Planetside 2

[Jimbo]

After reading Smed's post on experience gains, I'm really not looking forward to playing.  Just playing beta has me scratching my head, there are some fun points but lots of WTF?! moments too.

Smed must be stuck in EQ mode where he thinks slowing down experience is great, hey can't have people level up and actually try out things.  Fucking developers...from EQ, DAoC, CoH, omg...they are leveling too fast quick cock-block exp gains so they can't level fast!

Playing TR so I'm slanted on it so far:

Balance of the weapons- I'm really scratching my head on this one.  The HA LMG sucks, but so does the other smurfs and barneys, but then again I'm biased (humped a M60 for the army when I was young), we really need a prone and/or bipod or tripod deployment and some more umph in our bullets.  I'll trade off running slower or not being able to jump as well or what ever, hell even take away the rocket launcher.  But then that would make another class.  The dumb fire rocket is pretty good, I mean with a well placed shot max's get dropped on one hit.  I run out of ammo before my LMG would kill them at close range.

The carbine and rifle are damn impressive!  Playing my medic is wild as I can run up and destroy them if i get the drop, hell I've even been shot at, turned and destroyed them, I know that has to frustrate some of the other factions.

The classes-- 
HA-see above. 
Medic-pretty cool, was hoping they had the healing boxes or grenades in but the heal gun is okay for now. 
Engineer is like Trippy said, little underpowered right now, deploying the turret is a death trap unless you have overwhelming odds, looks promising if the hacking and repairing and maybe buffing the turret with cert points (no clue if that is what they plan), could be a fun class but could be over powered down the road.
Light Assault is a fun idea and has a great gun and cool idea.  The grenade limit and how to resupply is wonky, but i guess certs will make that a little better.
Haven't played the infiltrator yet so no comment, same with the MAX haven't played him yet.

The base capture is okay, but the crash a base with 2 galaxy's and overwhelm the defenders is too easy.

Tanks seem okay, but took a bit to get back into the habit of gunning and driving, plus just realized my tank could deploy.  The ATV is the same, pretty fun to run around on, the Sunderers was a bit clunky to drive but seemed okay.  Haven't played the air craft yet.

It is in beta and okay, not sure if how the dev's are talking is really going to make the game fun.

Being able for a side to win would be nice, but knowing my luck if they did something like that it would be painful to everyone.

[Malakili]

The RPG elements are the things I worry most about as well, particularly in light of the f2p model which means they are going to have to give some incentive to buy things like boosters.   I've never liked the idea of RPG elements in a shooter, and I feel like the reason they appeared in PS1 and again in PS2 are that developers seem absolutely convinced that MMO persistence has to incude character progression.  I'm much much more interested in world progression, and at this point just the idea of having to level myself up in games is getting really fucking old. Granted, there is truth that you can jump right into this and play, and for that I am thankful. But the moment I start feeling like I'm losing because of what I don't have, its going to start really bothering me.   Its been somewhat refreshing playing Counter Strike: GO since it came out just because there is none of that progression/unlock crap.  In fact, I've been playing more CS: GO than PS2 beta, if that says anything.

Rant aside, this game is fun to play and I'm going to be playing it at launch and hope that the large scale stuff over shadows the downsides (which I think it will in the end).

[Merusk]

... that developers seem absolutely convinced that MMO persistence has to incude character progression.  I'm much much more interested in world progression,

I'll wager developers feel this way because it's the feedback that players have given via play habits.  No progression/ way to continue developing a character = falloff in play hours and an eventual discontinuation of play.

[Mrbloodworth]

Really enjoying tonight's base capture. stuff.

   

    Hey all -

    Membership and what benefits paid players have access has been talked about quite a bit on the forums this weekend. We're still working out the exact details on our membership model, precisely what benefits it will grant, but I wanted to give everyone a bit of a preview of what we're thinking on giving to members and why we decided to give those things.

    First, a quick aside about "pay-to-win"

    Ever since we first started working on this project, we've been dedicated to the belief that Planetside 2 is and must be a legitimately competitive online gaming experience. A large part of being legitimately competitive is confidence that the game is 'fair', for free-to-play games this typically boils down to the question of: "is it pay-to-win?"

