Planetside 2

[Miasma]

I guess there is double station cash if you buy some today, for black Friday, so if you were thinking of buying some sony bucks now would be a good time.

If you bought some at any point other than today, yes, you should be very pissed off.

Whats worth getting? (or can you get it all through normal gameplay)

I looked at the weapon list during beta and the list seemed to contain lots of very similar weapons and was hugely confusing

As mentioned buying a boost is a good idea.  The infantry weapons aren't too different but some are better than others, you can select the compare checkbox to see the difference.  An important stat that doesn't have bars to look at is how much ammo the gun holds.  People are saying shotguns aren't so great right now, I don't really know myself.  Might want to buy a good long range and a good close quarter type gun.  The rifles with high rates of fire seem to be considered good close quarter.  The official forums have lots of people talking about guns.  I guess you can buy an infantry pack too which has several of the better guns per faction.

The vehicles have more variety in what the guns do so buying them makes sense if you like vehicles.  Some will do anti-infantry, anti-armor, anti-air.  Same with MAX.

[Surlyboi]

Anybody saying shotguns aren't good is a noob. Can you pop someone from across a courtyard with one? No. But they're damned effective in close quarters, "around-the-next-corner-is-an-asshole-you-need-to-light-the-fuck-up" situations. I've got like 20 shotgun kills in the last two days doing base defense.

[HaemishM]

This interface is so fucktastically bad, tiny text, shit just flying all over the place and so many options for things like cert spending that a n00b like me gets lost. Yet somehow, I made it to BR5 and last night had a fun time with the Evil Chickens capturing some shit on Esamir.

[Jimbo]

I'll be back tomorrow night w/ my bang bus & engi.  Oh & I added camo, running lights, AMS, two better turrets.

[Falconeer]

My problem with shotguns is that I need two hits to kill anyone in close quarters, but the time it takes to shoot twice with a shotgun is the time it takes to shoot 15 bullets with any other gun, which kills them anyway. So, while I love shotguns and most of the times I use them "just because", so far I haven't been able to feel that much of an advantage using on in close quarters, and that makes me twice as angry considering how much I am giving up in anything beyond short range. Also, someone did a crazy job datamining the game only to find out that the Jackhammer is exactly like any other generic shotgun that any other faction can get. I am sure they'll eventually fix that, but super underwhelming at the moment.

[Tale]

Learning curve is a tad steep and dear god cert points as a light assault flow like slate... but it's pretty fun flying around shooting people from above. Z-axis is the forgotten area in the game so far.

Yeah I keep going to other tasks to earn certs, but when I come back to my light assault jetpack I wonder why I ever left.

[Tale]

Anybody saying shotguns aren't good is a noob. Can you pop someone from across a courtyard with one? No. But they're damned effective in close quarters, "around-the-next-corner-is-an-asshole-you-need-to-light-the-fuck-up" situations. I've got like 20 shotgun kills in the last two days doing base defense.

One of the carbines has a shotgun attachment as an upgrade. It just has one round, but again, used right...

[Kageru]

With the server lag and cramped buildings close quarters tends to involve a lot of spraying and praying. So high rate of fire counts for a lot, and is apparently why the NC guns are sucking. I'll probably get a shotgun for my engineer though because the rest of the weapons are carbines (SMG's) with about the same effective range.

The cert system was a lot more fun when things cost 30 and 50. Now that I'm saving up for 200, 500 and 1000 it feels pretty slow. The medic is pretty useless with low certs because you are generally defending a spawn point  and it's a safer plus full health to re-spawn there. It has become a lot more useful with the gun skilled up and I look forward to revive grenades.

The ground shake from tank shells is really annoying, basically an infantry accuracy debuff for several seconds. Air seems to be really powerful, but maybe that will change when people are more geared. At the moment a base assault is pretty much just dropping a force field so the tanks can pile in.

[Miasma]

Do I seriously have to buy a cert for the same scope I already know on one rifle, on every other rifle?

[Malakili]

Do I seriously have to buy a cert for the same scope I already know on one rifle, on every other rifle?

I think so :(.  I think they are trying to make it take a long time to actually make progress, although they actually sped it up from beta...

