Top cause of players leaving PS2 (2014)

[Mordelicius]

SOE need to stop fixing things that aren't even broken.

I just saw Gourney Dam get dismantled just like that on Planetside 2 Twitch channel. Witnessing the base gutted like that is disheartening and disagreeable.

The only thing that base is lacking is proper attacker Sunderer parking to the north, that's it. 'Proper' as in a shed or two.

Now, they got this wide open base that's going be a sniper haven on all sides, with tanks poking in and attackers having easy access to spawn camp both the main spawn and the teleporter spawn. Not only that, it's going to be buzzing with aircrafts now that the tall turrets are gone.

Wow, I swear, and I say this without venom. Do they even play their own game? I doubt it very much. It's mind-boggling, they always find a base to wreck. They did it to the Crown. They did it to Tawrich Tower. They did it to Quartz Ridge.

Tawrich Tower was great last year. It had this amazing crossroad that's a gateway to the east. All they saw in it was their Red Dot Dogma. Basically what that is, when they see a bunch of killing in their graphs, they automatically think it is 'bad'. Hence, it's dogma. They don't ever see it as good within context or flow.

What is Tawrich tower now? There's a huge rock formation blocking all line of sight, with the cap point in the outside building covered by more rocks. It's no wonder nobody wants to fight there. Contrast that with the EPIC fights last year. All they are doing is 'shift' these red dots, since players flee from the bases they destroy.

What's happening:
Good base tampered > Goes bad > Players avoid it > "red dots" go away.

Instead of finding cues from a good base and applying it to other bases, they're rather ruin a base, so players will spread out and not flock to it.

Now, if they are just removing a dozen objects and replacing it with a log, that would have been enough. But, why allow attackers such close access to the spawn room too?. It's mighty perplexing why spawn camping is being encouraged.

They just announced a spawn kill timer that gives zero XP. This is similar to the death XP timer i've been advocating since launch.
http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=51359
http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=56506

How will the defenders be able to defend, when it's so easy to lock players in. Do they realize that AA turrets are useless without an AV turret complement because tanks and infantry will destroy it easily? It's the interplay between Aircraft pressuring the AV turret, AA pressuring the aircraft and everything in between, vice versa. Everything in between as in Snipers pressuring engies repairing, AV laying down suppression fire on infantry pathway etc etc.

Once it is down, then aircrafts will descend to seal all defenders in. Obviously they don't know this because, they don't really participate in fights, and they aren't fluent with the chronology, flow and context of the battle at all.

This will be like Waterson's Redemption without the walls. I'm sure they never had an epic attack/defense experience on Gourney Dam. Instead, they consult graphs and dots as their reference.

[Rivenshield]

Originally Posted by Mordelicius

SOE need to stop fixing things that aren't even broken.

I just saw Gourney Dam get dismantled just like that on Planetside 2 Twitch channel. Witnessing the base gutted like that is disheartening and disagreeable.

It would seem that the tug of war between the ESports and Traditionalist factions continues apace....

[Mordelicius]

Originally Posted by Rivenshield

It would seem that the tug of war between the ESports and Traditionalist factions continues apace....

The thing is, PS2 Devs just stubbornly try to force personal/team design protocols that aren't simply fun to fight in.

some examples:
No Deploy Zones - They could have just given a Sunderer an upgrade/sidegrade ability to deploy and jam enemy sunderers from spawning players. That would have been more dynamic and conducive to the fight.

Three-point Caps far away from each other - Are players lining up to fight at J908(?) Crater? The Ascent? The new Crown? Players avoid these bases because it's simply not fun at 3-point bases where you have to WALK a long ways off and not have a good encounter while doing it. Players want to shoot and get shot at while going from point to point.

Compare that to highly popular Tower Bases and Biolabs where the cap points are relatively closer to each other. It's not even close. Watch, they will tamper with the Towers and Biolabs next. I heard they are just about ready to pluck A out of the tower and plant it elsewhere. My best hope here is that they don't put it some ways off (like the Crown).

Do they actually believe it's fun for for players to guard a cap point that's not even contested. it's a foolish thought. If one is to check ALL of the established Tower bases, if you're in one of the cap points, you're always engaged in the fight.

That or sleep at Crown C point, J908 C point. Even on non-tower bases like Howling Pass, the fights are always intense with the points, the gates, the pads and the generators are always contested.

