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2013-03-23, 10:36 AM
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[Ignore Me] #1 | ||
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Private
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First off all to make some things clear: I still like PS2 and I think it has a huge potential. But I have come to a point where I currently don’t enjoy the game to a point where I deem it worthy much of my time. This here are at least SOME of my reason why. I will surely have missed some. Also I doubt that you will find anything new but I thought it might be good for the game if people actually wrote down why they stopped playing if they do. Maybe it can help to make the game better. I actually think it would be way better to ask people why they quit the game, instead of why they are still playing.
Also English is not my native tongue, so please keep that in mind before trying to decipher sentences which are unclear. If there are questions you are free to ask, I will try to answer. Also the text has gone through several iterations so there might be passages which are not perfectly connected. Sorry about that. Some of you might also disagree with some of my points. Well, feel free to do so. It’s my personal opinion and you can have your own. It won’t change my mind. This is how I perceive the game and what problems I have with it and which problems I think it has. Not all of these points are reason which made me quit (except maybe once a week when my outfit runs special events). I chose them because either I think they need to be addressed or I think they have not been mentioned enough. Please excuse me for not using my real account. I still have an account here but I don’t want people to track me down and value my opinion on my K/D score/min or whatever. And we all know that people will. So please excuse me for not going down that road. ------------------ I started playing PS2 during beta and have since then played for about 160 hours so far and put roughly 60USD into it. I play on a big sever which does not have any issues with a lack of players and play in a medium sized outfit. We usually bring about two to three squads, on our fixed outfit nights about 1,5 to 2 platoons. I primarily play infantry and some ground vehicles, most time played is in my Lightning. I do not fly, although I have pods and AA missiles unlocked. It’s just found it to be not my style and not to my liking. A lot of the time I play dedicated AA roles, as these are often widely lacking on the field. In my outfit I have spent some time training new players and talking to players who decided to drop the game. Also I tried to convince friends and acquaintances from my previous gaming days to play the game. I will refer to what they had to say at a few occasions. I will NOT talk about stuff like “metagame” and all the other bugbears everybody has. Those are too obvious and this post will already be long enough, even without them. So I spare you most of the repetition of things we have already beaten to death. But also don’t expect a thread filled with novelties and ingenious insights. I just want to touch a few points that get on my nerves repeatedly and also some of the stuff I noticed while talking to outfit members and friends. Especially those who did NOT decide to continue playing. The biggest issue for me is that infantry combat is no longer fun when the numbers of people on the field increase. I highly enjoy the game when it’s our platoon against another. But once the numbers increase the infantry game turns into a big clusterfuck with everyone being everywhere and absolutely no flow to it. Which brings me to one of the overall problems of the game: the flow of battle. There is none. With the base design defense becomes a pain in the ass to do. It takes the defender way more planning and setup (and therefore time) to set up a defense as it takes the attacker to attack. Just snipe the turrets with tanks, drive sundis with LAs to the walls and you are in. The primary level of defense in the game is pretty much useless. I imagine a good defense like layers of an onion you have to peel until you get to the core, but in this game the onion is already smashed, leaving nothing to peel. The new spawn room designs and tunnels helped a bit, but they do in no way prevent spawn camping and other cheesy tactics mentioned months ago and still viable in the game (sundis in tech labs for example). Especially on many outposts the redesign of the spawn buildings did not help at all since they are located in positions which can be easily spamed by tanks and/or air. It doesn’t matter how many shields your building has if it can get shelled by tanks from positions they cannot be hit in or are harder to hit then the spawn building is. Don’t get me wrong, spawn buildings should not be strongholds but they should give defenders the possibility to break