f13.net

If you haven't been keeping up, for the last month or more PlanetSide has been overtaken by a cadre of hackers.  They started reasonably innocuously with flying MAXes, "cone of fire" hacks, and infinite afterburners, but recently they've escalated into "if you're on foot, you'll be teleported to them and killed".  The hacks today are game-breaking and render the game essentially unplayable when the hackers are on.

Now I know that PlanetSide has been on life support for years, but it's still pulilng in some cash and is still part of the Sony stable of games, so I'm mildly curious:  Why isn't this on anybody's radar?  I mean, at the very least it makes an interesting "ha ha look at Sony" or train wreck story.  Is the game really so irrelevant?

I'm afraid so. I enjoyed my time playing Planetside, but it had no long term appeal. This talk about hackers is mildly interesting, but I haven't played the game in about a year, I think.

I have the Station Pass but no real interest in PS, either. Very dated and they really missed the window for updating the game. The cave expansion was a serious mis-step, too.

I was under the impression PS has always had problems with hacks, though.

As much as I loved the game (and still do,) way too much important shit is client side. Probably something to do with having made the thing work with dial up connections. Something I would also contribute to the general mushiness in the feel of the game's client side prediction.

But hey, it was 2003 when the game came out. You had to make it work with dial up. The next time someone has the balls to do something like PlanetsSide, it needs to be broadband only.

And yes, I am sad to see that people with nothing better to do are kicking this poor old man when he's down. The game had so much unrealized potential.

Apathy strikes a critical hit for 5000 damage!

I read the thread title and my first thought was "I thought PlanetSide was dead?" So yeah... not on the radar.

I think the real story of this is that SOE thinks PlanetSide is just as important as the other posters in this thread.

Actually, this isn't true.  In the same time window, an overwhelming majority of DAoC players were on broadband, in a game that was much more tolerant of low-bandwidth connections than PS.  I don't think I'm allowed to say what exact figure was involved, but it was enough for us to say "screw the patch size limit".

Had they looked at EQ, I think they would have seen a similar ratio of broadband use (at a time when less than 25% of US households even had a broadband option).  I think there's a subtle effect of the psychological impact of latency involved there, if your latency passes 150ms (and with dialup it nearly starts there), the character feels unresponsive and robotic.  So they could have made PS optimized for broadband, and probably would have done much better as a result.

--Dave

Hm, those are some interesting stats.

I spoke in haste, because they really should have known better.

I'm still tempted to go back and play some PS, but with the hacking, less so.

The client-side stuff like hit detection were to allow the large scale battles that are possible in PS. Having that done on the server would've either melted the CPUs down or caused so much server latency that the large battles would be unplayable. Even today with much much faster server hardware than 10 years ago MP FPSes still don't go above around 64 players total (some can go to 128 players but I've never played on one that wasn't incredibly choppy) *and* the system requirements to actually run a current MP FPS server is much much higher than it was back in the QuakeWorld/Half-Life days.

Trippy is right.

Other than that, people know i love this game. But even i haven't been playing it... As far as the hacking goes...Its a very old game, and they (hackers) have had a very long time to figure things out. Thankfully, every patch screws up the hacks for a while. But, ya know, what FPS game doesn't have a hacking problem? Its is sad however... I wait for a Planetside 2, updated graphics (Same stuff, just "Re-imagined"), everything that matters server side. It would be glorious.

Anyway..Epidemic? No, "same ole same ole", but its easer to see with the smaller population.


However the new patch is rather sweet (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=12415.0).

And those epic large battles are what kept me playing, and eventully coming back to Planetside.
http://gotr.net/gallery/albums/userpics/10038/2.jpg Bridge fights where both sides are lobbing shells across bridge were sick. I've seen no other similar experience since...maybe someday it will be attempted again but who knows. It was fun leading 80 man raids with multiple channels in Teamspeak for Air, Ground, Infantry, and spec ops. Really. Fuckin. Fun.

