What worries me

[Navaron]

Is that anyone currently associated with the first game may be associated with this game. If I recall correctly the original beta dev team all but disappeared within the first six months of the game being live.

The game was then plagued by dumbass decision making, stupid gimmicks, and constant nerfing patches. Instead of making a "what we'd like to see" thread, we should make a thread of "Shit not to do again" thread. I think any game with 200-400 players in one battle with any base level of FPS quality will sell like tshirts at an Obama rally, just look at MAG. It looks like ass but will sell a million copies.

What we need to make sure is that the devs have a clear vision and stick to it instead of changing course every 2 patches.

Also, we need to boycott this game if Dave G is anywhere around it. Fuck that guy.

[Hamma]

:lol:

Dave is a great guy to be honest. PS wouldn't exist if not for him, I know thats an unpopular opinion and pretty much everyone hates him but I had the opportunity to meet and talk with him and he is a smart dude who had great ideas for PS and gaming in general.

That said though I highly doubt we will see him involved in this. As you mentioned I doubt that many, if any of the original Dev team is around anymore. I'm sure though that folks on the current game now are involved somehow.

I digress though.

Your point is valid we need to post what we DO NOT want to happen, which I think is even more important than what we do want to see.


NO BFR's - these really hurt the game for me and many others. Boots on the ground in infantry small squad combat with a few vehicles mixed in (Like it was originally) was the bread and butter.
If there is a problem.. rollback the patch. Lets not dilly dally around while folks cant play.
Balance, Balance, Balance. Obviously this one is harder than it sounds because balance is often in the eyes of the person more powerful at the time.. :lol:
Better command tools. No more CR5 global shenanigans. Any 8 year old can get, and probably has CR5 making it a useless ability and it has become a chatroom.
The engine needs to handle lag better, no more warping across the map. It needs to feel like you are in a world, not in Jello. One of the problems with PS was when you were driving and bouncing all around and walking you often felt as if you were floating around.


And MOST IMPORTANT of all for me is to keep it an open world combat game. I don't want a bunch of gh3y instanced areas like some of the so called "MMOFPS" games coming out have. I want to be able to go anywhere in the open world and find combat.

EDIT: Some of the survey questions were a bit odd too.. hopefully they were just some marketers doing and not thoughts going through SOE's noggin.

[Marsman]

Strange that you complain about the declining state of the game following the exodus of the original dev team - and in the next breath diss Dave G - who was the head of that team and who's original vision defined what everyone seemed to like about the game. I'm not trying to be a Dave G fanboy, but understand if there was a decline to this game, it followed his departure so I fail to understand the h8 many perceive for his contribution. :doh:

[Navaron]

Strange that you complain about the declining state of the game following the exodus of the original dev team - and in the next breath diss Dave G - who was the head of that team and who's original vision defined what everyone seemed to like about the game. I'm not trying to be a Dave G fanboy, but understand if there was a decline to this game, it followed his departure so I fail to understand the h8 many perceive for his contribution. :doh:

Flight physics, weapon range, BFRs, and lack of prone were all Dave G's doing. He had good ideas, but he had a lot of retarded ones too.

[Marsman]

Flight physics, weapon range, BFRs, and lack of prone were all Dave G's doing. He had good ideas, but he had a lot of retarded ones too.
BFR's were announced with Dave's departure - he was not even head dev at that time. He opposed the idea as I recall, but it was long out of his hands at that point.

From Beta, I seem to recall the lack of prone as a technical compromise - I can't remember the details, but considering the challenges of making the worlds first FPS with hundreds on hundreds - it seemed a reasonable sacrifice. I never got the impression that was all by Dave's design, more likely just a limit of the tech at the time. Early beta was full of lot of cuts to allow the level of population.

Considering the game is 6 years old, the coding has held up well. With todays horsepower in cpu, graphics, and broadband speeds, who knows what is possible if the same cutting edge vision is placed in Planetside Next?

Time will tell...