out and resecure the capture point. Also the new “lattice 2.0” system is a nice addition and I think that it will improve the game. But the major problem with base design will still be there. Without a redesign and relocation of many buildings many of the bases and outposts will remain to be boring. The lattice system will help, but it won’t be a fix. The next point would most likely be overall feel of infantry and their choices in battle. Currently, outside of biolabs and some other facilities I feel like infantry is lacking in this game. In most places outside the two mentioned infantry is very often the “try to do more damage then you take before you respawn” game instead of being useful in a tactical manner. When you are actually able to get into positions where infantry-only fights are happening it’s a lot of fun. But there are too few places to allow good infantry engagements without vehicles to interfere OR to interfere on an even level. Terrain is rarely built in a way where it gives equal opportunities to every kind of playstyle. Of course not all the terrain needs to be and can be designed in that way. Amerish will always favor air vehicles but these places (where terrain design is balanced) are actually pretty hard to find. There are plenty of pretty spots, no doubt about that, but that’s the least thing I could care about as long as they interfere with gameplay. Think of it as with a RTS map. It can be as eye-candy as it possibly can be. Nobody will play it unless it has an overall good map layout. And I think PS2 has some issues in this area, making the game less enjoyable when “stuck” in those areas. Regarding infantry gameplay I also think another problem is the huge amount of aoe damage, which makes flak armor almost mandatory. Although aoe was toned down, there are still very little areas where not taking flak armor makes sense. It’s still almost mandatory. And without enough cover, combined with little health infantry is almost doomed to want to fight anywhere except places where vehicles cannot go to. Of course one might argue it’s good because infantry doesn’t cost resources and is unable to be removed from the field. But very often you feel like you have no other choice then getting into a vehicle to fight back. And then what follows are the huge tanks zergs we see in the game. The combined arms warfare is very often lacking. I really don’t know how to fix this. I think more cover would be a good start. Also fixing infantry shields would an idea. The current refill times of shields are a joke. Together with the little cover it forces infantry to fight very passively, being unable to do a charge at enemy positions without getting horribly murdered, so they are hiding behind rocks instead waiting eagerly for the next HE to take some portions of the health away. With better shields and more cover people would actually be able to get close to a facility without driving a sundi next to the walls. Also tanks being used as artillery (and real artillery guns seem to be coming in the near future) is a pain in the ass to deal with. Especially when you are cut off from MBTs, as MBTs are stronger Lightnings now. Also I think there is still a mismatch in infantry vs air gameplay. I cannot really put my finger on it but it might be related to the limited av options infantry has from the start. Turrets are nice but they get sniped pretty easily and fast. Usually this is one of the first things a tank driver does when approaching a base. Getting the turrets back up is possible, but not in all bases/outposts. In some places destroyed turrets remain destroyed until the fight is over. Then we have lock-on launchers. The problem with those is hat: one on it’s own is pretty much useless. Several of them can work, but require team work. A load of them kills almost everything. And I think this is a problem that needs to be addressed. Because it leads to the problem that lock-on launchers are absent outside of outfits and one of the reasons why many players perceive ESFs to be op. Using a lock-on rocket launcher is not easy and the weapon itself is hidden behind a payment wall. A fresh user won’t hit much with it until he was able to practice a lot. If their first impression is not impressive enough, they simply will no longer care about the weapon. They can be everything from up to op, just depending on how many of them there are. And that’s bad because it makes the weapon “un-fun” for almost everybody. For one on the using, for the other on the recieving side. They are not fun to use (ecept for an outfit standing on a cliff, and even then it’s more cheap then fun) and are not fun to be shot from. Which leaves AA mostly down to the max which (imho) currently is the best AA in the game. Two bursters (or enough makes with one) can at least keep ESFs somewhat at bay. The same amount of AA launchers can’t as they are unable to hit air reliably enough. Also the