Planetside 2: Grindy McGrindy McSpaceyPants

I'm on Connery (West Coast server). I'm on the red team, handle is "Soto". I'll be the one traveling to and from ridiculous places in a jet pack.

BTW, there was a patch this morning that might address some issues. Or might not (Windows apparently thinks that the game crashes when I exit it; there was supposed to be a fix for it in this patch but nout).

So how do I get an invite to the outfit? Also, do we have a voice server up?

HKPhooey on Waterson.

Dedbuffalo on Waterson, I am really bad at this game.

I also suck. I died 15 times before getting a single kill. Since I started to figure things out, I've only died about twice for each kill but my overall ratio still sucks.

SeniorCafe at Waterson, Vanu.

Garoun on Waterson, vanu

One thing that's driving me crazy are the poor indicators that someone is on the other team. Spotted enemies are marked with a little red thing over their head, which is fine, but otherwise I'm finding it difficult to tell the difference between them and my teammates. This is a serious problem when combined with friendly fire. When I run into a random person I'm not expecting to see there's a half-second pause where I have to figure out if I should be shooting or not. The guy on the other team starts unloading on me during this time, and I rarely seem to come out on top.

I also find that there aren't very good indicators as to how I died. For example, an infiltrator could blindside me from a mountaintop, a ledge above me, or a nearby corner, and the only information I get is the weapon they used and how much health they had left. Half my deaths come from situations where I'm not sure exactly how I died, which means I don't get enough feedback on things I should be doing differently.

Still, I have had some fun moments with the game. So I'm going to give it a few more days to see if I can start making some sense of what's going on.

Also, I'm Baldr2 in the game.

CheeseToast at Waterson on Vanu

Everyone in the outfit has invite capabilities, btw. If we start recruiting heavily from the server population I'll change that later.

I only played the release version for about an hour and I've blown up so many of my friends. So many. Apparently grenades can't be thrown through the invincibility doors that you can snipe out of? Is there a penalty for blowing up your friends?

Kill enough and you'll get a weapon lock for five or ten minutes (or some duration I don't remember).

Target identification is so bad in this game. SO BAD. At least the blue triangles help identify friendlies, but the range on them is far shorter than the range on weapons.. so good luck with that!

This mainly comes up when using AA turrets and trying to decide if that incoming bomber is friendly or hostile.

There's also a UI issue with weapon switching that wasn't in the beta. I've put a few rounds into friendly MAX units by putting down an ammo pack, switching to repair kit, and the game deciding it wasn't done auto switching to my rifle and the UI gets confused for a few seconds as to what weapon I have out.

edit: thankfully weapon lock seems really really forgiving, I've never been weapon locked in this game. But I don't use the Lasher, and that appears to be it's special power.

Eh, those guys were dicks.

Yeah, SOE seems to have either miscalculated on the camo issue or possibly been influenced by greed for filty lucre into bollixing it up.

Basically the reason that target ID is a problem is that the faction colors only make up a portion of the typical solider's uniform. The basic uniforms have chunks of gray and/or black on them such that most factions look alike. Why would SOE do such a dumb thing? Well, the non-colored segments of the uniform are placeholders for the fancy camo skins that you can buy (with American dollars) through the Station Store. And if a soldier invests money in this, the camo is actually fairly effective: IDing an enemy in camo that matches the terrain is very difficult. So this whole issue creates a problem with target ID.

Also, I consider this issue to be the first crack in the "freemium parity" model: IMO buying camo gives the purchaser a competitive advantage. Camo for vehicles is not as effective but is still a small advantage.

So yeah, target ID is a problem. And it's exploitable if you pay cash money.

Did they remove the MAX special abilities entirely?

Wouldn't being unable to be distinguished from the enemy lead to a lot of friendly fire deaths?

Yes, but the trade-off is also fewer enemy fire deaths, and often a short but crucial period of hesitancy from an enemy during the split second they are trying to decide which team you are on, which can give you a signficant short term advantage.

Edit: Uniform camo IS available, I just got confused when browsing the store. So camo is available for uniforms, vehicles and weapons.

As to MAX abilities, they have in fact taken away two things. First, they removed the faction-specific special abilites (the most missed of which is the awesome Vanu jump capability - I honestly feel pretty badly cheated in picking Vanu - I'm pretty sure Talisker was counting on access to jump jets as the main reason to pick Vanu, and that's not in the game, sadly.) Second they took away the long-distance run mode, which means that MAXes can no longer easily traverse the distance between bases, making MAXes into basically a "one trick pony" of base combat only. Also, the removal of the run mode takes away one of my favorite emergent techniques from PS1: the awesome "MAX Crash" type of assault. I cry a fat tear for the loss of MAX Crashes. There was nothing quite as great as a well organized, properly timed, large scale MAX crash.


Also, one other thing I definitely miss from PS1 is the Ant. Driving a lowly, slow, unarmed Ant, desperately vital to any campaign, across hostile territory whilst being hunted by land and by air was one of the coolest things in PS1.

I understand a bunch of the changes they made: the new cert system is better than the old, the new base capture system is a massive improvement, the new base layouts are likewise excellent, and the new weapons are quite good. But, I cannot really understand why they removed the ANT or the MAX special abilities. I don't see any upside to either one of those changes, but I do see a big downside.