[Nija]

If you don't like shotguns because you need two hits to kill a softie, I have a proposition for you.

NC MAX hacksaws. 7 rounds per arm shotguns. Shoots as fast as you can pull the trigger. 500 certs per arm to increase that to 12 rounds per arm.

My best so far (Dropping in on the B point in a biodome) is 6 kills without reloading. I'm not going to spend the certs to buy the increased mag size anytime soon, but it's damn tempting.

[Nebu]

Logged on.  Died 6 times in as many minutes to people that I never even saw. 

This could be a great game.  The way they introduce people to it... not very encouraging. 

[Malakili]

Logged on.  Died 6 times in as many minutes to people that I never even saw. 

This could be a great game.  The way they introduce people to it... not very encouraging. 

It is beyond me why the drop people into battle right away.  Spawning at the Warp Gate is much more productive on all counts.  You can meet people, learn how assets spawn into the game, have some time to prepare for battle, etc.

Especially spawning into the middle of nowhere, and then probably defaulting to a nearby sunderer which is equally dangerous.  Top it off with no tutorials and the whole thing really is garbage for new players.  I'm glad I got that stage out of the way in beta.

[Trippy]

Well, one issue is that it's unclear from the map where you should go if it doesn't drop you right in a battle. The UI is really quite painful.

[tmp]

It is beyond me why the drop people into battle right away.  Spawning at the Warp Gate is much more productive on all counts.

I suspect it's the result of all that metrics gathered from various games, how some people give up on the game really quick --like five minutes quick-- 'because there's nothing to shoot at'. Hence you see that 'straight jump into visceral combat asap' as a way to fight that nowadays.

[Nebu]

If they added a tutorial and a brief warzone battle (8v8 or something) it would go a long way to help players get accustomed to the UI, their weapons, and the loadouts.  It's horribly unfriendly to the uninitiated and I doubt I'll be back.   

[Sky]

It's a good game that they introduce like shit. It's also free. Not sure why you want to make the snap judgement, but you should give it a shot (and watch the tutorial vids, they're useful at times).

They need to completely revamp the pod drops. It's ludicrous. I logged on to play a bit tonight, hot drop to ten steps and death. Then respawn at a sundy and die. Yeah, not feeling it tonight. Taking two deaths just to get into the game sucks on a game that tracks k/d (and I was all the way to 0.7!)

The other things, as said ad nauseum, is the UI. I watched the video that said how to see which map icon was which and how to react to gen drops for shields, etc. But I'll be a school girl's cherry on prom night if I can figure out where to even reload with the mess of tiny icons spammed everywhere.

Enemy recognition is a bit rough but not so bad I'd put it in with the two main issues I have with the game. And really, the first issue can be worked around if you have enough time to play more methodically and deploy to a base behind the lines and drive in or whatever - but they keep yapping about instant action.

The UI is really my main gripe. Were they testing at 1080p?

[01101010]

Do I seriously have to buy a cert for the same scope I already know on one rifle, on every other rifle?

I think so :(.  I think they are trying to make it take a long time to actually make progress, although they actually sped it up from beta...

Scope is specific to the rifle. However, LA and Engy can use the same guns so you only have to buy 1.

[Jobu]

Taking two deaths just to get into the game sucks on a game that tracks k/d (and I was all the way to 0.7!)

I've never even bothered to look at my k/d ratio. Why's it even matter? I mostly pay attention to map control, or my own cert tree. Maybe my BR, but that's about it. The game doesn't give you anything with better ratios... so what's the big deal? Just bragging rights? It feels like a leftover mentality to me. Like your final ratio on de_dust before the server changed maps or something.

[Zetor]

Is it just me, or are the EU servers really fucking terrible? I'm seeing warping enemies and allies, and yesterday there was a time when grenades wouldn't explode and ammo packs wouldn't activate (we were assaulting a base, had 20-30 unexploded grenades blinking all over the place, and everyone was yelling for ammo). Same with the EU client, it's locked up twice so far and seems to crash on exit. As a bonus, I had to create a new account to play, couldn't use my old SOE account. Wut?