skyguard is a joke, it’s still almost impossible to hit anything with it that isn’t damn close to you. For a dedicated anti air vehicle it’s doing a very bad job. And that’s why you see it very rarely. There is a large mismatch between the strength of aa options. And this leads to a problem: the “casual” deems air to strong. Is it? I don’t think so. But the overall casual player does not have enough tools at his hand to have the impression that he is able to fight back. Less in av, more in aa. I don’t know how to fix this. Maybe give HAs the AA lock on launcher for free and nerf it a bit in strength but make it hit more reliably. Or give people free skyguards. I don’t know but the overall feel drives people towards using vehicles and air instead of playing as infantry. And I think this is what actually matters and makes the game less fun for people wanting to play infantry. They feel like they absolutely have to play vehicles if they want to make a difference. Which they don’t but to be effective as infantry takes way more coordination, effort and personal skill then driving with a vehicle zerg. I think there is a mismatch in player perception of the game when it comes to large numbers. And as the ad tells us: the game is all about numbers. Also the delicate topic of ESFs is something I want to touch. Everybody who reads the official forums or talks to new players will always hear that ESFs are op. No matter how much balancing has gone into them the issue is still there. For one I think it’s because of the issue mentioned above. Also I think it’s because the ESFs were designed outside of the rest of the PS2 design philosophy. For comparisons sake let’s just pretend that Libs are MBTs of the sky. They are slow, hit hard but require several people to unfold their true potential. So let’s assume ESFs are the Lightnings of the sky. A one crewed vehicle which has to specialize in what it want’s to do. Noticed something there? ESFs don’t need to specialize much. They have nose guns, pods and countermeasures always at their disposal. Especially since the AA missile nerf there (again) is pretty much no use in not taking rocket pods. With your nose gun you are also able to dogfight, take on ground targets, and you still have flares and afterburners. The ESF is built as a flying swiss army knife. It can run setups which are decent to good against almost everything it can possibly encounter. And although I know I am not going to make many friends with this I think that this is what makes Air/AA balance so hard in this game. You need to give (to not say: force) pilots to choose their options. And make their choice matter. Currently the system of outfitting an ESF is shallow and leads to a lot of complaints. Hell, alone dedicated AI and AV rocket pods would already help. But yet “HEAT” rocket pods (with a huge ammo count, to add to the issues) are the only ones in existence. Which brings me to another point: the very often shallow point of choosing vehicle loadouts. The game is basically build around the philosophy that there is a weapon which takes the middle ground and two which take the dedicated “anti” roles. The problem here is that due to low TTK there is very often no use in taking the dedicated guns, except for your second MBT gunner. With being unable to refit a vehicle once spawned it is always better to go with the “HEAT” solution except when you exactly now what you are going up against. And even then it’s debatable to use AV weapons because you will run into infantry at some point. With the HE nerf it became pretty much useless. The problem here is that AV and HE weapons are for one not good enough counters. The difference in TTK/shots to kill to HEAT is not worth losing the ability to fight anything else (although HE AV damage is still decent). They might seem better on paper to fill the role, but in a game which is so largely constructed around numbers, in most of the cases it does not matter if it takes you four or five shots. It’s more important to be able to adopt to the situation. The weapon design largely looks nice on paper, but once it’s tested in a gameplay environment it falls short and makes a lot of options in the shop a useless money sink. Intended or not, it’s not an enjoyable experience for someone spending cash there. It got somewhat better with the VR but still I think the issue should be addressed. I have plenty of weapons sitting in my account which I will most likely never use again. Simply because I had to figure this out by myself and though counters actually where significant counters. [cut due to post limitations] |
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2013-03-23, 10:36 AM
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[Ignore Me] #2 | ||
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Private
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Which brings me to the more deeper, financial core of the game.
