You should have focused on combat

Since Rogue Planet took over, there vision is wrong, you guys should have focused on the most important element of the game. Combat, gunplay, refining the particle physics and I will be the first to tell you that the vast majority wants special operations.

It’s the character customization, the inherent feeling your are one with your character and you feel elite.

You’ve left out new vehicle concepts, compelling maps, badly needed base changes, refinement of weapons with better attachment choices, cosmetic refinements of outdated weapons, lackluster real use of wearing armor that is only appearance based, not expanded belts or backpack to give more viable options, hell you could even explore more in implants with cybernetics, new eyes, new ears, new legs and you don’t even have to look far because plenty of content is still there from the original Planetside.

Directives are all that matter, not outfits, squads or trash camping.

YUP!

I feel they've completely missed the mark.

People play planetside 2 for the massive scale and the combined arms fights. Instead of improving performance so the game doesn't nuke itself the second a few players start fighting on the map, or reverting the CAI change, they decide to add more explosions and outfit gimmicks.

And why, why do we still not have more medals/directives past auraxium?????? Seriously, dudes have 20, 50, 100 thousand kills on a weapon and still don't get any rewards. Ridiculous.

They should have worked on the gameplay flow.

We've seen enough evidence to know that people go to 24/7 fights not because they are what people want the most, but because the rest of the gameplay just isn't fun. With the Outfit update we saw everyone jumping back into the base capture parts of the game rather than 24/7 fights, only to find out it's still not what they want.

That gameplay flow of capturing a base, fighting to the next one (which is often just an uncontested drive to the next base), then fighting through the next base should be just as fun and engaging as a 24/7 fight, if not more. Make sure that after a base is captured the fight isn't put on hold until the attackers can haul their behinds to the next base but flows smoothly into a vehicle battle and then smoothly transitions back into a base battle. Make sure that when you are outnumbered the fight is still fun, this game doesn't have population balancing so you should still be having fun and something productive to do even when outnumbered and fighting a Zerg.

On top of that they should be working on a better vanilla state. Currently a newby with a vanilla vehicle or infantryman is simply outgunned and outperformed by anyone with an upgraded vehicle. Make everything side-grades, a vanilla vehicle should be the most middle-of-the-road vehicle available and any upgrades you throw on it would only specialize it into one form or another. Alternatively a vanilla vehicle is much cheaper resources wise, and becomes more expensive the more upgrades you throw on it as a drawback.
They should also look at all the low-use content. Why use anything other than Nanoweave or Flak armor for general combat? Make other options just as good, or make the nanoweave and flak less universally useful. Similarly other upgrades need to be looked at. At the end of the day almost every upgrade would need to see more or less the same use.

PS2 lacks, first and foremost, a clear direction (or strategy), to evolve. In all those years I have seen feeble attempts to change things left and right without pursuing anything further. Here a few "unfinished businesses":

-PS2 infantry weapons are mostly copy&paste of each other, without strong faction traits (aside from heat mechanics which is VS only), low-quality (by today's standard), suffering from game engine limitations (high RPM weapons limited by FPS). What did they do?

1. "Doku will make new weapons". Doku made 3 nice models copy&pasted (longer/shorter barrel, bigger/smaller blocks) to squeeze as much money as possible out of it resulting in an LMG, a Carbine, an Assault Rifle and a Battle Rifle. Then disappeared from the scenes. No more new weapons.

2. "New weapon mechanics": unstable ammo, capsulate ammo, impact ammo, then a few weird experiments (low RPM first, high RPM after, then the opposite), capping Bloom (Naginata), capping recoil (Promise). The unstable ammo was heavily nerfed due to hitbox issues (didn't they knew it already?) Plus even more odd weapons now given away from free because nobody buys them (the "playful NSX Tengu").

3. Okay... Let me think. I got it. We take the existing weapons and reskin them. Low effort high gain. Here comes the NS-11A reskinned (which is quite nice BTW), the Archer reskinned, then stop. What next? No idea...

Are weapon fine? Balanced? Are there strong and prevalent faction traits?

- Population Imbalance.

1. Queues. Nobody likes them.

2. Here come Koltyr. Everyone goes there when they have nothing to do. But it is forbidden to make XP in Koltyr and it is too small to be useful. Then lock Koltyr for good. Then open it again. With or without XP? Who knows...

3. Koltyr does not work. Queues neither. Here comes NSO. Which weapons? NS only. But those are too few and not specialized. Two carbines almost equals (NS-11C and Tanto), an useless Assault Rifle (Yumi), the Naginata (not so bad but with limited use sometimes). Vehicles? No... Special weapons? No (except the sniper rifle of the Elephant Man), an unfinished Javelin. Stop

Meanwhile, often there is imbalance. Only a fraction of players can play NSO. Only a fraction of that fraction likes NSO and keep logging in.

- Alerts

1. How to win a continent? Okay let's toss construction. Make bases. No nobody likes bases, okay forget bases.

2. Let's make thematic alerts, everybody likes them. Kill Maxes? ESF galore (Aerial Anomalies)? Conquer the continent? Keep track of the old continents? Longer alerts? Shorter Alerts? How to incentive players to play alerts and contribute to make their faction win? Okay let's give them decals. Decals are good. No, better special weapons. No, ISO-7 for implants. No, better certs, no, better XP, All of them No... We give them A7 and then? They'll buy special weapons with those so we close the loop. No, no more A7. A7 is bad.