I know the EU servers are being managed by another company, but damn... considering playing on an east coast US server (despite the forseeable bad latency problems) just to give the game a fair chance.

[Trippy]

I see warping on Connery, a WC server, as well. Haven't encountered the non-exploding grenades yet but I've played for about 2 hours total so far.

[Goumindong]

So high rate of fire counts for a lot, and is apparently why the NC guns are sucking.

Eh. If you can aim then NC guns are easily as strong as the TR guns with the exception of, maybe, the TR heavy assault rifles. The real advantage of the TR guns is the ammo capacity and the NC heavy has 100 in the clip base, so thats good enough.

[Falconeer]

From what I gathered (and someone datamined all the weapons) the NC weapons have -in general- worst Rate of Fire and Cone of Fire spread than the Vanu and Terran counterparts. The tradeoff should be that they do more damage per bullet, and I am sure your mileage may vary, but I think it's fair to say that being good at aiming isn't enough when your recoil forces you to more breaks between bursts, your Time-To-Kill just goes up regardless of the stopping power of your bullets.

I am sure people will get used to it and eventually there will be more balancing, but the NC weapons are, at the moment, the least noob friendly and in general the hardest to properly use.

Then again, someone else pointed out that similar imbalances exist between tanks and aircrafts, whereas many say for example that the TR tank is the worst of them all, but I haven't really researched that.

Also, Zetor, EU Woodman was a disaster yesterday afternoon. But it was much better around 9pm, peak hour, so there's hoping. Also, I find that switching planet sometimes helps.

[Kageru]

Indeed, NC weapons are mathematically and game-play inferior. Someone data-mined the values (which includes cone of fire blook), took the average player accuracy as reported by SOE, worked out damage in game and did the calculations. NC weapons have higher TTK than the other weapons. On top of which since so much of the infantry battles are close range, and being hit interferes with your aim, high firing rate is even stronger than the math indicates.

Obviously if you can reliably get headshots... well, you are ambushing or a god-like player and it really doesn't matter.

[01101010]

Flak on the skyguard turret moves way too slow. You can't effectively lead a target. Planes are way too twitchy in the air for the guard to be effective at any range other than right under them - especially that VS horseshoe.

I agree that k/d is pretty meaningless in a game where you can die repeatedly without getting into any kind of firefight: Run across the vehicle term at a bad time, spawn at that AMS being blown up just as to pop up, run to a fight only to have a nade go off right around the corner... from your own team, etc. I check mine at times but only because it is on the TAB screen and I like to keep an eye on that stuff.

[Falconeer]

I use K/d as a rough indication of my progress. And eventually a very rough mean of comparison with my friends, since I know their playstyle and we are always on voice chat. K/d gives me a better idea of what they are doing right and what I am doing wrong, besides aiming. That's it, but I am glad it's there. I like stats, not necessarily for competition purposes.

[Nebu]

It's a good game that they introduce like shit. It's also free. Not sure why you want to make the snap judgement, but you should give it a shot (and watch the tutorial vids, they're useful at times).

Why the snap judgement?  Because there are already a number of online FPS games that are much better crafted.  The only thing PS2 has going for it is scale and the fact that I have a bunch of station cash coins from EQ2 that I have nothing to spend on.  I watched a tutorial for like 30 mins before playing the game and I still didn't know what to do once I was dropped in front of enemy sights.  The UI and implementation are terrible for new players... and they need new players. 

[tmp]

Is it just me, or are the EU servers really fucking terrible? I'm seeing warping enemies and allies, and yesterday there was a time when grenades wouldn't explode and ammo packs wouldn't activate (we were assaulting a base, had 20-30 unexploded grenades blinking all over the place, and everyone was yelling for ammo). Same with the EU client, it's locked up twice so far and seems to crash on exit. As a bonus, I had to create a new account to play, couldn't use my old SOE account. Wut?

I get the warping enemies and stationary people shot with a sniper rifle never receiving any damage (which i presume means they are actually not where the client is showing them) pretty often. Occasionally it gets worse to the point result of actions don't update until some 5-10 seconds afterwards. Didn't see non-working packs and grenades yet but it sounds like another part of these severe lag cases.

