Planetside 2: Grindy McGrindy McSpaceyPants

The population imbalance on Waterson is getting sort of ridiculous; I logged on last week to check, and at one point the TR had 80% population on one continent, 60% on a second, and 30% on the third. I guess the celebrity thing works to bring in new players, but not in a very balanced way.

That's pretty much why I've quit playing -- I've made a ton of progress on my Vanu guy on Waterson, but it's pretty much always just swamped with TR.

In an interview about EverQuest Next, Sony Online Entertainment's CEO, John Smedley, spilled some numbers and dollars info about Planetside 2:

Source.

Personally, I find it funny that he takes a jab at Star Wars: The Old Republic, given Sony's own history with the nearly-perpetual-until-shut-down disaster known as Star Wars Galaxies.

In case anyone is still interested, here is the Roadmap-site available to vote on all the features that SOE suggests to implement the next six months.

Awesome information. I don't think I've played since the first week of December or so (the multitude of problems in this game cause too much rage for me, and I think ended up going straight from this to Sims 3 just to keep from having a stroke), but I'm still interested in seeing where they're planning to take the game.

Well, the list has lots of good ideas. Then again, most of them are presented without too much detail, or are no-brainers. But it seems the game might become continually better.

What problems have you encountered?

Warts and all, I'm still thoroughly enjoying the game. These pretty much sum up the highs:

And a massive patch drops. Lots of small improvements to the UI, balancing, restructuring of bases and spawn points as well as a new gun class, the SMG. Looks ok so far.

I'm getting maybe half the framerate I was pre-patch on my ati6950, good lord. And it stays shitty even if I dial down my settings significantly.

Yes, from what I heard yesterday there is a significant amount for people that have this problem. Others (like myself) see an improvement, but with rare stuttering. In the hour or so I played there were perhaps 5 announcements broadcast that they are working on both.

I'm seeing stuttering at times. It doesn't actually seem to be affecting the rendering frame rate, but it sure does chop up gameplay when it happens. Also had quite a bit of client and server instability yesterday. Hopefully they'll have that sorted soon because I quite like the patch changes. I'm still kind of surprised they deployed it on a Saturday morning.

Oh, and SOE did do a nice thing: the alpha squad bonus perk has been upgraded to 50% XP boost from 10%. I believe they will be restoring it for people who already replaced it with something else.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcZlGTZOo3c#t=10m

The hotfixes helped me a bit re: framerates, etc, and I fixed the rest myself -- by creating a windows power plan that forces my CPU to 100% at all times (my normal power plan is set to let the CPU drop to 5% minimum; by switching to one that has both 100% min and 100% max, my frame rate pretty much doubles, and no stutters).

The sequence at 12:25 is awesome.

Edit: ...ah, you reposted it as a link what jumps to the good part :)

...and yet, they were repelled by a third as many TR tanks, because the TR actually did things like split up and hit the flank, and didn't just bunch up and start colliding with each other as soon as someone started shooting at 'em. Still, it looked cool.

That is an impressive amount of armor.

It's the minimap that drives home just how many tanks that was.

Yes, because stacking tanks up in a mountain pass is the way to victory.

Not everything is about winning. Sometimes it is about driving a gigantic purple column of hovertanks through a ditch.

Server merges!

Shit that can't be good.

One thing I love about PS2 is that I have a blast with it even though I'm terrible at it. I hope this game isn't going the way of the first one.

PS2 is a much better game when you have actual opponents (and squad mates... I guess...). The game still felt vastly under populated at the peak of the game's release during all but prime time hours, and I can only imagine how those numbers have settled since then. Any effort to bring more people together should be a good thing for those remaining few players that seem to login outside of primetime.

Being forced to merge rather than expand servers only a couple months after its release doesn't say good things about the state of the game itself, but this game desperately needs to do its best to make sure off-peak players actually have someone to shoot, so it's important that SoE does what's necessary to see happen. I'm just glad they're not wallowing in denial or ignoring the issue completely.

I'm on Jaeger. This is definitely a good thing. Amerish & Esamir are dead almost every night. In fact I was with a small squad last night on Amerish and all we did was scoot around and cap points, very few defenders. I swear it felt like there were 30 total people playing on the map. I'm sure it was more. But I didn't see them. Indar on the other hand, that place is crazy every single night.

If you haven't played this game in a month or more, log in and check it out. They've done many improvements to the world and bases. I'm relearning them all over again and finding new stuff everyday.

This is a good game, imo. It does need some work.

In my opinion these are things that the devs should be working hard on to improve at this point.
A: In game voice. It seems spotty at best. I couldn't tell you how many platoons and squads I've joined over the last few months and get kicked from. Why, because I'm not joining their teamspeak server. It's really their loss and I let them know. But either way it's irritating as all hell. My mic works half the time in this game. 100% of the time in everything else.

