Top cause of players leaving PS2 (2014)

[Mordelicius]

Originally Posted by BlaxicanX

So you admit that I proposed no argument, but ask me to provide evidence to support this non-existent argument anyway?

Basically, you tried to promote your thread as having objective merit rather than being merely your opinion on some balance mechanics, and now you're upset because by asking you to provide evidence to support your assertions, I've exposed how baseless your claims really are. Okay.

Trying to paint the situation as me having some kind of secret personal hard-on for you is flattering, but inaccurate. You're not nearly interesting enough of a person to warrant "trapping" into an argument, to be honest. There are more interesting, and seemingly more capable posters on this forum for me to engage in discussion, and in fact by this point I'm mostly just responding to you out of obligation- you've already conceded that your arguments are based on nothing more than personal sentiments, so there's no point left for me to make.

In short, calm your tits.

Funny, you keep throwing words like 'source', 'data', and 'objective', yet you have yet to give any form of example of any. Again, what's your criteria for being objective in PS2 forum/discussion? Remember, I didn't use these words, you did.

From the start, you want to open an epistemological debate on PS2 'source'/'data' (and now 'objectivity'), yet when I ask you for examples to know your position, you come with nothing.

What is 'source' to you?
What is 'data' to you?
What is 'objective' to you?

Basically, you don't say anything despite 3 of my questions, and expect me to interpret your philosophic positions and debate with myself. In short, you want a debate you don't want to be part of it. That's what's going on here.

Reveal your positions, define it, then make an argument based on them yourself. Otherwise, the only one you are confusing is yourself.

[Figment]

@discussion going on a few pages back: Other games have headshots and low TTKs, because there's at most a couple out of all the 64 players sniping. But when I play CoD with someone who isn't familiar with the game, it's just impossible for them to practice duels and aiming because by the time they see me - if they even do - they're already dead. In PS2, they really won't see people coming. And small groups and loners just don't know where to look first.

Here you could have 30 snipers on one ridge. One of them will hit.

For instance, you may recall how in PS1 Thunderers could NOT hit an aircraft reliably? At all? But would do great damage if they would? We ran 9 Thunderers once. BFRs and aircraft alike would get instagibbed simply because of the volume of fire.


PS2 has more zerg. So to then lower the TTK and provide more area of effect one shot kills vehicles per capita is simply asking new players to be raped.

Especially in combination with this base design stuff. It is very intimidating to then get spawncamped too and just don't know how to get out of this situation - if it is possible at all (yes, you can spawn back a base, we had those insane discussions where defense was not allowed by some players and people were told to just leave and not fight instead because clearly that's why people play this game: to leave and not fight whenever they meet enemies of whatever numbers...).

It's simply impossible to stop large groups with a lot of volume of fire, that don't have any natural attrition because of medics and engineers having infinite ammo, heal and revive, which are all so fast you don't really get any window of opportunity to exploit.

Compare to PS1, where large groups could be bogged down, and taken out, picking them off one at a time or starved from ammo and medkits. In PS1, I and many others often single handedly defended a base against 8-15 players. Or at least stalled them. Although that took a lot of effort to do, BUT, it was possible. In PS2, you can't even leave the spawnroom in some of the buildings. Luckily the newer buildings have more cover, but too many simply don't provide any basic defense options. Just having pop-shacks isn't a defense.

[MaxDamage]

I think the real answer you're looking for is Potassium.

Too many people eating bananas for every one of their "five a day".

They're not even that great for you, you should mix it up.. all that potassium might help to prevent cramp during a workout but when you're playing Planetside 2, it goes straight to your head.

[ringring]

Another way to look at the resource thing is, how do you react when you have too little being supplied on the continent you're fighting on.

Do you either:-
a) campaign to win territories to gain more supplies?
b) leave to fight on a different continent where supply is greater
c) go to the warpgate on a different continent for 5 - 10 minutes to stock up again

The hardest and least likely is 'a'. I recall someone in beta writing a post that referenced the book Freakonomics which if I recall correctly said that players won't do what is 'best for the game' they'll do what is best for them and if those two don't coincide then tough.

