Wow. This place really died, eh?

[Figment]

Originally Posted by stargazer093

so..... do any of you still have the faith, that PS2 will last longer and ever made to the level of PS1? Just wondering

Honestly I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison. Circumstances for both games vary tremendously and the reasons for a decline are very different.

The speed of decline really depends on the social cohesion of outfits IMO.

I found it a lot harder to "connect" with people in PS2 outside of my own outfit.

[Canaris]

You know the most interesting part of this is, a thread called "Wow. This place really died, eh?" has garnered a lot of post from people who love Planetside yet left PS2 due to many gameplay issues, tells us that we all still love the concept that was Planetside and if what is now DB are able and willing to actually give this game the attention, redesigns and updates it deserves. The player base is still here lurking

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by p0intman

hey man, how have you been? it has been a little bit.

Life hasn't changed much. Still looking for my next MMO and catching up on all the games my old computer couldn't play. I miss my bolt driver.

Originally Posted by Figment

"Told you so."

If you'd told me the whole thing would be inapplicable, it wouldn't've dragged on so damn long.

Originally Posted by Figment

"Told you so."

Yeah. I don't think many people were particularly reassured by it. It felt more like they were saying "okay we've stopped listening now".

Originally Posted by Canaris

You know the most interesting part of this is, a thread called "Wow. This place really died, eh?" has garnered a lot of post from people who love Planetside yet left PS2 due to many gameplay issues, tells us that we all still love the concept that was Planetside and if what is now DB are able and willing to actually give this game the attention, redesigns and updates it deserves. The player base is still here lurking

I'll always check on Planetside occasionally, at least until someone else finally manages to deliver that same "rolling war" experience.

[p0intman]

Originally Posted by Vancha

Life hasn't changed much. Still looking for my next MMO and catching up on all the games my old computer couldn't play. I miss my bolt driver.



If you'd told me the whole thing would be inapplicable, it wouldn't've dragged on so damn long.



Yeah. I don't think many people were particularly reassured by it. It felt more like they were saying "okay we've stopped listening now".



I'll always check on Planetside occasionally, at least until someone else finally manages to deliver that same "rolling war" experience.

I think for now that concept is dead in the water until someone decides to get really ambitious and tries to recreate what PS2 delivered. the thing is, it isn't easy to do, nobody really understands the formula like we do, unfortunately.

[Figment]

Originally Posted by Vancha

If you'd told me the whole thing would be inapplicable, it wouldn't've dragged on so damn long.

"The whole thing"?

Regarding AMS, there indeed proved to be no frontline when aircraft were simply going to ignore the ground fight and hop over the enemy. As predicted prior to beta. Introduction of the AMS made frontlines possible.

Regarding Galaxy squad spawning, they put it in now apparently (I've got no personal experience with it as my outfit is dead in PS2 and I don't get into random squads these days: if I log in at all it is to inspect new outpost level designs). From what I gather though, it's pretty much disintegrating the already minor logistical challenges and barriers further, adding reason for calling it "redeployside" on top of the rather easy redeploying. As predicted prior to beta it would give large squads, particularly organised platoons and zergfits a lot of power. Too much power cause the easier it is to redeploy, the easier it is to counter small groups. (I already took issues with HART drop on squad leader and the lack of a SOI anti-dropzone for similar reasons and recall making a thread in beta about reaction times against squads behind front lines, spawn hopping squads and some more things).

Regarding black ops: always said it was pointless with the capture mechanics and inventory systems: no one strike resecures have been in at all, unless they were one strike capture the base too, but always with points in other buildings, so you couldn't protect both the point and the spawn and try getting somewhere. Small crowds never stood a chance to hold with the base design (only offensively ironically if they got to spawncamp). Without attritition being applicable to medics and engineers, larger groups will always win. Pointed that out prior to beta based on early footage and comments.

And infiltration as infiltrator has never had much of a point due to jet packs. Pointed that out prior to beta based on simply knowing there was a jetpack and seeing some of the buildings: the circumference of walls, wall design being easily hopped on to and capture points.