The only close 3-point that isn't really fun is the new Quartz Ridge. And that's only because it doesn't fit the lattice it is on. The old Quartz Ridge was far superior in flowing from Indar Excav or towards Hvar. The base itself is good, but within the context of the lattice and the terrain, it simply makes no sense.

Now, they've just about imbalanced the new Gourney Dam. I mean snipers will simply be dropped on the large rocks and the high walls. If it's Vanu, there would be Lasher/Maxes there shooting energy balls at the spawns from those high points. That's not to mention aircrafts utilizing the trees, terrain and walls to their advantage. As for the tanks on the ground. What's to stop them from shooting from the bridge areas? It's similar to what they did to the Biolab defender spawn. Surround and spawn camp.

The worse part about this is they haven't cited what's exactly justifies this full overhaul. It's a very popular base and is the equivalent of old Crown at Hossin, that promotes a lot of intense and memorable -and often combined arms - battles. Yet, the first thing they can think of is replace it. Really? It's so inexplicable .

The only real thing that is 'off' in this base is the eastern part (sorry not north as I've mentioned before) where parking a sundy is almost prohibitive. There's simply no good parking spots with a large and lengthy natural rock formation. The sunderers always end up being easily destroyed by tanks in plain sight up and down that road. Other than that, there's simply no reason to just tear this great base apart.

[Rivenshield]

Originally Posted by Mordelicius

The thing is, PS2 Devs just stubbornly try to force personal/team design protocols that aren't simply fun to fight in.

Whoah. Time out.

/waves hands

Tech pubs/process analyst guy here. I've worked on plenty of major enterprise software development projects for customers ranging from HP to the state of California, and while you can have plenty of conflicting opinions on design and implementation -- and plenty of small-town style bitching and my-clique-is-cooler-than-yours-ing, because every dev team is a tiny community unto itself -- you better believe the development manager is the czar and master of everything that actually gets implemented.

Which in our case is Higby. He is a two-fisted pro-social high energy good guy and I'd probably enjoy working for him. But he is enamored of the high-speed eSports model, and we've all known that since day one. Good defense leads to chokepoints and stalemates and all those other things that are detrimental to High Speed Fluid Dynamic Gameplay. The real world fallout (to point out one example) is that he'd rather have these cockamamie No Deployment Zones than what almost any PS1 vet would regard as decent base design.

We know that because that's what we're stuck with. We're stuck with his prejudices as to what constitutes Fun, most of which are antithetical to those in the bittervet community. In all honesty, *he's* stuck with genuine constraints on man hours and money, and sometimes at a certain point you shrug and say, hey, fuckit, we coulda-shoulda done that better but it's time to move on instead of staying locked in analysis paralysis. I can't even fathom what an alarming chunk of time and resources it took to backtrack and go, uh, yeah, we need that lattice thing... and to his credit he rolled with the punch. We know that too.

(Which makes the ongoing base design tweakage all the more irritating. Why bust up good bases that make memorable fights and not redesign a few to get rid of the gayass arbitrary red circle that robs me of the high art and adventure of trying to park my AMS in the most creative way possible? Why not put actual defensible WALLS instead of gigantic fences on a lot of those bases in Esamir? And so on and so forth, which seems to be your main beef. Me, I'm jaundiced at this point. If the landscape magically changes I just shrug and fight over it any more. What I lust for is a good strategic metagame like we had out of the box 11 years ago, along with engie tools that actually let you shape the battlefield instead of merely placing random booby traps. Give me back my high-density minefields and Spitfire turrets, God damn it).

Now. About those money constraints. Sitting over him and controlling the purse strings is Smed. A good middle manager has a holistic grasp of how to deliver to the customers, ride side-saddle with the code jockeys that are doing the actual work, balance his budget, and placate his corporate masters. A rotten one makes a lot of noise about the first three ('customer value', 'bottom line' and so forth) and only thinks of the latter. You know Smed is a pure political animal when he didn't get shitcanned after the hash he made of Star Wars Galaxies. Nobody could have pulled that kind of boober in the regular business world and destroyed an entire customer base and created that kind of bad word of mouth and *not* lost his job unless he has Jedi-like bullshit artist skills. So there's that.

