The state of PS2 and what I feel must change.

PS1 had about 500 people max playing it on an average busy day for over half of its life.

It was not a golden utopia of gaming. And its game mechanics, were not irrelevant to this fact.

Why I, stopped played it very quickly - was its linearity.

I agree that going back to a single fight over the SCU and then the battle is over is a bad idea, but I think pain fields forcing out people that just try to waste the attacker's time is also a good idea. I would still argue something that I argued a long time ago which is that major bases need multiple spawn rooms with independent SCUs. This gives defenders a little more mobility around the base and splits up the attackers' focus somewhat so that the battle isn't focused down to a single point until the very end. Perhaps three spawn rooms inside the walls at Amp Stations, with four spread amongst the buildings at Tech Plants and maybe just one more at Bio-labs would go a long way toward allowing defenders a bit more flexibility.

I was thrilled to see this! Server mergers were as I pointed out in the OP the most critical thing they could do.

None of you people can ever say SOE doesn't ever listen to their fans. They do a solid job at that and while they might not always agree with us they can tell when there is a problem.

Well done SOE. You've kept a customer.

I agree either would be ok. Have you had any thought into maybe making the SCU more defendable in Tech plants and Amp stations? Seems to me the SCU gens should be connected internally(under the same roof) to the spawn rooms like the bio lab. This will create an infantry fight where instead of just vehicles camping spawn doors. Also the AMP station SCU is just too close to the CC, they might as well be the same objective.

Oh I agree. A redesign is needed.

I'd prefer these things to be in WINDOWLESS BUILDINGS WITH SINGULAR ENTRANCES but that's another thread I reckon.

Seriously? So we can go back to PS1 where everyone inside sat around with their guns pointed at the door and everyone outside bombarded the door with explosive shells whenever someone walked near at and it opened? That's what you want to go back to?

That isn't the way things are?

EDIT: They can do it so that vehicles can't get to that door, that's not hard.

Where is Smed in all of this? He has been extremely quiet the last month or so. He hyped, hyped, hyped PS2 over every social media known to man as the next "sliced bread" in the FPS genre, and now that the servers are not packed full it's like he ran away & hid. Lame, he needs to get his head back in the game.

I hope whomever made the decision to throw away 8+ years of play-tested game mechanics feels bad about the current state of PS2. It was a bad move and somebody should feel bad about it. To quote Buzz "BAD BAD BAD BAAAADDD BAAAAAAAAAADDD." I really don't think anybody at SOE understands how truly frustrated myself and many others are with this abomination trying to be passed off as a Planetside franchise game.

PS1 was a great game. It failed due to bad post launch development decisions (admitted by Smed), lack of advertising, and general all-round neglect/stupidity by SOE (who seriously thought that putting a gun on a cloaked aircraft was a good idea?!!?). It did NOT fail because the core game mechanics sucked. If the game sucked it wouldn't have lasted for 8 years, and tons of players would not be constantly campaigning for things like crewed tanks, the lattice, hacking capture system, and the restrictive cert system to come back in PS2. Smed and Higby need to get off that stupid BF3 horse and return the Planetside franchise to its roots before it's too late.

I totally understand that PS2 should not be an exact carbon copy of PS1 with new graphics, but SOE should have used PS1 as the starting point and worked to improve it. Tossing originality to the wind and ripping off another franchises gameplay mechanics is going to have a bad ending. If you don't believe me, just look at all the dead WoW clones.

My biggest fear is that PS2 has traveled so far down the wrong path there is neither the time or the money to fix it. If PS2 fails, I honestly can't see SOE revisiting the franchise again any time soon, which is a huge shame because so many of us loved the first game.

For once I feel compelled to bring up CoD as an example of linearity


Or even Counter Strike which is the root of all evil.

There isn't much that's appealing about the random chaos of PS2. It was a neat theory pre-launch to be able to go anywhere and try to take land (albeit slowly), but the reality is that without SOME structure the gameplay is one big "ring around the rosie" and is a real drain on the fun.

