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

Not agree. C4 and shotguns are powerful enough.

The performance updates greatly reduced the number of crashes to desktop for me.

Agree.



My list:
1. Prices are too high. 7€ for a weapon, 5€ for a camo, which you could make yourself in 10min if moding were allowed. 7€ for a virtual weapon is not a microtransaction ... for 7€ i can get a whole game during steam sale.

2. Servers are crap. The game often laggs during primetime, although your connection is fine. (no downloads, no lag in other games, FPS always above 40) Hit detection also doesnt work properly, sometimes your weapons do no damage.

3. Balance: If something is overpowered, SOE leaves it in the game for months, then nerfs it so hard that it becomes useless. (Examples: ZOE, Striker, Vulcan) I wonder how many months it will take until SOE realizes the lib buffs were too much ...

They should have ditched the Planetside IP so there would be no expectation that this game would be like Planetside 1

*stuffs RADAR-X in a can of peanut butter*

SOE DONE GOOFED AND MADE THE GAME F-2-P SO YOU IDIOTS COULD SPAM UP THEIR FORUMS!

Just... I'll go with a simple and solid no

Too many bases, too close together; too little reason to fight over them.

I could go on with a bunch of things they have and are doing correctly (more so than my list here), so don't get me wrong and think I believe in any doom-and-gloom prophecy. But to keep in-mind the point of the thread, here are my thoughts:


Poor Project Management

1. Released out of beta without OMFG-level CPU optimization in-place
2. Lack of push to release most meaningful updates out first: OMFG, meta-game, population incentives/control, outfit tools, a good new-user tutorial etc.
3. Pushing weekly updates without the QA infrastructure or public testing plans properly in-place to catch issues on Test before they made it to the Live servers
4. Watching the Development To-Do release estimates on critically-needed updates stretch their dates by months and months
5. Lack of push to team-members to communicate frequently on the official forums, or evidence thereof

Poor Design

1. Not learning from Planetside 1 in terms of a lattice-like system, capture mechanics, logistics (where is our ANT?), provide more features for Outfits
2. A high frequency of releasing new weapon and vehicle content exceptionally out of balance, and then toning it down over a series of nerfs. I can understand if the nerfs were tweaks, but they consistently appear to be much more.
3. Too high ration of certification point accrual in contrast with meaningful things on which to spend them. I feel the options for certification are exceptionally limited after 1 year into the game. As a result, there are too many super-soldiers and not enough specialized warriors. The specialization from Planetside 1 is sorely missed.
4. Poor balance on certification choices: while I understand the overall goal is to make a fully-certed heavy only 10-20% more effective than a new heavy, with the game's TTK set as it is, that narrow window is too easily felt. The disparity felt between a new character and a veteran is too easily felt.
5. Poor balance on certification choices, part 2: where are the meaningful trade-offs to certifying my HA into armor and shields? The way it stands now, there are none.
6. Allowing different infantry classes to overlap too much as quoted here:
   " “My very first thought was everyone and everything can kill everyone and everything
   * Engineers should repair, fortify, and supply. Deployable turrets are fine to me, but why did it take so many months for the AV turrets to be toned down? Your primary weapon is your ability to set up fortifications and funnel the battle by strategically placing spawns, barricades, and assorted CE.* Medics should be medics. They shouldn't be ones to kill vehicles with C4.* Infils. Infils are sneaky. That is their strength. They should sneak into bases and hack things. They should do recon. They should be able to defend themselves BARELY if they get caught. They should fear being discovered, not the other way around.* Heavies should by nature be the ones to take out the heavy armor and air.* Light Assault should be the ones who get into tricky places to defend and breach. The heavies push up the staircase, the light assaults flank by going over the wall. The sit up in the tree picking off the soldiers attempting to rush a point. They get themselves into strange places so the opposition has to be on the constant lookout.* Maxes are a specialty class. They're either ai, av, or aa. Not all - AV/AA shouldn't damage infantry as much, etc.
7. Allowing different vehicles role to overlap too much or to be under-performing in the areas in which they should specialize:
   * Harrassars released as fast-moving anti-everything
   * the Skyguard should be the most frightening anti-air vehicle in the game, especially with the initial barrier to entry for new pilots as high as it is

Community Relations and Communication

1. Lack of specific feedback when asked development questions:
   bad: we didn't release item x in the patch because we felt it wasn't ready
   good: in terms of item x, areas a-d are ready to go, but features e and f still need tweaking
2. A low frequency of "just so you know, we're reading this" posts in contrast with the "this is inappropriate, shutting this thread down" posts
3. Disparity of information provided using other social outlets in contrast with the official forums. If new information is provided via a tweet, make the official forums link to the tweet more prominent (I like there is a link, but wonder if many miss it).

Tried to make the game too much like PS1.

*played PS1 from launch until PS2 launch*... Just before you *****

This. And they are still moving devs to other teams and not replacing them. We lost Clegg recently. Who is next?