Fact: Higby makes all the decisions. And everything he does gets filtered for cost-effectiveness/how brightly it makes him shine to *his* superiors by Smed. We are not talking about a fucking democracy here. We're not talking about a community like PSU, except with uber game design skills. We are talking about Big Business. We have a great software lead with whom we profoundly disagree on a good many issues and a middle manager who's a hybrid clone of Barack Obama and the pointy-haired manager from the Dilbert cartoons. This is their game. It's their baby.

And if Malorn (the bittervet Steve Jobs) and his Old School Is Best School faction -- and that's what I intuit we're talking about here -- manage to shove their concepts through the double-barreled corporate bullshit filter that comprises ANY software development environment and score the odd recognizable victory, then we should be grateful.

Take all of this however you please.

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Rivenshield

Whoah. Time out.

/waves hands

Tech pubs/process analyst guy here. I've worked on plenty of major enterprise software development projects for customers ranging from HP to the state of California ...........
and his Old School Is Best School faction -- and that's what I intuit we're talking about here -- manage to shove their concepts through the double-barreled corporate bullshit filter that comprises ANY software development environment and score the odd recognizable victory, then we should be grateful.

Take all of this however you please.

Great post, but isn't intuit what we have to call eskimos there days

Personally, I think ps2 as it is now is all we'll ever get.

Right at the start Smed talked about sandbox and Eve and how it wasn't going to be Planetbattlefield. Well, if it isn't Planetbattlefield it certainly isn't Planetside.

Oh, we'll get changes alright, we'll get new hats. Sometimes I think the game is more like Ken and Barbie the MMO than Planetside (yea I know, too harsh, I apologise if any devs read this, I know they're trying).

[Belhade]

Well, then he should go and make an e-sports game and let PS2 be the large-scale battle game it's supposed to be.

[Mietz]

Originally Posted by Rivenshield

Take all of this however you please.

As someone in market communications this isnt even the tip of the iceberg.

Do you know what corporates love? Graphs.
They fucking love graphs.

Showing them a graph that goes straight up is like giving an addict his fix. This is why red dots are so important, because it makes the graph ugly.
You dont exist, the community does not exist, all that exists is the graph and the graph has to be a curve with an upwards trend, everything will be done to make that curve go up and not down. If it goes down it is evil and bad.

People have lost jobs for making the graph go down.

It doesnt matter if the graph is wrong because it has systemic inaccuracies in measurement or that it displays a change thats in the margin of error (honestly its 90% guesswork for evaluation in most marcom strats).

In my corp a designer was fired because his banner design had a 0.14% lower click-through rate (response rate) than the previous banner done by his predecessor.

ZERO POINT ONE FOUR PERCENT.

[Mordelicius]

Originally Posted by Rivenshield

Whoah. Time out.

/waves hands

Tech pubs/process analyst guy here. I've worked on plenty of major enterprise software development projects for customers ranging from HP to the state of California, and while you can have plenty of conflicting opinions on design and implementation -- and plenty of small-town style bitching and my-clique-is-cooler-than-yours-ing, because every dev team is a tiny community unto itself -- you better believe the development manager is the czar and master of everything that actually gets implemented.

Which in our case is Higby. He is a two-fisted pro-social high energy good guy and I'd probably enjoy working for him. But he is enamored of the high-speed eSports model, and we've all known that since day one. Good defense leads to chokepoints and stalemates and all those other things that are detrimental to High Speed Fluid Dynamic Gameplay. The real world fallout (to point out one example) is that he'd rather have these cockamamie No Deployment Zones than what almost any PS1 vet would regard as decent base design.

We know that because that's what we're stuck with. We're stuck with his prejudices as to what constitutes Fun, most of which are antithetical to those in the bittervet community. In all honesty, *he's* stuck with genuine constraints on man hours and money, and sometimes at a certain point you shrug and say, hey, fuckit, we coulda-shoulda done that better but it's time to move on instead of staying locked in analysis paralysis. I can't even fathom what an alarming chunk of time and resources it took to backtrack and go, uh, yeah, we need that lattice thing... and to his credit he rolled with the punch. We know that too.

