Why I think PS2 failed...

A lot of you are probably going to say "Hey, PS2 hasnt failed!" And a lot of you probably agree but wont say it.

Really the reason is nothing new. Its been in my sig for quite awhile. They released this game with no point.

Now the fanboys will say "Hey, COD and BF have no point!" And the first thing Ill say to that is I hate COD and BF, saying PS2 is ok because other games suck too isnt going to save this game from failing. But COD and BF dont suck because they have no point they suck because theyre too small, simple and repetitive. They do have a point though or points depending on the game type. Capture the flag, you score the flag 3 times or whatever it is, you win, etc. The other game types have their criteria that you must achieve to win. PS2 doesnt have that, there is no point, its just an endless XP grind that goes no where and does nothing.

And heres what I think SOE did. They never figured out what the point was going to be before they started making the game. They must have been like "Hey, lets just start working on the environments, characters, vehicles, etc now and worry about what exactly the point of the game is supposed to be later". And then before you know it the deadline is up and they have to put out the game, albeit with no point.

Anyway, I think PS2 will hang on for a couple of years. Many MMOs limp on for years in critical condition, Im sure PS2 will do the same.

The only thing that will save them is adding new game play mechanics like continent locking, though I doubt continent locking by itself is enough. Ive yet to see any indication theyre ever going to add anything of substance to this game. As the game limps on theyll add new vehicles, new maps, etc, but itll still be the same old boring XP grinder.

Apparently they used to claim they'd never go with a Lattice System and persevere with the Hex. If that's true, they obviously knew it couldn't work and had to go against their word. And that's an incredible overhaul, quite a game changing aspect.

I suspect that because of the type of Player base that grew with PS2 from it's beginnings, they have had to twist and turn all over the place deviating from their original vision.

Imagine today, someone building another Ultima Online ('97 launch), which at that time sported a somewhat more mature player base in a niché and original MMO, where very few Teenagers played. The first Felluca UO rulesets wouldn't work at all now on the Player base MMO's attract now, it would be absolute chaos and a disaster (Sorta like Mortal Online, and that's hanging in the balance).

I suspect the original player base for PS1 was a different kettle of fish as well, and nothing like the crowd that PS2 has drawn in.

At least, I postulate that could be an issue.

The game has a point. Take as much territory from your enemy as possible. The catch is the game is persistent, so the war never ends.

I think what you're trying to describe is the lack of commitment that a section of the player base feels. To them the game is about their K/D and making epic montage videos for their friend to watch and tell them how pro they are. This isn't the games fault, its the part of the player base that lauds praise upon what its used to, a style of game play developed in a small scale 12 v 12 environment.

The missing part of the puzzle is coming however. Continent locking. This was on the cards from day one, but PS2 has had a slow path to walk to get there. It's one of the critical parts of PS1 which really change the dynamic of the combat. Just as the Lattice has almost stopped the daily occurrence of an entire empire sitting at The Crown all day and tunnel visioning into the 12 v 12 mentality and forgetting about the 30 other sectors, Continental locking will force people to recognise the global scale combat they're actually meant to be fighting instead of obsessing over the single base fights.

It's not the player base fault, a percentage of those who miss the bigger picture were in nappies when PS1 was released in 2003, and the intervening years have only been filled with CoD, BF3 and the like. Of course they are used to thinking about only fighting in one base, that's all the map they had in other FPS shooters, it's what they're used to. Breaking the TDM habit is hard, especially because if you want to, you can play PS2 like a TDM and only care about your own personal score. Constantly checking your K/D, working out what weapon or vehicle is "OP" this patch so you can farm your score higher. This is thinking small. One guy can farm a great kill streak, but if that soldier is fighting in a base that's long since been cut off and is dragging others away from the ever greater loss of territory off in the distance, they have done the enemies work for them. They have reduced the ability to hold on to precious ground, and once Continent locking arrives, doom themselves and the rest of their empire to being removed from the continent.

With regard to character development, I tend to agree to some extent. The predefined class system is another accommodation to pre-established FPS games to help people feel less out of depth. However the cert tree goes some way to helping, and of course not forgetting that the game can and does evolve as time passes.

So PS2. Not dead, just a bit misunderstood. Once the player base gets its head round it (with a bit of a nudge from continent locking) the game which it should have been will come into being, and we can finally put it upon an equal footing with its forbear. PS1 was always going to be a tough act to follow, but PS2 is more than capable of being the true heir to the name. Heaven knows it's already the best FPS game out there, now it just needs to beat its dad.