I could go on forever but the lack of direction is clear even without talking about collecting plants, constructions, Zergs, redeployside, vehicles versus infantry game-play, players retention (not hype. Keeping players!!!), KDR emphasis, no good tools to coordinate a team, Battle Royale abysmal failures (Arena?), the next frontier of PS2 (Planetside in the space according to Andy Sites) ...

Yeah this is basically what I was trying to get at. It's better formulated with a few good examples, but we can all conclude that the devs start working on a tons of stuff, yet never actually follow through with their ideas. As a result, the devs work very hard for very little, and most of the stuff added to the game feels confused, unfinished and overall lacks purpose, due to an overall lack of direction from the team. Can you believe Hossin still hasn't even been completed? After like what, nearly 6 years of the "temporary construction bases"? Or the lattice system?

I honestly would love if they stopped for a month or two and just planned out their long term objective, and the list of goals they will focus on to get there. Right now it's just making the game worse with every poorly thought out update.


Also it would be great if the community was actually listened to. A lot of the stuff was already said, the feedback from pts updates and livestreams is critically analyzed and most of what the community predicts actually ends up happening...although that's not a surprise. When the dudes playing tell you "don't add that, it sucks" or "don't make an arena game, no one wants it" you shouldn't be surprised that they don't like it when it gets pushed out anyways. Seriously. So many good ideas and just common sense that the community tries to engrain in the devs, who in turn scream that they listen then proceed to disregard any critical feedback offered to them. And even in their ideas, the devs don't follow through. So in the end, we get unfinished content the community didn't ask for, and that neither devs or players are happy about.

yeah, i'd kill for more patches that buff things that are underused, nerf things that are overused,
add new weapons/vehicles, FACTION FLAVOUR.

instead all they seem to focus on is big over-the-top outfit exclusive crap like bastions, OS and colossus.
i'm so sick of getting fights ruined by OS, or getting nuked by a bastion or colossus that i can't fight back against...
that kind of easymode BS doesn't belong in PS2.

and now they're focusing on story and RPG elements?
do they even know what PS2 is?!
noone plays PS2 to run around an empty corner of the map collecting a hundred space carrots...

we need to take a break from the outfit crap and RPG junk, get back to PLANETSIDE 2!

Yes! And all of this has practically two core problems:

1. The wrong emphasis.
   • Queue's for example were against overpop and faction-switching. But if you tracked the player numbers during alerts you saw that the biggest overpop happened not because everyone joined one faction, but because everyone left one or two factions. Often something like an Alert being lost was the culprit. The queue's have been a thorn in the game's side ever since serving no real purpose other than annoy people trying to join, punishing them for something they didn't cause.
2. Deliberately sacrificing good idea's to sell stuff.
   • The devs have failed to utilize the full potential because they tried to earn money. NSO as you mention is a good example, were they try to sell memberships by dangling those juicy and much asked for NSO/mercenaries in front of them. Yet NSO is a good idea for helping solve population balance if you do it right, rather than a quick membership sell that is currently going nowhere. A few examples of lost mechanics that were wasted just to sell stuff:
     • ANVIL's (could have helped balance underpops).
     • Routers (was going to help with a continuously adapting battlefield as Medic deployable).
     • Class-specific grenades on the Punisher (could have enhanced all weapon classes and added depth to infantry combat).
     • All unique weapon mechanics for Doku weapons (could have enhanced existing weapon selection and variety of combat styles).
     • Bastion Carrier (Could have been the pinnacle of teamplay, is just the biggest farm machine).
     • Colossus (could have been a solid team vehicle with trade-offs, became a glorified AA gun).
     • Citadel shield (could have been used to create layered defenses for bases, adding depth to attacks).
     • Merit deployables like Caltrops and Hardlight Canopy (could have been used to let all players modify the battlefield).
     • etc etc.

Save your breath killers. You know they don't read their own forums and they don't listen to the community.

Wrel even calls the PS2 customers toxic. Yeah, we're so toxic that we have no problem supporting charity gigs in this game. IMHO that dude Wrel has a lot to apologize for...

ARMA 3 and Squad give me my combat fix now. I dumped DBG like a bad habit. Which it is...

Enjoy you're space carrot stew Planeteers. o7

I wouldn't be so sure. A lot of the idea's that only I tried to push through have made it into the game, although completely butchered. The Forwards Station was a modified version of an idea I had posted several times before they changed it into the Router. I had proposed the idea for ANVIL's for years as a way to combat underpops before they made it an outfit exclusive bonus. Same with the class-specific underbarrel grenades. There have also been several iterations on the PTS that never made it to live with almost copy-paste idea's I had made, although in many cases they would have swapped it to another faction (like a missile system with a limited laser-guidance and a chargeable weapon that pierces through targets).

So I actually think they do read these forums, they just warp it to fit the current idea they are trying to push through our throats and sell stuff haphazardly.