Resources have never worked and I don't believe they ever will except for providing a reason to sell a boost which necessary in a ftp game. They will not add to the game experience for players.

[Figment]

People just get overloaded with information and the map changes too fast to really campaign for it on top of the effect being hardly noticeable or only noticeable over time.

Facility benefits (provides tank tech, etc) are much easier to work with. :/

[Babyfark McGeez]

One thing i never understood and it really hit me again when i was watching angry joe and friends "getting their shit pushed back in" on hossin; Why aren't resources global?

Because imo the best way to go about resources is to make the amount of territory matter (like the old system but unlike the current one), but have it global so you can't get "starved" on one continent and have to go elsewhere to resupply. One would think this would be obvious and really easy to implement.

As for basically selling more frequent access to tanks/air/maxes via resource boosts/membership, well...atm it doesn't seem to matter since it's "Phase-one-side" all over again. But once the resource system works properly i see this as a much more slippery slope than selling attachments, guns or implants.
After all, with this new system you can no longer affect your resource gain by your personal performance. Boosts are the only way to do that now. Not particulary good.

And please don't come up with this "SOE has to make money" BS, that is pretty much a bad joke by now.
Where is my purple fro, my selection of different character and face models, my server/name/sex change tokens or any other form of basic merchandising hm?
As long as i don't see any of that i call BS on any "Oh us poor, poor SOE, we just can't help but put price tags on game mechanics to survive" excuses. They are just fucking lazy when it comes to monetization, probably in no small part due to the godawful "rush it rush it" way of developing this game, but that is their problem and the dead horse continuing to rear its ugly, dead head since they announced their silly 20th november 2012 release date.
It's the gift that keeps on giving, we also owe "Phase-one-side" to it.

Maybe they will actually learn the lesson behind this for future projects, but i have my doubts about that.

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Babyfark McGeez

One thing i never understood and it really hit me again when i was watching angry joe and friends "getting their shit pushed back in" on hossin; Why aren't resources global?

Because, I imagine, because of the whole the rich get richer and the poor get poorer thing.

If the territory division means that one empire is starved then they're starved everywhere, you can't change continent to get more resources and if that happens you start asking what purpose does resources play at all.

Mind you, the problem with resources is indicative of many flawed systems. They should have designed this game from the top down rather than the bottom up.

[Babyfark McGeez]

Originally Posted by ringring

Because, I imagine, because of the whole the rich get richer and the poor get poorer thing.

If the territory division means that one empire is starved then they're starved everywhere, you can't change continent to get more resources and if that happens you start asking what purpose does resources play at all.

Mind you, the problem with resources is indicative of many flawed systems. They should have designed this game from the top down rather than the bottom up.

But how often are you so fucked with all continents combined? There has to be atleast some continent where your faction holds some territory, otherwise you're boned regardless of the system and either have like 10% global pop or your faction is functionally retarded.

As i see it, it can happen that your faction gets warpgated on one continent, but usually in turn they dominate another continent. Aside from the odd hours (where the current system is no help either) the territory control pretty much evens out when viewed globally, which is why it would make way more sense to treat resource income globally too. It would even things out.

Buuut let's see what they make up, i mean, come up with.

[BlaxicanX]

The way you've described them doesn't make them sound useful. If no sniper can OSK, then why bother using a bolt action instead of a semi-auto rifle? In fact a weapon with the faster RoF is going to be a better suppression weapon anyway.

I'd also posit that a sniper rifle doesn't make an effective suppression weapon in this type of environment anyway. There's just too many players. Rather than taking pot-shots at individual players, why not just hop into a tank and suppress entire groups of players at a time? You've got almost as much range.

[Gatekeeper]

Well, it obviously depends on damage-per-shot, refire rate, reload time, etc. etc. etc. You might as well say "how can a gun with lower RoF but higher damage-per-shot ever be useful unless it's a OSK" - which is an extremely reductive argument.

As for "why use a sniper-rifle for suppression instead of a tank" you could equally well use the same argument for using either for outright kills. The answer is that they have different pros and cons - a tank is a big, obvious target that requires an investment of resources and is limited in where it can go compared to infantry - but in return it's tougher, and has more firepower.