    As much as I want to give you the definitive answer that Planetside 2 is NOT pay-to-win, it turns out it's actually a fairly personal question and people define what exactly pay-to-win is in their own way. The viewpoints cover the spectrum from people who will opine that any advantage that paying players get at all is pay-to-win, to others who don't even see a problem when you can pay a dollar to instantly blow up someone's tank. Rather than try to convince YOU that Planetside 2 isn't pay-to-win, I want to talk about why I'm convinced it's not, and then talk about why we've made the decisions we have, for membership and microtransactions while being constantly mindful of the goal of creating a "legitimately competitive" experience.

    In Planetside 2 we don’t restrict your character from any type of gameplay based on paying money. No weapon, vehicle, attachment, continent, class or certification is unavailable to you as a free player. Everything and anything that can affect gameplay is available to unlock through gameplay. This is a big deal. It would be extremely easy for us to make tanks and aircraft restricted to members only, it would be very easy for us to sell exclusive guns on the marketplace for Station Cash. We wouldn’t do those things because we have a commitment to ensuring that the game remains legitimately competitive.

    Another thing that I believe keeps us pretty firmly in the “not pay-to-win” column is the way characters in Planetside 2 advance. Unlocking a new weapon or ability in the game should never make you straight up more powerful. Rather, a new unlock should give you access to a new gameplay style which has trade-offs. This is the concept of sidegrades, if I spend Auraxium to unlock a Skyguard turret for my Lightning, hell yea it makes me a lot more powerful vs. airplanes, but it makes me a lot less powerful vs. tanks. That’s not a power advantage, it’s a playstyle shift, and each and every thing you unlock in the game should offer similar choices to the player, rather than a undeniable upgrade. This is admittedly not exactly the case in the game right now (a notable example is unlocking secondary weapons for aircraft, these undeniably grant a significant power advantage currently), but we’re working on making this the case in as many areas as possible.

    Yet another aspect of legitimately competitive is where you’re drawing the line when you define the competition. For me, when I say the game is competitive I meant that on a moment-to-moment basis your ability to compete with and kill my character is entirely based on our personal skill. I should never be able to acquire an item that makes it just straight-up easier to kill you, or makes it straight up harder for you to kill me. One exception would be for consumable items. Consumable items such as grenades, med kits, implants and even to some degree vehicles, do give a distinct power advantage in a moment-to-moment context – but, these items are available exclusive for resources which are exclusively earned in game.

    Our goal is to make it so that any fight you have in the game with another player is entirely won or lost based on that player’s skill rather than how much money they’ve spent or how much time they’ve invested in the game. We want a player who is badass at shooters and has just jumped into Planetside 2 for the first time to kick *** at it without spending a dime, and they will, because the ultimate arbiter of your success or failure in the game is your own personal skills (be they driving, firing, teamwork, tactics, etc) and NOT which gun you bought. Now of course, if you walk into a room with a guy who has a kickass close quarters weapon out, and you’ve got an assault rifle that’s meant for long range engagements, he might crush you, but that is still skill in the form of choosing when and where to engage, it’s not an advantage that was bought or sold.

    Okay, so “access to stuff” is out as paid benefit. So too is “more powerful stuff”. So what do we do to keep the team employed in these jobs we love creating games that hopefully you guys love too? There are two things that we are considering selling in the game: Cosmetics and Convenience. That’s it. Seriously.

    Cosmetics are pretty self-explanatory, I think everyone “gets it” with cosmetics and won’t be too upset at buying camo patterns or decals for real money.

    What about Convenience, what does that mean exactly?

    For us, convenience is purely the act of unlocking something faster, whether that means through buying a side-grade weapon directly with a StationCash microtransaction or earning certification points faster due to a boost or membership. That leads us to the real topic of the thread (which will probably end up being shorter than this “aside”, go figure).

    Planned membership benefits

    As I mentioned before, none of these things are set in stone and we’re posting them now so that we can hear your feedback and adjust if needed. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to model a membership that gives great benefits but does not gate specific functionality or gameplay and allows the game to remain completely competitive. The current plan is to have membership affect your character advancement in three primary ways, each of which will additionally be accessible via a “boost implant” available to all players – yes, this does mean that players who are members will be able to double down on one area if they choose to.

