The New Player experience per the Cryaotic Stream: "It's fun when you're not getting **** on."

That's what I and other people have been saying for a long time. The game is very enjoyable when we don't have to deal with people who are not good enough for straight-up infantry gameplay, and instead abuse AI MAXes and AI Vehicles to cheese easy kills on infantry.
There simply should be no AI Vehicle loadouts available. Kobalt is more than enough for self defense, and all cannons are OHK on direct hit anyway.

The problem if SOE would simply remove AI vehicle loadouts there would be no reason for vehicles to exist. At least currently, because of the food chain: AI Vehicles > Infantry > AV Vehicles > AI Vehicles > ... , all parts have a purpose. If you get farmed by AI Vehicles, the easiest solution is to pull AV Vehicles and clear them out.
But this chain consists of direct counters, and it's never fun playing against a direct counter, because the choice of gear matters more than personal skill.

So if AI vehicle weapons were removed, vehicles would need a new purpose instead of "farming infantry" and "dealing with vehicles that farm infantry". I suggest this new purpose should be called "SUNDERERS".
Remove all AI weapons, including HEAT. Possibly leave Kobalt for self-defense. Remove OHK from cannons and Halberds. Make infantry AV weapons significantly weaker. Like literally 10 bricks of C4 to take out a non blockade Sunderer and 6 bricks to take out tank.

Then, most of the time players would need vehicles to destroy an enemy Sunderer. And the opposite side would need tanks to protect the Sunderer.

Haven't seen this mentioned yet ...

These guys have a dedicated following of entertained viewers on Youtube, especially Criken, because they are goofy, funny, and if they are competent at the game they are playing its just a bonus.

Heck, one of the promotion Streams last week, BirgirPall, just about all their videos are labeled "I Broke..."



And that churned out this PS2 highlights video experience:



Which in all honesty? We've totally goofed off like this to have fun in PS2 before, even in the super dooper serious leet Outfits once an Op night or Alert ends or something ... or maybe we just enjoyed someone "dancing" and playing music in the Warp Gate.

Is PS2 a game with an identity issue between fast paced instant gratification FPS and PS1 that has lead to a mess? Yes.

Is 2 years of issues of frame rate, hit detection, end goal spawn camp base design, outfit support, and new content creation pipeline efficiency a mess? Oh hell yes.

That said though, even if that mess was never even as much of a thing, even if these entertainers can competently tackle genuinely difficult games like Dark Souls 2, they are going to try their best to play these games in an absurd fashion. They probably wouldn't have even allowed themselves to be attached to an experienced Outfit anyways, unless that Outfit proved entertaining in some goofy fashion.

Does the stream still have highlights that show new players have it rough though? Definitely.

In my no longer humble opinion because its been an issue since the game launched, most of the new player issues could be fixed just with better base design that flips the middle finger at Spawn Camping by way of Spawns being inside/underground with a SCU just out of line of sight that is the last objective to defend and at least one of the base's defensive objectives able to be reached by a underground/inside passage(s). Just straight up separate the places where Infantry and Armor/Air are the right tool for the right job, with objectives like blowing up infantry sized holes or the specific classes only working on sub systems as complimentary side objectives and main only captured in a vehicle and AI driven supply trucks as objectives for the team work oriented combined arms on bases that are designed with having a smaller force defend against a larger force in mind from the get go with automated turrets, defensive radar, and holes in the walkable wall patched with destroyable not opaque shields (aka doors).

Wow I'm in tears after watching this.

So much fail.

I hope all those farmers realise they stabbed the game in the back big time last night.

We just lost hundreds of potential new players for sure.

When I saw Angry Joe's prep stream VOD I just wanted to spam him with emails and messages offering to be his and by extension his stream's PS2 mentor. Because his community outfit completely failed to bring him up to speed and back into the game. Then they let him and the other new players flounder on Hossin in an impossible fight for an hour or two.

Not that any of OP's points are wrong of course. I just wanted to help ease the pain. On the upside my conscience is clear at least. I farmed the new players with an extended mag EM6 and only for half an hour or so. And apart from a magical kill every second super farm of a Sunderer every one of them at least shot back at me.

That stream was absolutely torture to watch. Goes to show that size matters but isn't the deciding factor, your team has to have at least some clue as to what they're doing. Angryjoe and Crykens event reminded me of their world of warcraft event where they ran lvl 1 taurens to stormwind, it ended the same way you would expect.

Mass Slaughter

While I believe vehicles have been nerfed practically into the ground against infantry (only direct hits OHK and splash dmg is pissing distance) and bases could be altered a bit to prevent camping, I think new player experience would be 100 times better if they knew good places to fight. Right now the instant action and redeploy system currently in place is absolutely atrocious, chances are you can't get any where near a fight let alone near one that you aren't getting steam rolled in.

Improve redeploy and maybe give big red *WARNING* signs in the middle of their screen when they try to spawn at a base 1v5 and big green *PERFECT* spots where fighting is 50/50

I also want SCUs in every base, put them very close to the spawnroom making them very easily defended but in the event of a wash out you're not being farmed for 3-15 minutes. Being spawn camped is one of the most frustrating things in this game, prevent it from happening and a lot of unneeded hate will evaporate. SCU's would also prevent entire platoons spawning at the last second to resecure bases, which would be a problem with more lenient spawning restrictions.

This game's predictability adds to that. I remember the great times where people would dash to some far region of a map because a base was being drained in Planetside 1. In PS2, there's too much info on the map, too much predictable behavior. No room for originality at least at the new player level.

