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2012-03-14, 09:26 PM | [Ignore Me] #91 | ||
Lieutenant General
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PS1 of course had its peak "marketing" effort in 2003. The majority of people had bad connections and social networks on the internet were in their infancy. According to facebook, at least 30K people, pre-media hype, are interested. And that is just people on Facebook. I still come across people who played PS1 and are not aware of PS2. Then there is the increase in player potential, with eastern Europe joining the online community and youths joining the older PS1 veterans.
I would say, 50-80K should be doable with good marketing. If it receives good reviews and replayability and if people get tired of 'grind' MMOs... Who knows. Not saying it cannot be done, just saying SOE and ProSiebenSat should be ready for it. Really do hope the system they come up with can cope. Players should know in advance which servers would merge with which IMO and preferably when, so it is not seen as decline. |
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2012-03-15, 12:23 AM | [Ignore Me] #92 | |||
Colonel
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Ooooh.. You see what I did there? Uncap = sanc + warpate - loading screen. It adds no additional functionality or capability. It streamlines gameplay. |
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2012-03-15, 12:28 AM | [Ignore Me] #93 | ||
Contributor PlanetSide 2
Game Designer |
I don't think it really matters how many poeple are on the server. The facts remain that the population will expand & contract. The battles will shift accordingly with populations going to maximum and tapering off. Even if we have 10 continents, at some point the population will drop substantially and some of those continents will become ghost towns, or the player density will be cut back severely.
Since PS2 is a game where the players are the content, keeping up the density is important to preserving the gameplay. How is this going to be done? We can't simply instance more Indars and then destroy them when they aren't need as the world is supposed to be persistent. The only thing that really comes to mind to preserve density while also preserving persistence is to have a large number of continents, but expand / contract the number of available continents to fight on, sort of like how with Core Combat only 2 caves were open at any given time and it rotated, the Planetside Server could lock or open continents as the population increases/decreases. The set of continents that are available should rotate to keep things fresh of course. For release when we only have 3 continents they could create duplicate continents and then replace them later with new unique continents, assuming the server could handle it. Along those lines.... Idea - Continents are actually servers 1) Each continent is a server, with duplicates at launch. 2) Duplicate servers get replaced with new continents over time. 3) Set of available servers (i.e. continents) adjusts with global planetside 2 population 4) All players and outfits are globally unique. I think it would be rather cool for each continent to be a server, but the players & outfits are globally unique. So for each geographical location, you have a set of servers equal to the number of continents. As the player population dwindles access to servers could be reduced, and as the population increases, servers could open up. The servers that are available could be random or rotated to keep things fresh. But then you run into a problem where there are 3 starting continents but the would-be population of Planetside could be much bigger. It's kind of cheesy but extra servers could simply be duplicate continents. As new continents get added they can replace the duplicates. As the game goes on and on, they could have dozens of unique continents to fight on with the set of continents people have access to shifting as global PS2 population changes. It would scale really well and long-term Planetside 2 could have a lot of individual persistent worlds that sort of lock & unlock like the old caves did depending on population and rotate so we have a lot of unique places to fight. They could also be region specific, like Europe has their own set of continents/servers, so does North America, and East Asia, etc. |
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2012-03-15, 12:40 AM | [Ignore Me] #95 | |||
Contributor PlanetSide 2
Game Designer |
Sorry for the multiple posts, but it just occurred to me as I was reading that other thread about space combat that my idea above about each continent being a server may be close to what they are planning.
http://www.fpsguru.com/game/284/feat...t-SyndCon.html
All they need are "placeholder continents" to account for a larger player base than they have continents to individually sustain. Over time they can replace the placeholder (duplicate) continents with new unique ones. Last edited by Malorn; 2012-03-15 at 12:43 AM. |
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2012-03-15, 12:48 AM | [Ignore Me] #96 | |||
Private
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In this case there is no way to even make it difficult for someone to move into the continent, which one was able to do in ps 1 |
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2012-03-15, 01:08 AM | [Ignore Me] #97 | ||
Major
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That's actually a good point.
Since we don't need lattice links to capture territory, you can't block access to a continent by taking the base by the warpgate anyway. Last edited by Fenrys; 2012-03-15 at 01:12 AM. |
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2012-03-15, 01:33 AM | [Ignore Me] #98 | ||||
Sergeant
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Lack of progress generally leads to the death of games, I just fear this game will burn out sooner with fewer continents to fight for and no sense of actual progression since it's going to be extremely unlikely any empire will get remotely close to locking a single continent.
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2012-03-15, 01:42 AM | [Ignore Me] #99 | |||
Colonel
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Ooh! Idea! I'd just been thinking about how it will kinda suck that each empire is permanently stuck with the same uncap. So. Cap a continent, and the empire gets a pop up window asking which uncap they should claim, and suddenly that one is theirs, and the other two are assigned randomly to the other two factions. |
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2012-03-15, 01:46 AM | [Ignore Me] #100 | |||
Corporal
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2012-03-15, 02:30 AM | [Ignore Me] #103 | ||
Contributor PlanetSide 2
Game Designer |
Nah it takes a while for it to get stale, especially when you have multiple continents to fight on. And rotating will affect the positioning of the empires so it is a little disruptive. I can see maybe once every two weeks but even that seems a bit extreme.
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