[Video] State of the game, statistics, zergs and farming

It's not about infinite vs finite. I used to play Dark Age of Camelot, a now old mmorpg, relying heavily on a tri-faction group pvp to take territory, then thanks to that claim, take some sacred relics that granted more power to the foreign faction that owned them. It's an infinite system, but territory and the relics were very meaningful because it was tough gaining those relics or expelling those invaiders, and engaged most the realm to claim or defend.

But there's nothing of the sort for PS2. I mean, it's not because my VS empire is going to claim Hossin for instance, that i'm going to consider Hossin home territory. Yet in DAOC, i had a home territory and didn't want it taken. As i knew my home territory, i knew just as well knew that my progression was through penetrating into the enemy's own, because he considers his territory the same as i do mine.

In PS2 there's no "home", there's no "foreign": it's only "here" and "there". As such there is no perceptible progression. I do regret that it's so, and seemingly not susceptible to any change.. Not that i don't enjoy the team DM, but still...

By the way, i'm the kind that looks everywhere, and that's my way of having fun: though i do care about statistics, i don't do it because of them, but just because that's my way of playing: i'm a prudent player, and i enter a PS2 building in about the same way you see some TV show's swat team storm in, looking at every corner!
For me it can't be as fun if i don't consider my character's death a state of failure.

Unlike now newly released weapon used to be OP. That is all.

Pre-nerf Harasser is perhaps best example. It used to be best AV and AI vehicle.
Phoenix was able to one-hit kill infantry before it got nerfed.
Or when MANA AV turret was released it was possible for a lone engineer to destroy entire armor column if he deployed the turret far behind the column. It was combination of OP and new playstyle to which tankers didn't have time to adapt.

I think it was when everyone was crying about rocket pods

I think it's that kind of idea train that makes for exploring better gaming. Drop in the ideas and see how they work. Tune them and get input from players, etc. You can dedicate one Continent (or certain areas within that Continent) as the testing grounds for new systems.

The Devs seem stuck. They outlined a massive schedule of building out the game, but they hit a wall in 2 areas:
1) they got hit with huge staff cuts
2) the Designers on staff (or those with control) don't actually know how to tune big systems to work. They only can get general ideas and then make a wild stab at it... and that's it. After that, they either remove it or leave it in.

So now they've scrapped the big picture Roadmap (I don't see any big systems on it anymore). And they've kinda hunkered down into just adding cool new weapons and cosmetics.

Some Designers have wild ideas, some are very good at tinkering and making things work, some are good at re-creating derivative stuff, etc. And Designers that have one skill, often value that skill more strongly and don't really see or get the other skills. And Leads that have one skill typically don't recognize (or even see) the value of other skills, don't back them, and don't keep people on staff with them. It's VERY hard for a Lead to handle (or authorize or oversee) work areas that they themselves can't see, understand, or gauge.

SOE has 4 entire Continents. It still has a sizeable playerbase. The Producer could simply say to its staff, "ok, we're gonna take one Continent and totally allow you guys to try whatever systems you want. We'll give you 1/2 of a day a week to work on it and we'll have meals on weekends or after hours to encourage people to work on it. Be creative, come up with and try stuff." Instead, they just start locking Continents because otherwise they have too much unused space.

And another major issue is to clarify what exactly SOE wants their game to be long term. For now, we can only speculate based on where we think they've tried to move the game over the past 2 years. Until we know what they want and will be open to, it makes it very hard for players to help with design/direction/ideas/etc.

To be honest, I don't have much faith in many game companies these days. SOE is definitely not on that list. They just don't seem to have any vision or drive for Planetside 2. Over the course of two years, very little has changed and I expect that pattern to continue. The rate of new content is drastically lower than other games I've seen. Hell, even Terraria, an indie game, has received bigger content changes than PS2, comparatively. Well, I think indie games in general have had more vision than most mainstream games these days, which is probably one of the reasons they've become to popular recently but that's a separate discussion. I'm not saying PS2 is a bad game. I enjoy it. Its just that there's something wrong when, as a company, your player-base is losing faith in your ability to continue advancing the game.

I think what has happened is that SOE have encountered a bounch of unforseen issues that
they were forced to solve, and this has either stopped or slowed down the game progress.

The performance patches was one of those things, it was nessesary to fix and it took a lot
of time and resouses to do so. I doubt it was planned that so much neeed to be done and this
is most likely effecting the rest of the game development.

That and they have strayed so far from their pre-alpha vision of what the game was going to be that I doubt they even know what they want the game to be anymore. The Hex system was designed to spread out the players over the whole map, because SOE figured there would be many thousands of players per server. It was a good system that made sense. That whole "every inch of territory matters" thing Higgles talked about pre-alpha was what they originally wanted this game to be. Sadly, it was clear even in beta that people will choose to play the game in the most boring, thoughtless ways possible (zergs, ghost caps, TDM pointlessness) and eventually SOE just caved and went with it.

