News: SOE Updates PlanetSide2 Road Map

[Baptist]

I miss the surprise of something, the unexpected... the Road map has been a disappointment to me and I was actually looking forward to it being finally complete.
With all the shuffling of items we've seen I'd lost interest and hadn't looked at it for awhile, so it came as a great surprise of logging in one day and having a Harasser in the patch, was fun, the not knowing what is in the box is why I like patches it cause's discussion within the Outfit, with the road map you don't get that, maybe they're working on Empire only Tanks, maybe they'll launch both continents together at once.

Not that I think these are possibilities, but it would be nice to not be told everything with set dates, it just leads to the chance of more nashing of teeth and crying on the forum, I say tell us nothing and let us be pleasantly surprised when we do get something.

[ChipMHazard]

I think the problem with the roadmap is that is was thought of as an actual schedule that the community could directly influence by voting up or down on ideas.

That was obviously never the case. The community was never supposed to be able to directly influence whether or not a listed item would make it into the game simply by voting down or up. Nor was the roadmap ever supposed to have been a schedule set in stone.
Which is certainly for the better since that would simply have forced the devs to release incomplete and untested content just to keep up with the schedule.
The voting system is there for the devs to get a feeling on what might be more prudent to work on first, and the ability to give feedback is there to help the devs refine the concepts.

The developers are obviously working as hard and as fast as they can. People can either adopt the virtue of patience or they can not.

[Shamrock]

[NewSith]

Originally Posted by ringring

That said this is extremely disappointing. Only one new continent released in a year, that is way below my lowest expectation. I think Newsith is now being too optimistic on his November - December forecast, I'd put it at least 3 months later.

I wouldn't call it optimistic. I think it may even get pushed back one month, due to PS2 birthday.

Originally Posted by Sturmhardt

Hossin in September, continent locking in November... I get the feeling that they only have 10 guys working on ps2, the rest has been pulled to another game that will be released as unfinished as ps2 and then left alone..

You are actually incorrect. The devs want to avoid working too much in summer, and I for one am not against it. Because:

A) Summer is considered to be the worst period for marketing and new developments, because all the potential cutomers go on their vacations.
B) It really hard to work hard when it's summer and you are in California. If they push themselves they will only end up having half-baked product (if we refrain from all the sarcastic replies for a minute)

[Snipefrag]

Also.. whoever said the terminal load out screen is fine.. God its not, no short cuts to load outs, you have a clunky combo box which if you miss click it by 1 pixel to low it ends up going the edit weapon load out dialog, cant tell you how many times i have done that as inf when accessing a terminal in an enemy base in a hurry.

Also the fact that when editing your load out on the deployment screen it doesn't remember what layout you had selected when you hit customize (just gives you the first option), edit it, then hit back to the deploy screen and its unselected the original loadout you customized and selected the first one again !

For my infiltrator i have three options, long range (RAM 50), medium (99SV) and close (Hailstorm).. I decide on the deploy screen that there is a nice place around medium range with a few enemies around so i want to use medium.. select it, edit the loadout to add in silencer then hit back and then deploy without reselecting and i end up with my long range unsilenced RAM 50 landing on a beacon... Annoying !

[Sturmhardt]

Originally Posted by NewSith

You are actually incorrect. The devs want to avoid working too much in summer, and I for one am not against it. Because:

A) Summer is considered to be the worst period for marketing and new developments, because all the potential cutomers go on their vacations.
B) It really hard to work hard when it's summer and you are in California. If they push themselves they will only end up having half-baked product (if we refrain from all the sarcastic replies for a minute)

Since we both don't work at SOE, your guess is as good as mine. Don't tell people they are wrong if you don't know it for sure.

.sent via phone.

[Sturmhardt]

Argh, stupid Tapatalk made me post twice...
.sent via phone.

[Qwan]

Not to self: Never put out a MMOFPS you guys are brutal.

I dont know guys everythings seems ok to me, call me nieve, or stupid but I think things are going great. I mean here is my perspective, right now there working on charactor improvement, game play, balance issues, vehicle construction, and over all player interaction, these are all small things. Its like once they get a good handle on these things, then putting out a newer continents/or content will perhaps come alot faster. I mean its no sence in putting out new continents when you dont even know whether its going to be interlink or hex or even the perminent design of the base, if the small things arent working properly then why even bother putting together the big things that are just going to make it less enjoyable. I mean once they get all these small issues worked out and the gears running smoothly for the first three continents, Hossin should be a snap. I mean there still changing around base design. Right now they have to change bases on 3 continents, and they will continue to change untill they feel they have it right. So why even put out Hossin when they dont even have the base set up perfected or even a capture system (Lattice or Hex) locked in. Not to metion bugs, balance issues and things like that. I mean if I was in charge of this game I would be having my guys work on these things before we even talked about a new continent. So lets say they get everything done up proper, and there ready to release Hossin, everything should fit smooth, not alot of changes will have to be made when it comes out, because all bugs, base issues, and players interfaces and things like that, were fixed earlier in the game. When they add Hossin, it should fit right into place no problems. So lets keep gaming guys, and giving the devs feedback, because in the long run PS2 is what were going to make it.