They did emergency hotfix yesterday though, so maybe things have improved since then; i haven't yet checked.

[Mrbloodworth]

Well, one issue is that it's unclear from the map where you should go if it doesn't drop you right in a battle. The UI is really quite painful.

Those are set by your squad leader, there is nothing else in the game that automagicly tells you where to go. If you are solo, you have to figure it out, or use the many ways to get instantly into a battle ( Redeploy, Instant Action, Spawn on Squad lead ). Everything else, ABC marking, Way point, colored smoke All come from the squad leader. Even the requests for Air, tank, support, ETC that are part of the unfinished mission system are placed by squad/platoon leaders

As for sub-objective icons, the shield gens match the shield they control ( Icon is right on the shield. It can be a tank, a Spawn, or the Vertical or horizontal lines in the case of vehicle bay shields. ). Its the same icon. As for everything else, if you play battlefield, you will b fine.

The UI and implementation are terrible for new players... and they need new players.  

What part? The HUD, or the Game/settings/load out screens? The HUD is really standard for the most part.

[Nebu]

Bloodworth: If you drop me into the middle of your game with no idea what anything means, then you're going to lose me.  I even went to the trouble of watching a few youtube tutorials (more than most new people will do).  I have almost no idea what anything on my screen is beyond a) what I know from playing PS1 and other FPS and b) bad guys.  That's shitty implementation. 

Were I an experienced player, I'd find where new players were being dropped and mow them down for xp.  Why?  The game encourages it. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Yeah, you'll notice back in beta I said this introduction is bad. Moving on, what are you having trouble with?

Were I an experienced player, I'd find where new players were being dropped and mow them down for xp.  Why?  The game encourages it.  

It's any major fight across all three conts and the cont with room. Good luck. You also notice, all new users are instantly placed into an existing squad. If your SL has no way points set up, or is not communicating, well you just need to look back at those "well crafted FPS" that do not require it. People have been trained to play alone, together.

[Sky]

I think they could improve the HUD icons by making them much larger/fade for distance and move them to a hotkey rather than always being on screen. Or even slap that in as an option, so people who can use the bajillion miniscule icons can have their way, too.

BW, the last thing I'd suggest new players (or any players) try is the instant action options. Drop pods are xp pinatas. I have survived TWO by landing on roof tops, and then only for a short time.

Pro tip - you can guide the descent of the drop pod somewhat. And you should probably aim for a roof.

[Falconeer]

The only thing PS2 has going for it is scale

To me, that's the reason to play it. Sure, there's plenty of good fps out there, but I've been playing 16 vs 16 arenas and the likes since the 90s. Planetside (1 and 2) are the only games, along with WWII Online, that give me scale and feel like war, not a "room".

Good games are good games, regardless the lack or presence or frills of a tutorial. Sure the UI can be improved, and I am sorry for those who can't get over that, but heh. It's a shooter, there's N/W/S/E. There's big blinking "DEPLOY" things on the map. And there's people shooting at you who've been playing longer than you (literally, every single one of them since you just got in). I honestly, really, seriously can't understand what's the problem. Die, respawn, learn, kill.

[Mrbloodworth]

BW, the last thing I'd suggest new players (or any players) try is the instant action options.

Simply stating fact. If you are solo, you have instant action, or you drive yourself out there.

I honestly, really, seriously can't understand what's the problem. Die, respawn, learn, kill.

I do not get it eather.

Yes, Icons could use a scale slider. So could text. For me personally, id like to cut down on the number of friendly markers in my view. All this stuff was requested in beta. I assume its just a matter of time. As for the hud over all.....






Welcome to modern shooters? I guess.

[Zetor]

OK, so people have been saying PS2 has purely horizontal progression. Yet the two classes I play (medic and engineer) have a straight-up "x% better" progression on their main skill, and many other straight-up upgrades all over the place (x% more health, carry y more grenades, take z% less damage from explosions). It is also very hard for me to land hits with the starter NC carbine - I imagine a scope or the anti-recoil upgrades would help a lot without any significant drawbacks.

(Global Agenda did progression better imo, but they also fell short - many of the lowest-end weapons were inferior to ones unlocked later)