Planetside 2 and Professional Gaming

[shamE]

Originally Posted by Malorn

How do you take a game designed and balanced around massive combat with hundreds and thousands of players, and also balance it for small-scale combat with only a handful of players (as all gaming competitions are)?

That's two different games entirely. Balancing the game for one will screw up the balance for the other. No thanks.

No, lets say there could be and option in main menu that allow to host a arena game separate from the rest of the game? We don't know what they plan on doing but I'm sure if they did do anything it would be a separate option from the main game.

Originally Posted by EVILoHOMER

I hope not I always find esport games to be the most generic games with the worst community.

In some cases yes. The counter stike and call of duty series are like that. But the communities from games like battlefield, tf2 the the esports and pub communities are tightly knit and usually come from the same places.

[Mezorin]

Like it or not, the whole e-sports aspect of gaming is kind of a big thing these days. League of Legends, MW3, BF3, and even World of Warcraft all have sports ready modes in them. So we'd all be missing out if the devs didn't entertain the idea a bit.

A monthly, or bi yearly outfit tournament or a return of the Outfit Wars may not be a bad idea, but if they do them they should do them Planetside style. Forget this 5 on 5 or 8 on 8 COD bullcrap, one hundred players per team clash over the space of a dozen hexes in large scale combat. There could be tailored maps, or the developers could just have a duplicate version of some of the popular hot spots for these guys to do battle in.

The idea here is that organized Planetside 2 competitive level play would bring something new to the e-sports scene rather than just being a "Me Too" for boring assed 8 on 8 game play. The game play with massed battles would also be closer to how things work in regular PS2 gameplay, so it'd be more relevant to a regular PS2 player who is more likely to be in a zerg scrum than some Counter Strike style tower duel.

[Espion]

Originally Posted by Mezorin

The idea here is that organized Planetside 2 competitive level play would bring something new to the e-sports scene rather than just being a "Me Too" for boring assed 8 on 8 game play.

More happens in a 15min 1v1 SC2 match than what would happen in a whole day of PS1 gameplay. The amount of teamwork and coordination that happens in a ~5v5 pro level match in any game is immense compared to what goes on in 60+ players raids in PS (not to mention the skill/versatility requirements since you have a very limited amount of teammates to fall back on), and it helps to understand that before you go comparing it to other games and going on about esports/competition.

From what Higby has said so far, it seems more like the aim is to just make PS2 fun to watch as a spectator at a casual level (like watching a friend play a game in his livingroom), rather than gearing the game towards high level competition (since that's practically impossible), then rely purely on high viewer counts to push the game into the scene (like D3)