PS2 concerns rant... Caution - WTFHUGE

Frostiken · 2011-07-22, 05:20 PM

I'm convinced that this game is doomed. This is a Planetside forum so I won't have to go too much into this, except to say that if you really did play it and vaguely followed the history of PS1's content updates, you know that in spite of the overwhelmingly popular idea of where the game should've gone, SOE ###### it up completely with countless changes, completely blew balance and never attempted to fix it, and in general did the total opposite of what players wanted.

Things SOE needs to get right:

- Third person camera. Remove it. Seriously, dumbest ###### thing to have in an FPS. The entire game ended up just being people corner-camping, waiting to leap out and yell SURPRISE before filling your face with Lasher Spam.

- On that note, remove all the spam weapons. All of them. No weapon should reward inaccuracy, and very few weapons should do area-effect damage. If you want to blow things up, you should have to work for it with a well-aimed hand grenade. By the time Planetside was on the downward slope, SOE had: Thumper grenade launcher, Rocklet rifle, the Lasher, the Radiator (the worst of them all, damaged through walls, and the area-effect would linger), the Scorpion, Dragon, the Maelstrom, and the hand grenades themselves. All of these are area-effect explosive splash-damage weapons. The game ended up literally being you running around wildly like an idiot, dodging explosions like an angry wizard was hurling meteors from above at you. Base assaults ended up being spastic, devastating affairs since they were full of chokepoints and encouraged immense concentration of area-effect weapons into tiny access points.

- On that note, base zerging needs to go away, and the concept of bases needs to be trashed. Focusing fighting into the same copy-pasta structures and towers wasn't what anyone wanted. If you ask, nobody's going to say that their favorite moments was the time they hacked the backdoor and ate a face full of Lasher spam for 45 minutes. All base fighting ended up being was you footzerging from the tower until the base inevitably flipped to neutral.

- Remove almost all the cert points. Another death-blow for Planetside was marginalization of your team. Once upon a time, Planetside needed a variety of players to accomplish things. Armor commanders would spearhead an assault while pilots provided air cover. A Galaxy pilot would carry his team into battle and drop them off. If they came across armor, they'd shelter and have the guy with the AV weaponry wipe it out. A sniper on a hillside would force the enemy to keep their heads down, and the AI MAX would bust in the doors. They'd push for the control room, secure it, and wait for the hacker to show up. That doesn't happen anymore. SOE gave people so many cert points and people played for so long that everyone's BR9000 and CR5, so everyone runs around in Rexo, nobody uses Galaxies since they can just get in their Reavers and fly there on their own (and rape everything on the ground along the way). Once they're at the base, they all just carry Decimators (the ubiquitous AV weapon) and Heavy Assault, can heal themselves, and are master hackers. So they've completely removed the need to work as a team, and instead you just sort of 'go with the flow' and kill all the barneys, elmos, and smurfs you see.

- Remove instant-action. SOE is wrong, they don't need to have a way to get people to the action faster. As player numbers dropped and their atrocious design came crashing down on them, they struggled to keep people entertained, so they refined the 'instant action' system. What this meant is that people would warp to a random planet/continent, and start capturing totally empty bases. If and when the enemy ever showed up, a 'hotspot' would appear on the map, and everyone would hit the Instant Action button and would all warp to the fight. This had three consequences - the first was that it made small fights into big epic battles with as many players as possible - that's good right? Well, not really. The second thing it did was to effectively remove small-scale battles. See, when you had to rely on the HART to drop, you had to pick a drop location and you had no idea what to expect. With Instant Action you knew you were going to go where everyone else was. While PS is an MMOFPS, the giant Mongol horde of enemies wasn't always the best thing for the game. Rather than a series of small skirmishes on multiple fronts, the game was just everyone crashing into one base at a time, in a row, until the continent was captured. The third thing that this did was concentrate all fighting around bases. The best moments in the game weren't spent slogging into bases, it was getting to the next base. What you were supposed to do was lose a base, and then stage defenders at the next vulnerable ones, and slow down the enemy advance along the way. With Instant Action, everyone just spawned at the nearest tower, so as soon as you captured the tower a tidal wave of bodies would pour out, and fighting was relegated to the same ###### footzerg within 100 feet of the base walls. This was compounded by the inevitable backhacking of towers so that as soon as one base flipped, the tower at your next base was well in enemy control and, like magic, a huge glut of baddies would pour out of the tower in an impossible flood.

- Hire someone that knows a ###### thing about balancing a game. Or just hire anyone for that matter because not doing it at all isn't going to make the problem go away. Planetside was one of the most poorly balanced games I'd ever played. Due to atrocious balance and gameplay decisions, you ended up with, for example, the Decimator - vehicles were powerful, and would crush infantry to bits. So in order to give infantry a chance, they put in a heavy-hitting anti-vehicle weapon. The result is that you're either told to be raped by vehicles, or carry the Deci with everyone else, and rape every MAX within sight. Balance between factions was worse, for example the Vanu AA MAX had jumpjets meaning it could jump over Reaver missile spam while firing passive-seeking homing bolts. Meanwhile the TR MAX was stuck in place and could only aim in one direction, and the NC MAX's homing missiles told aircraft they were about to get attacked, giving them plenty of time for defensive maneuvers. Everything was complete crap. People give the BFRs a lot of flak, but the BFRs were the least of Planetside's problems. Like everything else, they were broken and badly balanced, but in principle they could've been made to work. But they weren't. BFRs were simply the most glaring and obvious example of the problem, but most of the die-hard Planetside fans who were still around at that point were willing to deal with the awful balance and turned a blind eye to it.

