Voice your opinion! What do you think SOE did wrong?

1. Any artist that is ever satisfied with their own art isn't much of an artist.

2. If it's so mediocre, why hasn't anyone else attempted it? The scale of Planetside is what sets it apart. What you are saying is "Hey SOE, while you're blazing a trail where no one else dares to go, why don't you re-invent the wheel while you're at it?" If they can be so much more, why isn't anyone ELSE doing that? Planetside 2 is the only game I've seen since Half-Life 2 that made me say "This is a leap forward".

I play the game a lot, so they did a lot right.

As far as wrong:

1. Too much twitter and reddit
2. Leaving obviously OP things in game for too long
3. Over nerfing not obviously OP things too fast
4. Ham-fisted marketing (I want this game to be profitable but omfg god...enough of the UPGRADE NOW)
5. Too much focus early in game life on MLG. Puhlease folks.

Ok I'll bite. Here are the things I feel SOE dropped the ball on

Leveling & Progression

• Removal of this part of the system robbed this game of all of it's potential. Truth be told the decision to remove this aspect of the game created a domino effect that just ruined the game even further. Planet side's leveling system allowed the player to specialize their character but limited their ability to access everything in the game. This very important balancing act kept vehicles, maxes, aircraft & weapons from running rampant. As you can see without this vital system zergs are made of 99% vehicles, and there are no restrictions on what a player can use at anytime.

Unlimited Certifications

• Working in junction with the leveling and progression system players had a set number of certifications to limit the player's ability to be a jack of all trades. In PS1 if a player wanted to pilot all types of aircraft they could, but in no way shape or form would they be able to specialize in anything more than a basic land vehicle. With unlimited certifications and resources players have access to all weapons, vehicles and equipment making Battle Rank, & XP 100% useless. SOE actually shot themselves in the foot here because since there is no need to level I don't need to buy xp boots or even have to consider subscribing.

Continents & Lattice

• Planet side has 10 (yes 10) continents, and 1 sanctuary for each faction. This is proof positive that the game was released WAY too early. Now you may be asking how does this effect the game. Glad you asked. The lattice system (or any system for that matter) can NOT work without all continents in place. The system is lack luster currently because Lattice was designed with conquest in mind. With only 3 land masses the lattice can't do it's job which is lock out opposing factions and guide factions to a meeting point to duke it out.

I could bring up about 30 other things that I feel they screwed up on but these three are by far the biggest. It was the very core of the original installment of planetside and it's what made the game a hit.

Ways for underpopped factions to fight back against larger factions

Striker v1, ZOE v1
Striker v2, ZOE v2

NC Maxes only getting access to shotguns

The canister on the Vannie

Having the mag's main gun have a much lower max elevation than prowler or vanguard

Esamir walls

Biolabs (They suck when it's a 48+/48+ fight)

Not allowing SL to draw on the !@#$%ing map

the game should have been in beta for at least another 6 months-1 year.

during this, they could have made it more like PS1. it is only now they are starting to realise "oh ****, we should have put PS1 stuff in the first place instead of adding it in over time" (i'm looking at you, lattice, spawn rooms, resource revamp and continental lattice).

the spawn rooms should not just be rooms plopped somewhere in a base, they should have been under the base, in a complex of underground mazes like PS1. they should have had the same mechanics as PS1. but since they are out in the open, when the enemy has a larger opposing force, it just turns into a spawn camp with not only infantry, but land and air vehicles as well.

some of the bases are way too close to eachother, and it just contributes to the spawn camp. instead of giving the enemy more time to regroup and prepare their forces for the next attack, they are instantly spawn camped. a simple fix to this would be to remove some of the spawn rooms from the bases that are too damn close to other bases, and make the cap times much more quicker. it would make those big epic fights and stalemates between bases SO much more common, but we only really ever see it between certain bases.

