Why is Planetside 2 losing so many players?

When SOE changes its ways - people will stop necro'ing the thread.

• Something is over-powered? Nerf it to the ground! Then over-buff it a month later, then nerf it again! New items should be quickly adjusted upwards/downwards on a weekly basis, rather then waiting 2-3 months to fix the balance.
• Cash grabs, cash grabs, cash grabs. Weapons cost about 2x to 3x too much in both certs and SC. You will sell a lot more 100 SC items to a lot more people then a 600 SC item. The 50-200 SC price is an impulse buy, things that are 500-1500 SC are not. (Cosmetics other then camo - prices are fine - but camo prices are too high.)
• Time-based boosts should only use up time when you are logged into that character. Another blatant cash grab.
• Failure to learn the lessons of the past - way too much of the development time has been spent making PS2 more like PS1. They could have been more successful by taking the design / gameplay / lessons of PS1 and updating it for 2012.
• Buggy releases kill games. If your QA department is not up to the task and your developers can't write good code, then don't release risky updates until they have been on the test server for longer.
• Don't release a major patch on a Thursday or Friday, then force people to suffer with it until the following work week. Patch on Tuesdays, when players are least likely to be dedicating large amounts of time to enjoying your game. That also gives you a few more days to fix things before Friday.
• Communicate on the forums / official website -- not on 3rd party sites. If your staff is posting 90% of new information on 3rd party sites and using those other sites to engage the public -- you are ignoring the people who give you money. The 3rd party sites are for MARKETING, not for engaging with your players.
• Poor support for in-game community building -- no custom chat channels, lack of outfit progression, lack of outfit recruiting tools, lack of a /who command, rudimentary friends list, MOTD that didn't display in the chat tab until this week, no account-wide friend/ignore list (ala Wildstar).
• Design problems with bases - too much copy/paste, way too many minor bases (all the bases around Tech / Amp / Biolabs should be tucked in and used for things like additional control points / shield generators for gates, etc.)

While I agree that a lot of the things that SOE has done aren't helping the situation, the evidence provided by Bonom Denej shows that despite the thread's misleading title and the severely outdated information on the first page, the game's not doing that poorly.

The whole thread is just fanning the flames.

I'd step in and say that SOE's blatant money grabs are required because they are, after all, a company. It doesn't matter what we do, whether or not we like the game, or how we like things in game; because if the company doesn't make buck, then they will simply stop making the game. If this means I'm a fanboy, whatever.

I'm sure they pay as close attention as they can afford to social media and even these forums, but when a person new to the game sees a thread that says the game is "losing so many players", then they're probably not going to play the game. They may not even bother to download or install it. SOE also has to pay attention to things like reddit, twitter, facebook, and these forums. I'm sure they'd like to be able to post to all of these options, but from what I understand is they're a relatively small team, so maybe they just do not have the manpower to watch all of these outlets simultaneously, so they've assigned at least 1 person to each outlet. It sucks for people who don't regularly use twitter or reddit, but that's just how it has to be at this time.

This is true, I don't use the steam client at all.. I've found out that it actually slows the game down a bit with steam running n the background. I am not in the statistics.

The population is stable now

At first it went down alot because people who like Counter Strike, Call of duty, TF2 ect ect were just trying the game out. Then decided to go back or they simple could not run the game

This style of game is very different from arena shooters so those players were not going to stay long

I still HUGELY dislike the shooting mechanics... not being able to get stand-recoil/spread fast enough stinks. This is probably the only reason why I don't play much anymore and when I do, only shotgun

If it's losing players now its probably people tired of the ****** performance. I know that is one my main reasons for giving it a rest. Nothing is really more annoying then deaths due to **** performance in the game. Catching a guy dead to rights, from behind, firing first and dying cuz the game's hit detect decided to make half your rounds not do anything. Or when you get surrounded, are actually killing off 1, 2, 3, and the 4th guy kills you only because you had to spend so long killing the 3rd guy.

Plus this game doesnt run particularly smooth anymore either. The zone times have like gone up 100x, I used to be able to almost instantly change zones once I was done with respawn timers, now its a minute long process each time. Hell, even getting into an equipment terminal takes like 20 seconds sometimes.....

There is no meta-game. Ive started playing the new steam released free fps-mmorpg "heroes and generals" coz at least its got some meta-game of conquering all of europe and can takes days or weeks to complete. Here in ps2 u can continent lock in a matter of hours and then it gets reset a few hours later...

Plus "heroes and genreals" counters the zerg mechanics. U can only have certain amount of players participating in capturing cities. But it allows pro teams to get advantages like better tanks and planes to come with them.

But both the fps-mmorpg are getting repetitive. I guess gaming companies just need to copy the good mechanics and remove the bad. And hopefully in a few years there will be a better fps-mmorpg with real meta-game and new different types of battles each time u play etc.

Thread locked. To prevent further non constructive posts and due to this being a very old thread which mostly doesn't reflect current Planetside 2 server population. -04