[Firefly]

A majority of those games (if not all) are server-based "instances" at best, or "e-sports". They're matches. An MMO is persistent. I can tell you that of the many years in which I played Planetside, at its peak and at its slowest, that I never got bored.

Yeah we have to wait 15min for a non-LLU hack. Yeah you have to sit through the animation for a spawning vehicle, versus running up to a pre-spawned vehicle. The trade-off is that you're not fighting against 8 other players (presuming a 16v16 is evenly balanced and full). The trade-off is that you're fighting against, potentially, hundreds of other players.

Many of my fondest FPS moments came strictly from Planetside. I can count other FPS moments from other games, but if I tallied all the ones from other games, combined they would not stack to the memories of Planetside.

Or the time when we were sure we'd sit quietly for a 15-min base hack waiting for it to go through, and all of a sudden the VS decided that base resecure was their primary target. I'll wait 15 minutes because that 15min "secure" was positively the best fight I have ever seen in a video game. I was sure that we'd lose the hack on multiple occasions. We had some random hero manage to stop a re-secure at the last possible second on no less than three separate occasions in that one span. That's not including the waves of Lasher-spamming idiots and VS Max crashes that breached the CC.

Memories like four full Galaxies flying into a hotly contested base at low altitude and nearly being blown out of the sky because of the fierce AA fire. Four full Galaxies is almost five full squads. That's versus a hundred other players, and that was just my outfit. Not counting the other TR players.

Or the time when my outfit stacked a full platoon in the generator room and held off an onslaught of NC players to the point where we had to kill several of our guys in the generator room, have them respawn as MAX units and get rid of all their ammo, and suicide-rush to bring us "backpacks" full of ammo because we were almost out.

There's also the memory of running an alliance "spec ops" night where we put teams of infiltrators on every base during a three-way fight, and blowing the generators on all the bases. Hearing the comms on Teamspeak, you'd think it was World War 3 because of all the gunfights.

I'd wait the extra four seconds to get in a vehicle for this. I'd wait the extra 15min for a base hack.

But you can't have moments like that when there's jack and shit for PR. And the thing I fear the most is that SOE is going to fuck this one up the way they fucked up the first one. I spoke with the marketing guy from SOE who, most likely because he had too much to drink, admitted that there wasn't enough marketing.