Too Many people

ringring · 2013-04-01, 08:39 AM

At least in population terms is PS2 attempting the impossible?

Regardless of optimisation have the devs been too agressive in attempting to get 2000 people onto a continent?

Afrter all, because of that they have tried to spread the fighting out by having many outposts on a continent and by having many objectives within the spread out bases of which Amp Stations are the prime example.

Even so, they must realise that when a continent is about to be captured the empires must logically concentrate so that the entire fight is ultimately contained within a single hex.

I wonder whether a better discision would be to reduce the populations and to change things like base designs to have the single points of conflict producing more epic hard fought fights.

Sledgecrushr · 2013-04-01, 08:42 AM

What kind of gaming rig are you using?

RSphil · 2013-04-01, 08:55 AM

id say no. was on miller last night and it was full with about another 50+ waiting in the VR training room to get on to a continent. the game runs ok to great if you rig is not 10 years old. mines a new one so runs spot on. the bases are fine bar the camping but but as time goes on they will sort this out, the game is still only a few months old. this new hex system will hopefully sort out a few problems with defense ect. id say this game is spot on for numbers of people. with maps this size you need a lot of people to make it feel like a real war. i tried Arma 3 and large maps with only a few players suck's. never find anyone to kill. though they do herd everyone to a point to fight over it is still to big. planetside 2 has a good mix of map size and population. i hope it gets bigger and bigger tbh.

KALU · 2013-04-01, 08:58 AM

Never enough... 4000 would be interesting!

Phantomdestiny · 2013-04-01, 09:03 AM

haha i can't wait for them to add the seemless oceans between continents that would bring a crap ton of players in and would add strategic "metagame" instead of just tactical metagame

hashish · 2013-04-01, 09:44 AM

Originally Posted by RSphil

id say no. was on miller last night and it was full with about another 50+ waiting in the VR training room to get on to a continent. the game runs ok to great if you rig is not 10 years old. mines a new one so runs spot on. the bases are fine bar the camping but but as time goes on they will sort this out, the game is still only a few months old. this new hex system will hopefully sort out a few problems with defense ect. id say this game is spot on for numbers of people. with maps this size you need a lot of people to make it feel like a real war. i tried Arma 3 and large maps with only a few players suck's. never find anyone to kill. though they do herd everyone to a point to fight over it is still to big. planetside 2 has a good mix of map size and population. i hope it gets bigger and bigger tbh.

I agree, Miller is the best ! lol had a seriously intense assault last night in indar but i still think it would be nice if we had more continents and bit more meta-game development through the hex system and ofcorse santuaries

check out the footage from last nights massive assault -
lol after we did this, the NC did the exact same thing and then the servers starting tripping out. Everyone started experiencing aloot of latency/ping. My fps was fine tho, bottlenecking a little bit on cpu at 27-34fps..

ringring · 2013-04-01, 10:31 AM

Hmmm, ah well.

My thoughts were that the performance issues we're all seeing is not primarily to game optimisations but simply that we've run up against the limits of today's tech.

I've read the descriptions of yesterday's fight on Miller/ Spec Ops where apparently rendering was down to several metres and hits took seconds before they registered.

It seems to have been fierce battle which we want but without the 'issues'. I wonder whether it's possible to have both with the current numbers at least.

Calisai · 2013-04-01, 10:41 AM

Impossible, no. Difficult for the 90% of the playerbase without epic rigs to handle the CPU requirements. I think the game may have been a year or two early. Also, I don't think it was properly conveyed that the game was going to be majorly CPU dependent. Most gamers are used to having to have epic GPU's. This caused a perception issue that they're massive GPU rigs that get great FPS on other games would get the same on this one. It should have been stated more emphatically that this game is way heavier on the CPU.

I started playing Tech Test & Beta with an AMD 960T. I quickly figured out that it wasn't going to cut it. I upgraded to a i5-3570k. The difference is night and day. When I OC'd that to 4.4 compared to the stock, there was another huge jump in performance. Even in zerged biolabs I don't drop below 30fps and in the majority of fights I'm up over 70fps.

It seems like new systems today (new CPUs specifically) should be able to handle the game without too many issues, it's the legacy systems out there that are having issues. Hopefully with more optimizations this will only get better. Unfortunately, there isn't much that they can do to support the older CPUs as the horsepower is just not there.

That's why I say the game may have been a year or two early for the hardware that's currently in play... or may have overreached it's numbers a bit.

NapalmEnima · 2013-04-01, 01:03 PM

Ambitious as hell? Ahead of it's time? Need a monster rig to run it?

Yep, it's a Planetside game alright...

I know I bought my latest machine specifically with PS2 in mind. I'd be shocked if that wasn't true of many others here as well. The same was true with the original.

PurpleOtter · 2013-04-01, 02:02 PM

Too many people playing Planetside?

Phantomdestiny · 2013-04-01, 02:51 PM

there is never enough people bring more minions to the glorious terran republic

hashish · 2013-04-01, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by NapalmEnima

Ambitious as hell? Ahead of it's time? Need a monster rig to run it?

Yep, it's a Planetside game alright...

I know I bought my latest machine specifically with PS2 in mind. I'd be shocked if that wasn't true of many others here as well. The same was true with the original.

Yea i bought my laptop just to run planetside 2 lol.. Does a good job on ultra settings, even in that big ass fight last night on miller

RSphil · 2013-04-01, 03:06 PM

i see alot of people complain about optimization and mostly people with old pc's. they expect to play new games with 10 year old rigs and are shocked when they cant. i see the same in Guild wars 2 also. if you cant run this game on minimum with good fps then its time to build something a little more modern tbh. im one for building things a little op. when i saw planetside 2 i built a new rig to play this and guild wars on max settings as i like more power lol. my i7 3930k at 4.4GHz does fine and hardly taxes the cores and the 7970 gcard is great. i also put 32gig of ram in for fun lol.

i love this game and cant wait for it to get bigger.

ringring · 2013-04-01, 04:03 PM

One of the reasons why I raised the question is that (clearly) the devs have made decisions based on their percieved needs to manage the action. (I've described that wrongly.

Look at Amp Stations, one of my bug bears. They are spread out all over the place, there 6 individual gens, plus a capture point and the spawns are slightly seperated too.

I speculate this is to avoid too many people clumping because I can't see an otherwise sensible reason for it.

Would you accept a lower pop lock if it meant a PS1 style base that was more compact and had pinch points? I think I would.

Snydenthur · 2013-04-01, 04:23 PM

This weekend there definately was too many players. It's not only a problem to the client, it's a massive problem for the server. Indar had awful lag. Hits registered like 1-3 seconds after the hit. Again ammopacks, repairs and healing weren't working. It took a lot of tapping of E to get inside a vehicle. This was at miller, but I'm quite sure there were lag problems on every server since double xp does attract a lot of players.