OMFG should have been done when it was in beta. just further proof that it should have been in beta longer.

with being longer in beta, we wouldn't have had a screwed up roadmap like last year, and we would have more players.

it is only now that the game is slowly starting to get back up onto it's feet, and it is only now they are actually getting stuff done by the roadmap (mostly).

but alas, i still love this game, its just that it could have been so much more on release than in the future.

Metagame is not meaningful enough, we need proper logistics and better resource system (hopefully coming).

Aircraft flight models do not resemble physics. Proper flight model and joystick support is needed.

Liberator is a flawed concept, downfiring cannon is unpractical: only usable while hovering, but hovering makes Liberator large slow target. The designers solution to this is to give the AC too good acceleration, speed and too much HP. Wrong solution.

Cloak: broken concept. Too easy to see to work as designed, too hard to see to give fighting chance to enemy. Cloak should be a consumable, only to be used to bypass enemy position.

Players adapt to the game.
Sometimes it plays out as the designers imagined, sometimes it doesn't. Emergent gameplay can be both good (anything in DotA) or bad (FOO strategies aka cheesing).


If SOE has expectations and players do not live up the expectations, change the mechanics and hope the behavior follows accordingly.

But at no point you're going to say "players don't play the game properly". It's an absurdity. It's ********. If your game requires heavy ammounts of roleplay to get a proper dynamic, you're going to have a very small subset of players doing things "properly".

That reminds me of all the awesome DayZ videos that will never happen; are you going to ask the players to "stop shooting eachother !" for better enjoyment ? No, because killing in this game is, most of the time, beneficial. Looking at you SOE-Z


That's stuff you can't predict, but then you adapt and change the ruleset.
If players are standing behind spawn shields to grab easy certs, you change the spawn rooms.

Honestly, i dig this game, except for a few details that's killing it, i have characters on all 3 sides and this is unanimous to them.

First of all, spawnrooms, i don't mind where they are that much but for the love of god make the shields on them NO direction, it ends up with players just sitting in them and camping until they loose, so these "battles" everyone is talking about rarely take place.

Second C4, Come on, this is supposed to be a futuristic game, even NOW a small hand held C4 pack can't take out a fully healthy tank, it's ridiculous, seriousely, make them do half damage, or immobalize.

Third, sniper rifles, rifles and game view ranges, why bother with a 12x scope when you cant even see the enemy that far, the ranges on the rifles suck too, I suppose if we have personal shields, exoskeletons and cloaking we haven't invented longer firing rifles...any rifle for that matter, the longest firing one goes under half a km...

Oh and i disagree with alot of posters saying HA should have a harder time with the bazookas, not in every aspect just the hitting players one, in fact, up that damage, a bazooka shot at your feet should kill...except for a max ofc

I want players to haveto think alittle, use tactics, i'm not saying make this more realistic, i want the devs to THINK, right now it's like they're using their...unmentionables to balance and update the game.

i already posted my opinion a while ago in this thread. Here's a TL;DR version:

- We have clesses, but we're lacking roles for them - what's the role of a LA in a squad?

- Things that are fun to do are being nerfed or removed - Counter Strike is known for its "Take out a knife - run faster", so why can't Planetside be known for "jump from a cliff - land safely on wheels"?

- Not enough loadout customization options - the slots options should interact with eachother adding additional bonuses and downsides (like improving damage taking capity even more for the prise of adding a cooldown on class ability).

- Weekly updates - uploading untested solutions half of which is hated by the community - the most recent example: people gave a lot of solutions what to do instead of that crappy "Upgrade now!" button - but none of the ideas will be used, because the ask for playerbase opinion was send after the button was implemented on live servers and SOE won't remove a button once they added it.


But the biggest mistake is focusing on individual players instead of groups (Outfits, to be specyfic) - For me, the people i play with, are the biggest reason to stay with this game.

The only real bonus "vehicles" have in general is that they can be pulled all over the place. And that it's very easy to pull a lot of them in a very short time. Once they are out on the battlefield around 80% of them will die within 5 minutes from mainly infantry then other thanks and aircraft.

