroying what cooperation we had prior. Once again I predicted this when I was asked to join and refused. I was branded a noncooperation person and ostracized for my position. And yet I was correct once again.

Now, the point of all this is not to rehash the past but to hopefully find those who feel as I do and maybe form some alliances. While I am in game I would like to avoid the zergfit as much as possible and actually try to get back to some tactics. Anyone interested can feel free to reach out.

You're mostly right.

You're absolutely 200% entirely right about something which very little people talk about though. And I'm guessing it's because most of the people who care about this thing have left the game, and so the forums.

And that is, that when you choose to play for a faction, you belong to that faction, you are on the same team as everyone else in that faction, and to achieve victory, you must collaborate, cooperate, coordinate with the rest of the faction.

Whether you are a solo player, or a member of a big outfit, you are working with the rest of your faction towards a common goal.

And that just doesn't exist anymore, it's just gone, literally.


What's left is grinding directives, improving your KD, and basically playing the game like some kind of arcade arena where nothing matters anymore, where no one cares if your faction wins or loses, where the only thing that matters is to "have a good fight", and by that, people mean "a good farm" (cause where I come from, a good fight is one that was a challenge but in which we surpassed ourselves).

PS2 today is a farming simulator.

(hence my sig)

There is no faction unity and there is no faction common goal.

And that, 100% of that, that's on the devs!!

--> Disclaimer <-- When I say something like "there is no faction common goal", I don't mean that there is absolutely none. I'm just saying it as an expression, most of the time, outside of outfit special ops, there is no common goal. Even most of the smaller outfits don't work to win anymore, they go for the resouces, even if that sacrifices a victory for their faction. ---> Disclaimer <---

Well on the good news side if you can find a way to coordinate and play tactically you can lead the zerg around by the nose. I know because we have done it. Unfortunately during prime time everything is a zerg.

I forgot to conclude lol, so just to add (briefly) :

Because there is no faction unity, no common goal, no shared objectives everyone strives to achieve, there is no need for leadership.

There is no need for public platoons with waypoints, there is no need for a "order channel" (I'm speaking of the text version they deleted a while back (and it was a huge mistake)).

There is no need for anything that could help players work together if they aren't here to work together in the first place.

Well then you might be right. But if that is the case then the game is truly on its death bed and we are just witnessing it bleeding out. I hate to see it but its up to the player base to stem the tide. I say we all file a bug report titled zergfit and in that make the devs aware we will spend no more money on this game till they fix the zerg model. Oh and firing Wrel would aid in the only hope for recovery!

Way I see it, it's not like that all the time and it's not everyone. I was generalising.

That said it's a trend that has been steadily increasing over the recent years.

I mean this is a lot more true now than last year, and it was then a lot more true than the year before that etc..

As someone who has a small outfit with on most days around 3-6 people playing, and actually going for victory all the time (getting directives is secondary, resources we only prioritise when we are really low which rarely happens), I absolutely feel the pain of lacking cooperation. We have a few other outfits we work together with on Joint Ops days, but aside from that I agree coordination is mostly gone. By some miracle and together with 20r we managed to revive command channel for one alert and win because of it (guess when 2 people tell others to do the same thing the opinion is somehow more correct?). Other than that zergs just push, don't listen when they should stop, cutting off borders between the 2 other factions, hence forcing hem into harder double teaming. Or holding downricht worthless positions.
Remember a mini-alert on Amerish recently: The easiest shared front between TR and VS would be Lithcorp, but that was held by NC. We told the people there to please leave to open a second front and take off some pressure from everywhere else. They refused and only left when they were zerged out by 100 people after everything around had been lost for minutes. We could definitely have used the 40 people or so, that were sitting there defending a point that was a strategic snakepit. And of course we lost the alert pretty hard, because we were absolutely double teamed, as our enemies didn't even have a shared border and had no opportunity to go at each other.
At least on Miller the zergs are a case of the blind leading the dumb. And one (not mentioning names, you'll know who I am talking of anyway) is way worse than the rest even. Not sure if they were the ones defending Lithcorp that day, but it would have been right in their wheelhouse.

Oh yes and once making Wrel "Youtuber " lead dev the situation has been worse than ever. But no surprise there.

Parts of this can be attributed to the "Auto join squad on login" being ticked by default. This fills squads with the type of players who cannot even be bothered to visit the Settings menu and untick it. Obviousily they are not going to follow a waypoint. Even if one is set about 50% of auto recruited people go on to do their own thing. Besides proper squad play is essentially not required since after critical mass, all that matters is to double team the dominant faction during alerts. Before that there are no ways to contribute to faction victory for causual players.

I agree with much of what the OP says here, it is a struggle to make this game into what it is supposed to be. I do what I can, the trouble is that players who are accustomed to disorder are disinclined to follow orders on a level required to make good plays happen. I definitely don't have the energy every day I log on. I have dropped some suggestions on the forum, but I don't know if that will really lead to anything.

I want PS1 back - PS2 is a mess...

It's super boring now. It's either a Biodome campfest or a TI Alloys campfest. Seems most players only care about their KDR and there is never a squad with cohesion. Outfits are worthless.

What I have come realize is that most players like it this way, so this is how the game goes now.

Now you all are giving me flashbacks from back when I was looking into outfits a few months back.

All the ones I remember seeing had the same exact summary in the outfit browser: "We're super organized and communicate lots! You better get Discord/get Teamspeak/follow orders or else!"

Then I had flashbacks of everything my team did in the past week such as where I spawned at a router and immediately died because it was placed at the top of a building with no cover nearby and direct line of sight to the enemy spawn; literally 40% of my faction being at the least valuable base for the duration of an alert; attacking a base that had 5 deployed sundies and somehow none of them were in a good spot; using "Join combat" to enter a biolab fight but instead of spawning inside the biolab I spawned at a sunderer parked in the middle of a field in esamir, 100m+ away from the bio lab, that had enemy snipers camping it; etc.

Took maybe 5 minutes for me to decide any outfit that seems to have a fetish for orders is a red flag, so I made my own small outfit for friends. I guess there's a good portion of small outfits that actually think before making decisions, but they're harder to come by than your standard "I have authority I didn't earn and demand blind obedience" outfits and even then there's no guarantee a small outfit is any better, anyway!

Some game Daybreak's made. Between merit and resources, there's never been more incentive to join an outfit. But at the same time, there's never been less reason to join an outfit.

You're almost right, but not quite.

It's not that most players want the game like this.

It's that all teh player who DONT want the game like this have left the game..

On Connery, that last statement about the blind leading the dumb is literal: RumbleTough (the leader of TWC2) is actually literally blind, and he still plays and leads platoons from time to time.

Also, lmao @OP you created an entire thread to boldly claim you were never coming back to the game, yet here you are crawling back to make another. The forum warrior runs strong with this one.

Okay, must admit I was not expecting that. It's not a game I think of as blind-friendly.

lol, not what I said bro, never said I would not return for short periods to assist my outfit lol. But hey, you do you and think what you want.

He said he took a break from the game.

He said (in this thread)

jokes on you sucker !

This game has become a grinding, Zerg fest POS.

I have come to understand that the majority of the new player base knows nothing about tactics or how to do anything but zerg. The player quality is lower than I have ever seen it. It is really a shame what is being done to this game. But with a youtuber as lead dev none of this is a surprise.