In the recent pasts there have always been playstyles which were yielding an ungodly amount of certs, while there are others which did not and still don’t. This has gotten better, but it’s still the case and I doubt that it will ever change. In most cases it still involves vehicles (good cert gain) vs infantry (less cert gain) except in some situation. But overall this leads to another problem: the games cert gain balance is out of whack. With one playstyle you are able to get 12k+ score/hour easily, while another which might be even more needed (like being dedicated AA or securing points while another squad captures a nearby territory, making sure no backcap cuts you off) yield little to no xp in comparison. Of course one could say: well, it’s about having fun, not about playing to get the most certs. Well, the problems of the recent past (Libs, Rocket Pods, Sundi farming) and the current ones (The Crown) beg to differ. This sentence would be true if the game would not require a shitload of certs in the first place. For one this could surely be addressed with introducing more universal certs, like why do I have to cert into C4 and flak armor in every class? Also, why are some certifications straight upgrades? Why doesn’t C4 and tank mines replace the grenade spot? Why are some certifications more desirable then others (flak armor vs others)? Addressing this would make getting those certs and building loadouts more meaningful instead of being straight out improvements of the classes and also give the players a better feeling of progress decided by his playstyle and not to pick the best options out of the selection. But I also think that redesigning the cert system is only a start which would be fighting the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that the distribution of how many certs a player can get is out of balance. Many of the “casuals” I talked considered the cert gain as “unfair”. My current cert/hour ratio is roughly about 37 certs per hour. And this includes medals, boosted playtime and double xp weekends. Even for most people in our outfit the number is lower. Being around 25-30 mostly. This issue reminds me of a very long discussion we had during the Tribes Ascend alpha and beta. The problem was that many of the top tier players had enough ingame currency to buy everything multiple times, where more casual players were unable to obtain enough to have the feeling that they are getting anywhere This will drive the more casual players off and/or force them to grind at the Crown. And don’t get me wrong, but if one player is able to do 4 to 5 times the amount of certs then another, simply because he plays a different role or in a different place then there is something wrong with your F2P game. You will never see this in another successful F2P game. Of course good players should be rewarded(!), but not by the amount the game currently does. And very often this does NOT even mean being a better player, just knowing where and how to farm in the most efficient way. If you want your game to have an ingame currency unlock system you have to make sure that the overall balance is better and people to not feel being left out because they play the game they want to. A large portion of this might be the emphasis on kills. And as the idea of a passive cert gain as a major factor in progression has been dropped I cannot think of something how to fix this problem. Just changing numbers won’t do it. This also leads to a problem with boosts. When people told me that they feel they are getting too few certs and I told them to get a boost they asked me why they should buy a boost if one playstyle can yield them more xp then another one with boost. I ran out of arguments there because they are/were right. The problem here might be that the overall feel of the cert gain does not make people play the game they want it to play but “forces” them to play it they feel the game wants them to play it. And that’s not fun. Also I think that’s bad for the overall gameplay experience for everybody. Especially since it makes people flock to places like the crown. It would be fine if we would have a Crown in every hex, but we don’t. And this is also one of the reasons why I think people are at places like the Crown. Kills=certs. The rest is not that significant. The other (next to still too many bases being too hard to defend) is that there is always a fight going on there. I know that you are working on systems to make it easier to tell where currently a fight is happening so I don’t go there. But what I want to mention is the problem with population balance. If the pop is out of balance in one continent almost nobody fucking cares. And introducing continent locking won’t change anything. The only reason you can give people to fight on Esamir instead of the Crown is to give them a reason they care about. The reason the majority of F2P players play is: certs. They don’t care about NC/TR/VS owning the continent, even if it would give them a malus. They care about getting xp and therefore they care about the Crown.You tried to fix that with the pop bonus, and this is a good start. But seriously, who came up with the bright idea that 16% XP bonus would make people fight when outnumbered 3:1, in a game where numbers are everything? If you want this to work you need to increase it. A lot. We run a mid sized outfit and it’s getting harder and harder to find fights for us. It’s either ghostcapping or running with the zerg. Or we can group up with other outfits which basically makes us a zergfit for the night. Which is all undesirable for us. Many to all of the reasons I have listed above lead to bases being empty most of the time. So we decided to at least go to the continents our faction doesn’t play on to get some more people to