    1 – Passive Cert Growth. This is often mischaracterized (by myself as well) as “offline cert points”. It’s actually just passive cert gain that works if you are online or offline. With the current plan all players will gain cert points passively over time at a set rate. Members will get a faster rate. The current penciled in benefit for membership is 50% increase to the speed which passive cert points are granted. This does not affect cert points earned via experience.
    2 – Automatic experience boost. Members will accrue experience at a 50% increased rate. This will affect “active” cert point gain, as well as battlerank gain.
    3 – Automatic resource boost. Members will accrue resources at a 50% increased rate. This will affect the rate which you can acquire consumables like grenades, spawn beacons and med kits, as well as vehicles and Auraxium unlocks.

    Additionally:
    4 – Increased resource pool caps. As Auraxium is uncapped, this only affects Catalysts, Alloys and Polymers, it’s a 100% increase to those pool sizes. This allows you to spawn some additional vehicles, grenades and consumables if you have no resource income on the map before you’re tapped out.

    All of these benefits are intended to enhance the speed at which you can acquire things in the game. That’s it. They give a lot of convenience for the guy who either wants to unlock all the things immediately, or to the guy who has a few hours on the weekend to play but wants to be able to keep up with his lottery winning buddy who games 100 hours a week. What these benefits do not do is give the guy who spends money on this game some overwhelming advantage that a free player has no access to. Yes, members, players who purchase boosts, or directly purchase weapon side-grades from the store will be able to in many cases (although not all, since time played and skill still counts for a lot in cert and resource accumulation) unlock items or certifications faster than non-paying players. To us, the competition isn’t who unlocks all the weapons first, it’s who uses them most effectively, and that is entirely up to you.

    We think this plan is fair. We think this allows us to sell a membership that will really benefit Planetside 2 players without compromising the core goal of keeping the game legitimately competitive. As always, we look forward to hearing your thoughts.

    Thanks for reading!

    -
    mh

[Sky]

4GB patch!?

[Nebu]

4GB patch!?

Patching in the fun! 

[Malakili]

Yeah, downloading that bad boy at the moment.

[Sky]

Got in, couldn't find a place to get out of my infiltrator suit because there was nobody to snipe and cloak lasts like 4 seconds. Redeploy I guess means suicide, but at least I got into a heavy suit. Run around lost in a giant base not made for people to run around on apparently. By then the action died, saw a turret and jumped in because there was some air around, someone starts shooting the turret. It's a guy on foot but I'm too slow to target him so I jump out and I'm dead before I can turn around.

There's that. Should've known better than to try a shooter. I just don't get into them anymore and they're filled with people who do that just destroy people like me. $40 down the shitter.

[Malakili]

Got in, couldn't find a place to get out of my infiltrator suit because there was nobody to snipe and cloak lasts like 4 seconds. Redeploy I guess means suicide, but at least I got into a heavy suit. Run around lost in a giant base not made for people to run around on apparently. By then the action died, saw a turret and jumped in because there was some air around, someone starts shooting the turret. It's a guy on foot but I'm too slow to target him so I jump out and I'm dead before I can turn around.

There's that. Should've known better than to try a shooter. I just don't get into them anymore and they're filled with people who do that just destroy people like me. $40 down the shitter.

Try to find team mates and stick with them.  You can't really be successful in this game running around by yourself.

[Falconeer]

You can't really be successful in this game running around by yourself.

Oh no, someone can. It's just not me and you, Sky. Not anymore.

[Malakili]

You can't really be successful in this game running around by yourself.

Oh no, someone can. It's just not me and you, Sky. Not anymore.

Ok, maybe someone can.   But the point is, its not really smart to be unsuccesful doing that and then claim the game just isn't for you.  It isn't best played that way, at the very least.

[Sky]

I used to be quite effective as a combat engineer cloaky type sneak back in the day.

I think it's 50% skill atrophy (last serious shooting was BF2) and 50% lack of time to invest.

Also, the icons/names on the HUD need to scale. At 1080p on a tv it's lol.