I guess this is what they get for trying to host this on Emerald.

It's actually starting to amaze me at how slowly SOE are trying to make changes to the game "for the better"

Cause seriously, whats changed since I first played in the beta content wise? Harraser, Hossin, lattice system, cont locking, thats about it, am i missing anything in particular?

Guns dont count.

It really is VERY simple to make the new player experience about 2x better bare minimum.

Don't let spawn points get camped so easily. Yet SOE continuously does little to fix this, and what they have attempted was half *****.

I would argue that an environmental redesign would be a sufficient nerf to vehicles by itself. After getting ruthlessly spawn camped on Hossin though, I just have low hopes for anything short of a dome shield.

Hossin is a lot better that a well placed sundy can hold off a base for quite for some time and even push back the attackers a lot of the time. This is kind of non-existent on every other continent.

You are absolutely right. Pull a Lib or a HE tank on a battle were the other side isn't and you almost guarentee yourself 30 kills. I ran a 57 kill steak yesterday with a HE lightning doing this. New players don't understand what an HE lightning is, and it certainly is not tactical. It's easy once you understand the tools to farm. It's a constant battle of bringing new players in that don't understand this, for the vets to farm. I'd rather the game be more tactical, and the new players where brought in to fight, not as cannon fodder.

This game being challenging to learn is what drew me to it. There wasn't even a tutorial. You couldn't walk outside with out max flak armor. It was great. It's great and horrible in a fun way. All at the same time. Loved it. Will that get the masses to play? Maybe not. But helping people learn all the crap I had to learn the hard way is part of the fun.

I can't remember much of when I first started to play except trying to hold a tower against a liberator,a galaxy,and about 5 high BR vanu with no qualms with using lots of C4 and proximity mines against the tower's sole defender.

This game can be harsh to learn in the beginning,but no single aspect of Planetside 2 is hard to understand. I knew immediately when seeing my first lightning tank that it was not a vehicle meant to facing off against main battle tanks. I knew that heavy assaults were designed to the brunt of the infantry force. I knew that ESF's were a god awful mess to fly and I'd never seriously try to learn.

I agree to both ideas that this game needs a mentoring system and a more expansive tutorial. Telling someone to duck under obstacles(I don't remember ever needing this,especially since broken doors don't exist in the real game),shoot bad guys,and stand around points to cap them does not prepare someone for the game.

Part of the issue,I think,why they don't have the tutorial is because they don't know what the game is supposed to be. How would a vehicle tutorial look? "With your main battle tank you dominate the field,but you're next to useless at many bases so jump out and charge the point and hope that it doesn't get C4'ed while your gone." Maybe that's a bad example,but the lack of a true metagame does hurt it in some serious ways. "After you've pushed the enemy back to their warpgate, ummm, keep them there!"

In the end,it will be left up to the community to start helping new players.

You know what I noted. Stream snippers trolling and intentionally making a bad new player experience. The game isn't going to die because of the mechanics. But because of the community and that we allow this to actually happen.

Were you playing in a 33:66 underpopped hex again? shame.

Oh jesus christ, this was a PROMOTIONAL event? It kinda exploded in our and SOE's face pretty nicely it seems.

First day I played, I finished the tutorial and was immediately sent to a random location via that instant action feature. Moment I landed I was face-toface with a prowler tank and at the time, it was looking to "my east". I started firing at it with my riffle and it turned to look at me with the main cannons.... I *gulped* then started to hold down my S key to go backwards. It edged up towards me but did nothing lol. I switched to my hand gun without thinking and went "pew pew pew" At the time, I was using a VS character. After the clip emptied, he backed up and then fired a shell in my direction but missed. I thought maybe that was a warning shot. I decided to bail but as I turned around he was chasing me so obviously that ended with a *splat* During the brief moment of my death screen, I saw a huge explosion with the tank going boom lol. I didn't realize at the time I was standing on a tank mine. It was funny.... All of this of course was long time ago but idk how long ago. I now play as the NC ever since I started having fun with the Phoenix. I time to time still make silly mistakes though. People tend to jump out in front of me or someone tries to shoot my rocket down and it ends up hitting an ally or something which is strange... I now play on that Emerald server as MissKitty for the IGN. I like using sundies now and support even if it has lot less action involved than the other roles. Sometimes, the support roles make or break a fight too.

PS2 is a great game, and I love it, but it's absolutely true that this is a game in which it's very easy to have really bad experiences. Dying forty times in a row without a kill would be completely absurd in most games, but for somebody new to Planetside that's not at all unreasonable. I remember that, on my first day, I died 124 times and got 6 kills. The new player experience is absolutely soul-crushing, and I don't think it's improved much in the last year. I don't have any great suggestions for fixing it, but it definitely does need to change. IMO the difficulty of getting into PS2 is the one thing keeping it from being a really spectacular FPS.

Great stuff OP(Fortress), keep it up I like your threads they talk about real problems the game's community and deves always ignore. What's more intriguing is that you have that many lightning kills and you post stuff from reason and logic, props.

While that may be true most of the blame should be guided towards soe, i mean we still have ****** spawnrooms which can be camped by vehicles from all angles and this is still the case on hossin as well. The only viable way to make things better is to provide a route to the capture point which can not be accessed by vehicles. I just don't understand why they aren't putting the spawnrooms under some kind of structure which would make the game infinitely better. Obviously it could still be camped by maxes but those can actually be dealt with unlike bulldog farming galaxies and ppa magriders.

I just hope this makes them realize how ****** the current spawn rooms actually are.