- Focus fighting away from bases, outdoors. The problem with base fighting is, besides being a giant cluster-######, it is stale and repetitive. Everyone drops on the roof of the Tech Center and blows the gen. Or you just wait for it to flip to neutral. ######. Yawn. The best fighting was outdoor bridge battles, or running gunfights between forests. Provide ample areas for outdoor ambushes, such as saying that vehicles traveling offroad only travel at most at 75% speed, while they're faster on paved routes, to focus armor movements on vulnerable roads. Marginalize the ability for single players to have huge effects on the battle by, for example, flying around in a Reaver killing everything they see.

- Rip off Battlefield. As Planetside matured, its tactical demands became fewer and fewer. Rexo meant everyone could survive copious amounts of damage, so there was little threat to standing in front of an MCG, while at the same time, all the area-effect spam weapons meant you didn't even have to aim to whittle the enemy down. All fighting was focused on taking a tower, and then zerging the base from the tower, so there really wasn't much to do. By making the game more lethal, less frenetic, and slower-paced, it should be far, far easier to deal with balance issues, and would definitely make players care more about the actions of their teams. All too often, running in the open strafing left and right rapidly was the most effective form of advance. Slower pacing in games has always corresponded to greater tactical depth as it allows players to make decisions, allows those decisions to have a greater impact as it takes the enemy longer to respond, and makes players care about those decisions as a result. By marginalizing the ability of a single player to function as a walking arsenal able to punch tanks apart, you encourage them to want to stick together to maximize their effectiveness, and they will be less inclined to run off on their own. In a game with zero consequences for just about anything, with heaps of overpowered weaponry and giant unstoppable arsenals in your lockers, players are never really FORCED to work as a team. The repetitive nature of the game meant that there wasn't much need to work as a team. The game, especially in the later years, felt more like a team deathmatch with vehicles. A good example of this is the ANT. Back at release, ANT-bombing was a hilarious and useful tactic. Eventually that went away. Eventually ANTs themselves went away. Once upon a time, people actually tried to supply bases under siege with the ANT, trundling to the warp gate, soaking up the space cheese, and then going back (or flying, whatever). Eventually, you'd see just waves of enemies parked at the warp bubble in their Reavers waiting to pick off ANTs, and the risk became too much and people just stopped with the ANTs, letting the bases flip themselves to neutral (which signified 'victory' for the attacking team).

- Listen to your god damn players. Most players suggestions are total ######. 90% of balance complaints are 'nerf everyone but me'. So I can understand why SOE didn't really listen too much. However, SOE was wrong in that they didn't listen to anyone. Throuhout PS's life, even before any of the expansions, people were making great "things" to describe how to refine the gameplay a bit more. Introduce these sorts of things to capture between bases, remove some bases here and there... SOE ignored it all, and instead gave us... caverns. Caverns. ###### caverns. Nobody wanted the caverns. Nobody cared about the stupid slingshot Tron rope things. Nobody wanted to screw around in some sort of crazy Quake-esque fantasy land arena, and nobody did, the caverns were empty because it was the total opposite of what anyone wanted. When they introduced BFRs, the only way people could get them was to get kills... in the caverns, effectively FORCING players to fight in their stupid little caves. SOE had no idea what their players wanted, and they simply refused to even try to interact with the community. As a matter of fact, the original producer, DaveG and a community manager named Sporkfire were the only two who ever really talked to the community, and both of them got fired.

- Pull your head out of your ass. When Planetside was new, the promise was that newbies wouldn't be disadvantaged to vets. For a while, this was true (see earlier, the 'golden days' of Planetside where most people weren't BR20). However, when they introduced the insipid ###### caverns, they had to motivate players, so they introduced new, overpowered weaponry that forced you to fight in the caverns to earn as well as, of course, buying the expansion. As SOE let you get more and more certs, you let vets stomp around as if they were the god damn Ironman while newbies were getting raped by the endless AOE spam and single-seated airborne cowboy killmobiles. As the vets played longer and SOE introduced another expansion with even more toys, the newbies were stuck with dumb-ass things like the Punisher assault rifle (oh lordy), while Vets ran around invisible and had pistols that could one-shot kill you. Every new weapon they introduced was like it was in a race to be even more powerful and outrageous than the last. When I finally quit Planetside for good, it was when they started to introduce new toys, but the kicker was they were only for players with certain 'ribbons', like 'Played the game for over two years' and 'Has 800 kills in aircraft'. So these new things that my subscription fee is funding development for were completely out of my reach in every practical sense. The result was that I had to wait to buy special certs for them, while the vets got all the advantages. ###### you Sony.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TL;DR version: SOE will ruin this game. Planetside was a great game, but it was a deeply flawed, broken game that slowly collapsed as they made it suck more and more. The coolness of Planetside was enough to overcome the multitude of ###### design and balance decisions, but that slowly wore off until nobody but the biggest fanboys could tolerate it anymore. Planetside 2 isn't anything new or exciting, and I highly doubt it'll be able to hold up the giant triple-layer ###### sandwich SOE is already preparing to drop on it.