Originally Posted by Emperor Newt
Said some awesome stuff....
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That's some really smart and important logic, especially with regards to the logistics and costs involved with tournaments. Hard to imagine a "lan party" style thing even being possible with teams of 48.
When Smed clarified last year that his vision of "e-sports" was more like reality tv than MLG, that concept sort of made sense for PS2 as a persistent world MMO. However, since then SOE has completely failed at making the world meaningful to the players, which completely removed any possible "drama" the players could entertain an audience with. Simply put: no one cares what happens on Auraxis, because none of it ever
matters.
With that in mind, turning PS2 into a large scale session shooter, through this MLG thing, would at least make something useful out the game. Logistically, it's probably not possible to have physical tournaments, but Internet based ones are certainly viable. Would it be hard to organize more than 48 people per team? Sure, but Buzz and other outfit leaders proved that it's entirely possible within the context of PS2. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
It saddens me that SOE didn't make anything at all in PS2 to develop community identities and player associations. Even a concept as simple as giving Outfits the ability to declare an outpost or facility their home base and then only granting Outfit bonuses while that outpost/facility is held by their empire, would have given players a sense of "home" and meaning. Add to that concept the simple addition of granting each outpost/facility one unique benefit when it's your "home base" and all of a sudden Outfits would have a reason to consider where they'd like to situate themselves and care about the state of the world in general.
There were a lot of "little things" SOE could have done, lots of "community building game play systems" they could have added, that would have allowed PS2 to build strong emotional bonds, like Star Wars Galaxies did. SWG was WAY more buggy and annoying than PS2 (though it crashed much less frequently...), yet it was designed in such a way that even a decade later people are espousing how great it was to play with the friends they made. I stressed this long before "Planetside Next" was even in closed beta (ie. I posted it on the PS1 forum), but no one seemed to "get it". Now the population is dwindling and no one outside of the niche of hardcore Planetside fans even cares about PS2... Smed, why did you have to fail on this most important aspect of an MMO? (Community building, in case that wasn't clear).
Anyhow, MLG and the PS4 version may be the last real chance this game has to build some kind of dedicated community that has the potential for growth. It's finally something people might actually give a damn about. (I won't, but I am sure others will).