(http://gotr.net/gallery/albums/userpics/10261/PSScreenShot0032.jpg)

Love to see that image, but my work classifies that site as "Porn".  :ye_gods:

It's a bunch of fucking Barneys and their Fagriders. Can't get a real weapon like a Jackhammer to save their lives.

Purple freaks.  :grin:

lmao

Noobhammers..... then again i picked one up everytime I owned a Smurf face, so I guess I'm a noob. And EVERY NC had one.

Thats cause they suck.

TR for life.

Heh MCG lamer.

Never used any of that crap. Always found it more fun to shoot you in the face from halfway across the map and then watch you scramble and pick you off on the run.

I don't use heavy assault. To situational. Cycler + Rocklet is king.

Nothing clears out a hallway better...

God I wish this game had caught on.  :?

CCP should buy it from SOE. I'd pay $25 a month if I could hot drop on EVE planets. :drill:

It's perfect for CCP, it's the only game less comprehensible than Eve after you finish the tutorial!

Actually, I think integration of ground/station stuff into Eve is a huge mistake, but I'd love to see CCP run PS or a clone as a separate game.

It did, it just didn't stay on.

Thumper!


....THUMP!

I pretty much use grenade launchers in any game that has them. I like the indirect fire, bouncing around corners or lofting over cover, figuring out ranges and arcs. Good times.

Nah, i wont say i didn't use it, mostly for BFR hunting (Lots -o- jammers), but my favorite was the rocklet and the radiator.

My friends and i were hell on wheels in a marauder. Even wrote the "Tips and tricks".

Gimme a tank any day!  I luv vehicles, would load up some battle music; nothing like having "Cliffs of Dover", "War of 1812", or "Ghost Riders" cranking in the back ground and driving like a wild man.  I could get some jumps that would have impressed the Duke boy's, wish I could find the screen shot of my getting my Enforcer stuck in a tree after one night of driving like a mad man  ;D

So clearly there is an audience for a non-Sony MMOFPS done right.

Vera Lynn, Tchaikovsky and Simple Minds? Odd mix.

Yes. Has been.(Look at battlefield 2142 for PS influences) Me personally, i want a planetside 2. (SOE or not) and Huxley is not it.

No no no!  No one does Ghost Riders like Johnny Cash! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4TRvYAyt3k&feature=related)  Of course the original is awesome too by Vaughn Monroe (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6829692291248038192).

Eric Johnson (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7959518288584765325) is allways gonna be a turn and burn, kicking song.  I was in the Air Force back in '93 and me and buddy were watching AFTV and they had his song with the Thunderbirds, it has been imbeded in my mind since then.

And anytime you get to shoot of cannons in music is awesome!

On a typical ADD moment...I miss The Muppet Show (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhbxN4NO38k&feature=related)

But yeah, they need MMOGFPS done right.  I get my fix from the FPS out there, but a true battle of 400+ is just wicked.  Too bad WWIIOnline and Planetside didn't deliever.

Nobody can prove PlanetSide had perfectly optimized network code, but my guess is that it wasn't. Yes I know that little things like cone of fire (just as an example,) are hard for a server to keep track of on a massive scale, but somehow I think it could have been done a little better with more headroom for bandwidth. The degree to which the game allows for latency is sickening. Unplug your network connection, play for a bit, and then plug it back in, you'll see what I mean. Slower connections can also put more strain on a server. But without anything other than anecdotal evidence, this isn't an argument worth having.

On to something more fun: How can an NC with their noobhammer, or a Vanu with their lasher spam criticize the MCG, which actually takes a little bit of skill to use well?

The fact is, TR was the real man's empire. You knew if you were racking up the kills as the TR you were doing something right. Plus we had red and black, goggles, and gas masks.  :grin:

And don’t' forget the TR's shitty tank. You needed some mad skill to be good with that thing. Once a friend and I got over 100 kills on a single prowler.

No, they don't.

You need to play some BF2 or BF2142 with someone with a shitty connection then. They do.

I loved driving (http://www.planetside-universe.com/images/vehicles/vanguard_sm.jpg)s. Being in a big outfit and being able to pound a base before our foot soldiers rushed in.

Boom boom.