B: don't change my team colors when you move our bases. I like that they switched up the warpgates positions. However, before my cap points were always red. Now they're light blue. Playing for a month or so with red being my cap point now being light blue, screws with me and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

C: This idea could eliminate some cheating and give new players an idea on what the hell is going on.
- Have a starter zone. Maybe a small continent that you stay on until lvl 10. Call it base camp or something. Throw new players into the action there, allow them to try out the different factions without creating new characters, teach them the ropes of base attacking and defense. Allow them to try out different vehicles and weapons. Be a good way to recruit new players into outfits. One of the biggest impediments to this game, at least when I started playing was having no clue what to do.

D: Ability to add more personal/squad waypoints. With the constant changes to the environment I find I'm getting lost when flying and on the ground. If I could have multiple waypoint options that would be incredibly helpful.

Actually it's great news. SOE is finally doing something smart with one of their MMOs. They had more servers than they needed at launch because they wanted to make sure they could handle the initial launch rush and then some. From everything I've read recently, including articles linked upthread, SOE is happy with the number of registered users and the number of people making in-game purchases. This server merge is less about dwindling numbers and more about making the game more playable for existing customers. Right now on a lot of servers Indar is the only continent that sees consistant action. Amerish and Esamir are practically ignored. Higher pop per server will change that.

Another issue these consolidations address is the population imbalance between factions on specific servers. I play on Matherson for example, where the Vanu population is routinely under 30%, whereas Sol Tech, the server they are merging into Matherson, has a nice large Vanu population, but a small and disorganized New Conglomerate population (my first chaarcter was NC on Sol Tech), which will in turn benefit from Matherson's higher and better organized NC pop. It's the same with Waterson, where TR pop was out of control thanks to Total Biscuit. Merging with Jaeger will give the VS and NC pop on Waterson a nice boost. I'd also think it would be awesome to see some of the larger NC and VS outfits on Waterson coordinate to push the TR there from multiple directions. The enemy of my enemy so to speak...

Honestly, I've never been a fan of SOE, but I have to say that so far I am really liking the way they're handling Planetside 2. They knew they had some optimization issues when they went live, and they worked to fix them quickly. I suspect part of the reason they went live with so much server capacity was to try and offset those optimization issues by dispersing population. Now that things are better, they can contract and put even more people into the mix together. I think it will be a lot of fun to run ops on Amerish and Esamir for a change. I've also been impressed with the Station Cash store and how they manage F2P vs. P2P. You can play Planetside 2 and never pay a dime, using certs to unlock everything. It'll take forever, but it's doable. Or, if you're enjoying the game anyway, you can fork over $15-$20, wait for a triple station cash promotion, and buy yourself pretty much all the guns and other SC goodies you need for the cost of a bargain game on Steam. So many important upgrades in the game are not dependant on SC, and in fact a lot of them are only purchasable with certs, meaning you need to play to get good skills and gear. That's awesome, and there are so many ways to earn XP (which translates to certs) that you don't have to be a total FPS max-gamer to have a good time and earn your gear.

Yeah, I've definitely seen that. It's a shame, too, because I really like the other continents. They did a great job at winnowing the continents from PS1 down to three continents that are highly differentiated, each with a unique look and feel and unique geography that makes for different sorts of fights. It's a shame that everyone gravitates to Indar all the time.

You can change the colors to whatever you like from the options menu. If you want to go back to the old friend/foe colors, there's even a preset for that.

The color changes bugged me as well, and I am now hesitant to change them back (you can make both enemies on the map and cap points colored blue (NC), purple (VS) and red (TR) if you want, telling you instantly who you are fighting) because not only would I need to get used to it again, but I fear they could yank it out from under me once again with any update. I mean, the most recent update screwed with the colors of platoon squads on the map, so now I can't find my own squad on the map unless I select to deploy to my squad leader. Confusing and serves no purpose.

This weekend Azure Twilight spent a lot of time on Esamir and Amerish. Some of it was to shoot some video for an upcoming piece they're priducing, but a lot of it was actual ops being run on those continents. I enjoyed it a lot, and given that the server population is about to double with the merge, it's good to get to know Esamir and Amerish before we end up fighting there for real once Indar is pop-locked nightly.

I adjusted the faction colors to be brighter alternatives, mostly to help with visibility. I was already shooting at red things, so that wasn't a problem. It took me most of a play session to get used to shooting at blue things, but seeing purple markers all the time helped rewire that in my brain.

Tried some TR on Waterson. Initially tried Vanu in deference to a few posts here but to be honest those kinds of map control games have always struck me as being markedly less fun when you're the side that rarely gets its shit together.

