With the launch of Opt and New cont, PS2 becomes king

Those of you who are worrying about the downward trend in player numbers should look at what happened to EVE. It started with a huge amount of excitement and tons of people playing. Then player numbers dropped... Fast. Slowly, the numbers levelled out and started to climb. It took a long time for this to happen, but it did. EVE is still going strong, with insane player counts.

Planetside is still in that initial slump. Player count will start to climb again with time, if the game is properly marketed.

I'm not going to look up the stats for the player numbers for eve because I'm posting this with my phone and it would take me ages, but I'm sure you guys are capable of looking it up yourselves.

The process of applying said brute force, denying your enemies the ability to do so and doing so faster and more efficiently is a strategy game all it's own. This is the essence PS2 is trying to capture, and it can be seen now, abet in limited form.

You are correct though, you don't see a lot of advanced tactics (or even tactics like above) because of the other truth you mentioned:

The biggest issue with PS2 is that there is no meta-game. Once devs get around to rolling out meta game, individual battles will matter. And when battles matter, outfits will form to win them. And when outfits form, they will need to get organized and develop strategies.

And when that happens, things will become truly epic...

Great, another continent to spread out my servers already ****** population.

About good use of physx; I have seen some trailers where its used in other games and I think ps2 has the worst. The air lifts looks cool and the bullet sparks but thats it. The seemingly perfect sphere of sparks from explosions of vehicles looks like something out of a mod rather than developer quality, it doesnt look good at all. The dirt pieces from explosions on thd ground arent worth much, especially the ones indoors. Metal doesnt make thos kind of pieces.

About netcode; I dont know what to compare to unless youre not limiting it to MMO games. In Space Marine where there are no dedicated servers the death behind cover doesnt happen as often as in ps2. Back in UT2004 I was unaware of such phenomenas. I would like if someone could give good comparisons.

About new continets, I think they should have had rotating continets instead of being able to choose. First week indar, next week esami, next week amerish and so on. This would mean more servers needed, like we had at first (50% more). Then when they have enough continets for continet lattice and locking they would merge some servers. I think I would have loved that.

Bring "all" the armor for the biolab fight . (What's how NC escorts their Maxes)

Planetside 2 is a little far away from becoming a king of free to play games.
1 entire year of bugs and no real new content cannot be save by a optimization patch. This patch should be going up on the Beta Test, not now, not in this time.

If game lasts +4years we need some destruction, perhaps ap shells could go throw walls, but immediately nanites start repairing it.

I worry ps2 will never reach full player potential.

Or if the game launched last year with the content & optimisations that are coming how much bigger would it be today.

I think issues like having to switch to lattice, to many bugs, having to stop updates for optimisation have throttled the game. It will now never be as big as it could have been.

That said I enjoy playing, I hope the player base grows in 2014 & the game has some longevity. Whilst there are plenty of offline fps shooters I'll play or would like to play. I doubt I would play any multiplayer fps on a smaller scale than ps2.

Planetside 2 has an unique appeal to me. And that's probably the long road ahead.

However, Nanite Systems would be smart by keeping an eye at Roberts Space Industries.

This game has the potential to become the biggest fps game on the market.

SOE have it in the palm of their hands.

If optimization is done right and they really push their advertisement for it on PS4.... hell relaunch the game and do an advertisement drive for PC as well they could bring in a large crowd that won't be turned away by lowsy performance (as happened with alot of people first time around) and also bring them in with nearly a years worth of new content and a much more polished interface since it's not so great release last year

PS2 is the only game that offers combat on such a large scale SOE should be able to capitalize on that

I dream of a day when SOE need to bring some of the servers out of retirement to cope with a peak time player base

That was my reaction to this thread ...

Planet side 2's chance has gone allready .
Every single mmo ever ,must have good launch and content to keep players interested . if it don't have that and you start "fixing" stuff year later .... those peoples who was there in day 1 will never come back , not even if you fixed to be best game in world .

specially when bases are soulless empty boxes and environment looks like it's designed for those bases , not other way round .
(like it should)

gun models still look funny and similar to other guns. (assault rifle compared to carbine models)
infantry looks like 80's scifi space soldiers

(reminds a bit of NC and TR )

There is no way to win ,unlike original Planet Side .