Y'all are spoiled in that big vanguard tank (sorry about the name.) The few times I've hacked one or jumped ship to get one were highly enjoyable. The gun is so freaking huge. Picks off people hiding behind trees nicely. Also, get 3 or 4 of them together and engage things at range and it's like an artillery bombardment.

Then you have the magmower - with no arc on it's shot. Just as effective as AA as AV. Damn, I still hate the Vanu.

Edit: Damn it, now I want to play PlanetSide again.

Planetside is dead and it's sad.

Doubt I'll ever have this much fun ever again in an FPS. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojJshXrUTE0)

Aha. My Planetside screenshots are still up on the interbutz.

http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/Planetside.html

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/Planetside/PSSS78.jpg)

I ran it on my old compy, so the graphics are turned way down.

Ah, Nzame on Cyssor.   A great fight.

I really don't understand why MMOFPS's aren't given serious consideration.  It's like TV, where if one "Sci Fi" show fails the executives dismiss science fiction as nonviable, yet they'll green-light three failed cop shows and four failed doctor shows a year.  FPS games dominate PC multiplayer (cf CounterStrike, HL, BF, Quake, Unreal, ad nauseum), yet there's no successor to PlanetSide even announced.  (I might be mistaken, but all "MMOFPS"s I know about are really MMORPG's a la Tabula Rasa, where hitting is a die roll.)  A game with PlanetSide's gameplay and HL2's performance would be huge.

The issues have been discussed in this thread already.  Too much has to be put client-side to make it not a laggy pile of shit over a certain number of people.  On TR and other games the most advanced math there is is "is x in range?  What's their die roll?"

  To do an FPS right you've got "Where is x when y fires.  What's in between them? What's being fired where &  how fast?  Now project the distance x traveled.. and check.. oh wait he stopped 2 ft short of being hit..."

Fuck that KAAOS video was great.  I'd love to be a part of a squad like that.

There's a technological window opening for an MMOFPS based on Cell Processor blades.  One thing that the Cell does *really well* is massive amounts of parallel physics simulation (one physicist is using 16 PS3's to simulate black hole collisions (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/02/28/ps3s_put_to_use_simulating_blackholes/)), which has been the usual barrier to taking the FPS past 64 players.  In PS, they had to expose lot of stuff you should never trust the client with, otherwise there simply wasn't any way to cost-effectively do it.  There are now blade format Cell-based systems available, the problem is that there's not a lot of programmers that can deal with the...quirks, of the Cell architecture.  But thanks to the PS3, a lot more than there used to be.

--Dave

The programmer mind-share part is the only real step forward with the Cell BE. Well, that and WoW's growth of MMOG revenue expectations. There have been suitable parallel environments for many (processor) generations, but they tend not to catch the interest of games developers because they are expensive to deploy and there aren't heaps of people familiar with the architectures who are working in the games industry. I would imagine that scalable games server design will continue to advance more quickly through industry supported communities:

http://www.projectdarkstar.com/

Wouldn't one of the other limitations be the amount of info that can be passed to the servers though? Seems to me that a true FPS game is passing a lot more data than your usual RPG on a global clock. I'm probably wrong though :-)

I ran with KAAOS when I played PS.  It was some of the most fun I've had on an FPS game.  Hot dropping as an organized squad behind enemy lines to change a course of a huge battle  :heart:

Too bad PS made so many dumbass changes and killed my enthusiasm for it.  But still, fun times.

It's a shame its just in a neither dead nor alive zombie state though, it seems no one wants to give that type of game another chance. 

It's a non-trivial problem, but not ultimately the current chokepoint.  Bandwidth keeps getting cheaper (and will continue to for a while), and if you toss the dialup compatibility out, your pipe down to the player can be 10 times wider than what we've been using.  At base, bandwidth is an n^2 problem, but there are various optimization tricks (which are already well explored), and it's the n^x physics problems that have really been choking us off there right now.

Client-side visuals is another issue, of course, we still have graphics pipelines that degrade exponentially in performance with the number of separate geometries involved.  But as we approach photo-realism (and we're very nearly there), that will start becoming less of an issue.

