Updated: Producer Letter

[Hamma]

Ok, I deleted the original producer letter news post because it was inaccurate. Below, is a quote from the final (complete) letter according to SporkFire.

Several weeks ago, we announced our future plans for the game and started on PlanetSide's never-ending journey of continually added content and gameplay. The two new vehicles we added, the Liberator three-person bomber and the SkyGuard anti-aircraft buggy, have had a huge impact on battle conditions across Auraxis. Commanders are now able to rain destruction on their enemies through the Orbital Strike and EMP Blasts. Medics are now able to locate soldiers that need their help easier. I wanted to take a moment to shed some light on what's next for PlanetSide.
In a few weeks, we'll be shaking up the base capture process by bringing out of the SOI and back onto the terrain. In order to successfully capture a base, rather than waiting inside the base's SOI for the capture process to count down, players will need to capture a base's Lattice Logic Unit and deliver it to one of their nearest facilities. We'll describe this more fully in the coming days.

Read the full letter here. Needless to say this has everyone up in arms, considering the words "Capture the Flag" were tossed around in some of the incorrect updates. Here is what Spork had to say in reply to that.

As I said previously, the version being quoted right now is an early draft. Evidently, the latest draft had not propagated to all web servers when I first posted (correct version is up now, including the proper date).
CTF is only an internal monicker we placed on a system that is intended to bring battles outside the SOI. Instead of requiring soldiers to hang around an SOI that has dimished action, we want to make the entire capture process more dynamic. The design, which I will detail soon, is intended to make this happen.
What we are envisioning is not a simple capture and deliver game. That's been done - you've all done it and for a game shipped in 1997, it would be pretty innovative. What we are trying to do is give rise to chase scenarios. Bring back choke points. Give people a reason to engage in bridge battles again, and generally keep action flowing independent of the base SOI (which will still have advantages). We think that implementing the Lattice Logic Module will stir up better gameplay and improve the overall pace of the game. The design process has been very careful on this to ensure that the grief behavior we've seen in other CTF scenarios does not happen in this design.

That came from this thread, which is currently pretty hot. If you want to discuss these new changes here on PSU check the comments link.


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