Why is Planetside 2 losing so many players?

thats called flawed render distance and lag, but feel free to think you are special

Its not the loss of people from the initial surge that concerns me. Its if they can keep attracting newbies and then retain them.

Lots of people are quite good at this game already. The very quick TTK and the various ways you get insta-killed. Newbies doing nothing but dying repeatedly isn't gonna be fun for them. Perhaps servers with battlerank limits. Allow newbs to fight other newbs for a while before they get moved to the higher battlerank server?

A: Holidays & Steam Sales

im nearly on the verge of quiting I play Nc and vanu and tr weapons plus the air crap just makes me give up. some of you will call this complaining well it is in away. I played beta as did many and i never felt this way then. Air was gimped then but now well we just leave when air spams show up . Sadly the hacking has gotten so out of hand as well. ill wait for the next patch before i put a finaly verdict in but im not sinking another penny in this game till they do something about the above. this game is a good game and its new i know that soo ill wait to see what Soe does hope they do it soon.........

Yeah, this too. I imagine most new players who try the game are dropped into an empty ghost cap, or a battle where they will be constantly slaughtered by the hordes of Skilliberators, tanks, rocket pods, and the sheer amount of instakill explosive spam in this game. Either scenario likely winds up with them logging out and never returning.

I think there's a few real badboys.

1. Poor optimization. Game runs poorly on many PCs. Low FPS can severely reduce the gaming experience.
2. Certs, takes too long to earn. The long road to earning them, coupled with the fact that many Certs are straight up upgrades, could demoralize many, especially newer players.
3. No in-game tutorial.
4. Poor defense against hackers. Can scare a lot of players away, even without having met hackers, or cause them to believe that incidents where lag was involved, that they met a hacker.
5. Unsatisfying gameplay, essentially just base flipping. The K/D system also doesn't fit into this game, and having a 0.4 K/D or so stuck onto their stats I could imagine would be rather demoralizing for newer players.

I quit because the servers were dead, every time I play my server is either low or medium and when the game launched it used to hit max and I'd be in a 600 person queue. Now I can go cap bases on my own for like 20 hours of the day, really the only time there are any good sized battles is during prime time, which is a big problem that SOE never fixed over the original.

They need to just have one server per region and have more conts, then open conts as each one becomes full. This way the players get forced together and we have big battles and balanced populations. Instead we just have each faction dominating a different cont and ignoring each other because no one wants to defend a base as the capture mechanics suck and the hex system is ****.


The game will be dead in a few months tbh, SOE rushed another broken game that no one wants to play to release.

My server was pretty active tonight, a Wednesdy, up until a lot of people crashed several times in short order. I don't plan to play much until that issue is addressed.

The game gets boring very fast, which is why players leave. Don't waste your money OP. The reasons the game gets boring are:

-Only flying an ESF is generally fun
-Ground combat limited to The Crown, and very rarely Biodomes: Everywhere else it's just a vastly outnumbered defender getting rolled by an overwhelming force in an undefendable location where the attacker could win with half the numbers anyway due to base layout
-Base layouts lead to spawn camping first - then capturing, stifling any resistance that could have been possible, meaning no one fights outside of the Crown
-Spawn proximity leads to ghost capping being the most effective strategy in the game (flying around in an ESF, to land run around in an empty base and flip cap points to fly away to the next outpost and repeat - increadibly boring, but super effective)
-Crash hack stops any good fights if they start: Too many hackers using some insane hack that causes plattoons and outfits to be dropped by the game at once in big battles - effictively ruining the battle. Happened to my outfit 3 times now.



Now what's crazy is most of the posters on this board don't even want these issues fixed. Instead they want to make the only thing that's fun to do in this game (fly an ESF) impossible, or remove them, instead of fixing the actual problem that base layouts and the experience point system causes the percieved "air is overpowered" issue (libs may be, but anyone who claims an ESF is OP hasn't tried one).

The only point you make I disagree with is point 1; and only partly.

I'm no expert in statistics but:

Sampling the Steam players from the whole population is probably a good indicator of the proportion of players that have stopped playing over the period of time. If if there is a 50% drop in players per day on Steam you might be able to say roughly the same drop has happened to the entire population.

One of the only times this wouldn't apply would be if there was sample bias, such as Steam being full of whiny kids who would stop playing a game at the drop of a hat, as opposed to the rest of the game's population who are full of intelligent and patient ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to assume that's not the case; there are idiots everywhere.

Of course the data does not show the actual number of current people playing though, and there could've been 60 000 total players per day at the start and roughly 25 000 right now for all we know, which is where you would be right about Steam data being inaccurate here.