[Tigersmith]

dave georgeson, the guy is my idol. Tribes ftw. then planetside made my dreams come true. :D

[Manitou]

dave georgeson, the guy is my idol. Tribes ftw. then planetside made my dreams come true. :D
Agreed.

[QuakCow]

I'll just throw in that the artificial concentration of forces that the lattice provided was the first step in ruining the game for me.

[Hamma]

:eek:

First time I've heard that. The bases without the lattice were pretty rough. You'd make progress somewhere and one lone hacker would go back and hack everything behind you.

[Ait'al]

Hehe. THE LOOOOONE HACKEERR! 8) There's a theme song to this I can smell it. Or did they do that video already.

Now that I potentially derailed this.

I still want the moving orbs of interdementionality potentially put in somewhere. If they can find a way to implement them well. 8p. The official PS way to instance. LIVE!!! And where you can or cannnot see it coming. Then you will have a new off specialist like repairers used to be. Interdemential moving orb watchers.

That was my old idea for how to get the original beta alien tower things in somehow. It would be cool to have to compensate for giant moving warps that make half the army disappear float by. It has it's own reasons to need the specialist. (until they make it easy for everyone to have at least.) It would fit in concept wise. Especialy in a more complex game. The gates/orbs could both warp people and object. Either changing the terrain like having a tower mysteriously appear(maybe with some being predictable and potentially filled with defense to stop moving armies if someone can take advantage of it.) or having the base wall disapear etc.(especially depending on hte size of the bubbles.). but then you could have people disapear into it when they went to the wall or not. There could be several types so you ahve to check. Either only warps the wall away and leaves people, warps people and things away, or any other combination you can add it to give it lots of facets.. Can't think of the word. like tagged abilities and features. It would give use to those inbase consoles we never realy got to use. And maybe readition of some of the older radar concepts or larger scale servaliance. (return of the radar based vehicles! potentially. a million ways to implement that sort of thing. just start thinking them up.)

I thought the lattice was crappy too. It took away the need for real strategy and teamwork. If it was implemented it should have only been implemented for a short time then disappear for some reason. Like a locking system while taking the cont for a bit to make it easier if you can do something. But only very temporarilly to provide an advantage for a very short time(like 30 minutes to an hour and can only happen once every 10 hours per cont). Could give more use to hacking skills etc also if done well.

[Denali]

I'm hoping that the first step in something like this is figuring out exactly where PS went wrong. Looking back and seeing where and at what point they lost the loyal fanbase should show which decisions were seen as bad ones and were largely unpopular. Even if they were going in directions that were seen at the time as logical moves or the ideal direction for the game to go if the fanbase wasn't on board it was the wrong decision. Hopefully this game caters more to what the subscribers want than anything else. Let the people be heard!

[Navaron]

I'm hoping that the first step in something like this is figuring out exactly where PS went wrong. Looking back and seeing where and at what point they lost the loyal fanbase should show which decisions were seen as bad ones and were largely unpopular. Even if they were going in directions that were seen at the time as logical moves or the ideal direction for the game to go if the fanbase wasn't on board it was the wrong decision. Hopefully this game caters more to what the subscribers want than anything else. Let the people be heard!

keep on pimpin' pimp

[Firefly]

A majority of the developers were either reassigned to Everquest projects or to that spy-game garbage that SOE started working on, if they did not leave the company and go to greener pastures.

[Hamma]

I know one of the later devs, Dallas Dickenson moved on to the new Star Wars MMO @ Bioware

[Firefly]

I know one of the later devs, Dallas Dickenson moved on to the new Star Wars MMO @ Bioware
Yep. He works for EA-Bioware now.

[DviddLeff]

Lattice was a welcome change; before it you never (well, not as often) saw the big fights developing, and its the big fights that set PS apart from a game like Battlefield which has much better combat and less lag.