--Dave

You just named a stack of FPS games I can play for free past initial purchase and all allow some kind of team deathmatch. Why should I pay a MMO $15 a month to do the same thing?

... although the Guild Wars payment model could work for such a game.

That's been a common complaint about the PS model, yet people still play it.  Makes me think they're on to something.

There's something to be said for just the ability to gather hundreds of people on one world, and knowing that there are battles going on on different continents at the same time. 

I think it would be even better if they were to add some real persistence to the world, rewards that couldn't be picked up in a day or a month, to encourage play past the month or so timeframe (about the time my interest always flagged, at least).  Obviously it would be really bad to introduce things that made you better in battle, since one of PS's big strengths has always been that a rank newbie could take out a veteran if he had the skill.  I'm thinking more along the lines of medals, or campaign ribbons, maybe tied in with some greater storyline. If the players could influence that storyline, it'd be even better.  Cooler-looking armor for 100, 500 and 1000 battles maybe?

Short version: I think that the answer is persistence and ability to gather large numbers of people across the world for large wars.

People still play it, sure. But you can find 1,500 people to play just about anything. Heck, I think AC2 had more players when they announced it was shutting down.

Compared to the number of FPS games out there and their sales over the years, PS is not a successful FPS game. It's a niche for an audience that wants that niche. Great and all as long as SOE makes enough money to keep it up. But it's not something other companies look at as an enviable business model worth emulating.

It's not the only MMOFPS out right now. But the others aren't all that successful either. Ultimately, the entire sub-genre still needs its EQ1 before more people stand up and take notice. And that means someone needs to give it a pretty big shot time and money wise.

I would have thought managing separate geometries as independent of graphics quality?

Personally, I'd rather have deformable worlds for MMOFPS than Crysis-level graphics. As long as shadows and lighting are useful to gameplay, COD4 is fine for me. Physics is problem to solve but the far more interesting one in my opinion.

You're absolutely right. This is one of the main reasons PS was never a breakout hit. The biggest barrier to an MMOFPS is the subscription fee, and all those cool games that are free prove it. What PlanetSide offers is the massive scale, which at first doesn't sound like much when you're having a blast on any given team deathmatch game, but when you actually experience a raging back and forth bridge battle on cyssor with behind the lines incursions and galaxy drops you understand what makes it great immediately.

SOE should have known this and should have been doing everything it could to get people past the hurdle of a subscription fee. The game should have shipped with some sort of unlimited free trial, just with caps on the CRs you could earn. On top of that, they should have had a demo trial that only worked for a few days.

Keep in mind that graphics programming is a black art far beyond my own programming skills, but here's my understanding of it:  The poly per second counts you see thrown around on benchmarking reviews all assume a strip of triangles where only one additional vertex is needed per poly.  Break up the strip, start wrapping it around itself, the rate goes down.  Beyond that, every time you change geometries, you have to reset the pipeline, flush the cache, reload your shaders, etc., and you have to do this every frame for every geometry.  What winds up happening is that up to a few hundred different geometries, performance degrades linearly, after that it begins degrading exponentially.  And "geometry" doesn't mean "model", it means each piece of geometry that must be seperately rendered, for your typical MMO each player avatar is 5-15 geometries (boots, gloves, shoulders, weapon, etc.).  So you wind up *way* down the exponential degradation really quickly when you put a lot of people in the same place.  Now, if you reduce the cusomizability of the avatar and therefore the geometries, it helps a lot, if you reduce the raw number of polys it helps some, if you reduce the number of passes per frame it helps quite a lot (so bump maps, specularity, alpha maps, etc.).

You can do a lot of optimizations, and of course you can have graphics options that run all the way from photo-realistic to "looks like cel-shaded ass", but ultimately you have to optimize for some particular target, and that sets your maximum number of players who can interact in the same area without it turning into a slideshow.

--Dave

EDIT: For another example, the big innovation that made better grass and trees feasible was turning them all into a single geometry that was built at runtime.