Lattice worked for PS1, because it didn't have very many players. Lattice and locking doesn't work for PS2, because people choose to pile 200+ players into a small location to the point where it not only ruins the gameplay, it literally breaks the game itself. The game and the game engine, despite what many folks here will say, was not designed for this kind of battle. Ever wonder why it stops counting at 96+ and why it used to stop counting at 48+? That was a hint to the expected size of the battles in those locations.

So what we're left with is a lot of people who have good computers and who really only enjoy the abusive play styles Matti is talking about. This is really sad, because this game could have been so much more and there are already hundreds of other games out there for those types of people to play.

Most people with poor computers, who could have had a lot of fun running around as support personnel, have left the game because there isn't much support required (that whole "no meta game" thing), so it's not even worth their time to live with performance issue. They can't compete in combat with the people who have good computers and internet connections, they can't really do much of anything to progress their character, so why bother sticking around a buggy game that they just die over and over again in? This is the reasoning I have heard from several folks I know who used to play PS2.

https://minecraft.net/stats
"Statistics

PC/Mac version

17,103,435 people have bought the game.
In the last 24 hours, 6,399 people bought the game."

Some good points right there. I never played PS1 so I can't relate but I think it should
be possible to find some more of those smaller fights for players that like that, no
matter what reason.

Thanks for your input!

I would just like to throw this out there

https://sites.google.com/site/planetsideupgradeproject/home/planetside-2/terrain/territory-2-0

Basically, the idea is to join small outposts to a central facility, which controls region. This has potential to give players something to focus on, while also adding incentive for tactical gameplay.

I'm not entirely convinced. I mean, if farming/KDR/KPM or whatever is what people care about so much, I don't think we would see as much zerging as we do.

Sure, for the guy in a vehicle, it's great to go into a 96+ hex and just start shelling everyone and racking up the kills, but that's assuming the infantry, or crops if you will, decide to be there to get harvested.

Considering the Infantry make up the majority of the force in the hex, they either don't care about KDR or KPM or whatnot, or they are just really nice guys just trying to bump the stats of the guys in vehicles.

If they cared about that stuff, what I think we should expect to see is them just not participating in those battles at all. Like, just not even go there, go somewhere else instead. You don't throw yourself into the meatgrinder.

The game isn't designed around these massive battles, it's expected for people to be spread out, contesting every hex they can. Not just all dogpiling on a single base.

I can only conclude that most people don't care about stats, and are fine throwing themselves into hopeless meatgrinders for hours on end rather than splitting up and having multiple smaller scale battles elsewhere that are actually somewhat balanced.

But maybe I'm wrong, those are just my thoughts. Maybe if they decreased xp gain in hexes with more than 48 players in it, the zerging at least would be less of an issue.

Because there is safety in numbers. The more people on your side, the more likely you're going to at least kill one guy before you inevitably detonate. If you can steamroll the other side, good. They don't deserve to fight anyway, they aren't real people.

Shouldnt it be "Hey guys, this is MattiAce!"?

Haven't you head it before ^^?

Thats all I ever viewed it as....and I liked the large maps cuz it allows for more areas to attack from....ofc pretty much all bases revolve around 1 capture point, so you eventually only have like 1 approach path....but it used to be a really fun game.....

Sometimes taking a break from it is a really good thing, I have to admit I've been
playing it too much these last two years =)

I have pretty much quit.......cuz the unloading into people and they dont die is just plain old. Especially HA lol......it must be something with that shield, like how that tank firing blank reloading bug, its like HA turn on thier shield and become invulnerable until the game figures out there is a new health pool there or something. Cuz, I have unloaded like, literally, 10 some rounds into a Heavies head from 2 inches away and not killed him, ofc, he was already unloading into me and I beat him......how, I really dont know, other then poor hit detect issues...I did pop my Shield after he shot me....maybe there is something to my theory....Ive unloaded 30 rounds into their body and not killed em.......

Its just old, the unreliable TTK issues kill shooters for me.....esp when it used to be alot more spot on.....

They don't take that amount of damage, you might have experienced bad hit reg or the spread of the weapon
might have been more than you thought but yes, there is a lot of people with balance issues with the HA class.

Try to always use 4 bullet bursts even at 10-15m range.

It doesn't help that SOE tried to make Planetside 2 an MLG title. There were free goodies a while back like MLG decals, boosts, etc. I ******* hate SOE for trying to do that with Planetside 2. Planetside 2 is an MMO, not Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, etc. But hey, whatever. Too late to change any of that now isn't it?

This is one of the reasons it would have been nice to have intercontinental lattice (though we'd probably need more continents for that).

Basically each faction could have a home continent then that they pretty much are expected to always have on lockdown. That continent's bonus could even be related to a particular thing that faction is expected to excel at (oh hey, that asymmetric balance thing that this game has nearly forgotten).

Then in the middle you could have several neutral continents that the factions fight over most of the time. Locking one continent opens the warpgates of the connecting continents to your faction, unlocking them if it was locked before (basically, when you lock a continent you then launch an "invasion" of the next adjacent continents). This would even create some situations where some continents only have two empires on them, because the third hasn't pushed to that area...

But I guess that's starting to get into the realm of dreaming.