fight against. The problem being: if you bring in enough people to being able to effectively fight the enemy, they simply leave the continent. You then lock the continent and go to bed afterwards. The next morning the other two factions have already played continent lock ping-pong two times. All your work is lost. There is no persistence in this game outside of character progression. Everything can be lost and/or gained in an blink of an eye. For a game which calls itself “persistent” this is not a desireable gameplay element. It should be about the battle going for hours, not the war being over within minutes.Maybe the new lattice system will help. But I doubt it because it will also tunnel more people into the same areas. Making the fights bigger, and most likely less desirable for small to medium sized outfits because the chances of running into an enemy zerg also increase with the new design. For a mid sized outfit the game gets very frustrating from time to time and over the last months we had a lot of dropouts because they got bored with the game. Very often we reverted to doing stupid nonsense during fights (bring in a skyguard on top of a gal to put it on a tower landing pad), which does not help at all but is good just for the laughs. “Normal” gameplay very often does not do it for us anymore. I cannot imagine what the situation is for small outfits or a group of friends playing together. Although I do not agree with LevelCaps improvement ideas I think he highlighted the games problems quiet well. The game is currently very hard to enjoy without being in an outfit. And I am sorry but “Join the outfit” is not the magical solution to all the games problems. It’s a F2P game, it needs all those John Does and his two friends to be able to log in and have fun from the get go. If it doesn’t do that it has a problem if it wants to remain F2P. It needs a steady influx of new players, and currently I don’t have the impression that the game is able to get a lot of new players outside of double xp weekends. And after those I have my doubts that many of them stay. The game does not seem to do a good job at keeping the “casuals” interested, it also does at teaching them the game. I know this is going to be addressed. Some time in the future. But seriously, where really are a bunch of friendly people in our outfit but we are getting sick of having to explain the game fundamentals of the game to a large percentage of new players. That’s your job, not ours. I know that a tutorial system is down the line. But it’s most likely still months to go and I still have my doubts if will actually be able to tell people the fundamentals of this game. Not because I think people are dumb, but I know how bad tutorials can be. It’s a rather complicated game. These tutorials need to be kick-ass. Super kick-ass. The last thing I want to touch is something that didn’t influence my fun with the game directly but I still want to mention it. The shop. First of all: improve you deal of the day. Make it several items. Or one from several categories like camo, vehicle and infantry. 99% of the time the deal of the day is something I am not even remotely interested in. Also the new and old guns in the shop. As we know they are all sidegrades, and I really don’t want to get into the discussion here because I think we can agree that at least some certainly are clearly NOT sidegrades, but why do they have so many payment tiers? Why is in one case an AV weapon more expensive then an AI weapon and on another vehicle the other way round? If they are all sidegrades make them cost the same. It’s hard to get the sidegrade argument across if some weapons cost more. It just looks fishy from the outside. Maybe introduce tiers for primary and secondary weapons or make newer weapons more expensive then older ones. The current system has no logic behind it. At least not from the outside. Also, looking from the outside, paying 700 smedbucks for a weapon looks ridiculous for many players I talked to. Of course triple sale days cut those down, but the random guy out there doesn’t know of these! So 700 SC should be considered the base price people see the first time they look into the store. And it’s not something one would consider a microtransaction or a desirable price for a single gun. In a game with hundrets available. The perception from the outside is very important, and when people look into the shop and see the current pricing, they at least quirk an eyebrow. The shop currently is not a good first impression to have. And that’s it. At least all the stuff I wanted to mention and that made the cut. Overall all these issues might often seem very minor, but for me their combination is what made me put the game down for now. The problem is that for every hour of fun I have with the game I have at least another hour (if not more) of mediocre to frustrating gameplay. It’s just too many small issues (and a lot more I have not even touched because then nobody would ever read this) which, in their sum, make the game currently no longer desirable for me. And I actually think this might be exactly the problems why my friends dropped it and many in our outfit did. I can drop it even after spending quiet some money on it, but only because I got 100+ hours out of it. The others were F2P players, they did not invest anything. But it did not grab them within the few hours they played it. Too much grind, too much spam, too little to do, too little direction, too unrewarding; where the arguments brought up the most. And I cannot blame them as those arguments have a true core at least. And I think it’s painfully to hear if you want PS2 to succeed because these players would have most likely stuck with the game if those issues would not exist. It’s not that they disliked the game