The only thing I'd add to what Dave said is that with proper pre-batching, you can make great savings in performance by sending up a geometry/texture set to the GPU, and then tell it to render it multiple times in multiple "locations" (things get hairy when you are talking about this type of thing, and I for sure don't know the proper terminology).

For example, if you have 30 tanks with the same geometry and textures, you can batch them up, set a complete render state block (DX10 there, although state blocks work for OpenGL as well as DX9 iirc), and then simply render lots of times in different places. GPU pipes are optimized for fill and are very bad at state changes, so you gain a lot by smart prepping of how you present data to the card.

It's called instancing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometry_instancing).

Because your logging into a world, not a server. Also, the scale, 133 x 3 on one continent, not to mention i think PS has one of the largest arsenals for a FPS (Including Vehicles ETC), and The cert system is a form of "Skill" RPG system, allowing you to play what you want and how you want. The world portion is very important, as outfits are a very strong part of the experience.

As far as the biggest barrier, i would argue that it was the learning curve. Planetside is a very complex game. Also, MMORPG players finding out that "real" skill is required, not just TAB + Number key 1, repeat.

@MahrinSkel, Planetside does not have that level of customization in the avatars, only not to recently did they add merits that may approach that kind of complexity, but those were only 4, 5px strips..But i do understand your talking "in general".  minimal customization played well into the Conscription aspect of the empires.

I think another thing was Core Combat. They took time and resources to make a paid expansion that no one wanted. That's time and resources that may have been better spent improving the base game experience.

All this talk of multiplayer technology is silly; the fact is, they already did it and did it well enough to make a really fun game out of it. Even if latency hasn't gotten a whole lot better (it has), we could simply scale up the same techniques they used and make a fun game. Technologically, we can do it. We'd have to take shortcuts (give the client a lot of power) but it's fully possible.

The trick is, as always, not in the technological side of things -- it's making the game fun to play.

Well people wanted mechs. They just didn't want to grind out the captures in the stupid caves.

Core combat was supposed to be "urban combat", it was just to far from "urban earth city's" and to much "Giant crystalline buildings and very alien city's" that people never took to it. Oddly enough, The caves were where you could find some of the best grunt combat.

Also, the average Joe had a REALLY hard time figuring out navigating of the zip lines.

The kills requirements came WAY after core combat (and BFR patch), and it was part of an anti-proliferation change.

It was retarted. If they wanted urban combat, they should have made a mini-continent with more buildings and no vehicle pads.

Ziplines. Double-You Tee Eff? :uhrr:

I was referring to the caverns capture requirement to get your first BFR.

We are talking about the Same thing. You need kills (of a certain XP yield) and Captures, its all part of the (BFR) anti-proliferation change.

Core Combat was crap.

Gutboy?

(just kidding)

Thanks for the explanations on the graphics tech. It actually made sense. I assume this is why we're still seeing state-change terrain from the new Unreal and Lucascarts projects rather than purely deformable terrain. That would be good enough for me. As long as I can blow a hole in a wall without having to go through the entrance, I'm fine. If I'm flying something that can blow up continents, I don't expect a puny piece of steel to stop it.

Planetside Player made AD (http://www.marcopolo.me.uk/PSMovies/PS_AD_LARGE.wmv)

Though he's dirty TR scum, I gotta agree with bloodworth. PS took a shitload more skill than any other MMO before or since. That turned off all the spreadsheet whizzes that thhought they were hot shit in PVP in any other MMO.

I'll remind you that twitch is only one kind of skill.  The thing that turned me off to PS was that I had to have a bajillion builds premade and they had to contain the right contents.  There was still plenty of min-maxing going on in PS, it just took less time to do it.   There have been other good skill-based MMO's in the past (DAoC 8v8 was, for me, the best strategy-based combat I've ever enjoyed in a multiplayer PvP game).  The hard part was being able to pay the admission price to enjoy the content where these sub-games existed. 

I only ever had one build. For me, it was filling a role , a role that was my playstyle (Secondary fire support, medical, marauder driver, Combat support (Repairing stuff) and Squad leader). I never approached it as "I must have this combo/set up". That was something left behind in MMORPG games, and i feel it wasn't required in Planetside.