FWIW a tank doesn't need to one-hit-kill infantry in order to be effective either - the PS1 Magrider was a strong anti-tank platform but (relatively) weak against infantry (at least once it's 'magmowing' roadkill potential was nerfed) and was still both fun and effective.

tl;dr - there are plenty of ways of differentiating weapons without resorting to "this one has a OSK while this other one fires faster but doesn't" and OSKs aren't essential to the game.

[Calista]

They need to stop working on PS2 beyond bug fixes and polish and start working on Planetside 3. Just basically keep on with the general direction of the game while adding "maps" and other features (maybe add a 4th faction for better monetization etc.) and go for another marketing push under the guise of a different title. Sound familiar? Cheesy I know but it seems to work. If it weren't for the PS4 version coming out soon this would be a no-brainer and might still be viable in this case as well. Pops are stale and this incremental release process isn't helping much at all. Just freeze it and bundle up new things for a push under a new title and hopefully with all the work that has been done the past 2 years the retention will be better the next time around.

[CrankyTRex]

Well, when I left PS2 it wasn't because of minor balancing issues like sniper rifles. It was because I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment playing the game, and I suspect most people who try it and bail feel the same way.

There's just very few opportunities for an individual, particularly a newb, to feel like they did something important, which is due to the combination of low TTK, awkward base design, and bad spawn/heal/territory control mechanics. Instead of fixing how one captured bases, they just dropped the lattice on everything and officially made the game a meat grinder.

Meat grinders are fine for games with rounds and points like CoD because then the sense of accomplishment comes from winning a round, but PS2 is open ended, so that isn't an option.

All the potential MMO avenues of accomplishment like levels, skills, quest rewards, and such are blunted by the whole cert system which is designed around revenue generation. Obviously they're not going to spit out a new gun or camo for you every couple levels/achievements because then you'd be less inclined to pay money for certs, and similarly the amount of certs required for anything of note has to be high enough to encourage paying instead of playing.

And it's not terribly organic at grouping people together outside a zerg either. A small group of five guys have pretty much no chance of heroically stalling a larger enemy assault and thus build some form of camaraderie such that they might stick together for a while. If you're outnumbered, you might as well just leave rather than fight to the death.

So once the novelty of the scale of it wears off, there's not much reason to stick around unless you happened to make some friends with an outfit.

[Mordelicius]

Seems they are reverting the alert changes.

In Emerald, VS just cap every continent while NC and TR just Indarside through it all. There's no reason to participate on multiple alerts that goes on and on. That is even when they recently changed it to 50-51% victory conditions.

Any future continent locking mechanics should prevent stacking in one continent. This will make it more challenging and rewarding to cap a continent.
Example:

Esamir Lock Conditions: 95% Esamir base capture + 33% base capture on 2 (or 3) other continents.

Sure, players may not be in Esamir, but the will still be a part of the process while withholding the 33% base percentage from a faction stacker, while fighting in Indar, or Hossin. This will bring back the multi-continent 'campaign' feel that was lost when they discontinued the Global Alerts .

These conditions should be explicitly stated in the Warpgate terminals for the non-alert event. Or better yet, it should be in the map.

Currently, too much continent stacking. This will remain true even if they revert back to the last alert/continent cap mechanics. It's almost as if it's a race who get to zerg through the continent first, while neglecting the other continents. And if one caps first, it's a race whether the next cap can be stopped or not.

[Figment]

I don't know. I don't know that when we say "cont lock" the devs hear "cont lock" in the same way we mean it.


They locked it. Key. Throw it away.

We mean: capture it all, get comm benefit and make it hard to get back on continent because enemies don't have a foothold, then push through to the next continent, hold foothold on other continent to keep enemies from attempting to get through the warpgate...


As I said in Alpha, the warpgate design being a Sanctuary is the culprit here. As long as the warpgate is the fallback base, you don't have active continent switching, because people aren't literally kicked off.

[Rivenshield]

Not to mention a lack of sancs means you have ten-twenty dipsticks standing around counting against their empire's pop limit... whatever that mysterious number may be.