Hey all –
We’ve had a busy couple weeks here on the Planetside 2 team, and I wanted to talk about three things in particular that we've been working on.
First up: Roadmap Update. It’s been about a month since we've released the Roadmap website and so far it has been incredibly helpful for us on the team to see your ideas and suggestions on upcoming features. So, huge “Thank you!” to everyone who has participated in discussion of our upcoming features on Roadmap, and if you haven’t yet, please do check it out. We’ve already changed priority and direction on several features based on feedback and suggestions from the Roadmap site. In some cases feedback has caused us to reevaluate a feature and/or changed the scope of required work which will cause features to be moved forward or backwards in the schedule to match their new estimated delivery, so, you can expect to see a reshuffling of features on there soon. As we realign the features we’ll be going through each, giving more details where possible, and including the reasons for them moving in the schedule so that everyone understands how their favorite upcoming feature is coming along.
Speaking of shuffling, right now the Roadmap lists most tasks on the month they’re being worked on internally, which makes sense for our internal project management, but not as much sense when thinking about it as a “release date”. So, we will be shifting the months that tasks are listed in forward based on the fact that we generally patch at the tail end of the month, due to this, updates marked for “May” would show up in late May or, if delayed, early June, which many of you have let us know is a bit confusing. For game updates we are working off a 2-week cadence, so you can expect to see two major updates each month, and minor updates and bug fixes in between when and if necessary.
At the end of the day, the goal of the Roadmap is to give the an accurate view of what will actually be getting delivered month-by-month. It will never be 100% accurate 100% of the time, but we’re working on a plan to ensure it is kept up-to-date with our best estimates of when features will be released.
Next: Players Site:
http://players.planetside2.com. We’re really excited to finally release the beta version of the Planetside 2 Players site! The website has a ton of really kickass character-focused features including: comprehensive character and progression stats, detailed stats on class, weapon, and vehicle usage, realtime & historical killboards for each character, friend status and more.
In addition to character statistics the site features leaderboards which can be filtered based on a number of criteria, like server & time period, as well as a PlanetStatus page which displays the current territory control of each continent for your server. Several features such as outfit browsing and certifications will be coming online in the future. The website is in beta so please be gentle and report any bugs you see with it here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/i...in-beta.96152/
We’re really proud of the Players site and we can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it.
Finally: Server Merges. Next week we will be doing server merges to help even populations across all game servers. Right now we have a lot of disparity between populations on our servers, some are highly populated with active fights across all continents, some are not. This is a factor of which servers were most popular at launch, and players gravitating to one or two servers per locale. Now that the crush of new players from launch and the holidays has died down, and our server populations and incoming new players have stabilized we have a good idea of where each server stands in terms of player population, empire population and we can model merges to optimize the populations.
The following servers will be getting Merged:
US West:
Genudine and Helios -> Helios
US East:
Mattherson and SolTech -> Mattherson
Waterson and Jaeger -> Waterson
EU:
Cobalt and Lithcorp -> Cobalt
Ceres and Mallory -> Ceres
Connery, Woodman, Miller and Briggs will not be part of the merges.
You won’t have to do anything to participate, the entire server population will be moving, your friends, outfits & certs will all be coming with you. Those of you on servers that are being merged will just see that your character is on a different server the next time you log in after the merger is complete. The result of these merges will be a more consistent and full server population during off-peak hours, more players to support better utilization of all of the continents in the game and, generally a lot more massive in your massively-multiplayer. Shortly after the merges are complete we plan to begin offering server transfer tokens, so if you would prefer to go to a different server at that point you could.
Until next time, thank you for playing Planetside 2 and we’ll see you on Auraxis!
-
Matthew Higby (@mhigby)
Creative Director - Planetside2