Regarding your other points I do agree with them and the data can't inform this by itself.

Subscription model is mostly dead as a business model. Outside of some existing games that have been around for years, and have a loyal fanbase,and large following namely EvE and WOW. the majority of all MMO type games have either gone under, or have gone to a F2P /content pay/item shop system in the last half dozen years. Given the current economic conditions around much of the world, investors are no longer willing to take the high risk that Online games with monthly subs represent. The last big launch in the US, was SWTOR, and in less then 2 years its gone to a F2P game, in order to generate revenue.

As far as the numbers, steam is a big enough sample size to be considered for statistical data i believe. No real idea what the margin of error would be. That said, its showing a typical trend in MMO's, even though its a FPS, in that it generates a high level of interest early on, or willingness to try it, and tends to lose a significant portion of its potential consumer base quickly.

The games that show success online, are ones that have grown it as a grass roots movement.

this

Because they are neglecting and ignoring the top issues presented to them by the community

That's a good idea about a server for low-ranks. It would have to be based on a larger equation, though, as someone who has 3 characters of BR-10 each, effectively has triple the actual experience, but might still qualify if rank alone were used. And then there's the possibility of experienced farmers opening new accounts just to troll the newbie servers. I don't know how big of a problem that would be.

I posted a poll back in beta asking what players felt was the biggest downside to the game, and to my surprise, 'newbie learning curve' was at the top of the list.

A well done, in-game tutorial could have helped this game a lot, and to release without it is just suicidal. Frustration with learning a new game can drive people away just as quick as any other issue.

The sad thing is, SOE could have enlisted one or more of the well known names in the community to design the tutorial for free. There was plenty of time for it. /sigh/

Probably because right after releasing a game, they all left to go on vacation all over the world while players went on a rampant exploit binge. New players gave up, and subscribers like myself canceled.

Most larger companies usually put x months hold on vacations during large events like this. It's no wonder Sony in hemorrhaging so much money.

You forgot to Add that many Vet players are very sick of the hacks that are not being addressed. I know my self and about 50 others have sent in Video as well as support tickets on the matter and noting is being done. So you could say many of us who have spent well into $150 on sc cash to play with the toys we like and still lose to the 2 L 4 players running into a room auto targeting 2 shotting everyone in the room and easy winning. Tell they fix there security on this great game its going to Die sadly. Shame too, because we like it.

For everyone saying that chart isn't really a showing because its just steam....That's TWENTY THOUSAND people..in less than a month. GONE. I honestly would like to see a percentage of memberships that have been cancelled since then....mainly so I can raise my hands in success of never purchasing one to start with.

whats missing is a real virtual combat zone like planetside had and real Sanctuarys, dropping new players into an obviously defended base simply because it as 1-2 allies in is stupid to say the least.

Real bases like they had in Alpha too, these we have now are idiotic.

I was so happy when beta ended because no one could make the 'it's beta!' excuse for the game performing poorly.

Then, it evolved.

'it's finals!' 'it's Christmas!' 'it's new years!' 'its national take a dump day!'

When do the excuses stop?

I didn't get the impression the Original Poster was comparing apples to apples with their graph, so I asked for the data on the currently Top 5 Free To Play games on Steam and got this:



Seems like this peak and then drop off is normal for F2P, especially in games that have a rocky start like APB Reloaded. Planetside 2 has some serious issues and this is not a ideal start, it is apparently not leaving a good first impression on gamers after enjoying its initial burst of popularity. I personally think the biggest offenders are:

- game client crashes to desktop
- map + base design that encourages spawn camping by AOE weapons on vehicles, most commonly Liberators, then Pods from ESF, the HE from tanks and Sunderers (Hi there new game, lets see what I can do n~BOOM! You lose, enjoy waiting to respawn, sucker!)
- graphical glitches, low frame rates, and other latency issues
- map + base design which makes it appear that the only way to face off against a zerg (larger numbers) is to be on the attack with larger numbers on your side (guess what a new player probably doesn't reasonably have yet)
- BR1's being shoved into a random squad of unfamiliar players in the middle of a hot spot after what is laughably called a tutorial, only to most likely be killed by a BR20+
- NC's Drop Off, Recoil, RoF, and CoF (1 out of 3 chance a player's first experience will be ... more or less challenging to hit their opponents than the other factions basic weapons, let alone the advanced) ... and a bad Indar Warpgate for their faction's specific vehicles that have the hardest time with slopes as their basic load outs