[Hamma]

Yea PS without the lattice was even more frustrating than PS post the lattice. Now you can come back a few hours later and the entire continent has changed. pre lattice thats like 45 minutes. :lol:

[Ait'al]

I liked that idea more. I think I came in with the lattice but it looked too much was lost in subtlety in the game with the lattice being added. the terrain and the larger scale strategy became useless basically. Half hte map was useful to going behind enemy lines. Most really large scale warfare that the game had to use can't be done right when restricted to front lines. the only problem was no one playing learned to utilize it yet. I think the lattice was stuck in to soon and stopped that from happening. When I joined I would have been using that a lot personally and I'm pretty sure could have demonstrated good use of it. And I don't think that is just my ego talking. That would have part of my favorite parts of the game if I had got to do it. but people kept concentrating gameplay because they couldn't figure out how to play (sometimes I would think from gameplay changes making the game unsteady) and maybe from pop changes but that shouldn't affect it much since it should fluctuate.

And I thought all the really big battles all happened before the lattice was implemented. I always heard and saw pics and videos from back before that saying that.

[Firefly]

I hate the lattice because it dictates where fights will be held. Oh look, this base is hacked. Wonder where they'll go next! But everyone is correct - pre-lattice was a dicey game. One hacker could come along and screw up your entire plan.

[QuakCow]

I always just loved leading/being in the team deployed to counter that hacker...I never did well in the big fights...

And whatever killed the gal as primary troop transport also hurt my personal enjoyment. God knows it did speed the game up, but the travel time really helped develop a sense of team (the chit chat was a great way to get comfortable).

[Fuzzball]

It has been so long for me, I completely forgot lattice wasn't there from the beginning.

I started this game when I was 14, now I am 20. Planetside has become part of my life, and is the game I always go back too after getting tired of other new games, nomatter how shitty the graphics are or how overpowered one empire is over the others. I personally don't care what they do for Planetside 2, I am going to play it nomatter the outcome.

I can't say it was my first MMO though, I regret to announce that I was playing The Sims Online before Planetside. :(

[Hamma]

Yikes! :lol:

That game was really bad, didn't last very long either. It's all good though we all make mistakes.. ;)

[DviddLeff]

The big fights were pre lattice because they initially didn't have a pop limit, but we did have to deal with frequent crashing and mega lag (this may have just been in beta, cant remember much from back then :p).

Then they had a pop limit that favoured the first two empires to join, so out of 400 players 300 could be from two empires, with 100 from the third, but they then changed it when the servers could only support a single pop lock so it was boring if you had 50 people out of the main fight with no one to play against.

While yes the lattice did stagnate and limit the fighting to specific areas and corridors between them, that could simply be fixed by randomising the links between bases, or adding in small outpost bases (think a base without walls) between the main facilities, but spread them out to all corners of the map.

Regarding the Galaxy what killed that was everyone having too many cert points, so everyone grabbed some kind of fast transport like the mossie or ATV and no one needed one anymore; why fly one big fat target when you can fly 12 of them and all with guns on?

[Firefly]

Effective defenses also killed Galaxy drops.

Example, you know they're going to drop on top of your base or at the back door (most likely back door). So you'd have a few CR4s/CR5s waiting with a CUD and they'd pinpoint an OS at the likely drop spots.

Also placing a minefield and Spitfire turrets, in addition to a wall of ANTs, at and around the back door, would disrupt the drop. If you were smart, plasma spam... as well as the Radiator pain field... would help cut into health. A back door guard team would mop up the rest.

[DviddLeff]

Yeah Firefly, those are definitely big factors in killing it; an organised drop could deal with deployables, but a well timed OS would mince you if you dropped from the flight ceiling.

More entry points would have been good for bases as well, what amused me was that the back door was easier to defend than the front internally. Perhaps have entry points that had to be destroyed; skylights or sections of wall that could be blown up and then repaired.

So what killed the Gal drop:
1. Too many cert points to spend on fast transport
2. Too many CR4/5s
3. Radiators
4. Only available from drop ship centres
5. Continent fights usually pop locked so you couldn't leave to get a gal at Sanc then come back.

[Firefly]

That defense is very good if it's done properly.