The map design forces the tank which is designed to fight from a distance to move up close where it becomes nothing more than an desired Cert piñata. This is mostly due to terrain. There are no real open areas in the game any more. Sure northern indar but how often do you manage to push that far up?? The western side had a base far out allowing for some interesting tank battles but then it was removed.

Majority of bases are designed to handle about 48+ vs 48+. And currently being remade to keep tanks out. I don't mind as long as they make the surrounding are a place where tanks rule! Instead we have the equivalent of League of legend Lane system
So right now you see a large empty map and perhaps 2 or 3 80+ vs 80+ if not even more.
I don't like it when it says 48+ vs 48+ and then one side is 76% of the total force in that hex <.< And they are all crammed onto one little base.....

I wasn't agreeing or disagreeing with you.

I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of this thread. Many think Vehicles are OP, many think they are UP. Everyone seems so 'united' that PS2 is a piece of crap.. yet they still play it over other titles. My opinion is, people like to b----. They're not happy unless their complaining about something. So SOE must have done something right if people complain about vehicles, some that are OP and some that are UP.

I have my own opinion on vehicles, but that is beyond the scope of this thread.

Of course it's hypocrisy half of the people here most likely complain about things because they had 1 or 2 bad runs in the game earlier. Heard some people say something intelligent about the game and then they logged on to Forumside to play Rambo here to.
Majority of PS2 forum opinions are based on those vague sources of experience. It's nothing more than a repetition of the old witch hunts. Lack of knowledge, ignorance and just following the crowd added up to behaviour that added nothing and solved nothing. Except a pile of useless ash..

And i wasn't saying Vehicles where OP nor UP.
What i was saying was that the shape of the game doesn't allow the vehicles to do what they are good at. Instead creating situations that has less favour towards vehicles than it has towards infantry. Which in the end causes the behaviour people have with vehicles at the moment.

It was to clarify a response to your mention about people whining from an infantry perspective. infantry people are a majority thus holds the largest amount of people with little knowledge of ...well anything thus mostly their opinions are harder to trust.

It's like vehicle players that make rants. In majority you will quickly notice that they just simply suck at driving a vehicle.
It's all kind of pathetic really XD

Im a jack of all trades, tanks infantry whatever..though the flash is beyond me i must say.
I have no problem with driving a tank, ive tried each sides many times in combat, and infantry do their best fighting against wich is good too, though honestly if a tank is driving, you just DONT run infront/behind it, and if you get run over by one, well keep an eye on the map, it shows you where they are, youre squishy it's not, some tankers need to be introduced to the brakes tho.
The biggest infantry/tank problem i have is that all but one class has the C4, if anything i would have figured the engi and cloakers only have it, it's allso the power of the C4 against armored main tanks, one C4 and you're dead, light assaults may as well drop nukes on us in that case. NERF IT to half damage on tanks atleast if they are going to have it on all.

As for other stuff in the game, it'd be cool with a engi repair grenade, medics have it why not engis, or how about under mounted grenade launchers for some assault rifles, SOE has a game with a willing community, if they went through the proper channels of testing and implementation this game could develop far bigger, with far more subscribers, i had ben gone for 2 years or something close and they only add submachineguns aaaand a harasser, most developers, even the smaller ones would have come out with expansions, craploads of new toys, what SOE needs to do is get the complaints on one long list, balance/fix/polish and after that do something HUGE, else this game we...like...so much would slowly die and wither more than it has.

These battles and wars are no more, the ones we loved and started out with are gone, now we just attack while the enemy cowers in spawnrooms and vice versa, the spawn room is NOT a control point, you will ONLY loose if you hide in it, so for my part, i go infil, stalker cloak, and go wreak havoc by hacking terminals and guns in their base and capping points, sure beats sitting in a spawnrooms waiting to die by painfields.

What SOE did wrong?

