What was your launch day like? - Page 3

Canadian Vanu · 2012-11-21, 10:02 AM

Well, the intro was enjoyable. Certainly gets you excited.

Wargrim · 2012-11-21, 11:10 AM

The launch went MUCH smoother than i had ever expected. Smed was telling the truth when he said they had their ducks in a line.

When the Countdown ended, the PS2 website was overloaded, as was PSU, but once someone posted the direct dl link, i started and in 2-3 hours i was in the game. ( Waterson TR, Plueschpanzer )

Hammered escape to skip tutorial, left random squad, checked map, saw action at The Stronghold, instant action there.

Fight starts good, tank and infantry combat. I tell my team to stop parking tanks right behind friendly tanks so we can reverse for repairs. Surprisingly, people listen.

At one point, NC Aircav arrives. I get killed by breaker rockets. I throw an insult in his direction. Our spawn gets now spammed by multiple Rocket Pod Reavers, plus a Liberator with upgraded Cannons. I throw another insult in their direction. I guess i should have expected it. I tickle the Lib with my single Burster Arm. Die respawn. I realize the NC cap will take a while, and there are tons of NC outside our spawn that do not know i can shoot through the shield. Switch to HA, rocket to the face, over and over again. Once the base is lost, i drift across Indar. Somehow i end up at Allatum, i use region chat to tell people about teleporters, shield gen and SCU. We do not really make progress though.

After a while, the people i played Beta with start logging in and send friends requests. We squad up and move around. At the Vanu front on Indar. Amongst other things, we cap Quartz Ridge and cut off the Vanu push in TR land. We have a blast, we fly Libs, drive Tanks, Sundies, Infantry combat, and in the end we meet the TR Tank Zerg pushing south, back to Allatum. I crash 4 times all in all, but can get back in quick every time, even when there is a queue.

Real good fun, i expected the first days to be unplayable due to insane load, but it ran just fine.

Snugglepuff · 2012-11-21, 11:35 AM

It was spectacular, both visually and gameplay-wise.

The scale is unmatched. It's ridiculous. The Heavy Assault's BR (Battle Rifle) is amazing - feels like a semi-auto G3. Lots of damage per shot, pretty accurate. I stuck a 4x scope on it so I could help keep the cloaker's heads down when they're picking people off and I think I've killed more of them with it than any other class ^_^

That said, I think there's waaaaay too many infiltrators, lol. There were numerous times where as soon as I stepped outside, I instantly died to a bolt driver and it was rarely by the same person.

SpottyGekko · 2012-11-21, 12:55 PM

Launch day went waaaaay better than I expected !

Kudo's to the SOE team for really having "their ducks in a row". It is often said, but more often than not it's just marketing talk. They delivered.

Raymac · 2012-11-21, 01:01 PM

It was a suprisingly awesome launch day for me. I live in California so I had to wait allllll day at work before I could get home to install it. Forgot to uninstall beta so I ran into the normal error 1001 and figured this was going to be a long night.

Jumped right onto the PS2 website, downloaded the game suprisingly quickly, logged into the Connery server without a wait (non-member at the time), got dropped into a Biolab fight on Amerish and I was off and running.

Performance held steady at 20-40 fps which is about all I can expect from my Phenom II x4 965, GTX260, and 4GB RAM. It's not great, but playable for me for now until I can afford my upgrade. I did get the flicker bug once, but just jumped of a ledge to kill myself and it was gone. Ironically, the only real hang up I had was from my internet provider. My stupid broadband modem kept disconnecting, so I would start cursing the game and then see my modem trying to reconnect, "Oh, well there's your problem right there."

I really just lone wolfed it around, messing around with different guns, just trying to get my feet under me, especially since my modem was being a bitch. Had a great time. For a major launch, it was amazingly smooth for me and the way you always hope it goes. It's kind of cool to think this is the beginning of many years playing this game. Even though I was in beta, this feels like the beginning.