And I could go on and on about what was missing to make certain playstyles and player and outfit uniqueness viable.

I mean it was all kinda obvious and straightforward consequences. I can't really recall ever being far off with a prediction. And yes... I did predict that with all those mechanisms in place, Black Ops outfits were going to be dead soon enough, as they would likely not beat sheer numbers very often unless those numbers were reliant on few destructable spawnpoints. Where an AMS could be taken out with more ease than a Galaxy due to hp... Among other arguments...

For one, I've always harped on number mitigation. Whether it was about engi glue or medic juice running out, or tanks being driven by multiple people or seat switching being impossible or at least delayed, it is all about creating inter-dependency on other players to create advantages, while reducing the amount of targets so it strengthens solo players in other ways than through mere firepower or personal capacity. It's about setting the right player limitations.

I dunno Vancha. I was extremely skeptic of PS2 design decisions from pre-alpha as it would never make the things we liked PS1 for even remotely viable in PS2. :/ So yeah.

It's never been about one mechanism being in or out. It's always about how all the mechanisms interact with one another to create "the whole thing"... The structure of PS2 as a whole has been... Underwhelming to me.



I think one of the biggest issues in the end is that a lot of important game design decisions were based on "player convenience". Too much convenience removes the opportunity of creating a challenge or exploit an enemy's weakness. Take the class system and everyone getting access to all classes, rather than having to make due with a select few. :/

Yeah. I don't think many people were particularly reassured by it. It felt more like they were saying "okay we've stopped listening now".

Think the exact words were probably more like: "too many voices in my head aaaaargh make it stop". Or something.

[ringring]

Yea, 'player convenience' is evil.

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by p0intman

I think for now that concept is dead in the water until someone decides to get really ambitious and tries to recreate what PS2 delivered. the thing is, it isn't easy to do, nobody really understands the formula like we do, unfortunately.

As far as I can tell it's still a technical nightmare too. I visited the PS subreddit the same day I checked up on here and still saw people complaining about framerates and bullets registering. Maybe when the basic mechanics aren't such a challenge we'll see people start to tackle the gameplay structure more.

Originally Posted by Figment

Stuff

Oh hell no. I'm not continuing an argument from 3 years ago. You can be right this time.

[Figment]

Originally Posted by Vancha

As far as I can tell it's still a technical nightmare too. I visited the PS subreddit the same day I checked up on here and still saw people complaining about framerates and bullets registering. Maybe when the basic mechanics aren't such a challenge we'll see people start to tackle the gameplay structure more.

I doubt many people upgraded their systems since 3 years ago... :/ Economic crisis and pc's generally long term investments and all...

Oh hell no. I'm not continuing an argument from 3 years ago. You can be right this time.

I've always been right... That's why I'm sad.

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Figment

I doubt many people upgraded their systems since 3 years ago... :/ Economic crisis and pc's generally long term investments and all...



I've always been right... That's why I'm sad.

Oh I don't know, when I see people posting their specs there does seems to be an uplift.

But I think the tech problems being experienced now are not due to PC issues, they seem to be network problems and bugs being created after every patch. If SOE/DBG were a professional software company they would get slaughtered over the quality control in their product. (actually, they'd be having to explain it in front of a Judge)

[Figment]

Tbh I've always seen more issues being reported by people that I would relate to personal hardware, internet providers and geographic location of the client than to SOE server and network maintenance.

Server and network issues are always going to happen in any company, let alone a MMO company.



New bugs that didn't appear in patch testing are also to be expected since the scope of the implementation and potentially affected things tend to be hard to foresee and oversee in advance, with many complications not being reproducable on small scale testing or easily overlooked.

[Hamma]

Cool to see all the old faces around here having a discussion despite the past some of us have had. Great discussion guys. I need to conjure up some thoughts on this and make a post when I get some time.

[Hamma]

So my thoughts on this relate to support of the community and SOE itself. I feel like you guys dug into the game mechanics a bunch.