[shiznitz]

And you don't have to actually be in a squad.  Just be around other people. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Character Wipe and Server Name Change 09.17.2012

In order to progress Beta testing, during our update later this week all character data including names will be wiped. Please keep in mind this will not be the final wipe in the testing process.

We also have exciting news! All available servers will be been given new names which will feel more appropriate for the PlanetSide universe. These names are temporary, and subject to change before launch.

Stay tuned for more information this week.

As mentioned earlier this week all Beta servers will be provided names after the next update. Below is a list of the servers that will be available:

US East:

Themisto
Leda
Himalia

US West:

Metis
Adrastea
Amalthea

EU:

Thyone
Herse
Chaldene

Different for the sake of different.

[Sky]

And when I say skill atrophy, I'm projecting. I've played twice without actually shooting faces with guns. Maybe once I get up to speed on their bizarre UI, but it just seems weird to me. I don't foresee a time very soon where I'll have time to sit and surmount the initial learning curve.

[Mrbloodworth]

What are the issues you are having, other than shooting?

The main game UI is really rather standard. Not sure it could possibly be more standard really. The ESC menu stuff can be a bit confusing, they have a number of things that need quicker access that is somewhat buried IMO. Also, there are two areas to look at certs, yet only one where you can spend them. Not sure why.

[01101010]

They bring back the Johari server on launch and I may have to play.

[WayAbvPar]

US West:

Metis
Adrastea
Amalthea

WHY?? Why do they do this? Let's have two made up words approximately the same length, and both starting and ending with the same letter, and make them both server names. To make things even more exciting, we will have them serve the same region. Maximize the confusion and frustration- that will keep the money rolling in.

[Malakili]

US West:

Metis
Adrastea
Amalthea

WHY?? Why do they do this? Let's have two made up words approximately the same length, and both starting and ending with the same letter, and make them both server names. To make things even more exciting, we will have them serve the same region. Maximize the confusion and frustration- that will keep the money rolling in.

I was just thinking this when I a gaming community I've been rolling with had a poll to choose the new one.  I was like, what the hell do these even mean - what is the difference, why is location no immediately obvious! 

[Mrbloodworth]

Game Change Summary from 9/19 Live Stream
Figured I would throw this together for people to comment on the various changes they talked about in the live stream. These are notes I took during the stream and everything I list here was specifically mentioned in the stream.

New continent: Esamir! Icy waste.

Vehicles

    Upgrading tank armor across the board to take one more HA rocket without being killed. Includes Lightnings and faction-specific tanks. Rear armor is not upgraded.
    Sunderer will have 3 major deploy certs/options:
        Respawn Station: similar to current Galaxy
        Resupply Station: Aura that gives healing and ammo to nearby infantry
        Blockade Armor: Increases Sunderer health, and from a previous post by Smed, it will let the Sunderer breach enemy forcefields. Breaching won't make this round.
    M60 Mortar turret (unlocked weapon for Lib tailgun, Galaxy turret and Sunderer) is getting its projectile speed increased significantly.
    "Almost all" vehicle certs going in. Exceptions are "unique" vehicle certs that are more complicated.

Facilities

    Changing all Amp Stations to mimic the new Peris station. Notably:
        Spawn gen and main capture point have swapped positions. Spawn Gen is now the core of the base.
        You can also breach the main building by bringing down a single exterior generator, instead of all of them. Although you won't have full building access until they're all down.
    Changing Tech Plants to be less complex:
        Single capture point. The satellite capture points will be independently captured, similar to amp stations.
        Moving the spawn gen to an exterior building, but still shielded.
        Generally improve movement and travel in/around tech plants. No more "rat's nest" of weird corridors and complicated mid-deck.
    Facility Generators will be destroyed differently.
        No longer be destroyed with weapons fire.
        Attacks will interact with generator to set it to overload, and will have to defend the overloading generator until it blows.
        Any defenders who reach the generator can avert the overload.
    New animations with sound for capturing facilities.
    Infiltrators can "hack" facilities. They can take control of an enemy turret or terminal for their team. Can't be stealthed to do it.
    Warpgates are being changed to be more like a terminal at a bus station or airport. Should be easier to mobilize and less running teammates over.
    Walls are continuing to be added to bases.