Talking about camo: does anyone feel Vanu(purple) have an advantage playing at night? I was originally the Blue people, and managed to lose most combat fights against vanu at night, especially in cities.

I then made a Vanu on Waterson, and solo captured all generators in a city due to just crouchwalking past lines of defense during the night(6 person squad? Ill just walk about 30 feet to their left and nobody sees me-black and dark purple are great color choices for night). I did this for like 20 minutes and nobody ever stopped me prior to coming back to attempt to recap the point.

Played with Bakir and BlueJackalope today, plus Greg for a bit. It was fun to get an outfit squad together but I died many times. We did get the outfit voicechat working: basically you need to turn your mic and transmit settings to max, and change the Outfit Chat hotkey to something easy to use. The ingame voice is not as good as Ventrilo or Mumble, but it works adequately and has the advantage of being well integrated into the game. Also, it seems to be possible to be in multiple channels at once: outfit, squad, etc. You can hear from all the channels you are in, but you can specify which channel to speak in by using the hotkey for that particular channel. It's a fairly elegant system once you get the settings right.

Quaro on Watterson.

Axian0451 on SolTech

Why we have separate characters on each server? Just to make us need more certs?

I miss my Terran infiltrator, the Vanu beam of purple I'm right here dumbass sucks :/

Quick vehicle tip: PgDn brings up the "who can use" menu, so you can lock out all non squaddies and outfit people, or lock it out totally

Target ID is a problem when you first start playing, but it's something you learn. The factions have different silhouettes. These days I mostly play with the IRNV scope, which makes all characters the same colour (flat white) and I never mistakenly shoot at friendlies.

I have a small mumble server up, works fine to use it alongside the PS2 built-in voice chat (just map your mumble push-to-talk key to something different than any of the PS2 keys).

server: mumble.greyjack.com
password: old^and^slow
port: 64738 (default mumble port)

Poor default target ID is one way to get you into habit of pressing Q a split second before you open fire, or just on anything that crosses your aim. Has the side bonus of getting you extra spotter XP on other people's kills; i got quite a few cert credits today just sitting quietly on a tower and drawing red triangles for others to shoot at.

So I just noticed that the Engineer can cert in the Battle Rifle, a weapon type that I think is newly introduced. The VS version is the Eidolon which is a long range, heavy hitting, quite accurate semi-auto. Heavy Assault can cert this as well, but for HA it seems a bit redundant: people don't usually go HA to fight long distance. But for the Engi it's awesome IMO. It's a bit unwieldy so not great at short range (for short range, Vanu Engineers should accept no substitute for the Pandora auto-shotgun), but man at medium and long range it kicks ass. It allows the relatively squishy engi to fight at a safe distance, and it hits friggin' hard for something that is not an Infiltrator sniper rifle. Also, the ammo seems to have very little drop-off so you don't have to lead the target as much as with a bolt-action Ghost.

I keep finding little wrinkles in this game, like Infiltrator hacking and (not sure which classes can do this but engis can at least) generator overloading.

Anyone (except maybe MAXes?) can overload (and stabilize) generators, I believe.

So this happens....

Which is really annoying because so far the only fix is to exit the game, then log back in.

Hit ctrl+shift+d to disable disco mode.

The disco mode seems to happen roughly around the point when the pile of bugs/memory leaks/whatever it is in the client have already caused the framerate to tank into close to single digits, so restarting when it occurs is a good idea anyway.

I had it happen and it went away after a minute or two.

For those who haven't used Talisker's Mumble server, it is much, MUCH, better than the ingame voice and I highly recommend that everyone in the outfit download mumble and connect to Talisker's server. The ingame voice is highly unreliable for me: some players are way too faint, some are way too loud, the voice quality sucks, and the static is annoying. Mumble on the other hand, is damn smooth. Even though you can individually tune the voice settings in game, it still doesn't correct the full problem.

Therefore, if you are in the BF Outfit, for the love of baby Jesus, please download and install Mumble :O.

How does that tie into the comms hierarchy of PS2. Can't you have multiple channels and call into some squad leader channel to coordinate a wider war?

Yes, the ingame chat supports multiple channels - using Mumble doesn't affect that in any way as long as you bind your Mumble push to talk key to a key that you are not using for ingame chat. So if we wanted to coordinate with other outfits, we could use the ingame chat, crappy as it is. However, when we play within our own outfit, Mumble is way better IMO.

OK so an update to the mumble info. I think Talisker gave out the wrong url.

To hook up to the mumble server, here is the current correct info:

address: mumble.greyjack.com
port: 64738
password: "old^and^slow"

It's much better than ingame so I do recommend it.

Sumbitch, that DNS alias was busted. Well, either server name should work now, and the 64738 is the default port.

Sorry for any confusion.

Some quick observations - I don't see many Galaxies in the air - have they become obsolete? (I jump into one and make some milk runs when it feels like my day is done. True to form last night I put my Gal, which had a record of two passengers into a steep climb and then hit the "E" button rather than the "W" button. Whoops, sorry dudes. I had a nice view of it smashing into the ground tail first.)

The Station Cash unlocks seem really expensive. $7 to unlock a gun? $5 for a fancy Helmet? I hope this game does well, but I'm wondering how that pricing is working out for them.
That being said, I haven't noticed anything totally unbalanced, yet, and it is nice to have a real cannon on my Lightning.

Also - do BattleRanks do anything?