But it has a counter-balance. The trick with Galaxy drops is to fly nap of the earth, as low as possible and as fast as possible. An OS will take some time to cycle up. If your guys know how to switch from 3d person POV to 1st person POV, and especially if you can pre-OS the area... and your boys are dropping jammers and using their own EMP, you can pretty much take care of most issues before you hit the ground. Anyone that didn't get OS'd can still take you out, but if your pilot was flying fast and low then most of you can get inside before the beam comes down.

Now, if the tangos get the drop on you and they fire their OS as you're approaching, you're hosed. And if the defenders are dug in well, and if they have Lasher spam... you're hosed. Of course, nothing says "Screw you!" to the VS like spamming them back with looted Lashers.

[DviddLeff]

Never had to face mass Lasher spam, you wont find me not wearing purple ;)

But year, as you say there are a lot of counters to drop defences, but I think they key is the availability of the fast transports as to what killed the gal.

Still when I came back for the reactivation I was helping organise random 5 strong gal drops on cyssor, which was (eventually) successful in grabbing a fully popped base. And with my outfit we did do some successful drops also; its still do-able, just need to know what you are doing and have the element of surprise.

[Sentrosi]

I'll throw in my 0.02 cents of opinions here.

Weapon balance needs to be addressed. I dislike having a full squad of TR being decimated by 4 Vanu spamming the Lasher. Does not seem right. You can easily hold a tower with 4 Vanu, but holding a tower with the TR took a lot of coordinated effort AND a full squad.

Empire hopping. Do NOT allow this. I hated knowing that some TR commander could hop over to the other empire if the TR was not doing well that day. Make three servers and only have people log into one server/empire.

Flight physics need to change.

Vehicle/player models need to be updated.

[Firefly]

Never had to face mass Lasher spam, you wont find me not wearing purple ;)


I ran an Op one night after we spent a month looting Lashers and using alts for weapons trading. We stockpiled them and then went into a VS base with Lashers.

Take that, you sons of bitches!:evil:

[DviddLeff]

While yes the lasher excelled at holding corridors it was very much a situational weapon, really good at defence, but out in the field I would rather have an MCG any day; they are far more versatile range wise, easily able to compete at mid range with the MA rifles, yet still have the TTK at close to do the business. I do not know how the current incarnation of the Lasher fairs outdoors though.

That is the key thing about PS; different tools for different jobs, and while yes nothing was perfectly balanced I think the game benefited from it as it gave each empire a definite identity, not just a different colour scheme and armour style.

If I was going to loot anything it would be a Striker for scaring the shit out of aircraft (yeah, you are fighting VS, if you get a lock its going to be a Starfire!).

[Hamma]

Empire hopping. Do NOT allow this. I hated knowing that some TR commander could hop over to the other empire if the TR was not doing well that day. Make three servers and only have people log into one server/empire.

Totally agree here I hated when they implemented this.

[Firefly]

While yes the lasher excelled at holding corridors it was very much a situational weapon, really good at defence, but out in the field I would rather have an MCG any day; they are far more versatile range wise, easily able to compete at mid range with the MA rifles, yet still have the TTK at close to do the business. I do not know how the current incarnation of the Lasher fairs outdoors though.

Since the game revolves around indoor fights... I'd say it kinda doesn't matter.

I've had my ass kicked by Lashers out-of-doors. It wouldn't be so bad of a weapon if the Lash factor had friendly-fire.

[Ait'al]

The game doesn't revolve around it if people figured out how to hold continents again and had roaming tank columns or had every figured out how to use better recon to defend one after the took it. People just suck so bad they could never get the cooler parts of the game. 8(

[Kyonye]

Best
For
Rusting

and nothing else.

[DaSquisha]

The game doesn't revolve around it if people figured out how to hold continents again and had roaming tank columns or had every figured out how to use better recon to defend one after the took it.

/agree 100%

[Traak]

Totally agree here I hated when they implemented this.
I was totally relieved when they implemented this. Now there was an escape, which still exists, for idiot zerglings who just refused to do anything logical, intelligent, or strategic.

You didn't have to try to change your baboon-like Empire. You just switched to the side that was kicking ass and taking names. If you can't win with'em, then win against'em.

[Hamma]

There are other threads on empire hopping.. closing ancient thread bump.