Matt Higby Interviewed by Mittani

[Hamma]

http://www.planetside-universe.com/news-matt-higby-interviewed-by-mittani-3012.htm

The Mittani.com interviewed Matt Higby regarding a large variety of things including MLG, Weapons and the Alerts System. Matt revealed a Battle Islands type system that will go hand in hand with eSports.
Those outfits who wish to participate in MLG events and who have high enough leaderboard rankings will be able to sign up to be seeded into a competitive bracket. Matches from that bracket will be played throughout the course of a season with each outfit fielding a platoon of players against the other outfit’s platoon and battling it out on brand new competition focused battle island maps that we are creating and which support competitive objectives, win conditions and hopefully create an exciting viewership experience. The finals and maybe even semi-finals will be played live at forthcoming MLG events.
Check out the full interview here (http://themittani.com/news/mittani-interviews-ps2s-matt-higby).

[p0intman]

Once we were trying to find why we had a certain type of load would pop on a couple of the worlds but not all of them, and it wasn’t really correlated to overall population or anything else obvious that we could see. When we ended up digging into it we found that on some servers, entire outfits will /suicide and redeploy to get places rapidly, this wasn’t happening on all the servers, but on the servers where players did do that, we got some interesting spikes on the server performance as entire areas were being sent down to a large group of players at once and we identified that behavior as the cause. It was something easy to fix once we figured out what was going on, but now answering the question “what weird stuff do players on this server do?” is an important step in our debugging process.
lord zotz is pleased!

edit: Also, I am guilty of this. /suicide is an amazing redeploy option.

[Phantomdestiny]

i'm glad they went for the battle island format for e sports also it appears that they will also make a come back for "normal" players interesting

[Silent Thunder]

i'm glad they went for the battle island format for e sports also it appears that they will also make a come back for "normal" players interesting

I'd love if they did that. With much smaller battle islands inbetween "major" continents on the continent lattice later in development.

[Boildown]

Our goal with all weapons we create is to ensure that they fill a desirable role and provide meaningful tradeoffs and choices for players to make about the way they play. We never want there to be objectively inferior options and superior options for any weapon type, but rather for there to be different reasons to use the weapons in different situations, or based on personal playstyle preferences. The idea of releasing a weapon and then a few weeks later releasing a “better” version doesn’t really fit with that goal and is not something that we’re doing intentionally.

Say what they want, but they nerfed the Piston (and corresponding other faction automatic shotguns) in order to reduce overlap with the one-shot-kill shotguns, then released another round of nearly-identical one-shot-kill shotguns. In that time the Piston has gone on sale what, three times now? Did they notice a sudden drop in how often the automatics are being used and decided a sale would help, like a they are running a Wal Mart? Because they should have, the automatic shotguns absolutely suck now, they have no place where another weapon wouldn't be better, another shotgun wouldn't be better. Intentional or not, the PS2 devs need to look at what effect their new weapon releases actually have, and be more careful in the future.

[Rolfski]

Nice Q&A with Matt. I like their idea of making MLG related gaming content available to all players. Battle Islands/smaller continents for instance, could be an interesting concept that could speed up the implementation of the meta game in the regular game.

Can't wait for more diverse alerts/secondary objectives. Capture the flag/convoy -like items that need to be escorted into the Warp Gate could make for some hilarious fighting.

[camycamera]

fantastic interview. i am the most exited about the new alert stuff, it will bring even more variety to the already excellent alert system.

[DirtyBird]

A lot of the ideas for new alert types avoid this limitation, for instance “Capture All Biolabs” which rewards you for capturing as many biolabs as possible during the alert – this is something that the entire server can participate in without worrying about having to get to a certain continent.
I tipped this :D
In the future they might have an alert system based on how many of a particular base your faction owns, Tech Plants, Amp Stations, or Bio Labs, across all the continents giving bonuses for fighting in those areas.

I like it when the devs give us bits of information on upcoming stuff.
It can be a challenge to find it all because they drop tidbits in so many different places but it all comes out in the end.
Their own forums seem to be the last place you'll find it.

[Falcon_br]

When I read the topic name, I tought:
OMG they fired Luperza!!!


I am more calm now and it was a great interview!

[Canaris]

Several things annoy me when it comes to 'gaming journalism' (That's a lie, basically everything about it pisses me off). First, interviews are often conducted by people who barely play the game they're talking about, resulting in fluff questions, wild speculation, or marketing garbage that teaches existing players nothing. Second, the devs or company officials being interviewed too often fall back on talking points or vague platitudes when confronted with gameplay-specific questions.

If only most game interviews started like this :D

[Qwan]

Nice Q&A with Matt. I like their idea of making MLG related gaming content available to all players. Battle Islands/smaller continents for instance, could be an interesting concept that could speed up the implementation of the meta game in the regular game.

Can't wait for more diverse alerts/secondary objectives. Capture the flag/convoy -like items that need to be escorted into the Warp Gate could make for some hilarious fighting.

I really hope they consider the convoy, that would be a awesome mobil battle. (fingers crossed).

[Phantomdestiny]

i wouldn't doubt that the new resource system implements some sort of convoy mechanics or else it would of been redone earlier in the roadmap