Combat

    MAX units are being heavily changed:
        MAX units will have a cooldown and resource cost, similar to vehicles. Eventually Implants will be offered to reduce cooldown, similar to vehicles.
        MAX anti-vehicle weapons are being improved for TR and NC. VS is not being improved, so presumably the current VS effectiveness against vehicles is the goal for TR and NC.
        NC Scattercannon getting more ammo and more "pellets per shot" to make it competitive with Dual Cycler. Considering adding "spinup" time to Dual Cycler.
    VS sniper rifle is slowly being buffed.
    Inflitrator changes:
        Can hack (mentioned above)
        Getting motion-sensor IFF dart gun that will show enemies in a radius around it to their squad.
        Infiltrator will eventually get EMP and Jammer tools.
    Generally adding a lot more certs next week.
    New infantry weapons next week!
    Explanation of Carbines: NC tuned to be short range. TR long range. Sidegrades are going to be added for each faction to give different range and firing rate options. Bolt action sniper rifles going into each faction.
    Light Assault next week will get better escape/survival to fit into a squad skirmisher-type role.
    Specialty infantry weapons like MCG and Jackhammer will be added in about 2-3 weeks.
    Smoke grenades being improved.
    IRNV range being nerfed.

Systems

    Command certs being added.
        Can place various colored smoke markers (with flare at night) visible to your own faction.
        Can ping map for entire faction for attack requests, defense calls, etc.
    Medals are being added/improved. You get a medal for a weapon based on kills with a specific weapon. Awards Auraxium. Medals will be added for vehicles as well.
    Faction colors added to /yell
    Improved waypoints, added platoon waypoint.
    Improved indicators for squadmate vehicles.
    Track vehicles for an owner, even if they leave vehicles, and countdown for deconstruction for owned vehicles that are abandoned.
    Improved vehicle damage indicators.
    Added some canned voice call hotkeys.
    New HUD for Fighters and Flash.
    Improved UI for buying certs/weapons at any time.
    Outfit tags will show on players/kill cams

http://www.twitch.tv/las0m/b/332774696

[kildorn]

Cool, will try again next week when the new weapons/certs are in for Infantry.

[Ratman_tf]

I got a beta invite, and I'm afraid to click on any of the links! 

[Mrbloodworth]

Heads up, supposedly there are more keys going out.

[Mrbloodworth]

PlanetSide 2 Command Center -- Episode 5

[HaemishM]

Yep, there are more keys. I got one last night. Too bad I won't be able to get to it until Tuesday at the earliest other than to install it.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yep, there are more keys. I got one last night. Too bad I won't be able to get to it until Tuesday at the earliest other than to install it.

Humm. Starting to think when you get extra keys are based off of when you picked up alpha squad. Where did you get yours, a friend, a site or twitter or something?

[Falconeer]

You just reminded me that I got my Alpha pack the day it was announced, and I still haven't received the friend invite. Bleh.

[HaemishM]

I never bought the alpha pack. I just got the email out of the blue.

Played a little bit last night. It... needs work.

[Mrbloodworth]

Hey guys -

I wanted to address some common issues we're seeing on beta right now and some plans for solving them which you'll see in the next couple weeks.

Spawn Camping

Towers and certain large facilities have had big increase in the prevalence of spawn camping since the last patch. When a base is about to flip you'll see players spawn engineers and camp the tubes with turrets. To combat this we will be implementing pain fields (areas where enemy players take damage over time as long as they're standing in them) in certain spawn rooms.

Rockets and tank shells occasionally do no damage

Currently there is a bug where if you fire immediately after reloading the projectile will not do damage. This is most obvious when firing rocket launcher and tank shells. You can avoid this by waiting a moment after reloading before firing, but it will be resolved with this week's beta update. [Currently scheduled for Wednesday night/Thursday morning]

Population balancing

We've noticed the issues associated with population imbalances in the game. There are two primary things we're doing to address these issues in the near future:

1 - This week we'll be increasing the XP and Resource bonuses for under populated empires, as well as the threshold for when those bonuses are received.
2 - Next week we will be implementing zone and world level empire population caps. These will prevent a single over-populated empire from locking the other empires out of the zone / server.