Being killed from completely random directions is the norm, which is part of the reason people go to the crown. It's an extreme example because it's a stupid meatgrinder, but at least there you have a set structure of where your allies are generally going to be, and where your enemy will generally be. The reason Rush became so popular in the Battlefield series is because many people got tired of getting shot in the back and running around in circles, myself included.

At the end of the day I think most people just want a good fight. A good fight can only really happen when a lot of people know where their enemy is likely to be, and that just isn't possible under the current hex system.

They will listen and they have. That's that makes SOE a good company.

They listen to their players. Quit drinking the hatoraid and be happy.

I love the amount of people actually arguing over the spawn room pain field thing lol, its not the pain field that counts, its the fact that the attackers are forced to camp them for the entire cap. That's all his point was and yet people are getting all huffy and puffy cause he suggested a possible solution.

On a different note.

I think a lot of the problems in PS2 is the XP/Cert fest that it has become. It was never about farming in PS1, it was more about taking the base as that is where the majority of XP came from, that glorious feeling the moment the XP or CEP rolled in 15 minutes after a CC was hacked.

In ps2 you can get more xp from farming kills and cheap tricks (c4 spawnshield etc.) than you do from the base cap, so that is what players are going to do naturally. Players go and do whatever brings the most xp, so it is actively encouraged to use the cheapest tricks possible to get kills.

Again, the problem here is depenent on perspective.

In Miller in an organised outfit. Its not random chaos that appeals to me, its actually directing and being in a unit that operates on meaningful operational and strategic level that gives something more from the game than any sum of its tactical battles.

And its a false dillema to suggest its 'no structure at present' vs. 'imposing much needed structure'. There is plenty of structure at pleasant, as i've been harking on about (and really very few people ahve engaged with) is the lack of people to populate that structure.

Any way imconfident, with server mergers now coming, this whole debate has been made irrelevant, I think people will see what I mean and i've been talking about the first night there server hits 'high'.

Being randomly killed is the nature of a giant combined arms battle game. Forcing everyone into one location, won't make that better.

Whether or not there good games is irrelevant. There not trying to do the same things this game is doing, namely a giant combined arms warfare battle simulator (obviously not realistically) with a giant map and the largest 'per map' population of any online FPS to date.
As i've said time and time again, from what i've seen, I stand utterly behind the idea, I think is see elsewhere in dicussions about conways the game of life (Dennett has a paper on just this if anyone can be bothered to look it up). simple rules = surprising emergent phenomenon.
When you have near enough 2000 people on a map, and an active outfit community, thats when the game really comes alive and it becomes so much more than just 'crownfight lololololoz ... I are bored now of teh indars'.
I expect to be proven correct over the next month now SOE has finally changed their tune after months of brining this up.

You are the greatest person ever, BuzzCutPsycho. It is rare that I agree with 100% of everything someone suggests. I do agree with you on everything here.

I doubt PS2 is a cellular automaton though; and even if procedural games exist, we need to give them a meaning.

Only a few games set rules without meaning. And to push it to another extreme, the best game would be to make your own ? C++ is the ultimate sandbox.

I think you need to get out more ... or at the very least read more.

I hope SOE devs remember all the other players, not just ones with a cult of personality. Many have written detailed posts about really reasonable changes, many others have really small changes but would improve the little things that bug us. But threads like this freak me out because they might see it and just swing the gate waaaay too far to appease folks like Buzz (the loudest people) and open up another set of issues. In all honesty, with whats included in the current Roadmap plan, the game will already have a huge improvements.

What a great post! I agree with 95% of this. This is such a great game, havent had a game hook me in like PS2 since WoW vanilla. I want it to succeed, I NEED it to succeed. Keep the positive feedback coming! Devs are you listening??!!

oh, you're one of those people

You know when your "meaningful operation" moves on, the area you just "tactically" took is retaken by ghost cappers 15 minutes later?

You are a masterful tactician only in your own mind. This game is about the fight. If the fights suck, or are hard to come by, the game suffers.

I never said I was good. I do my best that is all, its about making a fun time for the outfit (one based on organised teamplay playing for the objective), not proving my tactical acumen.

Not every post on this forum is about polishing e - peens.