Planetside was more of a Traditional Role playing game that anything ending in RPG, you filled a real role... The role of a solider in a large empire. The players made the entire "Empire" something real, broken down to outfits, then individual squads.

Me personally, if a game has dice role, i have a hard time calling it skill. I understand that tactics, strategies ETC.. are one type of skill, but i lump what others call "Skill" in RPG games, as "Knowing the system". Two different types of skill. Thankfully, Planetside required both.

But in most RPG's, its not really skill that wins the day.. Its whats known as "blobbing " in RTS's, it just not blobbing units, but blobbing Stats and numbers. Don't get me wrong, i enjoy RPG's, but its a different kind of "competition".

anyway /flame suit on  :grin:


PS: If you cant tell, Planetside held some of the most immersive experiences in any MMO for me. Due to what i said, more of a traditional RPG, and a very strong community of outfit mates and squads. I don't think ill ever get that from a game again that is in any way restrictive. I'm not the best writer, so its hard to explain in words. If you jumped in and played it like a Normal FPS, you would have missed this, if you jumped in and tried to treat it as a Normal RPG, you missed this as well.

No need for the flame suit.  We each like different things.  I can appreciate what Planetside was trying to do, but never really felt immersed in it.  Some of that could be that while I played the game for a couple of months, I never felt like I knew what I was doing.  Drop in an area, shoot stuff, capture something, and run to the next area.  It's a fine game and a nice hybrid between the more traditional MMO and an FPS.  I always felt that it just didn't have much stickiness to it. 

I think the biggest challenge in MMO pvp is that you need to get to a point in the game where gear is less of a factor before you can enjoy the portion that is more skill based.  Most players will never reach that point due to the time commitment needed.  This is why I appreciated DAoC so much.  It was trivial to get to max level (could do it in less than 1 day played) and a decent template took a few days more.  Getting past the gear/level barrier was little more than a speedbump.  In WoW, I doubt I'd ever make it to the true pvp endgame due to insane time requirements.

I think anyone who enjoyed Planetside for what it was gets it. It was about being in a good outfit and kicking ass for your side. It was about bridge battles and zipping across the map in a Reaver to get fire support to your outfit.

It was about Galaxy drops. Fuck yea.

The second paragraph was why i loved planetside. Gear didn't matter, nor did Battle rank (AKA "Level"). The part where you never knew what you were doing, two things. It backs up my comment about the largest determent being the games complexity ( Need to look beyond shoot people and capture places, theres more to it), and what i was talking about in regards to community. Outfits and squads, they would have helped with this, and provided the "Sticky" you could have needed.

Thats why i said:

I think I agree. I'm wondering how Outfits could have been more appealing in a long-term game. Maybe give outfits a rank like individual players, and give them little perks for being "teh awesome"?

Planetside needed the perk system from Fallout. The implants were a good try but they never added any new ones.

Many many MANY ideas were discussed for spending outfit points (http://www.planetside-idealab.com/idea_outfitbarracks.shtml). Nothing ever came of it.

I remember the idea of outfit barracks.

Blah. That just makes me sad.

Planetside "coulda woulda shoulda" threads were fun but just not worth it any more. They assfucked the game for good with that stupid cavern expansion.

I disagree.  If Sony were willing to invest some talent, they could revive the game in a matter of months.  Right now, PS only has a development team of
six or so (http://wiki.planetsidesyndicate.com/index.php?title=PlanetSide_Team), and I have my doubts it's that many.   Such a small team has no hope of both making a dent in the hacking problem and bringing freshness into the game.  And those two things are what's needed to bring people back.  Most of those I know left the game because they were bored or because they perceived the game to be unfair.  If they added a few devs, got the fairness problems (hacker / bad net code / CSHD) under control, made a few new maps, and reinforced the land-taking gameplay, they'd get a large surge in returning PS players.  And as MMO dabbling seems to be in vogue the last couple years, I think they'd attract new players as well.