We will continue to monitor the issues associated with population balance and reassess as more continents become available for play.

Default lack of anti-air

With the recent character wipe we've noticed players having a lot of trouble dealing with aircraft (especially liberators) from the ground. This week we'll be making Burster MAX weapons more readily available to new characters (this may just be a 1 Auraxium unlock for now, or it may just show up automatically on your character, we're still figuring it out), and eventually we'll be adding more anti-air weaponry for Engineers.

Platoon and squad issues

Platoons and squad leaders have expressed several communication and coordination related issues, largely having to do with being able to see all platoon members on the map, being able to see platoon and squad vehicles on the map. We're working on fixing these issues as quickly as possible and you should start seeing improvements this week, with a lot more coming next week.

My guns suck now! Boo! Hiss!

We've seen a lot of threads about various weapon balance changes and the feeling that "_____ faction's weapons have been nerfed, I can't hit anything now". Looking through our data we can see that overall weapon accuracy has gone down a few percentage points in the last week, but not significantly and not for any one faction more than any other. Here is some aggregate accuracy data for each of the main infantry weapons gathered since the most recent patch vs pre-patch:

Pre-patch accuracy:

NC Assault Rifle: 34.0542%
TR Assault Rifle: 33.0161%
VS Assault Rifle: 33.2806%

NC Carbine: 33.3055%
TR Carbine: 32.4743%
VS Carbine: 33.6675%

NC LMG: 28.3856%
TR LMG: 27.7163%
VS LMG: 27.8617%

Post-patch accuracy:

NC Assault Rifle: 29.9629%
TR Assault Rifle: 29.2134%
VS Assault Rifle: 29.4579%

NC Carbine: 30.6946%
TR Carbine: 29.4575%
VS Carbine: 29.8943%

NC LMG: 24.0507%
TR LMG: 24.6082%
VS LMG: 24.8786%

This shows a drop across the board of about 3-4.5% accuracy on each weapon with the addition of the new recoil mechanics. This is pretty much as expected and isn't impacting any particular empire more than the others. The average difference in accuracy across each empire are as follows:

NC: -3.7614%
TR: -3.8115%
VS: -3.9724%

NOTE: This loss in accuracy hurts the NC the most, since they're generally speaking the most punch per bullet, but the effects should be mostly negligible.

As always, thanks for continuing to beta test, your feedback and bug reports are definitely helping us to make this game great. Until next time!

-
mh

Higby, Yesterday at 10:04 PM

AlenL IronBear

We were able to resolve the issue preventing new lighting data from going live. Sometime next week (barring an earthquake, war, act of god or TR warpgate rave) the new light data should go live. You will notice a significant improvement to how bright interiors are. What I'll be keeping an eye out for is any rooms out in the vast world we might have missed, or intense areas of combat in bases that feel lacking in illumination.

So sometime late next week, not today, keep an eye out for the changes and gimme bugs to squash. :D
Thanks guys/gals/smurfs/elmos!

[Goumindong]

Higby is wrong. The accuracy reduction hurts the TR[or VS] the most, since they're generally the least accurate[or had the largest aggregate reduction].

The difference between 97% and 100% is a very small reduction in DPS, the difference between 0% and 3% is a huge reduction in DPS

[Mrbloodworth]

I honestly did not notice any change personally. Everyone I shoot dies.

[01101010]

Oh goody... pain fields to deter spawn camping.  How's that work with a medic?

[Mrbloodworth]

Pain Fields are another one of those things they resisted, that were in PS1 for a reason.

[01101010]

Pain Fields are another one of those things they resisted, that were in PS1 for a reason.

Well of course... I think me and my buddy were part of the reason for the pain field considering it was part of the AA Alliance's base routine to duck into the spawn room and hack out pounders (when they were still AI) while on top of the terms. Good times when all the sudden there is a MAX on the term that popped out of nowhere. Of course, after the pain field came in we did the same thing but loaded out with more med packs till the tubes dropped.

[NiX]

Does anyone happen to have an extra key? It sounds interesting enough to want to try it and I missed out on the PS1 hayday.