Oh lord, playing PS2 is fucking depressing now

[Babyfark McGeez]

Seriously, what happened here?

I stopped playing again for a while, and after i did log in again this week on miller-tr i noticed how utterly horrible the gameplay has become.

First, the population imbalance is atrocious.
I don't care that planetside is "a game about numbers", infact i even like being outnumbered, more challenging and more to shoot at (not to mention a small, free xp boost).
However there is a point where it just becomes a joke. There is barely ever any remotely even fight to be found. Usually two continents have overwhelming numbers on one side (50+%) and if you're lucky one continent has a somewhat acceptable population.
But as tr it was allways the same anyways: Ok numbers up to 8 pm, then all of a sudden numbers drop like a stone and the faction becomes more or less nonexistent (atleast on indar).
Vs is the opposite, which is why a vs player and me determined that tr is the faction of kids and vs is the faction of unemployed people.

Second, farming mentality.
I use to point out where enemy sunderers are located via regionchat. Now two things can happen: Either nothing, or i get told that "we know that, but it's a good farm". Then when you proceed to down the sundy, best outcome is your own team is pissed off silently. Worst outcome is you get fucking teamkilled. Great stuff.

Third, my faction consists of fucking morons now.
You can bet that if there is a remote facility, disconnected from the mainland, everyone will go there, losing all the other territories in the process. Getting back your own tech plant? Naaaah. Defending a base for an alert? No way man.
It doesn't even make any sense, i somewhat understood it during that joke of "WDS", but now? people flock to the most retarded bases aslong as they are disconnected from the mainland. The only "order" i saw during my playtime was someone ordering support for such a disconnected base, while the tech plant right next to it was being under assault and an amp station needed defense for an alert.
Nobody knows what they are doing, it is as if all the coordinated outfits have left the game and all that is left are either newbies or lonewolf farmers.

Am i just unlucky in my server/faction/continent/time of the day combination or is that really how PS2 is being played these days? Because, fuck me, that is depressing to witness.

[AThreatToYou]

IIRC that's Miller for you. Every server but Waterson.

But let me be entirely fair: that's just the game. Tactics? Winning? Lol, fuk that! Winning is having the highest k/d and/or score per minute!

[HereticusXZ]

Yeah, pop imbalance is pretty fraking frustrating, correcting it with XP "incentives" is just making the problem even worse!

I also agree it's extremely frustrating when no one wants to nock out the enemy spawn because "It's a good farm!" but we lost the base!!!



IMO if you you lose the facility while in it, You should lose half of the XP you gained in the fight, punish people for being greedy, Don't reward them! Give them a incentive to pick and choose to participate in reasonable fights and to fight harder!

The game really needs to get away from XP incentives and give us tactically important incentives similar to Tech-Plants controlling the production of MBT's. a Bio-Lab should control production of MAX and Amp-Stations should control the production of Liberators!


ABOVE ALL, Solve the god damn pop ballance! I don't care about Alerts, OMFG, WDS, Nexus, Hossin, or any of the Community Clash bullshit if the live-game that we play every single day is royally fucked with one-sided populations!

[Assist]

Originally Posted by AThreatToYou

IIRC that's Miller for you. Every server but Waterson.

But let me be entirely fair: that's just the game. Tactics? Winning? Lol, fuk that! Winning is having the highest k/d and/or score per minute!

Unfortunately that's true, as there is still no substantial reason to play for your faction as opposed to your own personal gain.

[bpostal]

Originally Posted by Assist

Unfortunately that's true, as there is still no substantial reason to play for your faction as opposed to your own personal gain.

You can play for your faction because you enjoy seeing your faction do well. Unfortunately that only carries you for so long.
During my week off for spring break I played for maybe two hours...and beat Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 in a row again because that sounded more satisfying and enjoyable.

[Babyfark McGeez]

Well last time i could atleast pretend it was actually about territory control and didn't feel like the only one playing that way.
But this time it's like people aren't even trying anymore. The whole "k/d ratio, spm and certs" gameplay was so "in your face" that my eyes nearly fell out of the socket from rolling so much.

Maybe i should try waterson. :J

[DviddLeff]

Get yourself a positive outfit and start having fun again.

[CraazyCanuck]

I play Mattherson and Connery depending upon which of my buddies are on 8pm+ eastern and can almost always find a good fight. Might want to give either a try. Amerish last night was a blast. I've also played early in the morning on occasion and that's when I find similar issues to some of those you've mentioned.

[Dougnifico]

Ah.... so happy to be on Connery. lol

[HereticusXZ]

See I've been Connery TR from Launch and it's no exception to the population problem...



Connery' History was for the first 3 months absolute TR domination, holding control of Indar uncontested for 2 and a half straight months + the Prowler & Striker problems, to NC total domination for a few months during the Hacksaw OP drama, then the Helios Merger + ZOE Fiasco and the VS are suddenly dominating.

Connery has this illusion of being a "balanced" server because you have Outfit Alliances and competitive Outfits carrying the whole faction against a 42% or higher world-pop enemy faction. I presume other Servers have a similar situation if not far worse one to deal with!

Say what you will about target rich environments, that argument caters to the XP Farm crowd. I'm here to capture territory to get resources so I can enjoy the game. If I just want to farm I'll go play some BS Arena Shooter game, or maybe cookie-clicker!