1. If mmo don't have good launch and dosen't manage to keep its players for first 3 months . its going to fail .
2. mmo is most difficult game genre to create ,there is so much room to fail .
3. and if not in hands of very good dev's who have clear vision of what they want from game , game will fail .

The PhysX looks alright...but sometimes I run into this awesomely hilarious bug where massive chunks of the map pop out and cover the field from explosions. It looks cool, but you can't see through it at all.

You must be confident in SOE to actually get this optimization working. Yes I remember in January they said they were working on optimization sad truth the fps got even worse. Let hope they get the optimization right and I mean right as in these forums will be swarmed with "MY FPS INCREASED" threads.

Oh, you know what two more similarities are?

Player driven world

Depth of content

Like I have said hundreds of times, once cont-lockin' + new resource system roll out, we will see outfits taking a much bigger role.

As for content... this was (is) all the stuff in PS1: http://wiki.planetsidesyndicate.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Just think: with optimizations and balance done, SoE can start rolling out more of that...

The game has a lot of potential, but it also has a long way to go before it reaches that potential.

They better not drag their feet though, in a couple years they're going to be seeing more direct competition from games built on a similar concept. There's already one in development for Warhammer 40k, though it's not going to be F2P.

What's said above is a tad harsh, but there's some truth to it. MMO's these days have to do well from the get go, otherwise they won't reach their full potential. I've seen MMO's turn around from being close to getting shutdown, to surviving and making enough revenue to keep going. But they never go back to being popular, they rarely attract even a fraction of the original playerbase back, and they never become even a slight competition to the larger names in the industry.

OP mentioned this game will do better than BF4, now that's just laughable. There are more people playing BF:BC2 & BF3 than Planetside 2, we don't need to even jump forward to predict how this game will fare against BF4. This game had a chance to draw Battlefield franchise players. I said initially at launch that this game most resembled Battlefield and I just happened to love BF games, so it worked out for me. But the devs seemed torn on deciding who they want to create this game for, what audience. In their effort to attract multiple different audiences, they ended up with a game not quite good enough to attract any specific franchise playerbase. Those that liked Battlefield games will likely go back to BF, if they haven't already. Those that liked Planetside 1 will forever be angry that this game isn't a direct copy of Planetside 1 with upgraded graphics. Those that prefer CS probably never played this game for long. Those that liked CoD left long ago because they don't like vehicle & aerial combat. What Planetside 2 will end up with is a niche market, a niche playerbase.

There's nothing wrong with a niche game, but SOE management may feel differently. I loved this game at the beginning, but that was also back when things were more balanced, there were less cheese weapons and items in the game. If I can sum up my beef with this game in order to help the devs understand why many left, I'd say:

1. Station cash, it's the reason why we see overpowered weapons and items in the game, it's the reason why factions are unbalanced, it's the reason why people continue to get frustrated having to deal with cheese. Cheese items sell because gamers frustrated at losing will jump at any chance at buying something overpowered so they can pwn.

2. Lack of content releases. We're almost a year in, and there's still only 3 continents, that's just not good enough. People get bored playing the same maps all the time, they need something new. Hossin should've been launched around May/June, and another continent should've been launched around this time. Different maps keep things fresh in a FPS game, SOE takes way too much time getting new content out.

3. Population differences on the servers. No FPS game is ever fun when you have to play severely outnumbered on a regular basis. This has been and probably will always be a problem in Planetside 2, and it won't go away until the devs decide to instance battles. One of the things FPS gamers look for above all else, is to have a fair shot. There is nothing fair when your faction is severely outnumbered on a consistent basis.

3. Lack of direction and sense of achievement. In a persistent world, there's no end of rounds, no winner/loser. The alerts have helped but alerts are ruined by population problems. In DAOC there was a reason for taking keeps, as they lead to relic raids, and obtaining relics gave your realm bonuses. So there was always a reason for doing something. Here, there's just a severe lack of direction or goals.

and yet he still gets shot outside of his render range

Do you know how much bases (maps in terms of other FPSes) there are in a continent?
Once you've answered that.. answer this
How often do FPSs make new maps?
Now multiply that by the answer to question 1

I'd like to add number 5

5.bad design in bases . empty feeling world and similarity of every single gun ( gun's are important in fps after all ).
many of vehicles looks odd and "derpy" (harasser ,TR main battle tank ).
PS2 misses a lot of those small things what make the game world come to alive .