PS2 didn't fail. It's pretty successful. You're right about having a problem with a point (or 'metagame'), but hopefully upcoming development will go some way to addressing that.

No way to know if it has succeeded or failed without knowing their costs and their income. It isn't a massive financial success like a WoW, but it seems to have a stable population of people willing to shell out cash.

It is tenuous though. One good combined arms MMO hitting the market will annihilate this game.

SOE are actually a lot better than most of the games industry and most of us here have had a lot of laughs and unproductive hours playing this game so let's not be too negative.

No I think ps1 and ps2 people are pretty much the same type of person, within a spectrum at least and with different previous experience.

But otherwise the same age range, the same playstyles, the same countries. A different previous experience perhaps.

Bah, they should have made 15~20 good base/tower designs and copy pasted them all over like PS1. This "every base is an individual" idea is just far too expensive, and slow, to do on the scale PS2 needs. We should have had 15 continents by now. They could have went back later and individualized the continents.

You're right. As much as most of us, including me, like to bash and sometimes be negative and hate on SOE, I think we still all want it to succeed the best it can. I thoroughly enjoy the game and I play this game more than any other and have so since BETA. There's so much good here, but a lot of "grey / muddy" area in it too that needs to be worked out. But nothing is horribly bad.

I wish we'd all band together to be more positive and really strive to help make PS2 something special. I personally don't want it to hemorrhage and die off. I don't think you guys want that either.

Sorry OP. It's far too "Pay-to-Versatile" to ever Fail by the only standard that matters in the Business.

Have other games found less grubby ways to sustain themselves?? *cough*hatsimulator*cough* ... Yes!
But no, this can't "Fail". It's cyclical-income capital and bandwidth/production expense are effectively joined at the hips.
It will effectively take up to a decade for it to become so dated that it's no longer sustainable.

il still play once it's down to a single server and i have a ping of 300ms. i have the ps4 on standbye for when it hits that level of dead. hopefully years away.

The psychological value a player puts into the base is how much effort is put into defending it. Right now we put zero effort into defending, therefore there is no value to winning.

Why should you bust your nut capping XYZ base, when in 20 minutes time the enemy is just gonna roll in and cap it with no resistance?

Want player to defend? Give us the PS1 AMS, PS1 mines, PS1 spitfires, PS1 motion detectors.

I knew this was coming. Gotta agree, just another part of PS2 lacking from PS1.

There is no real reason to be positive about everything, just out of style, because marketing messages make you feel warm and fuzzy or whatever. But looking at the game as a whole and calling it a complete failure while talking about only things you see as bad is too much for me.

It's true as well that we can get too focussed on small details and be over critical of them. But tend to think that that is how things get done myself.

Well for starters, I do disagree... I don't think this game failed.... though player retention has been problematic recently.

And how can you NOT compare to BF/COD? They're the industry "standard" FPS games, and in comparison, PS2 is a whole lotta shooter. It has more "purpose" than they do, with a massive scale, and even better hit reg than BF (And COD hardly counts since they still use hitscan).

The meta game isn't what it could be... but they're (slowly) working on it. Server wide battle lines (Continetal Lattice) and resource revamp (supply lines) will really add to that depth and hopefully they'll add more depth the the RR as time goes on to make it better, while adding more continents and islands to grow the server world lattice.

The game is fine, and has been fine for some time. The thing about it, is that in an effort to suckle the Early Access teet, SOE made an early access game... except they didn't tell anyone that.

PS2 has been in early access Beta for 2 years now, and just seems like no one really knows what they are doing. I really don't mean that to sound as rude as it does, but the fact of the matter, is that PS2 development has this predictable pattern, where something messes up, someone comes on and says: "Oh we'll fix that and make sure it never happens again" and then... 4 months later something else major messes up and we repeat.

It's only so long that someone can really stand to put up with that, before they decide their time is better wasted elsewhere.