TL/DR: Being Out-Poped is NEVER a good thing, no matter how you try to twist it!

[bites]

Originally Posted by Dougnifico

Ah.... so happy to be on Connery. lol

Must be nice from your point of view ... but being that this is a persistent world ... I can tell you its not _THAT_ nice ... what used to be "NC IS OVERPOPED WAAH" is slowly waltzing into "VANU ALL THE THYME!!!"
ZOE Started it down this path of nasty and its been progressively getting worse ... WDS highlighted this especially ... "Even pops during prime" (which in reality means TR is below both VANU and NC, NC who sometimes BARELY outpop Vanu ... in most cases) any time outside of that however (eg theres more than 5 hours in a day people...) Vanu zergfit around with up to 50% pop, they cruised round ghost capping EVERYTHING and took WDS via attrition rather than any form of skill or strategy.

Honestly I don't know how .. or why they still do it ... it boggles my mind that after this many months they are still zergging the shit out of the server to the point that during a late night Alert .. all NC does is try slow down the massive zerg (the plat leaders just outside peak used to actually state this as the goal, fact is most are gone and your lucky to find 2 open squads now).. and TR (rightly so) just don't bother ... which you can't blame them for at all!

The result ... it sucks, and slowly but surely while the "pop" remains relatively the same .. the server itself is hard pulling to one direction and taking itself out of the race for fun.

TLDR Still love the game (read as "TAKE MY MONEY!!!"), but outside of peak times (or during them for our TR overlords) its quickly becoming an uphill skiing event that isn't that much fun (you can still play in the snow .. but you won't be climbing mountains anytime soon...)

Sauce: http://borderlinetactical.net/rsnc/w...ld_id=1&zoom=3

[bpostal]

Babyfark, if you're talking about yesterday's biolab alert I gotta warn ya that there's a lot of people who either log off for a couple hours when those pop or just ignore the whole damn thing entirely.

[Chowley]

Ya Miller pop is pretty awful at the moment. I generally play from 8pm on so my playtime is usually completely dominated by the giant VS air zergs, its seriously getting old.

Although the sundy farming while common, I usually only see when the server is very quiet, late at night or early in the day. When the server is bloody quiet and motivation is low I do not object to ignoring enemy sundies.

The worst thing for me now though is Indarside has made a pretty big return in the last week Indar is pushing me away from the game, along with other issues.

[almalino]

Originally Posted by Chowley

Ya Miller pop is pretty awful at the moment. I generally play from 8pm on so my playtime is usually completely dominated by the giant VS air zergs, its seriously getting old.

Get NC Phoenix and OHK small planes from the air. They usually think they can escape when hit but Phoenix gives no indication and it is OHK.

I often look for such zergs and hunt planes with Phoenix. So much fun. Phoenix is very powerful Anti Air rocket + granted it is very slow.

[Mordelicius]

@ OP:

On the population imbalance, it's the WDS Preseason 2. It touched off not just intra-server faction switching or just flat out logging out, but cross server migration.

The "MLG themed" NC competition in Waterson such as NUC and ZAPS has largely evaporated already before WDS even started. In addition, due to the ZOE nerf many hight VS migrated to other servers.

As a result, the VS 'barely' lost the WDS preseason 2 to NC. Had it gone another day, the NC would have lost our razor thin lead. The VS were essentially ignoring alerts and capping continents just to get the lead, resulting to less and less fighting with each faction concentrated on one continent.

On farming. It happens since the alert rewards aren't enough. It rarely happens in NC Waterson, but it can be frustrating when a rogue group would be farming somewhere unimportant during an alert.

I've suggested a different alert reward system a while ago to make it more interesting: http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=55841 (supply crate drops that physically is parachuted! Something concrete that can be fought over after the alert).


On the TR being least populated. In general, the chief reason is the buildup and collapse of insta-win vehicles/fracture max complex, coupled with the OP Strikers. When your whole 'gameplay' was based on strikers decimating vehicles and letting your Anti-infantry Harassers/Max Fracture finish off the remaining infantry for months, losing it almost overnight can be devastating.

In addition, in Waterson, NUC (TR) is not as active/effective as they used to be (which sucks; fighting NUC is one of the best reason to be in Waterson). Waterson TR has been making a comeback lately though.

@ the topic of last couple of patches:

Liberators are currently overpowered. My fully armored Sunderer was destroyed in 3-4 second. They have to fix this crap. Wasn't the Sunderer survivability was just fixed recently allowing attackers to consistently allowed to respawn and not get mass wiped by Sundies blowing left and right?

These Libs are obliterating the spawn Sundies to great effect. Raise Sunderer resistance to the Liberators. Take a pick SOE, make Liberators air glass cannon or weakly destructive tank. They can't be both! They are strong against everything again.

Sniping is overpowered. They say they want to protect the newbies from being farmed (that's what we've been saying on and on and on last year: nerf all the OP stuff pronto) that's why they added the new kill screen yet they ignored warnings that Snipers do not need any buff . Their instakill long range headshots is low risk/high reward. Been saying it all along they didn't need buff. It's like Dev left hand doesn't know the right hand, doing things to nullify each other's functions.