per se, it where just some game designes they drove them off. And those should be possible to fix. But once they are gone, it is hard to bring them back. They already had their fair share with the game and now they know that they did not like it. It will be hard to convince them otherwise. F2P games are as easy to drop as they are to pick up. But currently PS2 makes it unnecessary hard to pick it up which seems to make it way too easy to drop it. But the overall fun the game can bring was not good enough to make them look over the games shortcomings. And after 100+ hours I have also reached this point. It does not negate or invalidate the fun I had with the game but the “new” fun I can get out of it seems to reduce with every week, with the increasing feeling of “been there, done that” and boredom. I hope that within the next months the improvements of the game have taken it to a level where this is no longer the case. I will be happy to check it out again in a few months but currently I don’t deem the overall package enough value to invest my time. And now I thank you for your time for (hopefully) actually reading my drivel. |
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2013-03-23, 11:20 AM
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[Ignore Me] #3 | ||
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Contributor Lieutenant Colonel
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I'm still not sure I understand your reasoning for posting on an alt account but you've got some good points and solid reasoning.
Only advice I can give is, as you've said, pick it back up in a few months to see what's changed.
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 Smoke me a Kipper, I'll be back for breakfast |
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2013-03-23, 11:47 AM
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[Ignore Me] #4 | ||
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Lieutenant Colonel
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Or you could have said .
"Im not really happy so im taking a break while wait to see what changes." You could have even followed it with a bullet point list of things that make you unhappy. And then we might have actually read what you said.
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Wherever you went - Here you are. |
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2013-03-23, 12:56 PM
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[Ignore Me] #6 | ||
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Contributor General
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You're right. That is a long post.
Sorry, a bit of a smartarse response, although I never read long posts I like them short sweet and to the point. I assume you've said there are lots of things wrong or rather things you don't like. Me too.
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Last edited by ringring; 2013-03-23 at 12:59 PM. |
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2013-03-24, 02:49 PM
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[Ignore Me] #7 | |||
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Contributor Second Lieutenant
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To the OP: good points. I agree. |
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2013-03-23, 09:59 PM
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[Ignore Me] #8 | ||
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First Sergeant
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Not going to lie, didn't read any of that.
That said, too many people are "stuck" playing this game because of time/money invested. That's a sunk cost, you can cut your losses by quitting now. You won't get the time or money back, but at least you won't be contributing further.
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2013-03-24, 11:00 AM
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[Ignore Me] #10 | |||
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Contributor PSU Moderator
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Infantry Combat
Air Balance
MBT Balance
Gameplay Balance
Shop
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 Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature *Disclaimer: When participating in a discussion I do not do so in the capacity of a semidivine moderator. Feel free to disagree with any of my opinions.
Last edited by ChipMHazard; 2013-03-25 at 06:24 AM. |
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2013-03-25, 07:08 AM
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[Ignore Me] #11 | |||
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Private
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 you  Ando no, I can't see any misinterpretation. And thank you for that. I just could not get myself into formating it any better. It just started with me writing down stuff which came to my head from time to time and it became quiet messy. I just could not get myself into bringing it into order and would have most likely never finished it because of that. So I decided to post it anyway. |
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2013-03-25, 06:19 AM
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[Ignore Me] #14 | ||
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Sergeant Major
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Wow, long post. Some good points though.
Some responses:
(also thanks to ChipMHazard for the summary)
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Last edited by Gatekeeper; 2013-03-25 at 06:36 AM. |
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[Long thread] How I stopped worrying and (almost) stopped playing instead
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