First off let me say this - the game isn't dead. It was dead for a ton of people before they even gave it a chance. And most of those people were... here on PSU. It's certainly not as successful as it could or should have been. Which brings me to my first thought.

SOE started to drift away from this website I'd say after the first six months or so. It appeared they got most of the feedback they wanted from the original PS1 vets and moved on to another method of feedback. It's not a mystery that the majority of users of this forum are PlanetSide 1 vets and honestly (my opinion) would probably never be convinced PlanetSide 2 was any good unless it was a prettier reskinned version of PlanetSide 1.

I continued to reach out to the devs and Jen and I were lucky enough to be able to participate in a variety of promotional things for the game. Which brings me to my next point..

SOE and the team wasted entirely too many cycles on MLG and promoting it. I was at the various events where PlanetSide 2 was promoted and it largely felt like somewhat of an afterthought. Sure I think it brought some players to the game.. but no real effort was ever put in to making the game actually work for any sort of competition (despite whether you think it should have had a competitive side or not) it felt like they only went half way. A variety of community driven events were largely hamstrung by the fact they had to find 300 workarounds to broadcast the game and do a competition.

I think that some of the cardinal mistakes that have been made by SOE continue to be made to this day on other games. And that is continuing to take feedback from communities that may not actually be playing their games. The constant reliance on Reddit, Twitter, etc I believe is a mistake and I also believe only relying on a fan website is a mistake. I think some of the failures we have seen are due to people giving feedback who are either negative or just simply not playing.

That's about all I have on my brain right now. I believe with this last round of layoffs the team has truly been gutted of its heart and soul. The game as you see it now is what it will remain until the servers are turned off someday. We will only see performance improvements, optimizations, occasional balance. I doubt we will see new features, or continents.

SOE/DBG suffer from a massive "ooohhhh shiny" complex. Most of the games they are making require real long term investment but they are treated more like short term projects. This wasn't really a mystery to any of us here.

[Figment]

I think the main problem with SOE is the long term vision (you touched on that in the last point). I think that includes taking on too many projects and assigning inexperienced (though motivated) people to work in game genres they're not really familiar with.

And I've heard from many sources they don't have a good coding standard. Remember how messy the code was of PS1? Remember Beady commenting on how the code came without any notes about what parts of the code did?


PS2 often felt to me like RPG designers creating a FPS. The bases were designed around fitting in the landscape, but not to function defensively. Lots and lots of time has been wasted on creating then recreating and recreating the same continents.

They should have looked for experience they didn't have on the team. Personally I would have advised bringing in a military engineer as advisor for base design.

I also think that there's a big issue in knowledge transfer within the company. Where Arclegger was starting to create better bases (as I think we all agree), other devs were still making open boxes. There should have been a core principle on base design. Where all PS2 bases went out of their way to be different and nifty scenery (nice in itself for lore), there was no structure to it. In contrast, PS1 bases all shared the same principles through all base types, making it easier for players to "learn" how a base functioned and should be controlled in defense or attack due to its multi-linear battle flow, even if the layouts differed.

With PS2, not only did you have to learn each base lay-out and environment, each base would have different principles to capture, there were few ways to control a base as there was no linear flow at all. And jetpacks. I think one of the biggest flaws was adding jetpacks for regular infantry. Jetpacks in PS1 had limited impact due to being VS only and MAX only. Mossiedroppers were frequently hated and feared for very good reason: for taking the height advantage from the defenders and bringing the fight from just ONE new direction in a tower fight: above. Same goes for HARTing in on squad leaders (and overlooking the ease of switching squad leader).

I really don't think they had a thorough idea what impact jetpacks would have on every aspect of the game by handing over the height advantage to people (particularly taking it from the defenders) so easily, but just thought "it's the future and it's cool, let's do it". I'm quite sure they trivialised the impact it would have.

[NCLynx]

Hey cool my password worked.

Don't leave home without a REK.

[p0intman]

Originally Posted by NCLynx

Hey cool my password worked.

Don't leave home without a REK.

REK CHECK!