Well.... for one they release new content - real content, not camos or a weapon with slightly different stats - too slow.
At the same time they tend to add more problems to the game than the patch would fix. This might be subjective though.
So... the solution for this would be what they are intending to do as I understand it. Less patches, but bigger and better reviewed ones. Hopefully including more content.
Balancing errors included ZOE, which they fixed, and still include imo the shotgun MAX and the Phoenix and lockdown. Problem being that both are faction specific and have an advantage the other sides can't match. Namely so much CQC power as to seem almost invincible save for C4 and AV nade spams and the ability to destroy tanks from total safety. Tanks that are behind cover.
And lockdown is plain ********.

But for all its problems I still love this game. So there must be some things they did right. Don't focus only on what they did wrong, or you will miss the things they did right.
Recently: I dislike the Locust and the Trap. They seem to be uselees weapons to me. But I use them nonetheless. There is no weapon imo that sounds so TR as the Locust. The Trap ususally gets me killed, but is fun to use. It doesn't have to be good all around. Weapons needn't be flawless. They need to be good enough.

And in general: For all that is amiss, there is no war giving me the possibilites only Auraxis can.
My fellow soldiers: I love waging war on Auraxis.
I like my prowler and his anchormode despite its downsides. I love soaring through the skies in my radar mosquito, revealing our foes to my fellow soldiers. I rejoice at the sound of a careless sunderer blowing up on my painstakingly hidden tank mines, taking its unsuspecting passengers with it. Nothing can compare to the sheer firepower of a Prowler firing line, annihilating anything that dares to venture into its line of sight. A skilled Magrider dodging killing blows is truly a sight to behold. It is enraging to see them taunting on top of a mountain no tank was ever meant to climb. You know not despair until you drove around a corner and found yourself face to face with a Vanguard, his 150mm main gun ready to spell your doom and his shield charged to ensure his victory. I relish the feeling of resisting a VS zerg at a base, killing and being killed, as I make them pay for every metre and minute they advance, while their numerical advantage slowly chokes the life out of our troops. I cheer at the sight of a TR airborne platoon coming to deliver us from our plight. And I weep as those heroes of the sky get torn apart by the enemy FLAK. There is nothing more terrifying than the sight of an airborne platoon, delivering a NC MAX-crash at the last minutes of an alarm. No triumph greater than to stall them until the alarm is won. It is my utmost pleasure to battle wits with the enemy guards as I sneak my explosives to their sunderer. There is no rage like the bullet that denies me success, and no sound more marvellous than the lifeline of their assault crumbling through my cunning and daring.
My friends, I love this war....

I'll bite as well....



IMO - the answer to this is real simple.

Instead of thinking players\gamers wouldn't get it because its too deep they should have done the following:

1. Take Planetside 1 - add planetside 2 graphics
2. Add new weapon mech instead of old PS1 gun play style
3. Keep everything the same from planetside 1 apart from models & graphics
4. Profit & Win!

Instead they took PS1 conept - tried to make it different and easier and instead got massive fail...
In my opinion.

1. "Take Planetside 1 - add planetside 2 graphics
2. Add new weapon mech instead of old PS1 gun play style
3. Keep everything the same from planetside 1 apart from models & graphics
4. Profit & Win!"

3.5) Get rid of the CUD cheats, command XP, caves, BFR's, sunderer EMP blast thing I read about, and roll back 2008 AV buffs..

Awesome idea. That will guarantee no battle takes place anywhere.

It has nothing to do with age, not to mention that the minimum age is supposed to be eighteen. This is not a 'game for teens.' Especially when most of the player base are not teenagers at all. And yes of course Smedley should get the chop but his history with this game and others is bad enough without being ageist about it.

Not listen to meeeeeee

I'm with everyone else about how much this game still needs to be worked on. I've been suggesting, commenting, bug reporting, etc since BETA. But it's a bit unfair to really diss Smedley that much. When you actually hear him talk and other Devs like Higby, they're actually incredibly passionate about gaming and PS2.

That's not a total excuse but they don't really deserve some really harsh comments in my opinion.