QuantumMechanic · 2012-11-21, 01:04 PM

I'm doing base defense somewhere as a TR Engineer, and a Vanu drop pod lands not 50 meters away. I of course have the jump on the guy, so I fire on him as soon as I see him and kill him with a headshot.

Then I get his name and rank notification and it turns out he was BR1. I literally felt regret burning a hole in my stomach.

I wait a few seconds and then send him some tells explaining that the tutorial sucks, and suggested he respawn at his warp gate and look for a new player squad there.

But no reply from him at all. I get the feeling he ragequit.

===============================================

The server performance issues are still there. I still saw a lot of warping and lagging and rubberbanding. Also note that all servers (well the 3 I have characters on anyway) went down at 1am PST. Being that it was release day, I'm not surprised. But if that continues every night for some time... well it's no different than beta.

All in all it seems to be a pretty good launch. I was expecting more new players actually, they only had to add one extra server, for the east coast. But they could well add more servers as the week progresses.

Still holding onto my station cash before I buy anything.

Edit: just read Smed's tweets about adding new US and Europe servers. I wonder what the actual server capacity is anyway. Did they really ever reach 2,000 per continent?

Edit again: also the fact that VOIP was down was too bad. My biggest concern for launch is the first impression the game makes on new players, and not having the in-game VOIP for communication was a shame I thought. Apparently they needed to conserve server bandwidth though.

EVILPIG · 2012-11-21, 01:19 PM

Launch was amazing. 4 platoons of infantry, supported by a platoon of Air and a Platoon of Armor with 2 squads of our Shadow Team shifting behind the lines. Coordination at it's finest. We wrote the book on Combined Arms in PS1, and continue to refine our art. Cooperation brings victory!

DovahTerran · 2012-11-22, 10:06 AM

Launch was something I won't forget. I made my character and joined in on Connery (US West 1, I think) and then got presented with an awesome video. The only downside was that my comp almost had an aneurysm trying to load in THAT many people as I rocketed down to the surface of an Amp station. I really liked getting thrown into a coordinated squad. It kind of added to that whole briefing video and made things really immersive and fun.

I only fought on Esamir yesterday. That was pretty cool, seeing that we had enough people to fill out every continent nicely. During Beta Esamir was a cold ball of boredom for TR most of the time.

Subject CHANGE~!

One thing.. Has anyone else had trouble with the game not drawing everyone that is near you? I fought at Amp Station Elli last night and the Vanu were riding up in hordes. But the strange part was that some were randomly disappearing and appearing (it didn't matter much, I still had plenty to shoot

) ; however, does anyone know why that is? Perhaps a safeguard to keep the game from crashing? Clientside lag? I didn't see any rubberbanding or warping. Just random "ghosting" of models.

psijaka · 2012-11-22, 01:12 PM

After waiting 10.5 hours for the download to finish, Launch Day turned into Launch Day+1.

Managed to play briefly on Woodman, but warping all over the place; chaos.

Created a new character on Ceres later in the day as Woodman very busy, and played for 4 hours solid; had some lag issues but on the whole went well.

Sawboss · 2012-11-22, 03:49 PM

Smoothest mmo launch i've ever seen. Feels good to finally be in the game earning permanent upgrades.

The very first drop was pretty insane though, computer freaked out being chucked into the middle of a huge battle, but after 3 deaths spawned slightly further back with a prowler and went on a killing spree.

Felt kind of bad mowing down players who were obviously new and didn't quite get what was happening yet as they ran across a frozen river on Esamir on foot.. The sheer number of them was awesome though and why I love this game.

MaxDamage · 2012-11-22, 05:00 PM

Best night of gaming since the first night of Planetside 1 retail release.

Rivenshield · 2012-11-23, 01:22 PM

Originally Posted by MaxDamage

Best night of gaming since the first night of Planetside 1 retail release.

Fellow TR vet here. Markov... but I remember your sig from the olden time. Been stuck for two months on hotel wifi, and won't get to play for another week.

Your words give me great hope. Hold down the fort until I get there. LOYALTY UNTIL DEATH!