The glaring obvious stuff...

Stop dancing around it. We all want one thing at this point. It's hard to do but it must be done. It will give thousands of new playtime hours to vets, draw new players, and most importanly get thousand and thousands of retired players to return.

**** We need a new continent. ****

Also: Finish Hossin (All the "construction" bases were labeled as such because they were placeholders) And give the masses what they want: A secondary set of air controls with acceleration disabling options and a mouse yaw.

Even the lattice system was supposed to be a temporary fix while they rethink battleflow. Another failed promise

NO! A new continent solves nothing. All you get is a new continent suffering from all the same flaws that current continents struggle with. Worse, if you've seen how they handled the Esamir continent revamp they'll just cram it full with bases that are easy to capture and hard to defend. A new continent is only useful if you've solved everything else.

true, but since they don't seem to want to (or are they even able to?) solve everything else, I would rather they add new continents or piss poor revamps than the new storm/cancer/explosions/outfit assets they seem to constantly want to pump out.

Stongly thuking agreee!!!!

Nooooo, Hard pass!
New continents are a massive undertaking needing a lot of time and resources
(Which could be spent on other things)
And also look at their track record, Hossin, bad, New Esamir, worse, do we really want another one of those? XD
The brilliant peeps who designed the old maps are all gone, we're left with Wrel,
And we don't need any more abominations like his esamir redesign.

Lastly I think the next map would be Oshur, which is a series of islands,
We all know how annoying those small parts of hossin/amerish are with the bridges and death water.
Now Imagine a whole map of that. XD

Yes. It is a massive undertaking and needs a lot of time and resource. And RPG needs to rip off the bandaid and do it.

It's what will bring the old players back. Even if it turns out mediocre.

Oshur may have starting material, yes. Desolation may be an option as well. Additionally, if old resources are recycled (Koltyr / battle island) it would allow the game to extend the lattice across continent PS1 style.

And no, Wrel won't be able to do it. It's too much for his "dabbling" in map design. They will need to put dedicated designers on this.

It's big, but it's what is needed. Everything else is a half measure just trying to stem losses instead of growth spurt.

The outfit update brought the old people back. But it didn't fix the problems that made them go away in the first place, so shortly after they stopped playing again.
A new continent will do that again: A momentary surge, then people leaving again. Yet this surge will be smaller. Why? Because there's only so many times you can tempt these people to come back and disappoint them.

The devs need to first put the effort into changing the painpoints in the game. Fix the reasons why most people prefer a 24/7 fight over the "intended" gameplay. Fix the fact that people dislike being outnumbered in a game where you have no population balancing by making it fun and engaging to be outnumbered. Fix the bad balance between air, tanks and infantry.
Only then can they start pouring resources into new continents. Otherwise you aren't ripping off a band-aid but ripping out your stiches and scar yourself permanently, if not watch yourself bleed to death.

In my eyes this can also seen in most of the bases. While some of them have been overhauled around the time Hossin came out, most are still very similiar to the time when the game came out. BUT you will see the amount of "fixes" all over them. Secondary spawnrooms in weird places, stupidly placed walls cutting of parts of the base, Sunderer garages and capture points that have been moved a dozen times already etc. Those have all been done to hotfix two problems on a surface level that actually need a deep change in the game to actually prevent them.
They are supposed to prevent the vehicle zerg from farming defending infantry that are basically helpless in the current state of game. And they are supposed to prolong fights for the whole time the capture timer ticks down so people don't have to wait for five minutes doing nothing.

Solution:
Actually defendable bases, maybe with a bit of destruction, that are actaually conquered fast once the defenses have fallen, so the fight can move on.

I like the infantry vs. infantry combat for the most part. There's definitely a lot of bad weapons that get ignored, but it's hard to have every gun be different while still being useful.

My biggest gripe is the high number of BAD bases that often become the focal point of entire continents. It's fine to have a couple experimental bases near warpgates or in places that aren't commonly fought over, but things like TI Alloys are a freaking travesty to assault, and just as hard to push out of. Good freaking luck attacking The Crown from the TI Alloys choke and ravine. It is so freaking tempting to blame Wrel on this one, and I cannot count the number of /yells that do just that. It's like they haven't played the game a single time in a TI Alloys 96 v 96 v 96.

Sure, I have a strong distaste for Shrouded Skyway (two bridges and that's it) and Heyoka Chemical Lab (nowhere good to park an AMS), but thankfully they're both out of the way and easy to ignore. TI Alloys cannot say the same. The center of a continent needs impeccable design because it will be constantly used.

This is without mentioning the five identical repeat bases on Hossin, or the massive wart they added to Esamir (thankfully it's temporary... RIGHT?), or the nooks and crannies on older continents that would benefit quite a bit from an extra base and some lattice/warpgate placement shuffling. Too much positive space (the routes and attack options within bases) is poorly designed, and too little negative space (the land between bases) gets used for fights pretty much ever.

I am praying the end of the campaign is used to usher in some much-needed overhauls to the current continents. A lore reason for jumbling everything up and giving it all a new coat of paint would be a nice cherry on top to... well, fixing everything. You don't need lore to do it, just do it lads.