I haven't played any big-open-combat games since BF2/BFBC2 so part of the value here is just being a F2P game where one gets to occasionally drive in a tank column. I've mostly used engineer - ~100 credentials used - but I'm not quite sure if I want to go for the AV turret as a 1000-point skill. It's obviously flexible in its targetting (without being as weak as the NS Annihilator rocket) but AA-use requires superior skill in judging ranges at any sort of distance, and it'd be nigh-on useless in one of the "3-4 aircraft besiege a tower" type situations that sometimes happen. And vs. land vehicles there's the issue of the front being so mobile. I have a hard time getting into firing position (without being preposterously exposed) even using a vehicle; doing the same thing on foot would be that much harder.

ESF seem like they'd be the no-brainer skillpoints-to-deadliness winners as the game stands now, but the controls boggle me. I don't know why I'm no good with a joystick in these games (wasn't in BFBC2 either) but I'm not. And using a mouse feels bizarre. For fine-targeting I'd be happy with the mouse being un-inverted yaw/pitch, like a turret, but the mouse is mapped pitch/BANK, which screws me up every time even with my fingers on the yaw controls. If the X axis of the mouse is going to be bank, then I need to have the Y axis inverted, because the minute I'm banking I revert to aircraft control logic. But with the Y axis inverted I can't do fine aiming worth a damn or be bothered to think about yawing much. The whole experience makes me feel like an incompetent old person trying to play computer games.

So, with all of that said, I'm thinking I might look to the AA homing missile for the heavy as my 1000-point goal. I find those 1-3 ESFs-besiege-a-fort battles maddening, and the only effective answer when solo or nearly solo is a MAX, which runs into the timer the first time I die. I'm thinking even if an AA missile didn't get kills it'd at least be a really effective annoyance, and it'd also be useful in larger battles featuring enemy airpower.

For AA nothing beats the MAX with dual Bursters, the follow up is going to be Heavy Assault lock on launcher, I like the ground/Air one personally, it's much more versatile. I just purchased it two days ago and was wishing I would have purchased it well before!

Flying with a regular mouse is a nightmare. I connected my thumb track ball to another USB port and use it for flying.

For shooting targets I've found the following to be the best. Basically set up where they'll have to cross your path or flank. Standing out front is a sure way to die.

There may be more people on Waterson tonight, but it's still skewed heavily towards TR (29% VS, 40% TR, 31% NC).

Edit: correction, that was a different server. Waterson is 27% VS, 36% TR, 37% NC at the moment. Was 26/39/35 earlier. So, they've at least managed to balance TR and NC on my server, I guess.

Hah, a quick survey of the servers shows that VS is the smallest faction everywhere except Helios, where it's #2. Oh well.

this game would be fun if I understood what was happening. They sort of just throw you the wolves almost immediately.

Also holy shit I don't need to know about objectives that are over 2 km away. Please stop making them flash on my screen.

I don't think the developers understand how weirdly off-putting the whole "throw the player into a firefight" intro is. In my case it was into a lopsidedly pointless base defence of the sort that often drags on for 5-10 minutes of one-sided slaughter, which didn't really sell the game - I wasn't getting enough time alive to figure out if it "felt" like a shooter. (It ultimately did.)

By faraway objectives do you mean like, intra-base stuff where it's telling you about a generator 1500-2000m away? In that instance I guess I'd just say the enemy having satellite base or not matters to how the fight comes out. What I wish is that there were some on-screen prompt that'd say "your team is getting ghosted because all of you idiots are fighting over the Crown instead of mounting a token defence of the rest of the map."

If anything there's just too much information for what I expect out of a shooter, which I understand is very much a me problem. Also, the amount of places where I can go usually ends up with me just flying loops around some mountain in an alien space ship.

The "types of facilities" stuff is way TMI to start with, but it's also pretty integral to making it a complex game - the different layouts provide variety in base defence/offence beyond the surrounding terrain being different. And the fact that the bases have satellite spawnpoints the enemy can capture separately, and that large base captures themselves involve capturable shield generators in outbuildings gives one more scope for small-group derring-do in the midst of a big fight.

The map can give you a good idea of where to go. Flashing sectors are "threatened," with heavy fighting indicated by little explosions colour-coded to the faction that's attacking. The tricky part is that sectors that are just flashing often aren't really threatened, I think that can indicate one enemy messing around.* Sometimes defensive battles with a ton of explosions can also be bad places to go, if it turns out to dead-end siege defences that aren't worth doing (but which 10 or so of your teammates are still pointlessly doing.)

EDIT: *I guess you can mouse-over the flashing sectors on the map and it'll give some explanation of why it's flashing on the left, like "enemy platoon detected." The pie chart that comes up doesn't, as one might expect, tell you the proportion of players in the sector but rather the ownership of adjacent provinces (which affects capture speed.)

Yeah I usually just click on whatever "Deploy" pops up and hope to god it's not a failing fight. Their "Tutorials" are just walls of text, which, yes, I should read, but I'm much more interested in trying to kill someone.

Also, default sniper rifle sucks so much.