P.S. and some of you vets should remember how PS1 started, wasnt the smoothest ride, but PS1 turned out to be an awesome game.

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Qwan

Not to self: Never put out a MMOFPS you guys are brutal.

...

P.S. and some of you vets should remember how PS1 started, wasnt the smoothest ride, but PS1 turned out to be an awesome game.

Quite correct.

I only joined PS1 after 1 year in 2004 and by that time all the main content was in (apart from BFR's and phantasm and GG's etc)

But, while gameplay was great the other part was v. poor - I mean stability. Being able to play for 2 hours without a crash was an achievement. I can clearly recall loading up a gal with my squad to resecure a hack on a continent and then going through the warpgate in the gal, someone was almost bound to crash and the rest loaded up the continent at different rates depending on the power of their computers.

And so on.

There was also what was called the term bug and the white texture bug.

Technical-wise there was a lot of patience needed to stick it out but game-play wise the game was all but complete and gameplay goodness trumped tech badness.

[NewSith]

Originally Posted by Sturmhardt

Since we both don't work at SOE, your guess is as good as mine. Don't tell people they are wrong if you don't know it for sure.

Well, I'm just saying from experience with gaming industry. But true that, nobody but SOE can tell.

[Crator]

Even the word "Road-Map" suggest you take a route down a road that has defined specific stops which predict when they will occur. Bad word for the "DEV communication interaction voting with player-base" thing I think...

[Kerrec]

You can all be reasonable consumers and look at the roadmap for what it IS, and not take it quite so literally.

It is a feedback device that allows the playerbase to voice opinions and have SOME influence on the sequence of what is worked on.

We're going to get this, this and this. After that, we're going to get this, this and this. After that we're going to get this, this and this.

SOE should have just gotten rid of the months on this second pass and listed the items based on what is most likely to be released NEXT to LAST. That way the playerbase would have been disarmed of their ability to whine and bitch because something is taking "too long".

Do people not realize how fickle the forum warriors are? Look at PTS. The forum warriors wanted it so badly as the final piece of the puzzle to get quality patches that worked and were balanced. Once they got it, they expected "someone else" to use it.

Forum warriors want quality balanced patches with no bugs, but they demand patches be delivered according to a pre-defined schedule.

Forum warriors want assymetric faction design, but they demand to have what the other teams have.

SOE did something hardly any developpers do, for the playerbase. And now that playerbase is using that "generosity" as fuel for their flames. It's sickening.

[Shogun]

Originally Posted by Kerrec

SOE should have just gotten rid of the months on this second pass and listed the items based on what is most likely to be released NEXT to LAST. That way the playerbase would have been disarmed of their ability to whine and bitch because something is taking "too long".

that would have been awesome and would have been harder to misunderstand.

the roadmap should really get rid of months and just be a list of current priority of things. and voting something up or down would be an indicator for devs, to MAYBE shuffle some things up or down the line.
the flaming will always start again, when something isn´t ready as indicated on the roadmap. that´s totally unnecessary.

[GeoGnome]

Originally Posted by Shogun

i don´t understand the roadmap concept at all.

we can influence the score of certain things (also i don´t know how)
but this doesn´t change anything because the score doesn´t change when things are made!
the months are all seperated, so what´s the point of the score system?
it would only make sense, when topics with great score would get higher priority and move up to earlier updates, while stuff nobody cares about gets delayed to later months.

i am happy to finally see engineer update on the list, but november?
at least the cloaker update isn´t too far away.

But we have influenced what has been made and what hasn't.

AMS non-deploy fields
Orbital Strikes
KDR Reset

I mean Orbital Strike was Upvoted, and they still pushed it back because of controversy.

[NoblesseOblige]

So many whiners in this thread. Clearly nobody remembers how abysmal dev to community interaction was in PS1. At least they're telling us what they plan to work on instead of remaining completely silent and then releasing content nobody asked for or wanted (remember BFRs?) God, I love the Planetside community, but sometimes people just act like petulent children because they aren't getting their pet update in the next week and then go on to say how awful and off track the devs are without any context for how bad community interaction is in the game industry as a whole.

All things considered, SOE is doing a much better job compared to their earlier days and other big development companies today. Honestly, I'm glad they're giving Hossin time and HUD customization is a needed update.