(Which makes the ongoing base design tweakage all the more irritating. Why bust up good bases that make memorable fights and not redesign a few to get rid of the gayass arbitrary red circle that robs me of the high art and adventure of trying to park my AMS in the most creative way possible? Why not put actual defensible WALLS instead of gigantic fences on a lot of those bases in Esamir? And so on and so forth, which seems to be your main beef. Me, I'm jaundiced at this point. If the landscape magically changes I just shrug and fight over it any more. What I lust for is a good strategic metagame like we had out of the box 11 years ago, along with engie tools that actually let you shape the battlefield instead of merely placing random booby traps. Give me back my high-density minefields and Spitfire turrets, God damn it).

Now. About those money constraints. Sitting over him and controlling the purse strings is Smed. A good middle manager has a holistic grasp of how to deliver to the customers, ride side-saddle with the code jockeys that are doing the actual work, balance his budget, and placate his corporate masters. A rotten one makes a lot of noise about the first three ('customer value', 'bottom line' and so forth) and only thinks of the latter. You know Smed is a pure political animal when he didn't get shitcanned after the hash he made of Star Wars Galaxies. Nobody could have pulled that kind of boober in the regular business world and destroyed an entire customer base and created that kind of bad word of mouth and *not* lost his job unless he has Jedi-like bullshit artist skills. So there's that.

Fact: Higby makes all the decisions. And everything he does gets filtered for cost-effectiveness/how brightly it makes him shine to *his* superiors by Smed. We are not talking about a fucking democracy here. We're not talking about a community like PSU, except with uber game design skills. We are talking about Big Business. We have a great software lead with whom we profoundly disagree on a good many issues and a middle manager who's a hybrid clone of Barack Obama and the pointy-haired manager from the Dilbert cartoons. This is their game. It's their baby.

And if Malorn (the bittervet Steve Jobs) and his Old School Is Best School faction -- and that's what I intuit we're talking about here -- manage to shove their concepts through the double-barreled corporate bullshit filter that comprises ANY software development environment and score the odd recognizable victory, then we should be grateful.

Take all of this however you please.

I do not believe the Devs (or the specific Dev you noted) is as 100% rigid design-wise as you make them to be. While I can't reference PS1, they've changed many of design aspects of the game, such as defensibility. Many of our old good ideas such a the XP gain cooldown on death is about to be implemented. Our ideas not to reward spawn campers and reward objective gameplay are being taken to heart.

However, there are still many things that are demonstrably bad that they still haphazardly continue to implement ( such as the NDZ, and the far-spaced cap point).

And that is why the flaws are pointed in detail so they can look at it themselves. A couple of months a go, one of the Devs has said that my NDZ alternative (Sunderer Jammer) is interesting. It's a bit late -I floated that idea as counter to BuzzcutPsycho's NDZ idea 5 months before it was implemented - but it's better than nothing.

The Meta gameplay is forthcoming. They talked about Resource 2.0 with logistics. Also, did you see the Battle island city they are prototyping? It has some nice looking city grids. Lastly, they've also talked about different types of new alerts. That's exactly got me to thinking of a new continent that is vehicle-only.

Imo, the Devs and their design philosophy can change. One of their biggest flaw atm, is their method of relying on Graphs/Heat Maps/Charts to divine gameplay. I believe Gourney Dam is the latest victim of this. If any of the Devs participated in any of the epic fights there, they wouldn't lay a hand on it.

Another flaw is their philosophy of gameplay interference. PvP MMO Gameplay is created through player vs player interaction. A No-Deploy Zone is a player vs developer interaction (that a player can't win or circumvent). It's not gameplay. I'm going to drive-in a Sunderer in with 5-8% probability of sticking to break a stalemate, only to be greeted with a bzzzt, you can't park prompt. Also, before the NDZ, there are so many ways to attack base, from all sides. At the very least add a generator so it becomes gameplay.

Lastly, you're missing out one aspect from their pov: The PS4. They know that DCUO is quite popular PS3/PS4 title having 66-70% player base with the rest being PC. They are positioning this to be a gateway title for newbie console players. If these next generation of gamers get hooked on PS2, they essentially win, because these new gamers will be too jaded to settle for anything less than massive fights.

Despite that, I believe PS2 doesn't necessarily have be E-Sports-esque. They know that it didnt' click. They are just leaving room for possibility that it can click in the future. That's why many of the bases are 'measured' and ready for competitive/skirmish fights.