Of course, this is all a pipe dream, because it's clear that Sony isn't willing to invest anything into the game.  This is why we've got this thread in the first place.  I love this game, and it's hard watching it die.

I'd like a graphics update too.

PS needed more world. I loved the game, and was deadly in a Mosquito back in the day. I preferred the Reaver, but the lack of intuitive missile splash damage against ground targets always pissed me off. And that's ultimately what drove me away after my third return (even having at that point run with KAAOS, which made everything fun by default).

The things your weapons did didn't make enough sense to me intuitively. I don't know how anyone could claim PS wasn't a stats game. To me it certainly felt like one.

• In COD4, I shoot an RPG, it goes, it hits wall, it explodes, explosion takes out target that was standing near it.
• In PS I could be shooting missiles at a person, but because it's a person and not a vehicle, they may die. Or not. Or lag around it. Or any number of other things.

"Skill" was trying to puzzle out what did what. We were doing that in UO before people figured out what exactly "Of invulnerability" meant. You just figured stuff out differently in PS, and the variables could change a bit more.

And I don't compare PS to MMORPGs. It doesn't make any sense to me to do so. It was always trying to be an MMOFPS and more logically trying to attract FPS players. It didn't do that at the time for all the understandable reasons and a few unfortunate ones (the need to grind at that point, the required fee, no offline mode at all, etc). MMOFPS is still an open field. The next one probably won't grab the entrenched community of PS. But they're not a big enough market to design for.

I really liked my time in PS, but the lack of balance sort of killed it for me. Especially the TR bias and the ability to be a master of all with enough cert points.

I still really think a limit on your ability to carry heavy weapons of multiple types would really help; no more stupid double chaingun or chaingun/striker combos. I can deal with chaingun/decimator, at least they only have a few shots.

TR was all sorts of broken.

I learned long ago that every empire thinks the other 2 empires are broken. It's just that the TR and the NC are half right. The Vanu are broken. =)

I don't know why you think the TR were that great though. Really the only thing they had going for them was cool looks.

MCG was a good gun, but so are the jackhammer and lasher (situationally much better weapons.)

The TR AV weapon was a pest (lockon missles,) but it did fuck all for damage.

The TR tank was a joke. Sure it allowed for 3 people, but that usually meant you rolled with 2 and nobody wanted to be your canopy gunner. So essentually you went in undergunned from the start. The boosted rate of fire was nothing compared to the overwhelming firepower of the NC Vanguard, or the mobility and arcless shots of the Vanu Magrider that were highly effective AA. It also had less armor than the Vanguard. Just about the only thing it did better than either tank is the fact that it could move as quickly in reverse as it could forward (which helps when your tank can't hold it's own in a fight.) Basically it was the Sherman of PlanetSide.

The TR MAX suits were lame too, and had the worst lockdown ability. There was a time when the TR AA max was an Anti-everything max though, but that was changed eventually.

And proving I'm running out of talking points, the medium assault weapon (cycler?) was a rapid fire, high cone of fire spread, low damage weapon that the NC Gaus rifle had beat in everything except ammo capacity.

The Marauder though. The Marauder was pretty sweet. But then so where the other light vehicles from the Vanu and the NC.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10031.msg303953#msg303953

Nebu, how the hell do you level up that quick in DAoC?  It took me forever to level...

Class matters.  With a vamp, valk, or similar classes you basically get to level 25 as fast as possible and then level in the frontiers.  Granted, most of the time I've PL'ed myself with a second toon.  A necro with a cleric bot can get a player from 1-40 in about 2h.  If I had to do it from scratch with no help from anyone, it would probably take me about 2 days played, though I have leveled a vamp and a valkyrie to 50 with no help from anyone in about a day and a half.  BD's are easy too.

Agreed, my main was TR and I never felt any of our unique weapons were the best. Actually I prefer the Vanu weapons in every category except the standard battle rifle, I liked the NC's Gauss.

Thanks Nebu, I played it when it came out, was with a bunch of us on Midgard, and just hated the nerf to leveling and how long it took to level.  Then again, I think all games should have quick leveling (solo and even quicker when grouped).  If you can get to level 50 in 48 hours of play time, then the game has changed a ton since I played.  I quit when City of Hero's came out and have never gone back.

