Render Distance: PS2 totally broken

[phungus]

It's just unplayable.

PS2 was very neat for the first couple weeks, then lack of meta etc made PS2 fall into the boringness duldrums. I did discover the ESF at that time and given my favorite space fighting game, Allegiance, had hit the final stages of death for a game I still found some fun flying around (no rocket pods though, just cheese A2A). I had alot of fun with the mossy; focused on shooting down other ESFs which kept me going a couple more months. Unfortunately for ESFs it's impossible to fly now (outside of a friendly air zerg). I think this is a combination of factors primarily being how they toned down render priority on ESFs, secondary issues include lack of targets (less people flying), and ground AA. While ESF render priority has "fixed" the anhilator issue (what a crap way to fix the problem, by making the target invisible and invulnerable...), the unfortunate side effect is that it makes to so enemy ESFs pop into existence at 100 meters; which is a death sentence when there are multiple enemy ESFs. Also in the dogfighting side game where you fly at max altitude the render priority has made it all but impossible to locate targets, basically forcing you on Connery to head to the VS warpgate where render distance improves, and the sythe's lack of speed gives you an advantage, this gets old quick.

In a tank you can huck shells and defend for a bit, but once you get more then a 100 players or so engaged in a battle then invisible ghosts kill you, with no possibility to retaliate. I've seen this happen multiple times, most noteably while defending, you can stop infantry for a while, but then they start blinking in and out of existance right in front of you, followed shortly after by invisible lock on rocket death. For infantry things can seem OK, but it's wierd that you can ignore masses of tanks 200 meters away - but then you realize you have invisible god mode, but even infantry fights get completely ruined by rendering in big enough battles, and sniping is just pointless.

In smaller engagments, about a platoon vs platoon or so in a 1 sq km area, things work perfectly, weapons even seem well balanced and you have actual combined arms fighting. But on Connery you pretty much have a couple large battles where render distance completely breaks things (especially for ESFs, where enemy swarms pop into existance within weapon range), or total ghost towns with no action - no in between.

The game could be awesome. Like I said you get good glimpses of what "large epic battles" are when platoons collide, but once you add in a few pubs and randoms spawning in (or the zerg's inherent compulsion to mass with other large masses of players) everything goes to complete shit. We're not talking like minor issues, it's straight up invisible god mode enemies killing you, or in the case of ESFs, getting stuck in the middle of enemy swarms because a fraction of a second later they didn't exist.

It's just completely and utterly broken. Having to decide between being stuck in a massive battle against invisible god mode enemies, or going on a ghost capping snore fest makes me chose BF3. And that's pretty much the existant dichotomy in PS2 now - well that or I could play my Vanu on Helios, but every time I do it gets ruined by hackers (which is odd because on Connery hacking issues are pretty equivalent to other FPSes, Helios is just overrun, but that's a separate issue).