I wonder how many of us are willing to admit originally we thought this formula would epically fail but have now come full circle given the alternative...PS2.

To put it simply without a drawn out list of specifics, what SOE did wrong can explained by the following statement:

Territory does not matter and I found that I really did not care if we lost a base.

Funny reading these posts about "what SOE did wrong" and most of it seems to be nothing but balance rubbish people are moaning about, like the OP complains about C4 when that doesn't even matter compared to the other stuff.

Here what they really did wrong:

1. They released the game too early, it was never ready and I can still remember being in beta and watching the live stream of SOE Live at the time with Smed on stage announcing the release date (not a single person clapped it was just silence) and we were all shocked by the date, people immediately posted on beta forums that the game was not ready.

2. The base designs were created in a way that deliberately gave the attackers more of an advantage in base fights than the defenders, such as spawn rooms being to 1 side and unconncted from the main base so that vehicles could camp them. So no PS1 style epic base fights but instead everything was over in 5-10 minutes.

3. Maps were poorly though out which caused each cont to be fully redone including Esamir going through a full change twice and causing months of set backs. We should of had Hossin and Searhus out by now with Oshur being made, but instead we are still waiting for Hossin.

4. Meta game, there isn't any. We've told them over and over it's all pointless as fights just move back and forth on each cont and they needed to get proper meta game in, they only needed to look at PS1 to see why people there moved around between the conts.

they sacrificed everything in terms of graphics for the sake of preformance, and then when they did focus on preformance they screwed it all up with 1 update

1 UPDATE


thats all it took to ruin any FPS that they gave us, after OMFG 1 i had 50 FPS at the warpgate and 30-40 in medium sized battles and 25 FPS in large battles


now i get 21 FPS in the warpgate, i get 1 FPS whenever a tank shell hits a spawn shield that im looking at, on indar if i look towards the vanu archives my FPS is cut in half

my FPS is fine but then when i turn it sorta hitches and lags

yeah i dont have a good computer, but it doesnt get any better when i change my settings, and im not going to play on low, because i cant see infils on low settings and the game looks like **** on low settings

im waiting for the next preformance update, right now, warframe runs 10 times better and can be more fun

Some of the ideas SoE have come up with are just Pure poison, which will lead to a nice slow painful death.
Coyotes are one example of poison already in the game.

When they first started to make this game ,they were just going to give us an updated planetside 1 .But instead they gave us PS2 .

That was when the game took a wrong turn

Which would be the case, and I would agree with you, if his 'passion' translated into action. Plus it's largely water under the bridge now as some at Sony Corporate want him out anyway. The plain fact is that regardless of his passion, he has mismanaged this game and others and his history is easily checkable in that regard. If it was a one off, that's one thing. For it to be repeated is something else entirely.

Its why the "Vet's" from PS1 were "Cryin" so much - but kiddies and mob killed those voices.

Quickly skimming over this thread - its funny how much my post rings true in so many of the posts in this thread.

What SOE did wrong with PS2?

Not using the PS cert, class and progression model:-

"There are too many MBT's" - because everybody can pull one
"There are too many ESF's" - because everybody can pull one
"There are too many Libs - because everybody can pull one
"There are too many Max's" - because everybody can pull one
"There are too many HA's" - because everybody can pull one
"There are too many "whatever" - because everybody can pull one

I don't know if the devs were really going for a "Persistent BF" game purposely, or it just drifted that way over the development time, but that's what PS2 has become, and not a sequel to PS, which is what it needed to be...

Too many places to capture. A lot of my longer battles are spent walking 300 yards down a road and waiting for a bar to change colour as the spawn room explodes.
I think these smaller bases should be left in the game, but not as actual places to capture.

The game engine was rushed, as was the release. Officially releasing a game that has constant server crashes, major hit detection issues, no 64 bit support (Seriously? 64 bit support has been important for memory intensive applications since Windows XP released in 2001) and performance problems that limit the most advanced desktop gaming machines to stuttering and FPS limits that render the game unplayable... Ignoring all balance issues, gameplay mechanics, etc...

How can you even attempt to develop and release content for such a fundamentally flawed game engine? It's like pouring the foundation for a house on top of a lake, then wondering why it sank.

The game has been patched to reduce the crashing issues and improve framerates / gameplay, and it IS playable for some, myself included. I enjoy the game, but imagine how much better it could have been if the developers had been given the time, budget, and personnel to finish the actual engine, rather then calling it done and rushing it out the door.

Simple because its what SOE always does..
They get these metrics and interpret them in a way that somehow favors the whiniest group of players that are generally on forums crying who are in fact a very small population of a community. A vocal minority if you will.

IMO sometimes you just gotta throw metrics out the window and just go by fun factor as thats the only reason we are here. A games flavor and dynamics adding that intangible that makes a game fun and exciting is not done by metrics. They are helpful, but they are not the law, unless you want a completely uninteresting piece of homogenized garbage.