Back on track...

Another thing, that is probably pretty big, is the lack of power you have as a normal foot soldier.  The 3 standar battle rifles didn't have enough punch and a lot of times you would be shooting at someone and missing.  I'll never forget, loggin in, taking the TR, loading up with the battle rifle, getting the jump on someone running into our base, and he starts moving back and forth, and I get the misses and he kills me.  That would have made a lot of FPS type say, "WTF!?!" and quit.  I just gave up on infantry combat and moved to vehicles.  Something just doesn't seem right with infantry combat.

Planetside did let me play a role, unlike the other "roleplaying" games, where you decided what you wanted to do and did it.  A guy or gal like me that was a gear head, would have pretty much the same set up  from start to end game, but hell the end game started the moment you logged on.

You can't look at just one piece of equipment in planetside. You have to look at the entire empire. Each has a strength and weaknesses.

I'm very familiar with the TR's main weakness - we needed more people to be as effective. The tank is a perfect example.

I barely played NC, but fighting them I never noticed any overall weakness, they always seemed strong in all areas.

Vanu ... I don't know, there always seemed to be less of them, but that was more a player choice issue. Their weaponry seemed a tad weaker on a per hit basis, but that always seemed fairly irrelevant when I played as one - a small deficiency that could be overcome with skill. Loved the mobility of the MAX units, that jump ability was easily the most useful of all Empire's MAX specialties.

Vanu's mobility was awesome. Magriders were the shit, and able to snipe reavers outta the sky and NOT HAVE TO CROSS BRIDGES! Pre-nerf, Magmowa's were even more fun. The Vanguard was pretty awesome though, and Prowler was the worst of the 3.

I found TR's guns to all be solid. I used to steal Cycler (standard rifle?). The MCG and jackhammers were both better in most circumstances then the Lasher, except when it had the week long super buff. Lock down maxes were fuckin sick. The game was well balanced. And a lot of fuckin fun.

This is turning into the Planetside Nostalgia Epidemic.  :drill:

Yes, Empire specific rifle, but the suppressor would technically be the "Standard" rifle of all empires. Also, the suppressor is sick in the right hands.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I don't think they were weak, I just thought the Vanu stuff was more fun to use. The Lancer in particular, once you compensated for that slight delay, was incredibly accurate and had a long range, great AV/Anti-Max weapon.

*sigh* Yeah, PlanetSide nostalgia ..

The worse part is I feel like playing it again, but lately it's just a big ole "What the fuck is the point?"  Sure, there isn't much point to most of the things I do, but unlike a whisper I can ignore, this game screams about what I'm doing.

What we need is a Eve like push to start playing again.

Oh wait, we tried that like 6 months ago and it died out fast. Bummer.

NC always fit me the best, but I played TR most of the time. I sucked with the jackhammer but I pwned with the ScatterMAX. I also loved being a fighter pilot, but it was much harder to come back after a long hiatus and be competitive in the air than it was to be a grunt again every few months.

Everyone pawns with a Scatmax.

In beta, us Vanu got rolled consistently and hard. At some point in beta one of the dev team posted on the forums that "The pulsar is functioning as intended!"

two weeks later:

"Sorry folks, we discovered a copy paste error in the pulsar, and it has been set to much less damage than we intended. It will be fixed in the next patch."

I'm pretty sure it was just a rapid-fire beamer for those first few months.

Lasher was severely broken after release though. Lasher + surge + recro armor = unfair lag kills in the highest order.

I miss playing with Ahriman Corps back on Emerald :(

I loved driving the Thresher for the Vanu. Fast, quick, could move over water. It could bounce over most bumps with little loss of speed. Every now and then, something would get screwed up with its weight and it would get extra "floaty". I'd hit a bump and I'd float for 10 times longer than normal. When this happened, I'd try to hit big jumps and land on top of the enemies. I even used this once to jump the wall into an enemy base. It was great until 3 seconds later when I hit a mine and blew up.