News: Instant Action E-Sports and PlanetSide 2

Hamma · 2013-01-30, 02:31 PM

http://www.planetside-universe.com/n...ide-2-2944.htm

Hamma · 2013-01-30, 03:00 PM

Boom! a 14 minute rant from yours truly, messed up the audio at one point but still understandable.

Phantomdestiny · 2013-01-30, 03:11 PM

as TB said "re-using battle islands from oshur as the esports location"

Hamma · 2013-01-30, 03:37 PM

Certainly one of the possibilities. Suffice to say it needs to be somewhere totally separate.

Sledgecrushr · 2013-01-30, 03:39 PM

Very nice vid Hamma. I think your pretty spot on about how great esports come about almost by accident.

A way to utilize esports in the dynamic game world would be like small squad spec ops missions. Infiltrate a base and hold onto the point for a set period of time. This isnt what I would call a classic esport scenario but I think it would be a lot of fun to watch a small incredibly skilled group fighting off waves of the zerg.

Phantomdestiny · 2013-01-30, 03:43 PM

Originally Posted by Sledgecrushr

Very nice vid Hamma. I think your pretty spot on about how great esports come about almost by accident.

A way to utilize esports in the dynamic game world would be like small squad spec ops missions. Infiltrate a base and hold onto the point for a set period of time. This isnt what I would call a classic esport scenario but I think it would be a lot of fun to watch a small incredibly skilled group fighting off waves of the zerg.

and it would promote outfit play in general for the new players

Sonny · 2013-01-30, 04:04 PM

Great video with a lot of good points. I'm glad to hear that the Devs are focusing on holding matches on different servers.

I'm imagining platoon-scale, 30-minute matches, all fighting over an island; two mountains at opposite ends (the spawn), an open plain with a central outpost containing three control points. Each second holding a control point gives your team +1 to your score, control all three simultaneously and you get +100 and the control points reset.

At the start of the game, each team gets given 20,000 resource points to spend during the 30 minutes to limit the amount of tank zerg and liberator spam.

The commentators have access to the first-person views, observer cam and an RTS-style 'starcraft' cam, which gives them a bird's eye view of the outpost and its surroundings, letting the viewer get a better overall picture of the strategies and maneuvers of each team.

Throughout the match, in the corner of the screen displays the scores, resources remaining and time remaining.

Well, anyway, I'm dreaming

NewSith · 2013-01-30, 04:29 PM

I gave up on the ESport idea, since there is just too many people that "don't want esports cause they don't".

I myself am against instancing. Instanced PCW will just get redundant really quickly, it will hold for 2 years max and will end up dead, just like in GA, since the game is not designed to be balanced around 1v1. And what's the point of playing a game competitively on a small scale, when there's BF that can pretty much offer the same thing, and it IS balanced around 1v1 combat. It will be even worse if they balance it around 1v1, because the casual community will suffer.

I'm all up for UES type of thing and I consider it a success, despite the poor execution of the event itself, minus the resets. You don't need resets, if your objective is to concentrate around non-instanced combat.

Hamma · 2013-01-30, 04:49 PM

That's why I think PlanetSide 2 as a "spectator" e-sport on twitch could be bigger than actual tournies and ladders.

Big Cyz · 2013-01-30, 05:40 PM

This E-Sports stuff is garbage. It takes development time away much more important things, and even the e-sports scene won't take to PS2 being their team-based shooter, as it is an MMO and lacks a lot of the mechanics that makes high-skill ceiling shooters competitive.

Just like when WoW PVP first went into E-Sports tournaments, less people would watch that then a single person training in League of Legends.

The only reason MLG partnered with SOE is because SOE threw so much money at them, otherwise the game would not even be mentioned in the same sentence as E-Sports, ever.

E-sports by it's very nature is small-scale, teams of even numbers, fighting in a controlled environment with strict rules in order to score points. This goes against much of the draw of Planetside 2 which is huge scale and chaotic battles. Such a waste.

DirtyBird · 2013-01-30, 05:42 PM

Originally Posted by Hamma

Certainly one of the possibilities. Suffice to say it needs to be somewhere totally separate.

About to watch it but this is also my initial thoughts as well.

Chewy · 2013-01-30, 06:31 PM

Originally Posted by Hamma

That's why I think PlanetSide 2 as a "spectator" e-sport on twitch could be bigger than actual tournies and ladders.

Agreed. Iv tried to get footage of good battles a few time, but never had anything turn out right. It was always just from my POV. A lone mans view of a massive battle. I shove my ass indoors when the armor comes or if Im not in a class to deal with the heat.

But, if (like you said) I had a free roaming cam Id be able to see the battle without being blinded by the fight. I vote on the god/observer cam being limited to a few that wont use it to help a certain faction. Maybe even have the cam a 100% of the time thing that needs an account with permission and takes its own character slot not linked to any faction (to let it enter any area and WG without the auto-kill happening). What it would take to get use of the cam would be up to the devs. Thinking about a simple application form that requires a YT/Twitch account, PS2 account, and another detail or 2 so that they could weed out most of the idiots and YT spammers looking for quick hits.

The cam would also let those with not so great PCs film things without FRAPS or the in game recorder affecting their gameplay.

Vashyo · 2013-01-30, 06:55 PM

I really dislike this cause it does slow down updates that affect the game as a whole.

How big of a portion of players from the community do competitive e-sports anyway? 1-2%? Sounds like a lot of hassle for a small crowd.

I think instead of just getting people in the game, they should focus KEEPING people in the game. I suppose we are getting more people as time goes by, but steamgraph doesn't show much increase, even the UES-event only got slightly more than a thousand players in the game, can't say much about people without steam but I wouldn't expect them to be a completely different demographic.

Just keep improving the game with new content and add mechanics to support the strategy and meaning in the metagame and eventually the games going to be so robust that you can't never go back to other shooters.

DirtyBird · 2013-01-30, 07:10 PM

With this esports idea have they given out any thoughts regarding balance?
I guess player numbers will be the same each team but is it a 3 way or 1v1?
Same BR or there abouts ie. not 60xBR50 vs 60xBR25?
Do they allow resources banked in the form of nades, mines, med sticks etc and how resources would be earned during the battle?
Maybe the ability to run a separate cert allocation for esports events?

Be interesting to see how they work it all out.
And does the Roadmap now have to consider implications to epsorts?

Hamma · 2013-01-30, 08:17 PM

I honestly don't see e-sports killing development time. The PS2 team is still huge.