You then have a ton of little niggling issues:

• Developers that pretty much Openly Despise the community they develop for (Tayradactyl is a great example)
• Inconsistant Q&A standards: OMFG was wonderfully handled, professionally done, expertly delivered... really A+ there. The first 2 months of this year, was similar... and now we're back to where we were this time Last year: Buggy releases, unbalanced content, patches to fix patches to fix balance to fix patches, pushed back features, etc. etc. Oh, and look: Raxxyl posted how sorry he was, and how from here on out everything will improve. Occasionally they will mention the PTS as a means of preventing this, then do nothing to support PTS play... I'm betting that will happen again this time.
• Promise of content that seems to not be at all considered a priority but is demanded by the community: We have the Most upvoted content in the history of the game, the Resource revamp and the continental lattice both being divided up into separate parts. The parts that people WANT of the resource revamp, the ants and whatnot... are being pushed back to sometime in the far flung future, while the part that no one really cares about: the 1 resource and different resource recharge rates is being pushed first. It's Painfully obvious reading the Resource revamp post, that people just want Ants and logistics back... but god only knows when we're getting that.
• A refocus on monetization instead of quality gameplay. People will pay for a good game, instead we're getting a perplexing amount of time being devoted to features that will bring about More monetization. I would be floored if the boosts in playerbase following the implants system was greater than that after the implementation of the continental lattice.
• Cart before the horse: I've said this a million times, we have features that have been put out now, that break the game as it is now... but will fit into the game when OTHER features are implemented. Examples: the 100%-75% continental cap, the alert system, and the WDS. At LEAST 2 months, probably more, was wasted on WDS, a system that wont make sense until decent controls are introduced to help underpopulated factions deal with overpopulated factions. The 100%-75% change absolutely screwed over any sense of accomplishment in this game and was not reverted despite again, this will benefit Continental locking, something that wont be implemented until at LEAST next month (Probably longer). And none of these things have been reverted... For No Reason.
• A witch hunt on toxicity in the community, rather than addressing the sources of the toxicity: This goes back to devs hating the players. There are many persistent comments made that could be addressed or fixed by the devs, that instead they wish to take light of and even insult members of the community who make them. I'm going to be blunt, I think T-ray is a great artist, I like his work... but there have been at least 2 times where community backlash against something he approved was such that it warrented a response, and his response was pretty much: "Nope, it's your problem not mine." One is the NC Bra changes (Which was responded to by: "Well some people like it," which was unsubstantiated nonsense.). One was the TR infil armor... which was already Out, but this time was yellow... again, response was that it wasn't his problem. This all has over time seemingly from my perspective made the devs less receptive to the communities complaints... instead making them classify everything as Toxicity in the community. Sometimes we get straight backhanded responses from things. You know what this does? This makes a toxic community, even worse. Most of the time, what people are asking for isn't exactly world shattering: People want something to do in the game, people want an explanation for why X is done in Y way... these are Easy statments to make... but so often they are made once and it is on the community to FIND the answers from the absolutely daunting volume of sources. I know it's a lot to ask that information come from ONE source, but... Information needs to come from ONE source. People shouldn't have to look on Reddit, 12 twitter accounts, ps2 forums, facebook, PSU, and Clegg's Vine... To find the information on the game.

This is a new one to me... intrigued.

They didn't put in a 'point' because they knew that the continental capture/locking system from PS1 would never work with only three continents in play, and they wanted to shove the game out the door and start monetizing it ASAP so they launched with three continents. They promised more, but look where that's gotten us -- almost two years later and they still haven't got continent #4 out the door.

Every single part of PS2 has been compromised to cash in on the F2P model. It could have been something great, but SOE had dollar signs in their eyes, didn't feel like putting in the effort to figure out what went wrong with PS1 (hint: Core Combat), and wanted to hop on board the white-hot F2P gravy train while they still could. I guess I can't blame them, after all it did work for a while -- I and a lot of people I know dumped a considerable amount of cash into this game for the first six months to a year on the promise of it developing into something as good as PS1. Now SOE has our money and we still have a shoddy rushjob of a game.

Guess we've learned our lesson for next time.

TBH, I would have been happier if they upgraded PS1's graphics, gunplay, and code base. Followed that with 10 new good base/tower designs. Then PS1 style copy-pasta the new bases & old bases onto 10 new continents designed to hold 600 players each. After release they could have went back in "individualized" the bases as they wanted, but during the interim we would have had a full game to play.

PS2 is struggling because of a lack of any real meaningful content and constant bugs and instability issues.

Most players won't be retained and most of those that stay won't want to spend money on such an unstable product